Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  “Katherine! Why, I saw her twenty minutes ago. I’ve just come back from Lady Carloes. Katie was at Hyde Park Corner with Philip.”

  “Philip!”

  Mrs. Trenchard got up, took off one black glove, then put it on again. She looked at the clock.

  “Will you come to the Stores with me, Millie? I’ve got to get some hot-water bottles and some other things.... Two of ours leak.... I’d like you to help me.”

  Millie looked once at the clock, and her mother saw her. Then Millie said:

  “Of course I will. We won’t be very long, will we?”

  “Why, no, dear,” said Mrs. Trenchard, who would have been happy to spend a week at the Stores had she the opportunity. “Quite a little time.”

  They set off together.

  Millie was not yet of such an age that she could disguise her thoughts. She was wondering about Katherine, and Mrs. Trenchard knew that this was so. Mrs. Trenchard always walked through the streets of London as a trainer in the company of his lions. Anything might happen, and one’s life was not safe for a moment, but a calm, resolute demeanour did a great deal, and, if trouble came, one could always use the whip: the whip was the Trenchard name. To-day, however, she gave no thought to London: she was very gentle and kind to Millie — almost submissive and humble. This made Millie very uncomfortable.

  “I’m rather foolish about the Stores, I’m afraid. I know several places where you can get better hot-water bottles and cheaper. But they know me at the Stores now.”

  Once she said: “I hope, Millie dear, I’m not keeping you from anything. We shall be home by half-past four.”

  In exchange for these two little remarks Millie talked a great deal, and the more she talked the more awkward she seemed. She was very unhappy about her mother, and she wished that she could comfort her, but she knew her so little and had been always on such careless terms with her that now she had no intuition about her.

  “What is she thinking?... I know Katherine has hurt her terribly. She oughtn’t to wear a hat like that: it doesn’t suit her a bit. Why isn’t it I who have forgotten, and Katie here instead to console her? Only then she wouldn’t want consolation....”

  As they walked up the steps of the Stores they were stared at by a number of little dogs on chains, who all seemed to assert their triumphant claims on somebody’s especial affections. The little dogs stirred Mrs. Trenchard’s unhappiness, without her knowing why. All down Victoria Street she had been thinking to herself: “Katherine never forgot before — never. It was only this morning — if it had even been yesterday — but this morning! Millie doesn’t understand, and she didn’t want to come — Katie....”

  She walked slowly into the building, and was at once received by that friendly, confused smell of hams and medicines which is the Stores’ note of welcome. Lights shone, warmth eddied in little gusts of hot air from corner to corner: there was much conversation, but all of a very decent kind: ladies, not very grand ones and not very poor ones, but comfortable, motherly, housekeeping ladies were everywhere to be seen.

  No wonder, surely, that Mrs. Trenchard loved the Stores! Here was everything gathered in from the ends of the earth that was solid and sound and real. Here were no extravagances, no decadencies, no flowing creations with fair outsides and no heart to them, nothing foreign nor degenerate. However foreign an article might be before it entered the Stores, once inside those walls it adopted itself at once to the claims of a Cathedral City — even the Eastern carpets, stained though their past lives might be with memories of the Harem, recognised that their future lay along the floor of a Bishop’s study, a Major’s drawing-room or the dining-room of a country rectory. If ever Mrs. Trenchard was alarmed by memories of foreign influences, of German invasions, or Armenian atrocities, she had only to come to the Stores to be entirely reassured. It would be better for our unbalanced and hysterical alarmists did they visit the Stores more frequently....

  But frequent visits had bred in Mrs. Trenchard a yet warmer intimacy. Although she had never put her feeling into words, she was determined now that the Stores was maintained solely in the Trenchard and Faunder interests. So pleasant and personally submissive had the young men and young women of the place been to her all these years, that she now regarded them with very nearly the personal benevolence that she bestowed upon her own Rebekah, Rocket, Jacob and so on. She felt that only Trenchards and Faunders could have produced an organisation whose spirit was so entirely sprung from their own views and observances. She did not defend or extol those views. There simply they were! and out of them the Stores were born. She paid her call here, therefore, rather as a Patroness visits a Hospital in which she is interested — with no conceit or false pride, but with a maternal anxiety that everything should be well and prosperous. Everything always was well and prosperous.... She was a happy Patroness!

