The Hayburn Family

by Guy McCrone

  Not for the first time in his life, Robin sat thinking of his “real” parents. They had been musicians, killed in a terrible fire, he had been told. They must have been young and quick and Viennese. What were other Viennese like, he wondered? He pictured them as persons of infinite charm. But he had never met any, except a rather pompous banker from Vienna who had visited them once when he, himself, was ten or twelve. A heavy, dark man with formal manners whom Robin hadn’t much liked.

  It is common, they say, for children to imagine themselves to be young princes or princesses, weaned, somehow, from glory, and forced to live with a man and a woman who are too fond of discipline, who do not understand their royal feelings. Robin had known something of these imaginings; and the knowledge that had been allowed to come to him, gently and with tact, that he was not a Hayburn but an Austrian foundling, had kept these imaginings alive.

  He might not be a prince, indeed, but it pleased him to think that he was quicker, more intense and of finer stuff than those he called his parents.

  And yet when the door opened presently, and Phœbe Hayburn crossed over to him, went on her knees on the hearthrug and looked up anxiously, searching his face, Robin bent to kiss her with all the familiarity of a young man, who bends to kiss a much beloved mother.

  Chapter Three

  THE following morning was cold, and there was a light rain falling, as Henry Hayburn left his house on the top of Partickhill and took his way down into Partick proper, where the not unimportant offices and yards of Hayburn and Company lay, fronting the busy river.

  It was seldom that Henry missed this half-hour’s walk between home and work. It was, indeed, difficult for him to avoid it, since no public vehicle came up into Partickhill. Besides, the drop down the footpath into Peel Street, and thence to Dumbarton Road, was easily accomplished by his long legs. And although it was inevitable that Henry, being an engineer with a natural interest in every new contrivance, should have one of the new motor-cars, he never thought to keep his petrol carriage at home. It must be kept at the yard, where its unpredictability might be constantly under the eyes of the yard mechanics.

  His long figure, striding along in the weather-worn Inverness cape and the old sportsman’s tweed helmet, was a sight to set clocks by; so little did his progress vary between half-past eight and nine. Partick housewives would turn from their work to watch this odd creature, his square, clean-shaven, pug-nosed face usually set in deep thought as he passed. Some of them, indeed, wondered how he got along without knocking into things, so little did he seem to notice where he went.

  But this half-hour of walking was one of the most productive times of Henry’s day. It was now that he did his thinking, attacked problems, fixed the day’s duties.

  The misty autumn rain wet his face, its fine particles made a white, watery bloom on the rough tweed of his cape. His feet, dropping down the incline, squelched mud and dead leaves on the little footpath. There was a smell of soot, of decaying vegetation, of the coming winter.

  Henry Hayburn had, people said, a touch of genius. A true son of his city, he was a brilliant engineer, creative and practical. In the twenty years since his return from Vienna he had built up and made himself master of an important shipyard. The South African War was then being fought, and Henry’s firm, it was known, had been doing special work. Some said that his name, young for honours though he still might be perhaps, would one day soon be laid before the Queen.

  And yet he was a simple creature, whatever his brilliance in things technical. He accepted his wife and son, and loved them. That was what wives and sons were there for. That his family had been strangely put together had long since ceased to occur to him. He had been grateful to Phœbe for the part she had once played, deeply grateful, indeed. But, thanks to her and to these years of healing and forgetting, there was nothing much left in Henry’s mind to forget or to heal.

  Now he was striding along the sodden pavements of Dumbarton Road thinking of his son’s illness. The boy must get well. No other thought was tolerable. The doctor had given a grave warning. Graver than he, Henry, had allowed Phœbe or Robin to know. But there was money enough. Money surely to buy his son’s health back and allow him to follow out the plan laid down. Let him go anywhere that was best, then: anywhere that would cure him. But when the cure was made, he must come home to his studies, to Hayburn and Company, to his career, to his heritage.

