Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 27

Table of Contents

When the Great War broke out, there were many for whom the emotion crystallised itself into a few words in a ditty, a few notes in an air. The air was sometimes palpable enough in its relevance to the event, as when some remembered a former war and hummed: “Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you”; or loyalty to their native land rose like a lump in the throat, and they proclaimed: “Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles.”

But when Alexander Smirnof went about all day long, on that fateful fourth day in August, humming: “Lascia, ch’io pianga,” the relevance was not so palpable. Esther Tishler did not happen to come within his orbit that day, but, if she had, she would not have remembered that she had once before heard him hum those notes, beating time to them with one hand. She had not recognised what air it was, or been sure that he sang at all, his voice was so faint, and the hand that beat time hardly moved at all.

But on that day, and on this, the same images were in his mind. He did not see the lean snouts of guns slowly lift, swing right or left, recoil; he had no vision of streaming banners or streaming brains. He saw moonlight coming through the ragged palm-leaves that leaned down over cafés in Rio de Janeiro. He heard the cut-throat players in the cheap orchestra play great music. It all seemed nearer and further in the same moment than it had ever seemed before. It seemed nearer because he saw as clearly as few men did that day what opportunities would come, in a doubtful trickle first, then in roaring spate, of making money.

Money? He was too busy and too happy that day to ask himself if that forty-five thousand pounds he had once declared to be his goal would still satisfy him. Or had he, in point of fact, said thirty-five thousand pounds? To anybody but Alexander Smirnof the thought that that man would withdraw some day from the concern owned by the man Sam Silver with any such sum as forty-five thousand pounds would have seemed as preposterous as that he should some day deal with millions of pounds as if they were pieces on a chess-board. But perhaps the thought would not have seemed preposterous if it had occurred to Smirnof. He never had, and never developed, the sort of imagination which automatically converts money into the things it can buy. He never saw his Rio de Janeiro fantasy encompassed by any luxury which might have been beyond the scope of a retired civil servant’s pension. He developed no vision of a wife encrusted with diamonds, like a pier-post with barnacles; no vision of thousand-ton yachts; no vision of a grand drawing-room in which the coloratura soprano of the season made lovely and expensive music.

It was true that one or two of these things became imposed upon him, partly by the natural pressure which wealth exerts towards the aggrandisement of one’s scale of living, partly as a manœuvre indispensable from the manipulation of capital on a large scale. Yet these were external not internal pressures. To him money was itself a music, which became more musical the more nearly it attained those dimensions in which it becomes, so to speak, intangible. It was a music outside the music of voices and instruments, a chess-board where the pieces were involved in a game as subtle and abstract as Lasker’s, a sort of scholastic theology.

“Lascia, ch’io pianga,” he hummed under his breath; and the air brought the fiddles and guitars of Rio nearer, for he foresaw that the money was going to be made which might buy them. And it thrust them, in that same moment, further, for his heart leaped, like a lover’s, at the thought of money breeding, not fiddles and guitars, but more money, more money, bubbling and hissing like the wake of a ship.

Silver’s firm, which had now become a limited-liability company, had an advantage over its rivals from the beginning. Only two or three months earlier, Smirnof had transferred it to a large factory in Rochdale Road, half gutted by a fire. He had a salamander instinct for fire, which would lead him half way across a county almost before the fire had broken out. The factory went for a song, for it seemed useless, until a large capital sum had been expended, to put it to rights. Silver was very miserable about it all and went up and down tugging nervously at his moustache. But Smirnof assured him that his initiative would be handsomely rewarded a lot sooner than he thought. And it was.

Smirnof’s nostrils smarted with intimations of the greatest of all fires. He saw all the heavens glow with flame when a few boys put a match to a handful of shavings at Sarajevo, and he quietly transferred his makers’ tables and machines to the parts of the building in the new factory which had been declared safe by the surveyors. He would disappear for two days, three days, at a time, softly making his preparations. When the war broke out, there was an initial depression in the industry which made everyone but Smirnof look very hang-dog about overhead expenses. But Smirnof scented at once the torrent of orders that was to come pouring in. He landed the first big Government order. It was easy enough to buy machines, all he needed was joiners to put up more and more makers’ tables. As the demand increased, he extended the factory into charred insecure regions of the building, which would have provoked considerable unpleasantness on the part of the authorities at a time of less urgency. He was among the first to realise how invaluable women were going to be to the employer of labour. The output and the profits soared.

A scandal here and there was uncovered at this time, but in other firms than Sam Silver’s. The stitching was inadequate in garments apparently perfect; collars and pocket-flaps were cut cunningly below specification; there was bribing and corrupting of agents. Silver’s face was a book no official could or did distrust. His word was a bond that was never violated.

In 1916 the output had become so vast that shifts working night and day could not keep pace with it. An architect and a firm of builders, with heavy backing from the Government, put up a fifty-thousand square feet one-floor factory for the firm on the Longton brick-croft, with space alongside and behind for unlimited development. The firm’s liability to the builders was discharged, as it seemed, overnight.

Smirnof neglected no avenue of aggrandisement. He gave his workers a bigger bonus than all his rivals. He bought over from the most powerful of them a young research chemist of great brilliance, at a salary three times greater than he had been receiving, and his patent processes reduced the cost per garment by twenty per cent. The profits per garment became more and more satisfactory, and in a few months they were turning out ten, twenty thousand garments per week, and more.

In 1917, they opened a proofing-plant so that they might do their own proofing. They were still receiving their cotton cloth in a dyed state, but delivery was not prompt enough for their furious energy. They therefore opened a dyeing-plant near the proofing-works. They then bought up weaving-sheds in Yorkshire, and established a subsidiary company for the sale of cloth to the rivals they had outstripped. In 1918 there was a flutter of alarm among the manufacturers lest the big bountiful War should be over before the year was out. But Smirnof was convinced that the end of the War, so far from withering this golden harvest, would for a certain time increase its fantastic fertility. The soldiers would be coming back, and would need new clothing. New States would be formed, and would want to dress themselves up like gentlemen. He extended the parent plant on the Longton brick-croft. He bought more machinery, another weaving-shed in Yorkshire. He almost did not notice the War had come to an end, he was so busy negotiating the purchase of a cotton-mill in Lancashire, and extending the ramifications of his export trade to half a dozen countries.

Sam Silver was a very rich man by now. Alexander Smirnof was very rich, too. And, perhaps, Smirnof, who had worked very hard, was meditating his retirement, now, or in some months, or in a year or two at most, for he had richly deserved it. And, in fact, Sarah Smirnof, his wife, asked him more than once about Rio de Janeiro, almost worried him—a thing she was not used to do. It would be so good for the children, the sun and the sea.

But Alexander Smirnof did not go to Rio de Janeiro.