Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  Henry said: “I’ll never forget this place. It will influence all my life.”

  “Well, then,” Duncombe shook his head almost impatiently, “I’ve done enough preaching . . . nonsense perhaps. It seems to me now important. Soon, if the pain returns, only that will matter.”

  They sat for a long time in silence. The shadows of the trees spread like water across the lawn. The corners of the garden were purple shaded.

  “God! Is there a God, do you think, Henry?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “I think there is One, but of what kind He is I don’t know.”

  “There must be. . . . There must be. . . . To go out like this when one’s heart and soul are at their strongest. And He is loving, I can’t but fancy. He smiles, perhaps, at the importance that we give to death and to pain. So short a time it must seem to Him that we are here. . . . But if He isn’t. . . . If there is nothing more —— What a cruel, cold game for Something to play with us — —”

  Henry knew then that Duncombe was sure he would not survive the operation. An aching longing to do something for him held him, but a power greater than either of them had caught him and he could only sit and stare at the colours as they came flocking into the garden with the evening sky, at the white line that was suddenly drawn above the garden wall, at two stars that were thrown like tossed diamonds into the branches of the mulberry.

  “Yes — I know God exists,” something that was not Henry’s body whispered.

  “God must exist to explain all the love that there is in the world,” he said.

  “And all the hatred too,” Duncombe answered, looking upward at the two stars. “Why do we hate one another? Why all this temper and scorn, sport and cruelty? Men want to do right — almost every man and woman alive. And the rules are so simple — fidelity, unselfishness, loving, kindliness, humility — but we can’t manage them except in little spurts. . . . But then why should they be there at all? All the old questions!” He broke off. “Come, let us go in. It’s cold.” He got up and took Henry’s arm. They walked slowly across the lawn together.

  “Henry,” he said, “remember to expect nothing very wonderful of men. Remember that they don’t change, but that they are all in the same box together — so love them. Love them whenever you can, not dishonestly, because you think it a pretty thing to do, but honestly, because you can’t help yourself. Don’t condemn. Don’t be impatient because of their weaknesses. That has been the failure of my life. I have been so badly disappointed again and again that I retired into myself, would not let them touch me — and so I lost them. But you are different — you are idealistic. Don’t lose that whatever foolish things you may be dragged into. It seems to me so simple now that the end of everything has come and it is too late — love of man, love of God even if He does not exist, love of work — humility because the time is so short and we are all so weak.”

  By the door he stopped, dropping his voice. “Be patient with my sister to-night. I am going to tell her about my affair. It will distress her very much. Assure her that it is unimportant, will soon be right. Poor Meg!”

  He pressed Henry’s arm and went forward alone into the dark house.

  But how tiresome it is! That very same evening Henry, filled with noble thoughts and a longing for self-sacrifice, was as deeply and as childishly irritated by the events of the evening and by Lady Bell-Hall as he had ever been. In the first place, when he was dressing and had just found a clean handkerchief and was ready to go downstairs, the button-hole of his white shirt burst under his collar and he was forced to undress again and was ten minutes late downstairs.

  He saw at once that Duncombe had told his sister the news. Henry had been prepared to show a great tenderness, a fine nobility, a touching fatherliness to the poor frightened lady. But Lady Bell-Hall was not frightened, she was merely querulous, with a drop of moisture at the end of her nose and a cross look down the table at Henry as though he were to-night just more than she could bear. It was also hard that on this night of all nights there should be that minced beef that Henry always found it difficult to encounter. It was not so much that the mince was cooked badly, and what was worse, meanly and baldly, but that it stood as a kind of symbol for all that was mistaken in Lady Bell-Hall’s housekeeping.

  She was a bad housekeeper, and thoroughly complacent over her incompetence, and it was this incompetence that irritated Henry. Somehow to-night there should have been a gracious offering of the very best the place could afford, with some silence, some resignation, some gentle evidence of affection. But it was not so. Duncombe was his old cynical self, with no sign whatever of the afternoon’s mood.

  Only for a moment after dinner in the little grey drawing-room, when Duncombe had left them alone and Henry was seated reading Couperas and Lady Bell-Hall opposite to him was knitting her interminable stockings, was there a flash of something. She looked up suddenly and across at him.

  “I learn from my brother that he has told you?” she said, blinking her eyes that were always watering at him.

  “Yes,” said Henry.

  “He tells me that it is nothing serious,” her voice quavered.

  “No, no,” Henry half started up, his book dropping on to the floor. “Indeed, Lady Bell-Hall, it isn’t. He hopes it will be all right in a week or two.”

  “Yes, yes,” she answered, rather testily, as though she resented his fancying that he knew more about her brother’s case than she herself did. “But operations are always dangerous.”

