ONE morning, the last of the term, soon after Father had left for the office, Mother called up the stairs, asking Phillip to come down at once. He was fitting a padlock to his cupboard door; Tommy was in bed next door with a bilious attack; it served him jolly well right; but he might recover any moment, and creep over to see what he could pinch next. At breakfast Father, hearing about the proposed padlock, had said something about locking the stable door after the horse had been stolen; but Phillip was taking no more chances with that skellum Tommy.
“Come at once, Phillip! Gerry wants to see you, he says.”
At the mention of his admired cousin, Phillip dashed along the passage and down the stairs. Gerry stood there.
“Don’t breathe a word to anyone, young Phil, but Uncle Charley sent me to ask you if you’d like to come with me, Uncle Hugh and himself, for the day to Brighton? Just us four.”
“But we don’t break up until this afternoon! Oh, damn!”
“We broke up yesterday.”
Phillip paused, irresolute. “Mum, will you advise me?”
“Well dear, you must decide for yourself. Do you do any work on the last day?”
“No, Mum. We’ve been weighed, and measured for the report, and all that.”
“You’ll probably get your remove next term, and there’ll be a different roll-call, so no one will know,” said Gerry. “Come on, chance your arm! I would. If they do remember, say you were bilious, after crabs, like Tommy. I’ll write you an excuse.”
“All right!”
The sky was blue, the sun shone, the cab waited round the corner. Uncle Hugh walked down the road with the aid of two sticks, a new straw boater on his head, watched by Mrs. Neville from her sitting-room window. She told Phillip, later on, that she found the fact of a cab waiting nearly opposite Hillside Road, but out of sight of the houses, decidedly intriguing. She had observed the arrival of Uncle Charley—with black piccaninny!—from her window seat, and had come to the conclusion, she said, that Uncle Charley was a decided character.
Mrs. Neville watched the two men, and the two boys, getting into the cab, before it went down the road. Later, she heard from Hern the grocer, calling for orders, that the cab had stopped outside his shop while Phillip had bought a pound of ginger snaps, with the news that he was going to Brighton for the day.
To Phillip, since there had been no imaginative wastage before action, and no tension, it did not seem like going to the seaside at all. Without any luggage, or even overcoats, they just got in a train without any fuss, and soon were rushing along past houses and so into the countryside.
*
The brothers were in jolly mood to be together again, recapturing the spirit of far away days, the old happy days when the family of five children, with Mamma, had set off every summer for a month with “Dr. Brighton.” The Old Man had joined them for week-ends, and odd days and nights; but most of the time they had been with Mamma, so that they had had what they called a high old time. What fun, what excitement, at the annual setting-off, Charley home from boarding school and Dorrie from the convent near Brussels, smaller Hetty and Hugh from their dame school, and baby Jo in charge of Susan the nurse-maid!
*
In the next carriage, Gerry and Phillip began to sky-lark. They pulled down the blinds; and let them go again to roll up with a snap. They jumped on the cushioned seats; tried to get underneath them. The luggage racks seemed the very place in which to travel, so they clambered up, pretending they were monkeys at the Zoo. They hung down by their toes, scratching elaborately, and uttering screaks of mock antagonism. Finally they settled to read their comics, stretched out on the netting, Phillip reading the ha’penny pink Cuts and Gerry the coloured penny Puck. When the uncles looked in, they pretended to be asleep; the wonderful thing for Phillip was that he had not, for the slightest moment, felt the least bit sick.
The train rushed into a tunnel. For some reason there were no lights in the carriage. Promptly Gerry howled like a wolf in the smoky darkness, Phillip imitating the hound of the Baskervilles. If only he had some luminous paint to put on his face! The train thudded out into dirty daylight, clearing itself as the embankment dropped away. On it rushed, smoke-clear through the sunshine, past fields of grass and corn.
How quickly they were at Brighton!
“Well, here we are, Hugh,” said Charley, outside the station. “Same old cab rank. I wonder if ‘Shepherd’s Warning’ will be here still?”
Alas, the old familiar red-face on the box was not to be seen. An ordinary face, more concerned with securing a fare, with no joviality, opened a door for them.
