He confessed that he hadn’t written to Ellenger for some months, “but I’m no good at letter-writing,” he said; “I never seem to get time.”
“With so much novel-reading to do in the evenings, you mean?” said Adrian.
Ronny laughed. “Well, perhaps when I’ve got you here to jog my memory I’ll manage a letter sometimes. Still, why should you? You never had much use for Len, had you?”
“No, but you had,” said Adrian.
“M … m, yes!” Ronny replied. “He was an awful old nuisance sometimes.” He changed the subject suddenly, in his well-known fashion, and Adrian thought to himself: “He’s just the same as he always was. What he likes is to be a centre of attraction and to have people dancing round, but he won’t undertake any responsibility in return.” Yet, after all, he reflected, that careless, easy come, easy go, butterfly nature of his was a large part of his charm. Adrian himself had once more succumbed to the charm, though not quite so abjectly as he had done at Charminster.
After supper Ronny returned to the sofa and his book and pipe, and Adrian, taking the armchair, set to work with a book on musical theory which he had bought that afternoon. He was quite content that he and Ronny should ignore one another. So long as Ronny was there he could ignore him, but if he had been out his mind would have been distractingly occupied with him. With Ronny there in the room, he could concentrate all his attention on his work, conscious of his presence only in the peace of mind and security which it brought to him.
The room was silent except for the spasmodic purring and fluttering of the fire. The evening crept on to nine o’clock, half-past nine, a quarter to ten. Then the frontdoor bell rang. A long pause, and then the door was opened: another pause, and there were sounds of footsteps on the stairs. Ronny sat up and listened. “That sounds like Esmé,” he said. He swung his legs to the floor and stood up. There was a tap on the door and simultaneously it opened. At the sound Adrian’s peace of mind shrivelled like a flower in the fire.
Esmé, it appeared, had just looked in on her way from the Hammertons. After a brief and rather scanty recognition of Adrian’s presence, she and Ronny dropped into a lively, bantering chatter in which Adrian detected a lurking asperity. He himself sat silent in his chair, miserably conscious that he ought to get up and leave them alone, yet unable to think of an easy and plausible way of doing so. And so he sat, horribly embarrassed, for an hour that seemed interminable. Esmé, it turned out, was annoyed about something that was not very apparent to the uninitiated, but it included some very keen-edged remarks about “the Turtle,” who, Adrian gathered, was Gill Weston, the girl in the black cloak. Ronny began by teasing her, but at last, as Adrian perceived by the familiar signs, he grew bored. “My dear girl,” he said at last, with the frown that Adrian knew so well, “why keep on at it? I’ve told you it wasn’t my fault. I simply couldn’t help myself.”
“No, you never can,” Esmé replied curtly. And then a long, wearisome wrangle began. Adrian sat there, bored, humiliated, miserable. He longed to go, but still something held him back. The other two had long since forgotten his presence, and at last he ventured to get out of his chair and quietly leave the room. They did not seem to notice his departure. From his bedroom upstairs he could hear their raised voices—the hard, precise tones of hers, the deeper, more lively inflections of Ronny’s, alternating in quick succession. After he had got into bed they died down to a low murmur, and twice he heard a subdued ripple of laughter from Esmé. Though he was extremely sleepy he was determined to remain awake till he had heard Esmé go, and he lay, miserable and burning with jealousy, listening to the low, intermittent murmur of talk.
He had lain, with ears alert, for nearly an hour, when he heard Ronny’s bedroom door open and, after a few moments, close again. Esmé must still be there, for if she had gone he would certainly have heard the sitting-room door open and even the careful opening and shutting of the front door. What was happening, then? Could she have gone with Ronny into his bedroom? The thought overwhelmed him. He lay on his side, curled up, motionless, in an agony of jealousy and shame. Then, throwing back the bedclothes, he went to the window, opened it with immense caution, and leaned out. In the windows below, the windows of the sitting-room, he could see a faint luminosity piercing the drawn blinds. The sight brought him some comfort. Perhaps, then, she had remained in the sitting-room. He drew down the window noiselessly and, getting back into bed, lay listening again. But he could hear nothing now, not a sound, and when at last he fell asleep he had not heard her go.
