Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  “‘The choice and master spirits of the age’?” Nora smiled.

  “I’m trying not to say that. But all right: Yes! ‘The choice and master spirits’ of this age. You could be the centre, the light, you know, moths and flames and that sort of thing. Oh, God—come back in an hour and I’ll tell you.”

  She drew breath to speak but he leaped in again. “How many other ladies could…?”

  She spoke then: “How many other ladies do you know, Rocks?”

  “None! That’s what I’m saying. You could…”

  “I mean ladies of any kind, in Society? You are comparing me, whom you know, with figments of gossip—people you don’t know.”

  “Listen! A good painting’s a good painting. You judge it for itself. You don’t trundle in Titian and Michelangelo and Raphael and the rest. For itself, Nora. And you should judge people that way, too. I don’t want to know about all these other ladies in order to judge you. I know you. And I know this age. Art in this age has sunk as low as art could possibly sink.”

  She was smiling at him. He reached forward and gently pinched her mouth into a more solemn shape. “Don’t mock me,” he begged. “Please listen. I swore I’d never say this. I swore I’d let you find it for yourself. But suddenly I feel it’s so urgent. You are jolted by this disagreement with Stevenson; you could make such disastrously wrong choices. I have to tell you. I think you are already earmarked by history to play a great role…”

  She shook her head. “Be practical, Rocks. You know me well enough. ‘Earmarked by history’ is pure wind. Talk in practical terms.”

  He grinned, sharp and brief, accepting her rebuke. “In practical terms, London is dead. It’s dead every winter. Where is everyone? Off hunting. Enjoying the country, my God.”

  “Not quite everyone.”

  “Exactly. And those who are left don’t know what on earth to do with themselves except give sad little dinners, meeting the same dull cliques…”

  “But people have to go down to the country. Estates have to be managed. That’s why Parliament’s gone down.”

  “Not everyone! Not everyone—that’s my point. More and more people don’t have estates. More and more people are sick to death of the country and the insufferable tedium of what passes for life out there in those damp dells. More and more people want to live all their lives in the city—this city. And they don’t want to go on and on and on meeting the same vapid, wearisome, spiritless, upper-class crowd. Can’t you feel it? Society is changing—or is on the very brink of change. There’s a new tide about to flow. A new Society, or a mixture of old and new, is about to form. All I’m saying is that you—you above all—could be on the very leading edge of that change. You could help to make it happen. You could shape it.” He gulped. “Lord, I think I’m sober again. D’you want me to talk about history now?”

  “And how I’ve been dog-eared by it?”

  “Earmarked!” he corrected before he realized she was teasing.

  She laughed. “Bit of both, I’d say. What you are suggesting is that I should form some kind of salon? A place where Society might mingle with Art and Letters?”

  She had to admit to herself that it was not impossible—not one of Roxby’s wild, engaging fancies. Of course, it was by no means as simple as he imagined.

  “I don’t belong to either group,” she objected.

  He laughed. “That’s exactly why you could do it, better than anyone. Even Mrs. John Stevenson could have done it. Lady Stevenson will find it that much easier.”

  Roxby and friends would get free food and wine and a congenial background against which to display and preen themselves. And she might go some way toward obeying John’s wishes while not departing too far from her own inclinations. And if Roxby was right, she might exceed all that John required of her or all that she sought for herself. Something for everyone. “I’ll think about it, Rocks,” she told him.

  “Capital!”

  “As a matter of fact, there’s a house for rent in Hamilton Place—at the bottom of Park Lane, you know. I’ve longed to take it for some time and couldn’t think of any justification.”

  Roxby smiled in feline satisfaction. “With the Duke of Wellington and the queen for neighbours, that takes good care of the social side. And what with Hyde Park and Green Park all around, half your visitors will feel they haven’t left the country!” He flashed her a grin that lasted about a tenth of a second but was broad enough to wiggle his ears. “Don’t forget my fiver, will you?” he said.

  Chapter 15

  Caspar scrounged another pony for Boy and together they went out to re-enact the Charge of the Light Brigade and sneer at the inferior railway working. It was a glorious April day, pretending to be summer, but chill in the shadow. The mixture gave the air a special crispness. Both boys, and their mounts, were glad to be out, free from stuffy classrooms or stables, like four adventurers wondering what lay around every corner and over every skyline.

  Their speed pushed fingers of tears back along their cheeks, where the water dried to leave pale streaks of salt, like fading snail paths. By the time they reached the ridge that their fancy had to transform into the valley of death they were sated with air and sun and galloping; they were ready for a touch of magic.

  Again the dreadful order came. Again the insolent Nolan waved vaguely down the valley and cried, “There, my Lord, is the enemy. There are the guns!” Again the Light Brigade advanced at a measured trot toward the mouths of the Russian guns, ready to endure the dreadful fire from both flanks, ready to die for England.

  “There’s Jeropkine!” Boy shouted, calling up the first enemy name that occurred to him. He pointed at a man in tail coat standing among the guns.

  “I’ll stick him!” Caspar yelled back, advancing to a fast trot. He was playing Cardigan; since he was the one destined for the army, it seemed natural he should be Lord Cardigan and Boy his ADC.

