Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  All this he heard during a terribly heavy three weeks with relatives in the North, during a hot and glittering July in London when the world seemed to gyrate with the flashing cabs, the seething crowds, the glass and flowers and scents of a London season. Katherine seemed dreadfully far away from him. He was aware very vividly how bad it was for a healthy young man of his age to have no definite occupation. The men whom he knew in town seemed to him both uninteresting and preoccupied. A day in England seemed of so vast a length. In Russia time had been of no importance at all, and one day had vanished into another without any sound or sign. Here every clock in the town seemed to scream to him that he must take care to make the most of every second. This practical English world, moreover, could offer no friendly solution for the troubles that beset him.

  He knew very well that if he asked any man at the club for advice he would be frankly dismissed for a fool. “What! You like the girl but can’t bear the Mother-in-law! My dear boy, any music hall will tell you how common that is. Wait till you’re married, then you can clear off all right — let the old woman scream as much as you like. What! the girl wants to stay with the mother? Well, again, wait till you’re married. The girl will follow you fast enough then!”

  How could he expect that any ordinary healthy Englishman would understand the soft, billowy, strangling web that the Trenchard family had, by this time, wound about him? Yes, another six months would complete the business....

  One hope remained to him — that when they knew of his immoral life in Moscow they would definitely insist on Katherine’s leaving him — and, if it came to that, she would stand by him. He knew that she would stand by him. He would himself long ago have told Trenchard had he not been sure that someone else would do that for him, and that then the sense of his own subterfuge and concealment would add to their horror and disgust.

  The stronger their disgust the better for him.

  The day of that disclosure seemed now his only hope. Let them fling him off and he knew what Katherine would do!...

  Upon a torrid afternoon, two days after the Trenchard-Faunder wedding, an irresistible desire to see Katherine drove him to the Westminster house. He rang the bell, and was told by Rocket, who always treated him with an air of polite distrust, that the ladies were out, but might be in at any time.

  “I will wait,” said Philip.

  “Very good, sir,” said Rocket reluctantly, and showed him into the drawing-room, cool and damp like a green cave. To Rocket’s own restrained surprise, old Mr. Trenchard was there sitting quite alone, with a shawl covering his knees, in a large arm-chair near the empty fireplace.

  The old gentleman showed no interest whatever in the opening of the door, and continued to stare in front of him through his gold-rimmed eye-glasses, his hands pressed fiercely into his knees. Rocket hesitated a moment, then withdrew, closing the door behind him.

  Philip advanced slowly into the room. One of his difficulties with old Mr. Trenchard had always been that he was not sure whether he were truly deaf or no. On certain occasions there had been no question old Mr. Trenchard was not at all deaf, and then again on others deaf as a crab! He had never shown any marked signs of being aware of Philip’s existence. There were many weeks that he spent in his own room, and he could not be said to show a very active consciousness of anyone except Katherine, whom he adored, and Aunt Aggie, whom he hated.

  But, altogether, he was to Philip a terrible old man. Like a silver-grey shadow, beautiful perhaps, with the silver buckles on his shoes, his delicate hands and his snow-white hair, but emphatically terrible to Philip, who throve and blossomed under warm human intercourse, and shrivelled into nothing at all under a silent and ghostly disapproval.

  But to-day Philip was desperate and defiant. This old man would never die any more than this old drawing-room, reflected in the green mirror, would ever change.

  “I’d like to smash that mirror,” thought Philip, “smash it into pieces. That would change the room if anything would. Why, I believe the whole family would tumble like a pack of cards if I smashed that mirror. I believe the old man himself would vanish into thin air.”

  “Good afternoon, sir,” Philip said — and then thought to himself: “Why should I be afraid of the old image? He can’t eat me!”

  He walked over, close to him, and shouted:

  “Good afternoon, sir.”

  The old man never stirred, not an eyelid quivered, but he replied in his clear, silvery voice, “Good afternoon to you.”

  He might indeed have been an Idol in his old particular temple — the old green room waited around him with the patient austerity that a shrine pays to its deity. The lamp on a distant table flung a mild and decent glow.

  “I’m damned if I’m going to be afraid of him,” thought Philip, and, taking a chair, he dragged it very close to the other’s throne. Sitting there, near to him, it seemed to him that the light, mild though it was, really did go right through the old fellow, his cheeks, like the finest egg-shell china, seemed to catch the glow, store it for an instant in some fine inner receptacle and then pass it out on the other side. It was only the eyes that were not fine. They were true Trenchard eyes, and now, in old age, they were dull and almost dead.

  They, ever so faintly, hinted that the beauty, fine as the present glass, was of the surface only, and had, behind it, no soul.

  “It’s a very hot day,” said Philip, in a voice that was intended for a shout if the old man were really deaf and pleasant cheerfulness if he were not, “really very hot indeed. But this room’s so very cool. Delightful.”

  Mr. Trenchard did then very slowly raise his head and look at Philip through his glasses. Then very slowly lowered his eyes again.

