by Hugh Walpole
“It’s the kind of brain I have,” said Henry. “It’s always been the same. I never could do examinations. I have an untidy brain. I could always remember things about books but never anything else. It was just the same in the War. I always gave the wrong orders to the men. I never remembered what I ought to say. But when they put me into Intelligence and I could use my imagination a little, I wasn’t so bad. I can see Scott and Hogg and the others moving about, and I can see Edinburgh and the way the shops go and everything, but I can’t do the mechanical part. I knew I couldn’t at the very beginning.”
“You’d better go on working for a bit while I think about it,” said Duncombe.
Henry went back to the letters, a sick heavy weight of disappointment in his heart. He could have no doubt concerning the final judgment. How could it be otherwise? Well, at the most he had had a beautiful six weeks. He had learnt some very interesting things that he would never forget and that he could not have learnt in any other way. But how disappointing to lose his first job so quickly! How sad Millie would be and how sarcastic his father! And then the girl! How could he now entertain any hopes of doing anything for her when he had no job, no money, no prospects! . . .
A huge fat tear welled into his eye, he tried to gulp it back; he was too late. It plopped down on one of the letters. Another followed it. He sniffed and sniffed again. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. He fought for self-control and, after a hard sharp battle, gained the victory. The other tears were defeated and reluctantly went back to the place whence they had come.
The clock struck one; in five minutes’ time the gong would sound for luncheon. He heard Duncombe get up, cross the floor; once again he felt his hand on his shoulder.
“You certainly have shown imagination here,” he said. “There are some remarkable things in this book. Not all of it authentic, I fancy.” The hand pressed into his shoulder with a kindly emphasis. “It’s a pity that order isn’t your strong point. Never mind. We must make the best of it. We’ll get one of those dried-up young clerks at so much an hour to do this part of it. You shall do the rest. I think you’ll make rather a remarkable book of it.”
“You’re going to keep me?” Henry gulped.
“I’m going to keep you.” Duncombe moved back to his desk. “Now it’s luncheon-time. I suggest that you wash your hands — and your face.”
Henry stood for a moment irresolute.
“I don’t know what to say — I — to thank — —”
“Well, don’t,” said Duncombe. “I hate being thanked. Besides, there’s no call for it.”
The gong sounded.
This was an adventurous day for Henry; he discovered in the first place that Duncombe would not himself be in to luncheon, and he descended the cold stone stairs with the anticipatory shiver that he always felt when his master deserted him. Lady Bell-Hall neither liked nor trusted him, and showed her disapproval by showering little glances upon him, with looks of the kind that anxious hostesses bestow upon nervous parlour-maids when the potatoes are going the wrong way round or the sherry has been forgotten. Henry knew what these glances said. They said: “Oh, young man, I cannot conceive why my brother has chosen you for his secretary. You are entirely unsuited for a secretary. You are rash, ignorant, bad-mannered and impetuous. If there is one thing in life that I detest it is having some one near me whose words and actions are for ever uncertain and not to be calculated beforehand. I am never certain of you from one minute to another. I do wish you would go away and take a post elsewhere.”
Because Henry knew that Lady Bell-Hall was thinking this of him he was always in her presence twice as awkward as he need have been, spilt his soup, crumbled his bread and made strange sudden noises that were by himself entirely unexpected. To-day, however, he was spared his worst trouble, Mr. Light-Johnson. The only guests were Tom Duncombe and a certain Lady Alicia Penrose, who exercised over Lady Bell-Hall exactly the fascinated influence that a boa-constrictor has for a rabbit. Alicia Penrose certainly resembled a boa-constrictor, being tall, swollen and writhing, bound, moreover, so tightly about with brilliant clothing fitting her like a sheath that it was always a miracle to Henry that she could move at all. She must have been a lady of some fifty summers, but her skirts were very short, coming only just below her knees. She was a jolly and hearty woman, living entirely for Bridge and food, and not pretending to do otherwise. Henry could not understand why she should come so often to luncheon as she did. He supposed that she enjoyed startling Lady Bell-Hall with peeps into her pleasure-loving life, not that in her chatter she ever paused to listen to her hostess’s terrified little “Really, Alicia!” or “You can’t mean it, Alicia!” or “I never heard such a thing — never!”
