Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Ingilby, relieved that the pressures were off him, came smiling to the door. “Nay. That he did not.”

  “It so happens, you see, that I met a man this holiday, a fellow called Bassett, who works for Lady Stevenson. He owns a company by the name of The Patent Hygienic and Artistic Bed Company—have you heard of them?”

  Ingilby shook his head. Caspar was tense with amazement at himself; this whole story was occurring to him about half a second before he spoke it, yet his tone suggested it was all stale, tedious background information that had to be trotted out before he could get to the point.

  “Well, we were talking about a new bed he has designed. It looks like a cast-iron bedstead—in fact, it is a cast-iron bedstead except for the four corner posts. Now they are to be made in wood—turned and carved, you see?”

  Ingilby nodded.

  “One of his problems—it happened with his last design: that was for an all-wooden bed—one of his problems is that the furniture-making quarter of London is all small and crowded and on top of itself. You can’t keep anything secret there, see. Things get copied overnight. So he was going to have these wooden corner posts made in France. However…” He drew in a deep, proud breath and smiled his broadest. “I said bugger that! London tongues may rattle like Eskimo teeth. A Yorkshireman knows how and when to keep a secret—especially if there’s a goodly bit of clink at the end o’ the road. The short of it is, Mr. Ingilby, my friend Mr. Bassett is willing to commission you to turn and carve four hundred corner posts between now and the first week in December…”

  “Nay! I’d never do it!” Ingilby interrupted.

  “You and Thomas would.”

  Thomas was the eldest boy, the one who had first brought Caspar here.

  “Nay. He’s to stay in school and better himself.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first bright lad to be taken out of school when the family fortunes demanded it. Thirty pounds, Mr. Ingilby—thirty pounds is what you’re turning away. Plus ten pounds for materials. Between now and December—think! A lot of money.”

  He could see Ingilby was thinking furiously. It was a lot of money.

  “Have ye a drawing?” he asked.

  Caspar took a sheet of paper from his pocket and showed Ingilby the profile he wanted to have turned in mahogany. “And if you’ll open the big door and drag your bench half out here, I’ll carve you the top part as a pattern in half an hour. Just so’s I don’t set foot inside—as Lord S. forbade.”

  He shouldn’t have brought up the reminder. Ingilby almost turned the whole idea down then and there. He could see fear in the man’s eyes, fighting with his desperate want of those thirty pounds. As he watched the man’s struggle, Caspar prepared to say: “Remember, Mr. Ingilby, I will one day be running Stevenson’s. What will happen to your pension then if you fail me now!”

  Fortunately he did not have to say it. But an hour later, all the way back to school, he kept thinking of those words and turning over with shame the knowledge that he would have said them if it had been necessary. Business can be cruel, he realized; until then he had not been sure he could match its cruelty.

  He was late for lockup and had the misfortune to be caught by Brockman, who was just leaving Blenheim, no doubt after some talk with Greaves, Caspar’s housemaster.

  “Where have you been, m’boy?” he asked sternly. He always pretended to hold a fair trial before he hanged you.

  “I went for a walk, sir, and didn’t notice the time I’m afraid. Is it after lockup?” The empty playing fields alone were an answer.

  “Mustn’t turn into a dreamer, m’boy. Your father was here just before he went to India, and asked us to make sure you shape into an alert and zealous man, fit for the queen’s commission. Report yourself to your Head of House. Say I said you were to have six of the best. At once.”

  “Sir!” Caspar, sensing that Brockman was about to grip his arm and say something manly and soul-bracing, barked out his acceptance and turned on his heel. He did not see chief staring after him with a worried frown.

  The shite! Caspar was thinking. He knows Boy is the new Head of House. He could at least have said “your brother.”

  Chief had one thing to his credit: He had abolished all bare-bottom swishings. Everyone kept on his trousers now. It was amazing what a cushioning even the thinnest worsted made.

