The Rise of Henry Morcar (15 page)

The reception was like all other Annotsfield wedding receptions, with champagne and patties (rather meatless) and trails of smilax and Morcar's throat growing tired with talking so long through the noise. Just for a moment there was a hush and a deeper feeling as Morcar in his speech replying to the toast blurted suddenly:

“Only one thing could make my wife and myself happier to-day—and I think you can all guess what that would be— if my brother-in-law could be here to greet us.”

Just for that one moment Morcar felt as though somebody was driving over his heart with harrows, as though all this allegedly happy scene were unreal except Mrs. Shaw's mild staring eyes, which at that moment had a tragic beauty as they gazed into his own. Then he passed on rapidly to one of the usual bridal jokes, closing the curtains over his for-the-moment too openly exposed heart.

The newly married pair were to spend their brief honeymoon in London in spite of Zeppelins, and a hired car was to take them to catch the afternoon express at Leeds. Winnie vanished and reappeared looking her best in the squirrel coat and cap; her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkled, she joked with her friends in her usual pert bright way. The farewell scene at the door amid the usual hail of confetti seemed to entertain her, and as they drove off she was laughing heartily. But in the car she took off her fur cap, saying that it was rather heavy, and she then exclaimed in a rather petulant tone:

“You've never said whether you liked my hair.”

Morcar, uncomprehending, gravely surveyed her head. Her hair certainly looked rather different to-day, he thought— shorter, curlier. “Oh! You've had it bobbed! Yes,” said Morcar, looking at it with his head on one side and rather pleased with the rapidity of his diagnosis: “I like it, Winnie love. It suits you.”

“Poor Harry. You didn't notice it before, did you? Poor Harry,” said Winnie strangely. She laid her hand on his for a moment and pressed it, then sat silent, her eyes averted, until they reached the station.

They were not alone again till late that night. Then, just for a moment, for a moment only, there was beauty and rapture. She lay in his arms, this perverse and wilful Winnie, astonishingly acquiescent, and looked up at him with wide, liquid, shining eyes of love. Her hair so soft and silky, her little neck which he could almost span with one hand, her breast so warm and full and rich against his own—for a moment these were rapture, these were beauty. For a moment he forgot that she was Charlie's sister.

Afterwards, there was his utmost kindness. In the recesses of his mind he was rather surprised that this was the love the poets and artists made such a fuss about, for it hardly seemed to deserve so much praise. But that surprise, of course, must never be revealed to his wife. Everything that was kind and good in him he must show to her now. Winnie seemed content, reclining her head on his shoulder, drawing deep calm breaths and smiling upon him sweetly. Nevertheless, through his sleep later, Morcar believed he dimly caught a sound of weeping.

A battle followed between Winnie and her parents of which the echoes reached Morcar near St. Eloi.

Most war brides in Winnie's position made their home with their parents pending their husband's return, and Mrs. Shaw's recent decline from health seemed to make this even more reasonable
in her case. But Winnie, it seemed, was determined to be installed in a house of her own at the earliest opportunity. Her father was angry, her mother plaintive, Mrs. Morcar dubious; but Morcar felt he understood Winnie's antipathy to living with the Shaws, because he shared it himself. He was conscious, too, that he had perhaps looked glum when, parting from Winnie to return to France after their honeymoon, she had spoken, as they stood on the King's Cross platform together, of his spending his next leave at the Sycamores. Accordingly he was not daunted or much disconcerted after the first surprise when, on coming out of the line after a tour of particularly dangerous duty, he found a short note from Winnie explaining that she had found a suitable house, together with a business communication from the solicitor he had employed to draw up his will, stating the procedure necessary to undertake the purchase of Hurstcote, which Mrs. H. Morcar had informed him was contemplated, and a long alarmed letter from his mother, describing the skirmishes between the Shaws and Winnie in a veiled manner, and hinting at her own feeling that a young wife ought to remain in the shelter of her parents' roof until her husband himself could make a home for her.
I would gladly have Winnie to stay with me here if she wished
, said Mrs. Morcar,
but she seems determined on this house—which in itself I must say is very suitable
.

