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Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

Page 448

by Hugh Walpole


  Ronder sat back in his chair, his eyes half closed. There was nothing that he enjoyed more than delivering his opinions about life to a fit audience — and by fit he meant intelligent and responsive. He liked to be truthful without taking risks, and he was always the audience rather than the speaker in company that might be dangerous. He almost loved Falk as he looked across at him and saw the effect that his words had made upon him. There was, Heaven knew, nothing very original in what he had said, but it had been apparently what the boy had wanted to hear.

  He jumped up from his chair: “You’re right,” he said. “We’ve got to lead our own lives. I’ve known it all along. When I’ve shown them what I can do, then I’ll come back to them. I love my father, you know, sir; I suppose some people here think him tiresome and self-opinionated, but he’s like a boy, you always know where you are with him. He’s no idea what deceit means. He looks on this Cathedral as his own idea, as though he’d built it almost, and of course that’s dangerous. He’ll have a shock one of these days and see that he’s gone too far, just as the Black Bishop did. But he’s a fine man; I don’t believe any one knows how proud I am of him. And it’s much better I should go my own way and earn my own living than hang around him, doing nothing — isn’t it?”

  At that direct appeal, at the eager gaze that Falk fixed upon him, something deep within Ronder stirred.

  Should he not even now advise the boy to stay? One word just then might effect much. Falk trusted him. He was the only human being in Polchester to whom the boy perhaps had come. Years afterwards he was to look back to that moment, see it crystallised in memory, see the books, piled row upon row, gleam down upon him, see the blue curtain and hear the crackling fire...a crisis perhaps to himself as well as to Falk.

  He went across to the boy and put his hands on his shoulders.

  “Yes,” he said, “I think it’s better for you to go.”

  “And about God and Beauty?” Falk said, staring for a moment into Ronder’s eyes, smiling shyly, and then turning away. “It’s a long search, isn’t it? But as long as there’s something there, beyond life, and I know there is, the search is worth it.” He looked rather wistfully at Ronder as though he expected him to confirm him again. But Ronder said nothing.

  Falk went to the door: “Well, I must go. I’ll show them that I was right to go my own way. I want father to be proud of me. This will shock him for a moment, but soon he’ll see. I think you’ll like to know, sir,” he said, suddenly turning and holding out his hand, “that this little talk has meant a lot to me. It’s just helped me to make up my mind.”

  When he had gone Ronder sat in his chair, motionless, for a while; he jumped up, went to the shelves, and found a book. Before he sat down again he said aloud, as though he were answering some accuser, “Well, I told him nothing, anyway.”

  Falk had, from the moment he left Ronder’s door, his mind made up, and now that it was made up he wished to act as speedily as possible. And instantly there followed an appeal of the Town, so urgent and so poignant that he was taken by surprise. He had lived there most of his days and never seen it until now, but every step that he took soon haunted him. He made his plans decisively, irrevocably, but he found himself lingering at doors and at windows, peering over walls, hanging over the Pol bridge, waiting suddenly as though he expected some message was about to be given to him.

  The town was humming with life those days. The May weather was lovely, softly blue with cool airs and little white clouds like swollen pin- cushions drifting lazily from point to point. The gardens were dazzling with their flowers, the Cathedral Green shone like glass, and every door- knob and brass knocker in the Precincts glittered under the sun.

  The town was humming with the approaching Jubilee. It seemed itself to take an active part in the preparations, the old houses smiling to one another at the plans that they overheard, and the birds, of whom there were a vast number, flying from wall to wall, from garden to garden, from chimney to chimney, with the exciting news that they had gathered.

  Every shop in the High Street seemed to whisper to Falk as he passed: “Surely you are not going to leave us. We can offer you such charming things. We’ve never been so gay in our lives before as we are going to be now.”

  Even the human beings in the place seemed to be nicer to him than they had ever been before. They had never, perhaps, been very nice to him, regarding him with a quite definite disapproval even when he was a little boy, because he would go his own way and showed them that he didn’t care what they thought of him.

  Now, suddenly, they were making up to him. Mrs. Combermere, surrounded with dogs, stopped him in the High Street and, in a deep bass voice, asked him why it was so long since he had been to see her, and then slapped him on the shoulder with her heavy gloved hand. That silly woman, Julia Preston, met him in Bennett’s book shop and asked him to help her to choose a book of poems for a friend.

  “Something that shall be both True and Beautiful, Mr. Brandon,” she said. “There’s so little real Beauty in our lives, don’t you think?” Little Betty Callender caught him up in Orange Street and chattered to him about her painting, and that pompous Bentinck-Major insisted on his going into the Conservative Club with him, where he met old McKenzie and older Forrester, and had to listen to their golfing achievements.

