by Hugh Walpole
Once and again he caught popular names. How they were condemned! The scorn, the languid, insolent scorn. Then pacifism.... He gathered that two of the men in the room had been forced to dig potatoes for the Government because they didn’t believe in war. Patriotism! The room quivered with scorn. Patriots! It was as though you had said murderers or adulterers! His anger grew. Robsart was better than this, far, far better. At least Robsart tried to make something out of life. He was not ashamed to be happy. He did not condemn. He was doubtful about himself, too. He would not have asked Peter to lunch had he not been doubtful... And the arrogance here. The room was thick with it. The self-applause mounted higher and higher. The fat man read one of his poem. Only a few words reached Peter. “Buttock... blood... cobra... loins... mud... shrill... bovine..”
Suddenly he felt as though in another moment he would rush into their midst, striking them apart, crying out against them, as condemnatory, as arrogant as they. He got from his sofa and crept from the room. No one noticed him. In the street the beautiful, cool, evening air could not comfort him. He was wretched, lonely, angry, above all, most bitterly disappointed. It seemed to him as he walked along slowly up Fleet Street that life was really hopeless and useless. On the one side, Robsart; on the other, these arrogant fools, and in the middle, himself, no better than they — worse, indeed — for they at least stood for something, and he for nothing, absolutely nothing. That absurd poem had, at any rate, effort behind it, striving, ambition, hope. He had cared all his life for intellectual things, had longed to achieve some form of beauty, however tiny, however insignificant.... He had achieved nothing. Well, that knowledge would not have beaten him down had he felt the true spirit of greatness in these others. He realised now how deeply he had hoped from that meeting. He had believed in the new world of which they were all talking; he had believed that its creation would be brought about by the forces of art, of brotherhood, of kindliness, and charity, and nobility. And then to go and listen to a meeting like Temple’s? But what right had he to judge them, or Robsart, or anyone?
Only too ready to believe himself a failure, it seemed now that the world too was a failure; that the worst things that the pessimists had said during the war were now justified. Above all he detested his own arrogance in judging these other men.
He had come by now to Piccadilly Circus. He was held by the crowd for a moment on the kerb outside Swan & Edgar’s. The Circus was wrapped in a pale, honey-coloured evening glow. The stir of the movement of the traffic was dimmed as though it came through a half-open door. Peter felt calm touch his bitter unhappiness as he stood there. He stayed as though someone had a hand on his shoulder and was holding him there. He was conscious for the second time that day of anticipation. How, having been cheated once, he tried to drive it away, but it would not leave him, and he waited almost as though he were expecting some procession to pass. The shops were closing, and many people were going home. As he stood there Big Ben struck six o’clock, and was echoed from St. James’s and St. Martin’s. People were coming in prepared for an evening’s amusement. The last shoppers were waiting for the omnibuses to take them up Regent Street.
Opposite Peter there were the Criterion posters Our Mr. Hepplewhite, and opposite Mr. Hepplewhite Mlle. Delysia was swinging her name in mid-air to entice the world into the Pavilion. Every kind of shop crowded there round the Circus — barbers’, and watch-makers’, and bag-makers’, and hosiers’, and jewellers’, and tobacconists’, and restaurants, and tea-shops — there they all were; and the omnibuses, like lumbering mastodons or ichthyosauri, came tottering and tumbling into the centre, finding their heavy, thick-headed way out again as though they were blinded by this dazzling, lighted world.
He was struck, as he watched, by the caution, the hesitation, the apparent helplessness of all the world. Londoners had always been represented as so self-confident, self-assured, but if you watched to-night, it seemed that everyone hesitated. Young men with their girls, women with babies, men, boys; again and again Peter saw in faces that same half-timid, half-friendly glance; felt on every side of him a kindliness that was born of a little terror, a little dread. There was some parallel to the scene in his mind. He could not catch it, his mind strove back. Suddenly, with the big form of a policeman who stepped in front of him to control the traffic, he knew of what it was that he was thinking. Years ago, when he had first come up to London, he had lived in a boarding-house, and there had been there a large family of children with whom he had been very friendly. The parents of the children had been poor, but their single living-room had been a nursery of a happy, discordant kind. Every sort of toy had found its way in there, and Peter could see the half-dozen children, now trembling, fighting, laughing, crying, the mother watching them and guarding them.
