I Shall Not Want (54 page)

There
was,
however, something else, something that he couldn't name. It was simply that as he stood there a voice inside him cried out that this boy was his and should be cherished, that every other boy in the world was less to be esteemed. He looked into his face more closely. And as he looked he saw that it was not the face of a child at all; it was the face of someone who has already encountered the first round of life's disappointments.

But the boy, he saw, was holding out his hand to him. He had obediently gone forward and now stood waiting awkwardly for John Marco to say something.

John Marco did not hesitate longer. He held out both hands to him, clasping the boy's thin one in two of his.

“So you've come to see your father at last, have you?” he asked.

His voice in his own ears sounded hollow and unreal as he said it; this wasn't the way he had meant to welcome him, not the way he would have welcomed him if he had been alone.

The boy merely nodded; he had made no attempt to come any nearer.

“And how do you like the look of him now that you have seen him?” he asked. “Is he what you expected?”

There was still the same jocularity in his voice; the same falseness. But that was because they had a stranger with them, someone to whom this meeting was simply an odd
spectacle to be remembered, not something that was of the stuff of a man's own history.

“You can speak to him,” Hesther was saying. “Say something.”

She addressed the boy in a low voice as though intended for his ears alone; it was obvious that in that instant mother and son were one again, and she was trying to enter into him and fill him with her strength, her courage.

The boy still said nothing. He remained there, awkward and alone.

“Tell your father how pleased you are to see him,” Mr. Weelch interposed encouragingly.

John Marco turned away from the boy for a moment and addressed Hesther.

“Who is this man?” he asked. “Why is he here?”

“He's here because he's been looking after your son's soul,” Hesther answered. “He's been instructing him.”

“Instructing him?” John Marco repeated.

“Certainly. He's going to enter the ministry.”

A coldness, a sickness almost, swept over him as he heard the words, and he turned towards the boy again.

“So you're going to be a minister, are you?” he asked. “You're very young to have made up your mind.”

“Not too young,” Mr. Weelch replied hastily. “The Lord sometimes guides our footsteps early.”

John Marco ignored him.

“Do you want to go into orders?” he asked.

His voice had grown natural again by now; it was straight, direct, like the voice of a man talking to his equal.

“Are you sure it's what you want?” he insisted.

“Tell him,” said Hesther.

“That's right,” echoed Mr. Weelch. “Tell him.”

There was a pause, a long painful one, and then the boy answered.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

The words were said so quietly that only the movement of his lips showed that he had spoken. But the effect on
Hesther and Mr. Weelch of his having spoken at all was strangely apparent. They seemed not only gratified but actually relieved; it was as though someone whom they had trained and re-trained and then trained again had at last been put to the test and had emerged victorious.

“You wouldn't rather come into the business with me?” John Marco asked. “You wouldn't rather make your way in the world?”

Mr. Weelch leaned forward.

“You don't understand the boy's nature,” he said. “He's heard the call.”

John Marco ignored Mr. Weelch for the second time. He took hold of the boy by the elbow—it was a firm, authoritative grip and the boy did not question it—and led him over to the door.

“Gome outside with me,” he said. “Come and look.”

The door opened straight out onto the top balcony; and the whole arena of the shop was spread below them. It was only half-a-dozen paces from her, but Hesther started forward nervously. It was evident that she feared that anything might happen once the boy had been taken out of her sight.

But Mr. Weelch subdued her.

“I can see them,” he said. “They shan't evade me.”

The two of them were alone now, the ageing, heavy-shouldered man and the silent, timid boy. John Marco put his arm around him.

“Do you see that,” he was saying. “Do you see all those people moving about down there? I brought them here. They belong to me just as much as those girls behind the counter do. This shop is something that I built out of nothing. There's no one else who knows the secrets of it as I do. There's no one else who could keep it all alive. I've put ten years of my life into it and I want to put the rest into it as well. But when I get too old who am I going to leave it to? Who am I going to trust with it all?” He tightened his grip round the boy's shoulders and dropped his voice a little. “How would you like to have it for your
own one day,” he asked. “How would you like to be able to order all those assistants about yourself?”

