“There are also the errors in buying. Some of them are very grave ones. I’ve kept a record of them.”
There was silence for a moment.
“But aren’t we losing sight of our main object?”
It was the bank’s nominee who had spoken: they were the first words that he had said.
“I understood that you gentlemen had some kind of offer to make to Mr. Marco.”
“An offer?” John Marco repeated.
“The offer I had mentioned to me,” the nominee went on as gently as before, “was that you should retire from the management and receive an annuity.” He paused and pressed the tips of his fingers together. “If left to the board of directors,” he added, “I have no doubt that the annuity would be a very generous one.”
But John Marco had risen now and was holding on to the table for support.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “I won’t listen to you. I prefer to fight you. Fight you, I tell you. Fight the whole bloody lot of you. I’ll fight you at the General Meeting, and I’ll win.”
He stepped back, hotly, clumsily, and the chair behind him crashed over onto the floor. Then without speaking again, without even looking in their direction, he walked past them towards the door.
He was alone now; one man against seven. But the vigour seemed to have gone out of him and his feet were dragging across the thick carpet as he moved. His face was quite bloodless and his hands which were clenched beside him were twitching. He swayed for a moment at the door, as though the faintness had overcome him, and Mr. Skewin half rose to save him.
But John Marco recovered himself: he swung the door open in Mr. Skewin’s face and then slammed it after him. They could hear those jerking, dragging feet retreating down the corridor.
The board room was silent again; a charged, unnatural kind of silence. The bank’s nominee opened his handkerchief and coughed discreetly into it.
“It’s all most unfortunate,” he said. “I had wanted to raise the question of the dividend. I’m really afraid that the bank must be shown some consideration first.”
ii
There were still five weeks before the General Meeting, and for that month and a quarter John Marco abruptly ceased drinking. The cut-glass decanter on its silver tray remained locked inside the cupboard, and there was no one who saw John Marco with even a trace of spirits upon him. No one at the shop that is; at home it was different. He would go straight to his study in the evenings and would emerge again, faltering and uncertain of himself. At first Louise was patient with him, trying to help him out of the slough into which he had fallen. She was careful to bring to the house only those friends whom he liked, the people who might interest him. But he ignored them. He would leave the company without explanation when they went upstairs to the drawing-room, and she would find him later when she went up to bed, sprawling in his chair, the bottle three-quarters empty on the table and his eyes glazed and stupid.
And it was not only her friends that he ignored: it was Louise as well. He seemed oblivious of her presence in the house at all. It was nearly six months since that night when he had gone into her room; he apparently never thought of her. And he looked a different man now. His clothes hung still more loosely on him and his face had lost its hard, firm lines: the outlines of it blurred and sunken. There was age in the face; age and also the breaking down of everything inside him. He was no longer even the kind of man whom she wanted for a lover. She locked her door after her at nights.
Twice during that last month Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hackbridge had asked if they could see him; and each time he had refused. There was no kind of intercourse at all between them. John Marco no longer spoke to them, and what messages were sent were carried by his secretary. He still saw all the important travellers himself; still sorted through the vast, untidy heap of the morning mail, watching every movement inside the machine that he still governed. Since the board-meeting, moreover, he had returned to his tours of inspection. Only, he went alone now, without Mr. Hackbridge shambling after him. And out of the corner of his eye he watched the expression on the faces of the assistants, pondering whether when the last fight really came he could still count on them.
iii
The Annual General Meeting was close now; only two days away in fact. But the young man in sombre, respectable black and the round, narrow collar of the Amosite deaconry, who walked rapidly through the shop and up the broad staircase towards John Marco’s room, knew nothing of this. His mind was centred on himself. There was a resolve about him, a fixed certainty of purpose, that separated him from the idle shoppers in the aisles. He walked like a man whose mind is made up about something.
The secretary’s room was empty when he got there and he stood for a moment tapping his heels together impatiently. Then, setting back his shoulders, he walked across the room and swung open the door of John Marco’s office.
“I’ve come,” he said.
From the desk at the end of the room, John Marco looked up at him. And, as he looked up, the young man noticed how ill he seemed, how wasted and shrunken. And he was more glad than ever that he had not waited, that he had come now when he was wanted.
“I’ve corne,” he said, “I’ve changed my mind.”
John Marco still did not answer. He was staring up at the young man in front of him. The youth had grown up suddenly, breaking through the mould that Hesther had imposed on him. There was independence in the way he held himself. And as John Marco looked at him what he saw was himself standing there, with the Old Gentleman somewhere in the background and the Sunday School, and Mary ready to walk home with him. He got up and came towards him incredulously.
“Why have you come here?” he asked. “I didn’t send for you.”
“I want you to take me into the firm,” the other John Marco answered. “You offered it to me once.”
John Marco paused and regarded him; he ran his eyes up and down his figure as if he were measuring him.
“Are you serious?” he asked. “Do you really want to be here with me?”
