Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  It fascinated him to discover the inevitable relationships that were seemingly built into the very fabric of the universe. His hair had literally stood on end the day when integral calculus ceased to be a series of mechanical steps upon the page and became a concept, graspable in its entirety and never again confused. And the excitement with which he discovered a simple geometric proof of Pythagoras’s theorem…the memory of it could still make him feel taller and the air more sweet.

  “You get it from your mother,” Greaves had said. He had been discussing Caspar with Brockman, who by now had an unlimited admiration for Nora’s financial skills. “Keep up your studies and you’ll be senior wrangler with no difficulty.”

  Caspar pretended to agree that his ability was from his mother, but he knew it was not so. She was best precisely where he was weakest—at sums. She it was who had taught him all the tricks that got him by in plain calculation, like casting out nines, cross-multiplying, division by factors, and so on. But whenever he tried to interest her in the elements that so fascinated him—the relationship between inscribed and exscribed circles on a square, for instance—she would follow him a few steps and then ask what use it was.

  Guiltily he allowed himself to drift along with Greaves’s suggestion that his should be an academic career in mathematics. But he only had to think of the way his blood stirred when he took up tenon saw and chisel in Ingilby’s carpentry workshop, or walked into Stevenson’s steel mills at Stevenstown, or stood, as now, at the heart of some great scene of commerce, and he knew the academic life could never hold him. What prevented him from making the outright break was his contempt for the rest of the curriculum at Fiennes: an unceasing study of the classics and divinity, with no reference of any kind to the modern world. Only Greaves’s teaching of mathematics reconciled him to making any effort with his studies.

  It was all very well for Boy, who loved the classics and who would no doubt spend days this holiday walking up and down the beaches and over the bogs, talking Latin and Greek with Winifred—another fanatic for dead languages. Last summer they had even performed Oedipus Rex in Greek for the bemused villagers of western Connemara (who had nonetheless cheered the rafters down about their ears). Boy was made for Fiennes and Fiennes for Boy; year by year he ascended ever higher into some never-land where he was kitted out wonderfully to serve at the right hand of Alexander the Great or take down the Eclogues as fast as they fell from Virgil’s lips, if only someone would invent a workable vehicle for travelling in time. It was certain that Boy himself would never be that inventor; anyone with less practical sense or ability would be in daily peril of ten varied deaths. What sort of mess he would one day make of the firm of Stevenson’s Caspar shuddered to think.

  And that irked him above all. He, who with all the weight of his almost-sixteen years upon him, felt competent enough to take over Stevenson’s tomorrow if anything befell his father, would have to join the colours, while Boy, who had neither interest in nor talent for the firm’s work, would take it over and very probably ruin it.

  This business of joining the colours was—like his drifting along with Greaves’s dream of turning him into a mathematician—another of those issues he was shirking. In fact, it had been years now since he had felt the faintest interest in anything military. A good band could still stir the blood, of course, and there was something impressive and awe-inspiring in the sight of a regiment parading its colours and battle honours through the streets; but he knew now that that wasn’t a hundredth part of army life. Almost everything a soldier did was carried through by reference to a manual, or a code, or a law, or a custom. And he just wasn’t that sort of person.

  He wanted to battle all right. He wanted life to be a fight. He wanted that little edge of fear every day (which was why he knew he would shun the academic life, too). But he wanted the struggle to be such that his own effort and cunning counted more than anything else. He wanted to be in business.

  From the stern of the ship he watched Liverpool and Birkenhead dwindle to mere darkenings of the horizon.

  He was on his way below when he saw Winifred leaning on one of the rails, near a dinghy stowed inboard. At first he thought she was out there to capture what little romance the dirty sea and anaemic evening sky afforded, but when he came near she turned and pointed to the curved pieces of the clinker-built dinghy and said, “Steamer, how do they bend wood like that?”

  It was such an improbable topic for her to be interested in that he knew she was merely working around to something else. But he told her how they boiled the wood in iron pipes and bent it around the ribs before it could set, and she showed a polite interest.

  “Are you going to be seasick?” he asked.

  “No!” The question surprised her.

  “You’re very quiet.”

  “Ah!” she sighed, hinting she had good reason.

  He waited and then said, “I’m going below.”

  “I think I’ve done something rather foolish,” she said, avoiding his eye.

  He leaned against the rail, not looking at her, to make it easy.

  “What do you think Papa would say to the idea of my working?” she asked.

  “But you do work. Sunday school…charity affairs…all the…”

  “I mean employment. A job, as they say nowadays!”

  Caspar mimed a summary hanging, throat noises and all.

  She smiled glumly. “That’s why I didn’t tell him, of course. I knew he’d just say no. Now at least he’ll have to discuss it.”

  “Say no to what?” Caspar was excited. Without thinking it through in any detail, he had a feeling that a rebellion from Winifred might somehow blaze a trail for him, even though his own struggle was as yet so vaguely defined. At the very least he would not be alone.

  “I wrote to Miss Beale at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. She’s the new principal. I asked her for a teaching post.”

