Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  “I want you to marry me, Lizzie,” he said. “It may seem very soon after Margaret’s death, but it’s what she would have wished, I know. Please, please don’t refuse me. I don’t know how I have the impertinence to ask, but I must. I can’t help myself—”

  At his words the happiness that had filled her heart during the last fortnight suddenly left her, as water ebbs out of a pool. She felt guilty, wicked, ashamed. She had never before been so aware of his helplessness and also of some strange, reproaching voice that blamed her. Why should she be blamed? She looked at him and longed to take his head in her hands and kiss him and keep him beside her and never let him go again.

  At last she told him that she would give him her answer the next day.

  When at last he left her, she was miserable, weighted with a sense of some horrible crime. And yet why? What was there against such a marriage? She was pursued that evening, that night. Next day she would not see him, but sent down word that she was unwell and would he come to-morrow? All that day, keeping alone in her flat, feeling the waves of heat beat about her, tired, exhausted, driven, the whole of her life stole past her.

  “Why should I not marry him? Why must I not marry him?”

  The consciousness that she was fighting somebody or something grew with her through the day. Towards evening, when the heat faded and dusk swallowed the colours and patterns of her room, she seemed to hear a voice: “You are not the wife for him. He will have no freedom. He will lose his character. He will become a shadow.”

  And her answer was almost spoken to the still and empty room. “But he will be happy. I will give him everything. Why may I not think of myself at last after all these years? I’ve waited and waited, and worked and worked....”

  And the answer came back:— “You’re old. You’re old. You’re old.” She was old. She felt that night eighty, a hundred.

  She went to bed at last; closed her eyes and slept.

  She woke suddenly; the room swam in moonlight. She had forgotten to draw her blinds. The high, blue expanse of heaven flashing with fiery stars broke the grey spaces of her room with splendour.

  She lay in bed watching the stars. She was suddenly aware that a figure stood there between her bed and the thin shadowy pane. She gazed at it with no fear, but rather as though she had known it before.

  It was the figure of a young girl in a white dress. Her hair was black, her face very, very young, her eyes deep and innocent, full of light. Her hands were lovely, thin and pale, shell-coloured against the starry sky.

  The women looked at one another. A little unspoken dialogue fell between them.

  “You are Margaret?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have come to tell me to leave him alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, don’t you see? He won’t be happy. He won’t grow. His soul won’t grow with you. You are not the woman for him. Someone else — perhaps — later — but oh! let me have him a little longer just now. I love him so! Don’t take him from me!”

  Lizzie smiled.

  “You beautiful dear!... How young you are! How lovely!”

  “Leave him to me! Leave him to me!”

  The moon fell into fleecy clouds. The room was filled with shadow.

  With the morning nothing had been dimmed. Lizzie was happy with a strange sense of companionship and comfort.

  When Edmund came she saw at once that he was greatly troubled.

  “Well?” he asked her.

  “You’ve seen Margaret!” she cried. “Last night!” He nodded his head.

  “It may have been a dream....”

  “You don’t want to marry me....”

  “Oh, yes! Don’t think I would go back....” She put her hands on his shoulders.

  “It’s all right, Edmund. I’m not going to marry you. I’m too old. We’re friends for always, but nothing more. Margaret was right.”

  “Margaret!” He stared at her. “But you didn’t know her!”

  “I know her now,” she answered. Then, laughing, “I’ve got two friends instead of one husband! Who knows that I’m not the richer?”

  As she spoke she seemed to feel on her cheek the soft, gentle kiss of a young girl.

  NOBODY

  THE only one of them all who perceived anything like the truth was young Claribel.

  Claribel (how she hated the absurd name!) had a splendid opportunity for observing everything in life, simply because she was so universally neglected. The Matchams and the Dorsets and the Duddons (all the relations, in fact) simply considered her of no importance at all.

