Читать книгу Iron and Smoke - Sheila Kaye-Smith - Страница 18

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In the Spring, Timothy Bastow came to stay at Herringdales. Humphrey felt that his coming would please Jenny and at the same time would not sweep her back too dangerously into the old contacts. Also he might make the home atmosphere more exhilarating, ventilate it with a few ideas and abstractions. It was curious, Humphrey thought, that when he had lived alone he had never felt dull but that now he was married he strove continually with successive moods of boredom and mental oppression.

Jenny was delighted to welcome her brother. His arrival made her forget the sorrow of the last meet and the last gallop, when the April menace drove the East Sussex hounds back to kennel. In spite of the changing weather they had a good run to Terrible Down, killing in the little wood that borders the Laughton road, and when she came home, tired and glowing, she found Timothy already waiting for her at the Herringdales.

She kissed him enthusiastically, and he saw how she had changed—grown prettier and more important—with just a touch of the hoyden, it seemed to him, as she came in with the skirts of her habit thrown over her arm, and her tall hat set rakishly by the wind. She on her side was not so pleased with him. He seemed worn and preoccupied; she told herself he must be working too hard.

The first evening was all talk—chiefly Timothy’s and Humphrey’s. Having made her first enquiries after her parents and those at home, and having received the satisfying answers she expected, Jenny was glad to sit and listen, glad to feel that Humphrey now at last had the comradeship of mind that he desired, even though she was not bestowing it. She listened carefully to their conversation, making notes for her own guidance. It seemed to her that her manner and point of view were not so different from Timothy’s, after all, and yet she knew that even if she said the exact things Timothy was saying now Humphrey would not answer her as he answered him. Also she would never dare contradict him as her brother contradicted. Timothy contradicted almost everything he said, and he seemed to like it. She knew that he would not like it from her.

The next day Humphrey went over to Yockletts’ Court, his estate in Kent, which he left in charge of a bailiff. He was over there nearly every month, and as the trains were few and the connections bad he generally stayed away for a couple of nights. Jenny did not care very much for being left alone at night, even though Anna Luck was appointed to sleep in Humphrey’s dressing-room. The sighing and whispering of the old house, which now she scarcely noticed when her husband was at home, would become very persistent as she sat alone in the drawing-room after dinner, and worse still when she lay alone in the great hearse-like bed with its columns and plumes. She would conceive the ridiculous fear that one day the house might actually succeed in telling her its secret ... and then she would be finished, burdened, haunted.... She did not know why or how; but sometimes the fear would dominate her, and cowering down in bed, she would stuff her ears, and silence the voice that spoke out of the wall and the beam that answered it.

She had not dared tell Humphrey of these fears, but she had persuaded him to make his April journey into Kent coincide with her brother’s visit. It would be good, too, to have Timothy to herself. When Humphrey was there she felt she could not spoil the conversation by dragging it round to her own interests, but alone with her brother she could talk as her heart dictated. She could make him tell her all the trifles of Slapewath and Eden-in-Cleveland and she would confide in him all her social aims and embarrassments, stopping only on the edge of that secret country where she and her husband wandered in search of each other. She could not take him there.

It was a fine morning, so she suggested that they should both ride. The horses were brought, and they rode down into the Cucknere Valley, by Pigstone and Clappers and Thunders Hill, so that she could give him at least the names of the old black country that had been. But she found him poor company that day, and all the good talk she had planned came to nothing. Even a gallop along the wide grassy border of the Dicker road gave him only a passing exhilaration.

“Tim, I believe you’re not well,” she said to him as they rode home—“You don’t seem yourself, somehow. Are you over-working?”

“No, I’m not likely to do that at Oxford.”

“Aren’t you? I’d have thought ... But I’m sure you’re worried about something. You’re not a bit yourself.”

“What is myself, Jenny?” he asked with a smile.

“The Tim I’m used to.”

“Well, aren’t you used to a very odd creature, whose ways you can’t always account for?”

“No, I don’t think you’re at all odd, Tim—even though I don’t agree with lots of your ideas. You may be different, but you’re not odd.”

“What a splitting of hairs, my dear Jen. You make more distinctions than the dictionary. And when you have on your dinner-table a piece of china that’s different from the rest, don’t you call it an odd piece?”

“Well, anyhow, I wish you’d tell me what’s the matter.”

“Very well, then, I will.”

She had refused to let him take her up an argumentative side-street, and after all he had come to Heathfield with the idea of telling her if not the purpose. He would have preferred to tell her just before he left, so that their days together could be unclouded, but evidently he had already brought into them the shadow of a secret, and it would be better to speak clearly at once. Already she was anxious.

“Tim—it’s nothing to do with Mother?”

“No, not directly. Indirectly it affects us all. It’s the firm that’s causing anxiety.”

