Fortitude

H >> Hugh Walpole >> Fortitude

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"I want to write books"--he stared at the golden cloud--"to be a novelist.
I daresay I can't--I don't know--but I'd rather do that than anything....
Father wants me to be a solicitor. I'm with Aitchinson now--I shall never
be a good one."

Then he turned almost fiercely away from the window.

"But never mind about me, mother. It's you I want to hear about. I'm going
to take this on now. It's my responsibility. I want to know about you."

"There's nothing to know, dear. I've been ill for a great many years now.
It's more nerves than anything, I suppose. I think I've never had the
courage to stand up against it--a stronger woman would have got the better
of it, I expect. But I wasn't always like this," she added laughing a
little far away ghost of a laugh--"Go and look in that drawer--there,
in that cupboard--amongst my handkerchiefs--there where those old fans
are--you'll find some old programmes there--Those old yellow papers...."

He brought them to her, three old yellow programmes of a "Concert Given at
the Town Hall, Truro." "There, do you see? Miss Minnie Trenowth, In the
Gloaming--There, I sang in those days. Oh! Truro was fun when I was a girl!
There was always something going on! You see I wasn't always on my back!"

He crushed the papers in his hand.

"But, mother! If you were like that then--what's made you like this now?"

"It's nerves, dear--I've been stupid about it."

"And father, how has he treated you these years?"

"Your father has always been very kind."

"Mother, tell me the truth! I _must_ know. Has he been kind to you?"

"Yes, dear--always."

But her voice was very faint and that look that Peter had noticed before
was again in her eyes.

"Mother--you must tell me. That's not true."

"Yes, Peter. He's done his best. I have been annoying, sometimes--foolish."

"Mother, I know. I know because I know father and I know myself. I'm like
him--I've just found it out. I've got those same things in me, and they'll
do for me if I don't get the better of them. Grandfather told me--he was
the same. All the Westcotts--"

He bent over the bed and took her hand and kissed it.

"Mother, dear--I know--father has been frightening you all this
time--terrifying you. And you were all alone. If only I had been there--if
only there had been some one--"

Her voice was very faint. "Yes ... he has frightened me all these years. At
first I used to think that he didn't mean it. I was a bright, merry sort of
a girl then--careless and knowing nothing about the world. And then I began
to see--that he liked it--that it gave him pleasure to have something there
that he could hurt. And then I began to be frightened. It was very lonely
here for a girl who had had a gay time, and he usen't to like my going to
Truro--and at last he even stopped my seeing people in Treliss. And then I
began to be really frightened--and used to wake in the night and see him
standing by the door watching me. Then I thought that when you were born
that would draw us together, but it didn't, and I was always ill after
that. He would do things--Oh!" her hand pressed her mouth. "Peter, dear,
you mustn't think about it, only when I am dead I don't want you to think
that I was quite a fool--if they tell you so. I don't want you to think
it was all his fault either because it wasn't--I was silly and didn't
understand sometimes ... but it's killed me, that dreadful waiting for
him to do something, I never knew what it would be, and sometimes it
was nothing ... but I knew that he liked to hurt ... and it was the
expectation."

In that white room, now flaming with the fires of the setting sun, Peter
caught his mother to his breast and held her there and her white hands
clutched his knees.

Then his eyes, softened and he turned to her and arranged her head on the
pillow and drew the sheets closely about her.

"I must go now. It has been bad for you this talking, but it had to be. I'm
never, never going to leave you again--you shall not be alone any more--"

"Oh, Peter! I'm so happy! I have never been so happy... but it all comes
of being a coward. If I had only been brave--never be afraid of anybody or
anything. Promise me, Peter--"

"Except of myself," he answered, kissing her.

"Kiss me again.... And again..."

"To-morrow..." he looked back at her, smiling. He saw her, for an instant,
as he left the room, with her cheek against the pillow and her black hair
like a cloud about her; the twilight was already in the room.

An hour later, as he stood in the dining-room, the door opened and his
father came in.

"You have been with your mother?"

"Yes."

"You have done her much harm. She is dying."

"I know everything," Peter answered, looking him in the face.

IV

He would never, until his own end had come, forget that evening. The golden
sunset gave place to a cold and windy night, and the dark clouds rolled up
along the grey sky, hiding and then revealing the thin and pallid moon.

