Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  The kitchen grew darker and darker. She let the underclothes lie upon her lap. Soon she must light the lamp, but meanwhile, before the oven she let her fancies overwhelm her, luxuriating in her terror.

  Suddenly the kitchen-door was flung open. She started up with a cry. Martin stood there and in a voice, so new to her that she seemed never to have heard it before, he shouted, “Where’s Maggie?”

  She stood up in great agitation. He came towards her and she saw that his face was violent with agitation, with a kind of rage.

  “Where’s Maggie?” he repeated.

  She saw that he was shaking all over and it was as though he did not know who she was.

  “Maggie?” she repeated.

  “My wife! My wife!” he cried, and he shouted it again as though he were proclaiming some fact to the whole world.

  “She went out,” said Mrs. Bolitho, “about three hours back I should think.”

  “Went out!” he stormed at her. “And in this?”

  Then, before she could say another word, he was gone. It was in very truth like an apparition.

  She sat there for some time staring in front of her, still shaken by the violence of his interruption. She went then to the kitchen-door and listened — not a sound in the house. She went farther, out through the passage to the hall-door. She opened it and looked out. A sea of driving mist, billowing and driving as though by some internal breeze, met her.

  “Poor things,” she said to herself. “They shouldn’t be out in this.” She shut the door and went back into the house. She called, “Jim! Jim! Where are you?” At last he came, stumping up from some mysterious labour in the lower part of the house.

  “What is’t?” he said, startled by her white face and troubled eyes.

  “The two of them,” she said, “have gone out on to the moor in this mist. It isn’t safe.”

  “Whatever for?” he asked.

  “How should I know? She went out first and now he’s after her. ’Tisn’t safe, Jim. You’d best follow them.”

  He didn’t argue with her, being an obedient husband disciplined by many years of matrimony.

  “Well, I’ll go,” he said slowly. “Best take William, though.”

  He went off in search of his man.

  But Bolitho need not trouble. Half an hour later Maggie returned, stood in the sitting-room looking about her, took off her jacket and hat, then, pursuing her own thoughts, slowly put them on. She was then about to leave the room when the door burst open and Martin tumbled in. He stood at the doorway staring at her, his mouth open. “Why!” he stammered. “I thought ... I thought ... you were out—” She looked at him crossly.

  “You shouldn’t have gone out — an afternoon like this. If I’d been here—”

  “Well, you weren’t. You shouldn’t have gone out either for the matter of that. And I was at the circus — a damned poor one too. Your things are soaking,” he added, suddenly looking up at her. “You talk about me. You’d better go and change.”

  “I’m going out again,” she said.

  “Out again?”

  “Yes ... There’s a train at Clinton at seven. I’m catching that.”

  “A train?” He stared at her, completely bewildered.

  “Yes. That’s what I went out to get my head clear about. Martin, you’ve beaten me. After all these years you have. After all my fine speeches, too.”

  He began to drum on the window. He tried to speak casually.

  “I haven’t beaten you, Maggie.”

  “Yes, you have. I said you wouldn’t be able to send me away. Well, you’ve managed to and in the only way you could — by your silence. You haven’t opened your mouth for a fortnight. You’re better now, too, and Mrs. Bolitho will look after you. I was determined to hang on to you, but I find I can’t. I’m going back to London to get some work.”

  His hand dropped from the window. Then, with his head turned from her and his voice so low that she could scarcely hear the —

  “No, Maggie, don’t go.”

  She smiled across at him. “There’s no need to be polite, Martin. We’re both of us beyond that by this time. I’ll come back if you really want me. You know that I always will, but at last, after all these years, I’ve found a scrap of self-respect. Here am I always bundling about — first the aunts, then you, then Paul, then you again, and nobody wanting me. I don’t suppose,” she said laughing, “that there can be anybody less wanted in the world. So I’m just going to look after myself now. It’s quite time I did.”

  “But I want you,” he said, his voice still very low. She looked up, her eyes lit as though with some sudden recognition.

  “If you really mean that,” she said, “say it again. If you don’t mean it, don’t humbug me. I won’t be humbugged any more.”

  “I haven’t humbugged you — ever,” he answered. “You’re the only person I’ve always been absolutely straight with. I’ve always, from the very beginning, told you to have nothing to do with me. It’s more true than ever now. I’ve been trying ever since you came back to me in London to get you to leave me. But it’s too late. I can’t fight it any more ... I loved you all the time I was abroad. I oughtn’t to have written to you, but I did. I came back to London with the one hope of seeing you, but determined not to.”

  “I loved you more than ever when you came into my lodging there, but I was sick and hadn’t any money, besides all my other failings ... It’s the only decent thing I’ve ever really tried to do, to keep you away from me, and now I’ve failed in that. When I came in and found you were gone this afternoon I thought I’d go crazy.”

