The Rise of Henry Morcar (44 page)

Morcar did a great deal of business and met a great many business men, and it was naturally their ideas which he encountered most frequently. Business, thought Morcar with grim amusement, surveying with relish. the greatest turnover in history, was more than just business in the United States; it was something between a sport and a religion. A sport—something like scalp-hunting, thought Morcar; a Red Indian fortitude was certainly necessary to engage in it; as they said, it was a great life if you didn't weaken. A religion—the finest buildings, the magnificent sky-scraping towers, were business premises. Were these business Americans as democratic as they made out? Well, yes and no, thought Morcar. The power of wealth was such that Morcar gasped at it; if you had dollars enough, you could get away with things for which in England you'd find yourself in gaol. The things Capital and Labour said to each other and did to each other, too, would have made the hair of Fred, the shop-steward at Syke Mills, stand on end. On the other hand, Morcar could but remember the incident of the janitor at the New England factory of a cloth manufacturer he had met as a merchant's guest. The manufacturer's natural suspicion of a foreign rival had yielded to his pride in his own product, and he took Morcar out to his plant to show him round. The janitor, a stout elderly man in spectacles, after admitting them suddenly threw his arms round Morcar's neck. “Eh, lad!” he exclaimed: “You're a Yorkshireman! I owned you as soon as ever you spoke.” Mildly disentangling himself from the embrace, Morcar admitted this, and suggested that the janitor likewise hailed from the county of the white rose. “Yes. Bradford,” agreed the janitor. Now Morcar was not a man who put on dignity or gave himself airs, but all the same he could not imagine the Syke Mills doorkeeper behaving with quite such carefree sociability to one of Morcar's guests. He had to admit that there was a feeling of equality in the janitor's behaviour greater than you could find in England.

On the other hand, Morcar sometimes slyly told himself that he now understood how he himself appeared to David Oldroyd, for that was just how the American business man appeared to him. Fresh from the united effort, the sinking of all differences in a common purpose, of wartime England,
the rugged individualism of American business practice in January 1941 struck him (to his own surprise) as somehow Victorian, old-fashioned, out of date.

Thus his reactions swayed back and forth between vexation and liking, until one day the decisive event took place. He was in a train northbound towards Canada when he heard of it. A spring blizzard veiled the landscape; it was indeed “snowing to beat hell”, as a tall, large, loose-jointed man in a rather high white collar, a salesman travelling in dry goods, who sat across the aisle from Morcar, remarked with feeling. The train stopped—very late because of the snow—at a wayside station, and a lad ran in with newspapers in the usual way. Morcar glanced at the headlines. Such a gush of relief and happiness filled his heart that he could not keep silence. He leaned across the aisle.

“Well, sir,” he said eagerly: “I see the Lease and Lend Act is passed.”

“Yeah,” agreed the drygoods salesman without expression, nodding. Then he seemed to recollect something about Morcar—his accent perhaps—and looking towards him again, added kindly: “Make a difference to your country, I daresay?”

“It certainly will,” said Morcar with fervour. “Make a difference to Hitler, too.” He paused, then suddenly cried out joyously: “I forgive you the McKinley tariff!”

“Pardon?” murmured the salesman politely, perplexed.

“And I'll throw in Dingley as well,” said Morcar.

“Uh-huh?” rejoined the salesman, still more perplexed.

“And America's not joining the League of Nations after the last war, and wrecking the Economic Conference in 1933, and every darned thing,” said Morcar with joyous emphasis: “I forgive you them all!”

“Well now, that's a new viewpoint to me. In my country,” said the salesman with mild courtesy: “We usually reckon we have to forgive yours.”

“Well, let's call it quits,” offered Morcar, laughing: “Then we can start afresh.”

The drygoods salesman gave a non-committal murmur but a friendly smile, and asked Morcar what it was like to be in an air-raid. His eyes bulged with sympathy and alarm as Morcar gave him a blow-by-blow description.

“That can't be the ship!” exclaimed Morcar, looking down from the high 14th Street pier at a small deck, red with rust,
which seemed chiefly occupied at the moment by heaps of scrap iron and lengths of chain.

