Noble in Reason

by Phyllis Bentley

  All these motives together induced my father to break up his household, surrender the lease of his house, send Henry and myself to London and John and Netta to Ashworth. He himself found a subordinate post in a large neighbouring firm and retired with his wife to a couple of rooms in a small terrace house just off that large industrial artery, King’s Road, the main entrance from the west into Hudley. These drastic and possibly enterprising but unusual plans marked the difference in temperament between my father and the West Riding manufacturers about him. He found it not much easier than I did to accept the usual and follow the norm.

  As a result, however, our family unit disintegrated and never again entirely coalesced.

  I perceive now that the scene on the Hudley railway platform that morning, between my father and the porters, was the beginning of a determination in me always to behave with urbanity and smoothness in my social relations. The spectacle of my father’s vehemence was so painful, and this pain was so strongly reinforced by the other miseries of the situation, that its impression upon me went very deep. Courtesy and moderation became for me a perpetual criticism of my father, a means of dissociating myself from him, an expression of my revolt against all that he symbolized.

  3

  The three years I spent in London with Henry were very happy for me.

  As long as the train carrying Henry and myself was still in Yorkshire, I felt wretched, bowed down by the grief of leaving home and the worry of our family affairs—I knew something was wrong though only dimly comprehending it. But when we drew out of my native county, and met towns with strange names, and fields with strange soil, I gave a great sigh and responsibility rolled off my shoulders; I could do no more for the Jarmaynes in Hudley, they must look after themselves. I was in an express train, a corridor train, a train travelling to London; I could not but be excited by the adventure. Moreover, Henry treated us both to luncheon in the restaurant car, a thrilling novelty to me. True, he delivered a homily to me on this treat, saying that it must be the last of its kind, strict economy would be necessary, and so on. “Father won’t be able to help us much, Chris,” said Henry, frowning: “We must try to support ourselves.” I felt honoured by his confidence, and nodded earnestly, but could not help enjoying both the meal and its service by a frock-coated waiter.

  Accordingly I arrived at Kings Cross in a cheerful and even lively mood. In such a mood I was, so to say, in full possession of my faculties and able to turn them outwards, so I enjoyed the bustle of the crowded station, the huge engines letting off steam, the repartee of the porters. Moreover, I experienced a moment of success, which made me feel that perhaps I should be able to cope better with life in London than in Hudley. We were to be met, Henry had explained to me, by my father’s friend—they had sung together in the Ashworth choir in their youth—who was now employed in the London office of Oldroyds’, one of the great West Riding textile firms; Hodgson was his (emphatically Yorkshire) name. Now that we stood on the crowded platform we saw the difficulty of singling him out; Henry frowned and gazed about him thoughtfully. But at that moment I saw in the middle distance a short sturdy figure in an excellent coat of indigo serge with a velvet collar; there was a bristling satisfaction about this person’s large red face which struck me as suitable for Mr. Hodgson, for I had seen such looks often in the West Riding. I pointed him out to Henry; we advanced; I was right; the face, the coat belonged to Mr. Hodgson.

  “So you’ve brought the boy with you after all, eh?” said Mr. Hodgson, giving me a disapproving glance.

  “Yes,” said Henry firmly.

  His tone closed the subject. Mr. Hodgson sniffed but said no more. I, however, felt completely dashed, and at once began to wonder whether I should faint before I reached our new home.

  Mr. Hodgson had secured rooms for us above a shop in the Elephant and Castle district. He knew our landlady in some way through his wife, and the accommodation was clean by London standards, and respectable. We had two rooms on the top floor; one of a size just to hold two beds; the other tiny and dark, but with a fireplace, which we could use as a sitting-room. I could see by the gloom of Henry’s expression that he thought we could not afford the luxury of a second room, even at the low prices then current, but I had taken a fancy to the tiny cupboard—for it was little more—and was glad when Mr. Hodgson advised him in a low tone to try it for a week or two, as if he meant to work seriously at musical theory in the evenings, a room with a proper table and a fire would be a great convenience. Mr. Hodgson invited us to spend the day with him on the following Sunday, and left us. Henry, with vehement exclamations of disgust, examined the mantelpiece, table, chairs and corners of our lodgings, and found them dirty by Yorkshire standards. I agreed; but I thought it unkind to dim the light-hearted Cockney cheerfulness of our landlady Mrs. Tedding, as Henry did, by commenting on the fact in so stern a tone. We unpacked and ate and went to bed. My emotions were unstable; at one moment I enjoyed the excitement of adventure, the next I felt utterly forlorn and longed for home. This continual see-sawing exhausted me, the room swam, I lay very quiet and still so as not to wake Henry, and soon slept.

