Knight Without Armour, Page 2

  “If you don’t mind, sir,” answered A.J. not very coherently, “I’m afraid I must go. I’ve got a letter ’to finish—”

  “Oh, very well, then—some other evening. Goodnight.”

  And the next morning Smalljohn, whose worst crime was that he thought he understood boys, recounted in the common-room how magnanimity had melted young Fothergill almost to tears—how with shaking voice the boy had declined the cocoa invitation and had asked to be allowed to go.

  It had been A.J.’s first fight, and he fully realised that he had lost. What troubled him most was not Smalljohn’s victory but the attitude of his fellows; if they, had only stood with him, Smalljohn could have been defeated. Yet they called him a coward because in Rugby football, which he was compelled to play although he disliked it, he sometimes showed that he didn’t consider it worth while to get hurt. At the end of his third year the headmaster’s report summed him up, not too unreasonably, as: “A thoughtful boy, with many good qualities, but apt to be obstinate and self- opinionated. Is hardly getting out of Barrowhurst all he should.”

  A.J. had two adventures at Barrowhurst altogether; the first was the Smalljohn affair, which was no more than a nine days’ wonder and certainly did not add to his popularity; but the second was in a different class: it established his fame on a suddenly Olympian basis, and passed, indeed, into the very stuff of Barrowhurst tradition. Two miles away from the school is the tunnel that carries the Scotch expresses under the Pennines. It is over three miles long, boring under the ridge from one watershed to another. A.J. walked through it one school half-holiday. Platelayers met him staggering out, half-deafened and half-suffocated, with eyes inflamed, soot-blackened face, and hands bleeding where he had groped his way along the tunnel wall. He was taken to the school in a cab, and had to spend a week in bed; after which he was thrashed by the headmaster. He gave no explanation of his escapade beyond the fact that he had wanted to discover what it would be like. He agreed that the experience had been thoroughly unpleasant.

  A.J.’s fourth year was less troubled. He was in the sixth form by then, preparing for Cambridge, and was left to do pretty much as he liked. The tunnel affair had given him prestige of an intangible kind both with boys and masters, and he spent much of his time reading odd books on all kinds of subjects that form no part of a public-school curriculum. He cycled miles about the moorland countryside, picking up fossils and making rubbings of old brasses in churches; he also (and somehow quite incidentally) achieved an official Barrowhurst record by a long jump of twenty feet. His sixth-form status carried prefecture with it, and rather to everyone’s surprise he made an excellent prefect—straightforward, firm, and tolerant.

  He went to Cambridge in the autumn of 1898; his rooms at St. John’s overlooked the river and the Backs, being among the best situated in the University. Sir Henry made him a fairly generous allowance, and began to hope that the boy might prove some good after all, despite the tepid reports from Barrowhurst. A.J. liked Cambridge, of course. He didn’t have to play games, there were no schoolmasters with their irritating systems, he could read his queer books, listen to string quartets, and wield a geologist’s hammer to his heart’s content. The only thing he seemed definitely disinclined for was the sort of work that would earn him a decent degree. Sir Henry encouraged him to join the Union, and he did so, though he never spoke. He made one or two close friends, and was well liked by those who knew him at all. (He was still called ’A.J.’—the nickname had followed him to Cambridge through the agency of Barrowhurst men.) Most of the vacations he spent in Bloomsbury; of late years he had seen less and less of his brothers and sisters, several of whom had emigrated. He also travelled abroad a little—just to the usual places in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

  He had no particular adventures in Cambridge, and left no mark on university history unless it were by the foundation of a short-lived fencing club. He had picked up a certain skill with the foils in Germany; it was a typically odd sort of thing to capture his enthusiasm.