He awoke at seven next morning and wondered sleepily what was the meaning of the heavy weight on his mind. But next minute he had recalled everything. Was she still there? Would he find the table laid for three when he went down to breakfast? But no, they would not dare to face Annie, the maid, who would certainly tell Mrs. Draper. If she had stayed the night she would have sneaked out already, before the house began to stir. And yet, when he had had his bath and dressed and went down to breakfast, he half expected to find her there, and it was a delicious relief to discover the sitting-room empty and quiet in the sane morning light and breakfast for two on the table. It was as if the previous evening and his miserable vigil had been no more than a nightmare. Ronny’s door was ajar, and his cheerful voice called out: “Carry on, Little Man. I won’t be two shakes.”
In a moment he came in, alert and smiling, and sat down, lifting the cover from the bacon and eggs. “I hope you hadn’t a very thin time last night,” he said. “But you mustn’t mind Esmé. She’s always barging in.”
“She must have … have stayed pretty late,” said Adrian, hoping that Ronny’s reply would set his mind at rest. But the reply, when it came, only increased his doubts.
“She did,” chuckled Ronny, with sparkling eyes: “damned late!”
What Ronny had said was only too true. Esmé was always barging in, and if it wasn’t Esmé it was one or more of the others. There was hardly an evening, except those when Ronny himself was out, that was not interrupted by an invasion. Adrian got to loathe the sound of the front-door bell. If only he had taken rooms by himself and never renewed his friendship with Ronny. But it was too late now: he couldn’t now leave Lennox Street. Ronny would be astounded and also offended if he were: to suggest such a thing. Besides, he didn’t want to leave. That was the worst of it. Once again he was entangled in the snare.
It was fortunate that he had his work. For the greater part of the day it absorbed his attention. The enthusiasm with which he had come to London had revived as soon as he had settled down to work, and now he was immersed in it, heart and soul. When he was not at Lennox Street he was busy and happy. But when work was over he hurried back home, hoping to see something of Ronny and dreading the disappointment and misery which were almost certain to be awaiting him there.
“I wish you wouldn’t bottle yourself up so when people come in,” Ronny had said to him after one of the usual invasions. “You’re so blooming stand-offish.”
Adrian blushed scarlet. “They don’t like me,” he said at last. “I’m not their sort.”
“You don’t give them a chance, Little Man.”
“They don’t give me a chance,” said Adrian.
“They would all right if only you joined in a bit. Just barge in with a bit of nonsense now and then. It doesn’t matter a damn what you say: only say something and they’ll take you for granted. But you sit about, all silent and disapproving, so what can they do but just leave you to yourself?”
Adrian sighed. “I know,” he said. “It’s my own fault, but I can’t help it. The fact is, I … I …”
“You don’t like them.”
“I hate them,” said Adrian, turning scarlet again.
Ronny laughed. He was not in the least offended. “Well, you are a one,” he said. “You’re like Esmé. When you’re both so good at hating, it’s a wonder you two don’t hit it off. But then you don’t like girls.”
“Don’t I?” said Adrian. He was surprise
d at Ronny’s certainty on a point which he had never himself considered.
Ronny laughed again. “No, Little Man,” he said, “you don’t. There’s no doubt about that.”
After two months of this existence he went for a few days to Abbot’s Randale. His grandfather had written telling him that Clara and Bob were there, and he had felt a sudden longing to escape into the calm and stimulating society of the family. He wrote, therefore, saying that he would turn up on the following Friday.
It was mild March weather, and on the Friday morning he had a wire from his Uncle Bob telling him that they would meet him with the car at Wilmore, and there, when his train reached Wilmore, were Bob and Clara waiting for him. Clara and Adrian sat together at the back.
