The Young Enchanted E-Book

Hugh Walpole

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The Young Changed Book is a book that takes the year 1920 and makes it seem like a disguise. London in 1920 – and young people, standing in the center of the present, with extraordinary opportunities circling around her, ready and eager to take advantage of these opportunities, eager to draw conclusions in the world made.

Leseprobe

Contents

BOOK I

TWO DAYS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

BOOK II

HIGH SUMMER

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

BOOK III

FIRST BRUSH WITH THE ENEMY

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

BOOK IV

KNIGHT ERRANT

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

BOOK I

TWO DAYS

CHAPTER I

THE SCARLET FEATHER

I

Young Henry Trenchard, one fine afternoon in the Spring of 1920, had an amazing adventure.

He was standing at the edge of Piccadilly Circus, just in front of Swan and Edgar’s where the omnibuses stopped. They now stop there no longer but take a last frenzied leap around the corner into Regent Street, greatly to the disappointment of many people who still linger at the old spot and have a vague sense all the rest of the day of having been cheated by the omnibus companies.

Henry generally paused there before crossing the Circus partly because he was short-sighted and partly because he never became tired of the spectacle of life and excitement that Piccadilly Circus offered to him. His pince-nez that never properly fitted his nose, always covered one eye more than the other and gave the interested spectator a dramatic sense of suspense because they seemed to be eternally at the crisis of falling to the ground, there to be smashed into a hundred pieces–these pince-nez coloured his whole life. Had he worn spectacles–large, round, moon-shaped ones as he should have done–he would have seen life steadily and seen it whole, but a kind of rather pathetic vanity–although he was not really vain–prevented him from buying spectacles. The ill-balancing of these pince-nez is at the back of all these adventures of his that this book is going to record.

He waited, between the rushing of the omnibuses, for the right moment in which to cross, and while he waited a curious fancy occurred to him. This fancy had often occurred to him before, but he had never confessed it to any one–not even to Millicent–not because he was especially ashamed of it but because he was afraid that his audience would laugh at him, and if there was one thing at this time that Henry disliked it was to be laughed at.

He fancied, as he stood there, that his body swelled, and swelled; he grew, like ‘Alice in her Wonderland,’ into a gigantic creature, his neck shot up, his arms and his legs extended, his head was as high as the barber’s window opposite, then slowly he raised his arm–like Gulliver, the crowds, the traffic, the buildings dwindled beneath him. Everything stopped; even the sun stayed in its course and halted. The flower-women around the central statue sat with their hands folded, the policemen at the crossings waited, looking up to him as though for orders–the world stood still. With a great gesture, with all the sense of a mighty dramatic moment he bade the centre of the Circus open. The Statue vanished and in the place where it had been the stones rolled back, colour flamed into the sky, strange beautiful music was heard and into the midst of that breathless pause there came forth–what?

Alas, Henry did not know. It was here that the vision always stayed. At the instant when the ground opened his size, his command, his force collapsed. He fell, with a bang to the ground, generally to find that some one was hitting him in the ribs, or stepping on his toes or cursing him for being in the way.

Experience had, by this time, taught him that this always would be so, but he never surrendered hope. One day the vision would fulfil itself and then–well he did not exactly know what would happen then.

To-day everything occurred as usual, and just as he came to ground some one struck him violently in the back with an umbrella. The jerk flung his glasses from his nose and he was only just in time to put out his hands and catch them. As he did this some books that he was carrying under his arm fell to the ground. He bent to pick them up and then was at once involved in the strangest medley of books and ankles and trouser-legs and the fringes of skirts. People pushed him and abused him. It was the busiest hour of the day and he was groping at the busiest part of the pavement. He had not had time to replace his pince-nez on his nose–they were reposing in his waistcoat pocket–and he was groping therefore in a darkened and confusing world. A large boot stamped on his fingers and he cried out; some one knocked off his hat, some one else prodded him in the tenderest part of his back.

He was jerked on to his knees.

When he finally recovered himself and was once more standing, a man again amongst men, his pince-nez on his nose, he had his books under his arm, but his hat was gone, gone hopelessly, nowhere to be seen. It was not a very new hat–a dirty grey and shapeless–but Henry, being in the first weeks of his new independence, was poor and a hat was a hat. He was supremely conscious of how foolish a man may look without a hat, and he hated to look foolish. He was also aware, out of the corner of his eye, that there was a smudge on one side of his nose. He could not tell whether it were a big or a little smudge, but from the corner of his eye it seemed gigantic.

Two of the books that he was carrying were books given him for review by the only paper in London–a small and insignificant paper–that showed interest in his literary judgment, and but a moment ago they had been splendid in their glittering and handsome freshness.

Now they were battered and dirty and the corner of one of them was shapeless. One of the sources of his income was the sum that he received from a bookseller for his review copies; he would never now receive a penny for either of these books.

There were tears in his eyes–how he hated the way that tears would come when he did not want them! and he was muddy and hatless and lonely! The loneliness was the worst, he was in a hostile and jeering and violent world and there was no one who loved him.

They did not only not love him, they were also jeering at him and this drove him at once to the determination to escape their company at all costs. No rushing omnibuses could stop him now, and he was about to plunge into the Piccadilly sea, hatless, muddy, bruised as he was, when the wonderful adventure occurred.

All his life after he would remember that moment, the soft blue sky shredded with pale flakes of rosy colour above him, the tall buildings grey and pearl white, the massed colour of the flowers round the statue, violets and daffodils and primroses, the whir of the traffic like an undertone of some symphony played by an unearthly orchestra far below the ground, the moving of the people about him as though they were all hurrying to find their places in some pageant that was just about to begin, the bells of St. James’ Church striking five o’clock and the soft echo of Big Ben from the far distance, the warmth of the Spring sun and the fresh chill of the approaching evening, all these common, everyday things were, in retrospect, part of that wonderful moment as though they had been arranged for him by some kindly benignant power who wanted to give the best possible setting to the beginning of the great romance of his life.

