The Rise of Henry Morcar by Phyllis Bentley Read Free Book Online Page A

unfinished went into the house next door. He found the Shaws and a couple of Winnie’s admirers all playing a round card game of a noisy kind in which they had coaxed Mrs. Shaw to take part, so he had no opportunity to speak to Charlie privately. But he had no need; from Charlie’s welcoming glanceand smile, from Winnie’s mild greeting, very unlike her usual pert reception, from the way Mrs. Shaw made room for him beside her, he knew that they had all guessed his trouble.
    Next day when he came home from school he met his mother in the hall carrying an empty glass and a spoon on a small tray. She looked flushed and troubled.
    â€œThe doctor’s sent your father to bed for a few days,” she said. “For a rest. It’s his heart. He’s been rather worried about business lately.”
    His father never smoked again. All through that winter his pipe hung, empty and cold, in the oak rack beside the hearth. This picture mingled in Morcar’s mind with the wet streaky haunches of a dark brown horse beneath the gaslight from a street-lamp, bands of leather harness and reins dangling through the air—the hansom in which his father went hopefully out to Town Council meetings or returned from them exhausted. How many times that winter Harry at his mother’s bidding ran along through the cold driving West Riding rain to the cab proprietor at the end of Hurst Road, to fetch a hansom for his father! How many times, at night, he heard the horses’ hoofs clop-clopping down the road and halting at the Sycamores’ gate. Harry paused in his homework, his mother raised her head and waited for footsteps to come up the path; none came; then they knew that his father was too tired to dismount without help. Harry ran out and unbuttoned the apron and pulled the shiny black leather away, while his father, unconscious of his own delay, fumbled with thin nerveless fingers in his pocket for coins and made slow jokes with the cabman. Then the hansom became a standing order, morning and midday and night, to take his father to and from the mill. Then it came at morning and noon only; in the afternoon his father rested at home.
    In the New Year came the picture of his mother in a large white cooking apron with her sleeves rolled up, carefully placing little squares of newspaper between the dessert plates in the china cupboard. It seemed they must leave the Sycamores and go to a smaller house, since his father was giving up the mill. Mrs. Shaw came in to condole, panting a little, her large bulk spread over the drawing-room settee.
    â€œI’m afraid this is a bad blow for you, Mrs. Morcar love,” she said.
    â€œIt will be better so,” replied Mrs. Morcar proudly: “Fred will have more time to give to his Council work.”
    Winnie came in and helped to pack.
    â€œWinnie’s been a real good help,” announced Mrs. Morcar at tea-time. “She has indeed.”
    Her tone implied that this was something of a surprise to her, and indeed for some reason, Harry could not then fathom what, there was always an antagonism between his mother and Winnie.
    They moved to a house in Hurst Road, a house which Morcar could not, would not, remember. He excused himself for this because they lived there less than six months, but the real reason for his rejection of its image was that he never had a happy moment there. It was wretched to be so far away from Charlie, for it meant that he seemed always to reach the Sycamores at the wrong moment. When one lived next door, one took soundings, so to speak, one tried the temperature of the water with one’s toe before entering and withdrew if the water seemed chill and the moment inopportune. But living a quarter of a mile away made setting out for the Shaws’ quite an important step, not easy to retract; one could not hang about in somebody else’s back garden and wait for Mr. Shaw’s temper to cool or Mrs. Shaw’s baking to finish;