Fortitude

H >> Hugh Walpole >> Fortitude

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"But I knew him--and knew him jolly well too--when he was about twelve, so
that I really get a pull over the rest of you there, for it adds of course
immensely to the interest and if ever child was Father of the Man, Peter
was. You know how we both funked that marriage of his for him--you because
you knew Clare so well, I because I knew Peter. And then for a time it
really seemed that we were both entirely wrong. Clare's is a far simpler
personality than Peter's, and if you work along one or two recognised
lines--let her have her way, don't frighten her, above all keep her
conventional--it's all right. Clare was, and is, awfully in love with him,
and he madly with her of course--and that helped everything along. You know
how relieved we both were and indeed it seemed, for a time, that it was
going to be the making of both of them--going to make Clare braver and
Peter less morbid.

"Well, it's since you've been away that everything's happened. Although the
baby was born some weeks before you went, it's only lately that Clare has
been up and about. She's perfectly well and the baby's splendid--promises
to be a tremendous fellow and as healthy as possible. You can imagine, a
little, the effect of it all on Clare. I don't suppose there's any girl in
London been so wrapped in cotton wool all her life, and that old ass of
a father and still more irritating ass of a mother would go on wrapping
her still if they had their way. The fuss they've both made about this
whole business is simply incredible--especially when the man's a doctor
and brings Lord knows how many children into the world every week of
his life. But it's all been awfully bad for Clare. Of course, she was
frightened--frightened out of her wits. It's the very first time life
ever had its wrappings off for her, and that in itself of course is a
tremendously good thing. But you can't, unfortunately, wrap any one up for
all those years and then take the wrappings off and not deliver a shock to
the system. Of course there's a shock, and it's just this shock that I'm
so afraid of. I'm afraid of it for one thing because Peter's so entirely
oblivious of it. He was in an agony of terror on the day that the baby was
born, but once it was there--well and healthy and promising--fear vanished.
He could only see room for glory--and glory he does. I cannot tell you what
that boy is like about the baby; at present he thinks, day and night, of
nothing else. It is the most terrific thing to watch his feeling about
it--and meanwhile he takes it for granted that Clare feels the same....
Well, she doesn't. I have been in a good deal during these last few days
and she's stranger than words can say--doesn't see the child if she can
help it--loves it, worships it, when it is there, and--is terrified of it.
I saw a look in her eyes when she was nursing it yesterday that was sheer
undiluted terror. She's been frightened out of her life, and if I know
her the least little bit she's absolutely made up her mind never to be
frightened like that again. She is going to hurl herself into a perfect
whirlpool of excitement and entertainment and drag Peter with her if she
can. Meanwhile, behind that hard little head of hers, she's making plans
just as fast as she can make them. I believe she looks on life now as
though it had broken the compact that she made with it--a compact that
things should always be easy, comfortable, above all, never threatening.
The present must be calm but the Future's absolutely got to be--and I
believe, although she loves him devotedly in the depths of her strange
little soul, that she half blames Peter for all of this disturbance, and
that there are a great many things about him--his earlier life, his earlier
friends, even his work--that she would strip from him if she could.

"Well, enough for the present. I don't know _what_ nonsense there isn't
here. Into the envelope it all goes. I've been talking to you for an hour
and a half and that's something...."

II

"... I've just come in from dinner with Peter and Clare and feel inclined
to talk to you for hours ahead. However, that I can't do, so I shall write
to you instead and you're to regard it all as a continuation of the things
that I said in last night's letter. I am as interested as ever and indeed,
after this evening's dinner more interested. The odd thing about it all is
that Peter is so completely oblivious to any change that may be going on
in Clare. His whole mind is centred now on the baby, he cannot have enough
of it and it was he, and not Clare, who took me up after dinner to see it
sleeping.

