CHAPTER VIII—THE REGENCY
THE rigorous theory that a Hepplestall was instantly prepared at the word of command to go to the ends of the earth in the interests of the firm was, in practice, softened by expediency. They did not, for instance, recall their manager at Calcutta or Rio and expect him to fill a home berth as aptly as a man who had not spent half a lifetime in familiarizing himself with special foreign conditions; they used their man-power with discretion and humanity, and there seemed nothing harsh in expecting William Hepplestall, chief of their Manchester offices, to remove to Staithley when he became the acting Head.
William was a man who, in other circumstances, would have deserved the epithet “worthy,” perhaps with its slightly mocking significance emphasized by a capital W. A “Worthy” has solid character bounded by parochial imagination; and William rose, but only by relentless effort, to thinking in the wide-world terms of trade imposed upon the chief of Hepplestal’s Manchester warehouse. He was masterly in routine; under Sir Philip, a trusted executant of that leader’s conceptions; and since he bore his person with great dignity, he cut a figure ambassadorial, impressive, fit representative in Manchester of the Hepplestalls who took the view of that city that it was an outpost—their principal outpost—of Staithley Bridge.
Probably Sir Philip, had he been alive, would have prevented William’s promotion; but Sir Philip had died suddenly, without chance to nominate a successor who, most likely, would have been unobvious and, most certainly, the best. And even Sir Philip would have saluted ungrudgingly the spirit, humble yet resolute, in which William accepted his responsibility. The Board, weakened in personnel by the war, did, as Boards do, the obvious thing, and were very well satisfied with the wisdom of their choice.
What they did not understand, what William himself did not foresee, was that his difficulties were to be increased by the conduct of his wife. Mrs. William had failed to realize that in marrying William she married a Service. She thought she married the head of Hepplestall’s Manchester offices and that she had, as a result, her position in Manchester and her distinguished home in Alderley Edge, which is almost a rural suburb and, also, the seat of a peer. Short of living in London, to which she had vague aspirations when William retired, she was very well content with her degree; and the news that she was expected to uproot herself and to live in Staithley came as a startling assault on settled prepossessions. While she hadn’t the challenging habit of asserting that she was of Manchester and proud of it, she knew the difference between Manchester, where one could pretend one was not provincial, and Staithley, where no such pretense was possible, and it was vainly that William told her of Lady Hepplestall’s offer to leave the Hall in their favor. Sir Philip’s widow knew, if Mrs. William didn’t, what was incumbent on a Hepplestall.
“In other words, we’re to be caretakers for Rupert,” she said. “What will become of my Red Cross committee work here?”
William suggested that by using the car she need be cut off from none of her activities. “But I’m to live down there,” she said, “decentralized, in darkest Lancashire,” and she had her alternative. If the firm required this irrational sacrifice of William’s wife, he had surely his reply that he was rich enough to retire and would retire with her, to London. Her friend, Lady Duxbury, was already preparing to move to London after the war; the William Hepplestalls could move now. They were forced to move now.
“It is not a question of being rich enough to retire,” he said. “No doubt I am that; but I am an able-bodied servant of the firm. We Hepplestalls do not retire while we are capable of service.”
She had never thought him so dull a dog before; she whistled at the obligations of the Service, and she exaggerated the influence of a wife which persuades in proportion as it is ventured sparingly, seasonably, and with due regard to the example of pig-drivers who, when they would have their charges go to the left, make a feint of driving them to the right.