RUPERT in the office had been all that Mary had dared to hope, and that
was the danger of it. She watched him almost distrusting her eyes as she
might have watched a sudden conversion at a Salvation Army meeting, as
a spectacle that was too fantastic to be accepted at face value. She
had an idea that somebody suffered when the penitent reacted from the
emotion of the bench.
“Always a catch in everything,” she had thought when she avowed her
origin to Rupert, though she feared to lose him by the confession, and
now she was adventuring again in skepticism, she was hunting the catch,
the flaw latent in human happiness. She had won a victory and she
expected to pay the price.
William invited them to the Hall and Rupert deferred to her with
conventional politeness which seemed to her bleak menace. He froze her
by his courtesy after he had so pointedly ignored her presence except
for the pained surprise with which he had welcomed her, but she tried to
believe that she was hypersensitive.
She had butted in, into an affair of men, and even if he recognized
that she had done the one thing possible, she could hardly expect him
to applaud her meddling. Men were not grateful to meddling women. Heaven
knew she did not want him to eat the leek for her; and often there were
understandings which were better left unspoken. If that was it, if they
were tacitly to agree that her trespass was extreme but justified, then
she could do very well without more words. She could exult in his silent
approbation; but silent resentment would be terrible.
It would be terrible but bearable: she was thinking too much of herself
and too little of him. She loved, and what mattered in love was not what
one got out of it but what one put into it. By a treachery, if he liked
to take that view of her interference, she had put more into her love
than she had ever put before, she had taken a greater risk and he was
signally the gainer by it. He was going to Hepplestall’s, he was a
greater Rupert now.
She couldn’t have it both ways and what had been wrong in London was
that he had loved her too much, in the sense that he had spent his
life upon her and on things which came into his life only through his
relationship with her. To be beautiful, love must have proportion and
his had grown unshapely. If all her loss were to be loss of superfluity,
her price of victory would be low indeed. He would not in Staithley be
the great lover he had been in London, but there was double edge to that
phrase “great lover”: the great lovers were too often the little men.
Certainly and healthily he would love her less uxoriously now, and that
must be all to the good.
All, even if he loved her no more. That was the risk she had taken with
open eyes, and love her sanely or love her not at all, he had come to
Hepplestall’s: Rupert the man was of more importance than Rupert the
husband. And the right man would not cease to love her because she had
gone crusading for his soul under the banner of a Bradshaw.
She saw that she had come round to optimism and found herself in such a
port with a thousand new alarms. She was crying safety when there was no
safety, she...
Rupert and William were talking and she had not been listening. She must
have missed clews to Rupert’s thought and forced herself to hear. It
didn’t sound revealing talk, though. Lightly--and how could they be
light?--they were chaffing each other about their cars.
“I’ll prove it to you now,” William was saying. “We’ll garage your crock
here and I’ll drive you up to the Hall in a car that is a car.”
“No, thanks,” said Rupert, “I’ve something to do first, with Mary. We’ll
follow you soon. I dare say my aunt won’t be sorry to have warning of
our coming.”
William’s face fell. Gertrude could make herself unpleasant when she did
not get her way, and this time her hopes had gone sadly agley. He would
have liked a bodyguard when he announced to her that Rupert was coming
to Staithley. “I had hoped--” he began.
Rupert nodded curtly. “Yes,” he said, surprising William by a look which
seemed strangely to comprehend his dilemma, “but we shall not be long.”
Mary thrilled through all preoccupation to the heady thought that a
Bradshaw was to dine at Staithley Hall, but her way there was not, it
seemed, to be an easy one. Rupert chose, she supposed, to have things
out with her first, and if she did not relish the anticipation, she
could admire his promptitude. He had an air of grim gayety which
mystified by its contradiction, but of which the grimness seemed
addressed to William and the gayety to her.
“Got any luggage?” he asked her. She had quitted Staithley with a
suitcase; she returned with no more outward show of possession, and they
picked up her case in the ante-room where she had left it as they passed
through to get the car.
“Well, Mary Ellen,” he said, using her full name which certainly was
normal in Lancashire where the Mary Ellens and the John Thomases are
almost double-barreled names, “this is Staithley. How well do you
remember it? Is there a road round the mills?”
