Knight Without Armour (2 page)

Sir Henry, in fact, was tolerably rich. He had always cultivated
influential friendships in the City, and he was also editor and proprietor of
the
Pioneer
, a weekly paper of Liberal views. Sixty-three years of
age, with a vigorous body, an alert mind, a mellow booming voice, and an
impressively long and snow-white beard, he was almost as well known as he
wished to be. He entertained; he was invited to speak at public dinners; he
knew everybody; Garibaldi had stayed a night at his house; Gladstone had
knighted him. Besides all this, his reputation as a man of letters stood
high—and curiously high, for he had written nothing that could be
considered really first-rate. Only, all along, he had had the knack of making
the most of everything he did; even a very mediocre poem he had once composed
had managed an entry into most of the anthologies. Somehow, too, he had got
himself accepted as an authority on Elizabethan literature; he had edited the
Hathaway edition of Shakespeare, and thousands of schoolchildren had fumbled
over his glossaries. Surmounting and in addition to all else, the man was a
character; should any big controversy arise in the Press, he was always asked
for his opinion, and always, without fail, gave it. His views, though
unexciting, stood for something that still existed in far greater proportions
than the brilliant youngsters realised—a certain slow and measured
solemnity that flowed in the bloodstream of every Englishman who had more
than a thousand pounds in Consols.

Sir Henry had begotten no children; he took Ainsley in the spirit of a
martyr bearing his cross, and in the same spirit engaged a German governess.
This capable person added history and music to the list of things the boy was
supposed to have been taught; later on a beginning was made with French and
German. The great Sir Henry rarely saw either him or her; sometimes, however,
Ainsley was conducted into the library ‘to see the books’ and to
be called ‘my little man’ and smiled at. “These,”
explained Sir Henry, on more than one such occasion, sweeping his arm towards
the rows of shelves, “are my best friends, and some day you will find
them your best friends also.” Ainsley was never quite certain whether
this was a promise or a threat.

When he was twelve, Sir Henry sent him to Barrowhurst.

Barrowhurst was not a very old foundation; Liberal and Evangelical in
tendency, it had several times entertained Sir Henry as its Speech Day guest
of honour. Situated in wild moorland country, it provided a vast change from
the atmosphere of governesses and Bloomsbury gardens. At first Ainsley
revelled in the freedom suddenly offered him; for the first time in his life
he could walk about on his own, read books of his own choosing, and make
friends without the frosty surveillance of grown-ups. He did not, however,
make many friends. He was rather shy and reserved in manner; amongst the
school in general he was for a long time hardly known, and the masters did
not care for him, because he soon displayed that worst sin of the
schoolboy—an indisposition to fit into one or other of the accepted
classifications. He was not exactly troublesome, and his work was always
satisfactory; only, somehow or other, he was difficult to get on with; he was
apt to ask questions which, though hardly impertinent, were awkwardly
unanswerable; he wouldn’t respond, either, to the usual gambits of
schoolmasterly approach. For some reason he hated games, yet he wasn’t
by any means the too brainy, bookish youngster; on the contrary, he was
physically strong and sturdily built, and soon became actually the best
swimmer and gymnast the school had known for years.

There was another Fothergill at the school, of a different family, and
Ainsley, to avoid mistakes, always signed his papers with a very large and
distinguishable ‘A.J.’ This became such a characteristic that he
began to be called ‘A.J.’ by his friends, and the initials
finally became an accepted nickname.

In his third year he suddenly startled everybody by leading a minor
rebellion. There was a master at the school named Smalljohn who had a system
of discipline for which A.J. had gradually conceived an overmastering hatred.
The system was this: Smalljohn stood in front of the class, gold watch in
hand, and said, “If the boy who did so-and-so does not declare himself
within twenty-five seconds, I shall give the whole form an hour’s
detention.” One day, after confessing himself, under such threat of
vicarious doom, the author of some trivial misdeed, A.J. calmly informed his
fellows that it was the last time he ever intended to do such a thing.
Couldn’t they see that the system was not only unfair but perfectly
easy to break down if only they all tackled it the right way? And the right
way was for no one ever to confess; let them put up with a few
detentions—Smalljohn would soon get tired of it when he found his
system no longer worked. There are a few Barrowhurst men who will still
remember the quiet-voiced boy arguing his case with an emphasis all the more
astonishing because it was the first case he had ever been known to
argue.

