Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  And I think that she hates me too. That nurse (whom I can’t abide) has tremendous power over her. I detest the house now. It’s so gloomy and still and corpse-like. When you think of all the people it used to have in it — so many that nobody would believe it when we told them. What fun we used to have at Christmas time and on birthdays, and down at Garth too. Philip finished all that — not that he meant to, poor dear.

  After seeing mother I had tea with father down in the study. He’s jolly when I’m there, but honestly, I think he forgets my very existence when I’m not. He never asked a single question about Henry. Just goes from his study to his club and back again. He says that his book Haslitt and His Contemporaries is coming out in the Autumn. I wonder who cares?

  It makes me very lonely if one thinks about it. Of course there’s dear Henry — and after him Katherine and Mary. But Henry’s got this young woman he picked up in Piccadilly Circus and Katherine’s got her babies and Mary her medicine. And I’ve got the Platts I suppose. . . .

  All the same sometimes it isn’t much fun being a modern girl. I daresay liberty and going about like a man’s a fine thing, but sometimes I’d like to have some one pet me and make a fuss over me and care whether I’m alive or not.

  On the impulse of this mood, I’ve asked Peter Westcott to come and have tea with me. He seems lonely too and was really nice at Henry’s the other day. Now I shall go to sleep and dream about Victoria’s correspondence.

  April 18. — A young man to luncheon to-day very different from the others. Humphrey Baxter by name; none of the aesthete about him! Clean, straight-back, decently dressed, cheerful young man. Item, dark with large brown eyes. At first it puzzled me as to how he got into this crowd at all, then I discovered that he’s rehearsing in a play that Clarice is getting up, The Importance of Being Earnest. He plays Bunbury or has something to do with a man called Bunbury — anyway they all call him Bunny. He’s vastly amused by the aesthetes and laughs at them all the time, the odd thing is that they don’t mind. He also knows exactly how to treat Victoria, taking her troubles seriously, although his eyes twinkle, and being really very courteous to her.

  The only one of the family who hates him is Ellen. She can’t abide him and told him so to-day, when he challenged her. He asked her why she hated him. She said, “You’re useless, vain and empty-headed.” He said, “Vain and empty-headed I may be, but useless no. I oil the wheels.” She said hers didn’t need oiling and he said that if ever they did need it she was to send for him. This little sparring match was very light-hearted on his side, deadly earnest on hers. The only other person who isn’t sure of him is Brooker — I don’t know why.

  Of course I like him — Bunny I mean. What it is to have some one gay and sensible in this household. He likes me too. Ellen says he goes after every girl he sees.

  I don’t care if he does. I can look after myself. She’s a queer one. She’s always looking at me as though she wanted to speak to me. And yesterday a strange thing happened. I was going upstairs and she was going down. We met at the corner and she suddenly bent forward and kissed me on the cheek. Then she ran on upstairs as though the police were after her. I don’t very much like being kissed by other women I must confess; however, if it gives her pleasure, poor thing, I’m glad. She’s so unhappy and so cross with herself and every one else.

  April 20. — Bunny comes every day now. He says he wants to tell me about his life — a very interesting one he says. He complains that he never finds me alone. I tell him I have my work to do.

  April 21. — Bunny wants me to act in Clarice’s play. I said I wouldn’t for a million pounds. Clarice is furious with me and says I’m flirting with him.

  April 22. — Bunny and I are going to a matinee of Chu Chin Chow. He says he’s been forty-four times and I haven’t been once. He likes to talk to me about his mother. He wants me to meet her.

  April 24. — Clarice won’t speak to me. I don’t care. Why shouldn’t I have a little fun? And Bunny is a good sort. He certainly isn’t very clever, but he says his strong line is motor-cars, about which I know nothing. After all, if some one’s clever in one thing that’s enough. I’m not clever in anything. . . .

  April 25. — Sunday, I went over to luncheon to see whether I could do anything for Victoria and had an extraordinary conversation with Ellen. She insisted on my going up to her bedroom with her after luncheon. A miserable looking room, with one large photograph over the bed of a girl, rather pretty. Mary Pickford prettiness — and nothing else at all.

