Read Online The Rise of Henry Morcar by Phyllis Bentley - Free Book Online Page B

told him he had better get off to bed and kissed him goodnight. To his astonishment he fell asleep immediately.
    He woke at just the right moment next morning and sprang out of bed at once. His mother seemed still asleep for no sounds came from the next room and he wondered with some diffidence whether he would need—for the first time in his life—to wake her, but luckily just as the problem became acute he heard her stirring. She was prompt with his meal and nothing occurred to delay him, and soon he was riding down Hurst Road towards Annotsfield. The morning was rather cool and dull, but the birds were singing in the park trees. Morcar was keenly happy. At last! At last! He rode with beautiful precision, but without any schoolboy flourishes, down the hill and across the knot of traffic in the centre of Annotsfield and along Cloth Hall Street and East-gate, weaving in and out of trams with sober skill.
    At last he reached Prospect Mills. Half the red door stood open. Morcar picked up his bicycle and carried it in, up the four stone steps, depositing it in the dark back passage where his machine and Charlie’s had so often leaned before; he took the brat out of the bicycle pouch, snatched off his cap and gave a clumsy pat to his thick fair thatch, then pushed open the office door and entered industrial life.
    An elderly man with greying hair, thinnish, wearing crooked pince-nez and a morose expression, sat on a high stool at the sloping desk which ran down the centre of the room. Morcar did not remember to have seen him there before. He looked up at the boy sideways over his glasses and said: “Yes?”
    Blushing and twisting his cap in his hands, Harry gave his name. “I’ve come to work,” he explained.
    â€œOh yes, I remember now—Mr. Shaw told me,” said the cashier in an unexpectedly kind voice. “Well—Mr. Shaw isn’t here yet; he’s coming back from Bridlington this morning. Well now, let me see. I don’t just know what Mr. Shaw means to put you at.” Harry gazed at him anxiously, and he responded to the appeal. “You can help next door till he comes.” Relieved, Harry hung up his cap on a hook by the door and began to unroll the brat.
    â€œThat’s a fine apron you’ve got there,” said the cashier, amused.
    â€œIt was father’s,” muttered Harry, looking down.
    The cashier stood up and turning him round in a rough but friendly manner tied the tapes for him, then pushed him through the inner door of the office into a long light room which wasapparently the Shaws’ warehouse and place of despatch. Various piles of finished pieces stood about on low wooden platforms and shelves; they were not very numerous—“but of course they’d send everything out they could before Wakes,” reflected Harry quickly. A knot of men stood gossiping at the far end of the room; at the cashier’s shout they broke up and in a leisurely way resumed their avocations. One was measuring cloth on the long wooden table, golden with use; another was packing; a third seemed to be in charge, and came towards them enquiringly. The cashier explained Morcar.
    â€œCan you write and figure and such?”
    Harry said he could, and accordingly he was put to help a dark short solid man, addressed as Booth by the rest, at the weighing machine. They lifted a piece on to the platform of the scales; the man adjusted the weights and called the result to Harry, who wrote it neatly on the ticket attached to the piece, while Booth entered it in a book; then they lifted the piece off the scales to a table, where Booth stitched its number and some particulars into the end of the fabric in an odd-looking sewing-machine. Harry was happy to find his first textile task so well within his capacity and Booth approved his clear figures and careful accuracy, so they got on together well enough. At first Harry could not understand a word his companion said,