He stood on the edge of the pavement, he made a step forward and at that moment there arose, as it were from the very heart of the ground itself, a stout and, to Henry’s delicate sense, a repulsive figure.

She was a woman wearing a round black hat and a black sealskin jacket; her dress was of a light vivid green, her hair a peroxide yellow and from her ears hung large glittering diamond earrings.

To a lead of the same bright green as her dress there was attached a small sniffing and supercilious Pomeranian. She was stout and red-faced: there was a general impression that she was very tightly bound about beneath the sealskin jacket. Her green skirt was shorter than her figure requested. Her thick legs showed fairly pink beneath very thin silk black stockings; light brown boots very tightly laced compressed her ankles until they bulged protestingly. All this, however, Henry did not notice until later in the day when, as will soon be shown, he had ample opportunity for undisturbed observation.

His gaze was not upon the stout woman but upon the child who attended her. Child you could not perhaps truthfully call her; she was at any rate not dressed as a child.

In contrast with the woman her clothes were quiet and well made, a dark dress with a little black hat whose only colour was a feather of flaming red. It was this feather that first caught Henry’s eye. It was one of his misfortunes at this time that life was always suggesting to him literary illusions.

When he saw the feather he at once thought of Razkolnikov’s Sonia. Perhaps not only the feather suggested the comparison. There was something simple and innocent and a little apprehensive that came at once from the girl’s attitude, her hesitation as she stood just in front of Henry, the glance that she flung upon the Piccadilly cauldron before she stepped into it.

He saw very little of her face, although in retrospect, it was impossible for him to believe that he had not seen her exactly as she was, soul and body, from the first instant glimpse of her; her face was pale, thin, her eyes large and dark, and even in that first moment very beautiful.

He had not, of course, any time to see these things. He filled in the picture afterwards. What exactly occurred was that the diamond earrings flashed before him, the thick legs stepped into the space between two omnibuses, there was a shout from a driver and for a horrible moment it seemed that both the girl and the supercilious Pomeranian had been run over. Henry dashed forward, himself only narrowly avoided instant death, then, reaching, breathless and confused, an island, saw the trio, all safe and well, moving towards the stoutest of the flower-women. He also saw the stout woman take the girl by the arm, shake her violently, say something to her in obvious anger. He also saw the girl turn for an instant her head, look back as though beseeching some one to help her and then follow her green diamond-flashing dragon.

Was it this mute appeal that moved Henry? Was it Fate and Destiny? Was it a longing that justice should be done? Was it the Romantic Spirit? Was it Youth? Was it the Spirit of the Age? Every reader of this book must make an individual decision.

The recorded fact is simply that Henry, hatless, muddy, battered and dishevelled, his books still clutched beneath his arm, followed. Following was no easy matter. It was, as I have already said, the most crowded moment of the day. Beyond the statue and the flower-woman a stout policeman kept back the Shaftesbury Avenue traffic. Men and women rushed across while there was yet time and the woman, the dog and the girl rushed also. As Henry had often before noticed, it was the little things in life that so continually checked his progress. Did he search for a house that he was visiting for the first time, the numbers in that street invariably ceased just before the number that he required. Was anything floating through the air in the guise of a black smut or a flake of tangible dust, certainly it would settle upon Henry’s unconscious nose: was there anything with which a human body might at any moment be entangled, Henry’s was the body inevitably caught.

So it was now. At the moment that he was in the middle of the crossing, the stout policeman, most scornfully disregarding him, waved on the expectant traffic. Down it came upon him, cars and taxi-cabs, omnibuses and boys upon bicycles, all shouting and blowing horns and screaming out of whistles. He had the barest moment to skip back into the safe company of the flower-woman. Skip back he did. It seemed to his over-sensitive nature that the policeman sardonically smiled.

When he recovered from his indignant agitation there was of course no sign of the flaming feather. At the next opportunity he crossed and standing by the paper-stall and the Pavilion advertisements gazed all around him. Up the street and down the street. Down the street and up the street. No sign at all. He walked quickly towards the Trocadero restaurant, crossed there to the Lyric Theatre, moved on to the churchyard by the entrance to Wardour Street and then gazed again.

What happened next was so remarkable and so obviously designed by a kindly paternal providence that for the rest of his life he could not quite escape from a conviction that fate was busied with him! a happy conviction that cheered him greatly in lonely hours. Out from the upper Circle entrance to the Apollo Theatre, so close to him that only a narrow unoccupied street separated him, came the desired three, the woman and the dog first, the girl following. They stood for a moment, then the woman once more said something angrily to the girl and they turned into Wardour Street. Now was all the world hushed and still, the graves in the churchyard slept, a woman leaning against a doorway sucked an orange, the sun slipped down behind the crooked chimneys, saffron and gold stole into the pale shadows of the sky and the morning and the evening were the First Day.

Henry followed.

Around Wardour Street they hung all the shabby and tattered traditions of the poor degraded costume romance, but in its actual physical furniture there are not even trappings. There is nothing but Cinema offices, public houses, barber shops, clothes shops and shops with windows so dirty that you cannot tell what their trade may be. It is a romantic street in no sense of the word; it is not a kindly street nor a hospitable, angry words are forever echoing from wall to wall and women scream behind shuttered windows.

Henry had no time to consider whether it were a romantic street or no. The feather waved in front of him and he followed. He had by now forgotten that he was hatless and dirty. A strangely wistful eagerness urged him as though his heart were saying with every beat: “Don’t count too much on this. I know you expect a great deal. Don’t be taken in.”

