The Rise of Henry Morcar

by Phyllis Bentley

  Of course, thought Morcar, half crossly, half amused: the Americans have quite the wrong idea about modern English life. They think in terms of dukes and coronets, footmen and lodgekeepers, curtseys and caste. When Morcar told them he had never seen a duke in his life and didn’t intend to if he could help it, they gazed at him in astonishment; when he explained that in the West Riding dukes and such-like were not much thought of, they gave him a glance of incredulous suspicion and turned away. They thought England was still ’way back in the 1850’s or whenever it was that those feudal times flourished, thought Morcar vaguely, uncertain himself. They expressed surprise at the short a’s and general intelligibility of his accent, and when Morcar, blushing a little, informed them that several millions of north-country British spoke as he did, they said politely: “Is that so?” with complete disbelief. Nay, they even put every Englishman down as a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, reflected Morcar indignantly, a real George III. Morcar could well understand how they felt about George III, for he felt like that himself about the Spanish Armada when he chanced to remember it. But what exasperated him so was that Americans seemed never to have heard that the English disliked George III quite as much as they did, both at the time and later; that the majority of English people—certainly all the business men in the West Riding—couldn’t agree with them more, as David would say, in the poor view they took of that stupid and tyrannical king and his actions. Americans had never heard of how the West Riding fought Charles I, the siege of Bradford and all that kind of thing. Of course he himself didn’t know much American history, admitted Morcar honestly.

  If the Americans knew little of ordinary peacetime life in England, naturally they had even less idea of English life during the war. How could they have any idea of that strange existence, in Mr. Churchill’s words so grim yet gay? But at least many of them seemed eager to hear of it, and listened with sympathy to what he could tell. Stumbling and stammering, Morcar found himself answering volleys of questions after dinner-parties, in club cars and train washrooms, at the drugstore counter; talking to “small groups” at luncheons, at last positively standing up and addressing Rotarians in quite a formal way, describing the blitz and the blackout and the sound of the siren, and what it felt like to spend sixteen days crossing the Atlantic in a small ship whose captain had been torpedoed twice before. After Morcar had finished his business engagements, he was stuck in New York for several weeks, trying to find a passenger ship home when no such ship existed; with time on his hands, nothing to do but haunt the British consul’s office daily, he talked gladly to everyone who wanted to hear. “You’re English, aren’t you?” said the taxi-driver. “Yeah, I knew you were English soon as I heard your voice. I was over there in 1918. Things seem kind of bad over there today, don’t they?” Morcar explained just how bad they were. “Kind of sad,” commented the taxi-driver. The negro redcap, pointing to the label on Morcar’s case, asked if he had recently crossed the ocean. Morcar explained that he had just come over from England. “How is it with you in England?” asked the man earnestly. As they stood outside the platform gate in the palatial station, Morcar described the air raids. “You are doing a pretty fine job out there, yes sir,” concluded the porter, solemnly shaking his fine dark head.

  On the other hand there were incidents not so pleasant. There was a young reporter who came up after a Rotarian lunch which Morcar had attended, and in a brisk unfeeling manner asked Morcar all sorts of questions offering to show that the British barrage balloons were useless, the anti-aircraft guns antiquated, the Army defeated, the Navy all washed up. Morcar kept his temper and answered as politely as he could, till the lad said in his cool efficient tone: “Now just one final question: Do you think England has any chance of winning the war?” “Yes!” shouted Morcar, crimsoning. The reporter looked astonished by so much vehemence. “Sorry to sound violent,” apologised Morcar affably: “But it’s a kind of personal matter with me, you know.” There was a lady in Detroit, too, who remarked in a doubtful condescending tone: “Well, it does look as if England were doing all she could before asking for help.”

  But on the other hand, again, every hotel had a collecting tin on its reception desk for British War Relief. Morcar earned many a sour look from reception clerks by shaking these tins to see if they contained any contribution; they were always most generously heavy with coin. His hosts’ wives seized eagerly upon him and enquired what would be the most useful articles to include in their Bundles for Britain. Clergymen called upon him by appointment and asked what would be the most efficacious method of assisting British youth. One day, every shop window in Fifth Avenue showed some labelled British goods: whisky and cloth and gloves and books. Many had beside them the packing-case in which they had travelled, to prove that they had genuinely crossed those dangerous submarine-haunted three thousand miles of sea. Britain delivers the goods, read Morcar, gazing into a window decked in red white and blue; his heart was touched and he felt kindly towards every retailer on the Avenue. On the night after one of the big fire raids on London Morcar chanced to be dining with a party of business acquaintances in a famous New York restaurant. The headlines that morning had been terrible; Morcar had cabled to enquire about the Haringtons’ safety but had as yet received no reply. At the dinner he exerted himself to be lively and cheerful, but found difficulty in sustaining the part. One of the guests turned to him and observed in a friendly candid tone: “I’m afraid your country took an awful bad beating last night.” In spite of himself Morcar winced and coloured. The man’s eyes rounded with concern, he called up a waiter and whispered instructions. The waiter nodded and went to the orchestra, and the strains of There’ll always be an England filled the room. The merchant beside him turned a beaming happy glance on Morcar. Between appreciation for the feeling which had prompted the orchestral request, embarrassment at this public exposure of his wound, and concern for his country and his love, Morcar could hardly speak or eat. It was several days before he received a cable from Harington saying laconically and not altogether reassuringly: “All unhurt.” The cable was brought to him as he sat in the barber’s shop in his hotel. As he looked up after a long sigh of relief and fumbled beneath the white gown to get a quarter out of his pocket, he found the eyes of bell-boy and barber fixed on him sympathetically. “Bad news from England?” asked the barber, razor poised in hand. “Not too bad,” said Morcar.

