Wheels within Wheels Page 16

  “Julia tells me you want to marry her. It’s not what we expected, certainly. She might have chosen, however, some brainless schoolboy. We hope you’ll be happy. I don’t see why you shouldn’t be. Sensible people can be. It’s the only sound way to live. Children. Responsibilities. A stake in the State. Julia tells me that you have very little money. That’s not a bad thing. Nobody knows the value of money till they’ve earned it. She tells me you have no job. We must see about that. I spoke to Hugh. He can arrange something certainly. He needs brains in that business. There’s plenty of force there, but too little brain. We’ll arrange that.”

  The syllables clattered like the needles; Shirley found himself hypnotized into agreement; just as a small boy he had been.

  “I mustn’t,” he thought. “I must be firm. I know her game. I’ve watched her play it long enough.”

  It was a sound game. Mrs. Maine got her way by appearing to give other people theirs. Like a cricketer hitting with the break, she accepted each new circumstance, putting it to her own use. Whereas the whole Maine family had been astounded by the announcement of Julia’s plans, she had accepted the fact uncritically. “We want nothing but your happiness, my dear. Now, let’s see what’s best to be done about it.”

  She aroused co-operation instead of opposition. She was working with, not against her granddaughter. Since she had not got the husband for her granddaughter she could have wished, she was resolved to make what she had got into an appropriate grands on-in-law. She would find a post for Shirley in the family business. He would be given responsibilities. The man who was trusted usually deserved trust. A growing family’s needs of money would spur him to hard work. In a very little while he would be indistinguishable from her son and her son’s friends. The marriage, however disastrous it had appeared at the start, would become the object of universal approbation. “You never can tell,” she would say.

  That was what she was planning. John Shirley smiled grimly to himself. He was not going to make that kind of marriage.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want any post. I’ve enough money for my own expenses. I can support myself.”

  The old lady blinked. She was unused to opposition.

  “Certainly you have. But have you enough to support a wife?”

  “No, but your son has.”

  “A man does not expect to support his daughter after her marriage.”

  “On the contrary, when a man brings a child into the world he makes himself responsible for the various contingencies her existence may create. Provided he approves of them. He can if he wishes give his refusal to this marriage. But if he gives his acceptance, then he must accept the consequences.”

  “Do you consider that a very manly attitude to take up?”

  “My attitude is not concerned. It is the question of the attitude your son will adopt.”

  “Why should you imagine that my son will be willing to support such a marriage?”

  “Because he may consider it to be for his daughter’s happiness.”

  The old lady’s knitting needles clicked the faster; but she showed no sign of anger or impatience.

  “You have grown into a strange man. The boy I remember was very different.”

  “The world is very different.”

  She looked at him steadily. As far as she was concerned the world was not any different. She had not abandoned any of her principles. As she had coerced her family and friends into an acceptance of those principles the world of which she was a part had not altered either.

  “I must talk to Hugh,” she said. “He has to decide.”

  The interview with Hugh was more difficult, but in a different way. With old Mrs. Maine there had been no question of fondness. With Hugh there was. Hugh had been one of the best friends that he had ever had. He had shared more good times with him than he had with any other man. Of all men in the world Hugh was the one whom he would be the most anxious to spare pain. And at the moment he was causing it. He knew that. There was a hurt, worried expression on Hugh’s face as they sat opposite each other in the dark library, on either side of the fireplace, across which they had exchanged so many confidences in the past. They neither of them quite knew what to say. Hugh, with a worried look on his large, fat face, his lips parted and his forehead creased, had a curiously babyish appearance, as though he were saying, “Where’s my bottle?”

  “He’s never really grown up,” Shirley thought: “with a part of himself at least.” And he wanted to protect his old friend, to cherish him; to say, “Don’t worry; no one’s going to hurt you.”

  But instead he sat there, the furrows deep between his eyes.

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Hugh. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. On a lot of issues I don’t agree with you. It would be silly for me to pretend that I don’t think you have wasted your life. But if I were ever to hear anyone say a word against you, I’d knock him down. There’s not a man I’d trust further. If I had your word for a thing I wouldn’t be asking for your signature to any document. But when it’s a question of a daughter, well, one feels somehow differently about a daughter.”

  He spread his hands sideways with a little helpless gesture. There was no need for him to explain himself. Shirley could phrase the thoughts that were passing in his mind. A daughter was something you had loved before it had been born: that was the expression of your love for a loved person; that came later to be a love of its own, separate and distinct. That was self-love in a way, since it was a prolongation, a perpetuation, of yourself: of what was most permanent, most essential in yourself: in which you saw mingled with what you valued most highly in yourself that which you had most loved in the one person that was loved more than self. A daughter was so many things. She was the small inarticulate bundle in a cradle: she was the tiny child turning for protection and guidance: she was the girl who later sought for mental as the child had sought for physical guidance: the girl that had grown to womanhood: that you had watched open as a flower opens.