But he was jocular and bantering again by now, and he stopped himself. These words weren't real, they were the kind of thing that all elderly, boastful men say in the presence of shy, unresponsive youngsters who are too self-conscious to reply. Yet within himself he was not joking at all; he was simply waiting for the miracle of seeing the boy beside him turn from Hesther's son into his.

Mr. Weelch, however, was leaning forward watching them anxiously; this conversation had gone on too long altogether, too dangerously long.

“The devil taketh him up into an exceedingly high mountain, and showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, and saith unto him, all these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me,” Mr. Weelch was repeating; and as he said it he shook his head over the wisdom of the words.

“Well, do you like it?” John Marco persisted. “Would you like it to be yours one day?”

“It can't be if I'm in the Chapel,” the boy replied.

“Then why go into the Chapel?” John Marco asked. “Why not come here where you belong?”

But the boy shook his head.

“I've promised,” he said.

John Marco took him by the arm again, but roughly this time. He was angry by now.

“Who have you promised?” he demanded.

“God,” the boy answered.

John Marco bent forward until his face was on a level with the boy's.

“Are you sure it was God?” he asked. “Or was it your mother that you promised? Your mother and that man in there with her now.”

But Mr. Weelch was no longer inside the room. In quick, bouncing steps he was advancing towards them

“I'm afraid that time is drawing close,” he said. “Mrs. Marco has to be going.”

This time John Marco stepped in front of him, so that the whole width of his body separated him from the boy.

“Do you swear it?” he asked. “Do you swear that you want to wear the cloth?”

“I swear it,” the boy answered. And he repeated it loudly enough for Mr. Weelch to hear. “I swear that I want to be a minister.”

Mr. Weelch's smooth face appeared round John Marco's elbow.

“You see,” he said. “The boy's mind is quite made up. I've tried to shake him myself, and failed. He's inflexible.”

The three of them went back into the private room, Mr. Weelch with his hand pressed affectionately into the small of the boy's back. Hesther was standing there ready for them, drawing down her black veil as they came in. But before the veil descended John Marco saw the look of victory on her face, the smile that she made no effort to conceal.

“You said that you wanted to do something for your son,” she reminded him. “Are you still of the same mind?”

“What is it?” he asked.

“He'll have to go on studying if he's to become a minister,” she answered. “There are his fees.”

“Only eighty pounds a year,” Mr. Weelch put in hurriedly. “Eighty pounds per annum inclusive for five years.”

John Marco avoided the eager gaze of Mr. Weelch that was turned in his direction. Then he saw that the boy's eyes were fixed on him, too. They wore that same look, half of resolve, half resignation, that he had noticed when the boy had first stood before him. It was impossible to tell what were the real thoughts behind them.

“Perhaps he's doubting me,” he thought. “He doesn't understand why I wanted him to come here.”

And turning to Hesther he smiled back at her; there was victory of a kind in his smile, too.

“I'll pay his fees,” he said, “if the boy comes to see me from time to time to say how he's getting on. I want him to think of me as his father.”

On the following day, the last before Christmas, the fog cleared and Mr. Hackbridge was rushed off his feet again.

But that one day of sunshine, those nine hours during which people had crowded themselves into the shop like the faithful pouring into Mecca, was not enough; it was lost among all those other blank, abysmal days. Hidden among the losses of that terrible month, the sun clouded over again and the crowds dispersed. And on that morning nearly five months later when Mr. Lyman, in his little glass box of an office in the counting house, drew the last double underline with his ebony ruler to the year's accounts it seemed that for the whole of the past twelve months, and not merely for four weeks of it, they must have been trading in a morass of fog and rain and snow. As Mr. Lyman looked at the final balance he whistled.

