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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Joyful Delaneys,' Hugh Walpole intricately weaves a tapestry of familial relationships, social dynamics, and personal aspirations set against the backdrop of early 20th-century England. Employing a rich, descriptive prose style interspersed with sharp dialogue, Walpole paints a vivid portrait of the Delaney family wrestling with their aspirations and moral dilemmas. The narrative operates within a literary context marked by the exploration of human emotion and the complexities of societal expectations, echoing the existential themes prevalent in the works of contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Hugh Walpole was a celebrated novelist and playwright, highly regarded for his keen psychological insight and ability to convey the intricacies of human nature. His deep-seated interest in familial bonds and his experiences navigating the literary landscape of his time influenced the conception of 'The Joyful Delaneys.' Drawing from his own life and the tumultuous events following the First World War, Walpole delves into the essence of human joy amid life's tribulations, making the Delaneys' journey deeply relatable. 'I highly recommend 'The Joyful Delaneys' to those interested in character-driven narratives rich in emotional depth and social commentary. Walpole's masterful storytelling provides a profound exploration of the human spirit, making this work not only a delightful read but also a compelling reflection on resilience in the face of adversity.' In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Joyful Delaneys
Table of Contents
Introduction
Beneath the bright laughter of a close-knit clan, the novel traces how the performance of happiness collides with private doubts, testing loyalty, self-knowledge, and the fragile agreements that hold a family—and the community around it—gracefully together even as change presses in from every side.
The Joyful Delaneys, a novel by British writer Hugh Walpole, belongs to the tradition of the family chronicle and social comedy, shaped by the psychological realism for which he is known. Published in the interwar period, it is set against the textures of early twentieth-century life, where shifting social expectations meet enduring domestic rituals. Without relying on melodrama, Walpole situates readers in a recognizable modern milieu of parlors, pavements, and public rooms, using that everyday stage to explore the Delaneys’ distinctive temperament. The result is a work that marries intimate observation with a broader portrait of a society negotiating continuity and change.
At its surface, the premise is disarmingly straightforward: a family celebrated for its warmth and conviviality attracts friends, suitors, allies, and onlookers, and then must live up to the reputation its own charm has created. The narrative follows encounters, visits, and occasions in which the Delaneys’ apparent ease proves both invitation and test. Walpole’s interest lies less in a single twist than in the incremental pressures of affection, ambition, and propriety. The story’s momentum arises from collisions between temperament and circumstance, ensuring a reading experience that feels both companionable and quietly suspenseful without revealing what any individual choice finally brings.
Readers meet Walpole’s characteristic omniscient voice—urbane, sympathetic, and gently ironic—guiding the eye from bustling rooms to private reflections with unforced clarity. Scenes are built through social textures: the temperature of a gathering, the cadence of a conversation, the unspoken meanings that pass across a table. The mood balances buoyancy with an undertow of disquiet, the prose generous to its characters even at their most blinkered. Without pyrotechnics, the style trusts accumulation: the weight of glances, the return of a phrase, the way kindness or vanity echoes across pages. It is a novel of company, of voices overlapping, and of silences that matter.
Among the themes that emerge, joy itself becomes a discipline—a family’s guiding ideal that can inspire generosity yet mask fatigue or fear. Walpole explores how households craft a shared story about who they are and what they owe one another, and how that story strains under competing desires for independence and belonging. Questions of reputation, tact, and moral courage recur, as do the small bargains that make social life possible. The book also considers generational inheritance: what younger members accept or resist, what elders protect or surrender, and how love navigates the difference between guidance and control.
These concerns travel easily into the present. Readers attuned to curated public selves will recognize the book’s inquiry into the cost of always appearing contented. Its attention to civility—when it shelters kindness and when it conceals avoidance—speaks to contemporary debates about authenticity and care. The portrait of community as both refuge and pressure mirrors today’s networks, from neighborhoods to workplaces, where loyalties form and fray under scrutiny. Without being programmatic, the novel invites reflection on emotional labor inside families, the ethics of ambition, and the sustaining power of humor and ritual when certainty is scarce.
Approached as a companionable social novel, The Joyful Delaneys offers a richly peopled ensemble, intimate domestic set pieces, and a steady moral intelligence that refuses easy verdicts. It rewards lingering attention to nuance: a joke told too brightly, a favor offered at the wrong moment, a memory that steadies a wavering resolve. Readers will find an atmosphere at once welcoming and bracing, a study of happiness that honors its radiance while acknowledging its work. In Walpole’s hands, the Delaneys’ world becomes an exercise in seeing—how we look at those we love, and how, finally, we choose to live among them.
Synopsis
Set in an English provincial town, The Joyful Delaneys follows a warm, expansive family whose exuberant outlook unsettles and invigorates the community they enter. The narrative introduces the Delaneys through scenes of everyday bustle—arrivals, unpacked crates, and quick friendships—that establish their reputation for openness and goodwill. Around them, the novel sketches the town’s established hierarchies: cautious shopkeepers, conscientious clergy, and watchful neighbors whose routines run smoothly until the newcomers’ energy begins to ripple through them. Without declaring heroes or villains, the early chapters set a tone of lively observation, showing how good humor, spontaneity, and conviviality begin to challenge prevailing habits.
