Читать книгу The Joyful Delaneys - Hugh Walpole - Страница 6

Table of Contents

On that same New Year morning, not very far from the Delaneys’ breakfast-table, at the precise moment when Fred Delaney gazed for the first time, open-mouthed, at Miss Alice Van Renn, Mr. Claude St. John Willoughby woke up in his bed at Number Twenty-three White Horse Street, Shepherd Market, to find Brocket standing in his doorway looking at him, even as Patrick Munden had found Fred Delaney.

A very different greeting this, however, from the other: not at all friendly—quite the contrary.

Claude St. John Willoughby sat up and rubbed his eyes.

Mr. Brocket in his shirt-sleeves and only-too-familiar brown apron said in a voice intended to be elegantly and even classically ironic, but, in reality, thick, beery and brutal:

‘I was only wondering when your lordship intended to rise and allow ’is room to be done—no offence, but it’s past nine o’clock.’

These last words were said with a tang like the slap of a wave on a rock. Mr. Willoughby looked at Brocket and thought how loathsome he was. Brocket had the build of a prize-fighter, but instead of the jolly purple countenance set about with a crooked nose and a cauliflower ear that you might expect, his skin had the thick grey-white consistency of dough, and his head was especially unpleasant, being bald like a tonsured priest’s, with a fringe of grey hair round a faintly yellow poll, grey hair that appeared, unless you looked at it very steadily, to be always a trifle on the move.

He was clean-shaven, and the end of his wide-nostrilled nose, his lips, and his hands were always damp. He appeared during most of the day in his shirt-sleeves and a grey waistcoat on which there were yellow stains. His sleeves were rolled up and revealed brawny but unhealthy-pallored arms. On these also grey hairs crawled. His vast middle was always bound around with a faded brown apron. He wore in the morning slippers that gave him the appearance of webbed-feet, for they were sliced at the toes because of his corns. His slippers could be heard flap-flapping all over the house.

He was a bachelor but was reputed a devil with the women and immensely rich. This last was, in all probability, untrue, but he did own Number Twenty-three and let it out to bachelor gentlemen. Within Number Twenty-three he ruled like the God of the Israelites. Everyone trembled at his approach, more especially if he had had a drop or two. The bachelor gentlemen at present his tenants were: on the ground floor, Colonel Badget; on the second floor, Mr. Best; on the third floor, Major Pierson; and on the top floor, Mr. Willoughby.

Brocket behaved like a self-indulgent sensualist to his tenants. Of some he made favourites, others he tortured. At this present time Mr. Best was his favourite and Mr. Willoughby he tortured.

You may ask then—Why did Mr. Willoughby remain there? He remained because, in the first place, he was growing old (he had passed his seventieth birthday) and to change quarters now was an alarming business; secondly, because he was poor and his room was cheap; thirdly, because Brocket had a sort of terrible fascination for him; fourthly, because he could not conceive of saying: ‘Mr. Brocket, I think I will go away now.’

His room was cheap, but it was not very pleasant. It possessed only one small window and, being immediately under the roof, was very hot in summer, very cold in winter. He had to share the bath with Major Pierson on the third floor, and although Major Pierson had known this when he engaged his rooms, he was sometimes unagreeable about it.

There was not a great deal of space. There was a wash-stand, a table, an easy chair, two straight chairs, a glass cabinet behind which Claude Willoughby kept his treasures, and a wardrobe. On the mantelpiece were photographs of his mother, a girl to whom he had once been engaged, and a setter dog that he had once loved. Over the mantelpiece was an old engraving of Longton Hall in Derbyshire, once the family place, the house where he had been born. Everything was extremely neat and tidy. He himself sitting up in bed, his Adam’s-apple moving nervously within his bony neck, his few grey hairs still tidy on his head, his faint brown eyes anxious and concerned, was very neat and orderly. His thin bony hands were almost bloodless against the dark rug with which he covered the bed on cold nights. He raised one hand now to stroke nervously his short grey brush-moustache.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Something must have happened to the alarm-clock.’

‘Something must,’ said Brocket bitterly. ‘Didn’t you ’ear the girl come in? There’s your breakfast been on the table a hour if a minute—and stone cold by now.’

‘No, I didn’t hear the girl,’ Mr. Willoughby said with dignity. ‘Happy New Year!’ he added courteously.

