by Hugh Walpole
The others in that compartment were Aunt Aggie, George Trenchard (he sat next to his father and told him jokes out of the papers) and Mrs. Trenchard. In the other carriage Katherine and Philip had the corners by the window. Aunt Betty sat next to Philip, Millie and Henry had the farther corners. When the train started, Katherine’s heart gave a jump, as it always did when she set off for Garth. “We’re really off. We’ll really be in Garth by the evening. We’ll really wake up there to-morrow morning.”
Philip had not seen Henry since his return from Manchester, so he tried to talk to him. Henry, however, was engaged upon a very large edition of “War and Peace,” and, although he answered Philip’s enquiries very politely, he was obviously determined to speak to no one. Millie had Henry Galleon’s “Roads” to read, but she did not study it very deeply — Aunt Betty had a novel called “The Rosary” and her knitting; now and then she would break into little scraps of talk as: “But if I moved the bed across lengthways that would leave room for the book-case,” or “I do think people must be clever to make up conversations in books,” or “There’s Reading”. The lovers, therefore, were left to one another....
Katherine had upon her lap the novel that had so greatly excited Henry; he had insisted upon her reading it, but now it lay idly there, unopened. That little smile that had hovered about her lips last night was still there to-day. Often her eyes were closed, and she might have seemed to be asleep were it not that the little smile was alive — her eyes would open, they would meet Philip’s eyes, they would be drawn, the two of them, closer and closer and closer.
They talked together, their voices scarcely above a whisper. The day was one of those that are given sometimes, in a fit of forgetfulness, by the gods, at the beginning of March. It was a very soft, misty day, with the sun warm and golden but veiled. Trees on the dim blue horizon were faintly pink, and streams that flashed for an instant before the windows were pigeon-colour. Everywhere the earth seemed to be breaking, flowers pushing through the soil, rivers released from their winter bondage laughing in their new freedom, the earth chuckling, whispering, humming with the glorious excitement of its preparation, as though it had never had a spring in all its life before, as though it did not know that there would yet be savage winds, wild storms of rain, many cold and bitter days. Blue mist — running water — trees with their bursting buds — a haze of sun and rain in the air — a great and happy peace.
Katherine and Philip, although they saw no one but one another, were aware of the day — it was as though it had been arranged especially for them. The rise and fall of their voices had a sleepy rhythm, as though they were keeping time with the hum of the train:
“I’m so glad,” said Katherine, “that your first view of Glebeshire will be on a day like this.”
“I’m a little afraid,” he answered. “What will you say if I don’t like it?”
She seemed really for an instant to be afraid. “But, of course, of course, you will.”
“Everyone doesn’t. Someone told me the other day that either it was desolate enough to depress you for a lifetime or stuffy like a hot-house, and that the towns were the ugliest in the United Kingdom.”
Katherine sighed and then smiled.
“I expect they’d think Manchester the loveliest place on earth,” she said. Then, looking at him very intently, she asked him: “Do you regret Russia — the size and the space and the strangeness? I daresay you do. Do you know, Phil, I’m rather jealous of Russia, of all the things you did before I knew you, I wonder whether I’d have liked you if I’d met you then, whether you’d have liked me. I expect you were very different. Tell me about it. I’m always asking you about Moscow, and you’re so mysterious — yes, I believe I’m jealous.”
Philip looked away from her, out of the window, at the fields with their neat hedges, the gentle hills faintly purple, villages tucked into nests of trees, cows grazing, horses mildly alert at the passing train. For a moment he was conscious of irritation at the tidy cosiness of it all. Then he spoke, dreamily, as though he were talking in his sleep:
“No. That’s all behind me. I shall never go back there again. I don’t think of it often, but sometimes I fancy I’m there. Sounds will bring it back, and I dream sometimes.... One gets so used to it that it’s hard now to say what one did feel about it. I had a little flat in a part of the town called the Arbat. Out of my window I could see a church with sky-blue domes covered with silver stars, there was a shop with food, sausages and all kinds of dried fish, and great barrels of red caviare and mountains of cheese. The church had a cherry-coloured wall, with a glittering Ikon at the gate and a little lamp burning in front of it. There were always some cabs at the end of my street, with the cabmen in their fat, bunched-up clothes sleeping very often, their heads hanging from the shafts. Lines of carts from the country would pass down the street with great hoops of coloured wood over the horses’ necks and wild-looking peasants in charge of them. They didn’t seem wild to me then — they were quite ordinary. Always just before six the bells at the church would ring, one slow, deep note and a little funny noisy jangle as well — one beautiful and unearthly; the other like a talkative woman, all human.... In the autumn there’d be weeks of rain and the mud would rise and rise, and the carts and cabs go splashing through great streams of water. When the snow came there’d be fine days and the town on fire, all sparkling and quivering, and every ugly thing in the place would be beautiful. There’d be many days too when the sky would fall lower and lower and the town be like grey blotting-paper and the most beautiful things hideous. Opposite my window there was a half-built house that had been there for three years, and no one had troubled to finish it. There was a beggar at the corner — a fine old man with no legs. He must have made a fortune, because everyone who passed gave him something. It would be fine on a snowy night when the night-watchmen built great fires of logs to keep them warm.
