Caspar fled to the sane, mean world that began at the stairhead; the mad laughter pursued him all the way.
“Yes,” the old tobacconist said in the same conversational tone as before. “It’s the Other Nation down there, young sir. She had no right there, either.”
Then Caspar saw he was holding an envelope between his fingers. “Would this be what you were sent for?” he asked.
With relief Caspar walked to the counter, but the man clutched the envelope to him. “What would be the name of the periodical again?” he asked.
“I told you,” Caspar said, his heart beginning to race. “My Lady’s Drawing Room Companion.”
The man looked and pieced it out, syllable by syllable. Caspar felt sure he would then hand over the letter, but he looked up and said, “And the address, sir?”
Oh, Lord! Caspar thought. What was the bloody address! He had seen it. “There’s two,” he said, playing for time. “The printer’s, and the office. Which has she put?” He did not expect the man to answer.
Think, think, think! It was a part of London he’d never been to. Near the Strand—that was the picture he had. And a tree. That was a picture, too. It came to him suddenly and he almost shouted it out.
“Wych Court, is it?” he asked in careful carelessness. “Or the other one?”
Mercy! The man handed him the envelope, and then snatched it back. “Is she due any pay for it?” he asked.
Caspar prepared to face him down. He had already purloined the writing desk; he wasn’t getting any more—not without working for it. “What would the cheapest respectable funeral cost?” he asked.
“As a favour?” the man said. “I know an undertaker as’d do one for a tenner.”
That probably meant he could get one done for five.
“I’ll see what my uncle says,” he said, pointing at the envelope. “That may be worthless old rubbish.” Still the man would not let go. “And we’ll never know unless I get it to him in time for this issue, will we?”
That finally persuaded the man.
“Get those two hags out of her room at once,” Caspar said. “I’ll be back this afternoon.”
***
He found he could not forge her writing well enough to pass inspection, so he wrote the whole thing out again in as close a hand as he could manage. She must have been very cold and weak, he thought. And he personally wouldn’t have given tuppence for the information—a thin gruel of tittle-tattle. At the end he tacked his own nugget:
There was a time when every article in our households had a voice. To those with ears to hear, it spoke of its maker, for in those halcyon times no line divided artist from craftsman. How different are these days of ours, when artists who have been no nearer to our Birmingham iron foundries than the ticket office of Euston station mould sprays and wreaths and ferrous tributes to be poured out in limitless repeats by ironfounders who, though they may yearn to add a touch here, a fillip there, may not deviate one hairsbreadth from that which the remote artist has dictated.
Worst to suffer are those intimate articles never seen on public display, most especially that abomination, the French cast-iron bedstead. Leave it in a hotel in Dover, and it greets you next night in Reading, next in Macclesfield, next in Clitheroe…Dumbarton…John O’Groats. And think not, gentle reader, to escape to Iceland, for the man who so sprinkled the bedchambers of this fair land of ours with his deadening uniformity is even now in ballast for Reykjavik, you may be assured.
How fortunate we are, then, that among those emporia which are universally acknowledged as leaders in taste and elegance there is at least one, Avian’s by name, where they are prepared to reverse this dispiriting trend. How fortunate, too, that we have at least one noted manufactory of beds, The Patent Hygienic & Artistic Bed Company, where the artist works beside the craftsman, and both have their voice. The result is a bed that is sturdy cast iron in its utilitarian parts and elegant hand-carved wood and wellfound brass in its artistic achievements. [Caspar italicized the word to give it an heraldic ring.]
Are we equally fortunate in our arbiters of excellence? It is they, the great ladies who lead London Society, who, by their patronage (or lack of it), will breathe life upon, or crush, this tender flower of artistic revival among the leviathan outpourings of smoky industry. It seems the question is already answered, for Lady Stevenson of Hamilton Place (“Of course,” I hear you say) has installed the very first of these new beds in her son’s room, and more, we understand, are to follow. And this, mirabile dictu, is before the beds have even appeared at Avian’s! Other noted furnishers, we understand, hold the manufactory in siege for their supplies.
