Masterman and Son

Masterman and Son.

by W. J. Dawson.

PART ONE

ARCHIBOLD MASTERMAN

I

THE MASTER-BUILDER

Archibold Masterman, tall, heavily-built, muscular, and on the wrong side of fifty, was universally esteemed an excellent specimen of that dubious product of modern commerce, the self-made man. At twenty he was a day-labourer, at thirty a jobbing builder, at forty a contractor in a large way of business. At that point may be dated the beginning of his social efflorescence. It was then that he began to wear broadcloth on week-days, and insisted on a fresh shirt every other day.

Hitherto careless of his appearance, he now took a quiet pride in clothes, and discovered the uses of the manicure. A little later he discovered that a man"s position in society is judged by the kind of house he lives in, and that it is social wisdom to pay a high rent for a small house in a discreetly "good" locality, rather than a low rent for a much better house in a deteriorated suburb. That was the year in which he purchased Eagle House, a pompous, old-fashioned residence standing in its own grounds in Highbourne Gardens.

Highbourne Gardens was one of those London suburbs which contrive to preserve a faint aroma of gentility for many years after the real gentlefolk have left it. It had many old houses of the plain and specious order, inhabited a century ago by great London merchants. In the floors of these houses might be found vast beams of some foreign wood, hard enough to turn the keenest chisel; in the gardens at their backs were copper beeches, mulberry trees, and an occasional cedar of Lebanon. Modern London, with its vast invasion of mean streets, stopped respectfully before the proud exclusiveness of Highbourne Gardens. It was one of the last localities to have roads which were marked "Private," guarded by locked gates, and to employ watchmen in faded liveries, who dwelt in tiny sentry-boxes and at stated hours collected the letters of the residents.

It was precisely the kind of neighbourhood for such a man as Archibold Masterman to make his first social experiment, and he was quick to recognise its advantages. Eagle House, Highbourne Gardens, was a thoroughly respectable address; if it did not convey the impression of social distinction, it clearly did imply solid competence, which was a good deal better. Jones, the well-known city tailor, lived there, and drove a pair of horses which any lord might envy; there were half a dozen brokers who kept as good tables as any man in London; and there was Loker, the famous manufacturer of soaps, whose rhymed advertis.e.m.e.nts met the eye in every railway-carriage. According to the views of Archibold Masterman, in his present stage of social enlightenment, these ill.u.s.trious persons composed a real aristocracy of solid merit.

Above all, there was in Highbourne Gardens a church, at which most of these prosperous persons were regular attendants, and Archibold Masterman was shrewd enough to see that such a church was admirably adapted to the plan of social advancement which he had in view. It was not an Episcopal church, it was true; but that scarcely mattered in a neighbourhood which was by long tradition Non-conformist. It was enough for him that it contained the people he wished most to know, and his first act on settling at Eagle House was to rent the most expensive pew in the church which then chanced to be at liberty. The day when he took possession of this pew was a red-letter day in his life. He was conscious that he was well-dressed, and that he and his family were favourably remarked. Loker, the soap manufacturer, took the collection in his aisle, and when Masterman put a new five-pound note upon the plate, he knew that he had created a sensation. When he left the church, Loker shook his hand with great cordiality, and from that hour his position was a.s.sured.

All this was, of course, many years ago. Since then he had played his cards so well that he had become almost the best-known man in the locality. He was certainly esteemed the wealthiest. He was a deacon in the church, _vice_ Loker deceased, and he now trod the aisles with the collection plate, and kept a jealous eye upon its contents. Among the church folk his record for generosity stood high. Among the younger men the story of his life had become a stimulating tradition.

There were two versions of this tradition. In the young men"s societies, and at their annual club dinner, he was accustomed to tell a touching story of how he once did a piece of humble work which no one else would touch, and found his fidelity rewarded by sudden promotion, which gave him his first real chance in life. This story never failed to arouse loud cheers, and when irate parents found their boys unwilling to black their own shoes or weed the garden, they would cry, "Remember Masterman." Among a few old cronies in the building trade, in convivial moments, this tradition took a different form. To them he boasted that he bought his first plot of land by issuing a cheque when he had nothing in the bank, only borrowing the money just in time to prevent discovery.