The Circus was a nursery. The blue evening sky was closed down, a radiant roof. Everywhere were the toys. Now it seemed that balls were danced in the air; now that someone sang or rang bells; now that some new game was suddenly proposed and greeted with a shout of joy. The children filled the Circus; the policemen were toy policemen, the omnibuses toy omnibuses, the theatres toy theatres.
On every side of him Peter felt the kindliness, the helplessness, the pathos of his vision. They were children; he was a child; the world was only a nursery, after all. The sense of his earlier indignation had left him. It seemed now that anger and condemnation, whether of Robsart, or Temple and his friends, or of himself, were absurd. They were all children together, children in their ignorance, their helplessness, children in their love for one another, their generosity, and their hope.
For the first time in his life that sense of disappointment that had been for so long a stumbling-block to all his effort left him. He felt as though, like Pilgrim, he had suddenly dropped his pack. Children in the nursery — the lot of them. No place in this world for high indignation, for bitterness, for denunciation.
The injustice, the ill-humour, the passions of life were like the quarrels in children’s play; the wisest man alive knew just as much as his nursery-walls could show him.
He laughed and turned homewards.
The new world? Perhaps. The progress of the world? Perhaps. Meanwhile, there were nursery-tea, a game of pirates, and a fairy-tale by the fire... and after it all, that sound, dreamless sleep that only children know. Would one wake in the morning and find that one was leaving the nursery for school? Who could tell? No one returned with any story....
Meanwhile, there was enough to do to help in keeping the nursery in order, in seeing that the weaker babies were not trodden upon, in making sure that no one cried himself to sleep.
Anger and condemnation would never be possible again; no, nor would he expect the Millennium.
LUCY MOON
LUCY MOON was the daughter of the Reverend Stephen Moon, Rector of Little Hawkesworth in North Yorkshire. She was twenty-one years of age, and pretty. She was so pretty indeed that she reminded one young man in Hawkesworth of “a cornfield under a red moon,” and the Reverend Simon Laud, to whom she was engaged, thought of her privately as his “golden goddess,” from which it will he seen that she had yellow hair and a peach-like complexion.
She had lived always a very quiet and retired life, the nearest to adventure being two or three expeditions to Scarborough. She did not know, however, that her life was retired. She was never dull. She had two younger brothers, and was devoted to her father and mother. She never questioned their authority. She read the books that they advised, and wished to read no others. The life that ebbed and flowed around the rectory seemed to her a very exciting one, and it was not until the Reverend Simon Laud, rector of a neighbouring parish, proposed to her, and she found that she accepted him, although she did not love him, that she began to wonder, a little uncertainly, with a little bewilderment, about herself. She had accepted him because everyone had agreed that it was so obviously the right thing for her to do. She had known him ever since she could remember. He was older than she, and kindly, although he
had asthma and his knees cracked. He had been rector of his parish for twenty years, and everyone said that he was a very good man indeed. He had a sense of humour too, and his Penny Readings were the best in all North Yorkshire. It was not until Simon had kissed her that Lucy wondered whether she were doing right. She did not like him to kiss her. His nose seemed so large when near to her, and his lips tried to catch hers and hold them with a kind of sucking motion that was quite distressing to her. She looked ridiculously young when Mr. Laud proposed to her, with her fair gold hair piled up in coils on the top of her head, her cheeks crimsoned with her natural agitation, and her young, childish body, like a boy’s, slender and strong under her pink cotton gown.
“My little girl!” Mr. Laud said, and kissed her again. She went up to her room and cried for quite a long time. Then, when she saw how happy her mother was, she was happy too. Perhaps he would not want to kiss her after they were married.
