Noble in Reason

by Phyllis Bentley

  Mr. Hodgson summoned my father by telegraph, but the Sunday train-service from Hudley being notoriously poor, he could not arrive till late at night. Before setting out to meet him, Mr. Hodgson came to see me once again, and after an interchange of nods between him and the Teddings, we were left alone together. Settling himself in the creaking basket chair which all my questioners in turn had occupied, so that the sound flayed my nerves, he leaned forward and laid his hand on my knee.

  “Now, Chris,” he said soberly: “Just tell me why Henry did it. Private like, between you and me.”

  “But I don’t know, Mr. Hodgson!” I cried, frantic. “He was a little disappointed about his music—and distressed because of the family misfortunes—but not enough, surely—at least I should have thought not. I don’t know.”

  Mr. Hodgson hitched his chair nearer.

  “Chris,” he said, lowering his voice: “Was it a woman?”

  “A woman!” I exclaimed. “How could it be?”

  “Hush!” said Mr. Hodgson, looking about him. “Keep your voice down. Mrs. Tedding said to me privately that she thought there was a smell of scent in that room, this morning.”

  “But good heavens!” I exclaimed. “What could that have to do with it?”

  “He hadn’t—got involved—with any sort of woman?”

  “No, no!”

  “Are you sure, Chris?”

  “Absolutely certain sure.”

  “What about the scent, then?”

  I expect I coloured or showed some other sign of confusion, for Mr. Hodgson said quickly:

  “If it was a woman, Chris, my advice to you is: Don’t tell your father. It would only break his heart.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “We can’t bring the poor lad back, whatever we say. So why blacken his reputation?”

  “Mr. Hodgson, nobody could say anything to blacken Henry’s reputation, because it was absolutely clear. Henry was the most honourable person I’ve ever known.”

  Mr. Hodgson’s face softened at this. He stood up, laid one hand on my shoulder, and said:

  “Good boy. Well, I must go.”

  I faltered: “I suppose I must wait up to see my father?”

  No doubt my fear showed in my face and voice, for Mr. Hodgson answered quickly:

  “No need at all. You go to bed and take some of that stuff the doctor brought you.”

  The Teddings confirming this, I retired with much relief. My brother’s body had been removed by the police and, anxious to be alone, I assured the Teddings that I should not mind occupying the bedroom which I had shared with Henry. But when I found myself in the room, surrounded by evidences of Henry’s occupation—his hairbrushes, his boots, his clothes— I was unable to banish him from my mind, and my last two visions of him, pale with anger against me and pitiable in death, constantly rose before me in all their vivid pain. Could Florrie really have anything to do with his death? But how? Why? The doctor’s drug was powerless against this torment; I tossed and turned and grieved. Presently there came the subdued noise of arrival downstairs; hushed voices floated up towards me, a light appeared outside on the landing. In terror I cowered beneath the bedclothes as Mrs. Tedding made an anxious enquiry.

  “I shall be all right here with Chris, thank you,” was the gruff reply.

  It was the voice of John. I sat up in bed as he came in.

  “Chris! Are you awake?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. Where’s father?”

  “He couldn’t come. Mother’s ill.”

  “Mother ill?” I gasped. “What with?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing serious,” said John impatiently. “Don’t bother about it. But what have you been about, Chris,” said John, sitting down on the bed beside me, “to let poor Henry do this to himself, eh?”

  There were tears in his eyes as he spoke. It had never occurred to me before that John had any affection for Henry, or indeed that I had any affection for Henry myself, but now we wept together, and our grief was real.

  “But why did he do it, Chris love?”

  “I don’t know, John. Honestly, I don’t know.”

  There was a pause. John, crossing one leg over the other, began to unlace his boots. It struck me that my eldest brother had grown up a great deal since I last saw him; he was a man now, with a strong determined face and a powerful frame, looking very much older than his couple of years’ advantage over Henry seemed to warrant. He was also a good deal better dressed than Henry and I had lately managed to be.

