tion. It should be closed to them for ever. For Tom
the family had ceased to have any meaning. His belief
was in the tradition of commercial expansion, just as
John's was centred in spread of English Liberalism, and
neither cared a jot for anything else. Commerce and
Liberalism depended upon the fruitfulness of money and
both therefore invested their money with great skill and
caution, invested, sold out, reinvested, leaving no stone
unturned to make every penny earn every possible frac-
tion of interest. They would have been hurt had they
been told that they were usurers, but they were usurers.
They liked to think that they were pioneers of modern
England, and they were pioneers of modern England.
Both hated the aristocracy and both were very eager that
the lower classes should be kept in order and cured of
the drunkenness, lewdness, thriftlessness, extravagance,
recklessness and love of pleasure which impaired the
quality of their labour and exposed them to dangerous
ideas and insidious doctrines. Tom was a Justice of
the Peace and was notorious for the swingeing punish-
ments he imposed on all offenders. They were different
only in their ideals. Tom thought England could be
made perfect by imposing severe discipline on the lower
classes, while John was of the opinion that all would be



MR. JOSEPH MOON AND THE SUCCESSION 473

well if the aristocracy were removed. Therefore Tom
remained in Thrigsby where he could have hundreds
of thousands of the poor within reach, while John pres-
ently moved to the South of England to study the ways
and the iniquities of the aristocracy. He had no inten-
tion of looking for their qualities.

When Tom began to study the Poor Law and ex-
pressed his aspiration to be a guardian and help in the
administration of it then Agnes, without understanding
a word of the Poor Law, instinctively revolted. She
saw that Tom was becoming harder and more cruel
and felt that he was seeking an outlet from the kind-
ness which he forced himself to give to her. She was
afraid of him and dared not implore him, as she longed
to do, to pour out his cruelty upon her. She tried to
provoke him to it, but he had an invincible idea that he
was a good husband to her and nothing could break in
upon that idea. He had her captive. The idea shut her
in like an iron door. She suffered the wildest agony.
Often she would lie upon her bed and writhe and weep
for her barrenness. He would see that she was suffer-
ing and be coldly kind and refuse to listen to her when
she tried to discuss the matter with him, because it must
be too painful for her. She could have the best advice
available, but she must not talk about it. His attitude
was: "We know. Yes, we know. It is our tragedy.
Let us forget it." She, poor wretch, wanted to realise
it, not to have it eating into her very bones, not to
have it crushing all her life and every pleasant thing
in it. At most he would recommend her to turn to God,
to his mother's God, in whom he no longer believed,
for comfort. Religion was made for women, who had
so many obscure sources of suffering. That religion,
Agnes knew, was not made for her. She was living



474 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

in a world for which it was inadequate. She was an
honest creature and needed to know her tragedy, to
expose herself to it, not to bolster herself up against it.
She had strength and beauty of character and she loved
Tom and wished to be stronger and more beautiful for
him, if only he would let her. He loved her too, but
could not see her point of view, or, indeed, that she had
a point of view. He was her husband, her dictator, he
knew best how to make her life less hard.

At last she broke down and went to Jamie and
astounded and shocked him by pouring out her tale.
"I want you to know," she said, "for I feel so useless,
useless altogether, useless even to Tom, for it is shutting
out everything in me that wants to help him and to be
with him." "I don't think I understand Tom very
well," said Jamie. "He and I are so different and in
so many ways he is a better man than I am. I used to
laugh at him but what you have told me makes it very
hard to laugh." Agnes was between laughing and cry-
ing. "Dear Jamie," she said, "it is almost enough to
have told you. What is happening to us all, or was
life always so hard?" "I don't know," he said. "It is
always hard, I think. But my mother's life must have
been easy compared with yours. And those old people,
Andrew and Angus and Donald, I think their lives were
easier, simpler perhaps. It may be that they made mis-
takes for which we have to pay. But I like to think
that we are trying for something greater than they ever
dreamed of, some way of living that will give more satis-
faction to more people. It is all very dark now and
hard to see, but I like to think that. Sometimes I do
believe it and then I find that I can bear any suffering. "-
"Why can't Tom see things like that?" "I expect Tom
is helping to do what I only dream. That would make