After the bloody raids in which Morcar had just taken part, the thought of being alive, a peaceful citizen of Annotsfield, with a house of his own, was indescribably alluring. If he were killed in the war, he did not see that Winnie would be any the worse off for having begun the purchase of house and furniture, for these two commodities were scarce and in great demand in England and he could trust Mr. Shaw to see that she sold at a profit. He made up his mind at once therefore and wrote to Winnie, Mr. Shaw, his mother and his solicitor Nasmyth, to say that the house should be bought. He had already deposited a power of attorney in the solicitor's hands, so the negotiations need not wait for his presence.

A sheaf of letters flew across to him in reply, reaching him when he was involved in preparations for the coming battle of the Somme. He opened his wife's first, drew out several sheets of notepaper headed in writing
Hurstcote, Hurst Bank, Annotsfield
, saw that the matter of the house purchase was settled and laid aside Winnie's sheets for a more leisurely perusal when he should have coped with the rest. Mr. Shaw's small contorted characters, in very black ink, informed him that Winnie's place was with her mother and she was not fit to undertake the preparation of a house in her present condition. Mrs. Morcar with her usual dignified
reticence mildly commented on the strangeness of Harry's buying a house he had never seen while expressing willingness to help Winnie in every possible way so that she should not overtire herself. The lawyer informed him that he had made the necessary advance payment to the Annotsfield Building Society from Henry Morcar's savings, and Hurstcote was now Henry Morcar's property, subject to his paying them two pounds a week for the next five years. An insurance policy had been taken out in accordance with the Building Society's requirements.

Perceiving from the turn of some sentences in the letters of Mr. Shaw and his mother that Winnie was thought to be pregnant, Morcar turned to his wife's letter again eagerly. Winnie's hand was not a pretty one, mused Morcar; it was at once vehement and formless, emphatic, black-stroked but of uncertain outline. Her spelling was erratic and her grammar uncertain. But like Charlie she had the knack of vivid description; her pen flew rapidly across the paper in lively sentences full of detail spiced with malice. She was writing in Hurstcote itself, it seemed, having gone there to put a fire in for the painters. Hurstcote was a small stone house, newish, semi-detached, just on the brow of Hurst Bank; the front windows looked over the Bank across a tiny garden; the back windows looked at the tops of the trees growing in the valley. There were two sitting-rooms, a kitchen and a scullery downstairs, with a tiny but neat square hall at one side; the notât-all steep staircase had a landing in the middle from which sprang the bathroom; three little bedrooms, and a tiny hole which Harry might like for his study, occupied the second floor. There were no attics, but good cellars on a level with the ground at the back, which dropped away abruptly. Coal delivery might be a problem. There was electric light. The bathroom was too small to swing a cat in, but Winnie had always been against giving baths to cats. The kitchen stove was poor, so an uncle's wedding cheque which had previously been earmarked for armchairs was being devoted to the purchase of a gas oven. Other wedding cheques, and other of Morcar's savings, were to go into furniture. His mother was helping to choose carpets, make curtains, embroider linen. Winnie had secured a “woman” to “come in” three days a week.

It was all so normal that Harry felt soothed and happy; the shellfire seemed to die away in the distance, the oozing trench to grow dim, while a picture of a quiet peaceful little room with a view over Hurst Bank and a blazing north-country fire rose clear before his delighted eyes. It gave him real pleasure to address his reply to Mrs. H. Morcar at Hurstcote.

He thought ruefully however, as he wrote his reply, that it was
just like Winnie not to mention her pregnancy in her letter to her husband. Since she had chosen to be silent, he hardly knew himself how to broach the matter to her, and after much thought compromised on a sentence written below:
Your loving husband, Harry
, which ran:
Take care of yourself and don't work too hard
.

Apparently this was satisfactory to Winnie, for in her next letter she brought herself to remark:
The doctor says I am very well
, and thereafter in an offhand allusive way from time to time she indicated her preparations for the birth, in her letters to her husband.

The child was born in September 1916, while Harry was still in the battle of the Somme. He was three weeks old before Harry knew of his existence, and christened and thriving, big and bonny, before Captain Morcar could get leave to make the boy's acquaintance.

