Adrian Glynde

by Martin Armstrong

  An hour and a half later he had a cup of coffee and a sandwich in Covent Garden Market. When he returned at last to Liverpool Street it was twilight, and the sun had risen when his train drew out of the station.

  With daylight his anguish returned. What was the good, he asked himself now, of going to Abbot’s Randale? But where else could he go? It would have been impossible to go to Yarn, for he could never have brought himself to speak to Clara of what had happened to him. It was a thing which was altogether outside the sphere of their relationship. Her cool, impervious common-sense would be helpless and useless in the presence of his anguish. To betray such feelings as were consuming him would seem to her so very unlike a Glynde. And his mother? He might as well pour out his heart to a butterfly. Yet surely they must have feelings? Yes, but feelings that could never be reached, never shared. But his grandfather would understand and sympathise: there was not the least doubt about that.

  He leaned back in his corner seat and stared with a barren mind at the scene that flowed past. He was high and dry, derelict; his life, he felt, had reached an end. The minutes passed, an hour, an hour and a half, but he was unaware of time. He was aware only of duration, a monotonous duration of pain. When the train stopped at Wilmore Junction he did not notice it, and awoke to it only just in lime to snatch his bag and jump out. Plunged suddenly into those familiar surroundings, that halting-place at which he had paused briefly at such various moments of his life, he thought of his old friend in the refreshment-room. It would be comforting to talk to her and have a cup of tea. She knew nothing of his tragedy and there was no embarrassing necessity to tell her. He went heavily down the platform to the wellknown door, but for the first time it resisted him. It was not yet opening time. He went on disconsolately, and sank into a seat to wait for the branch line train.

  Before long it clanked in, the absurd little engine pushing from behind. He got into an empty carriage. But as soon as the train had started he realised that he could not go to Abbot’s Randale. What was the good of going? He could not face the labour of getting from the station to his grandfather’s, of explaining his unexpected arrival and pouring out his lamentable tale. For, though his grandfather would certainly understand and sympathise, he could not alter what had happened.

  A quarter of an hour later the train halted at Selling, the first stop after Wilmore, and Adrian opened the door and got out. He gave up his ticket and set off down the road towards the little village a mile away. He had no plan.

  XXVII

  The effort of walking took the edge off his pain, but he was exhausted when he reached the village. He had neither the strength nor the will to go farther. He turned into the first inn and asked for a room, saying that he had had a long journey and wanted to sleep.

  At half-past twelve the landlord’s wife knocked at his door and told him that she had had lunch laid for him in the sitting-room. Adrian wanted no lunch, but to avoid appearing strange he got up and went to the little sitting-room, to which, on hearing his footsteps in the passage, the landlord’s wife guided him. There were cold beef, vegetables, salad, and a dish of stewed prunes on the table. Adrian glanced at them with loathing. Then, looking round the room, he saw a hanging bookcase on the wall near the door. He went over to it to choose a book with which he might distract his thoughts. His eyes ran over the titles: Handy Andy, Sermons by the Rev. J. G. Clutterbuck, The Poultry Farmer’s Guide, Nicholas Nckleby, The Pickwick Papers, Mrs. Barbauld’s Poems. He chose Nicholas Nickleby, and, sitting down to his lunch, opened it in the middle. He helped himself to food, but did not take up his knife and fork. Instead, he turned to the open book. “By degrees,” he read, “these raptures subsided, and Mrs. Nickleby went on to entertain her guests with a lament over her fallen fortunes.” His eyes moved to the illustration on the opposite page, which displayed, with what seemed to him in his present state a brutal grotesqueness, “The Affectionate Behaviour of Pyke and Pluck.” He returned to the other page and read on, but when he had reached the bottom he found that he had understood nothing, and, taking up his knife and fork, he compelled himself to eat. But the food was so dry that he could hardly swallow it and he filled a glass with water and drank it off at a single draught. He soon gave up the attempt to eat and again his eyes sought the book. “By degrees these raptures subsided, and Mrs. Nickleby went on to entertain her guests with a lament over her fallen fortunes, and a picturesque account …” Again he forgot the book, the room, all that had passed during the last twelve hours, while his eyes followed the lines to the bottom of the page. His helplessness made him angry, and he went back to where he had started and set himself firmly to concentrate. “By degrees these raptures subsided, and Mrs. Nickleby went on to entertain her guests with a lament over her fallen fortunes.” The insufferable reiteration of that opening sentence, with its suggestion of caricature of his own tragedy, was too much for him. He rose from the table and, taking the book with him, went to an easy chair covered in horsehair near the empty grate. There he sat with the open book on his knee. When a maid came to clear the table he pretended to be reading, but as soon as the door had closed, his eyes left the page.

