READING FOR THE BAR
It had been a hot, windless day in London, in early September.
Though summer was in full swing in the country without a hint of
autumn, the foliage in the squares and gardens of the Inns of Court
was already seared and a little shrivelled. The privet hedges were
almost black green; and the mould in the dismal borders that they
screened looked as though it had never known rain or hose water and
as if it could no more grow bright-tinted flowers than the asbestos
of a gas stove which it resembled in consistency and colour. It was
now an evening, ending one of those days which are peculiarly
disheartening to a Londoner returned from a long stay in the depths
of the country--a country which has hills and streams, ferny
hollows, groups of birches, knolls surmounted with pines, meadows of
lush, emerald-green grass, full-foliaged elms, twisted oaks,
orchards hung with reddening apples, red winding lanes between
unchecked hedges, blue mountains in the far distance, and the
glimpse of a river or of ponds large enough to be called a mere or
even a lake. The exhausted London to which David Williams had
returned a few days previously had lost a few thousands of its
West-end and City population--just, in fact, most of its interesting
if unlikable folk, its people who mattered, its insolent spoilt
darlings whom you liked to recognize in the Carlton atrium, in Hyde
Park, in a box at the theatre: yet the frowsy, worthy millions were
there all the same. The air of its then smelly streets was used up
and had the ammoniac strench of the stable. It was a weary London.
The London actors had not returned from Cornwall and Switzerland.
Provincial companies enjoyed--a little anxiously owing to uncertain
receipts at the box office--a brief license on the boards of famous
play-houses. The newspapers had exhausted the stunt of the silly
season and were at their flattest and most yawn-provoking. The South
African War had reached its dreariest stage....
Bertie Adams on this close September evening had out-stayed the
other employés of _Fraser and Warren_ in their fifth floor office at
No. 88-90 Chancery Lane. He had remained after office hours to do a
little work, a little "self-improvement"; and he was just about to
close the outer office and leave the key with the housekeeper, when
the lift came surging up and out of it stepped a young man in a
summer suit and a bowler hat who, to Bertie's astonishment, not only
dashed straight at the door of the partners' room, but opened its
Yale lock with a latch-key as though long accustomed to do so. "But,
sir!..." exclaimed the junior clerk (his promotion to that rank had
tacitly dated from Vivie Warren's departure). "It's all right," said
the stranger. "I'm Mr. David Williams and I've come to draw up some
notes for Mrs. Claridge. I dare say Miss Fraser has told you I
should work in the office every now and then whilst my cousin--Miss
Warren, you know--is away. You needn't wait, though you can close
the outer office before you go; and, by the bye, you might fetch me
_Who's Who_ for the present year." All this was said a little
breathlessly.
Bertie brought the volume, then only half the size of its present
bulk, because it lacked our new nobility and gave no heed to your
favourite recreation. D.V. Williams stood in the yellow light of the
west window, reading a letter... "Cousin? No! Twin brother,
perhaps; but had she one?..." mused Bertie... and then, that
never-to-be-forgotten voice ... "Here's 'Oo's Oo--er--Hoo's Hoo, I
mean.... Miss..." He only added the last word as by some
sub-conscious instinct.
"_Mister_ Williams," said Vivien-David-Warren Williams, facing him
with resolute eyes. "Be quite clear about that, Adams; _David
Vavasour Williams_, Miss Warren's cousin."
"Indeed I will be, Miss ... Mister ... er ... Sir..." said the
transfigured Bertie (his brain voice saying over and over again in
ecstasy ... "_I_ tumble to it! _I_ tumble to it!"). And then again
"_Indeed_ I will, Mr. Williams. I'm a bit stupidlike this evenin'
... readin' too much.... May I stay and help you, Sir? I'm pretty
quick on the typewriter, Miss Warren may have told you ... Sir ...
and I ain't--I mean--_I am not_--half bad with me shorthand.... You
know--I mean, _she_ would know I'd joined them evenin' classes..."