MR. JOSEPH MOON AND THE SUCCESSION 475

him blind." "You won't tell Catherine? I don't want
Catherine to know." "No." "I oughtn't to have said
that, but I can never keep anything from Tom myself."
Jamie smiled: "I imagine you'll keep it from him
that you have told me." "Yes." Agnes too smiled.
She felt happier. Part of her burden had passed over
to Jamie and he was content to bear the weight of it.
Presently she said: "You ought to be happy, Jamie.
It would be dreadful if none of us was happy, when
we're all so pleased with ourselves and convinced that
we are somehow great and important." He assured her
that he was happy enough and was at any rate prepared
to meet anything that life might have to offer. "We
have none of us been just to you," said Agnes, "because
though we all feel that you are unusual and have great
qualities, there is nothing we can point to as your
achievement. Perhaps we cannot believe in anything
but success." "There's the bank," replied Jamie with
a grin. "I should have thought Tom would believe in
the bank." "Yes. But you are swallowed up in that.
Though I wasn't thinking so much of that, but of your
being important because you are what you are." "Noth-
ing," said Jamie, "is important in Thrigsby but money
and there I am admittedly a failure. I can't keep it.
Tom said once that if I had a hundred pounds in my
hand and crossed the road, by the time I got to the other
side I should have lost it." "Money, money, money!"
cried Agnes. "Is there nothing else? Can't people be
estimable without it?" "Not generally," he answered.
"To be publicly esteemed is very expensive." "At any
rate," said she, "I know you better now and I should
be sorry if you were any different. I think Catherine
is a very lucky woman to have you and her baby and I
hope she knows it." On that she went upstairs to see



476 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

the baby and left Jamie to a melancholy musing, vaguely
dissatisfied, oppressed with the picture of the narrowness
of the life to which Agnes was condemned. It was the
story of Andrew's wife over again. Success measured
by money produced indifference to human failure. It
looked as though marriage and love and parenthood had
been abandoned as factors in happiness, dropped in
favour of the security afforded by money. There was
not even the heroic stoicism of his mother, such as had
been adopted to protect a dear religion. Men like Tom
simply shut their eyes to their failure and sentimentalised
it. He was glad that Agnes had come to him. She had
shaken him in his complacency and confirmed him in his
recognition of the impossibility of measuring his outward
life by money or his inward life by formula. That
would mean to accept and condone squalor in both. At
the same time he could no longer be stoical. The old
religion was broken for him. It offered him no com-
pensation that he could accept without feeling that he
had denied and betrayed his liberty. Ah ! That was the
word. It had begun to have a new, though as yet no
very precise, meaning for him. It implied tolerance.
He must allow every man, even Tom, to be himself, and
certainly he felt no rancour over Tom's treatment of
Agnes. That was a pitiful but inevitable tragedy. Only,
if he himself were not in his own life to pile tragedy on
tragedy he must gain and assert his own liberty. He had
thought that the disapproval of others could deprive
him of it but now that seemed to him false. Tom had
everybody's approval, including his own, but he had
destroyed his own liberty. He was bound hand and foot
to his avarice. What then was this liberty and how
could it be asserted in terms of Thrigsby, in terms of
marriage with Catherine? There was no doubt in his



MR. JOSEPH MOON AND THE SUCCESSION 477

mind as to which was the more difficult. Thrigsby had
begun to appear to him as a grim joke, a huge effort on
the part of humanity's liking for the grotesque: slums
for the poor, villas for the rich, a complete denial of
the human need of grace, beauty, and even fresh air, a
most thorough denial of all that previous generations
had held desirable. So complete was the denial that it
was hardly at all a menace to liberty: it had indeed
given liberty a new meaning and driven himself to look
for it in his own soul and not as a gift from the Almighty
or a privilege wrung from princes and governors. It
entailed isolation, but with it the power to break isolation
down. It made it intolerable for him to live without
more communication with his fellows than he had. He
must be active among them for more than material profit
or momentary pleasure, which meant the establishment
of monotony and a drifting to stagnation. As he saw
it now, Tom, the bank, the Keiths and the Greigs meant
the creation of slums and poverty to procure a wealth
as stagnant as poverty: a vicious circle from which
liberty was excluded. They were building a dark prison
in which future generations must live. There would
soon be no chink nor cranny left through which the light
could penetrate. And there could be no revolt. There
were sentimental formulae to provide for every dissatis-
faction, and how could the poor rebel ? They could keep
themselves alive by working ten hours a day: they had
no room for anything else but such pleasure as they
could snatch, and sleep. As for liberty! Who talks of
liberty in England? Are not all men free to say what
they like, think what they like, do what they like, to
become rich in any way they like so long as they keep
within the law? A man must be very drunk before he
is locked up in England. Yet this is not liberty. It is