  She did not mind this: she took it entirely for granted, as she did her plainness, her slowness of speech, her shyness in company, her tendency to heat spots, her bad figure, and all the other things with which an undoubtedly all-wise God had seen fit to endow her. It was only that having all these things, Claribel was additionally an unfortunate name; but then, most of them called her Carrie, and the boys “Fetch and Carry” often enough.

  She was taken with the others to parties and teas, in order, as she very well knew, that critical friends and neighbors should not say that “the Dorsets always neglected that plain child of theirs, poor thing.”

  She sat in a corner and was neglected, but that she did not mind in the least. She liked it. It gave her, all the more, the opportunity of watching people, the game that she liked best in all the world. She played it without any sense at all that she had unusual powers. It was much later than this that she was to realise her gifts.

  It was this sitting in a corner in the Horton flat that enabled her to perceive what it was that had happened to her Cousin Tom. Of course, she knew from the public standpoint well enough what had happened to him — simply that he had been wounded three times, once in Gallipoli and twice in France; that he had received the D.S.O. and been made a Major. But it was something other than that that she meant. She knew that all the brothers and the sisters, the cousins, the uncles and the aunts proclaimed gleefully that there was nothing the matter with him at all. “It’s quite wonderful,” they all said, “to see the way that dear Tom has come back from the war just as he went into it. His same jolly, generous self. Everyone’s friend. Not at all conceited. How wonderful that is, when he’s done so well and has all that money!”

  That was, Claribel knew, the thing that everyone said. Tom had always been her own favourite. He had not considered her the least little bit more than he had considered everyone else. He always was kind. But he gave her a smile and a nod and a pat, and she was grateful.

  Then he had always seemed to her a miraculous creature; his whole history in the war had only increased that adoration. She loved to look at him, and certainly he must, in anyone’s eyes, have been handsome, with his light, shining hair, his fine, open brow, his slim, straight body, his breeding and distinction and nobility.

  To all of this was suddenly added wealth — his uncle, the head of the biggest biscuit factory in England, dying and leaving him everything. His mother and he had already been sufficiently provided for at his father’s death; but he was now, through Uncle Bob’s love for him, an immensely rich man. This had fallen to him in the last year of the war, when he was recovering from his third wound. After the Armistice, freed from the hospital, he had taken a delightful flat in Hortons (his mother preferred the country, and was cosy with dogs, a parrot, a butler, and bees in Wiltshire), and it was here that he gave his delightful parties. It was here that Claribel, watching from her corner, made her great discovery about him.

  Her discovery quite simply was that he did not exist; that he was dead, that “there was nobody there.”

  She did not know what it was that caused her just to be aware of her ghostly surprise. She had in the beginning been taken in as they all had been. He had seemed on his first return from the hospital to be the same old Tom whom they had always known. For some weeks he had used a crutch, and his cheeks were pale, his eyes were sunk like bright jewels into dark pouc
hes of shadow.

  He had said very little about his experiences in France; that was natural, none of the men who had returned from there wished to speak of it He had thrown himself with apparent eagerness into the dancing, the theatres, the house-parties, the shooting, the flirting — all the hectic, eager life that seemed to be pushed by everyone’s hands into the dark, ominous silence that the announcement of the Armistice had created.

  Then how they all had crowded about him! Claribel, seated in her dark little corner, had summoned them one by one — Mrs. Freddie Matcham with her high, bright colour and wonderful hair, her two daughters, Claribel’s cousins, Lucy and Amy, so pretty and so stupid, the voluminous Dorsets, with all their Beaminster connections, Hattie Dorset, Dollie Pym-Dorset, Rose and Emily; then the men — young Harwood Dorset, who was no good at anything, but danced so well, Henry Matcham, capable and intelligent would he only work, Pelham Duddon, ambitious and grasping; then her own family, her elder sisters, Morgraunt (what a name!), who married Rex Beaminster, and they hadn’t a penny, and Lucile, unmarried, pretty and silly, and Dora, serious and plain and a miser — Oh! Claribel knew them all! She wondered, as she sat there, how she could know them all as she did, and, after that, how they could be so unaware that she did know them! She did not feel herself pretematurally sharp — only that they were unobservant or simply, perhaps, that they had better things to observe.

