Читать книгу Gerald Cranston's Lady - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 5

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The man who raised himself slowly from his pillow, as Christopher Rennie pushed the control-button of the big alabaster center-light and poured out the tea, had awakened, as though he were still an officer on active service, to immediate full consciousness. His eyes—pale, china-blue eyes with a hint of frosty flame in the pupils of them—shone alert with superabundant health. His close-clipped hair—tawn, touched to auburn where the light caught it—was unruffled as his temper; his hand—the large capable hand which reached for the tea-cup—rock-like in its steadiness. His lips—the two firm lips that with a terse, “Thanks, Rennie,” drained the hot liquid in one steady gulp—showed healthy as his eyes on a countenance which revealed, even at first glance, decision.

Yet even at first glance, other qualities than decision showed in Gerald Cranston’s countenance. From it—whether one considered the lean jowl, the high forehead, the out-jutting chin, or the prominent cheek-bones—there radiated a force, a driving-power, a poised and a dominant individualism that bespoke the born leader.

He set down his tea-cup; ordered, terse as ever, “My bath, Rennie”; and rose from bed. One saw, then, that the body of this man matched his countenance. He stood six feet two on arched, well shaped feet. His legs were powerful, long in the thigh and a trifle bowed with horsemanship. He had a flat back, a low waist-line, and narrow hips. The plain silk pajamas, open at the throat, displayed, under a neck whose sinews were muscled cords, a triangle of broad, almost hairless, chest. The shoulders of that body sloped like an athlete’s. The biceps of its either forearm might have been a boxer’s. One saw, too, when the owner of that body moved toward the bath-room, that—even as an athlete’s or a boxer’s—every movement of it was under an instinctive control, automatically and amazingly disciplined.

For “discipline,” whether of the body or of the mind, whether of the instincts or of the emotions, whether of himself or of others, was Gerry Cranston’s fetish—almost, one might say, his religion: a religion so sternly practised that it entered into every minutest detail of his existence.

Mostly—since he was by temperament an ascetic—this religion of self-discipline applied itself to Gerry Cranston’s mind, which now, as he locked himself into the big lavishly fitted bath-room and picked up his dumb-bells, began, in accordance with its training, to function quite independently of the mere physical routine.

On this, his wedding-morning, the processes of that mind, though more than ordinarily complicated, were as consecutively reasoned, as logical and as coldly detached as ever.

“Marriage,” they began, “should mark a definite point in a man’s career. Certainly mine does. On his marriage a man ought to take stock of himself. Well, I’ve done that. I know just where I stand, and just how far I’ve got to go. Within a thousand or so—reckoning the Cranston ordinaries at market-price—I’m worth a quarter of a million pounds. That’s not enough. Not nearly enough. I want a million at least. Possibly two. That’ll only bring in a hundred thousand a year....

“No difficulties there! Anybody with a disciplined brain can get money. Get it straight, too! The difficulty is that I want more than money. I want power. The Lord knows why I should want power; it’s natural, perhaps, when one feels one can run things. But anyway I do want it. I’ll get it, too. But that’ll take time. Hermione may help me there—though marrying into the old aristocracy doesn’t mean much nowadays. It’s the new aristocracy, the plutocrats with titles, who run the empire. I’ll have to buy a peerage, I suppose. That’ll go against the grain—even out of a couple of million. Not that I’d grudge the money. Money’s only counters. It’s the principle of the thing I dislike....”

Gerald Cranston put down his dumb-bells, and began his tubbing. Deliberately he was keeping the personal issue between himself and Hermione out of his thoughts until such time as he had finished his mental stock-taking.

“I’ve got a few things against me,” went on that stock-taking. “Oakham Grammar School isn’t Eton, and a corn-chandler’s office isn’t Oxford. The Eton-and-Oxford crowd are born to power, educated to it. I’m not—yet. That’ll come.... Power’s like money. And as dangerous! One needs self-discipline, self-control to handle it. It must be fun, though, to run the really big things. Better fun than running a battery.... That was luck—getting through the war without a scratch. I suppose I am lucky. Why shouldn’t I be? If a man knows what he wants, if he’s got ability and self-discipline, he makes his own luck. Luck’s like capital; you can either blue it or invest it. Take Cranston’s! If I hadn’t persuaded Harold and Mother that it was necessary to float Cranston’s—”

On that, temporarily, the mental stock-taking ceased. In the as yet half-polished diamond of Gerald Cranston’s character were many facets; and two of these, the sentimental and the imaginative, began to glimmer as his thoughts veered to the business which had been the corner-stone of his fortune.

Every investor in the Midlands, and, since the launching of it as a public company, some investors in the South, knew of “Cranston’s, Limited, Millers, Forage Contractors, and Coal Distributors”; but nobody, not even his brother Harold, knew exactly how much Cranston’s, Limited, meant to Gerald Cranston. To him, its chairman, that business stood for a symbol—a symbol of success stamped with his own signature. In his way, and as far as it was yet in him to love, he loved it.

So, as a lover’s, his memory harked back to those days, long before the war, long before that double itch for power and money drove him from the provinces to London, when Cranston’s had been his whole life; to the day when, leaving school on his father’s death, he had found his brother Harold at the head of an almost moribund distributing business; found himself under-nurse to an anemic baby, to a thing almost bereft of life-blood, with hardly a kick in it....

Eighteen years ago that! And now the anemic baby was grown to a lusty giant. Now the one-time corn-chandlers with their few clients and their fewer carts were a force in the Midlands. Their posters flared from the Wash to the Bristol Channel. Their lorries overran half England. For to corn he, Gerald Cranston, had added coal; and to coal, fertilizers; and to fertilizers, farm machinery. To-day, moreover, thanks to him, Cranston’s were no longer mere chandlers. What they sold, they produced—milling their own corn, mixing their own manures, mining their own coal, making their own machinery.

All that had been his own doing. The plans, the plans of which the war years saw the full fruition, had been all his. And, “Luck?” he thought, “you can’t call a thing like that luck. War or no war, the ultimate success was always certain.”

The one-time corn-chandler got out of his bath, towelled himself vigorously, lathered his cheeks and shaved them clean with sure steady strokes of the long-bladed razor. Shaving, sentiment flickered out of him. But for a while imagination still glimmered. Cranston’s, after all, was only the corner-stone, the square-hewn solid corner-stone, whereon he meant to rear the edifice of even greater successes. Already, thanks to the capital set free by the flotation of the family business, the walls of that edifice were rising. In imagination, he saw them towering to the financial skies. And, “I must build well,” he thought. “I must watch each stone into its place, see each girder set solid in its concrete. Stability! Stability is the test of value, as self-discipline is the test of a man.”

Then deliberately as he wiped his razor, Gerald Cranston wiped his mind clean of financial problems, and set himself to consider the stability of that other edifice, the edifice of his marriage.