  “I’m not going to struggle any more. If you go away I’ll follow you wherever you go. I may as well try to give up keeping you out of it. It’s like keeping myself out of it.”

  Slowly she took her hat and coat off again.

  “Well, then,” she said, “I’d better stay, I suppose.”

  He suddenly sat down, his face white. She came across to him.

  She put her hand on his forehead.

  “You’d better go to bed, Martin, dear. I’ll bring your tea in.”

  He caught her hand. She knelt down, put her arms round him, and so they stayed, cheek to cheek, for a long time.

  When he had gone to his room she sat in the arm-chair by the fire, her hands idly folded on her lap. She let happiness pour in upon her as water floods in upon a dried and sultry river-bed. She was passive, her tranquillity was rich and full, too full for any outward expression.

  She was so happy that her heart was weighted down and seemed scarcely to beat. It was not, perhaps, the exultant happiness that she had expected this moment to bring her.

  When, in after days, she looked back to that quiet half-hour by the fire she saw that it was then that she had passed from girlhood into womanhood. The first chapter of her life was, at that moment’s laying of her hand on Martin’s forehead, closed. The love for him that filled her so utterly was in great part maternal. It was to be her destiny to know the deep tranquil emotions of life rather than the passionate and transient. She was perhaps the more blessed in that.

  Even now, at the very instant of her triumph, she deceived herself in nothing. There were many difficulties ahead for her. She had still to deal with Paul: Martin was not a perfect character, nor would he suddenly become one. Above all that strange sense of being a captive in a world that did not understand her, some one curious and odd and alien — that would not desert her. That also was true of Martin. It was true — strangely true — of so many of the people she had known — of the aunts, Uncle Mathew, Mr. Magnus, of Paul and of Grace, of Mr. Toms, and even perhaps of Thurston and Amy Warlock — all captives in a strange country, trying to find the escape, each in his or her own fashion, back to the land of their birth.

  But the land was there. Just as the lion, whose roar very faintly she could hear through the thick walls, remembered in his cage the jungles and mountains of his happiness, so was she aware of hers. The land was there, the figh
t to get back to it was real.

  She smiled to herself, looking back on the years. Many people would have said that she had had no very happy time since that sudden moment of her father’s death, but it did not seem to her, in retrospect, unhappy. There had been unhappy times, tragic times, but life was always bringing forward some magnificent moment, some sudden flash of splendour that made up for all the rest. How could you be bitter about people when you were all in the same box, all as ignorant, as blind, as eager to do well, as fallible, as brave, as mistaken?

  The thoughts slipped dimly through her mind. She was too happy to trace them truly. She had never been one for conscious philosophy.

  Nevertheless she did not doubt but that life was worth while, that there was something immortal in her, and that the battle was good to fight — but what it really came to was that she loved Martin, and that at last some one needed her, that she need never be lonely any more.

  Mrs. Bolitho stepped in with the tea.

  “I’ll take it in to him,” Maggie said, standing up and stretching out her arms for the tray.

  The woman looked at her and gave a little “Ah!” of satisfaction, as though, at length, she saw in Maggie’s eyes that for — which she had been searching.

  “Why, I do believe,” she said, “that walk’s done ‘ee good.”

  “I do believe,” Maggie said, laughing, “it has.”

  Carrying the tray carefully she went through into Martin’s room.

  THE YOUNG ENCHANTED

  CONTENTS

  BOOK I. TWO DAYS

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  BOOK II. HIGH SUMMER

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  BOOK III. FIRST BRUSH WITH THE ENEMY

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  BOOK IV. KNIGHT-ERRANT

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  TO MY FRIEND

  LAURITZ MELCHIOR

  AND, THROUGH HIM,

  TO ALL MY FRIENDS

  IN DENMARK

  THIS BOOK

  IS DEDICATED

  MOTTO

  to me over the past

  Decillions.

  There is no better than it

  And now. What behaves well

  In the past or behaves well

  To-day is not such a wonder.

  The wonder is always and

  Always how there can be

  A mean man or an infidel.”

  Walt Whitman.

  BOOK I. TWO DAYS

  CHAPTER I

  THE SCARLET FEATHER

  I

  Young Henry Trenchard, one fine afternoon in the Spring of 1920, had an amazing adventure.

  He was standing at the edge of Piccadilly Circus, just in front of Swan and Edgar’s where the omnibuses stopped. They now stop there no longer but take a last frenzied leap around the corner into Regent Street, greatly to the disappointment of many people who still linger at the old spot and have a vague sense all the rest of the day of having been cheated by the omnibus companies.