“The Muse detained your grandfather,” said Clara as they drove out of the station yard. “She has been fairly reasonable since we arrived, but yesterday and today she has insisted on a little attention. Did you know that your mother was in England?”
“Good Lord, really?” said Adrian unconcernedly.
“Yes, India knows them no more. He has abandoned the arts of war there, and she the arts of peace. What will become of Indian society I tremble to conjecture. Let us hope she will be able to transmit her influence through the post. She wrote asking for your address. You haven’t heard from her?”
“Not a word,” said Adrian.
“I rather gathered from her letter,” Clara went on, “that they want you to join them, now that they’re settling in England. But of course that will depend. We don’t know your mother’s age nowadays. If she has decided to confess to, say, thirty-eight or forty, a personable and accomplished young man as a son might be an asset.”
Adrian laughed and blushed. “Unhappily,” he said, “the young man you so flatteringly describe has other fish to fry. Besides, Mother would be too much of a responsibility. I’d rather leave her to the Colonel.”
“Sh … sh!” Clara raised a warning finger. “The General, my dear. Pray don’t forget. Your mother particularly mentioned it when she wrote, so as to save us from the possibility of a hideous faux pas. By the way,” she added, “would you have cared for a baronetcy?”
“You have one to dispose of? “Adrian’s method with Clara was never to show surprise at what she said.
“Not I. But they’ve been pressing one on your grandfather and can hardly be persuaded that he doesn’t want it. A friend pointed out that he owed it to literature to accept, but your grandfather replied that he had already borrowed so much from literature that he couldn’t afford to incur a further debt. The friend then reminded him that he ought to consider posterity; so your grandfather considered posterity (as represented, of course, by you) and decided that you would be better without it. I am relieved to know that we shan’t have to train the servants not to say Sir Roliver and, later, Sir Radrian.”
When they reached Abbot’s Randale Oliver Glynde was strolling in front of the house, and Adrian joined him until tea-time. Already he was full of that sense of well-being which his grandfather’s house always brought to him. Lennox Street seemed a whole continent away, and he was delighted to let himself forget it and Ronny. The prospect of four days at Abbot’s Randale and of its occupants and their talk was sheer happiness.
At dinner Clara enquired after his work. “There is no immediate fear, I trust, of a public appearance at the Albert Hall?”
“As a pianist?” asked Adrian.
“Or, what in some ways would, I think, be worse, as a conductor.”
“Neither,” said Adrian. “So far, I am as capable of conducting an orchestra as of conducting a bus.”
“I hope an orchestra is easier than a bus,” said Bob. “During the General Strike—as you may remember, because I boasted about it a good deal at the time—I tried my hand at bus conducting, and a very difficult and exasperating job it was. The musical part of it—the ringing of the little bell on the ticket punch—was one of the hardest. Have you ever tried to play the ticket punch?”
“Never,” said Adrian, “but I have always thought it a very beautiful instrument.”
Bob shook his head. “Take my advice,” he said, “and stick to the piano.”
“Have you ever thought,” said Oliver, “what a wonderful thing it would be if we could profit instantly and completely by the intellectual and spiritual discoveries of others as we do by their material discoveries; so that, for instance, bus conducting or orchestra conducting, by the very fact that it was an established art, was within the capacity of all, whether or not they chose to use it, just as any of us can turn on the gas or the electric light? Then the whole accumulated experience of a generation would be instantly absorbed by the next generation, and babies would begin at the point reached by the wisest of their fathers’ generation. Why is it not so? There seems to be no valid reason against it except the fatal one that, as a matter of fact, it is not so. Each of us has to learn by his own experience. It is appalling to think how little we can help others, how useless to others is the experience we have painfully won by labour, disappointment, and all kinds of mental and spiritual anguish. The best we can do is to put them in the way of discovering for themselves. It is a terrible privation for the old to be so little able to help the young. But vicarious experience is a paradox. Each of us is alone and helpless—helpless to help and helpless to be helped.”