  “That’s a splendid ham!” were invariably her first words, and “I do like the way they arrange things here,” her second. She could have wandered, very happily, all day from compartment to compartment, stopping continually to observe, to touch, to smile, to blow her nose (being moved, very often, quite emotionally) to beam happily upon the customers and then to turn, with a little smile of intimacy, to the young men in frock coats and shiny hair, as though she would say: “We’ve got a good crowd to-day. Everyone seems comfortable ... but how can they help it when everything is so beautifully done?”

  Her chief pride and happiness found its ultimate crown in the furniture department. Here, hung as it was somewhere up aloft, with dark bewildering passages starting into infinity on every side of it, was the place that her soul truly loved. She could gaze all day upon those sofas and chairs. Those wonderful leather couches of dark red and dark blue, so solid, so stern in their unrelenting opposition to flighty half-and-half, so self-supporting and self-satisfying, so assured of propriety and comfort and solid value for your money. She would sink slowly into a huge leather arm-chair, and from her throne smile upon the kind gentleman who washed his hands in front of her.

  “And how much is this one?”

  “Nine pounds, eight and sixpence, ma’am.”

  “Really. Nine pounds, eight and sixpence. It’s a splendid chair.”

  “It is indeed, ma’am. We’ve sold more than two dozen of this same article in this last fortnight. A great demand just now.”

  “And so there ought to be — more than two dozen! Well, I’m not surprised — an excellent chair.”

  “Perhaps we can send it for you? Or you prefer — ?”

  “No, thank you. Not to-day. But I must say that it’s wonderful for the money. That sofa over there—”

  Up here, in this world of solid furniture, it seemed that England was indeed a country to be proud of! Mrs. Trenchard would have made no mean Britannia, seated in one of the Stores’ arm-chairs with a Stores’ curtain-rod for her trident!

  Upon this January afternoon she found her way to the furniture department more swiftly than was usual with her. The Stores seemed remote from her to-day. As she passed the hams, the chickens, the medicines and powders, the petticoats and ribbons and gloves, the books and the stationery, the cut-glass and the ironware, the fancy pots, the brass, the Chinese lanterns, the toys, the pianos and the gramophones, the carpets and the silver, the clocks and the pictures, she could only be dimly aware that to-day these things were not for her, that all the treasures of the earth might be laid at her feet and she would not care for them, that all the young men and young women in England might bow and smile before her and she would have no interest nor pleasure in them. She reached the furniture department. She sank down in the red-leather arm-chair. She said, with a little sigh:

  “She has never forgotten before!”

  This was, considering her surroundings and the moment of its expression, the most poignant utterance of her life.

  Millie’s chief emotion, until this moment, had been one of intense boredom. The Stores seemed to her, after Paris, an impossible anachronism; she could not
understand why it was not instantly burnt up and destroyed, and all its solemn absurdities cast, in dirt and ashes, to the winds.

  She followed her mother with irritation, and glances of cynical contempt were flung by her upon the innocent ladies who were buying and chatting and laughing together. Then she remembered that her mother was in trouble, and she was bowed down with self-accusation for a hard heartless girl who thought of no one but herself. Her moods always thus followed swiftly one upon another.

  When, in the furniture department, she heard that forlorn exclamation she wanted to take her mother’s hand, but was shy and embarrassed.

  “I expect Katie had to go with Philip.... Something she had to do, and perhaps it only kept her a moment or two and she got back just after we’d left. We didn’t wait long enough for her. She’s been waiting there, I expect, all this time for us.”

  Mrs. Trenchard’s cheek flushed and her eyes brightened.

  “Why, Millie, that’s most likely! We’ll go back at once ... that’s most likely.... We’ll go back at once.”

