“I’m better now I’ve got that off my chest,” he said. “I had to do it before we parted though, by George, I’ve cut it fine.” There are several ways, besides the right way, of looking at a wrist-watch. She was annoyed to find herself capable of noticing that Rupert’s was the right way. “I shall have to dash for my train. Where can I put you down? I must go now: I’ll apologize on Thursday for abruptness.”
“I’m going to the flat,” she said. “Baker Street.” He was paying the bill, getting his cap and stick, urging pace on the taxi-driver, busy in too many ways to be observant of Mary.
“Hepplestall,” she thought going up her stairs, “Hepplestall, and I’ve to act to-night.” Her bed received her.
Incongruous in youth and khaki he sat abashed amongst black-coated elders of the service at the board of Hepplestall’s.
He wanted urgently to scoff, to feel that it all didn’t matter because nothing mattered but the war, and they set the war in a perspective new to him, as passing episode reacting certainly upon the permanency, Hepple-stall’s, but reacting temporarily as the Cotton Famine had reacted in the days of the American Civil War.
He did not fail to perceive the significance of old Horace, Sir Philip’s uncle, who was seventy, with fifty years to his credit of leadership in the Service, a living link with heaven knew what remote ancestors. Perhaps old Horace in his youth had seen the Founder himself. It bridged time, it was like shaking hands with a man who had been patted on the head by Wellington, and, like Horace, Rupert was subjected to the fact of being Hepplestall. The law of his people, the dour and stable law, ran unchangeable by time.
Complacent he had not been as he bared his head before Sir Philip’s grave, but he had kept his balance.
Death, that lay outside youth’s normal thought and entered it with monstrousness, was Rupert’s known familiar and a father dead could sadden, but could not startle, a soldier who had seen comrades killed at his side. It touched him, quite unselfishly, to think that Sir Philip had gone knowing him not as rebel, not as apostate of the Hepplestalls, but as a son of whom he could be proud—Rupert the cricketer, the solid schoolboy who developed, unexpectedly but satisfactorily, into a reading man at Cambridge, and then the soldier; but he was stirred to other and far deeper feelings by the references made at the board to Sir Philip. They were not formal tributes, they were chatty reminiscences hitting Rupert the shrewder because there was nothing conventional about them, bringing home to the son how his father had seemed to other eyes than his. How little he had known Sir Philip! How carelessly he’d failed in his appreciations! And it was double-edged, because the very object of this meeting was to salute him as heir to the chieftainship, implying that in the son they saw a successor worthy of the father.
They even apologized to him for having, in his absence, appointed an interim successor. Sir Philip’s death created a situation unprecedented in the history of the firm because never before had the Head died with his son unready to take the reins, and the war aggravated the situation. Rupert’s training could not begin till the war ended; it would be many years before he took his place at the head of the table, Chairman of the Board.