The Dawn of Reckoning

by James Hilton

  * * *

  CHAPTER X

  I

  Ward was due to arrive in England at the beginning of the following December. Many of his colleagues were Australians, and the English contingent returned in an ordinary passenger liner with what seemed no doubt to them the minimum of publicity. They had reckoned, however, without the all-embracing activities of modern journalism. This return of Ward and his companions, occurring as it did during the depth of a particularly lifeless autumn, attracted the frenzied zeal of a half-desperate Fleet Street. For weeks before the Oruma reached Tilbury the full orchestra of the great “dailies” had been preparing for the event. “The physician Ward,” like a popular novelist or actor, had somehow appealed to the capricious taste of the public, with the added benefit that it was Fleet Street, and not the man himself, who scored the financial advantage.

  The story of Ward’s undoubtedly heroic exploit, meagre in its certified details, had been so elaborated by people gifted with journalistic imagination that the figure of Ward stood as that of a Siegfried, giving vicarious disproof to the complaints that England was becoming altogether decadent. School children were told of Ward in the same sentence as of Drake and Florence Nightingale; during the two months of the rather slow homeward voyage from Tasmania by way of Sydney, Ward’s fame grew and spread and became fierce like a prairie fire fanned by a high wind.

  What happened might, of course, have been expected. On the arrival of the boat at Tilbury crowds of press-reporters and photographers gave the returning adventurers some foretaste of what they might expect. A multitude numbering at least five thousand surged round the cramped Fenchurch Street Station when the boat train came in, and insisted on staying until they had seen their hero. Their hero, however, escaped by a side exit and took a taxi to his hotel, a quiet one in the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury, well-known only to a few carefully selected families from the Provinces. In a few minutes the sleuths of Fleet Street had tracked him down, and in a few hours the quiet hotel in Bloomsbury was as well-known to the world as Claridge’s and the Savoy.

  Popular frenzy knew no bounds. The soberer journals, without in any way disparaging Ward, deplored the extraordinary madness of the enthusiasm. No foreign crowned head had ever been lionised on such a colossal scale. If Ward went to a theatre the audience cheered him more than the play; if he walked down Bond Street little knots of people followed him till as a last resort he had to take a taxi back to his hotel. He gave interviews good-humouredly, signed autographs for a solid hour every morning, and wrote several articles to Sunday newspapers for almost incredible sums.

  Then, towards Christmas, the enthusiasm died down almost as suddenly as it had risen. By the beginning of the New Year, Ward was, in the journalistic sense, quite “dead”; even the news that he had taken the post of surgeon at a famous London hospital did not attract a great deal of attention. He had, however, established himself permanently as a well-known personage, and both the book he was writing and the lectures he was proposing to give were certain of being popular successes.

  II

  At Chassingford, Philip and Stella found Ward looming even larger and larger on their horizon.

  Ever since the first cable containing news of him they had found it impossible to keep him out of their words and thoughts. They talked of him cordially and affectionately, as of a true and valued friend whom they were both of them proud to know: And now, with Ward’s name shouted from all the newspapers, and with everybody in Chassingford full of gossip about him, it was small wonder that, without their noticing it, a legend of him came into being and took habitation with them.

  It was Philip who would say, after dinner during the long lamp-lit winter evenings: “When I was at Cambridge Ward used to…” Some anecdote, pointed or pointless, with Ward for the hero. And then Stella would take up the tale with: “Did you ever notice when Ward used to come here how he…” The Legend was all about them, wrapping them round, enchanting them somehow, and each in a different way.

  Sometimes they rebelled against it, as if the clouds lifted suddenly and revealed to them the spell that had been cast over them. “Good God, we’ve been talking about Ward for two solid hours!” Philip exclaimed once. “He seems to be the only subject that makes us fluent.”

  That was before the newspaper “boom.” When that came, it was easier for Philip to explain the prominence that Ward held in their conversation; easier also to let themselves talk frankly and endlessly about him. They were not always in the mood for hero-worship. Sometimes they argued whether the sort of bravery Ward showed deserved any special praise at all, since apparently it was natural to him and required far less deliberate courage than Philip had to expend every time he made a public speech. Sometimes, especially at the height of the “boom,” they talked a little condescendingly of him, as of a mere popular idol. And once Stella cried out furiously: “Oh, for Heaven’s sake let’s stop talking about the fellow altogether. I’m sick to death of hearing his name from early morning till late at night. Even when I’m asleep I dream about him!”

  Philip’s voice quickened curiously: “What’s that?—You dream about him? Do you?”

  “Yes, often. Last night I dreamed the house was on fire and he saved us all from being burned to death.”

  She laughed oddly, as if to throw doubt upon whether she were speaking seriously or not.

  III

  They were rather surprised when weeks passed by and Ward did not visit them. “He must know we’re here,” said Stella. “Perhaps, though, he feels he’s too big for us now.” Philip shrugged his shoulders rather irritably. “We’re as good as he is, Stella, and I can’t imagine him fool enough to think otherwise. Most likely he’s afraid we should lionise him if he came here.”

  “Oh, but we wouldn’t, would we, Philip? I’d promise not to, anyway. Do write to him and ask him to come.”

