by Howard Mason
I nodded, abstractedly. “This Curtius.… What’s his history?”
Her eyes went to the portrait. “He was the bastard son of a German princeling. His mother was an Italian. He inherited by killing his half-brother, he was a master at chess, and that is his favourite dog. If you want any more, it’s all in the family history books.” She shot the information at me with a take-it-or-leave-it air, but quite pleasantly, and then she said again: “My father’s waiting.”
I hoped von Arnhem would prove to be more forthcoming than his daughter. Taking a last look at the portrait, I said:
“Those chessmen he’s playing with… Are they still in existence?”
She hesitated; then she came down the stairs. “Yes. I’ll show you the Chess Room if you like; we’ll go up that way.”
She said “the Chess Room” rather as one might say “the Blue Room” or “the Gold Room,” if one lived in a castle, that is, with an air of casual grandeur. I followed her through the long hall and up a little step, and then along a gallery, till we came to a door which led, as far as I could see, into a round turret; I’d noticed it from the outside. The room, when we entered it, was circular, too.
It was an extraordinary place. The whole floor was laid out in black and white chequered squares, like a board. Facing us, on the wall opposite, was a full-length portrait of the chess-player of the little picture in the hall. He was standing in this one, but he still looked like a spider; a tall, leggy one, with a squat black body. The whole of the rest of the wall was lined with shelves from top to bottom, and on every shelf were laid out more chessmen than I had seen even in Constantine’s shop; rows and rows of them, spiky and curved and shaggy and smooth, red and green and ivory-pale and black. In the centre of the middle shelf, I recognized the set of the painting; there they were, all with expressive little heads; there was a leer on the face of the queen. One piece stood out from the others: a clumsily-carved bishop, painted red, which didn’t match the others.
“Quite a museum.”
“Yes.”
She led me out then, and I followed her back into the gallery and up a flight of stairs. There were modern radiators, I noticed, set in on the landings. It all looked very well-kept and comfortable, though not what you might call cosy. It must be quite a trek if you forgot your handkerchief, I thought. We reached a landing and turned down a wide corridor, and I said: “How long have you lived here?”
“I was born here.”
I was about to question her some more when she stopped at a big wooden door, and motioned me to enter.
The room I stepped into was large and cool, with big windows opening out high above the river. The walls, like all the others, were stone, and tapestry-covered. I turned, to see a small alcove at the other end of the room, just wide enough to take the four-poster bed, hung with faded crimson damask curtains. Sitting upright against the pillows, in the centre of the bed, an old man was watching me.
As I moved towards the bed, he continued to look me over without speaking, so I saw no harm in returning his interested gaze.
He was very old and rather impressive. He had a reddish, gouty face, above which white hair receded from a great prow of a brow. A big, high-arched nose was set between eyes as blue as the girl’s, which peered brightly out under tufty white eyebrows. His chin and jowl were heavy. If one had met him at a meet of the Pytchley, wearing hunting pink, one might have taken him for an English squire, rather over-addicted to his port.
Now, propped against the pillows, wheezing gently, the great nose and chin drooping sagaciously over his chest, he was clad in an old-fashioned white nightgown and a nightcap, whose white tassel hung down incongruously against his sturdy, muscular old neck. At once formidable and cosy, he looked like a Roman emperor who has been tucked up in bed by his nanny.
Since he seemed in no hurry to speak, I said:
“Herr von Arnhem?”
Instead of answering me, he turned to the girl and, speaking for the first time, addressed her in English.
“Who did yer say the feller was?”
Rusty, creaking, asthmatic, the voice was yet the most English of English voices, arrogant, authoritative, accustomed to being obeyed.
The girl glanced towards me.
For the second time that morning, I said: “I’m Lord Stonybridge.”
The old man gazed at me with his bright blue eyes, seeming to sum me up. Then he lifted his head.
“No, yer not, young feller,” he announced clearly and with surprising vigour. “Yer can’t be. I am.”
* * * *
At first I wondered whether he was out of his mind.
I glanced at the girl, for reassurance. As though she knew what I was thinking, she nodded calmly. I looked back at the old man and said:
“Who did you say you were?”
This time the words rolled out of him like the tolling of a bell.
“George Albert Bernard Scrivener, seventh Viscount Stonybridge of Stour,” he said richly, and sank into a wheezy chuckle. “Put that in your pipe, young feller, and see if you can smoke it.”
I stared at him.
“You’re dead,” I said, foolishly.
“Not buried yet, yer know.”
“Then whose funeral did I omit to attend three weeks ago?”
“My brother John’s. No stamina. Always knew I’d outlast him,” he said complacently. “And now, Sophia, my dear, I think you’d better get us something to drink. Some sherry, I should think, shouldn’t you? And a biscuit. Don’t forget the biscuits, my dear,” he called after her. He turned back to me, still chuckling. “I like a nice biscuit with my sherry.”
He leaned back against the pillows and surveyed me, looking immensely pleased with himself.
“Thought I’d startle yer. Knew you’d turn up one of these days.” He peered at my face more closely. “Here, yer not Oliver, are yer?”
I said, as though in a dream, “No. I’m Charles.”
