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.

“Sir Ralph Duxbury is younger than you,” she argued, “and he’s retiring at the end of the war. They’re going to London to enjoy life before they’re too old.”

“Duxbury,” said William severely, “is a war-profiteer. His future plans tally with his present.”

“Oh, how can you say that of your friend?”

“I can say it of most of my friends. But you would hardly suggest that it is true of me. You would hardly put the case of a Hepplestall on all fours with the case of a Duxbury.”

She did suggest it. “But surely you are all in business to make money!”

“My dear,” he said, with dignified rebuke, “I am a Hepplestall,” and left it, without more argument, at that. He knew no cure for eyes which saw no difference between the Service and the nimble men who had thriven by the mushroom trades of temporary war-contractors. “And we go to Staithley.”

If it was a matter of capitulations, he had his own to make in his disappearance from Manchester, his familiar scene. The Head of Hepplestalls made no half-and-half business of it, dividing his days between the mills, the Manchester office and the Manchester Exchange. He left others to cut a figure on ‘Change and to hold court in the offices. His place was at the source, at the mills, a standard-bearer of the cotton trade, a manufacturer first and a salesman and distributor only by proxy. It meant, for William, the change in the habits of half a lifetime, the end of his pleasant Cheshire County associations at Alderley, the end of his lunches in his club in Manchester, and, so far, he could have sympathized with Gertrude if only she hadn’t, by the violence of her expression, driven him hotly to resent her view.

She called it “darkest Lancashire”—Staithley, the Staithley of the Hepplestalls! “Caretakers for Rupert!” There was truth in that, though the caretaking, by reason of the war and because when the war ended Rupert had still to begin at the beginning, would last ten years and (confound Gertrude), couldn’t she see what it meant to William that he was going to live and to have his children live in Staithley Hall where he had spent his boyhood? Caretakers! They were all caretakers, they were all trustees. Above all, he, William, was Head of Hepple-stall’s and his wife had so little appreciation of the glory that was his as to be captious about the trivial offsets.

The responsibility, heaven knew, was heavy enough without Gertrude’s adding to it this galling burden of her discontent, but, though she submitted, it was never gracefully. She went to Staithley determined that their time there should be short, that she would lose no opportunity to press for his retirement; but she had learned the need of subtlety. She had found her William a malleable husband, but there were hard places in the softest men and here was one of them not to be negotiated easily or hurriedly, but by a gentle tactfulness. Perhaps she knew, better than he knew himself, that there was no granite in him.

She reminded him, not every day or every week, but sufficiently often to show that she did not relent, of her hatred of Staithley. She had the wisdom not to criticize the Hall—indeed she couldn’t, even when she flogged resentment, disrelish that aging place of mellow beauty—but, “If it were anywhere but at Staithley!” she cried with wearying monotony, and in a score of ways she made dissatisfaction rankle. It was a fact in their lives which she intended to turn into a factor.

She made a minor counter of Rupert’s marriage to a musical comedy actress. “I’m caretaker for a slut,” she said, and when, after the war, William was indulgent about Rupert who was demobilized and yet did not come to Staithley, her fury was uncontrolled. “He has had no honeymoon and no holiday,” said William. “Both are due to him before he comes here.”

“Here,” she said, “to the Hall, to turn me out of the only thing that made Staithley tolerable. You expect me to live in a villa in Staithley?”

“The Hall is Rupert’s. If he were a bachelor, he would no doubt ask us to stay on. As he is married, we must find other quarters.”

“But not in Staithley. William, say it shall not be in Staithley.”

“It must.”

“I’m evicted for that slut! Have you no more thought for your wife than to humiliate me like that?”

“There is no humiliation, Gertrude. And, I expect, no need to think of this at all yet. Rupert deserves a long holiday.”

“Keeping me on tenterhooks, never knowing from one day to the next when I shall get orders to quit. And, all the time we could do the reasonable thing. We could leave Staithley and go to London.”

“We shall not leave Staithley,” he said. “Staithley is the home of the Head of Hepplestall’s.”

“The homeless Head,” she taunted, and he did, in fact, almost as much as she, resent the implications of Rupert’s marriage. It had been suave living at the Hall, peopled with memories of his race and, important point, affording room for a man to escape into from his wife. Certainly he had been dull about Rupert’s marriage, he hadn’t sufficiently perceived that he must leave the Hall to live elsewhere in Staithley. “A villa in Staithley,” Gertrude put it, and truly he supposed that he must live in a house which would be correctly described as a villa. He couldn’t expect the associations of the Hall, but he wanted scope in a Staithley home in which to flee from Gertrude, and looked ahead with a sense of weariness to the long period of Rupert’s noviciate. Then, and not till then, he might chant his “Nunc dÎmittis” he might retire and go, as Gertrude wished, to London, but not before then. Certainly not before then.

