“Had I been a free man...What a fool I was...”
These were the constant useless enfeebling fancies at the back of all his thoughts. He began to look upon Mona as a crafty woman who had ensnared him to his ruin. He was next door to hate of her, but he actually hated Lois. He hated her beauty, the queer look of distinction she had from her mother; he grudged every farthing which was spent upon her food, her schooling, her clothes. And on the top of it all she had the nerve to march down to his office on a busy day — yes, his delusions carried him even to that extravagance — in her neat brown coat and skirt, a white crêpe-de-Chine blouse, her Sunday silk stockings and her bright patent leather shoes, and ask him for thirty pounds. Just that! Thirty pounds, as if it was tuppence! Such a string of virulent complaints broke from him and frothed and tumbled, it seemed that all the failures of all the generations were shaking their fists at the cloudy power which kept them under.
“Do you want proof?” he cried. “There it is, below the window, on the pavement. Mr. Joseph Wyatt. Mark Thewliss’ secret agent. Every year up he bobs, stroking his stupid Viking’s moustache and thinking himself invisible. Three or four times a year. Making little inquiries. All so that he may go back and tell Thewliss that we are getting on just the same, and not likely to cause him any trouble in his fine new married life.”
“How do you know that?”
The young voice at his shoulder was now ominously quiet and level, but Henry Perriton was not aware of the change. He did not look at her, did not think of her, as a being to whom he had dealt out shame and disillusionment and a too-swift maturity with the strokes of an axe. Lois was nothing more to him than a pair of ears. He crowed.
“People don’t make inquiries about me for long without it coming to my ears. Once a Mr. Wyatt may come along and do his spying — twice perhaps. But a third time — no! I begin to notice him. Mr. Wyatt talks to my tradesmen, does he? And he talks to my servant. Then we set a little trap for him. Who’s at the back of inquiries? Just between friends, you know, over a final whisky-and-soda in the bar. The disclosure to stop there, of course. Not a word to be breathed, my hand on my heart? And out pops the name — Mark Thewliss — and nods and winks to underline it.”
The nods and winks had been due to Joseph Wyatt’s complete ignorance of why Mark Thewliss wanted his reports and to his reluctance to admit his ignorance. Wyatt was a slave of routine, carrying out instructions which needed a better man in a matter, the very core of which was unknown to his employer. For that Lois Perriton was Mark’s daughter, the secret cause of all the overwhelming troubles which were to follow, may have been known to the man in the moon, but was unimagined by either Mark himself or Mr. Joseph Wyatt. Hence the nods and winks in the bar following the sound old rule, “If you don’t know, affect a mystery.”
Mr. Perriton, however, had and could have no doubt that Mark knew it. Nor any longer could Lois.
“So now you know,” said Mr. Perriton, but not quite so easily. “I am not the man from whom you have the right to ask for thirty pounds.”
He received no confirmation of that statement.
“Well, have you?”
And again he had no answer.
In such men as Henry Perriton the violent passions reach their climax soon. Rejoinders may prolong their fury for a little while, but collapse is imminent and certain. Mr. Perriton recollected with discomfort that he had promised and sworn over and over again that never should the child that was to be born know the truth about its birth, if only Mona would marry him; that even so Mona had with difficulty been persuaded. It was hard for him to realise so long after his desire had withered that this compact had been made. But it had been, and he had broken it. He began to feel an uneasiness.
“Well, have you the right, Lois?” There was a note almost of pleading in his voice. “You can understand how you must have exasperated me.”
For the third time there was no reply. Mr. Perriton’s fingers beat a tattoo upon the window-pane. Suppose that Lois, at whom he hesitated to look, were to run home and tell her mother in a flood of tears of the scene which had occurred, what was going to happen?
“If she leaves me there’ll be a scandal,” he said to himself. “The truth will come out. And the truth isn’t respectable.”
Respectability meant a good deal to Mr. Perriton. That’s why he drank alone. It meant a good deal, too, to his business. It lay not amongst the great houses which wanted their work done by the men most competent but amongst smaller people, tradesmen and the like, who looked for respectability as much as for competence. It would not do for Mona to leave him — and she would leave him. She was proficient as a secretary and clerk. She could make a living for herself and for Lois, too, worse luck! Mr. Perriton felt that he stood upon quaking sands.
“I am sorry that I said what I did, Lois,” he said meekly. “You must forget it, my dear,” and Lois laughed.
The laugh was a shock to Henry Perriton. Tears he would have welcomed. He could have got round tears. Tears would have been his opportunity. But hard, rude, contemptuous laughter made his position very difficult. He looked at Lois now for the first time since he had dragged her to the window, and he tingled with alarm. She was standing erect at the side of the window, her hands clenched at her side, her eyes shining pebbles. He had not one clue to the thoughts which moved behind them, except this: they were not gentle thoughts. Her face was the colour of parchment. Lois had neither beauty nor youth at that moment. Nor, on the other hand, had she any look of age. He seemed to himself to be face to face with someone eternal.