He did expect a great deal; with every step excitement beat higher. Their sudden reappearance when he had thought that he had lost them seemed to him the most wonderful omen. He believed in omens, always throwing salt over his left shoulder when he spilt it (which he continually did), never walking under ladders and of course never lighting three cigarettes with one match.

Some way up Wardour Street on the left as you go towards Oxford Street there is a public house with the happy country sign of the Intrepid Fox. No one knows how long the Intrepid Fox has charmed the inhabitants of Wardour Street into its dark and intricate recesses–Tom Jones may have known it and Pamela passed by it and Humphrey Clinker laughed in its doorway–no one now dare tell you and no history book records its name. Only Henry will never until he dies forget it and for him it will always be one of the most romantic buildings in the world.

It stood at the corner of Wardour Street and a little thoroughfare called Peter Street. Henry reached the Intrepid Fox just as the Flaming Feather vanished beyond the rows of flower and vegetable stalls that thronged the roadway. Peter Street it seemed was the market of the district; beneath the lovely blue of the evening the things on the stall are picturesque and touching, even old clothes, battered hats, boots with gaping toes and down-trodden heels, and the barrow of all sorts with dirty sheets of music and old paper-covered novels and tin trays and cheap flower-painted vases. In between these booths the feather waved. Henry pursuing stumbled over the wooden stands of the barrows, nearly upset an old watery-eyed woman from her chair–and arrived just in time to see the three pursued vanish through a high faded green door that had the shabby number in dingy red paint of Number Seven.

Number Seven was, as he at once perceived, strangely situated. At its right was the grimy thick-set exterior of “The City of London” public house, on its left there was a yard roofed in by a wooden balcony like the balcony of a country inn, old and rather pathetic with some flower-pots ranged along it and three windows behind it; the yard and the balcony seemed to belong to another and simpler world than the grim ugliness of the “City of London” and her companions. The street was full of business and no one had time to consider Henry. In this neighbourhood the facts that he was without a hat and needed a wash were neither so unusual nor so humorous as to demand comment.

He stood and looked. This was the time for him to go home. His romantic adventure was now logically at an end. Did he ring the bell of Number Seven he had nothing whatever to say if the door were opened.

The neighbourhood was not suited to his romantic soul. The shop opposite to him declaring itself in large white letters to be the “Paris Fish Dinner” and announcing that it could provide at any moment “Fish fried in the best dripping” was the sort of shop that destroyed all Henry’s illusions. He should, at this point, have gone home. He did not. He crossed the road. The black yard, smelling of dogs and harness, invited him in. He stumbled in the dusk against a bench and some boxes but no human being seemed to be there. As his eyes grew accustomed to the half light he saw at the back of the yard a wooden staircase that vanished into blackness. Still moving as though ordered by some commanding Providence he walked across to this and started to climb. It turned a corner and his head struck sharply a wooden surface that suddenly, lifting with his pressure a little, revealed itself as a trap-door. Henry pushed upwards and found himself, as Mrs. Radcliffe would say “in a gloomy passage down which the wind blew with gusty vehemence.”

In truth the wind was not blowing nor was anything stirring. The trap-door fell back with a heavy swaying motion and a creaking sigh as though some one quite close at hand had suddenly fainted. Henry walked down the passage and found that it led to a dusky thick-paned window that overlooked a square just behind the yard through which he had come. This was a very small and dirty square, grimy houses overlooking it and one thin clothes-line cutting the light evening sky now light topaz with one star and a cherry-coloured baby moon. To the right of this window was another heavily curtained and serving no purpose as it looked out only upon the passage. Beside this window Henry paused. It was formed by two long glass partitions and these were not quite fastened. From the room beyond came voices, feminine voices, one raised in violent anger. A pause–from below in the yard some one called. A step was ascending the stair.

From within voices again and then a sound not to be mistaken. Some one was slapping somebody’s face and slapping it with satisfaction. A sharp cry–and Henry pushing back the window, stepped forward, became entangled in curtains of some heavy clinging stuff, flung out his arms to save himself and fell for the second time within an hour and on this occasion into the heart of a company that was most certainly not expecting him.

II

He had fallen on his knees and when he stumbled to his feet his left heel was still entangled with the curtain. He nearly fell again, but saved himself with a kind of staggering, suddenly asserted dignity, a dignity none the easier because he heard the curtain tear behind him as he pulled himself to his feet.

When he was standing once more and able to look about him the scene that he slowly collected for himself was a simple one–a very ugly room dressed entirely it seemed at first sight in bright salmon pink, the walls covered with photographs of ladies and gentlemen for the most part in evening dress. There were two large pink pots with palms, an upright piano swathed in pink silk, a bamboo bookcase, a sofa with pink cushions, a table on which tea was laid, the Pomeranian and–three human beings.

The three human beings were in various attitudes of transfigured astonishment exactly as though they had been lent for this special occasion by Madame Tussaud. There was the lady with the green dress, the girl with the flaming feather and the third figure was a woman, immensely stout and hung with bracelets, pendants, chains and lockets so that when her bosom heaved (it was doing that now quite frantically) the noise that she made resembled those Japanese glass toys that you hang in the window for the wind to make tinkling music with them. The only sounds in the room were this deep breathing and this rattling, twitting, tittering agitation.

Even the Pomeranian was transfixed. Henry felt it his duty to speak and he would have spoken had he not been staring at the girl as though his eyes would never be able to leave her face again. It was plain enough that it was she who had been slapped a moment ago. There was a red mark on her cheek and there were tears in her eyes.