  That was one mood. At another time she would implore Philip not to ask him to come. “He used to frighten me. Oh, don’t bother about him, Philip.”

  Then one evening Philip returned to Chassingford after a day in town. “I met Ward in the Strand this morning,” he said, observing Stella closely.

  She started, and something sharp and strange flashed into her eyes. “You did?—Really?—And what happened?”

  “Oh, we talked. He insisted on lunching me at Simpson’s. And I asked him to dinner.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes; why not?”

  “But Philip, I told you why not…I don’t want him to come…I couldn’t bear him—there’s something about him that—that oppresses me…And you promised me you wouldn’t ask him…Oh, Philip, why did you when you knew…?”

  “It’s all right.” His voice was like a could douche upon her excitement. “You needn’t get alarmed. He declined my invitation.”

  “He couldn’t come?”

  “Couldn’t…or wouldn’t.”

  She gave a faint gasp of relief. “That’s lucky…isn’t it?” she said, weakly. “But you oughtn’t to have asked him…”

  IV

  Three hours later before going to sleep she said uneasily: “Philip, I wonder why Ward wouldn’t come?…If he won’t accept an invitation from you, I think I’ll write to him…myself…”

  And she added, with careful slowness: “I’m—I’m not going to be silly about him any more.”

  V

  But it happened that when she wrote a note to Ward asking him to come to a dinner-party at the Hall, he replied to her as he had done to Philip—by a courteous refusal. He was too busy; his work at the hospital would not allow of his going so far out of town and so on. She wrote back immediately a sharp, extremely feminine letter that she would probably have torn up on a second reading, “I don’t believe that your work prevents you from visiting your friends,” she wrote. “You can choose your own evening—or make it lunch if that suits you better. There are good late trains from Chassingford to town, and in any case we should be able to put you up for the night. If you don�
��t come, Philip, I know, will be both hurt and disappointed…” She posted the letter in hot haste, as if aware that a delay would probably result in its being torn up.

  By return an answer came, not to her but to Philip, stating that although he (Ward) was very busy, he would try to look them up some time in the near future if they would fix on a suitable evening.

  “So now,” said Philip, as he handed her the letter, “you’ve got what you want, or else what you don’t want. Which is it? I don’t know.”

  “And neither do I,” replied Stella. Then she gave him a look half-imploring, half-defiant, and returned the letter without glancing at it. “An acceptance, I suppose?”

  “Yes. Shall I ask him for next week?”

  “To-morrow if you like,” she replied instantly. “It makes no difference to me.”

  VI

  In the end Philip selected and Ward agreed to an evening about a week later. When the day came the weather was wild and rainy—one of those fierce January days that die fighting, with twilight, calm as death, to give an awful quietus to the roaring of winds and rain. The darkness, when it crept over the mist-hung lawns, drew with it a pall of silence, more terrible by far than the storm that had raged all day. Philip was away in a neighbouring town on business, and Stella took tea alone amidst the sombre cosiness of the library.

  There were times in her life, and this was one, when she felt that all her years in England and in an English household had meant nothing to her; that deep down in her was a heart-beat still untamed by the colder northern clime. Something, she felt, was on the verge of happening; something that would resolve her out of uncertainty into a sharp tumultuous confidence. The Hall, with its breathings of distant days and traditions which she did not and could not share, appeared cold and foreign to her; she was an interloper, and the old walls, by their very calmness, were telling her so. Only yesterday, it seemed, she had sat on the floor against Philip’s knees and had listened to him expounding to her all the small accurate things that were not worth knowing. How kind and good he was to her, and had been, ever since their first meeting. He loved her, she knew, with a love that was like the rest of him, tireless and at times tiresome; a love that never flagged and never rioted; that was at once patient and profound; intellectual without romance and physical without passion.

  She poked up the fire and lit an Egyptian cigarette. The hours crawled on; the night was very dark and still. Something, she was sure, was going to happen…A strange thing was already in her heart that had never been there before; a fear of the house itself, of the long dark corridors and the black windows with the blinds yet undrawn. Almost in panic she climbed the stairs to her bedroom and began to dress for dinner.

  VII

  Ward came.

  The first thing she noticed was the merely physical change in him. Somehow she had never reckoned on his coming back any different. He had been ill, she knew, but it had never occurred to her that his illness would alter his appearance.

  Now she stood almost aghast as Venner ushered him into the drawing-room. She drew in her breath tightly, as if facing an apparition; but she perceived the truth subtly and at once; he had gone out to the Antarctic a boy and had come back a man. There was manliness in every line and furrow of his face; the old winsome, almost unearthly boyishness had grown into a grim and passionate virility. He did not look so young as he was, but had instead a deep half-tragical maturity that seemed perfectly in accord with the touches of iron-grey hair round his temples.

  She felt, as she met him and as he gave her hand a quick indefinite pressure, a sudden leaping up of something within her, as at a new and decisive contact. The twinkling electric lights of the drawing-room swam together into a dim opaque mist in which Ward, grim and dinner-jacketed, was the heroic centre-piece; a curious columnar immensity about him seemed to dwarf and obscure all else for the time being, so that she had no presence of mind to do anything but smile weakly and avoid his eyes.