He bought a day suit off a surprised footman of about his own build, had a cab brought around to the back door, and set off for Wych Court. It was early afternoon.
Wych Court was in a seedy part of town, not quite Holborn, not quite Inns of Court, not quite Fleet Street. But it was quite the best centre for secondhand books, quite the worst for dirty books, and quite the liveliest for editorial offices of journals and magazines. If Grub Street had an heir in modern London, it was here, just north of the Strand.
Caspar told the cabbie to wait. Then he ran upstairs to the Companion offices and, putting on his cockiest Yorkshire, asked for the editor. It was a superfluous question. The editor sat on a six-inch dais in lordly isolation, three feet from his assistant, on the right, three feet from his clerk, in front of him, and three feet from his copytaster, to his left. The whole office was half the size of Caspar’s bedroom.
“Mrs. Abercrombie’s copy,” Caspar said. “She’s sorry she’s late, but…”
The editor groaned. “Put it there,” he said pointing to a deep basket on the clerk’s desk. He had the face of a henpecked eagle, fierce from a distance, hesitant when seen closer to.
“Nay,” Caspar said. “She wants an answer and some money at once. It’s very hot is this. And if ye don’t buy it, I’m to take it on to the Realm.”
All four looked at him with open mouths. They were obviously finding it difficult to believe that Mrs. Abercrombie had issued orders so peremptory—or even that she had issued orders at all. The editor began to splutter in a high-pitched whine. “She…she…she what!”
“Mrs. Abercrombie?” the assistant said.
“I don’t believe it!” the copytaster added.
Caspar looked at the clerk, who just grinned back at him encouragingly.
“Are ye going to read it or aren’t you?” Caspar asked impatiently. “She’s very badly and I’m to get her physic on the way home.”
“Hot?” the editor asked. “What does that mean…hot?”
“You just read it.”
At least he looked at it. “That’s not her hand,” he said.
Caspar swallowed. “I told you,” he said “She’s badly. She spoke it out and I took it down. Except the last bit,” he added defensively. “She just told me, like, what she wanted and I wrote it meself.”
The man flipped through the sheets. “Usual rubbish,” he said to his assistant. Then Caspar saw his eye get caught by the addition. He read a few lines, darted a sharp look at Caspar, resettled himself in his chair, and read again from the top.
The clerk pulled a face that said Good for you!
The editor finished and looked at Caspar with the deepest suspicion. “You wrote that?” he asked.
“Aye,” Caspar said belligerently. “What’s wrong wi’ it?”
“Yorkshire tyke like you!”
“Oh ah!” Caspar said. “Just because we don’t talk soft, like you, you all think we’ve no education up there.”
“Where did you get yours, may I ask?”
“Sheffield Wesley College.”
The Sheffield Wesley College had taken a whole-page advertisement in White’s Directory for Leeds, 1853. It being out of date and Nora having no further use f
or it, the book had hung in string-looped sections in the boghouse at Quaker Farm last summer, to be used as lavatory paper. Caspar, thinking the prospectus for this school made it sound a much more progressive place than Fiennes, had torn off the page and kept it. He could have told this man everything about the Sheffield Wesley College.
But the pat assurance of his answer seemed to satisfy the editor.
“If she’s so sick, how did she get this information?” he asked next.
Caspar fidgeted with weary impatience—like, he hoped, a man deciding to go to the Realm instead. “She told me where to go and I went out and got the information for her,” he said.
“Where?”
“You may not believe me, sir,” he said with light sarcasm, “but I went directly to Avian’s and this Patent Bed place out in Holloway. I’m well known for being devious.”
The man suppressed a smile. “Whom did you see at Avian’s?”
Caspar looked at the ceiling. “Mr. Vane…” he said, counting off his thumb and raising a finger as if he were about to begin a list. But the editor held up a hand.
