Knight Without Armour (3 page)

It was a distinguished gathering, in a small way—professors and
professors’ wives, a Harley Street surgeon, a titled lawyer,
journalists, a few M.P.’s—all, of course, dominated by the
patriarchal figure of Sir Henry himself. He was now seventy-seven, broad-
shouldered, straight-backed, with leonine head and flashing eye—a truly
eminent Victorian who had survived, wonderfully preserved, into the new
reign. He had long ago reached the age when people said that he
‘still’ did things. He still owned the
Pioneer
, which,
after a stormy career in the ’sixties and ’seventies, had settled
down, like Sir Henry himself, to an old age of ever-slightly-increasing
respectability and ever-slightly-diminishing circulation.

The odd part of it (to A.J.) was the way Philippa Warren had suddenly
fitted herself into Sir Henry’s scheme of things. She seemed already to
take both him and his views equally for granted; she was at once casual and
proprietary, like a guide displaying a museum piece; she realised quite
simply that Sir Henry had become an institution and that visitors liked to
hear him gossip in an intimate way about great names that were already in the
history books. She would give him conversational cues, such
as—’That’s rather what Matthew Arnold used to tell you,
isn’t it, Sir Henry?’—or—’Sir Henry, I’m
sure Mr. So-and-so would like to hear about your meeting with
Thackeray.’ She rarely expressed opinions of her own, but she knew
exactly, like a well-learned lesson, the precise attitude of Sir Henry
towards every topic of the day. It was almost uncanny, and from the beginning
A.J. found himself queerly fascinated. She had a clear, icy mind; she could
compress her ideas into an epigram where others might have needed to employ a
speech. On hearing about the Barrowhurst and Cambridge nickname she
immediately called him ‘A.J.’ and expected him to call her
‘Philippa’; he was certain, from the first half-hour of the
dinner-party, that they were destined for the most intimate of
friendships.

After a week he was less positive, and after a month he was frankly
puzzled and doubtful. He seemed so early to have reached an unsurmountable
barrier; she would talk about anything and everything with the utterest
frankness, yet somehow, after it all, he felt that it had no connection with
getting to know her. Sir Henry, of course, never ceased to sing her praises.
She was the model secretary; how he had ever managed so many years with that
fellow Watts, he could hardly think. The scene in the library every morning
at ten o’clock when Philippa arrived to begin work was almost touching.
Sir Henry, stirred to a gallantry that had never been his in earlier days,
would greet her with a benign smile, pat her shoulder and ask after her
health, and, if he imagined or chose to imagine that she looked tired, would
ring for a glass of sherry. And she on her side grudgingly yet somehow
gratefully permitted time to be wasted on such courtesies.

A.J. agreed that she was marvellous. Her merely physical effect on the old
man was remarkable; there came a sparkle into his eyes and a springiness into
his walk that had not been seen since the first Jubiles. A.J. judged, too,
that she did other things; Sir Henry’s occasional articles in the Press
(writing was one of those things he ‘still’ did) became more
frequent, more varied, and—if that were possible—more
characteristic of him than ever. Once A.J. glanced over her shoulder when she
was working; she was preparing notes, she said, for some centenary article on
Elizabethan literature that Sir Henry had promised to write. In neat,
verbless phrases she had selected just the material he would
need—’Marlowe in his worst moments grandiloquent and
turgid’—’
Fairy Queen
a monument of literary
atavism’—’
Titus Andronicus
probably not
Shakespeare’s’—and so on. Sir Henry did the rest, and how
well he did it, too, and with what a sublime flavour of personality! A.J.
kept the article when it appeared, underlining such sentences
as—’I do not think it can be denied that in his less happy
moments Marlowe was occasionally guilty of a certain grandiloquence of
phraseology—almost, I might say, turgidity’—’I cannot
but think that the
Faerie Queene
, regarded from a strictly literary
viewpoint, is in some sense atavistic’—and—’I have
yet to discover any arguments that would lead me to suppose that
Titus
Andronicus
was, in its entirety, a work by the master-hand that penned
Lear
and
Othello
.’

A.J. was kept fairly busy during the years that followed. Sir Henry got
him reviewing jobs on the
Comet
and other papers, besides which he
wrote occasionally for the
Pioneer
and was also understood to be at
work upon a novel. But the plain truth soon became apparent that he was no
good at all as a journalist. He was too conscientious, if anything; he read
too carefully before he reviewed, and he gave his opinions too
downrightly—he had none of Sir Henry’s skill in praising with
faint damns. Nor had he the necessary journalistic flair for manufacturing an
attitude at a moment’s notice; he would say ‘I don’t
know’ or ’I have no opinion’ far oftener than was
permissible in Fleet Street. He even, after several years, gave up his
projected novel for the excellent but ignominious reason that he could not
make up his mind what it was to be about. But for the fact that Sir Henry was
behind him, his journalistic career would hardly have lasted very long.
Aitchison, the
Comet
editor, could never use more than a fraction of
the stuff he sent in, though personally he liked the youth well enough and
was sorry to see him slaving away at tasks for which he had so little
aptitude.

