CHAPTER XVII
Carstairs went straight from the works to Dr Jameson's private house. The Doctor was seriously ill and could not be seen, so he went back to his diggings in deep thought. "Better go home and see the guv'nor before I do anything now. Oh, the fearful and wonderful British law," he thought to himself. He saw the landlady and gave notice.
"Have you got another appointment, Mr Carstairs?" she asked.
"No, I've got the sack," he answered.
"Oh!" she said. "Has Mr Darwen—" she stopped; she wanted to know all about it, but did not know how to ask.
"Mr Darwen has sacked me, yes," he said; Carstairs was a most unsatisfactory subject for a woman to tackle, he left so much to the imagination. "I shall leave about three o'clock on Monday afternoon," he explained, as a conclusion to the subject. He produced his drawing board and settled down to do a good afternoon's work on his slowly evolving patent. As he bent low over the board, scrutinizing some fine detail work, his eye caught an extra pin-hole on the edge of the clean white board. He dug the point of his pencil thoughtfully into it. "That's funny," he said to himself. "I don't remember to have done that." He looked around at the three other corners and saw pin-holes in all of them. It was a new board and he had never had a sheet of paper on it of the size indicated by the pin-holes. "Some devil has been taking a tracing of this, our esteemed friend, Darwen, or his agents, no doubt." He leaned back in his chair in deep thought for a time, then he bent forward and set to work vigorously again.
He was still busy when the landlady's daughter brought in his tea. He looked up casually and caught her eye bent on his work with extreme interest. "Good evening, Miss Hughes," he said.
"Good evening, Mr Carstairs," she answered, and she had summoned up a defiant sort of air to meet his eye.
Carstairs' face was like the Sphinx. "I'm going up to London to-morrow. Would you mind letting me have breakfast at half-past six? I shall come back by the eleven twenty, but I've got a very important piece of work here I want to finish before I go, so please don't let me be disturbed for the rest of the evening."
"Certainly, Mr Carstairs. Half-past six, and I'll see no one disturbs you."
"Thanks very much." Carstairs regarding her steadily with his calm, inquiring eyes, caught a gleam in hers that she did not want to be seen; he gave no sign, and she went away quite oblivious of the fact that he had read her like an open book.
Next day he went off to London and saw his lawyer brother; they talked over his case against Darwen, and his brother very quickly decided that he had "no case." So Carstairs returned, and in the stillness of the wee sma' hours he examined the drawing again, and found, as he expected, four more pin-holes. He did not smile; when in company his mirth was seldom excessive, when alone, his features never for one second relaxed their attitude of calm seriousness. He replaced the drawing board in its position, leaning against the wall behind the piano, and went to bed.
The following Monday he called at the office for his month's pay. He waited at the little shutter that the men were paid at, while the office boy went to fetch a clerk who fetched another clerk, who consulted with the first clerk, and called a third clerk and sent the office boy for a book and a pen, then they all three consulted together again and reprimanded the office boy before handing the cheque through the little shutter. Which entire rigmarole was the outcome of insufficient work, and too sufficient pomposity. While Carstairs waited, Darwen opened the door of his office.
"Hullo, old chap, come inside. Here, Morris, bring that cheque along with you." He held out his hand.
Carstairs ignored it. "Thanks, I won't stay, I'm just going off to Chilcombe."
Darwen laughed. "A Saxon," he said, "is an individual who proceeds along 'strait' lines. I was going to ask you to come home with me this evening. The mater would like to see you."
"Thanks very much. I should like to see your mother, but I'm afraid I can't stop this evening."
The clerk brought out the cheque. Darwen took it and, glancing over it, handed it on to Carstairs. "There you are, old chap. I'm sorry it's the last."
Carstairs took it. "Thanks," he said. "Good-bye," and turning on his heel he went out for the last time.
Darwen watched him through the window as he walked down the street with his long swinging stride. "The reason, personified, of why England owns half the earth," he said, to himself. "And equally the reason that she doesn't own the whole of it," he added, thoughtfully.
