The Balliols Read online

  “No, milord.”

  “Then that is the sum by which you would recommend us to raise Walker’s wages?”

  “Well, yes. Yes, I suppose that… well, milord, if you were—that’s to say, going to raise his wage.…”

  “Now, what are we to take that to mean?”

  “Nothing, milord. I mean.…”

  “Come, come now, Mortimer. You must mean something.”

  The chairman’s voice had neither sharpened nor quickened; but it had grown firm. Mortimer, his eyes on the ground, shifted his feet uncomfortably. His forehead had flushed to a damp crimson.

  “Have you anything against Walker?”

  For a moment further Mortimer hesitated; then suddenly he looked up and blurted out all in a rush: “I’m sorry, milord and gentlemen. It’s no business of mine, I know, but Walker’s the most difficult man a boss ever had to deal with. It’s not that he’s lazy, though he’s that; or that he’s clumsy or incompetent, though he’s that too, in a way. It’s his manner. There’s a sneering, supercilious smile on his face the ‘ole of the time. I just don’t know how to take ’im.”

  He paused, hot and breathless. “I’m sorry, milord…” he started.

  But the chairman cut him short.

  “You’ve told us exactly what we needed to know. Thank you very much. You have given us the material on which to base our decision.”

  As soon as the door had closed behind Mortimer, Lord Huntercoombe turned to the secretary.

  “Would you be inclined to endorse Mortimer’s opinion?”

  “I can’t say that I’ve found him very satisfactory.”

  “Then it would seem that the question is not so much whether we should raise Walker’s salary, as to whether we should retain him on our staff.”

  There was a slight laugh at that.

  “At one moment,” said Balliol, “we are deciding to raise a man’s wages; the next, to sack him.”

  “It only shows the incompetent are wise to remain inconspicuous,” was Prentice’s comment. “If the fellow had only kept quiet, no one would have heard of him and, as far as he was concerned, all would have been well.”

  But the chairman was not going to allow the meeting to drift into the discussion of an impersonal subject.

  “The point, gentlemen, is this: are we to dismiss Walker here and now, or are we to have him up and give him the warning that apparently he deserves most richly?”

  The motion was so put that the chairman was able to state his opinion without appearing to. As he phrased it the administration of a reproof from the board was a higher punishment than dismissal.

  “Then it is agreed that we see Walker. Very good. Send for Walker.”

  A couple of minutes later there entered into the room a bright-eyed, red-haired young scamp; with a confident manner and an open grin. He was not in the least nervous. It was abundantly clear what Mortimer had meant by his “supercilious sneering smile.” It was what his feminine acquaintance described as a “naughty twinkle.” He was the kind of person who knew how to make a superior look a fool.

  The chairman considered him ruminatively.

  “Walker,” he said at length, “you have asked for your salary to be raised. You are receiving thirty shillings a week. You are not worth thirty shillings a week. You are idle, clumsy, and impertinent. You represent thirty shillings amount of nuisance. I propose, therefore, to raise your wages to two pounds. Unless you manage to prove yourself to be worth forty shillings a week during the next two months, you will be dismissed instantly. You may go.”

  “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” said the chairman turning to his colleagues as the door closed behind the reproved packer. “I couldn’t help it. There was something about the look of that man I liked.”

  The incident put the board in a cheerful temper. They turned to the next subject on the agenda. It was the question of the cigar department.

  “This, I believe, concerns Mr. Prentice. Mr. Prentice?”

  In a calm, cold voice Prentice laid out his thesis. As the board was no doubt aware, they in company with other wine merchants, kept a stock of cigars and cigarettes. It was quite a side line but certain conservative customers made a point of ordering brandy, liqueurs and cigars at the same time. How long they would continue to do that, he was doubtful; in fact, very doubtful. He foresaw a time when that side line would cease to be a line at all. In his opinion that would be a pity. They had their foot, or rather their toe, over the threshold of the tobacco trade. It was a question of advancing or retreating. His idea was to advance that toe; to make the cigar department gradually, tentatively, watching results, separate and independent. He foresaw a time when it would be the general, rather than the exceptional thing for a woman to smoke cigarettes. That would mean that man would smoke more in women’s presence. He foresaw a great future for the cigarette and for the cheap cigar. He would like to use the tobacco department not as an embellishment for their brandy sales, but as a lure to the main wine business.

  “I would like to see one of our windows set with tobacco jars; with cabinets of cigars; with pipes, with cigarettes; to be, in fact, a shop.”

  “And how do you propose setting about this?”

  “I am proposing, with the board’s approval, that we should take on to our staff a young man who has worked in a tobacco shop, who understands tobacco, who will organize tobacco as a separate department.”

  There was a silence while the various directors considered the problem. A great deal depended, Balliol knew, on the attitude that he himself adopted. He could not say it was a scheme that he particularly liked. He believed in specialization; he did not like the idea of a firm being split up among departmental managers. At the same time, he did not see that the scheme could do any particular harm. If it failed, it would have wasted a certain amount of Prentice’s time, but very little of the firm’s capital. It would not require any particular outlay, beyond the addition of a name to the salary list. At the same time, on any ordinary occasion he would have opposed, though not very heartily, Prentice’s suggestion.