478 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

rather expediency and a certain civic sense, a timid ad-
mission of the principle of give and take which reduces
what is given and taken to the minimum. It is order
rather than freedom: once again, the end lost in the
means. The tyranny of the family had been broken, or
was then being broken, but a new and greater tyranny
had been set up. Behind the tyranny of the family was
at least the authority of a great religion: behind this
new tyranny, that of public order, was no authority. It
had no aim but expediency, no desire but for riches, no
perception of good and evil, no activity but the buying
and selling of labour. Its be-all and end-all was slavery
in the interests of order. Its merits were so obvious
that only a fool would think of criticising it. Abuses
there might be, but the system itself was beyond criticism,
and it was the duty of every Englishman to adapt him-
self to it no matter what the sacrifice. It was the beauty
of the system that it had no need of ideals. It was
itself an ideal, or the working out of an ideal: the or-
ganisation of human life in a free country, a democratic
country which had for ever done with aristocracy, a
country for ever committed to compromise.

Then, pathetically, our champion of liberty saw the
compromise of his own life, how, revolting from the
callous money-making of the firm of Keith, Stevenson
he had taken refuge in the bank, how, turning from
religion, he had taken shelter in literature, and how,
discovering a great love in Tibby, he had fled to a smaller
and more pleasant love in Catherine. Shades of Byron
and Shelley! What a poor thing he seemed, he, who
in his youthful conceit had imagined himself to be in
force another Napoleon. He roared with laughter at
himself. Tragedy indeed? His life was a grim farce.
Compromise at every turn and all the while his mind



MR. JOSEPH MOON AND THE SUCCESSION 479

would not compromise. At least he had that freedom
and the courage to be a fool. He decided that he would
compromise no more. Though much harm would be done
yet he would not let all wither away. He had his mental
life still and would preserve that whatever happened.
"The man of independent mind. ..." Poor drunken
Burns! Even he in Thrigsby would have had the song
choked in his throat.

It was a chastened and humble James that went to
the bank on the day after Agnes' visit. Thrigsby's streets
seemed wonderfully unsubstantial as though the black-
ened buildings could easily be blown away to remove
the earth of their burden. They were so ugly and ram-
shackle that they could not possibly be anything but
temporary, and the people had very much the air of
brief sojourners: they were so obviously not really in-
terested in what they were doing, no more interested,
thought James, than himself. He certainly was not in-
terested in the maintenance of the balance between re-
serve and credit, or in keeping Cateaton's superior to
the Thrigsby and District. Still less was he interested
in the recent rivalry which had sprung up between him-
self and Mr. Joseph Moon, lately transferred from his
very successful branch to the head office. So far he
had managed to keep Mr. Joseph Moon subordinate to
himself, but now rivalry seemed absurd. Mr. Joseph
Moon was one kind of man, he himself was another.
Their aims were not the same. Mr. Joseph Moon was
intent on self-preservation within the vicious circle of
the buying and selling of labour, while Jamie's concern
was with the preservation of a precious something called
liberty which the vicious circle excluded. His new toler-
ance made him see Joseph as a decent little man bent
on standing well with his fellow-Thrigsbeians and on



480 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

having his name carved on one of the foundation stones
of a chapel : harmless ambitions enough which he would
in all innocence employ the most mischievous means to
satisfy. Why not let him? The whole of Thrigsby
was nothing but a means to such an end. There were
thousands of Joseph Moons and they would have their
Thrigsby though a thousand Jamies said them nay.
Jamie therefore relaxed in his share of the rivalry
and very soon saw himself supplanted in the confidence
of Mr. Rigby Blair. On the whole he was glad of that,
for the worst slave to the machinery of the bank was
its manager.

