Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  At the sound of the door he turned, saw Martin and smiled, the old trusting smile of a child, that had been, during his time abroad, Martin’s clearest memory of him.

  “Oh, is that you? Come in.”

  Martin came forward and his father put his arm round his neck as though for support.

  “I’m tired — horribly tired.” Martin took him to the shabby broken arm-chair and made him sit down. Himself sat in his old place on the arm of the chair, his hand against his father’s neck.

  “Father, come away — just for a week — with me. We’ll go right off into the country to Glebeshire or somewhere, quite alone. We won’t see a soul. We’ll just walk and eat and sleep. And then you’ll come back to your work here another man.”

  “No, Martin. I can’t yet. Not just now.”

  “Why not, father?”

  “I have work, work that can’t be left.”

  “But if you go on like this you’ll be so that you can’t go on any longer. You’ll break down. You know what the doctor said about your heart. You aren’t taking any care at all.”

  “Perhaps ... perhaps ... but for a week or two I must just go on, preparing ... many things ... Martin.”

  He suddenly looked up at his son, putting his hand on his knee.

  “Yes, father.”

  “You’re being good now, aren’t you?”

  “Good, father?”

  “Yes ... Not doing anything you or I’d be ashamed of. I know in the past ... but that’s been forgotten, that’s over. Only now, just now, it’s terribly important for us both that you should be good ... like you used to be ... when you were a boy.”

  “Father, what have people been saying to you about me?”

  “Nothing — nothing. Only I think about you so much. I pray about you all the time. Soon, as you say, we’ll go away together ... only now, just now, I want you with me here, strong by my side. I want your help.”

  Martin took his father’s hand, felt how dry and hot and feverish it was.

  “I’ll be with you,” he said. “I promise that. Don’t you listen to what any one says. I won’t leave you.” He would like to have gone on and asked other questions, but the old man seemed so worn out and exhausted that he was afraid of distressing him, so he just sat there, his hands on his shoulders, and suddenly the white head nodded, the beard sank over the breast and huddled up in the chair as though life itself had left him; the old man slept.

  During the next four days Martin and Maggie corresponded through the fair hands of Jane. He wrote only short letters, and over them he struggled. He seemed to see Maggie through a tangled mist of persons and motives and intentions. He could not get at the real Maggie at all, he could not even get at his real feelings about her. He knew that these letters were not enough for her, he could feel behind her own a longing for something from him more definite, something that would bring her closer to him. He was haunted by his picture of her sitting in that dismal house, a prisoner, waiting for him, and at last, at the end of the four days, he felt that he must, in some way or other see her. Then she herself proposed a way.

  “To-morrow night (Friday),” she wrote, “the aunts are going to a meeting. They won’t return until after eight o’clock. During most of that time Martha will be in the kitchen cooking, and Jane (who is staying late that night) has promised to give me a signal. I could run out for quarter of an hour and meet you somewhere close by and risk getting back. Jane will be ready to let me in. Of course, it may fail, but things can’t be worse than they are ... I absolutely forbid you to come if you think that this can make anything worse for you at home. But I MUST see you, Martin ... I feel to-night as though I couldn’t stand it any longer (although I’ve only had five days of it!), but I think that if I met you, really you, for only five minutes, I could bear it then for weeks. Let me know if you agree to this, and if so where we could meet about 7.30.”

  The mere thought of seeing her was wonderful. He would not have believed a month ago that it could have come to mean so much to him.

  He wrote back:

  “Yes. At the corner of Dundas Street, by the Pillar Box, 7.30.”

  He knew that she had been to that dark little street with her aunts to see Miss Pyncheon.

  The night, when it came, was misty, and when he reached the place she was at once in his arms. She had been there more than five minutes, she had thought that he was not coming. Martha had nearly caught her ...

  He kissed her hair and her eyes and her mouth, holding her to him, forgetting everything but her. She stayed, quiet, clinging to him as though she would never let him go, then she drew away.

  “Now we must walk about or some one will see us,” she said.