Brocket studied him. ‘Marvellous how these old boys go on living,’ he thought. ‘You’d have thought he’d have been dead long ago.’

However, he didn’t want Mr. Willoughby to die. He paid the rent regularly, moreover Brocket felt a kind of sadistic affection for the old boy. He loved to see the look of timorous uncertainty creep into those brown eyes, he liked to raise his voice suddenly so that the old boy jumped, he liked to begin a complaint slowly, cumulatively, and then listen, with a glowering brow, to Mr. Willoughby’s slow, stammering explanations. Yes, he almost loved him. Mr. Willoughby was one of his principal daily entertainments.

However, this morning he had work to do, so with a grunt he departed and his slippers flip-flappered down the stairs.

Claude was delighted when he was gone. He raised his thin arms and yawned. Then, very carefully, for he had always, when he woke in the morning, a touch of lumbago, he got out of bed, felt for his brown dressing-gown, his faded green slippers, brushed his few grey locks with his old silver brushes, washed his face and hands and brushed his teeth, and then, humming a little tune (as though in pleasure at the departure of Brocket) sat down to his breakfast. It was not, of course, very agreeable: the tea was lukewarm, the toast was tough, and the two pieces of bacon had congealed round the one egg so that the dish looked like a very unappetizing surrealist painting. Nevertheless he was hungry and there was the Oxford Marmalade which oversleeping could not affect.

All the same how very odd that he had not heard the girl enter! She made always such a clatter! The way that she breathed through her nose was enough alone to waken him. And, being an old man, he was wide awake and staring at six o’clock as a rule. He had, however, gone to bed rather late last night. He had found at the newsvendor’s in Shepherd Market (they maintained a Lending Library; so obliging and kind they always were!) the reminiscences of old Colonel Blake called Random Shots and Tender Memories, and had sat up reading the book. It had brought the old delightful past so vividly back to him that his eyes had filled with tears as he read. He had known so many of the places and people that Reggie Blake had known. He remembered, as though it were yesterday, Ernest Cassell calling Reggie ‘a Tom Cat with a Hundred Tails,’ because Reggie had been an indefatigable raconteur—bit of a bore that way!

But there it was. He had sat up remembering old times, and so his breakfast was cold! There were, however, many pleasant things and one of the pleasantest was his Daily Telegraph. An extravagance, perhaps; but if so, his only one.

He drew to the fire the old armchair with the tear in the right arm that always greatly distressed him because he thought that it must distress the chair who had been for so long a good and faithful friend to him. He said ‘the fire,’ but that was a title by courtesy, for the girl who had lit it an hour and a half ago had used the coal extravagantly, and now, when there were but embers and a piece of vexed-looking charred stick, he did not wish to put on more coal because in that case his allowance for the day would soon be exhausted.

So he drew his dressing-gown about him and, smiling at one winking coal as though it were his best friend, stretched out his legs and read his paper. He read about how terrible had been the fog and darkness over most of England, how the Codex Sinaiticus had arrived from Russia in charge of a special courier, of a terrible railway accident in France on the Paris-Strasbourg line, and of New Year’s Honours conferred on a number of gentlemen whose names were quite unknown to him. He read, too, with a rather twisted smile under his little moustache, of distressed areas and starving multitudes. They can’t be really starving, he thought, because there is always the dole; I wonder if any of them are quite as poor as I am. Obviously if you were living at Number Twenty-three White Horse Street, Mayfair, you couldn’t be quite as poor as if you were living at Number Twenty-three Fish Street, Old Kent Road. And yet not quite so obviously!

He put down his Telegraph and got out from the drawer under the cabinet the dark red book where he with extremely neat accuracy kept his accounts. For once they were on the cheerful side, for the dividends he had received last week had gone up a little. As a rule when he had paid Brocket the rent and the bill for breakfasts and extras, there was almost nothing left at all. Still, so long as he kept well, he could manage.

