A DEATH AND A BATTLE
Yes, life was now crowding in upon Henry indeed, crowding him in,
stamping on him, treading him down. No sooner had he received one
impact than another was upon him---- Such women as Clare, in regular
daily life, in the closest connection with his own most intimate
friend! As he hurried away down Marylebone High Street his great
thought was that he wanted to do something for her, to take that angry
tragedy out of her eyes, to make her happy. Peter wouldn't make her
happy. They would never be happy together. He and Peter would never be
able to deal with a case like Clare's, there was something too naïve,
too childish in them. How she despised both of them, as though they had
been curates on their visiting-day in the slums.
Oh, Henry understood that well enough. But didn't all women despise all
men unless they were in love with them or wanted to be in love with
them or had helped to produce them?
And then again, when you thought of it, didn't all men despise all
women with the same exceptions? Clare's scorn of him tingled in his
ears and made his eyes smart. And what she must have been through to
look like that!
He dreamt of her that night; he was in thick jungle and she,
tiger-shaped, was hunting him and some one shouted to him: "Look to
yourself! Climb into yourself! The only place you're safe in!"
But he couldn't find the way in, the door was locked and the window
barred: he knew it was quiet in there and cool and secure, but the hot
jungle was roaming with tigers and they were closer and closer. . . .
He woke to Mary Cass's urgent call on the telephone.
Then, when Millie was in his arms all else was forgotten by
him--Clare, Christina, Duncombe, work, all, all forgotten. He was
terrified, that she should suffer like this. It was worse, far worse,
than that he should suffer himself. All the days of their childhood,
all the _tiniest_ things--were now there between them, holding and
binding them as nothing else could hold and bind.
Now that tears could come to her she was released and free, the
strange madness of that night and day was over and she could tell
him everything. Her pride came back to her as she told him, but when
he started up and wanted to go at once and find Baxter and drag him
through the streets of London by the scruff of his neck and then hang
him from the top of the Tower she said: "No, Henry dear, it's no use
being angry. Anger isn't in this. I understand how it was. He's weak,
Bunny is, and he'll always be weak, and he'll always be a trouble to
any woman who loves him, but in his own way he did love me. But I'm not
clear yet. It's been my fault terribly as well as his. I shouldn't have
listened to Ellen, or if I did, should have gone further. I would take
him back, but I haven't any right to him. If he'd told me everything
from the beginning I could have gone and seen his mother, I could have
found out how it really was. Now I shall never know. But what I _do_
know is that somehow he thought he'd slip through, and that if there
_was_ a way, he'd leave that girl to her unhappiness. If he could have
found a way he wouldn't have cared how unhappy she was. He would be
glad for her to die. I can't love him any more after that. I can't
love him, but I shall miss all that that love was . . . the little
things. . . ."
By the evening of that day she was perfectly calm. For three days he
scarcely left her side--and he was walking with a stranger. She had
grown in the space of that night so much older that she was now ahead
of him. She had been a child; she was now a woman.
She told him that Baxter had written to her and that she had answered
him. She went back to Victoria. She was calm, quiet--and, as he knew,
most desperately unhappy.
He had a little talk with Mary.
"She'll never get over it," he said.
"Oh yes, she will," said Mary. "How sentimental you are, Henry!"
"I'm not sentimental," said Henry indignantly. "But I know my sister
better than you know her."
"You may know your sister," Mary retorted, "but you don't know anything
about women. They must have something to look after. If you take one
thing away, they'll find something else. It's their only religion, and
it's the religion they want, not the prophets."
She added: "Millie is far more interested in life than I am. She is
enchanted by it. Nothing and nobody will stop her excitement about
it. Nobody will ever keep her back from it. She'll go on to her death
standing up in the middle of it, tossing it around----
"You're like her in that, but you'll never see life as it really is.
She will. And she'll face it all----"
"What a lot you think you know," said Henry.
"Yes, I know Millie."
"But she's terribly unhappy."
"And so she will be--until she's found some one more unhappy than
herself. But even unhappiness is part of the excitement of life to her."
