The Road from the Monument

by Storm Jameson

  He had been fetched home from the university, and he wanted to get back.

  The few feet of neglected garden in front of the house held little else than the laburnum, an old tree with roots that sucked all the goodness from the earth, and long branches like whipcords: one of these, caught by the wind, was being flung against the house, its end tapping the window of the bedroom like a hard finger, or a beak.

  ‘That bird,’ his father muttered.

  ‘It’s the laburnum,’ Gregory told him.

  The old captain closed his eyes; he had dropped asleep again, his son thought, and he crept out of the room, to ask the woman who came in three or four times a day to see to the old man how long she expected the illness to last.

  ‘Why, until he goes,’ she said, staring.

  ‘He isn’t going to die.’

  She did not answer.

  A little later he went back into the bedroom and found his father lying, pale eyes open, staring at something far in the past, or on the other side of the world. Bending down, Gregory said gently, ‘I shall have to go back, you know.’

  His gentleness covered a savage reluctance to waste any more time here when he ought to be at work. His father did not speak. His arm moved, slowly, very slowly, a brown stick the colour of seaweed, an anchor tattooed above the wrist: the hand closed over his son’s with surprising force. As plainly as if he had spoken he was saying: Don’t leave me…. Nonsense, his son thought, nonsense, he’s all right, he’s going to last weeks, months. He left that evening, on the night train, and the old captain died at some moment during the small hours, no one there….

  An anguish he had avoided for years pinched him. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, and his throat hardened painfully. I couldn’t even wait with him a few hours, he thought drily — a dry agony. I left him.

  When he looked again at his watch, it was close on dawn. He thought indifferently: I’ll see Lambert today. Indifference was followed by a sharp feeling of relief. If what his wife said was true — and why doubt it? — Lambert no longer wanted to make a nuisance of himself—whatever form of nuisance the silly fellow had in his mind.

  ‘Good,’ he said aloud, yawning.

  With cold amusement, he realised that he was still — still — holding round him the rags of his respectability, reputation, comfort, trying to cover his nakedness. Still struggling to prop up that image labelled Gregory Mott on which he had worked during so many brilliantly triumphant and well-filled years.

  Chapter Two

  On his way to Rutley House, where he would see Gregory, and show him the letter… ‘You’re surprised, eh?’ or (smiling), ‘Is this yours, old boy?’… Lambert felt younger than his fifty-one years, years younger, and energetic and cool-headed. Towards Gregory he had only the kindest feelings. Ever since sending off his article a week ago, he had begun to think of him with pity, with a sort of protective affection, as though the prospect of seeing his own clever words in print, even unsigned, had in some inexplicable way purged him of a great burden of resentment.

  This morning, when he was dressing, a very old memory had stirred in him, so old that he was first disconcerted, then moved by its sudden reappearance…. A child, his face blubbered with crying after what his father called a good thrashing. He had been crying for hours. Someone indistinct, mother or father, bending over him, asked: Do you understand now why you were punished? — Yes, yes — It was to make you a good decent boy; you’ll never be wicked again, will you? — No, never. — Forgiven, his heart swelling against his ribs, he felt cleansed, weak, light as air…. Is there any sensation in the world more exquisite than the reconciliation which follows punishment and forgiveness? After their little trouble, he and Gregory would be closer friends than before, held by one more memory, and by the loyalty, affection, generosity, which had turned in him like a tide and filled all its old channels, rising, buoying him up.

  His fingers felt and touched the leather case.

  As often when he had not seen him for some time, Gregory was struck by the incongruity of Lambert’s face and body — the body so shapelessly lean and flabby, the face cut as cleanly as a nail: little eyes sunk and twinkling in their discoloured orbits, the nose thin, bold, twisted: the two lines that joined the nostrils to the ends of the long mouth were more now than deep lines, they were sharp folds in the yellow skin. At the moment, with the bright June sun striking full on them, these folds had a life of their own, something at once insect-like and mechanical, which went on under every other movement, smiling or inquisitive, of his face…. He crossed the room without speaking and laid something on Gregory’s table. He had still not spoken. Gregory looked up from the note-case to those twitching yellow folds, and asked,

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘Miss Verity had it. In her room.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You obviously dropped it in Nice, in her bedroom. She got your name from it, of course.’

