POINTS OF VIEW
On the following morning, the ominous Friday of this disastrous week,
there was a letter for Mr. Upton on the breakfast-table down in
Leicestershire. This circumstance was not so usual as it sounds,
because Mr. Upton conducted all his correspondence from his office at
the works. If you simply put the name of the village, as he did on his
stationery, to the works it went; it was necessary to direct your
letter to the hall if you wished it to be delivered there; and few
there were who had anything to say to Mr. Upton, on paper, unless it
was on business too. His youngest son, however, had furnished the more
impressive address to Dr. Bompas, whose hurried hand it was that dealt
the first blow.
It so happened that a letter from Dr. Bompas had been expected; this
made the letter he wrote especially upsetting, and for the following
reason. Mrs. Upton had been so shaken by her vivid dream on the
Thursday morning, that her husband had telegraphed to Bompas, somewhat
against his own judgment, to know how he found their son. The reply had
been: “Better expecting him again to-day will write”—which prepared the
family for still more reassuring accounts in the morning. Lettice felt
relieved as the original discoverer of Dr. Bompas. Horace found his
views confirmed as to the systematic exaggeration of a touch of asthma,
and Fred was only prevented by absence from entirely agreeing with
Horace. Mr. Upton thought no more about the matter. But poor Mrs. Upton
lay upstairs looking forward to a letter which it was quite impossible
to show her now that it had come.
Mr. Upton read it more than once without a word; and it was not his way
to keep a family matter to himself at his own table; but on this
occasion he triumphed over temperament with an extraordinary instinct
for what was in the air.
“The most infernal letter I ever had in my life!” was his only comment
as he thrust it in his pocket out of sight. Lettice, however, might
have seen that her father was far more distressed than angry had not
Horace promptly angered him by saying he was not surprised. The young
fellow’s face and the old one’s neck were redder before the last was
heard of that remark. A garbled paraphrase of the letter was eventually
vouchsafed; the boy had made very little improvement, and was not
likely to make more while he remained at a school where he was allowed
to use any remedy he liked; in fact, until he was taken away from
school, and placed under his own immediate control in town, Dr. Bompas
declined to persevere with the case.
“Blighter!” said Horace impartially, as though now there were two of
them. Such was, in fact, the sum of his observations to Lettice when
their father had taken himself and his letter upstairs. Young Tony was
not “playing the game”; but then he never did play it to the expert
satisfaction of Fred and Horace.
Upstairs the husband gave a more elaborate version of his letter, and
told a lie. He said he had destroyed the letter in his indignation. He
had destroyed it, but solely to escape any question of his showing it
to his wife. He said a happier thing by chance; he said that for two
pins he would motor over to the school and see for himself how the boy
really was; then perhaps he would be in a position to consider the
entreaty which Mrs. Upton added to the specialist’s demand, that his
patient should be placed under his eye in town. Mr. Upton went so far,
however, without much immediate intention of taking so strong a
measure.
He wished to discuss the matter with Horace; he might be quite
justified in his fears. He was sorry he had let them lead to words with
his eldest son. There were aspects of the case, as it presented itself
to his mind, which he could hardly thresh out with Lettice, and her
mother must not know of his anxiety on any account. Horace, however,
had gone off earlier than usual in his dudgeon.
Mr. Upton was not long in following him to the works.
It was a charming garden that he passed through on his way; it charmed
its owner all the more from his having made it himself out of a few
rolling meadows. The rhododendrons were at the climax of their June
glory. The new red gravel (his own colouring to a shade) appealed to an
eye which had never looked longer than necessary in the glass.
Lawn-tennis courts were marked out snowily on a shaven lawn; the only
eyesore the good man encountered was poor Pocket’s snob-wickets painted
on a buttress in the back premises; his own belching blast-furnaces,
corroding and defiling acres and acres within a few hundred yards of
his garden wall, were but another form of beauty to the sturdy Briton
who had made them too.
Horace was called into the private office and speedily propitiated. “I
was more anxious than I could tell you at the time,” his father said;
“the fact is, I concealed half the fellow’s letter on account of
Lettice. But it’s a man’s matter, and you ought to know.”
Of course the letter had stated that the erratic patient had failed to
keep his appointment on the morning of writing; but if it had drawn the
line of information there, it is highly improbable that Mr. Upton would
have exercised so wise a discretion at table and in his wife’s room.
It now appeared that as a busy professional man the outspoken Bompas
had gone far out of his way to play Mahomet to his patient’s mountain.
Tony had told him where he hoped to stay in London, which Bompas
particularly wished to know on account of some special prescription the
boy was to try that night. On his failure to appear at the appointed
time, the doctor had telephoned to the address in question, only to
learn that the boy had not stayed there at all. He had been given
another address with the same result, except that from the second house
he gathered that the young gentleman had gone on to some hotel. Horace
was left to imagine a professional opinion of such proceedings, and
asked for his own on the facts as a man of the world.
