Of Time and the River (102 page)

He referred to his father often, but always in this casual and easy manner, as “the governor,” and to his mother as “the mater,” flinging in parenthetically with his easy nonchalance such a statement as “of course, my whole crowd came from Devonshire”—a statement which was unadorned and meaningless enough but that somehow—God knows how—carried with it a wonderful evocation of an ancestral seat, an ancient and distinguished name, the quiet but impregnable position of one of the “old county families.”

And yet, God knows how he did it: the man said nothing about his people that might not be said of any modest little family, and probably everything he said was true. He made no open pretences to great name or wealth or ancient lineage, but in these swift, casual, half-blurted-out references to “the governor,” “the mater,” and so on, he projected perfectly a legend of prestige and family that was most engaging in its sense of style and dash and recklessness.

The design of this legend was perfectly familiar to everyone: Eugene had read it a thousand times in the pages of books, but he had never known anyone who could evoke it so perfectly, so tellingly, and with such a non-committal economy of means, as Morison. In this casual, charming, almost nakedly simple picture of his life which he could suggest in a blurted-out phrase without giving a shred of real information about himself, or making a single admission of fact, the characters were few in number, their lineaments broadly and forcibly outlined, and their setting a familiar one.

In this setting Morison himself played the part of the dashing young aristocrat, wild, reckless, and impetuous, always ready for fun, fight, or frolic, a bottle of Scotch, or a pretty woman, a roaring drunk, or a hot seduction—a mad hare-brained sort of fellow who plunged impetuously forward into everything, but who was somehow always saved from the odium that attaches itself to a baser sort of drunkard, brawler, or seducer, because he had in him those mysterious qualities of blood and character that made of him “a gentleman,” and therefore gave his acts a faultless style, a whole immunity.

And the figure that he stroked in of his father was also a pleasant one. For “the governor,” although he existed chiefly for the purpose of admonishment and reproof, as a curb upon the wild spirits of his son, was neither a sour Puritan nor a grim-visaged household tyrant, but really a very good and understanding sort of fellow, and, within reasonable limits, as tolerant as anyone could ask. The old boy, in fact, had been “a bit of a buck himself” in his younger days, and had seen his share of the flesh and the devil, and was quite willing to make allowances for the wilder escapades of youth, so long as a reasonable decorum and moderation were observed.

But there, alas! was the rub—as Morison himself would ruefully admit. He was himself such a mad, scapegrace sort of fellow that his acts sometimes passed all the bounds of decorum and propriety, and for that reason “the governor” was always “having him in upon the carpet.”

There, in fact, was the whole setting. The governor existed for the sole purpose of “having him in upon the carpet”—one never saw them in any other way, but when Morison spoke about it one saw them in THIS way with blazing vividness. And this picture—the picture of Morison going in “upon the carpet”—was a very splendid one.

First, one saw Morison pacing nervously up and down in a noble and ancient hall, puffing distractedly on a cigarette and pausing from time to time in an apprehensive manner before the grim, closed barrier of an enormous seventeenth-century door which was tall and wide enough for a knight in armour to ride through without difficulty, and before whose gloomy and overwhelming front Morison looked very small and full of guilt. Then, one saw him take a last puff at his cigarette, brace his shoulders in a determined manner, knock on the panels of the mighty door, and in answer to a low growl within, open the door and advance desperately into the shadowed depths of a room so immense and magnificent that Morison looked like a single little sinner walking forlornly down the nave of a cathedral.

At the end of this terrific room, across an enormous space of carpet, sat “the governor.” He was sitting behind a magnificent flat desk of ancient carved mahogany, in the vast shadowed depths behind him storeyed rows of old bound volumes climbed dizzily up into the upper darkness and were lost. And men in armour were standing grimly all around, and the portraits of the ancestors shone faintly in the gloom, and the old worn mellow colours of the tempered light came softly through the coloured glass of narrow Gothic windows which were set far away in recessed depths of the impregnable mortared walls.

Meanwhile “the governor” was waiting in grim silence as Morison advanced across the carpet. The governor was a man with beetling bushy eyebrows, silver hair, the lean, bitten and incisive face, the cropped moustache of a man who has seen service in old wars and commanded garrisons in India, and after clearing his throat with a low menacing growl, he would peer fiercely out at Morison beneath his bushy brows, and say: “Well, young man?”—to which Morison would be able to make no answer, but would just stand there in a state of guilty dejection.