  Morcar did a great deal of business and met a great many business men, and it was naturally their ideas which he encountered most frequently. Business, thought Morcar with grim amusement, surveying with relish. the greatest turnover in history, was more than just business in the United States; it was something between a sport and a religion. A sport—something like scalp-hunting, thought Morcar; a Red Indian fortitude was certainly necessary to engage in it; as they said, it was a great life if you didn’t weaken. A religion—the finest buildings, the magnificent sky-scraping towers, were business premises. Were these business Americans as democratic as they made out? Well, yes and no, thought Morcar. The power of wealth was such that Morcar gasped at it; if you had dollars enough, you could get away with things for which in England you’d find yourself in gaol. The things Capital and Labour said to each other and did to each other, too, would have made the hair of Fred, the shop-steward at Syke Mills, stand on end. On the other hand, Morcar could but remember the incident of the janitor at the New England factory of a cloth manufacturer he had met as a merchant’s guest. The manufacturer’s natural suspicion of a foreign rival had yielded to his pride in his own product, and he took Morcar out to his plant to show him round. The janitor, a stout elderly man in spectacles, after admitting them suddenly threw his arms round Morcar’s neck. “Eh, lad!” he exclaimed: “You’re a Yorkshireman! I owned you as soon as ever you spoke.” Mildly disentangling himself from the embrace, Morcar admitted this, and suggested that the janitor likewise hailed from the county of the white rose. “Yes. Bradford,” agreed the janitor. Now Morcar was not a man who put on di
gnity or gave himself airs, but all the same he could not imagine the Syke Mills doorkeeper behaving with quite such carefree sociability to one of Morcar’s guests. He had to admit that there was a feeling of equality in the janitor’s behaviour greater than you could find in England.

  On the other hand, Morcar sometimes slyly told himself that he now understood how he himself appeared to David Oldroyd, for that was just how the American business man appeared to him. Fresh from the united effort, the sinking of all differences in a common purpose, of wartime England, the rugged individualism of American business practice in January 1941 struck him (to his own surprise) as somehow Victorian, old-fashioned, out of date.

  Thus his reactions swayed back and forth between vexation and liking, until one day the decisive event took place. He was in a train northbound towards Canada when he heard of it. A spring blizzard veiled the landscape; it was indeed “snowing to beat hell”, as a tall, large, loose-jointed man in a rather high white collar, a salesman travelling in dry goods, who sat across the aisle from Morcar, remarked with feeling. The train stopped—very late because of the snow—at a wayside station, and a lad ran in with newspapers in the usual way. Morcar glanced at the headlines. Such a gush of relief and happiness filled his heart that he could not keep silence. He leaned across the aisle.

  “Well, sir,” he said eagerly: “I see the Lease and Lend Act is passed.”

  “Yeah,” agreed the drygoods salesman without expression, nodding. Then he seemed to recollect something about Morcar—his accent perhaps—and looking towards him again, added kindly: “Make a difference to your country, I daresay?”

  “It certainly will,” said Morcar with fervour. “Make a difference to Hitler, too.” He paused, then suddenly cried out joyously: “I forgive you the McKinley tariff!”

  “Pardon?” murmured the salesman politely, perplexed.

  “And I’ll throw in Dingley as well,” said Morcar.

  “Uh-huh?” rejoined the salesman, still more perplexed.

  “And America’s not joining the League of Nations after the last war, and wrecking the Economic Conference in 1933, and every darned thing,” said Morcar with joyous emphasis: “I forgive you them all!”

  “Well now, that’s a new viewpoint to me. In my country,” said the salesman with mild courtesy: “We usually reckon we have to forgive yours.”

  “Well, let’s call it quits,” offered Morcar, laughing: “Then we can start afresh.”

  The drygoods salesman gave a non-committal murmur but a friendly smile, and asked Morcar what it was like to be in an air-raid. His eyes bulged with sympathy and alarm as Morcar gave him a blow-by-blow description.

  45. Convoy

  “That can’t be the ship!” exclaimed Morcar, looking down from the high 14th Street pier at a small deck, red with rust, which seemed chiefly occupied at the moment by heaps of scrap iron and lengths of chain.

