Fortitude

H >> Hugh Walpole >> Fortitude

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"They must soon be here," said Mrs. Galleon gloomily. Her gloom was happy
and comfortable. She was making the very most of a pleasant business with
the greatest satisfaction in the world. She had done exactly the same at
Bobby's wedding, and, in her heavy, determined way she would do the same
again before she died. Alice Galleon would be there in a moment, meantime
the two ladies, without moving in their chairs, flung sentences across at
one another and smoothed their silk skirts with their white plump hands.

"It's not really a healthy house--"

"No--with the orchard--and it's much too small--"

"Poor dears, hope they'll be happy. But one can't help feeling, Jane dear,
that it was a little rash of you ... your only girl ... and one knows so
little about Mr. Westcott, really--"

"Well, your own Bobby vouched for him. He'd known him at school after all,
and we all know how cautious Bobby is about people--besides, Emma, no one
could have received him more warmly--"

"Yes--Oh! of course ... but still, having no family--coming out of nowhere,
so to speak--"

"Well, it's to be hoped they'll get on. I must say that Clare will miss her
home terribly. It takes a lot to make up for that--And her father so
devoted too...."

"Yes, we must make the best of it."

The sun's light faded from the room--the clock and the pictures stood out
sharply against the gathering dusk. Two ladies filled the room with their
shadows and the little fire clicked and rattled behind the murmuring
voices.

II

Alice Galleon burst in upon them. "What! Not arrived yet! the train must be
dreadfully late. Lights! Lights! No, don't you move, mother!"

She returned with lamps and flooded the room with light. The ladies
displayed a feeble protest against her exultant happiness.

"I'm sure, my dear, I hope that nothing has happened."

"My dear mother, what _could_ happen?"

"Well, you never know with these trains--and a honeymoon, too, is always
rather a dangerous time. I remember--"

"I hear them!" Alice cried and there indeed they were to be heard bumping
and banging in the little hall. The door opened and Peter and Clare,
radiant with happiness, appeared.

They stood in the doorway, side by side, Clare in a little white hat and
grey travelling dress and Peter browner and stronger and squarer than ever.

All these people filled the little room. There was a crackling fire of
conversation.

"Oh! but we've had a splendid time--"

"No, I don't think Clare's in the least tired--"

"Yes, isn't the house a duck?"

"Don't we just love being back!"

"... hoping you hadn't caught colds--"

"... besides we had the easiest crossing--"

"... How's Bobby?"

"... were so afraid that something must have happened--"

Mrs. Rossiter took Clare upstairs to help her to take her hat off.

Mother and daughter faced one another--Clare flung herself into her
mother's arms.

"Oh! Mother dear, he's wonderful, wonderful!"

Downstairs Alice watched Peter critically. She had not realised until this
marriage, how fond she had grown of Peter. She had, for him, very much the
feeling that Bobby had--a sense of tolerance and even indulgence for all
tempers and morosities and morbidities. She had seen him, on a day, like a
boy of eighteen, loving the world and everything in it, having, too, a
curious inexperience of the things that life might mean to people, unable,
apparently, to see the sterner side of life at all--and then suddenly that
had gone and given place to a mood in which no one could help him, nothing
could cheer him... like Saul, he was possessed with Spirits.

Now, as he stood there, he looked not a day more than eighteen. Happiness
filled him with colour--his eyes were shining--his mouth smiling.

"Alice, old girl--she's splendid. I couldn't have believed that life could
be so good--"

A curious weight was lifted from her at his words. She did not know what
it was that she had dreaded. Perhaps it had been merely a sense that Clare
was too young and inexperienced to manage so difficult a temperament as
Peter's--and now, after all, it seemed that she had managed it. But in
realising the relief that she felt she realised too the love that she had
for Peter. When he was young and happy the risks that he ran seemed just as
heavy as when he was old and miserable.

"Oh, Peter! I'm so glad--I know she's splendid--Oh! I believe you are going
to be happy--"

"Yes!" he answered her confidently, "I believe we are--"

The ladies--Mrs. Galleon, Mrs. Rossiter and Alice--retired. Later on Clare
and Peter were coming into Bobby's for a short time.

Left alone in their little house, he drew her to the window that overlooked
the orchard and silently they gazed out at the old, friendly, gnarled and
knotted tree, and the old thick garden-wall that stretched sharply against
the night-sky.

Behind them the fire crackled and the lamps shed their pleasant glow and
that dear child with the great stiff dress that Velasquez painted smiled at
them from the wall.