  She began at once, a tremendous tirade, striding about the room, her hands behind her back. Words poured forth like bath-water out of a pipe. She said that I hated her and that every one hated her. That she had always been hated and she didn’t care, but liked it. That she hoped that more people would hate her; that it was an honour to be hated by most people. But that she didn’t want me to hate her and that she couldn’t think why I did. Unless of course I’d listened to what other people said of her — that I’d probably done that as every one did it. But she had hoped that I was wiser. And kinder. And more generous. . . . Here she paused for breath and I was able to get in a word saying that I didn’t hate her, that nobody had said anything against her, that in fact I liked her —— Oh no, I didn’t. Ellen burst in. No, no, I didn’t. Any one could see that. I was the only person she’d ever wanted to like her and she wasn’t allowed to have even that. I assured her that I did like her and considered her my friend and that we’d always be friends. Upon that she burst into tears, looking too strange, sitting in an old rocking-chair and rocking herself up and down. I can’t bear to see any one cry; it doesn’t stir my pity as it ought to do. It only makes me irritated. So I just sat on her bed and waited. At last she stopped and sniffing a good deal, got up and came over. She sat down on the bed and suddenly put her arms round me and stroked my hair. I can’t bear to have my hair stroked by anybody — or at least by almost anybody. However, I sat there and let her do it, because she seemed so terribly unhappy.

  I suppose she felt I wasn’t very responsive because suddenly she got up very coldly and with great haughtiness as though she were a queen dismissing an audience. “Well, now you’d better go. I’ve made a sufficient fool of myself for one day.” So I got up too and laughed because it seemed the easiest thing and said that I was her friend and always would be and would help her anyway I could but that I wasn’t very sentimental and couldn’t help it if I wasn’t. And she said still very haughtily that I didn’t understand her but that that wasn’t very strange because after all no one else did, and would I go because she had a headache and wanted to lie down. So I went.

  Wasn’t I glad after this to find Bunny downstairs. He suggested a walk and as Victoria was sleeping on the Sunday beef upstairs I agreed and we went along all through the Park and up to the Marble Arch, and the sun was so bright that it made the sheep look blue and the buds were waxy and there were lots of dogs and housemaids being happy with soldiers and babies in prams and all the atheists and Bolsheviks as cheery as anything on their tubs. Bunny really is a darling. He sees all the funny things, just as I do; I don’t believe a word that Ellen says about him. He assures me that he’s only loved one girl in his life and that he gave her up because she said that she wouldn’t have babies. He was quite right I think. He says that he’s just falling in love again with some one else now. Of course he may mean me and he certainly looked as though he did. I don’t care. I want to be happy and people to like me and every one to love everybody. Why shouldn’t they? Not uncomfortably, making scenes like Ellen, but just happily with a sense of humour and not expecting miracles. I said this to Bunny and he agreed.

  We had tea in a café in Oxford Street. He wanted to take me to a Cinema after that but I wouldn’t. I went home and read Lord Jim until Mary came in. That’s the book Henry used to be crazy about. I think Bunny is rather like Jim although, of course, Bunny isn’t a coward. . . .

  Now Millie was seized with a strange and unaccountable happ
iness — unaccountable to her because she did not try to account for it. Simply, everything was lovely — the weather, the shops, the people in the streets, Mary, Henry, the Platts (although Clarice pouted at her and Ellen was sulky). Everything was lovely. She danced, she sang, she laughed. Nothing and nobody could offend her. . . .

  In the middle of this happiness Peter Westcott came to tea. She had asked him because she was sorry for him and because she felt that she had not been quite fair to him in the past. Nevertheless as she waited for him in her little sitting-room there was a little patronage and contempt for him still in her heart. She had always thought of him as old and gloomy and solemn. He seemed to her to be that to-day as he came in, stayed awkwardly for a moment by the door and then came forward with heavy rather lumbering steps towards her. But his hand was warm and strong — a clean good grip that she liked. He sat down, making her wicker chair creak — then there was an untidy pause. She gave him his tea and something to eat and talked about the weather.

