Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  Millie went across to him and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Of course I don’t think you an ass. But you are easily taken in by people — you always believe what they say.”

  Henry nodded his head. “Perhaps I don’t so much as I mean to. But it’s the best thing to try to. You get far more that way.”

  The three sat there in silence. At last Millicent said:

  “Isn’t it queer? Here’s the world on the very edge of every sort of adventure, and here are we on the very edge too? I feel in my bones that we shall go through great things this year — all of us. Unpleasant and pleasant — all sorts. I don’t believe that there’s ever been in all history such a time for adventure as now.”

  Henry jumped up from behind the table.

  “That’s true!” he cried. “And whatever happens we three will stick together. Nothing shall separate us — nothing; and nobody. You and I and Peter. We’ll never let anybody come between us. We’ll be the three best friends the world has ever seen!”

  He caught Millie’s hand. She looked up at him, smiling. He came across and caught Peter’s also. Suddenly Millicent put out hers and took Peter’s free one.

  “You’re a sentimental donkey, Henry,” she said. “But there’s something in what you say.”

  Peter flushed. “I’m older than both of you,” he said, “and I’m dull and slow but I’ll do what I can.”

  There was a knock on the door and they sprang apart. It was Mr. King to take away the tea.

  BOOK II. HIGH SUMMER

  CHAPTER I

  SECOND PHASE OF THE ADVENTURE

  Now might young Henry be considered by any observer of average intelligence to be fairly launched into the world — he is in love, he is confidential secretary to a gentleman of importance, he has written ten chapters of a romantic novel and he is living in chambers all on his own. It has been asserted again and again that the Great War of 1914 turned many thousands of boys into old men long before their time. The exact contrary may also be proved to be true — namely that the War caught many boys in their teens, held them in a sort of vise for five years, keeping them from life as it is usually lived, teaching them nothing but war and then suddenly flinging them out into a Peace about which they were as ignorant as blind puppies. Boys of eighteen chronologically supposed to be twenty-four and superficially disguised as men of forty and disillusioned cynical men at that, those were to be found in their thousands in that curious tangled year of 1920. Henry thought he was a man; he was much less a man than he would have been had no war broken out at all.

  On the afternoon following the tea party just now described he left Hill Street about four o’clock, his head up and his chest out, a very fine figure indeed had it not been that, unknown to himself, his tie had stepped up to the top of his collar at the back of his neck and there was a small smudge of ink just in the right corner of his nose. He had had a very happy day, very quiet, very peaceful, and he was encouraged to believe that he had been a great success. It was true that Sir Charles had addressed very few words to himself and that Lady Bell-Hall had addressed so many during luncheon that he had felt like a canary peppered with bird-seed, but he did not expect Sir Charles to speak very often, nor did he mind how frequently the funny little woman in the bonnet spoke, so long as she liked him. It had all been very easy, and the letters had been entrancing, so entrancing that Berkeley Square seemed to be Princes Street, and he could see through the open door Sir Walter’s hall and Maria Edgeworth announced and the host’s cheery welcome and glorious smile, and the laughter of the children, and Maria dragged into the circle and forced to sing the Highland song with the rest of them, and Honest John hurrying down Castle Street wrapped up against the cold, and the high frosty sky and the Castle frowning over all.

  He had been there — surely he had been there in an earlier incarnation, and now this. . . . He was pulled up by a taxi ringing at him fiercely, and by the press of carriages at the Piccadilly turning.

  He was swung suddenly on to the business of the moment, namely that he was going to make his first serious attempt at breaking through into the mysteries of Peter Street, then definitely to do or die — although as a matter of honest fact he had no intention whatever of dying just yet. He was borne into Shaftesbury Avenue before he knew where he was, borne by the tide of people, men and women happy in the bright purple-hued spring afternoon, happy in spite of the hard times and the uncertain future, borne along, too, by the cries and sounds, the roll of the omnibuses, the screams of the taxis, the shouting of the newsboys, the murmur of countless voices, the restless rhythm of the unceasing life beneath the brick and mortar, the life of the primeval forests, the ghosts of the serpents and the lions waiting with confident patience for the earth to return to them once more.

  He slipped into Peter Street as into a country marked off from the rest of the world and known to him by heart. This afternoon the barrows and stalls were away; no one was there, not even the familiar policeman. It was like a back-water hidden from the main river, and its traffic by the thick barrier of the forest trees, gleaming in its own sunlight, happy in its solitude. He found the door-bell, listened to it go tinkling into the depths of the house, and after its cessation heard only the thumping of his own heart and the shattered beat of the unresting town.

  He waited, it seemed, an unconscionable time; then slowly the door opened, revealing to his astonished gaze the girl herself. So staggered was he by her appearance that for the moment he could only stare. The passage behind her was dark in spite of the strong afternoon sun.

  “Oh!” he said at last. “I came. . . . I came. . . .”

  She looked at him.

  “Have you come to see my mother?” The tiny slur of the foreign accent excited him as it had done before. It seemed suddenly that he had known her for ever.

  “Because if you have,” she went on. “Mother’s out.”

  “No,” he said boldly, “I’ve come to see you.”