  “I had an operation once — —” began Henry, then seeing that her eyes were busy with her knitting again he stopped. Nevertheless her little pink cheeks were shaking and her little obstinate chin trembled. He could see that she was doing all that she could to keep herself from tears. He could fancy herself saying: “Well, I’m not going to let that tiresome young man see me cry.” But touched as he was impetuously whenever he saw any one in distress, he began again— “Why, when I had an operation once — —”

  “Thank you,” she said to her knitting, “I don’t think we’ll talk about it if you don’t mind.”

  He picked up his book again.

  Next morning Henry asked for leave to go up to London for two days. He had been possessed, driven, tormented during the last week by thoughts of Christina, and in some mysterious way his talk with Duncombe in the garden had accentuated his longing. All that he wanted was to see her, to assure himself that she was not, as she always seemed to him when he was away from her, a figure in a dream, something imagined by him, more lovely, more perfect than anything he could read of or conceive, and yet belonging to the world of poetry, of his own imagined fictions, of intangible and evasive desires.

  It was always this impulse that drove him back to her, the impulse to make sure that she was of flesh and blood even though, as he was now beginning to realize, that same form and body were never destined to be his.

  He had other reasons for going. Books in the library of the London house had to be consulted, and Millie would now be in Cromwell Road again. Duncombe at once gave him permission.

  Going up in the train, staring out of the window, Henry tried to bring his thoughts into some sort of definite order. He was always trying to do this, plunging his hands into a tangle, breaking through here, pulling others straight, trying to find a pattern that would give it all a real symmetry. The day suited his thoughts. The beautiful afternoon of yesterday had been perhaps the last smile of a none too generous summer. To-day autumn was in the air, mists curled up from the fields, clouds hung low against a pale watery blue, leaves were turning red once again, slowly falling through the mist with little gestures of dismay. What he wanted, he felt, thinking of Christina, of Duncombe, of Millie, of his work, of his mother, lying without motion in that sombre house, of his own muddle of generosities and selfishness and tempers and gratitudes, was not so much to find a purpose in it all (that was perhaps too ambitious), but simply to separate one side of life from the other.

  He saw them continu
ally crossing, these two sides, not only in his own life, but in every other. One was the side of daily life, of his work for Duncombe, of money and business and Mr. King’s bills, and stomach-ache and having a good night’s sleep, and what the Allies were going to do about Vienna, and whether the Bolsheviks would attack Poland next spring or no. Millie and Peter both belonged to this world and the Three Graces, and the trouble that he had to keep his clothes tidy, and whether any one yet had invented sock-suspenders that didn’t fall down in a public place and yet didn’t give you varicose veins — and if not why not.

  The other world could lightly be termed the world of the Imagination, and yet it was so much more, so much more than that. Christina belonged to it absolutely, and so did her horrible mother and the horrible old man Mr. Leishman. So did his silly story at Chapter XV., so did the old Duncombe letters, so did the place Duncombe, so did Piccadilly Circus in certain moods, and the whole of London on certain days. So did many dreams that he had (and he did not want Mr. Freud, thank you, to explain them away for him), so did all his thoughts of Garth-in-Roselands and Glebeshire, so did the books of Galleon and Hans Andersen, and the author of Lord Jim, and la Motte, Fouqué, and nearly all poetry; so did the voice of a Danish singer whom he had heard one chance evening at a Queen’s Hall Concert, and several second-hand bookshops that he knew, and many, many other things, moments, emotions that thronged the world. You could say that he was simply gathering his emotions together and packing them away and calling them in the mass this separate world. But it was not so. There were many emotions, many people whom he loved, many desires, ambitions, possessions that did not belong to this world. And Millie, for instance, complete and vital though she was, with plenty of imagination, did not know that this world existed. Could he only find a clue to it how happy he would be! One moment would be enough. If for one single instant the heavens would open and he could see and could say then: “By this moment of vision I will live for ever! I know now that this other world exists and is external, and that one day I shall enter into it completely.” He fancied — indeed he liked to fancy — that his adventure with Christina would, before it closed, offer him this vision. Meanwhile his state was that of a man shut into a room with the blinds down, the doors locked, but hearing beyond the wall sounds that came again and again to assure him that he would not always be in that room — and shadows moved behind the blind.

  Meanwhile on both worlds one must keep one’s hand. One must be practical and efficient and sensible — oh yes (one’s dreams must not interfere. But one’s dreams, nevertheless, were the important thing).

  “Would you mind,” the voice broke through like a stone smashing a pane of glass. “But your boot is — —”

  He looked up to find a nervous gentleman with pince-nez and a white slip to his waistcoat glaring at him. His boot was resting on the opposite seat and a considerable portion of the gentleman’s trouser-leg.

  He was terribly sorry, dreadfully embarrassed, blushing, distressed. He buried himself in Couperas, and soon forgot his own dreams in pursuing the adventures of the large and melancholy familiar to whose dismal fate Couperas was introducing him. And behind, in the back of his head, something was saying to him for the two-millionth time, “I must not be such an ass! I must not be such an ass!”

