THE rigorous theory that a Hepplestall was instantly prepared at the
word of command to go to the ends of the earth in the interests of
the firm was, in practice, softened by expediency. They did not, for
instance, recall their manager at Calcutta or Rio and expect him to
fill a home berth as aptly as a man who had not spent half a lifetime in
familiarizing himself with special foreign conditions; they used their
man-power with discretion and humanity, and there seemed nothing harsh
in expecting William Hepplestall, chief of their Manchester offices, to
remove to Staithley when he became the acting Head.
William was a man who, in other circumstances, would have deserved
the epithet “worthy,” perhaps with its slightly mocking significance
emphasized by a capital W. A “Worthy” has solid character bounded by
parochial imagination; and William rose, but only by relentless effort,
to thinking in the wide-world terms of trade imposed upon the chief of
Hepplestal’s Manchester warehouse. He was masterly in routine; under Sir
Philip, a trusted executant of that leader’s conceptions; and since
he bore his person with great dignity, he cut a figure ambassadorial,
impressive, fit representative in Manchester of the Hepplestalls who
took the view of that city that it was an outpost--their principal
outpost--of Staithley Bridge.
Probably Sir Philip, had he been alive, would have prevented William’s
promotion; but Sir Philip had died suddenly, without chance to nominate
a successor who, most likely, would have been unobvious and, most
certainly, the best. And even Sir Philip would have saluted ungrudgingly
the spirit, humble yet resolute, in which William accepted his
responsibility. The Board, weakened in personnel by the war, did, as
Boards do, the obvious thing, and were very well satisfied with the
wisdom of their choice.
What they did not understand, what William himself did not foresee, was
that his difficulties were to be increased by the conduct of his wife.
Mrs. William had failed to realize that in marrying William she married
a Service. She thought she married the head of Hepplestall’s Manchester
offices and that she had, as a result, her position in Manchester and
her distinguished home in Alderley Edge, which is almost a rural suburb
and, also, the seat of a peer. Short of living in London, to which she
had vague aspirations when William retired, she was very well content
with her degree; and the news that she was expected to uproot herself
and to live in Staithley came as a startling assault on settled
prepossessions. While she hadn’t the challenging habit of asserting that
she was of Manchester and proud of it, she knew the difference between
Manchester, where one could pretend one was not provincial, and
Staithley, where no such pretense was possible, and it was vainly that
William told her of Lady Hepplestall’s offer to leave the Hall in
their favor. Sir Philip’s widow knew, if Mrs. William didn’t, what was
incumbent on a Hepplestall.
“In other words, we’re to be caretakers for Rupert,” she said. “What
will become of my Red Cross committee work here?”
William suggested that by using the car she need be cut off from none of
her activities. “But I’m to live down there,” she said, “decentralized,
in darkest Lancashire,” and she had her alternative. If the firm
required this irrational sacrifice of William’s wife, he had surely his
reply that he was rich enough to retire and would retire with her,
to London. Her friend, Lady Duxbury, was already preparing to move to
London after the war; the William Hepplestalls could move now. They were
forced to move now.
“It is not a question of being rich enough to retire,” he said. “No
doubt I am that; but I am an able-bodied servant of the firm. We
Hepplestalls do not retire while we are capable of service.”
She had never thought him so dull a dog before; she whistled at the
obligations of the Service, and she exaggerated the influence of a wife
which persuades in proportion as it is ventured sparingly, seasonably,
and with due regard to the example of pig-drivers who, when they would
have their charges go to the left, make a feint of driving them to the
right.
“Sir Ralph Duxbury is younger than you,” she argued, “and he’s retiring
at the end of the war. They’re going to London to enjoy life before
they’re too old.”
“Duxbury,” said William severely, “is a war-profiteer. His future plans
tally with his present.”
“Oh, how can you say that of your friend?”