  Gregory smiled briefly. ‘Lambert the clever investigator. You surprise me. Well?’

  ‘Aren’t you relieved to get it back?’

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘My dear fellow, you can’t have wanted it to be lying about in — in a young woman’s bedroom!’

  ‘What do you expect me to say?’

  Lambert did not tell him. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s very little danger — now that we have this letter in our hands — of a public scandal. I don’t say we’re safe — but safer. Suppose she, or some friend of hers, had gone to one of our more squalid Sunday papers with this in her hand…. Do the Institute a devil of a lot of harm — and all that.’

  ‘Well?’

  Lambert had the sense that he had been standing, with his hand out, expecting it to be grasped, for a long time. He groped blindly with it. ‘You can’t have been feeling very pleased with yourself, my poor Gregory. Why don’t you get the whole thing off your chest? You haven’t a better friend in the world. All your Arthurs and Emily Grosmonts and the rest…. you can’t rely on one of them. You can rely on me, y’know.’

  Gregory did not answer.

  At a loss, Lambert said, ‘You know that Beatrice spoke to me?’

  ‘If I were you I’d forget that.’

  ‘Why?’

  What could I tell him? Gregory thought derisively. That I’d give a fortune not to have touched the girl — I must have been off my head — but that the only things I’m ashamed of happened much later? No, I can’t tell him anything…. The silliness of talking about himself to Lambert disgusted him, violently. Leaning against the table, he said,

  ‘You’ve had the fun of digging up the story, evidence, all that. It’s all you’ll get. You’ll have to make do with it.’ He added gently, ‘I’m not criticising you.’

  The devil you’re not, thought Lambert. He would have felt less unnerved if Gregory had slapped his face. No, by God, this is one too many, he thought…. His good intentions rose and mocked him: all the efforts he had made — with the sole idea of saving his friend from himself — only to discover and be defeated by Gregory’s complete lack of scruple, complete egoism, and what, in the Director of the Rutley Institute, was even worse, his complete indecision, dishonesty, indifference. And the indifference includes me, he thought with a jeering self-pity, his oldest friend — after all I’ve done for him.

  ‘If you think I had any motive except to help you,’ he began. He controlled himself and went on in a pleasanter voice. ‘Can’t you stop trying to ruin yourself? You don’t seem to have the faintest notion what you’ve done to yourself, or the least regret. I don’t understand you.’

  Gregory’s mouth twitched. ‘I know you want me to say that you had every right to meddle, you want me to thank you for doing it, and repent of my sins and get you to absolve me…. You’re almost too like yourself, my dear Lambert.’

  Bitterness souring in him, Lambert said, ‘I’ve spent ten years building you up here. Because
I was fond of you and believed in you — in your genius and decency. I haven’t a shred of confidence in you left. Not a shred.’

  ‘Sad,’ Gregory mocked.

  Lambert lost control of himself. ‘I hadn’t intended to insist on your resigning….’

  Gregory looked at him quizzically. ‘Resigning?’

  The other had gone farther than he meant. Too far. Damned if I’ll take it back, he thought stubbornly. ‘Working with you has become impossible — intolerable. The alternative is for me to resign — and explain privately to the Board why I’m doing it. You don’t expect me just to walk out, do you?’

  Did he always resent me? Gregory wondered. No. I’m his childhood, his youth, and he’s reached the moment when he wants to deny them. The only difference between us is that I began denying mine as soon as I could think…. He felt the pain of loss — loss of an old friend, an old habit — then only a profound indifference.

  ‘Why,’ he asked mildly, ’do you want to ruin me?’

  Lambert had recovered both his good sense and his conviction of authority. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Ruin you? What are you talking about?’ His voice suggested that the other man had come to ask him for permission to do something not provided for in the regulations. ‘All I wanted when I came in was to re-establish confidence between us. I wanted to be sure you won’t drop any more important letters in the bedrooms of young women you happen to pick up. Nothing else.’

