The Elderbrook Brothers

by Gerald Bullet

  The voice went on, quiet and persuasive. It was the old story, and one hardly needed to listen to it, yet listen one did, because, coming from this illumined spirit, it had the effect of a light shining in darkness. The familiar Christian mythos seemed suddenly new and strange and true: not true merely in the sense of being accepted, as Felix had always accepted it, but challengingly ‘real’, with the reality of a vivid dream. For the first time Felix became aware of the sheer arbitrariness of the story; and in the same moment he realized that though he had never denied he had equally never believed it as he believed ordinary inescapable things. Today its very difficulty was an additional attraction. Nothing probable could convince him, nothing easy content him, nothing short of the preposterous seduce him from despair. In Judaea and not elsewhere, at a certain time and at no other time, and in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and in no one else, an absentee Creator had made a belated debut into human history. Looked at soberly, it seemed an audacious formula, impossible of belief. But Felix was in a mood to embrace the impossible, and something deeper than mood drove him, after much self-doubt and hesitation, to seek an interview with Father Hemner.

  Book Three the Luck of the Game

  § 1

  THE offices of Elderbrook & Talavera, general brokers, were situated in a small court or alley on the north side of Ludgate Hill, a few hundred yards east of the Circus and an almost equal distance west of St Paul’s. It was in many respects an attractive situation, and one that gave great satisfaction to our Mr Elderbrook. Perhaps he was deceived in supposing his reasons for the choice to be purely business ones; but such reasons there were, especially for a firm so unorthodox, so little trammelled by tradition, and with its fingers in so many and diverse pies, as Elderbrook & Talavera. For beyond Ludgate Circus lay Fleet Street and the Strand, with London’s river flowing south of them, and Piccadilly and Mayfair, region of rank and fashion, beckoning from the west. Beyond St Paul’s was the City, hub of the commercial universe. Trumpet Court, approached through Trumpet Alley, stood therefore in an enchanted no man’s land between two demi-paradises. Silk-hatted congregations of men did business in the one; morning coats and gardenias and gold-headed canes contributed to the glamour of the other; and the taximeter cabs, still comparatively new to London streets, would take you in a very few minutes to either place. These proximities pleased and stimulated Guy. They gave him a feeling of power and satisfied his craving to be in the middle of things. He was little concerned with London’s long history, but the life of the streets stirred him, almost as though it were an extension of himself.

  Trumpet Court belied its name. Within a stone’s throw of one of the busiest thoroughfares in London, it yet had its own quietness. The roar of the street was here subdued; and an ancient plane tree growing in the middle of the paved court seemed not out of place, or only just enough out of place to give strangers a small shock of pleasure. Situated at this nerve-centre like a spider in its web, Guy felt both more and less himself than he did in his dingy lodgings. He was here more that public person, that busy man of affairs, which he was engaged in building up, and less the raw, eager, more ingenuous self that belonged to the past. Which was the ‘real’ Guy is a question that can hardly arise: it certainly did not arise in his own mind. If it were to arise the answer would perhaps be that he was neither; for what are the selves we appear in but the passing fancies, the temporal masks, of one behind the scenes? His interior life was not without its moments of unthinking relaxation, when ambition lay quiet in its bed. He liked his comfort, and if he allowed himself a comparatively small measure of it, that was in pursuit of his master-plan, not from a natural asceticism. He liked lying in bed in the morning, and was tempted, like other men, to lie too long; he relished his eggs and bacon and rejoiced in the good strong coffee Mrs Macfarlane his landlady made for him. True, he had carefully abstained from acquiring a taste for wine and spirits, and steered clear of those still more intoxicating delights to which a normal young man is predisposed by nature; but these things, too, figured in his map of the future, ready for when he should have time for them. Meanwhile they must not be allowed to deflect him from his primary purpose, which was, in a word, to spend little money and make much. The firm had already, in the few years of its existence, served that purpose astonishingly well. The partnership had suited Guy down to the ground so far; for Jimmie Talavera was clever enough to have good ideas, and weak enough, when it came to a tussle, to be overruled and perhaps ultimately set aside. His weakness just lately, it is true, had been taking an inconvenient form; but the days of his usefulness to Guy were not yet ended. Guy had learnt much from Jimmie, much more than Jimmie knew; but he had learnt still more from other men, business associates and rivals, and from the very air he breathed, here in London. He had a quick eye and a retentive memory for the salient facts, the significant detail. The noise and bustle of busy men trying to get the better of each other, the conferring, the telephoning, the contrived casual encounters, the pursed lips, the nod and the wink, the inside information, the bluff and counter-bluff: he revelled in it, it was music and solace to him, it was heart’s nourishment.

  ‘Miss Morgan!’

  ‘Yes, Mr Elderbrook.’