  Henry generally paused there before crossing the Circus partly because he was short-sighted and partly because he never became tired of the spectacle of life and excitement that Piccadilly Circus offered to him. His pince-nez that never properly fitted his nose, always covered one eye more than the other and gave the interested spectator a dramatic sense of suspense because they seemed to be eternally at the crisis of falling to the ground, there to be smashed into a hundred pieces — these pince-nez coloured his whole life. Had he worn spectacles — large, round, moon-shaped ones as he should have done — he would have seen life steadily and seen it whole, but a kind of rather pathetic vanity — although he was not really vain — prevented him from buying spectacles. The ill-balancing of these pince-nez is at the back of all these adventures of his that this book is going to record.

  He waited, between the rushing of the omnibuses, for the right moment in which to cross, and while he waited a curious fancy occurred to him. This fancy had often occurred to him before, but he had never confessed it to any one — not even to Millicent — not because he was especially ashamed of it but because he was afraid that his audience would laugh at him, and if there was one thing at this time that Henry disliked it was to be laughed at.

  He fancied, as he stood there, that his body swelled, and swelled; he grew, like ‘Alice in her Wonderland,’ into a gigantic creature, his neck shot up, his arms and his legs extended, his head was as high as the barber’s window opposite, then slowly he raised his arm — like Gulliver, the crowds, the traffic, the buildings dwindled beneath him. Everything stopped; even the sun stayed in its course and halted. The flower-women around the central statue sat with their hands folded, the policemen at the crossings waited, looking up to him as though for orders — the world stood still. With a great gesture, with all the sense of a mighty dramatic moment he bade the centre of the Circus open. The Statue vanished and in the place where it had been the stones rolled back, colour flamed into the sky, strange beautiful music was heard and into the midst of that breathless pause there came forth — what?

  Alas, Henry did not know. It was here that the vision always stayed. At the instant when the ground opened his size, his command, his force collapsed. He fell, with a bang to the ground, generally to find that some one was hitting him in the ribs, or stepping on his toes or cursing him for being in the way.

  Experience had, by this time, taught him that this always would be so, but he never surrendered hope. One day the vision would fulfil itself and then — well he did not exactly know what would happen then.

  To-day everything occurred as usual, and just as he came to ground some one struck him violently in the back with an umbrella. The jerk flung his glasses from his nose and he was only just in time to put out his hands and catch them. As he did this some books that he was carrying under his arm fell to the ground. He bent to pick them up and then was at once involved in the strangest medley of books and ankles and trouser-legs and the fringes of skirts. People pushed him and abused him. It was the busiest hour of the day and he was groping at the busiest part of the pavement. He had not had time to replace his pince-nez on his nose — they were reposing in his waistcoat pocket — and he was groping therefore in a darkened and confusing world. A large boot stamped on his fingers and he cried out; some one knocked off his hat, some one else prodded him in the tenderest part of his back.

  He was jerked on to his knees.

  When he finally recovered himself and was once more standing, a man again amongst men, his pince-nez on his nose, he had his books under his arm, but his hat was gone, gone hopelessly, nowhere to be seen. It was not a very new hat — a dirty grey and shapeless — but Henry, being in the first weeks of his new independence, was poor and a hat was a hat. He was supremely conscious of how foolish a man may look without a hat, and he hated to look foolish. He was also aware, out of the corner of his eye, that there was a smudge on one side of his nose. He could not tell whether it were a big or a little smudge, but from the corner of his eye it seemed gigantic.

  Two of the books that he was carrying were books given him for review by the only paper in London — a small and insignificant paper — that showed interest in his literary judgment, and but a moment ago they had been splendid in their glittering and handsome freshness.

  Now they w
ere battered and dirty and the corner of one of them was shapeless. One of the sources of his income was the sum that he received from a bookseller for his review copies; he would never now receive a penny for either of these books.

  There were tears in his eyes — how he hated the way that tears would come when he did not want them! and he was muddy and hatless and lonely! The loneliness was the worst, he was in a hostile and jeering and violent world and there was no one who loved him.

  They did not only not love him, they were also jeering at him and this drove him at once to the determination to escape their company at all costs. No rushing omnibuses could stop him now, and he was about to plunge into the Piccadilly sea, hatless, muddy, bruised as he was, when the wonderful adventure occurred.

  All his life after he would remember that moment, the soft blue sky shredded with pale flakes of rosy colour above him, the tall buildings grey and pearl white, the massed colour of the flowers round the statue, violets and daffodils and primroses, the whir of the traffic like an undertone of some symphony played by an unearthly orchestra far below the ground, the moving of the people about him as though they were all hurrying to find their places in some pageant that was just about to begin, the bells of St. James’ Church striking five o’clock and the soft echo of Big Ben from the far distance, the warmth of the Spring sun and the fresh chill of the approaching evening, all these common, everyday things were, in retrospect, part of that wonderful moment as though they had been arranged for him by some kindly benignant power who wanted to give the best possible setting to the beginning of the great romance of his life.