by Hugh Walpole
“Me and Henry?” said Millie, regardless of grammar.
“That’s why I’ve burdened you with this lengthy discourse. I haven’t spoken of myself for years to a soul. But I want your friendship. I want it terribly and I’ll tell you why.
“You and Henry are young. I see now that it’s only the young who matter any more. If you take the present state of the world from the point of view of the middle-aged or old, it’s all utterly hopeless. We may as well make a bonfire of London and go up in the sparks. There’s nothing to be said. It’s as bad as it can be. There simply isn’t time for even the young middle-aged to set things right. But for the young, for every one under thirty it’s grand. There’s a new city to be built, all the pieces of the old one lying around to teach you lessons — the greatest time to be born into in the world’s history.
“And what the middle-aged and old have to do is to feed the young, to encourage them, laugh at them, give them health and strength and brains, such as they are, to stiffen them, to be patient with them, and for them, not to lie down and let the young trample, but to work with them, behind them, around them — above all, to love them, to clear the ground for them, to sympathize and understand them, and to tell them, if they shouldn’t see it, that they have such a chance, such an opportunity, as has never before been given to the son of man.
“For myself what is there? The world that was mine is gone, is burnt up, destroyed. But for you, for you and Henry and the great company with you. Golly! What a time!”
He mopped his brow. He looked at Millie and laughed.
“Please forgive me,” he said. “I haven’t let myself go like this for years!”
Millie’s sympathy was, for the moment, stronger than her vocabulary, her sympathy, that is, for the earlier part of his declaration. As he recounted to her his own story she had been readily, eagerly carried away, feeling the absolute truth of everything that he said, responding to all his trouble and his loneliness. When he had spoken of his boy she had almost loved him, the maternal in her coming out so that she longed to put her arms round him and comfort him. He seemed, as every man seems to every woman, at such a time, himself a child younger than she, more helpless than any woman. But at the end he had swung her on to another mood. She did not know that she liked being addressed as The Young. She felt in this, as she had always before felt with him, that there was something a little priggish, a little laughable in his earnestness. She did not see herself in any group with thousands of other young men and young women. She was not sure that she felt young at all — and in any case she was simply Millicent Trenchard with Millicent Trenchard’s body, ambitions and purposes. She had also instinctively the Trenchard distrust of all naked emotions nakedly displayed. This she was happily to conquer — but not yet.
She felt finally as though she were a specimen in a glass jar, set up on the laboratory table, and that the professor was beginning:
“You will now notice that we have an excellent specimen of The Young. . . .”
Then she looked at him and saw how deeply in earnest he was, and that he himself was feeling true British embarrassment at his unforeseen demonstration. This called forth her maternal emotions again. He was a dear old thing — a little childish, a little old and odd, but he needed her help and her sympathy.
“I’ll tell you,” she said, “I don’t think it’s very much good putting us all into lumps like that. For instance, you couldn’t place Mary Cass and myself in the same division, however hard you tried. If you are going simply by years, then that’s absurd, because Mary is years older than I am in some things and years younger in others. One’s just as old as one feels,” she added with deep profundity, as though she were stating something quite new and fresh that had never been said before.
He smiled, looking at her with great affection.
“I don’t want you to look upon yourself as anything in particular,” he said. “Heaven forbid. That would be much too self-conscious. What I said was from my point of view — the point of view of those who were young before the War — really young, with all their lives and their ambitions before them — and can never be young again in quite that way. I only wanted to show you that knowing you and Henry has given me a new reason for living and for enjoying life and a better reason than I’ve ever had before. I know you distrusted me and I want you to get over that distrust.”
“If that’s what you want,” Millie cried, jumping up and smiling, “you can have it. I feel you’re a real friend, both to Henry and me, and we want a friend. Of course we’re young and just beginning. We shall make all kinds of mistakes, I expect, and I’d rather you told us about them than any one else.”
“Would you really?” He flushed slowly with pleasure. “And will you tell me about mine too? Is that a bargain?”
“Well, I don’t know about telling you of yours,” she answered. “I’ve noticed that that’s a very dangerous thing. People ask you to tell them and say they can stand anything, and then when the moment comes they are hurt for evermore. Nor do they believe that those are their mistakes — anything else but not those. However, we’ll try. Here’s my hand on it.”
He took her hand. She was so beautiful, with her colour a little heightened by the excitement and amusement of their talk, her slim straight figure, the honesty and nobility of her eyes as they rested on his face, that, in spite of himself, his hand trembled in hers. She felt that and was herself suddenly confused. She withdrew her hand abruptly, and at that moment, to her relief, Mary Cass came in.
She introduced them and they stood talking for a little, talking about anything, hospitals, Ireland, the weather. Then he went away.
“Who’s that?” said Mary when he was gone.
“A man called Westcott, a friend of Henry’s.”
“I like him. What’s he do?”