“Fortunately,” said Clara in her smooth, logical tones, “it is only on rare occasions that we become conscious of our helplessness.”
Oliver Glynde glanced at his daughter, so calm, so self-possessed, materially and intellectually such an admirable work of art within her clearly defined outline. She, he reflected, was the measure of his success and failure as a father. He loved her bright, compact, stimulating mind, her affection for him, her complete lack of fear of him. He loved to have her and Bob with him: he would have been glad to have them always with him. But how useless he would be to her in any terrible emergency, how powerless to help. He and she were two continents whose common frontier was only a few short miles. And yet, he went on to reflect, were not her qualities exactly those which precluded terrible experiences? She was so admirably protected by mountains of unshakable calm, seas of temperate indifference. She had no flashing volcanic heights, no dark, unsounded depths. She would never need the help he could never give. He watched the three of them talking together, pursuing the subject he had raised. His eyes wandered to Adrian, that dark, sensitive boy behind whose external calm he felt rather than saw the restless stir of smouldering passions. What would happen to Adrian? What, perhaps, he wondered, with a sudden stab of fear and longing, was happening already, unknown to him? He was still disturbingly like Sandy, a dark, brooding Sandy without the old Sandy’s openness and accessibility. He was not like Clara: he, the old man knew, had deeply hidden capacities for loving and suffering: he was not immune from terrible experiences. With a sinking of the heart he realised how helpless, how agonisingly helpless he would be if anything terrible were to happen to Adrian. For though Adrian had admitted him to much of himself, to more perhaps than he had admitted any other living soul, he had never shown him his innermost heart. But that was a thing too rare, too impossible to hope for. How often in the whole lifetime of mankind had one creature laid itself bare to another? Yet could not that final barrier be broken down with a supreme effort? If it were, the terrible helplessness, the terrible uselessness, the terrible loneliness would be abolished.
The old man sighed. Such dreams could come true only in an ideal state, when body and mind and law and convention had been finally shuffled off. And yet, though it was impossible to imagine the achievement of such a communion with the cool, crystalline heart of Clara, it seemed still to the old man that some small, simple key might even now unlock the deeply hidden, warm, ever bubbling spring which was the heart of the boy sitting opposite him.
XXII
Adrian returned to town on the following Tuesday in time for a Queen’s Hall concert for which he had a ticket. H
e had arranged to dine out because the concert began at eight o’clock, and he only just had time to drive to Lennox Street and deposit his bag. Ronny was not in when he arrived there. He was glad that his evening was provided for. It would have been depressing, after the delightful sociability of Abbot’s Randale, to arrive back and find that he had to spend the evening alone, or, worse still, with some of those friends of Ronny’s whom he so much disliked. He did not mind going alone to a concert. While the music lasted he was always so much absorbed in it that he was unaware of his surroundings, and during the interval it was not unpleasant to smoke a cigarette in the corridor, leaning against the wall and watching the crowd.
On this occasion he reached his seat just as Beecham, who was conducting, came on to the platform; and as soon as he had settled himself the concert began. In his haste he had not noticed his neighbours on his right and left, and he was surprised, in the silence that followed the opening piece, to hear himself spoken to.
“And did you ever learn your toccata?” the voice said.
He turned his head and found, seated next him on his left, the black-eyed girl who had talked to him in the train two months ago. He had hardly thought of her during the interval, yet he found himself delighted to meet her again. “Why, I never saw you when I came in,” he said, smiling and blushing.
“And I didn’t see it was you,” she said, “till halfway through the overture. Are you alone?”
He told her that he was.
“So am I,” she said. “I often go to concerts alone. My mother isn’t very strong and doesn’t go out much, and other people, people one quite likes at other times, are often an awful bother at a concert.”
Adrian smiled. “I hope I shan’t turn out to be a bother,” he said.
“Well, I can but give you a try,” she answered, with that amused look in her black eyes which he had noticed in the train.
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