Twice lost, p.8
Twice Lost, page 8
Keith did not quite care for this tone, which seemed a little excessive. But he was not warned. The thing was too far from his experience of Thomas.
‘I hope the upset won’t put you off your work upon The Inquisitors,’ he said sincerely. ‘Coming in the midst of a great creative effort—how very unfortunate! A disrupting influence. A veritable “person from Porlock”! But, then, the whole thing——’
‘Oh, dear, no,’ returned Thomas, lightly. ‘I find it stimulating.’
‘What odd things Father does say,’ Keith thought as he closed the door. And suddenly it struck him that of late Thomas’s odd sayings had become frequent and marked. There was often a kind of tactlessness, an insensitiveness, as if Thomas did not stop to think what he was saying.
Then for some minutes Keith stood in the passage considering this rather uncomfortably. He remembered several instances—and they were particularly unhappy ones. He remembered with a sudden flood of distaste the nature of the material he had been amassing for Thomas’s latest work… Morbid stuff. Records of the Spanish Inquisition at its vilest. And a play, too. Thomas, although he had had one or two stage successes, was not primarily a playwright. Keith went into his own room and there pondered what he had gathered of this work. What was the theme? he asked himself, point-blank, having so far fought shy of the question. In essence (as far as he could judge), the play was to be nothing more nor less than a justification of cruelty. But surely Thomas himself hardly realised that? Cruelty sometimes performs a catharsis. It is an antiseptic in society and as such to be employed and admired. Yes, that was the argument of The Inquisitors. A calm, detached plea for the use of cruelty and force in modern society—the brazen, impudent, scientific type of cruelty which has performed the damnable feat of self-justification. Thomas’s Inquisitors were to possess modern minds, they were to go as far as our own scientists and medicals into the base depths of insensibility and indurated conscience; but they were to surpass them in honesty, for while making no pretence that they inflicted tortures to save souls and admitting that they acted merely for their Church’s worldly salvation and aggrandisement, they brazenly, unashamedly, were to confess to their sensual pleasure in what they did.
That the spirit of cruelty cleanses society, that it is cathartic in action, is a theme sadly familiar to the modern world, after all. Too familiar. Schoolboys strut in it. Yet what banality could not genius exalt and transfigure?
Yes, it would be a freak among his father’s productions, Keith decided, a freak and a tour de force; one of those brilliant freaks which genius sometimes throws off. One of those triumphs of pure inspiration, one of those works in which the artist seems to rise above his normal powers, to be discoursing, with marvelous insight, in a tongue he never learned by normal means, of things clean out of his experience, as if by a black miracle.
So Keith sought to dismiss his doubts. His objections were of course not moral, not at base. Success sanctifies the most evil theme. One could but hope that the present adventure, coming at a time of creative tension, would not endanger the work, which at least promised to be of sensational quality and to make no little noise.
But Carlotta House with this new stigma upon it had surely become impossible in anyone’s estimation! Struck by this happy fact, he returned to question his father more closely, pressed his inquiries with gentle diligence and found that Thomas had not even now advanced too far with the negotiations to withdraw, if he really wished to. A small money loss that was negligible was the only bar to such an act of commonsense. So with tactful and friendly insistence, Keith urged this course upon him, sitting on the foot of the bed and talking long and earnestly—until he perceived that Thomas was looking rather flushed. Then, with his usual delicate feeling, he withdrew; believing, from Thomas’s amenable manner, that at last his words would be heeded.
Keith was vividly interested in the drama at Hilbery. Greedy for details, he ran about gossiping and gleaning news of the case, and even pushed his inquiries as far as Hilbery itself. It seemed to him that the whole trouble was about to roll away; he hoped that the police and sightseers would work such havoc between them that all further thought of the house would have to be abandoned (whatever Thomas might feel about it at the moment), and this made him very cheerful.
On joining a party at a friend’s house at Campden Hill that evening, he found the case under discussion—for it had figured sensationally in the evening papers.
‘So, Keith, we hear that Thomas is in trouble with the police?’
Keith responded with an amusing account of Thomas’s adventures, giving these a slightly ludicrous turn (an odd little fact, noted with surprise and interest by that intelligent gathering); and he was also able to supply vivid eye-witness portraits of certain of the chief actors. He had been down to Hilbery. Talking to excited locals, he had had a plentiful choice of theories. He had run about like a good newspaper man and had stuck his nose into everything. He was a bold and assured talker, and the attention of a critical company, which was already amused and agog because the Antequins were involved, inspired him to give of his best.
Someone remarked that the young witness was very pretty and produced an evening paper in support of his words.
‘Ah, let me see her,’ said Keith, and he looked with professional interest at Christine Gray for the first time; for in her case his reporter’s tactics had been of no avail, he had caught no glimpse of her. The snapshot, slightly out of focus, gave a curiously impressionistic view of the young girl’s head, which was both flattering and misleading. Juvenile delinquency was very much in the air at the time, and someone now suggested that Christine Gray might be the criminal; whereat Keith smiled and declared, ‘She’s an innocent little schoolgirl, as normal and healthy as daylight, greatly distressed by her position. A little suburban nobody. But pretty, yes. Everyone is falling in love with her.’ These words were remembered and he was laughed at later.
