Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 31

Table of Contents

The enjoying of money—that is to say, money in a really formidable quantity—is an art like any other; the practitioner of the art must be born with an instinctive flair for it, like the man who some day is to paint pictures or compose music. He must, in addition, assiduously practise the technique of the art.

For some years, at least, Sam Silver never had a moment to acquire the art of enjoying money; or, if he had, he was far too fatigued to apply himself to it. It would be safe to say that, during the four or five years of his residence in Ivanhoe Towers, he got no more than a very incidental pleasure out of the vast sums his firm was earning. In the year 1916, a good deal of the profits went into the building of new plant, and the acquiring of new machinery. The year after, the profits were at least thirty-five thousand pounds; the year after that, sixty thousand; the year after, not less than one quarter of a million.

But, at least, until the time when he moved over to a smaller but much more comfortable house near Altrincham, the increment in his private fortune impinged upon his direct awareness far less than the sudden uprush of his wages from a slack week of twenty shillings to a “rush” week of four pounds ten. There, in Altrincham, he began to feel his way towards a state of things in which money began to be expressible in terms of diverse pleasurable experiences. There had been one or two people from the beginning anxious to help him to such realisations. There were more by then.

To put it bluntly, he had very little fun in Ivanhoe Towers, and Hannah Silver had even less. He spent much less time at home, of course, than she did. He worked far harder nowadays than he used to, when he had been one of Mr. Winberg’s or Mr. Horowitz’s hands. He went to the factory earlier in the morning, and came back later at night. He came more and more to leave matters of mere organisation to his assistant, Smirnof, though he kept tight hold of the ultimate threads of policy. So, at least, he was convinced. But when it came to the actual manufacture of the garments, there he could depute the matter to nobody. It did not occur to him to reproach himself for making a fortune out of the War, despite one or two incoherent harangues that that strange young man, Harry Stonier, addressed to him. Indeed, he seemed to be making a fortune entirely independently of whether he wanted to or not. Money was rolling down on him like snow tumbling down a gully.

He was, however, extremely conscientious about the quality of the rainproofs, waterproofs, tunics, ground-sheets, gum-boots—all the various articles of military use the War Office commissioned from him from stage to stage. He was well aware of the manifold chicaneries which some of his brother manufacturers indulged in. But that seemed to him not merely disagreeable; it was manifestly, as his own account books showed, bad business.

So he ran about the works all day long, pretending he knew all about the big machinery he had installed, and pouncing with real authority on an untidy end of cotton that some girl had not snipped away. At the works he was busy, and, in a way, happy. He was not happy in Ivanhoe Towers. He might have been a little happier if his wife had not looked so haggard and so woebegone. He crept out in the morning before she was awake; but when he returned at night, she was sitting up against the curtains of the drawing-room—her nose poked through them mournfully—where she kept her watch. A dismal ray of light fell on the moss-muted gravel and the weed-choked lawn. Every night it felt like the once-a-month visit that a man is allowed to make to a relation who has been so unlucky as to get himself shut up in prison.

There was a nucleus of habitability, it was said earlier, in Ivanhoe Towers. This was a huge basement kitchen, and one or two adjoining rooms, which Mr. and Mrs. Hargreaves, one-time retainers of the deceased Sir, occupied. It might all have been a little less unpleasant if not for Mr. and Mrs. Hargreaves. For, apparently, they went with Ivanhoe Towers, and there was about as much hope of uprooting them as of uprooting the colossal boiler in their basement kitchen. It was the sort of boiler you would have associated with a dye-works rather than with a private house. Not that it occurred to Sam and Hannah Silver, not for a long time at least, to uproot the old couple. The Silvers were not the sort of people to turn a pair of ancients out into the cold world from the home they had occupied for so many decades. But when, later, the idea was forced home upon them that it would make things easier with a younger generation of retainers at Ivanhoe Towers if the Hargreaveses were retired somewhere, it was discovered that they were tied up with the lease in the same serpentine fashion as the hot-water-pipes were tied up with the fabric of the house.

The Hargreaveses were old, but they were formidable. Whether or not they had preceded the tenure of the deceased Sir and his lady, it became increasingly evident they intended to outlive the tenure of Sam and Hannah Silver. Esther was deputed to deal with them, for it was felt, almost with heat, that Esther should have covered the Hargreaves situation when the papers were drawn up and signed. What happened when she went down into their basement-kitchen was not reported; but she did not venture there again. The Hargreaveses, as a rule, did not issue far from their basement-kitchen, but, during the few days that followed the Esther interview, they were up and about the house with a surprising agility, now shuffling along distant passages, now appearing at unexpected windows, all the time shaking their heads, their fists, tittering, he showing his brown teeth, she showing her shrivelled gums. The purport of all that was to show clearly who was to be considered lord of Ivanhoe Towers, this little upstart Jew tailor and his wife, or the late Master and Mistress, for whom, it was to be concluded, they felt they held the house on trust.