To Henry she was simply the most beautiful creature ever made in heaven and sent down to this sinful earth by a loving and kindly God. He had thought of her as a child when he first saw her, he thought of her as a child again now, a child who had, only last night, put up her hair–under the hat with the flaming feather, that hair of a vivid shining gold was trying to escape into many rebellious directions. The slapping may have had something to do with that. It was obvious at the first glance that she was not English–Scandinavian perhaps with the yellow hair, the bright blue eyes and the clear pink-and-white skin. Her dress of some mole-coloured corduroy, very simple, her little dark hat, set off her vivid colour exquisitely. She shone in that garish vulgar room with the light and purity of some almost ghostly innocence and simplicity. She was looking at Henry and he fancied that in spite of the tears that were still in her eyes a smile hovered at the corners of her mouth.

“Well, sir?” said the lady in green. She was not really angry Henry at once perceived and afterwards he flattered himself because he had from the very first discovered one of the principal features of that lady’s “case”–namely, that she would never feel either anger or disapproval–at any member of the masculine gender entering any place whatever, in any manner whatever, where she might happen to be. No, it was not anger she showed, nor even curiosity–rather a determination to turn this incident, bizarre and sudden though it might be, to the very best and most profitable advantage.

“You see,” said Henry, “I was in the passage outside and thought I heard some one call out. I did really.”

“Well you were mistaken, that’s what you were,” said the green lady. “I must say–! Of all the things!”

“I’m really very sorry,” said Henry. “I’ve never done such a thing before. It must seem very rude.”

“Well it is rude,” said the green lady. “If you were to ask me to be as polite as possible and not to hurt anybody’s feelings, I couldn’t say anything but that. All the same there’s no offence taken as I see there was none meant!”

She smiled; the gleam of a distant gold tooth flashed through the air.

“If there’s anything I can do to apologize,” said Henry, encouraged by the smile, but hating the smile more than ever.

“No apologies necessary,” said the green lady. “Tenssen’s my name. Danish. This is Mrs. Armstrong–My daughter Christina–”

As she spoke she smiled at Henry more and more affectionately. Had it not been for the girl he would have fled long before; as it was, with a horrible sickening sensation that in another moment she would stretch out a fat arm and draw him towards her, he held his ground.

“What about a cup of tea?” she said. At that word the room seemed to spring to life. Mrs. Armstrong moved heavily to the table and sat down with the contented abandonment of a cow safe at last in its manger. The girl also sat down at the opposite end of the table from her mother.

“It’s very good of you,” said Henry, hesitating. “The fact is that I’m not very clean. I had an accident in Piccadilly and lost my hat.”

“That’s nothing,” said Mrs. Tenssen, as though falling down in Piccadilly were part of every one’s daily programme.

“Come along now and make yourself at home.”

He drew towards her, fascinated against his will by the shrill green of her dress, the red of her cheeks and the strangely intimate and confident stare with which her eyes, slightly green, enveloped him. As he had horribly anticipated her fat boneless fingers closed upon his arm.

He sat down.

There was a large green teapot painted with crimson roses. The tea was very strong and had been obviously standing for a long time.

Conversation of a very bright kind began between Mrs. Tenssen and Mrs. Armstrong.

“I’m sure you’ll understand,” said Mrs. Tenssen, smiling with a rich and expensive glitter, “that Mrs. Armstrong is my oldest friend. My oldest and my best. What I always say is that others may misunderstand me, but Ruby Armstrong never. If there’s one alive who knows me through and through it’s Mrs. Armstrong.”

“Yes,” said Henry.

“You mustn’t believe all the kind things she says about me. One’s partial to a friend of a lifetime, of course, but what I always say is if one isn’t partial to a friend, who is one going to be partial to?”

Mrs. Armstrong spoke, and Henry almost jumped from his chair so unexpectedly base and masculine was her voice.

“Ada expresses my feelings exactly,” she said.

“I’m sure that some,” went on Mrs. Tenssen, “would say that it’s strange, if not familiar, asking a man to take tea with one when one doesn’t even know his name, and his entrance into one’s family was so peculiar; but what I always say is that life’s short and there’s no time to waste.”

“My name’s Henry Trenchard,” said Henry, blushing.

“I had a friend once” (Mrs. Tenssen always used the word “friend” with a weight and seriousness that gave it a very especial importance), “a Mr. William Trenchard. He came from Beckenham. You remember him, Ruby?”

“I do,” said Mrs. Armstrong. “And how good you were to him too! No one will ever know but myself how truly good you were to that man, Ada. Your kind heart led you astray there, as it has done often enough before.”

Mrs. Tenssen nodded her head reminiscently. “He wasn’t all he should have been,” she said. “But there, one can’t go on regretting all the actions of the past, or where would one be?”

She regarded Henry appreciatively. “He’s a nice boy,” she said to Mrs. Armstrong. “I like his face. I’m a terrible woman for first impressions, and deceived though I’ve been, I still believe in them.”

“He’s got kind eyes,” said Mrs. Armstrong, blowing on her tea to cool it.

“Yes, they’re what I’d call thinking eyes. I should say he’s clever.”

“Yes, he looks clever,” said Mrs. Armstrong.

“And I like his smile,” said Mrs. Tenssen.

“Good-natured I should say,” replied Mrs. Armstrong.

This direct and personal comment floating quite naturally over his self-conscious head embarrassed Henry terribly. He had never been discussed before in his own presence as though he didn’t really exist. He didn’t like it; it made him extremely uneasy. He longed to interrupt and direct the conversation into a safer channel, but every topic of interest that occurred to him seemed unsuitable. The weather, the theatres, politics, Bolshevism, high prices, food, house decoration, literature and the Arts–all these occurred to him but were dismissed at once as unlikely to succeed. Moreover, he was passionately occupied with his endeavour to catch the glimpses of the girl at the end of the table. He did not wish to look at her deliberately lest that should embarrass her. He would not, for the world bring her into any kind of trouble. The two women whom he hated with increasing vehemence with every moment that passed were watching like vultures waiting for their prey. (This picture and image occurred quite naturally to Henry.) The glimpses that he did catch of the soft cheek, the untidy curls, the bend of the head and the curve of the neck fired his heart to a heroism, a purity of purpose, a Quixotism that was like wine in his head, so that he could scarcely hear or see. He would have liked to have the power to at that very instant jump up, catch her in his arms and vanish through the window. As it was he gulped down his tea and crumbled a little pink cake.

As the meal proceeded the air of the little room became very hot and stuffy. The two ladies soon fell into a very absorbing conversation about a gentleman named Herbert whose salient features were that he had a double chin and was careless about keeping engagements. The conversation passed on then to other gentlemen, all of whom seemed in one way or another to have their faults and drawbacks, and to all of whom Mrs. Tenssen had been, according to Mrs. Armstrong, quite marvellously good and kind.

The fool that Henry felt!

Here was an opportunity that any other man would have seized. He could but stare and gulp and stare again. The girl sat, her plate and cup pushed aside, her hands folded, looking before her as though into some mirror or crystal revealing to her the strangest vision–and as she looked unhappiness crept into her eyes, an unhappiness so genuine that she was quite unconscious of it.

Henry leant across the table to her.

“I say, don’t... don’t!” he whispered huskily.

She turned to him, smiling.

“Don’t what?” she asked. There was the merest suggestion of a foreign accent behind her words.

“Don’t be miserable. I’ll do anything–anything. I followed you here from Piccadilly. I heard her slapping you.”

“Oh, I want to get away!” she whispered breathlessly. “Do you think I can?”

“You can if I help you,” Henry answered. “How can I see you?”

“She keeps me here...”

Their whispers had been low, but the eager conversation at the other end of the table suddenly ceased.

“I’m afraid I must be going now,” said Henry rising and facing Mrs. Tenssen. “It was very good of you to give me tea.”

“Come again,” said Mrs. Tenssen regarding him once more with that curiously fixed stare, a stare like a glass of water in which floated a wink, a threat, a cajoling, and an insult.

“We’ll be glad to see you. Just take us as you find us. Come in the right way next time. There’s a bell at the bottom of the stairs.”

Mrs. Armstrong laughed her deep bass laugh.

He shook hands with the two women, shuddering once more at Mrs. Tenssen’s boneless fingers. He turned to the girl. “Good-bye,” he said. “I’ll come again.”

“Yes,” she answered, not looking at him but at her mother at the other side of the table. The stairs were dark and smelt of fish and patchouli. He stumbled down them and let himself out into Peter Street. The evening was blue with a lovely stir in it as in running water. The booths were crowded, voices filled the air. He escaped into Shaftesbury Avenue as Hänsel and Gretel escaped from the witch’s cottage. He was in love for the first time in his young, self-centred life....

CHAPTER II

HENRY HIMSELF

In the fifth chapter of the second part of Henry Galleon’s Three Magicians there is this passage (The Three Magicians appeared in 1892):

When he looked at the Drydens, father, daughter, and son, he would wonder, as he had often in earlier days wondered, why writers on English character so resolutely persisted in omitting the Dryden type from their definitions? These analyses were perhaps too sarcastic, too cynical to include anything as artless, as simple as the Dryden character without giving the whole case away... and yet it was, he fancied in that very character that the whole strength and splendour of the English spirit persisted. Watching Cynthia and Tony Dryden he was reminded of a picture in a fairy-tale book read and loved by him in his youth, now forgotten to the very name of its author, lingering only with a few faded colours of the original illustration. He fancied that it had been a book of Danish fairy romances.... This picture of which he thought was a landscape–Dawn was breaking over a great champigné of country, country that had hills and woods and forests, streams and cottages all laid out in that detailed fancy that, as a child, he had loved so deeply. The sun was rising over the hill; heavy dark clouds were rolling back on to the horizon and everywhere the life of the day, fresh in the sparkling daylight was beginning. The creatures of the night were vanishing; dragons with scaly tails were creeping back reluctantly into their caves, giants were brandishing their iron clubs defiantly for the last time before the rising sun; the Hydras and Gryphons and Five-Headed Tortoises were slinking into the dusky forests, deep into the waters of the green lakes the slimy Three-Pronged Alligators writhed deep down into the filth that was their proper home.

The flowers were thick on the hills, and in the valleys, the birds sang, butterflies and dragon-flies flashed against the blue, the smoke curled up from the cottage chimneys and over all the world was hung a haze of beauty, of new life and the wonder of the coming day.

In the foreground of this picture were two figures, a girl and a boy, and the painter, clumsy and amateurish, though his art may have been, had with the sincerity and fervour of his own belief put into their eyes all their amazement and wonder at the beauty of this new world.

They saw it all; the dragons and the gryphons, the heavy clouds rolling back above the hill were not hidden from them; that they would they knew. The acceptance of the whole of life was in their eyes. Their joy was in all of it; their youth made them take it all full-handed....

I have thought of them sometimes–I think of the Drydens now–as the Young Enchanted. And it seems to me that England is especially the country of such men and women as these. All the other peoples of the world carry in their souls age and sophistication. They are too old for that sense of enchantment, but in England that wonder that is so far from common sense and yet is the highest kind of common sense in the world has always flourished. It is not imagination; the English have less imagination than any other race, it is not joy of life nor animal spirits, but the child’s trust in life before it has grown old enough for life to deceive it. I think Adam and Eve before the Fall were English.

That sense of Enchantment remains with the English long after it dies with the men and women of other nations, perhaps because the English have not the imagination to perceive how subtle, how dangerous, how cynical life can be. Their art comes straight from their Enchantment. The novels of Fielding and Scott and Thackeray and Dickens and Meredith, the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, the pictures of Hogarth and Constable and Turner. The music of Purcell, the characters of Nelson and Wellington and Gordon....