  “We’ve only got five minutes. Martin, what I want to know is, are you happy?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  They walked like ghosts, in the misty street.

  “Well, then I am,” she said. “Only your letters didn’t sound very happy.”

  “Can you hold on till after the New Year?” They were walking hand in hand, her fingers curled in his palm.

  “Yes,” she said. “If you’re happy.”

  “There are troubles of course,” he said. “But I don’t care for Amy and the rest. It’s only father that matters. I can’t discover how much he knows. If I knew that I’d be much happier. We’ll be all right, Maggie, if nothing happens to him.”

  With a little frightened catch in her throat she asked him:

  “How do you mean, if anything happens to him?”

  “If anything happened to him—” she could feel his hand stiffen round hers; “through me — then — why then — I’d leave you — everything — I’d have to.”

  “Leave me! ... Oh Martin! No!”

  “I’d go. I’d go — I don’t know where to. I don’t know what I’d do. I’d know then that I must leave every one alone, always, for ever — especially you.”

  “No. You’d need me more than ever.”

  “You don’t understand, Maggie. I’d be impossible after that. If father suffered through me that would be the end of it — the end of everything.”

  “Martin, listen.” She caught his arm, looking up, trying to see his face. “If anything like that did happen that would be where you’d want me. Don’t you see that you COULDN’T harm me EXCEPT by leaving me?”

  “You can reason it as you like, Maggie, but I know myself. I know the impulse would be too strong — to go away and hide myself from everybody. I’ve felt it before — when I’ve done something especially bad. It’s something in me that I’ve known all my life.” Then he turned to her: “But it’s all right. Nothing shall happen to the old man. I’ll see that it doesn’t. We’ve only got to wait a fortnight, then I’ll get him away for a holiday. And once he’s better I can leave him. It WILL be all right. It SHALL.”

  Then he bent down to her. “You know, Maggie, I love you more, far more than I ever thought. Even if I went away you’d be the only one I’d love. I never dreamt that I’d care for any one so much.”

  He felt her tremble under his hand when he said that.

  She sighed. “Now I can go back,” she said. “I’ll say that over to myself again and again.”

  They stayed a little longer, he put his arms round her again and held her so close to him that she could feel his heart throbbing. Then when they had kissed once more she went away.

  She returned safely. Jane opened the door for her, mysteriously, as though she enjoyed her share in the conspiracy. Maggie sped upstairs, and now with Martin’s words in her ears, had enough to stiffen her back for the battle.

  The next move in the affair was on the following afternoon when Maggie, alone in the drawing-room, beheld Caroline Smith in the doorway.

  “She’s got cheek enough for anything,” was Maggie’s first thought, but she was not aware of the true magnificence of that young woman’s audacity until she found her hand seized and her cheek kissed.

  Caroline, in fact, had greeted her with pre
cisely her old spontaneous enthusiasm.

  “Maggie, darling, where have you been all these days — but WEEKS it is indeed! You might at least have sent me just a word. Life simply hasn’t been the same without you! You pet! ... and you look tired! Yes, you do. You’ve been overworking or something, all because you haven’t had me to look after you!”

  Maggie gravely withdrew, and standing away from the shining elegance of her friend said:

  “Caroline — I want to know something before we go any further. What I want to know is — why did you read that note that I asked you to give to Martin Warlock?”

  Caroline stared in amazement. “My dear, what IS the matter? Are you ill or something? Oh, you are. I can see you are! You poor darling! Read your note? What note, dear?”

  “The note I gave you a month ago — one evening when you were here.”

  “A note! A month ago. My dear! As though I could ever remember what I did a MONTH ago! Why, it’s always all I can manage to remember what I did yesterday. Did you give me a note, dear?”

  Maggie began to be angry. “Of course I did. You remember perfectly well. I gave it to you for Martin Warlock. You let him have it, but meanwhile you read it, and not only that but told everybody else about it.”

  Caroline’s expression changed. She was suddenly sulky. Her face was like that of a spoilt child.