  “My daughter will be here very shortly to receive you,” he said.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” Philip said, still very cheerfully. “We’ve not had many talks together, have we? and that really isn’t right, considering that I’m engaged to your grand-daughter.”

  The old man picked up a magazine that lay on the little table that was in front of him. “Do you ever see Blackwood?” he said, as though he were very politely making conversation for a complete stranger. “It’s a magazine for which I have a great liking. It seems to me to keep up its character wonderfully — most agreeable reading — most agreeable reading.”

  It was then that Philip, looking up, caught a reflection of Mr. Trenchard’s face in the Mirror. It may have been imagination or it may have been the effect of shadow, or again it may have been nothing but truth — in any case it seemed to Philip that the old man’s expression was an amazing mixture of pathos and wickedness — a quite intolerable expression. Philip made a movement with his hands as though he were brushing away a confusion of cobwebs, then burst out: “Look here, I don’t know whether you’re deaf or not — if you are it won’t matter, and if you aren’t we’ll have a straight talk at last. You can’t move until someone comes in to move you, and that may be a long while yet. You aren’t strong enough to knock me down, so that I’m afraid you’ll just have to stay here for a while and listen.... Of course you know by this time who I am. It’s no use your pretending.”

  Philip paused and looked, but the old man had not stirred at all. His hands were still pressed into his knees, his eyes staring through his glasses, and, as his delicate breathing rose and fell, one black button shone in the lamplight and faded again. This immobility seemed to stir more profoundly Philip’s anger.

  “I’m going to marry your grand-daughter Katherine, and of course you hate it and me too. You’re just as selfish as all the others, and more too, I daresay. And you think you can frighten me by just doing nothing except showing you dislike me. But you won’t frighten me — no, never — so you needn’t expect it. I’m going to marry Katherine and take her right away from you all, so you may as well make up your mind to it.”

  Philip, flushed in the face and half expecting that the walls of the house would fall in upon him, paused — but there was no
change at all in Mr. Trenchard’s attitude, unless possibly one shining hand was driven a little more deeply into the knee. There was perhaps some unexpected pathos in the intensity of those pressing fingers, or, perhaps, Philip’s desperate challenge was, already, forsaking him. At any rate he went on.

  “Why can’t you like me? I’m ready enough to like you. I’m not a bad kind of man, and I’ll be very good to Katherine, no one could ever be better to anyone than I’ll be to her. But why can’t we lead our own life? You’re an old man — you must have seen a lot in your time — you must know how times alter and one way of thinking gives way to another. You can’t keep a family together by just refusing to listen to anything or anybody. I know that you love Katherine, and if you love her really, surely you’ll want her to lead her own life. Your life’s nearly over — why should you spoil hers for her?”

  He paused again, but now he could not tell whether the eyes were closed or no. Was the old man sleeping? or was he fiercely indignant? or was he satirical and smiling? or was he suddenly going to cry aloud for Rocket?

  The uncertainty and the silence of the room worked terribly upon Philip’s nerves. He had begun courageously, but the sound of his voice in all that damp stillness was most unpleasant. Moreover, he was a poor kind of fellow, because he always, even in the heat of anger, thought a friend better than an enemy. He was too soft to carry things through.

  “He really does look very old,” he thought now, looking at the thin legs, the bones in the neck, the lines on the forehead of the poor gentleman, “and after all it can’t be pleasant to lose Katherine.”

  “If you’d only,” he went on in a milder voice, “give me a chance. Katherine’s much too fond of all of you to give you up simply because she’s married. She isn’t that sort at all. You knew that she’d marry some day. All the trouble has come because you don’t like me. But have you ever tried to? I’m the sort of man that you’ve got to like if you’re to see the best of me. I know that’s my fault, but everyone has to have allowances made for them.”

  Philip paused. There was a most deadly stillness in the room. Philip felt that even the calf-bound Thackeray and the calf-bound Waverley novels behind the glass screens in the large book-case near the door were listening with all their covers.

  Not a movement came from the old man. Philip felt as though he were addressing the whole house —

  He went on. “When you were young you wanted to go on with your generation just as we do now. You believed that there was a splendid time coming, and that none of the times that had ever been would be so fine as the new one. You didn’t want to think the same as your grandfather and be tied to the same things. Can’t you remember? Can’t you remember? Don’t you see that it’s just the same for us?”

  Still no movement, no sound, no quiver of a shadow in the Mirror.

  “I’ll be good to her, I swear to you, I don’t want to do anyone any harm. And after all, what have I done? I was rude one Sunday night, Henry drank too much once, I don’t always go to church, I don’t like the same books — but what’s all that? isn’t everyone different, and isn’t it a good thing that they are?”

  He bent forward— “I know that you can do a lot with them all. Just persuade them to help, and be agreeable about it. That’s all that’s wanted — just for everyone to be agreeable. It’s such a simple thing, really.”

  He had touched Mr. Trenchard’s knee. With that touch the whole room seemed to leap into hostile activity. He had, quite definitely, the impression of having with one step plunged into a country that bristled with foes behind every bush and tree. The warmth of the old man’s knees seemed to fling him off and cast him out.

