Found floating, p.3
Found Floating, page 3
After sitting for some time over coffee and cigars, the four men left to show Mant the works. Eva, evidently bursting for confidences, waited behind.
‘Oh, my dear,’ she said as soon as she and Katherine were alone, ‘it’s not going to work. I wish to goodness he had stayed at home.’
Katherine felt that she must defend William’s plan. ‘Oh, Eva, don’t say that. Why should you think so?’
‘I know it. I could see it. Jim and he’ll never get on.’
‘They’ll get on as well as Jim got on with Uncle William.’
‘No, they won’t. They’ll have a row. I can see it coming—already. Jim wasn’t pleasant to him at lunch.’
‘He’s disappointed about Mant being brought here.’
‘Of course, but it was more than that. Already he doesn’t like him.’
‘Jim’s not very wise, you know, Eva,’ Katherine went on. ‘If he did feel like that, he shouldn’t have shown it.’
Eva pulled in closer to the fire and lit another cigarette. ‘I’m not worrying about that. Mant wouldn’t notice, or he’d think it was just Jim’s manner. What I’m afraid of is afterwards; when they begin to work together. They won’t pull. I can see it now. Their whole outlook will be different.’
In her secret mind Katherine could not but agree, yet as in a sense the representative of her uncle, she still felt she must uphold his judgment.
‘You don’t know that, Eva dear. I think Mant was trying to be friendly at lunch.’
‘Jim, you see, is differently made,’ Eva went on pursuing her own line of thought. ‘He took after my father’s family, not the Carringtons. As I often say, he’s a Musgrave. The Musgraves were a dreamy lot, fond of music and art and all that, and hating business like poison. I wish he could get another job.’
‘Do you think he couldn’t?’
Eva looked at her thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know; it wouldn’t be easy. Another commercial job would be no improvement, and I don’t know what else he could do.’
‘Something musical?’
‘Ah, yes, I dare say. But there’s no money in music.’ Eva paused, then once again reverted to her own line of thought. ‘You know, he frightens me at times, Jim does. He can be so terribly violent. Or violent’s not quite the word Reckless would be better. It takes a lot to rouse him, but if he once gets roused I believe he’d stop at nothing. It’s not what one would think about him with his quiet manner, but it’s the fact.’
Katherine shrugged. ‘I know. I’ve felt the same.’
‘I’ve been frightened sometimes when he and Uncle William have had a row, he gets so worked up. He ought to control himself. I wish you’d speak to him about it, Katherine. He minds you far more than he does me.’
Katherine disclaimed any such influence over her cousin and changed the subject. Presently Eva said she was going out to tea and would have to run. With a half sigh at the turn events had taken, Katherine saw her to the door.
Such was the coming of Mant. Soon he fell into the ways of the Grey House, and settled down as if he intended to spend the rest of his life there. He gave but little trouble and was invariably polite to Katherine and the maid. But he was aloof and self-contained, remaining for long periods in his room and, except at meals, seldom joining the others.
For some time after his arrival things went on as usual. Then small changes began to occur. The first was that William gave up his study to Mant and moved to another room which had been called the breakfast room. Some of his furniture he took with him, and this Mant replaced with very much better and more expensive pieces. Katherine was not at all pleased. She thought that Mant might well have taken the breakfast room and furnished it to suit himself, without disturbing the older man. However, William didn’t seem to mind, and after all, it was his business and not hers.
The next change, a very much more important one to Katherine, was that William began curtailing his visits to the works. This, which had been the whole object of bringing Mant over, did not please Katherine either. The old man so obviously felt giving up the reins of government that she was sorry for him and resentful against Mant for taking them out of his hands. She told herself she was being illogical, as indeed she was, but the realisation made no difference to her feelings.
But the old man’s presence changed the whole routine of the house. Even though he sat for long periods alone in his room, the knowledge that he was there and might want companionship was ever with her. Indeed, she grew nearer to him than at any time before. As time passed, he seemed to depend on her more and more. She tried to interest him in some of her own undertakings, discussing viewpoints for sketches or the subject of the latest debate, but with indifferent success. He was too old to take up new ideas, and he had never been a man for hobbies.
He puzzled her, did her Uncle William. As the weeks drew into months she felt she was not wholly in his confidence, in fact that there was a whole side of his mind from which she was shut out. Also while he seemed on the one hand aged and broken, almost decrepit, on the other he was always betraying flashes of his old vitality and mental power. He was now rarely at the works and Mant apparently consulted him but little, yet he would not leave Bromsley for the long holiday Dr Jellicoe so urgently recommended. More and more he withdrew into himself, going out less, lunching less frequently at his club in Birmingham, seeing fewer callers. It was all wrong, Katherine told herself, yet he was his own master and she could do nothing about it.
Mant had completely settled down at the Grey House and nothing was said about his moving elsewhere. As time passed he thawed somewhat towards Katherine, and that in the very same way as had William. Slowly and hesitatingly he began to talk to her about the works. Whether she had that gift of sympathetic hearing which drew confidences, or whether Mant felt lonely and in need of feminine society, she didn’t know. But gradually their strange intimacy increased, until soon he was obviously telling her more about what was going on than he told William.
