Читать книгу Unchanging Quest - Philip Gibbs - Страница 6

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HAT wretched play of mine was a succès d’estime, and I was much congratulated by an audience which crowded the drawing-room of our house in Clapham Park, and excited the neighbourhood because of the large number of carriages and cabs lined up in the road outside. Everything went wrong, of course. My father, dressed as a Stuart Cavalier, and looking it to the manner born, pulled up the curtain while I was on the stage cursing Paul because he couldn’t remember his opening lines. That caused great laughter. Afterwards the curtain wouldn’t go up at all until it was violently jerked from the wings, with the help of a broomstick. Some of the footlights went out in the middle of my best scene, which had to be acted in semi-darkness, and Beatrice lost her gilt-handled dagger at the very moment when she needed it to stab her rival. After vainly groping for it, she strangled the lady—who was Evelyn—and did it so well that Evelyn’s gasps and gurglings were not assumed.

Paul forgot more than his opening lines. He “gagged” all through, while I was vainly trying to prompt him, but convulsed the audience by his horseplay as a Royalist soldier of drunken habits. Hugh Evesham and Katherine were the triumph of the evening, and their passionate love-scene, which they played with grace and tenderness, received rounds of applause from the tightly-pressed audience. Afterwards there was a call for “Author,” but I refused to appear, much to the annoyance of my father, who went on instead and referred to the “genius” of his son, with some allusion to a more than doubtful ancestor who had written sonnets in the time of Queen Elizabeth.

“Blood,” he said, “will out. To-night, as some of you may know, the chief part in my son’s little play has been performed by a scion of one of our oldest and noblest families. His dignity and grace, which all of you have observed, are the natural heritage of a young man among whose ancestors was just such a Cavalier as he has enacted to-night—Harry Evesham, who rode in Rupert’s Horse.”

I was in a poisonously bad temper. The applause meant nothing to me, for between the acts I had seen Hugh Evesham take Katherine in his arms behind the scenes, when they thought that nobody could see them. Since their engagement had been announced I had been barely civil to Evesham, and, looking back on those boyhood days, I see now that I must have been a sulky young pup. But Evesham was always courteous, as though he made allowance for my feelings, and Katherine went out of her way, not once, but many times, to be comradely and kind. I treasured her congratulations most when, through my father’s friendship with a publisher, I received an appointment on the editorial staff at a salary which seemed to me magnificent. It was sixty pounds a year.

It was in the little room that I used as an office in that publishing house off Fleet Street that I received an unexpected visit from Paul, who was now a junior bacteriologist in the Pasteur Institute.

“Can you spare five minutes?” he said in a casual way, though I saw there was trouble in his eyes.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Have some of your bacilli got loose to devastate London?”

“Not so good as that,” he answered with a grin. “It’s about Kitty. I’m worried in my conscience.”

He ignored my light-hearted remark casting doubt on his possession of such a thing.

“Look here, you know Kitty’s going to be married to Evesham next month? She thinks him the most wonderful fellow in the world—the soul of honour, and all that. Idealist to the finger-tips!”

“Is there anything wrong with him?” I asked in a stupefied voice. “What on earth are you driving at?”

I had a sense of fear at Paul’s gloomy expression. For Katherine’s sake I hoped there was nothing wrong with Evesham.

Paul helped himself to one of my cigarettes, and lit it before answering, and gave a queer, ironical laugh.

“I don’t want to blow the gaff on a pal. It isn’t done in our set, is it? That’s what makes it so infernally awkward. All the same, Kitty is my sister. I shall have to take notice.”

He pulled a crumpled letter out of his pocket and held it out to me.

“Have a look at that,” he said. “I’d like your advice.” It was a letter from a girl—passionate and pitiful, as it seemed to me then. I have forgotten its phrasing, but she made it clear enough that Evesham, whom she called “Brighteyes,” had been taking her about town, and going to her rooms in the Pimlico Road, until a few weeks ago, when he had suddenly “given her the bird,” as she called it in her queer mixture of slang and bad grammar. It appeared that she had been a ballet girl at the Palace until she had “chucked the game” because Brighteyes had promised to take care of her. Now she was very ill, and the landlady threatened to turn her out of her rooms because she couldn’t raise the rent. Surely Brighteyes, whose father was “a blooming lord and all that,” wouldn’t let her down after all his love-making, and his promises, and his fine sentiments, unless he was a cad, like some of the other boys she had known, who would take all they could from a girl and then leave her in the lurch and let her starve to death, while they pretended to be so virtuous with their mothers and sisters. She had found out Paul’s address one day from Brighteyes, and she was sending the letter to him because she knew that he was Evesham’s best friend, and might persuade him to help her, as he ought to do.... There was a postscript, which is the only part of the letter I remember word by word.

