Delphi Collected Works of Hugh Walpole (Illustrated)

by Hugh Walpole

  He greeted and welcomed it as a relief after the horror of Hogg’s presence. Poor Amy! She was in as bad a way as he now — they were at last in the same box.

  “Yes,” he said, “that was Hogg.”

  Looking at her now in this new way, he was also able to see that she herself was changed. She figured definitely as an actor now with an odd white intensity in her face, with some mysterious purpose in her eyes, with a resolve in the whole poise of her body that seemed to add to her height.

  “Well,” she said, “what train are you taking up to London?”

  “What train?” he repeated after her.

  “Yes, to see Falk.”

  “I am not going to see Falk.”

  “You’re not going up to him?”

  “Why should I go?”

  “Why should you go? You can ask me that?...To stop this terrible marriage.”

  “I don’t intend to stop it.”

  There was a pause. She seemed to summon every nerve in her body to her control.

  The twitching of her fingers against her dress was her only movement.

  “Would you please tell me what you mean to do? After all, I am his mother.”

  The tenderness that he had felt at first sight of her was increasing so strangely that it was all he could do not to go over to her. But his horror of any demonstration kept him where he was. “Amy, dear,” he said, “I’ve had a dreadful day — in every way a terrible day. I haven’t had time, as things have gone, to think things out. I want to be fair. I want to do the right thing. I do indeed. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by going up to London. One thing only now I’m clear about. He’s got to marry the girl now he’s gone off with her. To do him justice he intends to do that. He says that he has done her no harm, and we must take his word for that. Falk has been many things — careless, reckless, selfish, but never in all his life dishonourable. If I went up now we should quarrel, and perhaps something irreparable would occur. Even though he was persuaded to return, the mischief is done. He must be just to the girl. Every one in the town knows by now that she went with him — her father has been busy proclaiming the news even though there has been no one else.”

  Mrs. Brandon said nothing. She had made in herself the horrible discovery, after reading Falk’s letter, that her thoughts were not upon Falk at all, but upon Morris. Falk had flouted her; not only had he not wanted her, but he had gone off with a common girl of the town. She had suddenly no tenderness for him, no anger against him, no thought of him except that his action had removed the last link that held her.

  She was gazing now at Morris with all her eyes. Her brain was fastened upon him with an intensity sufficient almost to draw him, hypnotised, there to her feet. Her husband, her home, Polchester, these things were like dim shadows.

  “So you will do nothing?” she said.

  “I must wait,” he said, “I know that when I act hastily I act badly....” He paused, looked at her doubtfully, then with great hesitation went on: “We are together in this, Amy. I’ve been — I’ve been — thinking of myself and my work perhaps too much in the past. We’ve got to see this through together.”

  “Yes,” she answered, “together.” But she was thinking of Morris.

  Chapter VIII

  The Wind Flies Over the House

  Later, that day, she went from the house. It was a strange evening. Two different weathers seemed to have met over the Polchester streets. First there was the deep serene beauty of the May day, pale blue faintly fading into the palest yellow, the world lying like an enchanted spirit asleep within a glass bell, reflecting the light from the shining surface that enfolded it. In this light houses, grass, cobbles lay as though stained by a painter’s brush, bright colours like the dazzling pigment of a wooden toy, glittering under the shining sky.

  This was a normal enough evening for the Polchester May, but across it, shivering it into fragments, broke a stormy and blustering wind, a wind that belonged to stormy January days, cold and violent, with the hint of rain in its murmuring voice. It tore through the town, sometimes carrying hurried and, as it seemed, terrified clouds with it; for a while the May light would be hidden, the air would be chill, a few drops like flashes of glass would fall, gleaming against the bright colours — then suddenly the sky would be again unchallenged blue, there would be no cloud on the horizon, only the pavements would glitter as though reflecting a glassy dome. Sometimes it would be more than one cloud that the wind would carry on its track — a company of clouds; they would appear suddenly above the horizon, like white-faced giants peering over the world’s rim, then in a huddled confusion they would gather together, then start their flight, separating, joining, merging, dwindling and expanding, swallowing up the blue, threatening to encompass the pale saffron of the lower sky, then vanishing with incredible swiftness, leaving warmth and colour in their train.

  Amy Brandon did not see the enchanted town. She heard, as she left the house, the clocks striking half-past six. Some regular subconscious self, working with its accustomed daily duty, murmured to her that to-night her husband was dining at the Conservative Club and Joan was staying on to supper at the Sampsons’ after the opening tennis party of the season. No one would need her — as so often in the past no one had needed her. But it was her unconscious self that whispered this to her; in the wild stream into whose current during these last strange months she had flung herself she was carried along she knew not, she cared not, whither.

  Enough for her that she was free now to encompass her desire, the only dominating, devastating desire that she had ever known in all her dead, well-ordered life. But it was not even with so active a consciousness as this that she thought this out. She thought out nothing save that she must see Morris, be with Morris, catch from Morris that sense of appeasement from the torture of hunger unsatisfied that never now left her.