  The thing, of course, that they were all just then observing was Tom and his money. The two things were synonymous, and if they couldn’t have the money without Tom, they must have him with it. Not that they minded having Tom — he was exactly what they felt a man should be — beautiful to look at, easy and happy and casual, a splendid sportsman, completely free of that tiresome “analysis” stuff that some of the would-be clever ones thought so essential.

  They liked Tom and approved of him, and oh! how they wanted his money! There was not one of them not in need of it! Claribel could see all their dazzling, shining eyes fixed upon those great piles of gold, their beautiful fingers crooked out towards it Claribel did not herself want money. What she wanted, more than she allowed herself to think, was companionship and friendship and affection.... And that she was inclined to think she was fated never to obtain.

  The day when she first noticed the thing that was the matter with Tom, was one wet, stormy afternoon in March; they were all gathered together in Tom’s lovely sitting-room in Hortons.

  Tom, without being exactly clever about beautiful things, had a fine sense of the way that he wished to be served, and the result of this was that his flat was neat and ordered, everything always in perfect array. His man, Sheraton, was an ideal man; he had been Tom’s servant before the war, and now, released from his duties, was back again; there was no reason why he should ever now depart from them, he having, as he once told Claribel, a contemptuous opinion of women. Under Sheraton’s care, that long, low-ceilinged room, lined with bookcases (Tom loved fine bindings), with its gleaming, polished floor, some old family portraits and rich curtains of a gleaming dark purple — to Claribel this place was heaven. It would not, of course, have been so heavenly had Tom not been so perfect a figure moving against the old gold frames, the curtains, the leaping fire, looking so exactly, Claribel thought “the younger image of old Theophilus Duddon, stiff and grand up there on the wall in his white stock and velvet coat, Tom’s great-grandfather.”

  On this particular day, Claribel’s sister, Morgraunt Beaminster and Lucile, Mrs. Matcham, Hattie Dorset, and some men were present. Tom was sitting over the rim of a big leather chair near the fire, his head tossed back laughing at one of Lucile’s silly jokes. Mrs. Matcham was at the table, “pouring out,” and Sheraton, rather stout but otherwise a fine example of the Admirable Crichton, handed around the food. They were laughing, as they always did, at nothing at all, Lucile’s shrill, barking laugh above the rest. From the babel Claribel caught phrases like “Dear old Tom!”

  “But he didn’t — he hadn’t got the intelligence.”

  “Tom, you’re a pet....”

  “Oh, but of course not. What stuff! Why, Harriet herself...!” Through it all Sheraton moved with his head back, his indulgent indifference, his supremely brushed hair. It was just then Claribel caught the flash from, Mrs. Matcham’s beautiful eyes. Everyone had their tea; there was nothing left for her to do. She sat there, her lovely hands crossed on the table in front of her, her eyes lost, apparently, in dim abstraction. Claribel saw that they were not lost at all, but were bent, obliquely, with a concentrated and almost passionate interest, upon Tom. Mrs. Matcham wanted something, and she was determined this afternoon to ask for it. What was it? Money? Her debts were notorious. Jewels? She was insatiable there... Freddie Matcham couldn’t give her things. Old Lord Ferris wanted to, but wasn’t allowed to.... Claribel knew all this, young though she was. There remained, then, as always, Torn.

  Thrilled by this discovery of Mrs. Matcham’s eyes, Claribel pursued her discoveries further, and the next thing that she saw was that Lucile also was intent upon some prize. Her silly, bright little eyes were tightened for some very definite purpose. They fastened upon Tom like little scissors. Claribel knew that Lucile had developed recently a passion for bridge and, being stupid.... Yes, Lucile wanted money. Claribel allowed herself a little shudder of disgust. She was only seventeen and wore spectacles, and was plain, but at that moment she felt herself to be infinitely superior to the whole lot of them. She had her own private comfortable arrogances.

