And here are some extracts from a diary that Millicent kept at this time.
April 14.—Just a week since I started with the Platts and I feel as though I'd been there all my life. And yet I haven't got the thing going at all. I'm in nearly the same mess as I was the first morning. I'm not proud of myself, but at the same time it isn't my fault. Look at the Interruptions alone! (I've put a capital because really they are at the heart of all my trouble.) Victoria herself doesn't begin to know what letting any one alone is. I seem at present to have an irresistible fascination for her. She sits and stares at me until I feel as though I were some strange animal expected to change into something stranger.
And she doesn't know what silence means. She says: "I mustn't interrupt your work, my Millie" (I do wish she wouldn't call me "my Millie"), and then begins at once to chatter. All the same one can't help being fond of her—at least at present. I expect I shall get very impatient soon and then I'll be rude and then there'll be a scene and then I shall leave. But she really is so helpless and so full of alarms and terrors. Never again will I envy any one with money! I expect before the War she was quite a happy woman with a small allowance from her father, living in Streatham and giving little tea-parties. Now what with Income Tax, servants, motor-cars, begging friends, begging enemies, New Art and her sisters she doesn't know where to turn. Of course Clarice and Ellen are her principal worries. I've really no patience with Clarice. I hate her silly fat face, pink blanc-mange with its silly fluffy yellow hair. I hate the way she dresses, always too young for her years and always with bits stuck on to her clothes as though she pickedpieces of velvet and lace up from the floor and pinned them on just anywhere.
I hate her silly laugh and her vanity and the way that she will recite a poem about a horse (I think it is called something like "Lascar") on the smallest opportunity. I suppose I can't bear seeing any one make a fool of herself or himself and all the people who come to the Platts' house laugh at her. All the same, she's the happiest of the three women; that's because she's more truly conceited than the others. It's funny to see how she prides herself on having learned how to manage Victoria. She's especially sweet to her when she wants anything and you can see it coming on hours beforehand. Victoria is a fool in many things but she isn't such a fool as all that. I call Clarice the Ostrich.
Ellen is quite another matter. By far the most interesting of them. I think she would do something remarkable if she'd only break away from the family and get outside it. Part of her unhappiness comes, I'm sure, from her not being able to make up her mind to do this. She despises herself. And she despises everybody else too. Men especially, she detests men, although she dresses rather like them. Victoria and Clarice are both afraid of her because of the bitter things she says. She glares at the people who come to lunch and tea as though she would like to call fire down and burn them all. It's amusing to see one of the new artists (I beg their pardon—New Artists) trying to approach her, attempting flattery and then falling back aware that he has made one enemy in the house at any rate. The funny thing is that she rather likes me, and that is all the stranger because I understand from Brooker, the little doctor, that she always disliked the secretaries. And I haven't been especially sweet to her. Just my ordinary which Mary says is less than civility. . . .
April 16.—Ephraim Block and his friend Adam P. Quinzey (that isn't his real name but it's something like that) to luncheon. I couldn't help asking him whether he didn't think the "Eve" rather too large. And didn't he despise me for asking! He told me that when he gets a commission for sculpting in an open space, the tree that goes with the "Eve" will be large enough to shelter all the school children of Europe.
Although he's absurd I can't help being sorry for him. He is so terribly hungry and eats Victoria's food as though he were never going to see another meal again. Ellen tells me that he's got a woman who lives with him by whom he's had about eight children. Poor little things! And I think Victoria's beginning to get tired of him. She's irritated because he wants her to pay for the tree and the serpent as well as Eve herself. He says it isn'thisfault that Victoria's house isn't large enough andshesays that he hasn't even begun the Tree yet and when he's finished it it will be time enough to talk. Then there are the Balaclavas (the nearest I can get to their names). She's a Russian dancer, very thin and tall and covered with chains and beads, and he's very fat with a dead white face and long black hair. They talk the strangest broken English and are very depressed about life in general—as well they may be, poor things. He thinks Pavlowa and Karsavina simply aren't in it with her as artists and I daresay they're not, but one never has a chance of judging because she never gets an engagement anywhere. So meanwhile they eat Victoria's food and try to borrow money off any one in the house who happens to be handy. You can't help liking them, they're so helpless. Of course I know that Block and the Balaclavas and Clarice's friends are all tenth-rate as artists. I've seen enough of Henry's world to see that. They are simply plundering Victoria as Brooker says, but I'm rather glad all the same that for a time at any rate they've found a place with food in it.
I shan't be glad soon. I'm beginning to realize in myself a growing quite insane desire to get this house straight—insane because I don't even see how to begin. And Victoria's very difficult! She loves Power and if you suggest anything and she thinks you're getting too authoritative she at once vetoes it whatever it may be. On the other hand she's truly warm-hearted and kind. If I can keep my temper and stay on perhaps I shall manage it. . . .
April 17.—I've had thorough "glooms" to-day. I'm writing this in bed whither I went as early as nine o'clock, Mary being out at a party and the sitting-room looking grizzly. I feel better already. But a visit to mother always sends me into the depths. It is terrible to me to see her lying there like adead woman, staring in front of her, unable to speak, unable to move. Extraordinary woman that she is! Even now she won't see Katherine although Katherine tries again and again.
And I think that she hates me too. That nurse (whom I can't abide) has tremendous power over her. I detest the house now. It's so gloomy and still and corpse-like. When you think of all the people it used to have in it—so many that nobody would believe it when we told them. What fun we used to have at Christmas time and on birthdays, and down at Garth too. Philip finished all that—not that he meant to, poor dear.
After seeing mother I had tea with father down in the study. He's jolly when I'm there, but honestly, I think he forgets my very existence when I'm not. He never asked a single question about Henry. Just goes from his study to his club and back again. He says that his bookHaslitt and His Contemporariesis coming out in the Autumn. I wonder who cares?
It makes me very lonely if one thinks about it. Of course there's dear Henry—and after him Katherine and Mary. But Henry's got this young woman he picked up in Piccadilly Circus and Katherine's got her babies and Mary her medicine. And I've got the Platts I suppose. . . .
All the same sometimes it isn't much fun being a modern girl. I daresay liberty and going about like a man's a fine thing, but sometimes I'd like to have some one pet me and make a fuss over me and care whether I'm alive or not.
On the impulse of this mood, I've asked Peter Westcott to come and have tea with me. He seems lonely too and was really nice at Henry's the other day. Now I shall go to sleep and dream about Victoria's correspondence.