  He took a mediocre pass degree in his third year and then wondered what on earth came next. Sir Henry was disappointed and made it very clear that he did not intend to support him any longer. A.J. fully agreed; he did not want to be supported; he would certainly find something to do of some kind or other, but he was completely vague about it, and there were so many jobs which, for one reason or another, were impossible. He did not care for the services; he had no vocation for the church; his degree was not good enough for school- mastering or for diplomacy or for the law. Clearly then, very little remained, and when, in the summer of 1901, he left Cambridge for good, it was understood that he was to become a journalist and that Sir Henry would ‘find him something.’ In August he went abroad for a month, and it was while he was doing the conventional Rhine tour that he received a typewritten letter signed ‘Philippa Warren’ and conveying the information that Sir Henry’s former secretary, a Mr. Watts, had died of pneumonia and that she had been appointed instead. He thought little of it, or of her, except to reflect that Sir Henry’s choice of a female secretary would probably be based on dignity rather than elegance. At the beginning of September he returned to London and found there was to be a big dinner-party on his first evening, which annoyed him slightly, as it meant he had to unpack everything in a hurry so as to dress. Sir Henry’s sister, a Mrs. Holdron, was hostess; she said—“Oh, Ainsley, will you take in Miss Warren?”—and he smiled agreement and tried vaguely to associate the name with any particular one of the dozen or so strangers to whom he had been perfunctorily and indistinctly introduced. He had completely forgotten the Philippa Warren who had written to him.

  The reception room was on the first floor, overlooking the square, and all its windows were wide open and unshuttered to admit the soft breeze of a September night. He felt an arm slipped into his and guiding him rather than being guided through the plush-curtained archway into the long and rather gloomy corridor that led to the dining-room, Almost simultaneously they both made the same banal remark about the weather, whereupon she laughed and added, with a sort of crystal mockery: “I said it first, Mr. Fothergill.” He laughed back, but could not think of an answer.

  In the dining-room that looked on to the typical brick-walled oblong garden of London houses, he glanced at her curiously. She was young, and full of a vitality that interested him. Her dark, roving eyes gave poise, and even beauty, to a face that might not otherwise have seemed noteworthy. Her nose was long and well-shaped, but her lips were perhaps too small and thin, just as her forehead looked too high. She certainly was not pretty. Not till half-way through the meal did he realise that she must be Sir Henry’s new secretary.

  It was a distinguished gathering, in a small way—professors and professors’ wives, a Harley Street surgeon, a titled lawyer, journalists, a few M.P.’s—all, of course, dominated by the patriarchal figure of Sir Henry himself. He was now seventy-seven, broad- shouldered, straight-backed, with leonine head and flashing eye—a truly eminent Victorian who had survived, wonderfully preserved, into the new reign. He had long ago reached the age when people said that he ‘still’ did things. He still owned the Pioneer, which, after a stormy career in the ’sixties and ’seventies, had settled down, like Sir Henry himself, to an old age of ever-slightly-increasing respectability and ever-slightly-diminishing circulation.

  The odd part of it (to A.J.) was the way Philippa Warren had suddenly fitted herself into Sir Henry’s scheme of things. She seemed already to take both him and his views equally for granted; she was at once casual and proprietary, like a guide displaying a museum piece; she realised quite simply that Sir Henry had become an institution and that visitors liked to hear him gossip in an intimate way about great names that were already in the history books. She would give him conversational cues, such as—’That’s rather what Matthew Arnold used to tell you, isn’t it, Sir Henry?’—or—’Sir Henry, I’m sure Mr. So-and-so would like to hear about your meeting with Thackeray.’ She rarely exp
ressed opinions of her own, but she knew exactly, like a well-learned lesson, the precise attitude of Sir Henry towards every topic of the day. It was almost uncanny, and from the beginning A.J. found himself queerly fascinated. She had a clear, icy mind; she could compress her ideas into an epigram where others might have needed to employ a speech. On hearing about the Barrowhurst and Cambridge nickname she immediately called him ‘A.J.’ and expected him to call her ‘Philippa’; he was certain, from the first half-hour of the dinner-party, that they were destined for the most intimate of friendships.

  After a week he was less positive, and after a month he was frankly puzzled and doubtful. He seemed so early to have reached an unsurmountable barrier; she would talk about anything and everything with the utterest frankness, yet somehow, after it all, he felt that it had no connection with getting to know her. Sir Henry, of course, never ceased to sing her praises. She was the model secretary; how he had ever managed so many years with that fellow Watts, he could hardly think. The scene in the library every morning at ten o’clock when Philippa arrived to begin work was almost touching. Sir Henry, stirred to a gallantry that had never been his in earlier days, would greet her with a benign smile, pat her shoulder and ask after her health, and, if he imagined or chose to imagine that she looked tired, would ring for a glass of sherry. And she on her side grudgingly yet somehow gratefully permitted time to be wasted on such courtesies.