Mr. Rigby Blair lived for three months in the house
above the bank and then one morning he was found
dead in his bed. Soon Mr. Joseph Moon reigned in his
stead and Jamie had to go home to his wife and tell her
that he had not been appointed manager. This news was
received very ill. "Mr. Moon is quite a young man?"
asked Catherine. "Three years younger than I," re-
plied Jamie. "He is a better financier and his father
controls greater interests." "But it was always an un-
derstood thing that you were to succeed Mr. Blair. "-
"By us, but apparently not by the others." "You don't
seem to mind." "Frankly, I don't." "But you will
never be manager now. You will never have more than
a certain salary. O Jamie, it will be perfectly hateful
meeting Tom, now." "What does Tom matter ?"-
"He despises you. You know he does. And always
without a cause till now." "Do you prefer Tom to me?"
"No, Jamie dearest, you know I don't, but I hate his
having good reason to sneer at us." "As long as we are
living happily together I don't see how his sneering can
affect us, though we had only a crust of bread. "-
"You may not feel it, though I do. And there's mother,



MR. JOSEPH MOON AND THE SUCCESSION 481

and Belle with her new rich husband that she's so proud
of though he drinks like a fish." "But if I tell you
that I'm much happier, that I've been dreading having
to take up the appointment." "I don't believe it. I
don't believe you're quite such a fool as that." "I'm
sorry if you are disappointed." "Well, what do you
expect me to be? What will your mother think of it?"
"She'll be more reasonable than you." "She'll be re-
signed to it. She is resigned to everything and I hate
her for it. You are like her. She's a saint, I know.
So are you. But a saint in business is just a fool."-
"You sha'n't suffer as far as money goes. I shall have
more time for writing." "We sha'n't have the position
and I certainly didn't expect to be the wife of a common
journalist."

Catherine, it will be seen, had matured and, wearying
of her husband's elusiveness and unfailing gentleness,
had gone to her mother for instruction in the art of
marriage. From her she had learned the uses of the
sharp tongue, the curtain lecture, the skilful quarrel, the
curt demand, the wheedling caress, the kiss reconcilia-
tory, the angry flood of tears, the ill-cooked meal, and
the perfect joint, the sudden truth, the subtle equivoca-
tion, the locked door and the torrent of words, while at
the same time preserving, what her mother lacked, the
charming soft arrogance of her beauty. If, for a mo-
ment, we may regard marriage as a profession like any
other, we must admit that Catherine was brilliant and
shone in it. It was a profession to her, the only one
open to her. It was her object to be among wives easily
the first. She had been from the beginning socially
indefatigable and ingratiated herself with all the Greigs
as soon as she discovered that her husband had lost
ground with them. Jamie, as a husband, was rather



482 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

intractable material but that only intensified her pleasure
in her problem. There was no circle admittedly the
best in Thrigsby but there were several groups who took
that title to themselves. Into every one of these Cather-
ine thrust her way, dragging Jamie after her, and, in
spite of his shy aloofness, she had won a considerable
popularity. She counted that week a failure in which
they did not dine out twice, and occasionally she gave
dinner-parties in her own house. Her position would
have been consolidated by Jamie's appointment to the
managership at Cate.aton's, and she was furious at his
failure, ashamed of him, exasperated by his frank con-
fession that it was his own fault, that he had let it slip
out of his hands. "How could you let yourself be bested
by that common, spotty-faced Moon? I should have
thought that, even if you did not care about yourself,
you would have had some thought for me and for your
name. After all the Lawries do stand for something in
Thrigsby." "For what?" asked Jamie. "Well, you and
Tom aren't exactly unknown." "But if I had got the
managership we should have gone on just as we were
doing." "And why not?" "Because we were going to
wrack and ruin as fast as we could : I mean between our-
selves." "Oh! You've been thinking again." "I have
had good cause to think." "We shall be poor, do you
realise that?" "I have told you that you shall not want
money." "But your writing only makes enemies."-
"Only of men who could never possibly be my friends."
"You are not thinking of me at all." "I am thinking
of the two of us." "So am I." "Then we think dif-
ferently." "O ! you are maddening, maddening."- -"My
dearest child, do, do believe in me a little." "How can
I believe in a fool who wants his wife and children to
end in the workhouse?"



