Noble in Reason (10 page)

To revert to my father's letters. He wrote every Saturday morning separate letters to Henry and myself, in his firm, neat, strong, highly individual hand. Gloom always descended upon us as we read. Not that he said anything unkind; but his whole point of view was so at variance with our own and he so completely misunderstood the situations upon which he commented, that we were appalled by the impossibility of either acting upon his suggestions or finding a reply to them which should not reveal our horror. He continually urged Henry, for example, to stand upon his rights at Messrs. Cockerylls' and work hard at the Guildhall, whereas exactly the opposite advice was needed, since Henry's haughty temper often led him into conflicts at his place of employment and he already sat up till the small hours working at his music. The dreamy Christopher was urged to be punctual, hardworking and submissive and not expect any salary advance till he had proved his worth; whereas Mr. M would have loathed a Heepish demeanour and a salary rise was the subject of most hopeful interest to me at the moment. The mere fact, too,
that the long arm of parental control reached out and touched us here in London, depressed us.

John sent an occasional postcard to me, to Henry an occasional letter. But Henry had another correspondent, the sight of whose slender aquiline writing on the breakfast-table always caused my heart to sink, for I knew the consequences which would follow. It was Beatrice who at long intervals would dash off, on very thick rough white writing paper of a then very stylish kind (with highly deckled edges), a brief note to my brother. Her widely spaced lines rarely covered more than two sides of the four into which her paper was folded; the whole would not amount, I judged, to more than six sentences at most. But upon Henry these notes had an exciting effect out of all proportion to their length. A dark scarlet flushed his cheek immediately he saw one; snatching up a knife with a hand that trembled—for he could not endure the clumsy disorder of opening letters by the thumb—he sliced open the envelope with meticulous strokes, and devoured the note over and over again before folding it with exquisite neatness and placing it in his waistcoat pocket (over his heart) with loving care. During all this a smile of intense secret happiness illumined his face and he neither spoke nor looked at me; but when the process was complete he would resume his meal and address me with a false bonhomie, making some feeble jest about Mr. M which was very unlike his usual stern incisive utterances. Presently he laid down his knife and fork again and stole another look at Beatrice's letter.

This was all very well; but after these moments of febrile joy Henry would sink alarmingly into an abyss of gloom. He said nothing of his trouble to me, but it was not difficult to guess that his uncertain prospects, the improbability of his being able to marry for many years, the present blight on the family's fortunes, weighed heavily upon his spirits. I remember particularly his distress on his twenty-first birthday, which
occurred about the middle of this London period. A number of letters and parcels awaited him on the table, amongst which was a letter from Beatrice. Henry opened this first and showed that dark radiance which became his handsome face so well. Then he turned to my father's present, which proved to be a pair of serviceable but not particularly elegant gloves. Henry burst out uncontrollably:

“John had a gold watch!”

I exclaimed in distress.

“Don't take any notice of what I said, Chris,” said Henry, turning to me however a ravaged face: “Father does the best he can.”

I understood perfectly that it was the decay, the deterioration, in the Jarmayne family's standing, symbolised by the descent from watch to gloves, not the mere value, which troubled him; any mean calculation was entirely alien to Henry's proud spirit.

His distress on such occasions distressed me, the more so as I instinctively felt—I say instinctively because the grounds for my conviction were obscure to me—that John would win the game with Beatrice, though Henry seemed much the more attractive proposition of the two to me. On these days of gloom I tried to be as nice to Henry as I could: to abstain from those faults which annoyed him in me. I washed and brushed with especial care; I straightened the somewhat mean though decent appointments of the supper table; I remembered to make up the fire before he came in; I sat, sensibly upright, in a chair to read instead of sprawling all over the rug or broken-springed settee. Henry saw these efforts and rewarded me with a smile, kind though a trifle stiff and wan.

