‘It was a cotton frock,’ he said quietly.
She stared and hastily smothered a laugh; obviously he was in grim earnest. He reminded her of a big brooding schoolboy. ‘Tell me what happened,’ she said softly.
‘All right, I will, though I don’t know why I should,’ he remarked. Then he changed his tone. ‘Just after I left school, I got a job in a cotton office in Manchester. I met a girl when I was twenty and very soon we were engaged. Couldn’t get married for a year or two because I hadn’t enough to do it on. At last they told me to leave my desk and start going on ’Change, in other words promoted me and gave me a good rise. That was enough for us, we got married. We hadn’t much money, but what we had gave us a very good time. I was in love and very happy then. I wanted to do well at my job and kept my nose down to it during working hours, but forgot all about it at night and at the week-end. Still, I wanted to get on, and my wife encouraged me. Well, I was promoted again, this time to the London office, with more responsible work and another rise. We were excited about that, I can tell you. I can see us now, getting all our things packed—not that that took us long—ready for the great move. We found a little flat, very cheap, near Swiss Cottage, and Lucy—my wife—slaved away cleaning it up and I helped her when I came home at night, and we enjoyed ourselves I can tell you, though we’d no friends and nobody hardly spoke to us for months. But it was London and we felt we were getting on and we were happy together. We managed to spread the money out, and we’d have dinner in Soho once or twice a week and go to the theatre, in the pit. It was a bit lonely for her, but she didn’t mind it at first. We’d soon find our feet, move up in fact. I bought a dress-suit, my first.’ He stopped, stared at her, and cleared his throat. ‘I don’t suppose you want to hear all this. Don’t know why I’m bothering you with it.’
‘Go on, go on. I want to hear it,’ she told him.
‘Well, I’ll make it as short as I can,’ he went on. ‘One of the directors gave a party, and we were invited. This was the great event. We felt everything was beginning for us. They were taking us up. You can just hear us talking it over, Lucy all nervous and excited, hoping to make a good impression for my sake. Well, I put on my dress-suit and she made herself as pretty as a picture. During the evening I didn’t see much of her. I was among the men most of the time, talking business, making the most of the opportunity. Once or twice I looked across and gave her a smile and she smiled back, but I thought she looked a bit forlorn. I was full of it all going home, but she was very quiet, tired I thought. Then when we got to bed I pretended to go to sleep, but I heard her crying. When I asked her what was wrong, she said she was tired, got a headache. As a matter of fact she hadn’t been feeling too well, so I left it at that. But I noticed she never mentioned that party. There was another a month or two afterwards, but she wouldn’t go. She’d a good excuse then because by that time she was really ill. Within a year she was dead. But I found out what was the matter that night. She let it slip. She’d only had a cheap cotton frock on (it looked pretty enough to me, and I knew a bit about dress goods) and the other women there had let her know it. She was a little provincial nobody in a cotton frock and they didn’t forget to let her see it. She’d had a wretched evening, had felt snubs and sneers in the air all the time. It kept coming out later, when she was weak, half delirious. I remember sitting by her bedside....’ He stopped and looked down into the fire.
Margaret waited, afraid of marching briskly into that reverie of his. At last she moved a little in her chair and he looked up. There was just light enough for her to see his face tightening.
‘That did it for me,’ he cried. ‘Up to then I’d been the nice honest decent little servant of the Company. Well, that was finished. They couldn’t give a poor little nobody in a cotton frock, all eyes and smiles and nervousness, a friendly word or look, couldn’t they! I told myself I’d put them all in rags. I was mad, but it put an edge on me, strung me up as if I was a fiddle-string. Going home to that empty little flat night after night during the first year, I swore to myself I’d spend the rest of my life beggaring every woman who’d been to that party. Couldn’t do it, of course, but I did what I could. Before I’d done, I took a lot of cotton away from some of those fellows and piled it on the backs of their women. Within three years I’d wrecked that company and walked over to its biggest competitor. That started me. You wouldn’t think I was sentimental, would you? But that began it. And it wasn’t hard because there was nothing for me to do but to make money. I didn’t even want to spend it at first, nobody to spend it on, and didn’t want to enjoy myself or take it easy, not with that cotton frock stuck in my throat.’
He rose from his chair and kicked a log back into its place on the fire. Then he stood looking down at her, his massive face very clear in the candle-light.
‘You’ll hear some tales of me, probably heard ’em already. I’m one of the rudest of the rude self-made men. I’ve no respect for charming hostesses, nice ladies whose husbands could do with a bit of capital, or dainty aristocratic girls who wouldn’t be above marrying a man twice their age if he happened to have bought a title and owned a few factories and ships and a newspaper. They’ll tell you that, and they’re right. I keep my respect for the young men’s wives who turn up in cheap frocks. I suppose a man’s got to be sentimental about something, and that’s how it takes me. I’ve slipped many a year’s dress allowance into an envelope. Queer, isn’t it?’
Margaret murmured something, but she hardly knew what it was, for she was troubled by a vision of factories and ships and crowded offices, and against this background there stood out the figure of this man, no, this huge resentful boy with his oddly commonplace little romance, someone lost, now smiling, now crying, in a tiny flat, one of thousands, nearly thirty years ago. She stared at him. He had never really grown up. Were they all like that, these men who grabbed power, who wrecked whole countrysides, who sent other men flying all over the world? Once again she seemed to ache beneath the sudden pressure of life. It was time Philip returned. Why didn’t he come, bringing the lamp? She felt lost herself in this queer light. The very look of that single candle, pointing at the shadows, made her ache.