The Rise of Henry Morcar (11 page)

“I want to be on my own, Mother!” exclaimed Harry impatiently.

As he spoke he knew his decision was taken. His mother continued the discussion all the weekend, but Harry's mind did not change, and on Sunday evening immediately after tea he went to the Sycamores and asked for Mr. Shaw. The maid had evidently received instructions what to do with him when he called, for she led him past the drawing-room where the family, as Harry could hear from their voices, were congregated, and placed him in the dining-room, where he was joined by Mr. Shaw. They sat down with stern expressions at the long table, which was covered, as it had always been in Harry's memory, with a chenille tablecloth in ultramarine blue.

“Well? Have you come to say you'll join us, Harry?” demanded Mr. Shaw in a cool tone.

“Yes—on those terms you mentioned. I suppose in a way I shall be a kind of works manager?” hazarded Harry.

Mr. Shaw winced but agreed, and the matter was settled.

Harry's new employer led him to the other room, where Mrs. Shaw
was trying to coax Charlie and Winnie to go to Chapel and not succeeding.

“Harry's coming to Prospect as soon as he can get free,” said Mr. Shaw in a benevolent tone, laying his hand on Harry's arm—the young man's shoulder was now too far above him for a benevolent gesture.

“I'm very glad, Harry dear,” said Mrs. Shaw kindly, while Charlie exclaimed: “Good!” and thumped a cushion vigorously, and Winnie remarked: “About time too,” with her usual blend of tart sweetness.

“Now go to Chapel all together, you three, do,” urged Mrs. Shaw. “To please me, Charlie. I know your mother would like you to go, Harry. And bring her in to supper afterwards.”

The young men exchanged glances and decided to yield, and Winnie sprang up and said she would accompany them if they would agree to go to Hurst Congregational instead of all the way to Eastgate. This compromise was accepted by Mrs. Shaw, and the three young people went off together. Winnie was wearing a dark green costume, as she called it, and a rich dark green satin blouse with thick, open lace at the cuffs and throat; a black beaver hat with a green ribbon sat at an agreeable angle on her smooth hazel hair, which was dressed high on her head, revealing unexpectedly small and delicate ears. Harry felt proud that they were all three growing up into such important, promising, successful and interesting people. Evening service was always rather sentimental and touching, and as they sang the sweet sad hymns Harry felt deeply happy to be there with his friends, on the eve of their great enterprise together. Winnie sang rather well, in a clear true soprano; the young men muttered comfortably together in the bass. Harry put a shilling (double his usual contribution) into the collection, to commemorate the occasion and show his gratitude to the Almighty for re-uniting him to Prospect Mills, and he could not help noticing that Charlie did the same. Winnie threw in her sixpence with a petulant air—women never took purses to church and could not change their minds about the collection, thought Harry leniently. Outside the Chapel the three parted, the Shaws returning to the Sycamores and Harry going up the road to fetch his mother.

It was clear that Mrs. Morcar did not want to go to the Shaws for supper. She stood by the table listening to his account of the interview, the excursion to Chapel and the supper invitation with a look of deep trouble and anxiety on her face. At the close of his narrative she sighed.

“Well, I suppose you know best what you want, Harry,” she said. “But it's not what I should have chosen for you.”

She concealed her feelings admirably at the Shaws', however, and the supper went off well.

A sharp bout followed next morning with Mr. Lucas, who on learning of Harry's new job exclaimed angrily:

“I suppose Shaw thinks he'll get hold of all Oldroyds' new season's designs.”

“That's not fair, Mr. Lucas,” objected Morcar.

“It might be fair to Shaw and unfair to you,” said Mr. Lucas bitterly. “You're being a fool, Harry, a young fool. Is there a girl in it, eh?”

“No,” said Morcar, astonished.

Mr. Lucas snorted. “The more fool you,” he said. “What Mr. Oldroyd will say I tremble to think.”

“I'll tell him myself if you like,” said Morcar stoutly.

Mr. Lucas's expression changed. “He isn't at the mill today,” he said. “He's not so well, it seems.”