"Thank you, Adams; but if you have joined the evening classes you
oughtn't to interrupt your attendance there. I can _quite_ manage
here alone and you need not be afraid: I shall leave everything
properly closed. You could give up the key of the outer office as
you go out. You may often find me at work here after office hours,
but that need not disturb you ... and I need hardly say, after all
Miss Fraser and Miss Warren have told me about you, I rely on you to
be at all times thoroughly discreet and not likely to discuss the
work of this firm or my share in it with any one?"...
"Indeed you may ... Mr. Williams ... indeed you may.... Oh! I'm so
happy.... Good-night ... Sir!"
And Adams's heart was too full for attendance at a lecture on Roman
law. He went off instead to the play. He himself belonged now to the
world of romance. He knew of things--and wild horses and red-hot
tweezers should not tear the knowledge from him, or make him
formulate his deductions--he knew of things as amazing, as prodigal
of developments as anything in the problem play enacted beyond the
pit and the stalls; he was the younger brother of Herbert Waring and
the comrade of Jessie Joseph: at that moment deceiving the sleuth
hounds of Stage law by parading in her fiancé's evening dress and
going to prison for his sake.
Beryl Claridge had taken up much of Vivie Warren's work on the 1st
of August in that year, while Honoria Fraser was touring in
Switzerland. Miss Mullet and Miss Steynes were replaced (Steynes
staying on a little later to initiate the new-comers) by two young
women so commonplace yet such efficient machines that their names
are not worth hunting up or inventing. If I have to refer to them I
will call them Miss A. and Miss B.
Beryl Claridge was closely scanned by Bertie Adams, and frequently
compared in his mind with the absent and idealized Vivie. He decided
that although she was shrewd and clever and very good-looking, he
did not like her. She smoked too many cigarettes for 1901. She had
her curly hair "bobbed" (though the term was not invented then). She
put up her feet too high and too often; so much so that the
scandalized Bertie saw she wore black knickerbockers and no
petticoats under her smart "tailor-made." She snapped your head off,
was short, sharp and insolent, joked too much with the spectacled
women clerks (who became her willing slaves); then would ask Bertie
about his best girl and tell him he'd got jolly good teeth, a good
biceps and quite a nice beginning of a moustache.
But she was a worker: no doubt of that! Of course, in the dead
season there were not many clients to shock or to win over by her
nonchalant manners, only a few women who required advice as to
houses, stocks, and shares, law, or private enquiries as to the
good faith of husbands or fiancés. Such as found their way up in the
lift were a little disappointed at seeing Beryl in Vivie's chair or
at not being received by their old friend Honoria Fraser. But Beryl
was too good a business woman to put them off with any license of
speech or manners. For the rest she spent August and early September
in "mugging up" the firm's business. Although deep down in her
curious little heart, under all her affectation of hardness and
insolent disdain of public or family opinion she firmly loved her
architect and the children she had borne him, she desired quite as
passionately to be self-supporting, to earn a sufficient income of
her own, to be dependent on no one. She might have her passing
caprices and her loose and flippant mode of talking, but she wasn't
going to be a failure, a cadger, a parasite, a "fallen" woman. She
fully realized that in England no woman _has_ fallen who is
self-supporting, whose income meets her expenses and who pays her
way. Given those guarantees, all else that she does which is not
actually criminal is eventually put down to mere eccentricity.
So Honoria's offer and Honoria's business provided her with a most
welcome opening. She realized the opportunities that lay before this
Woman's Office for General Inquiries, established in the closing
years of the nineteenth century--this business that before Woman's
enfranchisement nibbled discreetly at the careers and the openings
for profit-making hitherto rigidly reserved for Man. She wasn't
going to let Honoria down. Honoria, she realized, was in herself
equivalent to many thousands of pounds in capital. Her reputation
was flawless. She was known to and esteemed by a host of women of
the upper middle class. Her Cambridge reputation for learning, her
eventual inheritance of eighty thousand pounds were unexpressed
reasons for many a woman of good standing preferring to confide her
affairs to the judgment of _Fraser and Warren_, in preference to
dealing with male legal advisers, male land agents, men on the Stock
Exchange, men in house property business.