Peter gave a deep sigh of happiness.

"Our House..." he said and drew her very close to him. The two of them, as
they stood there outlined against the window were so young and so pleasant
that surely the Gods would have pity!

III

In the days that followed he watched it all with incredulity. So swiftly
had he been tossed, it seemed, from fate to fate, and so easily, also, did
he leave behind him the things that had weighed him down. No sign now of
that Peter--evident enough in the Brockett days--morose, silent, sometimes
oppressed by a sense of unreasoned catastrophe, stepping into his bookshop
and out again as though all the world were his enemy.

Peter knew now that he was loved. He had felt that precious quality on the
day that his mother died, he had felt it sometimes when he had been in
Stephen's company, but against these isolated emotions what a world of hate
and bitterness.

Now he felt Clare's affection on every side of him. They had already in so
short a time a store of precious memories, intimacies, that they shared.
They had been through wild, passionate wonders together and standing now,
two human beings with casual words and laughing eyes, yet they knew that
perfect holy secrets bound them together.

He stood sometimes in the little house and wondered for an instant whether
it was all true. Where were all those half cloudy dreams, those impulses,
those dread inheritances that once he had known so well? Where that other
Peter Westcott? Not here in this dear delicious little house, with Love and
Home and great raging happiness in his heart.

He wrote to Stephen, to Mr. Zanti, to Norah Monogue and told them. He
received no answers--no word from the outer world had come to him. That
other life seemed cut off, separated--closed. Perhaps it had left him for
ever! Perhaps, as Clare said, walls and fires were better than wind and
loneliness--comfort more than danger.... Meanwhile, in his study at the top
of the house, "The Stone House" was still lying, waiting, at Chapter II--

But it was Clare who was the eternal wonder. He could not think of her,
create her, pile up the offerings before her altar, sufficiently. That he
should have had the good fortune... It never ceased to amaze him.

As the weeks and months passed his life centred more and more round Clare
and the house that they shared together. He knew now many people in London;
they were invited continually to dinners, parties, theatres, dances.
Clare's set in London had been very different from Peter's literary world,
and they were therefore acclaimed citizens of two very different circles.
Peter, too, had his reviewing articles in many papers--the whole whirligig
of Fleet Street. (How little a time, by the way, since that dreadful day
when he had sat on that seat on the Embankment and talked to the lady with
the Hat!)

His days during this first year of married life were full, varied, exciting
as they could be--and yet, through it all, his eye was always upon that
little house, upon the moment when the door might be closed, the fire
blazing and they two were alone, alone--

He was, indeed, during this year, a charming Peter. He loved her with the
hero worship of a boy, but also with a humour, a consciousness of success,
a happy freedom that denied all mawkish sham sentiment. He studied only to
please her. He found that, after all, she did not care very greatly for
literature or music or pictures. Her enthusiasm for these things was the
enthusiasm of a child who is bathed in an atmosphere of appreciation and
would return it on to any object that she could find.

He discovered that she loved compliments, that she cared about dress, that
she loved to have crowds of friends about her, and that parties excited her
as though these were the first that she had ever known. But he found, too,
that in those half-hours when she was alone with him she showed her love
for him with a passion and emphasis that was almost terrifying. Sometimes
when she clung to him it was as though she was afraid that it was not going
to last. He discovered in the very beginning that below all her happy easy
life, an undercurrent of apprehension, sometimes only vaguely felt,
sometimes springing into sight like the eyes of some beast in the dark,
kept company with her.

It was always the future--a perfectly vague, indefinite future that
terrified her. Every moment of her life had been sheltered and happy and,
by reason of that very shelter, her fears had grown upon her. He remembered
one evening when they had been present at some party and she had been
radiant, beautiful, in his eyes divine. Her little body had been strung to
its utmost energy, she had whirled through the evening and at last as they
returned in the cab, she had laid her head on his shoulder and suddenly
flung her arms about him and kissed him--his eyes, his cheeks, his
mouth--again and again. "Oh! I'm so safe with you, Peter dear," she had
cried to him.

He loved those evenings when they were alone and she would sit on the floor
with her head on his knee and her hand against his. Then suddenly she would
lean back and pull his head down and kiss his eyes, and then very slowly
let him go. And the fierceness, the passion of her love for him roused
in him a strength of devotion that all the years of unhappiness had been
storing. He was still only a boy--the first married year brought his
twenty-seventh birthday--but his love for Clare had the depth and reserve
that belongs to a man.