  “It was a mistake you two coming off here together,” said John.

  “I like it here,” I said feebly.

  “Well, you’ll have to come home now, choose how,” said John.

  And indeed his strong Yorkshire presence seemed to make all our London arrangements appear petty and cheap. I sighed. John glanced at me shrewdly, then looked away.

  “Chris—was it about Beatrice? That Henry did it, I mean?”

  “I don’t think so,” I faltered, perplexed.

  “He wrote to her sometimes, though?”

  “Yes. Perhaps it wasn’t any one reason, John. He was disappointed about his music a little, I think, and vexed that he didn’t get on as fast as he hoped.”

  “Well, he always liked himself too much, did Henry,” said John grimly.

  It was Henry’s epitaph.

  6

  It was many years later, in the moment of satiety which terminated an unworthy affaire, that I realized why Henry had killed himself. A young man of much sensibility, deeply in love, surrounded by the temptations to wine, women and song offered by a great metropolis in its careless heyday, Henry enforced a stern abstinence upon himself not only as regarded sex but in all other pleasant relaxations. He worked from morning to night at a task where the brilliant success which alone he thought worthy of him continually eluded him; and meanwhile he starved his senses of every satisfaction. (In this I think he had been partly infected by my father, whose disgust against any form of sensual enjoyment I have already noted.) Then the wretched Florrie, anxious to earn enough for her night’s lodging, through my foolish indiscretion presented herself—offered herself would perhaps be the better word. The temptation was too strong, Henry’s frustrated hunger too great, his revolt against his over-severe self-discipline too sudden and powerful, to be resisted—after all Henry was his mother’s son as well as his father’s. Henry took Florrie (or perhaps merely caressed her), then found his shame, his self-disgust, his infidelity to Beatrice, too hateful to be endured. As John said, Henry liked himself too well—too well to be able to live with a soiled and tarnished version of his personality.

  For myself, the great shock of Henry’s death undoubtedly accentuated the melancholy and timidity of my disposition, my anxious uncertainty about myself and my family. The tragedy also returned me to the West Riding.

  4

  Failure

  1

  It was not without a certain youthful resolution, a determination to make my life go well from this fresh start, that I returned to Hudley. My sojourn in London, I reflected, had after all been rather in the nature of a holiday until its tragic termination; it was only in the West Riding that my real life was to be found. When John and I, after passing together through the ordeal of the inquest and the funeral, returned to the north, I own I felt a romantic excitement as the train entered Yorkshire and mill chimneys and pit-head-stocks became features of the scene. I was returning home, and I experienced a youthful gush of affection for my native landscape. My father met us at the station and greeted me with loving warmth; he looked old and haggard and I felt sorry for him about Henry, so that my heart was tender towards him. It was something of a shock to find that he was not living in Ashroyd but in humdrum lodgings—I knew this of course but had never clearly visualized it—and that neither my mother nor Netta was with him. Still, my spirits remained fairly high until after tea. When we had settled ourselves round the fire my father turned to me eagerly and said:

 
“Now, Chris, tell me all about Henry.”

  “But, father, there’s nothing to tell. I don’t know why he did it—I just found him,” I began miserably, the sweat starting to my forehead.

  “Don’t think I blame you about Henry, Chris,” said my father, fixing me with his piercing blue eyes.

  My heart sank. It had not occurred to me before that I could be blamed. My father did not even know about Florrie, I reflected, yet considered me the obvious target for blame!

  “Father, have you thought over that matter I mentioned in my letter?” put in John,

  My father frowned. “I have had a letter from Josiah Hodgson myself,” he answered stiffly.

  It appeared that Mr. Hodgson had offered to lend my father five hundred pounds with which to begin business for himself again. It was plain that he made this offer because he felt himself guilty with regard to Henry’s death—his friend’s son had been entrusted to his care and he had failed in his trust. I respected him very much for this offer, but understood why my father hated to accept it. John wished my father to accept the loan, and thought his reluctance characteristically “la-di-da” and silly. He sat with his arms folded and his face grim, his heavy lower lip protruding in silent contempt, while my father raged on, winding himself up to ever greater heights of anger.