“Dad’s work.”

“That’s it. Only unfortunately they’re not all Dad’s. If they were, then we could manage better.”

“What exactly has happened?”

“Nothing’s happened yet, but I’m afraid it’s going to. You see, the iron trade’s getting past the boom. Business is much slacker than it used to be, and I feel something really bad in the way of a slump is coming. Our company simply can’t face that. It’s not organised to stand the smallest loss. All our profits have gone in dividends. It’s foolish to pay those huge dividends, but we don’t seem able to help it. The people who financed us at the start, and got nothing out of the firm for years, now naturally want their money back. We’ve not been able to put by a penny, and now if things should slump even moderately we’re done for.”

“But are you sure they’re going to slump?”

“Practically. In some quarters they’ve slumped already. It’s unofficially known that Hendersons’ is going into liquidation and I’ve heard the same about Gibson and Partners. You see, the demand for iron isn’t continuous, like the demand for coal, or the demand for eatables, such as the big Quaker firms are wise enough to trade in. If we were selling chocolates we could go on for ever. But the time’s bound to come when every house in England that’s going to have a bathroom will have got one. You’ve no idea how much of our trade is purely domestic—baths and pipes and stoves—and no amount of new building is ever likely to give us the boom we had when every British householder woke up to the fact that he ought to have a bathroom, with hot and cold water laid on.”

“But what about machinery in factories, and all that?”

“There again you’ve got a rush that’s died down. People have been building factories thick and fast for the last fifty years. Now we’ve got enough, and the whole thing’s going much more slowly. As for a war, which everybody thinks would make the fortune of the iron trade, we’re too rocky at present—anyway Bastow’s is—for a war to do us the slightest good. The economic upset would bust us up before we could benefit from any orders we might receive—not that the firm shall ever make war material if I can help it.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Nothing at present—just hold on, and try and prevent the partners losing their heads and forcing us into liquidation. If only we can hang on, we may be able to weather the storm.”

“Timothy, what about my dowry?”

“Well, you’re in the same hole as the rest of us. I’m afraid you may lose some of it. You won’t lose it all, and you may lose none. That’s all I can say.”

“Humphrey would be awfully worried if he knew. He’s counting on my money—my income, you know—to help along the estate, and pay off the mortgage on the land he has in Kent. We don’t spend half our income, and the rest all goes to the land.”

“Your husband’s got some sense—more sense than we have. But don’t tell him about this, Jen; it would only worry him, and it might make him furious with Dad. Of course Dad ought to have let him know how things were—he said he didn’t know himself then, but he must have. Nothing may come of it all, and then it would have been a pity to have upset him. Perhaps I oughtn’t to have told you, but you saw I was worried and it’s been a relief to talk about things.”

“I’m glad you told me. Is Dad frightfully worried?”

“He is a bit, but he’s more hopeful than I am.”

“Well, he knows the business better than you, so perhaps it’s not so bad after all.”

Timothy shook his head.

“He’s got to bluff himself. But don’t fret, Jenny. You shan’t lose everything. Of course if we go bust you get your money out—what’s left of it. That might make things up to Humphrey a good deal. I know he wanted ready money for the estate, and the fact that Dad couldn’t give him any ought to have warned him. But I suppose he doesn’t know much about business.”

“No—at least not our sort of business. Though his family used to be in the iron trade hundreds of years ago.”

“Well, I for one shan’t grumble if the Bastows go the way of the Mallards.”

“But, Timothy, you must stand by Dad and the firm, you mustn’t let your ideas prevent your helping him now he’s in a tight corner.”

“I won’t, Jen. Even if I don’t love the iron-trade I love my people, and I don’t want to see them ruined and disappointed and set to struggle once again in their old age. All the same I like the farms down here better than the factories up there. Oast-houses seem to me a great improvement on chimneys, and it’s a relief to see a view that doesn’t include at least one Big Smoke.”

“Well, as it happens, this farm we’re riding by is Pigstone, where the Mallards’ furnace used to be. That pond was their hammer pond, and the furnace used to be down just there where the little wood is now.”

Timothy gazed in respectful silence at the low red farmhouse, the cowled oasts and many-coloured barns that were mirrored in the long smooth mere, the end of which was lost mysteriously in a low, scrambling wood.

“Well, if Bastow, Routh and Partners ever comes to look like this ...”

“It was the biggest furnace west of Rye, and you could hear their hammers going right away as far as Chiddingly. That’s why that hill we came up from the valley is called Thunders Hill, because you used to hear the hammers thundering away at Pigstone.”

“How long has it been a farm?”

“Oh, ever since sixteen hundred and something. The Mallards gave up working iron when they became baronets and landed gentry. But they say that if you walk up Thunders Hill at night you can still hear the forge going—the hammers going—‘boom—boom’—like thunder far away.”