So Beryl became in most respects a source of strength to Honoria
Fraser, deprived for a time of the overt co-operation of her junior
partner.
Beryl in the first few weeks of her stay evinced small interest in
the departure of Vivien Warren and her reasons for going abroad. She
had a scheme of her own in which her architect would take a
prominent part, for providing women--authoresses, actresses, or the
wives of the newly enriched--with week-end cottages; the desire for
which was born with the Twentieth century and fostered by the
invention of motors and bicycles. Cases before the firm for opinions
on intricate legal problems Beryl was advised to place before the
consideration of one of Honoria's friends, a law student, Mr. D.V.
Williams, who would shortly be back from his holiday and who had
agreed to look in at the office from time to time and go through
such papers as were set aside for him to read. Beryl had
remarked--without any intention behind it--on seeing some of his
notes initialled V.W. that it was rum he should have the same
initials as that Vivie girl whom she remembered at Newnham ... who
was "so silent and standoffish and easily shocked." But she noticed
later that when Mr. Williams got to work his initials were really
three and not two--D.V.W. One thing with the other: her departure
from the office at the regular closing hour--five--so that she might
see her babies before they were put to bed; Williams's habit of
coming to work after six; kept them from meeting till the October of
1901. When they did meet after Honoria's return from Switzerland,
Beryl scanned the law student critically; decided he was rather
nice-looking but very pre-occupied; perhaps engaged to some girl
whose parents objected; rather mysterious, _quand même_; she had
heard some one say this Mr. David Williams was a cousin or something
of Vivie Warren ... what if he were in love with Vivie and she had
gone away because she had some fad or other about not wanting to
marry? Well! All this could be looked into some other time, if it
were worth bothering about at all. Or could Williams be spoony on
Honoria? After her money? He was much younger--evidently--but young
men adored ripe women, and young girls idolized elderly soldiers.
_C'était à voir_ (Beryl ever since she had been to Paris on a stolen
honeymoon with the architect liked saying things to herself in
French).
Towards the end of October, David received at Fig Tree Court a
letter from his father in Glamorganshire.
Pontystrad Vicarage,
_October_ 20, 1901.
MY DEAR SON,--
The improvement in my sight continues. I can now read a
little every day, by daylight, without pain or fatigue, and
write letters. I feel I owe you a long one; but I shall
write a portion each day and not try my eyes unduly.
I am glad to know you are now settled down in chambers at
Fig Tree Court in the Temple and have begun your studies for
the Bar. You could not have taken up a finer profession.
What seems to me so wonderful is that you should be able to
earn your living at the same time and be no charge on me. I
accept your assurances that you need no support; but never
forget, my dear Son, that if you _do_, I am ready and
willing to help. You sowed your wild oats--perhaps we both
exaggerated the sins of the wild years--at any rate you have
made a noble reparation. What a splendid school the Colonies
must be! What a difference between the David who left me
five years ago for Mr. Praed's studio and the David who
returned to me last summer! I can never be sufficiently
thankful to Almighty God for the change He has wrought in
you! No lip religion, but a change of heart. I presume you
explained everything to the Colonial Office after you got
back to London and that you are now free to take up a civil
career? The people out there never sent me any further
information; but the other day one of my letters to you
(written after I had received the sad news) returned to me,
with the information that the hospital you were in had been
captured by the Boers and that you could not be traced. I
enclose it. You can now finish up the story yourself and let
the authorities know how you got away and returned home.
The other day that impudent baggage Jenny Gorlais came and
asked to see me ... she said her husband was out of work and
refused to give her enough money to provide for all her
children, that he had advised her to apply to _you_ for the
maintenance of _your_ son! Relying on what you had told me I
sent for Bridget and we both told her we had made every
enquiry and now refused absolutely to believe in her stories
of five years ago--that we were sure you were _not_ the
father of her eldest child. Bridget, for example, believed
the postman was its father. Jenny burst into tears, and as
she did not persist in her claim my heart was moved, and I
gave her ten shillings, but told her _pretty plainly_ that
if she ever made such a claim again I should go to the
police. You should have heard Bridget defending you! _Such_
a champion. If you want a witness to character for your
references you should call _her_! She is loud in your
praise.