  “Why didn’t Josiah offer the loan before, when it would have been some good? If he’d had any true friendship, he would have offered it before, and none of all this need have happened. Henry would have been alive!” cried my father, glaring round at us.

  At this John moved impatiently.

  “What’s the good of all this?” he muttered. “We can’t bring Henry back again. It’s cutting off our nose to spite our face, to refuse good money when it’s offered.”

  “Blood-money!” exclaimed my father. “You are heartless, John—you are ready to profit by your brother’s death.”

  John coloured. “That’s not true. It’d be a lot easier for me to stay with Uncle Alfred than to come back to Hudley and bother with you.”

  “Stay with your Uncle Alfred then!” shouted my father.

  “There’s Chris to think of,” said John.

  My father and brother both turned their eyes on me. That anyone should change his plans on my account was painful to me, and I made hurried disclaimers: “Don’t trouble about me. Don’t do anything for my sake.”

  “That’s silly, Chris,” said John in his most sensible, down-to-earth tone. “Of course we have to trouble about you.”

  “Don’t think we blame you about Henry, Chris,” repeated my father.

  “What’s the point of keeping on dragging in Henry?” said John. “Poor old Henry’s dead and gone. There’s no need to make ourselves more miserable than we need be about it.”

  “You are heartless, John!” exclaimed my father again.

  I hardly knew whether my acute discomfort in listening to this argument was outweighed by my relief in the cessation of my father’s questions about Henry, or no; whether to be glad when John presently left to catch a train to Ashworth, or oppressed by being left alone with my father.

  In the next few days oppression won, however, and I longed for some relief from his company. So one sunny afternoon, my father being at his employment, I conceived the idea of bicycling over to Ashworth to see Netta. Giving our landlady a message to this effect for my father, I set off cheerfully enough, and my spirits rose with the fresh air and exercise and my own cleverness in finding the way; after three years in London the gradients of the West Riding hills surprised me but I enjoyed conquering them, and was excited by the prospects they afforded. But as I approached Ashworth my confidence (as usual on any enterprise I undertook outside the world of books) sank low; I felt that I had done wrong in acting on my own initiative, I should not have come without receiving an invitation, or at any rate warning John. I therefore changed my destination and sought out my uncle’s mill. It was large, so that many questions were necessary to track down my brother, and by the time I had penetrated to his small office, I felt quite daunted and entered with a hangdog and sheepish air, which deepened as I perceived that my brother was not at all pleased to see me.

  “Chris!” he exclaimed, frowning. “What are you doing here? Is there anything wrong at home?” he added quickly.

  “I just came to see Netta,” I explained, hanging my head lower than before.

  “Well!” exclaimed John. “You do have the daftest ideas, I must say, Chris. However, now you’re here I suppose I’d better take you in to see Uncle Alfred.”

  “Will he be vexed I’ve come?” I enquired.

  “Now see here, Chris,” said John sternly, rising and standing rather menacingly close beside me: “Uncle Alfred isn’t your sort—and he isn’t Henry’s sort. But that doesn’t mean you have to be rude to him. As a personal favour I ask you to behave as nicely to him as you can.”

  The implication of this speech—that I was a wildly eccentric person who only liked certain “sorts” of people and was ill-mannered to all others—astonished me and wounded me so deeply that I could not find a word to say in my defence. With an exasperated snort, John pushed me in front of him out of his little cubby-hole, then led the way to my uncle’s much more handsome office. He was not there, however, but “in the mill,” as the West Riding phrase goes, and this perhaps mitigated my first impression of him, for standing at the end of a row of looms and haranguing a foreman in the quiet tone proper to the din and clatter of the shuttles, he appeared at his best, knowledgeable, capable, in his element. Still I saw at once that John was right and Uncle Alfred was “not my sort”; short and broad and bald, with a red face, coarse features, small shrewd grey eyes, a look of invincible complacency and a great deal of gold watch-chain, he would have, I felt convinced, not a single copy of Shakespeare in his house. (This was then my criterion of culture.)