But when this event at last took place, in the new year of 1917, Morcar at once fell head over heels in love with Baby Harry. He was a fair, merry, healthy little boy, who looked at him, thought Morcar, from his own grey-blue eyes but smiled Charlie's lively smile, kicked his delightful toes with an energy absurdly reminiscent of Mr. Shaw and waved shapely hands which seemed to Harry a miniature edition of Mrs. Morcar's. Baby Harry surveyed the new strange member of the household with solemn but friendly awe, blew a deprecatory bubble and gurgled enquiringly at him, looked pained when Winnie who was busy with his safety pins and buttons turned him on his stomach and tried to crane his neck so as to secure another glimpse of Morcar. His tiny fingers, with their perfect joints and exquisite nails, rested peacefully on Morcar's straps when Morcar nursed him; his round rosy cheek was incredibly smooth and cool against Morcar's weather-beaten face. Sometimes he rolled with furious energy on the hearthrug; sometimes he sat erect, gazing philosophically at the world and holding his own toes. He was a general favourite. Mrs. Shaw doted on him, Mrs. Morcar truly and devotedly loved him and made for him the most delicious silk frocks with incredibly complicated smocking. Those of Winnie's brothers and sisters who were still at home admired his fresh appearance and sweet disposition Whole-heartedly, while Mr. Shaw told Morcar sen-tentiously that there was nothing so lovely as a baby, dandling his first grandson on his knee the while. (This had the same results as of old in the Sycamores with Mr. Shaw's own offspring; the over-shaken baby began to soil his bib and Mr. Shaw called wildly for his daughter. This time, however, the baby had another champion, for Morcar snatched him from his grandfather indignantly.) Winnie was at her best as a mother; as she sat feeding
the child or changing him or bathing him an expression of deep content illuminated her face, her restless spirit seemed calmed, her sharp tongue was blunted to benevolence. She was thoroughly competent in all essentials of child care, and even struggled to understand the newest ideas of infant welfare just come into fashion, asking Harry to explain nutrition terms to her with a humility which he found touching.

As for Morcar, he felt a degree of emotion about Baby Harry which he had not felt about anybody or anything since Charlie was killed—perhaps indeed his feeling for the child was the strongest he had ever experienced in his life. Perhaps he was cut out to be a father rather than a lover or a husband, he thought soberly, admitting to himself that Baby Harry meant more to him than his wife. But his love for the child was so deep, so satisfying, that he felt an immense gratitude towards Winnie. She had given him this child, their son; this beautiful innocent creature who was his own, his own to love and cherish, to protect and provide for.

“You've got something to do now, Harry,” said Mrs. Shaw to him, chuckling feebly—she was now bedridden—as Morcar laid the child on her bed in order to wrap him more carefully in his white woollen shawl to return to Hurstcote after a visit to his grandparents.

“I don't care
what
I do for him,” said Morcar earnestly, folding the shawl over in the prescribed fashion and taking the child into his arms. “I'll do
anything
for him, Mrs. Shaw.” He looked about him; he was alone in the room with the ailing woman. He added in a conspiratorial tone: “All I want, Mrs. Shaw, is to come safe back and make a good home for Winnie and Baby.”

“You'll have to win the war first,”, the old lady warned him.

“Oh, of course,” said Morcar.

His leave was up next day and he returned to France, in ample time for the Allies' third spring offensive.

It was the spring of 1919; a tallish, broad-shouldered, solid young man, with thick fair hair, grey-blue eyes, a fresh complexion and a wide mouth, wearing officer's khaki, was travelling towards Annotsfield in a northbound train. He carried his head slightly poked forward owing to a flesh wound through his left shoulder, but had been told by the medical officer that this would remedy itself shortly. His usual expression was mild and sober, but a pleasant grin curved his full lips and a merry look enlivened his eyes when occasion justified. After being crowded for many miles, the railway carriage had emptied at a junction and Morcar,
left alone, was looking at himself in the somewhat tarnished railway mirror. So this was Henry Morcar, aged twenty-eight, recently Captain H. Morcar, D.C.M., now demobilised and about to re-enter civilian life. Not too bad, thought Morcar, surveying himself thoughtfully. He had a wife and a child and a house and a job, so he was luckier than most. Then why did he feel so empty and so enervated? The landscape outside the carriage window was green and smiling; there were dandelions in the hedges and lambs in the fields. In his kit he had a length of pale-blue crêpe-de-chine for Winnie, a miniature football and a crane for the boy. He had longed for this day through four dreary months since thé Armistice last November; now it was here and he felt hollow and perplexed. He winked at himself in the glass to cheer himself up. His reflection winked back and Morcar felt rather better. But not much.