Noble in Reason

by Phyllis Bentley

  “John had a gold watch!”

  I exclaimed in distress.

  “Don’t take any notice of what I said, Chris,” said Henry, turning to me however a ravaged face: “Father does the best he can.”

  I understood perfectly that it was the decay, the deterioration, in the Jarmayne family’s standing, symbolised by the descent from watch to gloves, not the mere value, which troubled him; any mean calculation was entirely alien to Henry’s proud spirit.

  His distress on such occasions distressed me, the more so as I instinctively felt—I say instinctively because the grounds for my conviction were obscure to me—that John would win the game with Beatrice, though Henry seemed much the more attractive proposition of the two to me. On these days of gloom I tried to be as nice to Henry as I could: to abstain from those faults which annoyed him in me. I washed and brushed with especial care; I straightened the somewhat mean though decent appointments of the supper table; I remembered to make up the fire before he came in; I sat, sensibly upright, in a chair to read instead of sprawling all over the rug or broken-springed settee. Henry saw these efforts and rewarded me with a smile, kind though a trifle stiff and wan.

  A day or two after the excitement of a letter from Beatrice, came the agitation of Henry’s reply to her. Henry wrote unadorned and rather too outspoken letters; strict truthfulness was always his intention, and like my father he said what he meant rather too clearly to sound urbane. (I was appalled, when he once showed me a paragraph in a letter he had written to Messrs. Cockerylls, by its bald ferocity.) Surprised and affronted by his correspondents’ reactions, he had come to regard letter-writing as a difficult and puzzling task, and of course a letter to Beatrice was an immensely important occasion. Accordingly the table had to be cleared of every other object, the writing-tools symmetrically displayed; silence was sternly requested and an absence of fidgeting somewhat irritably demanded. If possible, therefore, I always went out on my bicycle while Henry wrote to Beatrice, and was heartily glad when the process was over. For a few days after the despatch of his letter, Henry was cheerful and hopeful, positively whistled while shaving and told anecdotes of the staff and customers at Messrs. Cockerylls’ which were less mordant than his usual scornful exposures. But then began the long agony of waiting for a reply, closed only by the violent joy and despair of its arrival. So that the majority of Henry’s days were not happy ones.

  As time went on, too, it seemed to me also that Henry was not as happy in his music classes as he had been at first. He now worked for longer hours even than before, but when he lifted his head from his music-paper, he had a harassed and perplexed expression on his face, and sometimes when he came in from a class he tossed his books down on the table with a weary impatience. I took his intense and prolonged application for granted; it never occurred to me that Henry, like myself, might sometimes long for easier pleasures.

  For there were times when, happy though I was, the heady and lurid excitements which lay around me just off my path aroused in me a wild surging desire for Life—as we said then, Life with a capital L; for scent, colour, drink (I had never tasted it) and laughter, for something rich and pungent, I knew not what it was. These desires I “worked off” as I then called it, fulfilled as we say now, in my daydreams, which otherwise were rather in abeyance at that time. I would not for the world, of course, have allowed the austere and noble Henry a glimpse into this seething cauldron of my dreams. They were only occasional, in any case, for my real life was so happy at that time, I did not heed them.

  4

  I perceive now that my sympathy for Henry over Beatrice’s letters was the first disinterested pity I had ever felt. I had pitied my mother, I had pitied Netta; but in them I had a deep interest, I loved them and they loved me. Henry I frankly did not love, though I respected him. So when I straightened forks and ceased to fidget, for Henry’s sake, I was exercising (at long last) some true compassion.

