Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 14

Table of Contents

It did not take more than a month or two before the feeling gained ground that Sam Silver was not, after all, a formidable recruit to the ranks of capital. He was a good honest workman, but no boss. He didn’t possess the boss mentality.

In fact, the Silver factory remained about as low down in the scale as the Horowitz factory. Perhaps Silver was too honest. Perhaps he was too easy-going with his workmen. Perhaps he was too ashamed of having turned his back on his old friends to be able to put his heart in it. But there it was. Silver as boss couldn’t be taken seriously, even though he developed a rather bushy black moustache at this time, rather capitalistic in shape and texture. It was also possible that the moustache mobilised itself of its own accord, because he was too dispirited to do anything about it.

So gradually the anarchists drifted back to the Silver kitchen. It was never quite the same thing as it had been before. The hands of the clock cannot march back on their traces, nor the stream flow uphill again. But a good number of the habitués returned. The happy chirrup settled like a canary again on Mrs. Silver’s lips. Silver again took up his seat at the head of the table at the confluence of the draughts from the kitchen door and the front street door. No reference was made to Silver’s new status. It was treated as guests might treat a smell of cooking coming up from the kitchen when they are being collected in a drawing-room during the few minutes that precede a dinner-party. It was there. It hung faintly about in the air. But it wasn’t talked about.

No, it wasn’t quite the same gang of anarchists as had gathered about Silver’s kitchen a year ago. But the gang itself had never been identical two Saturdays running. Was it that the Tendenz, the Stimmung, were not quite what they had been? Would you say that there had been a slight swivelling towards the right?

For instance, would Harry Stonier have felt quite at home in the Silver kitchen a year ago, or would not the anarchists have cold-shouldered him into the street again? Harry Stonier was a clerk at the Town Hall now. For two years after leaving school he had worked in a wire factory. He was a working-class man like the rest of them.

Yet he wasn’t, somehow. Because he was a clerk at the Town Hall? You couldn’t have that up against him. He wouldn’t have been the first clerk to find his way into the Silver kitchen. And the fact that he worked for the municipality didn’t mean that he was an out-and-out supporter of the old régime. No, it wasn’t that. His father, moreover, was a brass-moulder. Had been, and still was. Harry Stonier had once told them so when they had asked him.

They had asked him. That was the point. They had gone as far as that. He didn’t carry about with him the atmosphere of the working-man, bone and blood of the working-people. Far less did he seem to belong as of right to their company of root-and-branch rebels. In fact it was said of him that when someone, meeting him in a public park, asked him what his politics were, he looked quite alarmed, as if he did not know what the word meant. He had blushed and been silent for some time. Then he said: “Oh, me? I suppose I’m a Liberal. Is that all right?”

But the matter was not brought up in the Silver kitchen. They did not rise with dynamite-stick and bomb to excommunicate him. They let him stay. He was very young, after all; he was only seventeen. May was sixteen. As a rule he did not stay long. May would look into her father’s face and would find there some indication, whether he looked at her or not, as to whether she should stay or go. If she went, Harry Stonier went with her.

Sometimes he left, even if May stayed behind for one reason or another. And that was because Elsie had turned up. Harry Stonier and Elsie Silver did not get on well with each other at all. He did nothing about it, but sometimes she was quite rude, even though she knew how much that pained May, for whom she would do anything in the world except stop being rude to Harry Stonier. She thought him a molly-coddle and a mammy’s darling, and said so. So he got up and went. He and May would arrange to meet in Baxter’s Moor or Layton Park, if it was likely that Elsie would be about. They were young, those two, but they cared for each other a great deal already. He was Gentile and she was Jewish, but nobody said anything about it, not even Esther, though it was impossible to say how long Esther would remain silent. Possibly she had not said anything yet because Elsie was so rude to the young man; and those two sisters made a point of never backing each other up. Besides, they were two children; in one or two important ways they were far younger than sixteen and seventeen. So May Silver and Harry Stonier went on reading Lamia and Epipsychidion to each other, and thrusting their way through the tangled bluebell drifts in the Mitchen copses.