by A. J. Cronin
‘Ah, yes, he was devoted to her … as were all her people.… But she kept him upon the run.’ A slow smile of reminiscence kindled Bertram’s eye. ‘ You know that in her later years the old lady became excessively stout. Indeed, she had such difficulty in getting about she was obliged to be wheeled, and Mould, then the gardener’s boy, was chosen as the means of propulsion. At an extra sixpence a week. It was a tremendous honour. But somewhat exacting, especially when your grandmother wished to go to the village and had to be pushed all the way up Ambry Hill. One hot summer day, when young Mould reached the brow of the hill he stopped to wipe his face on his sleeve. But as he let go the chair, off it rolled without him, gathering speed, flashing down the hill and round the bend at a breakneck pace. The poor lad was petrified. He saw himself the murderer of his mistress. With a horrified yell he dashed down the hill. When he reached the bottom.…’ Wincingly, Stephen set himself to laugh; he knew the anecdote by heart. ‘… There was your grandmother, calmly drawn up in the village square, bargaining with the butcher for a side of lamb.’ Bertram’s smile faded. ‘She was an indomitable woman. Immensely charitable. And devoted to my father. She died just eight weeks after him.’
Could it be that the Rector was thinking of his own marriage? Outside, an owl hooted. In the still-room along the passage Caroline was moving earthenware pickle jars with unnecessary brusqueness. Bertram straightened and sipped his port, aware that he must break the silence before constraint fell between himself and Stephen. How strange it was to care so deeply, and yet to sense this embarrassment haunting their relationship whenever they were alone together. Was it because he cared too much? He never experienced such lack of ease in the company of his two other children. Of course he was fond of Caroline, admitted her staunchness, found her a ‘great stand-by’. But her homeliness, dedicating her, he felt, to perpetual spinsterhood, jarred, unconsciously, his sense of family pride. As for David, his youngest child, now nearly thirteen years of age, here, alas, his love was swamped by sadness, by disappointment and pity. To think that any son of his, for that matter any Desmonde, should be an epileptic who, even when untroubled by attacks, was inclined to stammer in his speech!
The Rector suppressed a sigh. To yield to feeling was dangerous. Yet in his present mood there was no escape from it.
‘It’s good you finished so well at Oxford. You’ve done splendidly.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I seemed to lose heart rather at the end.’
‘I felt like that too, when I came down from Trinity … though I loved it just as much as you.’
Stephen was silent. How could he tell his father that he had hated the university? – the dryness, the superiority, the sense of being outside of life, the endless preoccupation with sports that held no interest for him, the bloodless study of dead tongues which unutterably bored him, and which had driven him, from sheer contrariness, to perfect himself in French and Spanish, above all … his detestation of the career ordained for him.
But the Rector had resumed.
‘You have earned a holiday. Claire wants you over for tennis. And Uncle Hubert has asked you to Chillingham.… Wasn’t his salmon good tonight?… Your cousin Geoffrey is there, on shore leave, at present.’
Again Stephen did not answer. And for the first time Bertram began to question if, beneath his passive manner, his son were not suppressing signs of strain. His natural pallor seemed intensified and his eyes held that enlarged darkness which, diminishing the rest of his face, had since his earliest days been a symptom of emotional or physical distress. He is not strong, I hope he is not sickening for something, thought Bertram, with sudden anxiety, and quickly, protectively, he declared:
‘You must certainly have a rest. No need for you to go to the Settlement until July. Allowing five months for London, your ordination would then be at Christmas, a most suitable season of the year.’
Stephen roused himself. For how long had he foreseen and dreaded this moment, tried, on his friend Glyn’s advice, to hasten it, then nervously drawn back, written a score of letters, and always torn them up. Now that it was upon him he felt sick and hollow inside.
‘Father … I must talk to you.’
‘Yes?’ Encouragingly, with a nod, and finger-tips compressed.
A pause. Is it money? the Rector thought mildly. Some unpaid college debt? Then, haltingly, the words came out.
‘I do not want to go on and take orders.’