“Lois, I was carried away. I have business worries, and your request on the top of them...Yes, it was deplorable,” he pleaded, and his voice trailed lamentably to silence.
Lois waited until he had finished, and then turned and walked towards the door. Her movement shook Mr. Perriton into action. He was at the door before Lois, with his back to the panels, gesticulating, stuttering.
“You won’t tell Mona...Promise me! You won’t breathe a word to her. It would upset everything.”
“But everything is upset,” Lois answered.
“Not everything,” babbled Mr. Perriton. “We are both sensible people. We can make the best of things, can’t we? I’ve had a hard life, Lois. You’ll agree when you come to think of it quietly. Don’t act in a hurry. We’ll talk it over together.”
“We’ll never talk it over,” said Lois.
Of the shame and distress which overwhelmed her she would not betray a sign. She stood implacably erect, conscious for the first time of a strength which even then thrilled and uplifted her. After the first stunning blow she had very quickly recovered. She meant to have her way now with the little man who gibbered out his prayers to her. He didn’t matter.
The enemy was not Henry Perriton, but the man at Upper Theign, who had robbed her adored mother of the wide life for which nature had meant her, and had made her herself — well, what she was. Him she would hate by night and by day to the last conscious minute of life. She had no reproaches for her mother. Her heart, indeed, was even tenderer towards her. She understood now the reason of Mona’s submission, and, with a flash of insight, her constant grief that she could not open up for her daughter the dazzling avenues which marriage with Mark Thewliss would have secured.
“You’ll promise me! You’ll promise me!” Henry Perriton was reduced to a monotonous repetition. “You’ll promise me your silence, Lois.”
“On one condition,” Lois replied at length. “Yes? Yes?”
“You must lend me the thirty pounds I came for.”
“I’ll give it to you, Lois.”
“No.”
“I will. With pleasure.”
Lois, with a shrug of her shoulders, ceased to argue. She was going to pay it back. Repayment would be the first charge. That for her was the end of the matter.
“I’ll bring the money home for you this evening.” Lois shook her head.
“No.”
Mr. Perriton wa
s a little taken aback.
“You want it now — this minute?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. I’ll write a cheque and send my clerk out to cash it.”
Mr. Perriton sat down at his desk and wrote with a jibe in his mind which he dared not utter.
“She’s the daughter of her father, not a doubt of it. That’s the way men become millionaires. Ask for an hour’s credit and you are looking down the barrel of a pistol.” He sent his secretary with the cheque to the bank, and Lois sat down in a chair.
“I’ll tell you now why I want the money,” she said. “It’s the cost of a full course of tuition in shorthand, typewriting and the simpler secretarial duties. I always meant to be free of you at the first possible moment, even when I believed myself to be your daughter.”
“My dear,” Mr. Perriton expostulated with an attempt at a smile, “that wasn’t very nice of you.”
“I am not nice,” said Lois coldly.
The clerk brought the bank-notes into the private office and retired. Mr. Perriton counted them out to Lois, who tucked them away into her bag.
“So that’s your plan! To be free and independent,” said Mr. Perriton with a rueful attempt at jocularity.
“Half of it,” Lois returned shortly. The other half was not for his nor for anyone’s ears yet. It was much too great a secret even to be whispered aloud to herself. She meant to make a little home, somewhere a long way from Liverpool, for her mother and herself, where there should be no cheap sarcasms, no silent submissions; quite a little home, but so warm with happiness and gay with laughter that a kingdom could not match it. For the moment, however, she could not dwell upon it. She did not notice Mr. Wyatt when she came out again into the street, although he was close to her, unconcernedly fondling his dragoon’s moustache. She walked along the pavement seeing no one, with a heart full of bitterness and humiliation.
XV. THE HOLIDAY
AMIDST THE CROWD which gathered outside Buckingham Palace on the night of July 31st, 1914, like a family in some momentous crisis about its chief, stood Lois Perriton. She was then a little over eighteen years old; and during the last twelve months she had been employed at a salary of three pounds a week in the London office of a society for the protection of wild animals. The grim history of a great war was accurately foreseen only by the few; and Lois was wondering with a thrill of pleasurable excitement, as were so many in that throng, what vast upheavals the cataclysm of to-morrow was to bring about, and how they were to affect the tiny section of the world in which she moved. Of two things she was sure. One, that she was alive in that year of that century; two, that other work than the protection of wild animals must be sought for and obtained.
Efficiency combined with an overmastering purpose — in Lois’ case the half of her plan which she had not disclosed to Henry Perriton — have a way of forcing circumstances into their service; and before Christmas had come Lois was a clerk in the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty. She had long since learnt that of matters of importance it was wise to speak to one only. In looks we know that she was a “crasher,” and looks in this unfair world always help; she had, too, as a basic quality of her being the appealing aloofness of her mother. It was inevitable that as the great department expanded, she should rise to positions of ever increasing confidence.