“I can say it of most of my friends. But you would hardly suggest that
it is true of me. You would hardly put the case of a Hepplestall on all
fours with the case of a Duxbury.”
She did suggest it. “But surely you are all in business to make money!”
“My dear,” he said, with dignified rebuke, “I am a Hepplestall,” and
left it, without more argument, at that. He knew no cure for eyes which
saw no difference between the Service and the nimble men who had thriven
by the mushroom trades of temporary war-contractors. “And we go to
Staithley.”
If it was a matter of capitulations, he had his own to make in
his disappearance from Manchester, his familiar scene. The Head of
Hepplestalls made no half-and-half business of it, dividing his days
between the mills, the Manchester office and the Manchester Exchange. He
left others to cut a figure on ‘Change and to hold court in the offices.
His place was at the source, at the mills, a standard-bearer of the
cotton trade, a manufacturer first and a salesman and distributor only
by proxy. It meant, for William, the change in the habits of half
a lifetime, the end of his pleasant Cheshire County associations at
Alderley, the end of his lunches in his club in Manchester, and, so
far, he could have sympathized with Gertrude if only she hadn’t, by the
violence of her expression, driven him hotly to resent her view.
She called it “darkest Lancashire”--Staithley, the Staithley of the
Hepplestalls! “Caretakers for Rupert!” There was truth in that, though
the caretaking, by reason of the war and because when the war ended
Rupert had still to begin at the beginning, would last ten years and
(confound Gertrude), couldn’t she see what it meant to William that he
was going to live and to have his children live in Staithley Hall where
he had spent his boyhood? Caretakers! They were all caretakers, they
were all trustees. Above all, he, William, was Head of Hepple-stall’s
and his wife had so little appreciation of the glory that was his as to
be captious about the trivial offsets.
The responsibility, heaven knew, was heavy enough without Gertrude’s
adding to it this galling burden of her discontent, but, though she
submitted, it was never gracefully. She went to Staithley determined
that their time there should be short, that she would lose no
opportunity to press for his retirement; but she had learned the need of
subtlety. She had found her William a malleable husband, but there
were hard places in the softest men and here was one of them not to be
negotiated easily or hurriedly, but by a gentle tactfulness. Perhaps she
knew, better than he knew himself, that there was no granite in him.
She reminded him, not every day or every week, but sufficiently often
to show that she did not relent, of her hatred of Staithley. She had
the wisdom not to criticize the Hall--indeed she couldn’t, even when she
flogged resentment, disrelish that aging place of mellow beauty--but,
“If it were anywhere but at Staithley!” she cried with wearying
monotony, and in a score of ways she made dissatisfaction rankle. It was
a fact in their lives which she intended to turn into a factor.
She made a minor counter of Rupert’s marriage to a musical comedy
actress. “I’m caretaker for a slut,” she said, and when, after the war,
William was indulgent about Rupert who was demobilized and yet did not
come to Staithley, her fury was uncontrolled. “He has had no honeymoon
and no holiday,” said William. “Both are due to him before he comes
here.”
“Here,” she said, “to the Hall, to turn me out of the only thing
that made Staithley tolerable. You expect me to live in a villa in
Staithley?”
“The Hall is Rupert’s. If he were a bachelor, he would no doubt ask us
to stay on. As he is married, we must find other quarters.”
“But not in Staithley. William, say it shall not be in Staithley.”
“It must.”
“I’m evicted for that slut! Have you no more thought for your wife than
to humiliate me like that?”
“There is no humiliation, Gertrude. And, I expect, no need to think of
this at all yet. Rupert deserves a long holiday.”
“Keeping me on tenterhooks, never knowing from one day to the next when
I shall get orders to quit. And, all the time we could do the reasonable
thing. We could leave Staithley and go to London.”
“We shall not leave Staithley,” he said. “Staithley is the home of the
Head of Hepplestall’s.”