He knew at once, from a slight movement on the part of his companion the shipping clerk, that he had said the wrong thing; this certainly was the freighter in which he was to cross the Atlantic homeward. For a moment he felt quite daunted at the thought of spending weeks in that tiny space amid Atlantic waves; then he rallied, for after all there was nothing in the world he desired more at the moment than to get back to England. “Ah—I see it is,” he said blandly, reading out the freighter's name, which was painted on the bows. “Quite a neat little craft.” Little was the word, he thought; there was scarcely room to walk. He saw himself pacing up and down a few yards each way, like a caged lion.

“Better not to mention her name, either here or at home. She's about seven thousand tons,” murmured the clerk. “With eleven thousand tons cargo.”

“Ah,” said Morcar non-committally. He had no idea whether this tonnage was large or small, so (in the language he had recently learned) he played his cards close to his chest and offered no comment. The clerk strolled on and Morcar strolled with him; behind them trailed the six other passengers, silent and doubtless rather daunted, like Morcar, but like him resolute to get home. “Ah!” he exclaimed in a different tone. The after-deck offered an animated scene. A group of men were busily engaged, under the supervision of a ship's officer, in securing a couple of aircraft to the deck by means of strong wires and bolts. The aircraft, which travelled minus their wings, were painted brown and green in dingy camouflage. It was clear to Morcar from the excited bearing of the men and the many shouted orders of the mate that aircraft formed an unaccustomed cargo for the little freighter, and he felt proud to be sailing in a craft which was taking planes to beleaguered England. The whole party seemed to experience a similar rise of spirits; they hung over the pier railing and watched intently.

“I hope we get them home to England safely,” remarked one of the passengers, a New Zealander.

“God knows they're wanted!” exclaimed Morcar with ardour.

A third aircraft was rapidly attached to the fore deck. The heaps of scrap resolved themselves into rivets and wedges, the chains into neat coils; the loose rust was swept overboard, the iron decks took on the appearance of an old-fashioned firegrate after the application of blacklead. When all was clean and neat—shipshape, I suppose, thought Morcar—the passengers were allowed to board the
Floating Castle
, as Morcar decided to
call the ship. (It was not her name but somewhat resembled it, and he was sure no ship called
Floating Castle
had ever been entered at Lloyds, so to name her thus was not careless talk, gave no secrets away to the enemy.) Presently the immemorial signal blasts of a ship about to sail blared out bravely, the little ship backed out from the pier, turned and headed for the ocean. The voyage had begun.

Now they were passing the Statue of Liberty, now she was only a distant silhouette with a pointed halo, now the waves began to be larger and to slap sharply against the side of the
Castle
, ruffled by the afternoon breeze. Morcar stood watching the lofty pinnacles of New York recede as the ship went down the bay. A phrase came into his mind, a tag from some forgotten lesson of his schooldays, Shakespeare he supposed:
cloud-capp'd towers and gorgeous palaces.
They were all of that, he thought admiringly, and he felt a real sadness of farewell as the island of Manhattan swam away till the skyscrapers looked like a cluster of tall pink and white flowers rising from a blue-grey sea of foliage. He should like to come and see them again after the war if he had any money left after the war to do so, which at the moment seemed highly improbable for any Englishman. Yes, he felt quite sad. He was saying goodbye to a people he had grown to like, goodbye to ease, goodbye to luxury, goodbye perhaps to life itself—but all the same he would give an arm, thought Morcar strongly, to be back in England at that moment. England was beleaguered and beset; Christina—well best not think of that, thought Morcar, turning from the bulwarks to pace restlessly up and down. The passenger deck, a tiny square which he could cover in a few strides, was far too small to relieve his sense of impatient longing; he descended to the iron deck below, walked the ship from end to end, entered into conversation with any officer, apprentice or seaman who would talk with him.