Peter stayed there in the dining-room, waiting. His grandfather slept in
his chair. Once his aunt came crying into the room and wandered aimlessly
about.

"Aunt, how is she?"

"Oh, dear! oh, dear! Whatever shall I do? She is going ... she is going....
I can do nothing!"

Her thin body in the dusk flitted like a ghost about the room and then she
was gone. The doctor's pony cart came rattling up to the door. The fussy
little man got out and stamped in the hall, and then disappeared upstairs.
There was a long pause during which there was no sound.

Then the door was opened and his aunt was there.

"You must come at once ... she wants you."

The doctor, his father, and Mrs. Trussit were there in the room, but he was
only conscious of the great white bed with the candles about it and the
white vases, like eyes, watching him.

As he entered the room there was a faint cry, "Peter." He had crossed to
her, and her arms were about his shoulders and her mouth was pressed
against his; she fell back, with a little sigh, dead.

V

In the darkened dining-room, later, his father stood in the doorway with a
candle in his hand, and above it his white face and short black hair shone
as though carved from marble.

Peter came from the window towards him. His father said: "You killed her by
going to her."

Peter answered: "All these years you have been killing her!"

CHAPTER IX

THE THREE WESTCOTTS

I

The day crept, strangely and mysteriously, to its close. Peter, dulled by
misery, sat opposite his grandfather in the dining-room without moving,
conscious of the heavy twilight that the dark blinds flung about the room,
feeling the silence that was only accentuated by the old man's uneasy
"clack-clack" in his sleep and the clock's regular ticking. The unhappiness
that had been gradually growing about him since his last term at Dawson's,
was now all about him with the strength and horrible appearance of some
unholy giant. It was indeed with some consciousness of Things that were
flinging their shadows on the horizon and were not as yet fully visible
to him that he sat there. That evening at Stephen's farm, realised only
faintly at the time, hung before him now as a vivid induction or prologue
to the later terrors. He was doomed--so he felt in that darkened and
mysterious room--to a terrible time and horrors were creeping upon him from
every side. "Clack-clack" went his grandfather beneath the rugs, as the
cactus plant rattled in the window and the silence through the stairs and
passages of the house crept in folds about the room.

Peter shivered; the coals fell from a dull gold into grey and crumbling
ashes. He shut everything in the surrounding world from his mind and
thought of his dead mother. There indeed there was strangeness enough, for
it seemed now that that wonderful afternoon had filled also all the earlier
years of his life. It seemed to him now that there had never been a time
when he had not known her and talked with her, and yet with this was also
a consciousness of all the joys that he had missed because he had not
known her before. As he thought of it the hard irretrievable fact of
those earlier empty years struck him physically with a sharp agonising
pain--toothache, and no possible way of healing it. The irony of her
proximity, of her desire for him as he, all unwittingly, had in reality
desired her, hit him like a blow. The picture of her waiting, told that
he did not wish to come, looking so sadly and lonely in that white room,
whilst he, on the other side of that door, had not the courage to burst
through those others and go to her, broke suddenly the hard dry passivity
that had held him during so many weeks.

He was very young, he was very tired, he was very lonely. He sobbed with
his hands pressed against his eyes.

Then his tears were quickly dried. There was this other thing to be
considered--his father. He hated his father. He was terrified, as he sat
there, at the fury with which he hated him. The sudden assurance of his
hatred reminded him of the thing that his grandfather had said about the
Westcotts ... was that true? and was this intensity of emotion that filled
all the veins in his body a sign that he too was a Westcott? and were his
father and grandfather mirrors of his own future years?... He did not know.
That was another question....

He wondered what they were about in the room where his mother lay and
it was curious that the house could remain silent during so many long
hours. It seemed held by the command of some strong power, and his mind,
overstrained and abnormal, waited for some outbreak of noise--many noises,
clattering, banging, whistling through the house. But his grandfather slept
on, no step was on the stairs, the room was very dark and evening fell
beyond the long windows and over the sea.

His youth made of a day eternity--there was no end nor term to his love,
to his hatred, to his loneliness, to his utter misery ... and also he was
afraid. He would have given his world for Stephen, but Stephen was already
off on his travels.