And the talk that then passed between the outraged father and the prodigal son was, from Morison’s own account, astonishing. It was a talk that was no talk, a talk that was almost incoherent but that each understood perfectly, another language, not merely an economy of words so spare that one word was made to do the work of a hundred, but a series of grunts, blurts, oaths and ejaculations, in which almost nothing was said that was recognizable as ordered thought, but in which the meaning of everything was perfectly conveyed.

The last outrageous episode that had brought Morison in to his present position of guilt “upon the carpet” was rarely named by name or given a description. Rather, as if affronted decency and aristocratic delicacy could not endure discussion of an unmentionable offence, his fault was indicated briefly as “that sort of thing” (or simply “sort of thing,” spoken fast and slurringly)—and all the other passions and emotions of anger, contrition, stern condemnation and reproof, and, at length, of exhausted relief and escape, were conveyed in a series of broken and jerky exclamations, such as: “After ALL!” “It’s not as if it were the first time you had played the bloody fool!” “What I mean to say is!” “Damn it all, it’s not that I mind the wine-woman-song sort of thing—young myself once—no plaster saint—never pretended that I was—man’s own business if he keeps it to himself—never interfered—only when you do a thing like this and make a bloody show of yourself—you idiot!—sort of thing men can understand but women!—it’s your mother I’m thinking of!” and so on.

Morison’s own speech, in fact, was largely composed of phrases such as these: he blurted them out so rapidly, scarcely moving his lips and slurring his words over in such a broken and explosive way that when one first met him it was hard to understand what he was saying:—his speech seemed to be largely a series of blurted-out phrases, such as “sort of thing,” “after ALL!” “what I mean to say is!” and so on. And yet this incoherent and exclamatory style was curiously effective, for it seemed to take the listener into its confidence in rather an engaging manner which said: “Of course, there’s no need to go into detail about all this, because I can see you are a man of the world and the same kind of fellow as I am. I know we understand each other perfectly, and the truth of what I am saying must be so self-evident that there’s no point in discussing it.”

In stature, he was a little below the middle height, and rather fleshy. In fact, although his jaunty and impetuous manners gave him an air of boyishness, he was already getting fat around the waist, and his neck was fat and there was a fold of flesh beneath his chin. His face was very ruddy, smooth, a little alcoholic, and he had a small blond moustache with waxed ends. Finally, his hair was thick, sleek, of a dark taffy-coloured blond which shaded off into roots of fine silken blondish white at the edges of his temples.

He could almost have passed for the average Oxford youth if it had not been for the roll of fat beneath his chin and the blurred, veinous, and yellowed look of his eyes, and he could almost have passed for the dashing gentleman whose lineaments he could so deftly and cleverly sketch in a few boldly casual strokes had it not been that there was something spurious in his character that gave him away in everything he did or said.

And yet Eugene never knew just what this spurious quality was. He felt at once that the man was fraudulent and unfortunate, and that all he told about himself was fraudulent, and yet everything he told was not only natural and credible enough but even plausible. All he said was that he had been a lieutenant in the flying corps, and had recently resigned, and had been given an appointment in the Colonies and been sent to Oxford for a course in Colonial Administration, and that later he would be sent to Africa.

Later on, Eugene understood that all of this was probably true, but at the time it sounded like a lie. Or, if it was not a lie, he thought that there was something discreditable and shameful behind it. He thought that if Morison had been in the army flying service, as he said, he had resigned not from choice but because he had to—because he had been caught cheating at cards, or had not paid his debts, or had been mixed up in some unwholesome mess with a woman. And he thought that if Morison were now going out to Africa it was not so much from choice as by compulsion—because he had to go. In the years that followed Eugene saw that these suspicions were probably unfounded and unjust, but that was the way Morison made him feel.

There was about him, somehow, the look of the ruined adventurer— shabby and run-down—the face of the actor shining through its mask of deft gentility, the face of the charlatan looking through its visage of sincerity, and the old veined yellow eyes of ruin, hopelessness, and loss looking through all his attitudes of youth, infectious spontaneity, and grace. And for this reason, somehow, the man seemed pitiably gallant, and Eugene liked him.