April 18.—A young man to luncheon to-day very different from the others. Humphrey Baxter by name; none of the aesthete abouthim! Clean, straight-back, decently dressed, cheerful young man. Item, dark with large brown eyes. At first it puzzled me as to how he got into this crowd at all, then I discovered that he's rehearsing in a play that Clarice is getting up,The Importance of Being Earnest. He plays Bunbury or has something to do with a man called Bunbury—anyway they all call him Bunny. He's vastly amused by the aesthetes and laughs at them all the time, the odd thing is thatthey don't mind. He also knows exactly how to treat Victoria, taking her troubles seriously, although his eyes twinkle, and being really very courteous to her.
The only one of the family who hates him is Ellen. She can't abide him and told him so to-day, when he challenged her. He asked her why she hated him. She said, "You're useless, vain and empty-headed." He said, "Vain and empty-headed I may be, but useless no. I oil the wheels." She said hers didn't need oiling and he said that if ever they did need it she was to send for him. This little sparring match was very light-hearted on his side, deadly earnest on hers. The only other person who isn't sure of him is Brooker—I don't know why.
Of courseIlike him—Bunny I mean. What it is to have some one gay and sensible in this household. He likes me too. Ellen says he goes after every girl he sees.
I don't care if he does. I can look after myself.She'sa queer one. She's always looking at me as though she wanted to speak to me. And yesterday a strange thing happened. I was going upstairs and she was going down. We met at the corner and she suddenly bent forward and kissed me on the cheek. Then she ran on upstairs as though the police were after her. I don't very much like being kissed by other women I must confess; however, if it gives her pleasure, poor thing, I'm glad. She's so unhappy and so cross with herself and every one else.
April 20.—Bunny comes every day now. He says he wants to tell me about his life—a very interesting one he says. He complains that he never finds me alone. I tell him I have my work to do.
April 21.—Bunny wants me to act in Clarice's play. I said I wouldn't for a million pounds. Clarice is furious with me and says I'm flirting with him.
April 22.—Bunny and I are going to a matinee ofChu Chin Chow. He says he's been forty-four times and I haven't been once. He likes to talk to me about his mother. He wants me to meet her.
April 24.—Clarice won't speak to me. I don't care. Why shouldn't I have a little fun? And Bunny is a good sort. He certainly isn't very clever, but he says his strong line is motor-cars, about which I know nothing. After all, if some one's clever in one thing that's enough. I'm not clever in anything. . . .
April 25.—Sunday, I went over to luncheon to see whether I could do anything for Victoria and had an extraordinary conversation with Ellen. She insisted on my going up to her bedroom with her after luncheon. A miserable looking room, with one large photograph over the bed of a girl, rather pretty. Mary Pickford prettiness—and nothing else at all.
She began at once, a tremendous tirade, striding about the room, her hands behind her back. Words poured forth like bath-water out of a pipe. She said that I hated her and that every one hated her. That she had always been hated and she didn't care, but liked it. That she hoped that more people would hate her; that it was an honour to be hated by most people. But that she didn't wantmeto hate her and that she couldn't think why I did. Unless of course I'd listened to what other people said of her—that I'd probably done that as every one did it. But she had hoped that I was wiser.Andkinder.Andmore generous. . . . Here she paused for breath and I was able to get in a word saying that I didn't hate her, that nobody had said anything against her, that in fact I liked her—— Oh no, I didn't. Ellen burst in. No,no, I didn't. Any one could see that. I was the only person she'd ever wanted to like her and she wasn't allowed to have even that. I assured her that I did like her and considered her my friend and that we'd always be friends. Upon that she burst into tears, looking too strange, sitting in an old rocking-chair and rocking herself up and down. I can't bear to see any one cry; it doesn't stir my pity as it ought to do. It only makes me irritated. So I just sat on her bed and waited. At last she stopped and sniffing a good deal, got up and came over. She sat down on the bed and suddenly put her arms round me and stroked my hair. Ican'tbear to have my hair stroked by anybody—or at least by almost anybody. However, I sat there and let her do it, because she seemed so terribly unhappy.
I suppose she felt I wasn't very responsive because suddenly she got up very coldly and with great haughtiness as though she were a queen dismissing an audience. "Well, now you'dbetter go. I've made a sufficient fool of myself for one day." So I got up too and laughed because it seemed the easiest thing and said that I was her friend and always would be and would help her anyway I could but that I wasn't very sentimental and couldn't help it if I wasn't. And she said still very haughtily that I didn't understand her but that that wasn't very strange because after all no one else did, and would I go because she had a headache and wanted to lie down. So I went.
Wasn't I glad after this to find Bunny downstairs. He suggested a walk and as Victoria was sleeping on the Sunday beef upstairs I agreed and we went along all through the Park and up to the Marble Arch, and the sun was so bright that it made the sheep look blue and the buds were waxy and there were lots of dogs and housemaids being happy with soldiers and babies in prams and all the atheists and Bolsheviks as cheery as anything on their tubs. Bunny really is a darling. He sees all the funny things, just as I do; I don't believe a word that Ellen says about him. He assures me that he's only loved one girl in his life and that he gave her up because she said that she wouldn't have babies. He was quite right I think. He says that he's just falling in love again with some one else now. Of course he may mean me and he certainly looked as though he did. I don't care. I want to be happy and people to like me and every one to love everybody. Why shouldn't they? Not uncomfortably, making scenes like Ellen, but just happily with a sense of humour and not expecting miracles. I said this to Bunny and he agreed.
We had tea in a café in Oxford Street. He wanted to take me to a Cinema after that but I wouldn't. I went home and readLord Jimuntil Mary came in. That's the book Henry used to be crazy about. I think Bunny is rather like Jim although, of course, Bunny isn't a coward. . . .
Now Millie was seized with a strange and unaccountable happiness—unaccountable to her because she did not try to account for it. Simply, everything was lovely—the weather, the shops, the people in the streets, Mary, Henry, the Platts (although Clarice pouted at her and Ellen was sulky). Everything waslovely. She danced, she sang, she laughed. Nothing and nobody could offend her. . . .
In the middle of this happiness Peter Westcott came to tea. She had asked him because she was sorry for him and because she felt that she had not been quite fair to him in the past. Nevertheless as she waited for him in her little sitting-room there was a little patronage and contempt for him still in her heart. She had always thought of him as old and gloomy and solemn. He seemed to her to be that to-day as he came in, stayed awkwardly for a moment by the door and then came forward with heavy rather lumbering steps towards her. But his hand was warm and strong—a clean good grip that she liked. He sat down, making her wicker chair creak—then there was an untidy pause. She gave him his tea and something to eat and talked about the weather.
