by Hugh Walpole
“I do,” said Mrs. Armstrong. “And how good you were to him too! No one will ever know but myself how truly good you were to that man, Ada. Your kind heart led you astray there, as it has done often enough before.”
Mrs. Tenssen nodded her head reminiscently. “He wasn’t all he should have been,” she said. “But there, one can’t go on regretting all the actions of the past, or where would one be?”
She regarded Henry appreciatively. “He’s a nice boy,” she said to Mrs. Armstrong. “I like his face. I’m a terrible woman for first impressions, and deceived though I’ve been, I still believe in them.”
“He’s got kind eyes,” said Mrs. Armstrong, blowing on her tea to cool it.
“Yes, they’re what I’d call thinking eyes. I should say he’s clever.”
“Yes, he looks clever,” said Mrs. Armstrong.
“And I like his smile,” said Mrs. Tenssen.
“Good-natured I should say,” replied Mrs. Armstrong.
This direct and personal comment floating quite naturally over his self-conscious head embarrassed Henry terribly. He had never been discussed before in his own presence as though he didn’t really exist. He didn’t like it; it made him extremely uneasy. He longed to interrupt and direct the conversation into a safer channel, but every topic of interest that occurred to him seemed unsuitable. The weather, the theatres, politics, Bolshevism, high prices, food, house decoration, literature and the Arts — all these occurred to him but were dismissed at once as unlikely to succeed. Moreover, he was passionately occupied with his endeavour to catch the glimpses of the girl at the end of the table. He did not wish to look at her deliberately lest that should embarrass her. He would not, for the world bring her into any kind of trouble. The two women whom he hated with increasing vehemence with every moment that passed were watching like vultures waiting for their prey. (This picture and image occurred quite naturally to Henry.) The glimpses that he did catch of the soft cheek, the untidy curls, the bend of the head and the curve of the neck fired his heart to a heroism, a purity of purpose, a Quixotism that was like wine in his head, so that he could scarcely hear or see. He would have liked to have the power to at that very instant jump up, catch her in his arms and vanish through the window. As it was he gulped down his tea and crumbled a little pink cake.
As the meal proceeded the air of the little room became very hot and stuffy. The two ladies soon fell into a very absorbing conversation about a gentleman named Herbert whose salient features were that he had a double chin and was careless about keeping engagements. The conversation passed on then to other gentlemen, all of whom seemed in one way or another to have their faults and drawbacks, and to all of whom Mrs. Tenssen had been, according to Mrs. Armstrong, quite marvellously good and kind.
The fool that Henry felt!
Here was an opportunity that any other man would have seized. He could but stare and gulp and stare again. The girl sat, her plate and cup pushed aside, her hands folded, looking before her as though into some mirror or crystal revealing to her the strangest vision — and as she looked unhappiness crept into her eyes, an unhappiness so genuine that she was quite unconscious of it.
Henry leant across the table to her.
“I say, don’t . . . don’t!” he whispered huskily.
She turned to him, smiling.
“Don’t what?” she asked. There was the merest suggestion of a foreign accent behind her words.
“Don’t be miserable. I’ll do anything — anything. I followed you here from Piccadilly. I heard her slapping you.”
“Oh, I want to get away!” she whispered breathlessly. “Do you think I can?”
“You can if I help you,” Henry answered. “How can I see you?”
“She keeps me here . . .”
Their whispers had been low, but the eager conversation at the other end of the table suddenly ceased.
“I’m afraid I must be going now,” said Henry rising and facing Mrs. Tenssen. “It was very good of you to give me tea.”
“Come again,” said Mrs. Tenssen regarding him once more with that curiously fixed stare, a stare like a glass of water in which floated a wink, a threat, a cajoling, and an insult.
“We’ll be glad to see you. Just take us as you find us. Come in the right way next time. There’s a bell at the bottom of the stairs.”
Mrs. Armstrong laughed her deep bass laugh.
He shook hands with the two women, shuddering once more at Mrs. Tenssen’s boneless fingers. He turned to the girl. “Good-bye,” he said. “I’ll come again.”
“Yes,” she answered, not looking at him but at her mother at the other side of the table. The stairs were dark and smelt of fish and patchouli. He stumbled down them and let himself out into Peter Street. The evening was blue with a lovely stir in it as in running water. The booths were crowded, voices filled the air. He escaped into Shaftesbury Avenue as Hänsel and Gretel escaped from the witch’s cottage. He was in love for the first time in his young, self-centred life. . . .