  But before they could brave the first fusillade the fantasy departed and they became, once more, two sweating schoolboys bareback on moorland ponies. It happened the moment Boy called softly to Caspar, “Cavey. It’s old Greaves!”

  “Old” Greaves was all of twenty-eight. He was the first of chief’s new breed of housemasters—men with a stake in the school. As chief had said when introducing the master on the day of the half-hol, Greaves taught modern mathematics.

  But at this precise moment Greaves, upwind and unhearing, was standing with his back to them, one hand behind him, stuck between his coat tails, scratching with rigour.

  Boy giggled. “I bet he got took short out here and couldn’t wipe himself properly.”

  They had overcome their giggling fit by the time he heard them and looked around. His face lit up with unfeigned delight that did more to win their trust than could all the words in the lexicon. “Stevenson one and Stevenson two!” he called out. “Just the fellows. Look at this!”

  (He would not use the handles “major,” “minor,” etc. on the very reasonable grounds that a fifth brother would be something ridiculous like “minissimus,” while an improbable but not impossible ninth sibling would be “minissy-issy-issy…mus.” The boys had made a song out of that. On the other hand, the sequence one, two, three, four…was—and here his finger would jab around from boy to boy while he hammered the word “what…what…what, eh, boy?” at them until someone gained a mark by calling out “an infinite string of rational, whole, positive, natural integers, sir.” Greaves was your man for bringing realism to maths, all right.)

  He was inviting them to look at the working. The cutting was almost finished, but even from this distance Caspar could see that the face was still much too deeply undermined.

  “One of your father’s?” Greaves asked.

  Caspar left it to Boy to answer, obeying the same logic that had led Boy to concede him the leadership of the charge. He was astonished then to hear the mildness
of Boy’s reply. “No, sir, as it happens. His firm has done some work in the same valley but a long way away.” He waved airily eastward.

  Caspar could not let that go by. “Our firm would never do such slipshod work as this.” He spoke more to reprove Boy than to answer Greaves more fully.

  But Greaves was onto the word at once. “Slipshod? You surprise me.”

  Again Caspar waited for Boy to amplify, but all he did was nod and say, “Very.”

  Greaves looked from one to the other, still waiting. Caspar, having given Boy every chance, explained. First he dismounted and picked up a lump of rock; the ground was littered with them—sharp, jagged fragments.

  “This sort of thing, sir,” he said, passing the lump to Greaves, “should never be thrown so far from the seat of the explosion. Not in this sort of quantity. They’re overcharging every shothole.”

  “Which is wasteful?”

  “Dangerous, sir. It can fracture rock without breaking it, leaving it weak and unsafe.”

  “I see. Yes, I see.”

  They all began walking toward the site, and as they went Caspar listed its other deficiencies—the undercut face, the frayed ropes, the drunkenness, the smoking near the powder. Greaves listened attentively and looked from Caspar to Boy with an odd grin, as if he, too, suspected that Boy ought to be the one who was pointing out these things. He gazed at the working then with new eyes. “To think that I stood up there admiring their industry and skill!” He chuckled. Then, without the slightest change in tone, as if he really were wondering aloud, he said: “If that cutting measured twenty thousand cubic yards and it cost four shillings per cubic yard to remove, I wonder what the total cost would be?”

  Boy, who had also dismounted, put up a hand as if he were in a class. Greaves made a resigned face and hauled it down to Boy’s side again. “Just say it,” he sighed.

  “Four thousand pounds, sir.”

  Greaves turned to Caspar. “D’you agree, two?”

  Caspar, who had not yet grasped the difference between the stage realism of the classroom and nuts-and-bolts reality, pulled a dubious face.

  “What is it?” Greaves asked.

  “Well…” Caspar laughed in embarrassment and scratched his head. “It’s actually more like seven thousand cubes, sir. And you couldn’t get it shifted for four shillings. More like six-and-sixpence…seven bob.”

  “Caspar!” Boy mocked.

  But Greaves, who Caspar had feared might get angry at his correction, held up a finger. “No, no,” he said. “This is interesting. So, young man, what d’you think it would cost? Really cost?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I’m not very good at sums.”

  “Guess. Estimate.”

  Caspar looked at the working with a weather eye, smoothing down moustaches he had not yet got—his father’s moustaches. Greaves, seeing the father through the son’s unconscious mimicry, suppressed a smile.

  “Less than three thousand anyway, sir. You’d lose if it cost more than that.”

  “Hm. Let’s try a different estimate. How far away is that hill? The one with the two goats. I’ve just walked here from there so I’ve a good idea of what your answer should be.”

  Caspar warmed to the game. Their father always played it—“What’s the radius of that curve…the volume of that embankment? How many hundred pounds a day is this working costing us…?” and so on.

  “More than a mile, sir. Less than a mile and a half.”

  “Excellent!” Greaves said. “‘Not good at sums, eh? But sums is only a very small part of mathematics. The rest is quantities and relationships. And more. Much, much more. Life itself, I sometimes think.” He stooped and picked up a couple of pebbles. He threw one at Boy. “Catch!” he called. Boy’s hand darted out and just managed to hold the stone.