“What happened to old Oliver’s boy?”
“Killed in a shooting accident,” I said. “In Africa.”
“Just like his grandfather. Always careless with firearms. What d’yer do?” he shot at me suddenly.
“Do?” I said helplessly. “I’m a journalist.”
“Nonsense. Yer a Scrivener, aren’t yer?” He peered at me again, with disapproval. “Journalist, eh? Don’t like ’em. What sort of a one?”
“Racing column.”
“Well, that’s different, of course. Why didn’t yer say so in the first place?” He eyed me with interest. “What d’yer think of Zoroaster for the Queen’s Prize?”
I said automatically: “Form’s all right. Depends on the going. He’s a mudlark.”
He laughed, delighted. “I keep up with things, yer see. Nothing like the Times sports page to keep yer mind active. Eighty-four last birthday. What d’yer think of that, hey?”
I wasn’t sure if he was deliberately baiting me, or whether he was just in his dotage. I strongly suspected the first. Either way, I couldn’t stand much more of this conversation. I felt my skin crawling with curiosity, like a disease. I said:
“Will you please tell me what this is all about?”
“Plenty of time for that. Yes, eighty-four. I don’t feel it, mind you. I don’t feel it. The question is, do I look it?”
If he was waiting for a compliment, he wasn’t going to get one. I decided to try a swift shot in the dark.
“Played chess lately?” I said.
That pulled him up short. He snuffled, distrustfully; the blue eyes were very watchful.
“What if I have?”
“Your set missing any pieces?”
“Pieces?”
“A red bishop, for instance?”
I had scored a bull’s-eye.
“Have you got it?” he said, tersely.
“I had
.”
“What happened to it?”
“It was stolen.”
For a moment I thought he was going to have a stroke. His face became very red, and his breath forced its way out with difficulty.
“Dam’ fool,” he muttered, half inaudibly. “Dam’ fool. Dam’ fool.” He started to cough. He was almost choking himself. I began to wonder if I ought to fetch the girl.
Just then, she came into the room. She was carrying a tray of drinks. She set them down and went to the bed. The old man was gradually recovering his breath.
After a moment, he nodded at her, and held out his hand.
“Ah, that’s what I need. Do me good. Thanks. You have some, too.” He took the glass she had poured, and turned to me, now himself again.
“Well, now,” he said. “You just wait until I’ve got some sherry inside me, and then—” he motioned me to a chair, hitched himself up on his pillows, and straightened his nightcap—“and then I’ll tell yer all about it.”
PART TWO
Lord Stonybridge’s Story
He told me, as he had promised, all about it. He took his time in the telling, with interruptions for lunch and later for his afternoon nap, which he announced his firm intention of taking as usual. During this time I took the opportunity of sending a wire to Nobby, telling him to join me, since he was clearly wasting his time at Stour; and it looked as though I was here, for the present, to stay. In fact, one of the servants was sent down to Cochem to collect my small baggage; the car, however, I left where it was, since it couldn’t be brought up to the castle.
I have reproduced Stony’s story in his own words, as far as I remember them, but I haven’t attempted to convey the peculiar flavour of his speech, which had been crystallized, as it were, in the St. James’s Street and Warwickshire of pre-1914 England, and had become more arrogantly English, rather than less so, after years of exile in Germany.
He took his time about it, as I say, rambling over his childhood and youth in a leisurely way; he was clearly enjoying himself, and no amount of pressing would bring him to the point before he chose to come to it. Still, I was quite prepared to listen to a bit of Stonybridge family history, and the story is not without interest.
There were the four of us (he began); myself, the eldest; John, who was a year younger; and, coming a long way after us, Oliver and Charles—your grandfather.
John and I both took after our mother; we got on well together, and were very close, while Oliver and Charles formed their own alliance.
Our mother was a charming woman, lively and easygoing. As for our father—your great-grandfather—he was a sterner proposition. Though he was eccentric enough in his own way, he had strong traditional views about the upbringing of children and their duties to their parents, and John and I found him something of a trial. In one thing only, we two resembled him: we were both remarkably single-minded in the pursuit of our tasks or pleasures. While Charles or Oliver would tinker with a hobby for an hour and abandon it unfinished, John and I would stay out for a whole day in the woods with a shotgun, cold and tired, rather than come home without having potted a bird or a rabbit; and John would devote weeks to the unremitting search for some particular butterfly that he wanted for his collection. Semper petimus; it was our only streak of Stonybridge blood.
My father devoted most of his days to the Stour gardens. You will have seen them. He was one of the keenest of its guardians, and it was always a source of regret to him that I, as the eldest son, cared not a fig for gardening. You can imagine his delight when, at an early age—about twelve or thirteen—my brother John began to take an interest in it. Soon John became as fanatic a gardener as our father; he used to hate his summer term at school, because it made him miss the early flowering of Europe; and he would knock down any one of us who happened to tread on the beds or break a flower.
The first important thing that happened in our family took place when John was twenty, and I was twenty-one.
The year was 1890; and for some time my father had been growing restless, because the unchanging stability of Europe allowed him no opportunity for change and development in the garden. And it was then that he took it into his head to dig up the Garden of Europe and replant the whole thing as a large-scale map of the Middle East.