“I think so,” she said, “but you’ll meet cobbles.”
“It’s Staithley,” he said, and drove the circuit of the mills in
silence. “Um,” he said. “London. Furthest East, which is the Aldwych
Theater, to Furthest West, which is the St. James, to Furthest North,
which is the Oxford, and back East by Drury Lane. We’ve driven further
than that round these mills. Somebody once mentioned to me that they’re
big. There’s a coal mine, too, that’s a bit of detail nobody bothers to
think of. Well, is there any way of looking down on this village?”
“There’s Staithley Edge,” she said. “There’s a road up by the Drill
Hall.”
“Point it out,” he said. “You understand that we’re doing this to
give Aunt Gertrude time to powder her nose. It isn’t really a waste of
petrol.”
Whatever it was, and certainly she found no harsh reactions here, they
were doing it in the dark which fell like a benediction on Staithley.
Their wheels churned up rich mud of the consistency, since for days it
had been fine, of suet pudding, and the road, worn by the heavy traffic
of the mills, bumped them inexorably. “Staithley!” he said. “Staithley!”
but she did not detect contempt. They reached the Drill Hall and the
Square, unchanged except by a War Memorial and a cinema, and turned
into the street up which she had once gazed while Mr. Chown waited,
ill-lighted, ill-paved, a somber channel between two scrubby rows of
deadly uniform houses. “Staithley goes home,” Tom Bradshaw had said,
and this was where an appreciable percentage of it had gone; but neither
Rupert nor Mary were being sociological now. She did not know what he
was thinking; she thought of Staithley Edge and of the moors beyond,
wondering a little why she should find Staithley so good when it was so
good to get out of it up here.
A tang of burning peat assailed her nostrils, indicating that they had
reached the height where peat from, the moors cost less than coal from
the pits, and soon the upland air blew coolly in their faces as they
left the topmost house behind. The road led on, over the hill, across
the moor which showed no signs, in the darkness, of men’s ravaging
handiwork, but at the first rise Rupert stopped the car and got out.
“So that’s it.” He looked on Staithley, where the streets, outlined by
their lamps, seemed to lead resolutely to an end which was nothing. It
was not nothing; it was the vast bulk of Staithley Mills, unlighted save
for a glimmer here and there, but possibly he was seeing in these human
roadways which debouched on that black inhuman nullity, a symbol of
futility. The gayety seemed gone from him like air from a punctured
balloon, as he said again, in a dejected voice, “So that’s it. That pool
of darkness. They’re a great size, the Staithley Mills.”
She was out of the car and at his elbow as she said, “A man’s size in
jobs, Rupert.”
“Or in prisons,” he said bitterly.
“Prisons!” And she had been feeling so secure! Here was sheer
miracle--she and Rupert were standing together on Staithley Edge;
they were in her land of heart’s desire, and the Edge, her Mecca, was
betraying her, the miracle was declining to be miraculous. “Prisons!”
she said, in an agony of disillusionment.
“Oh, aren’t we all in prison?” he asked. “The larger, the smaller--does
it matter?”
This was philosophy, and Mary wanted the practicalities. “Are you seeing
me as jailer? Is that what you mean?”
“Resenting you?” he asked. “You!” and left it so with luminous emphasis.
“No. Life’s the jailer. For four years I was every day afraid of death.
I’m afraid of life to-night. What shall I make of Staithley? Those
mills, to which each Hepplestall since the first who built there has
added something great. Those milestones of my race. I meant to run away,
I meant to dodge and shirk and make belief. You’ve steered me back and
I thank you for it, Mary. But it’s a mouthful that I’ve bitten off.
Hepplestall’s! What shall I add? I don’t know. I’m overpowered. It’s so
solemn. It’s so big.”
“You’re big, Rupert.”
He seemed not to hear or to feel her hand on his. “‘On me, ultimately on
me alone rests the responsibility.’ That is what my father, who was
Head of Hepplestall’s, said to me. Look at those mills, then look at me.
They’re big. They’re terrifying in their bigness.”
“No. Worth while in their bigness.”