  The trouble about Henry’s musical studies I half understood even at that time, but I hesitated to set myself up as judge in a medium different from my own. I had, after all, a certain reputation as the only unmusical member of the Jarmayne family; I had often been rebuked for singing out of tune. So I would not allow myself to think what I really guessed: namely that Henry bad no genuinely creative musical talent. The elementary steps of musical theory were easy to him, for he had a good ear and an inherited aptitude. But when he had to compose, the poetic element was absent, the inspiration was lacking; he had no original thought of any kind; only a quick and lively brain, very clear and definite, but conventional, confined in all matters within a limited range. I believe now that in the comprehension of the sublimities of music, my father, though in a confused uncertain way, was more able than his son; I see that Henry reached his musical limits within a month or two of coming to London. To a nature like Henry’s, proud and accustomed to despise any inefficiency in others, this inability to progress must have been a severe and perplexing blow.

  For myself, of course, this London experience was of very great value. I have said, for I knew it then, that I did not at that time become a Londoner. But neither did I remain entirely a Yorkshireman. My speech was slightly though not entirely Southernized; my manners, modelled on those of the Londoner Mr. M, had a trifle more of welcome in their mode than those current in the West Riding. Moreover, and more significantly: I had observed two sets of manners, two modes of living, two ways of speech, of which the practitioners of each thought it the only right and possible system. Knowing this, I was emancipated a little from both, detached a little from both, and detachment, the ability to observe with some impartiality his own environment, is a great advantage, perhaps indeed a prime qualification, to any artist, any thinker.

  As for the reading I was enabled to do in Mr. M’s establishment, its value to me was incalculable.

  5

  One wet Saturday night I mounted a bus to return home after the theatre—I had seen Oscar Ashe in Count Hannibal and was in an excited and romantic mood. Nobody but myself would have climbed to the open top on such a night, I thought with pride, but I travelled habitually on the tops of buses, partly from real enjoyment of the wider range of vision provided above, but mainly as a gesture of defiance to the conventional people who travelled below. To my surprise another passenger was already present, crouching under one of the shiny black apron covers which protected the seats. I began to unhook another covering and to pour off the water which had accumulated in its folds, when the woman cried out cheerfully:

  “Come and sit by me, dear! We shall be warmer together!”

  Blushing and disconcerted, but unable from the politeness I made such a point of practising to refuse, I edged in beside her, and received a shock of alarm followed by a tingle of excitement, for her brassy hair and rouged cheeks—rouge was then worn only by the disreputable—together with a certain cheap gaudiness in her dress and her heavy scent, proclaimed even to my innocence that she was “one of those,” a woman of the streets in fact, against whom Henry had sternly warned me. The lurchings of the bus threw us against each other and necessitated apologies from time to time; she called me dearie in the Cockney style, nestled up to me, threaded her arm through mine and putting her head on one side smiled up into my eyes. All this seemed to me part of my emancipation from the narrow milieu of Hudley, and I quite preened myself on my advance towards the freedom of manhood.

  The conductor now came clattering upstairs; he was rather a surly fellow, or perhaps just vexed out of his normal cheerfulness by his late hour of work at the end of a long week, or by his need to come out into the rain to seek our fares. I paid promptly; but the woman beside me, drawing out a very shabby purse, scrabbled about in it to find coins in a manner which revealed, to the conductor doubtless as well as myself, that she had not the requisite fare. The conductor clicked his tongue and exhorted her to come along, come along, with some impatience; the woman said she had mounted the bus later than she had; the conductor on principle
contradicted her; a warm argument ensued and it seemed likely that my companion would be put off the bus. I was aware, as I say, of the view taken of such women by my family, and on that very account I felt a strong, almost hysterical sympathy with her, as a pariah, an outcast from the kind of society I particularly despised. This feeling was strengthened by my uncomfortable realization that the conductor might not have thought to climb the stairs on such a night and the woman might have escaped his notice and not been called on to pay her fare, if my arrival had not called his attention to the upper deck. I therefore drew out the necessary coppers from my pocket in a secret manner and suddenly thrust them behind my companion’s shoulder into the conductor’s hand, blushing the while. He took them and issued the ticket in silence, but with an uneasy and disgruntled air, and clattered off down the steps.