A day or two after the excitement of a letter from Beatrice, came the agitation of Henry's reply to her. Henry wrote unadorned and rather too outspoken letters; strict truthfulness
was always his intention, and like my father he said what he meant rather too clearly to sound urbane. (I was appalled, when he once showed me a paragraph in a letter he had written to Messrs. Cockerylls, by its bald ferocity.) Surprised and affronted by his correspondents' reactions, he had come to regard letter-writing as a difficult and puzzling task, and of course a letter to Beatrice was an immensely important occasion. Accordingly the table had to be cleared of every other object, the writing-tools symmetrically displayed; silence was sternly requested and an absence of fidgeting somewhat irritably demanded. If possible, therefore, I always went out on my bicycle while Henry wrote to Beatrice, and was heartily glad when the process was over. For a few days after the despatch of his letter, Henry was cheerful and hopeful, positively whistled while shaving and told anecdotes of the staff and customers at Messrs. Cockerylls' which were less mordant than his usual scornful exposures. But then began the long agony of waiting for a reply, closed only by the violent joy and despair of its arrival. So that the majority of Henry's days were not happy ones.

As time went on, too, it seemed to me also that Henry was not as happy in his music classes as he had been at first. He now worked for longer hours even than before, but when he lifted his head from his music-paper, he had a harassed and perplexed expression on his face, and sometimes when he came in from a class he tossed his books down on the table with a weary impatience. I took his intense and prolonged application for granted; it never occurred to me that Henry, like myself, might sometimes long for easier pleasures.

For there were times when, happy though I was, the heady and lurid excitements which lay around me just off my path aroused in me a wild surging desire for Life—as we said then,
Life with a capital L;
for scent, colour, drink (I had never tasted it) and laughter, for something rich and pungent, I
knew not what it was. These desires I “worked off” as I then called it, fulfilled as we say now, in my daydreams, which otherwise were rather in abeyance at that time. I would not for the world, of course, have allowed the austere and noble Henry a glimpse into this seething cauldron of my dreams. They were only occasional, in any case, for my real life was so happy at that time, I did not heed them.

I perceive now that my sympathy for Henry over Beatrice's letters was the first disinterested pity I had ever felt. I had pitied my mother, I had pitied Netta; but in them I had a deep interest, I loved them and they loved me. Henry I frankly did not love, though I respected him. So when I straightened forks and ceased to fidget, for Henry's sake, I was exercising (at long last) some true compassion.

The trouble about Henry's musical studies I half understood even at that time, but I hesitated to set myself up as judge in a medium different from my own. I had, after all, a certain reputation as the only unmusical member of the Jarmayne family; I had often been rebuked for singing out of tune. So I would not allow myself to think what I really guessed: namely that Henry bad no genuinely creative musical talent. The elementary steps of musical theory were easy to him, for he had a good ear and an inherited aptitude. But when he had to compose, the poetic element was absent, the inspiration was lacking; he had no original thought of any kind; only a quick and lively brain, very clear and definite, but conventional, confined in all matters within a limited range. I believe now that in the comprehension of the sublimities of music, my father, though in a confused uncertain way, was more able than his son; I see that Henry reached his musical limits within a month or two of coming to London.
To a nature like Henry's, proud and accustomed to despise any inefficiency in others, this inability to progress must have been a severe and perplexing blow.

For myself, of course, this London experience was of very great value. I have said, for I knew it then, that I did not at that time become a Londoner. But neither did I remain entirely a Yorkshireman. My speech was slightly though not entirely Southernized; my manners, modelled on those of the Londoner Mr. M, had a trifle more of welcome in their mode than those current in the West Riding. Moreover, and more significantly: I had observed two sets of manners, two modes of living, two ways of speech, of which the practitioners of each thought it the only right and possible system. Knowing this, I was emancipated a little from both, detached a little from both, and detachment, the ability to observe with some impartiality his own environment, is a great advantage, perhaps indeed a prime qualification, to any artist, any thinker.

As for the reading I was enabled to do in Mr. M's establishment, its value to me was incalculable.