  After he had sat idle for some time a heavy step was heard in the flagged passage, the door opened, and a large, red-faced man stood in the doorway. “I dunno if you’d be interested in a rat hunt, sir,” he said to Adrian.

  Adrian flinched at the bare thought of being drawn into any sort of company. “A rat hunt?” he said timidly.

  “Yes, sir. We’ve got an old barn that pestered with rats that you can’t keep nothing in it, so we’re going to have’em out. Turn the hose on’em, you know, and shoot’em when they come out. If you’d care to …”

  Adrian found himself, by mere inability to refuse, drawn into it. He was already getting up from his chair, and soon he was following the landlord down the passage.

  “I’m not sure if I can fit you up with a gun. We’ll see,” said the landlord over his shoulder.

  A couple of men with guns under their arms stood in the back doorway; a third, gunless, waited inside. They moved to make way for the landlord, who went out and turned into a shed on the right, followed by Adrian and the third man. He rummaged in dusty corners, on dusty shelves, in a long, coffin-like box. Soon he had pulled out of the box an old rifle. He dusted it on his sleeve, opened the breach, turned it round, and glanced down the barrel. “Not too bad,” he said, handing it to the third man. “You take that, Jim. It’s an old rook-rifle. There’s some cartridges in that tin up there on your right.”

  He paused, hands on hips, and stared about him. Then he opened a drawer, searched in it noisily, and pulled something out. “There’s this,” he said to Adrian, “but I don’t know that you’ll be able to do much with it.”

  It was an old service revolver. “I doubt she’ll be a bit stiff,” he said. He tried the trigger. There was a dry, wheezing sound, a pause, a snap. He opened it and examined the chamber and the barrel. “Not too bad,” he said, and handed it to Adrian. He poured a handful of cartridges out of a tin box. “Shall I load her for you, sir? I doubt you won’t want more than the five: she won’t be very accurate, I’m afraid.” He filled the chamber and handed the revolver back to Adrian. Then, struck by a sudden doubt, he asked: “You’re used to firearms of course?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Adrian untruthfully.

  The three of them went out of the shed; the landlord took up his own gun, which was leaning against the wall near the back door, and, joined by the other two, they all went over to an old thatched barn at the other side of the yard. Straw, empty cases, every kind of rubbish, cleared from the barn, was heaped up outside. A man holding a hose stood waiting.

  The landlord posted his friends at suitable places; then, glancing at Adrian as if still a little doubtful of the wisdom of having given him the revolver, he led him behind the barn where he was invisible to the rest and could neither harm them nor be harmed by them. “There,” he said. “Now look out for them where you see tho
se holes in the boards there. And, mind you, don’t shoot, only away into the field. Let’em get clear, or you might put a bullet through Jim, inside there.”

  He disappeared round the corner of the barn, and Adrian heard him shout: “Right you are, Jim. Turn on the waterworks.” Then through the wooden walls of the barn he heard the hissing and spluttering of the hose.

  Adrian glanced at the revolver in his hand. He was trembling so violently that he could hardly hold it. Tentatively he fingered the trigger. Then he glanced down at the holes. From one of them a small rat, its fur wet and ruffled, was slowly emerging. It seemed to be injured. Perhaps it had been half-stunned by the water-jet from the hose. The words “A drowned rat” came into his mind. “Poor little devil!” he thought to himself, watching it pityingly. The crash of a gun-shot sent a convulsive shock from his heels to his head, loosening his knees. For a moment he thought his own revolver had gone off. He paused, recovering himself. Then, drawing a long breath, he braced himself suddenly, raised the hand that held the revolver, and, pressing the muzzle to his right temple, pulled the trigger with all his might.