“On a starry night I could see the domes of St. Saviour’s Cathedral like little golden clouds — very beautiful.”
“And what was the inside of your flat like?” asked Katherine. She had been leaning a little forward, her hands clasped together, deeply interested.
“Oh! very small! I made it as English as I could. It had central heating and, in the winter, with the double windows, it got very stuffy. I had English pictures and English books, but it was never very comfortable. I don’t know why. Nothing in Russia’s comfortable. I had a funny old servant called Sonia. She was fond of me, but she drank; she was always having relations to stay with her. I would find funny-looking men in the kitchen in the morning. She had no idea of time, and would cook well or badly as she pleased. She liked to tell fairy stories; she stole and she drank and she lied, but I kept her because I couldn’t bother to change her.”
He stopped — then began again, but now more dreamily than before, as though he’d been carried far away from the train, from England, from Katherine. “Yes — that was it — one couldn’t be bothered. One couldn’t be bothered about anything, and one didn’t need to bother, because no one else bothered either. Perhaps that’s just why I loved it, as I see now that I did love it. No one cared for anything but what was in the air — dreams, superstitions, stories. The country itself was like that too — so vague, so vast and boundless, so careless and heedless, so unpractical, so good for dreams, so bad for work, so unfinished, letting so many things go to pieces, so beautiful and so ugly, so depressing and so cheerful, so full of music and of ugly sounds ... so bad to live in, so good to dream in. I was happy there and I didn’t know it — I was happy and didn’t know it.” His voice had sunk to a whisper, so that Katherine could not catch his words. She touched the sleeve of his coat.
“Come back, Phil, come back,” she said, laughing. “You’re lost.”
He started, then smiled at her.
“It’s all right ... but it’s odd. There are so many things that didn’t seem to me to be curious and beautiful then that are so now.” Then, looking at Katherine ve
ry intently, as though he were calling her back to him, he said:
“But don’t talk to me about Russia. It’s bad for me. I don’t want to think of it. I’ve left it for ever. And when you ask me questions it revives me, as though it still had some power.... You say that you’re afraid of it — why,” he ended, laughing, “I believe I’m afraid of it too — I don’t want to think of it. It’s England now and Glebeshire and you — and you,” he whispered. They were interrupted then by an attendant, who told them that it was time for the first luncheon.
Afterwards, when the shadows were lengthening across the fields and the misty sun rode low above the far hills, they sat silently dreaming of their great happiness. It was an afternoon that was to remain, for both of them, throughout their lives, in spite of all after events, a most perfect memory. There are moments in the histories of all of us when we are carried into heights that by the splendour of their view, the fine vigour of their air, the rapture of their achievement offer to us a sufficient reassurance against the ironic powers. We find in them a justification of our hopes, our confidences, our inspirations, our faith....
So, for these few hours at least, Katherine and Philip found their justification.
This was a moment that two others, also, in that carriage were never afterwards to forget. Millie, under the warm afternoon sun, had fallen asleep. She woke to a sudden, half-real, half-fantastic realisation of Philip. She was awake, of course, and yet Philip was not quite human to her — or was it that he was more human than he had ever been before? She watched him, with her young, eager, inquisitive gaze, over the cover of her book. She watched him steadily for a long time.
She had always liked the clean, bullet-shaped head, his black eyes, his sturdiness and set, square shoulders, his colour and his strength. She had always liked him, but to-day, in this sudden glimpse, he seemed to be revealed to her as someone whom she was seeing for the first time. Millie, in all the freshness of her anticipated attack upon the world, had at this period very little patience for bunglers, for sentimentalists, for nervous and hesitating souls. Now, strangely, she saw in Philip’s eyes some hinted weakness, and yet she did not despise him. “I believe,” she thought, “he’s afraid of us.” That discovery came as though it had been whispered to her by someone who knew. Her old conviction that she knew him better than did the others showed now no signs of faltering. “I believe I could help him as they none of them can,” she thought. “No, not even Katherine.” She had, in spite of her determined, practical common-sense, the most romantic idea of love, and now, as she thought of the two of them wrapped up there before her eyes in one another, she felt irritated by her own isolation. “I wonder whether Katherine understands him really,” she thought. “Katherine’s so simple, and takes everything for granted. It’s enough for her that she’s in love. I don’t believe it’s enough for him.” She had always in very early days felt some protecting, motherly element in her love for Katherine. That protection seemed now to spread to Philip as well. “Oh! I do hope they’re going to be happy,” she thought, and so, taking them both with her under her wing, dozed off to sleep again....
The other was, of course, Henry.
No one could ever call Henry a gay youth. I don’t think that anyone ever did, and although with every year that he grows he is stronger, more cheerful and less clumsy and misanthropic, he will never be really gay. He will always be far too conscious of the troubles that may tumble on to his head, of the tragedies of his friends and the evils of his country.