_October_ 22.
There is one thing I want to tell you; and it is easier to
write it than say it. Your mother did not die when you were
three years old--much worse: she left me--ran away with an
engineer who was tracing out the branch railway. He seemed a
nice young fellow and I had him often up at the Vicarage,
and _that_ was the way he repaid my hospitality! He wrote to
me a year afterwards asking me to divorce her. As though a
Clergyman of the Church of England could do such a thing! I
had offered to take her back--not then--it would have been a
mockery--but by putting advertisements into the South Wales
papers. But after her paramour's letter--which I did not
answer--I never heard any more about her....
["Damn it all," said David to himself at this juncture of the
letter--he was training himself to swear in a moderate, gentlemanly
way--"Damn it all! Whatever I do, it seems I _cannot_ come from
altogether respectable stock."...]
You grew up therefore without a mother's care, though good
Bridget did her best. When you were a child I fear I rather
neglected you. I was so disappointed and embittered that I
sought consolation in the legends of our beloved country and
in Scriptural exegesis. You were rather a naughty boy at
Swansea Grammar School and somewhat of a scamp at Malvern
College--Well! we won't go over all that again. I quite
understand your reticence about the past. Once again I think
the blame was mine as much as yours. I ought to have
interested myself more in your pursuits and games ... what a
pity, by the bye, that you seem to have lost your gift of
drawing and painting! I do remember how at one time we were
drawn together over the old Welsh legends and the very
clever drawings you made of national heroes and
heroines--they seemed to come on you as quite a surprise
when I took them out of the old portfolio.
But about your mother--for it is necessary you should know
all I can tell you in case you have to answer questions as
to your parentage. Your mother's name was, as you know, Mary
Vavasour. It is a common name in South Wales though it seems
to be Norman French. She came to our Pontystrad school as a
teacher in 1873. Her father was something to do with mining
at Merthyr. I fell in love with her--she had a sweet
face--and married her in 1874. You were born two years
afterwards. Bridget had been my housekeeper before I was
married and I asked her to stay on lest your mother should
be inexperienced at first in the domestic arts. They never
got on well together and when Mary had recovered from her
confinement and seemed disposed to take up housekeeping I
sent away poor Bridget reluctantly and only took her back
after your mother's flight. Bridget was a second mother to
you as you know, though I fear you never showed her much
affection till these later days.
_October_ 23.
My eyes seem to be improving instead of getting tired with
the new delights of reading and writing. I owe all this to
you and to the clever oculist at Clifton. Dr. Murgatroyd
from Pontyffynon looked in here the other day, to ask about
your return. He seemed almost to grudge me my restored sight
because I had got it from other people's advice. Said _he_
could have advised an operation only he never believed my
heart would stand it. When I told him they had mixed the
anæsthetic with oxygen he became quite angry--and exclaimed
against these new-fangled notions. But I must not use up my
new found energy writing about him. I want to finish my
letter in a business-like fashion so that you may know all
that is necessary to be known about yourself and your
position. You may have at any moment to answer questions
before you get called to the Bar, and with your defective
memory--I am glad to hear things in the past are becoming
clearer to you--I am sure with God's grace you will wholly
recover soon from the effects of your wound and your
illness--What was I writing? I meant to say that you ought
to know the main facts about your family and your position.
I was an only son. Your grandfather was a prosperous farmer
and auctioneer. You have distant cousins, Vaughans and
Williamses, and some others living at Shrewsbury named
Price. I have written to none of them about your return
because they never evinced any interest in me or my
concerns. Your mother's people, her Vavasour relations at
Cardiff--did not seem to me to be very respectable, though
her father was a well-educated man for his position. He
died--I heard--in a mine accident.