  He dictated three letters in quick succession. Routine matters, of quite minor importance. Miss Morgan sat meekly, notebook in lap. Just sixteen, fresh from her shorthand and typewriting classes, she adored Mr Elderbrook, she adored being in business, she adored buying herself lunch every day (glass of milk with a dash, and two pieces of cake) in a crowded teashop, and going home in the train at nights. With her small round face and snub nose and quiet manner she was like a small purring cat. She made herself exceedingly useful, to both partners (they shared her, thus keeping down the overheads), and at home allowed it to be inferred that she was the repository of momentous business secrets. In fact she had but the dimmest idea of the manifold operations by which Elderbrook & Talavera waxed prosperous; nor perhaps would she have learnt much more from the occasional letters which were typed on Guy’s own typewriter by Guy’s own hand (it was her sole grievance), their carbon copies being kept in his private file under lock and key. But why lavish fifteen shillings a week on Miss Morgan when there was Nora Talavera at hand? Because, Guy had firmly explained in effect, you need Nora at home to keep house for you; because Nora doesn’t know shorthand; because it’s a bad scheme to make business a family affair. And because … It was for these other, unspoken, imponderable reasons that he had rejected the idea of making his home with the Talaveras, as they had suggested. Nora who had once been an attractive young girl was now a more than attractive young woman; moreover he was fond of her; and the arrangement proposed could have had, he suspected, only one end. It was an end he by no means excluded from the range of desirable possibility; but plenty of time for that, and meanwhile there were more important things to be seen to. It was no part of his idea of himself that he should figure as the industrious apprentice who marries his master’s daughter: more fun, by half, to take her to the theatre now and again, to treat her with brotherly—or a little more than brotherly—affection, and in due time, when his own magnificence should be established beyond question, to bestow himself upon her with princely generosity, if then it seemed good in his sight so to do. And if not, not.

  ‘Oh, and, Miss Morgan!’

  ‘Yes, Mr Elderbrook!’ Surprising with how many different shades of emphasis she could vary that oft-repeated formula.

  ‘Ring up Mr George Rawlinson’s office, Rawlinson & Beck-with, and confirm that he’s lunching with me today.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Elderbrook. I have it in the diary.’

  ‘Good!’

  He gave her a brief kind smile, carefully selected from stock. She went back to her typewriter in a state of innocent rapture, resolving that never, never, would she make a single mistake in Mr Elderbrook’s letters. She would punctually renew the ribbon, thoroughly clean the machine at least twice a week, and look up every hard word in her little po
cket dictionary. Greater love hath no typist than this.

  Guy got out of his swivel-chair and opened the door that communicated with his partner’s room.

  ‘Morning, Jimmie!’

  ‘Good morning,’ said Talavera. ‘So it’s you, is it?’

  ‘Who else?’ said Guy gaily. He saw at a glance that Jimmie was under the weather. ‘Another thick head?’ he inquired.

  If Guy had not been already an abstainer from whisky, Jimmie Talavera’s example would have made him so.

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ said Jimmie. ‘Look here, old boy. About this Nesfield Park holding.’

  ‘Yes. What about it?’

  ‘It’s time we sold.’

  ‘I don’t agree with you, Jimmie.’

  ‘We can get a handsome profit.’

  ‘If we hang on we can get a handsomer.’

  ‘It’s money lying idle,’ Jimmie grumbled. ‘If we wait too long … we don’t want to burn our fingers.’

  ‘My dear Mr Budd, you surprise me. You do really.’

  In facetious moments Guy called his partner Mr Budd, because it teased him, and because it was his name, Talavera being a nom de guerre which Nora had found for him in a school history-book. Sometimes the sally won a shy, wry smile. Today it did not.

  ‘We can’t wait for ever for that damned bus-route,’ said Jimmie morosely. ‘It’s my belief we were misinformed about that.’

  ‘Maybe we were, maybe we weren’t,’ said Guy, with the air of a man resolved to be fair at all costs. ‘But I’ve got something better than buses up my sleeve. A railway extension, Jimmie. A new station. How’s that?’

  ‘Another rumour? I don’t want to throw cold water, old boy——’

  ‘No, water’s not much in your line, is it, Jimmie?’

  He smiled at Jimmie with charming boyish candour. It was a smile nicely calculated to tip the balance in favour of Jimmie’s taking the impudence goodhumouredly instead of being hurt and offended..

  An answering grin rewarded him. ‘Fact is, Guy, I’m two double whiskies below par this morning. Tell me about this precious station.’

  ‘Precious is right. They want it and we’ve got it.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Don’t you see? We’re there first. We’re in the way. And so …’

  Real estate was only one of the commodities in which Elderbrook & Talavera dealt. It was little more than a profitable sideline. There was indeed scarcely anything they would not buy, from coal to sewing-machines, from pepper to granite quarries, provided they had a reasonable assurance of getting rid of it at a big profit. Their business was complex enough in its details, and called for expert handling and a good deal of technical and out-of-the-way knowledge; but all their dealings were variations, more or less elaborate, on a single simple theme or pattern. To discover what your neighbour wants or will want, and then prevent his getting it, except at your price: that is the road to greatness and power and public applause.