  A.J. agreed that she was marvellous. Her merely physical effect on the old man was remarkable; there came a sparkle into his eyes and a springiness into his walk that had not been seen since the first Jubiles. A.J. judged, too, that she did other things; Sir Henry’s occasional articles in the Press (writing was one of those things he ‘still’ did) became more frequent, more varied, and—if that were possible—more characteristic of him than ever. Once A.J. glanced over her shoulder when she was working; she was preparing notes, she said, for some centenary article on Elizabethan literature that Sir Henry had promised to write. In neat, verbless phrases she had selected just the material he would need—’Marlowe in his worst moments grandiloquent and turgid’—’Fairy Queen a monument of literary atavism’—’Titus Andronicus probably not Shakespeare’s’—and so on. Sir Henry did the rest, and how well he did it, too, and with what a sublime flavour of personality! A.J. kept the article when it appeared, underlining such sentences as—’I do not think it can be denied that in his less happy moments Marlowe was occasionally guilty of a certain grandiloquence of phraseology—almost, I might say, turgidity’—’I cannot but think that the Faerie Queene, regarded from a strictly literary viewpoint, is in some sense atavistic’—and—’I have yet to discover any arguments that would lead me to suppose that Titus Andronicus was, in its entirety, a work by the master-hand that penned Lear and Othello.’

  A.J. was kept fairly busy during the years that followed. Sir Henry got him reviewing jobs on the Comet and other papers, besides which he wrote occasionally for the Pioneer and was also understood to be at work upon a novel. But the plain truth soon became apparent that he was no good at all as a journalist. He was too conscientious, if anything; he read too carefully before he reviewed, and he gave his opinions too downrightly—he had none of Sir Henry’s skill in praising with faint damns. Nor had he the necessary journalistic flair for manufacturing an attitude at a moment’s notice; he would say ‘I don’t know’ or ’I have no opinion’ far oftener than was permissible in Fleet Street. He even, after several years, gave up his projected novel for the excellent but ignominious reason that he could not make up his mind what it was to be about. But for the fact that Sir Henry was behind him, his journalistic career would hardly have lasted very long. Aitchison, the Comet editor, could never use more than a fraction of the stuff he sent in, though personally he liked the youth well enough and was sorry to see him slaving away at tasks for which he had so little aptitude.

  Meanwhile, at the Bloomsbury house, A.J.’s friendship with Philippa continued and perhaps a little progressed. Gradually and at first imperceptibly a warmer feeling uprose on his side, but there was nothing tumultuous in it; indeed, he chaffed himself in secret for indulging something so mild and purposeless. He had certainly nothing to hope for; apart from his own lack of prospects, she had so often, in the course of their talks, conveyed how little she cared for men and for the conventional woman’s career of marriage and home life. Nor, for that matter, had A.J. any particularly domestic dreams. In a way, that was why she attracted him so much; she was so unlike the usual type of girl who fussed and expected to be fussed over.

  Then suddenly something quite astonishing happened. It was rather like the Smalljohn episode at Barrowhurst; it occurred so sharply and unexpectedly, and to the completest surprise of those who thought that A.J. was, if anything, too sober a fellow. Philippa, he discovered, was an ardent supporter of the woman’s suffrage movement, though, in deference to Sir Henry’s views on the matter, she kept her ardours out of the house. She was not a militant, but Sir Henry made no distinctions of such a kind; he was genuinely and comprehensively indignant over the burnings, picture-slashings, and other outrages of which the newspapers were full. Philippa realised how hopeless it was to convert him, while as for A.J., she probably did not consider his support even worth the trouble of securing. Yet, without effort, it was secured. A.J., in fact, dashed into the movement with an enthusiasm which even his greatest friends considered rather fatuous; there was no stopping him; he went to meetings, walked in processions, and wasted hours of his time writing propagandist articles which Aitchison turned down with ever-increasing acerbity. He really was caught up in a whirl of passionate indignation, and neither Sir Henry’s anger nor Philippa’s indifference could check the surge of that emotion.

