by Hugh Walpole
“Can you sleep?” he whispered.
“No,” I answered.
“It’s terribly hot, close — smell.... Are you going to sleep?”
“No,” I whispered back again.
“Let us move into the corridor. It will be cooler there.”
There seemed to me quite a new sound of determination and resolve in his voice. His nervousness had left him with the daylight. He led the way out of the carriage, turned down the little seats in the corridor, provided cigarettes.
“It isn’t much better here, but we’ll have the window open. It’ll get better. This is really war, isn’t it, being so uncomfortable as this? I feel as though things were really beginning.”
“Well, we shall be there to-morrow night,” I answered him. “I hope you’re not going to be disappointed.”
“Disappointed in what?” His voice was quite sharp as he spoke to me, “You don’t know what I want.”
“I suppose you’re like the rest of us. You want to see what war really is. You want to do some good if you can. You want to be seriously occupied in it to prevent your thinking too much about it. Then, because you’re English, you want to see what the Russians are really like. You’re curious and sympathetic, inquisitive and, perhaps, a little sentimental about it.... Am I right?”
“No, not quite — there are other things. I’d like to tell you. Do you mind,” he said suddenly looking up straight into my face with a confiding smile that was especially his own, “if I talk, if I tell you why I’ve come? I’ve no right, I don’t know you — but I’m so happy to-night that I must talk — I’m so happy that I feel as though I shall never get through the night alive.”
Of our conversation after this, or rather of his talk, excited, eager, intimate and shy, old and wise and very, very young, I remember now, I think, every word with especial vividness. After events were to fix it all in my brain with peculiar accuracy, but his narration had that night of itself its own individual quality. His was no ordinary personality, or, at any rate, the especial circumstances of the time drove it into no ordinary shape, and I believe that never before in all his days had he spoken freely and eagerly to any one. It was simply to-night his exultation and happiness that impelled him, perhaps also some sense of high adventure that his romantic character would, most inevitably, extract from our expedition and its purposes.
At any rate, I listened, saying a word now and then, whilst the hour grew dark, lit only by the stars, then trembled into a pale dawn overladen with grey dense clouds, which again broke, rolled away, before another shining, glittering morning. I remember that it was broad daylight when we, at last, left the corridor.
“I’m thirty-three,” he said. “I don’t feel it, of course; I seem to be now only just beginning life. I’m a very unpractical person and in that way, perhaps, I’m younger than my age.”
I remember that I said something to him about his, most certainly, appearing younger.
“Most certainly I do. I’m just the same as when I went up to Cambridge and I was then as when I first went to Rugby. Nothing seems to have had any effect upon me — except, perhaps, these last two days. Do you know Glebeshire?” he asked me abruptly.
I said that I had spent one summer there with a reading party.
“Ah,” he answered, smiling, “I can tell, by the way you say that, that you don’t really know it at all. To us Glebeshire people it’s impossible to speak of it so easily. There are Trenchards all over Glebeshire, you know, lots of them. In Polchester, our cathedral town, where I was born, there are at least four Trenchard families. Then in Truxe, at Garth, at Rasselas, at Clinton — but why should I bother you with all this? It’s only to tell you that the Trenchards are simply Glebeshire for ever and ever. To a Trenchard, anywhere in the world, Glebeshire is hearth and home.”
“I believe I’ve met,” I said, “your Trenchards of Garth. George Trenchard.... She was a Faunder. They have a house in Westminster. There’s a charming Miss Trenchard with whom I danced.”
“Yes, those are the George Trenchards,” he answered with eagerness and delight, as though I had formed a new link with him. “Fancy your knowing them! How small the world is! My father was a cousin, a first cousin, of George Trenchard’s. The girl — you must mean Millie — is delightful. Katherine, the elder sister, is married now. She too is charming, but in a different, graver way.”
He spoke of them all with a serious lingering pleasure, as though he were summoning them all into the dusty, stuffy corridor, carrying them with him into these strange countries and perilous adventures.
“They always laughed at me — Millie especially; I’ve stayed sometimes with them at Garth. But I didn’t mean really to talk about them — I only wanted to show you how deeply Glebeshire matters to the Trenchards, and whatever happens, wherever a Trenchard goes, he always really takes Glebeshire with him. I was born in Polchester, as I said. My father had a little property there, but we always lived in a little round bow-windowed house in the Cathedral Close. I was simply brought up on the Cathedral. From my bedroom windows I looked on the whole of it. In our drawing-room you could hear the booming of the organ. I was always watching the canons crossing the cathedral green, counting the strokes of the cathedral bell, listening to the cawing of the cathedral rooks, smelling the cathedral smell of cold stone, wet umbrellas and dusty hassocks, looking up at the high tower and wondering whether anywhere in the world there was anything so grand and fine. My moral world, too, was built on the cathedral — on the cathedral ‘don’ts’ and ‘musts,’ on the cathedral hours and the cathedral prayers, and the cathedral ambitions and disappointments. My father’s great passion was golf. He was not a religious man. But my mother believed in the cathedral with a passion that was almost a disease. She died looking at it. Her spirit is somewhere round it now, I do believe.”