“He’s a writer — —”
“Oh, Lord!” Mary threw herself into a chair. “What a pity. He looks as though he were better than that.”
“He’s a dear old thing,” said Millie. “Just a hundred and fifty years old.”
“Which means,” said Mary, “that he’s been telling you how young you are.”
“Aren’t you clever?” said Millie admiringly.
“Whether I’m clever or no,” said Mary, “I’m tired. This chemistry — —”
And with that we leave them.
CHAPTER III
THE LETTERS
Henry was not such a fool as he looked. You, gentle reader, have certainly by now remarked that you cannot believe that all those years in the Army would have failed to make him a trifle smarter and neater and better disciplined than he appears to be. To which I would reply, having learnt the fact through very bitter personal experience, that it is one of the most astonishing facts in life that you do not change with anything like the ease that you ought to.
That is of course only half the truth, but half the truth it is, and if smuts choose your nose to settle on when you’re in your cradle, the probability is that they’ll still be settling there when you’re in your second childhood.
Henry was changing underneath, as will very shortly, I hope, be made plain, but the hard ugly truth that I am now compelled to declare is that by the early days of June he had got his Baronet’s letters into such a devil of a mess that he did not know where he was nor how he was ever going to get straight again. Nevertheless, I must repeat once more — he was not such a fool as he looked.
During all these weeks his lord and master had not glanced at them once.
He had indeed paid very little attention to Henry, giving him no typewriting and only occasionally dictating to him very slowly a letter or two. He had been away in the country once for a week and had not taken Henry with him.
He had attempted no further personal advances, had been always kindly but nevertheless aloof. Henry had, on his side, made very few fresh discoveries.
He had met once or twice a brother, Tom Duncombe, a large, fat, red-faced man with a loud laugh
, carroty hair, a smell of whisky and a handsome appetite. Friends had come to luncheon and Mr. Light-Johnson had been as constant and pessimistic as ever, but Henry had not trusted himself to a second outburst. Of his own private love-affair there is more to be said, but of that presently.
The salient fact in the situation was that until now Duncombe had not mentioned the letters, had not looked at them, had not apparently considered them. Every morning Henry, with beating heart, expected those dread words: “Well now, let’s see what you’ve done” — and every day passed without those words being said.
Every night in his bed in Panton Street he told himself that to-morrow he would force some order into the horrible things, and every day he was once again defeated by them. He was now quite certain that they led a life of their own, that they deliberately skipped, when he was not looking, out of one pile into another, that they changed the dates on their pages and counterfeited handwritings, and were altogether taunting him and teasing him to the full strength of their yellow crooked little souls. And yet behind the physical exterior of these letters he knew that he was gaining a feeling for and a knowledge of the period with which they dealt that was invaluable. He had burrowed in the library and discovered a host of interesting details — books like Hogg’s Reminiscences and Gibson’s Recollections, and Washington Irving’s Abbotsford and Lang’s Lockhart, and the Ballantyne Protests and the Life of Archibald Constable — them and many, many others — he had devoured with the greed of a shipwrecked mariner on a desert island. He could tell you everything now about the Edinburgh of that day — the streets, the fashions, the clothes, the politics. It seemed that he must, in an earlier incarnation, have lived there with them all, possibly, he liked to fancy, as a second-hand bookseller hidden somewhere in the intricacies of the Old Town. He seemed to feel yet beating through his arteries the thrill and happy pride when Sir Walter himself with his cheery laugh, his joke and his kindly grip of the hand stood among the dusky overhanging shelves and gossiped and yarned and climbed the rickety ladder searching for some ballad or romance, while Henry, his eyes aflame with hero-worship, held that same ladder and gazed upwards to that broad-shouldered form.
Yes — but the letters were in the devil of a mess!
And then suddenly the blow fell. One beautiful June morning, when the sun, refusing to be beaten by the thick glare of the windows, was transforming the old books and sending mists of gold and purple from ceiling to floor, Henry, his head bent over files of the recalcitrant letters, heard the very words that for weeks he had been expecting.
“Now then — it’s about time I had a look at those letters of yours.”
It is no exaggeration at all to say that young Henry’s heart stood absolutely still, his feet were suddenly like dead fish in his boots and his hands weak as water. This, then, was The End! Oh, how he wished that it had occurred weeks ago! He had by now become devotedly attached to the library, loved the books like friends, was happier when hidden in the depths of the little gallery nosing after Bage and Maturin and Clara Reeve than he had been in all his life before. Moreover, he realized in this agonizing moment how deeply attached he had grown during these weeks to his angular master. Few though the words between them had been, there seemed to him to have developed mysteriously and subterraneously as it were an unusual sympathy and warmth of feeling. That may have been simply his affectionate nature and innocence of soul. Nevertheless, there it was. He made a last frantic effort towards a last discipline, juggling the letters together and trying to put the more plainly dated next to one another on the top of the little untidy heaps.