Their duties, according to the documents, were to keep clean their own steps and passages, and to look after the boiler-fire. They looked after the boiler-fire energetically but spasmodically. Sometimes they so banked up the boiler-fire that the basement-kitchen was as hot as a stoker’s hold; and they kept on banking it up till you would have thought no mortal creatures short of a pair of salamanders could have endured such an atmosphere. The poor old people looked more like salamanders, it might be said, than humans, their skin was so shrivelled and reticulated, and their eyes so beady. They used fuel in such quantities that often they found of a sudden it was all gone. It was not easy in those days, even for a Sam Silver, to restock his coal-cellars. But old Hargreaves took no notice of that. He would lie in wait for Silver before he set out for the factory, or after he returned, and abuse him violently. Then he and his wife would retire to their bed, and stay there for several days, thus establishing a further similarity between themselves and the reptilian species, which is capable of retiring into its hole, and into complete immobility, for long periods at a stretch, without being incommoded by any thought of nourishment. The house would then be plunged into arctic frost; but there was nothing to be done about it till Mr. and Mrs. Hargreaves got out of bed and attended to the boiler-fire again. It should be added that the house was never warm, even with the boiler going full blast down in the kitchen-basement. It was not warmth that the boiler distributed through the house along its network of pipes, so much as noises. The pipes in the Silvers’ bedroom ticked like an infernal machine; even, mysteriously enough, when the fire was out downstairs. Sam Silver had talked of infernal machines often enough in the old Oleander Street days, but that did not prevent him from getting up, cold with fright, time after time, to hear those ticking shifting noises a few feet behind the back of his skull. He knew that Hannah, lying beside him, was awake, too, but he was not sure; nor was she sure about him. So, side by side, hour after hour, they lay looking up into the pallid ceiling, listening to that clicking and ticking, remembering Oleander Street and their cosy bedroom there, and their cosy kitchen there, which was their own, their very own, and none to keep them away from it with warning finger and beady eye, from the fire, the kettle, the teapot, the tumblers, the sugar, the lemon, the warm sweet ritual of their Golden Age.

This would be a mournful document if an attempt were to be made to tell the tale of the housekeepers, maids, chauffeurs, and the rest that came and went at Ivanhoe Towers during the Silver phase of its history. It is doubtless clear by now that Hannah Silver would not have made a success of running a big house even under much happier auspices; for she had never made a success of running a very small house, at least in the purely domestic sense of the word. She would have been grateful for a lot more help from Esther, and that was a significant development, for the time had been when there was nothing in the world that terrified her so much as help from Esther. But after the first few months, Esther had less and less time to devote to Ivanhoe Towers. It was clear to her she would have to postpone till after the War the idea of the Tishler bungalow to be built at the bottom of her parents’ garden. Any building she could negotiate was in connection with the Pliskin cabinet-making works, which her husband, Joe, acquired about this time, by arrangement with Alexander Smirnof; which she herself acquired, to be accurate. For Joe, revealing depths of patriotic sentiment astonishing in one so lately an anarchist, went to be a soldier, leaving Esther, who had been a dutiful wife and prodigal mother for several years, to become a business-woman—a rôle in which she bore herself with great distinction.

May was not much use, either, at Ivanhoe Towers. The child had never seemed happy since they came to live in this Bridgeways Gaol of a house. The young man, Harry Stonier, never came to see her, although apparently there had been no quarrel. They still saw each other now and again—outside somewhere. The child never made any secret of it. Then he went off to Norwich to serve in the Quakers’ Ambulance Corps. It was one of his funny crotchets, without a doubt, this idea of never coming to the house. He was, after all, just a working-man, like they themselves had all been; or he was a clerk, anyhow, and his father was a working-man. What for did he have all these funny ideas? Mrs. Silver hoped that May would now meet some nice young Jewish gentleman—he might even be a high-up officer—and that would be nicer for everyone all round.

Then May, too, went off. She went off to serve in a canteen in Boulogne, France. The house felt quite appallingly empty without her. Mrs. Silver swallowed a lump in her throat. At all events, it would be easier for May to meet that nice young Jewish gentleman over in France, who might also be a high-up officer.