It was during one of these confidences that she seized the opportunity of suggesting that he might perhaps please the old man by confiding a little more in him.
He looked at her slowly before replying, as was his habit. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you feel that way I doubt if you fully appreciate the situation. In the first place, I’m doing the very thing he asked me to come over from Australia to do: to take the worry and responsibility of the works off his shoulders. Next, I’ve found that he doesn’t like to be told my plans, especially if they involve any little changes from his ways of work. The suggestion that his way wasn’t perfect doesn’t please him.’
‘I suppose that’s natural. Still, a little talk about the works would tend to take him out of himself.’
Mant this time hesitated for what was really a long time, even for him. ‘I think, Cousin Katherine,’ he said at last, ‘I must tell you something that’s been worrying me ever since I came here.’ Again he paused. ‘It’s not easy to do, but I can’t help that. I don’t think he’s well. I don’t mean in bodily health; it’s worse than that. I’ve sometimes suspected his mind is touched. What do you think about it yourself?’
Katherine did not answer at once. She could not deny that this dreadful thought had also occurred to her. She was not sure. Sometimes she feared it must be so, at others that the breakdown was purely physical.
‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. ‘I confess I have sometimes feared it.’
‘What he wants,’ Mant went on, ‘is a change. A voyage. Why doesn’t he go round the world and take you with him? He’s got plenty of money. He’d come back a new man. Why not suggest it?’
‘Suggest it? I have suggested it again and again. Not perhaps going round the world, but going away somewhere.’
‘And he won’t?’
‘Won’t hear of it.’
‘That seems to me a sign of the trouble. However, if he won’t, he won’t. What about getting a mental specialist to have a look at him. I don’t suppose Jellicoe, is specially qualified in that direction?’
‘He’d never allow it. Besides, it might do him harm if he were to know what is in our minds.’
‘I agree with that. But he wouldn’t have to know. If we got someone, I would bring him in as a visitor to the works. These mental men do that sort of thing.’
Katherine was not keen on the idea. It might, she thought, come to it later, but in the meantime it did not seem necessary.
One subject Mant sedulously avoided, until she herself raised it: his feeling towards Jim. She knew from Jim himself and from Eva that relations between the two men were not too happy. Jim naturally resented a man who was so little his senior in years, and a stranger at that, being placed over him at the works. And when he found that his junior position was to remain unaltered under the new management, his resentment only grew the deeper.
Katherine touched on the subject diffidently. She was sincerely attached to Jim, and her whole thought was whether she could say anything to ease the tension. But she was also terribly afraid of doing more harm than good.
Mant, however, was quite cool and businesslike on the subject. ‘Well, you see,’ he admitted, ‘I’ll agree that we don’t just hit it off. We’re not made the same, and that’s a fact. He’s like so many of you people over here, if you don’t mind my saying it. He doesn’t like anything new. Because a thing’s proved to be bad, that’s no reason to a lot of English people for changing it. If a thing’s been, it’s just got to stay that way, no matter whether it serves its purpose or not. Now in Australia we’re different. If we find a better way of doing anything, we think that’s a reason for throwing out the old way and adopting the new. Now, it’s been proved again and again that the first thing in overhauling a business is to get costs everywhere and see where your leaks are. That means putting down pretty accurate times of everything that’s done, and some of these chaps don’t like it. I’ve had to get rid of some men because they refused to do it. Nearly had the whole lot of them out over the head of it, though I got that stopped. Jim’s one that dislikes time studies—and there you are.’
It seemed reasonable to Katherine, so put. Still, she felt that there must be more in it than that. Greatly daring, she went on, ‘Do you not think that one cause of the trouble is that his position is too junior for a man of his years and standing? Do you not think that if he was more satisfied about that, things would be happier?’
Mant again delayed longer than usual in replying. ‘Well, Cousin Katherine, I didn’t want to say it to you, but now you’ve forced me. The truth is, Jim’s not worth it. He won’t take enough trouble. His heart’s not in the job, and that’s a fact. I may tell you straight, if Jim wasn’t a cousin, he wouldn’t be there. He’s not pulling his weight. He’s a problem right enough, and I wish to goodness he’d get out of it.’
Katherine sighed. The outlook certainly was not promising. It would be better, she agreed, if Jim could get something that suited his special gifts: something musical, for instance. And yet it seemed hard that here, in this works owned by his own family, he couldn’t find a congenial job.
For a time after that conversation things seemed to go better. Jim appeared to have settled down and to have grown better friends with Mant. Then, some six months after the coming of Mant, occurred that dreadful incident when Katherine seemed to see down into the soul of Jim.
It was after dinner. Mant and William were in their studies, and she was by herself in the sitting room, sewing and reading. Often she deplored the family idiosyncrasy which made these two men retire so often into their respective lairs and leave her without company for the entire evening. She had however grown accustomed to it, and often she had her friends in and oftener still she went out herself. But this night she was alone. Not long after dinner Jim had come. She had not seen him arriving, and knew only that some caller had asked for Mant. But she heard his voice going out. Surprised and a little hurt that he should be in the house without coming to see her, she had opened the sitting-room door to invite him to stay. It was then she had seen his face. Murder was written upon it as clearly as if the letters had been painted. Murder! A murderous hate of Mant, almost maniacal in its intensity.