  Caspar’s eyes went wide; he had never thought of Winnie as anything so grand. He had never thought of Winnie as anything outside the domestic circle. He had just assumed that, being a woman, she’d come out in the usual way, marry, and vanish into her own home and her husband’s life.

  “I know it’s not much of a school,” Winifred apologized. “But it could be made something of.”

  Caspar smiled, but Winifred, mistaking it for a look of contempt, said, “I’ll bet Fiennes wasn’t much before Brockman came.”

  “Nor since actually,” Caspar said. “What does Boy think of your applying?”

  Winifred shrugged. “I’ve not asked him.”

  Caspar filled with pride. She had asked him, not Boy! It was the first time he could remember it. And she didn’t say “I’ve not asked him yet.” Just that she had not asked him. Caspar knew why, of course, but he had to hear it. “Are you going to?” he asked.

  “There are some things you can’t talk about with Boy. He just talks about ‘duty’ and ‘obligation.’ He won’t discuss things. Papa’s the same.”

  “Tell Mama. She’d agree with you.”

  Winifred smiled conspiratorially, as if to acknowledge it was wrong to be talking about their parents in this way. “I’m saving her,” she said, ambiguously.

  “Winnie, d’you think Boy will make as much of the firm as Father has?”

  She stared evenly at him, knowing exactly what was in his mind. “That would be asking a lot.”

  “D’you think he’d even make a good job of it? He gets so…I don’t know…dedicated to things.”

  She laughed. “Who’s talking!”

  “I mean he doesn’t know how to come back when the branch he’s on gets too thin. He doesn’t know how to change his mind.”

  “Perhaps Father ought to put the firm into management and train all of us to retire into public life,” she teased.

  And Caspar, seeing he was going to get no commitment from her, pretended to agr
ee. “It’s what most people would be doing,” he said.

  ***

  In the cabin below, Nora was trying to persuade Arabella to stay longer than a mere ten days.

  “How I wish I could!” Arabella said. “But I simply have to go to Paris. It is all arranged through Lady Bear and the Female Rescue Society.” She smiled apologetically. “Besides, it might be very important. They have asked me to make a study of the Continental system. Those maisons tolérées, you know.”

  Nora nodded. Arabella’s lack of reticence in this area embarrassed her. Or, rather, it was her earnestness, her total lack of humour; in Nora’s own circle it was a subject of deft wit—a light jab and pass on.

  “Do you know anything about them?” Arabella asked.

  Nora knew her well enough to say, “I have a feeling I’m about to, my dear.”

  “Have you seen them?” Arabella persisted, with only a fleeting smile.

  “I’ve had them pointed out to me, of course. And I know the ones in Trouville are often used by sailors, and others, as a depot for leaving and collecting messages.”

  Arabella made an exasperated sound.

  “Oh, indeed,” Nora assured her wide-eyed, “they seem as natural and everyday in France as public houses in England.”

  “Ah, but a thousand times more pernicious. Believe me! That is precisely what we fear, you see. Once such houses are tolerated and licensed, the girls all listed and recorded, all inspected by government doctors, all given cards of identity, all made official, you see—then vice has made a nest in the very heart of the state.”

  “But we have it, too—as if I needed to tell you!”

  “Yes! But it is not tolerated.”

  Nora’s eyebrows shot up. Everyone knew that it was, in effect, tolerated, and very widely. Whole districts of London and every other city were given over to it; and the police turned a blind eye most of the time.

  “Not legalized, I mean,” Arabella said.

  “The French say that’s just our hypocrisy. We pretend it does not exist, merely because the law does not recognize it. And the girls’ incomes are not taxed because the money is not income, it is ‘gifts from admirers’! Meanwhile we endure a level of disease that shocks them.”

  Arabella raised her hands in despair. “You see! How right our fears are! If you, an intelligent and sensitive intellect, can think along those lines (and you a woman), how long before our glorious legislators (who are all men) start translating such thoughts into law?”

  “What has being a man or woman to do with it?” Nora asked. Then, seeing the hidden incongruity of the question, she added: “In the matter of reasoned debate, I mean?”

  Arabella visibly fought for control of herself, as if Nora’s mention of reasoned debate were a rebuke.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” she allowed. “It’s a red herring. There are two issues here. The fundamental, moral issue is that tolerance of vice must not be written into the system of the state. But there is a practical issue, too—and for us it will be a tactical one, I’m sure. If such a law is ever passed, it will be framed, debated, amended, and voted on by men. It will be applied by men. All charges under it will be prosecuted by men, defended by men, heard by men, judged and sentenced by men. If it provides for inspection of the women, even that most intimate act will be carried out by men. You may be sure that all these arrangements will not be made for female convenience.”

  The argument began to interest Nora. “In what way?” she asked.

  Arabella, seeing no opposition, now relaxed. “A French woman is inspected once a week. She could be infected at any time and pass on the contagion to dozens of men. The sensible way would be to make each man obtain a bill of health, which he would have to surrender to the woman. And before he could enter the house again he would have to obtain a further bill of health. And if any man were found unfit, he should be put in a prison-hospital, as the women now are.” Nora snorted at the impossibility of it.

