The Castleford Conundrum

by J. J. Connington

  “Why did you ever think of marrying her, Father?”

  Castleford would have preferred her to couple the question with a recital of grievances. There was an ominous brevity about it which left him no loop-hole to escape into side-issues. He took his pipe from his mouth and made a helpless gesture with his mutilated hand.

  “I did it for the best; really I did, Hilary.”

  Intent though she was upon her own grievances, his daughter was startled by the note in his voice. His disappointed hopes, his years of repression embittered by petty vexations, his exasperation at the fresh-scored humiliations of that evening, a certain shame at his position, and an appeal for sympathy from the only creature to whom he could turn: all were blended in that feeble justification. For once, that carefully-concealed misery had found expression.

  It was not the tone that surprised Hilary; it was the intensity of it. She had not been so blind as Castleford had hoped. Where her father was concerned, she had sharp eyes and quick ears; and behind the screen of her reserve she had noted and remembered trifle after trifle, until she had built up a very fair structure of evidence. Had she chosen to do so, she could have given him a shrewd description of the lie of the land at Carron Hill. She had no illusions about the state of affairs. What she did not know was the chapter of accidents which led up to it.

  Her father had married a second time when she was still a mere child. He had offered no explanations then; and in later years he seemed to shrink from giving any, even when she left him an opening. Now she had determined to force his confidence; and she had been aghast at the feeling which he betrayed in that single sentence. She had always looked on him as bent on quietness for the sake of quietness—“Don’t let’s have a fuss!”—and she had faintly resented his attitude, both on his own account and especially when she herself was sacrificed to maintain it. For the first time, she had got a glimpse of the misery which lay behind his patient manner.

  When she spoke, her response was to his tone and not to his words.

  “I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to hurt you. You know I didn’t?”

  Castleford’s gesture acquitted her. Then he put his pipe back in his mouth, clenched his teeth on it, and stared before him for a moment or two. He was trying to find the best opening for the tale he had to tell, and it seemed a task of some difficulty.

  “You don’t remember your mother?” he began at length. “Not clearly, at any rate, I expect. She was something like you—the same eyes and hair, and about your height, too.”

  “I’ve seen your miniature of her,” Hilary answered, mechanically picking up her work again. “I don’t remember her very clearly, of course. I was only about eight when she died, wasn’t I?”

  Castleford nodded. That miniature was another of the things which he had to suppress. He kept it in a locked despatch-box upstairs, and looked at it only when he was alone. It was one of the best things he had ever achieved, vivid and subtle. More than mere craftsmanship had gone to the making of it; and now it was condemned to lie in the dark.

  “If your mother had lived, things would have been different,” he said in a tone which invested the truism with vitality. “She was like you; she didn’t mind taking risks. I’ve always been too inclined to play for safety, myself, I’m afraid. She took a risk when she married me, for I was only twenty-two and I’d no reputation as a miniaturist, then, of course. She had some money—a hundred a year or so—and I had about the same. Just enough to live on, and no more, in these days. But she believed in me, you know; and she spurred me on. She took the risk.”

  He seemed to be speaking his thoughts aloud rather than addressing Hilary.

  “She took the risk. I don’t think I’d have done it if it had been left to me. But it turned out all right, as it happened. I got some sort of clientele together even quicker than we expected; I suppose my work must have been good enough to please people. Anyhow, we managed to do more than make ends meet. And then you were born, and that made more difference than you’d think.”

  He glanced across at his daughter with a faintly whimsical look which she was glad to see.

  “So wonderful as all that?” she demanded, encouraging him.

  “No, not so wonderful—rather an ugly baby, we had to admit. Disappointing in an artistic family, if anything. Still, we made the best of you, dreamed all sorts of dreams over your cradle, you know, just like any ordinary young couple, and made great plans for your future.”

  Hilary heard the sigh with which that sentence closed and hastened to force him on from something which had evidently cost a pang in the recollection.

  “And then?”

  “Oh, then, I worked twice as hard as before, and things turned out really very well for a time. In four years or so, I was quite on my feet—very lucky, really. And then came the war.”

  “The war?” Hilary queried.

  Evidently she had been expected to understand that reference without explanation.

  “Yes, the war,” Castleford went on. “Of course there was a demand for miniatures; it didn’t die out all at once. Here and there you’d find a girl wanting to give her officer sweetheart something to take with him; but not many of them came my way. I tried for a commission myself, but they turned me down on some point or other. They were more particular about small defects in those days than they were later, and they rejected me because one of my ears wasn’t up to scratch—scarlet fever when I was a boy.”

  He got up, knocked out his pipe on an ashtray, and pulled out his pouch as he came back to his chair.

  “The bottom seemed to fall out of things, just then. You’re too young to remember anything about it. We were back where we started, you understand; no commissions came in and we’d have been on the rocks if we hadn’t had that couple of hundred a year behind us. Your mother never seemed to lose heart over it, though; it was just one of the risks, I suppose; that was the way she looked at it. And then, quite unexpectedly, I got something steady—you’d never guess what.”

  “What was it?” Hilary asked, refusing to waste energy in guessing.