Meanwhile, at the Bloomsbury house, A.J.’s friendship with Philippa
continued and perhaps a little progressed. Gradually and at first
imperceptibly a warmer feeling uprose on his side, but there was nothing
tumultuous in it; indeed, he chaffed himself in secret for indulging
something so mild and purposeless. He had certainly nothing to hope for;
apart from his own lack of prospects, she had so often, in the course of
their talks, conveyed how little she cared for men and for the conventional
woman’s career of marriage and home life. Nor, for that matter, had
A.J. any particularly domestic dreams. In a way, that was why she attracted
him so much; she was so unlike the usual type of girl who fussed and expected
to be fussed over.

Then suddenly something quite astonishing happened. It was rather like the
Smalljohn episode at Barrowhurst; it occurred so sharply and unexpectedly,
and to the completest surprise of those who thought that A.J. was, if
anything, too sober a fellow. Philippa, he discovered, was an ardent
supporter of the woman’s suffrage movement, though, in deference to Sir
Henry’s views on the matter, she kept her ardours out of the house. She
was not a militant, but Sir Henry made no distinctions of such a kind; he was
genuinely and comprehensively indignant over the burnings, picture-slashings,
and other outrages of which the newspapers were full. Philippa realised how
hopeless it was to convert him, while as for A.J., she probably did not
consider his support even worth the trouble of securing. Yet, without effort,
it was secured. A.J., in fact, dashed into the movement with an enthusiasm
which even his greatest friends considered rather fatuous; there was no
stopping him; he went to meetings, walked in processions, and wasted hours of
his time writing propagandist articles which Aitchison turned down with
ever-increasing acerbity. He really was caught up in a whirl of passionate
indignation, and neither Sir Henry’s anger nor Philippa’s
indifference could check the surge of that emotion.

The whole thing ended in quite a ridiculous fiasco; he got himself
arrested for attacking a policeman who was trying to arrest a suffragette who
had just thrown a can of paint into a cabinet minister’s motor-car. The
magistrate seemed glad to have a man to be severe with; he gave A.J. seven
days, without the option of a fine, and, of course, the case was prominently
reported in all the papers.

At Brixton jail A.J. thought at first he would hunger-strike, but he soon
perceived that hunger-striking during a seven-days’ sentence could not
be very effective; the authorities would merely let him do it. He therefore
took the prison food and spent most of his time in rather miserable
perplexity. He had, he began to realise, made a complete ass of himself.

When he was discharged at the end of the week he hoped and rather expected
that Philippa, at any rate, would have some word of sympathy for him. Instead
of that, she greeted him very frigidly. “What an extraordinary thing to
do!” was all she commented. Sir Henry was far from frigid; he was as
furious as a man of eighty dare permit himself to be. He had A.J. in the
library for over an hour telling him what he thought. A.J. must clear
out—that was the general gist of the discourse; Sir Henry would no
longer permit their names to be connected in any way. If A.J. chose to
emigrate (which seemed the best solution of the problem), Sir Henry would
give him a hundred pounds as a final expression of regard—but it was to
be definitely final—no pathetic letters begging for more. A.J. said:
“You needn’t fear that, anyhow.” In the midst of the rather
unpleasant discussion, Philippa entered the library, fresh and charming as
usual, whereupon Sir Henry, his mood changing in an instant, remarked:
“Perhaps, my dear, we had better tell Ainsley our piece of
news.”

She barely nodded and Sir Henry went on, more severely as he turned to
A.J.—“Philippa has done me the honour of promising to be my
wife.”

A.J. stared speechlessly at them both. He saw the green-shaded desk-lamp
spinning round before his eyes and the expanse of bookshelves dissolving into
a multi-coloured haze. Then he felt himself going hot, shamefully hot; he
managed to stammer: “I—I must—congratulate
you—both.”

Philippa was not looking at him.

His eyes kept wandering from one to the other of them; she was so
beautiful, he perceived now, and Sir Henry, with all his sprightliness, was
so monstrously old. He had never noticed before how hideous were those rolls
of fat between his chin and his neck, and how he very slightly slobbered over
his sibilants.

“Yes, I congratulate you,” he repeated.

