Sons of Fortune (62 page)

Next morning, to their surprise, Caspar came alone to join them for breakfast. “Where’s Laney?” Winifred asked.

“She’s gone to Brooklyn on some errands for her father. I think it’s just tact on her part. That’s why she made a real proper goodbye last night.”

“Well, it’s nice to see you, anyway,” Nora said. “I thought we wouldn’t see you until the pier. After luncheon, I mean.”

“I came to ask you something.”

“Ah.” They waited while he assembled the question. It took a lot of breath.

“What if I bought the iron and steel works—the whole of Stevenstown—from the firm?”

“With what money?”

He smiled. “That’s always the second question—as a great London financier once said to me! Let’s finish the first. You see, what I’m afraid of is throwing Laney to the lions right at the top of Society. If all we had was one little old ironworks—one
cheap
little old ironworks—hem hem—we could start there in exactly the same way as here. We could grow toward the top.”

“Oh yes, Mama!” Winifred said. “Wouldn’t that be marvellous!”

“And I would lend you the money?” Nora asked.

“If the guvnor wouldn’t give it.” He bit his lip and raised his eyebrows like a clown, as if to say “Aren’t I impudent!”

“Poor boy—you’re desperate for that part of the firm, aren’t you,” Nora said. “I’m afraid, popsie, it’s a horse that won’t run—won’t even start, in fact. Your father never would agree to it.” When Caspar looked downhearted, she added, “Would you? In his position?”

He nodded sourly. “No.”

Winifred drew breath to speak but he stood and walked swiftly from the room, as if he could not face them and his failure at the same time.

“I sometimes think that to have a free choice is the most terrible burden in the world,” Nora said when she and Winifred were alone once more.

***

At eleven o’clock, when they were taking a little rest from their packing, Caspar came back again. This time there was a sheepish grin on his face.

“Sorry about that little scene,” he said. “It’s a bit of a shock to see things as the guvnor sees them. Anyway”—he thrust an envelope into Nora’s hands—“I haven’t been idle since. There’s all my thinking about the future of Stevenstown and the steel industry. It may be a bit of a muddle but it’s all there. If you get the right sort of man in charge, it could dwarf the rest of the firm in ten years. Pick him very carefully. Promise me that?”

Nora laughed at his solemnity.

“Promise!” he shouted. He was quite angry.

When she had promised, he calmed down a little and took to pacing about the room, poking his fingers idly into drawers and boxes.

“I don’t think I’ll come to the pier,” he said. “I’ll say goodbye now. No—not goodbye. Au revoir. We’ll come to England next summer. See you all.”

He kissed Nora, who clung to him in open disbelief of his promise. “You will, popsie, won’t you?”

“You’ll have to send me the money,” he said, more in his old and true character. “I’m not going to dig into my company for years.”

After he had gone, Winifred nearly burst into tears. “Poor old Steamer,” she said. “He’s so torn. I hate to see him like that.”

***

Caspar sat alone at the stairhead of the offices of the Uptown Construction Company. Where is Laney? he wondered. She ought to have been back by now. He wanted her to be with him. Now.

He wanted to know it was worth his giving up so much. He wanted to touch her. He wanted her voice to raise the tingle on his neck. He wanted the smell of her here. Oh, there were so many things he wanted.

Above all he wanted to escape from the dreadful logic of this call to go home. For he had not been honest, either with Laney or with his mother and sister, in saying that he would not expose Laney to the ridicule of Society. The complete truth was that he would not expose himself and Stevenson’s to the risks of such ridicule. He could not honourably go back and shoulder six millions-worth of responsibility—all that capital, all those trusting, loyal people—he could not saddle it with the burden of a girl from a Fenian-American slum quarter, no matter how bright or lovely or talented.

To take the firm in the directions he knew it had to go next, he needed to build that vast palace and become the confidant of royalty, no less—perhaps even the moneylender to royalty; international royalty, too, not just English. What use would Laney be there? A thundering liability—the fact could not be blinked away.

In those surroundings, possessed of those aims, he needed a wife to the manner born. He needed—Linny Sherringham.

Where was Laney?