"It was a prison or a fortune," he was accustomed to remark. "And I took the risk. I took the risk, and see what I am to-day." Whereat his old cronies, particularly Grimes, a small builder in Tottenham, who were all more or less under financial obligations to him, would applaud him even more vigorously than the church young men.

The whole character of the man may be discerned in the incident. That he should have risked a prison to make a fortune was nothing to be ashamed of; although he had sense enough to know that it was not the kind of story which would be received with acclamation by the church young men. Therefore to them he gave a milder version, suited to their innocence. But in his heart he was proud of his own daring, still prouder of his triumph. His blood thrilled pleasurably whenever he recalled that perilous and nearly fatal morning--his sudden decision to buy the land whose speculative value none but he could recognise, the bold bluff he practised on the sellers, the false cheque which he knew put the handcuffs oh his wrists, the mad, breathless rush across London to secure the money at any rate of interest from any kind of lender.

And then the ecstatic moment when, just ten minutes before the bank closed, he had paid in the five thousand pounds which saved his credit.

In the end he had made twenty thousand pounds out of that land, and from that moment he dated his prosperity. He had taken risks, and that was to him the equivalent of heroism. Life was full of risks, and the man who dared nothing was a coward. It was the simple philosophy of the buccaneer, the pirate, the adventurer. Had he lived a hundred years earlier and been bred to the sea, he would have gloried in the black flag, and would have competed with Captain Kidd for terrifying fame. The very joy of living lay in taking risks.

He had been taking risks ever since, although time and prosperity had taught him caution and a more sober craft. Sometimes, and especially since he had become a resident in Highbourne Gardens, he had resolved to content himself with the kind of business which avoided speculative perils, but the old instinct always proved too strong for him. Show him an opportunity that offered the chance of great and sudden profit, and he could no more help putting all he had in jeopardy to secure it than can the old gambler refuse one more cast of the dice. But under the chastenings of his new respectability he had become more and more secretive in these dubious transactions. His own family never once suspected them. All that they knew was that there were recurring periods when he went about the house in grim silence, and sat up half the night in the little room which he called his office. At such times his face seemed to harden; new lines appeared about the eyes and the firm mouth; but it always remained impa.s.sive and inscrutable. Some day the cloud would lift suddenly; the grim toiler in the midnight office came forth, jovial, loud-voiced, ten years younger; and there was a period of joyous extravagance, a new pair of horses in the stable, a conservatory added to the drawing-room, a large subscription to the church funds, and the genial stir and tumult of dinner and lawn-tennis parties. After a time the cloud rolled back again, but his friends were alike ignorant of the causes that produced or the triumphs which dissolved it.

So Masterman lived his life, and it was part of the man that the church had come to occupy a considerable place in it. He felt that he owed it grat.i.tude, for had it not done much to forward his social ambitions?

He no longer moved in it humbly, as a man sedulous of notice; he had long since become its undisputed king. The day was past when he was grateful for the hand-shake of a Loker: it was his turn now to confer the favours which he once had sought. It represented an essential feature in his triumph. When the time came that he sought public honours, which he meant to do, the church would prove a valuable factor in his ambitions. He would then get back all that he had given it, in willing service. It pleased him to think that the church itself would turn out a good investment when that time came.

Not that he was dest.i.tute of all sense of religion; in his own way he valued it, though not upon the grounds that were common with ordinary pious folk. He thought it a good thing that men should have definite views of truth, especially when their views encouraged them in the belief that they would become in another world persons of as much importance as they had been in this. As he understood the matter, it was necessary for a man to have certain right beliefs in order that he might become secure of the reversion of eternal happiness; and if that were true, a man would be a fool who did not accept these beliefs.

Hence he was severely orthodox, and insisted on orthodoxy in his family. He liked a good sermon, he liked good music, and it was part of his pride that the Highbourne Gardens Church had both in all excellence unapproachable by any of the lesser churches in the neighbourhood. This was the limit of his apprehension as regards the church. He recognised in it one of the great proprieties of life, a kind of etiquette toward G.o.d which no moral human creature would refuse.