  § 2

  JOE had not been quite himself since Emily’s death. Instead of the old flashes of brief anger he had fits of moroseness, when he would move from room to room, aimlessly, like a sick dog. But he still found a dumb satisfaction in doing, or seeing done, the work of the farm: so long as that went on, and he with if, he could go to bed tired and sleep his six hours and be up again long before daylight. And what he did his household must do: he could not bear that anyone in the house should be awake when he was sleeping, or sleeping when he was awake. Matthew, with all his patience, was too old to suffer such restraints gladly; but suffer them he did, rather than quarrel with the old man; and Nancy, with a shrug, took her cue from Matthew. Brother and sister, with scarce a word said, conspired to humour their father. Apart from their sense of his age and loneliness, there was enough of the child left in each of them to make rebellion distasteful. Unaware of the reasons, as they too were, Joe took their obedience for granted. Had he imagined the children to be sorry for him he would have felt himself diminished and affronted. He was not sorry for himself: all that can be said is that he was somewhat often out of humour, consumed with a useless anger about things done and things left undone in that long past he had shared with Emily: once or twice, and they were bitter moments, he had caught a brief glimpse of himself from her angle, though not (it would have spared him much) through her eyes. What he could not abide was to sit doing nothing, alone with his thoughts or exchanging small talk with his family. Reading, in Joe’s view, was doing nothing, unless it were reading the newspaper or one of the farming weeklies: the sight of Matthew with his ‘nose in a story-book’ only exacerbated his restlessness, so that he must fidget, interrupt, start an argument, find the boy a job, and if these devices failed fling open the door of the grandfather clock and begin noisily winding it, a broad hint that it was everybody’s bedtime. This last trick, however, had to be played with circumspection; for not even Joe could send a grown-up son to bed in the middle of the evening. Father or no father, Matthew would not budge till nine o’clock had struck. And that in winter months only: in the high summer, and during harvest, he was still working in the fields at that hour.

  Ranking high among the interests that still attached Joe to the earth was his pedigree herd of Longhorns. Mercestershire Longhorns had flourished in his grandfather’s day, but a generation later they were seldom to be seen. Now they had come into their own again; there were twenty to thirty herds of them scattered about the county, but none, in Joe’s estimation, better than his, and no individual among them the equal of his young bull, Marden Prince. Sired by Faircross True out of Marden Lady, and born here on the farm two years ago (you could find it all in Joe’s herd-register, the only piece of writing he ever took pleasure in), the Prince, like all his breed, was a beast of character, blending in his massive person a mildness that was almost bland with a vigour that would have terrified a master less experienced than Joe. He chafed at the confinement of his cot, as what animal of spirit would not? But with his big bare sloping brow, his small ears set low under long drooping horns, his endearing unlikeness to your everyday cattle, he had, you could not deny it, an air of exceptional benignity. Some said of his breed in general that its build was clumsy: Joe would not have it so. Those long horns were decidedly in the way when it came to transporting such cattle by road or rail; but Joe, for once more romantic than practical, did not wish them shorter. The Prince was his favourite, his foster-child: he took an almost personal pride in the young fellow’s stalwart performance of the duties assigned to him.

  Some distillation of such thoughts was in Joe’s mind, this autumn morning in 1912, as he stamped his way across the cobbled yard to the stall—or cot, as they called it—where Marden Prince reluctantly spent his nights and days. Castration or imprisonment, for a bull-calf there is no third possible destiny, except the slaughterhouse. The cow called Starbrow was due to be served again: she was at this moment browsing quietly, and alone, in a plat of rough grass near the house, on the far side. Intent on his business though he was, Joe savoured a wintry tang in the air, and liked it. It brought him the scent of a new-made morning and a sense-reminiscence, uncomplicated by thought, by remembering or imagining, of uncounted other autumns and winters, moments the more fresh for having passed unnoticed and remained unremembered, and now chiming together in the octaves of his long history. The air braced him; the cobblestones gave him firm ground; but the sunlight was a little too sharp for him, so that his dark-bright eyes became mere splinters of energy, gleaming in a creased, leathery face.

  He unbarred the door of the cot, pulled it open, and went in.

  Here was a dimmer light and a warmer smell, pungent and good. The bull’s broad buttocks almost barred the way in. Joe gave him a friendly smack and pushed along to his head.

  ‘Hullo, my sonny!’ Joe placed a flat palm on the Prince’s head.

  The great beast stirred. It was like a ship at anchor moving slowly with the wash of the water. He stamped a foot, once, twice, three times, as i
f in answer. He lunged forward a pace. But his head, though but loosely held, by a steel halter made fast to an iron ring, did not move.