  Boy, so lost and pitiful in the formless outer world, was in his element here as Head of House. Every hour of the day and night had its prescribed pattern. Every rule governing behaviour was written down. Now it was not mere spoken tradition that said only pharaohs could wear their shoes laced ladder-fashion, it was House Rule 79…and so on for a hundred and eighty-two other regulations, ranging from expulsion offences, such as wenching, down to the deliberately vague catchall: “A breach of Common Sense is a breach of House Rules.” In this structured world Boy was king. Aloof, unbending, respected, feared—the very best type of Fiennes man.

  “Well we’d better beat you then,” Boy said, as calmly as if he were making the most casual arrangement. “Go and call all out of the Barn.” He and Caspar were alone in the head pharaoh’s study.

  Caspar chuckled. “Doesn’t the incongruity of all this strike you?” he asked.

  “I don’t see any.”

  “After what you and I went through? Is what happened this summer no more real to you than this—this bit of idiocy?”

  “You’re not funking it, are you?” Boy was horrified.

  Caspar closed his eyes in resignation. “Boy!” he said. “I’m talking about contrasts. I’m talking about the real world and the real rules out there—and this…” No word sufficient to convey the stupidity of it occurred to him.

  “These rules are real, too—as you’ll soon find out, my lad,” Boy assured him. He was very impartial—it was exactly the way he would have spoken to a new pot down for his first beating. Boy went to the corner cupboard and selected a cane. He swished it once or twice, not threateningly—just as he would have swished it had he been alone in the room. “Good,” he said. Then, turning again to his brother, asked, “What are you waiting for?”

  “The impossible, I suppose,” Caspar said, and he went to call all out of the Barn.

  For Caspar it was nothing. Six years of being flogged had taught him almost total indifference to the momentary pain of it. Indeed, he was hard put not to laugh at Boy, who could only be a “Fiennes man,” never a man; who, in the world of men, would always be Boy.

  Caspar went straight from the beating to his study, where he wrote to Bernard Bassett, asking him as a favour to get some trade cards and a letterhead printed, saying The Patent Hygienic & Artistic Bed Company and an address of convenience at some small shop near Bassett’s office, and to write back to Caspar on one of the sheets, appointing him agent and asking him to “get wooden corner posts made as we discussed.” He also wrote to his bank asking for a further fifty pounds to be made payable at the West Yorkshire and Dales bank in Langstroth, saying that, after wide discussion with buyers in the trade, he had detected a market for a new design in beds and that, by the happiest chance, the beds he had bought were uniquely suited for adaptation. With the money, he explained, he would be able to adapt a quarter of his stock by the new year—the sale of which would pay off a hundred pounds of his borrowings.

  He had no idea that his mother was the Machiavelli behind the entire operation, but he was sure that both Bassett and Chambers reported everything back to her. He didn’t think Chambers, alone, would advance another penny; but these two snippets might just make his mother curious enough to make her tell Chambers to go ahead on her account. That, as he saw it, was his gamble. To his mother he merely wrote that he had had the most marvellous idea for his beds and, although it would delay his selling efforts for a while, it would certainly double his profits in the long (but not so very long) run.

  To his father he wrote not at
all.

  ***

  Ten days later, with Ingilby’s workshop in full operation and turning out ten to twelve corner posts a day, and with an accommodation for fifty pounds safely lodged at the bank in Langstroth, his plans took further shape. He wrote to Mary Coen, asking her to write back quickly and let him know what changes his mother was making at Hamilton Place in preparation for her winter season. Two days later he had her reply—new furniture from Watson, Bontor…new paperhangings by Trollope & Sons…new lamps from Miller & Co…and so on, all minutely described. Caspar copied it all out and sent it to Mrs. Abercrombie, the lady who wrote for My Lady’s Drawing Room Companion and who had given him her card outside Avian’s furniture shop. When his revived beds were ready, he wanted to use her again—getting her to write an article to puff the beds up in some way. A few days later she wrote back an embarrassingly effusive letter saying that she had been at her wit’s end and that he saved her life, quite literally. Caspar was pleased for that. He was even more pleased at the fuss made over these trivia in My Lady’s Drawing Room Companion. His mother, in one of her letters, mentioned “these very distressing revelations in that revolting periodical” but it was not until the Christmas holidays that he got to hear what a furore it had caused in Hamilton Place. By then his whole view of the world had undergone a profound transformation.

