I Shall Not Want (60 page)

“Young girls often faint,” he said. “It's their nature. I only hope that they didn't upset the customers.”

And he waved Mr. Hackbridge aside and poured himself out a drink and went on adding and re-adding those sheets of golden figures that the counting house kept sending down to him.

But the tiredness, the sense of driving the machine that was himself harder than any machine ever should be driven, continued; his hand was unsteady as he opened his letters in the mornings and there were times as he sat quietly in his chair when his heart without warning would start pounding angrily as if he had been running, and he would begin gasping as if his breath were imprisoned inside him. After these attacks—and they lasted sometimes for minutes on end—his face would go ashen and he would feel the sweat breaking out along his forehead. But there was no one else in the room to see. And as soon as he could breathe again he would turn back to his desk and go on working.

The climax, the moment when his heart without warning refused altogether for the time being to work for him, came one night as he was at dinner with Louise. It was nearly nine o'clock before the meal had started, and they were alone. John Marco had not changed his clothes: he was still wearing the frock coat that he had worn all day at the shop. It was a handsome, well-cut garment and only the facing which had worn a little shiny on the lapels showed that it was not altogether new. But there was a flower in the button-hole and the shoulders were full and rounded with the weight of man inside them.

“He looks important,” Louise thought. “Someone that you would notice in a crowd.”

And then as she was watching him, he suddenly did not look important any longer. She saw him pull at his collar and falter for an instant as though someone had spoken to him; and then, quite slowly, he folded forward onto the table, his arms sprawling, and his head down on the cloth across which the purple stain of the wine from the overturned glass was spreading. And before either Louise or the maid who was waiting on them could reach him, he had slid off his chair and collapsed on the floor, lying there on his back with one hand tugging at his collar. Only
it was a limp, clammy hand that fell away aimlessly as they moved him.

By the time the doctor had arrived, they had carried John Marco upstairs and laid him along the wide couch in the drawing-room.

The house now had the deep hush of disaster hanging over it. The maids were going about on tiptoe and the doctor's heavy tread on the stairs seemed callous and unthinking. The doctor himself was slow and unconcerned, like a man who expects death to wait for him; he opened his bag as unhurriedly as a pedlar. And all this time, John Marco, with his collar pulled open and his neck swollen and suffused, was lying with his head on one of the ivory silk cushions and his legs in their striped trousers lounging across the upholstery. He was breathing ponderously, as if the air around him were drowning him.

Then the doctor bent down and applied his stethoscope. He was on his knees beside the unconscious man for nearly five minutes. When he got to his feet again he was grave and silent like the rest of them.

“He must have rest,” he said. “Absolute rest. He's been killing himself.”

“Is he in danger?” Louise asked him.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, if he goes on drinking,” he said quietly.

It was nearly midnight when John Marco awoke. He was in his bed by then and there was a nurse standing by him. She was mixing something coloured in a glass. For a moment he lay there, the pieces of his mind grating against each other, and then he sat up on his elbow, staring in front of him.

“What's the matter,” he asked. “What's happened to me?”

Out of the shadows by the fireplace Louise appeared.

“You're ill, my dear,” she said. “You're not to worry.” She forced his shoulders back down onto the pillow and began stroking his forehead. And because he had no
strength in him he obeyed her, lying back staring up emptily at the ceiling.

“You'll be in bed a long time,” she remarked quietly. “You've got to rest.”

To rest! She was right, how right she was she would never guess. It had been more than one man could do to build up that business out of nothing; and then, because the seasons and the fashions had been difficult, to break it all up again and start building it anew. It was something that no one else could ever have done; and Louise in the security of that fine house of theirs had never known what he had suffered. But he had succeeded, too. The shop was minting its own gold again; Mr. Lyman's ledgers were full of it. He could afford to rest for a while in the half light of this bedroom with only the soft voice of Louise to tell him things.

But these dreams disappeared abruptly, and his mind became clear again. He remembered that Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hackbridge were plotting against him, that the house wasn't his really, that he had given his signature on notes to men whom he should never in his senses have trusted, and that the very bed that he was lying on belonged to a shabby little auctioneer who had visited the house one day when he had taken Louise out driving.

He sat up on his elbow again and pointed at the nurse with a hand that was shaking and unsteady.

“Send her away,” he said. “I don't need her. I shall be getting up. I shall be back at the shop to-morrow. I've got to be there. Got to be there, I tell you.”

And next morning, at his usual time, his face greyer than ever and his collar turned up high round his cheeks, he was climbing out of his carriage in Tredegar Terrace. Louise was with him: she had insisted on coming. And he leant heavily on her arm as he went inside.

Mr. Hackbridge was there and bowed politely to both of them. When they had passed him, however, he stood looking after them, and nodded his head slowly, pursing his lips as he did so.

“He must have had a wet night,” he said to himself knowingly. “A very wet one.”

ii

It was after Christmas now; the battle between the thin ranks of the assistants and the massed hordes of West London was over and won, and the merciful armistice of Boxing Day, when all the girls were able at last to rest their feet, had intervened. After Christmas; and the doctor had been proved wrong. That was the delicious irony of it. Louise had told John Marco what the doctor had said, and he had laughed at it. But, at the time, he had laughed a little diffidently as though fearing that somehow his heart and the doctor might be in league together. It was only now that he could afford to open his mouth really wide and say what a fool the man was, what fools all doctors always were. It was only now that he could raise his glass to his lips again without expecting to be struck down as a punishment. And he needed the stuff more than ever he had done; it was the mainspring that kept him going.

During those five weeks when he ought to have been dead, he had spent ten hours a day at the shop; he had lived there. And now, instead of getting himself ready for the mutes and the lilies, he was preparing for the January Sales, getting the pieces in shape for something that would shake the plate glass palaces of Oxford Street.

