Success
a thing as we have been discussing has got to be above suspicion. He
can’t do it properly otherwise; there must be plenty of people, who,
in the nature of things, must distrust him, suspect him of playing
his own game and the rest. It would be extremely difficult for anyone
to come in and do this work, even with a spotless reputation and
friends at court; without them about impossible. For a rank outsider,
with a scarred reputation, it is not to be thought of. The directors
themselves could not help going back on such a one after a time,
no matter how they started; it isn’t in reason that they should be
unimpressed by all that would be brought up against him by men they
knew and liked when he had really set to work and was making enemies
with both hands. There obviously would be chances for a man to feather
his own nest and play his own game in the unique position they had put
him in. They could not help realising it, and after a bit, they would
not like it in the light of Galhardy’s; and, what’s more, they would
not go on with it, no matter how they started, their faith would not be
robust enough. Your own would not be.”
“Oh?” Carson said. “You think that? Though I did not think you a
blackguard at the time of the Galhardy business, I should when the
racket began? I didn’t myself know I was in the habit of changing my
mind so easily.”
“No,” Michael protested, “it isn’t that! I don’t think you would change
your mind, or ever go back on me about that. I know that and——. Well, I
don’t suppose you know quite what it’s worth to me. It’s not that which
would make the difference to you, though it would to others; but it
would, through others and the general talk and publicity and row there
would be, make the need for more faith in me than—than it is reasonable
to expect you to have.”
“Look here”—he leaned forward and spoke earnestly—“I’m not one of you,
not really, and I never have been and never will be, whatever I may
have pretended or persuaded myself or played at. I don’t belong, and,
inside, vaguely you know it; I have different standards, I do some
things you wouldn’t, probably won’t do some things you do—have not
just your code; and when I was in that position you could not help
remembering it. You would be justified, for it would come into play and
worry you. You see, in that position I should be your man; in a very
little while they would be all against me and the whole thing; you, who
first introduced me, would be the only one for me, and you would have
to be for me in no common manner to make the position workable. And you
couldn’t be; however honest you might think me in the main, you could
not forget about the other things, the different standpoint and code,
and so on. It is not possible.”
“Only possible to let Jeffersons’ peter out to respectable bankruptcy,
paying twenty shillings in the pound?”
“It won’t do that. You can do something yourself: see no more of these
wasters get in, pension a few of them off on some excuse, and make the
improvements in machinery, I spoke of. That’s quite possible; but the
other——”
“You won’t undertake it?”
“No.”
Carson’s eyes had narrowed a little, they were rather small eyes,
but set far apart and very honest. “You aren’t right,” he began
obstinately, then he got up. “Oh, damn it all!” he said; he knew that
he was right.
* * * * *
“There’s one thing I can’t stand about Annarly,” he said afterwards to
Lady Sibyl, “that is his infernal logic and clearsightedness! It isn’t
decent to see so far into a thing. He’s not content with knowing why he
does what he does himself, which is bad enough; but he knows why other
fellows do a sight more clearly than they do themselves—till he tells
them, which is beastly.”
“Why didn’t he come back with you?” Lady Sibyl asked.
“Got to be in town.”
“On Saturday?”
“Well, he said so; I suppose he works on Sunday, I don’t know; anyhow,
he wouldn’t come, though, when we first got to Winder’s, he said he
would. I don’t know why he changed his mind, but he did.”
“We must ask him again later on,” Lady Sibyl said.
“He won’t come,” her husband told her. “Bet you what you like, he
won’t.”
Lady Sibyl looked surprised. “Why not?” she asked.
“Don’t know.” Carson did not know why he did things, or why other
people did, and could not have expressed it if he had. “Something to do
with his view of himself and us, perhaps. Awfully queer. But I believe
he was right in a way. I believe I would have come to think like that
of him. Fact I do now, I believe. Give you my word, Sib, I never felt
such a sweep in my life, but he was right, and he was right not to take
that job.”
CHAPTER XII
Nan sat by the window of the brown upper room; from it she commanded
a view of little beyond the quiet street into which people seldom
entered. Few people did that afternoon, although it was a fine
Saturday; after a time, however, she saw someone, Michael carrying his
bag, on his way home after the visit of inspection to the cotton-mill.
He looked up as he reached the house, and she smiled to him, trying
to learn from his face if any good had resulted from the visit. She
did not succeed, she must wait till he came in. Till after he had been
in some time very likely, for she seldom asked questions, it seemed
to her intrusive to do so, usually waiting till information should be
volunteered.
To-day it happened that she did not have to wait long; soon Michael
joined her at the window and began almost at once to speak of the
events of the last few days and the work at Jeffersons’.
“I am not going to take it up,” he said.
“Not? Did not Mr. Carson want you to?”
“I suppose I might have had it, but it wouldn’t have answered.”
She asked what it would have been worth; he did not know, but he
guessed a liberal salary. She guessed so too, and also that it would
have entailed something like the possibility of a return to a life and
position not dissimilar from the one he had lost. Yet he had said it
would not answer for him to take it.