At another time, it might be, the ice would never have been broken and he would have gone away, leaving them no closer than they had been before. But to-day her happiness was too much for her; she could not see him without wanting to make him laugh.
"Have you seen Henry?" she asked. It was so difficult to speak much about Henry without smiling.
"Not for a week," he answered, "he's very busy with his Baronet and his strange young woman." Then he smiled. He looked straight across at her, into her eyes.
"Why did you ask me to come to tea?"
"Why?"
"Yes, because you don't like me. You think me a tiresome middle-aged bore and a bad influence for Henry." His eyes drew her own. Suddenly she liked his face, his clear honest gaze, his strong mouth and something there that spoke unmistakably of loyalty and courage.
"Well, I didn't like you," she said after a moment's pause. "That's quite true. I liked you for the first time at Henry's the other day. You see I've had no chance of knowing you, have I? And I decided that we ought to know one another—because of Henry."
"Do you really want to know me better?" he asked.
"Yes, I really want to," she answered.
"Well, then, I must tell you something—something about myself. I never speak about the past to anybody. Of what importance can it be to anybody but myself? But if we are going to be friends you ought to know something of it—and I'm going to tell you."
She saw that he had, before he came, made up his mind as to exactly the things that he would tell her, that without realizing it he intended it as an honour that he should want to tell her. Then, too, her feminine curiosity stirred in her. Henry had told her a little, a very little, about him; she knew that he had had a bad time, that he was married, but that his wife had been seen by no one for many years, that he had written some books now forgotten, that he had done well in the War—and that was all.
"Tell me everything you like," she said. "I'm proud that you should want to."
"I was born," Peter began, "in a little town called Treliss on the borders of Cornwall and Glebeshire in '84. I had a very rotten childhood. I won't bore you with all that, but my mother was frightened into her grave by my father who hated me and everybody else. He sent me to a bad school, and at last I ran away up to London. I had one friend, a Treliss fisherman, who was the best human being I've ever known, and he came up to London with me. Things went from bad to worse the first years, but looking back on it I can only see everything that happened in the most ridiculously romantic light—absurd things that I'd like to tell you more about in detail some time. They weresoabsurd; you simply wouldn't believe me if I told you. I was mixed up for instance with melodramatic theatrical anarchists who tried to blow up poor old Victoria when she was out riding. Looking back now I can't be sure that those things ever really happened at all.
"I never seem to meet such people now or to see such things. Was it only my youth perhaps that made me fancy it all like that? You and Henry, may be, are imagining things in just that way now. Stephen, for instance, my fisherman friend. I've never met any one like him since—so good, so simple, so direct, so childlike. I knew magnificent men in the War asdirect and simple as Stephen, but they didn't affect me in the way he did—that may have been my youth again.
"Whatever it was we went lower and lower. We couldn't get any work and we were just about starving, when I got ill, so ill that I should have died if the luck hadn't suddenly turned, an old school friend of mine appeared and carried me off to his home. Yes, luck turned with a vengeance then. I had written a story and it was published and it had a little success. One thinks you know that that little success is a very big one the first time it comes—that every one is talking about one and reading one when really it is a few thousand people at the most.
"Anyway that first success put me on my feet. It was during those years after the Boer War when I think literary success was easier to get than it is now—more attention was paid to writing because the world was quieter and had leisure to think about the arts and money to pay for them. I don't mean that genius, real genius, wouldn't find it just as easy now as then to come along and establish itself, but I wasn't a genius, of course, nor anything like one. Well, I had friends and a home and work and everything should have been well, but I always felt that something was working against me, some bad influence, some ill omen—I've felt it all my life, I feel it now, I shall feel it till I die. Lucky, healthy people can laugh at those things, but when you feel them you don't laugh. You know better. Then I married—the daughter of people who lived near by in Chelsea; I was terribly in love; although I felt there was something working against us, yet I couldn't see how now it could touch us. I was sure that she loved me—I knew that I loved her. She was such a child that I thought that I could guide her and form her and make her what I wanted. From the first there was something wrong; I can see that now looking back. She had been spoilt because she was an only child and had a stupid silly mother, and she was afraid of everything—of being ill, of being hurt, of being poor. She was conventional too, and only liked the people from the class she knew, people who did all the same things, spoke the same way, ate the same way, dressed the same way. I remember that some of my Glebeshire friends came to see me one day andfrightened her out of her life. Poor Clare! I should understand her now I think, but I don't know. One has things put into one and things left out of one before one's born and you can't alter them, you can only restrain them, keep them in check. I had something fundamentally wild in me, she something tame in her. If we had both been older and wiser we might have compromised as all married people have to, I suppose, but we were both so young that we expected perfection, nay, we demanded it. Perfection! Lord, what youth! . . . Then a baby was born, a boy—I let myself go over that boy!" . . . Peter paused. . . . "I can't talk much about that even now. He died. Then everything went wrong. Clare said she'd never have another child. And she was tired of me and frightened of me too. I can see now that she had much justice there. I must have been a dull dog after the boy died, and when I'm dull Iamdull. I get so easily convinced that I'm meant to fail, that I've no right in the world at all. Clare wanted fun and gaiety.
"We hadn't the means for it anyway. I was writing badly. I couldn't keep my work clear of my troubles; I couldn't get right at it as one must if one's going to get it on to paper with any conviction. My books failed one after another and with justice.
"People spoke of me as a failure, and that Clare couldn't endure. She hadn't ever cared very much for my writing, only for the success that it brought. Well, you can see the likely end of it all. She ran off to Paris with my best friend, a man who'd been at school with me, whom I'd worshipped."
"Oh," Millie said, "I'm sorry."
"I only got what I deserved. Another man would have managed Clare all right—made a success out of the whole thing. There's something in me—a kind of blindness or obstinacy or pride—that sends people away from me. You know it yourself. You recognized it in me from the first. Henry didn't, simply because he's so ingenuous and so warm-hearted. He forgets himself entirely; you and I think of ourselves a good deal. I went back to Treliss. I had a friend there, a woman, who showed me a little how things were. I wanted to give everything up and just booze my time away andsink into a worthless loafer as my father had done. She prevented me, and I had, too, a strange revelation one night out on the hills beyond Treliss when I saw things clearly for an hour or two.