Linny…Laney! So near in sound. Such worlds apart in meaning.

The more he thought of all the things his refusal to return had cost him, the more desperately he needed to be with Laney and renew the ardour that alone justified what he had done.

It wasn’t only the loss of the stately palace, whose massive walls and windows and turrets he could see so clearly in his mind’s eye—surrounded by its terraces and fountains, its flowing lawns, proud peacocks, sweeping cedars, and carefully tended shrubberies and woods—it was not just the loss of this that plagued him. He saw, too, the yet-to-be-built bays and sheds of Stevenstown steel mills—the converters and open-hearth furnaces that his father would neglect to commission, the forges and rolling mills, the cable winders and wire drawers, and all the other new-world-pioneering machinery that would make Stevenson’s synonymous with steel. All those things he had put in his notes to his mother.

Please, Laney, please come soon,
he begged the silence.
Let me touch you and so own this city.

In a more abstract way he also saw (much as he could “see” the shape of a mathematical idea) the business as it might be in twenty years’ time. Even as it was at present, the firm was perfectly placed to move into shipbuilding and big land-engineering projects—especially big bridges. Didn’t New York need bridges! If there were a bridge to Brooklyn, Laney would be back by now. The chances the firm was throwing away! If only they acted properly now, then in twenty years one ship in ten in the world—in the
world!—
could have the words Stevenson Clyde…Stevenson Belfast…Stevenson Tyneside…embossed on her stern. Stevenson New York? Well, he chuckled to himself, it was hardly the same thing.

But if he had Laney, it would do. It would just about do.

Unaccountably he also thought of young Abigail. Not to see her for years—that, too, would be a loss, he realized.

He stood and went to the window, looking alternately at the two roads that might bring her from one of the Brooklyn ferries.
Laney? Oh, God, do come! Do come soon! Without you it’s all loss.

***

The farewell at the pier didn’t seem like a farewell at all. The ship was built for four thousand passengers. Only a few hundred were sailing in her. Nora and Winifred waved half-heartedly at other passengers’ farewell wishers, pretending that somewhere in that thin crowd stood Caspar and Laney.

“They’ll do marvellously, Mama!” Winifred said. “One day we’ll laugh at ourselves for being so sad.”

Just at that moment, as the gangway was being wheeled from the ship’s side, they saw Caspar—and they both knew at once that it could be none other—come bursting through the pier gates and run, vaulting bags and trolleys, scattering porters and pier workers, right to the foot of the gangway. The company was so eager for passengers that the men pushed the gangway back against the side of the ship and reopened the door at its head. Caspar, sweating and breathless, ran up.

Because she had already cast off for’ard and was drifting to an angle with the pier, he had to leap a fair gap at the top, but, with the help of two sailors, he just made it. Nora and Winifred had meanwhile come running down to the entry deck.

“Caspar!” they both cried as he picked himself up.

He was too out of breath to speak. His face was pure torment. Both read the agony there as he looked from one to the other and back again.

The first officer came up. “Madam,” he said apologetically to Nora. “We must sail. If this gentleman is a visitor, I fear…”

“Sail! Sail!” Caspar shouted hysterically. “I am a passenger.”

“Oh, Caspar…” his mother began.

But he turned and ran up the companionway to the top deck. They followed at their own fastest pace and arrived to see him clutching the rail and looking out at New York as if he were about to jump back off the ship at any moment.

Nora was on the point of going forward to him when Winifred clutched at her arm. She shook her head at her mother. “Leave him,” she said.

As the vast ship gathered speed and turned to leave Manhattan astern, Caspar walked crabwise along the rail until he was at the very back of the ship.
I could still jump it,
he kept saying to himself.
I could swim that far.
All the time he felt his muscles twitching to obey that impulse, while his spirit—that tyrannous spirit—all avarice, forbade them to do more than merely twitch.

Long after it had become truly impossible to leap into the water and swim ashore, he went on saying to himself:
You could! You could!
Bitter tears of self-hatred soaked his cheeks. What a rotten, rotten man he was!

Only then did Nora and Winifred dare to approach him.

