Читать книгу The Master of The Mill - Frederick Philip Grove - Страница 5

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The whole house was upset. The senator was in a vile temper and found fault with everything. He was a poor sleeper; and at night he often looked at his watch to see how far it was from daylight. For that purpose he insisted on using a flashlight which was supposed to stand upright in a certain spot on the floor by his bed; but when he was in a given mental state, neither the maid that looked after his rooms nor his old valet who had been with him for forty years could place it in the right position. Only Lady Clark could do that; and it so happened that, last night, he had gone up before her. It was a week after the evening when he had seen himself and his father at the loading platform of the old mill; and in the interval another grand conspectus of a phase of his life had prepared itself in his subconscious mind, only trifles, so far, emerging into full view. The fact that things seemed to elude his grasp made him impatient and unappreciative of the efforts which his servants put forth to do things in a way to please him. The few who had known his father, like the valet, saw in him, on such occasions, a reincarnation of the founder of the mill; but, since, throughout their long term of service, he had almost invariably been the personification of kindness, they overlooked, and forgave him his occasional lapses into testiness and dissatisfaction.

On the morning in question, having grumblingly told the old valet that, during the night, he had groped and groped for the flashlight; having next scowled at the maid whose special duty it was to make him comfortable in his bedroom, he betrayed the same temper at the breakfast table, in spite of the fact that his daughter-in-law, who, in his view, could do no wrong, presided and greeted him cheerfully. He frowned at Miss Charlebois who was late. And when he reached for his cup which the footman had filled, it was only just in time that Lady Clark read the signs.

Quickly she reached for that cup, forestalling her father-in-law, and lifted it to her lips. "The hot water," she said to the footman; "and let me see the toast before you serve it." Having added a few drops from the silver jug and glanced at the toast which she approved, she handed the cup back; and the old man drained it without comment and began to nibble at the single slice of toast, unbuttered, which Dr Sherwood allowed him for his morning meal.

After breakfast, an hour or two went by during which the senator went hither and thither, without plan or purpose. For a while he sat at a small desk in the library where he rummaged about in the almost empty drawers as if in search of what he could not find. Nobody interfered. Lady Clark was dressing for their daily drive. On the days of his 'moods' it was always doubtful whether her father-in-law would accompany her. Yet it would have been a mistake to count on his refusal. One could never be sure.

Having opened every drawer, the old man sat at the desk in evident perplexity. Shaking his head, with its remnant of carefully brushed snow-white hair, he rose and resumed the restless wanderings characteristic of extreme old age. Snatches of thought flitted through his mind, mirrored in the sunken features of his face. Sometimes he stopped and stood perfectly still as if to give them a chance to define themselves without letting muscular sensations interfere.

At ten o'clock a footman came and stood deferentially, waiting for the senator to notice him. It was in the large room-like recess of the gallery upstairs which separated the two apartments once used as the masters' suites--the one formerly occupied by the senator's wife, now by Lady Clark, to the left; the other, once occupied by himself, and later by Sir Edmund, now vacant. The far wall of this recess, which was furnished like a sitting-room, was taken up by a fireplace; and above it hung a large, life-sized painting. Whoever saw that painting for the first time, mistook it for a portrait of Lady Clark in her twenties; it was the brilliantly executed copy of a painting in the Manchester Art Gallery in England, representing Stella, the famous Dean's lifelong friend, at the moment of receiving the letter which seemed to prove the Dean's unfaithfulness. The uncanny resemblance had something mysterious about it; and it still puzzled the senator.

Suddenly, becoming conscious of the footman's presence, he asked irritably, without stirring, "What is it?"

"Captain Stevens is waiting in the library, sir."

"What does he want?"

Which, considering that Captain Stevens called daily at that hour, to report on the business of the mill, was an irrational question. Once, hearing it, a young footman had smiled to himself; and he had instantly been dismissed. This morning, the valet had tipped the butler off; and the butler had warned every member of the household staff to be careful. To this butler, himself a newcomer in the house, the vagaries of the old master were not pathetic but comic; but since Lady Clark punished any lapse in the respect shown to her father-in-law by discharging the offender, he humoured the old man.

"He didn't tell me, sir," replied the young footman.

"Ask him to wait. I'll be down."

As the mill stood, all its executives were old men, none less than seventy; but, as they knew very well, they had no longer any real power. The senator was president, Captain Stevens general manager only in name. The latter had once been general manager in fact; he had even held that position in fact before he had held it in name. He had never had any great respect for the senator, had never thought him 'any great shakes' as he expressed it. Himself had been a 'find' of old Mr Rudyard Clark's. After the latter's death, he had been eclipsed; but when young Sir Edmund had ousted the senator from the position of supreme power, he had come into his own, though not for many years; for, with Sir Edmund's death, the 'logic of circumstance' had deprived him as well as everybody else of the substance of power, leaving him only the empty shell. Now it was the engineers who did what they judged should be done. If new invention or accumulating experience demanded a change, they made it, letting Captain Stevens know ex post facto; and he invariably gave his approval to the accomplished fact. He was wise in the ways of the world and liked to go on drawing his comfortable salary of fifty thousand a year. He knew that, had he chosen to assert his nominal power against the engineers, the consequences would have been appalling, to say the least. If only in the interests of the Canadian export trade in flour, the federal government would have had to step in; it might have taken over the mill and all its subsidiaries.