I am not poorly off for a Welsh clergyman. My mother--a
Price of Ystrwy--wanted me to go into the Church and
prevailed on your grandfather to send me first to Malvern
and next to Cambridge. It was at Cambridge that I met your
comrade's father--Sam Gardner, I mean. He was rather wild in
his college days and to tell you the truth, I never cared to
keep up with him much--he had such very rowdy friends. My
mother died while I was at Cambridge and in his later years
your grandfather married again--his housekeeper--and rather
muddled his affairs, because at one time he was quite well
off.
After I was ordained he purchased for me the advowson of
this living. All that came to me from his estate, however,
was a sum of about eleven thousand pounds. This used to
bring me in about five hundred pounds a year, and in
addition to that was the fluctuating two hundred and fifty
pounds income from my benefice. I took about three thousand
pounds out of my capital to pay the debts you ran up, to
article you to Mr. Praed; and, I must admit, to get my
"Tales from Taliessin" and "Legends of the Welsh Saints"
privately printed at Cardiff. I am afraid I wasted much good
money on the desire to see my Cymraeg studies in print.
Well: there I am! with about eight or nine thousand pounds
to leave. I have not altered my will--leaving it all to you,
subject to an annuity of £50 a year to your faithful Nannie.
I was projecting an alteration in case of your death, when
you most happily returned. I may live another ten years yet.
You have put new life into me. One charge, however, I was
going to have laid on you; while you were with me I could
not bear to speak of these matters. If at any time after I'm
gone you should come across your unhappy mother and find her
in distressed circumstances, I bid you provide for her, but
how much, I leave entirely to your judgment. Meantime, here
I am with an income of nearly £700 a year. I live very
simply, as you see, but I give away a good deal in local
charity. The people are getting better wages now; in any
case they are usually most ungrateful. I feel I should be
happier if I diverted some of this alms-giving to you. You
must find this preparatory life very expensive. You must let
me send you twenty-five pounds every half-year for pocket
money. Here is a cheque on the South Wales Bank for the
first instalment. And remember, if you are in _any_
difficulty about your career that a little money can get
over do not hesitate to apply to me.
Your loving father,
HOWEL VAUGHAN WILLIAMS.
P.S. I have taken five days to write this but see how steady
the handwriting is. It is a pleasure to me to look on my own
handwriting again. And I feel I owe it all to you! I also
forgot in the body of the letter to tell you one curious
thing. You know we are here on the borders of an interesting
vein of limestone which runs all round the coal beds. I dare
say you remember as a boy of fifteen or so spraining your
ankle in Griffith's Hole? Well Griffith's Hole turns out to
be the entrance into a wonderful cave in the limestone.
Hither came the other day a party of scientific men who
think that majestic first chapter of Genesis to be a
Babylonian legend! It appears they discovered or thought
they discovered the remains of Ancient man in Griffith's
Hole. I invited them to tea at the Vicarage and amongst them
was a very learned gentleman quite as wise as but less
aggressive than the others. He was known as "Professor
Rossiter"; and commenting on the similarity of my name with
that of a "very agreeable young gentleman" whom he had
recently seen in Gower, it turned out that you were an
acquaintance of his. He thinks it a great pity that you are
reading for the Bar and wishes you had taken up Science
instead. At any rate he hopes you will go and see him in
London one day--No. 1 Park Crescent. Portland Place.
H. V. W.
Several times in reading this letter the tears stood in David's
eyes. So much trust and kindness made him momentarily sorry at the
double life he was leading. If it were possible to establish the
death of the wastrel he was personating he would perhaps allow his
"father" to live on in this new-found happiness; but if the real
D.V.W. were alive some effort must be made to help him out of the
slough--perhaps to bring him back. He would try to find out through
Frank Gardner.
Some time before Vivie Warren had taken her departure, she had left
behind in Honoria Fraser's temporary care a Power of Attorney duly
executed in favour of David Vavasour Williams; and reciprocally
D.V.W. had executed another in favour of Vivien Warren. Both these
documents lay securely in the little safe that David had had fitted
into the wall of his sitting-room in Fig Tree Court. Also David had
opened an account in his own name after he got back from Wales, at
the Temple Bar Branch of the C. &. C. Bank. Into this he now paid
the cheque for twenty-five pounds which his father had sent as
pocket money.
