Читать книгу The Staff at Simson's - Frederick Niven - Страница 4

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In the last decade of the XIXth Century the roll-call at Simson's was thus:

John Simson, son of the founder of the firm, more like a bearded farmer from the shires than a townsman, then in his fiftieth year, father of three—one girl, two boys—and devoted to his buxom, amiable wife in a manifest but nonuxorious fashion; Robert Simson, his bachelor brother, ten years his junior—as large of build as John, but with more urbanity. A pattern-designer of the city, skilful with his pencil in more than the applied art which provided him and his family with their daily bread, once drew a caricature of Robert for the menu-card of a Dinner of Soft-Goods Manufacturers in which that junior partner of the Simson house was represented as a big, smooth cupid with eyes of innocence.

In the warehouse, head of the Fancy Goods department, and sort of general manager or adviser for all the others, was Alexander Maxwell, close upon fifty then, but wearing his years well. He was a dapper man. His shock of silver hair and his bearing, his carriage, made him seem like a stage ambassador to young Laurie of the Dress Goods. Once or twice in his life he had been taken for a doctor, or medical specialist, perhaps because of his care of his hands, and by reason of the precise way he used them. His moustache was cropped, in a period when many men affected hirsute tusks. His wife, he often thought, was the most elegant lady he had ever seen. Both he and she admired Mrs. Maxwell tremendously. Woman (especially as exemplified in herself) and dress were her idolatries. Their family—in the order of its coming—was boy, girl, girl, boy. Mr. Maxwell had placed the elder boy, his school-days over, in a chartered accountant's office, loath to condemn him to what he called the dog's life of manufacturing.

Alexander Maxwell had two assistants in his department: Jack Corbett, discontented—not with the warehouse, but by reason of badgering at home—and always pondering, while travelling towards his suburb in the evenings, coloured pamphlets on South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada; and Johnny Leng, bandy-legged, of dark hue and Semitic cast of countenance, who strove to cheer the obviously sad Corbett with the latest bawdy story.

Head of the Shirtings department was Tom Huntley, a widower, a few years older than the junior partner, a loose-jointed man, his gait that of one tolerant, uncensorious, jack-easy. He had often a little laugh of acceptance or dismissal when some others might question or reprove. His chief assistant was Dan Huntley, not related (Tom had no relatives anywhere to his knowledge), a youth fond of vivid checks, white Ascot ties held with a gold horse-shoe pin, whose home was a two-room and kitchen flat in the transpontine district of Gorbals, where father, mother, brother, sister and he crowded together in hilarious amity, all sharing the same delight in loud attire and music-hall songs and, when they could, in going to the races. Danny of the Shirtings had a secret—an ambition that had nothing to do with the warehouse. He hoped, some day, to be on the music-hall stage. Clog-dancing was his speciality. Without loss of breath he could clog-dance and at the same time solemnly produce mirthful patter. On many a Saturday evening he gave exhibitions of his skill at the more obscure working-men's clubs. Others on the stages of the leading music-halls had begun so. Why not he? Tom Huntley's second assistant was Willie MacEwan, who always wore a hat of the latest style, shirts and ties of the moment's mode. He was as bandy-legged as Johnny Leng, his manner at one and the same time courteous and vulgar, and there was something, to most, engaging, charming about that squint, that cast, in his vivacious eyes.

Henry Braid, and he but thirty, was head of the Dress Goods, and he had just given an engagement ring to his girl. To his future father-in-law he had explained, "I am a pushing young man with the world before me," for in those days one asked the girl's father for her hand (as they used to say), and he—having already discussed the matter with the observant mother—had an "Aye" or a "Nay" ready. Braid had two assistants, Arthur Laurie and Alisdair Lennox, called Alice for short because of his niminy utterance and feminine fancies. Laurie, who lived in a village southward from the city, was a tenor singer at parties there, devoted to amateur productions of light opera and to a different girl annually. Lennox was a long, lean young man who walked with a waver as of a willow in a breeze, spoke with a cultivated lisp and was as ready to talk of the texture and shade of socks as his two sisters to discuss stockings and lingerie.