  The whole thing ended in quite a ridiculous fiasco; he got himself arrested for attacking a policeman who was trying to arrest a suffragette who had just thrown a can of paint into a cabinet minister’s motor-car. The magistrate seemed glad to have a man to be severe with; he gave A.J. seven days, without the option of a fine, and, of course, the case was prominently reported in all the papers.

  At Brixton jail A.J. thought at first he would hunger-strike, but he soon perceived that hunger-striking during a seven-days’ sentence could not be very effective; the authorities would merely let him do it. He therefore took the prison food and spent most of his time in rather miserable perplexity. He had, he began to realise, made a complete ass of himself.

  When he was discharged at the end of the week he hoped and rather expected that Philippa, at any rate, would have some word of sympathy for him. Instead of that, she greeted him very frigidly. “What an extraordinary thing to do!” was all she commented. Sir Henry was far from frigid; he was as furious as a man of eighty dare permit himself to be. He had A.J. in the library for over an hour telling him what he thought. A.J. must clear out—that was the general gist of the discourse; Sir Henry would no longer permit their names to be connected in any way. If A.J. chose to emigrate (which seemed the best solution of the problem), Sir Henry would give him a hundred pounds as a final expression of regard—but it was to be definitely final—no pathetic letters begging for more. A.J. said: “You needn’t fear that, anyhow.” In the midst of the rather unpleasant discussion, Philippa entered the library, fresh and charming as usual, whereupon Sir Henry, his mood changing in an instant, remarked: “Perhaps, my dear, we had better tell Ainsley our piece of news.”

  She barely nodded and Sir Henry went on, more severely as he turned to A.J.—“Philippa has done me the honour of promising to be my wife.”

  A.J. stared speechlessly at them both. He saw the green-shaded desk-lamp spinning round before his eyes and the expanse of bookshelves dissolving into a multi-coloured haze. Then he felt himself going hot, shamefully hot; he managed to stammer: “I—I must—congratulate you—both.”

  Philippa was not looking at him.

  His eyes kept wandering from one to the other of them; she was so beautiful, he perceived now, an
d Sir Henry, with all his sprightliness, was so monstrously old. He had never noticed before how hideous were those rolls of fat between his chin and his neck, and how he very slightly slobbered over his sibilants.

  “Yes, I congratulate you,” he repeated.

  He went out for lunch, paced up and down in Regent’s Park during the afternoon, and spent the evening at a restaurant and a music-hall. Towards midnight he went to the Comet office and asked to see Aitchison. Aitchison, a hard-bitten Scotsman of sixty, smiled rather cynically when A.J. suggested being sent abroad as a foreign correspondent; he guessed the reason, and personally thought it not at all a bad idea that A.J. should live down his notoriety abroad. There was, of course, no moral stigma attached to a seven-day sentence for trying to rescue a suffragette, but the boy had made a fool of himself and one can be laughed out of a profession as well as drummed out. The foreign correspondent notion, however, was hopeless; A.J. would be as useless, journalistically, abroad as at home. Aitchison knew all this well enough, and when A.J. further went on to suggest being sent out to the Far East to report the Russo-Japanese War which had just begun, he laughed outright. It was impossible, he answered; jobs like that required experience, and A.J. possessed none; reporting a war wasn’t like writing a highbrow middle about the stained-glass at Chartres. Besides, it would all be far too expensive; the Comet wasn’t a wealthy paper and probably wouldn’t have a correspondent of its own at all. To which A.J. replied that, as for money, he had a little himself and was so anxious to try his luck that he would willingly spend it in travelling out East if the Comet would give him credentials as its correspondent and take anything he sent that was acceptable. Aitchison thought this over and quickly reached the conclusion that it was an ideal arrangement—for the Comet. It was, to begin with, a way of getting rid of A.J., and it was also a way by which the Comet could obtain all the kudos of having a war-correspondent without the disagreeable necessity of footing the bill for his expenses—though, of course, if A.J. did send them anything good the Comet would be delighted to pay for it. And in haste less A.J. should see any flaw in this most admirable scheme, Aitchison accepted, adding: “Naturally you’ll bear in mind the policy of this paper—we don’t much care for the Russians, you know. Not much use you sending us stuff we can’t print, especially when it’ll cost you God knows how much a word to cable.”