“Europe is finished,” he would mutter to himself as he sat up in his tower with his binoculars, looking out across his herbaceous continent. “Dead as a doornail. Middle East’s the thing. Middle East’s the place of the future. We must scrap Europe and start again.”
There was consternation in the family. For nearly seventy years now the Stonybridge Garden of Europe had grown and flourished, and here was my father, getting old now and not very strong, proposing to undo the work of his great horticultural forbears and embark on this ridiculous new scheme. My mother pleaded with him; but it was John who took action.
John was the hardest hit of all by this whim of our father’s. He loved passionately every inch of the great flower-bed, and he was affronted to the very marrow by the prospect of destruction and change. And so, while my father embarked on his scheme, my brother quietly sabotaged it.
Every day, on my father’s instructions, the gardeners dug up plants and removed them to the nursery, cut the turf into new patterns, filled in a river here, an inland sea there; and every night, when my father was safely ensconced in his library on the far side of the castle, my brother John went out into the gardens and dug it all up again. He replanted, he relaid turf, as fast as the gardeners could pick it up; and thus, with this desperate rearguard action, he maintained the frontiers of Europe, holding the advancing lands of Asia at bay.
Of course, my father knew who was doing it. He was furious. His temper, always uncertain, flared up like a bonfire till my mother feared for his health and sanity. For nearly a week this battle raged; and then my father put his foot down.
He sent poor John away.
From being the most popular of us four sons, John had now become in complete disgrace. He was cut off with a shilling; or rather, with the price of a single fare to Ceylon and a letter of introduction to a tea-planter.
In those days, a young man of good family with no special gifts, if he had not been trained for the army, the church, or the diplomatic service, didn’t have a great deal of choice before him. Like many another younger son, John was forced to accept his fate and learn to plant tea.
Poor John! How he hated it at first. He would send me letters, which I collected from the postmistress in the village, for he was forbidden to write to us. He pined for the Stony gardens; and he wept to think of what was happening to them in his absence.
But as it turned out, once my father had vented his spleen on his unfortunate second son, he suddenly lost all interest in his scheme for the Middle East. He was one of those men who flourish on opposition; and once the chief source of it was gone, he dropped his idea as suddenly as he had adopted it, like a spoilt child who wants the new toy only as long as he is forbidden to have it.
Not that he ever forgave John; his son had offended him, and long after the origin of the quarrel had been forgotten, he continued to nurse his bitterness towards him. As for John, he grew gradually accustomed to his life in Ceylon, and settled down to the cultivation of rare tropical flowers, which had given him a new interest in life.
As for me, I remained at home, bored to tears, missing my brother, growing impatient of my father’s rapidly deteriorating moods and temper. My younger brothers, Oliver and Charles, left home altogether as soon as they were old enough to take their commissions in the Guards. They lived their own lives in London, both marrying young and with out my father’s approval: Oliver a little milliner, and Charles a girl on the stage. For my father, these unfortunate marriages were the last straw. I was the only hope left to him, and he saw to it that I remained at home and learned to look after the estate.
When I was nearly twenty
-five, my mother died. My father gradually shut himself up in his tower, and I grew desperate. It was then that I discovered the wonders of polar exploration.
I had always had an interest in the Arctic; and reading one day of an expedition that was about to set off for the polar regions, I knew suddenly that this was what I wanted to do. I applied to join the expedition, and was accepted. I had just enough money from my mother to enable me to undertake the trip; for of course my father would give me none.
When I told him of my intention, he flew into a rage worse than that which John had suffered. Was I going to leave him all alone at Stour, to go off and get myself killed in some tom-fool stunt among the ice-floes? Not over his dead body. Suppose I never came back? What was going to happen to the gardens, to the castle, to the family? My younger brothers were at this very moment fighting in Africa, in the Boer War. I was the only member of the family who could be of any use to him.
But I was firm in my determination; and when my two brothers, Charles and Oliver, were killed in the same action near Pretorius, I allowed not even this disaster to shake me from the course I had chosen. The far north had become my passion; I said good-bye to my father, and went.
I went to the Arctic; and when the expedition was over, I returned to England only for long enough to refit myself and sign on for another journey. If you’ve never been to the North, you’ll never understand what it is that draws one back there. Whatever the draw was, I succumbed to it.
It was in 1900 that my father finally died. I returned to England, feeling little sensation of loss, and indeed interested only in the prospect of obtaining, at last, the fortune which was now to be mine. My mother’s money was nearly gone, and my father’s death came for me like the answer to a prayer.
Or so I thought, as I went with a light heart to hear the family solicitor, a man called Burnley, read my father’s will.
My father had been very cunning. In spite of our quarrels, he had never led me to suppose that I would be cut off with a penny, like poor John. I was, after all, the heir to the property and the title, and these must be kept up. But he had said to himself that he would be damned if his heir, his only remaining son, should spend his life making dam’-fool Arctic explorations, with no one to look after the castle and the gardens that had been his life. And so all his unentailed fortune he left to me in trust, with conditions.