“Steamer?” Winifred said hesitantly.

They saw him stiffen. “I couldn’t do it,” he said. “In the end—when I had to choose—I couldn’t say no to Stevenson’s.”

Nora came near him, too shy to touch. “But all those things you said about Laney…”

He flung himself upon her, bending at the knees to become a child in stature. “They’re all true,” he howled. “They’re all still true. Oh my God, my God, my God—how am I going to live without her? I’ve done a terrible thing.”

“What did she say?” Winifred asked.

“I didn’t…I left her a letter,” Caspar said and broke down completely.

Nora was weeping now, and so was Winifred. They stood clinging together for what little comfort there was, a windswept group, alone at the stern, while the last faint lines of the Long Island shores slipped below the horizon.

***

None of them knew—and it was to be many years before even Caspar learned—that Laney never read his letter. She was already lying dead in Bellevue Hospital while he wrote it. The cause of death was given as “subdural hemorrhage following a recent blow on the skull.” The doctor did not like to open her to confirm the diagnosis; all the evidence of those who saw her collapse on the street supported it. And there was the still-healing scar on her scalp. There had been many proofs in the aftermath of the draft riots that human cranial bones are no match for clubs, paving stones, and boots. Hers was not the first cranial hemorrhage he had seen that week.

Caspar’s letter was found by the woman who was sent in, days later, to clean up the offices of the Uptown Construction Company. Though barely literate, she could make out enough to know the letter would only distress Joseph Delaney. She kept it a week, and then she burned it.

Joe Delaney, even in the depth of his grief at the loss of the most wonderful and treasured daughter ever granted to a man, had time to reflect bitterly on Caspar’s desertion, without so much as a word to all the people who had helped him. He assumed Caspar had heard of Laney’s death and had just cut away and run for England. But then, Joe had always known that an Englishman’s honour was not a coin for universal tender.

Day after day Caspar wakened thinking joyfully of Laney, and only then remembering. It was the morning fist-between-the-eyes. His body, which ached with unfulfilled love for her, was merciless. It prepared him to bump into her around every corner—even here on the ship. The rational cry of
Impossible!
was no medicine against the visceral depths of all that pain. Even his nose strained to pull the scent of her from out of the salt on winds from the Azores and Africa. Love does not know what “impossible” means.

Even now he could not look at the ocean without stiffening against an impulse to leap into it. It was still partly his desire to swim and swim and swim until he was back in Manhattan; but now, too, the impulse was confused with a blind desire for oblivion, a release from this intolerable hurt.

Nora, who so recently had felt that same hurt herself, was more hesitant in comforting Caspar than was Winifred, who had had the merest brush with the pangs of unfulfilled love. Perhaps, obscurely, Nora realized that if she said “It will pass—however painful, it will pass,” Caspar would see through the half-truth to the lie at its core. It would never pass; it might be overlaid; it might diminish; but it would never completely pass. But Winifred could say those same words and her innocence would cleanse them of double intentions.

He never responded beyond a smile, a squeeze of the hand, and a shrinking back into himself. But on the sixth day out, with two-thirds of the voyage done, he surprised her at the ship’s rail. It was a bright, sunny day on a calm sea whipped to little white horses by a pleasant breeze.

“Well, Winnie,” he said with jovial effort as he joined her, “that’s quite enough of me. Tell me about yourself. What did you do in prison?”

And she was so pleased to see even a shadow of the old Caspar return that she told him everything—of the school she had planned down to the last detail of the smallest classroom, of its organization, its scope, its curriculum, the aims its girls would have when they left, their assault on the walled and medieval City of Man.

“But I won’t be happy,” she said, “until I can call it the West London College for Girls and Boys. Just like in America, where boys and girls sit in the same classroom and learn the same lessons from the same teacher.”

Caspar certainly heard enough to shock him out of his despondency; but he was not so apoplectic as he would have been a year earlier.

“You’ve seen the result,” Winifred risked saying. “Surely you won’t say it’s unnatural or injurious?”

He closed his eyes but remained outwardly calm. She moved until she was pressed against him, arm to arm. “Oh, Steamer, you must go back for her. If you don’t, you’ll hate yourself forever.”

