Chapter XIII

On Saturday afternoon Mr. Giles Cordover came to fetch Nan. As Michael was away she was rather busy; by this time he had become more useful than he himself realised, and, in his absence, she tried to make up to her father for the temporary loss. On this occasion, however, Barmister would not let her stay; she could finish the work when she got back, or on Sunday, he said, or any time. So she accepted the invitation, and within ten minutes of Mr. Cordover’s coming went away with him.

Mr. Cordover lived some way out of town, in an old-fashioned suburb not much built over as yet, and served by so bad a train service that its chances of becoming popular were not great. The house itself was a substantial red-brick one; the original structure some hundred and fifty years old, the bay windows and other additions much more modern and agreeing no better with the rest than did the elaborate conservatory and weather-vane. But Nan, who could have told to a year the date of the original building, thought them quite suitable; they fitted with Mr. Cordover, if not with the house, and, after all, a man—a real man—is more than a house. Inside, everything fitted with Mr. Cordover—the sideboard with the carving of fruit, the solid chairs ranged in a straight row and polished to perfection, the pier glasses in the drawing-room, the curtains of green silk damask, so green and such silk that they had defied sun and time and were as green as ever. Everything was as Nan had expected, even the servants—they were not permitted to wear caps or address their master as “sir” on account of his political views of equality—but they were of the kind, lineal descendants of the old retainers, who no more thought of leaving, except for death or marriage, than a man’s own hands do.

“Well,” Mr. Cordover said, when he had shown the house and its inmates, “there it is, the whole of it, sideboard and all; solid stuff as you said, make fun of it, if you like.”

Nan looked up. “I know too much about the workmanship for that,” she said, “also——”

“Also what?” he demanded, as she paused. “Isn’t it quite what you thought?”

“I hadn’t thought about some of it before,” she confessed.

Her eyes went to an old setter lying on a cushion in the sunny window. He was very old, paralysed in his hind-quarters, only able to move with trailing limbs: an ugly thing, but free of pain, quite happy, more especially when able to show slobbering love to his master. Near by stood a chair, one of the beautifully kept chairs polished like the others, but with the leather torn and scarred by the claws of a one-eyed cat, rescued from tormenting boys (they were prosecuted for cruelty at the police court), and incurable as all the feline tribe with regard to the destruction of chair-seats. A parrot hung in a cage, an irascible parrot that bit itself when it had no one else to bite, the property formerly of an old clerk, now dead. Night and morning the master, gloved for the purpose, took the bird from its cage, talked to it, and let it walk round the room for exercise, as the former owner had done. Nan’s eyes went to these creatures, and at the same time her ears caught the sound of a crutch, the crutch of a little lame old lady to whom she had already been introduced: a distant cousin of Mr. Cordover’s, nominally presiding over the house. A frail little thing of timid ways and aristocratic prejudices, who knew little of Mr. Cordover’s politics and less of his angles—they never showed to her—but who lived like a delicate plant in this sheltered nook provided by his bounty. There was another woman upstairs, Nan had been introduced to her too, she was still frailer than this one, though younger; not to be much longer for this world, Nan had judged, when she looked into the dreamy eyes from which the mind was half fled, and to which peace had nearly come. A widow she was, with a name unfamiliar to the girl and a tragic story of loss and suffering; that Nan had heard, but she did not hear the other story of generous love unrequited, but living on to give asylum at the last. There was no need to speak of that; it softened Mr. Cordover’s face as he stooped to the frail creature whom he had brought home to die, and kindled his eyes to pathetic pride as he saw a beauty long gone for all others.

Nan, having seen these people and these things, as well as the house and furniture, hesitated when Mr. Cordover asked her if all was not as she had expected.

“All that I had thought about is,” she said, “the body is, but the soul”—her voice grew soft and shy—“I had not before thought about the soul.”

“Oh, the soul,” Mr. Cordover said. “Do you take stock in souls?” He turned abruptly. “Come and see the polyanthuses, they’re the finest you’ve ever seen.”

She went, slipping her hand in his arm as she did so; he kept it there, squeezing it a little.

Nan enjoyed every minute of her visit, the house and garden, the little lame old lady who presided at a tea as dainty as herself, and as pleasing as the mid-Victorian china in which it was served. Nan and the old lady became good friends.

“My dear,” she said at parting, “I hope you will come and see us again; it will be a great pleasure to me if you will. You remind me of the girls of my own young days, if I may say it; you don’t mind me saying it? You are so much quieter—you fill the room so much less than the girls of to-day. You will forgive me for making the personal remark?”