She turned again to this desolate business of housekeepers, maids, housekeepers, maids. She wondered what she had done to deserve it all. She snivelled secretly into her handkerchief. It was not really strange that there was all this trouble with staff. If the kitchen wasn’t as hot as a furnace, it was as cold as a tomb. The situation was further complicated by the clause in the contract about Mrs. Hargreaves keeping the steps and passages clean. The Hargreaveses were nothing if not literal-minded. He did, indeed, look after his boiler-fire, and she did, indeed, look after her steps and passages. She surrounded the kitchen with a noli me tangere of soap and water, and sometimes, for hours at a stretch, connection between the kitchen and the upper house was completely cut off. It did not make for permanence on the part of the new-comers. Now and again a stern lady, old or young, showed fight; but sooner or later, she was ignominiously worsted. Another maid to find, another housekeeper.

Silver acquired a car. It was impossible to acquire a house like Ivanhoe Towers without acquiring a car, too. It was a car of great magnificence, and a chauffeur of great magnificence went with it. Pulliton seemed to be tied up with the car pretty much in the same way as the Hargreaveses were tied up with the house. Silver wasn’t quite clear about it, but the manufacturers seemed to be rather diffident of letting anybody have so grand a car without taking on a Pulliton to maintain it in the state which it was born into.

Pulliton was so magnificent that he had to have an underling to keep the polish on the woodwork and the glass and the metal and the coachwork. Some might have thought that Pulliton was magnificent enough to be in the Army. But that was all right. Either he had been, or he was too superb to be. Nobody could have begun to frame the inquiry, even in the secrecy of his own mind, without being overborne at once the moment the majesty of Pulliton’s presence rendered itself.

Pulliton was not merely a noble animal; he was a distinguished mechanic. But not even Pulliton, sitting at the wheel of even that car, was proof against the hoodoo that Sam Silver established as soon as he seated himself in a car. He belonged to a clearly defined species who live in a state of mystical discordance with petrol-driven machinery. The most shameful things go wrong with the most impeccable engines when they seek to establish relations with them. The radiator starts boiling or the brakes seize or the big-end goes. It takes not many minutes for a puncture to happen. And at night the lights fuse.

Things went wrong in Silver’s car so frequently that Pulliton was forced, for the sake of his own credit and the credit of the manufacturers, to reduce Silver’s use of the car to a minimum. These things did not, as a matter of fact, happen when Silver was not in the car. When some young female member of the staff was looking the worse for wear—and how was it possible not to look the worse for wear in a house built up on a foundation of Hargreaveses?—Pulliton never spared the use of the car in the effort to restore the colour to the young lady’s cheeks. On those occasions the car moved like a bird.

So, quite often, Silver went to his factory on the tramcar, as he used to in the days when he worked for old Mr. Horowitz in the little sweating-den by the river which had so grotesquely budded and blossomed these last few years. Sometimes he got a lift in a car belonging to some associate or other in the trade, who, like himself, had acquired a house and a garden in the Baxter’s Moor neighbourhood, but a smaller house and a smaller garden. However, he was not popular in cars. He was not good for them.

There was not much in the way of a social life at Ivanhoe Towers. Silver and his peers were far too busy at their factories to find much time for that sort of thing, though now and again one or two manufacturers, almost as bewildered by it all as Silver himself, dropped in and smoked an expensive cigar and drank a glass of expensive brandy, and played a hand at whist, or even bridge, if there were enough of them. They would have preferred to play “Pishy-pashy,” it was much more a rest for the nerves, but doubtless it seemed too proletarian a game—the sort of game their workmen played in their houses in Longton and Bridgeways.

Gone for ever, it seemed, were those old days, the anarchist days, the tea-with-lemon days. The anarchists were disbanded. Some turned out to be straightforward, even fervent, patriots when the test came. As Polednik had always prophesied, Dan Jamieson, the Socialist orator, and one or two of his Socialist colleagues, became as imperialist as any born lord when the imperialists summoned them to fight for them in their war. They were fighting, or doing some sort of direct military service somewhere, at a great remove from Ivanhoe Towers.