  “That was very kind and obliging of you, dearie,” said the woman. “What’s your name, eh? Mine’s Florrie.”

  “Christopher,” I mumbled, holding down my head. Her voice was as cheerfully brassy as her hair, and I feared that the conductor from the foot of his steps was listening with disapproval.

  “And how old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “You’re tall for that age, dearie. You aren’t a Londoner, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Where d’you come from, eh?”

  This catechism continued until the bus reached my stop, when with an apology I climbed out from beneath the black apron and descended the stairs with some relief.

  But as the bus rolled off and I turned to cross the street I found her at my side.

  “I’ll walk a little way with you, dearie,” said she.

  This was more than I had bargained for, and as we moved along side by side I was too embarrassed to speak.

  “Well, this is my road,” I said at last, pausing at the corner. “So I’ll say good-night.”

  “Shall I tell you something, Chris dearie?” said Florrie at this, laying her hand on my arm: “I haven’t a penny in my purse; nothing to eat and nowhere to go.”

  Her gloves were out at the finger-ends, and this detail struck the son of the respectable Jarmayne family as at once ludicrous, pathetic and disgusting.

  “Why did you come down here, then?” I asked.

  “I’ve a friend near here that might give me a bed for the night,” said Florrie. (Her accent was so Cockney that I had some difficulty in making out her words.) “But if you could give me a bite and a drink first, it would be a great help, dearie.”

  “I don’t think,” I began, when the rain settled the matter by suddenly intensifying. A chill unpleasing drizzle before, it became in a moment an intolerably heavy deluge. Such passers-by as were to be seen cried out and ran for shelter, and we perforce did the same. It simply was not possible, at any rate for me (Henry being out at a concert), either to shut the door in Florrie’s face or leave her shivering in the tiny hall. I took her upstairs to our small sitting-room, revived the fire, cut bread and butter, made preparations for brewing tea. Florrie took off her thin soaked jacket (which I could not help seeing was of abominably poor cloth) and toasted her boots (which had large thin patches on the soles) at the fire. She looked around her at our little room, commented cheerfully on its details, thought we were very snug, while I longed for the kettle to boil quickly, so that she might be safely gone before Henry came home.

  The kettle boiled, and Florrie drank three cups of tea and ate voraciously of our bread and butter, but showed no inclination to go. It was almost with relief, though also with agonized fear, that I at last heard Henry’s quick light step on the stairs.

  “Here’s my brother,” I faltered.

  No doubt my face expressed my emotions clearly enough, for Florrie got up at once, and with a vexed though cringing look took up her jacket. If only Henry went into our bedroom first, I thought, all might yet be well. But no doubt he saw the light under the edges of the ill-fitting door, for he burst in energetically, with a frown on his forehead and a rebuke for my late sitting-up on his lips.

  I shall always see him standing there, his hand on the doorknob which he held at arm’s stretch, while his handsome face contorted into a look of livid disgust.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he said.

  “I’m just going,” piped Florrie, making to put on her jacket.

  “On the bus,” I croaked: “We met on the bus.”

  “Chris, go to bed,” commanded Henry. “At once.”

  He threw back the door, and I, feeble and foolish wretch, stumbled past him out of the room. The horror and fury which emanated from his person were so strong that I hardly dared pass close to him, and felt scorched, like a moth which has fluttered through a candle-flame, when I reached the safety of the landing.

  My habits of obedience to my family, my cowardly inability to assert my will, still held me in so strong a grip that I followed Henry’s command exactly, undressed with trembling hands and climbed into a bed which seemed singularly cold. For a time I lay there shuddering, expecting every moment to hear Florrie’s departure and Henry’s entry like an avenging angel into our room. Then it occurred to me that if I could be asleep when he came in, I could postpone his anger till tomorrow morning. This passage of time might diminish his anger, cool it; in any case, postponement of the awful moment would be a gain. I cowered down in my pillow, drew up the bedclothes about my head, lay very still and closed my eyes; soon this simulation produced the reality; I slept.

