by Hugh Walpole
“Nor had I — nor had anyone,” said Christopher.
“That whole affair with Francis was in idea — always — more than in fact. I knew, and I believe that he knew, that it was simply a piece of wild rebellion on my part; and on his — well, he’s like that, romantic, rebellious, responding in a minute to everything, but wanting, really, all the time to be safe and proper. That day we met in his rooms, we both knew, at heart, that something was missing — something one had to have if one was going to break away altogether. He was always a rebel by force of circumstances, never by real inclination.”
She put her hand on Christopher’s knee and drew very close to him. “Chris dear, I’m terrified now when I think of how near I was to absolute, complete disaster. If it hadn’t been for Roddy’s accident and for Lizzie ... Lizzie’s been to all of us everything in the world.
“Do you remember once telling me about Mr. Brun’s Tiger? I’ve often thought of it since and it seems to me now that to all of us — for Roddy and Francis and Lizzie and me — the moment of our consciousness came. Ever since that day when they carried Roddy back to Seddon each one of us has had to wait, just holding ourselves in.... But, you know, Dr. Chris, that’s the secret of the whole matter. It wasn’t I, or Breton, or even Lizzie or Roddy that defeated grandmother — it was simply Real Life. First the War, then Roddy’s accident — Roddy’s accident most of all. We had, all five of us, been leading sham lives, then suddenly God, Fate, Providence, what you will, steps in, jerks us all back, takes away from all of us what we thought we wanted most, puts us in line with the real thing — our Tiger, if you like. Grandmother simply couldn’t stand it. Lizzie and Roddy are real — half of Breton and me, and most of grandmother unreal — Well, Lizzie and Roddy have just put things straight quietly.... Grandmother’s generation saw things ‘through a glass darkly’ — They’re gone. It’s all going to be ‘face to face’ now.”
Christopher looked at her, smiling. She was so young, so adorably young with her seriousness.
She broke in— “What rot I’m talking! It only comes to this, that I wish now, like anything, that I’d been nicer to grandmamma. One sees things always too late.... I’d like to have another try, to begin with grandmamma again, to be more tolerant, to hate her less. But I expect in the end it would be the same. She’d have had me tied up, without a will of my own, without a word to say!... that was her idea of controlling us all. It’s over, it’s done with — no one, I expect, will have her kind of power again.... But she was fine! I only see now how fine she was!
“No one, I expect, will have her kind of power again....”
Now she stood away from Christopher, looking at him and also beyond him, as though she were finally, once and for all, surveying, cataloguing that same power —
“She wasn’t terrible, she wasn’t fine, she wasn’t really anything except a kind of peg for all sorts of traditions to hang on to. In herself she was just a plucky, theatrical, obstinate old woman. It was simply the idea of her that frightened us all. I remember the first time that I saw Yale Ross’s picture of her — He’d caught all the ceremony and the terror. It was then that I had the first faint suspicion that she didn’t, in herself, live up to the picture in the least.
“I suppose,” she went on, coming up closer to him, “that that’s why no one will ever be like her again — because no one will ever be taken in so completely by shams again, never by the empty shell of anything. But that’s just how she influenced us — all of us. Myself, you, Lizzie, Roddy, Francis ... we were all mixed up in it —
“And then the first moment that we really came into contact with her she wasn’t anything — wasn’t simply there. Do you know, Dr. Chris, seeing her now, just an old sick woman, conscious that everyone was escaping her, I almost love her!... I do indeed!”
She sprang up and stood before him and laughed, crying —
“I’m grown up, Dr. Chris, I’m grown up! It’s taken a time, but it’s happened at last! Meanwhile I shall be the most perfect wife, the most perfect mother, and when the Tiger is restive there’ll be the youngest Seddon to put it all into. Oh! What a child that child will be! Roddy and his impatience, me and my tempers — —”
She laughed and for an instant her old fierce defiance was there then, as though some spirit had flashed, before his eyes, through the window into space and freedom it was gone. She herself proclaimed its dismissal.