  Now Henry halted at a side street while a lorry, loaded with steel plates and tubing, turned from the main road, making for the shipyards of a world-famous competitor. Rapt though he was in the thought of his son, the upper layer of Henry’s consciousness marked the team of giant Clydesdale horses straining round the corner with their load; marked that these plates must be intended for the sides of this ship, that these tubes must be used in the interior of that other.

  When it was possible to walk round the end of this obstruction, Henry did so, leaving the pavement for a moment, looking from habit this way and that, then striding on.

  But presently he was turning in at his own gates and nodding good morning to his gatekeeper. Now familiar things soothed him. The sense of being inside his own yard. The sound of hammers in a half-built hull. Packing straw. Oil-soaked mud. The shouts of workmen. The belching chimney of a tug, as it moved out there on the river, hazy in the rain. These and the very act of crossing to his own office took hold of him, forced him to think of the day that lay before him, and brought him a great measure of comfort in his trouble.

  II

  There were no frills about the offices of Hayburn and Company. Other firms might occupy palaces; particularly where their shipyards, ever creeping down the river, had taken in what had, in earlier times, been a pleasant riverside property. Then the handsome house, early Victorian, or, more likely, Georgian, now blackened with smoke and standing among sheds and coal dumps, machinery and cranes, might have its shabby, forlorn dignity pressed into the service of Glasgow’s greatest industry, and become an imposing office.

  Henry’s private room was a mere box of a place, lined with cheap white pine, stuffy and absurdly overheated by a radiator connected to the works boiler. Visitors, unaccustomed, sometimes exclaimed at the heat, but Henry did not seem to notice and had not yet died of suffocation.

  He took off his tweed helmet and Inverness and laid them dripping over the radiator, thus adding the smell of wool woven in Harris to the steamy closeness of the room. Thereafter he settled himself in his swivel chair and rang for his letters. They were brought, all of them opened and read by his chief clerk, as was usual, so that Mr. Hayburn need not be troubled by what belonged merely to routine. One, however, was marked “personal”, and the seal had not been broken. The flap of the envelope was embossed with the lion and the unicorn. The postmark was London.

  Henry took it up, turned it this way and that, decided it was some official notice—there were many in these war days—laid it aside, and went through his other letters. This done, he rang for the heads of the departments to which the letters applied, discussed the contents with them, made decisions and gave his orders. It was getting on for eleven when the last man left him, setting him free to go out and have a look at the work that was in progress. Henry got up, looked through the window and saw that there was a gleam of bright sky, although it was still raining. He took his hat and cape from the radiator, noting with satisfaction that they were already quite dry. He put them on.

  As he crossed the room the unopened envelope caught his eye. Standing there by his table, Henry cut it open.

  It was a letter from Authority. Authority was aware of the service Mr. Henry Hayburn was rendering his country. And Authority wanted to be sure that, should the Queen see her way to offering Mr. Hayburn a knighthood, Mr. Hayburn would find no impediment to his name appearing among the New Year’s Honours.

  He drew out his chair again, slumped down in it and sat staring at the letter. Whatever others had whispered, such a happening as this had never once occurred to his simpli
city. Whether he should accept or not did not yet concern him. For in Henry’s mind, this, somehow, was as much an honour paid to his father’s memory as to himself. His thoughts went back. If his father could know! A great engineer who had been at the making of Glasgow! Who had built up the first Hayburn and Company, but had died mercifully before it had collapsed with the City Bank disaster, killing his widow with shock and throwing his sons Stephen and Henry on the world.

  And Phœbe? On the night of his mother’s funeral Phœbe Moorhouse had told him she would marry him and stand behind him while he rebuilt the ruined Company. Now this!

  But how would her unconventionality take it? Would she want to be Lady Hayburn? Henry doubted that. Yet, like himself, she would, surely, be pleased with this recognition of work well done.

  For a time he sat, staring before him. But at last an office-boy, coming in, roused him. He got up. “Get me my town coat and hat,” he said.

  The boy went to the white pine cupboard, took out a tall hat, a black overcoat and an umbrella and helped him to change.