“I don’t know what you were thinking as we drove round the mills. I was
wondering,” he smiled a little, “if they speak of a cliff as beetling
because it makes one feel the size of a beetle under it. And I thought
of a machine I remembered seeing in the works that they call a beetle.
It’s got great rollers with weights that clump and thump the cloth till
it shines and the noise of it splits your ears. Each huge wall of the
mills, God knows how many stories high, seemed to fall on me like
so many successive blows from a beetling machine. I was under
Hepplestall’s, as people talk of being under the weather, and it’s
always Hepplestall’s weather in Staithley. I wasn’t lying when I spoke
to those fellows in the yard, I had some confidence then, but it’s
oozed, it’s oozed. Look at the size of it all.”
“I’m looking,” said Mary, “and from Staithley Edge it’s in perspective.
Rupert, this air up here! I’m not afraid. Not here. Not now. You...
you’ve got growing pains, and they say they’re imaginary, but I know
they’re good. You’re a bigger man already than you were.”
“I’m a hefty brute for a growing child,” he smiled down at her.
“You can take it smiling, though,” she approved.
“It’s this modern flippancy,” he grinned. “A generation of scoffers. But
you can’t get over Hepplestall’s by scoffing at it. I came up here
to look down on it, and I’m only more aware than ever that it’s big.
You--you’ve got your idea of me. It’s a nice idea, but it’s pure
flattery.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes, it is, to-day. But it’s something to grow up to, and it’s
worth while because it’s your idea. If this family gang of mine told me
they believed in me I should know they were talking through their hats.
They wouldn’t be believing in me, they’d be believing in who I am,
they’d be believing in a tradition which declares that my father’s son
must be up to standard. You’re different. You know me and they don’t,
and you’ve brought me to Staithley. It’s your doing, and I want like
hell not to let you down. Your idea of me’s not true. It’s too good to
be true. But I mean to make it true.”
Mary looked uphill to where, a hundred feet above them, the darkling rim
of the Edge was silhouetted against the sky. “Staithley Edge,” she said,
“and in my mind I was calling you a cheat.” She stooped to the bank by
the road, she plucked coarse grass and held it to her lips. “Staithley
Edge, will you forgive me? The dreams I’ve had of you, and then the
shameful doubts and now the better than all dreaming that this is. I was
going to build a house on Staithley Edge, and I have built a man.”
“Of course,” said Rupert, “I knew you had a passion for hills.”
“I never told you,” Mary said.
“No. But I knew. This is a hill. It isn’t an Alp. It isn’t a mountain.
It’s Staithley Edge. I wonder what they’re doing about houses in
Staithley. I don’t want to rob any one, but I’d like a house up here.”
“Rupert!” she cried.
“It’s Aunt Gertrude, you know,” he seemed to apologize. “Poor old thing,
she’s got the same bee in her bonnet that her nephew used to have.
London. Well, William’s the Head and he ought to go on at the Hall, and
if he does it should pacify Gertrude. I expect he’s going through it
while we’re loafing up here. Shall we go and break the news to her that
there’s no eviction on the program?”
“Oh, my dear, there are a thousand things we haven’t said.”
“There’s the point, for instance, that if I look down on Staithley Mills
every morning from my bedroom I ought to feel less scared of them.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Mary and, kissing him, some
hundreds of the things they hadn’t said seemed lustrously expressed. She
found no insincerities in him now; the gesture and the bravado and the
air that it was all something he was doing for a wager--these had
gone and in their place was his task acknowledged and approached with
humility. It was a beginning and she thought so well of his beginning
that she had time to think of herself.
He turned the car towards the Hall, and the thought that she was going
there was no longer heady. He had spoken contemptuously of “this family
gang”; he had said, and she adored him for it, that she was different.
They had, perhaps, some comfort for Gertrude; they were going to her
with a message which should reconcile her to the news she would have
heard from William; but, for all that, Mary was daunted at her coming
encounter with Gertrude Hepplestall.
“Rupert,” she said, “you must help me to-night. Your aunt, and all the
Hepplestalls, your family--and me.”
He frowned. “Well?” he said.
“There’s the tradition, and you married me. You married into musical
comedy.”