He lay back in his chair and gazed far into the future, mental pictures in many colours shaped themselves in kaleidoscopic procession across the white expanse of ceiling. For half an hour he sat thus, then sitting suddenly upright, and drawing in his outstretched legs, he plunged back into the present among the papers on his table.
Some six months later, in the dining-room at Chilcombe Vicarage, there was held a family council of war. The old vicar was there, Commander Carstairs was there, Phillip and Stanley Carstairs were there, and they all looked serious. For six months Jack Carstairs had been applying for each and every one of the multitudinous appointments advertized in the technical papers, with no results; he had learned through the same medium that Darwen had been appointed to one of the London stations at £750 per annum, to start; and that evening he had returned from making personal application for a very junior appointment at £1 per week in a neighbouring town. The chief (of German antecedent), the personification of ignorance and bombast, had catechized and bullied him, cross-examined and contradicted him, and finally abruptly refused him the billet.
Jack was speaking, and they all listened attentively. "When a German ex-gasfitter, with a little elementary arithmetic and less electrical catalogue information, talks to me as though he were a miniature Kaiser and I the last-joined recruit of his most unsatisfactory regiment, and then refuses me a switchboard attendant's job on technical grounds, then, I admit, my thoughts lightly turn to robbery with violence as a recreation and means of livelihood. He'd have liked me to say 'yes, sir,' and 'no, sir,' and 'please, sir,' and touch my cap and grovel in the dirt. I'd see him in hell first."
"I always said, Hugh, you ought to have put that boy in the Service," the sailor interjected, quite seriously.
The others smiled, a wry, sickly sort of smile.
"Can't we—er—don't we know somebody with some influence on these councils who would use it on Jack's behalf." It was the artist who spoke.
The young engineer stood up suddenly with unwonted passion. "Damn it! I'm not a blasted mendicant! I'm a competent engineer! It's no use talking rot about modesty. I know what I have done and can do again. I say I'm a competent engineer. I've been getting two hundred and fifty quid a year, and earning it, saving it for the people who paid me. And I am willing to take a quid, one blasted quid a week, and I can't get it. I'm not going to beg for my own cursed rights. In all those hundreds of jobs I've applied for, I must have been the best man on my paper form alone. If I can't live as an engineer in my own cursed country, then, by God! I'll steal." He turned on his father with blazing eyes. "I say, I'll steal, and if any blundering idiot or flabby fool tries to stop me, I'll kill him dead. The first law of life is to live. What do you say to that? You preach platitudes from the pulpit every Sunday, what have you to say to the logic of the engine room?"
The old vicar smiled, somewhat sorrowfully. "I might say that you are possessed of a devil," he said, with quiet humour. "Your engineering experience ought to tell you that it's no use ramming your head against a brick wall."
Jack sat down. "That's so," he said, "there's an obstruction somewhere; the thing to do is to find it out and remove it."
"I tell you, Hugh! the initial mistake was in not putting that boy into the Service; though there's a maxim there that promotion comes 80 per cent. by chance, 18 per cent. by influence, and 2 per cent. by merit."
"That's rot, you know, unless you mean to say that 18 per cent. of the men in the Service are snivelling cheats."
The sailor was thoughtful. "There are some cheats in the Navy, but not many; as a rule it's not the man's own fault that he is promoted by influence. At the same time you can't afford to get to loo'ard of your skipper, much depends on one man's word, but that man is usually a——"
"Sportsman," Jack interrupted.
"Well! 'an officer and a gentleman' they call him. The Service would have suited you."
"My dear uncle, I have all respect for the Service, but at the same time I should not wish to be anything but an engineer, and engineers in the Service at the present time are somewhat small beer. Anyway, as a money-making concern, the Service don't pan out anything great. Bounce told me that the seamen haven't had a rise in pay since Nelson's time."
The sailor laughed. "That's a good old A.B.'s growl," he said. "I gather, too, that engineering is not panning out so very great as a money-making concern just now."
"No! you're right. I'm a bit sick when I think of it, too, it's rather sickening. I've got a model upstairs of an engine that would make any man's fortune, and I can't get the fools to take it up. I think I shall have to break away for the States."
They were all silent for some minutes till the old vicar rose. "Shall we go to bed?" he said, and they proceeded upstairs, solemnly, silently, in single file.