"You remember that they had some kind of a dispute about the name of the
boy at the time of the christening. Peter insisted that it should be
Stephen, after, I suppose, that odd Cornish friend of his, and Clare, weak
and ill though she was, objected with all her might. I don't know why she
took this so much to heart but it was all, I suppose, part of that odd
hatred that she has of Peter's earlier life and earlier friends. She has
never met the man Brant, but I think that she fancies that he is going
to swoop down one of these days and carry Peter off on a broomstick or
something. She gave in about the name--indeed I have never seen Peter
more determined--but I think, nevertheless, that she broods over it and
remembers it. My dear, I am as sorry for her as I can be. There she stands,
loving Peter with all her heart and soul, terrified out of her wits at the
possibilities that life is presenting to her, hating Peter's friends at
one moment, his work the next, the baby the next--exactly like some one,
walking on a window-ledge in his sleep and suddenly waking and
discovering--

"Peter's a more difficult question. He's too riotously happy just at
the moment to listen to a word from any one. His relation to the child
is really the most touching thing you ever saw, and really the child,
considering that it has scarcely begun to exist, has a feeling for him in
the most wonderful way. It is as good as gold when he is there and follows
him with its eyes--it doesn't pay much attention to Clare. I think it knows
that she's frightened of it. Yes, Peter is quite riotously happy. You know
that 'The Stone House' is coming out next week. There is to be a supper
party at the Galleons'--myself, Mrs. Launce. Maradick, the Gales, some
woman he knew at that boarding-house, Cardillac and Dr. and Mrs. Rossiter.

"By the way, Cardillac is there a great deal and I am both glad and sorry.
He is very good for Clare and not at all good for Peter. He seems to
understand Clare in the most wonderful way--far better than Peter does. He
brings her out, helps her to be broader and really I think explains Peter
to her and helps things along. His influence on Peter is all the other way.
Peter, of course, worships him, just as he used to do in the old days at
school, and Cards always liked being worshipped. He has an elegance, a
savoir-faire that dear, square-shouldered rough-and-tumble Peter finds
entrancing, but, of course, Peter's worth the dozen of him any day of
the week. He drags out all Peter's worst side. I wonder whether you'll
understand what I mean when I say that Peter isn't _meant_ to be happy--at
any rate not yet. He's got something too big, too tremendous in him to be
carved easily into any one of our humdrum, conventional shapes. He takes
things so hard that he isn't intended to take more than one thing at a
time, and here he is with Clare and Cards both, as it seems to me, in a
conspiracy to pull him into a thousand little bits and to fling each little
bit to a different tea-party.

"He ought to be getting at his work and he isn't getting at it at all. 'The
Stone House' is coming out next week and it may be all right, but I don't
mind betting that the next one suffers. If he weren't in a kind of dream
he'd see it all himself, and indeed I think that he'll wake one day soon
and see that a thousand ridiculous things are getting in between him and
his proper life.

"He was leading his proper life in those days at Dawson's when they were
beating him at home and hating him at school, and it was that old bookshop
and the queer people he met in it that produced 'Reuben Hallard.'

"He's so amazingly young in the ways of the world, so eager to make friends
with everybody, so delighted with an entirely superficial butterfly like
Cards, so devotedly attached to his wife, that I must confess that the
outlook seems to me bad. There's going to be a tremendous tug-of-war in a
minute and it's not going to be easy for the boy--nor, indeed for Clare.

"I hope that you don't feel so far removed from this in your Yorkshire
desert that it has no interest for you, but I know how devoted you are to
Peter and one doesn't want to see the boy turned into the society novelist
creature--the kind of creature, God forgive me, that brother Percival is
certain to become. You'll probably say when you read this that I am trying
to drag out all the morbid side of Peter and make him the melancholy,
introspective creature that he used to be, in fits and starts, when you
first knew him. Of course that's the last thing I want to do, but work to a
man of Peter's temperament is the one rock that can save him. He has, I do
believe, a touch of genius in him somewhere, and I believe that if he's
allowed to follow, devoutly and with pain and anguish, maybe, his Art,
he'll be a great creature--a great man and a great writer. But he's in
the making--too eager to please, too eager to care for every one, too
desperately down if he thinks things are going badly with him. I notice
that he hasn't been to see my father lately--I think too that all this
reviewing is bad for him--other people's novels pouring upon him in an
avalanche must take something from the freshness of his own.

"Anyhow I, Robert Galleon, your clever and penetrating husband, scent much
danger and trouble ahead. Clare, simply out of love for him and anxiety for
herself, will I know, do all she can to drag him from the thing that he
should follow--and Cards will help her--out of sheer mischief, I verily
believe.