  He arrived in London at midday, and the first thing that he did was to telephone to Millie. She would be back in her rooms by five that afternoon. His impulse to rush to Christina he restrained, sitting in the Hill Street library trying to fasten his mind to the monotonous voice of Mr. Spencer, who was so well up in facts and so methodical in his brain that Henry always wanted to stick pins into his trousers and make him jump.

  When he reached Millie’s lodgings she had not yet returned, but Mary Cass was there just going off to eat some horrible meal in an A.B.C. shop preparatory to a chemistry lecture.

  “How’s Millie?” he asked.

  She looked him over as she always did before speaking to him.

  “Oh! She’s all right!” she said.

  “Really all right?” he asked her. “I haven’t thought her letters sounded very happy.”

  “Well, I don’t think she is very happy, if you ask me,” Mary answered, slowly pulling on her gloves. “I don’t like her young man. I can’t think what she chose him for.”

  “What’s he like?” asked Henry.

  “Just a dressed-up puppy!” Mary tossed her head. “But, maybe, I’m not fair to him. When two girls have lived together and like one another one of them isn’t in all probability going to be very devoted to the man who carries the other one off.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Henry nodded his head with deep profundity.

  “And then I despise men,” Mary added, tossing her head. “You’re a poor lot — all except your friend Westcott. I like him.”

  “I didn’t know you knew him,” said Henry.

  “Oh yes, he’s been here several times. Now if it were he who was going to carry Millie off! You know he’s deeply in love with her!”

  “He! Peter?” Henry cried horrified.

  “Yes, of course. Do you mean to say you didn’t see it?”

  “But he can’t — he’s married already!”

  “Mr. Westcott married?’ Mary Cass repeated after him.

  “Yes, didn’t you know? . . . But Millie knows.”

  “Married? But when?”

  “Oh, years ago, when he was very young. She ran away with a friend of his and he’s never heard of her since. She must have been awful!” Henry drew a deep breath of disgust.

  “Poor man!” Mary sighed. “Everything’s crooked in this beastly world. Nobody gets what he wants.”

  “Perhaps it’s best he shouldn’t.”

  Mary turned upon him. “Henry, there are times when I positively loathe you. You’re nearly the most detestable young prig in London — you would be if you weren’t — if you weren’t — —”

  “If I weren’t —— ?” said Henry, blushing. Of all things he hated most to be called a prig.

  “If you weren’t such an incredible infant and didn’t tumble over your boots so often — —”

  She was gone and he was alone to consider her news. Peter in love with Millie! How had he been so blind? Of course he could see it now, could remember a thousand things! Poor Peter! Henry felt old and protective and all-wise, then remembering the other things that Mary Cass had said blushed again.

  “Am I really a prig?” he thought. “But I don’t mean to be. But perhaps prigs never do mean to be. What is a prig, anyway? Isn’t it some one who thinks himself better than other people? Well, I certainly don’t think myself better — —”

  These beautiful thoughts were interrupted by Millie and, with her, Mr. Baxter.

  It may be said at once to save further time and trouble that the two young men detested one another at sight. It was natural and inevitable that they should. Henry with his untidy hair, his badly shaven chin, his clumsy clothes and his crookedly-balancing pince-nez would of course seem to Bunny Baxter a terrible fellow to appear in public with. It would shock him deeply, too, that so lovely a creature as Millie could possibly have so plain a relation. It would also be at once apparent to him that here was some one from whom he could hope for nothing socially, whether borrowing of money, introductions to fashionable clubs, or the name of a new tailor who allowed, indeed invited, unlimited credit. It was quite clear that Henry was a gate to none of these things. On Henry’s side it was natural that he should at once be prejudiced against any one who was “dressed up.” He admitted to himself that Baxter looked a gentleman, but his hair, his clothes, his shoes, had all of them that easy perfection that would never, never, did he live for a million years, be granted to Henry.

  Henry disliked his fresh complexion, his moustache, the contemptuous curl of his upper lip. He decided at once that here was an enemy.

  It would not in any case have been a very happy meeting, but difficulties were made yet more difficult by the fact, sufficien
tly obvious to the eyes of an already critical brother, that the two of them had been “having words” as they came along. Millie’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes angry, and that she looked adorable when she was thus did not help substantially the meeting.

  Millie went into the inner room and the two men sat stiffly opposite one another and carried on a hostile conversation.

  “Beastly weather,” Mr. Baxter volunteered.

  “Oh, do you think so?” Henry smiled, as though in wonder at the extreme stupidity of his companion. “I should have said it had been rather fine lately.”

  Silence.

  “Up in London for long?” asked Baxter.

  “Only two days, I think. Just came up to see that Millie was all right.”

  “You won’t have to bother any more now that she’s got me to look after her,” said Baxter, sucking the gold knob of his cane.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Henry, “she’s pretty good at looking after herself.”

  Silence.

  “You’re secretary to some old Johnny, aren’t you?” asked Baxter.

  “I’m helping a man edit some family papers,” said Henry with dignity.

  “Same thing, isn’t it?” said Baxter. “I should hate it.”