After a while Henry arrived nearer the truth when he supposed that she came in order to obtain a free meal, she being in a state of chronic poverty and living in a small series of attics over a mews.
She was, it seemed, related to every person of importance and alluded to them all in a series of little nicknames that fell like meteors about table. “Podgy,” “Old Cuddles,” “Dusty Parker,” “Fifi Bones,” “Larry,” “Bronx,” “Traddles” — these were her familiar friends. When she was alone with Henry, Duncombe and his sister she was comparatively quiet, paying eager attention to her food (which was not very good) and sometimes including Henry in the conversation. But the presence of an outsider excited her terribly. She was, outwardly at any rate, as warmly excited about the domestic and political situation as was Lady Bell-Hall, but it did not seem to Henry that it went very deep. So long as her Bridge was uninterfered with everything else might go. She talked in short staccato sentences like a female Mr. Tingle.
To-day she was stirred by Tom Duncombe, not that she did not know him well enough, he being very much more in her set than were either his brother or sister. Henry had not liked Tom Duncombe from the first and to-day he positively loathed him. This was for a very simple human reason, namely, that he talked as though he, Henry, did not exist, looking over his head, and once, when Henry volunteered a comment on the weather, not answering him at all.
And then when the meal was nearly over Henry most unfortunately fell yet again into Lady Bell-Hall’s bad graces.
“Servants,” Lady Alicia was saying. “Servants. Been in a Registry Office all the morning. For father. He wants a footman and doesn’t want to pay much for him; you know all about father, Tommy.” (The Earl of Water-Somerset was notoriously mean). “Offering sixty — sixty for a footman. Did you hear anything like it? Couldn’t hear of a soul. All too damned superior. Saw one or two — never saw such men. All covered with tattoo marks and war-ribbons — extraordinary times we live in. Extraordinary. Puffy Clerk told me yesterday — remarkable thing. Down at the Withers on Sunday. Sunday afternoon. Short of a fourth. Found the second footman played. Had him in. Perfect gentleman. Son of a butcher but had been a Colonel in the War. Broke off to fetch in the tea — then sat down again afterwards. Best of the joke won twenty quid off Addy Blake and next morning asked to have his wages raised. Said if he was going to be asked to play bridge with the family must have higher wages. And Addy gave them him.”
Tom Duncombe guffawed.
“Dam funny. Dam funny,” he said. Lady Bell-Hall shook her head. “A friend of mine, a Mr. Light-Johnson — I think you’ve met him here, Alicia — told me the other day he’s got a man now who plays on the piano beautifully and reads Spanish. He says that we shall all be soon either killed in our beds or working for the Bolsheviks. What the servants are coming — —”
As the old butler brought in the coffee at this moment she stopped and began hurriedly to talk about Conan Doyle’s séances which seemed to her very peculiar — the pity of it was that we couldn’t really tell if it had happened just as he said. “Of course he’s been writing stories for years,” she said. “He’s the author of those detectives stories, Alicia — and writing stories for a long time must make one very regardless of the truth.”
&
nbsp; Then as the butler had retired they were able to continue. “I don’t know what servants are coming to,” she said. “They never want to go to church now as they used to.”
It was then that Henry made his plunge, as unfortunate in its impetuosity and tactlessness as had been his earlier one, it was perhaps the red supercilious countenance of Tom Duncombe that drove him forward.
“I’m glad servants are going to have a better time now,” he said, leaning forward and staring at Alicia Penrose as though fascinated by her bright colours. “I can’t think how they endured it in the old days before the War, in those awful attics people used to put them into, the bad food they got and having no time off and — —”
“Why, you’re a regular young Bolshevik!” Alicia Penrose cried, laughing. “Margaret, Charles got a Bolshevik for a secretary. Who’d have thought it?”