"I determined to come back and fight it out. I could show pluck even though I couldn't show anything else. Now I can see that there was something false in that as there was in so many of the crises of my life, because I was thinking only of myself set up against all the world and the devil and all the furies, making a fine figure while the armies of God stood by admiring and whispering one to another, 'He's a fine fighter—there's something in that fellow.'
"It was in just that mood that I came back to London. I went over to Paris and searched for Clare, couldn't hear anything of her, then came back and buried myself.
"I was full of this idea of courage, my back to the wall and fighting the universe. So I just shut myself up, got a little journalism—sporting journalism it was, football matches and boxing and cricket—and grouched along. The other men on the sporting paper thought me too conceited for words and left me alone. I drank a bit too, the worst kind of drinking, alone in one's room.
"Then the War came, thank God. I won't bother you with that, but it kept me occupied until the Armistice, then suddenly I was flung back again with all my old troubles thick upon me once more. I remember one day I had been seeing a rich successful novelist. He talked to me about his successes until I was sick. Then in the evening I went and saw the other end of the business, the young unpopular geniuses who are going to change the world. Both seemed to me equally futile, and once again I was tempted to end it all and just let myself go when I suddenly, standing there in Piccadilly Circus, saw myself just as I had years before at Treliss and my pretentiousness and lack of humour and proportion. And I saw how small we were, and what children, and how short life was, and then and there I swore I'd never take myself so seriously again as to talk about 'going to the dogs,' or 'fighting fate,' or 'being a success,' or 'destiny being against me.' I cheered up alot after that. That was my second turning-point. You and Henry have made the third."
"Me and Henry?" said Millie, regardless of grammar.
"That's why I've burdened you with this lengthy discourse. I haven't spoken of myself for years to a soul. But I want your friendship. I want it terribly and I'll tell you why.
"You and Henry are young. I see now that it's only the young who matter any more. If you take the present state of the world from the point of view of the middle-aged or old, it's all utterly hopeless. We may as well make a bonfire of London and go up in the sparks. There's nothing to be said. It's as bad as it can be. There simply isn't time for even the young middle-aged to set things right. But for the young, for every one under thirty it's grand. There's a new city to be built, all the pieces of the old one lying around to teach you lessons—the greatest time to be born into in the world's history.
"And what the middle-aged and old have to do is to feed the young, to encourage them, laugh at them, give them health and strength and brains, such as they are, to stiffen them, to be patient with them, and for them, not to lie down and let the young trample, but to work with them, behind them, around them—above all, to love them, to clear the ground for them, to sympathize and understand them, and to tell them, if they shouldn't see it, that they have such a chance, such an opportunity, as has never before been given to the son of man.
"For myself what is there? The world that was mine is gone, is burnt up, destroyed. But for you, for you and Henry and the great company with you. Golly! What a time!"
He mopped his brow. He looked at Millie and laughed.
"Please forgive me," he said. "I haven't let myself go like this for years!"
Millie's sympathy was, for the moment, stronger than her vocabulary, her sympathy, that is, for the earlier part of his declaration. As he recounted to her his own story she had been readily, eagerly carried away, feeling the absolute truth of everything that he said, responding to all his trouble and his loneliness. When he had spoken of his boy she had almostloved him, the maternal in her coming out so that she longed to put her arms round him and comfort him. He seemed, as every man seems to every woman, at such a time, himself a child younger than she, more helpless than any woman. But at the end he had swung her on to another mood. She did not know that she liked being addressed as The Young. She felt in this, as she had always before felt with him, that there was something a little priggish, a little laughable in his earnestness. She did not see herself in any group with thousands of other young men and young women. She was not sure that she felt young at all—and in any case she was simply Millicent Trenchard with Millicent Trenchard's body, ambitions and purposes. She had also instinctively the Trenchard distrust of all naked emotions nakedly displayed. This she was happily to conquer—but not yet.
She felt finally as though she were a specimen in a glass jar, set up on the laboratory table, and that the professor was beginning:
"You will now notice that we have an excellent specimen of The Young. . . ."
Then she looked at him and saw how deeply in earnest he was, and that he himself was feeling true British embarrassment at his unforeseen demonstration. This called forth her maternal emotions again. He was a dear old thing—a little childish, a little old and odd, but he needed her help and her sympathy.
"I'll tell you," she said, "I don't think it's very much good putting us all into lumps like that. For instance, you couldn't place Mary Cass and myself in the same division, however hard you tried. If you are going simply by years, then that's absurd, because Mary is years older than I am in some things and years younger in others. One's just as old as one feels," she added with deep profundity, as though she were stating something quite new and fresh that had never been said before.
He smiled, looking at her with great affection.
"I don't want you to look upon yourself as anything in particular," he said. "Heaven forbid. That would be much too self-conscious. What I said was from my point of view—the point of view of those who were young before the War—reallyyoung, with all their lives and their ambitions before them—and can never be young again in quite that way. I only wanted to show you that knowing you and Henry has given me a new reason for living and for enjoying life and a better reason than I've ever had before. I know you distrusted me and I want you to get over that distrust."
"If that's what you want," Millie cried, jumping up and smiling, "you can have it. I feel you're a real friend, both to Henry and me, and wewanta friend. Of course we're young and just beginning. We shall make all kinds of mistakes, I expect, and I'd rather you told us about them than any one else."
"Would you really?" He flushed slowly with pleasure. "And will you tell me about mine too? Is that a bargain?"
"Well, I don't know about telling you of yours," she answered. "I've noticed that that's a very dangerous thing. People ask you to tell them and say they can stand anything, and then when the moment comes they are hurt for evermore. Nor do they believe that thosearetheir mistakes—anything else but not those. However, we'll try. Here's my hand on it."
He took her hand. She was so beautiful, with her colour a little heightened by the excitement and amusement of their talk, her slim straight figure, the honesty and nobility of her eyes as they rested on his face, that, in spite of himself, his hand trembled in hers. She felt that and was herself suddenly confused. She withdrew her hand abruptly, and at that moment, to her relief, Mary Cass came in.
She introduced them and they stood talking for a little, talking about anything, hospitals, Ireland, the weather. Then he went away.
"Who's that?" said Mary when he was gone.
"A man called Westcott, a friend of Henry's."
"I like him. What's he do?"
"He's a writer——"
"Oh, Lord!" Mary threw herself into a chair. "What a pity. He looks as though he were better than that."
"He's a dear old thing," said Millie. "Just a hundred and fifty years old."
"Which means," said Mary, "that he's been telling you how young you are."