But war disintegrates. William was wrong in thinking that he had to pit his tenacity and his sense of duty only against Gertrude. The end of the war and its immediate sequel were to blow a shrewd side-wind upon his resolution to endure.

The great delusion of the war was that its end would be peace. William was encouraged by that delusion to wrestle with the war-problems of his business: the shortage of raw cotton, the leaping costs of production, the shortage of shipping. The home trade was good beyond precedent, it almost seemed that the higher the price the greater the demand; but the home market, at its most voracious, took only a minor part of Hepplestall’s output. Turkey was an enemy; India, China and South America followed warily the upward trend of prices, expecting the end of the war to bring a sudden fall, and, also, were difficult of access by reason of the transport shortage. In spite of the military service act, in spite of their woolen dyeing, and of every device that William and the Board could contrive to keep the great mills active, there was unemployment at Hepplestall’s. Cotton was rationed in Lancashire and Hepplestall’s quota of the common stock was insufficient to keep their spindles at work. The situation was met adequately by the Cotton Control Board and the Unions and by the substitution of corporate spirit for individualism; by high wages; by a pool of fines imposed on those who worked more spindles and took more cotton than their due; and ends were met all round, but, however different the case of the munition trades, cotton was no beneficiary of the war.

The year 1919 brought a great and a dangerous reaction. It was seen by the foreign markets that their expectations of a spectacular fall in prices were not to be realized, and, for a time, buyers scrambled to supply, at any price, cotton goods to countries starved of cotton practically throughout the war. William looked back to his father’s time when the margin of profit on a pound of yarn had been reckoned by an eighth or a farthing: it was now sixpence or more, and he trembled for the cotton trade. Such margins had the febrile unhealthiness of an overheated forcing-house. He hadn’t expected peace to duplicate for him the conditions of 1913, but these profits, current in 1919, expressed for him the hazards of the peace. There was a madness in the very air, and a frenzy of speculation resulted from this rebound of the cotton trade from war-depression to extreme buoyancy. The profits were notorious, and Labor could not be expected to remain without its share of the loot. That was reasonable enough, but William had no faith in the boom’s lasting and knew the difficulty of persuading Labor to accept reduction when the tight times came. Meanwhile, certainly, Labor had a sound case for a large advance in wages, even though wages had steadily risen throughout the war. William wondered if any helmsman of Hepple-stall’s had ever faced such anxious times as these; the very appearance of prosperity, deceptive and fleeting as he held it to be, was incalculable menace. In spite of himself, he was a profiteer—not a war, but an as-a-result-of-the-war profiteer—and both hated and feared it. This was not peace but pyrotechny; they were up like a rocket and he feared to come down like the stick.

Lancashire was turned into a speculator’s cockpit and cotton mill shares were changing hands sometimes at ten times their nominal value. The point, especially, was the prohibitive cost of building, so that existing mills had monopoly valuations. The general anticipation, which William did not share, was that a world hunger for cotton goods would sustain the boom for four or five years; there was plenty of war-made wealth ready for investment, and the cotton trade appeared a promising field for high and quick returns.

So much money was there and so attractive did cotton trade prospects appear that the local speculator began to be outbidden very greatly to his patriotic annoyance. The annoyance, indeed, was more than patriotic or parochial, it was sensible. A highly technical trade can be run to advantage only when its controllers have not only full technical knowledge, but full knowledge of local characteristics and prejudices, and Lancashire was, historically, self-supporting with its finance as well as its trade under Lancashire direction. From its brutal origins to its present comparatively humane organization, its struggles and its achievements had been its own.

The interests of the financier are financial; one-eyed, short-sighted, parasitic interests. Steam and the factory system fell like a blight on Lancashire, but they had in them the elements of progress of a kind; they worked out, outrageously, in the course of a century to a balance where the power was not exclusively the employers’. The object of the London financiers who now perceived in Lancashire a fruitful field was to buy up mills, run them under managers for the first years of the boom, then, before new mills could be built, to show amazing profits and to unload on the guileless public before the boom collapsed. It was a raid purely in financial interests and opposed to the permanent interests of Lancashire, which would be left to bear, in a new era of distress, the burdens imposed by over-capitalization. To the financier, Lancashire was a counter in whose future he had no interest after he had floated his companies and got out with his profits. And he collected mills like so many tricks in his game.

The owners were fraudulent trustees to sell even under temptation of such prices as were offered? Well, many did not sell, and for others there was the excuse, besides natural greed, of war-weariness. They had the feeling that here was security offered them, ease after years of strain; it was a sauve qui peut and the devil take the hindmost. They were men who hadn’t been in business for their health and were offered golden opportunity to retire from business. They had been, perhaps, a little jealous of others who had made strictly war wealth, and this was their chance to get hold, at second hand, of a share of those war profits. There was the example of others... there would be stressful times ahead for the cotton trade... Labor upheavals... it was good to be out of it all, with one’s money gently in the Funds.