  To-day, however, he had a scheme of his own that he wished to press. And though he knew that Prentice was not the kind of man to oppose another’s scheme merely because he had been himself opposed, the fact that he had been supported by a man who had a scheme of his own to put forward would give him material for cynical deliberation. He would smile that wry smile. “We are all venal,” he would think. “Balliol scratches my back so that I may scratch his in return. What creatures we are. Well, we’ll play his game.” Prentice would never have attempted such a plan himself, but it pleased him to think that others did. He would be glad of the opportunity to say, “We do evil that good may come. In order to get my own sound scheme through, I have to further another’s shoddy one. That’s the price honest men have to pay in a world like this.” Balliol was quite certain that by supporting Prentice’s scheme, he could insure the success of his own. As, in reply to the chairman’s question, he stated his reasons for approving of Prentice’s motion, he was conscious of Prentice’s wry smile. That wry smile returned twenty minutes later as Prentice in his turn expressed his approval of Rickman’s trial.

  “We seem to be adding very considerably to our expenses,” one of the directors remarked. “We have raised a packer’s salary and made two additions to our staff in the course of one afternoon.”

  “It is lucky that we are in a position to be able to afford it,” said the chairman.

  Which, in a different sense, was Balliol’s own opinion as he walked from his office towards the bus stop at Piccadilly. Most problems in his opinion resolved themselves into mercenary equations. You could buy your way out of anything. Since his firm was flourishing he had been able to get young Rickman sent abroad. He would be able to get this house started so that Jane would have something to think about. If he had not been able to get Rickman out of the way or to afford a house, he might have found himself in a confoundedly difficult position, with Lucy’s future hampere
d by a domestic scandal at the very moment when it was essential for her to make an effective entrance on an adult stage. It might all have been extremely difficult. As it was, all would be plain sailing now. With a jaunty step he climbed the steps of the bus, seating himself on a front seat, so that he could watch the horses.

  I wonder what Jane’ll say. He shrugged his shoulders. She had not had the time to realize what she felt about young Rickman. She would probably be glad that he had this chance of self-advancement.

  On one point he was resolved: he was not going to let Jane feel that he suspected anything; that it was on Rickman’s account that he had yielded to her whim and bought a house; that it was on her account that he had offered Rickman the job that would take him out of her life for years. When he returned to his home that evening he made his announcements in the most casually off-hand manner.

  “As a result of to-day’s work two people are going to have very nice surprises,” he informed her.

  She fixed her vague, bland look on him; waiting for an explanation.

  “In the first place I’ve decided to build a house in Hampstead. In the second I’ve fixed up young Rickman with a first-class job.”

  From the flush in her cheeks he knew which piece of news interested her the most.

  “What have you arranged for Roy?”

  “I’m making him our chief foreign representative.”

  “Does that mean he’ll have to travel?”

  “He’ll be in the Far East most of the time.”

  “In the Far East… then, that’ll mean——” She paused; a pensive, abstracted expression on her features. “Oh, but that’s splendid, that’s the best thing that could possibly have happened to him. I think it’s fine for him. And it’s lovely about the house. I’m so excited. We’ll have Liberty curtains in the drawing-room and a Morris wallpaper, and no pictures. Yes, and we’ll have a four-poster bed. No, we won’t. We’ll have a very low, wide bed, with a canopy above, and curtains, silk curtains; blue. We’ll have an amusing nursery, with the ceiling blue, like the sky, and with stars all over it. It will be fun. I shall enjoy myself. I am glad. It’s the best thing that could have happened for him.”

  XI

  The next weeks were busy ones for Edward Balliol. At the office there was much detail to be settled. The enlargement of the tobacco department was proving a larger problem than he had fancied. The new man, Smollett, was a far more independent person than he had imagined: not by any means the shop assistant. Roy Rickman’s itinerary demanded supervision. At home there was the excitement of house-building; the discussion of plans with architects and surveyors. There were decorators’ estimates; all the legal flummery of unencumbered conveyancing. Each day brought some fresh problem. There were frequent interviews; frequent visits to the Heath to examine the new site. Night after night Jane would spread a pile of patterns in front of her on the table. As the days passed what had been started as a distraction for Jane became for him an engrossing object. This house would be the first thing in his life to be his very own. Up to now he had shared his possessions with other people. There had been his home, the house that his grandfathers had handed on to him. There had been the bachelor rooms in London, rented like a school study on a yearly lease. There had been his London house, taken first of all on a seven years’ lease and renewed year by year so that now he found himself able to be rid of it with three months’ notice. He had always lived in other people’s atmospheres. “We have gone back to Nomad life,” he used to say. “We travel from flat to flat with our luggage in vans. We pitch our tents and then move on.” That was how it had always been before. It was different now. He was not inheriting a tradition. He was creating one. He was building out of his own taste in the manner of his time. This house would be his own; was something to which people could look two centuries hence; of which they could say: “This was the way in which at the beginning of the twentieth century a man of education and some means chose to live.” He would have set a stamp, he would have expressed his own individuality in the idiom of his day. He was starting a tradition, founding a family and a line. Such a feeling as came to innumerable other Londoners while village after village became a suburb; while the tide of Greater London swept outwards through Essex, Kent and Surrey.