  “This is a very cheap article,” said the young man, “or if Madame would prefer a chair with—”

  “No, no,” said Mrs. Trenchard quite impatiently. “Not to-day. Not to-day, thank you.”

  “There are the hot-water bottles,” said Millie.

  “Oh, of course.... I want some hot-water bottles. Ours leak ... three of them....”

  “In the rubber department, Madam, first to the right, second to the left....”

  But Mrs. Trenchard hurried through the hot-water bottles in a manner utterly foreign to her.

  “Thank you. I’m sure they’re very nice. They won’t leak, you say? How much?... Thank you ... no, I prefer these.... If you’re sure they won’t leak.... Yes, my number is 2157.... Thank you.”

  Outside in Victoria Street she said: “I might have given her until quarter to four. I daresay she’s been waiting all this time.”

  But Millie for the first time in all their days together was angry with Katherine. She said to herself: “She’s going to forget us all like this now. We aren’t, any of us, going to count for anything. Six months ago she would have died rather than hurt mother....”

  And behind her anger with Katherine was anger with herself because she seemed so far away from her mother, because she was at a loss as to the right thing to do, because she had said that she had seen Philip with Katherine. “You silly idiot!” she thought to herself. “Why couldn’t you have kept your mouth shut?”

  Mrs. Trenchard spoke no word all the way home.

  Katherine was not in the house when they returned. Millie went upstairs, Mrs. Trenchard stared at the desolate drawing-room. The fire was dead, and the room, in spite of its electric light, heavy and dark. Mrs. Trenchard looked at the reflection of her face in the mirror; with both hands she pushed her hat a little, then, with a sudden gesture, took it off, drawing out the pins slowly and staring at it again. Mrs. Trenchard glanced at the clock, and then slowly went out, holding her hat in her hand, advancing with that trailing, half-sleepy movement that was peculiarly hers.

  She did then what she had not done for many years: she went to her husband’s study. This hour before tea he always insisted was absolutely his own: no one, on any pretext, was ever to disturb him. To-day, cosily, with a luxurious sense that the whole world had been made for him, and made for him exactly as he liked it, he was, with a lazy pencil, half-writing, half-thinking, making little notes for an essay on William Hazlitt.

  As his wife entered he was reading: “How fine it is to enter some old town, walled and turreted, just at the approach of nightfall, or to come to some straggling village, with the lights streaming through the surrounding gloom; and then, after enquiring for the best entertainment the place affords, to take one’s ease at one’s inn! These eventful moments in our lives’ history are too precious, too full of solid, heartfelt happiness to be frittered and dribbled away in imperfect sympathy. I would have them all to myself, and drain them to the last drop.”

  How thoroughly George Trenchard agreed with that. How lucky for him that he was able to defend himself from so much of that same “imperfect sympathy”. Not that he did not love his fellow-creatures, far from it, but it was pleasant to be able to protect oneself from their too constant, their too eager ravages. Had he been born in his beloved Period, then he fancied that he might, like magnificent Sir Walter, have built his Castle and entertained all the world, but in this age of telephones and motorcars one was absolutely compelled.... He turned Hazlitt’s words over on his tongue with a little happy sigh of regret, and then was conscious that his wife was standing by the door.

  “Hullo!” he cried, starting up. “Is anything the matter?”

  It was so unusual for her to be there that he stared at her large, heavy figure as though she had been a stranger. Then he jumped up, laughing, and the dark blue Hazlitt fell on to the carpet.

  “Well, my dear,” he said, “tea-time?”

  She came trailing across the room, and stood beside him near the fire.

  “No ...” she said, “not yet ... George.... You, look very cosy here,” she suddenly added.

  “I am,” he answered. He looked down at the Hazlitt, and her eyes followed his glance. “What have you been doing?”

  “I’ve been to the Stores.”

  “Why, of course,” he said, chaffing her. “You live there. And what have you been buying this time?”

  “Hot-water bottles.”

  “Well, that’s exciting!”