  Henry took the letter from the desk and crammed it into his pocket. “I’m going into the town,” he said, stating the obvious. “I’ll be back to sign the letters.” He must consult with his brother Stephen and with his brother-in-law David Moorhouse about this.

  III

  No one quite knew how Stephen Hayburn occupied himself at his place of employment. But as Stephen’s place of employment was the head office of Dermott Ships Limited, and as his close friend was David Dermott Moorhouse, the chairman of the company, how Stephen occupied himself did not, perhaps, matter very much.

  At the turn of the century many great Scottish concerns, not yet having been turned into public companies, were still in the full possession of the men, or the relatives of the men, who had brought them into being. And thus, if the owner chose to maintain a hanger-on or two at the firm’s expense, there was nobody to say him nay.

  But from this do not let it be supposed that Stephen Hayburn was a fool. Quite the reverse. He knew that he was lucky. Brought up in Glasgow’s industrial purple, he had been destined by a fond, over-ambitious widowed mother for a gentleman’s life of idleness. But the City Bank crash that had wiped out the family fortune had likewise wiped out any such hope for Stephen. Thus, he had become a shipping clerk. But not quite an ordinary one. For Dermott Ships then belonged to old Mr. Dermott, a friend of Stephen’s dead father; and thereafter—in less than a year, indeed—to David Dermott-Moorhouse, the old man’s son-in-law, who happened to be Stephen’s close friend, and who, not unnaturally, saw to it that Stephen did not starve.

  Stephen occupied a little office beside the Chairman’s room. It was here that he conducted the business side of his bachelor existence. If you wanted a competent fourth for this new game of Bridge which was just beginning to be fashionable; if you were a hostess making up numbers for dinner and were seeking an unattached male with a sufficiency of light gossip spiced with enough pleasant malice to call forth little, gay scoldings; if you were a jaded weekender looking for a companion, tactful and distinguished, who knew how to fall in with your ideas of comfort and could swing a club without shaming you at Old Prestwick or St. Andrews, then all you had to do was to telephone Dermott Ships, Extension 6, and ask for Mr. Hayburn.

  Stephen was sitting in his office, thinking idly of a sentimental letter he had received from London this morning—wondering how he could induce the firm to send him south this month, drawing stars and triangles on his blotting-paper, and asking himself at the same time if another, perhaps more intimate meeting with the sender of the letter might not be unwise. From these important deliberations he was roused by his friend the Chairman standing in their intercommunicating doorway.

  “Here’s Henry to see us,” David Moorhouse said. “He says he wants our advice.”

  Stephen rose and followed David. He called “Hullo” to his brother as Henry came into view, standing hat in hand in the middle of David’s large, Turkey-rugged room with its blazing fire and the fly-blown photographic enlargement of old Robert Dermott over the mantelpiece.

  Why couldn’t Henry wear his clothes properly? Stephen found himself wondering, as, indeed, he had wondered all his life. Henry looked bundled up, somehow, in his black city overcoat. A nondescript tie was working its way up the back of his “stand-up” collar, and his boots were heavy, like a workman’s, and sticking with Partick mud.

  “Sit down, everybody,” David said, indicating two red leather fireside chairs. He went to his desk, took out a box of cigars, offered them, then, rotating himself in his own swivel chair, sat between them, sucking his cigar and placing the points of his fingers together.

  David Moorhouse was pink and portly. Good living had left its mark upon him. Hair that had once been chestnut was now thinning on the top and turning to a sandy grey. And yet David was still a handsome and dignified man, with the well-cut features and high cheekbones belonging to the men of Moorhouse breed.

  They were very old friends, the Hayburn brothers and he. There was an unbuttoning of the spirit when the three were alone together.

  “What do you think of that?” Henry said, showing them each in turn Authority’s letter.

  Neither David nor Stephen were typical Glasgow business men. In the commercial world they were known for lightweights. In Dermott Ships itself, indeed, the Chairman and his equerry were known with indulgence as the Old Boys. The firm had David’s nephew, Wil Butter, as its mainspring and hard-driving director. Yet now, however surprised the Old Boys might be, they did not show it, but fell back by instinct on the sententious bearing, the studied imperturbability of the pompous business Scot.