Some of the anarchists were conscientious objectors, as Harry Stonier was, for instance; though it would never have been quite right to call Stonier an anarchist. Several of the Russians enlisted in the Army; others, and amongst these were the poets, Ponski and Pontrevitch, violently objected to fighting in a war of which one of the main sponsors was the Tsar, Nicholas the Second. Their position became a little ambiguous when the February Revolution in Russia dislodged the Tsar. It became really difficult when an agreement was presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of His Majesty, King George the Fifth, in July 1917. It was described as an “Agreement concluded between His Majesty’s Government and the Provisional Government of Russia relative to the reciprocal liability to military service of British subjects resident in Russia and Russian subjects resident in Great Britain.” The situation was more than difficult. It was menacing. For, in fact, Ponski and Pontrevitch had not much more lust to fight for the Cadets, or the Bolsheviks, or whoever might ultimately gain the ascendancy in Russia, than they had had to fight for the Tsar. They had always pronounced themselves to be quite specifically anarchists, and they were very troubled by the reports that zealous efforts were being made to extirpate the anarchists in Petrograd and Moscow.

But there was the agreement in black and white, signed at Petrograd, in duplicate, by George W. Buchanan and Michel Terestchenko. So Ponski and Pontrevitch, and several other Silver anarchists, were deported to Russia, where, in point of fact, they found it convenient for the most part to forget their anarchist doctrines; and one or two attained high position in the Bolshevik régime, which a few months later overthrew its rivals and assumed the leadership of affairs.

So Ponski and Pontrevitch, as well as the patriots, were prevented from visiting Ivanhoe Towers, if it had occurred to them to do so. Representations had been made to M. Chicherin, who was active in a committee formed to look after the interests of Russian political emigrants. But without avail. So Ponski and Pontrevitch, and the others, set forth for Russia, leaving their wives and children behind them. Most of these soon fell to the charge of Sam Silver. But, these, too, did not visit Ivanhoe Towers to lighten its gloom a little. They were themselves not very light-hearted.

Hannah Silver acquired a car as well as her husband. Pulliton’s underling drove it for her when he was not too busy polishing Pulliton’s car’s woodwork and glass and metal and coachwork. But she did not like to disturb him at that occupation too often, partly because Pulliton didn’t like it, partly because she hadn’t anywhere much to go to in her car. The only place she much wanted to go to was Longton, the region of the streets of the flowering shrubs. For there, in the streets of the Oleander and the Magnolia and the Acacia, most of her friends lived. But it was out of the question to go visiting in a car in that region. She would have felt it the acme of bad taste. So she and her husband used the tramcar almost as much as common working-people, though, for one reason and another, as the war years went on, their visits became fewer and fewer.

She was acutely embarrassed the first time she returned to Longton after the removal to Ivanhoe Towers. She was so shy about it that she put off the visit for months. Finally, a fit of such acute depression seized her, that, putting on an old dress which Esther somehow had forgotten to get rid of, she crept forth. She got off the car in Blenheim Road opposite the corner of Oleander Street. It was dusk. It was not to one of her Oleander Street friends she went. She could not have borne that. She turned into Magnolia Street, and knocked timidly at Mrs. Emmanuel’s door. It was easier to visit the Emmanuels than anybody else, for Mr. Emmanuel, who was in the habit of visiting rich houses to enlist them in support of his various philanthropic schemes, had more than once visited the Silvers at Ivanhoe Towers.

There was another reason. The Emmanuel back door faced the back door of her own house, number eleven Oleander Street. She knocked. The Emmanuels were unaffectedly delighted to see her. They had great tact, too. They made tea-with-lemon for her, as she so often had made for them. There was lekkach, cake sprinkled with poppy-seed. The kettle sang cheerfully on the hob. The reflections of the bright flames danced up and down upon Mrs. Emmanuel’s brass trays and candlesticks and samovar. Mrs. Silver’s heart uncurled like a bud trembling in response to a spring wind.

They made no song about it when she asked might she go upstairs to the back bedroom, and look down on the yard and the kitchen of her house in Oleander Street across the entry; for she was still its landlord, and she did not know if the new tenants were treating her property with respect. It was night now, and quite clearly she would not be able to make out very much. But they took her upstairs, and left her there, and closed the door behind her. She came down a few minutes later, her eyes shining somewhat suspiciously. She had forgotten, moreover, to put her handkerchief away into her handbag, and her handkerchief seemed quite damp.

But the Emmanuels made no comment.

“You’ll come again, soon?” they both insisted, when Mrs. Silver left at last. “You promise you’ll come again soon?”

“I will,” breathed Mrs. Silver.

“And perhaps you’ll bring your husband, too? It will be like old times.”

She brought her husband, he was very happy to come, even though he was so busy in his factory. And, indeed, the Emmanuels were right. It was quite like old times. Except that the Silvers were rich now, and they had been poor once; and that a Great War was in progress, so that most of the young men of Magnolia Street and Oleander Street were missing, and some were dead, like David, the youngest son of the Emmanuels. Otherwise, it was quite like old times.