A few days afterwards, Vivie Warren reappeared--in spirit--and
indited a letter to Frank Gardner's agents in Cape Town. She was
careful to give no address at the head of the letter and to post it
at Victoria Station. In it she said she was starting on a tour
abroad, but asked him to do what he could to trace the boy who had
lain so grievously ill in the hospital at Colesberg. Had he
recovered after the Boers had taken Colesberg? As a rumour had
reached her that he had, and had even returned to England. She
wanted to know, and if they ever met again would tell him why.
Meanwhile if he got any news would he address it to _her_, care of
Honoria Fraser, Queen Anne's Mansions, St. James's Park; as her own
address would be quite uncertain for the present. Or it would do
quite as well if he wrote to Praddy; but _not_ to his father, which
might only needlessly agitate the old clergyman down in Wales, whom
Vivie by an unexpected chance had come to know.
The first result of this letter a year later was a statement of
Frank's belief, almost certainty, that his acquaintance of the
hospital _had_ died and been buried while the Boers held possession
of Colesberg; and that indeed was the utmost that was ever learnt
about the end of the ill-fated son of Howel Vaughan Williams and
Mary his wife, who were wedded in sunshine and with fair prospects
of happiness in the early summer of 1874.
The new-born David Vavasour Williams having by November settled all
these details, having arranged to pay the very modest rent of
fifty-five pounds for his three rooms at Fig Tree Court, and
twenty-five pounds a year to the housekeeper who was to "do" for him
and another gentleman on the same floor--a gentleman who was most
anxious to be chummy with the new tenant of the opposite chambers
but whose advances were firmly though civilly kept at bay--having
likewise passed his preliminary examination (since he could not avow
that inside his clothes he was a third wrangler), having satisfied
his two "godfathers" of the Bar that he was a fit person to
recommend to the Benchers; having arranged to read with a barrister
in chambers, and settled all other preliminaries of importance:
decided that he would pay an afternoon call on the Rossiters in
Portland Place and see how the land lay there.
Already a strange exhilaration was spreading over David's mind. Life
was not twice but ten times more interesting than it had appeared to
the prejudiced eyes of Vivien Warren. It was as though she--he--had
passed through some magic door, gone through the looking-glass and
was contemplating the same world as the one Vivie had known
for--shall we say fifteen?--years, but a world which viewed from a
different standpoint was quite changed in proportions, in colour, in
the conjunction of events. It was a world in which everything was
made smooth and easy before the semblance of manhood. What a joy to
be rid of skirts and petticoats! To be able to run after and leap on
to an omnibus, to wear the same hat day after day just stuck on top
of her curly head. Not, perhaps, to change her clothes, between her
uprising and her retirement to bed, unless she were going out to
dine. No simpering. No need to ask favours. No compliments. It is
true she felt awkward in the presence of women, not quite the same,
even with Honoria. But with men. What a difference! She felt she had
never really known men before. At first the frank speech, the
expletives, the smoking-room stories made her a little uncomfortable
and occasionally called forth an irrepressible blush. But this was
not to her disadvantage. It made her seem younger, and created a
good impression on her tutors and acquaintances. "A nice modest boy,
fresh from the country--pity to lead him astray--won't preserve his
innocence long--" was the vaguely defined impression, contact with
her--him, I mean--made on most decent male minds. Many a lad comes
up from the country to commence his career in London who knew far
less than the unfortunate Vivie had been compelled to know of the
shady side of life; who is compelled to lead a somewhat retired life
by straitness of means; whose determination towards probity and
regularity of life is respected by the men of law among whom he
finds himself.
But David having decided--he did not quite know why--to pursue his
acquaintance with Professor Rossiter; having written to ask if he
might do so (as a matter of fact he frequently saw Rossiter walking
across the gardens of New Square to go to the museum of the Royal
College of Surgeons: he recollected him immediately but Rossiter did
not reciprocate, being absent-minded); and having received a card
from "Linda Rossiter" to say they would be at home throughout the
winter on Thursdays, between 4 and 6: went on one of those Thursdays
and made definite progress with the great friendship of his life.