One wet Saturday night I mounted a bus to return home after the theatre—I had seen Oscar Ashe in
Count Hannibal
and was in an excited and romantic mood. Nobody but myself would have climbed to the open top on such a night, I thought with pride, but I travelled habitually on the tops of buses, partly from real enjoyment of the wider range of vision provided above, but mainly as a gesture of defiance to the conventional people who travelled below. To my surprise another passenger was already present, crouching under one of the shiny black apron covers which protected the seats. I began to unhook another covering and to pour off the water
which had accumulated in its folds, when the woman cried out cheerfully:

“Come and sit by me, dear! We shall be warmer together!”

Blushing and disconcerted, but unable from the politeness I made such a point of practising to refuse, I edged in beside her, and received a shock of alarm followed by a tingle of excitement, for her brassy hair and rouged cheeks—rouge was then worn only by the disreputable—together with a certain cheap gaudiness in her dress and her heavy scent, proclaimed even to my innocence that she was “one of those,” a woman of the streets in fact, against whom Henry had sternly warned me. The lurchings of the bus threw us against each other and necessitated apologies from time to time; she called me
dearie
in the Cockney style, nestled up to me, threaded her arm through mine and putting her head on one side smiled up into my eyes. All this seemed to me part of my emancipation from the narrow milieu of Hudley, and I quite preened myself on my advance towards the freedom of manhood.

The conductor now came clattering upstairs; he was rather a surly fellow, or perhaps just vexed out of his normal cheerfulness by his late hour of work at the end of a long week, or by his need to come out into the rain to seek our fares. I paid promptly; but the woman beside me, drawing out a very shabby purse, scrabbled about in it to find coins in a manner which revealed, to the conductor doubtless as well as myself, that she had not the requisite fare. The conductor clicked his tongue and exhorted her to come along, come along, with some impatience; the woman said she had mounted the bus later than she had; the conductor on principle contradicted her; a warm argument ensued and it seemed likely that my companion would be put off the bus. I was aware, as I say, of the view taken of such women by my family, and on that very account I felt a strong, almost hysterical sympathy with her, as a pariah, an outcast from the kind of society I particularly
despised. This feeling was strengthened by my uncomfortable realization that the conductor might not have thought to climb the stairs on such a night and the woman might have escaped his notice and not been called on to pay her fare, if my arrival had not called his attention to the upper deck. I therefore drew out the necessary coppers from my pocket in a secret manner and suddenly thrust them behind my companion's shoulder into the conductor's hand, blushing the while. He took them and issued the ticket in silence, but with an uneasy and disgruntled air, and clattered off down the steps.

“That was very kind and obliging of you, dearie,” said the woman. “What's your name, eh? Mine's Florrie.”

“Christopher,” I mumbled, holding down my head. Her voice was as cheerfully brassy as her hair, and I feared that the conductor from the foot of his steps was listening with disapproval.

“And how old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“You're tall for that age, dearie. You aren't a Londoner, are you?”

“No.”

“Where d'you come from, eh?”

This catechism continued until the bus reached my stop, when with an apology I climbed out from beneath the black apron and descended the stairs with some relief.

But as the bus rolled off and I turned to cross the street I found her at my side.

“I'll walk a little way with you, dearie,” said she.

This was more than I had bargained for, and as we moved along side by side I was too embarrassed to speak.

“Well, this is my road,” I said at last, pausing at the corner. “So I'll say good-night.”

“Shall I tell you something, Chris dearie?” said Florrie at
this, laying her hand on my arm: “I haven't a penny in my purse; nothing to eat and nowhere to go.”

Her gloves were out at the finger-ends, and this detail struck the son of the respectable Jarmayne family as at once ludicrous, pathetic and disgusting.

“Why did you come down here, then?” I asked.

“I've a friend near here that might give me a bed for the night,” said Florrie. (Her accent was so Cockney that I had some difficulty in making out her words.) “But if you could give me a bite and a drink first, it would be a great help, dearie.”