During the drive to the Old Steine the brothers had an argument about the exact place in Kemp Town where they had stayed as children. Hugh declared that it was in the fourth square behind the sea-front hotels of Marine Parade; Charley was convinced that it was the fifth square. There was a church near one corner, said Hugh; Charley remembered the church well, but it was in the adjoining square. Finally they had a bet about it.
“The sea, Uncle Hugh, the sea!”
Phillip stood up in the cab, staring at the prospect of white-flecked waves beyond buildings and trees, a steamship on the horizon. He gave Uncle Hugh a wide smile, thinking that he had seen the sea at the same time as himself, and therefore must be feeling as he was. How could anyone possibly feel otherwise?
“Coo, what’s that huge place?” he cried, as the cupolas and minarets of the Royal Pavilion came into sight. “Look, the roofs are like those huge onions Uncle Jim grows at Beau Brickhill. Is it the Aquarium, Uncle Hugh?”
“Well,” replied Uncle Hugh, setting his boater a little on one side. “It was built to hold as good fish as ever came out of the sea, by one who was somewhat of a poor fish himself, but otherwise it is not what the Lord Mayor and Corporation would exactly describe as the Brighton Aquarium.”
“No really, Uncle Hugh, is it the Aquarium?”
“In a word, my dear boy—No. The Aquarium is on the front, convenient to the sea which is constantly being pumped into the various tanks holding their finny denizens. Thus the good burghers of this village—I said burghers, not what you think I said, my boy—though what you think I said would be, I admit, a more apt description of many of the more corpulent of theatrical folk who regularly visit this excrescence upon old Brighthelmstone.”
Phillip wondered why Uncle Hugh spoke like that, in a sort of sarcastic voice. Uncle Hugh looked quite ill.
The cab stopped under a tree in the square.
“What are we stopping for?” said Uncle Charley.
“We’ve got to stop somewhere,” replied Uncle Hugh. “And this is as good a place as any.” He tried to pull himself upright.
Hugh Turney had an overwhelming desire to walk to the old lodgings, as he had hundreds of times in his boyhood, up St. James Street. His face was pale, more angular; he was breathing more quickly: a ghost of himself, in search of his lost innocence.
“Much better drive, old man, I don’t want you to exhaust yourself,” suggested Charley, whereupon Hugh laughed a loud mocking laugh, imitating his brother’s laugh.
This mock of himself made Charley angry. Like his father, he was a man of violent temper on occasion. Charley had had a quiet, gentle laugh before his father had turned him out of the house, with five pounds and a second-class passage from Liverpool to Montreal, nearly twenty years before. The laugh was part of a new boisterous personality he had built upon the unstable foundations of the old. Sometimes the old broke through, in what was called temper, but was more truly distemper.
Charley controlled his temper, telling himself that Hugh was not really himself. All the same, he could not resist the desire to explain why he had decided—it being his treat—they should drive to their old apartments in the cab, and not walk.
“We always drove there, first go off, you know, Hugh old man.”
“I know, I know,” came Hugh’s voice from his downheld head. He was resting his brow on his hands clasping the top of his
walking stick.
At the collapse of his brother, Charley yielded.
“Very well then, we’ll walk, just as you wish. But I’ll double the bet, as you’re so damned sure of your own opinion. Make it an even ten bob that it was the fifth square up. Are you on?”
Hugh did not reply for a few moments; then he spoke in a quiet and bitter voice.
“Ten bob! That’s about my total value, rags, bones, and all! Charley, old man, I couldn’t get that from any hospital, if I tried to sell my worthless carcass now, to the bodysnatchers! I’ve tried, so I know. So damned well stop laughing like a jackass!”
“What’s fretting you, my son?”
“Forget it, forget it I tell you! For God’s sake stop being the heavy elder brother! What does it matter where we used to stay in the golden age? A hundred thousand tons of chalk have fallen from the cliffs since those days. Even our bones are in part chalk. A man’s life is no more than a fly’s—a walking maggot’s.”
“Cheer up, old man, while there’s life, there’s hope. And talking of flies, your fly-buttons are undone, my son.”