“Very well, lad. Very well. I just had to make sure. Now let me tell you something: If you can find out things like this and write about them in this manner, then you are wasting your time running errands for stupid ladies who can’t put two words together without boring the world to tears. You could put that Wesley College education of yours to work and make a very decent living, for a lad your age.” He looked again at the paper. “Did you really write this?” he asked.
Caspar nodded, hoping it didn’t show—the way his hair was bristling.
Dramatically the editor separated the sheets containing Caspar’s writing from the rest, crossed out the two words ‘we understand’ from the final sentence (for even editors must justify their existence), passed them to his clerk, and said: “Rush that down to Turner’s. Set and print, word for word, tomorrow’s issue. Make sure it’s in tomorrow’s issue, now. Cut Spring Fashions from the bottom. Shift! Shift!”
When the clerk ran out, the editor turned, still with that dramatic largesse, to Caspar and said, “Now, lad, I’m going to astonish you, I’m going to pay you five pounds for what you brought here today. That’s fifty shillings for what it’s worth and fifty shillings to encourage you to…”
“Ten pounds,” Caspar said. He was only thinking of giving Mrs. Abercrombie a decent burial, but he saw in the other man’s eyes that he was going to get it. The fight that was coming was pure commercial sparring.
For five minutes they argued, Caspar feeling absolutely in his element. It was only when he threatened to go to the Realm with all his future discoveries that the editor reluctantly agreed to ten pounds.
“Make up your mind to it,” Caspar told him. “It’ll be twenty next time—and even more in future!” His mother had dozens of friends, and he could sell them one by one! “And the stuff’ll be a lot better than this rubbish about beds.” He listed three or four grand ladies he could sell right now if he wished. It was enough. He knew he’d get his twenty and more. What on earth had he been worrying about beds for! Why hadn’t he seen the possibilities when Mrs. A. had come to him first! Time to sharpen up his instinct for business—if he had one.
***
He went home via the tobacconist in Cleveland Street and handed over seven pounds; he was damned if he would pay ten for a five-pound funeral. The man was surprised to see Caspar in his working-class clothing but it shook him into accepting the seven instead of the ten. Caspar put that fact away, too: A dramatic change could unnerve people and make them accept things they would otherwise reject.
He told the man he would come to the funeral, which was to be tomorrow at St. Marylebone’s—that was to prevent fraud between him and the undertaker. Caspar had no intention of actually turning up. Then he went home, had a bath, read a few papers, and waited for Mary to come, though there had been no arrangement.
The house was long silent by the time she came tiptoeing down the corridor and stole into his room.
“I’d given you up,” he said, delighting in the feel and warmth of her.
“I had to wait till I was sure they were all asleep.”
“I mean I thought you might not want to.”
“Ah, ye were so careful of me last night, don’t I know I’m safe? And sure I like it too.”
Again he wanted to ask her to wait and be his mistress in two or three years; but still he fought shy of the words. Anyway, it was so lovely to hold her slim, graceful body and to know it would always be there for him.
She was gone before he awoke.
***
In the end he went to the funeral, where he was the sole mourner. He and another man, someone from the undertaker’s, easily managed the coffin between them. By the time he had tipped everyone, from vicar to sexton, there was none of his—her ten pounds left. He was glad then to have seen her go properly, even though half of him kept reminding the other half that the Mrs. Abercrombies of this world and those other basement dwellers were the inevitable and essential victims of progress. He had to keep wiping those pictures from his mind. It was the only time he ever envied Brockman his gift for ignoring all concrete and down-to-earth considerations and sticking exclusively to lofty, abstract ideals.
Then, the Stevenson office being so near (and his father so far), he dropped in to see the people he had known from his childhood up. Among them was a new face—a man introduced as Ewart Hodge, a production engineer from the Stevenson steelworks at Stevenstown. He had come to London to report on a new Swedish improvement to the Bessemer system of steelmaking. He ended up taking Caspar to a pub for lunch and filling half his afternoon with steelman’s talk.