CHAPTER II
HENRY HIMSELF
In the fifth chapter of the second part of Henry Galleon’s Three Magicians there is this passage (The Three Magicians appeared in 1892):
When he looked at the Drydens, father, daughter, and son, he would wonder, as he had often in earlier days wondered, why writers on English character so resolutely persisted in omitting the Dryden type from their definitions? These analyses were perhaps too sarcastic, too cynical to include anything as artless, as simple as the Dryden character without giving the whole case away . . . and yet it was, he fancied in that very character that the whole strength and splendour of the English spirit persisted. Watching Cynthia and Tony Dryden he was reminded of a picture in a fairy-tale book read and loved by him in his youth, now forgotten to the very name of its author, lingering only with a few faded colours of the original illustration. He fancied that it had been a book of Danish fairy romances. . . . This picture of which he thought was a landscape — Dawn was breaking over a great champigné of country, country that had hills and woods and forests, streams and cottages all laid out in that detailed fancy that, as a child, he had loved so deeply. The sun was rising over the hill; heavy dark clouds were rolling back on to the horizon and everywhere the life of the day, fresh in the sparkling daylight was beginning. The creatures of the night were vanishing; dragons with scaly tails were creeping back reluctantly into their caves, giants were brandishing their iron clubs defiantly for the last time before the rising sun; the Hydras and Gryphons and Five-Headed Tortoises were slinking into the dusky forests, deep into the waters of the green lakes the slimy Three-Pronged Alligators writhed deep down into the filth that was their proper home.
The flowers were thick on the hills, and in the valleys, the birds sang, butterflies and dragon-flies flashed against the blue, the smoke curled up from the cottage chimneys and over all the world was hung a haze of beauty, of new life and the wonder of the coming day.
In the foreground of this picture were two figures, a girl and a boy, and the painter, clumsy and amateurish, though his art may have been, had with the sincerity and fervour of his own belief put into their eyes all their amazement and wonder at the beauty of this new world.
They saw it all; the dragons and the gryphons, the heavy clouds rolling back above the hill were not hidden from them; that they would return they knew. The acceptance of the whole of life was in their eyes. Their joy was in all of it; their youth made them take it all full-handed. . . .
I have thought of them sometimes — I think of the Drydens now — as the Young Enchanted. And it seems to me that England is especially the country of such men and women as these. All the other peoples of the world carry in their souls age and sophistication. They are too old for that sense of enchantment, but in England that wonder that is so far from common sense and yet is the highest kind of common sense in the world has always flourished. It is not imagination; the English have less imagination than any other race, it is not
joy of life nor animal spirits, but the child’s trust in life before it has grown old enough for life to deceive it. I think Adam and Eve before the Fall were English.
That sense of Enchantment remains with the English long after it dies with the men and women of other nations, perhaps because the English have not the imagination to perceive how subtle, how dangerous, how cynical life can be. Their art comes straight from their Enchantment. The novels of Fielding and Scott and Thackeray and Dickens and Meredith, the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, the pictures of Hogarth and Constable and Turner. The music of Purcell, the characters of Nelson and Wellington and Gordon. . . .
And think what that sense of Enchantment might do for them if only their background would change. For generations gone that has not moved. One day when the earthquake comes and the upheaval and all the old landmarks are gone and there is a new world of social disorder and tumbling indecency for their startled gaze to rest upon then you will see what these children of Enchantment will do!
So much, for Galleon who is already now so shortly after his death looked upon as an old sentimental fogy. Sentimental? Why certainly. What in the world could be more absurd than his picture of the English gazing wide-eyed at the wonder of life? They of all peoples!
And yet he was no fool. He was a Cosmopolitan. He had lived as much in Rome, in Paris, in Vicenza, as in London. And why should I apologize for one of the greatest artists England possesses? Other times, other names . . . and you can’t catch either Henry Trenchard or Millicent — no, nor Peter either — and I venture to say that you cannot catch that strange, restless, broken, romantic, aspiring, adventurous, disappointing, encouraging, enthralling, Life-is-just-beginning-at-last Period in which they had these adventures simply with the salt of sheer Realism — not salt enough for that Bird’s tail.
I should like to find that little picture of Henry Galleon’s fairy book and place it as a frontispiece to this story. But Heaven alone knows where that old book has gone to! It was perhaps Galleon’s own invention; he was a queer old man and went his own way and had his own fancies, possessions that many writers to-day are chary of keeping because they have been told on so many occasions by so many wise professors that they’ve got to stick to the Truth. Truth? Who knows what Truth may be? Platitudinous Pilate failed over that question many years ago, and to-day we are certainly as far as ever from an answer. There are a million Truths about Henry and Millicent and the times they lived in. Galleon’s is at least one of them, and it’s the one I’ve chosen because it happens to be the way I see them. But of course there are others.
“The whole Truth and nothing but the Truth.” What absurdity for any story-teller in the world to think that he can get that — and what arrogance! This book is the truth about these children as near as I can get to it, and the truth about that strange year 1920 in that strange town, London, as faithfully as I can recollect, but it isn’t everybody’s Truth. Far from it — and a good thing too.