“It’s gone — it’s all gone — Dr. Chris. I’m the happiest woman in England!”
But even as she spoke her eyes were wistful; half-seen, half-recalled, eloquent with a colour, a flame that was too fierce for her present world, hung before her the memory of a moment when, in a darkened room, she had caught a letter to her lips, had sunk upon her knees before a passion whose face she had scarcely seen but whose voice she had heard and still now, in her new life, remembered. She had had her moment ... the last strains of its dying music were still in her ears. She caught her breath, then, turning, dismissed it; and, standing back from Christopher, gave him her last word —
“But look after Francis. Be with him as much as you can.... He needs all that you can spare — He’s got to be — he’s simply got to be — the success of the family!”
CHAPTER XIII
EPILOGUE — PROLOGUE
“Third Apparition — A Child Crowned ...”
Macbeth.
I
Late on the evening of May 17th Christopher heard of the relief of Mafeking. It was too advanced an hour, he understood, for the town to display its triumph that evening. Let Christopher wait.
The following night Brun, whom he had not seen for many months, appeared. The clocks had struck nine and Christopher was finishing his dinner, when the little man, shining and dapper, pleased and impersonal, was shown in.
“Hullo!” cried Christopher; “thought you were abroad somewhere.”
“I saw you at the Duchess’s funeral. Of course I was there. What do you suppose? Meanwhile come out now and see your fine people make manifestations.”
“Is there a noise?”
“A noise! Mon Dieu! But come and look!”
They went out together. Harley Street was silent and deserted and above it a night sky, scattered with stars, was serenely still. But, beyond the further roofs and chimneys, golden light hovered and a confused murmur, like the buzzing of bees, hummed upon space.
Through Oxford Street a great crowd of people was passing, but it was a crowd hurrying to find some other crowd. Oxford Street was plainly not the meeting-place. There was a good deal of shouting and singing; young men, five abreast, passed, girls with “ticklers” and whistles screamed and laughed and sang; merry bells were ringing, lights flared in the windows and now and again a rocket with a whiz and a shriek flashed into the sky and broke with a little angry splutter into coloured stars.
They crossed into Bond Street, down which other people were hurrying; sometimes a roaring echo of a multitude of discordant voices would be carried to them and then would be hidden again as though some huge door in front of them were swinging to and fro.
At the end of Bond Street, suddenly, as they might turn the corner of some sea road and, instantly, be confronted with the crash of a plunging surf, they met the crowd.
“Look out!” cried Brun, clutching hold of Christopher’s arm. “We don’t want to get drawn into this!”
Although they had apparently been walking quietly down Bond Street with no crowd about them, they now were pursued, upon all sides, by people. They raised themselves on to a doorstep, hanging there, bending their feet forward, and feeling that if the crowd in front of them were for a moment to give way down they would go!
Meanwhile, along Piccadilly, towards the clubs and Hyde Park Corner, a thick mass of human beings was pressing. This gathering seemed, of itself, to lack all human quality.
A face, a voice, a hand, a cry —— these things might now and again, as fish flash in a stream, detach themselves; sometimes a light from a flaring windo
w or an illumination would fling into pale, unreal relief a bundle of faces that represented, at that instant, a piece of human history, but sank instantly back again into chaos.
One might fancy that this was no crowd of human beings, but some new, unknown creature, dragging its coils from the sluggish bed of some hidden river, stamping to destruction as it went.
Then as though one were watching a show, with a click, the human element was back again. There two girls, their hats pushed aside, their hair half uncoiled, their cheeks flushed, their eyes partly bold and partly frightened, were screaming:
“Oo’re yer ‘itting? Don’t again then. Good old England! Gawd save — —”
It was not on the whole a crowd stirred only by national joy and pride. It may, in its units, when it first left its many homes, have announced its intention of giving “a jolly ‘ooray” for our splendid country and our Beloved Queen, but, once in a position from which there was no returning, once in the hands of a force that was stronger than any felt before, it had forgotten the country and its defeats and successes. Only two courses open. Either admit fear, feel that the breath of you is slowly but quite surely in process of being crushed out of you, feel that your arms and legs are being torn from you, that your ribs are being smashed into powder and that your heart is being pressed as flat as a pancake, let then panic overwhelm you, fight and scream to get out and away from it, see yourself finally falling, trampled, kicked, your face squashed to pulp, your eyes torn out, your breath strangled in your body ... so much for Fear. Or, on the other hand arouse Frenzy!