Morcar remembered Mr. Shaw's odious speculations on Brigg Oldroyd's health. Perhaps they were justified. He hesitated. “Mr. Oldroyd gave me the job here, and it's through his kind offer that I've got this other job now,” he said. “I'd like to see him to say goodbye to him and tell him I'm grateful.”

Mr. Lucas however thought this quite unnecessary, and Harry left Syke Mills the following week without again seeing his former employer.

Another calm and happy period followed.

It was true that Morcar received an unpleasant shock when he discovered the coarse, low-quality stuff which Prospect Mills were manufacturing. It seemed to sell well and he supposed it filled a need, but it was not the kind of stuff he had been used to handling at Syke Mills, nor a kind to which he proposed to devote his life. He decided at first to let the matter ride for a time until he had got the mill work reorganised and avoidable defects minimised—heaven knew this was badly needed—and then move on to finer fabrics and better designs gradually. But he learned then that it was impossible to tackle difficulties in neat chronological order; they all presented themselves at once, inextricably entangled. Machinery reached a point of deterioration where it had to be renewed; a decision had to be taken immediately as to what type to buy, and this decision would commit the Shaws for many years to come, to undertaking or declining certain classes of fabric. Workmen who left—and until Morcar's advent workmen often left Shaws'; his old friend Booth was still there, but
not another face he recognised—caused similar problems. Then, both Mr. Shaw and Charlie had a maddening habit of accepting commissions which their existing labour and machinery were not adequate to fulfil and expecting Morcar to find a way of fulfilling them. The way he eventually found committed them to further work of the same kind if the steps he had taken were not to prove expensively fruitless. Morcar did not in any case like “weaving on commission”, i.e. weaving other men's yarn into other men's pieces for other men to sell—it hurt his pride; but he admitted that it tided Prospect over some meagre seasons. The book-keeping at Prospect had been chaotic; Charlie had struggled vainly to straighten it out but could not do so because the reality it represented, the actual work done in the mill, was chaotic too. Now the two young men together wrestled it clear, introduced reforms and got a fresh system into smooth working order.

There were times, indeed, when Morcar wondered how on earth Mr. Shaw had managed to conduct business at all, never name to do so with any degree of success, for he soon discovered that he himself knew a very great deal more than Mr. Shaw about textiles, while Charlie was much more capable than his father at letters, accounts and soothing customers. But Morcar perceived after a time that Mr. Shaw had one extremely important talent; he knew what the public would like, and was often able to guess what customers would want before they knew themselves that they wanted it. Morcar observed the operation of this talent thoughtfully. He did not possess it himself, he feared; on the other hand, it was barely possible to judge whether he had it, or to develop it, since he never came into contact with customers.

Charlie, it appeared, was a superb salesman. He was honest, tactful and sincerely sympathetic because he understood the customer's point of view; his voice, his manners, his appearance were pleasant and gentlemanly without being so “upper-class” as to irritate solid West Riding merchants. He told good stories, but not till the serious business of the interview was over, and he never capped a customer's joke. He had left school at seventeen and gone into the mill without any technical instruction, so he knew little of textile theory and nothing of economics, but he was always a quick learner and under Morcar's coaching he soon became knowledgeable about textiles.

After a rather uncomfortable and muddled year, at the end of which Charlie and Morcar were privately both relieved to find that the balance in the bank was about the same as in previous years, Prospect settled into a steady routine which offered a fair certainty of reasonable profit. Then Morcar hit on a very charming small dice check design in a range of soft colours which found
real favour for ladies' wear; this became the Prospect speciality, and the firm rapidly prospered. It became, in fact, one of those neat, compact, reliable, profitable little family businesses over which harassed men saddled with large sprawling concerns shake their heads enviously. Now that their fortunes had taken this upward turn, the young men urged Mr. Shaw to smarten the mill up a bit and he was by no means unwilling; the premises were repainted inside and out in a tasteful green, the letterheads were altered to please Charlie; a lot of junk was cleared out of the office, a couple of girls with typewriters were installed and the furniture modernised. Mr. Shaw was so jubilant that he positively increased Morcar's salary twice without being asked, and on a third occasion when asked yielded after the minimum of grumbling.