"They ought to ha' christened him Jenny Lennox," said Sandy Bain (head of the Flannelettes) one day—Sandy, "the card" of Simson's, who always seemed to be in need of a shave, perhaps because, liking to lie in bed late in the mornings, he shaved when he got hame frae the wareus at nicht. By the date of this narrative, he was a staunch teetotaler. When chided for that he would explain, jabbing the bibulous bigot who objected in the midriff, or grabbing hold of him by lapel or coat-button to gain full attention, that it was purely a matter of finance. "I hae four weans noo, twa lads and twa lassies. I ken naething better than to be hauf-drunk a' the time. It's the ideal state in this disillusionin' world—but no' when ye hae weans. When the publican comes in at the door, poverty comes in at the windy. And noo ye ken—and to hell wi' ye!"

Sandy Bain of the Flannelettes was of the same age as Tom Huntley of the Shirtings. Little Watty Yule, one of his assistants, though also a teetotaler, was a tax upon Sandy's patience. Watty's heaven was in the church-hall at social gatherings, conversazione, soirée ("cookie-shine" in the warehouse word); and to lend a hand at these functions and convivial gatherings, assisting at the tea-urn or the coffee-urn, was all he asked. How often he had winsomely inquired, "May I press you to a jelly?" impossible to speculate. When any one forgot his name he would say, "Yule. Yule remember me." There was an extraordinary scene in the Flannelette department one day, Sandy Bain violently swearing at Watty and telling him that some morning he would kill him. The staff at Simson's gave ear, and then they heard: "Say good-morning to me, but dinna every morning say tae me, 'Good-morning, have you used Pears' Soap?' If ye say it again, I'll kill ye, as sure as Daith! It's beyond human endurance."

Sandy's other assistant at that time was one William Mackay, a son of a one-time wealthy West Indies' sugar broker who had known of it in his purse when the governments of France and Germany and Austria gave bounties to their sugar producers and Continental beet-sugar strove against the West Indian cane variety. There was to be a revival of sugar-refining in Glasgow later, but too late for William's father. He was in his final seventies when that day came, and his youngest son would have turned forty had he been alive. There were four others, two girls and two boys and never, perhaps, was there a family composed of such disparate individuals—but their motto, to judge by the behaviour of each to other, might have been Live and Let Live. None took the part of censor. It is conceivable that William, the youngest, was somewhat the pet of the family, though unspoilt thereby. In his infancy the best he could make of his name was Wem, so Wem he was for good at home. Through somebody in the warehouse who knew one of his brothers, it was carried there. So Wem he was in Cochrane Street also.

Head of the Wincey department was Andrew Middleton—fifty-five—a tall, gnarled man of a hue suggestive of jaundice but spare and strong, who trod the Glasgow planestanes with a long, lithe stride. He was troubled at times, the market for winceys being in a declining state, lest he might be discharged, but hopeful (considering that he had been with the firm in the days of the founder) that instead of being dismissed he might be pensioned. He was another dweller in Gorbals where, in two rooms and a kitchen with Mrs. Middleton, he suffered—as she—uncomplaining, in fact encouraging, the violin-practice of their only issue, a lad, then, of twenty. Vee-o-lon, by the way, was what Andy always called the instrument of his son's devotion. In public, talking of the boy, he would say it was far better for him to be practising the "vee-o-lon" than kicking his heels in the close in the evenings. In private, he dreamt that some day he would see his son on the platform of St. Andrew's Halls, in evening dress, bowing after a last encore, to a wildly enthusiastic audience packed to the hot ceiling.

He had but one assistant, and at times it was difficult to find work for both apart from pulling down a stack of cloth and building it up again. Of that assistant, Norman Nairn, we shall hear anon how he was, with the best intention in the world, deplorably led astray by Danny Huntley of the Shirtings or (from another standpoint) restored to reason when it seemed he had gone gite.

George Laidlaw and Dick Robertson were, at that time, in the Production department, into which buyers never entered. There were the Loom Books, the Yarn Books, the P.C. (or Production Cost) Books. As for George Laidlaw: Here, as in most communities there was a tendency for the component parts to fall into categories. In office, warehouse, club, camp, regiment, where-not, there are generally the markedly jolly one, markedly silly one, comic one, sober one, king's fool, people's favourite, the one who listens to the troubles of others and wisely advises, the one who borrows, the one who outstandingly lends, the religious one who but gives example of holiness, and the religious one who is a missioner. George Laidlaw was the sullen one, the dour one, the bully all under the one hat. Tall, loutish, he went about with a twist to his nostrils, as though everywhere finding an objectionable odour, hectoring those whom he thought he could hector, twisting the office-boy's arm, if it seemed that youngster was not fittingly servile to him, and surly even to Maxwell, Middleton, and Sandy Bain, his seniors by many a year. His eyes had only two expressions—one might almost say two lacks of expression. When alone they were as those of a dulled cod; when any one spoke to him they seemed to be made of a hard blue stone.

