Ruined City (11 page)

'Ask him if I can see him on business connected with the hospital,' said Warren.

She withdrew into the house, doubtfully, and left him standing at the door. Presently she returned. 'The doctor will see you, if you'll step inside,' she said.

He was shown into a consulting room. The surgeon was standing by the fire, grey-haired, erect, and very confident.

'Well, Warren,' he said, a little sharply. 'What can I do for you? You've got your discharge from the hospital?'

Warren nodded. 'I'm on my way back to London now. I've had a good long holiday. It's time I got back to my office.'

'You're in employment?'

'Yes. They took me for an out-of-work when I was admitted, and I thought it would be more comfortable if I went on like that.'

'I see. Well, what can I do for you now?'

'In the first place I want to thank you for the care and attention that I've had. In the second place, I want to pay for it.'

The surgeon smiled, a little grimly. 'Well,' he said. 'We don't turn away money in Sharples, these days. Have you seen Miss MacMahon?'

'I have. She tells me that I owe them seven pounds.' He hesitated for a moment, staring out of the window. 'They were very kind to me,' he said at last, 'thinking I was out of a job and short of money. So kind that explanations would have been a little difficult. I understand that you are Chairman of the House Committee. Would you mind if I gave you a cheque?'

The surgeon looked at him incredulously. 'Why — certainly.'

Warren smiled faintly. 'I see your difficulty,' he said. 'Clothes make the man, I know.' He drew a chair up and sat down, taking the cheque forms from his pocket. 'May I have a pen?'

The surgeon passed a fountain pen to him.

Warren paused, pen in hand. 'I think I ought to pay what this operation would normally have cost me,' he said. 'If I had been taken ill in London, I should hardly have got the operation done at less than a hundred guineas
.
And then the nursing home for four weeks — about twelve guineas a week. If I make it out for a hundred and fifty guineas, payable to the hospital — would that be satisfactory?'

Dr Miller moistened his lips. 'Perfectly.' He watched in silence while Warren wrote the cheque and blotted it, and examined it curiously when it was handed to him.

'It's a great many years since fees like this were paid in Sharples,' he remarked,'- if ever. This is your own bank —Warren Sons and Mortimer?'

Warren nodded.

'And you are Mr Henry Warren, of that house?'

'That's right.'

The surgeon laid the cheque upon his desk. 'This is exceptionally generous, Mr Warren
.
Thank you.'

The banker shook his head. 'That isn't generosity,' he said. 'It's business — I've only paid you what I should expect to pay for a successful operation.'

He paused. 'I have been very kindly treated here,' he said. I should like to do something for the hospital, apart from paying for my operation, if you would allow me.'

'Our hospital is in need of money,' said the surgeon. 'All hospitals are — but this one more than most.'

'I know. Are you in trouble with the current running expenses?'

'Not at the moment. Lady Swarland gives us a cheque each year, even in these difficult times.'

Warren nodded. 'From my own experience,' he said, 'I would have said that the installation of wireless to the beds was one of your greatest needs — for psychological reasons. But I know nothing of your technical requirements. Is there anything in the way of equipment that you need more than that?'

The surgeon thought for a long time. At last.he said, 'I think you're right. Morbidity is our great trouble here —depression. The men get listless, and let go. We need the wireless very badly, certainly. As much as anything.'

'I took the liberty of looking through your files,' said Warren, 'while I was working with the Secretary. He took the pen, and wrote another cheque. 'You got your last quotation two years ago. I think that ought to cover it.'

He passed the slip of paper to the surgeon. 'I don't want you to make any parade of this,' he said. 'I should prefer this gift to remain anonymous — for a number of reasons. That's why I took the liberty of calling upon you. Do you think that can be arranged?'

The surgeon nodded. 'I can arrange that, if you would prefer it. In that case, I can only thank you myself for your very generous gift. But even if you remain anonymous, I hope you will come down and stay a night with me, to see the installation when it is complete.'

Warren smiled. 'I shall look forward to that.'

They talked about the hospital for a few minutes. Then the surgeon said:

'I understand, Mr Warren, that you are the head of a banking house. What exactly does that mean. Are you concerned with industry?'

Warren nodded. 'My family started the business in about 1750. We ran as a private bank in Exeter till 1873. Then we moved the headquarters of the business to London, and finally the Exeter business was absorbed by one of the joint stock banks. We do very little business now with private accounts. We mosdy handle loans for the various Corporations and the smaller Governments, placing them on the London market. We do a lot of Continental business.'

'Do you touch shipping?'

'Not directly. Are you thinking of shipbuilding, and of your Yard here?'

The surgeon nodded. 'I was wondering if you had seen any sign yet of the revival in shipbuilding industry.'

Warren shook his head. 'I'm not a shipping man,' he said. 'But I know of nothing that would benefit you here.'

There was a pause.

'I was afraid that would be the answer.'

'It's better to be frank about these things,' said Warren. 'I've been in this town now for a month, and walking about it for ten days. I've seen your shipyard, your plate mills, and your mine. And I've been in most of the smaller workshops, too — or heard about them. I've done my level best to think of work that could be profitably carried on here.

'I can think of nothing,' he said. 'Nothing that would make any difference to the town.'

'You mean we've got to wait for a general revival of prosperity in the country?'

Warren was silent
.

The surgeon turned and faced him
.
'Or do you mean that we shall never work again?'