  John introduced me. My uncle nodded, eyed me shrewdly, and said some words, but I had forgotten the knack of hearing the human voice through the sound of looms, and bent forward (I was taller than he) perplexed. My uncle with the slight look of contempt which the professional gives the amateur put his hand on my arm and pushed me out of the long shed through the swinging wooden doors. The noise dropped to a mild hum as soon as the doors swung to behind us.

  “So you’re Chris, eh?” said my uncle.

  His speech was very Yorkshire and altogether inferior to my father’s.

  “I just came to see Netta,” said I hesitantly.

  “Aye. Well—you’d best take him up to Ashville to tea,” said my uncle to John, with a backward jerk of his head presumably in the direction of his house.

  This proved to be a large solid Victorian mansion standing in its own grounds, with a huge (and to me horrifying) cactus plant, several feet from prickled tip to tip, occupying a circle inside a low wall, before the front porch. Red geraniums abounded and a gardener in an apron was tying up plants. The interior of the house was furnished with what 1 even then felt to be stuffy and overpowering luxury; carpets, upholstery, curtains, were all of thick plush material on which sprawled enormous bright-coloured patterns. My aunt Minna proved to be a thin, worried-looking woman with traces of former blonde prettiness; she was handsomely dressed but apt to “natter” about unimportant details, and pretended to be afraid of her husband, whom she really controlled. My cousin Edie, a short, plump, bouncing young woman in her twenties with a great deal of yellow hair and a loud cheerful laugh, was not afraid of anyone, not even of John, with whom she was obviously in love—nor did she care who knew this last fact; she allowed it to appear in all its bluff honesty. These two women had evidently been kind to Netta, for she showed no fear or even diffidence in their presence. Summoned from upstairs by a loud shout from Edie—“your brother’s come to see you, love,”—Netta came trotting obediently down the upper flight of the massive staircase with a pleasant smile, expecting to see John, but suddenly perceiving me, her smile yielded to a joyous peal of laughter, and crying: “Chr
is! Chris!” she hurled herself down the stairs into my arms.

  “Fond of your little sister, eh?” boomed Uncle Alfred in my ear.

  “Er—yes,” said I.

  My visit might, I thought, be counted a fair success and I was disappointed by John’s look of gloom as, walking beside me while I wheeled my bicycle, he guided me after tea (a very sumptuous Yorkshire high tea) to the road I must take for Hudley. I despised Alfred Jarmayne and his family as ignorant and ill-mannered provincials, of course, but I thought (mistakenly) I had kept this sentiment fairly well concealed.

  When John next came to see my father and myself, he renewed his persuasions to accept Mr. Hodgson’s loan, even more strongly. It seemed to me that my father, though he raged against John’s heartlessness as he had done before, was in reality weakening in his opposition and would be glad of an excuse to yield. This was provided for him on the following Saturday afternoon by Mr. Hodgson who, coming to the West Riding to visit his employers—or perhaps arranging such a visit to suit his real purpose—called upon us, and, planted solemnly in a rather gimcrack armchair out of which he bulged, a hand on each solid knee, scolded my father for, as he put it, trying to kick against the pricks.

  “You’ve two other sons and a daughter to provide for, Edward,” he said solemnly, “besides your good wife, you know. We have our duty to do even if our hearts are broke.”

  “It’s easy for you to say that, Josiah,” exclaimed my father irritably.

  “Happen it’s not as easy as you think,” returned Mr. Hodgson, unperturbed. “Anyway, I shall take it as a personal favour if you will accept the loan, Edward.”

  “Oh, have it your own way!” shouted my father suddenly.

  He rushed out of the room, banging the door, and could be heard pacing rapidly about the room above.