"On their own heads be it. As to the carpets you asked me to go and look
at...."

III

"... And now for the supper party. Although there's a whole day behind me
I'm still quivering under the excitement of it. As I tell you about it it
will in all probability, declare itself as a perfectly ordinary affair,
and, indeed, I think that you should have been there yourself to have
realised the emotion of it. But I'll try and give it you word for word. I
was kept in the city and arrived late and they were all there. Mrs. Launce,
twinkling all over with kindness, Maradick in his best Stock Exchange
manner, the Gales (Janet Gale perfectly lovely), the old Rossiters, Cards,
shining with a mixture of enterprise and knowledge of the world and last of
all a very pale, rather nervous, untidy Irish woman, a Miss Monogue. Clare
was so radiantly happy that I knew that she wasn't happy at all, had
obviously taken a great deal of trouble about her hair and had it all piled
up on the top of her head and looked wonderful. I can't describe these
things, but you know that when she's bent on giving an impression she seems
to stand on her toes all the time--well, she was standing on every kind
of toe, moral, physical, emotional last night. Finally there was Peter,
looking as though his evening dress had been made for something quite
different from social dinner parties. It fitted all right, but it was too
comfortable to be smart--he looked, beside Cards, like a good serviceable
cob up against the smartest of hunters. Peter's rough, bullet head, the way
that he stands with his legs wide apart and his thick body holding itself
deliberately still with an effort as though he were on board ship--and then
that smile that won all our hearts ages ago right out of the centre of
his brown eyes first and then curving his mouth, at last seizing all
his body--but always, in spite of it, a little appealing, a little sad
somewhere--can't you see him? And Cards, slim, straight, dark, beautifully
clothed, beautifully witty and I am convinced, beautifully insincere. Can't
you see Cards say 'good evening' to me--with that same charm, that same
ease, that same contempt that he had when we were at school together? Bobby
Galleon--an honest good fellow--but dull--mon Dieu--dull (he rather likes
French phrases)--can't you hear him saying it? Well from the very first,
there was something in the air. We were all excited, even old Mrs. Rossiter
and the pale Irish creature whom I remembered afterwards I had met that
day when I went to that boarding--house after Peter. Clare was quite
extraordinary--I have never seen her anything like it--she talked the whole
time, laughed, almost shouted. The only person she treated stiffly was
Cards--I don't think she likes him.

"He was at his most brilliant--really wonderful--and I liked him better
than I've ever liked him before. He seemed to have a genuine pleasure in
Peter's happiness, and I believe he's as fond of the boy as he's able to be
of any one. A copy of 'The Stone House' was given to each of us (I haven't
had time to look at mine yet) and I suppose the combination of the baby and
the book moved us all. Besides, Clare and Peter both looked so absurdly
young. Such children to have had so many adventures already. You can
imagine how riotous we got when I tell you that dessert found Mrs. Rossiter
with a paper cap on her head and Janet Gale was singing some Cornish
song or other to the delight of the company. Miss Monogue and I were the
quietest. I should think that she's one of the best, and I saw her look at
Peter once or twice in a way that showed how strongly she felt about him.

"Well, old girl, I'm bothered if I can explain the kind of anxiety that
came over me after a time. You'll think me a regular professional croaker
but really I suppose, at bottom, it was some sort of feeling that the whole
thing, this shouting and cheering and thumping the table--was premature.
And then I suppose it was partly my knowledge of Peter. It wasn't like him
to behave in this sort of way. He wasn't himself--excited, agitated by
something altogether foreign to him. I could have thought that he was
drunk, if I hadn't known that he hadn't touched any liquor whatever. But a
man of Peter's temperament pays for this sort of thing--it isn't the sort
of way he's meant to take life.

"Whatever the reason may have been I know that I felt suddenly outside
the whole business and most awfully depressed. I think Miss Monogue felt
exactly the same. By the time the wine was on the table all I wanted was to
get right away. It was almost as though I had been looking on at something
that I was ashamed to see. There was a kind of deliberate determination
about their happiness and Clare's little body with her hair on the verge,
as it seemed, of a positive downfall, had something quite pitiful in its
deliberate rejoicing; such a child, my dear--I never realised how young
until last night. Such a child and needing some one so much older and wiser
than Peter to manage it all.