Then came the marvellous event. Her Aunt Harriet, Mrs. Comstock, her mother’s sister, and a rich widow, asked her to come and stay with her for a month in London. Mrs. Comstock was a good-natured, chattering widow, fond of food and bright attire; Mrs. Moon hesitated about committing Lucy to her care, but she felt perhaps it would do the child no harm to give her a peep at worldly ways, before the long black arms of Simon Laud closed her in for ever. Lucy was terrified and delighted both at once. It meant that she would see London, where she had never in all her life been. Even the war had not altered her. She had worked in the village institute, knitted and sewed, helped in the village concerts. The war had seemed very remote to her. She had lost no one whom she loved. She was vaguely distressed by it, as she might have been by the news of an earthquake at Naples. The Moon household believed in tranquillity. Mr. Moon was engaged in a series of village addresses on “The Nativity.” The war, after all, he felt, “is probably a blessing in disguise!”
So Lucy saw it. I think, as the day of her departure drew near, that she had some slight premonition of future events. The village, the fields, the lanes, the church, were touched suddenly by some new and pathetic splendour. The spring came late to Yorkshire that year, and the lanes were coloured with a faint shadow of purple behind the green, so light and shining that it seemed to be glass in its texture. The bright spaces of the moon were uncertain in their dim shadows, and there were soft spongy marshes where the frost had released the underground streams, and long stretches of upland grass, grey-white beneath the pale spring skies. Space was infinite. The village, tucked under the rim of the moor with its grey church, its wild, shaggy, tiny graveyard, its spreading village street, was like a rough Yorkshire child huddling for protection beneath its father’s shoulder. This had pathos and an appeal for love, and a cry of motherhood. The clouds, carried by the fresh spring wind, raced above the church steeple, swinging the young birds in their flight, throwing joyfully, contemptuously, shadows across the long street, shadows coloured and trembling like banners.
Lucy had known these beauties all her life; now they appealed to her with a new urgency. “When you come back,” they seemed to say to her, “we shall not be the same. Now you are free as we. When you come back you will be a prisoner.”
It was strange to her, and horrible, that the thought of her approaching marriage should haunt her as it did. There were things about it that she had not realised. She had not understood that her parents, the village, her relations would all make so momentous an affair of it. When Mr. Laud had proposed to her, and she had accepted him, it had seemed to her a matter simply between themselves. Now everyone had a concern in it; everyone accepted it as so absolutely settled. Did Lucy for a single instant contemplate the breaking of an engagement she saw with an almost agonised terror the whole village tumbling upon her head. The very church steeple would fall down and crush her. She was beginning too, to see her father and mother now in a new light. They had always been very sweet to her, and she had loved them dearly, but they had been sweet to her, she could not help but see, very largely because she had shown so absolute an obedience. Her mind now would persistently return to certain occasions in her young history when she had hinted ever so slightly at having an opinion of her own.
Had that opinion been given a moment’s opportunity? Never. Never once.
Of her two parents, her father was perhaps the more resolute. His mild, determined surprise at the expression of an individual opinion was a terrible thing to witness. He did wish not to be dogmatic with her, but, after all, things were as they were. How could bad be good or good bad? There you were. A thing was either right, or it wasn’t.... There you were.
And so around Lucy and her Simon a huge temple was erected by the willing hands of her parents, relations, and friends. There she was right inside with the doors locked and the windows closed, and Simon with his long black arms, his large nose, and his damp red mouth waiting for her.
It was her own fault. There was nothing to be done.
It must not be supposed, however, that she was unhappy when she set off on her London visit. She was entirely resigned to the future; she loved her mother and father and the village, and Mr. Laud had been assigned to her by God. She would enjoy her month, and then make the best of it. After all, he would not want always to kiss her. She knew enough about married life to be sure of that.
She went up to London with a neat black trunk, a new hat with roses on it, and a little umbrella, green and white, that her mother gave her.
Mrs. Comstock had a flat at Hortons, in Duke Street.
To Lucy Duke Street meant nothing. Jermyn Street meant nothing. Even Piccadilly did not mean very much. St. James’s Palace, however, did mean a good deal, and the first sight of that pearl-grey dignity and beauty, with the round friendly clock, little clouds like white pillows in the blue sky above, the sentry in his box, the grace and courtesy of the Mall, these brought a sob into her throat, and made her eyes dry and hot.