He paused, then went on:
“It was the cathedral that made me so unpractical, I suppose. I who am an only child — I believed implicitly in what I was told and it always was my mother who told me everything.”
He was, I thought, the very simplest person to whom I had ever listened. The irritation that I had already felt on several occasions in his company again returned. “My father’s great passion was golf” would surely in the mouth of another have had some tinge of irony.
In Trenchard’s mild blue eyes irony was an incredible element. I could fancy what he would have to say to the very gentlest of cynics; some of the sympathy I had felt for him during the afternoon had left me.
“He’s very little short of an idiot,” I thought. “He’s going to be dreadfully in the way.”
“I was the only child, you see,” he continued. “Of course I was a great deal to my mother and she to me. We were always together. I don’t think that even when I was very young I believed all that she told me. She seemed to me always to take everything for granted. Heaven to me was so mysterious and she had such definite knowledge. I always liked things to be indefinite ... I do still.” He laughed, paused for a moment, but was plainly now off on his fine white horse, charging the air, to be stopped by no mortal challenge. I had for a moment the thought that I would slip from my seat and leave him; I didn’t believe that he would have noticed my absence; but the thought of that small stuffy carriage held me.
But he was conscious of me; like the Ancient Mariner he fixed upon my arm his hand and stared into my eyes:
“There were other things that puzzled me. There was, for instance, the chief doctor in our town. He was a large, fat, jolly red-faced man, clean-shaven, with white hair. He was considered the best doctor in the place — all the old maids went to him. He was immensely jolly, you could hear his laugh from one end of the street to the other. He was married, had a delightful little house, where his wife gave charming dinners. He was stupid and self-satisfied. Even at his own work he was stupid, reading nothing, careless and forgetful, thinking about golf and food only all his days. He was a snob too and would give up any one for the people at
the Castle. Even when I was a small boy I somehow knew all this about him. My father thought the world of him and loved to play golf with him.... He was completely happy and successful and popular. Then there was another man, an old canon who taught me Latin before I went to Rugby, an old, untidy, dirty man, whose sermons were dull and his manners bad. He was a failure in life — and he was a failure to himself; dissatisfied with what he used to call his ‘bundle of rotten twigs,’ his life and habits and thoughts. But he thought that somewhere there was something he would find that would save him — somewhere, sometime ... not God merely— ‘like a key that will open all the doors in the house.’ To me he was fascinating. He knew so much, he was so humble, so kind, so amusing. Nobody liked him, of course. They tried to turn him out of the place, gave him a little living at last, and he married his cook. Was she his key? She may have been ... I never saw him again. But I used to wonder. Why was the doctor so happy and the little canon so unhappy, the doctor so successful, the canon so unsuccessful? I decided that the great thing was to be satisfied with oneself. I determined that I would be satisfied with myself. Well, of course I never was — never have been. Something wouldn’t let me alone. The key to the door, perhaps ... everything was shut up inside me, and at last I began to wonder whether there was anything there at all. When at nineteen I went to Cambridge I was very unhappy. Whilst I was there my mother died. I came back to the little bow-windowed house and lived with my father. I was quite alone in the world.”
In spite of myself I had a little movement of impatience.
“How self-centred the man is! As though his case were at all peculiar! Wants shaking up and knocking about.”
He seemed to know my thought.
“You must think me self-centred! I was. For thirteen whole years I thought of nothing but myself, my miserable self, all shut up in that little town. I talked to no one. I did not even read — I used to sit in the dark of the cathedral nave and listen to the organ. I’d walk in the orchards and the woods. I would wonder, wonder, wonder about people and I grew more and more frightened of talking, of meeting people, of little local dinner-parties. It was as though I were on one side of the river and they were all on the other. I would think sometimes how splendid it would be if I could cross — but I couldn’t cross. Every year it became more impossible!”
“You wanted some one to take you out of yourself,” I said, and then shuddered at my own banality. But he took me very seriously.
“I did. Of course,” he answered. “But who would bother? They all thought me impossible. The girls all laughed at me — my own cousins. Sometimes people tried to help me. They never went far enough. They gave me up too soon.”
“He evidently thinks he was worth a lot of trouble,” I thought irritably. But suddenly he laughed.
“That same doctor one day spoke of me, not knowing that I was near him; or perhaps he knew and thought it would be good for me. ‘Oh, Trenchard,’ he said. ‘He ought to be in a nunnery ... and he’d be quite safe, too. He’d never cause a scandal!’ They thought of me as something not quite human. My father was very old now. Just before he died, he said: ‘I’d like to have had a son!’ He never noticed me at his bedside when he died. I was a great disappointment to him.”
“Well,” I said at last to break a long pause that followed his last words, “what did you think about all that time you were alone?”