"Well, there I was hating it when the final moment came. Cards got up
and in one of the wittiest little speeches you ever heard in your life,
proposed Peter's health, alluded to 'Reuben Hallard,' then Clare, then the
Son and Heir, a kind of back fling at old Dawson's, and then last of all,
an apostrophe to 'The Stone House' all glory and honour, &c.:--well, it was
most neatly done and we all sat back, silent, for Peter's reply.

"The dear boy stood there, all flushed and excited, with his hair pushed
back off his forehead and began the most extraordinary speech I've ever
heard. I can't possibly give you the effect of it at secondhand, in the
mere repetition of it there was little more than that he was wildly, madly
happy, that there was no one in the world as happy as he, that now at last
the gods had given him all that he had ever wanted, let them now do their
worst--and so crying, flung his glass over his shoulder, and smashed it on
to the wall behind him.

"I cannot possibly tell you how sinister, how ominous the whole thing
suddenly was. It swooped down upon all of us like a black cloud. Credit
me, if you will, with a highly--strung bundle of nerves (not so solid
matter-of-fact as I seem, _you_ know well enough) but it seemed to me, at
that moment, that Peter was defying, consciously, with his heart in his
mouth, a world of devils and that he was cognisant of all of them. The
thing was conscious--that was the awful thing about it, I could swear that
he was seeing far beyond all of us, that he was hurling his happiness at
something that he had there before him as clearly as I have you before me
now. It was defiance and I believe the minute after uttering it he would
have liked to have rushed upstairs to see that his baby was safe....

"Be that as it may, we all felt it--every one of us. The party was clouded.
Cards and Clare did their best to brighten things up again, and Peter and
Tony and Janet Gale played silly games and made a great deal of noise--but
the spirit was gone.

"I left very early. Miss Monogue came away at the same time. She spoke
to me before she said good-night: 'I know that you are an old friend of
Peter's. I am so fond of him--we all are at Brockett's, it isn't often that
we see him--I know that you will be his true friend in every sense of the
word--and help him--as he ought to be helped. It is so little that I can
do....'

"Her voice was sad. I am afraid she suffers a great deal. She is evidently
greatly attached to Peter--I liked her.

"Well, you in your sober way will say that this is all a great deal of
nonsense. Why shouldn't Peter, if he wishes, say that he is happy? All I
can say is that if you yourself had been there...."

CHAPTER VIII

BLINDS DOWN

I

It was not until Stephen Westcott had rejoiced in the glories (so novel
and so thrilling) of his first birthday and "The Stone House" had been six
months before the public eye that the effect of this second book could be
properly estimated. Second books are the most surely foredoomed creatures
in all creation and there are many excellent reasons for this. They will
assuredly disappoint the expectations of those who enjoyed the first work,
and the author will, in all probability, have been tempted by his earlier
success to try his wings further than they are, as yet, able to carry him.

Peter's failure was only partial. There was no question that "The Stone
House" was a remarkable book. Had it been Peter's first novel it must have
made an immense stir; it showed that he was, in no kind of way, a man of
one book, and it gave, in its London scenes, proof that its author was not
limited to one kind of life and one kind of background. There were chapters
that were fuller, wiser, in every way more mature than anything in "Reuben
Hallard."

But it was amazingly unequal. There were places in it that had no kind of
life at all; at times Peter appeared to have beheld his scenes and
characters through a mist, to have been dragged right away from any kind of
vision of the book, to have written wildly, blindly.

The opinion of Mrs. Launce was perhaps the soundest that it was possible to
have because that good lady, in spite of her affection for Peter, had a
critical judgment that was partly literary, partly commercial, and partly
human. She always judged a book first with her brain, then with her heart
and lastly with her knowledge of her fellow creatures. "It may pay better
than 'Reuben Hallard,'" she said, "there's more love interest and it ends
happily. Some of it is beautifully written, some of it quite unspeakably.
But really, Peter, it's the most uneven thing I've ever read. Again
and again one is caught, held, stirred--then, suddenly, you slip away
altogether--you aren't there at all, nothing's there, I could put my ringer
on the places. Especially the first chapters and the last chapters--the
middle's splendid--what happened to you?... But it will sell, I expect.
Tell your banker to read it, go into lots of banks and tell them. Bank
clerks have subscriptions at circulating libraries always given them ...
but the wild bits are best, the wild bits are splendid--that bit about the
rocks at night ... you don't know much about women yet--your girls are
awfully bad. By the way, do you know that Mary Hollins is only getting L100
advance next time? All she can get, that last thing was so shocking. I hear
that that book about an immoral violet, by that new young man--Rondel,
isn't it?--is still having a most enormous success--I know that Barratt's
got in a whole batch of new copies last night--I hear...."