  Old Mr. Trenchard raised his head with a fierce, furious gesture like the action of a snake striking.

  In a voice that was not silvery nor clear, but shaking and thick with emotion, he said:

  “I warn you, young man — if you dare to take my grand-daughter away — you’ll kill me!”

  Before Philip could do more than start back with a gesture of dismay, the door had opened and Mrs. Trenchard and Aunt Aggie had entered.

  Meanwhile there was Henry.

  Important events had occurred in Henry’s life since that Sunday when he had told Millie about Philip’s terrible past and had shared in that disastrous supper. He was to go to Cambridge.

  This important decision had apparently followed on Aunt Aggie’s disclosure of his evil courses, therefore it may be considered that Philip was, in this as in the other recent events in the Trenchard history, responsible. Quite suddenly George Trenchard had lifted up his head and said: “Henry, you’re to go to Cambridge next October. I think that Jesus College shall bear the burden of your company. I believe that there are examinations of a kind that you must pass before they will admit you. I have written for papers.”

  This declaration should, of course, have been enough to fling Henry into a wild ecstasy. Before the arrival of Philip it would undoubtedly have done so. Now, however, he seemed to himself to have progressed already so far beyond Jesus College, Cambridge. To have troubles and experiences so deep and weighty as compared with anything that anyone at Cambridge could possibly have known, and that to propose that he should go there was very little less than an insult.... And for this he blamed Philip.

  Nevertheless the papers arrived. He was, in reality, no fool, and the Cambridge ‘Little Go’ is not the most difficult examination under the sun. At the end of May he went up to Cambridge. If one may judge by certain picturesque romances concerned with University life and recently popular amongst us, one is to understand that that first vision of a University thrills with all the passion of one’s first pipe, one’s first beer and one’s first bedmaker or scout, as the case may be. The weather was chill and damp. He was placed in a tiny room, where he knocked his head against the fine old rafters and listened to mice behind the wainscot. His food was horrible, his bedmaker a repulsive old woman, and the streets were filled with young men, who knew not Henry and pushed him into the gutter. He hated everyone whom he saw at the examination, from the large, red-faced gentleman who watched him as he wrote, down to the thin and uncleanly youth who bit his nails at the seat next to his own. He walked down Petty Cury and hated it; he strolled tip the King’s Parade and hated that too. He went to King’s College Chapel and heard a dull anthem, was spoken to by an enormous porter for walking on the grass and fell over the raised step in the gateway. He was conceited and lonely and hungry. He despised all the world, and would have given his eyes for a friend. He looked forward to his three years in this city (“The best time of your life, my boy. What I would give to have those dear old days over again”) with inexpressible loathing.

  He knew, however, three hours of happiness and exultation. This joy came to him during the English Essay — the last paper of the examination. There were four subjects from which he might choose, and he selected something that had to do with ‘The Connection between English History and English Literature.’ Of facts he had really the vaguest notion. He seemed to know, through hearsay rather than personal examination, that Oliver Cromwell was something responsible for ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, that that dissolute monarch Charles II. had to do with the brilliance and audacity of Mr. Congreve and Mr. Wycherley, that Queen Anne in some way produced Pope and Robespierre, Wordsworth, and Queen Victoria, Charlotte Mary Yonge (he had cared very deeply for ‘The Daisy Chain’), and our Indian Empire Mr. Rudyard Kipling. He knew it all as vaguely as this, but he wrote — he wrote divinely, gloriously ecstatically, so that the three hours were but as one moment and the grim nudity of the examination-room as the marbled palaces of his own fantastic dreams. Such ecstasy had he known when he began that story about the man who climbed the ricketty stairs. Such ecstasy had been born on that day when he had read the first page of the novel about Forests — such ecstasy had, he knew in spite of itself, received true nourishment from that enemy of their house, Philip.

  His spirits fell when he came to himself, saw
how many other gentlemen had also written essays and with what indifference and languor the red-faced gentleman hustled his pages in amongst all the others. Nevertheless, he did come out of that examination-room with some conviction as to the course that his future life would take, and with a kindness, almost a tenderness, towards this grey town that was going to allow him, even to command him, to write essays for the next three years. With Henry one mood succeeded another as rapidly as, in his country, wet weather succeeds fine.

  He returned to Garth in an outrageous temper. His main feeling now was that Philip had spoiled Cambridge for him. Philip and his immoral life ‘got in’ between all that he saw and dropped a misty veil, so that he could think of nothing in the way that tradition had taught him. He had always had a great respect for tradition.

  Then as the weeks passed by he was made increasingly unhappy by the strange condition in which he found the family. He was, at heart, the crudest sentimentalist, and his sentimentalism had been fed by nothing so richly as by the cherished conviction that the George Trenchards were the most united family in England. He had always believed this; and had never, until now, considered the possibility of any division. But what now did he find? His mother stern, remote, silent, Millie irritable, uneasy and critical, Aunt Aggie always out of temper, Aunt Betty bewildered and tactless, even his father disturbed and unlike himself. And Katie?... He could not have believed that six months would change anyone so utterly.