And yet, in spite of his temperament, he had, deep down in his soul, a sense of humour, an appreciation of his own comic appearance, a ready applause for the optimists (although to this he would never, never confess). “He’s a surly brute,” I heard someone say of him once — but it is possible (I do not say probable) that he will be a great man one of these days, and then everyone will admire his fine reserve, “the taciturnity of a great man”; in one of his sudden moments of confidence he confessed to me that this particular journey down to Glebeshire was the beginning of the worst time in his life — not, of course, quite the beginning. Philip’s appearance on that foggy night of his grandfather’s birthday was that — and he is even now not so old but that there may be plenty of bad times in store for him. But he will know now how to meet them; this was his first test of responsibility.
He had always told himself that what he really wanted was to show, in some heroic fashion, his love for Katherine. Let him be tested, he cried, by fire, stake, torture and the block, and he would “show them.” Well, the test had come. As he sat opposite her in the railway carriage he faced it. He might go up to Philip and say to him: “Look here, is it true? Did you have a mistress in Moscow for three years and have a son by her?” But what then? If Philip laughed, and said: “Why, of course ... everyone knows it. That’s all over now. What is it to you?” He would answer: “It’s this to me. I’m not going to have a rotten swelp of a fellow marrying my sister and making her miserable.”
Then Philip might say: “My dear child — how young you are! all men do these things. I’ve finished with that part of my life. But, anyway, don’t interfere between me and Katherine, you’ll only make her miserable and you’ll do no good.”
Ah! that was just it. He would make her miserable; he could not look at her happiness and contemplate his own destruction of it. And yet if Philip were to marry her and afterwards neglect her, and leave her as he had left this other woman, would not Henry then reproach himself most bitterly for ever and ever? But perhaps, after all, the story of that wretched man at the Club was untrue, it had been, perhaps, grossly exaggerated. Henry had a crude but finely-coloured fancy concerning the morals of the Man of the World. Had not Seymour dismissed such things with a jolly laugh and “my dear fellow, it’s no business of ours. We’re all very much alike if we only knew.” Had he not a secret envy of this same Man of the World who carried off his sins so lightly with so graceful an air? But now it was no case of an abstract sinner — it was a case of the happiness or unhappiness of the person whom Henry loved best in life.
A subtler temptation attacked him. He knew (he could not possibly doubt) that if his parents were told, Philip would have to go. One word from him to his mother, and the family were rid of this fellow who had come out of nowhere to disturb their peace. The thing was so infernally easy. As he sat there, reading, apparently, his novel, his eyes were on Katherine’s face. She was leaning back, her eyes closed, smiling at her thoughts. What would Katherine do? Would she leave them all and go with him? Would she hate him, Henry, for ever afterwards? Yes, that she would probably do.... Ah, he was a weak, feeble, indeterminate creature. He could make up his mind about nothing.... That evening he had had with Philip, it had been glorious and disgusting, thrilling and sordid. He was rather glad that he had been drunk — he was also ashamed. He was intensely relieved that none of the family had seen him, and yet he saw himself shouting to them: “I was drunk the other night, and I talked to rotten women and I didn’t care what happened to me.... I’m a boy no longer.”
He hated Philip, and yet, perhaps, Philip was leading him to freedom. That fellow in the novel about the sea and the forests (Henry could see him challenging his foes, walking quietly across the square towards his friend, who was waiting to slay him). He would have admired Philip. Henry saw himself as that fine solitary figure waiting for his opportunity. How grand he could be had he a chance, but life was so lofty, so unromantic, so conventional. Instead of meeting death like a hero, he must protect Katherine ... and he did not know how to do it....
As the sun was sinking in a thick golden web that glittered behind the dark purple woods — woods that seemed now to stand like watchers with their fingers upon their lips — the train crossed the boundary river. That crossing bad been, ever since he could remember, a very great moment to Henry. To-day the recognition of it dragged him away from Philip and Katherine, from everything but Glebeshire.
He looked across at Katherine instinctively — s
he, sitting now upright, gazing out of the window, turned as though she had known and smiled at him. They were in Glebeshire, there was the first valley, mysterious, now like a dark purple cup, there the white winding road that went over the hill on to Rasselas, Liskane, Clinton and Truxe, there was the first break in the hills, where you always peered forward expecting to catch a shimmer of the sea, here that cluster of white cottages that, when he had been small, had seemed to be tumbling down the hill, very dangerous to live in ... at last the pause at Carlyon, the last stop before Rasselas.
It was quite dark now. The light had suddenly been drawn from the sky, and the earth was filled with new sounds, new scents, new mysteries. The train stopped for a minute before Rasselas, and, suddenly all about it, through the open window there crowded whispers, stealthy movements, the secret confidences of some hidden stream, the murmured greetings of the trees. The train lay there as though it had wanted them all to know how lovely the evening was. On the road that skirted the train a man with a lantern greeted a cart. “Well, good-night to ‘ee,” a voice said clear and sharp like an invitation; Henry’s heart began to beat furiously. Glebeshire had welcomed them.