He went out for lunch, paced up and down in Regent’s Park during the
afternoon, and spent the evening at a restaurant and a music-hall. Towards
midnight he went to the
Comet
office and asked to see Aitchison.
Aitchison, a hard-bitten Scotsman of sixty, smiled rather cynically when A.J.
suggested being sent abroad as a foreign correspondent; he guessed the
reason, and personally thought it not at all a bad idea that A.J. should live
down his notoriety abroad. There was, of course, no moral stigma attached to
a seven-day sentence for trying to rescue a suffragette, but the boy had made
a fool of himself and one can be laughed out of a profession as well as
drummed out. The foreign correspondent notion, however, was hopeless; A.J.
would be as useless, journalistically, abroad as at home. Aitchison knew all
this well enough, and when A.J. further went on to suggest being sent out to
the Far East to report the Russo-Japanese War which had just begun, he
laughed outright. It was impossible, he answered; jobs like that required
experience, and A.J. possessed none; reporting a war wasn’t like
writing a highbrow middle about the stained-glass at Chartres. Besides, it
would all be far too expensive; the
Comet
wasn’t a wealthy paper
and probably wouldn’t have a correspondent of its own at all. To which
A.J. replied that, as for money, he had a little himself and was so anxious
to try his luck that he would willingly spend it in travelling out East if
the
Comet
would give him credentials as its correspondent and take
anything he sent that was acceptable. Aitchison thought this over and quickly
reached the conclusion that it was an ideal arrangement—for the
Comet
. It was, to begin with, a way of getting rid of A.J., and it was
also a way by which the
Comet
could obtain all the kudos of having a
war-correspondent without the disagreeable necessity of footing the bill for
his expenses—though, of course, if A.J. did send them anything good the
Comet
would be delighted to pay for it. And in haste less A.J. should
see any flaw in this most admirable scheme, Aitchison accepted, adding:
“Naturally you’ll bear in mind the policy of this paper—we
don’t much care for the Russians, you know. Not much use you sending us
stuff we can’t print, especially when it’ll cost you God knows
how much a word to cable.”

A.J. left for Siberia at the beginning of April. Sir Henry declined either
to approve or to disapprove of the arrangement; all he made clear was that
A.J. could not expect any more chances, and that, if he wanted the hundred
pounds, he must go abroad as one of the prime conditions. Siberia was
undoubtedly abroad; its prospects for the emigrant were A.J.’s affair
entirely. During the last week of hectic preparation that preceded the
departure A.J. saw rather little of the old man, and the final good-byes both
with him and with Philippa were very formal.

No one saw him off at Charing Cross, and he felt positive relief when, a
couple of hours later, the boat swung out of Dover Harbour and he saw England
fading into the mist of a spring morning. Two days afterwards he was in
Berlin; and two days after that in Moscow. There he caught the Trans-Siberian
express and began the ten-days’ train journey to Irkutsk.

The train was comfortable but crowded, and most of the way he studied a
Russian grammar and phrase-book. Every mile that increased his distance from
London added to a certain bitter zest that he felt; whatever was to happen,
success or failure, was sure to be preferable to book-reviewing in
Bloomsbury. His trouble had always been to know what to write about, and
surely a war must solve such a problem for him. It was an adventure, anyway,
to be rolling eastward over the Siberian plains. He met no fellow-countryman
till he reached Irkutsk, where several other newspaper-correspondents were
waiting to cross Lake Baikal. They were all much older men than he was, and
most of them spoke Russian fluently. They seemed surprised and somewhat
amused that such a youngster had been sent out by the
Comet
, and A.J.,
scenting the attitude of superiority, preferred the companionship of a young
Italian who represented a Milan news agency. The two conversed together in
bad French almost throughout the crossing of the lake in the ice-breaker. It
was an impressive journey; the mountains loomed up on all sides like
steel-grey phantoms, and the clear atmosphere was full of a queer other-world
melancholy. Barellini, the Italian, gave A.J. his full life-history, which
included a passionate love-affair with a wealthy Russian woman in Rome. A.J.
listened tranquilly, watching the ice spurt from the bow of the ship and
shiver into glittering fragments; the sun was going down; already there was
an Arctic chill in the air. Barellini then talked of Russian women in
general, and of that touch of the East which mingled with their Western blood
and made them, he said, beyond doubt’ the most fascinating women in the
world. He quoted Shakespeare—’Other women cloy the appetites they
feed, but she makes hungry where she most satisfies’—Cleopatra,
that was—Shakespeare could never have said such a thing about any
Western woman. “But I suppose you prefer your English women?” he
queried, with an inquisitiveness far too childlike to be resented. A.J.
answered that his acquaintance with the sex was far too small for him to
attempt comparisons. “Perhaps, then, you do not care for any women very
much?” persisted Barellini, and quoted Anatole France—’De
toutes les aberrations sexuelles, la plus singuličre, c’est la
chasteté.’ “For thousands of years,” he added,
“people have been trying to say the really brilliant and final thing
about sex—and there it is!”