by Hugh Walpole
Peter was about to follow him back into the shop when suddenly the man shook his head. “No, not to-night,” he said and almost pushed him into the street.
Peter, looking back, saw that he was talking to the Russian girl.
But the day was not over with that. Wondering about Mr. Zanti, thinking that the boarding-house would be gloomy now after Mrs. Lazarus’ death, recalling, above all, to himself every slightest incident of his meeting with Miss Rossiter, Peter, crossing Oxford Street, flung his broad body against a fat and soft one. There was nearly a collapse.
The other man and Peter grasped arms to steady themselves, and then behold! the fat body was Bobby Galleon’s. Bobby Galleon, after all these years! But there could be no possible doubt about it. There he stood, standing back a little from the shock, his bowler hat knocked to one side of his head, a deprecating, apologetic smile on his dear fat face! A man of course now, but very little altered in spite of all the years; a little fatter perhaps, his body seemed rather shapeless — but those same kind eyes, that large mouth and the clear straight look in all his face that spoke him to all the world for what he was. Peter felt exactly as though, after a long and tiring journey, he had tumbled at last into a large arm-chair. He was excited, he waved his arms:
“Bobby, Bobby,” he cried, so loudly that two old women in bonnets, crossing the road like a couple of hens turned to look at him.
“I’m sorry—” Bobby said vaguely, and then slowly recognition came into his eyes.
“Peter!” he said in a voice lost in amazement, the colour flooding his cheeks.
It was all absurdly moving; they were quite ridiculously stirred, both of them. The lamps were coming out down Oxford Street, a pale saffron sky outlined the dark bulk of the Church that is opposite Mudie’s shop and stands back from the street, a little as though it wondered at all the noise and clamour, a limpid and watery blue still lingered, wavering, in the evening sky.
They turned into an A.B.C. shop and ordered glasses of milk and they sat and looked at one another. They had altered remarkably little and to both of them, although the roar of the Oxford Street traffic was outside the window, it might have been, easily enough, that a clanging bell would soon summon them back to ink-stained desks and Latin exercises.
“Why, in heaven’s name, did you ever get out of my sight so completely? I wrote to Treliss again and again but I don’t suppose anything was forwarded.”
“They don’t know where I am.”
“But why did you never write to me?”
“Why should I? I wanted to do something first — to show you-”
“What rot! Is that friendship? I call that the most selfish thing I’ve ever known.” No, obviously enough, Bobby could never understand that kind of thing. With him, once a friend always a friend, that is what life is for. With Peter, once an adventure always an adventure — that is what life is for — but as soon as a friend ceases to be an adventure, why then —
But Bobby had not ceased to be an adventure. He was, as he sat there, more of one than he had ever been before.
“What have you been doing all these years?”
“Been in a bookshop.”
“In a bookshop?”
“Yes, selling second-hand books.”
“What else?”
“Oh reading a lot... seeing one or two people... and some music.” Peter was vague; what after all had he been doing?
Bobby looked at him tenderly and affectionately. “You want seeing after — you look fierce, as you used to when you’d been having a bad time at school. The day they all hissed you.”
“But I haven’t been having a bad time. I’ve had a jolly good one. By the way,” Peter leant forward, “have you seen or heard anything of Cards?”
Bobby coloured a little. “No, not for a long time. His mother died. He’s a great swell now with heaps of money, I believe. I’m not his sort a bit.”
They drank milk and beamed upon one another. Peter wanted to tell Bobby everything. That was one of his invaluable qualities, that one did like telling him everything. Talking to him eagerly now, Peter wondered how it could be that he’d ever managed to get through these many years without him. Bobby simply existed to help his friends and that was the kind of person that Peter had so often wanted.
But in it all — in their talking, their laughing together, their remembering certain catchwords that they had used together, there was nothing more remarkable than their finding each other exactly as they had been during those years before at Dawson’s. Not even Bobby’s tremendous statement could alter that.
“I’m married,” he said.
“Married?”
Bobby blushed. “Yes — two years now — got a baby. She’s quite splendid!”
“Oh!” Peter was a little blank. Somehow this did remove Bobby a little — it also made him, suddenly, strangely old.
“But it doesn’t make any difference,” Bobby said, leaning forward eagerly and putting his hand on Peter’s arm— “not the least difference. You two will simply get on famously. I’ve so often told her about you and we’ve always been hoping that you’d turn up again — and now she’ll be simply delighted.”
But it made a difference to Peter, nevertheless. He went back a little into his shell; Bobby with a home and a wife and a baby couldn’t spare time, of course, for ordinary friends. But even here his conscience pricked him. Did he not know Bobby well enough to be assured that he was as firm and solid as a rock, that nothing at all could move or change him? And after all, was not he, Peter, wishing to be engaged and married and the father of a family and the owner of a respectable mansion?
Clare Elizabeth Rossiter! How glorious for an instant were the thin, sharp-faced waitresses, the little marble-topped tables, the glass windows filled with sponge-cakes and hard-boiled eggs!