Nan assured her that she would, and said she would be very pleased to come again, if she might.

Mr. Cordover sent her back to town in the car, with strict injunctions not to tip the chauffeur.

“I pay my servants half as much again as other people,” he said, “on the understanding that they take tips from nobody. They’d get the sack if they did, so they don’t, and it’s just as well to know that beforehand, for if it’s something to be ashamed of to give a tip which is taken—as it seems to be, seeing the way most men do it—it’s twenty times worse when it’s not taken.”

Nan said she would remember, and held out her hand for good-bye.

Mr. Cordover tucked the rug round her, “I’ll fetch you again some day soon,” he said. “Will you come?”

“If I may.”

“All right, that’s a bargain.” He gave a final tuck. “You and I’ll be friends before we’ve done, I foresee,” he said.

She thanked him with smiling eyes; she had not many friends; and the car went away.

She looked back once at the square house, and the thought of the inmates made the smile in her eyes misty. She looked back again when they slowed near the top of a steep rise further along the road. An old house stood on the left of the way here, a long, low house deep bowered in trees. The hill was so steep that the pace had slackened considerably; she was able to see it well, to observe the sense of peace and space that seemed to cling about it in the evening light, even to read the board by the wall, which notified that it was to let.

“I should like to live there,” she thought.

And when she reached home, so much was the fancy in her mind that she told her father she had seen the house she wanted to live in.

“Oh?” he said. “Maybe you will one day—if you really want to. It’s my experience that one pretty much gets what one wants, if one does really want it—and’s prepared to pay.”

Nan suggested that it was not the usual opinion.

“I dare say not,” he answered dryly, “plenty of people can neither really want nor are really willing to pay, though they wouldn’t believe it if you told them so. Folks make about as many mistakes in estimating their powers that way as they do in valuing their antiques. Show me a man who wants a thing all the time, and keeps on wanting it and is prepared to sacrifice to get it, and I’ll show you one that’s going to get it.”

“I don’t know if I want my house all that,” Nan said, “perhaps I don’t; perhaps I’m one of those who can’t really want.”

“Then you aren’t my daughter,” her father retorted. “I know what I want and always have. I want to live and die here in this place and at this work, and I shall be very surprised if I don’t do it. Now go and get your hat off; are you too tired to do a bit of work to-night?”

She was not, and came quickly and spent the rest of the evening at work. And not being finished then, went to it again on Sunday morning.

By the afternoon she had done, and when Michael, having travelled by a tediously slow Sunday train, returned she was sitting alone reading. Barmister was downstairs in the room with the dolphin mantelpiece; he usually spent Sunday afternoons there, more often in looking at past records of work than actually at work, enjoying the companionship of its near presence, much as a book-lover imbibes joy from the presence of his books and the mere sight and smell of them.

Nan and Michael had an undisturbed hour upstairs, and in it Nan heard about the warp-winding machinery and the accident at the power station. It was characteristic of Michael that he told her of the winding machinery first; it had been in his mind since the other, and was to him the more interesting of the two.

“I believe I have solved that problem,” he said.

And when she asked if he had found it as difficult as he had expected, he answered:

“In a way, yes. The real difficulty was the poverty of the land; the principal problem was to get a satisfactory improvement which would not cost too much.”

“Have you done that?”

“I think so: I got at something more or less satisfactory on Saturday evening. I was half inclined to let it go at that, though I knew there must be something better, if I could hit on it. In the small hours this morning I did hit on it. Funny how things come to you sometimes! I hadn’t been thinking of the winding machines at all—couldn’t, my hands were too full then: all of a sudden they came back to me, when I was busy with the dynamos, and I saw right away at once what it was I wanted and had really been trying to get at all the time. The extraordinary thing is that I didn’t see before; it’s so perfectly obvious.”

Nan, by this time, knew something about this kind of obviousness and its liability to show extremely abstruse to the lay mind. She asked about the idea now, and he explained with notes and diagrams made on pieces of paper in the train.

“I worked it out on the way down,” he said; “it’s a bit indistinct in places, I got sleepy before I was through. I slept most of the rest of the way. There was a fool of a commercial traveller in the carriage, a chatty chap who would talk about screws and bolts and boiler-joints. I told him they didn’t interest me, I didn’t know one end of a screw from another, except by sitting on it, and then I went to sleep.”

Nan laughed. “Dull for him,” she said.

