Читать книгу Unchanging Quest - Philip Gibbs - Страница 5

Table of Contents

HE rehearsals of my romantic play—dreadful stuff it must have been!—were the occasion of a lot of drama in my father’s house, outside the parts written down. They afforded me an exquisite mingling of delight and pain; delight because they brought Katherine over two nights a week and established my friendship with her, pain because I really suffered agonies at seeing Hugh Evesham make love to her according to the book, and also quite outside his role as “Richard Fairfield.”

As an actor he played his part admirably, as I was bound to admit, and was quite moving in a tragic scene where he had to make a heroic denunciation of the lady of his heart. I used to stand there prompting—Paul never knew three lines through, though Katherine was word perfect after the first week—saying, “Splendid! That’s first-class!”—but raging inwardly because it was Evesham and not myself who had such a wonderful chance of kissing Katherine’s hand, putting his arm about her, expressing adoration. Her blushes and her laughter added fuel to the fires of my self-appointed torture. My mother guessed what was happening behind my smiling eyes, and several times I saw her looking at me with a sympathy that revealed her knowledge of my secret.

The advent of Hugh Evesham in my family created something of a stir. My father, who had a romantic temperament, chiefly due to the early influence of Sir Walter Scott and some strain of blood which ought to have made him a soldier of fortune instead of a departmental chief in the Local Government Board, delighted to think that he was giving the hospitality of his roof-tree to a young man descended from a famous line of ancestors.

“That’s a delightful young man!” he said at the breakfast-table one morning, after turning up the Eveshams in Burke’s Peerage. “I’m not a snob, and we’ve no reason to be ashamed of our own family. On the contrary, the Chesneys were barons of Norman William, when the Eveshams were nothing but rustic thanes—small farmers, as you might say. But blood is blood. I believe it. Noblesse oblige, and thank God for it.”

Remembering the hideous gap in the chain of evidence which linked us with the Norman barons, I winked slightly at my eldest sister, Evelyn, who had a sense of humour, and, this being intercepted by my father, he became rather angry, and got off some rather good stuff about the value of tradition. He behaved to Hugh Evesham with a mixture of geniality and respect, and we all noticed that on the nights of rehearsals he put on a dinner-jacket, though as a rule we didn’t dress for dinner in Clapham Park. Evelyn and my second sister, Beatrice, spent most of the day in the kitchen when Evesham was expected for dinner—or supper, as we called it modestly—preparing special dishes, and then rushed upstairs, much flurried, to put on their best frocks, which were home-made.

“Why make such a fuss about the fellow?” I asked.

Evelyn was quite candid in her answer.

“If there’s any chance of winning such a prize, dear child, Beatrice and I can’t afford to miss it! It’s better to be Lady Evesham than the wife of a City clerk, which is all we could hope for before the arrival of this noble youth. Besides, as father says, ‘Blood is blood’!”

Beatrice was equally audacious.

“Evelyn and I are both in love with him. It’s merely a question which is going to win—my beauty or Evelyn’s intellect. I’m backing beauty, two to one in sixpences.”

“A nice virtuous household!” I remarked, with a sarcasm which was lost upon them. “If only mother knew the stuff you talk behind her back——”

“Oh, mother is an Early Victorian!” said Evelyn, with intellectual superiority. “We’ve learnt a little since her young day.”

“More than you ought to know,” I growled, and at the time I was really shocked by their moral depravity, though now I know that their conversational audacities were as nothing to those of their daughters, and that neither need mean a lack of virtue.

Clare, the youngest, whom I liked least, because of her prim little ways and conventional mind, neat as Beatrice was untidy, which was to the ultimate degree, and nice-mannered as Evelyn was rebellious and passionate, was not so excited by Hugh Evesham as the others, because Paul, for some extraordinary freak of psychology which even now I can’t understand, had fallen head over heels in love with her doll-like prettiness, and was unabashed in his courtship. But she enraged me one day by remarking that she thought it very good of Hugh Evesham to come to Clapham Park when he might be enjoying high society.

“Good heavens!” I said. “Don’t you think that we’re good enough for him?”

“Well,” answered Clare calmly, “we’re not on his social level, you know, however much we pretend. Why, he thinks nothing of going to tea with a duchess!”

I remember I roared with laughter, and said “Damn his duchesses! If he prefers their company to ours, let him stay away. I wish he would, anyhow. I’m sorry I asked him to play that part.”

Clare gave me a quick glance, and smiled.

“You’re jealous of him!” she said in her sly way, “because of Katherine Lambert. Anybody can see that, Gilbert, and it’s silly. She’s two years older than you, anyhow. You’re just a kid.”

She looked at me with sisterly contempt, and I felt like hitting her. Yes, it was silly—I knew that—my passionate love for Katherine Lambert. She was far removed from my boyish adoration. Men old enough to be my father—famous literary men—were in love with her. No doubt I hadn’t a dog’s chance.