That he was moral, in the ordinary meaning of the word, there could be no doubt. Long ago, when he was a mere day-labourer, he had indulged in a week"s drunkenness, and had learned once for all the lesson that success in life is not compatible with insobriety. He had been discharged from his employment, and had spent a miserable month in hunting work with a damaged character. From that hour he was a water-drinker. Life, having taught him this lesson, proceeded to teach him a second, that the man who means to succeed must not meddle with the coa.r.s.er pa.s.sions. He had come near to an entanglement with an evil woman, and had issued from it with a fixed conviction that the pleasures of pa.s.sion were never worth the price men paid for them.

Here the original hardness of his nature served him, and this was soon reinforced by the temper of ambition. Cool, shrewd, alert, he became too much enamoured of success to stop for wayside pleasures; he knew the more recondite joy of climbing over the shoulders of disabled men to seize the prize which they had forfeited. In a word, it paid him to be moral, and his temperament jumped with his self-interest.

But of morality in its higher forms of ethical ideals he knew nothing.

Deacon of a church as he was, he was still a pirate, a buccaneer, a highwayman of commerce, thirsting for illicit adventure. There was a grim humour in the situation of which he himself caught brief glimpses.

Like the bandit who makes a gift to the Virgin from his spoils, and holds himself henceforth reconciled to heaven, so Masterman paid his t.i.the to G.o.d, in the comfortable faith that no one had the right to examine too closely the means by which it was obtained.

"A hypocrite," the shallow reader will exclaim, but no word would be farther from the truth, for the real and only hypocrite is he who, having light to see the highest things, deliberately uses them to serve his lower instincts. Masterman did nothing of the kind. He simply had no higher light. Not even a jury with a damaging verdict, or a judge with a scathing allocution, could have convinced him that it was a wrong time to write a bogus cheque in an emergency, when twenty thousand pounds hung upon the chance of his deceit being undiscovered.

He would have done it again to-morrow, done it proudly, with a kind of fearless, misguided heroism. Life was like that, he would have said; you took your chances. And what he would have said and done at thirty-five, he would have said and done at fifty. There was a hard, unmalleable quality in the man that turned the edge of all those fine ethics which the preachers uttered. It was their duty to utter them, no doubt; it was what they were paid to do; but what did they know of life? What did John Clark, the minister of Highbourne Gardens Church, comfortably paid, and living in a good house, know of life as Masterman had found it? He was like a child playing in the shallows; he had never known deadly contest with tides, and waves, and tempests. So Masterman listened to him with a kindly irony, and went upon his way totally unmoved by any delicate displays of pulpit rhetoric.

Yet of late things had somewhat altered; he was conscious that there was a changed atmosphere in the world. John Clark was preaching a different kind of sermon, a bolder, plainer sermon, full of pungent references to public evils and daily conduct. That would not have mattered much, for Masterman was perfectly aware that he was John Clark"s master whenever he might choose to a.s.sert the rights of the purse. But a much more pertinent and painful problem was gradually rising in Masterman"s own household. He had but two children, Helen and Arthur, and upon the boy all his hopes were set. He had sent him to Oxford, where he had done tolerably well; from the University he had returned with a fund of new ideas which were to his father strange and detestable. And among them was a vague socialism, which displayed itself in vehement attacks on the common processes by which wealth was acquired. There came a day when Masterman was aware, for the first time, that he was face to face with a separate personality in his son, which had its own springs of action and claimed its own liberty of thought. And as the boy uttered his youthful diatribes, the father began to wonder how much he knew about his own life, how far those diatribes might be directed obliquely against himself.

He listened in silence, with a difficult good-humour. He never attempted to retort. When he did speak, he meant to speak once for all, but he would choose his time. He often wondered what he should say; whether he would tell the boy with a brutal frankness all about his methods of business, or leave him to discover a little at a time, when he entered the office, as in due time Masterman meant that he should. But whatever he said or did, he would act with finality when the time came. There were means of bringing Arthur to heel as well as John Clark.