Very softly and stealthily the door opened and, holding a quivering
candle, with her finger to her mouth, there appeared his aunt. He looked
at her coldly as she came across the room towards him. He had never felt
any affection for her because she had always seemed to him weak and
useless--a frightened, miserable, vacillating, negative person--even when
he had been a very small boy he had despised her. Her eyes were red and
swollen with crying, her grey and scanty hair had fallen about her collar,
her old black blouse was unbuttoned at the top showing her bony neck and
her thin crooked hands were trembling in the candle-light. Her eyes were
large and frightened and her back was bent as though she was cowering from
a blow. She had never taken very much notice of her nephew--of late she had
been afraid of him; he was surprised now that she should come to speak to
him.

"Peter," she said in a whisper, looking back over her shoulder at the door.

"Yes," he answered, staring at her.

"Oh, Peter!" she said again and began to cry--a whimpering noise and her
hands shaking so that the candle rocked in its stick.

"Well," he said more softly, "you'd better put that candle down."

She put it on the table and then stood beside him, crying pitifully,
jerking out little sentences--"I can't bear it.... I don't know what to
do.... I can't bear it."

He got up from his chair and made her sit down on it and then he stood
by her and waited until she should recover a little. He felt suddenly
strangely tender towards her; she was his mother's sister, she had known
his mother all her life and perhaps in her weak silly way she had loved
her.

"No, aunt, don't cry.... It will be all right. I too am very unhappy. I
have missed so much. If I had only known earlier--"

The poor woman flung little distracted glances at the old man asleep on the
other side of the fire-place--

"Oh, dear, I had to come and talk to some one.... I was so frightened
upstairs. Your father's there with your mother. He sits looking at her ...
and she was always so quiet and good and never did him any harm or indeed
any one ... and now he sits looking at her--but she's happy now--he will be
coming downstairs at any moment and I am afraid of what he'll do if he sees
me talking to you like this. But I feel as though I must talk a little ...
it's so quiet."

"It's all right, aunt. There's no one to be frightened of. I am very
unhappy too. I'd like to talk about her to you."

"No, no--your poor mother--I mustn't say anything. They'll be down upon me
if I say anything. They're very sharp. He's sitting up with her now."

Peter drew another chair up close to her and took her thin hand in his. She
allowed him to do what he would and seemed to have no active knowledge of
her surroundings.

"We'll talk about her," he said, "often. You shall tell me all about her
early life. I want to know everything."

"Oh, no. I'm going away. Directly after the funeral. Directly after the
funeral I'm going away."

Suddenly this frightened him. Was he to be left here entirely alone with
his father and grandfather?

"You're going away?" he said.

"Oh, yes--your Uncle Jeremy will come for the funeral. I shall go away with
him afterwards. I don't like your Aunt Agatha, but they always said I could
come to them when your mother died. I don't like your Aunt Agatha but she
means to be kind. Oh! I couldn't stay here after all that has happened. I
was only staying for your mother's sake and I'm sure I've never gone to bed
without wondering what would happen before the morning--Oh, yes, your Uncle
Jeremy's coming and I shall go away with him after the funeral. I don't
like your Aunt Agatha but I couldn't stay after all that has happened."

All this was said in a hurried frightened whisper. The poor lady shook
from head to foot and the little bracelets on her trembling wrists jangled
together.

"Then I shall be all alone here," Peter said suddenly, staring at the
candle that was guttering in the breeze that came from behind the heavy
blinds.

"Oh, dear," said his aunt, "I'm sure Uncle Jeremy will be kind if you have
to leave here, you know."

"Why should I have to leave here?" asked Peter.

His aunt sunk her voice very low indeed--so low that it seemed to come from
the heart of the cactus plant by the window.

"He hasn't got your mother now, you know. He'll want to have somebody...."

But she said nothing more--only gazed at the old man opposite her with
staring eyes, and cried in a little desolate whimper and jangled her
bracelets until at last Peter crept softly, miserably to bed.