“Oh, my dear sir, for the love of God tell Brighteyes to be kind to me. I’m not a good girl, but I played fair by him, and now I want him to play fair by me.”

It was signed “Evelyn Eversley.”

This letter was in a big schoolgirl scrawl, ill spelt and full of blots. I confess it filled me with rage against Hugh Evesham.

“Scoundrel!” I said. “Hypocrite and skunk!”

Paul adopted a man-of-the-world attitude which was rather impressive.

“Don’t sentimentalise too quickly, young feller. It may be a case of blackmail. In any case, we’re not all saints living in stained glass windows. Supposing it’s true—and we don’t know—the worst charge against Hugh is not sending the girl some money and refusing to answer her letters. That’s the meanest thing I’ve heard. Unbelievable!”

“Abominable!” I said. “Swine of swine!”

Paul tattooed on the window-pane and stared at the chimney-pots on the Fleet Street horizon.

“The point is,” he remarked gloomily, “what am I going to do about it? Put it up to Hugh, of course. That’s only fair, though deuced unpleasant. But what about Kitty? If I tell her, it’ll smash her beautiful ideal and all that. You know what women are—especially Kitty! It’ll knock her edgewise. The way she idolises that fellow is enough to frighten a hunk of human clay like me. One can’t live up to that sort of thing. On the other hand, if I don’t tell her, she may find out one day, and then there’ll be the devil to pay. Broken hearts and that kind of thing.... Very awkward!”

My advice was to get to the truth of the thing first, and, if Evesham admitted it, to tell Katherine before it was too late. But I jibbed when Paul asked me to do the job myself, as a friend of Evesham’s and a pal of Kitty’s.

“You’ve got such a bedside manner,” he said. “Kitty would take it much better from you than from me. I just blurt out things and lose my temper. It’s quite likely that I’ll have a row with Evesham, and break his beautiful nose or something.”

Needless to say, I refused a mission which was essentially his, and I wasn’t worrying about Evesham’s nose. But I felt desperately sorry for Katherine. She had given her heart to Evesham, and believed him to be a white knight, sans peur et sans reproche, the Bayard of her dreams. I hated to think of her disillusion, her anguish, the killing of the laughter in her eyes.

Then Hugh Evesham came into my room. It was about a poem of his which he thought I might help him to get published, because of my connections in Fleet Street.

I remember him as he stood in that room of mine in the old publishing house of Carvell & Bliss, so splendid in contrast to its squalor, and, anyhow, as he put his top hat down on a dusty table by the door and pulled off his lavender-coloured gloves. He wore a black morning coat with a white slip, and “peg top” trousers, as the fashion then was, with black and white stripes, over patent-leather boots. His tall and elegant figure, his smiling blue eyes, that little fair moustache of his, made me feel shabbier than I was, and utterly insignificant.

He saw at once that something was the matter with us. We both stood awkwardly, as though caught out in some guilty secret.

“Anything wrong?” he asked carelessly. “You two lads look as though you’d seen the ghost of Hamlet’s father. ‘How now, Horatio? You tremble and look pale!’ ”

Paul Lambert took the crumpled letter from my desk and held it out to Evesham.

“Better read this,” he said. “All rot, of course, but only fair to show you.”

Evesham’s colour changed just a little as he read the letter, or, rather, glanced through it impatiently. Something of the gay confidence with which he had greeted us faded out of his eyes, and for a moment he was distressed—and afraid. Then he laughed uneasily.

“Yes,” he said, “these little things will happen! Always annoying.”

I looked at Paul, who was staring at the floor. It seemed a long moment before he spoke—coldly.

“Then you admit its truth?”

Hugh Evesham flicked the letter on to the table and laughed again.

“Oh, lord, yes! Poor little Evelyn! I met her at a Covent Garden ball. She amused me at the time. You know how these things happen. A glamour of lights—a girl’s ‘Come hither!’—the heady wine of youth—and then the twinge of conscience. Lamentable!”

Paul glanced at him sheepishly before answering.

“Yes,” he said, “I know all that. And I’m not a prig or anything. But in this case it rather looks—well, it doesn’t look as if you’d played the game altogether, if you see what I mean. As if you didn’t care a damn. Not answering her letters or sending her money, when she wants it—badly, I should say.”

Evesham thought it was a mistake to answer letters from girls like that. Far better not to, in his opinion. It was always unsafe. They cropped up afterwards. That was why he hadn’t even read her last letters. Just let them drop into the fire. Of course he would send the child something, now that he knew she was in need. He had had no idea about that.