‘A highly unattractive child,’ was said of a similarly falsified portrait of Vivian. ‘But her home-life explains her.’
‘Those teeth should make identification easy,’ Keith said, his odd humour seeming to relish this little detail. ‘Not many people are really buck-toothed. It will lighten the task of the police.’ And, pleased with himself and in high spirits, he had one of those lapses into bad taste and coarse feeling to which the egoistical are prone, however cautiously they conduct themselves. He allowed himself to be facetious about this unfortunate trait in the little victim’s features; and he repeated the bad joke more than once, as if the detail intrigued him.
At the end of the evening, he found himself leaving the house at the same time as a middle-aged woman with a dark, plump face made piquant by its big, shallow dimples. He knew her and could not avoid walking a little way with her.
She was a Mrs Harrel, a friend, or, rather, a gossip of his father; one of those people who by dint of taking upon themselves all the active and initiating side of friendship, or being abnormally thick-skinned and persevering, are able to force their friendships upon the very shy. Thomas had been helpless to repulse her, Keith supposed, and then had found her a soothing habit. But it was regrettable.
He had seen her at the beginning of the evening, made a mental note to avoid her and then had forgotten her presence. She was there in such circumstances, probably, that she had had the discretion to keep in the background; and this although her attractions were of a kind not easily subdued. That she had contrived to introduce herself at all into that somewhat exclusive company did not in the least surprise him. Such catlike insinuations were her forte. She herself was a literary personality. There was hardly a famous man, so it seemed, with whom she had not been intimate. Book after book of light, gossiping reminiscences had borne her name, all full of scandals, old and new, lies and libels of the comical sort which the victims dare not rebut. She was patently a dangerous person to know or to be known by, and had little trouble in pushing her wares. Her style was execrable and amusing, Much too lazy and impatient to do the writing of her books herself, she was known to employ other hands; little but the inspiration was her own. Most of them were supposed to have been written by her schoolboy son, which accounted well enough for their peculiar flavour. She was rather better than her books, and made this perverted use of a considerable intelligence; was good-natured, if in a selfish, eupeptic way, and was not incapable of gratitude and loyalty. So her charms were not entirely base, and few people resisted her long when she determined upon their capture. Keith had resisted her. He was cold by temperament and was armed with jealousy. At the same time, he was wary. If she had ever fancied his job, she could perhaps have relieved him of it; and he was not without some inkling of this.
‘How oddly your father seems to be taking it,’ she said, in the familiar manner of an old friend.
‘Oddly?’ Keith was, of course, all the more struck and annoyed because the same thought had occurred so uncomfortably to himself.
She laughed. ‘But he is taking it oddly, you know. Lightly.’
‘Lightly?’ Keith repeated. He was most unpleasantly surprised.
‘Yes, I happened to drop in yesterday morning when he had just got back from Hilbery, and so heard the whole story. You had a few points wrong.’
Keith had regained his self-possession. ‘Oh, one needs to know him as well as I do. Lightly?—no, far from it. One cannot expect a man of his sensitivity not to be upset.’
‘I shouldn’t have been surprised if he had been upset, my dear man! No, not a thing to take lightly.’
‘Lightly!’ Keith cried again; unable, through shock and annoyance, to avoid the echoing trick, the word had irritated him so. At which Mrs Harrel laughed again. ‘Why, what’s the matter with you? You’re like a cuckoo this evening.’ And then she went on to speak with the impudent frankness of which she made a specialty.
‘Do you notice that he’s rather changed of late? Not ill—I don’t mean that. Not precisely. But altered.’
Keith rebuffed her. ‘Oh, a passing mood—which might be taken by anyone who did not know him very well——’
But Mrs Harrel interrupted, turning her head after some passerby and speaking casually, ‘For instance, he’s forgetful, abnormally so. You must have noticed that, at least.’
Exasperated, Keith replied, ‘He works too hard—and sometimes gets very tired. He’s not a young man.’
‘So you have noticed, then! I thought you must. But, my dear, who encourages him to work too hard? Why, you.’
‘I? I make him over-work?’ Keith cried, sincerely amazed and then deeply hurt. He was devoted to his father, who could doubt it? She saw with amused surprise his worried air and was agog to find out the real reason. He had grown slowly pallid with indignation under the street lights.
‘My father works when and if he wishes to. Like all artists, he’s inclined to over-drive himself when he’s in the vein.’
‘He’s by no means so thoughtful as he used to be for other people,’ Mrs Harrel resumed, quite as if he had not spoken. ‘In fact, there’s a peculiar insensitiveness, which really one can’t help noticing—it’s so marked, so odd.’
Keith was silent, determined to give the intrusive, dangerous creature no more handle.
But she hung on, in the face of these snubs, in her usual brazen manner, because she had an exciting feeling that Thomas had returned from Hilbery in some sort of trouble, and she would have given the world to find out what it was.