“Exactly like young Tony!” quoth Horace, never afraid to say what he
thought.
“What! Like a lad of sixteen to go and put up at some hotel?”
“Like Tony,” repeated Horace significantly. “Trust him to do what
nobody else ever did.”
“But how could Spearman give him the chance?”
“Heaven knows! Fred and I never got it.”
“I thought he was to stay at Coverley’s?”
“So I heard.”
“I don’t like it! It’s all wrong at his age,” said Mr. Upton. He had
his notions of life and its temptations, and he was blunt enough with
his elder sons, yet it was not without some hesitation that he added:
“You don’t think there’s any question of bad company, do you?”
And though Horace had “no use for” his so-called pocket edition, he
answered without any hesitation at all: “Not for a moment, from what I
know of Tony.”
Mr. Upton was sorry he had said so much. He excused himself by
mentioning his wife’s dream, now family property, which had been on his
mind all this time. Horace, however, had no hesitation in informing him
that nobody nowadays believed in dreams.
“Well, I never have, certainly,” said Mr. Upton. “But what can it be?”
“He probably went up to Lord’s, and forgot all about his doctor.”
“I hope not! You’re too down on him, Horace.”
“If there was nobody to put him up it was the game to go back to
school.”
“But he’s said to have gone to some hotel.”
“I don’t suppose he did,” said Horace. “I expect he got back somehow.”
The question was still under discussion when a telegram from Mr.
Spearman settled it. Where was Tony? He had not returned when due the
day before, and his friends in London wired that they knew nothing
about him.
“What friends?” cried Mr. Upton, in a fury. “Why the devil couldn’t
Spearman give their names or Bompas the addresses he talked about?”
Horace could only think of Mr. Coverley or “that Knaggs crowd.” Neither
he nor Fred had been at Coverley’s school, and young Tony’s friends
were by no means theirs.
Mr. Upton thought Lettice would know, and was going to speak to her on
the telephone when Horace reminded him of his own remark about its
being “a man’s matter”; it was beginning to look, even to Horace, like
a serious one as well, and in his opinion it was much better that
neither his mother nor his sister should know anything at all about it
before it was absolutely necessary. Horace now quoted his mother’s
dream as the devil did Scripture, but adduced sounder arguments
besides; he was speaking quite nicely of them both, for instance, when
he declared that Lettice was wrapped up in Tony, and would be beside
herself if she thought any evil had overtaken him. It would be simply
impossible for her to hide her anxiety from the mother on whom she also
waited hand and foot. Mr. Upton disagreed a little there; he had good
reason to believe in Lettice’s power of suppressing her own feelings;
but for her own sake, and particularly in view of that discredited
dream, he now decided to keep his daughter in the dark as long as his
wife.
It was his first decision; his next was to motor over to the school, as
he had fortunately told his wife he might, and have a word with Mr.
Spearman, who deserved hanging for the whole thing! The mischief was
done, however, and it was now a matter in which home and school
authorities must act together. A clerk was instructed to telephone to
the garage for the car to come straight to the works. And the
ironmaster stood waiting at his office window in a fever of anxiety.
The grimy scene on which he looked had a constant charm for him, and
yet to-day it almost added to the bitterness of his heart. His was the
brain that had conceived those broad effects of smoke and flame, and
blackened faces lit by the light of molten metal; his the strong hand
and the stout heart which had brought his conception into being. Those
were his trucks bringing in his ore from his mines; that was his
consequential little locomotive fussing in front of them. His men,
dwellers in his cottages on the brow of that hill, which was also his,
happened to be tapping one of his furnaces at the moment; that was his
pig-iron running out into the moulds as magically as an electric
advertisement writes itself upon the London sky at night. The sense of
possession is the foible of many who have won all they have; the
ironmaster almost looked upon the hot air dancing over the white-hot
bars as his too. The whole sulphurous prospect, once a green pasture,
had long been his to all intents and purposes, and no second soul would
ever take his pride in it; to his children it would never be more than
the means of livelihood; and how had it repaid even him for a life’s
devotion? With a house of sorrow in the next valley! With a stricken
wife, and sons whose right hands kept their cunning for the
cricket-field, and one of whom the very thought had become a sudden
madness!
Yet he could think of nothing else, except his wife, even in the great
green car that whisked him westward in a dancing cloud of dust; for he
did not drive himself, and the rush through the iced fragrance of the
summer’s day was a mental stimulant that did its work only too well.
Now it recalled the ailing infancy of the missing boy—bronchitis it had
been in the early stages—and how his mother had taken him to Hastings
three successive winters, and wrapped him up far too much. Old family
jokes cropped up in a new light, dimming the eyes without an instant’s
warning. On one of those flittings south the solicitous mother had
placed the uncomplaining child on a footwarmer, and forgotten him until
a cascade of perspiration apprised her of the effect: poor Mr. Upton
had never thought of the incident without laughter, until to-day.