  “This is an important matter, Henry,” David said pontifically. He stopped sucking his cigar and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. As was natural, perhaps, he now saw himself receiving the same offer. How much better his own poise and presence could carry a knighthood. His country place, down there at Aucheneame on Clydeside, with its lawns, its gardens and its stables. His gentle wife, Grace, and their carefully brought-up son and daughter. All of them well-bred, all of them pleasant to look at, all of them more than fit to support dignity.

  “Yes, it’s important,” Henry answered eagerly. A large hand with a bony wrist stretched out to receive the letter back.

  “Are you going to take it?” Stephen asked. A like notion to David’s had passed through his mind. What a trim, self-sufficient bachelor knight he himself would make! Urbane, well-informed and easy. Very much in social demand and a favourite with everyone. And his tie wouldn’t creep up his collar, and his fingernails wouldn’t show black with machine oil.

  “I’ve just come to ask what you think.” Henry had always looked up to his elder brother Stephen. He had been taught to do so by his worldly mother, who disliked his own young awkwardness, and had constantly held up Stephen’s polish for admiration and imitation. Although this was more than twenty years since, it had never occurred to Henry to make a revaluation. In all respects, he was worth a dozen Stephens, but nothing would have surprised him more than to be told so.

  They smoked their cigars in silence for a time, David and Stephen turning the matter over in their minds. Each in his way was fond of Henry. To David, Henry was an old friend and the husband of his sister Phœbe. To Stephen, a brother to whom, despite the fundamental differences, he had always stood close. It was unthinkable that either David or Stephen should feel real jealousy. And yet there were wisps of it floating in their minds, causing each in turn to think of Henry’s unsuitability to receive this honour. His lack of conventionality, his abrupt manners. Henry’s brilliance as an engineer affected their deliberations strangely little.

  Suddenly these were interrupted by a large, energetic man of thirty-seven or thereby, with a mop of black hair and a strong, mobile face. It was Wil Butter, David’s nephew and co-director.

  Wil was busy. He burst in with a sheaf of cost-sheets in his hand, shouting: “Look here, Uncle David!” before he became a
ware of Henry’s presence.

  David was glad to postpone the unpleasant duties that Wil’s forceful tone portended, by hastening to call “Hullo, Wil. Come and give us your advice.”

  Wil slapped down the sheets, said: “Oh, hullo, Uncle Henry. Listen, Uncle David, I’m in a fearful hurry. I’ve no—” and was making to go out again, but for once David managed to assert some authority.

  “No. Stay where you are, Wil. We want you. Henry, show him your letter. Your Uncle Henry wants to know what we all think about that.”

  Wil took Authority’s letter from Henry, sat himself on a corner of David’s great table, swung his legs and read the letter, emitting at the end a long, low whistle. “Good business, Uncle Henry!” he said, his large face grinning with delight and surprise. Wil Butter worshipped success.

  “Your Uncle Henry’s wondering if he should take it or not,” Stephen said.

  Wil paid no attention to this. He seldom paid any attention to Stephen Hayburn. Not because he disliked him, but because he saw no point in noticing him.

  “What do you think, Wil?” Henry asked.

  “About taking it? Of course you’ll take it! Take everything you can get! It’s all in the day’s work!”

  David and Stephen exchanged a look here, flinching a little at Wil’s lack of perception when it came to the more delicate values.

  “Besides, it’s a wonderful tribute,” Wil went on. “It shows you’ve really done something. And from everything I can hear you deserve it. What does Aunt Phœbe think?”

  “I haven’t told her yet.”

  “Haven’t told her! Polly would murder me if she hadn’t been told before everybody else that she might be Lady Butter!”

  “I wanted to make up my mind first. Besides, your Aunt Phœbe’s queer. You never know how she’ll take a thing like this.”