The weeks passed away and Jack's uncle went back to sea, and his brothers returned to London, and another brother came and went. The winter changed to spring, the days lengthened out and grew brighter, and still Jack Carstairs could get nothing to do, nor get any one to take up his patent. Then one morning amongst the two or three letters awaiting him was one with a penny stamp: the ha'penny ones he knew were the stereotyped replies of the various municipalities to the effect that they "regretted" his application had not been successful; it was a way they had, they sent these things with a sort of grim humour about a month after he had seen by the papers that some one else had been appointed; it wasn't very often they went to the extravagance of a penny stamp for a refusal, so he opened that first, glancing casually at the city arms emblazoned on the flap of the envelope; enclosed was a typewritten letter, he was appointed switchboard attendant at £1 per week.
Carstairs gazed at it sternly with bitter hatred of all the world in his heart. "A blasted quid," he said, aloud. "Ye gods! a quid a week! And Darwen, the cheat, is getting £750." He hadn't fully realized when he was writing his applications for these small appointments, exactly the extent of his fall; but now, as he had it in typewritten form before his eyes, and signed, he looked again, signed by a man who had served his time with him.
Mrs Carstairs was humbly thankful for small mercies, but the old vicar, whom Jack found alone in his study, looked into his son's eyes and read the bitterness of soul there. "Do you think it would be wise to refuse and wait for something better. This is your home you know. You can work on your patent."
"I thought of all that before I applied," Jack answered. "The patent! The path of the inventor seems the most difficult and thorny path of all."
The old man's eyes brightened; he liked the stern definiteness of his youngest son. "It does seem hard," he said. "I don't understand these things, but I think you are wise to take this appointment."
"Oh, yes! I have no idea of refusing, but when I think that that lying cheat, Darwen, is getting £750 a year, it makes me feel pretty sick."
"I know, Jack; we see these things in the Church the same as everywhere else; the cheat seems sometimes to prosper. Why it should be so, I cannot comprehend; the cheat must inevitably cheat himself as the liar lies to himself, so that they both live in a sort of fool's paradise; they both unaccountably get hold of the wrong end of the stick; they imagine that they are successful if they satisfy others that they have done well, while the only really profitable results ensue when one satisfies oneself that one has done well; then and only then, can real intellectual, moral, and physical, progress follow. It is possible to imagine a being of such a low order of morality that he could feel a real intellectual pleasure in outwitting his fellow-men by cheating; such an one, it seems to me, must be very near the monkey stage of development. As man progresses intellectually he sets his intellect harder and harder tasks to perform, else he declines. It is possible that the cheat may occasionally reap very material and worldly advantages by his cheating. Some few apparently do, though the number must be extremely small and the intellectual capacity exceedingly great, for they are constantly pitted, not against one, but against the whole intellect of the world, including their brother cheats. The rewards and the punishments alike, in the great scheme of the Universe, are spread out unto the third and the fourth generation; the progeny of the cheat, in my experience, decline in intellect and moral force till probably the lowest depths of insanity and idiocy are reached. This great law of punishment for the sins of the fathers is beyond my mental grasp, but that it is so I cannot doubt; it is in fact, to me, the greatest proof that there must be something beyond the grave. You understand, Jack, I'm not in the pulpit, this is worldly wisdom, but I want to set these things before you as they appear to me. You must forget Darwen; you reap no profit from his success or failure, but you expend a large amount of valuable energy in brooding over it. 'Play up, and play the game,' Jack. Don't cheat because others are cheating, if you do you are bound to become less skilful in the real game. Think it over, Jack, 'Keep your eyes in the boat,' don't think about the other crew or the prize, simply 'play the game.' Have you told your mother you're going?"
"Yes."
"Did you say you wanted to borrow some of my books?"
"No, thanks. I've got all the books I want. You've seen my two packing cases full."
"Ah, yes! I'd forgotten. So you're going to-morrow. That's rather soon, isn't it?"
"I told them that if appointed I'd start at once. I'm going to pack and then whip round and say good-bye to my friends."