"Aren't you clever?" said Millie admiringly.
"Whether I'm clever or no," said Mary, "I'm tired. This chemistry——"
And with that we leave them.
Henry was not such a fool as he looked. You, gentle reader, have certainly by now remarked that you cannot believe that all those years in the Army would have failed to make him a trifle smarter and neater and better disciplined than he appears to be. To which I would reply, having learnt the fact through very bitter personal experience, that it is one of the most astonishing facts in life that you do not change with anything like the ease that you ought to.
That is of course only half the truth, but half the truth it is, and if smuts choose your nose to settle on when you're in your cradle, the probability is that they'll still be settling there when you're in your second childhood.
Henrywaschanging underneath, as will very shortly, I hope, be made plain, but the hard ugly truth that I am now compelled to declare is that by the early days of June he had got his Baronet's letters into such a devil of a mess that he did not know where he was nor how he was ever going to get straight again. Nevertheless, I must repeat once more—he was not such a fool as he looked.
During all these weeks his lord and master had not glanced at them once.
He had indeed paid very little attention to Henry, giving him no typewriting and only occasionally dictating to him very slowly a letter or two. He had been away in the country once for a week and had not taken Henry with him.
He had attempted no further personal advances, had been always kindly but nevertheless aloof. Henry had, on his side, made very few fresh discoveries.
He had met once or twice a brother, Tom Duncombe, a large, fat, red-faced man with a loud laugh, carroty hair, a smellof whisky and a handsome appetite. Friends had come to luncheon and Mr. Light-Johnson had been as constant and pessimistic as ever, but Henry had not trusted himself to a second outburst. Of his own private love-affair there is more to be said, but of that presently.
The salient fact in the situation was that until now Duncombe had not mentioned the letters, had not looked at them, had not apparently considered them. Every morning Henry, with beating heart, expected those dread words: "Well now, let's see what you've done"—and every day passed without those words being said.
Every night in his bed in Panton Street he told himself that to-morrow he would force some order into the horrible things, and every day he was once again defeated by them. He was now quite certain that they led a life of their own, that they deliberately skipped, when he was not looking, out of one pile into another, that they changed the dates on their pages and counterfeited handwritings, and were altogether taunting him and teasing him to the full strength of their yellow crooked little souls. And yet behind the physical exterior of these letters he knew that he was gaining a feeling for and a knowledge of the period with which they dealt that was invaluable. He had burrowed in the library and discovered a host of interesting details—books like Hogg'sReminiscencesand Gibson'sRecollections, and Washington Irving'sAbbotsfordand Lang'sLockhart, and the BallantyneProtestsand theLife of Archibald Constable—them and many, many others—he had devoured with the greed of a shipwrecked mariner on a desert island. He could tell you everything now about the Edinburgh of that day—the streets, the fashions, the clothes, the politics. It seemed that he must, in an earlier incarnation, have lived there with them all, possibly, he liked to fancy, as a second-hand bookseller hidden somewhere in the intricacies of the Old Town. He seemed to feel yet beating through his arteries the thrill and happy pride when Sir Walter himself with his cheery laugh, his joke and his kindly grip of the hand stood among the dusky overhanging shelves and gossiped and yarned and climbed the rickety ladder searching for some ballad or romance,while Henry, his eyes aflame with hero-worship, held that same ladder and gazed upwards to that broad-shouldered form.
Yes—but the letters were in the devil of a mess!
And then suddenly the blow fell. One beautiful June morning, when the sun, refusing to be beaten by the thick glare of the windows, was transforming the old books and sending mists of gold and purple from ceiling to floor, Henry, his head bent over files of the recalcitrant letters, heard the very words that for weeks he had been expecting.
"Now then—it's about time I had a look at those letters of yours."
It is no exaggeration at all to say that young Henry's heart stood absolutely still, his feet were suddenly like dead fish in his boots and his hands weak as water. This, then, was The End! Oh, how he wished that it had occurred weeks ago! He had by now become devotedly attached to the library, loved the books like friends, was happier when hidden in the depths of the little gallery nosing after Bage and Maturin and Clara Reeve than he had been in all his life before. Moreover, he realized in this agonizing moment how deeply attached he had grown during these weeks to his angular master. Few though the words between them had been, there seemed to him to have developed mysteriously and subterraneously as it were an unusual sympathy and warmth of feeling. That may have been simply his affectionate nature and innocence of soul. Nevertheless, there it was. He made a last frantic effort towards a last discipline, juggling the letters together and trying to put the more plainly dated next to one another on the top of the little untidy heaps.
He realized that there was nothing to be done. He sat there waiting for sentence to be pronounced.
Duncombe came over to the table and rested one hand on Henry's shoulder.
"Now, let's see," he said. "You've had more than a month—I expect to find great progress. How many boxes have you done?"
"I'm still at the first," said Henry, his voice low and gentle.
"Still at the first? Ah, well, I expect there are more thanone knew. What's your system? First in months and then in years, I suppose?"
"The trouble is," said Henry, the words choking in his throat, "that so many of them aren't dated at all."
"Yes—that would be so. Well, here we have April, 1816. What I should do, I think, is to make them into six-monthly packets—otherwise the—Hullo, here's 1818!"
"They move about so," said Henry feebly.
"Move about? Nobody can move them if you don't—March 7, 1818; March 12, 1818; April 3—Why, here we are back in '16 again!"
There followed then the most dreadful pause. It seemed to the agonized Henry to last positively for centuries. He grew an old, old man with a long, white, sweeping beard, he looked back over a vast, misspent lifetime, his hearing was gone, his vision was dulled, he was tired, deadly tired, and longed only for the gentle peace of the kindly grave. Not a word was said. Duncombe's long white fingers moved with a deadly and practised skill from packet to packet, taking up one, looking at it, laying it down again, taking up another, holding it for an eternity in his hand then carefully replacing it. The clock wheezed and gurgled and chattered, the sunlight danced on the bookshelves, Henry was in his grave, dead, buried, a vague pathetic memory to those who once had loved him.
"Why!" a voice came from vast distances; "these letters aren't arranged at all!" The worst was over, the doom had fallen; nothing more terrible could occur.
Henry said nothing.
"They simply aren't arranged at all!" came the voice more sharply.
Still Henry said nothing.
Duncombe moved back into the room. Henry felt his eyes burrowing into a hole, red-hot, in the middle of his back. He did not move.
"Would you mind telling me what you have been doing all these weeks?"