  I awoke to find daylight streaming into the room. As so often happens, at the moment of awakening I knew that some gloomy and unpleasant affair was weighing upon me, but did not know what it was; then full memory returned and I remembered with terror the fearful interview with Henry that lay ahead. Very cautiously and slowly I turned over so as to face towards Henry’s bed, hoping greatly that he would be still asleep. But the bed was unoccupied; it was in fact “made”, a service which Henry usually performed for himself because he disapproved of Mrs. Tedding’s methods. My heart sank. Henry had risen early, then, and was busy in the sitting-room with his musical work. I tried to sleep again, but could not; the anguish of suspense was too great; I was obliged to rise and get the interview I dreaded as soon as might be into the past. Sighing heavily, I made the effort. Our washing arrangements would be regarded now as primitive: large white china ewers filled with cold water, with basins to match, stood on wooden washstands; a lidded can of hot water was brought up by Mrs. Tedding at a specified time each morning, and from its meagre contents we had both to wash and Henry to shave. The can was not in evidence in the room this morning, I noticed; perhaps the hour was earlier than I had thought; at any rate, I would make no fuss, I would wash in cold. A few moments later, dressed and brushed, I stepped out of the bedroom to face my ordeal.

  To my surprise the sitting-room door stood open, and our empty trunk—which, genteelly swathed by Mrs. Tedding in an embroidered cloth, usually served as a low table on the landing—lay overturned, almost as though kicked aside, a yard or so from its foot. I righted the trunk, then, screwing up my courage, I stepped towards the doorway, but fell back with a loud cry. A body hung against the door, its feet turned inwards, its neck supported by a blue cord which passed over the top to the coat-hook on the other side. So purple and distorted were the features, so strange the angle of the head, that I did not at first in the least recognise my brother, but ran into the sitting-room and back into the bedroom—the boots of the corpse knocking against the door as I brushed past—crying wildly: “Henry! Henry!” and felt astonished when he did not reply. Presently something familiar in the clothes struck me, and I stood gasping and trembling before the body when Mr. Tedding, who had heard my cries and hurried footsteps, came up in his shirt-sleeves to see what was going on. Seizing my shoulder with his hand, he quickly turned me away from the lamentable sight, and shouting loudly for his wife, delivered me into her hands on the landing below.

  “But it can’t be Henry?” I cried as she guided me t
o a sofa and sat down beside me with her thin kindly arm around my shoulders: “It isn’t Henry?”

  “I’m afraid it is, Mr. Chris dear,” she said, and this awful verdict was confirmed by a nod from Mr. Tedding when he presently entered the room.

  “But why, why?” I gasped. “Why should he-”

  “Hang himself?” said Mr. Tedding sadly. “Ah, that’ll be the question.”

  It was indeed the question which was put to me over and over again during the next few days by a variety of persons, though by none with more heart-searching anguish than myself: the doctor, the police, Mr. Hodgson, the junior partner of Messrs. Cockerylls, teachers from the Guildhall, Mr. Tedding—not his wife, who simply shook her head and said mournfully that young men have strange ideas. The police took the line that Henry must have been in money difficulties; did he gamble, they asked, or drink, or go racing? They received my vehement denials on these points with calm scepticism, and hinted, it seemed, to Messrs. Cockerylls that they had better check their accounts. Messrs. Cockerylls replied that Henry was not that kind of young man and had in any case no opportunity for theft; however, they checked their accounts and established, as they expected, Henry’s complete innocence. The Guildhall officials said that Henry was a promising young student who without doubt would have been able to pass the necessary examinations and set himself up in the provinces as a music teacher. To my ears this confirmed my estimate of Henry’s musical disappointment, but my other interrogators did not hear it so; they did not realize the height of Henry’s ambitions.