  His house absorbed him. Once or twice Roy came to dinner; once or twice Roy joined them in expeditions to look over the new house. Now and again, when he was at his office, Roy came to tea, or to take Jane walks or to a matinée. He did not worry. There was a date marked upon a calendar. That was proof of safety. Nothing that mattered could happen before then. Nothing could happen after it. He was content to let the situation slide.

  He felt no jealousy. His was not a jealous nature. And besides, it was with a feeling of some complacence that he viewed his handling of the situation. If he felt any personal emotion it was a kind of pity; born out of the memory of himself as an undergraduate, when he had sat through long hours of unavowed adoration at the feet of a woman in the middle thirties. She was married, the mother of children, just as Jane was. The husband had been a hard-riding, hard-drinking, wind-bitten country squire—noisy, hearty, red-faced. The hail-fellow-well-met type; whose fist is as ready to shake another man’s as black his eye. He had treated Balliol as a child; hospitable and welcoming with him. “Well, young man, tell me what they’re saying at Oxford about this new fast bowler.” Balliol had respected him; had liked him; but had wondered what his wife could see in him. She was so delicate, so bird-like; her husband was so rough. Through a long summer he had sat at her feet; then the long vac. had ended. He had written verses to her during the misty autumn. But when he came back at Christmas everything seemed different. They had met once or twice; at dances, at dinner parties; but it had not been the same, indoors, with the bright lights, the noise, the music. The moments of easy intimacy never returned. He had been very Byronic about it all; had written a long ode about tombs and graveyards; on the whole, had rather relished his melancholy. Later he had been inclined to laugh at it; the folly of youth. But now, over a greater distance, he remembered what he had truly felt; that whatever might have happened afterwards, that summer had been a lovely idyll.

  Were Jane and Roy living through such an idyll now? They might well be. Sometimes he was conscious of an atmosphere between them rather like that of twilight; a kind of luminous hush. On one afternoon in particular, when they had driven out together, the three of them, to look at the new house, now rising through the scaffolding to its second story. There had not been a great deal to see. It was a Saturday; the workmen were away. It was hot, and he felt sleepy. “Let’s go up to the Park,” he said.

  They had arranged their chairs in the shadow of a tree. He had sat on the outside. Jane had turned away from him towards Roy. The murmur of their talk, mingling with the innumerable soft sounds of a summer day, had a soothing effect. He leant his head back against the woodwork of the chair; the sunlight was warm upon his face. He tilted his straw hat forward to shade his eyes. His eyelids grew heavy.

  When he awoke there was no murmur of talk beside him. He turned his head. The two chairs were empty. A glance at his watch told him that he had been asleep for half an hour. I must have snored and driven them away. But he knew very well it was not that.

  Their last afternoon together, after all. They were probably walking in the rose garden. It was at its loveliest now. How often, during the torrid tropic months, Rickman’s memory would revisit it. What were they talking of? Of themselves? He doubted it. You could dispense with self-analysis when you were in love; in their way, anyhow. They were probably talking of the children, of the weather, of a new book, a new play, the political issues. Anyone overhearing them would fancy that they were making conversation. They wouldn’t be. Beneath that façade of words their thoughts would hold communication. He remembered all that vaguely, as one recalls a landscape that one has known a long time ago. It was very long since he had been in love. He could recall the “When and Where,” but not th
e “How and What”; the way he had felt, not the actual feeling. He could not even remember if it was happiness or sadness they were sharing. There were certain moods that he had heard described as “happy-sad.” He did not know whether he should be sorry for them, or envious.

  Then he saw them. Coming across the lawn towards him. They were not talking. She was looking down, trailing her parasol. There was a look on her face that he had not seen for fifteen years.

  They were sorry for one another. But he envied them.

  Book II

  Lucy

  I

  The Balliols’ house was practically finished when I left home in September for my first term at a preparatory school. The roof was up; the scaffolding was down; the heaps of cement and mortar had been cleared away; a gravel path ran up to the front door; the garden was a brown flat stretch but certain lifted mounds of earth indicated the projected pattern of flower-bed and lawn. Instead of the wooden fencing along which small boys ran their sticks with a hideous clatter, a low wall with iron chain-linked palings faced the road. Most suburban houses of the period were gable-roofed, rough-cast, bow-windowed; but Balliol had followed a Queen Anne model. It was a two-storied, low-roofed house: very red and white; with four tall rectangular windows on each side of the high white portico. It was a very impressive residence; but its uncurtained windows gave it a staring, carcase-like appearance. It was not yet alive. I was very curious to see what it would be like by Christmas.

  My letters home during that Christmas term were interspersed with questions about the house; most of the letters that I received from my parents contained some reference to it. It was to be called Ilex: a name that appealed to me but puzzled me; till I had it explained that Ilex was the Latin for Holm Oak. I thought it an elaborate and rather silly pun. But I feel now that its obscure playing on surburban nomenclature was very typical of Balliol; like his conversational use of inverted commas—”as the inhabitants of Hampstead would christen it.”