  Next morning I accompanied Henry to his place of employment. With the snobbishness of youth, I was shocked to find that this was a shop. (In the West Riding of those days, a great social gulf lay between the manufacturer and the retailer.) It was in fact a music shop in the Charing Cross Road, where Henry was to have certain facilities for piano practice in part-payment. Henry, looking pale and stern but (I thought) handsome and nobly sacrificial, went in alone, having given me strict instructions first not to wander away.

  “But don’t keep staring in at the window,” he said irritably. “Look in the shop next door.”

  The shop next door held no interest for me, but a few yards down there was a bookshop—and a few yards farther another —and another. I had never heard of the Charing Cross Road and was astonished, delighted, almost overwhelmed to find myself in such a paradise for the booklover. I strayed from shop to shop in an ecstasy of enjoyment. It was not that I forgot Henry; I disregarded him in a deliberate act of defiance; books were more to me even than Henry; I could defy even my family for their sake. Suddenly I saw in one of the book windows a large card bearing the then customary words: Boy Wanted. I flew into the shop, almost knocking over Mr. M —his name was Merridew but we always called him Mr. M— on my way. Tall, good-looking, rather bald, Mr. M had a courtly air—as soon as I saw him I thought of such mythical knee-breeched functionaries as Gold Stick and Black Rod.

  “What’s the hurry, my boy?” said Mr. M with quiet amusement.

  “I want the job,” I panted, breathless.

  “Why?” said Mr. M.

  “To be among the books,” said I.

  “You’ve got it,” said Mr. M.

  In those days no other formality was necessary, and the job was mine. It was while we were cheerfully exchanging, at a tall high sloping desk, details of address and parentage and hours of work, that I caught sight of Henry charging past the door in the road outside, his face quite livid and distorted with grief and rage. My heart sank and my flow of confidences ceased.

  “My brother,” I said timidly. “I’d better fetch my brother.”

  Mr. M’s expression likewise cooled, but he nodded. I hurried out and ran full tilt into Henry, who was returning uphill from his fruitless search for me. Naturally he was furious.

  “Where have you been, Chris? What do you mean by behaving like this? I shall have to send you home if I can’t trust you!” cried Henry, seizing my arm fiercely.

  “I’ve got a job, Henry,” I murmured.

  “Nonsense!”

  “In this book-shop.”

  Henry looked at the establishment and appeared slightly mollified.

  “Do come quickly or I may lose it again,” I urged, quite frantic at the thought of this possibility.

  Henry allowed himself to be led into the shop. He looked at Mr. M, Mr. M looked at him; their approval was mutual. H
enry began to explain that we had come from Yorkshire only yesterday, and that—fortunately at this point Mr. M was called away to attend a customer. Fortunately, because Henry’s tone and expression, if not his actual words, were fast relegating me to the position of dreaming delicate incapable younger brother. But the customer—how grateful I was to him!—had requirements difficult to satisfy, and Henry, who was to begin his duties at once, had to leave before Mr. M was free.