II

The day of the funeral was a day of high wind and a furious sea. The
Westcotts lived in the parish of the strange wild clergyman whose church
looked over the sea; strange and wild in the eyes of Treliss because he was
a giant in size and had a long flowing beard, because he kept a perfect
menagerie of animals in his little house by the church, and because he
talked in such an odd wild way about God being in the sea and the earth
rather than in the hearts of the Treliss citizens--all these things odd
enough and sometimes, early in the morning, he might be seen, mother-naked,
going down the path to the sea to bathe, which was hardly decent
considering his great size and the immediate neighbourhood of the high
road. To those who remonstrated he had said that he was not ashamed of his
body and that God was worshipped the better for there being no clothing
to keep the wind away ... all mad enough, and there were never many
parishioners in the little hill church of a Sunday. However, it was in the
little windy churchyard that Mrs. Westcott was buried and it was up the
steep and stony road to the little church that the hearse and its nodding
plumes, followed by the two old and decrepit hackney carriages, slowly
climbed.

Peter's impressions of the day were vague and uncertain. There were things
that always remained in his memory but strangely his general conviction was
that his mother had had nothing to do with it. The black coffin conveyed
nothing to him of her presence: he saw her as he had seen her on that day
when he had talked to her, and now she was, as Stephen was, somewhere away.
That was his impression, that she had escaped....

Putting on his black clothes in the morning brought Dawson's back to his
mind, and especially Bobby Galleon and Cards. He had not thought of them
since the day of his return--first Stephen and then his mother had driven
them from his mind. But now, with the old school black clothing upon him,
he stood for a long time by his window, wondering, sorrowfully enough,
where they were and what they were doing, whether they had forgotten him,
whether he would ever see them again. He seemed to be surrounded by a
wall of loneliness--some one was cutting everything off from him ... from
maliciousness! For pleasure!... Oh! if one only knew about that God!

Meanwhile Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Agatha had arrived the night before. Uncle
Jeremy was big and stout and he wore clothes that were very black and
extremely bright. His face was crimson in colour and his eyes, large and
bulging, wore a look of perpetual surprise. He was bald and an enormous
gold watch chain crossed his stomach like a bridge. He had obviously never
cared for either of his sisters and he always shouted when he spoke. Aunt
Agatha was round and fat and comfortable, wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a
black silk dress, and obviously considered that Uncle Jeremy had made the
world.

Peter watched his father's attitude to these visitors. He realised that
he had never seen his father with any stranger or visitor--no one came to
the house and he had never been into the town with his father. With this
realisation came a knowledge of other things--of things half heard at the
office, of half looks in the street, of a deliberate avoidance of his
father's name--the Westcotts of Scaw House! There were clouds about the
name.

But his father, in contact with Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Agatha, was strangely
impressive. His square, thick-set body clothed in black--his dark eyes, his
short stiff hair, his high white forehead, his long beautiful hands--this
was no ordinary man, moving so silently with a reserve that seemed nobly
fitting on this sad occasion. The dark figure filled the house, touching in
its restrained grief, admirable in its dignity, a fine spirit against the
common clay of Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Agatha.

Mr. Westcott was courteous but sparing of words--a strong man, you would
say, bowed down with a grief that demanded, in its intensity, silence.

Uncle Jeremy hated and feared his brother-in-law. His hatred he concealed
with difficulty but his fear was betrayed by his loud and nervous laugh. He
was obviously interested in Peter and stared at him, throughout breakfast,
with his large, surprised eyes. Peter felt that this interest was a
speculation as to his future and it made him uncomfortable ... he hated his
uncle but the black suit that the stout gentleman wore on the day of the
funeral was so black, so tight and so shiny that he was an occasion for
laughter rather than hatred.

The black coffin was brought down the long stairs, through the hall
and into the desolate garden. The sight of it roused no emotion in
Peter--_that_ was not his mother. The two aunts, Uncle Jeremy and his
father rode in the first carriage; Peter and Mrs. Trussit in the second.
Mrs. Trussit's bonnet and black silk dress were very fine and she wept
bitterly throughout the journey.

Peter only dismally wished that he could arrange his knees so that they
would not rub against her black silk. He did not think of his mother at all
but only of the great age of the cab, of the furious wind that whistled
about the road, and the roar that the sea, grey and furious far below them,
flung against their windows.

He would have liked to talk to her but her sobbing seemed to surround her
with a barrier. It was all inexpressibly dreary with the driving wind, the
rustling of the black silk dress, the jolting and clattering of the old
carriage. But he had no desire to cry--he was too miserable for that.