All three men worked hard. Mr. Shaw had a daemonic energy when he chose and selected his periods of indolence wisely. The two young men took it in turn to go to the mill before breakfast, they stayed late, they discussed their plans when they met at the weekend; altogether they took Prospect seriously. During the height of the check boom Harry even occasionally let himself into the mill on Sunday afternoon—though he dared not confess this Sabbath-breaking to his mother—to tidy up a few pressing problems ready for Monday. But the work was light to him after the toils of the previous five years, especially after his Technical College courses finished. (Mr. Shaw jeered at him for continuing these so long, but though desperately weary before the end Harry stuck to them till he passed out a fully qualified student.) It seemed to him then that he had been presented with a gift of boundless leisure, and he turned happily to the enjoyments to which his youth entitled him.

Charlie and Winnie Shaw belonged to a lawn tennis club; Morcar joined it too. In the summer evenings and on Saturday, in flannels of spotless white he careered cheerfully over the green sward in the sunshine. Nobody's white buckskin boots were more consistently, purely white than Morcar's; he cleaned them every night and stood them on his window-sill to dry. Charlie's were white too, but then it was Winnie who applied the caked white to Charlie's boots and sent his flannels to the cleaner's. Winnie herself, in a long white piqué skirt, a white blouse with a stiff collar and a knotted silk tie, white shoes and white stockings, looked extremely neat and trim. They all three played quite a good game and were sensible people, so they soon found themselves in positions of responsibility in the club. Winnie was a member of the ladies' committee which superintended the teas on Saturdays and match days; the two young men both sat on selection
and dance committees. The joy of being elected, by ballot of one's fellow-clubsmen, was quite immense.

Charlie soon became one of the best players in the club, swift, stylish, original; he was elected captain of the team, and he and Morcar formed the first match couple. Morcar's steady persistence often retrieved them from defeat, but it was Charlie always who played the winning strokes. The two Shaws also made an admirable mixed couple. But Winnie and Morcar did not play well together. To Morcar, Winnie seemed always to be in places on the court where she ought not to be; he was surprised and perplexed when they crashed into each other and missed the flying white ball. He said nothing about it but mildly pondered. Winnie, on the other hand, told Morcar he was never in the place where he ought to be—she looked round, she said, expecting a partner, and beheld a vacuum. She grew quite hot about it; this surprised Morcar, for Winnie when playing with her brother was a good loser, joking over their mistakes sardonically. Eventually it was agreed that if Morcar and Winnie played together they quarrelled. A succession of young female partners introduced to him by Winnie therefore flitted past Morcar's eyes; he could remember nothing of them save that they were in white, with puffed-out fair hair, and giggled often. One felt pleasantly protective, however, when playing with them, and giggling on a summer evening was agreeable.

In summer, too, there was the joy of cricket. Sometimes when the weather was fine and Mr. Shaw in an expansive mood, he would allow his traveller and his works manager an afternoon off together to watch Yorkshire playing some other county (inferior of course in their opinion) at Bradford. The train ambled through the winding green valleys and puffed up sombre hills and stopped at the special cricket-ground station, which confirmed its identity by a painted decoration of bat and wickets, with a red ball far too large in proportion. Then the indolent lounging hours on the open wooden benches, the white-flannelled figures on the pitch with famous names, the delicious “chock” of bat on ball, the graceful swift athletic action, the excitement of the mounting score competing with the flying minutes, the long, long discussions of famous innings, of slow bowlers' hat-tricks, of difficult umpires' decisions. Winnie made them sandwiches for lunch and sometimes accompanied them, looking fresh and summery in a thin frock of mauve-figured voile and a large white hat; but Winnie found cricket rather slow and was apt to make audible mordant comments on the batsmen which embarrassed her brother and Morcar.

In the winter came the delights of subscription dances. At
first the tennis-club gave “flannel” dances, at which the young people wore tennis attire to spare their pockets, but one or two of superior social standing began to turn up in formal evening dress, and the following year it was generally agreed to drop the idea of summer clothes at winter functions. When Harry first broached the project of a dress suit at home, Mrs. Morcar brought out his father's evening suit and offered to modify it to fit him. But it was far too narrow across the shoulders; besides, the cut was definitely old-fashioned.