“Hasn’t it dawned on you that you’re my wife, Mary?” But that was
precisely what had dawned upon her and his question made her wonder
if he saw what was implied. In London, he was all but explicitly the
husband of Mary Arden; in Staithley she was no longer Mary Arden, she
was the wife of Sir Rupert Hepplestall. That might not mean that the
foundations of their relationship had shifted, but it certainly meant a
vital difference in its values above the surface. She was Cæsar’s wife
and people ought not to be able to remember against Cæsar that he had
married an actress.
“Yes, your wife, Rupert. Your wife who was an actress.”
“Are you making the suggestion that you are something to be ashamed of?”
“I’ve the conceit to believe I’m not. You love me and I’ve the right to
be conceited. But it isn’t what I think of myself, it’s what Staithley
will think of me. London’s inured to actresses. Staithley--”
“Excuse an interruption,” he said, “but if you want to know what
Staithley will think to-morrow, look there.” He slowed the car
and pointed to the cinema across the Square. A man on a ladder
was hand-printing in large letters on a white sheet above the door
“Tomorrow. Mary Arden in...”
“That’s enterprise, isn’t it? The fellow can’t have heard more than half
an hour ago that I was here, then he’d to think of you and he must have
been busy on the ’phone to have made sure of getting that film here
tomorrow.”
“Rupert, how awful for you. They will never forget what I was now.”
“Never. Thank God.”
“Don’t you care?”
“Oh, yes, I care and if I cared cheaply, I should thank you for being my
propagandist. I should thank you for making me popular because you are
popular and I’m your husband. You can’t deny there’s that in it, Mary,
but there’s more. There’s the bridging of a gulf. There’s a breach
made in a bad tradition. We Hepple-stalls must drop being Olympian.
Aloofness; that’s to go and it’ll get a shove when Lady Hepplestall is
seen on the screen in Staithley. What do a thousand Gertrudes matter if
we can bridge the gulf? We’ve got to get together, we’ve got to reach
those men who hissed. Do you see that cinema as a cheap way? I don’t.
It’s a modern way if you like and it isn’t a way I made but one you
made for me. It’s a reach-me-down, and I shan’t stop at ways that are
ready-made. I’ll find my own. Up on the Edge I asked what I would add to
Hepplestall’s. I’ll add this if I can--I’ll add humanity.”
“And I can help. Music, for instance.”
“You’ll make me jealous soon. You have so many advantages of me. I’m not
even sure if I’m good enough for Lancashire League cricket. It’s good
stuff, I can tell you. Whereas you...”
“Am I to manage Staithley Mills?”
“Nor I, for years. Never, if I’m unequal to it. But you’re right. The
mills are the important thing, the rest’s decoration and decoration
won’t go far. Staithley won’t stand you and me as Lady and Lord
Bountiful. Those hissing friends of ours--circuses won’t satisfy them
and I’d think the worse of them if they would. I’ll talk to William
to-night and I expect he’ll snap my head off. He’s of the old gang,
William is. There’s the war between William and me, but, Lord, he’ll
know, he’ll know it all and I know nothing. I’m so young.”
“Yes,” said Mary, “and you’ll stay young, please. You’ll keep your hope,
my faith, your youth.”
“I’m young all right,” he said. “Listen to me if you doubt it. ‘I’ll
add humanity.’ Did I say that? With a voice beautifully vibrant with
earnestness? Young enough to be capable of anything. But I will add it,”
he finished as he drew up at the door of the Hall.
Hope burnished them as they came into the old home of the Hepplestalls;
they were the keepers of a great light lit on Staithley Edge; they had
a radiance which seemed to Gertrude a personal affront to her
chatelainship. They came with the insolence of conquerors into the
somber scene of her defeat, but she was on guard against revealing her
feelings to the actress woman who was Lady Hepplestall. She had failed,
she was doomed to Staithley, she had to explain away to her friend the
letter she had written announcing that she was coming to live in London,
she was to be evicted from the Hall by a saucy baggage out of a musical
comedy; but even if the baggage proved as bad as her worst anticipations
she would not lower to her by the fraction of an inch her flag of
resolutely suave politeness.