  XXVIII

  He awoke, vague, relaxed, and peaceful. He did not open his eyes, but lay still while his mind gathered itself together. Where was he? In Lennox Street? At Abbot’s Randale? If he opened his eyes, would the windows be at the foot of his bed or on his left side? He could not remember and did not make the effort to open his eyes and discover. It must be early—not yet time to get up. But he did not want to get up: it was too delicious to lie full-length in bed.

  He dropped back into a doze; then, after a long time, woke again, opened his eyes for a moment and closed them again. He had seen a low, sloping ceiling and, pushed out through the slope, a little dormer window; and sitting on a chair, her face turned away from him, his Aunt Clara. Round that brief vision of the room his memory began to crystallise. It was the little bedroom in the inn at Selling where, a long time ago, he had stopped because he was too tired to go on. Lucy! She came suddenly into his mind and, with her, the sense of a weary, complicated nightmare from which he had now awoken. But Aunt Clara? Where did she come in?

  He lay, quietly pondering, piecing things together. Then he hadn’t, after all…? And yet, here he was, released. Had he woken into another life? But in that case what was Aunt Clara doing here? They must have sent for her, of course. He remembered that he had had a letter from her in his pocket. What a long time ago it all was. Yes, they must have found him and brought him in and sent for her. What did she know, then? What did anyone know? Nothing, probably. It was an extraordinary thing to have done, but he was glad, very glad, that he had done it. He was always glad when he succeeded in doing something instead of merely thinking and suffering. No; it would simply be thought that it had been an accident. The revolver had been old and stiff. The truth would never be known.

  But suppose Aunt Clara did know the truth, what on earth would she make of it? It was impossible to imagine her reaction to an event so out of her scheme. He imagined himself telling her that he had made a bad shot at a rat, and her pursing her lips and replying a little disapprovingly: “The Glyndes have usually been good shots.” Then, in imagination, he faced her with the truth. “I tried to kill myself.” But imagination was not equal to her reply. He saw her purse her lips again. “My dear Adrian, the Glyndes have usually been good shots.” Yes, he contemplated the astonishing fact with a curious satisfaction: he had tried to kill himself, and in fact he had killed himself, his old unhappy self, so timid, so lax, so prone to disappointment and failure. He had, he knew, put a barrier between himself and the past, and now he was free of the past, ready to start again. And no one would ever know of what had happened—no one except his grandfather. To him he could not pretend: to him, and to him alone, he would tell everything. He stretched himself and opened his eyes.

  Clara turned her head and came over to his bedside. “How do you feel, my dear?”

  He smiled at her. “Remarkably well, thank you.”

  But was he actually well, he wondered, for the first time? He glanced again at her face. It was pale, but it wore its accustomed calm.

  “Is there anything much the matter?” he asked, as if enquiring about someone else.

  She shook her head. “The doctor says it’s nothing but concussion. You will have to keep quiet for a few days, that’s all.” She stooped and kissed his forehead, and suddenly and silently burst into tears. He reached a hand out of the bedclothes and took hers. She dried her eyes and gave him a wry smile.

  “You must allow me to indulge in my little reaction, my dear boy,” she said.

  THE END

  A Note on the Author

  Martin Armstrong (1882-1974) was an English writer and poet. He was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He served in World War I in the British Army in France as a Private in the Artists’ Rifles. He was commissioned into the Middlesex Regiment in 1915 and promoted Lieutenant in 1916. He was included in the final Georgian Poetry anthology.

  In 1929 he married writer Jessie McDonald, after she had divorced Conrad Aiken, making Armstrong the stepfather of the young Joan Aiken. He appears in disguised form as a character in Conrad Aiken’s Ushant.

  Discover books by Martin Armstrong published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/MartinArmstrong

  Adrian Glynde

  Sir Pompey and Madame Juno

  The Bird Catcher

  The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife

  The Bird Catcher

  The Sleeping Fury

  The Stepson

  Venus Over Lannery

  For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been

  removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain

  references to missing images.

  This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,

  London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain 1930 by Victor Gollancz Ltd

  Copyright © 1930 Martin Armstrong

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

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  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The moral right of the author is asserted.

  eISBN: 9781448210916

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