  A world of delight now opened up before me. In Mr. M’s bookshop I was completely at home. I was good at my work. Part of my duties was the packing and despatch of parcels; my fingers, so clumsy in all other circumstances, closed paper and string round books with the skill of love. What I particularly enjoyed, of course, was to serve customers in the shop, which I did sometimes early in the morning or in the lunch-hour; it was, again, a labour of love to me to find the exact edition of the book the customer wanted; I soon knew the contents of the many hundred shelves, almost as well as Mr. M himself and slightly better than the other two assistants. I proved to have a talent for the art of the index; my handwriting, careless and blotchy in all other connections, became neat and reliable when it recorded the titles and dates of books. My superiors were friendly and kind to me; when it was realized that I, like Mr. M, regarded the touching of a book with dirty hands as a crime, I was allowed to take all but the most valuable from the shelves and to read what I liked during my lunch hour, when I ate sandwiches among packing-cases (from which books delightfully flowed, golden fruit from a great kindly cornucopia) in the basement. One of the assistants, too, instructed me as to the existence and purpose of public libraries; I took out tickets and read library books in the evenings at home. In this sphere too I was liked and even respected; the library assistants welcomed me with a smile. I devoured books, gobbled them; shovelled them into my mind’s rapacious maw. One book led to another, and that to a third, so that though my reading was unguided it was not utterly heterogeneous and unrelated. I read at night till Henry bade me put out the light; I woke early and read in the mornings. The only times in my waking day, indeed, when I was not employed about books, were during my transit between our lodgings and the Charing Cross Road.

  Henry, who soon acquired the top hat and frock coat which were then the necessary uniform for the City clerk, travelled to work by bus every day; but I sent for my bicycle from Hudley and rode. Henry opposed this scheme at first because he feared for my safety in the London traffic—what if I should faint?—but the saving of bus fares was so important in our exiguous budget that he reluctantly gave his consent, and soon forgot that he had ever withheld it. In any case my faints had ceased, and I had suddenly begun to grow. So riding in London traffic became a well-loved skill with me; I knew and practised all the London tricks, could hang on the tailboard of a van or wriggle between a couple of buses, as well as the most Cockney errand-boy of the period. Invitations from Mr. Hodgson to tea at his house on Sunday at first reached us very regularly. To me Mr. Hodgson represented my father and I shrank from him. Luckily (as I thought) Henry did not care for Mr. Hodgson either, finding him gross and earthy, so we evaded his invitations as often as we decently could—perhaps a little oftener—and after a time they became rare. So my weekends were free. If the weather was fine, I rode (unaccompanied by Henry, who considered bicycling beneath him these days) to notable places outside London: to Kew, to Richmond, to Hampton Court, to Highgate and Hampstead Heath. I enjoyed these excursions thoroughly, but when I mounted my faithful “iron steed” (as Titbits called it) on Monday morning I was happier still. “I have a place in life, a job. I am wanted, useful, necessary,” I thought as I pressed down the pedals. It was a wonderful feeling, not previously experienced by Christopher Jarmayne.

  Altogether, in that still lightweight but tallish, cheerful lad at Mr. Merridew’s, a lad with neat hair and clean hands and bright eyes, who came forward with a happy smile and gave willing knowledgeable service, and soon had his wages raised with compliments on his efficiency, the woebegone bespattered self-pitying child of the Hudley Grammar School could hardly have been recognized.

  Besides, the economic factor had to be considered. I had money in my pocket which I had earned. Though I was not quite self-supporting, I had a couple of shillings a week allowed to me out of my earnings as pocket-money. Since in those days one could get into a theatre gallery for ninepence, this was wealth indeed. On Saturdays when it was wet I went to the theatre, standing with enjoyment for hours in the long queues. Henry grumbled about this too, at first, but as I showed a preference for the more serious types of drama, he soon came to accept it as a habit. He himself was busy with music classes at the Guildhall and the resultant homework, and was glad to have me suitably occupied elsewhere.

  Thus in all my doings in London, I acted alone. The delicious relief and ease of this! The bliss of being away from my family, free of all the biological tugs and pressures exerted by one’s kith and kin!

  Yet I was often very homesick—not for the Jarmayne household, nor even for Hudley, but for Yorkshire. It was only now when I had left it that I began to know how well I loved the West Riding. Its landscapes, which I had hardly seen when they were there before my eyes, now rose up in my imagination in all their sombre grandeur. The harsh winds raged, the tall chimneys threw out their plumes of smoke, the stormy hills rose and fell in turbulent succession, in my mind while I rode about the green, softly undulating, tall-tree country round London. Sometimes I felt a longing so intense that it was almost sickness, for those hills and mill chimneys, and for the rough northern speech. My roots held me firm at this time; I did not become a Londoner although I dearly loved London.