  She looked back to the stairs as though she were afraid that some one were lurking there and would overhear them. She dropped her voice a little.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Mother.” Then hurriedly, “Come up. Come up. I don’t like being alone and that’s the truth. If mother’s angry when she comes in I don’t care. Anything’s better.”

  She turned and led the way. He followed her, smelling the stuffiness that was like dirty blankets pressed against the nose. There was no window to the stairs, and at the corner it was so dark that he stumbled. He heard her laugh in the distance, then an opened door threw light down. He was in the room where he had been before, enwrapped still in its heavy curtains, and lit even on this lovely day with electric light heavily clouded under the pink silk shades. She was still laughing, standing at the other side of the table.

  He stood awkwardly fingering his hat. He had nothing to say, and they were both silent a long time. Then simply because he was expecting the hated woman’s arrival at any moment he began:

  “I’ve been wanting to come all these three days. I’ve thought of nothing else, of how you said I could help you — and — get you out of this. I will. I will — I’ll do anything. You can come now if you like, and I’ll take you to my sister’s — she’s very nice and you’ll like her — and they can do anything they like, but they shan’t take you away. . . .”

  He was quite breathless with excitement. She stared at him gravely as though not understanding what he said. When he saw the puzzle in her eyes his eloquence was suddenly exhausted and he could only stammer out:

  “That’s — that’s what you said the other day — that you wanted to escape.”

  “To escape?” she repeated.

  “You said that.”

  She moved her hands impatiently, and her voice dropped until it was almost a whisper.

  “When you came the other day I was foolish because mother had just been angry. I was excited because she had been angry before that horrid fat woman — you remember? I hate
her to be angry when she’s there because she likes it. She hates me because I’m young and she’s old. . . . Of course I can’t get away — and how could I go with you? I don’t know you. Why, you’re only a boy!” Then she added reflectively, as though she were giving the final conclusive argument, “and you’ve got ink on your nose.”

  Henry committed then what is always a foolish seeming act at the very best, he took out a not very clean handkerchief, licked a corner of it with his tongue and rubbed his nose.

  “It’s on the right side in the corner,” she said, regarding him.

  “Is it off now?” he asked her.

  “Yes.”

  Henry then pulled himself together and behaved like a man.

  “I don’t know what you mean now,” he said, “about not wanting me to help you, but you did say that the other day and you must take the consequences. I don’t want to help you in any way, of course, that you don’t want to be helped, but I am sure there is something I can do for you. And in any case I’m going on coming to see you until I’m stopped by physical force — even then I’m going on coming.”

  “I’ll tell you this,” she said suddenly. “I don’t want you to come because mother wants you to, and every one whom mother wants me to like is horrid. Why does she want you to come?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” said Henry, surprised. “She can’t know anything about me at all.”

  “She does. She’s found out in these two days. She said yesterday afternoon she wondered you hadn’t come, and then this morning again.”

  Henry said: “Won’t you take me as I am? Your mother doesn’t know me. I want to be your friend. I’ve wanted to from the first moment I saw you in Piccadilly Circus.”

  “In Piccadilly Circus?”

  “Yes. That’s where I first saw you the other afternoon and I followed you here.”

  That seemed to her of no importance. “Friend?” she said frowning and staring in front of her. “I don’t like that word. Two or three have wanted to be friends. I won’t have friends. I won’t have anybody. I’d rather be alone.”

  “I can’t hurt you,” said Henry very simply. “Why every one laughs at me, even my sister who’s very fond of me. They won’t laugh, one day, of course, but you see how it is. There’s always ink on my nose, or I tumble down when I want to do something important. You’d have thought the army would have changed that, but it didn’t.”

  She smiled then. “No, you don’t look as though you’d hurt anybody. But I don’t want to trust people. It only means you’re disappointed again.”

  “You can’t be disappointed in me,” Henry said earnestly. “Because I’m just what you see. Please let me come and see you. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.”

  They both heard then steps on the stair. They stopped and listened. The room was at once ominous, alarmed.

  Henry felt danger approaching, as though he could see beyond the door with his eyes and found on the stair some dark shape, undefined and threatening. The steps came nearer and ceased. Two were there listening on the other side of the door as two were listening within the room.

  He felt the girl’s fear and that suddenly stiffened his own courage. It was almost ludicrous then when the door opened and revealed the stout Mrs. Tenssen, clothed now in light orange and with her an old man.

  Henry saw at once that however eagerly she had hitherto expected him she was not easy at his presence just now. His further glance at the old man showed him at once an enemy for life. In any case he did not like old men. The War had carried him with the rest upon the swing of that popular cry “Every one over seventy to the lethal chamber.”

  Moreover, he personally knew no old men, which made the cry much simpler. This old man was not over seventy, he might indeed be still under sixty, but his small peak of a white beard, his immaculate clothing and his elegantly pointed patent leather shoes were sufficient for Henry. Immaculate old men! How dared they wear anything but sackcloth and ashes?

  Mrs. Tenssen, whose orange garments shone with ill-temper, shook hands with Henry as though she expected him instantly to say: “Well, I must be going now,” but he found himself with an admirable pugnacity and defiant resolve.

  “I called as I said I would,” he observed pleasantly. “And I came in by the door and not by the window,” he added, laughing.

  She murmured something, but did not attempt to introduce him to her companion.

  He meanwhile had advanced with rather mincing steps to the girl, was bowing over her hand and then to Henry’s infinite disgust was kissing it. Then Henry forgot all else in his adoration of the girl. He will never forget, to the end of whatever life that may be granted him, the picture that she made at that moment, standing in the garish, overlighted room, like a queen in her aloofness from them all, from everything that life could offer if that room, that old man, that woman were truly typical of its gifts. “It wasn’t only,” Henry said afterwards to Peter, “that she was beautiful. Millie’s beautiful — more beautiful I suppose than Christina. But Millie is flesh and blood. You can believe that she has toothache. But it was like a spell, a witchery. The beastly old man himself felt it. As though he had tried to step on to sacred ground and was thrown back on to common earth again. By gad, Peter, you don’t know how stupid he suddenly looked — and how beastly! She’s remote, a vision — not perhaps for any one to touch — ever . . .!”

  “That,” said Peter, “is because you’re in love with her — and Millie’s your sister.”

  “No, there’s more than that. It may be partly because she’s a foreigner — but you’d feel the same if you saw her. Her remoteness, as though the farther towards her you moved the farther away she’d be. Always in the distance and knowing that you can come no nearer. And yet if she knew that really she wouldn’t be so frightened as she is. . . .”

  “It’s all because you’re so young, Henry,” Peter ended up.

  But young or no Henry just then wasn’t very happy. The old man with his shrill voice and his ironic, almost cynical determination to be pleased with everything that any one did or said (it came, maybe, from a colossal and patronizing arrogance) — reminded Henry of the old “nicky-nacky” Senator in Otway’s Venice Preserved which he had once seen performed by some amateur society. He remained entirely unclouded by Mrs. Tenssen’s obvious boredom and ill-temper, moods so blatantly displayed that Henry in spite of himself was crushed.

  The girl showed no signs of any further interest in the company.

  Mrs. Tenssen sat at the table, picking her teeth with a toothpick and saying, “Indeed!” or “Well I never!” in an abstracted fashion when the old man’s pauses seemed to demand something. Her bold eyes moved restlessly round the room, pausing upon things as though she hated them and sometimes upon Henry who was standing, indeterminately, first on one foot and then on another. Something the old man said seemed suddenly to rouse her:

  “Well, that’s not fair, Mr. Leishman — it’s not indeed. That’s as good as saying that you think I’m mean — it is indeed. Oh, yes, it is. You can accuse me of many things — I’m not perfect — but meanness! Well you ask my friends. You ask my friend Mrs. Armstrong who’s known me as long as any one has — almost from the cradle you might say. Mean! You ask her. Why, only the other day, the day Mr. Prothero was here and that young nephew of his, she said, ‘Of all the generous souls on this earth, for real generosity and no half-and-half about it, you give me Katie Tenssen.’ Of course, she’s a friend as you might say and partial perhaps — but still that’s what she said and — —”

  The old man had been trying again and again to interrupt this flood. At last, because Mrs. Tenssen was forced to take a breath, he broke in:

  “No. No. Indeed not. Dear, dear, what a mistake! The last thing I was suggesting.”

  “Well, I hope so, I’m sure.” The outburst over, Mrs. Tenssen relapsed into teeth-picking again.

  Henry saw that there was nothing more to be got from the situation just the
n.

  “I must be going,” he said. “Important engagement.”

  Mrs. Tenssen shook him by the hand. She regarded him with a wider amiability now that he was departing.

  “Come and see us again,” she said. “Any afternoon almost.”

  By the door he turned, and suddenly the girl, from the far end of the room, smiled. It was a smile of friendship, of reassurance and, best of all, of intimacy.

  Under the splendour of it he felt the blood rush to his head, his eyes were dimmed, he stumbled down the stairs, the happiest creature in London.

  The smile accompanied him for the rest of that day, through the night, and into the Duncombe library next morning. That morning was not an easy one for Henry. He arrived with the stern determination to work his very hardest and before the luncheon bell sounded to reduce at least some of the letters to discipline and sobriety. Extraordinary the personal life that those letters seemed to possess! You would suppose that they did not wish to be made into a book, or at any rate, if that had to be, that they did not wish the compiler of the work to be Henry. They slipped from under his fingers, hid themselves, deprived him of dates just when he most urgently needed them, gave him Christian names when he must have surnames, and were sometimes so old and faded and yellow that it was impossible to make anything out of them at all.

  Sir Charles had as yet shown no sign. Of what he was thinking it was impossible to guess. He had not yet given Henry any private letters to write, and the first experiment on the typewriter was still to be made. One day soon he would spring, and with his long nose hanging over the little tattered, disordered piles on Henry’s table would peer and finger and examine: Henry knew that that moment was approaching and that he must have something ready, but this morning he could not concentrate. The plunge into life had been too sudden. The girl was with him in the room, standing just a little way from him smiling at him. . . .