“The homeless Head,” she taunted, and he did, in fact, almost as much
as she, resent the implications of Rupert’s marriage. It had been suave
living at the Hall, peopled with memories of his race and, important
point, affording room for a man to escape into from his wife. Certainly
he had been dull about Rupert’s marriage, he hadn’t sufficiently
perceived that he must leave the Hall to live elsewhere in Staithley. “A
villa in Staithley,” Gertrude put it, and truly he supposed that he
must live in a house which would be correctly described as a villa. He
couldn’t expect the associations of the Hall, but he wanted scope in a
Staithley home in which to flee from Gertrude, and looked ahead with a
sense of weariness to the long period of Rupert’s noviciate. Then, and
not till then, he might chant his “_Nunc dîmittis_” he might retire and
go, as Gertrude wished, to London, but not before then. Certainly not
before then.
But war disintegrates. William was wrong in thinking that he had to pit
his tenacity and his sense of duty only against Gertrude. The end of the
war and its immediate sequel were to blow a shrewd side-wind upon his
resolution to endure.
The great delusion of the war was that its end would be peace. William
was encouraged by that delusion to wrestle with the war-problems of his
business: the shortage of raw cotton, the leaping costs of production,
the shortage of shipping. The home trade was good beyond precedent, it
almost seemed that the higher the price the greater the demand; but
the home market, at its most voracious, took only a minor part of
Hepplestall’s output. Turkey was an enemy; India, China and South
America followed warily the upward trend of prices, expecting the end of
the war to bring a sudden fall, and, also, were difficult of access by
reason of the transport shortage. In spite of the military service act,
in spite of their woolen dyeing, and of every device that William and
the Board could contrive to keep the great mills active, there was
unemployment at Hepplestall’s. Cotton was rationed in Lancashire and
Hepplestall’s quota of the common stock was insufficient to keep their
spindles at work. The situation was met adequately by the Cotton Control
Board and the Unions and by the substitution of corporate spirit for
individualism; by high wages; by a pool of fines imposed on those who
worked more spindles and took more cotton than their due; and ends were
met all round, but, however different the case of the munition trades,
cotton was no beneficiary of the war.
The year 1919 brought a great and a dangerous reaction. It was seen by
the foreign markets that their expectations of a spectacular fall in
prices were not to be realized, and, for a time, buyers scrambled
to supply, at any price, cotton goods to countries starved of cotton
practically throughout the war. William looked back to his father’s time
when the margin of profit on a pound of yarn had been reckoned by an
eighth or a farthing: it was now sixpence or more, and he trembled
for the cotton trade. Such margins had the febrile unhealthiness of an
overheated forcing-house. He hadn’t expected peace to duplicate for him
the conditions of 1913, but these profits, current in 1919, expressed
for him the hazards of the peace. There was a madness in the very air,
and a frenzy of speculation resulted from this rebound of the cotton
trade from war-depression to extreme buoyancy. The profits were
notorious, and Labor could not be expected to remain without its share
of the loot. That was reasonable enough, but William had no faith in
the boom’s lasting and knew the difficulty of persuading Labor to accept
reduction when the tight times came. Meanwhile, certainly, Labor had a
sound case for a large advance in wages, even though wages had
steadily risen throughout the war. William wondered if any helmsman
of Hepple-stall’s had ever faced such anxious times as these; the very
appearance of prosperity, deceptive and fleeting as he held it to be,
was incalculable menace. In spite of himself, he was a profiteer--not a
war, but an as-a-result-of-the-war profiteer--and both hated and feared
it. This was not peace but pyrotechny; they were up like a rocket and he
feared to come down like the stick.
Lancashire was turned into a speculator’s cockpit and cotton mill shares
were changing hands sometimes at ten times their nominal value. The
point, especially, was the prohibitive cost of building, so that
existing mills had monopoly valuations. The general anticipation, which
William did not share, was that a world hunger for cotton goods would
sustain the boom for four or five years; there was plenty of war-made
wealth ready for investment, and the cotton trade appeared a promising
field for high and quick returns.