  At another time, it might be, the ice would never have been broken and he would have gone away, leaving them no closer than they had been before. But to-day her happiness was too much for her; she could not see him without wanting to make him laugh.

  “Have you seen Henry?” she asked. It was so difficult to speak much about Henry without smiling.

  “Not for a week,” he answered, “he’s very busy with his Baronet and his strange young woman.” Then he smiled. He looked straight across at her, into her eyes.

  “Why did you ask me to come to tea?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, because you don’t like me. You think me a tiresome middle-aged bore and a bad influence for Henry.” His eyes drew her own. Suddenly she liked his face, his clear honest gaze, his strong mouth and something there that spoke unmistakably of loyalty and courage.

  “Well, I didn’t like you,” she said after a moment’s pause. “That’s quite true. I liked you for the first time at Henry’s the other day. You see I’ve had no chance of knowing you, have I? And I decided that we ought to know one another — because of Henry.”

  “Do you really want to know me better?” he asked.

  “Yes, I really want to,” she answered.

  “Well, then, I must tell you something — something about myself. I never speak about the past to anybody. Of what importance can it be to anybody but myself? But if we are going to be friends you ought to know something of it — and I’m going to tell you.”

  She saw that he had, before he came, made up his mind as to exactly the things that he would tell her, that without realizing it he intended it as an honour that he should want to tell her. Then, too, her feminine curiosity stirred in her. Henry had told her a little, a very little, about him; she knew that he had had a bad time, that he was married, but that his wife had been seen by no one for many years, that he had written some books now forgotten, that he had done well in the War — and that was all.

  “Tell me everything you like,” she said. “I’m proud that you should want to.”

  “I was born,” Peter began, “in a little town called Treliss on the borders of Cornwall and Glebeshire in ‘84. I had a very rotten childhood. I won’t bore you with all that, but my mother was frightened into her grave by my father who hated me and everybody else. He sent me to a bad school, and at last I ran away up to London. I had one friend, a Treliss fisherman, who was the best human being I’ve ever known, and he came up to London with me. Things went from bad to worse the first years, but looking back on it I can only see everything that happened in the most ridiculously romantic light — absurd things that I’d like to tell you more about in detail some time. They were so absurd; you simply wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I was mixed up for instance with melodramatic theatrical anarchists who tried to blow up poor old Victoria when she was out riding. Looking back now I can’t be sure that those things ever really happened at all.

  “I never seem to meet such people now or to see such things. Was it only my youth perhaps that made me fancy it all like that? You and Henry, may be, are imagining things in just that way now. Stephen, for instance, my fisherman friend. I’ve never met any one like him since — so good, so simple, so direct, so childlike. I knew magnificent men in the War as direct and simple as Stephen, but they didn’t affect me in the way he did — that may have been my youth again.

  “Whatever it was we went lower and lower. We couldn’t get any work and we were just about starving, when I got ill, so ill that I should have died if the luck hadn’t suddenly turned, an old school friend of mine appeared and carried me off to his home. Yes, luck turned with a vengeance then. I had written a story and it was published and it had a little success. One thinks you know that that little success is a very big one the first time it comes — that every one is talking about one and reading one when really it is a few thousand people at the most.