It was the thought of possible sickness that truly terrified him. You might say (and Claude said it to himself sometimes) that he had no right to live under so high a rent. But Brocket’s was as cheap as he would find in Mayfair, and the whole happiness and colour of his life came from these streets around him. From Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner had been, from the beginning of conscious things, his world. For sixty years he had known it, loved it, cherished it, consoled it, thanked it, congratulated it. For thirty years he had had rooms, very fine ones too, in Berkeley Street. When Devonshire House had gone it was as though he himself had lost a rib or a kidney. Nevertheless he had accommodated himself to the changes. He had not been foolish about that, for he had known that changes must occur as they had always occurred. And, at this very moment of time, January 1st, 1934, the changes at the south end of Berkeley Square in course of construction were devastating, frightful, appalling; but he intended, on this very afternoon or possibly to-morrow afternoon, to walk along there and survey them, bravely, with his head up as though, in the process of nature, they were inevitable.

Take him their way, remove his little feet (his feet and hands were remarkably small) from this piece of ground and he would die. Simply die. Not that it mattered to anyone but himself whether he lived or died, but to himself it still mattered a great deal. He loved to be alive and the little things, the very, very little things, were quite enough to make his days exciting and sometimes even melodramatic....

A door, in the dim distance, banged. His bath! Unless he took it soon, Pierson would be indignant at his having one so late in the morning and would bark at him like a seal. He hoped that, by taking one now, he might avoid Pierson altogether.

So he gathered his soap in its talc case, his sponge-bag and his bath-towel together and proceeded forth. At the bottom of the short flight of stairs was a long shivering passage, and down this he must go, passing the doors of Pierson’s bedroom and sitting-room. He always walked tiptoe, tiptoe, and if he reached the bathroom without arousing anyone he would close the door behind him and then stand for a moment, smiling, his hand pressed on his heart.

To-day he was not so fortunate. He was almost in safety when a door opened and Pierson’s voice was heard.

‘Hullo, Willoughby! You’re late, aren’t you?’

Claude turned and felt, as always, that he was taken at a disadvantage with his old dressing-gown and faded slippers. However, he answered gallantly.

‘Hullo, Pierson! Happy New Year!’

Major Pierson was short, stout, and red of face. He wore a toupee and was always dressed as though about to lead a charge against the enemy. His clothes were in themselves ordinary, but tingling with a kind of combativeness. He was, however, in reality an amiable man so long as one wasn’t a foreigner and had nothing to say against the British Army, the virtue of English womanhood and the English climate. A familiar type made plain to us in many a work of fiction. His individuality (for we all have souls) lay perhaps in his extreme prudery. He could not endure a bawdy story nor any light allusion to sex. In spite of a varied life in India, China and Africa, he still believed that women were angels, and if an angel strayed, then it was some vile man’s intolerable fault. He had never married, perhaps because he had never dared to test his beliefs too severely. He regarded Claude Willoughby as an old woman and therefore pure of heart and conduct. But he felt a vast superiority to him and treated him rather as the Squire in the good old days treated a faithful village dependent. Willoughby never interfered with Pierson’s bathing plans and was scrupulously neat in his behaviour; nevertheless the sight of Willoughby on the way to the bath always annoyed him.

‘Don’t expect you’ll find the bath water very hot.’

‘Oh, that doesn’t matter in the least, thank you.’

‘What happened—oversleep yourself?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact I did; most unusual—sat up late reading.’

‘Reading, eh? Seen in the paper about these damned Bolshies?’

‘No, as a matter of fact ... what have they been doing?’

‘What have they been doing? What are they always doing? Plotting against the peace of the world. That’s what they’re doing.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. It’s really terrible.’

‘You’d better get in there. Damned draughty this passage.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. Thanks very much.’

Lying flat in the bath, Claude was happy. The water was not very warm, but warmer than it might have been. He reflected: ‘Why am I always so nervous when Pierson speaks to me? He’s a very kind man and means nothing but good. He looks down on me, of course, because he’s an Army man and I’m not. All Army men look down on civilians. But he’s nearly as poor as I am. He has only his Army pension and has to support, I believe, a very aged mother and an invalid sister. He is also, I fancy, extremely lonely. He has a Club, which I haven’t, but from what I hear, he’s not at all popular. Why, then, be nervous when he speaks to me? We ought to be friends. I ought to go down and visit him of an evening. But the mere thought of visiting him fills me with terror. Besides we should have nothing to say to one another. He’s more agreeable than Badget, who has money and lets you know it, and less of a bore than Best, who never stops talking. How charming it would be if someone lodged in this house who was a real friend and companion! But you must not, I suppose, expect friends after seventy. I’ve had a lot of friends in my time.’ And that made him think of Helen and Millie Pake, very old friends of his. What a good idea! He would go and have tea with them this afternoon and wish them a Happy New Year. They were always at home at tea-time and enjoyed a chat. What an excellent idea! Filled with pleasure, he finished his bath, dried his little shivering body, and hurried up to his room again.