He and Morison would go to different pubs and drink until the closing time. Morison was using him vilely, and Eugene knew it and did not care. Not only was he paying for three drinks of every four they drank, but he knew that Morison also sought his companionship because he thought it gave him some immunity from the college proctors when they made their visits to a pub. And this, in fact, he admitted very frankly and with a disarming gleefulness.

“You see,” he said, “if I came in here by myself I’d get progged, but as long as I’m with you I’m probably all right.”

“Why?”

“Oh,” he said, with an exultant little chuckle, “because they don’t know what to make of it! They’ve got their eye on ME, all right,” he laughed. “They’ve been giving me some very fishy looks—but when they see YOU here, they can’t be sure—they don’t know what to make of it!”

“Why don’t they?”

“Oh,” he said, “they’re puzzled about me, but they KNOW about you— they don’t dare to bother you because they know you’re not in the university.”

“How do they know it?” he said resentfully. “I look as much like a student as these Rhodes scholars that you see—yes, and a damned sight more than most of them!”

“Yes, I know,” he said tolerantly. “Still, they know you’re not. They’ve got a way of telling.”

“A way of telling! Good God, Morison, how have they got a way of telling? Do you mean to say they memorize the names and faces of all the students here, the day the term commences?”

“No, it isn’t that. You see, old boy, you don’t BELONG to them—I don’t know what it is, but they have a way of their own of knowing.”

“Do you mean that there’s some damned mystery about it?—that they’ve got some supernatural gift of intuition that tells them when you’re a student and when you’re not?”

“Quite!” he said. “That’s just it. That’s just the way they do it!” And he looked at Eugene for a moment with his blurred, veinous eyes, and laughed softly, good-naturedly, a little mockingly. “Curious, isn’t it?”

“It’s more than curious. It’s a miracle!”

But it seemed that he was right. For sometimes the proctors would come into a pub where they were drinking, speak amicably to everyone, and in a moment more go out again, but Morison would grow very quiet while they were there, and lean upon the bar, and look down at his drink until they left. And as they left they would look curiously at both men again, and their eye would pass Eugene swiftly and indifferently, and for a moment fix on Morison with a fishy and suspicious look. When they were gone he would look up again at the grinning bar-tender and, his ruddy face suffused with laughter, say exultantly:

“Oh, PRICELESS! Did you see him when he looked at me?”

“I did,” the man behind the counter said. “He didn’t half know what to make of it, did he? The other gentleman is not a student, IS he?”

“No!” Morison fairly shouted, his face crimson, as he pounded on the bar. “That’s just the point! And they don’t know what to make of it when they see me with him! They can’t be sure!” he choked. “They can’t be sure!”

And it was Morison who found the house out on the Ventnor road, took lodgings there himself, and gave Eugene the address.

LXX

In the autumn of that year, Eugene lived about a mile out from town in a house set back from the Ventnor Road. The house was called a “farm”—Hill-top Farm, or Far-end Farm, or some such name as that— but it was really no farm at all. It was a magnificent house of the weathered grey stone they have in that country, as if in the very quality of the wet heavy air there is the soft thick grey of time itself, sternly yet beautifully soaking down for ever on you— and enriching everything it touches—grass, foliage, brick, ivy, the fresh moist colour of the people’s faces, and old grey stone, with the incomparable weathering of time.

The house was set back off the road at a distance of several hundred yards, possibly a quarter of a mile, and one reached it by means of a road bordered by rows of tall trees which arched above the road, and which made Eugene think of home, at night when the stormy wind howled in their tossed branches. On each side of the road were the Rugby fields of two of the colleges and in the afternoon he could look out and down and see the fresh moist green of the playing fields and watch young college fellows, dressed in their shorts and jerseys, and with their bare knees scurfed with grass and turf as they twisted, struggled, swayed, and scrambled for a moment in the scrimmage-circle, and then broke free, running, dodging, passing the ball as they were tackled, filling the moist air with their sharp cries of sport. They did not have the desperate, the grimly determined, the almost professional earnestness that the college teams at home have; their scurfed and muddy knees, their swaying scrambling scrimmages, the swift breaking away and running, their panting breath and crisp clear voices gave them the appearance of grown-up boys.