  My happiness there was punctually damped every Sunday morning—for there were Sunday posts then—by the arrival of a letter from my father.

  Letters of course were of very great importance to Henry and myself, as exiles. My mother never wrote to us. Henry once or twice urged me to write to her, but when I dutifully tried to do so, I could not manage it; my feeling for her was not one which could be put into words. Accordingly both Henry and myself wrote to our parents jointly: My dear Father and Mother, we began, and then took to biting our pens and staring about us for inspiration. My great correspondent was Netta. I wrote freely and at length to her, describing conversations word for word and deploying this dialogue as I saw it done in novels; I drew pictures and diagrams (my drawing was atrocious, but I knew Netta would not mind and this was a pleasure to me) and even enclosed specimens of any new kind of wrapping paper or string or pen-nib that entered my experience, feeling that I thus put her into closer contact with my life. She replied at irregular but frequent intervals in short but intimate notes, ill-spelled, grammatically faulty and written in a round childish hand. I viewed these errors with a fond indulgence I certainly should not have shown to them from the hand of any other writer, for affection burst from them at every side. Her trail of crosses and circles (kisses and hugs) increased every week; I did not find them foolish, but warming and touching; the phrase your loving sister was sweet to me.

  To revert to my father’s letters. He wrote every Saturday morning separate letters to Henry and myself, in his firm, neat, strong, highly individual hand. Gloom always descended upon us as we read. Not that he said anything unkind; but his whole point of view was so at variance with our own and he so completely misunderstood the situations upon which he commented, that we were appalled by the impossibility of either acting upon his suggestions or finding a reply to them which should not reveal our horror. He continually urged Henry, for example, to stand upon his rights at Messrs. Cockerylls’ and work hard at the Guildhall, whereas exactly the opposite advice was needed, since Henry’s haughty temper often led him into conflicts at his place of employment and he already sat up till the small hours working at his music. The dreamy Christopher was urged to be punctual, hardworking and submissive and not expect any salary advance till he had proved his worth; whereas Mr. M would have loathed a Heepish demeanour an
d a salary rise was the subject of most hopeful interest to me at the moment. The mere fact, too, that the long arm of parental control reached out and touched us here in London, depressed us.

  John sent an occasional postcard to me, to Henry an occasional letter. But Henry had another correspondent, the sight of whose slender aquiline writing on the breakfast-table always caused my heart to sink, for I knew the consequences which would follow. It was Beatrice who at long intervals would dash off, on very thick rough white writing paper of a then very stylish kind (with highly deckled edges), a brief note to my brother. Her widely spaced lines rarely covered more than two sides of the four into which her paper was folded; the whole would not amount, I judged, to more than six sentences at most. But upon Henry these notes had an exciting effect out of all proportion to their length. A dark scarlet flushed his cheek immediately he saw one; snatching up a knife with a hand that trembled—for he could not endure the clumsy disorder of opening letters by the thumb—he sliced open the envelope with meticulous strokes, and devoured the note over and over again before folding it with exquisite neatness and placing it in his waistcoat pocket (over his heart) with loving care. During all this a smile of intense secret happiness illumined his face and he neither spoke nor looked at me; but when the process was complete he would resume his meal and address me with a false bonhomie, making some feeble jest about Mr. M which was very unlike his usual stern incisive utterances. Presently he laid down his knife and fork again and stole another look at Beatrice’s letter.

  This was all very well; but after these moments of febrile joy Henry would sink alarmingly into an abyss of gloom. He said nothing of his trouble to me, but it was not difficult to guess that his uncertain prospects, the improbability of his being able to marry for many years, the present blight on the family’s fortunes, weighed heavily upon his spirits. I remember particularly his distress on his twenty-first birthday, which occurred about the middle of this London period. A number of letters and parcels awaited him on the table, amongst which was a letter from Beatrice. Henry opened this first and showed that dark radiance which became his handsome face so well. Then he turned to my father’s present, which proved to be a pair of serviceable but not particularly elegant gloves. Henry burst out uncontrollably: