Читать книгу The Laslett Affair - Edward Harold Begbie - Страница 11

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Stephen came down to breakfast the next morning rather the worse for wear. His face was redder than usual, his eyes appeared to be smaller and more scowling, the look of sulkiness on his lips was more pronounced. He was not only physically deranged by the excess of the previous night, but mentally distressed by the knowledge that he had made a considerable fool of himself in a very public manner.

His distresses might have been less acute if his first appearance after so great a folly had been made in the privacy of his own family. But to descend the stairs of a house quite strange to him, and to take his place at the breakfast-table of a family renowned for its aristocratic exclusiveness and its devotion to the Church, this was a very painful ordeal for so self-conscious and inexperienced a young man.

It was at any rate something of a relief to him to be met by Hugh at the foot of the stairs, and to be greeted in a cheery fashion, as if nothing had happened, and as if no dragons waited behind the door of the dining-room. But when that door opened and he found himself, as it were, pitchforked into the midst of what appeared to be a crowd of very formidable people, the relief of Hugh’s presence instantly evaporated from his mind and left him with no other feeling than one of miserable loneliness.

The greeting he received from Lady Emily Jodrell, a big and motherly old person, was kind but a little formal; the greeting from Mr. Jodrell, warm, generous, and friendly. As for Hugh’s sisters and brothers, all of whom seemed to Stephen in his present mood very distant and aloof people, they nodded at him, looked at him, he thought, as if he were some odd creature from the Zoo, and then turned to talk among themselves.

While he was standing in their midst, flushed, awkward, and dumb, he noticed that two solemnly-bound books were placed at the head of the table. With a disorganising sensation of sick faintness, his bewildered and chaotic mind realised that these two books signified Family Prayers. He felt his mouth become dryer, so dry as to make speech impossible, and at the same moment his brow became clammy and stone cold.

Before he could right his feelings, the door opened, and at the same moment there was a portentous movement in the Jodrell family, and a sudden cessation of voices. Mr. Jodrell went to the head of the table, Lady Emily sat down in an arm-chair by the fire, the brothers and sisters dispersed themselves about the apartment. Stephen, who had felt himself rooted to the ground, suddenly found himself blocking the advance of processional servants advancing from the door, and bolted to Hugh’s side. They sat down together, at a little distance from the line of servants, who subsided into chairs at one and the same moment.

Stephen clasped his hands between his knees, tucked his feet under his chair, and sunk his head, setting his eyes on a butter-dish on the table, just as he had stared so often at any stupid object outside a dentist’s window when the critical moment arrived. The voice of Mr. Jodrell came to him, quiet, deep, resonant, reading from the Gospel. He squeezed his hands between his tight knees, scowled at the butter-dish, and wondered how many of the brothers and sisters were looking at him.

“Let us pray.” At last! Thank God!

He got up hurriedly from his chair, kneeled down, buried his face in his hands, and hoped that Mr. Jodrell would go on praying till he had recovered at least something of his shattered composure.

It was with something of a shock that Stephen found the whole family chattering together at the conclusion of these prayers, and heard Hugh slyly suggesting that perhaps he would prefer iced soda-water to coffee or tea. But his nerves were soothed by the voice of Mr. Jodrell addressing him on the subject of the rugger match, and when at last he took his seat at the table, with Hugh on one side of him, and Lady Emily on the other, he was in the mood, if not to do justice to an English breakfast, at least to behave himself with the appearance of a civilised being.

Half an hour afterwards he found himself alone in the library with his host, and before he quite knew how it came about he was giving Mr. Jodrell his views as to his future—what he intended to do when he came down from Cambridge. Mr. Jodrell was interested. There was no doubt about that. You can always tell by the manner in which a man listens whether he is interested or bored. Stephen felt quite sure that this nice old bird was interested. Flattered by the look in the old bird’s deep-set grave eyes, by the encouraging nod of the old bird’s exceedingly solid big head, and by the occasional “Good!” or “Well done!” that came from those long, judicious-looking lips, Stephen swaggered beautifully about the constituency which was being nursed for him, and the line he intended to take in Parliament.

