Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories (10 page)

The whole thing was hushed up as much as possible, thanks to my distinguished associates, but I had to get out of the country as quickly as I could and I received a severe wigging from my superior officers in London.

I am now rushing off to St Petersburg as a penance. I heard nothing from Ernestine and can get no word from her. If you can bring yourself to reply to such a rapscallion, write to my brother’s address and he will send on all letters.

Philip thought it prudent to conceal Robert’s communication from Dorothy, but he read it several times himself, for he was still a young man.

He wrote back the following spring when he was happier. “We have a son,” he stated baldly in the midst of a spate of gentle meanderings about his work, the weather and his beloved countryfolk. “I have called him Philip Nathaniel Henry Robert. Our first baby, also a son, died six hours after birth.”

It was the shortest paragraph in the letter and told nothing of the intense emotional drama of that mercifully far-off night twenty-two months before when the dark garden had flickered with the uncertain light of hurricane lanterns bobbing to and fro from the gate, and there had been hushed voices and low, heartrending sounds in the creaky old house.

On that occasion the doctor’s gig had remained in the stable yard until the grey morning had come, bringing bitterness and disillusion and despair with it.

For a considerable time there was no reply from Robert the elder, but one day a long parcel arrived containing a very fine ivory-headed cane pierced for a tassel, and with a card bearing the inscription
“For Robert the Younger with his reprobate Uncle’s love.’

There was also a brief note for Philip.

“The enclosed stick was given me by the lineal descendant of Rene de Chevreuse, Duc de Pouilly, whose ancestor had it as a gift from Louis XVI. I did him a trifling service in Beauvais and he insisted that I took it. It was his dearest possession.”

Philip wrote a suitable letter of thanks and hung the stick on the drawing-room wall, where it remained, an object of the deepest veneration, for over thirty years, lending a touch of romantic enchantment to an otherwise prosaic if comfortable room.

From these beginnings the correspondence continued a leisurely course down the years. Philip’s letters remained gentle, pleasant chronicles of a quiet, useful life unstirred by any remarkable occurrence. In his hands even the sensational affair at Cherry’s farm, which began with a double murder and ended with a conviction and a hanging, became a balanced, brief account of a rustic tragedy.

And that much more personal disaster, the death of old George, the churchwarden, in the early days of War, which ended a deep friendship and saddened the blossom whiteness of the spring for ever for the Vicar of Pelham Wick, was never mentioned at all.

Robert, on the other hand, made his colourful experiences live. As the years went on he became a legendary figure.

Ernestine, too, became a heroine. Her daughter turned up in wartime Paris and was miraculously saved from death as a spy by the intercession of her mother and the influence of Robert himself. His youth and vigour were perennial.

The last letter from Robert to reach the Vicarage arrived ten years later. It had all the old fire, if also some of the old floridness of style which the writer had never bothered himself to correct.

“The bad penny turns up once more,” he wrote happily, “looking a great deal the worse for wear, I am afraid, but still as sound as ever, thank God. I am writing this in the train coming home from Geneva.

My travels this time have taken me to Palestine, Rome and Prague, where I think I can truthfully say I did useful work—although my Viennese experience was perhaps not quite so satisfactory, if I must be honest. Still, I got around and shall be off to Washington in a week or two. Not bad for an old ’un, eh?

I called at Juan-les-Pins on my way out and had a few days with Ernestine in her lovely villa. I lost my heart to her once more. Even at sixty-five she is lovely. And although I did not approve of the greasy-haired young puppies who console her widowhood (her third husband, the Comte del Montator, died two years ago, as I may have told you), I found her a stimulating companion. What gaiety! What youth!

She was kind enough to say she still thought of me as a young man, and, God bless her, I believe she does.

When I left her I found myself strangely dissatisfied with my life. Perhaps I should have settled down. I have lived, yet what have I now? No honours, no fortune, no companion for my age. Only my magnificent memories. Still, in my normal moments these suffice me. I said I had lived; I have, you know.”

Three months after this, and before Philip had found time to reply, a telegram from Wiltshire arrived.