‘You don’t mind my speaking like this to you, of course,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Now, this play he’s working on at the moment—it’s surely something quite out of his usual line of country?’
Keith was incredulous. Was it possible that his father had opened his intimate thoughts to this woman, so slight and so shifty an acquaintance—a woman who was known to be passionately inquisitive and an unscrupulous gossip? Concerned as he was with the documentation, he himself always had a good idea of his father’s works at their inception, but it was not that Thomas ever discussed them with him; and, noting this sorely, Keith had always made it his pride to ask no questions. But it was a tender point, a secret grievance. And had he now to learn that Thomas had indulged in such incontinent babbling to a mere casual acquaintance—and a female at that?
‘A Spanish story!’ she went on. ‘The Inquisition! Why, golly, how crude.’
He was silent from excess of feeling.
‘Oh, I know, of course—medieval Granada’s only the setting—the spirit of the play is anachronistic and entirely modern. And that’s intentional, naturally. Just one more transcription of the modern nightmare—but I should have said we’ve had too many… Do you know, I have the impression that he has suddenly felt his age, has become conscious of murmurs of disaffection among his admirers—for such I’m afraid there are, my dear!—and has suddenly decided he must attempt something more in the contemporary spirit. Fatal, don’t you think?’
‘Well—fatal to anything short of genius,’ he admitted dryly.
A furious barking of dogs, an obscene yapping and squealing, almost drowned their exchanges at this point. Mrs Harrel’s lips twitched. ‘What Thomas has always wanted is a girl-friend,’ she remarked, taking leave of him. She went off with her soft, lazy, heavy yet enticing walk, the walk of a woman whose body was still provocative and beautiful in spite of increasing fat. He had not offered to put her into a taxi. He was reckless in his displeasure. At the corner she waved to him.
He went home with his head full of this woman. It was Mrs Harrel, no doubt, who served to distract his attention at this time from events at Hilbery and the quarter of real danger.
In an hour he had recovered his exceptional spirits. And although a little surprised, he was not much alarmed to find, on the morrow, that Thomas had suddenly risen from his bed of sickness and gone down to Hilbery. And he was totally unprepared for the sequel.
There had not appeared to Thomas any reason why he should not be friendly with the people of the neighbourhood in which he had once lived and proposed to live again. He had begun by calling upon the Grays. He called with an offer of such support as a man of standing in the district might give. His harmlessness and sincerity had met with equal harmlessness and sincerity, and he had made friends with Christine’s parents. It would be useless to say that, unworldly though they were, they were not a little flattered and dazzled by the attentions of so famous a man; that they did not automatically attribute to him motives quite superior to those of others who had breached their privacy. Besides, of course he was not quite a stranger. Many queer proposals, or offers of help, had been received by the Grays, and of these the majority had appeared to them inexpressibly offensive. Thomas, in short, was not the only one to be sentimentally affected by the pathetic distress of a pretty young girl.
But it was a long while since this ageing man, with his inflammable, artist’s nature so long harnessed to an ascetic discipline, had come so dangerously close to a young female creature of this sound, pure pattern as to feel her very heart-beats. He was deeply charmed. He lost his head. In sad fact, there was truth in Keith’s savage conclusion that his father had acted on a senile impulse and had fallen a victim to his own psychological history. Thomas had certainly succumbed to a temptation which would never have been felt as such in his days of vigour. Then he would not have thought twice of a young girl. The grey-haired man had suddenly acted with the susceptibility and precipitancy, and perhaps even the innocence, of a youth. All prudent ideas of an elderly partner had been entirely banished—but not the thought of marriage, not the pressing need of enlisting help against Keith.
Yet Thomas had had the guile to make a cautious approach during Mr Gray’s lifetime. He had given sympathetic support, both moral and practical, throughout Christine’s ordeal. Then, when only a few months after the Lambert affair Mr Gray had died with great suddenness, there was Thomas, a rich, trusted, knowledgeable friend at the service of the two helpless ones. Undoubtedly Mr Gray’s death had smoothed Thomas’s path.
The young girl was scarcely eighteen. She was far too young to withstand flattery. She could not even have been expected to distinguish between her natural pleasure in being chosen and any genuine feeling she might have for an elderly man. Thomas Antequin was perfectly presentable. His simplicity, a charming natural gaiety, an ability to enjoy himself in simple ways, were quite to the taste of his new friends. Mrs Gray herself had married at eighteen, and had married very happily. But, as is often the way in such cases, an emotional development out of all proportion with the intellectual had taken place. She had never developed intellectually, and had remained, for all her experience, a little childlike. Besides, simply because he was of her own age and generation, Thomas had seemed to her to have right ideas and right notions of behaviour, and when she had compared him with the shoddy, irresponsible, amoral boys who were Christine’s contemporaries, she had forgotten his years and seen only the shining virtues of maturity. Yes, he had seemed to her a good human creature whom they could trust whole-heartedly. With Thomas, her darling would be safe. Moreover, she was a sorrowing widow and a woman greatly at a loss without a man’s guidance.
In place of advice, Christine had had only her mother’s romantic, ingenuous approval.