  “There!” Greaves said. “You just performed a mathematical operation that would consume sheets of paper and involve both differential and infinitesimal calculus as well as simultaneous equations. And you did it all in a fraction of a second!”

  The two boys grinned uncomprehendingly.

  “You don’t believe me?” Greaves said (delighted that they did not) and then went on to explain, in extreme slow motion, all the steps of eye, brain, and muscle that were involved in the apparently simple act of catching a stone: the ballistic arc (“That’s approximately y²=4ax you know!” with a grin), the intercepting course (“Three vectors, mark you!”), the expected momentum of impact, Newton’s laws of motion…and all done in a flash.

  “Now try it again,” he said. “Here’s another stone.” He threw it this time to Caspar.

  But it was not a stone; it was a pellet of goat dung. The wind caught it and blew it sideways, beyond Caspar’s reach. But his hand clutched the air where a stone would have been.

  “Memory, too,” Greaves said. “That’s another element in the calculation. You were catching a remembered stone. Very nimbly, too.” He looked from one to the other, pleased at the fascination he saw in their eyes. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Have you ever played fives? Or handball, some people call it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, I’ve had Purse remove the rhuharb frames and extend the concrete behind the old almonry. It should be well set by now. I’ll see you there in an hour. We’ll further our understanding of the ballistic arc!”

  “He makes it jolly interesting, doesn’t he!” Caspar said as they rode back.

  Boy chuckled. “I was just thinking: If a maths master has to play a sport, it could only be called ‘fives’!”

  “Why didn’t you tell him about how slipshod that working is?”

  “Because you did.”

  “I left it to you first.”

  “Well, other people aren’t interested in that sort of thing.”

  “He was.”

  “He’s different.”

  They rode on in silence for a while.

  “Boy? Do you want to be in charge of Stevenson’s when you grow up?” Caspar asked.

  “Of course I do. What a question!”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “Because it’ll all come to me. I have to want to—it’s like a duty.” He chuckled. “Why, young ’un? Looking for work? I’ll set thee on.”

  Laughing, they galloped off the tops, back down to the farm.

  Chapter 16

  The boy who is addicted to self-pollution befouls so much more than he imagines,” Brockman said.

  His hearers, the entire school confirmation class, Boy among them, sat unnaturally still, filled with unnatural tensions.

  “Pollute yourself and you pollute your name. Now, a name is like a thread linking you and all the other members of your family: back to your mothers and fathers and earlier forebears, sideways to your brothers and sisters, and forwards to the wives you will one day marry—creatures who are now and always will be purer, finer, and more sensitive than you—and forwards, still farther, to your own sons and daughters.

  “Now, I ask you to imagine a thread, of any material you like, buried in fine, dry, pure silver sand. Imagine that you dip one end of it, a mere quarter of an inch, let us say. No! The merest experimental tip of it! Imagine that tip to be left resting in a beaker of foul, polluted water. See! How eagerly that evil brew soaks into the dry thread! How fast it spreads, carrying its vileness the length of the thread! And beyond—into the sand. Oh, it is not long before that deadly turpitude has invested every fibre of the thread, every grain of the sand.

  “And your name is, as I say, the thread that binds you and all your people—dead, born, and unborn. Thus it is no idle, pretty figure of speech when I say that the stain of your self-pollution marks all your family. Nor is it for the sake of mere charm that I remind you of those fine and gentle flowers now mere buds, but whose fruit and fructification will be of your loins. They are, so to speak,
your sisters now. They are as your mothers once were. So when lascivious promptings arise within you, m’boys, stealing drowsily o’er you with vile, insidious persuasions, you should see, also rising, behind and above them, the loving images of your mothers and sisters. You should see their hands raised in shock and horror at what you are about to do. You should hear their sweet and tender voices calling you in pious supplication, imploring you to spare them this foul degradation, to let them continue in their tender purity.

  “‘Impossible!’ I seem to hear you say. ‘You greybeards know nothing of the strength of these passions. In you the fires are already sinking. The hush of middle life is upon you. To be sure, it must seem easy to you.’”

  He paused and smiled. But his eyes, as he looked from boy to boy, were deep and firm. And to each it seemed as if that gaze rested on him alone.

  “But we do know—we greybeards. We know what you do not yet know: how long and how hard, how bitterly hard, the struggle will be. But also we know how infinitely blessed, how ineffably sweet, are the rewards to the victor. What noble manliness he may then lay claim to! What iron strength of character! What grandeur of spirit! For he has been tested in the hottest and most hellish of fires and there was his mettle forged. There is literally nothing he may not attempt.

  “We also know (and I confess I enter on this part of my talk to you with heavy heart, knowing that among you there may be some already well embarked on a sorry voyage whose baleful destination it is now my dread duty to depict in all its ghastliness)—we also know the other side of the coin: the early and dishonoured graves that await the unrepentant addict. For be sure your sins will seek you out. By your pallid, bloodless countenance we shall know you. By your hollow, sunken eyes, red-veined and rimmed in black, you will proclaim yourself. By your pimples you will number each act of abuse as surely as if you carried a tally-stick tied about your neck. And it were better that tally were a millstone.