“Robert Braine sinking,”
it said briefly.
“Would greatly appreciate it if you could come.”
And it was signed
“Ernestine”.

The news struck a note of flat calamity, such as had not been sounded at the Vicarage of Pelham Wick for many years. The hero was dying. It was the end of an era, the passing of Romance.

As Philip stood helplessly by, watching Dorothy packing his necessities, he found that he was reacting to the emergency in an unusual way. Robert’s dying affected him as his living had done. Philip had not been to London for ten years, and never to Wiltshire, and he contemplated the journey now with excitement.

Nor was this the cold, blank sense of loss that old George’s death had brought widi it. Robert’s death was high tragedy: two friends parted for a lifetime, but still friends and united at a deathbed. It was poignant, almost exhilarating.

As Dorothy fastened the suitcase her eyes were shining.

“I’m glad
she
went to him,” she said.

“Ah, Ernestine,” said Philip softly and shook his head.

All through the long confusing journey, with its terrifying passage through the City, he thought of Robert and he was ashamed of himself for being so old. Two years of Robert’s memories would fill a column: his own life might be written in a chapter.

It was dark when he arrived at the small country railway station and the grim-faced youth who met him explained that there was very little time. After a terrifying ride, he climbed out on to a moss-grown drive and walked up two shallow steps to an old elm door, which stood open.

As he stood hesitating a light flickered at the far end of the stone hall and an old woman came forward, an oil lamp held high over her head.

“Mr. Dell?” she said in a harsh, respectful voice with a country twang in it. “Will you come in here, please, sir?”

He followed her into a dusty study and she set the lamp down on a table. She was a tall, gaunt woman and her manner was authoritative, after the way of very old servants.

“I didn’t like to tell you at the door, sir,” she said, ‘but he’s gone. He dropped off an hour ago.”

Philip nodded. It seemed he had expected the news. Yet he was conscious of a sense of deep disappointment. Robert was gone. The dramatic reunion was not to be. The elderly housekeeper insisted on taking him upstairs to the big overcrowded bedroom where books, ornaments and little wicker tables besieged an enormous patriarchal bed.

The old man who sat beside it rose respectfully as they entered and the woman glanced at Philip.

‘This is my husband, sir,” she said. “We’ve looked after the poor Master for fifty years.”

Philip was puzzled.

“I only knew Mr. Robert,” he said. “I never met his brother.”

“That would be Mr. Richard,” observed the housekeeper placidly. “He died when I was a girl. Mr. Robert’s been what you might call a recluse all his life. I don’t think he’s been outside the garden these twenty years. We took the liberty of sending for you, sir, because you were the only person he ever wrote to. He was a wonderful, quiet, thoughtful man, were Mr. Robert. He’d take the services at one time, but when the curate came he retired, as you might say.”

Philip stood very still.

“Was Mr. Robert the vicar of the parish?” he inquired unsteadily.

The woman blinked at him.

“Why, o” course he were, sir,” she said. “Just like his father and grandfather were before him. They were all wonderful retiring gentlemen. Never took but little interest in the parish. It was always as if their thoughts were far away. And Mr. Robert, he was just the same.”

A great inspiration came to Philip.

“You,” he said to the woman, “you are Ernestine?”

“Yes, sir,” she said primly. “My surname was Ernest and the Master’s mother thought it unsuitable for a woman, so she called me Irna in the German fashion, and afterwards the Master changed it to Ernestine. When I married John here we’d all got used to it… Would you care to see the Master’s face, sir? He were a very old man.”

“No,” said Philip suddenly. “No. I’d rather think of him as I remember him.”

The old servants bowed to his very natural request.

Dorothy came to meet Philip at Norwich station.

“How tragic missing him after all,” she said. “Still, I’m so glad you went, dear. Tell me, did you see Ernestine?”

To the best of his knowledge Philip had never told a direct lie in his life, but truth is a graceful mistress, capable of many disguises.

“Yes,” he said softly. “I saw her. Only for a moment. She went away almost as soon as I recognised her.”

“What was she like?”