The Rector’s expression did not noticeably change, as though sudden and complete surprise had, like sudden death, fixed his features in a semblance of normality. At last, almost stupidly, he said:
‘Not take orders?’
‘I feel I am not suited to the Church … I’m not good with people … I can’t organise … I couldn’t preach a decent sermon to save my life …’
‘These things will come.’ Bertram, drawn erect, was half frowning now. ‘My own sermons are not particularly brilliant. But they suffice.’
‘But Father, it isn’t only that. I have no interest in the work. I … I feel I’m not fitted to succeed you here …’
Confirmed in his earlier surmise by Stephen’s broken voice, the Rector recovered himself, assumed a soothing tone.
‘You’re tired, and rundown my boy. We all get stale and discouraged occasionally. You’ll feel different after a few brisk tramps on the Downs.’
‘No, Father.’ Breathing unsteadily, Stephen tightened his will. ‘This has been coming on for a long time. I can’t tie myself up in this little place … to a future of blankness and frustration.’
What had he said in his desperate groping for words? The shocked look in his father’s eyes distressed him. A moment of unendurable silence. Then:
‘I was unaware that you looked upon Stillwater in that light. We are a small parish, perhaps. But our worth to the country might be judged by other standards than those of mere dimension.’
‘You’ve misunderstood me. I love Stillwater … it’s my home. And I know how highly you are esteemed for miles around. It’s something else … surely you understand what I mean … what I feel I must do with my life.’
The Rector drew back sharply then, with gathering comprehension, gazed in startled fashion at his son.
‘Stephen … it is not that wild notion again?’
‘Yes, Father.’
Again a bar of silence vibrated between them. The Rector got to his feet and began, slowly at first, then with increasing perturbation, to pace the room. At last, with an effort, he calmed himself, drew close to Stephen.
‘My dear boy,’ he said, with great seriousness. ‘ I have never tried to bind you to me through your sense of duty. Even when you were very young, before you went to school, I preferred to rely on your natural feelings of affection and respect. Yet you must realise how completely I’ve built upon your following me here. Stillwater means so much to me … to all of us. And the circumstances of my life … your mother’s invalidism … David’s unhappy disability … the fact that you are my eldest and – forgive me’ – his voice shook slightly – ‘my much-beloved son … have caused me to rest my hopes on you. Nevertheless, at this moment, I put all that aside. Upon my honour, it is you I am thinking of and not myself, when I tell you, shall I say beg you, to forget this fantastic dream. You do not realise what it means. You mustn’t … you cannot do it.’
Stephen lowered his gaze so that he might not see the slight twitching of his father’s cheek.
‘Surely I am entitled to my own life.’ Through respect there burned an inner defiance.
‘Not that kind of life. It will bring you only to disaster. To throw away your brilliant prospects, wreck your whole career, for a mere whim … it would be an outrage in the face of God. And there’s Claire … how, under Heaven, would she fit into such a scheme? No, no. You are very young for your years, Stephen.… This mad idea that has got hold of you seems all important to you now. But in a few years you’ll smile at yourself for having even thought of it.’
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bsp; Sunk in his chair, with flushed cheeks and downcast eyes, his wits made dull and torpid by the port, Stephen could not find a word to say. At this moment, without exaggeration, he hated his father … yet was at the same time vanquished by the shamed consciousness of his paternal affection, by the recognition, in justice, of his point of view, and worst of all by a warm nostalgic tide welling up into his throat, a flood of childhood memories … of breezy rides to Ambry in the pony-cart, his father idling with the reins, Carrie in clean white pinafore, Davie wearing his first flannel shorts; of water picnics on the Avon, hot sunlight on cool water, and a widgeon rising from yellow reeds as the punt pushed through; of family carols sung before the Christmas tree, a powder of snow upon the window-panes … of, how could one tear up such tender, binding roots.
Bertram bent forward and laid his hand, not impressively, but rather with touching diffidence, upon his son’s shoulder.
‘Believe me, it’s your happiness, Stephen. You can’t … you could not find it in your heart to go against me.’