  You knew that she was really no different from the hundred and one other girls who looked flower-like on tennis courts, in ballrooms. But for you she was. Since you had spent so much care on her: so much love, you felt that she was something better: that she was destined for something better. You could not bear to learn about her things that would not seem to you particularly unfortunate were you to hear them about the daughter of a friend. In your heart of hearts you suspected that behind that flower-soft mask were passing the same thoughts as flickered behind the faces of those other girls whose exteriors belied their hearts. You knew that pure thoughts were less often found in the young with their unseared features than in the old with their lined foreheads and pouched eyes, who had worked out of their systems the poison that flesh was heir to. You knew all that. But you shut away the knowledge. Your daughter was the reflection of your love: you wished to believe that she was all your love had been.

  In just that way you wanted to believe that the man she married would be different from other men. You did not want to hand over the daughter on whom you had poured out so much love and care to such a man as you yourself had been. You knew that he was such a man, in all human probability. That if he were not he would lack humanity: but you shut away all that. You wanted not to know. Certainly you did not want as your daughter’s husband a man whom you had been a boy with; with whom you had exchanged scabrous confidences; whose head you had held under a tap when he had reeled back late to barracks. Hugh Maine knew too much about Shirley. There could be no poetry for him in his daughter’s marriage to such a man. And because Shirley realized that, because he felt that he was robbing his old friend of the happiness and ease of mind to which every father is entitled, he found the friendliness of his interview with Hugh Maine infinitely more difficult than the antagonism of his interview with the old lady. He put his hand upon Hugh’s shoulder.

  “I know how you feel,” he said. “But I’ll do my best. I swear I will try to make Julia’s
marriage a success.”

  Hugh Maine smiled: that old, half-wistful, half-pleading smile that was in its implied helplessness so peculiarly disarming.

  “I know you will, old friend, I know.”

  Shirley was resolved to make a success of the marriage.

  “It’s the first time I’ve really tried at anything,” he told himself; “since the war, at any rate. I won’t fail her.”

  X

  Though the Maines had agreed to the announcement of their daughter’s engagement they insisted that that engagement should last a year. Shirley was content to wait. He had no wish to rush Julia into anything. Besides, the waiting would be pleasant. Not since the war had he felt so at home in his own city. He was conscious of occupying a different position among his fellow-countrymen.

  A year back he had been moneyless and an idler in a society where to be without an income and without employment was to be self-condemned. He was living in his mother’s house instead of supporting as a son should, his family’s old age. He had no position in the State. Now he was on the brink of marriage to one of the most influential families in the South. He had an address in the French quarter that was his own. Rumours of an oil well in the West Indies had been exaggeratingly whispered till he had come to be thought of as a rich landed proprietor who had too many obligations in connection with his estate to have much time to devote to any single occupation. He had become, in fact, a personage.

  In the Boston Club men invited as well as listened to his opinions. A number of men who were stodgily formal in the drawing-room atmosphere of their marriage were grateful for the opportunity to relax in a bachelor apartment. The days were few when some man or other did not drop in after his office closed, and climb the steep stairway for a chat. There would be a couple of highballs probably. It would be after six before the guest would rise to go: reluctantly, most often.

  “Wish I hadn’t got to go. You certainly do know how to make yourself comfortable.”

  Shirley picked up during those weeks the dropped threads of friendships that had ceased to be anything more than acquaintanceships. He began to picture himself making a permanent home in New Orleans. It was where, after all, he belonged.

  “If it hadn’t been for that oil well,” he thought, “I’d have never realized it.”

  • • • • •

  For others, too, that summer of 1929 was the herald of dreams fulfilled. The crested wave was at its height. The old legend of the Philosopher’s Stone had at last come true. Everything that Wall Street touched was turned to gold. General Electric, General Motors, Radio, Westinghouse, Montgomery Ward ricocheted from one high level to another. Publicists, professors, politicians proclaimed the birth of a new era. A world grown weary of panaceas, exhausted by the stupendous effort of the war, enervated by post-war disenchantment, ready to accept the solution that demanded the least expenditure of effort, believed that wealth could be made, as electric light, by the pressing of a button: that wealth and what it stands for in the graces and amenities of life need not be inherited or earned but could be won by anyone who would entrust his savings to a clever broker to invest on margin. The world was tired; it had done too much; it had endured too much. It was easy for it to accept the offer to sit in an arm-chair and watch the tape machine ticking off the millions. Tired eyes were dazzled by the mirage. During that long, warm summer the world grew bright and eager: as a tired man does after a second cocktail; regarding his vitality as a proof of recovered health.