Warren met his eyes. 'That's what I mean,' he said gently. 'I think you know it yourself, and anyway, it's better to face up to the facts.' He considered for a minute, and then said, 'If prosperity comes back to the country, as I think it will, I'm afraid Sharples will be left behind. It's five years now since your shipyard closed down, since your mine stopped and the rolling mills. Your executives have gone to other jobs, and your workmen have grown weak and flabby on outdoor relief. If you got a ship to build now, at a bumper price, you couldn't built it profitably, or complete it to time. And it's the same in the plate mills, and the mine.'

'You don't think any work will come back here when shipbuilding revives?'

'It depends on the extent of the revival. Another war might do it. Nothing less.'

'Well,' said the surgeon at last, a little heavily, 'as you say, it's better to have the truth.' He glanced again at Warren. 'I have always understood that you people in the City controlled industry,' he said. 'That you moved companies and businesses about like chessmen. I've seen a great deal in the papers about the banks assisting industry. Don't they assist places like Sharples?

'This place built fine ships once, and not so long ago,' he said. 'There were seven Barlow destroyers at the Battle of Jutland. Seven, no less.'

'I have heard that,' said Warren gravely. 'It's very creditable.

'What you say about the City is only partly true,' he said. 'People deposit money in the banks, or lend it out to companies, and our job is to see that that money is kept reasonably safe. That is what we call legitimate business. In this case, to give ships out to be built in Sharples would entail a risk of non-completion or bad work that nobody would dare to take.'

'I quite understand,' said the surgeon. ' Warren rose to take his leave. 'I am afraid that I see nothing whatsoever to be done for Sharples,' he said evenly. 'Legitimately, that is to say. . .'

He turned to the other. 'It has been so kind of you . . .' he said formally. They walked together to the door.

I'll let you know when our wireless installation is complete,' said Dr Miller. They said goodbye, and he closed his door again, and turned back to the consulting room. There he stood for a long time fingering two cheques. He wore the expression of a man who at the age of fifty-six no longer believes in fairies, and has received indisputable proof of their existence.

Warren sat in the train till evening, as it roared the length of England down to London. He was alone in his compartment; most of the time he lay in one corner, motionless, staring out of the window. It seemed to him that he had come to one of the turning points in his life, in his career. He knew what he was going back to. He was returning to the work that he had been doing for the last fifteen years, with the distinction that now he would have to live in chambers, quite alone. He was already a wealthy man; he would go on working, making more money, because that was the only interest he knew. He felt that before long that interest would desert him. It would be difficult to keep an interest in the work if he were working only for himself . . .

Of course, he might marry again after his divorce. That .might be. But next time, he would marry somebody who knew the discipline of work.

Darlington swept past him, and Northallerton; he passed through York. With every mile that took him south he grew a little more depressed; it seemed to him that he was leaving a place where people had been kind to him, to go back to an empty life of nothing but his work. He felt that the people he had known in Sharples needed him, and that he was running away back to his own life. He had given them several hundred pounds; surely that was enough to quiet the conscience of anyone but a fool. But it wasn't.

He passed through Doncaster. There were fifty acres of the shipyard, more or less — one wouldn't give a bean more than five thousand pounds for the whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel. It wasn't worth that — it wasn't worth a halfpenny, because it wasn't earning anything. He could do that himself. But one would have to get the public in on it — to pay the losses. No one man could support the loss that that shipyard would make if it built ships again.

He pulled himself up with a jerk. This was sheer madness. He was thinking Hatry stuff.

He passed through Newark. If that Yard ever was to start again, the difficulty would lie with the first order. The order would be obtained for such a place with difficulty; that probably would mean at a cut price. Therefore, it would probably be done at a colossal loss, and the ship would be late in delivery. You would have to find a pretty complacent shipowner to order from a yard like Barlows. Somebody that you had some sort of hold upon, perhaps . . .

There was always a
quid pro quo.
One of the Latin countries, or perhaps the Balkans, now: One might be able to do something there. They were always pressing him to advance a little farmer than he cared to go. Perhaps, however, if they placed an order for a ship. . .

He thought of his old father, dead for many years. He closed his eyes, and he could see the old man sitting at his desk. 'That stuff won't do,' he muttered to himself. 'That isn't how our business was built up.'

Grantham swept past him, and away into the dusk behind. The yard employed three thousand men when it was working at full bore — a wage bill of perhaps seven thousand pounds a week. Three hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year. That meant, perhaps, that they would build ships to the value of seven hundred thousand pounds a year, allowing for materials and overheads. That meant at least six ships of ten thousand tons, or smaller vessels in proportion.

It was impossible. Nobody, in this time of depression, could find an order for one single ship of such a size — let alone a flock of them.

There was the staff. That might not be so difficult; most of the chief executives of the old team were working in the industry at lower salaries and many of them not so far away — at Wallsend and in Sunderland. He could probably get them together again at a twenty per cent rise in salary — if they were any good. But how was he to judge of that?

The whole thing was impossible, sheer madness to attempt. He must be sensible, and put it from his mind.

He passed through Peterborough.

It would be damn good fun. . .

Three weeks later Barlows' Yard became the property of Mr Henry Warren.

He bought it through a solicitor; it was a long time before the news leaked out of the new ownership. He did not use his firm's solicitors, which might have led the rumour straight to him, but used a firm called Matheson and Donkin who had done some work for him before. He summoned Matheson on the morning after he reached London, and gave him his directions.

Two days later Matheson reported back to Warren in his office. 'The shipyard is the property of Mrs Hector Barlow,' he said. 'She's in Le Touquet at the moment — or else in the south of France. Jacobson and Priestly are acting for her. There's a son, too. He's something in the cinema industry, but I don't think he comes into the picture.'