  He knew at once, from a slight movement on the part of his companion the shipping clerk, that he had said the wrong thing; this certainly was the freighter in which he was to cross the Atlantic homeward. For a moment he felt quite daunted at the thought of spending weeks in that tiny space amid Atlantic waves; then he rallied, for after all there was nothing in the world he desired more at the moment than to get back to England. “Ah—I see it is,” he said blandly, reading out the freighter’s name, which was painted on the bows. “Quite a neat little craft.” Little was the word, he thought; there was scarcely room to walk. He saw himself pacing up and down a few yards each way, like a caged lion.

  “Better not to mention her name, either here or at home. She’s about seven thousand tons,” murmured the clerk. “With eleven thousand tons cargo.”

  “Ah,” said Morcar non-committally. He had no idea whether this tonnage was large or small, so (in the language he had recently learned) he played his cards close to his chest and offered no comment. The clerk strolled on and Morcar strolled with him; behind them trailed the six other passengers, silent and doubtless rather daunted, like Morcar, but like him resolute to get home. “Ah!” he exclaimed in a different tone. The after-deck offered an animated scene. A group of men were busily engaged, under the supervision of a ship’s officer, in securing a couple of aircraft to the deck by means of strong wires and bolts. The aircraft, which travelled minus their wings, were painted brown and green in dingy camouflage. It was clear to Morcar from the excited bearing of the men and the many shouted orders of the mate that aircraft formed an unaccustomed cargo for the little freighter, and he felt proud to be sailing in a craft which was taking planes to beleaguered England. The whole party seemed to experience a similar rise of spirits; they hung over the pier railing and watched intently.

  “I hope we get them home to England safely,” remarked one of the passengers, a New Zealander.

  “God knows they’re wanted!” exclaimed Morcar with ardour.

  A third aircraft was rapidly attached to the fore deck. The heaps of scrap resolved themselves into rivets and wedges, the chains into neat coils; the loose rust was swept overboard, the iron decks took on the appearance of an old-fashioned firegrate after the application of blacklead. When all was clean and neat—shipshape, I suppose, thought Morcar—the passengers were allowed to board the Floating Castle, as Morcar decided to call the ship. (It was not her name but somewhat resembled it, and he was sure no ship called Floating Castle had ever been entered at Lloyds, so to name her thus was not careless talk, gave no secrets away to the enemy.) Presently the immemorial signal blasts of a ship about to sail blared out bravely, the little ship backed out from the pier, turned and headed for the ocean. The voyage had begun.

  Now they were passing the Statue of Liberty, now she was only a distant silhouette with a pointed halo, now the waves began to be larger and to slap sharply against the side of the Castle, ruffled by the afternoon breeze. Morcar stood watching the lofty pinnacles of New York recede as the ship went down the bay. A phrase came into his mind, a tag from some forgotten lesson of his schooldays, Shakespeare he supposed: cloud-capp’d towers and gorgeous palaces. They were all of that, he thought admiringly, and he felt a real sadness of farewell as the island of Manhattan swam away till the skyscrapers looked like a cluster of tall pink and white flowers rising from a blue-grey sea of foliage. He should like to come and see them again after the war if he had any money left after the war to do so, which at the moment seemed highly improbable for any Englishman. Yes, he felt quite sad. He was saying goodbye to a people he had grown to like, goodbye to ease, goodbye to luxury, goodbye perhaps to life itself—but all the same he would give an arm, thought Morcar strongly, to be back in England at that moment. England was beleaguered and beset; Christina—well best not think of that, thought Morcar, turning from the bulwarks to pace restlessly up and down. The passenger deck, a tiny square which he could cover in a few strides, was far too small to relieve his sense of impatient longing; he descended to the iron deck below, walked the ship from end to end, entered into conversation with any officer, apprentice or seaman who would talk with him.

  He should never forget that voyage, thought Morcar, a series of pictures of its progress were stamped indelibly on his brain. The Floating Castle, a freighter of the British merchant marine, usually plied between New York and the Far East, but had come as a reinforcement to the Atlantic battle. All aboard were of British nationality; the captain, English, had been a Royal Navy man, axed in the days when naval disarmament was made a reality by Britain if by few other countries; the crew were Malays, the stewards Singapore Chinese, the officers English, Welsh, Scots and Belfast Irish. Morcar at first had a tiny but cosy cabin to himself; the bedlinen could not be described as spotless, for it was stained with great daubs of rust, but it was brilliantly clean; the sunlight on the waves outside reflected quivering flashes on the ceiling through the open porthole; the white paint shone, the neatly dovetailed equipment tickled Morcar’s sense of humour.

  The Floating Castle went peacefully up the coast and after some
delay by fog turned into Halifax harbour. No doubt Halifax was to its inhabitants a pleasant place, homely and kind and not without beauty, but to Morcar it represented a hell of frustration and suspense. The huge harbour was already crowded with craft when the Castle arrived, so that it was clear a convoy was in process of preparation, and Morcar hoped to be off homewards at break of day. But after hours of eager expectation this hope was disappointed, and a couple of days later the hope of joining the next convoy was disappointed again. The weather was hot; the passengers, who had already read all the worthwhile books in the little ship’s library and were falling back on sermons and manuals, grew languid, the officers a trifle snappy; the Captain and first mate often went ashore carrying brief cases and returned hours later looking portentous with knowledge which they did not reveal.