Be above and beyond your body, scream and shout, rattle rattles and blow whistles, trample upon everything that is near you, smack faces with your hand, pull off clothing and scatter hats and bonnets, scream aloud, no matter what it is that you are screaming, let your voice exclaim that at length, at length, you, a miserable clerk on nothing a week, in the City, are, for the first time in your existence, the Captain of your soul, the ruthless master of a wretched, law-making tyrannous world.... So much for Frenzy!
Either way, be it Frenzy or Fear, the Country has not much to say to it at all. With every moment it seems that from the Circus more bodies, more arms and legs are being pressed and crushed and packed; with every moment the clanging of the bells is louder, the fire in the sky higher and wilder, the singing, the screaming, the oaths and the curses are nearer, the defiance that loss of individuality gives.
“Let’s get back,” said Brun. He turned, but, at that moment, someone from behind him cried, “Oo are yer shoving there?” He was pushed, with Christopher, half falling, half clutching at arms and shoulders, forward into the street.
They righted themselves, Brun fastened upon Christopher’s arm, shouting into his ear, “We’d better go along with the crowd for a bit. We’ll get a chance of cutting up Half Moon Street. Can’t do anything else.”
They were pressed forward. Now, received into the bosom of the crowd, they were conscious both of the human element and of the stronger composite spirit that was mightier than anything human, a creation of the City against whose walls they were now so riotously shouting.
Next to Christopher was a young man in evening dress; his hat had disappeared, his collar was torn, sweat was pouring down his forehead and at the top of his voice he screamed again and again:
“Good old England! Good old England! Good old Bobs! Good old Bobs!” Squeezed up against Christopher’s arm was a stout body that looked as though it had once belonged to some elderly gentleman who liked white waistcoats and brass buttons. From somewhere, in obvious connection with these buttons, came a weak, breathless voice: “You’ll excuse me hanging on so, sir. It’s familiar — not my way — but this crowd ...”
A girl, with crimson face, leant against Christopher, put her arm round his neck, tickled his face with a feather; she screamed with laughter: “Oo-ray! Oo-ray — Oo-bloody-ray!”
“Look out, you swine!” somebody shouted.
“And ’e shouted out, did Bobs Come along, you stinking nobs, We will show you—”
Around them, above them, below them there tossed a whirlpool of noise, something outside and beyond the immediate sounds that they were making. Bells, voices, shouts that seemed to have no human origin, the very walls and stones of the City crying aloud.
Then, opposite the entrance to Half Moon Street another crowd seemed to meet them. There was pause. “Get out of it!” “Go the other way.” “Damn yer eyes, step off it.” “Go back, carn’t yer?”
It was then that for the briefest moment and for the first time in his life Christopher was afraid. Someone was pressing into his back until surely it would break, some other was leaning, and driving his chest in, driving it so that the breath flooded his face, his eyes, his nose. Colours rose and fell; someone’s evil breath burnt upon his cheeks. Light flashed before him in broad, steady flares.
“Brun, Brun,” he cried.
“All right,” a voice from many miles away answered him.
He was seized with the determination to survive. They thought that they could “down” him, but they should see that they were mistaken; his rage rising, he was no longer Dr. Christopher of Harley Street, but something savage, lawless beyond even his own control. He drove with his arms; curses met him and someone drove back into him and a ridiculous face with staring eyes that stupidly pleaded and a nose that was white and trembling and a mouth that dribbled at the corners came up against his.
“Keep back, can’t you?” someone shouted.