So much money was there and so attractive did cotton trade prospects
appear that the local speculator began to be outbidden very greatly to
his patriotic annoyance. The annoyance, indeed, was more than patriotic
or parochial, it was sensible. A highly technical trade can be run
to advantage only when its controllers have not only full technical
knowledge, but full knowledge of local characteristics and prejudices,
and Lancashire was, historically, self-supporting with its finance as
well as its trade under Lancashire direction. From its brutal origins
to its present comparatively humane organization, its struggles and its
achievements had been its own.
The interests of the financier are financial; one-eyed, short-sighted,
parasitic interests. Steam and the factory system fell like a blight
on Lancashire, but they had in them the elements of progress of a kind;
they worked out, outrageously, in the course of a century to a balance
where the power was not exclusively the employers’. The object of the
London financiers who now perceived in Lancashire a fruitful field was
to buy up mills, run them under managers for the first years of the
boom, then, before new mills could be built, to show amazing profits and
to unload on the guileless public before the boom collapsed. It was
a raid purely in financial interests and opposed to the permanent
interests of Lancashire, which would be left to bear, in a new era of
distress, the burdens imposed by over-capitalization. To the financier,
Lancashire was a counter in whose future he had no interest after he
had floated his companies and got out with his profits. And he collected
mills like so many tricks in his game.
The owners were fraudulent trustees to sell even under temptation of
such prices as were offered? Well, many did not sell, and for others
there was the excuse, besides natural greed, of war-weariness. They had
the feeling that here was security offered them, ease after years of
strain; it was a _sauve qui peut_ and the devil take the hindmost. They
were men who hadn’t been in business for their health and were offered
golden opportunity to retire from business. They had been, perhaps, a
little jealous of others who had made strictly war wealth, and this
was their chance to get hold, at second hand, of a share of those war
profits. There was the example of others... there would be stressful
times ahead for the cotton trade... Labor upheavals... it was good to be
out of it all, with one’s money gently in the Funds.
And Finance goes stealthily to work: it was not at first apparent,
even to sellers, that behind the nominal buyers were non-Lancashire
financiers. There was no immediate apprehension of the objects; nobody
took quick alarm. Labor, especially the Oldham spinners, had cotton
shares to sell and took a profit with the rest. They started a special
share exchange in Oldham: it was open through the Christmas holidays
and on New Year’s Day of 1920. That speaks more than volumes for the
dementia of that boom. Working on New Year’s Day in Oldham! What was
the use of being sentimentally annoyed at being outbidden by a Londoner,
even if you perceived he was a Londoner, when the congenital idiot
offered ten pounds for a pound share on which you had only paid up five
shillings?
Appetite grew by what it fed on and Finance ceased to be satisfied with
acquiring small mills whose names, at any rate, were unknown to the
outside investor. Hepplestall’s was different, Hepplestall’s was known
to every shopkeeper and every housewife in the land. It was, in the
opinion of Finance, only a question of price; and prices did not cow
Finance.
William sat in the office of the Hepplestalls with a letter before him
which was Finance’s opening gambit in the game. It was addressed to
him personally, marked “private and confidential,” by a London firm
of chartered accountants whose national eminence left no doubt of the
serious intentions of their clients.
Which of us does not know the fearful joy of mental flirtation with
crime? William, restraining his first sound impulse to tear up the
letter and to put its fragments where they properly belonged, in
the waste-paper basket, persuaded himself that his motive was simple
curiosity. It had nothing to do with Gertrude, nor with her impatience
of Rupert who was prolonging a holiday into a habit, and who, if he made
no signal that her reign in Staithley Hall must end, made no signal,
either, that his training for the Service must begin. By this time,
William had, distinctly, his puzzled misgivings about Rupert, but he
hadn’t quite reached the point of seeing in Rupert’s absence and his
uncommunicativeness a deliberate challenge to the Service. He attributed
to thoughtlessness an absence which was thoughtful.