The present trouble was that Arthur seemed greatly to approve John Clark"s teaching. He quoted it, amplified it, and insisted on its rightness. And yet in all this the father knew quite well that his son could intend no disloyalty to him. The boy"s frank gray eyes had no deceit in them. But they also flashed an unmistakable challenge on the world. The father could not but admire the boy. He was no fool, he often told himself with a bitter smile. Perhaps these new opinions of his were, after all, mere froth; it might be wise to let him talk himself out. Surely he must come to see life from the commonsense point of view, which of course was Masterman"s. So the father eagerly debated, and once more the light burned late in the little office, and as the days pa.s.sed, his mouth grew grim and the lines deepened on his face. Here was a problem much more difficult than buying land without money, and it was not solved by mere daring.

So matters stood when John Clark preached his notorious sermon on jerry-building, in which he accused without mercy the men who ran up rotten buildings for the poor as thieves and a.s.sa.s.sins.

Archibold Masterman heard the sermon, and left the church with a frowning face. For the rest of the Sabbath he shut himself up in his office, and a heavy silence dwelt in Eagle House.

II

A DISCUSSION

It was in Masterman"s office that the informal meeting of some of the leading church officials took place next day. The meeting had been preceded by what was known as "a high tea,"

for the customary evening dinner was dispensed with when deacons were the guests. This was done out of deference to the inferior position of some of the younger deacons, who had not yet attained the social dignity of late dinners.

Masterman, however, took care that this subst.i.tutionary meal did credit to his own social superiority.

Where the younger deacons were accustomed to provide for the entertainment of their brethren plates of exiguous ham, manifestly bought at the cookshop, insufficient salads frugally overlaid with sliced eggs, and a spa.r.s.e variety of home-made cake and pastry, Masterman spread a groaning table with a cold sirloin of beef, a pair of fowls, and an entire ham, to say nothing of thick cream and expensive fruits. Masterman"s coffee, too, was of a richness quite unapproachable by the inferior decoctions of Beverley and Luke, whose wives dealt at local shops, and were not above using a certain detestable invention known as coffee essence. Luke and Beverley also used gas fires in their dining- and drawing-rooms, to save labour, which was necessary when but one maid was kept; whereas Masterman had a coal fire even in the hall, and burned logs of wood in his living-rooms. Upon Masterman"s table there was also real silver of undeniable price, and a vast silver urn; whereas Beverley and Luke could pretend to nothing better than electro imitations, which were not even silver-plated. So that it was clear that though Masterman gave high teas, they were scarcely distinguishable from evening dinners; and if he was a deacon, he was by no means a common deacon.

Arthur Masterman had long ago come to regard those diaconal high teas with a kind of sombre merriment. It amused him to remark his father"s difficult adjustment to a form of meal to which he was not used; his conflict between condescension and hospitality; his manifest, and not quite successful, effort to modify his blunt, domineering outspokenness to the sensitive susceptibilities of his guests. He was aware also, with a sort of pride, how big his father seemed beside these men. He loomed above them like some vast cathedral front over huddled houses. They were city dwellers all, and had never been anything else.

They had the precise, neat manners of men accustomed to formal ways of life. Their talk rarely went beyond the gossip of church affairs, or the recapitulation of something in the morning"s paper. But no one could look at Archibold Masterman without a sense of something primitive and ma.s.sive in the man. The heavy frame, the great breadth of shoulder, the clean-shaven face with its firm lines, the eyes, clear, watchful, dominating, with a certain almost vulpine intensity and hardness--all these declared a man at all times unusual, but most unusual in contrast with these men, who bore in every feature the evidence of how cities by mere attrition grind men down into conventional similarities. That the boy should fear his father was natural, for Archibold Masterman was a man whose will was law; that he should not wholly understand him was also natural, for a vast world of experience lay between them: but his pride in him was a genuine and steadfast feeling, all the more remarkable because the father was uneducated, and the son had drunk deep of the waters of Oxford scholarship.

With the sister, Helen, the case was very different.