Then, somehow or another, he found himself entertaining a notion concerning politics which had never before entered his mind. Perhaps he himself had said something which suggested this notion to Mr. Jodrell, for Mr. Jodrell was certainly speaking as if he wished to give Stephen the credit for the idea. He was speaking of England’s need for young men in her Parliament who would put country before party, who would be governed by moral earnestness, who would feel in their bones how high and holy a thing it is to serve so great a country, and who would fight with all the ardent passion of knights-errant to rescue politics from the shameless corruption of these sordid and disappointing times.

“You are perfectly right,” he would say; or, “I quite agree with you;” and then go straight ahead with these ideas of his—ideas which made politics something of a religious crusade.

He began to speak of Hugh. He was not sorry, he said, that Hugh had no ambition, and wanted to become a schoolmaster. He thought that the schoolmaster, the conscientious schoolmaster, the schoolmaster born and bred in the great traditions of our race, might do the chief work of the nation in the next fifty years or so—the work of broadcasting those traditions, if he might so put it, among a generation suffering, so far as he could see, from an inadequate home-life and a false theory altogether concerning the business of evolution and the true ends of individual existence.

When they parted it was as if a Nestor, too old to fight, was taking farewell of a young Achilles armed for the battle.

Hugh Jodrell walked to the Ritz Hotel with Stephen, and on the way Stephen, gratefully reviving in the fresh air, held forth on the ideas of Mr. Jodrell. He was impatient to be done with Cambridge, and be out in the fighting line. He spoke of men who would have to be smashed, statesmen whose names were known in every nation, and implied that he was to do the smashing. “The old gang has got to be broken up. What the country wants is young blood.”

At the door of the hotel Hugh would have left him, but Stephen was now so wound up to talk that he would give Hugh no rest till he came inside. “I suppose you know,” said Hugh, looking at his watch, “that it’s nearly twelve o’clock.”

“Is it?” cried Stephen; “why, good Lord! I thought it wasn’t eleven. But come in; you must.”

As they were entering, Mrs. Laslett and Phillida, who had been shopping, drove up to the door. Phillida called to Stephen from the window of the car, making him turn in the doorway.

At sight of his sister’s face, smiling at him out of the car’s window, Stephen lost all sense of political ambition, and also all feeling of moral fervour. He smiled very pleasantly back, waved his hand, and exclaimed to Hugh, “Hullo, here’s Phillida: you remember her? Good luck—you’ll be able to give them a full history of last night.”

“I don’t think that I had better quite do that,” replied Hugh, interested by these new arrivals, and curious about them.

“I’ve seen your background, you know,” said Stephen, “and now you will see mine. We’re rather a lively lot, let me warn you; new blood, you see!”

Mrs. Laslett greeted Hugh with an easy laughing good-nature, flashing her great eyes at him, challenging him to tell her what he had been doing to her lamb of a son since last night, and before he could answer that question, inviting him to come inside and drink a cocktail. “I expect that both of you,” she said, “have got mouths like brick-ovens.”

Phillida, who was watching Hugh, saw that he did not respond with the average young man’s pleased satisfaction to this gay raillery of her mother, and began to speak to him about the match at Twickenham, telling him how much she had enjoyed it, using the slang of the modern girl to impress him with the knowledge that she was grown up and out in the world.

They went up by the lift to the Lasletts’ suite of rooms, and were greeted there by the persistent sound of a telephone bell, tinkling with a gentle politeness.

Hugh was impressed by the magnificence of the apartment in which this little bell was ringing so urgently and yet so politely. It seemed to him as big as a ballroom, with its end windows looking out on the Green Park and its front windows on Piccadilly. It was elaborately furnished, blazed with lights and flowers, and seemed to have no need of the roaring fire in the grate, it was so oppressively hot even at the door.