That sight of the palace gave her the setting for the rest of the wonderful new world. Had Mrs. Comstock allowed her, she would have spent the whole of her time in those fascinating streets. Piccadilly frightened her a little. The motor-omnibuses and cars rushed so fiercely along, like pirates on a buccaneering expedition, and everyone was so haughty, and the shops so grand.
But it never ceased to be marvellously romantic to her that you could so swiftly slip through an alley and be hushed at once with a lovely tranquillity, no sound reaching you but the cry of the flower-man, the distant honk of a taxicab, the bells of St James’s Church, the distant boom of Westminster. All the shops in these streets round Hortons seemed to her romantic fancy to be coloured a rich old walnut. And against this background there was every kind of treasure — prints of coaches stuck deep in snowdrifts, of huntsmen leaping over hedges, of fishermen wading deep in tranquil rivers, of Oxford colleges and Westminster Abbey — all these, printed in deep old rich colours, blue and red and orange, colours so deep and rich that they seemed to sink far down into the page. There were also the jewels and china and boxes — old Toby jugs and delicate cups and saucers, and amber-bead necklaces, and Chinese gods, and cabinets of rich red lacquer. She had a permanent picture of these treasures in the old dark shops, and from the house’s bachelors, young and old, plain and handsome, but all beautifully dressed, stepping in and out, going, she supposed, to their clubs and dinners and games, carrying with them everywhere that atmosphere of expensive cigars and perfectly-pressed clothes and innumerable baths.
She gathered all this in the first day or two of her stay, and it was as delightful and personal to her, as though she herself had been God, and had created it all. Hortons, in its own turn, was delighted with her. It had never seen anything so fresh and charming in all its long life. It had often received beautiful women into its capacious heart, and it had known some very handsome men, but Lucy was lovely. Mr. Nix, who could be on occasions a poet, said of her that she made him think of “strawberries and junket and his own self at twenty.” He did not say this to Mrs. Nix.
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To Lucy, the only thing that was wrong with Hortons was her aunt. She disliked Mrs. Comstock from the very first moment. She did not like the way that she was over-dressed, the way that she talked without looking at you, the way that she spoke so crossly to her maid, the way that she loved her food, the way that she at once implied that it was wonderfully fortunate for Lucy to have her to come to.
She discovered at once that her aunt was on the side of her parents with regard to Mr. Simon Laud. Mrs. Comstock’s opinion was that Lucy might consider herself very fortunate to have been selected by so good a man, that she must do her best to deserve her good fortune, because girls nowadays don’t find it easy to pick up men. Men know too much!
“To pick up men!” What a horrible phrase! And Lucy had not picked up Simon Laud. She had been picked up — really against her will. Lucy then discovered that her Aunt Harriet — that is, Mrs. Comstock — had invited her to London for this month in order to have a companion. She had a paid companion — Miss Flagstaff — but that unfortunate woman had at last been allowed a holiday. Here was a whole month, then, and what was poor Mrs. Comstock to do? Why, of course, there was that niece up in Yorkshire. The very thing. She would do admirably.
Lucy found that her first duty was to read every morning the society papers. There was the Tatter with Eve’s letter. There was the Queen and the Lady’s Pictorial, and several other smaller ones. These papers appeared once a week, and it was Lucy’s duty to see that they stretched out, two hours every morning, from Saturday to Saturday.
Aunt Harriet had society at her fingers’ ends, and the swiftly succeeding marriages of Miss Elizabeth Asquith, Miss Violet Keppel, and Lady Diana Manners just about this time gave her a great deal to do. She had a scrap-book into which she pasted photographs and society clippings. She labelled this “Our leaders,” and Lucy’s morning labours were firmly linked to this scrap-book. Once she pasted an impressionist portrait of Miss Keppel upside-down into the book, and saw for a full five minutes what Aunt Harriet was like when she was really angry.