  It was then, while she was despising them, that she made her discovery about Tom. She looked across at him wondering whether he had noticed any of the things that had struck her. She at the same time sighed, seeing that she had made, as she always did, a nasty sloppy mess in her saucer, and knowing that Morgraunt (the watchdog of the family) would be certain to notice and scold her for it.

  She looked across at Tom and discovered suddenly that he wasn’t there. The shell of him was there, the dark clothes, the black tie with the pearl pin, the white shirt, the faintly-coloured clear-cut mask with the shining hair, the white throat, the heavy eye-lashes — the shell, the mask, nothing else. She could never remember afterwards exactly what it was that made her certain that nobody was there. Lucile was talking to him, eagerly, repeating, as she always did, her words over and over again. He was, apparently, looking up at her, a smile on his lips. Morgraunt, so smart with the teasing blue feather in her hat, was looking across at them intent upon what Lucile was saying. He was apparently looking at Lucile, and yet his eyes were dead, sightless, like the eyes of a statue. In his hand he apparently held a cigarette, and yet his hand was of marble, no life ran through the veins. Claribel even fancied, so deeply excited had she become, that you could see the glitter of the fire through his dark body as he sat carefully balanced on the edge of the chair.

  There was Nobody there, and then, as she began to reflect, there never had been anybody since the Armistice. Tom had never returned from France; only a framework with clothes hung upon it, a doll, an automaton, did Tom’s work and fulfilled his place. Tom’s soul had remained in France. He did not really hear what Lucile was saying. He did not care what any of them were doing, and that, of course, accounted for the wonderful way that, during these past weeks, he had acquiesced in every one of their proposals. They had many of them commented on Tom’s extraordinary good nature now that he had returned. “You really could do anything with him that you pleased,” Claribel had heard Morgraunt triumphantly exclaim. Well, so you can with a corpse!...

  As she stared at him and realised the dramatic import of her discovery, she was suddenly filled with pity. Poor Tom! How terrible that time in France must have been to have killed him like that, and nobody had known. They had thought that he had taken it so easily, he had laughed and jested with the others, had always returned to France gaily.... How terrified he must have been — before he died!

  As she watched him, he got up from the chair and stood before the fire, his legs spread out. T
he others had gathered in a corner of the room, busied around Hattie, who was trying some new Jazz tunes on the piano. Mrs. Matcham got up from her table and went over to Tom and began eagerly to talk to him. Her hands were clasped behind her beautiful back, and Claribel could see how the fingers twisted and untwisted again and again over the urgency of her request.

  Claribel saw Tom’s face. The mask was the lovelier now because she knew that there was no life behind it. She saw the lips smile, the eyes shine, the head bend. It was to her as though someone were turning an electric button behind there in the middle of his back....

  He nodded. Mrs. Matcham laughed. “Oh, you darling!” Claribel heard her cry. “If you only knew what you’ve done for me!”

  The party was over. They all began to go.

  Claribel was right. There was Nobody there.

  When everybody had gone that evening and the body of Tom was alone, it surveyed the beautiful room.

  Tom’s body (which may for the moment be conveniently but falsely called Tom) looked about and felt a wave of miserable, impotent uselessness.

  Tom summoned Sheraton.

  “Clear all these things away,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dinner jacket to-night, sir?”

  “No, I’m not dressing.” He went to the door, then turned round. “Sheraton!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “What’s the matter with me?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir!”

  “What’s the matter with me? You know what I mean as well as I do. Ever since I came back.... I can’t take an interest in anything — not in anything nor in anybody. To-day, for instance, I didn’t hear a word that they were saying, not one of them, and they made enough noise, too! I don’t care for anything, I don’t want anything, I don’t like anything, I don’t hate anything. It’s as though I were asleep — and yet I’m not asleep either. What’s the matter with me, Sheraton?”