Of that last attack which had so nearly done away with him, only a kind of treacherous weakness still remained. When a new plan came to him, and his head was still full of them—there was now a reluctance inside his brain, a sort of drowsiness that did not want to be disturbed. It was as though one part of his mind was protecting his life from the rest of him. But this did not make him spare other people. “Let
them
get tired,” he said. “Let
them
see what it's like to fall asleep at their desks and wake themselves up again and still go on working.” And so poor Mr. Hackbridge and the uncomplaining Mr. Skewin were
kept on the run like page-boys, and Mr. Lyman was everlastingly being given new sets of figures to prepare, ingenious fresh sums that all added up to the brave new total.

It was into this world of pressure and urgency, this frantic, rushed world of profits and competition, that Hesther suddenly appeared again. He no longer even thought about her; and each time when his son had presented himself—he came obediently like an overgrown schoolboy accustomed to authority: it was a tribute to her faith in him that Hesther now allowed him to come alone—they had not spoken of her. On these occasions, John Marco had been curt with the youth: he had wanted to get him out of his sight again. It was hard to find anything admirable in this shy young man who wore heavy boots and the round collar of an Amosite deacon. In him, he had seen the last of his dreams dissolving; had known that, after he was gone, there would be someone else, a stranger, giving the orders in John Marco Ltd.; had realised that his name on the shop-front would one day be all that was left of him.

It was the first day of the January Sales and the gangways of the store were crowded like sheep pens, when Hesther came into the shop. John Marco had gone out onto his balcony a dozen times that afternoon, and each time he had returned satisfied. Below him, as he had looked, he had been able to see nothing but the shifting sea of ladies' hats, with the bald head of Mr. Hackbridge appearing in the midst of it like a floating iceberg. And because the weariness that he had been fighting was creeping over him again, he drained the last glass out of the decanter and put on his hat and coat ready to leave.

It was only when he stepped out onto the balcony again and saw the bright, blurred lights of the chandeliers above his head, and felt his feet unsteady beneath him as he moved, that he acknowledged to himself how much he must have drunk. But it was six o'clock already and his day was over. He could afford now to have things a little blurred and unsteady until to-morrow morning.
And he went down the curving staircase slowly and carefully, keeping close to the balustrade. All round him there rose the drone and vibration of the great shop in action; it seemed the very hum of life itself.

Down on the ground floor he had to push and jostle with the shoppers that crowded in on him. He was one of them now, caught up in this mob that he had enticed there. It was hot, very hot, down here; and his head was swimming. His thoughts came to him, indiscriminate and confused. But there was one central thread running right through them. “We're making money, coining it,” he kept repeating; “We're bankers, not drapers. Everything around me is turning into gold.” And for a moment his tiredness vanished, and only the exhilaration of success remained.

Then through a gap in the crowd he saw the tall, black figure of Hesther. She seemed busy and preoccupied, moving about among the other shoppers as though oblivious to them. In her hand she was carrying a sheaf of tracts.

He stood still, his eyes kept close on her unable at first to bring his mind full circle properly to comprehend what he saw. “She is nothing of mine,” he told himself; “this woman does not belong to me. She is out of the shadows, out of the past. My life is the bright, glittering one of the shop that is all around her. Why does she still come here? Can't she see that our ways are divided?”

And as he watched her he saw her go over to one of the assistants and hand her one of the tracts. The assistant took it politely, and then smiled. John Marco could see the words on it. Printed in heavy type as though to terrify the indifferent was the message “REPENT YE, THE LORD”: the rest of the admonition was lost in a fold of the paper.

John Marco watched Hesther move away in search of other souls to save, and went over to the girl. He took the piece of paper away from her, and threw it angrily onto the floor.

“Get on with your work,” he said.

His hands were trembling by now and there was a red mist in front of his eyes. It was his shop, his sale, his life in fact; and Hesther had suddenly broken into the midst of it all, destroying everything. His heart was pounding and the vein in his temple was standing out as he made his way through the crowd to stop her.

And then as he reached her, Hesther paused and saw him. Her face lit up with a new exaltation at the sight.

“Sinner,” she said. “Read the Lord's warning. Take heed before it is too late.”

And she thrust one of the printed handbills at him.

He crumpled it up and threw it down on the floor as he had thrown down the other one.

“Get back outside into the street,” he said. “Don't bring this rubbish here.”

His voice was louder than he had intended, and he saw several of the shoppers pause and look in their direction.

But Hesther's voice was raised louder than his: it was now full and carrying like Mr. Tuke's.

“The Lord's word can never be rubbish,” she answered. “It is written in blood for man's salvation.”

A crowd, a separate crowd from that at the counters began to form round them by now: Hesther and John Marco were the centre of a group of silly, frightened women who could only open their eyes and stare.

“Get outside,” John Marco repeated.

He had dropped his voice by now, and was speaking through teeth that were almost closed.

“Not until I have delivered the message,” Hesther replied defiantly. “Not until the Lord's work is done.”

It was Mr. Hackbridge who, seeing the unusual obstruction in the middle of one of the main thoroughfares of the shop, stepped forward. When he saw Mr. Marco and the black figure of Hesther he stopped. But John Marco called him forward. His face was flushed and he was breathing heavily.

“Remove this woman,” he said. “Put her outside.”

Mr. Hackbridge was very tactful about it. He laid his hand on Hesther's arm without even allowing his fingers to close round it. The whole gesture was delicate and considerate: it was as though he were trying to brush the whole incident aside without offending anyone.

“This way, please,” he said.

But Hesther did not move. She turned towards John Marco again.

“You're my husband,” she said. “I have a right to stay. I demand in God's name that I remain; I am needed. This whole shop is tainted.”