  Chapter 31

  In the middle of the previous summer term Greaves had instituted a Fiennes Mathematical and Philosophical Society, which had at once become known by the vulgar as “Sapsoc.” Members met twice a week in the evenings to listen to Greaves reading from scientific papers (a special exeat from the restrictions of lockup being granted for the purpose); then they would assemble again after Sunday chapel to discuss the notions they had been presented with at the evening meetings.

  The summer meetings of Sapsoc had been thinly attended. But autumn had swelled the ranks. There was a new feeling in the air at Fiennes as in the world in general. Science was no longer a mere provider of wonders and curiosities; it was beginning to assemble large systems of thought that explained life and the universe in solid and intellectually satisfying ways.

  This was apparent from the very first meeting of the autumn term, when Greaves read Professor Thomson’s papers stating the laws of conservation and dissipation of energy, together with Clasius’s classic statement of the Law of Thermodynamics.

  “You see, gentlemen,” he said, “the First Law, as we may call it—Professor Thomson’s law—states that you cannot get something for nothing. Energy cannot be created; it cannot be destroyed. It may only change its form—light may turn into heat, sound may turn into heat, and so on. But no new energy is made. No energy is lost. But wait! ‘Not so,’ says Clasius. ‘Energy may not be lost, but it can become unavailable. We may know it is there, but be unable to get at it, unable to use it.’ Thomson says you can’t get something for nothing. Clasius says you cannot even get back all your investment. After any transaction involving energy, some of it is forever unavailable. It has gone to join a vast pool that will one day be lowest grade—a pool that is ever-growing, a pool that will one day be the entire universe. Yes! The universe is running down! Its end is one universal bath of the lowest grade heat evenly spread. No light, no dark. No hotter, no cooler. No moving, no still. No centre, no outside.”

  To his hearers it seemed marvellous. Theirs was surely the ultimate privilege, to be sitting drinking cups of tea in a small drawing room in a remote Yorkshire dale, while comprehending—in a sense, overseeing—the (comfortably distant) fate of the universe. Caspar’s contribution to the discussion was to point out that if the natural order was to even out concentrations and rarefactions of energy and make, instead, one level miasma, wearing down the peaks (so to speak) and filling the valleys, then mankind was always working counter to the natural tendency, always making and exploiting bigger concentrations and differentials.

  As an example, he took steam engines, which had begun by working only with atmospheric pressure at about fourteen pounds an inch. Now there were engines working at hundreds of pounds an inch. In the future they would have engines working at thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds to the inch. Mankind, working in this way, would, he suggested, turn the world into the one shining exception to this pessimistic rule of universal running down.

  Greaves said it was an interesting comment but he did not wish the discussion to take on a purely utilitarian, not to say industrial, tone; he wished them instead to concentrate on the grandeur of the philosophical scheme that linked so many distinct discoveries and ideas into one simple set of universal laws. Caspar privately thought that his own notion of mankind thumbing its nose at universal laws had far more grandeur.

  But all these ideas were swept aside in the third week of term when Greaves began serial readings of the newly published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, by Mr. Charles Darwin. It stunned his hearers; there was no doubt in any of their minds that they were listening to a profoundly revolutionary text. Being an elite of boys with strong interests in natural history and science, they all knew something of the earth’s history as the geologists had revealed it. They knew the world was vastly older than the six thousand-odd years calculated by Archbishop Ussher. They knew the rocks and sediments and glacial deposits—even the water-eroded caverns that twisted through the limestone under their very feet—were evidence of processes that had consumed tens of millions of years, perhaps even hundreds of millions. They knew the different strata contained fossil relics, evidence not of one universal flood but of thousands of separate extinctions spanning aeons of time. They knew that the sheer number of species was already uncountably vast and, if one added extinct species, too, showed minor variations and similarities that amounted to caprice—a sheer display of virtuoso talent—if one assumed each to be the result of a separate and deliberate act of creation.