Without doubt she had coddled him, and all for this, and she herself
too ill to hear a word about it!
His mind harked back to his wife. In her sad case there was no
uncertainty. He thought of thirty years ago when he had seen her first.
There had been drama and colour in their meeting; the most celebrated
of the neighbouring packs had run a fox to earth on his works, indeed
in his very slag-heap! The author of cancerous furnaces in the green
heart of a grass country had never been a popular personage with the
hunting folk; but he was master of the situation that memorable day. It
was his terrier that went into the slag-heap like a ferret, and came
out bloody with a moribund fox; his pocket-knife that shore through the
brush, his hand that presented it across the wall to the only young
lady in at the death. The men in pink looking over, the hunt servants
with their work cut out on the other side, the tongue of molten slag
sticking out of the furnace mouth—the momentary contact of the
industrial and the sporting world—it was that strange and yet
significant scene which had first endeared its dingy setting to the
ironmaster’s heart. But he had made the contact permanent by falling in
love with the young lady of the brush and marrying her under all the
guns of her countified kith and kin. And now she was a stricken
invalid, and their youngest-born was God knew where!
Of course there were no tidings of him at the school, where the now
distracted father spent a more explosive hour than he cared to think
about as he flew on to town in the car. He was afraid he had been very
rude to Mr. Spearman; but then Spearman had been rash enough to
repudiate his obvious responsibility in the matter. It was not his
fault that the boy went up to town so often to see his doctor and stay
the night. He had his own opinion of that arrangement, but it had
become his business to see it carried out. Mr. Upton got in a sharp
thrust here, to which the house-master retorted that if a boy of
seventeen could not be trusted to keep his word, he should like to know
who could! Tony had promised him faithfully to return that same night,
failing friends whom he had mentioned as certain to put him up; their
names Mr. Upton was able to demand at last as though they were so much
blood; and he could not have cursed them more freely if Spearman had
been a layman like himself. But that was all the information
forthcoming from this quarter; for, happening to ask what the head
master thought of the affair, Mr. Upton was calmly informed that it had
still to reach his ears; at which he stared, and then merely remarked
that he was not surprised, but in such a tone that Spearman sprang up
and led him straight into the presence.
Now the Benevolent Despot of this particular seat of learning was an
astute pedagogue who could handle men as well as boys. He explained to
Mr. Upton that the safe-keeping of the unit was the house-master’s
concern, but agreed it was time that he himself was made acquainted
with the present case. He took it as seriously, too, as Mr. Upton could
have wished, but quite as frankly from his own point of view as his two
visitors did from each of theirs. He had no doubt the boy would turn
up, but when he did it would be necessary for him to give a
satisfactory account of his proceedings before he could be received
back into the school.
“Bother the school!” cried Mr. Upton, diluting the anathema with
difficulty. “Let me find my lad alive and well; then you can do what
you like.”
“But how do you propose to find him?” inquired the head master, with
only a dry smile (which disappointed Spearman) by way of rejoinder.
“First I shall have a word with these infernal people who, on their own
showing, refused the boy a bed. I’ll give them a bit of my mind, I
promise you! Then there’s the hotel they seem to have driven him to; it
may be the one we always stay at, or one they’ve recommended. If I
can’t hear anything of him there, I suppose there’ll be nothing for it
but to call in the police.”
“My dear sir,” exclaimed the head master, “you may as well call in the
public at once! It will be in the papers before you know where you are;
and that, I need hardly point out to you, is as undesirable from our
point of view as I should have thought it would be from yours.”
“It’s more so from mine!” cried Mr. Upton, in fresh alarm and
indignation. “You think about your school. I think about my wife and
boy; it might kill her to hear about this before he’s found. But if I
don’t go to the police, who am I to go to?” The head master leant back
in his chair, and joined his finger-tips judicially.
“There was a man we had down here to investigate an extraordinary case
of dishonesty, in which I was actually threatened with legal
proceedings on behalf of a certain boy. But this man Thrush came down
and solved the mystery within twenty-four hours, and saved the school a
public scandal.”
“He may save you another,” said Mr. Upton, “if he can find my boy. What
did you say the name was?”
“Thrush—Eugene Thrush—quite a remarkable man, and, I think, a
gentleman,” said the head master impressively. Further particulars,
including an address in Glasshouse Street, were readily supplied from
an advertisement in that day’s _Times_, in which Mr. Thrush was
described as an “inquiry agent,” capable alike of “delicate
investigations” and “confidential negotiations.”
That was the very man for Mr. Upton, as he himself agreed. And he
departed both on speaking terms with Mr. Spearman, who said a final
word for his own behaviour in the matter, and grimly at one with the
head master on the importance of keeping it out of the papers.