Peter came out of his shell again. “I shall just love to come and see her,” he said.
“Well, just as soon as you can. By Jove, old man, I’ll never let you go again. Now tell me, everything — all that you have done since I saw you.”
Peter told him a great deal — not quite everything. He told him nothing, for instance, about meeting a certain young lady on a Good Friday afternoon and he passed over some of the Scaw House incidents as speedily as possible.
“And since I came up to London,” he went on, “the whole of my time has been spent either in the bookshop or the boarding-house. They’re awfully good sorts at both, but it’s all very uncertain of course and instead of writing a novel that no one will want to read I ought to have been getting on to editors. I’ve a kind of feeling that the bookshop’s going to end very shortly.”
“Let me see the book,” said Bobby.
“Yes, certainly,” said Peter.
“Anyhow, we go on together from this time forth — 72 Cheyne Walk is my little house. When will you come — to-morrow?”
“Oh! To-morrow! I don’t think I can. There are these Processions and things — I think I ought to be in the shop. But I’ll come very soon. This is the name of my boarding-house—”
Bobby, as he saw his friend, broad-shouldered, swinging along, pass down the street with the orange lamps throwing chains of light about him, was confronted again by that old elusive spirit that he had known so well at school. Peter liked him, Peter was glad to see him again, but there were so many other Peters, so many doors closed against intruders.... Bobby would always, to the end, be for Peter, outside these doors. He knew it quite certainly, a little sadly, as he climbed on to his bus. What was there about Peter? Something hard, fierce, wildly hostile ... a devil, a God. Something that Bobby going quietly home to his comfortable dinner, might watch and guard and even love but something that he could never share.
Now, in the cool and quiet of the Chelsea Embankment as he walked to his door, Bobby sighed a little because life was so comfortable.
CHAPTER IV
A LITTLE DUST
I
That night Peter had one of his old dreams.
In all the seven years that he had been in London the visions that had so often made his nights at Scaw House terrible had never come to him. Now, after so long an interval they returned.
He thought that he was once more back on the sea-road above Treliss, that the wind was blowing in a tempest and that the sea below him was foaming on to the rocks. He could see those rocks like sharp black teeth, stretching up to him — a grey sky was above his head and to his right stretched the grey and undulating moor.
Round the bend of the road, beyond the point that he could see, he thought that Clare Rossiter was waiting for him. He must get there before it struck eleven or something terrible would happen to him. Only a few minutes remained to him, and only a little stretch of the thin white road, but two things prevented his progress; first, the wind blew so fiercely in his face that it drove him back and for every step that he took forward, although his head was bent and his teeth set, he seemed to lose two. Also, across the moor voices cried to him and they seemed to him like the voices of Stephen and Bobby Galleon, and they were pleading to him to stop; he paused to listen but the cries mingled softly with the wind and he could hear bells from the town below the road begin to strike eleven. The sweat was pouring from him — she was waiting for him, and if he did not reach her all would be lost. He would never see her again; he began to cry, to beat against the wind with his hands. The voices grew louder, the wind more vehement, the jagged edges of the rocks sharper in their outline; the bells were still striking, but as, at last, breathless, a sharp terror at his heart, he turned the corner there fell suddenly a silence. At last he was there — only a few trees blowing a little, a little white dust curling over the road, as though there had been no rain, and then suddenly the laughing face of Cards, no longer now a boy, but a man, more handsome than ever, laughing at him as he battled round the corner.
Cards shouted something to him, suddenly the road was gone and Peter was in the water, fighting for his life. He felt all the breathless terror of approaching death — he was sinking — black, silent water rose above and around him. For an instant he caught once more the sight of sky and land. Cards was still on the road and beside him was a woman whose face Peter could not see. Cards was still laughing. Then in the darkening light the Grey Hill was visible against the horizon and instead of the Giant’s Finger there was that figure of the rider on the lion.... The waters closed.... Peter woke to a grey, stormy morning. The sweat was pouring down his face, his body was burning hot and his hands were trembling.
II
When he came down to breakfast his head was aching and heavy and Mrs. Brockett’s boiled egg and hard crackling toast were impossible. Miss Monogue had things to tell him about the book — it was wonderful, tremendous ... beyond everything that she had believed possible. But strangely enough, he was scarcely interested. He was pleased of course, but he was weighted with the sense of overhanging catastrophe. The green bulging curtains, the row of black beads about Mrs. Brockett’s thin neck, the untidy egg-shells — everything depressed him.
“I have had a rotten night,” he said, “nightmares. I suppose I ate something — anyhow it’s a gloomy day.”
“Yes,” said Miss Monogue, pinning some of her hair in at the wrong place and unpinning other parts of it that happened by accident to be right. “I’m afraid it’s a poor sort of day for the Procession. But Miss Black and I are going to do our best to see it. It may clear up later.” He had forgotten about the Procession and he wished that she would keep her hair tidier.
He wanted to ask her whether she had seen Miss Rossiter but had not the courage. A little misty rain made feathery noises against the window-pane.
“Well, I must go down to the shop,” he said, finding his umbrella in the hall.