On the hill in the little churchyard, a tempest of wind swept across the
graves. From the bending ground the cliff fell sheer to the sea and behold!
it was a tossing, furious carpet of white and grey. The wind blew the spray
up to the graveyard and stung the faces of the mourners and in the roar of
the waves it was hard to hear the voice of the preacher. It was a picture
that they made out there in the graveyard. Poor Aunt Jessie, trembling and
shaking, Mrs. Trussit, stout and stiff with her handkerchief to her eyes,
Uncle Jeremy with his legs apart, his face redder than ever, obviously
wishing the thing over, Aunt Agatha concerned for her clothes in the
streaming wind, Mr. Westcott unmoved by the storm, cold, stern, of a piece
with the grey stone at the gravehead--all these figures interesting enough.
But towering above them and dominating the scene was the clergyman--his
great beard streaming, his surplice blowing behind him in a cloud, his
great voice dominating the tumult, to Peter he was a part of the day--the
storm, the earth, the flying, scudding clouds. All big things there, and
somewhere sailing with those clouds, on the storm, the spirit of his mother
... that little black coffin standing, surely, for nothing that mattered.

But, strangely enough, when the black box had been lowered, at the sharp
rattling of the sods upon the lid, his sorrow leapt to his eyes. Suddenly
the sense of his loss drove down upon him. The place, the people were swept
away--he could hear her voice again, see her thin white hands ... he wanted
her so badly ... if he could only have his chance again ... he could have
flung himself there upon the coffin, not caring whether he lived or died...
his whole being, soul and body, ached for her....

He knew that it was all over; he broke away from them all and he never,
afterwards, could tell where it was that he wandered during the rest of
that day. At last, when it was dark, he crept back to the house, utterly,
absolutely exhausted in every part of his body ... worn out.

III

On the following day Uncle Jeremy and Aunt Agatha departed and took Aunt
Jessie with them. She had the air of being led away into captivity and
seemed to be fastened to the buttons of Uncle Jeremy's tight black suit.
She said nothing further to Peter and showed no sense of having, at any
time, been confidential--she avoided him, he thought.

He of course returned to his office and tried to bury himself in the
work that he found there--but his attention wandered; he was overstrung,
excited abnormally, so that the whole world stood to him as a strange,
unnatural picture, something seen dimly and in exaggerated shapes through
coloured glass. That evening with Stephen shone upon him now with all
the vigour of colour of a real fact in a multitude of vague shadows. The
reality of that night was now of the utmost value.

Meanwhile there were changes at Scaw House. Mrs. Trussit had vanished a few
days after the funeral, no one said anything about her departure and Peter
did not see her go. He was vaguely sorry because she represented in his
memory all the earlier years, and because her absence left the house even
darker and more gloomy than it had been before. The cook, a stout and
slatternly person, given, Peter thought, to excessive drinking, shared,
with a small and noisy maid, the duties of the house--they were most
inefficiently performed.

But, with this clearing of the platform, the hatred between Peter and his
father became a definite and terrible thing. It expressed itself silently.
At present they very rarely spoke and except on Sundays met only at
breakfast and in the evening. But the air was charged with the violence of
their relationship; the boy, growing in body so strangely like the man,
expressed a sullen and dogged defiance in his every movement ... the man
watched him as a snake might watch the bird held by its power. They stood,
as wrestlers stand before the moment for their meeting has arrived. The
house, always too large for their needs, seemed now to stretch into an
infinity of echoing passages and empty rooms; the many windows gathered the
dust thick upon their sills. The old grandfather stayed in his chair by the
fire--only at night he was wheeled out into his dreary bedroom by the cook
who, now, washed and tidied him with a vigour that called forth shrill
screams and oaths from her victim. He hated this woman with the most bitter
loathing and sometimes frightened her with the violence of his curses.

Christmas came and went and there followed a number of those wonderful
crisp and shining days that a Cornish winter gives to its worshippers.
Treliss sparkled and glittered--the stones of the market-place held the
heat of the sun as though it had been midsummer and the Grey Tower lifted
its old head proudly to the blue sky--the sea was so warm that bathing was
possible and in the heart of the brown fields there was a whisper of early
spring.

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