She went upstairs to change her face after a tempestuous interview with
William, and, expectant of a Mary strident in jazz coloring, changed
also her frock to a sedate gray which should contrast the lady with the
Lady. Then Mary came, with hair wind-tossed, and round her lips were
marks as if she were a child sticky with toffee (but that was because
when you pluck grass on Staithley Edge and press it to your cheek
and kiss it, it leaves behind traces of the smoky livery it wears),
apologizing for her plain traveling dress, looking so unlike Gertrude’s
idea of the beauty-chorus queen who had captured Rupert that immediately
she was off on a new trail and saw in Mary a tool made for her through
which to work on Rupert and after all to bring about the sale
of Hepple-stall’s. She could manage this smudge-faced piece of
insignificance and she could manage a Rupert who had been caught by it.
Her spirits rose, and their happiness seemed to her no longer offensive
but imbecile.
Later on, she wondered why she forgot that the business of an actress
was to act. She meditated ruefully upon the vanity of human hopes and
the fallibility of first impressions, and she had no doubt but
that Mary, for some dark purpose of her own, had counterfeited
insignificance.
Mary hadn’t, as a fact, acted, but she had thought of Mary Ellen
Bradshaw and of Jackman’s Buildings and Staithley streets as the door
of the Hall opened to her, and she had continued to think of Mary Ellen
Bradshaw through the few moments when Gertrude was greeting her. She
didn’t know that the mourning grass of Staithley Edge had left its mark
on her face; if she had known, she would have felt more insignificant
still, but she had washed since then, she had kissed Rupert in their
bedroom in Staithley Hall and her effect now upon Gertrude was that
of the bottle marked “Drink me” upon Alice in Wonderland. Gertrude
had drunk of no magic bottle, but she dwindled before Mary. It was
disconcerting to an intriguer who had so lately seen Mary as her pliant
instrument, but “Pooh! some actress trick,” she thought, making an
effort to believe that she dominated the table.
“I’m afraid you will find Staithley very dull,” she said, “but we shall
all do our best for you.”
“Thank you,” said Mary. “It’s exciting so far.”
“Yes. It must be strangely novel to you. Of course, I never go into the
town. One needn’t, living in the Hall; but I’m forgetting. I shan’t be
living here.”
“Oh, you will, aunt,” said Rupert. “We went up on the Edge to have
a look at it all, and we decided--it arose out of a suggestion of
Mary’s--to build a house up there. You see, uncle, you’re the Head. The
Hall is naturally yours and aunt’s.”
“Naturally? It’s your property, Rupert.”
“Then that settles it. We’ll get some one to run us up a cottage on the
Edge quite quickly. Really a cottage, I mean. I shall be working as a
workman and I ought to live as one. I shan’t do that, but it won’t be a
mansion pretending to be a cottage.”
“Well!” said Gertrude. “A cottage on the Edge!”
“We have to grow, Rupert and I,” said Mary. “We aren’t big enough for
the Hall yet.”
“I feel about a quarter of an inch high, uncle, when I think of those
mills... those thousands of men.”
“Oh, the workpeople,” said Gertrude, putting them in their place. “Your
uncle tells me some of them dared to hiss.”
“Yes, I want to talk to you about that, uncle.”
William shuffled in his chair. “Not very nice of them, was it?”
“Impertinents,” said Gertrude. “They ought to be locked up.”
Rupert stared at her. If this was the attitude of the Hall, he
thought, no wonder there had been a show of resentment. But it was only
Gertrude’s attitude. “Would you also lock up,” said William, “the very
many who did a deadlier thing than hissing? The men who stayed away,
the men who went home ignoring Rupert altogether? We’d have to close the
mills for lack of labor.”
“Lord,” said Rupert, “that’s telling me something.”
“I thought it best that you should know.”
Rupert thought so too, even if it was a piece of knowledge which seemed
to bring him off a high place with a bump.
“Oh, my dears,” Gertrude put in, “you’ve no idea how difficult it all
is.”
“No,” said Mary, “but Rupert knows that he knows nothing and he’s here
to learn.”
“Yes. I’m here to learn. Can you put your finger on this for me, uncle?