He carried the others with him enthusiastically, and the next day came the
test. He was whispering to a neighbour; Smalljohn heard and asked who it was.
Silence. Then: “If the person who whispered does not confess within
twenty-five seconds, the whole form will be detained for an hour.”
Silence. “Fifteen seconds more….Ten seconds…Five…Very well,
gentlemen, I will meet the form at half-past one in this room.”

After that afternoon’s detention Smalljohn announced: “I am
sorry indeed that thirty-three of your number have had to suffer on behalf of
a certain thirty-fourth person, whose identity, I may say, I very strongly
suspect. I can assure him that I do not intend to let a coward escape, and I
am therefore grieved to say that until he owns up I shall be compelled to
repeat this detention every day.”

It was nearing the time of house-matches and detentions were more than
usually tiresome. A.J. soon found his enemies active, and even his friends
inclined to be cool. After the third detention he was, in fact, rather
disgracefully bullied, and after the fourth he gave in and confessed. He had
expected Smalljohn to be very stern, and was far more terrified to find him
good-humoured. “Pangs of conscience, eh, Fothergill?” he queried,
and A.J. replied: “No, sir.”

“No? That sounds rather defiant, doesn’t it?”

A.J. did not answer, and Smalljohn, instead of getting into a temper,
positively beamed. “My dear Fothergill, I quite understand. You think
my system’s unfair, don’t you?—I have heard mysterious
rumours to that effect, anyhow. Well, my boy, I daresay you’re right.
It is unfair. It makes you see how impossible it is for you to be a sneak and
a coward—it brings out your better self—that better self which,
for some perverse reason, you were endeavouring to stifle. To a boy who is
really not half the bad fellow he tries to make out, my system is perhaps the
unfairest thing in the world…Well, you have been punished, I doubt
not—for apart from the still small voice, your comrades, I understand,
have somewhat cogently expressed their disapproval. In the circumstances,
then, I shall not punish you any further. And now stay and have some cocoa
with me.”

“If you don’t mind, sir,” answered A.J. not very
coherently, “I’m afraid I must go. I’ve got a letter
’to finish—”

“Oh, very well, then—some other evening. Goodnight.”

And the next morning Smalljohn, whose worst crime was that he thought he
understood boys, recounted in the common-room how magnanimity had melted
young Fothergill almost to tears—how with shaking voice the boy had
declined the cocoa invitation and had asked to be allowed to go.

It had been A.J.’s first fight, and he fully realised that he had
lost. What troubled him most was not Smalljohn’s victory but the
attitude of his fellows; if they, had only stood with him, Smalljohn could
have been defeated. Yet they called him a coward because in Rugby football,
which he was compelled to play although he disliked it, he sometimes showed
that he didn’t consider it worth while to get hurt. At the end of his
third year the headmaster’s report summed him up, not too unreasonably,
as: “A thoughtful boy, with many good qualities, but apt to be
obstinate and self- opinionated. Is hardly getting out of Barrowhurst all he
should.”

A.J. had two adventures at Barrowhurst altogether; the first was the
Smalljohn affair, which was no more than a nine days’ wonder and
certainly did not add to his popularity; but the second was in a different
class: it established his fame on a suddenly Olympian basis, and passed,
indeed, into the very stuff of Barrowhurst tradition. Two miles away from the
school is the tunnel that carries the Scotch expresses under the Pennines. It
is over three miles long, boring under the ridge from one watershed to
another. A.J. walked through it one school half-holiday. Platelayers met him
staggering out, half-deafened and half-suffocated, with eyes inflamed,
soot-blackened face, and hands bleeding where he had groped his way along the
tunnel wall. He was taken to the school in a cab, and had to spend a week in
bed; after which he was thrashed by the headmaster. He gave no explanation of
his escapade beyond the fact that he had wanted to discover what it would be
like. He agreed that the experience had been thoroughly unpleasant.