Henry turned round. The terrible thing was that tears were not far away. He was twenty-six years of age, he had fought in the Great War and been wounded, he had writtenten chapters of a romantic novel, he was living a life of independent ease as a bachelor gentleman in Panton Street—nevertheless tears were not far away.
"I warned you," he said. "I told you at the very beginning that I was a perfect fool. You can't say I didn't warn you. I've meant to do my very best. I've never before wanted to do my best so badly—I mean so well—I mean——" he broke off. "I've tried," he ended.
"But would you mind telling mewhatyou've tried?" asked Duncombe. "The state the letters were in when they were in this box was beautiful order compared with the state they're in now! Why, you've had six weeks at them! Whathaveyou been doing?"
"I think they move in the night," said Henry, tears bubbling in his voice do what he could to prevent them. "I know that must sound silly to you, or to any sensible person, but I swear to you that I've had dozens of them in the right order when I've gone away one day and found them in every kind of mess when I've got back next morning."
Duncombe said nothing.
"Then," Henry went on, gathering a stronger control of himself, "they really are confusing. Any one would find them so. The writing's often so faded and the signatures sometimes so illegible. And at first—when I started—I knew so little about the period. I didn't know who any of the people were. I've been reading a lot lately and although it looks so hopeless, I—" Then he broke off. "But it's no good," he muttered, turning his back. "I haven't got a well-ordered mind. I never could do mathematics at school. I ought to have told you, the second day I tried to tell you, but I've liked it so, I've enjoyed it. I——"
"I daresay you have enjoyed it," said Duncombe. "I can well believe it. You must have had the happiest six weeks of your life. Isn't it aggravating? Here are six weeks entirely wasted."
"Please take back your money and let me go," said Henry. "I can't pay you everything at once because, to tell you the truth, I've spent it, but if you'll wait a little——"
"Money!" cried Duncombe wrathfully. "Who's talking ofmoney? It's the wasted time I mind. We're not an inch further on."
"We are," cried Henry excitedly. "I've been taking notes—lots of them. I've got them in a book here. And whoever goes on with this next can have them. He'll learn a lot from them, he will really."
"Let's see your notes," said Duncombe.
Henry produced a red-bound exercise book. It was nearly filled with his childish and sprawling hand. There were also many blots, and even some farcical drawings in the margin.
Duncombe took the book and went back with it to his desk. There followed a lengthy pause, while Henry stood in front of his table staring at the window.
At last Duncombe said, "You certainly seem to have scribbled a lot here. Yes . . . I take back what I said about your being idle. I'm glad you're not that. And you seem interested; you must be interested to have done all this."
"I am interested," said Henry.
"Well, then, I don't understand it. If you are interested why couldn't you get something more out of the letters? A child of eight could have done them better than you have."
"It's the kind of brain I have," said Henry. "It's always been the same. I never could do examinations. I have an untidy brain. I could always remember things about books but never anything else. It was just the same in the War. I always gave the wrong orders to the men. I never remembered what I ought to say. But when they put me into Intelligence and I could use my imagination a little, I wasn't so bad. I can see Scott and Hogg and the others moving about, and I can see Edinburgh and the way the shops go and everything, but Ican'tdo the mechanical part. IknewI couldn't at the very beginning."
"You'd better go on working for a bit while I think about it," said Duncombe.
Henry went back to the letters, a sick heavy weight of disappointment in his heart. He could have no doubt concerning the final judgment. How could it be otherwise? Well, at the most he had had a beautiful six weeks. He had learnt some very interesting things that he would never forget and thathe could not have learnt in any other way. But how disappointing to lose his first job so quickly! How sad Millie would be and how sarcastic his father! And then the girl! How could he now entertain any hopes of doing anything for her when he had no job, no money, no prospects! . . .
A huge fat tear welled into his eye, he tried to gulp it back; he was too late. It plopped down on one of the letters. Another followed it. He sniffed and sniffed again. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. He fought for self-control and, after a hard sharp battle, gained the victory. The other tears were defeated and reluctantly went back to the place whence they had come.
The clock struck one; in five minutes' time the gong would sound for luncheon. He heard Duncombe get up, cross the floor; once again he felt his hand on his shoulder.
"You certainly have shown imagination here," he said. "There are some remarkable things in this book. Not all of it authentic, I fancy." The hand pressed into his shoulder with a kindly emphasis. "It's a pity that order isn't your strong point. Never mind. We must make the best of it. We'll get one of those dried-up young clerks at so much an hour to do this part of it. You shall do the rest. I think you'll make rather a remarkable book of it."
"You're going to keep me?" Henry gulped.
"I'm going to keep you." Duncombe moved back to his desk. "Now it's luncheon-time. I suggest that you wash your hands—andyour face."
Henry stood for a moment irresolute.
"I don't know what to say—I—to thank——"
"Well, don't," said Duncombe. "I hate being thanked. Besides, there's no call for it."
The gong sounded.
This was an adventurous day for Henry; he discovered in the first place that Duncombe would not himself be in to luncheon, and he descended the cold stone stairs with the anticipatory shiver that he always felt when his master deserted him. Lady Bell-Hall neither liked nor trusted him, and showed her disapproval by showering little glances upon him,with looks of the kind that anxious hostesses bestow upon nervous parlour-maids when the potatoes are going the wrong way round or the sherry has been forgotten. Henry knew what these glances said. They said: "Oh, young man, I cannot conceive why my brother has chosen you for his secretary. You are entirely unsuited for a secretary. You are rash, ignorant, bad-mannered and impetuous. If there is one thing in life that I detest it is having some one near me whose words and actions are for ever uncertain and not to be calculated beforehand. I am never certain of you from one minute to another. I do wish you would go away and take a post elsewhere."
Because Henry knew that Lady Bell-Hall was thinking this of him he was always in her presence twice as awkward as he need have been, spilt his soup, crumbled his bread and made strange sudden noises that were by himself entirely unexpected. To-day, however, he was spared his worst trouble, Mr. Light-Johnson. The only guests were Tom Duncombe and a certain Lady Alicia Penrose, who exercised over Lady Bell-Hall exactly the fascinated influence that a boa-constrictor has for a rabbit. Alicia Penrose certainly resembled a boa-constrictor, being tall, swollen and writhing, bound, moreover, so tightly about with brilliant clothing fitting her like a sheath that it was always a miracle to Henry that she could move at all. She must have been a lady of some fifty summers, but her skirts were very short, coming only just below her knees. She was a jolly and hearty woman, living entirely for Bridge and food, and not pretending to do otherwise. Henry could not understand why she should come so often to luncheon as she did. He supposed that she enjoyed startling Lady Bell-Hall with peeps into her pleasure-loving life, not that in her chatter she ever paused to listen to her hostess's terrified little "Really, Alicia!" or "You can't mean it, Alicia!" or "I never heard such a thing—never!"