Hugh glanced downwards. “Do not be anxious,” he said. “A dead bird never falls from the nest.”
Charley’s loud laughter rang out again. He loved his young brother; he had cherished his memory of him during the years of exile—as he thought of them—abroad; and he had been deeply shocked to see what was left of little Hugh when, with at first amazement, he had realized that the flapping object on the small red bicycle, approaching the cab, and then collapsing, had been Hugh. Later, from the Old Man, he had learned that an early death, preceded by loss of all his faculties, was inevitable.
Charles Turney had gone, the very next day, to Cavendish Street, to see the specialist to whom Thomas Turney had originally taken his son: to be told that the newly-discovered salvarsan, six-o-six, was useless: the disease was in its tertiary stage, the nerve-centres were in process of rapid disintegration; nothing could be done. Poor little devil, and from his first go-off, at nineteen! At least the Old Man had done his best for Hugh! That was something in his favour.
“Hold your horse awhile, cabby!”
Hugh Turney’s thoughts as he sat in the open cab were a somewhat complicated linkage of effect and cause: if the Old Man had not been so damned intolerant and critical of Mamma, Charley would not have needed to stand up for her, and so draw upon himself the ire of the Old Man. Charley had ability, he would have settled down with the Firm. Then the Old Man would have left himself, Hugh, alone. But the swine had kicked Charley out: then he, taking Charley’s place, had been put into the blasted business, to give the Old Man contentment in his desire for immortality. That compulsion had made him go against his own grain: he had done things he had never wanted to do; and now, in retrospect, it seemed to Hugh that in deliberately setting out to destroy himself, he had done so only because the Old Man had already started the destruction. He had followed the pattern, without knowing what he had been doing. He had destroyed himself, out of destroyed love of his Father! He had never cared for drinking; alcohol made him sick; and as for those awful tarts in the Alhambra, the Leicester Lounge, and the Empire Promenade, they had always revolted him. Yet he had been drunk night after night, and gone with those appalling females! And now he, in sudden revelation, knew the answer to the enigma! It was all linked up with the maniac power of fathers over their sons! If only he could live to write a novel upon that theme! The hidden malaise of modern society! But no respectable publisher would look at it, even though the hoi polloi were no longer outraged by the remote frenzies of Swinburne, or cared whether Hardy, innocent as a wind-torn oak upon the downs, was either rude or lewd, or both! G. K. Chesterton’s ‘village atheist brooding over the village idiot’—Thomas Hardy! The English had always lacked imagination, regarding trade as having made the best of all possible worlds, behind the ironclad strength of the British Navy assuring material wealth!
“Just a minute, Charley old man. I’ll be all right. Just give me time.”
Hugh wanted to return home at once, to shut himself in his garden room, and write, write, write … before the last darkness got him. Shaken by his emotions, he rested his head upon his hands supported by the stick.
The boys looked at each other. Gerry winked at Phillip. Charley raised a finger. He was now in tune with his brother.
The leaves rustled above the open cab, with the sea-breeze. Hugh looked up. He had seen his complete theme in a revelatory flash: scene upon scene like the cards flicking in one of the automatic machines on the pier when you put in your penny and turned the handle—half-glimpses of vanished childhood, doomed youth, mock heroics of the Boer War, himself trampled in the stony shallows of Modder River, as the Gordon Highlanders broke and ran, himself standing up when they had gone, to receive a bullet through the heart, fired by a Boer but impelled by the dark forces of the Money Lords … his body carried away, but gently, in the waters of the plain … “a hero to the ignoramuses at home.” That would be the final sentence!
As a fact, Hugh Turney had never been under fire in the recent war, to his lasting regret. He had wanted to be killed; but it was that white man, Sidney Cakebread, who had died there. Did Gerry ever think of his father? O God, the wastage of life—dream, hope, and love! Hugh Turney looked at the boys’ faces on the seat before him, and felt himself to be like Gray, who in the Elegy had produced, he thought, the best poem in the English language outside Shakespeare. Ah well, mustn’t spoil their fun. ‘Regardless of their doom, the little victims play.’
“Well, Charley, we may as well get out here, what?”