And Finance goes stealthily to work: it was not at first apparent, even to sellers, that behind the nominal buyers were non-Lancashire financiers. There was no immediate apprehension of the objects; nobody took quick alarm. Labor, especially the Oldham spinners, had cotton shares to sell and took a profit with the rest. They started a special share exchange in Oldham: it was open through the Christmas holidays and on New Year’s Day of 1920. That speaks more than volumes for the dementia of that boom. Working on New Year’s Day in Oldham! What was the use of being sentimentally annoyed at being outbidden by a Londoner, even if you perceived he was a Londoner, when the congenital idiot offered ten pounds for a pound share on which you had only paid up five shillings?

Appetite grew by what it fed on and Finance ceased to be satisfied with acquiring small mills whose names, at any rate, were unknown to the outside investor. Hepplestall’s was different, Hepplestall’s was known to every shopkeeper and every housewife in the land. It was, in the opinion of Finance, only a question of price; and prices did not cow Finance.

William sat in the office of the Hepplestalls with a letter before him which was Finance’s opening gambit in the game. It was addressed to him personally, marked “private and confidential,” by a London firm of chartered accountants whose national eminence left no doubt of the serious intentions of their clients.

Which of us does not know the fearful joy of mental flirtation with crime? William, restraining his first sound impulse to tear up the letter and to put its fragments where they properly belonged, in the waste-paper basket, persuaded himself that his motive was simple curiosity. It had nothing to do with Gertrude, nor with her impatience of Rupert who was prolonging a holiday into a habit, and who, if he made no signal that her reign in Staithley Hall must end, made no signal, either, that his training for the Service must begin. By this time, William had, distinctly, his puzzled misgivings about Rupert, but he hadn’t quite reached the point of seeing in Rupert’s absence and his uncommunicativeness a deliberate challenge to the Service. He attributed to thoughtlessness an absence which was thoughtful.

He had at first no other idea than to calculate what fabulous figure would, in existing circumstances, be justly demanded for Hepplestall’s on the ridiculous hypothesis of Hepplestall’s being for sale. There was surely no harm on a slack morning in a little theoretic financial exercise of that kind. There wasn’t; but, for all that, he went about the collecting of data, alone in his office under the pictured eyes of bygone Hepplestalls, with the furtive air of a criminal.

For insurance purposes, in view of post-war values, they had recently had a professional valuation made of the mills, machinery, office and warehouse buildings in Staithley and Manchester. Providential, William thought, meaning, of course, no more than that he need not waste more than an hour or so in satisfying his natural curiosity. It was, he asserted, defiantly daring the gaze of the Founder on the wall, natural to be curious.

He had the valuation for insurance before him now: he applied the multiplication table to reach an estimate of the market value. He meditated goodwill. Guiltily he attempted to capitalize the name of Hepplestall’s, and it made him feel less guilty to capitalize it in seven figures. The total result was so large that, notwithstanding the national eminence of the chartered accountants whose letter was in his pocket, he felt justified in regarding his proceedings as completely extravagant.

So he might just as well amuse himself further. He might, for instance, refresh his memory of the distribution of Hepplestall’s shares, and he might turn up the articles of association and see if that document, usually so comprehensive, had anticipated this unlikeliest of all improbabilities, a sale of Hepplestall’s: and what emerged from his investigation was the fact that if he and Rupert voted, on their joint holdings of shares, for a sale at a legally summoned general meeting of Hepplestall’s shareholders, a sale would be authorized. He and Rupert! William found himself sweating violently. It was impure, obscene nightmare, but style his communings what he would, the pass was there and he and Rupert had the power to sell it.

He rose and paced the room. War disintegrates, but not to this degree, not to the degree of dissipating the tradition of the Hepplestalls. He, the Head, the Chief Trustee, had meditated treachery, but only (he faced the portraits reassuringly), only speculatively, only in pursuit of a train of thought started by an impertinent letter, which he had not torn up. No, he had not torn it up, he had preserved it as laughable proof of the insensibility to finer issues of these financial people. He would show it to his brothers or to Rupert: it would become quite a family jest.

To Rupert? Indeed he ought to show it first to Rupert, the future Head. He could, jokingly, good-humoredly, use it as a lever to make Rupert conscious of his responsibilities, he could say “if you don’t come quickly, there’ll be no Hepplestall’s for you to come to. Look at this letter. You and I, between us, have controlling interest; we could sell the firm, and the rest of the Board could not effectively prevent us. I’m joking, of course. That sort of thing isn’t in the tradition of the Hepplestalls. And, by the way, speaking of the tradition, when are we to expect you amongst us?”