Stephen did not dare look up lest he should disgrace himself with tears. He was done for … at least for the present. And he had meant to fight so hard, had sworn to Glyn that he would win.
‘Very well,’ he managed to mumble at last, tasting all the bitterness which defeat brings to a gentle yet passionate nature. ‘If you feel so strongly about it … I’ll give the Settlement a trial … and see what comes of it.’
Chapter Three
Bertram went upstairs slowly. Although his sense of relief was deep, it did not diminish the weariness that had suddenly come on him, nor the lingering anxiety around his heart. Outside his wife’s bedroom he hesitated, head tilted in an attitude of listening, then, tapping gently upon the panel, he braced himself instinctively and entered.
It was a large apartment, formerly the upstairs drawing-room – the best room in the house, old Canon Desmonde had named it, no doubt because of its fine proportions and eastern exposure which, besides admitting the morning sun, afforded a wide panorama of the Downs. In its conversion to his wife’s bed-sitting-room, some of the original furnishings had been retained – the needle-point chairs and Chippendale settee, a broad semi-circle of gesso mirror above the white marble mantel, the red Brussels carpet. Protected by a draught-screen, Julia Desmonde lay reading in bed, beneath the satin coverlet. She was a shapely, well-preserved woman of forty-five, with an easy, intensely indolent air, plump smooth features, and thick chestnut hair which billowed like a cloud across the pillow.
Marking with a blanched fingernail the place in her book which bore a drawing of the sign of the Zodiac, Julia directed towards her husband, from beneath fine brows, an inquiring glance. Her eyes were of a remarkable forget-me-not blue, childlike almost, with pale, slightly drooping, fleshy lids.
‘So we have Stephen home with us,’ he said.
‘Yes … I thought the dear boy looked well.’
She could be depended on to express, in her aristocratic, self-absorbed voice, an opinion contrary to his own.
‘How is the headache?’
‘Better, thank you. I sat too long in the sun this afternoon. That early spring sun is very treacherous. But I have just had a treatment.’
He perceived, from the contraption on the side table, that she had just had her vibrations. On the fender a metal kettle hissed out a jaunty plume of steam, indicating that in fifteen minutes the bran extract would be brought and mixed, the tablets of yeast crushed and swallowed, the yogurt spooned, or was it now dried seaweed? Then the hot-water bag would be refilled, the fire made up for the night, the lights turned low, the eye-pads moistened and laid on for sleep. And again, though he fought the question always with determined Christian charity, the thought assailed him: Why had he ever married her?
She had been, of course – indeed, still was, no doubt – in her statuesque way, something of a beauty, and as an only child, daughter of Sir Henry Marsden of Haselton Park, had been regarded, in the county society of those days, as the ‘catch of the season’. Who could have guessed, viewing her, for instance, as the young swan-like hostess of the Haselton Fête, as the belle of the hunt ball at the Assembly Rooms, surrounded by young officers from the Charminster barracks, smiling yet composed, the centre of attraction, that she would later on reveal such marked peculiarity, prove herself so unutterably useless to him as a wife.
Except for a few garden-parties in their early years of marriage, when, trailing a frilled parasol, she moved gracefully about the lawns, in a large hat, she had, with unruffled resolution, refused to interest herself in the work of the parish. God, she said amiably, had not meant her to carry soup to indigent rustics, nor to strain her nerves sewing baby-linen for the encouragement of rural copulation. Fortunately the Bishop’s wife liked her, but she would not meet the ladies of the lesser clergy. She preferred to spend her days sitting, overdressed, by her window, or in the rose-garden, engaged upon an endless embroidery of coloured silk from which she lifted her head repeatedly, to gaze for long periods into space, or to make occasional notes, when they occurred to her, of what she should report to her physician, whom – having long ago exhausted the county doctor – she visited in London twice a month. Her children, whom she bore with absent-minded ease, had been to her no more than momentary episodes. So long as they did not put her to inconvenience she regarded them with remote indulgence. Yet as her detachment grew, more and more, she retreated within herself, creating an existence which involved around her physical functions, a little world of happy hypochondria in which – could he, oh God, have foreseen it when, on that rose-scented afternoon twenty years before, he had almost died of her kiss in aromatic pain? – she had no greater pleasure, no keener interest, than amiably to discuss with him the colour and consistency of her stools.