  “Exactly!” Arabella said. “Men would never stand for it. But they impose far worse conditions on the female parties to the affair—and think it all the most natural thing in the world. Oh, it’s their world, true enough.”

  Again Nora opened wide her eyes, but this time in astonished admiration. “Dear me, Arabella, what a long journey you have been since last we talked!”

  Arabella subsided. “Reluctant step by reluctant step, I do assure you. Still”—she brightened—“that, as I say, is the lesser issue. The main effort must go in ensuring that the state—our state—never provides for vice under the law.”

  “Only under the carpet,” Nora teased.

  Arabella did not rise to it. “That is what I have to go to France for. To collect evidence on the degradation of the state and of our sex. I am to visit houses and prisons and hospitals—and, of course, refuges like our own. I shall talk with the Police des Moeurs and with anyone who will listen to me or tell me anything. Do you know, most of the people working for reform are Protestants like ourselves. Is that not comforting! Ours is such a superior Christianity.”

  Nora patted her on the arm encouragingly. “Yes, Arabella dear, do keep that in mind as you watch the Sisters of Mercy at work in the hospitals you will visit!”

  Arabella nodded, apparently chastened, seeming to accept the reproof; inwardly she seethed. There were times when Nora’s teasing grew a mite sharp.

  Nora wondered if Arabella would come back thinking any differently or if she would simply “discover” everything she was so intent upon finding there.

  The moment she returned to her own cabin, however, all thought of Arabella vanished. A far more personal worry replaced them: Boy.

  She had looked quickly through the dozen or so books her eldest son had taken on this holiday. The few that were not actually in Greek or Latin might just as well have been, for all they meant to her—books on philosophy and religion for the most part. She never saw him read any of the railway papers, nor the iron and steel journals, nor anything concerning civil engineering. Come to that, he hardly ever looked in an ordinary newspaper.

  She just could not fathom him. Once upon a time he had been so interested in all these practical things.

  Chapter 19

  Connemara was where their lives became joyfully simple. Everywhere else she went, Nora felt on show, even on trial, despite all the pleasures her life offered. In Connemara she returned to the uncluttered habits of her young girlhood—at a greater level of security, to be sure, but she was not above rolling up her sleeves and cooking a meal or turning out a room. That was a holiday for her.

  Only three servants were kept at Quaker Farm, or Keirvaughan as the estate had always been known locally. John and Nora had bought the place out of Irish railway profits during the famines, over ten years earlier; together with the Quakers they had consolidated the innumerable small holdings and ended the “conacre tenancies” that had kept the people impoverished to such a degree that they actually lived below the reach of the money system, untouched by any possible reward or incentive, living on thin charity between one potato harvest and the next. Some of the men had taken work with Stevenson’s, but most families had accepted John’s offer of £5 and free passage for themselves to America. The tenants who were left now farmed above subsistence level and were actually handling cash for the first time in their lives. (Even so, John had not considered the experiment a success until he heard one of the tenants, a man who had been kept alive by relief work until he was thirty, complain of a levy by the parish union for the indoor relief of paupers!)

  All of them, Stevensons and Thorntons, realized that if they imported the sort of life and standards they enjoyed in England to this wild edge of the kingdom, the whole point of coming here would be lost. So they brought only three maids and a footman; the footman, with one of the maids, would go back to England with Walter and Arabella in ten days. Laundry girls and ext
ra grooms for the children’s ponies were taken on locally, from tenants’ families. For the rest the children made their own beds, sorted their own laundry, tidied their rooms, and laid and cleared the tables. It was amazing then how little they found they needed, what lumpy mattresses they could sleep on, how dresses and pinafores might last an entire day, knives and forks serve for two courses, and boots go unblacked until a parent or an older sibling with sufficient authority would drag the offender to the boot locker by an ear or a fistful of hair.

  For the older boys this sense of freedom began as soon as they got down from the train in the Galway City terminus. Instead of taking the afternoon horse car to Clifden, the families had decided to stay overnight at Black’s hotel and spend the afternoon and the following morning seeing the city. The older children would then go on the public horse car; the adults and younger ones on a private car coming down from the farm that evening. The two cars, public and private, would travel together and change horses at the same places.

  Boy knew exactly which of the city’s sights he wanted to show Nick and his two younger brothers. Ever since the fiasco in York he had been eager to restore his stock with Nick in some way that did not involve his own participation. So as soon as their rather late lunch was over, and everyone was deciding what everyone else would be doing that afternoon, Boy announced that he and the other older chaps would go out along the beach and see what they could add to the shell and coral collection of their museum at home.

  “I know a beach where we can get pocketsful in five minutes,” he said as he led them down to the Claddagh, the fishing community to the south of the city—where the attraction was (of course) the women. The Claddagh females were not remarkably beautiful, nor especially available, nor notably willing. The handkerchiefs in which they bound their heads did not add the lustre of a mantilla nor the enticement of a yashmak. The blue mantle and red body-gowns and petticoats they wore were coarse in material and crude in colour; they did not sparkle like silks nor flatter like beige and mauve and tan. What they did do, which made the excursion worth several hours out of the lives of five busy young lads, was finish at the knee—leaving the lower limbs and feet au naturel as the guide book put it.