Dick Robertson was the younger son of a leather merchant, known in the Glasgow of those days as Leather Robertson. To be in the leather business, Leather Robertson said, was a dog's life, and he would not condemn all his sons to it. The third boy, Richard, he indentured to the Simsons.

Also in the Production department was young Robert Simson ("Bob" to his family, and to the staff), second son of the senior partner. Ian, the elder boy (Christened John, but so called to distinguish him from his father), was at university, a faculty for winning scholarships and bursaries having decided the father to send him there. Even if, eventually, he was to be a manufacturer, a university education, it was decided, was all to the good. As for Bob, John Simson considered that it would be throwing good money after bad to send him to college from high-school.

The brothers were excellent friends. Ian did not vaunt his capacity for study over Bob, and in games they had a common interest. Bob had only just started to learn the business, his careless school-days over, with Laidlaw and Robertson in that other office to rear of the main warehouse. Ian found many an opportunity to look in at Cochrane Street. His mother's uncertain notion that he might become a professional man was not to his heart at all. The "wareus" for him! He liked it. He liked the feeling of the place on his visits. The pillars that supported the roof, the pillars of wincey and flannelette, the stacks of fancy goods, dress goods, the young men at work with suggestion of exuberant spirits: place and people appealed to him. Their world belonged to him. Thus it was, however, Bob, the younger, was put into the business when his high-school days were over and Ian, the elder, was at university.

Below stairs was the calender-man, "old Fenwick." Looking down the well, through which he got his daylight from the upper warehouse, one could see his bald head glinting over his machines (hydraulically driven then), that were like mangles de luxe. Of his private life, till the pathos and tragedy of it had an end, none knew in the warehouse. The men there only felt that he was odd. Of that he was aware, and sometimes made attempts to be normal with them by aid of a droll story. But his droll stories were not of the normal sort. He might just as well not have troubled to try to establish easy and close relations. An account of a physical peculiarity of Lord Byron (the poet, ye ken), a story about Nell Gwynn (King Charles the Second's mistress, ye ken), an account of how a certain grande dame, who had met the Duke of Wellington, gave her subaltern godson a letter of introduction to him in which she asked the duke, as an old soldier, to give the lad what advice he could to one on the threshold of a military career—and the advice, that might have shocked and affronted the old lady had her godson dared to report it to her: stories of that sort were not the normal droll story for them. The jokes which he sometimes cracked (out of Elizabethan and Restoration plays, had they only known), though nearer to giving him success in his object, were not entirely of the right genre. So he remained odd, even in these amiable efforts.

Duncan Ramsay, wrapped in a leathern apron, like a farrier's, was the packer and chief porter, with headquarters down in the basement where, between the red-painted iron pillars supporting the ceiling, a huge packing-press stood and from nails in the walls hung stencils. Duncan Ramsay was a man unhappy in his married life as he had been in his boyhood. He came from a family the members of which almost all showed but one eyebrow, a black line across a beetling forehead with no gap atop the nose; and he had married a woman whose eyes (as was the way with most of her people) were so close-set as to give the impression that she could look through a peep-hole with both eyes at once. Nature refused to give them children, try as they would. They had been trying for ten years. He had married at twenty-five, and was thus thirty-five at the commencement of this narrative. Each wanted to have a baby, and each blamed the other for lack of success in their endeavours. Their case was one that would have been of intense interest to Sigmund Freud, alive then, but not taken seriously so far by any save himself.

Two assistants he had, one Peter Pringle, and the other, Willie Scott. Pringle lived alone in these days in a meagre room, hard by the old Gallowgate, an attic in one of the "lands", torn down these years. His hollow cheeks made Andy Middleton suspect tuberculosis, but Peter could flip from the floor to his shoulder a bale of one hundred and fifty pounds, as if it were a feather. One of his social accomplishments was whispering-singing. Sometimes, down in the packing basement, one might see a circle of the staff round him, all silent, all more than gravely attentive, with heads close, bending towards him. They were listening to his whispered but charmingly modulated rendering of some song, perhaps——

"My wee dug's deid,

My puir wee thing,

My bow-wow...."