Perhaps the stuffed charger – souvenir of Balaclava – in the parental hall should have warned him, but who, alas, could have foretold that her father, until the age of seventy no more than an amiable eccentric, addicted in his spare time to mechanical pursuits – the electrification of his estate by a chain of canvas windmills, the harmless construction of a quick-firing gun which, refused by the War Office, had no more than winged, in a fleshy part, the family butler – who, in Heaven’s name, would have foreseen that this irrepressible crank would, in his dotage, launch suddenly a grandiose project for the construction of a flying machine such as that subsequently flown by Blériot across the Channel, though that in itself would have been ill enough, but a weird contraption with fantastic screws, presumed capable of rising vertically from the ground: a helicopter. Thus, in defiance of the laws of gravity, Sir Henry had defiled his lovely park with sheds and hangar, imported workmen, engineers, a Belgian mechanic, spent money like water, in short, ruined himself, and, remaining earthbound, had died a laughing-stock. Haselton, which might have been Julia’s, was now a girl’s school, the great hangar a gymnasium, the sheds – fresh-painted horrors – turned into repositories for muddy hockey-sticks and unpaired canvas shoes.
Might it not be, thought Bertram, with fresh despondency, that something of this instability was now manifest in Stephen? No, no … impossible. The boy, too closely resembling him in mind and body, was all of him, his other self in fact. Yet because of his anxiety, the cloud that hung upon his spirit, he was tempted, despite his better judgement, to open his mind and seek some sort of consolation from his wife.
‘My dear,’ he said. ‘While he is with us I feel we should make an effort to take Stephen out of himself.’
Julia gazed at him in surprise. She possessed to a remarkable degree the power of distorting the meaning of what was said to her.
‘My dear Bertram, you know very well that I cannot make an effort. And why should Stephen be taken out of himself?’
‘I … I am concerned about him. He has always been an unusual boy. He is going through a difficult time.’
‘Difficult, Bertram? Is he not past the puberty?’
‘Of course … but you know ho
w it is with these young fellows. They get strange notions in their heads in the spring.’
‘Do you imply that Stephen is in a state of love?’
‘No … well, of course, we know he is fond of Claire.’
‘Then what do you mean, Bertram? He cannot be ill. You said yourself a moment ago that he was extremely well.’
‘It was you who said that.’ Despite himself, Bertram spoke with growing impatience. ‘I think he is far from well. But I see you have no wish to share my anxiety.’
‘If you wish to tell me, my dear, I have no objection to hearing you. But is it not enough that you are worried without worrying me? I think I did my part in bringing your children into the world. There was, from first to last, little pleasure in the undertaking. Afterwards, you made them your responsibility. I never interfered. Why should I do so now?’
‘True.’ He tried to repress his bitterness. ‘It would make little difference to you if Stephen ruined his life. Julia, there is something in him, beneath the surface, that I don’t understand. What is really in his mind? Who are his friends? Don’t you recollect when Geoffrey visited him at Trinity last year he found a most impossible person in his rooms … a rank outsider Geoffrey called him … a down-at-heel artist … a Welshman …’
He broke off, gazing at her almost beseechingly, until she was compelled to answer. She did so mildly.
‘What have you against the Welsh, Bertram? They have beautiful voices. Did this Welshman sing?’
‘No,’ Bertram replied, flushing. ‘He kept pressing Stephen, all the time, to go to Paris.’
‘Young men have done so before, Bertram.’
‘I daresay. But this was not for the obvious reason.’
‘Then for what reason, if not to have a French woman?’
‘To paint!’
It was said, he had got it out at last; and tensely, yet with some slight sense of relief, he waited, in silence, for her to speak.