Mrs. Launce, watching them both, was sometimes frightened. "God help them
both if anything interferes," she said once to her husband. "I've seen that
boy look at Clare with a devotion that hurts. Peter's no ordinary mortal--I
wonder, now and again, whether Clare's worth it all."

But this year seemed to silence all her fears. The happiness of that
little house shone through Chelsea. "Oh, we're dining with the Westcotts
to-night--they'll cheer us up--they're always so happy"--"Oh! did you see
Clare Westcott? I never saw any one so radiant."

And once Bobby said to Alice: "We made a mistake, old girl, about that
marriage. It's made another man of Peter. He's joy personified."

"If only," Alice had answered, "destiny or whatever it is will let them
alone. I feel as though they were two precious pieces of china that a
housemaid might sweep off the chimney piece at any moment. If only nobody
will touch them--"

Meanwhile Peter had forgotten, utterly forgotten, the rest of the world.
Walls and fires--for a year they had held him. The Roundabout versus the
World.... What of old Frosted Moses, of the Sea Road, of Stephen, of Mr.
Zanti? What of those desperate days in Bucket Lane? All gone for nothing?

Clare, perhaps, with this year behind her, hardly realised the forces
against which she was arrayed. Beware of the Gods after silence....

IV

And, after all, it was Clare herself who flung down the glove.

On a winter's evening she was engaged to some woman's party. Peter had
planned an evening, snug and industrious, alone with a book. "The Stone
House" awaited his attention--he had not worked at it for months. Also he
knew that he owed Henry Galleon a visit. Why he had not been to see the old
man lately he scarcely knew.

Clare, standing in the little hall, waiting for a cab, suggested an
alternative.

"Peter dear, why don't you go round to Brockett's if you've nothing to do?"

"Brockett's!"

"Yes. You've never been since we married, and I had a letter from Norah
this morning--not at all cheerful--I'm afraid she's been ill for months.
They'd love to see you."

"Brockett's!" He stood astounded. Well, why not? A strange
emotion--uncomfortable, alien, stirred him. He kissed her and saw her go
with a half-distracted gaze. What a world away Brockett's seemed! Old Mrs.
Lazarus, Norah (poor Norah!) Mrs. Brockett, young Robin Tressiter. They
would be glad to see him--it was a natural thing enough that he should
go--what was it that held him back? For the first time since his marriage,
as he slowly and thoughtfully put on his greatcoat, he was distressed. He
reproached himself--Norah, Stephen, Mr. Zanti!... he had not given them a
thought.

He felt, as he went out, as though he were going, with key and candle, to
unlock some old rusty door that led into secret rooms. It was a wet, windy
night. The branches of the little orchard rattled and groaned, and doors
and windows were creaking.

As he passed into the shadows and silence of Bloomsbury the impression
weighed with increasing heaviness upon him that the old Peter had come back
and that his married life with Clare had been a dream. He was still at
Brockett's, still silent, shy, awkward, still poring over pages of "Reuben
Hallard" and wondering whether any one would ever publish it--still
spending so many hours in the old musty bookshop with Herr Gottfried's wild
mop of hair coming so madly above the little counter.

The wind tugged at his umbrella, the rain lashed his face and at last,
breathless, with the sharp corner of his upturned collar digging into his
chin, he pulled the bell of the old grey remorseless door that he knew so
well. There was no one in Bennett Square, only the two lamps dimly marked
its desolation.

The door was opened by Mrs. Brockett herself and she stood there, stern and
black peering into his face.

"What is it? What do you want?" she asked grimly.

He brushed past her laughing and stood back under the gas in the hall
looking at her.

She gave a little cry. "No! It can't be! Why, Mr. Westcott!"

He had never, in all the seven years that he had been with her, seen her so
strongly moved.

"But Mr. Westcott! To think of it! And the times we've talked of you! And
you never coming near us all this while. You might have been dead for all
we knew, and indeed if it hadn't been for Miss Monogue the other day we'd
have heard no news since the day that wild man with the beard came walking
in," she broke off suddenly--"and there you are, holding your umbrella with
the point down and making a great pool on the carpet as though--" She took
the umbrella from him but her hand rested for an instant on his arm and she
said gruffly--

"But all the same, Mr. Peter, I'm more glad to see you than I can say--"
She took him into her little room and looked at him. "But you've not
changed in the least," she said, "not in the very least. And where, pray,
Mr. Peter, have you been all this time and come nowhere near us?"