He clung to his intention although the scruples, now so constant with him, that he might bore them, that they would have other visitors, that he might suffer once more that unpleasant experience of people looking right through him as though he didn’t exist, crowded about him. He must go out, he must pay visits. He had noticed in himself lately a tendency to stay in his room as though there only was to be really safe. That was dangerous. That way madness lay.

At length in his blue suit with the dark tie and grey gloves and cane with the ivory head of a dog, and his soft black hat, he was ready to venture. All he hoped was that he would not encounter Brocket. One moment’s experience of Brocket scowling at him and the dangers of facing the outside world were greatly increased. But there was no Brocket to-day and, as he walked into Shepherd Market, happiness returned to him as it so easily did at the slightest excuse in the world. Although it was half-past three in the afternoon there was still a faint sun-stained fog about. He liked that sun-stained fog almost beyond any other weather that London provided, and it seemed especially kindly and reassuring now, for London had been so very dark of late. Lights were burning in the newsvendor’s and, as always, he stopped to look at the rows of books behind the glass on the opposite side of the narrow passage. How very many books there were in the world to be sure! It must take so much energy and trouble to write a book! He admired authors greatly so long as no one forced him to read their works.

In Curzon Street there was an orange light in the air and the Christian Science Church loomed behind the fog almost like a mystic temple, and the steel and chromium of the new cinema up the street gleamed like the silver lines of a ship. How greatly vexed and hurt he had been at the first appearance of that cinema. It had seemed to him not only an insult to all the past history and characters of this sacred ground, but a personal insult to himself as well. He had become, however, not only accustomed to it but he even liked it. He wished it well. He enjoyed the photographs of the pictures, the uniformed figure on guard, the cars that assembled outside it. This after all was life; it meant happiness to many people, and, because he could not himself possibly afford to enter it, there was a quality of mystery there that stirred and excited him.

So, through the orange fog he walked to the home of his friends.

Outside the door of the handsome house were the names of the tenants and under each name a little bell: Patrick Munden, Lady Helen Pake, the Hon. Mark Pullet, Frederick Delaney. He touched the Pake bell, gave the big door a push and was inside the hall, then up the beautiful staircase, past the Pullets’, challenging the Pake door. Now, while he waited, once more fears attacked him. The house was so very silent; everyone within it might be dead. Suppose they were dead, those two old ladies, the young girl who looked after them during the day out on her shopping; dead, the two poor old things, and nobody knew it! Or suppose, on the other hand, they were entertaining their friends, as they well might be on New Year’s Day, and he would find himself in a circle of cold, indifferent strangers. That he would not be able to endure, and so, after a quarter of an hour, he would depart and return to his lonely room with nothing to do for the rest of the day but sit and miserably reflect on his wretched isolation? Or Helen might be in one of her grand tantrums and sit there, like a tragedy queen, making life horrible for everybody? Oh, it were better that he had not come, far, far better, and he was about to turn away and slip down the stairs again when the door opened and the little maid was there and, yes, Lady Helen and Lady Mildred were at home and would he come in, please?

Inside the little hall he listened and was comforted because there were no gay and raucous voices. There was no New Year’s party at least. And then when he saw his old friends sitting one on each side of the fire as he had so often seen them before, his heart beat with happiness. Here was sanctuary, here safety!

The sitting-room was small, as it was bound to be when you considered that out of the two original rooms there had been created two bedrooms, a bath-room, a kitchenette and a sitting-room. But the ceilings were high, the fireplace noble, there were flowers and old family silver, an oil-painting of Twyden Hall, the family place, now in the possession of Lord Rocklyn their brother, and a very fine portrait of Helen and Mildred painted in the ’Nineties by Sargent. The room was a little over-full perhaps and you had to walk carefully to avoid tables and chairs, but it was of a warm and cosy friendliness.

The ladies themselves were exactly what Claude considered that ladies ought to be.