Not that the accounts, the final figures, came as any sort of surprise; both he and John Marco had known all the time what they would look like. It was simply that seeing them there set out in his minute feathery hand on the ruled sheet of foolscap gave a finish, an inescapability, to the whole business; it erected a kind of tomb-stone to a melancholy year.

Once the double underline had been drawn, Mr. Lyman read the document over once more very carefully (for nearly six weeks he had been reading and thinking about next to nothing else), and left his office with the thing tucked under his arm. It might have been a certificate of merit, or a prize-poem, from the way he carried it down the long centre gangway of the counting house with the clerks all scribbling away industriously on either side; and when he came to knock on John Marco's door there was the same quiet air of mastery and achievement on his face. His whole manner, pert and mincing and precise, seemed to
convey that it was blissfully immaterial to him whether it was a profit or a loss that he was showing. So long as the abstract of figures was correct, his mission was completed; the rest was just the ordinary sordid dog-fight of daily commerce.

John Marco took the balance sheet from him and sat looking at it without speaking; he might have been oblivious of Mr. Lyman's presence. He remained oblivious for so long in fact that Mr. Lyman could endure it no longer: he coughed.

“There is one point, sir,” he said. “If I might be allowed to draw your attention to it.”

John Marco nodded.

“What is it?”

“It's your own commission, sir.”

“Well?”

“It's overdrawn, sir,” Mr. Lyman replied. “On those figures it's overdrawn by nearly six thousand pounds.”

His voice as he said it rose suddenly. There was just a trace of relish in it as he said it; the sentence ended almost on a note of jubilation.

The words, in the piping voice that had spoken them, remained in John Marco's ears long after Mr. Lyman had returned to his counting house and John Marco had gone over to the cabinet in the corner to pour himself a drink. It was not the overdraft that worried him—six thousand pounds was not a large sum to recover from next year's profits: it was hearing it mentioned on someone else's lips, hearing himself discussed as it were in a way which was both behind his back and to his face. But was six thousand pounds really the kind of sum to be unconcerned about? The house in Hyde Park Square was proving expensive, very expensive; and Louise's tastes had been growing steadily more fastidious, more exacting. She had just refurnished that fine drawing-room of theirs, getting rid of the comfortable chairs and couches of his own choosing and bringing in a lot of costly upright Empire stuff instead.
She was planning something of the same kind for the dining-room; and he had told her to have her own way in the matter. But it would all cost money.

Her clothes, too, cost more nowadays; the original allowance no longer covered them, and the bright cardboard boxes from Bond Street were piling up in her boudoir. But he had not the heart to stop her buying the things. She was there to look beautiful; and it would be out of all reason to grudge her a few new clothes if she needed them. Besides, it would mean telling her that he couldn't afford them, would mean confessing to some kind of failure, however temporary. And that was something his nature couldn't expand to. It had been his part of the bargain (a part too obvious for either of them to refer to) when she had agreed to come there, to see that he could always give her anything she asked for. It is only young husbands with wives of the same age as themselves, who can decently admit to being poor.

And somehow the business seemed more difficult to run nowadays, more hazardous. Fashions at the moment were at their most intricate. Ostrich feathers, for example, were at the very height of their boom and were growing scarcer and more costly every day; the alternative was simply to wait and see what happened and possibly to buy at crippling fantastic prices when next Christmas came round again, or to buy now and fill up the store rooms and risk a sudden disastrous feminine swing-over before the stuff had been disposed of. Waists, too, were another thing that was troubling him, they were slipping up and down the figure by as much as two inches. Even a confidential letter from their Paris buyer had failed to fix them.
“Alors, personne n'a pas exactement d
é
cid
é
,”
the letter had concluded,
“la taille eventuelle de la mode de cette saison angoisseuse.”
And with no guidance from abroad, no hint of a superior culture to assist them, English women became awkward and obstinate. At one moment the Spring fashion line in Knightsbridge was three fingers' depth below that of Regent Street and Oxford Circus.