  “Ours leaked.... Two of them, and we’d had them a very short time. I took Millie with me!”

  “Very good for her. Clear some of her Parisian fancies.”

  There was a pause then, and he bent forward as though he would pick up the book, but he pulled himself up again.

  “Katherine’s been out with Philip all the afternoon.”

  He smiled one of his radiant, boyish smiles.

  “She’s happy, isn’t she? It does one good to see her. She deserves it too if anyone in this world does. I like him — more and more. He’s seen the world, and has got a head on his shoulders. And he isn’t conceited, not in the least. He’s charming to her, and I think he’ll make her a very good husband. That was a lucky thing for us his coming along, because Katherine was sure to marry someone, and she might have set her heart on an awful fellow. You never know in these days.”

  “Ah! I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Trenchard, nervously turning her hat over in her hands, “that wouldn’t be like Katie at all.”

  “No, well, perhaps it wouldn’t,” said George cheerfully. There was another pause, and now he bent right down, picked up the book, grunting a little, then stood, turning over the pages.

  “I’m getting fat,” he said, “good for all of us when we get down to Garth.”

  “George ...” she began and stopped.

  “Well, my dear.” He put his hand on her shoulder, and then as though embarrassed by the unexpected intimacy that his action produced, withdrew it.

  “Don’t you think we might go out to the theatre one evening — theatre or something?”

  “What! With the children? Family party! Splendid idea!”

  “No, I didn’t mean with the children — exactly. Just you and I alone. Dine somewhere — have an evening together.”

  It was no use to pretend that he was not surprised. She saw his astonishment.

  “Why, of course — if you’d really care about it. Mostly pantomimes just now — but I daresay we could find something. Good idea. Good idea.”

  “Now that — now that — the children are beginning to marry and go off by themselves. Why, I thought ... you understand....”

  “Of course. Of course,” he said again. “Any night you like. You remind me....”

  He whistled a gay little tune, and turned over the pages of the Hazlitt, reading sentences here and there.

  “Tea in a minute?...” he said gaily. “Just got a line or two more to finish. Then I’
ll be with you.”

  She looked at him as though she would say something more: she decided, however, that she would not, and trailed away.

  Returning to the drawing-room, she found Katherine standing there. Katherine’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled: she was wearing a little black hat with red berries, and the black velvet ribbon round her neck had a diamond brooch in it that Philip had given her. Rocket was bending over the fire: she was laughing at him. When she saw her mother she waved her hand.

  “Mother, darling — what kind of an afternoon have you had? I’ve had the loveliest time. I lunched at Rachel’s, and there, to my immense surprise, was Philip. I hadn’t the least idea he was coming. Not the slightest. We weren’t to have met to-day at all. Just Lord John, Philip, Rachel and I. Then we had such a walk. Philip and I. Hyde Park Corner, right through the Park, Marble Arch, then through Regent’s Park all the way up Primrose Hill — took a ‘bus home again. Never enjoyed anything so much. You’ve all been out too, because here’s the fire dead. I’ve been telling Rocket what I think of him. Haven’t I, Rocket?... Where are the others? Millie, Aunt Aggie. It’s tea-time.”

  “Yes, dear, it is,” said Mrs. Trenchard.

  It was incredible, Katherine was utterly unconscious. She remembered nothing.

  Mrs. Trenchard looked at Rocket.

  “That’ll do, Rocket. That’s enough. We’ll have tea at once.”

  Rocket went out. She turned to her daughter.

  “I’m glad you’ve enjoyed your afternoon, dear. I couldn’t think what had happened to you. I waited until half-past three.”

  “Waited?”

  “Yes — to go to the Stores. You said at breakfast that you’d come with me — that you’d be back by three. I waited until half-past.... It was quite all right, dear. Millie went with me. She had seen you — you and Philip at Hyde Park Corner — so, of course, I didn’t wait any longer.”

  Katherine stared at her mother: the colour slowly left her face and her hand went up to her cheeks with a gesture of dismay.