  “There were all sorts of queer jobs in the war, you know,” her father went on. “The rummest sort of things suddenly turned out to be essential, things one could never have imagined being useful at all in war-time. I got one of them: they wanted miniature painters at the Admiralty.”

  “Whatever for?” Hilary demanded in astonishment. Then a hazy recollection of something crossed her mind. “Oh, something to do with camouflaging ships, painting them so that the submarines were put off, was that it?”

  “Dazzle-painting? No, it wasn’t that. You don’t need a miniature-painter to put weird streaks on a ship’s sides. It was compass-card lettering.”

  “Compass-cards?” Hilary was evidently no wiser.

  “For night compasses,” Castleford explained. “Ships had to sail at night without a light showing even in the binnacle, so they put the lettering on the compass-cards with radium paint. That paint was worth a small fortune, you know—between £400 and £500 per ounce, someone told me once—so naturally they didn’t want to waste it. And who could do fine work of that sort—the fine lettering on the cards—better than a miniature-painter who was trained in minute technique? And, of course, later on, they needed much the same kind of thing for the compasses of night-flying aeroplanes. There was plenty to keep the lot of us busy; and for the rest of the war I was painting nothing but the tiny lettering on these cards. It was trying to the eyes, after a while, but it wasn’t heroic. Still, I suppose I did as much good there as I’d have done elsewhere. What they paid for the work was enough to keep us all afloat; and we were glad to see it coming in, your mother and I.”

  His voice trailed off into a silence for some seconds, as though he had forgotten Hilary was listening.

  “Then came the Armistice,” he continued, “and naturally they sacked the lot of us. Things were pretty black for a while, with no commissions coming in and prices up. How your mother managed it, I don’t
know, but we seemed to get along somehow or other. Then, in 1919, came that Spanish influenza epidemic; your mother went down with it . . .”

  Again his voice dropped and halted for a time.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he resumed, with an obvious effort. “It put the whole world out of joint for me; but you’d never understand how I felt, even if I tried to let you see it. I depended on her so much in ways I only realised after she was gone. You were what kept me straight; I had to pull through somehow on your account, you see? And still commissions didn’t come in; and I had to begin nibbling at capital to keep afloat. It wasn’t an easy time, round about then, anything but easy.”

  “And then?” Hilary interjected, lest he should add to his depression with these old griefs.

  “Then? Well, it got worse, after that: prices up, cost of living rising, taxation enormous—not that I had much of an income to pay on—and our capital oozing away week by week. I had to keep up some sort of appearance, you know, with a view to commissions. Shabbiness wouldn’t pay; clients didn’t like it, naturally enough. And all the while, there was your future to think of, you see? That was at the back of my mind all the time; every cheque I drew on my capital account seemed a bit of safety whittled away from you.”

  With a quite unwonted demonstrativeness, Hilary slipped across and knelt down beside his chair. The gesture was enough; he needed no words to tell him that she understood what store he had set by her.

  “You see the position, don’t you?” he went on. “I—we were sliding downhill week by week and there seemed no way of pulling up again. I was nearly frantic with worry over it—not so much on my own account as yours, really. And then, unfortunately, I got a tip from a man who dabbled in shares. Dunlops were what he talked about. Sure to go up, he said; one could make three or four times one’s capital easily. I hung back for a while. You see, I never took much interest in stocks and shares; they’re out of my line and I don’t understand speculation. Then, as I got more and more worried over our money affairs, I thought of your mother. I knew quite well what she would have said: ‘Take a risk.’”

  He stared in front of him for a moment, even lost in memories.

  “Well, between one thing and another, I made up my mind at last to take a risk in Dunlops. I sold most of the investments I had—it was no time for half-measures, I felt—and I put the proceeds into Dunlops. You’ve no idea how I felt in the next few weeks; it was like a dream come true. Those shares went up and up; every day I used to read the quotations and they went higher and higher. I’d got over the safety-line and when I sold out we’d have enough money behind us to make you secure for life.”

  He made an inarticulate sound which was half groan, half sigh.

  “If only I’d had any sense! But when I thought of selling, the man who had given me the tip cried out against it. Dunlops were going far higher yet, he knew; and I thought I might hold on for a week longer, just to snatch a little extra profit. And then the market broke. Of course I was a fool at that game; I thought it was just a temporary set-back and that it would be silly to sell. And I went on thinking that, knowing no better, until all the profit was gone, and most of my original capital had followed it. At the end of that speculation, I’d hardly anything left—a few hundred pounds, perhaps, which might bring in enough income to starve on, not more. That was a bad time.

  “And then, after all, the tide turned again. Commissions started to flow in; I began to make a decent income; and bit by bit I was moving on the road towards a modest reputation in my own line. It was the big boom after the war; the profiteers were spending their money royally; and a good many of their wives wanted their faces painted on the flat as well as on the skin. Why most of them risked it is a mystery to me; but that didn’t matter. I was making money again; that was all I cared about, even if it meant painting the portraits of human pug-dogs. And, after all, some of them weren’t quite like that, you know. Things looked quite bright, then.