"Ah, of course. I'll see you off in the morning; six o'clock, did you say?"
"Yes, six ten at the station."
So Jack took his hat and stick and strolled round to his few friends in the village to tell them he was going. The Bevengtons were furthest away, and he called there last. Bessie had been away in London and other places, nearly all the time he had been home, when he called now she was home. He had heard she was coming.
"I've come to say good-bye, Mrs Bevengton. I've got a job, and I'm going up north again."
They both looked pleased; Mrs Bevengton really liked Jack. "When are you going?" she asked.
"To-morrow morning."
Bessie's jaw dropped, she was keenly disappointed, and she looked, Jack thought, in the pink of condition, more so than usual.
"I hope it's a good appointment, Jack," Mrs Bevengton said; she was disappointed too.
"A quid a week," he answered, bluntly, looking at her steadily.
Her jaw dropped also. "Oh, but I suppose it will lead on to better things."
"Twenty-five bob at the end of six months," he said, with rather a cynical little smile. Out of the tail of his eye he regarded Bessie, she had flushed a deep red at the mention of his microscopical salary. She seemed more matured, her manner impressed him with a sense of responsibility, an air of definiteness that appealed to him immensely; he saw now that her lips closed suddenly. She had made up her mind to something.
"Come on out for a walk, Jack," she said. "I haven't had a look round the old place for nearly a year. We shall be back to tea, mother."
She got her hat and they walked briskly down the pleasant village street in the glorious spring sunshine; every one they passed greeted them with civility and respect. Jack regarded them with pleasure; he told Bessie they were the stiffest, hardest, and most genuinely civil crowd he had ever encountered. "Perhaps I'm biassed," he said, "but I like men and these chaps appeal to me more than any others I've met so far."
They turned across the fields and went more slowly. "I've been having a good time, Jack, while I've been away."
"So I expect," he answered.
"Well, I've been to a lot of dances and parties and theatres, etc. I suppose I've enjoyed it—in a way."
"Yes, I should think you would—in most ways."
"Jack!" she was walking very slowly. "Two men—three men, asked me to marry them."
"Ah! I suppose they were not the right ones." He did not quite know what to say.
"Well, two of them were not—but one of them—it was Mr Darwen."
"Good Lord!" Jack turned as though he had been shot. "Are you going to marry him?"
"I don't quite know. I've come home to decide. I don't think I care for him in quite the right way. Why did he break off his engagement to Miss Jameson?"
"Ah—er—I—" Carstairs was thinking, thinking, thinking. He wondered what to do and what to say.
"He told me that he thought he was in love with her till he saw me, then he knew he wasn't."
"Er—yes."
"He's very nice and very handsome, still I know I don't care for him as—as I do for some one else."
Carstairs was silent, he was trying to think. The situation was getting beyond him, he had a fleeting idea of trying to change the subject, of closing the matter; but he knew that once closed it could never be re-opened, and he wanted to do the right thing. They were silent for some minutes.
"Jack?" she asked, and the struggle was painful. "Has my money made any difference to you?"
"Half a minute!" he said, hastily. "Don't say any more, please. Let me think"—he paused—"Five years ago I met a girl in Scotland."
"And you love her, Jack?"
"Yes. I thought not at one time, but I know now that I do."
They walked for a long time in silence, then she spoke.
"I'll write to Mr Darwen to-night and tell him that if he likes to wait a long, long time, I'll marry him," she said.
Carstairs was silent; the great big English heart of him was torn asunder.
"Why don't you speak, Jack? Mr Darwen's your friend, isn't he? He's handsome and so kind and attentive, and if he cares for me as—as he says he does, I think I ought to marry him. I couldn't before, but now—don't you think I ought?"
"Well, er—it's more a question for the guv'nor. Will you let me explain the situation to him, and then he'll see you. The guv'nor's very wise, in these things, and it's his province, you know. I should like you to talk to him."
"Thanks—thanks. I will."
That night Jack Carstairs sat up very late with his father in his study. And next morning the train whisked him north, to the dim, grey north, and the engines, and the steam, and the hard, hard men, mostly engineers. Jack was very sad and silent in his corner of a third-class carriage all the way.