Dorothy’s old eyes were bright and childlike in her excitement.

Philip put his thin arm round her.

“A creature of romance,” he said, “but not the type who could ever have satisfied me.”

Of all the unpleasant people I have ever met I think Mr. Walter Cough took the ultimate palm for downright greasy villainy.

I met him years ago in the days when I was earning a precarious living along with a crowd of other art-students in a nest of picturesque, but draughty, studio rooms overlooking the Bayswater Canal.

We had a joint agent at that time, a lazy, pink-faced young man as impecunious as we were. When one barren Friday he dropped in to say that if I would design a letter heading incorporating four angels, a couple of cornucopias, a mountain or so, and the title of a certain company in Old English caps, and take my sketch to Mr. Walter Cough, Inkermann Avenue, by six o’clock that evening, there was a very good chance that I should receive cash on the spot for my trouble, I got down to work immediately.

I did not like Walter Cough when I first set eyes on him in his smug little sitting-room with the cotton curtains, the plastic flowers and the overwhelming smell of stale cooking.

After he had insulted my drawing and beaten me down for it I liked him still less. But afterwards he grew friendly and told me about his nefarious profession.

I conceived a positive loathing for him and would have taken my work away in a fine burst of outraged virtue had I had my bus fare back to the studio and something to eat when I got there.

As it was, I took the money rather shamefacedly and he went on talking.

He was a plump, pale man nearing fifty-five, with an unctuous manner which gave place at times to a ghoulish humour larded over with conceit.

He was eating when I came in. It was a dreadful meal, consisting of ham, bloaters and jam washed down with great cupfuls of black tea from a pale blue enamel pot.

He didn’t offer me any, but kept me standing in front of him with my drawing propped up against a sticky jampot. He wouldn’t make up his mind about it at first and I was wondering why, because there was not much in it to like or dislike, when it occurred to me that he was keeping me as long as he could because he wanted an audience. Since I wanted to sell the drawing I encouraged him to talk.

“You didn’t want the address of your office on it, did you?” I ventured.

He chuckled and winked at me.

“This is the only office I’ve got and the only office I need,” he said. “That’s the beauty of my business. It’s the only warehouse, too.” He waved a podgy hand to the great cupboard in the corner. “That’s my stock in there. I do my business by sheer personality. You’d be surprised what a lot of mugs there are in the world. There’s one born every minute, that’s what Shakespeare says. Ever heard of Shakespeare?”

I said I had but that I didn’t recognise the quotation.

“I was in the gutter once,” he went on, his eyes popping at me. “You wouldn’t think that to look at me now, would you?”

I didn’t think it would be politic to tell him what I thought, looking at him then, and doubtless he took my silence for admiration for he nodded at me with great complacency.

“I used my head,” he said. “Open that cupboard over there. Go on, open it.”

I did as I was told, and when the cupboard door creaked open I found that it was full of the most villainously bound red and gold hymn-books I had ever seen. I fancied myself as something of a connoisseur in book production at that time, and as I examined one of the dreadfully printed little slabs of cheap paper, which crackled open amid a positive shower of dried glue, I was shocked and almost gave myself away.

It was a dreadful production. The cover was gaudy and vulgar, imitation leather embossed with cheap gilding and embellished with little tin clasps. Even the hymns themselves were bad and had been filched, I suspected, from some mid-Victorian production long fallen into disuse.

“What d’you think of it?” said Mr. Cough. “It’s not worth a guinea, is it?”

“Good heavens, no,” I said involuntarily.

He laughed and put a generous helping of jam on to the edge of a plate from which he had been eating cold bacon.

“That’s what I sell ’em for,” he said. “I won’t tell you what I pay for ’em, but it’s less than a tenth of that amount, less than a tenth. I sell “em by the half-dozen.”

“Whoever to?” I said, and my genuine bewilderment delighted him so much that he couldn’t help telling me. He put down his knife.

“Now it’s no good thinking you can do the same,” he said. “Get that clean out of your head before I begin. You haven’t got the brains and you haven’t got the personality, and you never will. But I can do it. I sell ’em to relations.”