A.J.’s fourth year was less troubled. He was in the sixth form by
then, preparing for Cambridge, and was left to do pretty much as he liked.
The tunnel affair had given him prestige of an intangible kind both with boys
and masters, and he spent much of his time reading odd books on all kinds of
subjects that form no part of a public-school curriculum. He cycled miles
about the moorland countryside, picking up fossils and making rubbings of old
brasses in churches; he also (and somehow quite incidentally) achieved an
official Barrowhurst record by a long jump of twenty feet. His sixth-form
status carried prefecture with it, and rather to everyone’s surprise he
made an excellent prefect—straightforward, firm, and tolerant.

He went to Cambridge in the autumn of 1898; his rooms at St. John’s
overlooked the river and the Backs, being among the best situated in the
University. Sir Henry made him a fairly generous allowance, and began to hope
that the boy might prove some good after all, despite the tepid reports from
Barrowhurst. A.J. liked Cambridge, of course. He didn’t have to play
games, there were no schoolmasters with their irritating systems, he could
read his queer books, listen to string quartets, and wield a
geologist’s hammer to his heart’s content. The only thing he
seemed definitely disinclined for was the sort of work that would earn him a
decent degree. Sir Henry encouraged him to join the Union, and he did so,
though he never spoke. He made one or two close friends, and was well liked
by those who knew him at all. (He was still called
’A.J.’—the nickname had followed him to Cambridge through
the agency of Barrowhurst men.) Most of the vacations he spent in Bloomsbury;
of late years he had seen less and less of his brothers and sisters, several
of whom had emigrated. He also travelled abroad a little—just to the
usual places in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

He had no particular adventures in Cambridge, and left no mark on
university history unless it were by the foundation of a short-lived fencing
club. He had picked up a certain skill with the foils in Germany; it was a
typically odd sort of thing to capture his enthusiasm.

He took a mediocre pass degree in his third year and then wondered what on
earth came next. Sir Henry was disappointed and made it very clear that he
did not intend to support him any longer. A.J. fully agreed; he did not want
to be supported; he would certainly find something to do of some kind or
other, but he was completely vague about it, and there were so many jobs
which, for one reason or another, were impossible. He did not care for the
services; he had no vocation for the church; his degree was not good enough
for school- mastering or for diplomacy or for the law. Clearly then, very
little remained, and when, in the summer of 1901, he left Cambridge for good,
it was understood that he was to become a journalist and that Sir Henry would
‘find him something.’ In August he went abroad for a month, and
it was while he was doing the conventional Rhine tour that he received a
typewritten letter signed ‘Philippa Warren’ and conveying the
information that Sir Henry’s former secretary, a Mr. Watts, had died of
pneumonia and that she had been appointed instead. He thought little of it,
or of her, except to reflect that Sir Henry’s choice of a female
secretary would probably be based on dignity rather than elegance. At the
beginning of September he returned to London and found there was to be a big
dinner-party on his first evening, which annoyed him slightly, as it meant he
had to unpack everything in a hurry so as to dress. Sir Henry’s sister,
a Mrs. Holdron, was hostess; she said—“Oh, Ainsley, will you take
in Miss Warren?”—and he smiled agreement and tried vaguely to
associate the name with any particular one of the dozen or so strangers to
whom he had been perfunctorily and indistinctly introduced. He had completely
forgotten the Philippa Warren who had written to him.

The reception room was on the first floor, overlooking the square, and all
its windows were wide open and unshuttered to admit the soft breeze of a
September night. He felt an arm slipped into his and guiding him rather than
being guided through the plush-curtained archway into the long and rather
gloomy corridor that led to the dining-room, Almost simultaneously they both
made the same banal remark about the weather, whereupon she laughed and
added, with a sort of crystal mockery: “I said it first, Mr.
Fothergill.” He laughed back, but could not think of an answer.

In the dining-room that looked on to the typical brick-walled oblong
garden of London houses, he glanced at her curiously. She was young, and full
of a vitality that interested him. Her dark, roving eyes gave poise, and even
beauty, to a face that might not otherwise have seemed noteworthy. Her nose
was long and well-shaped, but her lips were perhaps too small and thin, just
as her forehead looked too high. She certainly was not pretty. Not till
half-way through the meal did he realise that she must be Sir Henry’s
new secretary.