He had at first no other idea than to calculate what fabulous figure
would, in existing circumstances, be justly demanded for Hepplestall’s
on the ridiculous hypothesis of Hepplestall’s being for sale. There
was surely no harm on a slack morning in a little theoretic financial
exercise of that kind. There wasn’t; but, for all that, he went about
the collecting of data, alone in his office under the pictured _eyes_ of
bygone Hepplestalls, with the furtive air of a criminal.
For insurance purposes, in view of post-war values, they had recently
had a professional valuation made of the mills, machinery, office and
warehouse buildings in Staithley and Manchester. Providential, William
thought, meaning, of course, no more than that he need not waste more
than an hour or so in satisfying his natural curiosity. It was, he
asserted, defiantly daring the _gaze_ of the Founder on the wall,
natural to be curious.
He had the valuation for insurance before him now: he applied the
multiplication table to reach an estimate of the market value. He
meditated goodwill. Guiltily he attempted to capitalize the name of
Hepplestall’s, and it made him feel less guilty to capitalize it in
seven figures. The total result was so large that, notwithstanding the
national eminence of the chartered accountants whose letter was in his
pocket, he felt justified in regarding his proceedings as completely
extravagant.
So he might just as well amuse himself further. He might, for instance,
refresh his memory of the distribution of Hepplestall’s shares, and
he might turn up the articles of association and see if that document,
usually so comprehensive, had anticipated this unlikeliest of all
improbabilities, a sale of Hepplestall’s: and what emerged from his
investigation was the fact that if he and Rupert voted, on their joint
holdings of shares, for a sale at a legally summoned general meeting of
Hepplestall’s shareholders, a sale would be authorized. He and Rupert!
William found himself sweating violently. It was impure, obscene
nightmare, but style his communings what he would, the pass was there
and he and Rupert had the power to sell it.
He rose and paced the room. War disintegrates, but not to this degree,
not to the degree of dissipating the tradition of the Hepplestalls. He,
the Head, the Chief Trustee, had meditated treachery, but only (he faced
the portraits reassuringly), only speculatively, only in pursuit of a
train of thought started by an impertinent letter, which he had not torn
up. No, he had not torn it up, he had preserved it as laughable proof
of the insensibility to finer issues of these financial people. He would
show it to his brothers or to Rupert: it would become quite a family
jest.
To Rupert? Indeed he ought to show it first to Rupert, the future Head.
He could, jokingly, good-humoredly, use it as a lever to make Rupert
conscious of his responsibilities, he could say “if you don’t come
quickly, there’ll be no Hepplestall’s for you to come to. Look at this
letter. You and I, between us, have controlling interest; we could sell
the firm, and the rest of the Board could not effectively prevent us.
I’m joking, of course. That sort of thing isn’t in the tradition of the
Hepplestalls. And, by the way, speaking of the tradition, when are we to
expect you amongst us?”
Something like that; not a bit a business letter, not serious; genial
and avuncular; but there was, manifestly, a Rupert affair, and this
impudent inquiry of the eminent chartered accountants was the very means
to bring the affair to a head. The boy was exceeding the license allowed
even to one who had been in the war from the beginning; it was nearly a
year since his demobilization.
William thought that his letter would seem more friendly if he addressed
it from the Hall and looked in his desk for notepaper. He seemed to have
run out of the supply of private notepaper he kept in his desk; then the
spinning manager interrupted him. He put the letter in his pocket again:
he would write to Rupert after lunch at the Hall.
He was busy for some time with the spinning manager, and went home
convinced that the only serious thought he had ever had about the letter
in his pocket was of its opportuneness in the matter of Rupert. It was
nothing beyond a plausible excuse for writing to Rupert essentially on
another subject and the figures in his note-book were not a traitor’s
secret but the meaningless result of a middle-aged gentleman’s mental
gymnastics.