“He got somebody else to talk to pretty soon. At all events, there was somebody else in the carriage when I woke, and they were talking away like anything. I roused just as we were running through Enfield, or some such place, and heard them at it. They were talking about a reversible turbine, a thing that’s badly wanted, but about as likely to be accomplished as thought transference by Act of Parliament; theirs, the turbine they were speaking of, I mean, was the purest bunkum.”

“Did you tell them so?” Nan asked.

“Not in so many words; I asked them about it, and afterwards we talked about turbines in general.”

“Did they mind?”

“Oh, no, they were quite pleased; in fact, rather grateful—seemed to look upon me as a mine of useful information at the end. One of them gave me his card.”

He pulled it out, but the name was quite indecipherable.

“Oh, those are some notes I made in the Tube on an automatic switch for alternating currents. I don’t know if anything could be done in that way. It would be a good thing if it could; it might have been a help in such a smash as last night’s.”

And from that he went on to speak of the accident at the power station, and to tell her about it.

She listened with the greatest interest and a certain thrill of satisfaction, asking questions now and then. Among them was one which he had not asked himself.

“What will they give you for this?”

“I don’t know; I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You saved them a great deal in money, perhaps in life too.”

“Maybe. Yes, I suppose so; but if it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else; I just happened to be there at the moment.”

She said “Yes,” though she may not have entirely agreed. “I suppose you rather put their backs up,” she remarked. He had told her of Mr. Heath and his own answer to the inquiry of the new engineer, and various other incidents; also she knew something of his fatal gift for making enemies. “Still, even if you did do that, even if you made them feel very foolish, the fact remains, you saved them. They must make some recognition of it.”

“What? A column in the local newspaper saying that, as a consequence of the council neglecting to repair their chimney, which any decent bricklayer would have condemned, there had been a disaster; scope and size of which were minimised by the action of an interfering stranger, name unknown. No one but Milligen knew who I was, and he was out of the way. That would be recognition, wouldn’t it?”

“I didn’t mean that sort, you know I didn’t. I never see that fame, even real fame, is worth much, though it might be a little helpful to you now; that sort of thing, of course, is nothing at all. I was thinking of money, rather; they must give you something, I should think.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Overtime pay?” he suggested. “They might, but there is no must about it that I see; a certain amount of doubt, rather.”

And it seemed almost as if Michael were right, for, as time went on, nothing was heard of the council one way or the other. There was, no doubt, some report of the affair in the local newspapers, but he did not see them; and in them the part he played, reported on by the incoming engineer, whose business it was to please the council and not emphasise the extent of the disaster, was hardly likely to be made too glowing. The matter slipped from his mind and Nan’s too, and life went on much as before. The usual routine of daily work, the drawings for the patent agent, the occasional times of quiet companionship, and the occasional times—growing rarer—of fretting against the monotony of it all. So through the summer, with little or no change except that sometimes, more often than he used, he went to Hurstbury to see his father.

“I believe the poor old chap begins to feel a little left,” he once explained to Nan. “It never struck me before, but after that wedding it did; he seems somehow to be rather out of it, to be getting old. I don’t suppose it’s any particular pleasure to him to see me, I don’t see how it can be, considering what a mess I have made of things, and that we haven’t a point in common; but I think I’ll go. He’s on the shady side now—so am I, another way. It gives one a sort of fellow feeling; there may be some comfort in that.”

So he went when he could spare the time, though going meant sacrificing a scanty leisure, and when he was there he was able to do little besides sit and smoke with his father and rather laboriously make conversation. How laborious it was the father never knew; he thought the son enjoyed the talks, and looked forward to the visits—as he himself did, saving up little bits of information and little pieces of work over against Michael’s coming and for his delectation. One Sunday afternoon they overhauled the garden water-supply system; Mr. Annarly used to be fond of doing such things. That afternoon they made several alterations, Michael standing by handing the tools. Another Sunday, when the servants were all out, they examined a defective flue in the kitchener, and Michael, working under his father’s directions, made it worse than it was before. A third they spent in the old workshop, Mr. Annarly explaining various of his former contrivances to his son. At parting, he pressed some of the remaining tools on him, with an entirely erroneous idea of their value.

“You take them, my boy,” he said with the awkwardness of a man giving a considerable present. “Take them—here, take this too—I don’t suppose I shall ever use them again, I haven’t the fancy for things that I had. It’s a pity they should lie here; they’ll be useful to you.”

Michael took them: he carried them back to town with him in an unwieldy parcel, and put them carefully away. He never spoke of them to anyone, but he would not have parted with them for a good deal.