Helen was now seventy-five years of age, Millie some five years younger. Helen was sitting up in her chair, stiff as a poker, her body thin as a divining-rod. She was pale of cheek, hawk-like nose, pouches of dark under her eyes, her silver-grey hair tight about her head. She had long thin hands, so thin that the light seemed to shine through them. She had a long bony neck like a hen’s and held her head so high that you watched to see the neck-bones crack. Her magnificent flashing, tempestuous eyes were her finest feature. This she knew very well, for they had been called flashing and tempestuous often enough. She had never been beautiful, but always regal, and now at seventy-five was more regal than ever. All her life she had been the victim of fits of imperious temper, but now those fires were dying and she was slipping into the dusk of evening. She had always behaved like a queen, for no very adequate reason save that she had been the eldest daughter of the Earl of Rocklyn. That had mattered once; alas, it mattered nothing now. That she should be sister of the present Earl, who, poor Tommy, had wasted and rioted away in earlier days all the family patrimony and was now a withered skeleton living in a semi-closed Twyden with a housekeeper and a pack of dogs, martyred by gout and rheumatism. No, Helen had no longer any reason for grandeur, but that did not mean that she was not grand. Although her faculties were still sharp and acute, she lived in a kind of dream-world, not the Past only, the Past shot through with the Present (which she loathed and despised), then finally transmuted into a place of colours, rhythms, voices that had little relation to the reality of other people.

Millie, her sister, had worshipped and served her all her life long. In appearance Millie was short, plump, with snow-white hair and a most amiable behaviour. She too had her dignities and could rebuke a presumer most effectively, but she loved gossip and the small transactions of human nature and could not therefore hate the modern world as her sister did. She was the practical one, managed the small income of herself and her sister; it was the great business of her life to save her sister every possible discomfort and inconvenience. She worshipped her, was sometimes terrified of her, loved her and spoilt her. In spite of their smallness of means, confined existence and occasional aches and pains, Millie got much pleasure from life, although she considered that the way the world was going was appalling. Appalling and exciting. At the back of her mind was always the fear that they would wake up one morning and discover that they had no money. The investments, once so fat and satisfying, appeared with every year to dwindle. Of course, come the worst, they could always go to Twyden and make their home with Tommy, the dogs, and Mrs. Hardcastle, the housekeeper. Anything more appalling Millie could not conceive.

They were both delighted to welcome dear Claude Willoughby. He was exactly their contemporary, and though, in younger days, they had patronized him and thought him a good little man to run messages for them, he was now one of the few holders of the fort remaining. Moreover he had known everyone they had known and was an excellent gossip: he held identically their views about the present disgraceful state of the world; and, best of all, he had even less money than they had.

Helen received him as Queen Elizabeth might have greeted an ambassador from a foreign country, but her beautiful eyes mellowed nevertheless. Millie showed her pleasure without any dignity and told him to draw his chair to the fire and that tea would be there in a minute. They had rung for it just before he came in. Then Millie began at once, without a moment’s pause, to ask him whether he had heard of the latest horrible behaviour of Princess Corleone.

Very briefly, Princess Corleone was the villain of the piece in the lives of the members of the Pake world. Princess Corleone was an American, and there was nothing against being that, because some of the most charming women in the Edwardian world had been American. She had arrived in London before the War as a Mrs. Peter Twine, the wife of an American steel man. She had attempted then a little social advancement. She had been at once checked on all sides. There had been nothing whatever to recommend her as she had been ugly, vulgar, with a voice like a pea-hen, and had never stopped talking. However, Mr. Peter Twine had died, leaving her a large fortune, and she had married an Italian, Prince Corleone. He had been killed at Caporetto and she had returned to London, finding in the new post-war world all that she had needed. To her house in Grosvenor Street she had gradually lured politicians, painters, authors, younger nobilities, and finally Royalty itself.

Paula Corleone haunted the Pakes and their friends and fascinated them as well. In the old days they would not have considered her at all, and would have scorned to gossip about her. But now from their little fastness, with the wild savage new world roaring about them, they saw her as a kind of witch directing the storm. They saw her with her little restless body, her sharp eyes, they heard her shrill never-ceasing monotone, they could not learn sufficient detail of her personal life, her ‘affairs,’ her parties, her social indiscretions. They thought of her continually because they were baffled by her power. In the only world that they had actively realized she would not have been permitted for a moment. But she had money, and money now was everything. Birth, tradition, taste, morals, decent behaviour, charming manners, all these counted for nothing now beside money. They had been brought up never to consider money, never to mention it, never to think of it. In the old days there had been plenty. The parties at Twyden had been famous, and when there had not been parties at Twyden there had been parties everywhere else: house-parties in enormous houses, with vast rooms, icy passages, lawns dripping under the rain, the shrill cry of peacocks, frosty mornings and the Hunt assembled before the drawing-room windows, beautiful September mornings on Scottish moors and the ladies at luncheon-time driving out to join the gentlemen, endless, endless dinner parties, endless, endless balls—and always plenty of money.