“I used to think always about two things,” he said very solemnly. “One was love. I used to think how splendid it would be if only there would be some one to whom I could dedicate my devotion. I didn’t care if I got much in return or no, but they must be willing to have it ready for me to devote myself altogether. I used to watch the ladies in our town and select them, one after another. Of course they never knew and they would only have laughed had they known. But I felt quite desperate sometimes. I had so much in me to give to some one and the years were all slipping by and it became, every day, more difficult. There was a girl ... something seemed to begin between us. She was the daughter of one of the canons, dark-haired, and she used to wear a lilac-coloured dress. She was very kind; once when we were walking through the town I began to talk to her. I believe she understood, because she was very, very young — only about eighteen — and hadn’t begun to laugh at me yet. She had a dimple in one cheek, very charming — but some man from London came to stay at the Castle and she was engaged to him. Then there were Katherine and Millie Trenchard, of whom we were talking. Katherine never laughed at me; she was serious and helped her mother about all the household things and the village where they lived. Afterwards she ran away with a young man and was married in London — very strange because she was so serious. There was a great deal of talk about it at the time. Millie too was charming. She laughed at me, of course, but she laughed at every one. At any rate she was only cousinly to me; she would not have cared for my devotion.”
As he spoke I had a picture in my mind of poor Trenchard searching the countryside for some one to whom he might be devoted, tongue-tied, clumsy, stumbling and stuttering, a village Don Quixote with a stammer and without a Dulcinea.
“They must have been difficult years,” I said, and again cursed myself for my banality.
“They were,” he answered very gravely, “Very difficult.”
“And your other thoughts?” I asked him.
“They were about death,” he replied. “I had, from my very earliest years, a great terror of death. You might think that my life was not so pleasant that I should mind, very greatly, leaving it. But I was always thinking — hoping that I should live to be very old, even though I lost all my limbs and faculties. I believed that there was life of some sort after death, but just as I would hesitate outside a house a quarter of an hour from terror of meeting new faces so I felt about another life — I couldn’t bear all the introductions and the clumsy mistakes that I should be sure to make. But it was more personal than that. I had a horrible old uncle who died when I was a boy. He was a very ugly old man, bent and whitened and gnarled, a face and hands twisted with rheumatism. I used to call him Quilp to myself. He always wore, I remember, an old-fashioned dress. Velvet knee-breeches, a white stock, black shoes with buckles. I remember that his hands were damp and hair grew in bushes out of his ears. Well, I saw him once or twice and he filled me with terror like a figure out of the tapestry up at the Castle. Then he died.
“Our house was small and badly shaped, full of dark corners, and after his death he seemed to me to haunt the place. He figured Death to me and until I was quite old, until I went to Rugby, I fancied that he was sitting in a dark corner, on a chair, waiting, with his hands on his lap, until the time came for him to take me. Sometimes I would fancy that I heard him moving from one room to another, bringing his chair with him. Then I began to have a dream, a dream that frequently recurred all the time that I was growing up. It was a dream about a huge dark house in a huge dark forest. It was early morning, the light just glimmering between the thick damp trees. A large party of people gathered together in a high empty room prepared for an expedition. I was one of them and I was filled with sharp agonising terror. Sometimes in my dream I drank to give myself courage and the glass clattered against my lips. Sometimes I talked with one of the company; the room was very dark and I could see no faces. Then we would start trooping out into the bitterly cold morning air. There would be many horses and dogs. We would lead off into the forest and soon (it always happened) I would find myself alone — alone with the dripping trees high around me and the light that seemed to grow no lighter and the intense cold. Then suddenly it would be that I was the hunted, not the hunter. It was Death whom we were hunting — Death, for me my uncle — and I would fancy him waiting in the darkness, watching me, smiling, hearing his hunters draw off the scent, knowing that they would not find him, but that he had found me. Then my knees would fail me, I would sink down in a sweat of terror, and — wake!... Brrr!... I can see it now!”
He shook himself, turning round to me as though h
e were suddenly ashamed of himself, with a laugh half-shy, half-retrospective.
“We all have our dreams,” he continued. “But this came too often — again and again. The question of death became my constant preoccupation as I grew to think I would never see it, nor hear men speak of it, nor—”
“And you have come,” I could not but interrupt him, “here, to the very fortress — Why, man!—”
“I know,” he answered, smiling at me. “It must seem to you ridiculous. But I am a different person now — very different. Now I am ready, eager for anything. Death can be nothing to me now, or if that is too bold, at least I may say that I am prepared to meet him — anywhere — at any time. I want to meet him — I want to show—”
“We have all,” I said, “in our hearts, perhaps, come like that — come to prove that our secret picture of ourselves, that picture so different from our friends’ opinion of us, is really the true one. We can fancy them saying afterwards: ‘Well, I never knew that so-and-so had so much in him!’ We always knew.”
“No, you see,” Trenchard said eagerly, “there can be only one person now about whose opinion I care. If she thinks well of me—”
“You are very much in love,” I said, and loosed, as I had expected, the torrents of his happiness upon me.