Why did they hiss? Why did they stay away?”
“What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?” asked. Gertrude.
“It’s to be noted, Rupert,” said William, “that the hisses came before
you spoke, not afterwards.”
“You mean I said the right thing?”
“Did you mean what you said? Look at those books over there.” Behind the
glass of the old mahogany case to which he pointed, the titles looked
queerly incongruous. There were books on such subjects as Welfare
Societies, Works Committees, Co-Partnership, and Rupert thought them
incongruous not only in connection with that bookcase but with William.
“People have sent them to you?” he guessed.
“No. I bought them. If in the short years that I’ve been Head I have
left my mark on Hepplestall’s, it is in this direction. Your father, as
perhaps you know, was against what he called coddling the men. I
would not coddle, but I have encouraged Welfare Societies and I have
instituted Works Committees.”
Rupert had the sensation of deflation. He had called William of “the
old gang,” and here was William’s contribution to the march of
Hepplestall’s. Rupert was to add humanity, was he? Well, William had
added it first. “I did these things with hope,” William was saying.
“I pinned my faith to them, and what are they worth? There were two
Hepplestalls hissed in Staithley Mills today. That is the reply to what
I have tried to do. Can you wonder that I feel I’ve shot my bolt and
missed my aim? The detail of my Works Committees scheme took me a year
to evolve. I thought it was accepted and welcomed; and I was hissed
to-day in Staithley Mills.”
For a moment even Mary was daunted, not by the thing she had brought
Rupert here to do but by the realization of what release had meant to
William.
“Not you, uncle,” Rupert cried. “They hissed me for being a laggard.”
“We’re Hepplestalls. That’s why they hissed. They hissed the Service.”
It had seemed solemn enough on Staithley Edge, but that was childish
levity compared with this. What should one answer back to men who
hissed the Service which served them? Gertrude’s pig with a grunt
seemed justified in the light of William’s revelation of his progressive
efforts.
“And you,” William said, “you spoke, and they cheered you for it. Well,
it’s in those books. Co-Partnership. No: I’ve not done that. Limitation
of profits--I’ve thought the Government was doing that drastically. I
don’t know. You went too far for me, but they didn’t hiss you when
you’d done, You sav you’re here to learn. Well, I can’t teach you. The
technical side and the ordinary business side--oh, yes, we’ll teach you
those. But what Labor wants, what, short of something catastrophic on
the Russian scale, will satisfy Labor, I cannot tell you for I do not
know.”
Once, unimaginably long ago, Rupert had found the beginnings of a
solution in his wife’s appearance on the screen in a Staithley cinema.
It was so long ago that he thought he must have grown stupendously since
then.
Perhaps he had; it was a far cry from that uninformed optimism to this
throttling doubt.
The doubt, though, was almost as uninformed as the optimism. He could
see Mary’s lips moving: what was she signaling to him? Ah, that was it.
She was repeating what she had said as they turned up the drive. “You’ll
stay young, please. You’ll keep your hope, my faith, your youth.”
Yes, so he would. He wouldn’t let Mary down, he wouldn’t be beaten by
Staithley. _Punch_--queer how much he turned to memories of _Punch_ for
mental figures--had a cartoon in an _Almanac_ during the war. A tattered
soldier, beaten to the knee, represented one year; a fresh upstanding
soldier, taking the standard from the first, represented the next year.
Was the motto “Carry on”? Well, a good motto for peace too. William was
coming to the end of his tether, and Rupert must make ready to take from
his hands the standard of the Service.
He had to learn, to learn, and for this thing which mattered most he
had not found a teacher, but he must keep his hope. Somewhere was light.
Somewhere was illumination. Somewhere was a teacher.
A servant came into the room. “Mr. Bradshaw wishes to speak to Sir
Rupert on the telephone,” he said, and a scoffing laugh from Gertrude
died stillborn at a look from the ci-devant, insignificant Lady
Hepplestall. Rupert went to the door, like a blind man who is promised
sight; and it is permissible to hope that Phoebe Bradshaw, from the
place in which she was, saw the face of Rupert Hepplestall as he
answered the call to the telephone of Tom Bradshaw, his adviser.
THE END