He tried to explain; he was confused, he said something about marriage
and stopped. The room was filled with that subtle odour that brought his
other life back to him in a torrent. He was bathed in it, overwhelmed by
it--roast-beef, mutton, blacking, oil-cloth, decayed flowers, geraniums,
damp stone, bread being toasted--all these things were in it.

He filled his nostrils with the delicious pathos and intimacy of it.

She regarded him sternly. "Now, Mr. Peter, it's of no use. Oh, yes, we've
heard about your wedding. You wrote to Miss Monogue. But there were days
before that, many of them, and never so much as a postcard. With some of,
my boarders it would be natural enough, because what could you expect? _We_
didn't want _them_, _they_ didn't want _us_--only habit as you might say.
But you, Mr. Peter--why just think of the way we were fond of you--Mrs.
Lazarus and little Robin and Miss Monogue--as well as myself."

She stopped and pulled out her handkerchief and blew her nose.

"I dare say you're a famous man," she went on, "with your books and your
marriage and the rest of it, but that doesn't alter your old friends being
your old friends and it never will. There, I'm getting cross when all I
mean to say is that I'm more delighted to see you than words."

He was humble before her. He felt, indeed, that he had been the most
unutterable brute. How could he have stayed away all this time with these
dear people waiting for him? He simply hadn't realised--

"And Miss Monogue?" he asked at last, "I'm afraid she's not been very
well?"

"She's been very ill indeed--for months. At one time we were afraid that
she would go. It's her heart. Poor dear, and she's been worrying so about
her work--but she's better now and she'll be truly glad to see you, Mr.
Peter--but you mustn't stay more than a few minutes. She's up on the sofa
but it's the excitement that's bad for her."

But first Peter went to pay a visit to the Tressiter establishment. He
knew, from old custom, that this would be the hour when the family would be
getting itself, by slow and noisy degrees, to bed. So tremendous, indeed,
was the tumult that he was able to open the door and stand, within the
room, watching and un-noticed. Mrs. Tressiter was attempting to bathe a fat
and very strident baby. Two small boys were standing on a bed and hitting
one another with pillows; a little girl lay on her face on the floor and
howled for no apparent reason; Robin, but little older than Peter's last
impression of him had painted, was standing, naked save for his shirt and
looking down, gravely, at his screaming sister.

Every now and again, Mrs. Tressiter, without ceasing from her work on the
baby who slipped about in her hands like a stout eel, cried in a shrill
voice: "Children, if you don't be quiet," or "Nicholas, in a moment I'll
give you such a beating,"--or "Agatha, for goodness' sake!"...

Then suddenly Robin, looking up, caught sight of Peter, he gave a shout and
was across the room in an instant. There was never a moment's doubt in his
eyes. He flung himself upon Peter's body, he wound his arms round Peter's
leg, he beat upon his chest with his bullet head, he cried: "Oh! Mr. Peter
has come! Mr. Peter has come!"

Mrs. Tressiter let the baby fall into the bath with a splash and there it
lay howling. The other members of the family gathered round.

But Peter thought that he had known no joy so acute for years as the
welcome that the small boy gave him. He hoisted Robin on to his shoulder,
and there Robin sat with his naked little legs dangling over, his hands in
the big man's neck.

"Oh! Mr. Westcott, I'm sure..." said Mrs. Tressiter, smiling from ear to
ear and wiping her wet hands on her apron--Robin bent his head and bit
Peter's ear.

"Get on, horse," he cried and for a quarter of an hour there was wild
riot in the Tressiter family. Then they were all put to bed, as good as
gold,--"you might have heard a pin drop," said Mrs. Tressiter, "when Agatha
said her prayers"--and at last the lights were put out.

Peter bent down over Robin's bed and the boy flung his arms round his neck.

"I dreamed of you--I knew you'd come," he whispered.

"What shall I send you as a present to-morrow?" asked Peter.

"Soldiers--soldiers on horses. Those with cannons and shiny things on their
backs...." Robin was very explicit--"You'll be here to-morrow?" he asked.

"No--not to-morrow," Peter answered.

"Soon?"

"Yes, soon."

"I love you, more than Agatha, more than Dick, more than any one 'cept
Daddy and Mummy."

"You'll be a good boy until I come back?"

"Promise ... but come back soon."