The young man nodded: his mouth was drawn down at the corners as John Marco’s so often was.
“I’ve made up my mind,” he said simply.
“But aren’t you a minister by now?” John Marco asked. “Haven’t you been ordained?”
“I’m not fitted for it,” he answered. “I see now that I haven’t got the grace. I must get out into the world.”
John Marco suddenly put out his hand and laid it on the young man’s shoulder. He could feel hard bone there, bone of his bone; his touch rested at last on something that belonged to him. And for a moment the weight on his mind lifted and the young man’s strength seemed to become his. But then he remembered the board meeting and his debts, and the mortgages, and how Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hackbridge—all of them in fact—were ranged against him, and how the General Meeting was coming on the day after to-morrow. His heart froze up within him and he turned away.
“It’s no use,” he said. “It’s too late now.”
“You mean you don’t want me?”
The young man was looking him full in the face and John Marco met his gaze. He started: he had seen the fierce darkness of those eyes before, in Hesther; they were a part of his heritage that the young man would never be able to disown. But now that he was angry he seemed somehow more like John Marco than ever; there was no longer even the division of the years between them. And because it was too much like admitting his own failure to himself, John Marco was hard and abrupt.
“Stay where you are in the Chapel,” he said. “I’ve nothing for you here.”
There was silence for a moment.
“Is that your final answer?” the young man demanded.
John Marco drew his hand across his eyes. His head was dizzy once more. But what else was there to say to him? What other answer could he give when in two days’ time this whole business might have been voted away from him? But no: that couldn’t happen: that sort of thought was simply panic. The shareho
lders would never be such fools after all that he had done for them, all that he was going to do. In three days’ time he’d be master in his own house again; he would have broken Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hackbridge, broken them for the last time and discarded them.
“I asked if that was your final answer,” the young man repeated.
John Marco’s back was still towards him as he spoke.
“It is,” he said. “You chose the cloth. You must stick to it.”
The faintness and the dizziness had increased, and he began groping his way back to his chair. When the young man answered, the words came to him faint and from a distance.
“My mother was right about you,” he was saying. “She told me you’d got no heart anywhere inside you, and I didn’t believe her. I believe her now. There’s nothing human about you.”
By the time John Marco had reached his chair the young man had already left him; the glass door had slammed to after him and he was gone. John Marco sat down and remained there without moving. He wanted to go after the young man and call him back; call him back and make him understand; wanted to make him realise. He wanted in fact to explain that when a man in the middle of a tight rope sees his long-lost son he cannot be expected to throw his arms around him.
He tried feebly to get up, but his heart was fluttering too much. His breath was choking him again and he sank back. “He came and I sent him away again,” he said over and over again. Then at last his lips ceased moving and he sat waiting—waiting as he had waited for those last five weeks for the hour of the General Meeting that it seemed would never come.
Chapter XLIV
But it had come; it was over and finished by now. The meeting had broken up a quarter of an hour ago, and he was back in his room again.
He was still trembling from the strain of it, still trembling and sick. He gripped the front edge of the mantelpiece for support and tried to collect himself. But he was too much shaken, too much bruised and trampled on, for any thoughts to come to him. And his ears were still full of what they had been saying to him, about him, against him. He saw now how wide-spread the plot had been, wider than he had ever imagined; even the speakers from the centre of the hall had exchanged glances before addressing him.
Mr. Lyman’s duplicity, it appeared, had reached right back through the years; even in those days when he had still seemed so negligible and contemptible and John Marco had bullied and shouted at him, he had been keeping a record of everything, faithfully writing down the hostile evidence in that dainty hand of his. It was a supplementary and uncensored minute book that he possessed. There was nothing that had escaped him, and he had evidently primed his confederates in the body of the hall. First one man rose to ask about the loss on the Floristry Department and the five thousand pounds that had been spent on the roof garden. Then another man, three seats away, raised the question of the extravagance of putting the assistants into costume at Christmas time, and the fatal overstocks against which the other directors had advised. And there had been another and more sinister side to these revelations. A stranger got up and asked why John Marco had suddenly promoted a young man with no especial talent and made him the head of a department at a time when there were other and senior men who should have been considered; and dropping his voice a little he had added that he understood that when the ruthless economies, the halving of incomes had come, their chairman had refused to allow this particular assistant’s salary to be tampered with. And just at this point another outsider, someone who, but for Mr. Lyman’s treachery, could not have known, had risen and asked if it were true that there had been only one other exception to the economies in the whole firm—a woman: he had left it at that, and had allowed the shareholders to draw their own conclusions.