And think what that sense of Enchantment might do for them if only their background would change. For generations gone that has not moved. One day when the earthquake comes and the upheaval and all the old landmarks are gone and there is a new world of social disorder and tumbling indecency for their startled gaze to rest upon then you will see what these children of Enchantment will do!

So much, for Galleon who is already now so shortly after his death looked upon as an old sentimental fogy. Sentimental? Why certainly. What in the world could be more absurd than his picture of the English gazing wide-eyed at the wonder of life? They of all peoples!

And yet he was no fool. He was a Cosmopolitan. He had lived as much in Rome, in Paris, in Vicenza, as in London. And why should I apologize for one of the greatest artists England possesses? Other times, other names... and you can’t catch either Henry Trenchard or Millicent–no, nor Peter either–and I venture to say that you cannot catch that strange, restless, broken, romantic, aspiring, adventurous, disappointing, encouraging, enthralling, Life-is-just-beginning-at-last Period in which they had these adventures simply with the salt of sheer Realism–not salt enough for that Bird’s tail.

I should like to find that little picture of Henry Galleon’s fairy book and place it as a frontispiece to this story. But Heaven alone knows where that old book has gone to! It was perhaps Galleon’s own invention; he was a queer old man and went his own way and had his own fancies, possessions that many writers to-day are chary of keeping because they have been told on so many occasions by so many wise professors that they’ve got to stick to the Truth. Truth? Who knows what Truth may be? Platitudinous Pilate failed over that question many years ago, and to-day we are certainly as far as ever from an answer. There are a million Truths about Henry and Millicent and the times they lived in. Galleon’s is at least one of them, and it’s the one I’ve chosen because it happens to be the way I see them. But of course there are others.

“The whole Truth and nothing but the Truth.” What absurdity for any story-teller in the world to think that he can get that–and what arrogance! This book is the truth about these children as near as I can get to it, and the truth about that strange year 1920 in that strange town, London, as faithfully as I can recollect, but it isn’t everybody’s Truth. Far from it–and a good thing too.

Henry’s rooms were at the top of 24 Panton Street. To get to them you placed a Yale key in the lock of an old brown door, brushed your way through a dim passage, climbed a shabby staircase past the doors of the Hon. Nigel Bruce, Captain D’Arcy Sinclair, Claude Bottome, the singer, and old Sir Henry Bristow, who painted his face and wore stays. This was distinguished company for Henry who was at the beginning of his independent life in London, and the knowledge that he was in the very centre of the Metropolis, that the Comedy Theatre was nearly opposite his door and Piccadilly only a minute away gratified him so much that he did not object to paying three guineas a week for a small bed-sitting room without breakfast. It was a very small room, just under the roof, and Henry who was long and bony spent a good deal of his time in a doubled-up position that was neither aesthetic nor healthy. Three guineas a week is twelve pounds twelve shillings a month, and one hundred and fifty-one pounds four shillings a year. He had a hundred and fifty pounds a year of his own, left to him by his old grandfather, and by eager and even optimistic calculation he reckoned that from his literary labours he would earn at least another hundred pounds in his London twelve months. Even then, however, he would not have risked these handsome lodgings had he not only a month ago, through the kind services of his priggish brother-in-law, Philip Mark, obtained a secretaryship with Sir Charles Duncombe, Bart., at exactly one hundred and fifty pounds per annum.

With inky fingers and a beating heart he produced this estimate:

£

s.

d.

Income from Grandfather

150

0

0

Literary Earnings

100

0

0

Sir Ronald D.

150

0

0

_____

_____

_____

Grand Total

£400

0

0

And against this he set:

£

s.

d.

Rooms

163

16

0

Food

100

0

0

Clothes

50

0

0

Etceteras

50

0

0

______

______

_____

363

16

0

Saved in first year in London

36

4

0

There were certain risks about this estimate. For one thing literature might, conceivably, not contribute her hundred pounds quite so completely as he hoped. On the other hand, she might contribute more....

Again Henry was on trial with Sir Charles, was going into his service the day after to-morrow for the first time, had never been secretary to any one in his life before, and was not by temperament fitted entirely for work that needed those two most Damnable and Soul Destroying of attributes, Accuracy and Method. He had seen Sir Charles only once, and the grim austerity of that gentleman’s aristocratic features had not been encouraging.

Never mind. It was all enchanting. What was life for if one did not take risks? Every one was taking risks, from Mr. Lloyd George down to (or possibly up to) Georges Carpentier and Mr. Dempsey–Henry did not wish to be behind the rest.

Mr. King, his landlord, had suggested to him that he might possibly be willing to lay a new wall-paper and a handsome rug or carpet. There was no doubt at all that the room needed these things; the wall-paper had once been green, was now in many places yellow and gave an exact account of the precise spots where the sporting prints of the last tenant (young Nigel Frost Bellingham) had hung. The carpet, red many years ago, resembled nothing so much as a map of Europe with lakes, rivers, hills, and valleys clearly defined in grey and brown outline. Henry explained to Mr. King that he would wish to wait for a month or two to see how his fortunes progressed before he made further purchases, upon which Mr. King, staring just over Henry’s shoulder at the green wall-paper, remarked that it was usual for gentlemen to pay a month’s rent in advance, upon which Henry, blushing, suggested that an improvement in his fortunes was perfectly certain and that he was private secretary to Sir Charles Duncombe, Bart., of whom Mr. King had doubtless heard. Mr. King, bowing his head as of one who would say that there was no Baronet in the United Kingdom of whom he had not heard, nevertheless regretted that the rule concerning the month’s rent was constant, unchanging and could, in no circumstances whatever, be altered.

This Mr. King was little in stature, but great in demeanour. His head was bald save for a few black hairs very carefully arranged upon it, as specimens are laid out in the Natural History Museum. His face also was bald, in the strictest sense of the word; that is, not only did no hairs grow upon it but it seemed impossible that any hairs ever had grown upon it. His eyes were sharp, his mouth deprecating and his chin insignificant. He wore, it seemed, the same suit of black, the same black tie, the same stiff white shirt from year’s end to year’s end. He showed no human emotion whether of anger, regret, disappointment, expectation or sorrow.