After a while Henry arrived nearer the truth when he supposed that she came in order to obtain a free meal, she being in a state of chronic poverty and living in a small series of attics over a mews.
She was, it seemed, related to every person of importance and alluded to them all in a series of little nicknames thatfell like meteors about table. "Podgy," "Old Cuddles," "Dusty Parker," "Fifi Bones," "Larry," "Bronx," "Traddles"—these were her familiar friends. When she was alone with Henry, Duncombe and his sister she was comparatively quiet, paying eager attention to her food (which was not very good) and sometimes including Henry in the conversation. But the presence of an outsider excited her terribly. She was, outwardly at any rate, as warmly excited about the domestic and political situation as was Lady Bell-Hall, but it did not seem to Henry that it went very deep. So long as her Bridge was uninterfered with everything else might go. She talked in short staccato sentences like a female Mr. Tingle.
To-day she was stirred by Tom Duncombe, not that she did not know him well enough, he being very much more in her set than were either his brother or sister. Henry had not liked Tom Duncombe from the first and to-day he positively loathed him. This was for a very simple human reason, namely, that he talked as though he, Henry, did not exist, looking over his head, and once, when Henry volunteered a comment on the weather, not answering him at all.
And then when the meal was nearly over Henry most unfortunately fell yet again into Lady Bell-Hall's bad graces.
"Servants," Lady Alicia was saying. "Servants. Been in a Registry Office all the morning. For father. He wants a footman and doesn't want to pay much for him; you know all about father, Tommy." (The Earl of Water-Somerset was notoriously mean). "Offering sixty—sixty for a footman. Did you hear anything like it? Couldn't hear of a soul. All too damned superior. Saw one or two—never saw such men. All covered with tattoo marks and war-ribbons—extraordinary times we live in. Extraordinary. Puffy Clerk told me yesterday—remarkable thing. Down at the Withers on Sunday. Sunday afternoon. Short of a fourth. Found the second footman played. Had him in. Perfect gentleman. Son of a butcher but had been a Colonel in the War. Broke off to fetch in the tea—then sat down again afterwards. Best of the joke won twenty quid off Addy Blake and next morning asked to have his wages raised. Said if he was going to be asked to play bridge withthe family must have higher wages. And Addy gave them him."
Tom Duncombe guffawed.
"Dam funny. Dam funny," he said. Lady Bell-Hall shook her head. "A friend of mine, a Mr. Light-Johnson—I think you've met him here, Alicia—told me the other day he's got a man now who plays on the piano beautifully and reads Spanish. He says that we shall all be soon either killed in our beds or working for the Bolsheviks. What the servants are coming——"
As the old butler brought in the coffee at this moment she stopped and began hurriedly to talk about Conan Doyle's séances which seemed to her very peculiar—the pity of it was that we couldn't really tell if it had happened just as he said. "Of course he's been writing stories for years," she said. "He's the author of those detectives stories, Alicia—and writing stories for a long time must make one very regardless of the truth."
Then as the butler had retired they were able to continue. "I don't know what servants are coming to," she said. "They never want to go to church now as they used to."
It was then that Henry made his plunge, as unfortunate in its impetuosity and tactlessness as had been his earlier one, it was perhaps the red supercilious countenance of Tom Duncombe that drove him forward.
"I'm glad servants are going to have a better time now," he said, leaning forward and staring at Alicia Penrose as though fascinated by her bright colours. "I can't think how they endured it in the old days before the War, in those awful attics people used to put them into, the bad food they got and having no time off and——"
"Why, you're a regular young Bolshevik!" Alicia Penrose cried, laughing. "Margaret, Charles got a Bolshevik for a secretary. Who'd have thought it?"
"I'm not a Bolshevik," said Henry very red. "I want everything to be fair for everybody all the way round. The Bolsheviks aren't fair any more than the—than the—other people used to be before the War, but it seems to me——"
"Seen the Bradleys lately, Alicia?" said Tom Duncombe, speaking exactly as though Henry existed less than his sister'sdog, Pretty One, a nondescript mongrel asleep in a basket near the window.
"No," said Alicia. "But that reminds me. Benjy Porker owes me five quid off a game a fortnight ago at Addy Blake's. Glad you've reminded me, Thomas. That young man wants watching. Plays badly too—why in that very game he had four hearts——"
Henry's cup was full. Why, again, had he spoken?Whenwould he learn the right words on the right occasion? Why had he painted himself even blacker than before in Lady Bell-Hall's sight?
He went up to the library hating Tom Duncombe, but hating himself even more.
He sat down at his table determining to put in an hour at such slave-driving over the letters as they had never known in all their little lives. At four o'clock punctually he intended to present himself in Mrs. Tenssen's sitting-room.
When he had been stirring the letters about for some ten minutes or so the quiet and peace of the library once again settled beautifully around him. It seemed to enfold him as though it loved him and wished him to know it. Once again the strange hallucination stole into his soul that the past was the present and the present the past, that there was no time nor place and that only thinking made it so, and that the only reality, the only faith, the only purpose in this life or in any other was love—love of beauty, of character, of truth, love above all of one human being for another. He was touched to an almost emotional softness by Duncombe's action that morning. Touched, too, to the very soul by his own love affair, and touched finally to-day by the sense that he had that old books in the library, and the times and the places and the people that they stood for, were stretching out hands to him, trying to make him hear their voices.
"Only love us enough and we shall live. Everything lives by love. Touch us with some of your own enchantment. You are calling us back to life by caring for us. . . ." He stopped, his head up, his pen arrested, listening—as though he did in very truth hear voices coming to him from different parts of the room.
What he did hear, however, was the opening of the library door, and what he beheld was Tom Duncombe's bulky figure standing for a moment hesitating in the doorway. He came forward but did not see Henry immediately. He stood again, listening, one finger to his lip like a schoolboy about to steal jam. Henry bent his head over his letters, but with one eye watched. All thoughts of love and tenderness were gone with that entrance. He hated Tom Duncombe and hated him for reasons more conclusive than personal, wounded vanity. Duncombe took some further steps and then suddenly saw Henry. He stopped dead, staring, then as Henry did not turn, but stayed with head bent forward, he moved on again still cautiously and with the clumsy hesitating, step that was especially his.