“I think it’s superb,” she said, referring back to the book. “You won’t be having to go down to the shop much longer.”
It was really surprising that he cared so little. He banged the door behind him and did not see her eyes as she watched him go.
Processions be damned! He wished that the wet, shining street were not so strangely like the sea-road at Treliss, and that the omnibuses at a distance did not murmur like the sea. People, black and funereal, were filling stands down Oxford Street; soldiers were already lining the way, the music of bands could be heard some streets away.
He was in a thoroughly bad temper and scowled at the people who passed him. He hated Royal Processions, he hated the bookshop, he hated all his friends and he wished that he were dead. Here he had been seven years, he reflected, and nothing had been done. Where was his city paved with gold? Where his Fame, where his Glory?
He even found himself envying those old Treliss days. There at any rate things had happened. There had been an air, a spirit. Fighting his father — or at any rate, escaping from his father — had been something vital. And here he was now, an ill-tempered, useless youth, earning two pounds a week, in love with some one who was scarcely conscious of his existence. He cursed the futility of it all.
And so fuming, he crossed the threshold of the bookshop, and, unwitting, heedless, left for ever behind him the first period of his history.
“Programme of the Royal Procession,” a man was shouting— “Coloured ‘Andkerchief with Programme of Royal Procession—”
Peter, stepping into the dark shop, was conscious of Mr. Zanti’s white face and that behind him was standing Stephen.
III
At the sight of their faces, of their motionless bodies and at the solemn odd expression of their eyes as they looked past him into the dark expanse of the door through which he had entered, he knew that something was very wrong.
He had known it, plainly enough, by the fact of Stephen’s presence there, but it seemed to him that he had known it from his first awakening that morning and that he was only waiting to change into hard outline the misty shapelessness of his earlier fears. But, there and then, he was to know nothing —
Stephen greeted him with a great hand-shake as though he had met him only the day before, and Mr. Zanti with a smile gave him his accustomed greeting. In the doorway at the other end of the shop the Russian girl was standing, one arm on the door-post, staring, with her dark eyes, straight through into the gloomy street.
“What are you all waiting for?” Peter said to the motionless figures. With his words they seemed at once to spring to life. Mr. Zanti rolled his big body casually to the door and looked down the street, Stephen, smiling at Peter said:
“I was just passing, so I thought to myself I’d just look in,” his voice came from his beard like the roll of the sea from a cave. “Just for an hour, maybe. It’s a long day since we’ve ‘ad a bit of a chat, Mr. Peter.”
Peter could not take it on that casual scale. Here was Stephen vanished during all those years, returned now suddenly and with as little fuss as possible, as though indeed he had only been hiding no farther than behind the door of the shop and waiting merely to walk out when the right moment should have arrived. If he had been no farther than that then it was unkind of him — he might have known how badly Peter had wanted him; if, on the other hand, he had been farther afield, then he should show more excitement at his return.
But, Peter thought, it was impossible to recognise in the grave reserved figure at his side that Stephen who had once given him the most glorious evening of his life. The connection was there somewhere but many things must have happened between those years.
“Shall we go and have luncheon together?” Peter asked.
Stephen appeared to fling a troubled look in the direction of Mr. Zanti’s broad back. He hesitated. “Well,” he said awkwardly, “I don’t rightly know. I’ve got to be going out for an hour or two — I can’t rightly say as I’ll be back. This afternoon, maybe—”
Peter did not press it any farther. They must settle these things for themselves, but what was the matter with them all this morning was more than he could pretend to discover.
Stephen, still troubled, went out.
Fortunately there was this morning a good deal of work for Peter to do. A large number of second-hand books had arrived during the day before and they must be catalogued and arranged. Moreover there were several customers. A young lady wanted “something about Wagner, just a description of the plays, you know.”
“Of the Operas,” Peter corrected.
“Oh, well, the stories — that’s what I want — something about two shillings, have you? I don’t think it’s really worth more — but so that one will know where one is, you know.”
She was bright and confidential. She had thought that everything would be closed because of the Procession... so lucky —
A short red-faced woman, dressed in bright colours, and carrying innumerable little parcels wanted “Under Two Flags,” by Mrs. Henry Wood.
“It’s by Ouida, Madam,” Peter told her.
“Nonsense, don’t tell me. As if I didn’t know.”
Peter produced the volume and showed it to her. She dropped some of her parcels — they both went to pick them up.
Red in the face, she glared at him. “Really it’s too provoking, I know it was Mrs. Henry Wood I wanted.”
“Perhaps ‘East Lynne,’ or ‘The Channings’—”
“Nonsense — don’t tell me — it was ‘Under Two Flags.’”
Finally the woman put both “Under Two Flags” and “East Lynne” into her bag and departed. A silence fell upon the shop. Herr Gottfried was at his desk, Mr. Zanti at the street door, the girl at the door of the inner room, they were all motionless. Beyond the shop the murmur of the gathering crowd was like the confused, blundering hum of bees; a band was playing stridently in Oxford Street.