“I’m not a Bolshevik,” said Henry very red. “I want everything to be fair for everybody all the way round. The Bolsheviks aren’t fair any more than the — than the — other people used to be before the War, but it seems to me — —”
“Seen the Bradleys lately, Alicia?” said Tom Duncombe, speaking exactly as though Henry existed less than his sister’s dog, Pretty One, a nondescript mongrel asleep in a basket near the window.
“No,” said Alicia. “But that reminds me. Benjy Porker owes me five quid off a game a fortnight ago at Addy Blake’s. Glad you’ve reminded me, Thomas. That young man wants watching. Plays badly too — why in that very game he had four hearts — —”
Henry’s cup was full. Why, again, had he spoken? When would he learn the right words on the right occasion? Why had he painted himself even blacker than before in Lady Bell-Hall’s sight?
He went up to the library hating Tom Duncombe, but hating himself even more.
He sat down at his table determining to put in an hour at such slave-driving over the letters as they had never known in all their little lives. At four o’clock punctually he intended to present himself in Mrs. Tenssen’s sitting-room.
When he had been stirring the letters about for some ten minutes or so the quiet and peace of the library once again settled beautifully around him. It seemed to enfold him as though it loved him and wished him to know it. Once again the strange hallucination stole into his soul that the past was the present and the present the past, that there was no time nor place and that only thinking made it so, and that the only reality, the only faith, the only purpose in this life or in any other was love — love of beauty, of character, of truth, love above all of one human being for another. He was touched to an almost emotional softness by Duncombe’s action that morning. Touched, too, to the very soul by his own love affair, and touched finally to-day by the sense that he had that old books in the library, and the times and the places and the people that they stood for, were stretching out hands to him, trying to make him hear their voices.
“Only love us enough and we shall live. Everything lives by love. Touch us with some of your own enchantment. You are calling us back to life by caring for us. . . .” He stopped, his head up, his pen arrested, listening — as though he did in very truth hear voices coming to him from different parts of the room.
What he did hear, however, was the opening of the library door, and what he beheld was Tom Duncombe’s bulky figure standing for a moment hesitating in the doorway. He came forward but did not see Henry immediately. He stood again, listening, one finger to his lip like a schoolboy about to steal jam. Henry bent his head over his letters, but with one eye watched. All thoughts of love and tenderness were gone with that entrance. He hated Tom Duncombe and hated him for reasons more conclusive than personal, wounded vanity. Duncombe took some further steps and then suddenly saw Henry. He stopped dead, staring, then as Henry did not turn, but stayed with head bent forward, he moved on again still cautiously and with the clumsy hesitating, step that was especially his.
He arrived at his brother’s table and stopped there. Henry, looking sideways, could see half Duncombe’s heavy body, the red cheek, the thick arm and large, ill-shaped fingers. Those same fingers, he perceived, were taking up letters and papers from the table and putting them down again.
Then, like a sudden blow on the heart, certain words of Sir Charles’s spoken a week or two before came back to Henry. “By the way, Trenchard,” he had said, “if I’m out and you’re ever alone in the library here I want you to be especially careful to allow no one to touch the papers on my table, nor to permit any one to open a drawer — any one, mind you, not even my brother, unless I’ve told you first that he may. I leave you in charge — you or old Moffatt (the ancient butler), and if you are going, and I’m not yet back, lock the library and give the keys to Moffatt.”
He had promised that at the time, feeling rather proud that he should have been charged with so confidential an office. Now the time had come for him to keep his word, and the most difficult crisis of his life was suddenly upon him. There had been difficult moments in the War — Henry alone knew how difficult moments of physical challenge, moments of moral challenge too — but then in that desolate-hell-delivered country thousands of others had been challenged at the same time, and some especial courage seemed to have been given one with special occasion. Here he was alone, and alone in an especially arduous way. He did not know how much authority he really had, he did not know whether Sir Charles had in truth meant all that he had said, he did not know whether Tom Duncombe had not after all some right to be there.