  Gregory looked at him with amusement. ‘And how did you think you could make sure of it?’

  With an impatient movement of his head, Lambert went on, ‘But I’m beginning — reluctantly — to feel that you’re not a fit person to direct Rutley.’

  Gregory’s smile widened. ‘Are you?’

  A flame, instantly dulled, sprang in Lambert’s small eyes. ‘We’re talking about you — and your indecent lack of discretion, and carelessness. And your damned selfishness and vanity.’

  He really believes in the purity of his motives, thought Gregory. He hasn’t the faintest suspicion that he has begun to repay himself for years of playing second fiddle — and playing it very well. He knows he’s in the right, he knows he’s a sensible prudent man. He wants me to admit it, and feel inferior to him, and grateful. I doubt whether he wants me to resign — or he wants it less than he wants to see me humiliated. He would agree to sit comfortably behind the throne, but with complete power — the acting head of Rutley, cracking the whip, making all the decisions, reminding me now and then what I owe him. Keeping me as a social figurehead. A simple change of places — Gregory Mott down, Lambert Corry up.

  An echo was plaguing him. Ignoring it, he said lightly,

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t give you the splendid pleasure of forgiving me. You’ll have to be content with hearing that I’ve resigned…. If I decide to resign.’

  Something infinitely kind and weak trembled in Lambert, for the last time.

  ‘I don’t want to do you any harm, Gregory,’ he said, in a clumsy voice, the voice of a younger man.

  A newspaper was lying open on the table. Feeling under it, Gregory drew out the issue of the London Letter he had covered up when Lambert came into the room, and flipped it open at the article headed Mott mis à nu. ‘If this is what you can do when you’re not trying to harm me, I hope you’ll never try,’ he said mockingly.

  Lambert was startled. He had not expected Dinham to print the thing at once. His own copy of the London Letter was lying on his desk, unopened. He ran his eye hurriedly over the columns to the end. It was unsigned. He drew a relieved breath, and said in an aggressive voice,

  ‘What makes you think I wrote it?’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  Faced with the risk of lying, he could not get the words past his throat. He was silent.

  ‘I don’t mind it,’ Gregory said simply. ‘I’d rather you didn’t feel as you do about my books. But since you do, you have every right to say it. I — quite sincerely — don’t mind. Do get that into your hard head.’

  Lambert turned and went out.

  As soon as he had gone, Gregory got up and began searching along the shelves of personal books he kept here for the echo that had dodged him. After a minute or two he found it. With growing delight he read,

  Know then my Brethren, heav’n is clear

  And all the Clouds are gone;

  The Righteous now shall flourish, and

  Good dayes are coming on;

  Come then, my Brethren, and be glad

  And eke rejoyce with me;

  Lawn sleeves and Rochets shall go down,

  And hey! then up go we…

  Closing the book, he roared with laughter. He felt happier and lighter in head and heart than he had felt for weeks.

  Late in the afternoon, he went into Lambert’s room. ‘May I have Miss Verity’s address?’

  Lambert wrote it out on a card and gave it to him.

  ‘Thanks.’ He turned to go.

  ‘Is that all you have to say to me?’ asked Lambert. Gregory looked at him in astonishment. ‘What else?’

  Chapter Three

  Lambert made no attempt to discover why he found gregory’s magnanimity about his cruel article entirely unforgivable — more unforgivable than his genius, his prosperity, his fame. He did not even try to comfort himself with the pretence that it was not genuine magnanimity. It was genuine all right — and intolerable. One of the ways in which Gregory showed his superiority over other men. A lucid and perfectly calm and tenacious pride — without flourishes.

  Searching back, his resentment caught up other threads of the same unforgivable kindness, generosity, pride. There was that business with Evelyn Lamb. Why, except out of a disinterested superiority, had Gregory taken the trouble to spend hours of time with the old fool? She was absolutely useless to him. It was a gesture made to himself.