“You see,” he explained, “it was not the machinery which was wrong;
there were other things.” He went on to tell her about them in
the intermittent way in which he used, going into some things with
unnecessary minuteness, forgetting others altogether, misstating and
twisting some, conveying to most people a very inaccurate idea of
facts, but to Nan a most accurate one of the way in which he personally
saw them, and the mental and spiritual process which underlay it.
“So I told Carson I wouldn’t do it,” he concluded, “and here I am
again, where I was last October.”
“Not quite where you were,” she corrected; “that time the thing, work
and position and all the rest, was taken from you; this time you have
declined it.”
“I had no choice.”
She held that he had. “But even supposing you had not, there is still
a great difference between then and now. There seem to me to be three
ways of taking it when a thing is forced upon you—to resist, to submit
doggedly, or to accept and forward the end yourself. And the last—to
will what the gods will—always seems to give one the strong place, to
make one no longer the victim, but almost the equal and fellow-worker
with them.”
Such an idea had not occurred to Michael, it interested him a good deal
on the theoretical side though——
“Practically,” he said, “it doesn’t apply in this case. I’m not a
victim; in fact, it was Carson who felt bad about the decision, not I.”
Nan forbore to point out that his own words might be thought a
confirmation of her theory. She pursued the subject no further, but
mentioned instead more mundane matters.
“Miss Foregood and George are coming to tea,” she said. “Father and
Josiah have gone to look at a lot of furniture which is for sale at a
big house in Warwickshire, so Miss Janet is coming to tea with me to
hear about Rosalind’s wedding. What with Josiah being ill and then
father we have not had a chance of talking about it before. George
wants to speak to you about some warp-winding machinery, so, when I
heard you would be home to-day, I said he had better come too.”
Soon after the visitors arrived; the one shabbier and rather more
gloomy than when Michael had last seen him, but not less dogged by
reason of six months more failure; the other, Miss Janet, as cheerful
as ever. It required more than the illness of herself and Josiah—she
had been through both lately—or even the undiluted company of George to
reduce Miss Janet.
“He is a damper,” she owned at tea—in his presence—“but damp things
don’t bother me. I hang ’em to the fire and let ’em steam; if they
don’t do much good drying, why, they don’t; I’ve something else to do
than to mind that. Now tell me about the wedding. You needn’t listen,
George, if it’s too cheerful and trivial for you. He went out when Mrs.
Barker came to talk about it. Not that I blame him for that, if ever
there was a stupid woman on this earth! She was simply full of how much
a yard they paid for the trimming of Rosalind’s dress, and how many
dozen teaspoons she had, as proud as a peacock. I’ve no patience with
her; one’d think, to hear her talk that day, she’d made the Annarlys,
not God Almighty and the dressmaker.”
Nan and Michael both laughed, and, tea being finished, Nan proposed
Miss Janet should come to her room to see the dress which she had had
for the wedding.
“Mrs. Barker was very nice to me that day,” she said, as she led the
way.
“So she told me,” Miss Foregood answered. “She was nice to Michael too,
I understand; she prides herself on not giving the cold shoulder to
those in misfortune. To do her justice, she doesn’t either, though she
hasn’t much gumption in her way of not doing it. It was a good thing
for her it was Michael and not George she ‘was going out of her way to
be nice to because he was down on his luck’—that’s what she calls it.
George would have helped her into the way again with a flea in the ear.
Is this the dress?”
Nan said it was, and Miss Janet examined it critically and without
entire approval: the breadths were too scanty, and the material
too unsubstantial to justify the price, in her opinion. After the
examination they talked of the wedding, remaining in the bedroom to do
it, so that George’s conversation on warp-winding might be undisturbed.
Nan did not add much to what her visitor had already heard, although
she described from rather a different point of view. There was,
however, one fact she mentioned which Mrs. Barker had not—for the good
reason that she was not aware of it—her own acquaintance with Mr. Giles
Cordover.
“He brought me back in his car,” she said; “that’s how it was I got to
your house so soon after the wedding. I didn’t tell you, did I?”
“No, you didn’t—you didn’t tell me anything then, and I didn’t ask
either, there was something else to think about. So Mr. Cordover
brought you back in his motor-car, did he?”
“Yes, and he said he would come and fetch me some fine Saturday and
take me to his house.”
“What for?”
“I don’t quite know”—Nan had evidently considered the question
herself—“unless, perhaps, it is for me to see his furniture—we
talked about that, you know—and possibly, just a little, to annoy
the Annarlys. He is out of humour with them I fancy just now, and he
may think it would annoy them if he took me in the car to his house,
though, of course, it wouldn’t really.”
Miss Janet rubbed her nose with the end of her pince-nez, a habit she
had when considering. “I don’t know so much about that,” she said.
“Anyhow, you’d better go, if he does come, which he very likely won’t.”
“I think he will,” Nan said, “and if he does, I shall go, if I can—not
because of annoying the Annarlys, I’m sure it wouldn’t do that—but