Now no one stayed a minute over anything; off they went in a motor-car or an aeroplane. No one goes to church, no one goes to bed, no one goes to stay with anyone for more than a night. The noise about one’s ears is a frenzy; all the world is preparing for the last War that is to exterminate everything—and, above all this horror, riding her broomstick, directing proceedings in her shrill vulgar accents, is Paula Corleone.

Very quiet, though, is it now in this little room, the lights shaded, the tea in front of the fire, Helen sitting bolt upright, half in a reality that applauds the little macaroons (she has always loved sweet things) and enjoying the detail of Paula Corleone poking the Minister for War (or was it Agriculture?) in the ribs and screaming at him like a parrot about a new laxative that she had been trying. Yes, and watching, as Helen loved to do, the Chinese cabinet with the red dragons that had been among her very earliest perceptions at Twyden, there near the great stone fireplace in the Twyden drawing-room, when as a small infant she had been brought down for an hour with her mother and, on some especial occasion, like a birthday, had been permitted to turn back the panels and open the musk-scented little drawers, black with gold carvings of trees and pagodas....

The Chinese cabinet was theirs now—Tommy had allowed them to keep it—and Helen had but to gaze at it and all the past came swimming up, the great country-houses, the gardens, the long line or the downs, the tinkling Sunday reiteration of the bell in the village church. So, nibbling her macaroon, she heard but little of what Millie and Claude were saying.

Claude was happy and thankful too. For really this visit had turned out delightfully and he would have plenty, in his room at evening, to think over. They were talking about the new Duchess of Wrexe, who, only eighteen, had just married the Duke, a bachelor of forty. She was, they said, exceedingly beautiful and the daughter of a Devonshire farmer.

‘What the old Duchess would have said!’ Millie exclaimed. ‘You remember her of course?’

‘I should think I do,’ said Claude. ‘Time of the Boer War—Rossiter’s portrait of her is in the Tate. Did you know that? I went with Connie Beaminster the other day to see it. A silly woman, Connie, don’t you think? But she means well.’

‘She’s a great friend of the Delaneys.... Dear, dear! What an autocrat the old Duchess was! And now see what her grandson is doing!’

‘There are some farmers of quite good family,’ Claude said reflectively. ‘But I hear that this girl’s mother’s father had a shop in Taunton or somewhere....’

‘Oh, well,’ said Millie briskly. ‘No one cares any more about such things. They’d call us dreadful snobs, Claude, if they heard us, and so I suppose——’

‘Snobs!’ Helen suddenly broke in, to their astonishment. ‘If you tell me, Millie, that good blood doesn’t matter and decent manners and bringing children up to know their betters——’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Millie, shaking her head. ‘After all, Helen, our childhood wasn’t really very happy. You know we were terrified of Papa and never dared open our mouths and always had chilblains and had to wear boards down our backs at lessons and could never read an interesting book on Sundays. I do think children are much happier nowadays, and as to birth, Charles the Second made an orange-girl a Duchess, and look at the way the Prince Regent used to go on! It was only Queen Victoria who altered everything, and although I wouldn’t say a word against her, she did fill England with hypocrites, and no one can say that we’re that any more. After all, in the light of history sixty years is a very short time. Until Victoria, England was quite a rough country, and now she’s gone back to being rough again!’

Helen said, ‘You’ve been reading something, Millie.’

‘Not particularly. Only Lytton Strachey, and Mrs. Pullet tells me he’s quite old-fashioned now.’

‘You’d better go to one of Paula Corleone’s luncheon-parties.’

‘Oh no, of course not. I should be most uncomfortable! But of course we are very old-fashioned, living all by ourselves shut up in here, and we may as well recognize it. Why, do you know, Claude, there’s one of the most modern young poets living at the top of this house now. I passed him on the stairs the other day—such a wild-looking young man, but he gave me quite a nice frightened sort of smile. Fancy my frightening a modern young poet!’