Of course, Sam--Captain Stevens still called the senator by that name, to himself--had never approved, would never approve, of him, Captain Stevens; just as he, Captain Stevens, did not approve of Sam. To Captain Stevens nothing counted except that abstract being, the mill. No personal consideration, for administration or men, had ever mattered; just as it had not mattered to old Mr Rudyard or young Sir Edmund. The mill was supreme. If, at this time, he accepted what the engineers did without consulting him, he acted not from mere worldly wisdom alone, but from a fanatical devotion to something beyond him.

In spite of his seventy years, the captain was still a dapper little man; he still wore loud-checked suits, brilliantly flame-coloured neckties, smart, heavy-soled English shoes of brown leather, a gold-headed cane. He still bore himself very erect; he still gesticulated sparingly with his free hand which clasped a pair of new and immaculate lemon-coloured dog-skin gloves.

When the senator entered the library, the caller was sitting on the forward edge of a leather-bottomed chair, both hands on the knob of his cane, his chin resting on the knuckles of his upper hand.

"Good morning, good morning, senator," he said without rising. "I hope you slept well, sir?"

"I didn't sleep a wink," the old man said.

"Sorry to hear it. No fun, I suppose, lying awake at night. Never happens to me, I'm glad to say. Sleep like a log."

"You're lucky," said the senator. "Anything new?"

"Not a thing. I've got the production sheets here. Want me to read them?"

"What's the use?"

"That's what I say. No news is good news." And the little man rose to take his leave. "Till tomorrow."

"Till tomorrow."

And they issued into the enormous hall which reached through two stories, surrounded, on the second floor, by the gallery.

As the captain made for the vestibule which separated the hall from the porte cochère under which his high-powered car was waiting, the same footman who had announced him stepped forward, holding his light silk-faced topcoat.

A moment later, the senator still standing in the hall, the car, driven by a liveried chauffeur, slipped smoothly away; and instantly its place was taken by another, a Lincoln limousine, olive-green.

The senator turned to glance at the grand stairway; and indeed, Lady Clark was descending, dressed for the drive.

The sight softened the old man's mood. He remembered how, decades ago, in 1919 or 1920, he had first heard of her through his lawyer who had met her at Toronto where he had gone to argue a case. Already there had been rumours of an impending match between Miss Maud Fanshawe, daughter of Sir Alphonso Fanshawe, the late chancellor of Eastern University and the then Mr Edmund Clark. Asked to describe her, the lawyer had pondered for a moment as if at a loss. "She's a great beauty," he had said at last. "There's only one word in the English language which fittingly describes her . . ."--"That word?" Mr Samuel Clark had asked. Slowly and impressively the lawyer had rolled the word on his tongue. "That word is 'regal'." Regal she looked today, her beauty matured but unimpaired.

A minute later, a footman holding the door, they entered the car.

Whether it was that something in Captain Stevens's manner had touched a spring in the senator's memory; or that the interval since his last excursion into the past had simply become ripe, the senator's face, the moment he reclined in his corner of the tonneau, assumed a closed expression which warned Maud that he must not be disturbed. She was not certain what his mood signified; but she knew its effect on him and respected it; and thus it was that the whole drive of two hours was made in silence.

Between these two there was a relation which caused them to observe, with regard to each other, a considerate and affectionate politeness, poised between, on his part, the attitude of fatherly love and the homage he still rendered to beauty and elevation of character; on hers, of reverence and motherly indulgence. When they spoke, it was often what stood between the words which counted. He had tones which vibrated with unspoken things; her voice, a soprano, deepened into a contralto. Neither had ever let the other witness tears; but it was easy to see that, in the contemplation, by each, of the other's fate, there was a comprehension which, under circumstances of lessened restraint, might have caused them to join in an effusion over the tragedies hidden below the smooth aspect of the days.

The drive took them up the south hill, through the park, and, by way of the columnar gate of basalt and wrought iron, out on Hill Road which led down to the town, past the Terrace. This Terrace lay to the right, between lake and road, but at a lower level. The vast agglomeration of the charred ruins of workmen's cottages, burned in the second great fire of Langholm, was nearly vacant; for most of the mill-hands had left when automatic operation had been introduced; in fact, only those who, by reason of old age or infirmity, or because the workmen's compensation act had made them pensioners of the mill, found it to their advantage to remain still occupied their old quarters; and there were less than fifty of them. The senator, sole owner of the Terrace, had long since ceased to collect rents. When the mill, assuming the town as a private property, had become the sole owner of its institutions, paying off its debentures, the Terrace, once valued at two millions, had become a total loss.

In the descent of Hill Road, below which the Terrace lay spread like a map, with only here and there a few garments fluttering from clothes-lines in the breeze, they were bound to reach a point whence the mill came into view. But before that point was reached, the chauffeur turned left or south. Instead of entering the once populous Main Street, they passed, in two or three successive turns, through what had been the best residential quarter, spread over the hill that reached down from the wooded plateau in the south. Through Clark Street, where the Clark House of forty years ago was still standing, boarded up now, they swung out on the highway which led straight south, cleared, graded, and paved by the senator for the express purpose of providing the ladies of his household with a driveway of one hundred miles; for, by means of three more turns, it led through the woods back to the park-gate of the present Clark House.