After a dreamless night he awoke to a sudden consciousness that Millie,
Clare Westcott and Christina were in his room. He stirred, raising his
head very gently and seemed to catch the shadow of Christina's profile
in the grey light of the darkened window.
He sat up and, bending over to his chair where his watch lay, saw
that it was nine o'clock. As he sprang out of bed, King entered with
breakfast and an aggrieved expression. "Knocked a hour ago, sir, and
you hanswered," he said.
"Must have been in my sleep then," said Henry yawning, then suddenly
conscious of his shabby and faded pyjamas.
"Can't say, I'm sure, sir . . . knocked loud enough for anything. No
letters this morning, sir."
Henry was still at the innocent and optimistic age when letters are an
excitement and a hope. He always felt that the world was deliberately,
for malicious and cruel reasons of its own, forgetting him when there
were no letters.
He was splashing in his tin bath, his bony and angular body like a
study for an El Greco, when he remembered. Tuesday--nine o'clock.
Why? . . . What! . . . Duncombe's operation.
He hurried then as he had never hurried before, gulping down his tea,
choking over his egg, flinging on his clothes, throwing water on his
head and plastering it down, tumbling down the stairs into the street.
A clock struck the half-hour as he hastened into Berkeley Square.
He had now no thought but for his beloved master; every interest in
life had faded before that. He seemed to be with him there in the
nursing home. He could watch it all, the summoning, the procession
into the operating theatre, the calm, white-clad surgeon, the nurses,
the anaesthetic. . . . His hand was on the Hill Street door bell. He
hesitated, trembling. The street was so still in the misty autumn
morning, a faint scent in the air of something burning, of tar, of
fading leaves. A painted town, a painted sky and some figures in the
foreground, breathlessly waiting.
The old butler opened the door. He turned back as Henry entered,
pointing to the dark and empty hall as though that stood for all that
he could say.
"Well?" said Henry. "Is there any news yet?"
"Sir Charles died under the operation. . . . Her ladyship has just been
rung up----"
The old man moved away.
"I can't believe it," he said. "I can't believe it. . . . It isn't
natural! Such a few good ones in the world. It isn't right." He stood
as though he were lost, fingering the visiting-cards on the table. He
suddenly raised dull imperceptive eyes to Henry! "They can say what
they like about new times coming and all being equal. . . . There'll
be masters all the same and not another like Sir Charles. Good he was,
good all through." He faded away.
Henry went upstairs. He was so lost that he stood in the library
looking about him and wondering who that was at the long table. It was
Herbert Spencer with his packets of letters and his bright red tape.
"Sir Charles is dead," Henry said.
The books across that wide space echoed: "Sir Charles is dead."
Herbert Spencer looked at the letters in his hand, let them drop,
glanced up.
"Oh, I say! I'm sorry! . . . Oh dear!" he got up, staring at the
distant bookshelves. "After the operation?"
"During it."
"Dear, dear. And I thought in these days they were clever enough for
anything." He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. "Not much use
going on working to-day, I suppose?"
Henry did not hear.
"Not much use going on working to-day, I suppose?" he repeated.
"No, none," said Henry.
"You'll be carrying the letters on, I suppose?" he said.
"I don't know," Henry answered.
"Well, you see, it's like this. I've got my regular work I'll have to
be getting back to it if this isn't going on. I was put on to this
until it was finished, but if it isn't going to be finished, then I'd
like to know you see----"
"Of course it's going to be finished," said Henry suddenly.
"Well then----" said Herbert Spencer.
"And I'll tell you this," said Henry, suddenly shouting, "it's going
to be finished splendidly too. It's going to be better than you can
imagine. And you're going to work harder and I'm going to work harder
than we've ever done in our lives. It's going to be the best thing
that's ever been. . . . It's all we can do," he added, suddenly
dropping his voice.
"All right," said Herbert Spencer calmly. "I'll come to-morrow then.
What I mean to say is that it isn't any use my staying to-day."
"It's what he cared for more than anything," Henry cried. "It's got to
be beautiful."
"I'll be here to-morrow then," said Spencer, gathered his papers
together and went.