Millie laughed. ‘Now if it had been Helen... !’

Helen smiled a grim smile. ‘Millie’s getting so light-headed, Claude, that I don’t know what’ll become of her!’

‘Oh no, I’m not, but after all it isn’t any use to pretend we’re living in the old world. Two old ladies, buried away and forgotten—that’s what we are!’

Her voice shook a little. She moved over and gave her sister a kiss.

‘Put some coal on the fire, Claude, will you?’

Claude did so—not too much, for he could not help thinking of the economy that his own coal demanded.

The flames leapt up, they talked on cosily, as though Claude were their brother. The watcher on the threshold, looking at the figures, bent like ghosts about the fire, might have thought that they were seeking one another’s protection and comfort....

‘And what about you, Claude? How are things going with you?’

‘Very well indeed, thank you ... oh, very well.’

‘No more of that lumbago? I remember you were bothered ...’

‘Oh, ever so slight. There’s a new embrocation I’ve been recommended ...’

‘And that horrible man, your landlord? He hasn’t been offensive? If you have any trouble I’ll come along and tell him what I think of him.’

‘Oh no. I don’t like him, you know—couldn’t possibly like him. It’s only his manner. I can’t believe that he means to be as rude as he seems. But he can’t do anything, you know. Only make it a little uncomfortable.’

Helen is half asleep. Her back is as straight as ever, but she is young, so young, and although not beautiful still striking. Even Aunt Milchester allows that she is striking. She is kneeling in front of the Chinese cabinet. She is old enough now; she need not ask permission any longer. She turns back the crimson panels, fingers with her thumb the raised gold on the smooth black surface of the drawers. Someone is practising the piano—Millie in the schoolroom. She hears the voice of Bannister, the butler—‘I will go and see, my lady’—and then her mother’s thin, rather languid voice: ‘Ah, there you are, Helen! We are going down to the Lodge. I have to speak to Gummery about something’—and that sudden glorious vista through the window as you raise your head from the cabinet, of the sun behind the great oak and every leaf glittering. A baby moon just fading from the pale blue-white sky, and the thick bark-like scent of chrysanthemums. Millie playing ‘The Carnival of Venice’ in the schoolroom. Bannister, so fat, so unctuous, so devoted. ‘I’ll remember, my lady. Certainly, my lady....’

‘I must be going now.’ Claude is going, going, gone....

‘Come again soon and see us.’

‘I will. I will.’

But in the hall downstairs there was still a little adventure. As he moved to the hall door another door opened and a young girl stood there, all in dark red with a little fur cap on her very dark hair.

She smiled. What could he do but bow? He knew her, of course—Miss Delaney. He felt that he must account for himself lest she should think that he had been robbing the house.

‘A little foggy, isn’t it?’

Kitty Delaney came close to him. There was a faint scent of—what? Violets? Who was this little man, so small, so dapper, but his neat blue suit rather shiny? Her heart was moved by the anxious brown eyes, the mouth that trembled ever so slightly.

‘I have been paying a New Year call on Lady Helen Pake.’

‘Oh yes. Aren’t they darlings? We are so glad they live here.’

Claude felt from her, as he felt from the girl’s father and mother when he met them in the hall or on the stairs, a renewal of his ebbing vitality. How charming a girl! Something pleasant for him to think over alone in his room that evening....

‘I live quite close by.’

‘Oh, do you? ...’ She took him, as it were, under her care and protection. ‘I’m so glad you do. All of us here—just in these few streets. It’s like living in a village, don’t you think? We all ought to know one another.’

‘My name’s Willoughby. Claude Willoughby. The Pakes will tell you all about me. They’ve known me all my life.’

‘How do you do, Mr. Willoughby?’

Kitty held out her hand. Claude held it a moment. How warm it was beneath the glove! And was not the scent lilac? At any rate he could smell lilac, his favourite flower, white or purple, clusters of it—against the old dark wood of the stair.

‘Well, I must be going on. Good afternoon, Miss Delaney.’

‘Good-bye, Mr. Willoughby. You must come and visit us one day as you know the house so well.’

‘Indeed I will, Miss Delaney. Thank you so very much.’

He went tripping out into the fog, which by now had thickened. But he hummed a little tune as he felt his way.