Mrs. Launce was disappointed--Peter could tell well enough. He received
some laudatory reviews, some letters from strangers, some adulation from
people who knew nothing whatever. He did not know what it was exactly that
he had expected--but whatever it was that he wanted, he did not get it--he
was dissatisfied.

He began to blame his publishers--they had not advertised him enough; he
even, secretly, cherished that most hopeless of all convictions--that his
book was above the heads of the public. He noticed, also, that wherever he
might be, this name of Rondel appeared before him, Mr. Rondel with his
foolish face and thin mother in black, was obviously the young man of the
moment--in the literary advertisements of any of the weekly papers you
might see The Violet novel in its tenth edition and "The Stone House" by
Peter Westcott, second edition selling rapidly.

He was again bewildered, as he had been after the publication of "Reuben
Hallard" by the extraordinary variance of opinions amongst reviewers and
amongst his own personal friends. One man told him that he had no style,
that he must learn the meaning and feeling of words, another told him that
his characters were weak but that his style was "splendid--a real knowledge
of the value and meaning of words." Some one told him that he knew nothing
at all about women and some one else that his women were by far the best
part of his work. The variety was endless--amongst those who had appeared
to him giants there was the same uncertainty. He seemed too to detect with
the older men a desire to praise those parts of his work that resembled
their own productions and to blame anything that gave promise of
originality.

For himself it seemed to him that Mrs. Launce's opinion was nearest the
truth. There were parts of it that were good, chapters that were better
than anything in "Reuben Hallard" and then again there were many chapters
where he saw it all in a fog, groped dimly for his characters, pushed, as
it seemed to him, away from their lives and interests, by the actual lives
and interests of the real people about him. This led him to think of Clare
and here he was suddenly arrested by a perception, now only dimly grasped,
of a change in her attitude to his writings. He dated it, thinking of it
now for the first time, from the birth of young Stephen--or was it not
earlier than that, on that evening when they had met Cards at that supper
party, on that evening of their first quarrel?

In the early days how well he remembered Clare's enthusiasm--a little
extravagant, it seemed now. Then during the first year of their married
life she had wanted to know everything about the making of "The Stone
House." It was almost as though it had been a cake or a pie, and he knew
that he had found her questions difficult to answer and that he had had it
driven in upon him that it was not really because she was interested in the
subtleties of his art that she enquired but because of her own personal
affection for him; if he had been making boots or a suit of clothes it
would have been just the same. Then when "The Stone House" appeared her
eagerness for its success had been tremendous--there was nothing she would
not do to help it along--but that, he somewhat ironically discovered, was
because she liked success and the things that success brought.

Then when the book had not succeeded--or only so very little--her interest
had, of a sudden, subsided. "Oh! I suppose you've got to go and do your
silly old writing ... I think you might come out with me just this
afternoon. It isn't often that I ask anything of you...." He did not
believe that she had ever really finished "The Stone House." She pretended
that she had--"the end was simply perfect," but she was vague, nebulous. He
found the marker in her copy, some fifty pages before the end.

She was so easily impressed by every one whom she met that perhaps the
laughing attitude of Cards to Peter's books had something to do with it
all. Cards affected to despise anything to do with work, here to-day,
gone to-morrow--let us eat and drink ... dear old Peter, grubbing away
upstairs--"I say, Mrs. Westcott, let's go and rag him...." And then they
had come and invaded his room at the top of the house, and sometimes he had
been glad and had flung his work down as though it were of no account ...
and then afterwards, in the middle of some tea-party he had been suddenly
ashamed, deeply, bitterly ashamed, as though he had actually wounded those
white pages lying up there in his quiet room.

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