3
The Ministration of Katherine
All the remainder of that evening and a good deal of that night, Katherine thought, horror-stricken, over the revelation she had surprised in Jim’s face. She wasn’t exactly frightened by it, for she felt that Jim was far too good and kindly a man ever actually to commit so dreadful a crime. But it was extremely disquieting to find that such passions existed in her immediate surroundings. And also hateful. Katherine was one of those who longed for everyone about her to be friendly and happy.
She believed Mant had noticed nothing, though with Mant you never could be sure. Often she had thought he had not seen things, and afterwards some chance word had revealed that he had observed every detail. But on this occasion he had at least given no sign. He had withdrawn again to his study after a commonplace word or two and his usual formal ‘good night’.
First she had thought of following him and asking what was wrong. Then she decided that this might do more harm than good. But she felt she must find out what had happened, and then have a word with Jim in the hope of mending matters.
As it chanced when she came down next morning she found that Mant had already left for the works. She therefore racked her brains for an excuse to follow him to his office.
She found it in the case of a man who had been injured in the works a day or two previously. Owing to some unusual circumstance there was a doubt as to what his accident insurance would bring in. Katherine took a personal interest in such cases and a call to find out how the matter stood would, she thought, be unsuspicious.
So about eleven she set off. The works were quite close, in fact the Grey House stood on a corner of the works ground. The two were separated by a low hill covered with pines, through which ran a private path. She walked along the path and out on to the approach roadway to the works. A lorry loaded with the firm’s products was just leaving.
Somehow the departure of these crates and cases always struck a responsive chord in Katherine’s imagination. They represented as it were the consummation of all the activities and endeavour which had been poured into the concern. Old Thomas’s foundation, William’s building on it, her housekeeping, Mant’s activities, Jim’s, the workers’ generally, those labourers who were opening a drain on the approach road, the message boy who trotted past with a bundle of envelopes, all these and a vast number more performed their daily tasks with the sole object that these cases and crates, packed with electrical machinery, might continue to pour out in a steady stream through the entrance gates. This stream represented a sort of focus or spinal cord which held together the whole complex organisation. The manifold activities of the works converged to form it. Then, having passed the gates, it diverged again into all the world, or nearly so, like radiations leaving a transmitter. Katherine loved in imagination to follow the units of the stream as they went to various parts of England, Scotland and Ireland, to certain countries on the continent of Europe, to Africa, to the West Indies, even on one memorable occasion, to Patagonia. She longed to travel with the machines and see them set up in their new surroundings, tended perhaps by men of strange colours who spoke incomprehensible tongues. Strangely enough the return current, infinitely more important to the welfare of the works, the money which poured in from all the world in payment for these machines, did not appeal to her imagination to anything like the same extent.
Five minutes later she was being shown into Mant’s room. He rose when he saw her.
‘Why, Katherine’—he was gradually dropping the Cousin—‘this is a pleasant surprise. You don’t often honour the works with your presence. I hope there’s nothing wrong?’
‘Nothing whatever. It’s just that I thought I’d go down and see old Mrs Fletcher,’ and she put her question about the money.
‘You’re far too good to these people,’ he returned. They misunderstand your motives and don’t thank you for it. They think you’re trying to put them off with soft words and get out of paying them money. It’s a mistake.’
Katherine smiled. ‘I don’t believe it for a moment,’ she declared. ‘However we need scarcely start a discussion on the point. What about the money?’
‘She’ll get the money all right. There never was any real doubt of it. But she’ll get it because she’s entitled to it: not as charity.’
‘Of course. I’m with you there, Mant, absolutely. And I’m glad about the money. It means so much to these people.’
Mant agreed, and for some moments they discussed the insurance point which had arisen. Then Katherine rose to go. ‘I mustn’t keep you from your work,’ she declared, then added as if in an afterthought: ‘I was surprised Jim didn’t call in to see me last night. I thought he looked annoyed. I hope there was no trouble?’
Mant shot a suspicious glance at her and she saw that he realised that here was the real cause of her visit.
‘Did he look so very peeved?’ he asked.
‘He looked unhappy, and I hate to see him looking unhappy. He really is a good sort.’
Mant agreed with an unconvinced air. Katherine saw that if she wanted information, she must ask the direct question. ‘Nothing was seriously wrong, I hope?’
‘Just a little matter of business.’
‘A secret?’
‘Not mine at all events.’ He paused, then went on a trifle sardonically. ‘I wasn’t going to say anything about our little difference of opinion, but since you want to know, I’ll tell you. And if you’ve any influence with Jim, I hope you’ll use it.’
‘What do you mean?’ she said sharply.
‘I mean that unless there’s a change in him, he’ll soon be looking elsewhere for a job. I said I’d tell you and I will. Last night we had a row. Jim made a mistake in costing a certain article. A small relay it was, and he forgot to include the cast-iron box that contained it. It wasn’t a big item in a way, only about six shillings per relay. But a serious error all the same.’