  “And after that flash of sun, there came the slump. Everybody was hard up, or felt they were. Too hard up, at any rate, to want miniatures for family heirlooms, I expect. Before long, I was back where I’d been before. Like everyone else, I’d thought the boom would go on for ever; I hadn’t bothered to be careful with money—I mean I hadn’t saved every penny that I might have done. So when the boom collapsed, I wasn’t much better off than I’d been at the start, after the Dunlop crash.

  “I made just enough to let us keep afloat, but now, you see, Hilary, things were different altogether. My ideas had expanded a bit during that stretch when I had a big paper profit in Dunlops. I’d been planning all sorts of things for you: boarding-school, and after that Paris or Switzerland for a couple of years, and then a year abroad for the two of us. That had all been possible—on paper. After all that day-dreaming, poverty was a good deal harder than it had been before, somehow.

  “And I’d got one idea ingrained into my mind by all that set of experiences—security for you. I didn’t expect to get another chance; things looked too black for that; but I made up my mind that if any chance came my way, I’d take it, no matter what it was, so long as it meant that you’d be all right if anything happened to me. We’ve no relations, you know, and the idea of my dying and leaving you stranded in the world used to keep me awake at nights. I had some money invested; but the Dunlop affair had made me afraid even for the soundest investments. I’m a child in these things; I quite admit it; and the Dunlop business had turned me into a burned child.

  “Then—and this was the last straw—something went wrong with my heart. I couldn’t be sure how bad it was; I was afraid the doctors were lying to me and concealing the gravity of the case; and I had visions of a sudden collapse leaving you absolutely stranded. You were only eleven, then. The medicals told me I’d brought it on with anxiety; and that unless I stopped worrying, I’d go from bad to worse. Much good that advice did! I used to wake in the night with my heart beating sixteen to the dozen and a lump in my throat—globus hystericus, I think they call it and I’d lie there for hours, racked with anxiety on your account. Again and again I swore to myself that I’d take any chance that offered, anything, no matter what, so long as it meant that you’d be protected if anything happened to me.”

  He glanced down at Hilary with a mute question in his eyes.

  “I really do understand,” she reassured him. “Poor Father! I never guessed it was like that. She came along, wasn’t that it?”

  “That was it,” Castleford went on. “I’m not trying to justify myself, even to you, Hilary. I’m simply explaining things. She came along. At first she was a client, merely. Some acquaintance had given her my name, and she wanted a miniature of herself. Then, during the sittings she gave me, we talked a good deal and I learned something about her. Her husband had been a war-profiteer in a small way—an ironmonger, or something, of that sort, who’d blossomed out a bit—and then when he’d made his pile, the ’flu epidemic took him off. She’d plenty of money to spend; and to judge from one thing and another, she seemed to spend it freely.

  “I took care to make that miniature on the flattering side; you know it, in the drawing-room? It turned out that she painted in an amateurish way herself; and by-and-by she asked me to give her some lessons. I saw a good deal of her, on that excuse; and I had more than a suspicion that she had taken a fancy to me. I was better-looking then than I am now, you know. And I set myself to make that fancy stronger, not quite deliberately, in cold blood; but still with a feeling that I might as well see what came of it. It sounds beastly when one puts it into words, I know. I didn’t want her at all, but I did want her money on your account; and between the two, I suppose I got into a sort of blow-hot, blow-cold attitude which, as it happened, was just the very one to goad her on. You know what she’s like, Hilary; if she wants a thing, she must have it, and she must have it now, cost what it may. Well, before long, I was the thing she wanted. She wasn’t in love with me—not in the way I understand falling in lo
ve, at any rate; but I was something she’d set her fancy on just then, and she meant to have me, even if she threw me aside again within a month, afterwards.

  “And then, before I’d really made up my mind to it, a thing happened which forced the decision on me. It left me no way out. She used to hire cars, in those days; and now and again she’d take me away with her for the day in one. It was at the end of one of these days. She was dropping me on the way home; and I’d got out of the car. It was a touring car, and I stood on the pavement talking to her, with my hand on the car. I didn’t notice what I was doing, and she didn’t notice my hand, I suppose. Anyhow, she leaned over and slammed the door on my fingers.”

  He held up his mutilated hand.

  “You see what that cost. By the time they’d operated, my livelihood was gone. You and I were done for. That decided me, you see. There was no way out, except the one. Of course she was in a great state over the accident and the result—or at least she seemed to be. I shouldn’t like to say how much was pity and remorse in it and how much was just ‘getting what she wanted.’ She practically threw herself at my head while I was still an interesting invalid. I had no option that I could see. I let her have her way. I was desperate, you know.

  “And she was so eager to do anything, anything whatever that I hinted at. She altered her will immediately after we were married, and made provision for both you and me, in case she died. I was devilish grateful; how could I have been anything else? You were sent to a decent school; I came to live here at Carron Hill. I still had some remnants of pride, and I paid my own way so far as my little income ran to it—tailor’s bills, tobacco, all that kind of thing; but of course she saw to the running of the place and all the household expenses. She could well afford that. And I never sponged on her for money.”