  “Well, Maggie Cardinal, if you call that being a friend! To say that I would ever do such a thing!”

  “You know you did!” said Maggie quietly.

  “Read your letters? As though I’d want to! Why should I? As though I hadn’t something more interesting to do! No thank you! Of course you have been getting yourself into a mess. Every one knows that. That’s why I came here to-day — to show you that I was a REAL friend and didn’t mind WHAT people said about you! When they were all talking about you last night, and saying the most DREADFUL things, I defended you and said it wasn’t really your fault, you couldn’t have told what a rotten sort of a man Martin Warlock was—”

  “That’s enough,” said Maggie. “I don’t want your defence, thank you. You’re mean and deceitful and untrue. You never have been a friend of mine, and I don’t want ever to see you again!”

  Caroline Smith was horrified. “Well, upon my word. Isn’t that gratitude? Here am I, the only person in this whole place would take any trouble with you! When the others all said that you were plain and stupid and hadn’t anything to say for yourself I stuck to you. I did all I could, wasting all my time going to the dressmaker with you and trying to make you look like something human, and this is the way you repay me! Well, there’s a lesson for me! Many’s the time mother’s said to me, ‘Carry, you’ll just ruin yourself with that kind heart of yours, laying yourself out for others when you ought to be seeing after yourself. You’ve got too big a heart for this world.’ Doesn’t it just show one? And to end it all with accusing me of reading your letters! If you choose to sit in the park after dark with a man who everybody knows—”

  “Either you’re going to leave this room or I am,” said Maggie.

  “Thank you!” said Caroline, tossing her head. “I haven’t the slightest desire to stay, I assure you! Only you’ll be sorry for this, Maggie Cardinal, you will indeed!”

  With a swish of the skirts and a violent banging of the door she was gone.

  “The only friend I had,” thought Maggie.

  The next development was an announcement from Aunt Anne that she would like Maggie to accompany her to a meeting at Miss Avies’. Aunt Anne did not explain what kind of a meeting it would be, and Maggie asked no questions. She simply replied that she would go. She had indeed by this time a very considerable curiosity of her own as to what every one thought was going to happen in ten days’ time. Perhaps this meeting would enlighten her. It did.

  On arriving at Miss Avies’ gaunt and menacing apartment she found herself in the very stronghold of the Inside Saints. It was a strange affair, and Maggie was never to see anything quite like it again. In the first place, Miss Avies’ room was not exactly the place in which you would have expected to discover a meeting of this kind.

  She lived over a house-agent’s in John Street, Adelphi. Her sitting-room was low-ceilinged with little diamond-paned windows. The place was let furnished, and the green and red vases on the mantelpiece, the brass clock and the bright yellow wallpaper were properties of the landlord. To the atmosphere of the place Miss Avies, although she lived there for a number of years, had contributed nothing.

  It had all the desolate forlornness of a habitation in which no human being has dwelt for a very long time; there was dust on the mantelpiece, a melancholy sputtering of coal choked with cinders and gasping for breath in the fireplace, stuffy hot clamminess beating about the unopened windows. Along the breadth of the faded brown carpet some fifty cane-bottomed chairs were pressed tightly in rows together, and in front of the window, facing the chairs, was a little wooden table with a chair beside it, on the table a glass of water and a Bible.

  When Maggie and her aunts entered the chairs were almost all occupied and they were forced to sit at the end of the last row but one. The meeting had apparently not yet begun, and many heads were turned towards them as they took their places. Maggie fancied that the glances directed at herself were angry and severe, but that was very possibly her imagination. She soon recognised people known to her — Miss Pyncheon, calm and placid; Mrs. Smith, Caroline’s mother, very stout, hot, and self-important; Amy Warlock, proud and severe; and Miss Avies herself standing, like a general surveying his forces, behind the table.