He arrived at his brother's table and stopped there. Henry, looking sideways, could see half Duncombe's heavy body, the red cheek, the thick arm and large, ill-shaped fingers. Those same fingers, he perceived, were taking up letters and papers from the table and putting them down again.
Then, like a sudden blow on the heart, certain words of Sir Charles's spoken a week or two before came back to Henry. "By the way, Trenchard," he had said, "if I'm out and you're ever alone in the library here I want you to be especially careful to allow no one to touch the papers on my table, nor to permit any one to open a drawer—any one, mind you, not even my brother, unless I've told you first that he may. I leave you in charge—you or old Moffatt (the ancient butler), and if you are going, and I'm not yet back, lock the library and give the keys to Moffatt."
He had promised that at the time, feeling rather proud that he should have been charged with so confidential an office. Now the time had come for him to keep his word, and the most difficult crisis of his life was suddenly upon him. There had been difficult moments in the War—Henry alone knew how difficult moments of physical challenge, moments of moral challenge too—but then in that desolate-hell-delivered country thousands of others had been challenged at the same time, and some especial courage seemed to have been given one with special occasion. Here he was alone, and alone in an especiallyarduous way. He did not know how much authority he really had, he did not know whether Sir Charles had in truth meant all that he had said, he did not know whether Tom Duncombe had not after all some right to be there.
Above all he was young, very young, for his age, doubtful of himself, fearing that he always struck a silly figure in any crisis that he had to face. On the other hand, he was helped by his real hatred of the red-flushed man at the table, unlike his brother-in-law Philip in that, namely, that he did not want every one to like him and, indeed, rather preferred to be hated by the people whom he himself disliked.
Tom Duncombe was now pulling at one of the drawers of the table. Henry stood up, feeling that the whole room was singing about his ears.
"I beg your pardon," he said, smiling feebly, and knowing that his voice was a ridiculous one. "But would you mind waiting until Sir Charles comes in? I know he won't be long—he said he'd be back by three."
Duncombe moved away from the drawer and stared.
"Here," he said. "Do you know where my brother keeps the key of this drawer? If so, hand it over."
"Yes, I do know," said Henry. (It was sufficiently obvious, as the key was hanging on a string at the far corner of the table.) "But I'm afraid I can't give it you. Sir Charles told me that no one was to have it while he was away."
Duncombe took in this piece of intelligence very slowly. He stared at Henry as though he were some curious and noxious kind of animal that had just crawled in from under the window. A purple flush suffused his forehead and nose.
"Good God!" he said. "The infernal cheek!"
They stood silently staring at one another for a moment, then Duncombe said:
"None of your lip, young man. I don't know who the devil you think you are—anyway hand over the key."
"No," said Henry paling, "I can't."
"You can't? What the devil do you mean?"
"Simply I can't. I was told not to—I'm your brother's secretary and have to do what he says—not what you say!"
Henry felt himself growing more happily defiant.
"Do you want to get the damnedest hiding you've ever had in your young life?"
"I don't care what you do."
"Don't care what I do? Well, you soon will. Are you going to give me that key?" (All this time he was pulling at the drawers with angry jerks, pausing to stare at Henry, then pulling again.)
"No."
"You're not? You know I can get my brother to kick you out?"
"I don't care. I'm going to do what he said."
"You bloody young fool, he never said you weren't to let me have it."
"I may have misunderstood him. If I did, he'll put it right when he comes back."
"Yes, and a nice story I'll tell him of your damned impertinence. Give me that key."
"Sorry I can't."
"I'll break your bloody neck."
"That won't help you to find the key." Henry was feeling quite cheerful now.
"Christ! . . . You shall get it for that!"
He made two steps to come round the table to get at Henry—and saw the key. At the same instant Henry saw that he saw it. He ran forward to secure it, and in a second they were struggling together like two small boys in a manner unlovely, unscientific, even ludicrous. Ludicrous—had there been an observer, but for the fighters themselves it was one of those uncomfortable struggles when there are no rules of the game and anything may happen at any moment. Duncombe was large but fat and in the worst possible condition, with a large luncheon still unsettled and in a roving state. Moreover he had never been a fighter. Henry was not a fighter either and was handicapped at once because at the first onset his pince-nez were knocked on to the carpet. He fought then blindly in a blind world. He knew that Duncombe was kicking, and struggling to strike at him with his fists. Himself seemed strangely involved in Duncombe's chest, at which he tore with his hands, while he bent his head to avoid the blows. He wasbreathing desperately, while there was such anger seething in his breast as he had never felt for anything human or inhuman in all his life. He felt Duncombe's waistcoat tear, plunged at the shirt, and at once his fingers felt the bare flesh, the soft fat of Duncombe's well-tended body. He was also conscious that he was muttering "You beast, you beast, you beast!" that his left leg was aching terribly and that Duncombe had his hand now firmly fixed in his hair and was pulling with all his strength.
Henry was going. . . . He was being pushed backwards. He caught a large fold of Duncombe's fat between his fingers and pinched. Then he was conscious that in another moment he would be over; he was falling, the ceiling, far away, beat down toward him, his left arm shot out and his fingers fastened themselves into Duncombe's posterior, which was large and soft, then, with a cry he fell, Duncombe on top of him.
Henry, half-stunned, lay, his leg crushed under him, his eyes closed, and waited for the end. Duncombe now could do what he liked to him, and what he liked would be something horrible. But Duncombe also, it seemed, could not stir, but lay there all over Henry, heaving up and down, the sweat from his cheek and forehead trickling into Henry's eyes, his breath coming in great desperate pants.
Then from a long way off came a voice:
"Tom—Trenchard. What the devil!" That voice seemed to electrify Duncombe. Henry felt the whole body quiver, stiffen for a moment, then slowly, very slowly raise itself.
Henry stumbled up and saw Sir Charles, not regarding him at all, but fixing his eyes only upon his brother, who stood, his hair on end, his shirt torn and exposing a red, hairy chest, wrath in his eyes, his mouth trembling with anger and also with some other emotion.
"What have you been doing, Tom?"
"This damned——" then to Henry's immense surprise he broke off and left the room almost at a run.
Sir Charles went straight to his table, looked at the papers, glanced at the drawers, then finally at the key, which was still on the hook.
His voice, when he spoke, was that of the saddest, loneliest, most miserable of men.
"You'd better go and clean up, Henry," he said, pointing to the farther room.
He had never called him Henry before.