Mrs. Laslett with her rich furs thrown open, and seated on a sofa, showing a considerable length of silk stocking, did not wait till Phillida had answered the telephone, but straightway endeavoured to get from Hugh a personal relation of the rag which figured so eminently in many of the newspapers, chaffing both Hugh and Stephen in a manner which declared her cordial sympathy with high spirits of any sort or description.

“It must have been topping fun,” said Phillida, coming from the telephone; “I wish I had been there.”

“You would probably have had your frock ruined,” laughed her mother. “It says in the paper that no end of women had their dresses torn from their backs.”

“From their hips, you mean!” laughed Phillida.

At that moment the telephone rang again, and again Phillida went to it, conducting a drawling and slangy conversation about an engagement at a dance-club.

Hugh studied Stephen’s background. There were painted boxes of sweets on the centre table, the lids off, the contents disordered. There were numerous unopened packets and parcels fresh from the shops on tables, chairs, and sofas. On the sideboard there was an array of bottles and glasses, with fruit of all kinds on dishes and plates. Sofas and chairs were littered with the Christmas Numbers of illustrated papers.

Hugh was conscious of these things, and of lights in opposite windows shining through the fog at them, and of Mrs. Laslett’s astonishing long leg, and of Phillida’s tired drawl as she spoke through the telephone; but more than of anything else he was aware of some almost indefinable scent in this rich and disordered room, which seemed to take all the stuffing out of him, and to make it difficult for him to breathe with freedom.

He thought to himself, “How the deuce do people manage to live such a life as this?” and then, “How the dickens am I to get out of this fugg?” And then, with some sudden, sharp, and miserable pain in his heart, he said to himself, “All the same, this is Stephen’s background.”

“Mix us each a cocktail,” said Mrs. Laslett to Stephen, “while Mr. Jodrell tells us how you both managed to escape Vine Street.”

Stephen explained that Hugh was thinking just then more of a white jersey with the red rose of England on its breast than of all the wines and liqueurs in the world.

“Perhaps you will succumb to a chocolate,” said Phillida, and advanced to Hugh with one of the boxes from the table. She stood before him, smiling down on him as he raised his eyes to her face.

“Not on your life!” cried Stephen, going to the bottles on the sideboard: “neither sweet nor cigarette must corrupt him till Scotland’s glory has bitten the dust. Get away, Delilah; avaunt, Cleopatra!” He asked his mother to name her mixture, and began taking the corks out of bottles.

Again the telephone rang, this time for Stephen, and when Mrs. Laslett heard who it was that had called him she laughed cynically and told Hugh that all the mothers in London were beginning to run after Stephen for their daughters. “What with guarding Stephen from these designing mothers,” she said, “and protecting Phillida from Don Juans of every conceivable age, I scarcely have a moment I can call my own.”

Hugh was interested in Phillida. He remembered her as a small girl, and as a flapper. He had always thought of her as a queer and perplexing creature who, in a rather diverting fashion, was different from other girls. Now, as he looked up at her smiling eyes, he found that she was not at all different from other girls, but entirely different from the girl he remembered. What had happened to her? How had she managed so completely and so suddenly to jump out of her own skin?

Mrs. Laslett, smoking a cigarette and swinging a leg on the sofa, noticed how Hugh looked at Phillida, and the notion of marrying these two children revived in her mind. She thought that Hugh was one of the most uninteresting young men she had ever met—heavy, awkward, dumb, and not in the least aristocratic-looking; but what did that matter?—he was the nephew of an earl, his name was part of the history of England, and his family would be extremely useful to Stephen. She decided that she would ask him to dinner to meet Ann Vaudrey.

A page entered the room bearing a letter on a tray. He took it briskly to Stephen, who was just then coming from the sideboard with a glass in his hand.

“For me?” asked Stephen.

“Yes, sir,” breathed the page heavily, in a voice evidently affected by the fog. “Just come by special messenger, sir. I brought it up at once.”

Stephen took the letter, put down his glass, and while the others talked, and while the page beat his knees with the tray, or knocked the tray with his knees, and looked about him at the grand people in the grand room, he broke the envelope and read the contents. A frown in his eyes gradually gave way to a smile, and then the smile ended in a laugh which attracted the attention of the others.