MR. JOSEPH MOON AND THE SUCCESSION 483

From that time on she took the offensive against him,
plunged more vigorously than ever into social life, and
struggled hard to redeem his failure. Unfortunately for
both of them Mr. Joseph Moon, having tasted the sweets
of triumph over his rival, wished to continue the pleasure
of it indefinitely and never lost an opportunity of hu-
miliating Jamie, taking over more and more of his work
and reducing him to the position of a subordinate.
Joseph was a new broom and swept very clean and in-
discriminately. He made great changes in the staff, re-
duced salaries, and dismissed men who had been over
twenty and thirty years in the service of the bank.
Against that, remembering Peter Leslie, Jamie protested,
and when his protest was ignored he handed in his
resignation. It was accepted and he had to go home to
Catherine with the news that he had left the bank.
"Left the bank!" she cried. "I might have known. I
might have known that that Moon would never rest
until he had got you out of it. And now, pray, what
are you going to do?" "I don't know." "You don't
know? Are we to starve then?" "Even if we lived on
our capital we shouldn't starve for three years and some-
thing is bound to happen before then. I shall be glad
of a rest after all these years of routine." She was
frantic. Not at all adventurous, she needed the idea
of security to be active. Without that idea she saw
herself being dragged down and down into poverty
worse than that which she had known during her moth-
er's widowhood. Certainly in Thrigsby there were
depths of poverty truly terrifying. It was the abyss on
the edge of which all lived. Catherine persuaded herself
that her husband was bent on pushing her over. She
flattered herself that she understood him and she thought
him very weak. He would allow the Moons and all his



484 THREE SONS AND A MOTHER

enemies to thrust him down without a murmur. So she
bestirred herself, swallowed her pride and went to see
Tom.

He grunted when he received her news. '"But for
you, Catherine," he said, "I would tell him to go and
sweep a crossing. For your sake, I will do what I can."
Catherine plucked up heart. "Unfortunately," Tom
continued, and Catherine's heart sank, "unfortunately I
am not in a position to do much, as I have sold my in-
terest in my firm and am going to retire and leave
Thrigsby to live near my wife's family. I am anxious
about her health." "Poor Agnes," murmured Catherine.
"I am ready," said Tom, "to swallow my objection to
jobbery and I could get him squeezed into the Thrigsby
and District as a cashier, or there might be a clerkship
vacant in the municipal offices. My word would carry
weight with the Town Clerk." "Thank you for noth-
ing," said Catherine with a flash of anger. "I would
rather see him sweeping a crossing than that." Tom
knew perfectly well what she meant. He knew as well
as any Thrigsbeian the lamentable estate to which clerks
were relegated : the empty no man's land between riches
and poverty, but he felt that he had at last got his slip-
pery and unaccountable brother pinned down. He had
foretold this collapse. Jamie had flouted the tradition
and yet had more apparent happiness than himself who
had followed it to the letter, even to withdrawing from
active money-making as soon as his future was securely
provided for. He rejoiced in the downfall and Cather-
ine hated him. "I am sorry," he said, "that I am not in
a position to do more, but if you are in difficulties I
am quite willing to make myself responsible for Jamie's
contribution to my mother's income." "I am sure,"
replied Catherine, "that he will not hear of anything of



MR. JOSEPH MOON AND THE SUCCESSION 485

the kind. Good-afternoon." "I am afraid," said Tom,
"that there are bad times ahead. That is why I am
anxious to help."

Catherine came away with a horror of the stubborn
hardness of these Lawries. She had no great affection
for her sister, Belle, but she could not have treated her
so had she been in trouble. She knew or she thought
she knew that same stubbornness in Jamie. It was that
had been his undoing. They were a dreadful family,
the Lawries, and she no longer counted herself lucky
in her marriage. It was wrecked. She could not think
of it otherwise. Jamie's courage and cheerfulness en-
raged her. When she told him of Tom's reception of
her he laughed and said that Tom was a close old
moudiwarp but would turn up trumps if it ever came
to a real pinch.

Jamie was happy, had never been in such spirits; no
more bank, no more routine, no more absurd rivalry
with Joseph Moon. Joseph had got what he wanted,
and he himself, James Lawrie, had got what he wanted,
room to move in, time to think in, leisure to work in.
Catherine on the other hand had lost everything she