  It may have been simply that every one in the town was beside and above himself over the Jubilee excitements — but it made it very hard for Falk. Nothing to the hardness of everything at home. Here at the last moment, when it was too late to change or alter anything, every room, every old piece of furniture seemed to appeal to him with some especial claim. For ten years he had had the same bedroom, an old low-ceilinged room with queer bulges in the wall, a crooked fireplace and a slanting floor. For years now he had had a wall-paper with an ever-recurrent scene of a church tower, a snowy hill, and a large crimson robin. The robins were faded, and the snowy hill a dingy yellow. There were School groups and Oxford groups on the walls, and the book-case near the door had his old school prizes and Henty and a set of the Waverley Novels with dark red covers and paper labels.

  Hardest of all to leave was the view from the window overlooking the Cathedral Green and the Cathedral. That window had been connected with every incident of his childhood. He had leant out of it when he had felt sick from eating too much, he had gone to it when his eyes were brimming with hot rebellious tears after some scene with his father, he had known ecstatic joys gazing from it on the first day of his return from school, he had thrown things out of it on the heads of unsuspecting strangers, he had gone to it in strange moods of poetry and romance, and watched the moon like a plate of dull and beaten gold sail above the Cathedral towers, he had sat behind it listening to the organ like a muffled giant whispering to be liberated from grey, confining walls, he had looked out of it on a still golden evening when the stars were silver buttons in the sky after a meeting with Annie; he went to it and gazed, heart-sick, across the Green now when he was about to bid fare-well to it for ever.

  Heart-sick but resolved, it seemed strange to him that after months of irresolution his mind should now be so firmly composed. He seemed even, prophetically, to foretell the future. What had reassured him he did not know, but for himself he knew that he was taking the right step. For himself and for Annie — outside that, it was as though a dark cloud was coming up enveloping all that he was leaving behind. He could not tell how he knew, but he felt as though he were fleeing from the city of Polchester, and were being driven forward on his flight by powers far stronger than he could control.

  He fancied, as he looked out of his window, that the Cathedral also was aware and, aloof, immortal, waited the inevitable hour.

  Coming straight upon his final arrangements with Annie, his reconciliation with his father was ironic. So deeply here were his real affections stirred that he could not consider deliberately his approaching treachery; nevertheless he did not for a moment contemplate withdrawal from it. It was as though two pers
onalities were now in active movement within him, the one old, belonging to the town, to his father, to his own youth, the other new, belonging to Annie, to the future, to ambition, to the challenge of life itself. With every hour the first was moving away from him, reluctantly, stirring the other self by his withdrawal but inevitably moving, never, never to return.

  He came, late in the afternoon, into the study and found his father, balanced on the top of a small ladder, putting straight “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” a rather faded copy of Benjamin Haydon’s picture that had irritated Falk since his earliest youth by a kind of false theatricality that inhabited it.

  Falk paused at the door, caught up by a sudden admiration of his father. He had his coat off, and as he bent forward to adjust the cord the vigour and symmetry of his body was magnificently emphasized. The thick strong legs pressed against the black cloth of his trousers, the fine rounded thighs, the broad back almost bursting the shiny stuff of the waistcoat, the fine neck and the round curly head, these denied age and decay. He was growing perhaps a little stout, the neck was a little too thick for the collar, but the balance and energy and strength of the figure belonged to a man as young as Falk himself....

  At the sound of the door closing he turned, and at once the lined forehead, the mouth a little slack, gave the man his age, but Falk was to remember that first picture for the rest of his life with a strange poignancy and deeply affectionate pathos.

  They had not met alone since their quarrel; their British horror of any scene forbade the slightest allusion to it. Brandon climbed down from his ladder and came, smiling, across to his son.

  At his happy times, when he was at ease with himself and the world, he had the confident gaiety of a child; he was at ease now. He put his hand through Falk’s arm and drew him across to the table by the window.

  “I’ve had a headache,” he said, rather as a child might complain to his elder, “for two days, and now it’s suddenly gone. I never used to have headaches. But I’ve been irritated lately by some of the tomfoolery that’s been going on. Don’t tell your mother; I haven’t said a word to her; but what do you take when you have a headache?”

  “I don’t think I ever have them,” said Falk.

  “I’m not going to stuff myself up with all their medicines and things. I’ve never taken medicine in my life if I was strong enough to prevent them giving it to me, and I’m not going to start it now.”

  “Father,” Falk said very earnestly, “don’t let yourself get so easily irritated. You usedn’t to be. Everybody finds things go badly sometimes. It’s bad for you to allow yourself to be worried. Everything’s all right and going to be all right.” (The hypocrite that he felt himself as he said this!)

  “You know that every one thinks the world of you here. Don’t take things too seriously.”

  Brandon nodded his head.

  “You’re quite right, Falk. It’s very sensible of you to mention it, my boy. I usedn’t to lose my temper as I do. I must keep control of myself better. But when a lot of chattering idiots start gabbling about things that they understand as much about as — —”

  “Yes, I know,” said Falk, putting his hand upon his father’s arm. “But let them talk. They’ll soon find their level.”

  “Yes, and then there’s your mother,” went on Brandon. “I’m bothered about her. Have you noticed anything odd about her this last week or two?”