Henry walked round, touching the backs of the books with his hand. He
had known that this would be. There was no surprise here. But that
he would never see Sir Charles again nor hear his odd, dry, ironical
voice, nor see his long nose raise itself across the table--that was
strange. That was indeed incredible. His mind wandered back to that
day when Duncombe had first looked at the letters and then, when Henry
was expecting curses, had blessed him instead. That indeed had been
a crisis in his life--a crisis like the elopement of Katherine with
Philip, the outbreak of the War, the meeting with Christina--one of the
great steps of the ladder of life. He felt now, as we all must feel
when some one we love has gone, the burden of all the kindness undone,
the courtesy unexpressed, the tenderness untended.
And then he comforted himself, still wandering, pressing with his hands
the old leather backs and the faded gilding, with the thought that at
least, out there at Duncombe, Sir Charles had loved him and had spoken
out the things that were really in his heart, the things that he would
not have said to any one for whom he had not cared. That last night in
Duncombe, the candle lighting the old room, Sir Charles had kissed him
as he might his own dearly loved son. And perhaps even now he had not
gone very far away.
Henry climbed the little staircase into the gallery and moved into the
dusky corners. He came to the place that he always loved best, where
the old English novelists were, Bage and Mackenzie and absurd Clara
Reeved and Mrs. Opie and Godwin.
He took out _Barham Downs_ and turned over the leaves, repeating to
himself the old artificial sentences, the redundant moralizing; the
library closed about him, put its arms around him, and told him once
again, as it had told him once before, that death is not the end and
that friendship and love know no physical boundaries.
Hearing a step he looked up and saw below him Lady Bell-Hall. She
raised her little pig-face to the gallery and then waited, a black
doll, for him to come down to her.
When he was close to her she said very quietly: "My brother died under
the operation."
"Yes, I have heard," Henry said.
She put out her hand and timidly touched him on the arm: "Every one
matters now for whom he cared," she said. "And he cared for you very
much. Only yesterday when I saw in the nursing-home he said how much
he owed to you. He wanted us to be friends. I hope that we shall be."
"Indeed, indeed we will be," said Henry.
"What I want," she said, her upper lip trembling like a child's, "is
for every one to know how good he was--how wonderfully good! So few
people knew him--they thought him stiff and proud. He was shy and
reserved. But his goodness! There never was any one so good--there
never will be again. _You_ knew that. You felt it. . . . I don't
know . . . I can't believe that we shall never--never again . . .
see . . . hear . . ."
She began to cry, hiding her face in her handkerchief, and he suddenly,
as though he were many years older than she, put his arm around her.
She leant her head against him and he stood there awkwardly, longing
to comfort her, not knowing what to say. But that moment between them
sealed a friendship.
Nevertheless when he left the house he was in a curious rage with life.
On so many occasions he himself had been guilty of spoiling life, and
even in his worst moods of arrogance and ill-temper he had recognised
that.
But often during the War he had seen cloven hoofs pushing the world,
now here, now there, and had heard the laughter of the demons watching
from their dusky woods. At such times his imagination had faded as the
sunlit glow fades from the sky, leaving steel-grey and cold horizons
all sharply defined and of a menacing reality.
In his imagination he had seen Duncombe depart, and the picture had
been coloured with soft-tinted promises and gentle prophecies--now
in the harsh fact Duncombe was gone just as the letter-box stood in
Hill Street and the trees were naked in Berkeley Square. Life had no
right to do this, and even, so arrogantly certain are we all of our
personalities, he felt that this desire should be important enough to
defeat life's purpose.
Christina and her mother, Millie and her lover, Duncombe and his
operation, what was life about to permit these things? How strongly he
felt in his youth his own certainty of survival, but one cock of life's
finger and where was he?
Well, he was in Piccadilly Circus, and once again, as many months
before, he stopped on the edge of the pavement looking across at the
winged figure, feeling all the eddy of the busy morning life about
him, swaying now here, now there, like strands of coloured silk, above
which were human faces, but impersonal, abstracted, like fish in a
shining sea. The people, the place, then suddenly through his own anger
and soreness and sense of loss that moment of expectation again when
he rose gigantic above the turmoil, when beautiful music sounded. The
movement, suddenly apprehensive, ceased! like God he raised his hand,
the fountain swayed, the ground opened and----
Standing almost at his side, unconscious of him, waiting apparently for
an omnibus, was Baxter.