And John Marco had been forced to sit beside him and listen to it all. This had been the one meeting from which he could not walk out: they could say what they liked to him and he had to remain there and listen to them. They had howled down his speech, simply because a pale, forlorn-looking man, whose voice was mean and vindictive, had asked whether it was true that John Marco had proposed that his own commission should be doubled. And there had been boos and cat-calls from all over the hall. John Marco had faced these rows of chairs and seen hundreds of angry eyes all staring in his direction. “They don’t know how I’ve worked for them,” he had told himself, “they don’t know what I’ve done.” But the meeting had taken on a power and momentum of its own: it had ridden over him. There had been cries of “Resign! Resign!” and he had seen a score of fingers all pointing at him at once. He was the target, the bull’s-eye, at which they were all firing: it was like facing an execution squad without being blind-folded. And when the nominee of a large block of shares called for a committee of shareholders it was as though the volley had been fired already and he was nicely dead and disposed of.
It had been when this motion was put to the meeting that John Marco had realised that he had failed; that he no longer counted. He was in the chair and it was in his power to conclude the meeting: the chairman’s hammer was on the table at his side. But he had not the strength to use it; his mind was numb and dazed. He let a stranger stand up in front of him and wave his copy of the printed prospectus in his face like a banner of insurrection.
It had been during the voting that John Marco had seen Hesther. She had chosen her usual place behind one of the pillars where she could observe everything without being seen. And it was only now that she had emerged. John Marco could picture the gloating there would be inside her, the way her long hands would be rubbing together over this retribution called down from heaven. And then suddenly he had been glad that she was there. She would repeat it all to her son, would tell him how God punished the evil even upon earth; and the boy would understand then why he had driven him away again, why he had refused the first friendly hand for years that had been held out to him.
It was of the boy that he had been thinking as he had watched Hesther’s dark glove raised in the voting against him; and when he had turned his head for a moment he had seen nearly every other hand in the room raised as well. And still he had sat there. Then when the same men who had proposed the committee of shareholders had proposed that they should call upon Mr. Lyman to head the committee John Marco had got up, holding himself as erect as his pounding heart would allow him, and had descended the steps from the platform, walking past the front row of the shareholders without even turning his head to look at them, back to his own room where he could be alone again.
Only it wasn’t his room any longer. It would be Mr. Lyman who would be occupying that chair to-morrow; Mr. Lyman who would be ringing the bell and asking for Mr. Hackbridge—his friend, Mr. Hackbridge—to step upstairs for a moment; Mr. Lyman who would be signing the letters on notepaper with the name of a discarded man across the top of it.
Still holding onto the edge of the mantelshelf to steady himself, John Marco surveyed the room once more. During the last few years he had often come to hate it, this handsome, silent office where he had sat beating his brains trying to earn a dividend for fools. But now it looked familiar and congenial; there were years of his life locked in it.
But the meeting was over: Mr. Lyman might actually come into the room, his room, at any moment. John Marco went over to the desk and with a hand that shook a little extinguished the standard lamp that stood there. Then he put on his hat and coat, and took from the stand the umbrella with the thick gold band round it. Those three things were all there were that belonged to him; everything else was Mr. Lyman’s now.
He took one last look round the room and then went outside setting the Yale catch so that the door would lock itself after him; it had a private key this one, even the watchman did not possess a duplicate.
If Mr. Lyman wanted to get in now he would have to send for someone to break down the door for him.
ii
The house in Hyde Park Square seemed strangely empty when he reached it, and the maid who took his hat and coat from him kept
glancing sideways at him as he stood there. “Can she have heard anything?” he began wondering. “Is the news of my defeat all over London already?” “But this is panic,” he answered himself. “This is what I must guard against. No one knows yet: not even Louise.” And at the thought of telling Louise his mind faltered again. “Later,” he said, “I will break it to her after I have rested. I will have something to drink: then perhaps I can bring myself to face her with the news.”
His study was warm and comforting, the table pulled up beside his chair in readiness. He sat down wearily, so wearily that he lay there for a time with his legs thrust out in front of him and his arms hanging limply over the side. Then, when some strength had come back to him, he poured himself a drink; and another; and another.
He ate dinner alone, not even asking where Louise was—he was used to these lonely dinners nowadays—and then groped his way back to his study. The decanter still stood there and, by the time he went upstairs to his bedroom, he had mercifully blotted out everything, his defeat, the blackness of the future that lay ahead of him; everything.
He could not even understand what it meant when he saw the note in Louise’s handwriting that was lying on his dressing table. He just stood there, with the blurred image of himself in the mirror in front of him, reading and re-reading the message that it contained. Then his eyes fastened on the last page and remained there. “If you’d wanted me I’d have stayed,” the words ran. “But I have seen for months now that I don’t mean anything to you, and I’ve decided to go away. You’ll still have the shop: it’s all that interests you and I shall be happier somewhere else. In the memory of earlier times, your still affectionate Louise.”
Then his mind cleared a little and the emptiness of the house frightened him. He ran from the room calling for Louise by name.
Book VII
John Marco Reaches Jordan
Chapter XLV
It was nearly three months since Louise had gone away—with whom, he still wondered.
I Shall Not Want Page 48