  In the last weeks she had grown so regardless of the town’s opinion that she did not care how many people saw her pass Morris’ door. She had, perhaps, been always regardless, only in the dull security of her life there had been no need to regard them. She despised them all; she had always despised them, for the deference and admiration that they paid her husband if for no other reason. Despised them too, it might be, because they had not seen more in herself, had thought her the dull, lifeless nonentity in whose soul no fires had ever burned.

  She had never chattered nor gossiped with them, did not consider gossip a factor in any one’s day; she had never had the least curiosity about any one else, whether about life or character or motive.

  There is no egoist in the world so complete as the disappointed woman without imagination.

  She hurried through the town as though she were on a business of the utmost urgency; she saw nothing and she heard nothing. She did not even see Miss Milton sitting at her half-opened window enjoying the evening air.

  Morris himself opened the door. He was surprised when he saw her; when he had closed the door and helped her off with her coat he said as they walked into the drawing-room:

  “Is there anything the matter?”

  She saw at once that the room was cheerless and deserted.

  “Is Miss Burnett here?” she asked.

  “No. She went off to Rafiel for a week’s holiday. I’m being looked after by the cook.”

  “It’s cold.” She drew her shoulders and arms together, shivering.

  “Yes. It is cold. It’s these showers. Shall I light the fire?”

  “Yes, do.”

  He bent down, putting a match to the paper; then when the fire blazed he pushed the sofa forwards.

  “Now sit down and tell me what’s the matter.”

  She could see that he was extremely nervous.

  “Have you heard nothing?”

  “No.”

  She laughed bitterly. “I thought all the town knew by this time.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Falk has run away to London with the daughter of Samuel Hogg.”


  “Samuel Hogg?”

  “Yes, the man of the ‘Dog and Pilchard’ down in Seatown.”

  “Run away with her?”

  “Yesterday. He sent us a letter saying that he had gone up to London to earn his own living, had taken this girl with him, and would marry her next week.”

  Morris was horrified.

  “Without a word of warning? Without speaking to you? Horrible! The daughter of that man.... I know something about him...the worst man in the place.”

  Then followed a long silence. The effect on Morris was as it had been on Mrs. Brandon — the actual deed was almost lost sight of in the sudden light that it threw on his passion. From the very first the most appealing element of her attraction to him had been her loneliness, the neglect from which she suffered, the need she had of comfort.

  He saw her as a woman who, for twenty years, had had no love, although in her very nature she had hungered for it; and if she had not been treated with actual cruelty, at least she had been so basely neglected that cruelty was not far away. It was not true to say that during these months he had grown to hate Brandon, but he had come, more and more, to despise and condemn him. The effeminacy in his own nature had from the first both shrunk from and been attracted by the masculinity in Brandon.

  He could have loved that man, but as the situation had forbidden that, his feeling now was very near to hate.

  Then, as the weeks had gone by, Mrs. Brandon had made it clear enough to him that Falk was all that she had left to her — not very much to her even there, perhaps, but something to keep her starved heart from dying. And now Falk was gone, gone in the most brutal, callous way. She had no one in the world left to her but himself. The rush of tenderness and longing to be good to her that now overwhelmed him was so strong and so sudden that it was with the utmost difficulty that he had held himself from going to the sofa beside her.

  She looked so weak there, so helpless, so gentle.

  “Amy,” he said, “I will do anything in the world that is in my power.”

  She was trembling, partly with genuine emotion, partly with cold, partly with the drama of the situation.

  “No,” she said, “I don’t want to do a thing that’s going to involve you. You must be left out of this. It is something that I must carry through by myself. It was wrong of me, I suppose, to come to you, but my first thought was that I must have companionship. I was selfish — —”

  “No,” he broke in, “you were not selfish. I am prouder that you came to me than I can possibly say. That is what I’m here for. I’m your friend. You know, after all these months, that I am. And what is a friend for?” Then, as though he felt that he was advancing too dangerously close to emotion, he went on more quietly:

  “Tell me — if it isn’t impertinent of me to ask — what is your husband doing about it?”

  “Doing? Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No. I thought that he would go up to London and see Falk, but he doesn’t feel that that is necessary. He says that, as Falk has run away with the girl, the most decent thing that he can do is to marry her. He seems very little upset by it. He is a most curious man. After all these years, I don’t understand him at all.”

  Morris went on hesitatingly. “I feel guilty myself. Weeks ago I overheard gossip about your son and some girl. I wondered then whether I ought to say something to you. But it’s so difficult in these cases to know what one ought to do. There’s so much gossip in these little Cathedral towns. I thought about it a good deal. Finally, I decided that it wasn’t my place to meddle.”

  “I heard nothing,” she answered. “It’s always the family that hears the talk last. Perhaps my husband’s right. Perhaps there is nothing to be done. I see now that Falk never cared anything for any of us. I cheated myself. I had to cheat myself, otherwise I don’t know what I’d have done. And now his doing this has made me suspicious of everything and of every one. Yes, even of a friendship like ours — the greatest thing in my life — now — the only thing in my life.”