He lunched alone with Gertrude and, “I’m writing to Rupert to-day,” he
said incautiously.
“Oh?” She bristled. “Why?”
He perceived and regretted his incaution. It was indiscreet to say that
his object was to urge Rupert to Staithley when that coming could only
mean Gertrude’s going from the Hall. “Oh,” he said, “I’ve to send on a
letter which will amuse him.” He had decided that the only use of
that letter was humorous; it was a jest, questionable in taste but
illustrative of the times and therefore to be mentioned in the family
and preserved as a curiosity amongst the papers of the firm. And if it
were going to be a family diversion, who had better right than William’s
wife to be the first to enjoy it with him? She had unreal grievances
enough without his adding to them the real grievance of his denying her
the right to laugh at those harlequin accountants who so grotesquely
misapprehended Hepplestall’s. “This is the letter,” he said, passing it
across to her, expecting, actually, that she would smile.
She did not smile. “I see,” she said, and, in fact, saw very well.
Women’s incomprehension of business has been exaggerated. “Why, to
arrive at the figure they ask for would take weeks of work.”
“I got at it roughly in half an hour this morning,” he boasted.
“And sent it to them?” she asked quickly.
“Oh dear, no. I was only doing it as a matter of curiosity. If I sent
them my result, I should frighten them.”
“They must expect something big, though. Shan’t you reply at all or are
you consulting Rupert first?”
“I’d hardly say ‘consult,’” he said. “I’m sending it him as I show
it you--as a joke. I shall point out to him, as a form, that he and I
between us have a controlling share interest. I shall jest about
our powers. It’s an opportunity of making Rupert awake to his
responsibilities.”
“Yes,” said Gertrude, “I see. And you know best, dear.” She was
dangerously uncombative, arranging her mental notes that, though he
derided the letter, he had prepared an estimate and that he was writing
to Rupert who, with William, could take decisive action. By way purely
of showing him how little seriously she took it, she changed the
subject.
“I heard from Connie Duxbury this morning,” she said.
“Not the most desirable of your acquaintances, I think,” said William.
“Oh, my dear. Sir Ralph’s a member of Parliament now.”
“It isn’t a certificate of respectability.”
She looked thoughtfully at him, as he rose and went into the library to
write to Rupert, with the careful, anxious gaze of a wife who sees in
her husband the symptoms of ill-health. She wished to leave Staithley
for her own sake, but decidedly it was for William’s sake as well. In
Manchester, if he had not been advanced, if (for instance) his play at
Bridge was circumspect while hers was dashing, he had been broadminded.
She remembered that he had spoken of Sir Ralph as a profiteer, but had
admitted that most of their friends were profiteers. Staithley, already,
was narrowing William, in months. What would it not do for him in years?
She must get him out of Staithley before it was too late.
He was writing to Rupert; so would she write to Rupert. She would
assume, and she had her shrewd idea that the assumption was correct,
that Rupert’s views of Staithley marched with her own. She would paint
in lurid colors a picture of life in Staithley; she would exhibit
William, his furrowed brow, his whitening hair, as an awful warning;
she would enlarge upon the post-war difficulties, so immensely more
wearisome than in Sir Philip’s time. She would suggest that the
accountants’ letter was a salvation, a means honorable and reasonable,
of cutting the entail, of escaping from the Service. And she would tell
him to regard her letter as confidential.
She had no doubt whatever of her success with Rupert and as to William,
waverer was written all over him. Rupert’s decision would decide
William, and the William Hepplestalls would go to London. There were
housing troubles, but if you had money and if you took time by the
forelock, trouble melted. She proceeded to take time by the forelock and
wrote to Lady Duxbury to ask her to keep an eye open for a large house
near her own. She whispered to her dearest Connie in the very, very
strictest confidence that Hepplestall’s was going to be sold.