  That his father should begin to worry about his mother was certainly astonishing enough! Certainly the first time in all these years that Brandon had spoken of her.

  “Mother? No; in what way?”

  “She’s not herself. She’s not happy. She’s worrying about something.”

  “You’re worrying, father,” Falk said, “that’s what’s the matter. She’s just the same. You’ve been allowing yourself to worry about everything. Mother’s all right.” And didn’t he know, in his own secret heart, that she wasn’t?

  Brandon shook his head. “You may he right. All the same — —”

  Falk said slowly: “Father, what would you say if I went up to London?” This was a close approach to the subject of their quarrel of the other evening.

  “When? What for?”

  “Oh, at once — to get something to do.”

  “No, not now. After the summer we might talk of it.”

  He spoke with utter decision, as he had always done to Falk, as though he were five years old and could naturally know nothing about life.

  “But, father — don’t you think it’s bad for me, hanging round here doing nothing?”

  Brandon got up, went across to the little ladder, hesitated a moment, then climbed up.

  “I’ve had this picture twenty years,” he said, “and it’s never hung straight yet.”

  “No, but, father,” said Falk, coming across to him, “I’m a man now, not a boy. I can’t hang about any longer — I can’t really.”

  “We’ll talk about it in the autumn,” said Brandon, humming “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” as he always did, a little out of tune.

  “I’ve got to earn my own living, haven’t I?” said Falk.

  “There!” said Brandon, stepping back a little, so that he nearly overbalanced. “That’s better. But it won’t stay like that for five minutes. It never does.”

  He climbed down again, his face rosy with his exertions. “You leave it to me, Falk,” he said, nodding his head. “I’ve got plans for you.”

  A sudden sense of the contrast between Ronder and his father smote Falk. His father! What an infant! How helpless against that other! Moved by the strangest mixture of tenderness, regret, pity, he did what he had never in all his life before dreamed of doing, what he would have died of shame for doing, had any one else been there — put his hands on his father’s shoulders and kissed him lightly on his cheek.

  He laughed as he did so, to carry off his embarrassment.

  “I don’t hold myself bound, you know, father,” he said. “I shall go off just when I want to.”

  But Brandon was too deeply confused by his son’s action to hear the words. He felt a strange, most idiotic impulse to hug his son; to place himself well out of danger, he moved back to the window, humming “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

  He looked out upon the Green. “There are two of those choir-boys on the grass again,” he said. “If Ryle doesn’t keep them in better order, I’ll let him know what I think of him. He’s always promising and never does anything.”

  The last talk of their lives alone together was ended.

  He had made all his plans. He had decided that on the day of escape he would walk over to Salis Coombe station, a matter of some two miles; there he would be joined by Annie, whose aunt lived near there, and to whom she could go on a visit the evening before. They would catch the slow four o’clock train to Drymouth and then meet the express that reached London at midnight. He would go to an Oxford friend who lived in St. John’s Wood, and he and Annie would be married as soon as possible. Beyond everything else he wanted this marriage to take place quickly; once that was done he was Annie’s protector, so long as she should need him. She should be free as she pleased, but she would have some one to whom she might go, some one who could legally provide for her and would see that she came to no harm.

  The thing that he feared most was lest any ill should come to her through the fact of his caring for her; he felt that he could let her go for ever the very day after his marriage, so that he knew that she would never come to harm. A certain defiant courage in her, mingled with her ignorance and simplicity, made his protection of her the first thing in his life. As to living, his Oxford friend was concerned with various literary projects, having a little money of his own, and much self-confidence and ambition.

  He and Falk had already, at Oxford, edited a little paper together, and Falk had been promised some reader’s work in connection with one of the younger publishing houses. In after years he looked back in amazement that he should have ventured on the great Lon
don attack with so slender a supply of ammunition — but now, looking forward in Polchester, that question of future livelihood seemed the very smallest of his problems.

  Perhaps, deepest of all, something fiercely democratic in him longed for the moment when he might make his public proclamation of his defiance of class.

  He meant to set off, simply as he was; they could send his things after him. If he indulged in any pictures of the future, he did, perhaps, see himself returning to Polchester in a year’s time or so, as the editor of the most remarkable of London’s new periodicals, received by his father with enthusiasm, and even Annie admitted into the family with approval. Of course, they could not return here to live...it would be only a visit.... At that sudden vision of Annie and his father face to face, that vision faded; no, this was the end of the old life. He must face that, set his shoulders square to it, steel his heart to it....

  That last luncheon was the strangest meal that he had ever known. So strange because it was so usual — so ordinary! Roast chicken and apple tart; his mother sitting at the end of the table, watching, as she had watched through so many years, that everything went right, her little, tight, expressionless face, the mouth set to give the right answers to the right questions, her eyes veiled.... His mind flew back to that strange talk in the dark room across the candle-lit table. She had been hysterical that night, over-tired, had not known what she was saying. Well, she could never leave his father now, now when he was gone. His flight settled that.

 

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