At the sight of that hated face, seen by him before only for a moment
but never to be forgotten, rage took him by the throat, his heart
pounded, his hands shook; in another instant he had Baxter by the
waistcoat and was shaking him.
"You blackguard! You blackguard! You blackguard!" he cried. Then he
stepped back; "Come on, you swine! You dirty coward! . . ." With his
hand he struck him across the face.
At that moment Baxter must have been the most astonished man in
England. He was waiting for his omnibus and suddenly some one from
nowhere had caught him by the throat, screamed at him, smacked his
cheek. He was no coward; he responded nobly, and in a whirl of sky,
omnibuses, women, shop-window and noise they were involved, until,
slipping over the edge of the kerb, they fell both into the road.
Baxter, rising first, muttered: "Look here! What the devil . . ." then
suddenly realized his opponent.
They had no opportunity for a further encounter. A crowd had instantly
gathered and was pressing them in. A policeman had his hand on Henry's
collar.
"Now, then, what's all this?"
No one can tell what were Baxter's thoughts, the tangle of his
emotions, regrets, pride, remorse, since that last scene with Millie.
All that is known is that he pushed aside some small boy pressing up
with excited wonder in his face, brushed through the crowd and was
gone.
Henry remained. He stood up, the centre of an excited circle, the
policeman's hand on his shoulder. His glasses were gone and the world
was a blur; he had a large bump on his forehead, his breath came in
confused, excited pants, his collar was torn. So suddenly had the
incident occurred that no one could give an account of it. Some one had
been knocked down by some one--or had some one fallen? Was it a robbery
or an attempted murder? Out of the mist of voices and faces the large,
broad shoulders of the policeman were the only certain fact.
"Now, then, clear out of this. . . . Move along there." The policeman
looked at Henry; Henry looked at the policeman. Instantly there was
sympathy between them. The policeman's face was round and red like a
sun; his eyes were mild as a cow's.
Henry found that his hat was on his head, that he was withdrawn from
the crowd, that he and the policeman together were moving towards
Panton Street. Endeavours had been made to find the other man. There
was apparently no Other Man. There had never been one according to one
shrill-voiced lady.
"Now what's all this about?" asked the policeman. His tone was fatherly
and even affectionate.
"I--hit him," said Henry, panting.
"Well, where is 'e?" asked the policeman, vaguely looking about.
"I don't know. I don't care. You can arrest me if you like," panted
Henry.
"Well, I ought to give you in charge by rights," said the policeman,
"but seeing as the other feller's 'ooked it---- What did you do it for?"
"I'm not going to say."
"You'll have to say if I take you to Bow Street."
"You can if you like."
The policeman looked at Henry, shaking his head. "It's the War," he
said. "You wouldn't believe what a number of seemingly peaceable people
are knocking one another about. You don't look very savage. You'll have
to give me your name and address."
Henry gave it.
"Why, here's your lodging. . . . You seem peaceable enough." He shook
his head again. "It don't do," he said, "just knocking people down when
you feel like it. That's Bolshevism, that is."
"I'm glad I knocked him down," said Henry.
"You'd feel differently to-morrow morning after a night in Bow Street.
But I know myself how tempting it is. You'll learn to restrain yourself
when you come to my age. Now you go in and 'ave a wash and brush up.
You need it." He patted Henry paternally on the shoulder. "I don't
expect you're likely to hear much more of it."
With a smile of infinite wisdom he moved away. Henry stumbled up to his
room.
Perhaps he had been a cad to hit Baxter when he wasn't expecting it.
But he felt better. His head was aching like hell. But he felt better.
And to-morrow he would work at those letters like a fanatic. He washed
his face and realized with pleasure that although it was only the
middle of the morning he was extremely hungry. Millie--yes, he was glad
that he had hit Baxter.