He left Caspar in no doubt that the future in steel lay elsewhere than in the furnace shed or the hearth. “The big, bold man with the burn scars on his hands and face,” he said, holding forth his own pitted fists, “has gone as far as his nose and eyes can take him. Now it’s the turn of the man with the microscope and the bottles of chemicals. This Swede now, fellow called Göransson, very clever. He’s shown how to make any grade of steel—any grade—by stopping the Bessemer converter at the proper moment during the blow. But he’s using that Bergslagen ore, see—no phosphorus. So what are we going to do with our phosphoric ores, eh?” He winked. “The fellow with the test tubes is your man to tell you.”
And though Caspar was merely filling in time until the Companion came out, he left that pub, where Ewart Hodge was still quenching his vast steelman’s thirst, with his enthusiasm for industry fired to a new high. He saw it all so clearly. War, the soldier’s trade, was increasingly being reduced to minor skirmishes, where civilization clashed with primitive and barbarous peoples. Among the civilized peoples themselves war was perhaps already becoming outmoded. After all, war was no more than an extreme form of competition; and did not trade and industry now offer a much more effective and direct means for countries to compete?
He could imagine the history books of the future with their descriptions of the Great African Steel War, in which England triumphed over France and Sweden in the race to capture the vast steel market of a Europeanized Africa. Or, perhaps, the triumph was over America—Hodge said that in three or four centuries America might become a serious commercial rival to England. The winners would get the markets; the losers would have to buy sub-licences or come to private arrangements with victorious English companies. That was civilized war! No one would die or be executed or imprisoned. Mass starvation and poverty would be just the natural, inevitable kind—not the exceptional kind that followed traditional wars.
Soldiers would become no more than colourful policemen who kept backward or disgruntled people in order; otherwise they would be sort of national toys kept for ceremonial occasions. The officers would all be the youngest sons of the aristocracy. How grand he felt to be on the crest of history’s leading wave! How dull his father was
to think that the army offered any sort of future to men of ambition. Only half-men like Boy, who needed rules and discipline so badly he’d been prepared to sacrifice his manhood for them, could find a niche there.
But how to persuade first Boy and then his father to see such an obvious truth?
***
His intention, once he was sure the item had appeared in the Companion, had been to go out at once to Maran Hill and tell his mother everything—to stop her from storming into Wych Court or Avian’s demanding apologies, denials, and damages. But as soon as he opened the issue and leafed through it with fingers so trembling he could hardly control them, as soon as he read the item—which was word-for-word as he had written it—and seen what a “splash cut” they had made of it, portrait of Lady Stevenson and all, he knew he had to secure his sale with Avian’s first. That would be his peace offering to his mother.
Or would it? Lordy, it was a rather dreadful thing he had done, he was just beginning to realize. A little item tucked at the end of a column was one thing, but this whole-page splash! Should he go to her at once and throw himself on her mercy? No—no! Businessmen didn’t behave like that; mercy was not in the business lexicon.
No. He should go at once to Avian’s and make a contract. But for that he would need a bed, or several beds, as samples. So he would have to go to the barn in Holloway first. Then he remembered Mr. Vane’s warning about not trying to sell anything as the Honourable Caspar. Very well—he would go as the Yorkshire Tyke. “Caspar who? Never heard of him!” That would be fun.
When he got down from his cab in Hamilton Place at four o’clock that afternoon it was already dark. He was aware of a girl’s figure under one of the gas lamps but he was very close to her before he recognized she was Mary. She was crying.
“Oh, Master Caspar!” she said, in a torrent of words and sharp inhalations. “I’ve been dismissed. And not a penny in wages, she says. Would you ever go and tell her ’twasn’t me who told that paper anything? Sure she’ll not even heed me.”
Sons of Fortune Page 44