“There’s no answer,” he announced to the page. “You are entirely free, my lad, to hop it. I say, Hugh, here’s a joke——”

“Hi, wait a minute!” called Phillida to the page, and getting up from her chair she went to the table, took a handful of sweets from one of the boxes, and gave it to the boy, who departed rosy and beaming.

At that moment the polite telephone buzzed again, and once more Phillida went to answer its summons.

“What the devil do you make of this?” asked Stephen, standing at Hugh’s side, and handing him the letter.

It was a letter written in a woman’s hand on scented paper, with a pretty coloured monogram in a corner. It expressed the hope that Stephen had not been locked up in Vine Street last night, and invited him to tea that afternoon in the writer’s flat, as she wanted very much to know how the rag had ended.

Hugh handed the letter back to Stephen, smiled in an amused manner, and said, “Wastepaper-basket.”

“But who is she?”

“Goodness knows.”

Mrs. Laslett demanded, “What’s all this mystifying whispering between you two? What’s it about?”

Phillida, who had been listening, put her hand over the telephone and said, “Stephen has had a letter from an admirer.” She then continued her conversation.

“Come, Stephen, tell us the secret,” smiled Mrs. Laslett. “Who is the wicked vamp that thinks to prey upon his mother’s joy?”

Stephen was tearing the letter in half, but he stopped, and said, “No, by Jove; it’s polite enough to demand an answer. Noblesse oblige. Place aux dames. Never let us forget that. But who the devil is she? I wonder if by any chance she’s one of the ladies at the show. Yes, by gad, that’s who it is—one of the girls at the show last night!” He laughed delightedly, but of a sudden grew serious and anxious. “But how in thunder,” he demanded, “did she get hold of my name and address?”

His mother laughed, laughed with huge amusement, and said that Stephen and Hugh had evidently been going it last night in a manner that did not bear publication. She made a great joke of this suggestion, and elaborated it with all sorts of inferences, and went on laughing and chaffing until even she herself was exhausted.

When Hugh went, very glad to escape from such tedious persiflage, Stephen accompanied him, and descended with him in the lift to the ground floor. At the doorway Hugh suddenly raised his head, looked at Stephen, and said, “By the way, you know, it’s quite simple how you came to get that letter.”

“How?” asked Stephen, bringing his eyes from answering the look of a pretty girl just entering.

“You told me last night,” said Hugh, “that you had scattered the contents of your card-case among the ladies on the stage.”

Stephen burst out laughing. “By gad, did I do that?” he asked. “I say, old man, how young that was!”

“I shouldn’t answer the letter if I were you.”

“No, of course I won’t. Gracious, I should think not. But I don’t know, you know. I think that I ought to send the child a few flowers and a word of apology for my behaviour last night. Don’t you think so? You know, Hugh, when I come to think it over I must have been something a little more than pretty tight last night. God knows what I said and did on the stage. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if some one told me I’d invited the whole chorus to dinner and proposed to half a dozen of the prettiest of them.”

Hugh smiled and nodded his head. “I shouldn’t be surprised if you had,” he said quietly. “You’ve no idea how uncommonly unlike yourself you were last night.” He paused, then added, “But don’t forget you’re going to set the Thames on fire at Westminster next year. Young blood, old man; young blood and new ideas. I must go now; lots to do: good-bye.”

He walked away, thinking to himself that if Stephen had been uncommonly unlike himself on the previous night, Phillida this morning was uncommonly unlike anything that he remembered of her. He was disappointed in Phillida. Why? He could not quite formulate his disappointment in words. Perhaps it was because she was no longer a child. He was fond of children; always got on well with them; yes, Phillida was no longer a child. In thinking about her he thought of Mrs. Laslett, and thinking of Mrs. Laslett, somehow or another, he recalled the warning of his father in the library last night. He saw quite clearly that Stephen’s women-folk complicated his friendship with Stephen.