  “Anyway that first success put me on my feet. It was during those years after the Boer War when I think literary success was easier to get than it is now — more attention was paid to writing because the world was quieter and had leisure to think about the arts and money to pay for them. I don’t mean that genius, real genius, wouldn’t find it just as easy now as then to come along and establish itself, but I wasn’t a genius, of course, nor anything like one. Well, I had friends and a home and work and everything should have been well, but I always felt that something was working against me, some bad influence, some ill omen — I’ve felt it all my life, I feel it now, I shall feel it till I die. Lucky, healthy people can laugh at those things, but when you feel them you don’t laugh. You know better. Then I married — the daughter of people who lived near by in Chelsea; I was terribly in love; although I felt there was something working against us, yet I couldn’t see how now it could touch us. I was sure that she loved me — I knew that I loved her. She was such a child that I thought that I could guide her and form her and make her what I wanted. From the first there was something wrong; I can see that now looking back. She had been spoilt because she was an only child and had a stupid silly mother, and she was afraid of everything — of being ill, of being hurt, of being poor. She was conventional too, and only liked the people from the class she knew, people who did all the same things, spoke the same way, ate the same way, dressed the same way. I remember that some of my Glebeshire friends came to see me one day and frightened her out of her life. Poor Clare! I should understand her now I think, but I don’t know. One has things put into one and things left out of one before one’s born and you can’t alter them, you can only restrain them, keep them in check. I had something fundamentally wild in me, she something tame in her. If we had both been older and wiser we might have compromised as all married people have to, I suppose, but we were both so young that we expected perfection, nay, we demanded it. Perfection! Lord, what youth! . . . Then a baby was born, a boy — I let myself go over that boy!” . . . Peter paused. . . . “I can’t talk much about that even now. He died. Then everything went wrong. Clare said she’d never have another child. And she was tired of me and frightened of me too. I can see now that she had much justice there. I must have been a dull dog after the boy died, and when I’m dull I am dull. I get so easily convinced that I’m meant to fail, that I’ve no right in the world at all. Clare wanted fun and gaiety.

  “We hadn’t the means for it anyway. I was writing badly. I couldn’t keep my work clear of my troubles; I couldn’t get right at it as one must if one’s going to get it on to paper with any conviction. My books failed one after another and with justice.

  “People spoke of me as a failure, and that Clare couldn’t endure. She hadn’t ever cared very much for my writing, only for the success that it brought. Well, you can see the likely end of it all. She ran off to Paris with my best friend, a man who’d been at school with me, whom I’d worshipped.”

  “Oh,” Millie said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I only got what I deserved. Another man would have managed Clare all ri
ght — made a success out of the whole thing. There’s something in me — a kind of blindness or obstinacy or pride — that sends people away from me. You know it yourself. You recognized it in me from the first. Henry didn’t, simply because he’s so ingenuous and so warm-hearted. He forgets himself entirely; you and I think of ourselves a good deal. I went back to Treliss. I had a friend there, a woman, who showed me a little how things were. I wanted to give everything up and just booze my time away and sink into a worthless loafer as my father had done. She prevented me, and I had, too, a strange revelation one night out on the hills beyond Treliss when I saw things clearly for an hour or two.

  “I determined to come back and fight it out. I could show pluck even though I couldn’t show anything else. Now I can see that there was something false in that as there was in so many of the crises of my life, because I was thinking only of myself set up against all the world and the devil and all the furies, making a fine figure while the armies of God stood by admiring and whispering one to another, ‘He’s a fine fighter — there’s something in that fellow.’

  “It was in just that mood that I came back to London. I went over to Paris and searched for Clare, couldn’t hear anything of her, then came back and buried myself.

  “I was full of this idea of courage, my back to the wall and fighting the universe. So I just shut myself up, got a little journalism — sporting journalism it was, football matches and boxing and cricket — and grouched along. The other men on the sporting paper thought me too conceited for words and left me alone. I drank a bit too, the worst kind of drinking, alone in one’s room.

  “Then the War came, thank God. I won’t bother you with that, but it kept me occupied until the Armistice, then suddenly I was flung back again with all my old troubles thick upon me once more. I remember one day I had been seeing a rich successful novelist. He talked to me about his successes until I was sick. Then in the evening I went and saw the other end of the business, the young unpopular geniuses who are going to change the world. Both seemed to me equally futile, and once again I was tempted to end it all and just let myself go when I suddenly, standing there in Piccadilly Circus, saw myself just as I had years before at Treliss and my pretentiousness and lack of humour and proportion. And I saw how small we were, and what children, and how short life was, and then and there I swore I’d never take myself so seriously again as to talk about ‘going to the dogs,’ or ‘fighting fate,’ or ‘being a success,’ or ‘destiny being against me.’ I cheered up a lot after that. That was my second turning-point. You and Henry have made the third.”