Arthur had inherited from his father the gift of self-poise. He knew how to look at things with a single eye, to meditate on them in silence, and to take up an att.i.tude of his own toward them. Helen"s whole nature was of lighter calibre. She was a girl easily influenced by chance acquaintance, more ready to enjoy life than to examine its underlying elements, in all things more comformable to conventions. When she came home from an expensive finishing-school, she brought with her less her own character than a character imposed upon her by her teachers. She took her place in life with an instant alacrity of adaptation; formed a dozen light-hearted friendships, became popular for her vivacity and gaiety, and in her heart thought her father dull. She had none of the sense of his essential bigness that Arthur had. She had no curiosity about him: he was simply an element in the convenient furniture of her own life. She sometimes wished him a little more polished, resented his brusque manners, misunderstood his heavy silence, and was inclined to be ironical about his social ambitions. Yet these same social ambitions were the chief common bond between them. Through them she saw her road to a life that would gratify her vanity.

Somewhere, in the dim future, she discerned a golden world, which she hoped to enter when her father"s force of character had broken down the barriers of social caste. What her father"s character really was, or by what means he meant to reach that desirable golden world, she did not ask. As long as the result was reached, she had no curiosity about the process.

The last person in the family group to be remarked is the mother. She sat at the end of the long table, dispensing tea and coffee with an air of weary a.s.siduity. In her youth she had had some claim to beauty, and there still clung to her a kind of tired elegance.

Her hair, once blond, had become almost white, and lay in rippled fullness over a forehead much lined.

Her face was without colour, the eyebrows dark and beautifully curved, the eyes gray and clear, with a certain startled expression, as if life had presented to her little else than a series of unforeseen surprises.

She was a very silent woman; silence was her dominating quality, but it was enigmatic silence. Persons of effusive and flamboyant manners found her silence scarcely distinguishable from scorn; people of vivacious temperament called it stolidity; the general impression among her acquaintance was that it was significant of a nature at once cold and colourless. They were all wrong, however. And those were yet further from the truth who confused her silence with placidity.

There were times when a sudden flash of fire in the gray, watchful eyes witnessed to an inner heat. If she spoke little, it was not because she felt little--it was rather because she realised the total ineffectiveness of language to express her thought. Helen had characteristically never tried to understand her mother.

But as Arthur had grown older, and especially since his return from Oxford, he had often found himself speculating on the real nature of his mother"s character. He saw her, an apparent automaton, content to fill an automatic place in life, making no claims for herself, offering no opposition to the claims of others, apparently desirous of squeezing herself into a position of neglected insignificance; but he was acute enough to know that all this self-effacement was artificial. What were her real relations with his father?

Was she a woman simply overborne by his superior weight? How much of her silence sprang from fear of his heavy-handed judgments? But no sooner did such thoughts visit him than the boy recoiled from them with a sense of their indelicacy. Not to speculate at times upon the relations of his parents was impossible in one who was just at that stage of observation when the entire area of life is an object of intense curiosity; but to cherish or pursue such thoughts was too much like violating a privacy which both nature and custom had declared sacred. Yet of one thing he was sure: his mother"s native force of character was not inferior to his father"s, and her silence rested on a deep-lying intensity of temperament, not on apathy.

The meal pursued its common course of dullness.

Luke retailed some petty gossip about a family named Vickars, who had recently joined the church; and Beverley contrived to get upon his usual topic of fiscal reform, producing as his own opinions the substance of a leading article which had appeared in the morning paper. No one took any notice of Beverley, but Luke"s topic of conversation proved more interesting, especially to the only other deacon present, a middle-aged, slightly gray man, with quick, crafty eyes, called Scales. Scales kept the record of the seat-holders, and felt that Beverley was intruding on his own peculiar domain when he described the Hilary Vickars, the new family which had joined the congregation.

"I know them very well," he remarked. "They have only taken two sittings, and they are not the sort of people who will add much strength to the church. They live in a small house in Lonsdale Road--one of your houses, sir," he added, turning to Masterman.

"A very good cla.s.s of people live in Lonsdale Road, I believe," said Masterman drily.

"Oh yes, of course--I know that; and in the changing conditions of the neighbourhood a street of houses like Lonsdale Road is a great benefit to the locality.

But this Hilary Vickars only rents a part of a house, I am informed, and that is what I meant when I said he wouldn"t add much strength to the church."

"Hilary Vickars," said Arthur. "Why, isn"t he a writer? I think I saw his name mentioned the other day as the author of a novel which appeared this spring."