  Nothing, she told herself, as she sat at the dinner-table, looking dimly across the sparkling arena of silver and cut-glass, with the red-shaded lamps sending their warm glow to illumine the faces of the men—nothing would ever be the same again. She was aware, in a vague half-conscious way, that decisive moments in her life were passing. The whole orderly routine of dinner slipped past her like episodes in a crowded dream; miracles were happening, and one of them was her own outward quietness, when inside her such commotion was raging. She wondered what would happen if she were to scream suddenly at the top of her voice. She pictured Philip’s startled face, the gossip in the servants’ room afterwards, Venner perhaps dropping a tray of liqueurs in his astonishment…and Ward, calm and statuesque, regarding her outbreak as some new and interesting form of disease.

  Conversation, never Ward’s strongest point, surprised her by its occasional vividness. He was different; he was different; he was a grown man now, touching a chord in her that had never been touched before and that racked her with exquisite agony. He brought back to her mind those childhood days in a far country; memories vast yet simple, clean and naked as pain…And meanwhile Philip chattered politics and discussed his prospects for the next election.

  VIII

  As she had guessed, Ward spoke hardly at all about his experiences in the South. Philip, indeed, did not give him many chances of doing so; he seemed immensely glad of the opportunity to discuss the tangled intricacies of political tactics with one who, after so long abroad, might be expected to thirst for them. “If the Government throws out the amendment…then a dissolution…general election…If, on the other hand…” This sort of thing made Philip as excited as it was ever possible for him to be. He absently collected cutlery into a heap around his wine-glass as he expounded, and every now and then he tapped the table lightly with one finger in emphasis. A curious enthusiasm filled his eyes as he steered carefully through the meshes of a somewhat technical argument; Venner kept filling up his glass with port and he drank automatically.

  At last Ward remarked, half-smiling: “I’m sure Mrs. Monsell can’t be interested in all this, Philip. Don’t you think we’re boring her rather?”

  Philip glanced round as one roused suddenly from an intoxicating dream. “My wife is very interested in politics,” he said distantly. “Aren’t you, Stella?”

  She had been sitting there, not in the least bored (for she had not been listening), but entranced by her own particular dream. Something prompted her to reply: “Interested, yes, but not thrilled.”

  Ward looked up suddenly and gave her a quick glance, half-puzzled, half-sympathetic.

  IX

  When they went into the drawing-room, it became apparent to Stella, at any rate, that Philip had drunk more than was good for him Not that he had drunk a great deal, but that alcohol, even in very small quantities, had an immediate effect on him. It did not make him brilliant and vivacious (or he would have been more of a success at public dinners) nor did it make him noisy or boisterous; it merely afflicted him with an irresistible and undignified tiredness. And now, as he painfully settled himself in an arm-chair, he struggled hard to prevent the fuddled glaze from obscuring his eyes.

  Stella found conversation with Ward rather difficult, for he kept appealing to Philip, as if unwilling to be dragged into a tête-à-tête with her; and Philip, after much laborious repetition, could be induced to reply no more than vague affirmatives. His eyes were expressionless, and his whole posture was one of limpness and stupefaction. Ward, seated a little to the rear, would not be able to observe him so accurately, and Stella was glad of this. Her chief aim now was to prevent him from realizing that Philip was fuddled. She felt ashamed; and it was the first time in her life that she had been ashamed of Philip. When he had broken down in the middle of the Loamport speech years before, she had been passionately sorry for him; even at the recent football-match fiasco she had been no more than disappointed. But now, viewing his crumpled figure, more undignified than ever because of the immaculateness of his evenin
g clothes, she felt, not sorry, nor disappointed, but bitterly, poignantly ashamed. She would have felt less shame if he had come home roaring drunk in a taxi after a night at a cabaret, if his clothes had been torn after a mêllée with a night-porter, or if, on the threshold, he had begun to knock her about. She could have forgiven boisterous animal spirits, however objectionable; it was this harmless placid tippling, this refined domestic half-drunkenness, that forced on her the deepest sense of personal humiliation.

  She talked almost frantically to Ward, for she knew that Philip’s condition would not last long. She discussed the weather, politics, family affairs, Hungary, anything she could think of to stave off a recognition by Ward of what was the matter with Philip. And then, when she began to think she would succeed, Ward leaned forward towards her, and said, lowering his voice to a whisper: “I hope you won’t think me rude if, as Philip’s friend and also a medical man, I ask a rather personal question. Why does Philip take alcoholic drinks when he obviously can’t stand them?”

  She flushed hotly, and for a second was in the mood to snub him as crushingly as she could. Then, to her own infinite surprise, a feeling of calm satisfaction came over her; she was glad he knew; it was so much easier for her than if she were still trying to disguise the truth from him.

  She answered, very calmly: “I don’t know. I suppose he doesn’t realize…” She paused, and then found herself defending Philip almost instinctively. “He doesn’t often take too much, and of course he’s never really—really drunk…It was that argument he had with you—he got excited and didn’t realize quite what he was drinking.”