Towards the end of July it happened that he was able to tell his father a piece of news which gave the elder man great satisfaction. He hesitated some time before telling it on account of that very satisfaction; he knew that, say what he would, his father would estimate it very differently from what he himself did, and far above what he knew it to be really worth. However, at length he told it; he must, if for no other reason than that it would prevent his visits home, since it would take him away from London. It was a definite offer of engineering work definitely accepted at a salary of five hundred pounds a year.

The offer was made by the same great steamship company who had approached him in the spring and afterwards had withdrawn—he very well knew why. He knew why they approached him again now. The question of internal combustion engines for use on big ships was as important as ever to them, more important rather than less. And the difficulty of finding any man equal to such work as they wanted in connection with it, and also willing to undertake it, was as great. It was something more than a difficulty, it was very like an impossibility; men of that experience and with brains of such calibre are not to be hired like journeymen. Michael was to be hired. Michael, it was pretty generally suspected in some well-informed quarters, had the required brains. He had also a damaged reputation and a very ugly suspicion against him—if he had not, he would not have been for hire. The one thing weighed with the other: no doubt the directors weighed them very carefully; and, having spent much, and advanced no whit with the engine problem, they came to the conclusion that the lesser evil was to employ a man who could help them, even at the risk of having valuable processes and inventions stolen. At all events, the secretary wrote to Michael, saying the directors were again considering the matter of internal combustion engines, and would be glad, if he were of the same mind as earlier, if he would call at the offices of the company.

Michael called. He did not want to; he and Nan talked it over some time first. He realised the situation perfectly, the reasons which lay behind this letter as well as those which lay behind the others; and human nature, mere ordinary pride, prompted a curt refusal. But common sense and wisdom prompted otherwise; here, surely, was the chance of retrieving something of his name, and establishing his reputation. To refuse curtly because of a former, not unexpected, slight were mere childish vanity, even though accepting would entail unpleasant things, besides pocketing pride. He saw this last as plainly as the first; so did Nan, but she reminded him that he was in a position to make some sort of terms.

He called at the offices as requested, and once again found himself in the palatial quarters of a great firm: a place of polished mahogany and many well-dressed clerks; of complicated inter-telephone system and quiet, luxurious private rooms, where keen-eyed men with suave manners complimented those received with a few minutes’ exclusive attention, and afterwards dismissed them as cabinet ministers might. Michael received very undivided attention, and more of it than fell to the lot of some people. The coming to terms took time, for if he laboured under a disadvantage, so did the company, the disadvantage of finding it very difficult to get anyone else: and he knew their situation fully as well as they did his; and at the game of steadfastly keeping such things in mind whilst diplomatically omitting them in speech and dealing accordingly, he was bad to beat. Nevertheless, he came away from the interview depressed. The familiarity of the atmosphere affected him, in part with a morbid shrinking, as a burnt animal from the fire; in part with a sort of homesick sense of what was lost. He came away with a feeling of weariness and age, and a renewed recognition of the great gap set between himself and not only his former place but his former self too.

“I have agreed to go,” he said to Nan when he got back. “Oh, yes, I couldn’t do anything else; it would have been sheer folly to refuse, I know that, I never seriously thought of it, but I don’t know how it will work out. I’m to have five hundred a year, more when I make a success—that last is only a verbal promise, and they may slip out of it, or try to, though I shall do what I can to safeguard myself——” The old gleam shot up for a moment here, and the old fighting set, which had made so much difficulty for Galhardy’s, came about his jaw.

Nan saw it, and saw it go again. “That is not bad,” she said.

“No,” he answered. “It’s less, of course, than it’s worth, but more a good deal than they need have paid me. But I am not at all sure how the arrangement will answer; they won’t give me anything like a free hand. I could not nail them down to anything: they would only say they should wish for very full reports; that one of the directors, Mr. McFarline, had the keenest interest in the subject, and would look forward to following my work with great attention.”

“That means?”

“It means they won’t trust me an inch—I suppose one can hardly blame them—and will want everything reported, and signed, and countersigned; and every scrap of work done under somebody’s eye and recorded in somebody’s notes. I am not at all sure it will be possible to work that way.”

“Perhaps not. Still you can try, and if you can’t, you can’t. At the worst, you can always come back here.”

“No, I can’t. If I go, I can’t come creeping back to you and your father.”

“You can always come,” she said. “You must always come. Promise me you will. But you need not, I know you will without that; there is always the mouse-hole here and me, the mouse, inside it. You must always come when you want to.”

Michael said “no,” and meant it; nevertheless, they were good words to carry with him when he went to the Clyde on a doubtful venture.