Peter gave him a long kiss and left him. Supposing, one day, he had a boy
like that? A little boy in a shirt like that? Wouldn't it be simply too
wonderful? A boy to give soldiers to....

He went across to Miss Monogue's door. A faint voice answered his knock
and, entering the room, the scent of medicine and flowers that he always
connected with his mother, met him. Norah Monogue, very white, with dark
shadows beneath her eyes, was lying on the sofa by the fire.

Mrs. Brockett had prepared her for Peter's coming and she smiled up at him
with her old smile and gave him her hand. How thin and white it was with
its long slender fingers! He sat down by her sofa and he knew by the way
that she looked at him that she was reproaching him--

"Naughty Peter," she said, "all these months and you have been nowhere near
us."

"I, too, have a bone--you never sent me a word about my wedding."

She turned her head away. "I was frightfully ill just then. They didn't
think I'd pull through. I did write afterwards to Clare, I told her how ill
I'd been--"

"She never told me."

Peter bent over the sofa. "But I am ashamed, Norah, more ashamed than I can
say. After I got well and went to live with the Galleons a new life seemed
to begin for me and I was so eager and excited about it all. And then--" he
hesitated for a moment--"there was Clare."

"Yes, I know there was Clare and I am so delighted about it--I know that
you will both be so happy.... But, when one is lying here week after week
and is worried and tired things take such a different outline. I thought
that you and Clare--that you ... had given me up altogether and--"

Suddenly hiding her face in her hands she began to cry. It was
inexpressibly desolate there in the dim bare little room, and the sharp
sense of his neglect and the remembrance of the good friend that she had
been to him for so many years overwhelmed Peter.

He knelt down and put his arms round her. "Norah--don't, please, I can't
bear it. It's all right. I've been a beast, a selfish cad. But it shan't
happen again. I'll come often--I'm ashamed."

She cried for a little and then she smiled at him. "I'm a fool to cry like
that but you see I'm weak and ill--and seeing you again after all this time
and your being so successful and happy upset me I suppose. Forgive it,
Peter, and come again one day when I'm better and stronger--and bring Clare
too."

She held tightly to his hand and her grasp was hot and feverish. He
reassured her, told her that he would come soon again, that he would bring
Clare and so left her.

He took a cab and drove back to Chelsea in a storm of agitation. Suddenly,
out of nothing as it were, all these people, this old life had been thrust
up in front of him--had demanded, made claims. About him once again was
the old atmosphere: figures were filling his brain, the world was a wild
tossing place ... one of those Roundabouts with the hissing lights, the
screaming music, the horses going up and down. Plain enough now that the
old life was not done with. Every moment of his past life seemed to spring
before him claiming recognition. He was drunk with the desire for work. He
flung the cabman something, dashed into the little house, was in his room.
The lamp was lighted, the door was shut, there was silence, and in his
brain figures, scenes, sentences were racing--"The Stone House," neglected
for so long, had begun once more, to climb.

The hours passed, the white sheets were covered and flung aside. Dimly
through a haze, he saw Clare standing in the doorway.

"Bad old boy!"

He scarcely glanced up. "I'm not coming yet--caught by work."

"Don't be at it too late."

He made no reply.

She closed the door softly behind her.

CHAPTER V

THE IN-BETWEENS

I

Then, out of the wind and rain, came Mr. Zanti.

II

Three days after Peter's visit to Brockett's he was finishing a letter
before dressing for dinner. He and Clare were going on to a party later
in the evening but were dining quietly alone together first. The storms
that had fallen upon London three days before were still pommelling and
buffeting the city, the trees outside the window groaned and creaked with
a mysterious importance as though they were trying to tell one another
secrets, and little branches tapped at the dripping panes. He was writing
in the little drawing-room--warm and comfortable--and the Maria Theresa, so
small a person in so much glory, looked down on him from her silver frame
and gave him company.

Then Sarah--a minute servant, who always entered a room as though swept
into it by a cyclone--breathlessly announced that there was a gentleman to
see Mr. Westcott.

"'E's drippin' in the 'all," she gasped and handed Peter a very dirty bit
of paper.

Peter read:--"Dear Boy, Being about to leave this country on an expedition
of the utmost importance I feel that I must shake you by the hand before I
go. Emilio Zanti."

Mr. Zanti, enormous, smiling from ear to ear, engulfed in a great coat
from which his huge head, buffeted by wind and rain--his red cheeks, his
rosy nose, his sparkling eyes--stood out like some strange and cheerful
flower--filled the doorway.

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