Henry’s rooms were at the top of 24 Panton Street. To get to them you placed a Yale key in the lock of an old brown door, brushed your way through a dim passage, climbed a shabby staircase past the doors of the Hon. Nigel Bruce, Captain D’Arcy Sinclair, Claude Bottome, the singer, and old Sir Henry Bristow, who painted his face and wore stays. This was distinguished company for Henry who was at the beginning of his independent life in London, and the knowledge that he was in the very centre of the Metropolis, that the Comedy Theatre was nearly opposite his door and Piccadilly only a minute away gratified him so much that he did not object to paying three guineas a week for a small bed-sitting room without breakfast. It was a very small room, just under the roof, and Henry who was long and bony spent a good deal of his time in a doubled-up position that was neither aesthetic nor healthy. Three guineas a week is twelve pounds twelve shillings a month, and one hundred and fifty-one pounds four shillings a year. He had a hundred and fifty pounds a year of his own, left to him by his old grandfather, and by eager and even optimistic calculation he reckoned that from his literary labours he would earn at least another hundred pounds in his London twelve months. Even then, however, he would not have risked these handsome lodgings had he not only a month ago, through the kind services of his priggish brother-in-law, Philip Mark, obtained a secretaryship with Sir Charles Duncombe, Bart., at exactly one hundred and fifty pounds per annum.
With inky fingers and a beating heart he produced this estimate:
£
s.
d.
Income from Grandfather
150
0
0
Literary Earnings
100
0
0
Sir Ronald D.
150
0
0
Grand Total
£400
0
0
And against this he set:
£
s.
d.
Rooms
163
16
0
Food
100
0
0
Clothes
50
0
0
Etceteras
50
0
0
363
16
0
Saved in first year in London
36
4
0
There were certain risks about this estimate. For one thing literature might, conceivably, not contribute her hundred pounds quite so completely as he hoped. On the other hand, she might contribute more. . . .
Again Henry was on trial with Sir Charles, was going into his service the day after to-morrow for the first time, had never been secretary to any one in his life before, and was not by temperament fitted entirely for work that needed those two most Damnable and Soul Destroying of attributes, Accuracy and Method. He had seen Sir Charles only once, and the grim austerity of that gentleman’s aristocratic features had not been encouraging.
Never mind. It was all enchanting. What was life for if one did not take risks? Every one was taking risks, from Mr. Lloyd George down to (or possibly up to) Georges Carpentier and Mr. Dempsey — Henry did not wish to be behind the rest.
Mr. King, his landlord, had suggested to him that he might possibly be willing to lay a new wall-paper and a handsome rug or carpet. There was no doubt at all that the room needed these things; the wall-paper had once been green, was now in many places yellow and gave an exact account of the precise spots where the sporting prints of the last tenant (young Nigel Frost Bellingham) had hung. The carpet, red many years ago, resembled nothing so much as a map of Europe with lakes, rivers, hills, and valleys clearly defined in grey and brown outline. Henry explained to Mr. King that he would wish to wait for a month or two to see how his fortunes progressed before he made further purchases, upon which Mr. King, staring just over Henry’s shoulder at the green wall-paper, remarked that it was usual for gentlemen to pay a month’s rent in advance, upon which Henry, blushing, suggested that an improvement in his fortunes was perfectly certain and that he was private secretary to Sir Charles Duncombe, Bart., of whom Mr. King had doubtless heard. Mr. King, bowing his head as of one who would say that there was no Baronet in the United Kingdom of whom he had not heard, nevertheless regretted that the rule concerning the month’s rent was constant, unchanging and could, in no circumstances whatever, be altered.
This Mr. King was little in stature, but great in demeanour. His head was bald save for a few black hairs very carefully arranged upon it, as specimens are laid out in the Natural History Museum. His face also was bald, in the strictest sense of the word; that is, not only did no hairs grow upon it but it seemed impossible that any hairs ever had grown upon it. His eyes were sharp, his mouth deprecating and his chin insignificant. He wore, it seemed, the same suit of black, the same black tie, the same stiff white shirt from year’s end to year’s end. He
showed no human emotion whether of anger, regret, disappointment, expectation or sorrow.
He told no jolly stories of other tenants nor of life about town such as Henry would have liked him to tell. He had, Henry was sure, a great contempt for Henry. He was not, from any point of view, a lovable human being.
Henry did what he could for his room, he was proud of it, felt very kindly towards it and wanted to clothe it with beauty. It is difficult, however, to make a room beautiful unless the wall-paper and the carpet contribute something. Henry had a nice writing-table that his Uncle Timothy had given him, a gate-legged table from his sister Katherine and a fine Regency bookcase stolen by him from his Westminster home. He had three pictures, a Japanese print, a copy of Mr. Belcher’s drawing of Pat O’Keefe, “The Wild Irishman,” and a little water-colour by Lovat Frazer of a king and queen marching into a banquet-hall and attended by their courtiers. This last, splendid in gold and blue, green and red was the joy of Henry’s heart and had been given him by his sister Millicent on his last birthday.
In the bookcase there were, on the whole, the books that you would expect — the poems of Swinburne, Dowson, and Baudelaire, some of the 1890 novelists and one or two moderns. But he was also beginning to collect a few rare editions, and he had Clarissa and The Mysteries of Udulpho and The Monk in their original bindings, and an early Pilgrim’s Progress, a rather rare Donne and a second Vicar of Wakefield. These were his greatest treasures. He had only two photographs in his room — his sisters and that of his greatest and perhaps his only friend. These stood one on either side of the very plain alarm-clock that took the middle of the mantelpiece.