  • • • • •

  In New Orleans the rhythm of those sun-drenched weeks followed a heightened, quickened but unhectic rhythm. In experience, if not in years, New Orleans was too old to surrender easily to the moment’s mood. It was inoculated against any complete absorption in the present through its own troubled history, its vicissitudes of gloom and grandeur. It was conscious of the ebb and flow of tides. From the banks of its high levees it had watched the broad brown river flow into the Caribbean. The symbol with which a certain school of Greek philosophy had explained the story of mortality had lain about its doors. The gaiety and gallantry of heart with which New Orleans, city of carnival, had faced disaster was her defence against that other impostor, quick-won success. New Orleans was light-hearted through that eager summer, as she had been light-hearted in the dark days of the carpet-baggers. She was deep-rooted and prepared for change.

  For Shirley the weeks passed pleasantly. Every morning he would check up the rises in the Wall Street exchange of the stocks he held. Every day they rose. It was exciting: as a game is. There was hardly a moment of reverse. In the same way that a golfer during the weeks when he is reducing his handicap finds it very difficult to discuss anything but sliced drives, shanked mashie shots and pulled approaches, so Shirley in the first excitement of the game of buying shares on margin found himself drawn more and more into those very discussions that eight years earlier had exasperated him to revolt.

  He in his turn now that the ticker tape was sending his figures rocketing skywards could not resist the temptation to compare the advance of Radio with the advance of Westinghouse: to weigh the probabilities of this merger and of that: the wisdom of buying here and selling there. It was not that money qua money meant any more to him now than it had done then. It was the game that counted. Dollars were figures in a game. His absorption in that game explained to him what had seemed to him before in his countrymen an appalling over-valuing of money; a reduction of everything to the dollar level. He had held the European view that Americans thought and talked of nothing but money. He had not appreciated that their talk was on a level with the golfer’s discussion of his handicap. It might be boring, but it was not the proof of mercenariness.

  • • • • •

  In London the repercussions of the Wall Street Bull market were felt indirectly, in a general heightening of animation, percolated down through the increased expenditure of those who were profiting by the rising wave; as the various tradesmen who were entrusted with the furnishing of Appleton received larger orders from the added confidence that the boom had inspired in Frank Newton.

  Unworried by the fact that the transfer by it to Major Sir Fortnum Martin was not yet concluded, Newton set himself the task of moving out of his London house in early summer. The Major, Messrs. Lowenstein & Kohl had explained to him, was a difficult, peppery, finicky dilatory person; but they had no doubt at all of his resolve to take his house.

  The Major himself was by no means so contented about the situation. He had received within a month of his visit to the house-agents a cheque from Fraser for a hundred pounds. He had been promised more a little later. The cheque and the promises were most welcome, but like Bosola he suspected that “never rained such showers as these without thunderbolts i’ the tail of them.”

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “But I’ve practically promised to take this house in Easton Square.”

  “Go on practically promising.”

  “I can’t do that indefinitely.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to keep the situation fluid till I can find a serious client.”

  “So that you can take the commission on the sale.”

  “Naturally. I don’t want Lowenstein & Kohl to take it.”

  “I see.”

  The Major hesitated.

  “It doesn’t seem to me quite straight. After all, we’re delaying Newton’s chance of finding a tenant. It doesn’t seem fair to him.”

  Fraser laughed airily.

  “My dear fellow, Newton’s far too rich a man to be worried by a delay of a few weeks. I’ll find him a tenant and a good tenant right enough. I only want to make absolutely certain that it’s I and not Kohl who finds it for him. It doesn’t matter to him who finds the tenant, but it does to me, a lot.”

  “I suppose it’s all right,” the Major admitted grudgingly.

  “You bet it is. I’ll find him a tenant. Newton’s not worrying.”

 
; Captain Fraser had no doubt of his capacity for finding a tenant. He was right in thinking that Newton was not worrying; would not even have worried had he learnt that the Major after all was not going to take the house. He would have been quite certain that somebody else would. At a time like this one could sell anything. Besides, the problem of Daphne’s future was of infinitely more matter to him.

  • • • • •

  The affair with Seton Rivers was lasting an uncomfortably long time. He had done his best to discourage it, by doing everything to encourage it. When Daphne had asked him what he thought of Rivers, expecting adverse criticism and ready to defend Rivers, he had replied, “A very interesting fellow. We must see more of him.”

  He had adopted the tactics that had been prescribed for parents. “Encourage the man you don’t want her to marry. Discourage the one you do.” But he had followed that advice prudently. He had tried to explain Rivers to Daphne: not by argument, but by demonstration; by showing her how Rivers would behave in different settings.

  He had tried as far as possible to create situations when Rivers would be at his worst: had stressed Rivers’ failings, not his qualities. His attitude had been “He may or may not be the right man for her. I don’t think he is. But that’s for her to decide, not me. All that I can do as her father, is to show her this man from as many different points of view as possible; to show her what’s likely to be weak and irritable in him; so that if she does choose him it’ll be with her eyes open.”