Dan Huntley was a great admirer of his gift and virtuosity in it, but had one definite adverse criticism; it would be of no use in the music-halls. Whispering-singing, he opined, like performing fleas, was only for a close circle. "You couldna entertain a whole audience at the Gaiety wi' it frae the stage." Other accomplishments Peter Pringle had, of which you shall hear in due course.

Willie Scott was stocky and heavy but, though seemingly more robust than Pringle, always required a helping hand to elevate loads to his shoulder. Duncan Ramsay thought he was lazy. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Bridgegate he lived in a room and kitchen "house" with a mother who occasionally added to income by going out, in bonnet and dolman, to do needlework, and a sister who was employed in a boot factory in which, by the way, Leather Robertson (Dick Robertson's father) had shares—though, of that frail link between the second porter in the basement and the young man in the Production department, neither was aware. Willie was a youth of magnificent phrases, such as "I wouldna allow even my faither to strike me," or "Yer mither is always yer mither." The perky office-boy (Tommy Bruce), whose duties—and sometimes pretended duties or needs—carried him through all the warehouse and down into the basement frequently on hearing such remarks would strike an attitude and declaim: "You can take from me me life, but you cannot take from me me Victoria Cross," and go off, hop, skip and jump, up the stairs, Willie glaring after him.

That office boy had two ways of balancing the petty-cash book, when it did not balance of its own accord. One of them was to pocket what was in the box beyond the amount expected by his calculations. The other, was to pay in the deficit when, after repeated calculations, it was miserably clear that deficit there was. He had been in the Simson counting-house some time before his quaint way of book-keeping was discovered by Maitland. Maitland was the clerk, son of a farmer whose farm was away out southward from the city, on the verge of the moors. (The elder Maitland was determined that all his sons would not be farmers—a dog's life he called farming.) When Maitland reported the matter of the office-boy's accountancy to John Gilmore, who was cashier, there was profound silence in the office for several tense seconds.

Mr. Gilmore seemed to be stunned, but suddenly he recovered, and was taken with a fit of laughter that nearly choked him, troubled as he was with chronic bronchial catarrh. He was a slender man, going bald even in those days, who had been clerk in the reign of John the First. He had bulbous, protruding eyeballs on which it seemed the retina had just been thinly painted in faint blue. The effect was as of constant amazement at the world; but he was skilled, even when actually instead of only apparently amazed, at keeping his own counsel.

One morning "Alice" Lennox came into the counting-house on warehouse business and, seeing the private-room door open—sign that the bosses were both out—delayed a while to tell Mr. Gilmore of a pair of socks he had seen, a pair of socks. He had been to a "dawnce", he began, a "vewy" swell affair.

"There was a guest there," said he, "wearing the most beautiful socks I evah saw."

"Do you tell me so?" inquired Mr. Gilmore, staring at him, eyes popping.

"Oh, vewy beautiful," Alisdair expatiated. "The textcha was perfect."

"God sakes! Do you tell me so?" Gilmore huskily and politely asked.

There came the sound of the opening of the outer door, and then the step of Robert Simson in the corridor. Arranging his tie and shooting his cuffs, Alisdair daintily departed. The cashier remained rigid, frigid, tranced, gazing at the door into the warehouse, as it swung back on Alice's exit, slowed, and gently shut with a faint sigh from the silencer affixed to it to prevent slamming.

"O Lord!" Mr. Gilmore pled to the ceiling. His head slowly turned toward Maitland. "We'll hae to examine him some day," he huskily declared, "and see what we'll see."

Maitland, for all reply, gave one little snort. The farmer's son who rose at six-thirty every morning—tramping six and a half miles to Thornliebank station that he might be in Cochrane Street by nine—and who reached home out among the pewits at eight every evening, had deep contempt for dudes.

The office door opened and Mr. Robert trod past the counter to his room with a "Morning!"

"Good-morning, sir," said Gilmore, Maitland, and the little ex-schoolboy hunched, worried, over the petty-cash book.