Above all he was young, very young, for his age, doubtful of himself, fearing that he always struck a silly figure in any crisis that he had to face. On the other hand, he was helped by his real hatred of the red-flushed man at the table, unlike his brother-in-law Philip in that, namely, that he did not want every one to like him and, indeed, rather preferred to be hated by the people whom he himself disliked.
Tom Duncombe was now pulling at one of the drawers of the table. Henry stood up, feeling that the whole room was singing about his ears.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, smiling feebly, and knowing that his voice was a ridiculous one. “But would you mind waiting until Sir Charles comes in? I know he won’t be long — he said he’d be back by three.”
Duncombe moved away from the drawer and stared.
“Here,” he said. “Do you know where my brother keeps the key of this drawer? If so, hand it over.”
“Yes, I do know,” said Henry. (It was sufficiently obvious, as the key was hanging on a string at the far corner of the table.) “But I’m afraid I can’t give it you. Sir Charles told me that no one was to have it while he was away.”
Duncombe took in this piece of intelligence very slowly. He stared at Henry as though he were some curious and noxious kind of animal that had just crawled in from under the window. A purple flush suffused his forehead and nose.
“Good God!” he said. “The infernal cheek!”
They stood silently staring at one another for a moment, then Duncombe said:
“None of your lip, young man. I don’t know who the devil you think you are — anyway hand over the key.”
“No,” said Henry paling, “I can’t.”
“You can’t? What the devil do you mean?”
“Simply I can’t. I was told not to — I’m your brother’s secretary and have to do what he says — not what you say!”
Henry felt himself growing more happily defiant.
“Do you want to get the damnedest hiding you’ve ever had in your young life?”
“I don’t care what you do.”
“Don’t care what I do? Well, you soon will. Are you going to give me that key?” (All this time he was pulling at the drawers with angry jerks, pausing to stare at Henry, then pulling again.)
“No.”
“You’re not? You know I can get my brother to kick you out?”
“I don’t care. I’m going to do what he said.”
“You bloody young fool, he never said you weren’t to let me have it.”
“I may have misunderstood him. If I did, he’ll put it right when he comes back.”
“Yes, and a nice story I’ll tell him of your damned impertinence. Give me that key.”
“Sorry I can’t.”
“I’ll break your bloody neck.”
“That won’t help you to find the key.” Henry was feeling quite cheerful now.
“Christ! . . . You shall get it for that!”
He made two steps to come round the table to get at Henry — and saw the key. At the same instant Henry saw that he saw it. He ran forward to secure it, and in a second they were struggling together like two small boys in a manner unlovely, unscientific, even ludicrous. Ludicrous — had there been an observer, but for the fighters themselves it was one of those uncomfortable struggles when there are no rules of the game and anything may happen at any moment. Duncombe was large but fat and in the worst possible condition, with a large luncheon still unsettled and in a roving state. Moreover he had never been a fighter. Henry was not a fighter either and was handicapped at once because at the first onset his pince-nez were knocked on to the carpet. He fought then blindly in a blind world. He knew that Duncombe was kicking, and struggling to strike at him with his fists. Himself seemed strangely involved in Duncombe’s chest, at which he tore with his hands, while he bent his head to avoid the blows. He was breathing desperately, while there was such anger seething in his breast as he had never felt for anything human or inhuman in all his life. He felt Duncombe’s waistcoat tear, plunged at the shirt, and at once his fingers felt the bare flesh, the soft fat of Duncombe’s well-tended body. He was also conscious that he was muttering “You beast, you beast, you beast!” that his left leg was aching terribly and that Duncombe had his hand now firmly fixed in his hair and was pulling with all his strength.
Henry was going. . . . He was being pushed backwards. He caught a large fold of Duncombe’s fat between his fingers and pinched. Then he was conscious that in another moment he would be over; he was falling, the ceiling, far away, beat down toward him, his left arm shot out and his fingers fastened themselves into Duncombe’s posterior, which was large and soft, then, with a cry he fell, Duncombe on top of him.