Paul nodded, and there was a moment’s silence between us, until he spoke again, rather grimly.

“Isn’t it a bit awkward about Kitty?”

Hugh Evesham thought this question out, and I could see that he became rather pale.

“In what way?” he asked, in a low voice.

“Well,” said Paul, “she thinks you no end of an idealist and all that. A lily-white soul, and so forth. If she happened to find out——”

Evesham drew a deep breath and answered with emotion.

“She mustn’t find out! I suppose I can trust to the honour of you two lads? There’s a certain code among gentlemen——”

“Yes, among gentlemen,” agreed Paul, with a cruel emphasis on the last word.

Suddenly he spoke fiercely, and rose with his fists clenched.

“Look here, Evesham, it’s no good pretending to take this thing lightly. You’ve been behaving in a blackguard way to my sister, who believes in you. Why, this girl says you were seeing her until a few weeks ago. You’ve been engaged to Kitty since then. Keeping them both on at once. Good God, man!”

Evesham’s face flushed painfully.

“It was terribly awkward,” he said. “I couldn’t shake her off. She’s one of those little sluts——”

He became dramatic for a moment, and his voice trembled.

“I adore Katherine! I wouldn’t dishonour her for the world. Of course, I’m not worthy to touch her hand—no man is—but I swear to heaven this affair wasn’t so bad as it looks. And I want to bury it, and start afresh, and live up to my own ideals.”

“Damn your ideals!” said Paul. “If you hadn’t talked such high-flown stuff——”

“Sincerely!” said Evesham. “I want you to believe that. We all have dual natures. I want to live up to my father’s name. I’d rather die than be unfaithful to Katherine. Surely you’re old enough to understand that one slip doesn’t write a man down for ever. I played the giddy goat, got caught, and now all that’s over and done with.”

“I’m not sure,” said Paul sullenly. “You’ve rotted up my confidence. I thought you were better than the rest of us.”

Evesham pleaded with him, and, after a painful scene, left with all his jauntiness gone, pale to the lips.

When he had gone, Paul and I decided not to tell Katherine. That reference to our honour had rather caught us out, and we were very young, though we pretended to talk like men of the world. We agreed that a man like Evesham, or anyone else, might get into a terrible scrape with a girl without being altogether rotten. If Evesham hadn’t posed as such an exalted soul it would have been easier to forgive....

Well, it was Katherine herself who found out that her lover was not such an idealist as she had fondly believed.

By a very great mischance for Hugh Evesham, the father of that girl who had written to Paul—Evelyn Eversley, as she had called herself at the Palace, though her real name was Polly Hart—was a carpenter in the Mile End Road who attended some of the lectures at Romilly Hall. He had had “no truck” with his girl since she had taken to wild ways, but now a desperate letter from her took him to her poor little room in the Pimlico Road, where she had been “took bad,” as he told Canon Lambert one night. Katherine was sent round to see her as she lay dying of consumption, and on the mantelpiece, draped with torn lace, was the photograph of a smiling young man, who had written across his portrait, “To dear little Evelyn, from her loving Brighteyes.” ...

Paul was right in saying that Katherine would be “knocked edgewise.” I became frightened by the look in her eyes for a time. It was as though she had seen something rather dreadful, changing her view of life.... It was, remember, in 1894, when, perhaps, romantic love was more idealistic than is common nowadays, when young women have a shrewder knowledge of human nature, less illusion about life, a closer comradeship with their lovers. Perhaps they may have gained more than they have lost. Their hearts are not broken so easily by unfortunate love-affairs, and, though there is less romance, there is also less tragedy and less hypocrisy. I don’t know! ... But to Katherine it was a horrible shock of revelation that the exquisite Evesham, whom she believed to be a spotless soul, with the most beautiful and delicate instincts, should have been carrying on this squalid love-affair until a few weeks before his first kiss had thrilled her with a sense of ecstasy. I think it frightened her as well as angered her. She was frightened then, and afterwards, of Hugh Evesham’s physical beauty, and the lure that he had. She was afraid of surrendering her soul to a man unworthy of all that she believed to be good and noble.

Looking back on that episode of Katherine’s early life, I feel sorry for Hugh Evesham, and I’m glad that I tried to put in a word for him. He suffered an agony of remorse, as I know, and there was a dreadful scene between him and Katherine when she broke her engagement. He crumpled up badly, as Paul saw when Evesham left their house for the last time with tears in his eyes.

He went abroad for a few years, to Lord Evesham’s Canadian estates, and when he came back again, bronzed, harder looking, as handsome as ever, Katherine was the mother of Michael.