Hugh Evesham never showed by the flicker of an eyelid that he was conscious of any social condescension in coming to Clapham Park, though I think he must have been amused sometimes by my father’s friends, who were mostly unsuccessful literary men, impecunious artists, and Civil Servants with old-fashioned ways and extraordinary hobbies, whom my father had gathered round him to minister to his need of intellectual conversation—spiced with what he called “Bohemianism”—and who regarded him with reverence and admiration, as a fellow of infinite wit, wide range of knowledge, and enormous capacity for adventure, though he seldom went beyond Whitehall, and was regarded by his children as hopelessly conservative in opinions and ideas.

I had to acknowledge that Evesham was the soul of good nature and courtesy. He discussed politics with my father, politely disagreeing with his views on old Gladstone, congratulated me on the “genius” of my ridiculous play, which I then considered a masterpiece, and made himself so charming to Beatrice and Evelyn that they could not decide which was to be the lucky girl. He talked poetry with Evelyn, who wrote amazing novelettes which she hid from my father, and said pretty things to Beatrice, whose beauty acquired a new bloom from her blushes; and to my mother he behaved with a boyish deference which won her simple heart. But all the time I knew that he came to our house for one reason, and that was Katherine. She had captured him completely by that unconscious lure of hers—by the laughter at the corner of her lips, by her beautiful candour of soul, and perhaps by her faith in his idealism. And when I watched them together, I knew that he would have her for the asking. Her eyes became more luminous in his presence. A kind of spirituality was on her face, as though this love that had come to her was a religious thing. She had a habit of looking at him under her lashes, as though to hide this secret in her eyes. And I knew that he thrilled to her touch, and lingered over those love-scenes in my romantic drama more than was necessary to his part. I was the onlooker, as I have been all my life, standing in the wings, out of the play.

I remember he invited Katherine and my sisters to go to the Derby with him, and Paul and I stood in the road by the common that evening waiting to see them come back.

Paul spoke to me about Evesham, and said in a casual way, “He’s very sweet on Katherine. Anything in it, do you think?”

I didn’t answer directly, but asked another question, in a voice that I tried to steady.

“Do you think she likes the fellow?”

“Who wouldn’t?” asked Paul, with unusual enthusiasm. “The rising Hope of England’s Youth—what, what?”

We watched the procession coming back from Epsom, and kept sharp eyes open for the four-in-hand which Evesham was driving. Paul roared with laughter at this pageant of East and West—the coster girls with their waving feathers, blowing paper trumpets; the donkey carts driven by spare-jowled fellows in pearlies; the fat old ladies in velveteens waving gin-bottles from dog carts; the sporting gentlemen in broad checks, chewing the stumps of cigars, in high gigs; the scarlet-coated guards sounding tantivies on silver horns behind yellow coaches crowded with beauty and fashion; concertina-playing Cockneys urging forward their tired little mokes, their fast trotting nags, their knock-kneed old hacks, their fat little ponies, dressed in ladies’ underclothing; the vulgarity, drunkenness, jollity, laughter, with the shrieking whistles, the blaring cornets, the old music-hall songs, of a pandemonium that has driven clean out of English life into the Valhalla of Victorian ghosts.

“There they are!” shouted Paul. “Hooray!”

Evesham’s four-in-hand came between one of the yellow coaches and a greengrocer’s cart laden with ladies wearing their sweethearts’ hats. Evesham, in a white topper and fawn-coloured suit, kissed his whip to us. Katherine was sitting next to him, her face flushed, with laughter in her eyes, with a beauty which I remember across the years. She wore a mauve-coloured dress with balloon sleeves, and a Gainsborough hat with a blue feather. I daresay the girls of to-day would scream with laughter at her costume. To me it looked divine in those days. Behind were my sisters, Evelyn and Beatrice, with two young gentlemen from Evesham’s set, and almost as elegant as himself. One of them was so taken up with the beauty of Beatrice, whose hair had become disordered in the wind, so that it gave her a wildish gipsy look, that he did not see Evesham’s salute to us. Evelyn had her hand through the arm of her male companion, whose hat was at a rakish angle and who waved his disengaged hand at the laughing ladies on the coach in front. He looked to me a little drunk and disreputable, but I knew him afterwards as Evelyn’s husband, and a curate of St. Peter’s, Hanover Square.

“Seem to have had a priceless day,” said Paul enviously. “To think that I had to diagnose dirty diseases in the outpatients’ department!”

It was the day Katherine became engaged to Hugh Evesham, as she told Paul that night, with shy laughter and a sudden mist of tears in her eyes.

“Oh, Paul!” she cried, “do you think I’ll ever be able to live up to his idealism? He’s so noble and good that I feel frightened.”

Paul thought she needn’t worry.