  But this lumber of knowledge lay about in different attics of their minds, so to speak, half glimpsed and rarely dusted off. Not until Darwin’s words fell upon their ears did they put all these notions together and see that they were but distinct parts of one and the same puzzle. Life had continuously evolved from life. Those fossils were not dead. Their legacy—the first eye, the first bone, the first brain—survived and changed eternally. That one eternal thread of change locked all of life’s myriad forms into a single web of unending endeavour—to survive, to triumph, to multiply.

  For Caspar these ideas were a transfiguration. It was suddenly clear to him why life was such a struggle—not his life, everyone’s life: in obedience to universal law. A thousand forms were competing for a hundred places; most of them must lose. And even the winners were not safe, could not rest. Others were waiting, always, to wrest the laurels from them and send them down into that dark limbo into which they once sent their vanquished. Success and failure, riches and poverty, abundance and scarcity, privilege and deprivation…even such imponderables as optimism and pessimism, hope and despair—these were all mere aspects of one universal law of life: survive!

  Throughout history there had been people to rant against these inequalities, advocating their abolition. Suddenly it was brilliantly clear that such abolition was possible only by abolishing life itself. One could pass a law banning shadows but the only way to carry it into effect was to extinguish all the lights.

  He did not, however, offer these views to Sapsoc at large. Once bitten was twice shy, and he was not going to have Greaves accusing him of proposing that the modern capitalist was the most advanced form of life on earth (even though, thanks to Darwin, he now considered that to be most probably true).

  The great thing about all this, in his view, was that it gave a single frame of reference to everything. From a narrow point of view you could look upon his struggles to make a success of this little business his mother had devised as mere greed at work, or vanity. But take a broader and altogether grander view, and you could see it as the wo
rking of a universal law through him. If life had any morality, it had to be derived from life itself, from life’s own operations; it could never be imposed from outside by mere thought or wish. You had to look at what was actually happening—had happened from the beginning until now—and derive all your rules from that.

  And the two greatest rules, sanctified by all of history and prehistory?

  Survive.

  Succeed.

  They justified everything. Even (or, perhaps, especially) the impending battle with his own father.

  Chapter 32

  The rest of the family enjoyed their Christmas at Maran Hill. Caspar stayed alone at Hamilton Place, leaving early for the ice-cold barn out in rural Holloway, returning late after fitting out a dozen or so beds with their new wooden corner posts. Even Christmas Day he spent out there. But on the afternoon of Boxing Day the last bit of lapped tubing had been sawn out and the last wooden replacement was in and given its final coat of boiled linseed oil. One hundred of his bedsteads had been transformed.

  Weary but by no means exhausted, he threw wide the barn doors and let in a flood of thin December sunshine. It was a revelation, even to him, the author of the transformation. Not only were these beds unique, they were uniquely handsome. If they didn’t sell at between two and three pounds each, he had learned nothing that very first day in the business. He had turned what was mere bravado, in his letter to his mother, into living, gleaming fact. He looked at the hundred he had transformed and could not quite grasp or believe that he had done it. Not even the aching muscles of his back, the ice in his boots; the sensationless fingers stuck onto his painful hands, not all of these together could quite convince him that the achievement was his.

  He found a farmer with a hangover in need of fresh air, and persuaded him, for a modest fee, to cart one of the beds in to Hamilton Place. He wanted the story he was about to give to Mrs. Abercrombie to be at least superficially true. By the time they arrived at Hamilton Place, the sun and the farmer’s hair-of-the-dog whisky had restored Caspar to all his vigour.