He told no jolly stories of other tenants nor of life about town such as Henry would have liked him to tell. He had, Henry was sure, a great contempt for Henry. He was not, from any point of view, a lovable human being.

Henry did what he could for his room, he was proud of it, felt very kindly towards it and wanted to clothe it with beauty. It is difficult, however, to make a room beautiful unless the wall-paper and the carpet contribute something. Henry had a nice writing-table that his Uncle Timothy had given him, a gate-legged table from his sister Katherine and a fine Regency bookcase stolen by him from his Westminster home. He had three pictures, a Japanese print, a copy of Mr. Belcher’s drawing of Pat O’Keefe, “The Wild Irishman,” and a little water-colour by Lovat Frazer of a king and queen marching into a banquet-hall and attended by their courtiers. This last, splendid in gold and blue, green and red was the joy of Henry’s heart and had been given him by his sister Millicent on his last birthday.

In the bookcase there were, on the whole, the books that you would expect–the poems of Swinburne, Dowson, and Baudelaire, some of the 1890 novelists and one or two moderns. But he was also beginning to collect a few rare editions, and he had Clarissa and The Mysteries of Udulpho and The Monk in their original bindings, and an early Pilgrim’s Progress, a rather rare Donne and a second Vicar of Wakefield. These were his greatest treasures. He had only two photographs in his room–his sisters and that of his greatest and perhaps his only friend. These stood one on either side of the very plain alarm-clock that took the middle of the mantelpiece.

Henry, as he sat on his bed, looking before him out of the little window across to the corner gables of the Comedy Theatre, appeared very much the same crude and callow youth that he had seemed on going up to Oxford just before the war.

He had not yet caught up to his size which had leapt ahead of his years when he was about sixteen. He was still long, lean, and untidy, his black hair refusing any kind of control, his complexion poor with a suspicion of incipient pimple, his ears too red, his hands never quite clean. The same and yet not at all the same.

The hint of beauty that there had been when he was nineteen in the eyes and mouth and carriage of neck and shoulders was now, when he was twenty-six, more clearly emphasized. At first sight Henry seemed an untidy and rather uncleanly youth; look again and you would see quite clearly that he would be, one day, a distinguished man. His untidiness, the way that his trousers bagged at the knee, that he carried, like some knight with his lady’s favour, the inevitable patch of white on his sleeve, that his boots were not rightly laced and his socks not sufficiently “suspended”–these things only indicated that he was in the last division of the intermediate class, between youth and manhood.

The war had very nearly made him a man, and had not the authorities discovered, after his first wound in 1915, that he was quite hopeless in command of other men but not at all a fool at intelligence he would have been a man complete by this time. The war smartened him a little but not very much, and the moment he was free he slipped back into his old ways and his old customs with a sigh of relief.

But there again not entirely. Like his cousin John, who was killed in Galicia in 1915, stretcher-bearing for the Russians, he was awkward in body but clean in soul. The war had only emphasized something in him that was there before it, and the year and a half that he spent with his family in the Westminster house after the Armistice was the most terrible time of his life. No one knew what to do with him. His mother had had a stroke in the spring of 1917 and now lay like a corpse at the top of the old house, watching, listening, suffering an agony of rebellion in her proud and obstinate soul. With her influence gone, his grandfather and his great-aunt Sarah dead, his two aunts Betty and Anne living in the country down at Walton-on-Thames, his father more and more living his own life in his study, his sister Katherine married and involved now entirely in her own affairs, Henry felt the big house a mausoleum of all his hopes and ambitions. to Oxford he would not. Strike out and live on his one hundred and fifty pounds he would at the first possible moment, but one thing after another prevented him. He remained in that grim and chilly house mainly because of his sister Millicent, whom he loved with all his heart and soul, and for whom he would do anything in the world.

She also had a little money of her own, but the striking out was a little difficult for her. Her father and mother, all the relations said, needed her, and it wanted all the year and a half to prove to the relations that this was not so. Her father scarcely saw her except at breakfast and, although he regarded her with a kindly patronage, he preferred greatly his books, his club, and his daily newspaper. Her mother did not need her at all, having been angered before the war at the action that Millie took in the great family quarrel of Katherine v. Mrs. Trenchard, and being now completely under the control of a hard and tyrannical woman, Nurse Bennett, whose word now was law in the house, whose slightest look was a command.

Millicent and Henry determined that when they escaped it should be together. Millicent had her own plans, and after some months of mysterious advertising in the newspaper, of interviews and secret correspondences, she secured the post of secretary companion to a certain Miss Victoria Platt who lived at 85 Cromwell Road, Kensington. At the very same time Philip found for Henry the secretaryship of which I have already spoken. They escaped then together–Millicent to rooms at the top of Baker Street that she shared with a girl friend, Mary Cass, and Henry to the hospitality of Mr. King. Their engagements also were to begin together, Millicent going to Miss Platt for the first time on the morning after the day of which I am writing, Henry to go to his Baronet on the day after that.

They were beginning the world together. There was surely a fine omen in that. Apart they would do great things–but, together, was there anything they could not do?

At 7.15 that evening, bathed in the blue dusk that filtered in through the little attic window Henry was sitting on his bed staring, wide-eyed, in front of him.

At 8.15 on that same evening, hidden now by the purple shades of night he was still sitting there, his mouth open, staring in front of him. It is desperately platitudinous–it is also desperately true, that there is no falling in love like the first falling in love. And Henry was fortunate in this–that he had fallen in love for the first time at a comparatively ripe age. To some it is the governess or the music-master, to some even the nurse or the gardener’s boy. But Henry had in the absolute truth of the absolute word never been in love before to-night.