  The room was draughty and close and had a confused smell of oil-cloth and geraniums, and Maggie knew that soon she would have a headache. She fancied that already the atmosphere was influencing the meeting. From where she sat she could see a succession of side faces, and it was strange what a hungry, appealing look these pale cheeks and staring eyes had. Hungry! Yes, that’s what they all were. She thought, fantastically, for a moment, of poor Mr. Magnus’s Treasure Hunters, and she seemed to see the whole of this company in a raft drifting in mid-ocean, not a sail in sight and the last ship’s biscuit gone.

  They were not, taken altogether, a very fine collection, old maids and young girls, many of them apparently of the servant class, one or two sitting with open mouths and a vacancy of expression that seemed to demand a conjurer with a rabbit and a hat. Some faces were of the true fanatic cast, lit with the glow of an expectancy and a hope that no rational experience had ever actually justified. One girl, whom Maggie had seen with Aunt Anne on some occasion, had especially this prophetic anticipation in the whole pose of her body as she bent forward a little, her elbows on her knees her chin on her hands, gazing with wide burning eyes at Miss Avies. This girl, whom Maggie was never to see again hung as a picture in the rooms of her mind for the rest of her life — the youth, the desperate anxiety as of one who throws her last piece upon the gaming-table, the poverty of the shabby black dress, the real physical austerity and asceticism of the white cheeks and the thin arms and pale hands — this figure remained a symbol for Maggie. She used to wonder in after years, when fortune had carried her far enough away from all this world, what had happened to that girl. But she was never to know.

  There were faces, too, like Miss Pyncheon’s, calm, contented, confident, old women who had found in their religion the panacea of all their troubles. There were faces like Mrs. Smith’s, coarse and vulgar, out for any sensation that might come along, and ready instantly to express their contempt if the particular “trick” that they were expecting failed to come off; other faces, again, like Amy Warlock’s, grimly set upon secret thoughts and purposes of their own, faces trained to withstand any sudden attack on the emotions, but eager, too, like the rest for some revelation that was to answer all questions and satisfy all expectations.

  Maggie wondered, as she looked about her, how she could have raised in her own imagination, around the Chapel and its affairs, so formidable an atmosphere of terror and t
yrannic discipline. Here gathered together were a few women, tired, pale, many of them uneducated, awaiting like children the opening of a box, the springing into flower of a dry husk of a seed, the raising of the curtain on some wonderful scene. Maggie, as she looked at them, knew that they must be disappointed, and her heart ached for them all, yes, even for Amy Warlock, her declared enemy. She lost, as she sat there, for the moment all sense of her own personal history. She only saw them all tired and hungry and expectant; perhaps, after all, there WAS something behind it all — something for which they had a right to be searching; even of that she had not sure knowledge — but the pathos and also the bravery of their search touched and moved her. She was beginning to understand something of the beauty that hovered like a bird always just out of sight about the ugly walls of the Chapel.

  “Whatever they want, poor dears,” she thought, “I do hope they get it.”

  Miss Avies opened the meeting with an extempore prayer: then they all stood up and sang a hymn, and their quavering voices were thin and sharp and strained in the stuffy close-ceilinged room. The hymn, like all the other Chapel hymns that Maggie had heard, had to do with “the Blood of the Lamb,” “the sacrifice of Blood,” “the Blood that heals.” There was also a refrain:

  And, when Thou comest, Lord, we pray That Thou wilt spare Thy

  sword, Or on that grim and ghastly day Who will escape the Lord? WHO will escape the Lord?

  There were many verses to this hymn, and it had a long and lugubrious tune, so that Maggie thought that it would never end, but as it proceeded the words worked their effect on the congregation, and at the last there was much emotion and several women were crying.

  Then they all sat down again and the meeting developed a very business-like side. There was a great deal of discussion as to dates, places, appointments, and Maggie was amused to discover that in this part of the proceedings Mrs. Smith had a great deal to say, and took a very leading place.

  The gathering became like any other assemblage of ladies for some charitable or social purpose, and there were the usual disputes and signs of temper and wounded pride; in all those matters Miss Avies was a most admirable and unflinching chairman.