  And he told me about it, thought Lambert, out of the same damned superiority — as if he were saying: She wasn’t so neglected as that; I, Gregory Mott, went to see her…. Damn him, damn him.

  He had a moment of stupefied surprise that he had turned against his friend with such violence. Something like an abyss opened in him. He grew dizzy and pulled himself sharply back from the edge. It’s not I who have changed, he thought, it’s he. He has — no, not changed, but been shown up for what he is, unreliable, morally diseased, a hypocrite and a liar. If I hadn’t been so devoted to him — if I hadn’t spent the whole of my life seeing him as someone much finer and better than I am, I shouldn’t be so crazily disappointed…. He heard his wife’s voice reiterating, ‘Let’s face it, you make a doormat of yourself for your dear Gregory to wipe his feet on….’ It’s true, he thought, striking his desk with a bony finger, one of his father’s repressive gestures. I have every right to my change of heart.

  I’ve decided, he thought, calmly, solemnly.

  He was not willing to go on any longer doing the hard dull work of administration and letting Gregory take all the curtain calls. Not a day longer, he said to himself. It’s taken me too long already, ten years, to realise that he’s not fit to hold a position where he has so much power. I’ve been over-prudent and patient — but better be slow than sorry. I shall take steps to make sure he resigns. It’s the only sensible and decent thing I can do now….

  He was late home. His son, waiting for him in the hall, jumped at him impatiently. ‘I got a star today.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A gold star. For my essay. Look.’ He opened the exercise book he was holding, and pointed a small hand at the star cut out of gilt paper and fixed at the foot of a page of his careful writing. ‘I’ve had stars before, but not a gold one.’

  Lambert’s heart moved in him with the tickling softness of a feather. ‘That’s very good.’

  Timothy chuckled. ‘It’s the top.’

  ‘I must read this famous essay.’

  ‘I brought it for you.’ He pushed the book into his father’s hand. With a smile at once innocent and strangely old an
d sly, he went on, ‘Miss Collin said: Your father is a clever man, you must work hard and not disgrace him.’

  ‘But not too hard, my darling. Not to get overtired.’

  ‘Oh, puff to that,’ Timothy said. Lately he had begun to speak less like a child and more like a rough schoolboy. His father noticed the change with regret, yet it comforted him; it marked another stage in his son’s growth, another assurance that he was not, after all, too fine and delicate to live. And if, with everything else he had, with his gentleness, good looks, affectionate ways, he was going to be brilliant…. Lambert trembled a little.

  ‘Race you to my room,’ Timothy said. He bounded towards the stairs, on thin short legs.

  ‘Not so fast, not so fast, you’ll tire yourself,’ his father called.

  He lumbered after the boy, swollen with a love he could hardly bear. Nothing and no one else matters, he thought fiercely. Everything I do is because of him.

  He felt a twinge of scornful pity for Gregory. It’s my line that will go on, he thought: my name. Corry. The Corrys are the future. Finish for the Motts.

  He stayed too long with Timothy, and then, when he ought to have been changing, took time to read the essay through several times, astonished and delighted that the boy had written a dozen lively and grammatical sentences, so that he was late coming into the drawing-room. The chosen few — chosen to dine this evening — were waiting for him. As he came into the room, their faces turned towards him, reminding him suddenly of the avid movement of fishes to the side of the tank where they expect food. His sight blurred; the only face he saw clearly was Arbor’s, its old-maidish delicacy sharpened by the condescendingly sweet smile which conveyed his certainty, no doubt unconscious but immovable, of being at once more sensitive, more cultivated, subtler than other people. For less than a moment Lambert detested this face. He had an extraordinary sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness, very disagreeable. So disagreeable that he made a violent effort to suppress it, as if he were stamping on an insect. The feeling left him. He came forward jauntily, smiling, and noticed with pleasure that the rug his wife had just bought, which had been delivered only that day, was very like one in Beatrice Mott’s drawing-room. His wife, too, was wearing a new dress, and a spray of orchids, to which she drew his attention.