He had loved–yes. First his mother, then his sister Katherine, then his sister Millicent, then his friend Westcott. These affections had been loyal and true and profound but they had been of the heart and the brain, and for true love the lust of the flesh must be added to the lust of the mind and the heart.

He had tumbled in then, to-day, head foremost, right in, with all his hero-worship, his adoration, his ignorance, his purity, his trust and confidence, fresh, clean, unsullied to offer as acceptable gifts. He could not, sitting on his bed, think it out clearly at all. He could only see everything in a rosy mist and in the heart of the mist a flaming feather, and Piccadilly boiling and bubbling and Mrs. Tenssen with her bright green dress and the stable-yard and the teapot with the flowers and there–somewhere behind these things–that girl with her fair hair, her unhappy gaze beyond him, far far beyond him, into worlds that were not as yet his but that one day might be. And with all this his heart pounding in a strange suffocating manner, his eyes burning, his throat choking, his brain refusing to bring before him two connected thoughts.

At last, when St. James’s Church struck half-past eight a thought did penetrate.

He had promised to go to the Hunters’ evening party. Never less did he want to go to a party than to-night. He would wish to continue to sit on his bed and study the rosy mist. “I will sit here,” he said, “and perhaps soon the face will come to me just as it was. I can’t see it now, but if I wait....” Then he had cramp in his leg and the sudden jerk shot him from the bed and forced him to stand in the middle of the floor in an extraordinary attitude with one leg stiff and the other bent as though he were Nijinsky practising for the “Spectre de la Rose.”

The shock of his agony drove him to consider two very good reasons for going to the Hunters’ party. One was material–namely, that he had had nothing to eat since Mrs. Tenssen’s pink cake, that he was very hungry in spite of his love and that there would be free sandwiches at the Hunters. The other reason was a better one–namely, that it was possible that his friend Westcott would be there and to Westcott, above all human beings, save only Millicent, he wished to confide the history of his adventure.

Concerning his friendship with Westcott a word must be said. About a year ago at the house of a friend of Philip’s he had been introduced to a thick-set saturnine man who had been sitting by himself in a corner and appearing entirely bored with the evening’s proceedings. His host had thrown Henry at this unattractive guest’s head as though he would say: “I dare not offer up any of my more important guests to this Cerberus of a fellow, but here’s a young ass who doesn’t matter and I don’t care whether his feelings are hurt or no.” Henry himself was at this time cultivating a supercilious air in public, partly from shyness and partly because he did not wish to reveal how deeply pleased he was at being invited to parties. He liked at once Westcott’s broad shoulders, close-cropped hair and nonchalant attitude. The first ten minutes of their conversation was not a success, and then Henry discovered that Westcott had, in the days of his youth, actually known, spoken to, had tea with the God of his, Henry’s, idolatry, Henry Galleon. Westcott was perhaps touched by young Henry’s ingenuous delight, his eager questions, his complete forgetfulness of himself and his surroundings at this piece of information. He in his turn launched out and talked of the London of fifteen years ago and of the heroes of that time, a time that the war had made historic, curious, picturesque, a time that was already older than crinolines, almost as romantic as the Regency. Their host left them together for the remainder of the evening, feeling that he had most skilfully killed two dull birds with one stone. They departed together, walked from Hyde Park Corner together and by the time that they parted were already friends. That friendship had held firm throughout the succeeding year. As a friendship it was good for both of them. Westcott was very lonely and too proud to go out and draw men in. Henry needed just such an influence as Westcott’s, the influence of a man who had known life at its hardest and bitterest, who had come through betrayal, disappointed ambition, poverty and loneliness without losing his courage and belief in life, a man whose heart was still warm towards his fellowmen although he kept it guarded now lest he should too easily be again betrayed.

There was no need to keep it guarded from Henry whose transparent honesty could not be mistaken. Henry restored something of Westcott’s lost confidence in himself. Henry believed profoundly in what he insisted on calling Westcott’s “genius,” and that even the simplest soul on earth should believe in us gives some support to our doubting hopes and wavering ambitions. Henry admitted quite frankly to Westcott that he had not heard of him before he met him. Peter’s novels–Reuben Hallard, The Stone House, Mortimer Stant and two others–had been before Henry’s time and the little stir that Reuben had made had not penetrated the thick indifference of his school-days. Westcott was not at all sensitive to this ignorance. Before the war he had broken entirely with the literary life and his five years’ war service abroad had not encouraged him to renew that intimacy. He had had hard starving days since the Armistice and had been driven back almost against his will to some reviewing and writing of articles.

All men had not forgotten him he discovered with a strange dim pleasure that beat like a regret deep into his soul–the younger men especially because he had been a commercial failure were inclined to believe that he had been an artistic success. Mysterious allusions were made in strange new variegated publications to Reuben Hallard and Mortimer Stant.

He began to review regularly for The Athenæum and The New Statesman, and he did some dramatic criticism for The Nation. He soon found to his own surprise that he was making income enough to live without anxiety in two small rooms in the Marylebone High Street, where he was cared for by a kindly widow, Mrs. Sunning, who found that he resembled her son who was killed in the war and therefore adored him. Even, against his will, all his hopes, there were faint stirrings of a novel in his brain. He did not wish to revive that ambition again, but the thing would come and settle there and stir a little and grow day by day, night by night, in spite of his reluctance and even hostility.

Perhaps in this Henry had some responsibility. Henry was so sure that Peter had only to begin again and the world would be at his feet. One night, the two of them sitting over a small grumbling fire in the Coventry Street attic, Peter spoke a little in detail of his book.

After that Henry never left him alone. The book was born now in Henry’s brain as well as in Peter’s; it knew its own power and that its time would come.