Nothing loath, the boys jumped out, and talked together of what they should do while Uncle Charley helped Uncle Hugh to the pavement.
“Gent not feeling well, sir?” asked the cabby, pocketing half a crown (the fare being a shilling) and thus able to extend a little sympathy.
“Malaria from the Boer War,” said Charley.
The cabby made clucking noises of sympathy with tongue and teeth, before lifting the reins and preparing to turn round, already casting his eyes about for the next fare.
At the word malaria Gerry exchanged a glance with Phillip, and winked.
Hugh saw the wink. In sudden fury he cried to Gerry, “You young devil, you! Clear out of my sight, d’ye hear? I don’t want you near me! You’ll never be the man your Father was!”
Gerry looked with astonishment from one face to another.
“You two go and have a look at the sea,” said Uncle Charley, a hand on each boy’s shoulder, as he urged them to the kerb. “Uncle Hugh’s a bit upset, coming back after all these years, you see. We’ll meet on the promenade, down there by the sea, in half an hour. Don’t be late, or you’ll miss what I’m planning for you. Hugh’ll be all right when you return. He’s not feeling up to the mark, that’s all.”
*
“I say, Gerry, what is up with Uncle Hugh?” asked Phillip, as they stood on the promenade.
“Don’t you know?”
“Only what Mother said. He got rheumatism when he lived in a damp room by himself in London, after he’d left the Firm, didn’t he? Father never lets him come into our house, saying it’s catching, or something awful. Is it? Look, that’s a Rolls-Royce stopping! And crikey, a balloon! Look, over the sea!”
They stood by the railings. While they were staring at the balloon, some gentlemen got out of the motorcar, and came to the railings near them. Phillip could see at once that they were very high-up people.
“I bet it’s started from the Crystal Palace,” he said, wanting to show off his knowledge.
“Perhaps it’s trying for the Gordon Bennett cup,” said Gerry.
“Huh, the Gordon Bennett race is for motorcars, anyone knows that!” retorted Phillip, sharply, loud enough for the gentlemen beside them to hear.
“It’s also for balloons, young Phil.”
“What, motorcars and balloons racing together? You’ll tell me next that the Derby’s for horses and push-bik
es.”
One of the gentlemen gave him a glance. Immediately he felt abashed. The big red face under a fur collar continued to regard him for a few moments, before he spoke.
“Your friend is right,” he said, with a faintly Irish voice. “The Gordon Bennett race for motorcars was abandoned two years ago. It was considered too dangerous for unclosed continental roads. The race is now the Grand Prix, on a closed circuit. You should read The Daily Trident and be sure that your knowledge is up-to-date in future, young man!”
Then he smiled so charmingly that Phillip forgot he was a very high-up person. He had on the longest overcoat he had ever seen, with a fur lining all the way down to his boots.
Before he could think, Phillip heard himself saying, “I do read The Daily Trident, sir, it’s my favourite newspaper.”
“Do you see other newspapers, then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where?”
“In the Free Library, sir.”
“What do you like about the Trident, particularly?”
Phillip did not know what to reply. He was overawed by the magnificence of the gentleman; and when the others turned to look at him, he felt himself going pale. Then he remembered what Father had said once.
“It’s inspired by common sense, sir.”
The gentleman in the fur collar laughed; the others smiled.
“I am highly complimented that one of your generation should appreciate what I am trying to do.”
The gentleman held out his hand. Phillip held out his, expecting his bones to be hurt in a very manly handshake; but the gentleman bent down, and took his hand between his two hands, very gently, and said to him, “Don’t let anyone drive that clear, direct look from your face, with too much schooling, will you? Young men who get Firsts at the universities are burned up, their minds overstocked and legalised. The future requires new minds, to face the new patterns of nature. Now I am extremely interested in having met you, and before we part, do tell me, why do you really read the Trident?”
“Because my Father has it, sir.”
At this reply the others, as well as Gerry, laughed. Phillip wondered if he had given the wrong answer, and so made the gentleman feel disappointed. But the gentleman looked kindly as before, and said, “Do tell me your name.”
Young Phillip Maddison Page 34