“I couldn’t go back for her. I could never look her in the eyes again.”

“You must take the very next ship from Liverpool.”

“No.”

He was so decided, so calm, that she turned to him in surprise.

He spoke to the ocean. “Did it ever strike you—I don’t suppose it did—how like our mother Laney is?”

“Is she?”

“They’re sisters. In all essentials.”

“Isn’t that the highest possible…”

“Not,” he cut in, “for a firm that’s already the size of Stevenson’s. Not for the second generation. Don’t you see it? You remember the house I described to her? That big house? She’d die. She couldn’t walk into something she hadn’t helped build up. The mater couldn’t have done so, either.”

“You don’t
need
that house, Steamer. You need her so much more.”

His calm was beginning to frighten her.

“I don’t need it,” he said. “But Stevenson’s does. The firm and the family. There’s nine of us. There could be—sixty, seventy, eighty of our children. The firm can’t absorb them all. Even our father’s patronage and influence wouldn’t place them all and marry them all. So we must not just penetrate the very, very, very top of Society. We must become it. We shall have to be on Christian-name terms with royalty. Not in order to do any better, you understand, not any better for our children. Just to make sure they enjoy the prospects we nine share now. That big house is only the first of the things we’re going to need. But without it we can’t even think of getting the others.”

“It sounds very cold, very calculating, very…”

“Very far seeing?” he said.

“Yes. Mama said you have that ability.”

“It won’t be so bad. It will have its compensations. But Laney Delaney has no place in such a world. I could not destroy her by trying to force her into it.”

Winifred felt sick. “Steamer,” she asked quietly, “when did you think all this out?”

He considered that question a long time. “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said finally. “As soon as you and the mater turned up, I knew I was going to be cajoled into coming back. I suppose it didn’t take more than five minutes to realize I couldn’t bring Laney, too. But then I intended to turn down the offer—as I did, in fact. I didn’t decide to come back.” His voice took on a bitter edge. “I let
this
”
—
his heels stamped at the deck of the ship—“and
that
”
—
he waved at the ocean—“make it irrevocable for me. I’ll marry Linny Sherringham. She goes with the job, you could say.”

By now, Winifred was so appalled she could barely rise above a whisper. “But then you think just like our father. He wouldn’t disagree with a word you’ve said.”

“Hah!” The bitterness was absolute. “The wormwood and gall of this last year has been the slow realization that the guvnor has been absolutely right. Every step of the way. Except that he should have sired me before Boy.”

“Oh, Caspar!” she shouted as she ran away. “You are such a clever fool!”

***

They called briefly at Cork, which allowed Caspar to kit himself out in new clothes and return his borrowed ones to the First Officer.

When they docked at Liverpool, John was on the pierside. He had come with only one question on his mind—and his binoculars had answered it while the
Great Eastern
was still out in the tideway.

The delight on his face was huge as he ran up the gangway, the moment it was in position. He had eyes only for Caspar.

But in those final yards a doubt—almost a shyness—seemed to possess John.

“Guvnor!” Caspar called out. He advanced with outstretched hand, a huge smile where no such smile had been for nine year-long days.

Reassured, John strode toward him again, so that they almost collided. Too close for a handshake, they embraced, and then again. Then John, radiant in his joy, caught his son by the shoulders and held him off for an arm’s length inspection. He glanced swiftly and slyly over Caspar’s shoulders at the unsmiling face of Winifred.

“I decided I couldn’t fight all the Stevensons and win. They’re too tough.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Guv’nor,” Caspar answered. “I’ve just joined your side.”

John laughed uproarious delight. “Think we can keep them in their place?” he asked. “You and I, together?”

“Better than that,” Caspar replied, and he, too, looked over his shoulder to smile at Winifred. “First we’ll
find
them a place.
Then
we’ll keep them in it!”

Laughing together, they went down the gangplank, not even noticing that the ladies were left behind.

“Sometimes,” Nora said, looking at the two black-coated backs and the tall, shiny hats of her husband and son, “sometimes it would be rather nice to be a god.”