He realized that there was nothing to be done. He sat there waiting for sentence to be pronounced.
Duncombe came over to the table and rested one hand on Henry’s shoulder.
“Now, let’s see,” he said. “You’ve had more than a month — I expect to find great progress. How many boxes have you done?”
“I’m still at the first,” said Henry, his voice low and gentle.
“Still at the first? Ah, well, I expect there are more than one knew. What’s your system? First in months and then in years, I suppose?”
“The trouble is,” said Henry, the words choking in his throat, “that so many of them aren’t dated at all.”
“Yes — that would be so. Well, here we have April, 1816. What I should do, I think, is to make them into six-monthly packets — otherwise the — Hullo, here’s 1818!”
“They move about so,” said Henry feebly.
“Move about? Nobody can move them if you don’t — March 7, 1818; March 12, 1818; April 3 — Why, here we are back in ‘16 again!”
There followed then the most dreadful pause. It seemed to the agonized Henry to last positively for centuries. He grew an old, old man with a long, white, sweeping beard, he looked back over a vast, misspent lifetime, his hearing was gone, his vision was dulled, he was tired, deadly tired, and longed only for the gentle peace of the kindly grave. Not a word was said. Duncombe’s long white fingers moved with a deadly and practised skill from packet to packet, taking up one, looking at it, laying it down again, taking up another, holding it for an eternity in his hand then carefully replacing it. The clock wheezed and gurgled and chattered, the sunlight danced on the bookshelves, Henry was in his grave, dead, buried, a vague pathetic memory to those who once had loved him.
“Why!” a voice came from vast distances; “these letters aren’t arranged at all!” The worst was over, the doom had fallen; nothing more terrible could occur.
Henry said nothing.
“They simply aren’t arranged at all!” came the voice more sharply.
Still Henry said nothing.
Duncombe moved back into the room. Henry felt his eyes burrowing into a hole, red-hot, in the middle of his back. He did not move.
“Would you mind telling me what you have been doing all these weeks?”
Henry turned round. The terrible thing was that tears were not far away. He was twenty-six years of age, he had fought in the Great War and been wounded, he had written ten chapters of a romantic novel, he was living a life of independent ease as a bachelor gentleman in Panton Street — nevertheless tears were not far away.
“I warned you,” he said. “I told you at the very beginning that I was a perfect fool. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. I’ve meant to do my very best. I’ve never before wanted to do my best so badly — I mean so well — I mean — —” he broke off. “I’ve tried,” he ended.
“But would you mind telling me what you’ve tried?” asked Duncombe. “The state the letters were in when they were in this box was beautiful order compared with the state they’re in now! Why, you’ve had six weeks at them! What have you been doing?”
“I think they move in the night,” said Henry, tears bubbling in his voice do what he could to prevent them. “I know that must sound silly to you, or to any sensible person, but I swear to you that I’ve had dozens of them in the right order when I’ve gone away one day and found them in every kind of mess when I’ve got back next morning.”
Duncombe said nothing.
“Then,” Henry went on, gathering a stronger control of himself, “they really are confusing. Any one would find them so. The writing’s often so faded and the signatures sometimes so illegible. And at first — when I started — I knew so little about the period. I didn’t know who any of the people were. I’ve been reading a lot lately and although it looks so hopeless, I—” Then he broke off. “But it’s no good,” he muttered, turning his back. “I haven’t got a well-ordered mind. I never could do mathematics at school. I ought to have told you, the second day I tried to tell you, but I’ve liked it so, I’ve enjoyed it. I — —”
“I daresay you have enjoyed it,” said Duncombe. “I can well believe it. You must have had the happiest six weeks of your life. Isn’t it aggravating? Here are six weeks entirely wasted.”
“Please take back your money and let me go,” said Henry. “I can’t pay you everything at once
because, to tell you the truth, I’ve spent it, but if you’ll wait a little — —”
“Money!” cried Duncombe wrathfully. “Who’s talking of money? It’s the wasted time I mind. We’re not an inch further on.”
“We are,” cried Henry excitedly. “I’ve been taking notes — lots of them. I’ve got them in a book here. And whoever goes on with this next can have them. He’ll learn a lot from them, he will really.”
“Let’s see your notes,” said Duncombe.
Henry produced a red-bound exercise book. It was nearly filled with his childish and sprawling hand. There were also many blots, and even some farcical drawings in the margin.
Duncombe took the book and went back with it to his desk. There followed a lengthy pause, while Henry stood in front of his table staring at the window.
At last Duncombe said, “You certainly seem to have scribbled a lot here. Yes . . . I take back what I said about your being idle. I’m glad you’re not that. And you seem interested; you must be interested to have done all this.”
“I am interested,” said Henry.
“Well, then, I don’t understand it. If you are interested why couldn’t you get something more out of the letters? A child of eight could have done them better than you have.”