Something like that; not a bit a business letter, not serious; genial and avuncular; but there was, manifestly, a Rupert affair, and this impudent inquiry of the eminent chartered accountants was the very means to bring the affair to a head. The boy was exceeding the license allowed even to one who had been in the war from the beginning; it was nearly a year since his demobilization.

William thought that his letter would seem more friendly if he addressed it from the Hall and looked in his desk for notepaper. He seemed to have run out of the supply of private notepaper he kept in his desk; then the spinning manager interrupted him. He put the letter in his pocket again: he would write to Rupert after lunch at the Hall.

He was busy for some time with the spinning manager, and went home convinced that the only serious thought he had ever had about the letter in his pocket was of its opportuneness in the matter of Rupert. It was nothing beyond a plausible excuse for writing to Rupert essentially on another subject and the figures in his note-book were not a traitor’s secret but the meaningless result of a middle-aged gentleman’s mental gymnastics.

He lunched alone with Gertrude and, “I’m writing to Rupert to-day,” he said incautiously.

“Oh?” She bristled. “Why?”

He perceived and regretted his incaution. It was indiscreet to say that his object was to urge Rupert to Staithley when that coming could only mean Gertrude’s going from the Hall. “Oh,” he said, “I’ve to send on a letter which will amuse him.” He had decided that the only use of that letter was humorous; it was a jest, questionable in taste but illustrative of the times and therefore to be mentioned in the family and preserved as a curiosity amongst the papers of the firm. And if it were going to be a family diversion, who had better right than William’s wife to be the first to enjoy it with him? She had unreal grievances enough without his adding to them the real grievance of his denying her the right to laugh at those harlequin accountants who so grotesquely misapprehended Hepplestall’s. “This is the letter,” he said, passing it across to her, expecting, actually, that she would smile.

She did not smile. “I see,” she said, and, in fact, saw very well. Women’s incomprehension of business has been exaggerated. “Why, to arrive at the figure they ask for would take weeks of work.”

“I got at it roughly in half an hour this morning,” he boasted.

“And sent it to them?” she asked quickly.

“Oh dear, no. I was only doing it as a matter of curiosity. If I sent them my result, I should frighten them.”

“They must expect something big, though. Shan’t you reply at all or are you consulting Rupert first?”

“I’d hardly say ‘consult,’” he said. “I’m sending it him as I show it you—as a joke. I shall point out to him, as a form, that he and I between us have a controlling share interest. I shall jest about our powers. It’s an opportunity of making Rupert awake to his responsibilities.”

“Yes,” said Gertrude, “I see. And you know best, dear.” She was dangerously uncombative, arranging her mental notes that, though he derided the letter, he had prepared an estimate and that he was writing to Rupert who, with William, could take decisive action. By way purely of showing him how little seriously she took it, she changed the subject.

“I heard from Connie Duxbury this morning,” she said.

“Not the most desirable of your acquaintances, I think,” said William.

“Oh, my dear. Sir Ralph’s a member of Parliament now.”

“It isn’t a certificate of respectability.”

She looked thoughtfully at him, as he rose and went into the library to write to Rupert, with the careful, anxious gaze of a wife who sees in her husband the symptoms of ill-health. She wished to leave Staithley for her own sake, but decidedly it was for William’s sake as well. In Manchester, if he had not been advanced, if (for instance) his play at Bridge was circumspect while hers was dashing, he had been broadminded. She remembered that he had spoken of Sir Ralph as a profiteer, but had admitted that most of their friends were profiteers. Staithley, already, was narrowing William, in months. What would it not do for him in years? She must get him out of Staithley before it was too late.

He was writing to Rupert; so would she write to Rupert. She would assume, and she had her shrewd idea that the assumption was correct, that Rupert’s views of Staithley marched with her own. She would paint in lurid colors a picture of life in Staithley; she would exhibit William, his furrowed brow, his whitening hair, as an awful warning; she would enlarge upon the post-war difficulties, so immensely more wearisome than in Sir Philip’s time. She would suggest that the accountants’ letter was a salvation, a means honorable and reasonable, of cutting the entail, of escaping from the Service. And she would tell him to regard her letter as confidential.

She had no doubt whatever of her success with Rupert and as to William, waverer was written all over him. Rupert’s decision would decide William, and the William Hepplestalls would go to London. There were housing troubles, but if you had money and if you took time by the forelock, trouble melted. She proceeded to take time by the forelock and wrote to Lady Duxbury to ask her to keep an eye open for a large house near her own. She whispered to her dearest Connie in the very, very strictest confidence that Hepplestall’s was going to be sold.