  Her voice trembled and dropped. But still he would not let himself pass on to that other ground. “Is there nothing I can do?” he asked. “I suppose it would do no good if I were to go up to London and see him? I knew him a little—”

  Vehemently she shook her head.

  “You’re not to be involved in this. At least I can do that much — keep you out of it.”

  “How is he going to live, then?”

  “He talks about writing. He’s utterly confident, of course. He always has been. Looking back now, I despise myself for ever imagining that I was of any use to him. I see now that he never needed me — never at all.”

  Suddenly she looked across at him sharply.

  “How is your sister-in-law?” His colour rose.

  “My sister-in-law?”

  “Yes.”

  “She isn’t well.”

  “What — ?”

  “It’s hard to say. The doctor looked at her and said she needed quiet and must go to the sea. It’s her nerves.”

  “Her nerves?”

  “Yes, they got very queer. She’s been sleeping badly.”

  “You quarrelled.”

  “She and I? — yes.”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She’s getting a little too much for me, I think.”

  She looked him in the face.

  “No, you know it isn’t that. You quarrelled about me.”

  He said nothing.

  “You quarrelled about me,” she repeated. “She always disliked me from the beginning.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, yes, she did. Of course I saw that. She was jealous of me. She saw, more quickly than any one else, how much — how much we were going to mean to one another. Speak the truth. You know that is the best.”

  “She didn’t understand,” Morris answered slowly. “She’s stupid in some things.”

  “So I’ve been the cause of your quarrelling, of your losing the only friend you had in your life?”

  “No, not of my losing it. I haven’t lost her. Our relationship has shifted, that’s all.”

  “No. No. I know it is so. I’ve taken away the only person near you.”

  And suddenly turning from him to the back of the sofa, hiding her face in her hands, she broke into passionate crying.

  He stood for a moment, taut, controlled, as though he was fighting his last little desperate battle. Then he was beaten. He knelt down on the floor beside the sofa. He touched her hair, then her cheek. She made a little movement towards him. He put his arms around her.

  “Don’t cry. Don’t cry. I can’t bear that. You mustn’t say that you’ve taken anything from me. It isn’t true. You’ve given me everything... everything. Why should we struggle any longer? Why shouldn’t we take what has been given to us? Your husband doesn’t care. I haven’t anybody. Has God given me so much that I should miss this? And has He put it in our hearts if He didn’t mean us to take it? I love you. I’ve loved you since first I set eyes on you. I can’t keep away from you any longer. It’s keeping away from myself. We’re one. We are one another — not alone, either of us — any more....”

  She turned towards him. He drew her closer and closer to him. With a little sigh of happiness and comfort she yielded to him.

  There was only one cloud in the dim green sky, a cloud orange and crimson, shaped like a ship. As the sun was setting, a little wind stirred, the faint aftermath of the storm of the day, and the cloud, now all crimson, passed over the town and died in fading ribbons of gold and orange in the white sky of the far horizon.

  Only Miss Milton, perhaps, among all the citizens of the town, waiting patiently behind her open window, watched its career.

  Chapter IX

  The Quarrel

  Every one has known, at one time or another in life, that strange unexpected calm that always falls like sudden snow on a storm-tossed country, after some great crisis or upheaval. The blow has seemed so catast
rophic that the world must be changed with the force of its fall — but the world is not changed; hours pass and days go by, and no one seems to be aware that anything has occurred...it is only when months have gone, and perhaps years, that one looks back and sees that it was, after all, on such and such a day that life was altered, values shifted, the face of the world turned to a new angle.

  This is platitudinous, but platitudes are not platitudes when we first make our personal experience of them. There seemed nothing platitudinous to Brandon in his present experiences. The day on which he had received Falk’s letter had seemed to fling him neck and crop into a new world — a world dim and obscure and peopled with new and terrifying devils. The morning after, he was clear again, and it was almost as though nothing at all had occurred. He went about the town, and everybody behaved in a normal manner. No sign of those strange menacing figures, the drunken painter, the sinister, smiling Hogg; every one as usual.

  Ryle complacent and obedient; Bentinck-Major officious but subservient; Mrs. Combermere jolly; even, as he fancied, Foster a little more amiable than usual. It was for this open, outside world that he had now for many years been living; it was not difficult to tell himself that things here were unchanged. Because he was no psychologist, he took people as he found them; when they smiled they were pleased and when they frowned they were angry.

  Because there was a great deal of pressing business he pushed aside Falk’s problem. It was there, it was waiting for him, but perhaps time would solve it.

  He concentrated himself with a new energy, a new self-confidence, upon the Cathedral, the Jubilee, the public life of the town.

  Nevertheless, that horrible day had had its effect upon him. Three days after Falk’s escape he was having breakfast alone with Joan.

  “Mother has a headache,” Joan said. “She’s not coming down.”