“Brun, Brun,” he called again, and then was conscious that bodies were giving way before him. His hand met a stomach covered with cloth and little hard buttons, and then coming against a woman’s arm soft and warm, Christopher had instantly gained possession of his soul once more.
“Hope I didn’t hurt you,” he heard himself saying, then, some barrier of legs and bodies yielding, found that he was flung out, away, stumbling, in spite of himself, on to his knee.
He caught someone by the arm, and it was Brun.
“Good Lord!” said Christopher.
“It’s all right,” answered Brun. “We’re in Half Moon Street. We’re out of it.”
II
Somewhere in the peaceful retirement behind the clubs they surveyed one another and then laughed. Brun — the dapper perfect Brun — had a bleeding cheek, a torn waistcoat, and a large and very unbecoming tear in his trousers. He was half angry and half amused — finally a survey of Christopher, with mud on his nose and his collar hanging from one button and revealing a fat red neck, restored his good temper.
“You’d better come back with me,” said Christopher, “and be cleaned up.”
They went back to Harley Street and half an hour later were sitting quietly in easy chairs, with the house as though it were made of cotton-wool, so silent and hidden was it, about them.
Both men were excited; Christopher had been changed by the events of the last few weeks, and Brun, if he had not been so personally involved, had seen enough to excite his most eager curiosity and speculation.
Brun’s sharp little eyes, flashing across the tip of his cigar, sought Christopher’s large comfortable face, fell from there over his large comfortable body, down at last to his large comfortable boots.
“Well ... First time I’ve seen a Continental crowd in England.”
“Continental?”
“Always your Englishman, however excited and of whatever rank, knows there are things a gentleman doesn’t do. Those people to-night had not that knowledge. Very interesting,” he added.
Christopher peacefully smoked, his body well spread out in the chair, his broad rather clumsy-looking fingers clutching devotedly at his pipe.
“So you were at the funeral the other day?”
“I was. I expect I mourned her more sincerely than any of you. I’d never seen her, but she meant a lot to me — as a symbol. And I like symbols better than human beings.”
He pulled his body together with a little jerk and leaned forward: “
Christopher, do you remember, a long while ago, going into a gallery in Bond Street and meeting Lady Adela Beaminster there and Lady Seddon? It was just after Ross’s portrait was first shown.”
“I remember,” said Christopher, nodding his head. “You were there.”
“I was. I was there with Arkwright the African explorer man. I only mention the day because Arkwright was interested in Lady Seddon, wanted to know all about her, and I talked a bit, I remember. My point to him was that there was a situation between that girl and her grandmother that would be worth anybody’s watching. I followed it myself for a while and then I lost it. But you’re a friend of the family — tell me, Christopher, what happened between those two.”
“Nothing,” Christopher said, laughing.
“Oh, nonsense,” Brun answered. “They were all in it. Something went on. Then Seddon had that accident ... Breton was in it.”
But Christopher only smiled.
“Well, if you won’t — n’importe — I have my own idea of it all. That girl was a fine girl, and the old woman was fine too —
“But how they must have hated one another!”
He chuckled; then sitting back in his chair, his little eyes on the ceiling, he said almost to himself— “Once, years ago, when I was very, very young and romantic — almost — just for a year or two I loved your Shelley. He was everything — I could quote him by the page.... He’s gone from me now, or most of him has, but there was one line that seemed to me then the most romantic thing I had ever read and has remained with me always. It went— ‘And we’ll have fires out of the Grand Duke’s wood’ — It’s in the letter to Maria Gisborne, I think — I’ve quite forgotten what the context is now — it’s all pretty trivial and unimportant, but those were the days when I made pictures — I saw it! Lord, Christopher, how it comes back! The wood, very thick, very large, very black, no sun — very still, and the great house behind it, huge and white, with long gardens and green lawns and peacocks, and the Grand Duke, with his powdered wig, and diamond-buckled shoes, his gorgeous suit, his jewelled sword, his snuff and his wine, his silly little dried-up yellow face.