She made a few real friends amongst the other girls. She lost the sense of humiliation which Perriton’s disclosure had caused her, and she, in many respects still a child, had exaggerated into a visible brand. She realised that whatever her natal stigma, she was herself, and that in this new day of stress and endeavour it was only persons themselves that counted. She put some of her salary by each week. She saw the fulfilment of her purpose drawing nearer and nearer. Though she did not consciously say, “Let the war go on,” she knew greater happiness during those years than she had known, and anticipated the end of them with anxiety.
In one respect, however, the greater amenities of her life brought with them no softening. The man she hated was still the man she hated. He was the great blot upon this new fair register of her account with the world. She would never see his face if she could help it. If she had to see him, she would never speak to him. She would rather go away by herself and say “Raca” again, and endure all the terror of the flames which consumed but never ended consuming, as she had once done in her childhood. She hated him with bone and with muscle.
Yet on a morning of December, 1917, at twelve o’clock precisely, as she was returning to her room with a file of papers in her hand, she came upon a long, lean man whose appearance suggested that he was midway in the fifties. He was wandering rather helplessly in that network of corridors which housed the Intelligence Division. Lois Perriton turned about and, with the pleasantly maternal solicitude for the decrepit which the young people of the day displayed towards the middle-aged, asked:
“Can I help you in any way?”
“I have no doubt you can,” the stranger replied, “I am looking for the D.N.I.”
“The Director himself?”
“Yes,” returned the visitor. “The great Panjandrum himself with the little button on the top. He expects me.”
Lois smiled tolerantly.
“I’ll take you there.”
“It is perhaps out of your way,” the unknown hinted.
“Not a bit,” Lois answered with not a little pride. “I work in the Director’s office.”
And suddenly she saw that he was a little puzzled and that he looked at her keenly.
“Of course none of these old people can get it into their heads that the really responsible positions ought to be in the hands of young people. That’s why the war came,” she said to herself. Aloud she merely remarked:
“It is here,” and she opened the door of a large light room with a couple of big windows looking out upon the Horse Guards’ Parade. The Director, who looked more like the abbe he certainly was not than the admiral he certainly was, swung round from the tall desk in the middle of the room at which he was standing.
“My dear fellow,” he cried. “You are the very man I was wanting. Will you come in with me?”
He opened the door of an inner room and ushering in his visitor, called to his secretary who had been standing at the desk with him: “John, we’ll settle that matter as soon as I am free.”
For half an hour the two men remained confabulating in the inner room, whilst Lois worked at her big table under one of the windows, and officers and civilians drifted in and out and talked with the secretary. Then the inner door was thrown open again and the admiral stood in the doorway.
“I want the figures of the high explosives used at the Battle of Jutland. Miss Perriton, you know where they are.”
Lois extracted a sheet of paper from a file and carried it into the private room. The Director looked at the paper and handed it across the table.
“There you are!”
The visitor took it and read it slowly.
“Might I have a copy?” he asked.
“By all means,” the admiral agreed. “Miss Perriton, will you make one?”
“He can have this one,” she answered; and as she handed the sheet of paper to the visitor he made the most ridiculous remark.
“She certainly is a crasher.”
He made it with conviction and aloud, as though truth forced the words from him. Then he coloured and giggled foolishly, explaining: “Though ‘she’ is a very disrespectful word to apply to the Battle of Jutland. Well, I’ll be going on my way.”
“Dippy,” said Lois to herself.
It was the second time that the famous head of Mardyke and Campion had had that epithet applied to him by a girl.
Lois returned to her table, the Director resumed at the high desk his discussion with his secretary, the visitor retired from the Admiralty. Thus father and daughter met for the first time.
Mark Thewliss, though he had failed to impress Lois Perriton, was at this time a very important person. At the out
break of war his maiden speech had been remembered. He had been put in charge of an amalgamation of factories for the manufacture of high explosives. Within two years he was a Cabinet Minister and a member of the inner War Cabinet. And no man was looking forward more eagerly to the defeat of the enemy, or with more definite plans for the era of peace. Indeed, the pens were hardly dry in the Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles when he resigned from office and was raised to the peerage as Baron Thewliss of Upper Theign.
He was in a hurry. He was too shrewd a man not to understand that so many unproductive millions could not be blown into the air without a dreadful consequence to the nation’s economic life. But he was equally certain that through a few years of busy reconstruction, the dreadful consequence would not be felt. Meanwhile the hamper of the German patents had gone. Mark Thewliss hurried back to Brooke’s Market; the bazaars of Fez and Mequinez, Marrakesch and Casablanca, the Indies, the countries of Europe hung out fresh and entrancing colours for their customers. In the boom years Mardyke and Campion boomed mightily.
But the axe fell upon the Division of Naval Intelligence, and at the end of July, 1919, when she had entered upon her twenty-third year, Lois found herself out of a job, with a gratuity and two hundred pounds saved besides. She had need of a holiday — how great a need she only knew when the holiday was forced on her — and for once in a way she locked cares, purpose, hatred, away in a dark cupboard and gave herself to the natural spirits of her youth.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 598