He should never forget that voyage, thought Morcar, a series of pictures of its progress were stamped indelibly on his brain. The
Floating Castle
, a freighter of the British merchant marine, usually plied between New York and the Far East, but had come as a reinforcement to the Atlantic battle. All aboard were of British nationality; the captain, English, had been a Royal Navy man, axed in the days when naval disarmament was made a reality by Britain if by few other countries; the crew were Malays, the stewards Singapore Chinese, the officers English, Welsh, Scots and Belfast Irish. Morcar at first had a tiny but cosy cabin to himself; the bedlinen could not be described as spotless, for it was stained with great daubs of rust, but it was brilliantly clean; the sunlight on the waves outside
reflected quivering flashes on the ceiling through the open porthole; the white paint shone, the neatly dovetailed equipment tickled Morcar's sense of humour.

The
Floating Castle
went peacefully up the coast and after some delay by fog turned into Halifax harbour. No doubt Halifax was to its inhabitants a pleasant place, homely and kind and not without beauty, but to Morcar it represented a hell of frustration and suspense. The huge harbour was already crowded with craft when the
Castle
arrived, so that it was clear a convoy was in process of preparation, and Morcar hoped to be off homewards at break of day. But after hours of eager expectation this hope was disappointed, and a couple of days later the hope of joining the next convoy was disappointed again. The weather was hot; the passengers, who had already read all the worthwhile books in the little ship's library and were falling back on sermons and manuals, grew languid, the officers a trifle snappy; the Captain and first mate often went ashore carrying brief cases and returned hours later looking portentous with knowledge which they did not reveal.

Morcar occupied himself by assisting the carpenter to paint the name
Floating Castle
in large white letters on an enormous loose plank. This was to be displayed horizontally on the deck, explained the third mate, for the purpose of recognition by friendly aircraft. It was as he was painting a nicely curled S, on the hot June Sunday morning, that the third mate rushed up to him with round eyes and a gaping mouth, and told him that Germany had invaded Russia. Morcar was so dumbfounded that he stood at gaze until an angry shout from the bridge recalled him to himself, and he saw that he had dropped a large white splash of paint on the ship's woodwork. In the afternoon he heard over the captain's radio a relay of Mr. Churchill's speech swinging Britain unreservedly to Russia's side. The captain asked him what he thought of these developments.

“Well—we aren't alone any more,” said Morcar thoughtfully.

Next day when the Captain returned from shore he summoned his passengers to the upper cabin which they used as a lounge, and told them that the Admiral of the next convoy was to make the
Floating Castle
his flagship. There would be gunners aboard, there would be signalmen—and there would probably be little room for passengers. Some of the passengers might be transferred to other ships, and some just left behind in Canada. An awful silence descended on the cabin as he said this. Left behind! After the Captain had gone each passenger seized upon the first mate in turn and explained to him why it was imperative that he, if no other, should travel on the
Floating Castle.

“We could double up, three or four in a cabin,” suggested a quiet little man who had left an American wife and child to rejoin his former British regiment.

“We could all accommodate ourselves in this cabin—it is sufficiently spacious,” suggested a Frenchman who was proceeding to England because, as he explained to Morcar, he was French.

“The lounge will be occupied by gunners and signalmen,” said the mate in his dourest tone.

“We could sleep on the floor in the dining-saloon,” suggested Morcar.

The mate snorted.

Several days passed full of anguished suspense. Morcar paced the deck in silence and thought of England and Christina; the other passengers paced up and down likewise, with frowning brows, their minds doubtless full of troubles which however they kept to themselves. Then suddenly two passengers were taken off to another ship—an oil-tanker; three were squashed into one tiny cabin, and a couple of whom Morcar was one were allowed to sleep, as he had suggested, on the floor of the saloon. All their luggage except the most absolute necessities was thrust into the hold. Four gunners and a machine-gun came aboard, half a dozen A.B.s from the Royal Navy came aboard, a yeoman of signals came aboard, lastly with all proper ceremony the Admiral himself came aboard. A small spare elderly man with seaman's eyes and a fine head, summoned from retirement to this honourable and dangerous task, dapper, courteous and a martinet, he installed his bed in the wheelhouse and remarked casually that he never drank at sea. This dictum prevented all the ship's officers from taking a drink at sea, and from sheer decency the passengers were compelled to a similar abstention.