As the family’s rhythms take hold, readers meet the Delaneys in layered glimpses: affectionate parents who prefer fellowship to formality, and grown children whose temperaments diverge between practical aims and adventurous impulse. Their house quickly becomes a meeting place, a lively room where talk runs long and meals stretch into evening. The novel uses these domestic scenes to define character by behavior rather than declaration, emphasizing gestures, interruptions, and sudden enthusiasms. The family’s unguarded manner contrasts with the town’s measured expectations, creating immediate interest and mild alarm. The early narrative balances attractively chaotic comfort with hints of strain beneath the cheerful surfaces.
The town’s first response is curiosity, drawn by the Delaneys’ effortless hospitality. Neighbors and acquaintances come and go, discovering music, laughter, and small kindnesses that feel both generous and disconcerting. The Delaneys listen easily, forgive quickly, and invite widely, and the story marks this pattern through recurring gatherings where strangers become participants. At the same time, the narrative suggests limits to boundless cheer: the family’s finances require attention, past disappointments are alluded to, and the town’s gossip mills turn. Without halting the momentum, these early tensions deepen the portrait, showing that exuberance draws attention—and that attention carries responsibilities the Delaneys will need to navigate.
Parallel to the family’s spread of influence, the novel assembles a cross-section of townspeople whose viewpoints frame the unfolding action. A punctilious moralist, a self-effacing clerk, an independent widow, and a practical shopkeeper each respond to the Delaneys in specific, revealing ways. Some are reassured by sincerity; others are unsettled by a perceived looseness about convention. These characters, introduced in their own modest episodes, observe the newcomers, revise opinions, and sometimes misread them. The pattern establishes a social map: lines of loyalty, rivalry, attraction, and suspicion that will shape later turns. Through these interlocking perspectives, the town becomes both setting and instrument of change.
Personal stakes rise as individual Delaneys pursue paths that pull them outward. A new position offers one member both responsibility and visibility, and companionable encounters become more pointed as admiration shades toward attachment. The book traces the ambiguities of affection and ambition with circumspect detail: polite invitations, letters that ring with more than courtesy, and a friendship that seems harmless until it is not. The family’s hospitality, invaluable as social glue, also complicates boundaries. The chapters shift smoothly between bustling rooms and quieter walks, allowing private resolves to form even as public attention intensifies, setting up choices whose consequences will reverberate through home and town.
Midway, a cluster of disruptions tests the easy benevolence that has defined the Delaneys. An unsettling public incident prompts talk; a neglected obligation becomes unexpectedly urgent; and a chance encounter exposes an old grievance. None of these episodes is sensational in isolation, but together they concentrate the novel’s underlying questions about responsibility, generosity, and trust. Rumors circulate. The town’s more cautious figures claim prescience, while friends discover the limits of tolerance when reputations are at stake. The family responds first with their accustomed warmth, then with a growing recognition that goodwill must be balanced by steadiness. The atmosphere tightens without foreclosing paths forward.
In the aftermath, the narrative turns inward to examine private reckonings. Older Delaneys revisit earlier choices that made their present lives possible; younger ones test independence against familial loyalty. Conversations become more precise, promises more deliberate. Some acquaintances drift, wary of entanglement, while others step closer, moved by simple fairness. The book dwells on small decisions—a visit paid, a word withheld, an offer accepted—that carry larger meanings. Through these calibrations, the Delaneys’ cheerful creed is not discarded but interrogated: what courage does kindness require, and what cost does openness incur? The result is a firming of character without abandoning the vitality that first drew attention.
The strands converge around a public occasion that focuses eyes and gathers pressures: a civic event that demands cooperation, decorum, and honest dealing. Here, earlier misunderstandings, unspoken obligations, and private hopes collide in practical necessities. The family’s instincts toward inclusion encounter boundaries they can neither ignore nor charm past, and allies reveal their true measure under scrutiny. The scene is not staged for melodrama; instead, it clarifies loyalties and tests the town’s self-image. Decisions are made that alter several relationships and set trajectories, while leaving space for futures neither triumphant nor bitter. The narrative preserves suspense by emphasizing choice rather than pronouncing verdicts.
In closing movements, the novel underscores its central theme: that joy, to endure, must be chosen with eyes open. The Delaneys’ influence proves less an upheaval than a steadying counterpoint, inviting neighbors to rediscover warmth without abandoning prudence. Relationships settle into shapes that reflect honest temperament rather than wishful ideal. Without proclaiming lessons, the book suggests a practical hopefulness rooted in attention, generosity, and ordinary courage. The tone remains clear-eyed and humane, valuing fellowship while acknowledging imperfection. As a portrait of a family and the town they touch, The Joyful Delaneys presents a measured affirmation that cheerful living can coexist with responsibility and change.
Historical Context
Hugh Walpole’s The Joyful Delaneys is set in late 1930s England, chiefly in London’s middle-class milieu, where terraces, department stores, and expanding suburbs shape everyday life. The period is the closing arc of the interwar years, after the severe slump but before the outbreak of war in 1939. Public culture revolves around the BBC wireless, newsreels in bustling cinemas, and the ritual of tea shops and Lyons Corner Houses. Street-level London—omnibuses, new arterial roads, neon-lit West End evenings—contrasts with parish churches and local clubs that sustain social bonds. This urban texture frames a family narrative that registers national moods: guarded optimism, prudent thrift, and a persistent sense that Europe’s storms are drifting closer.
The Great Depression’s British phase (1929–1933) shaped the decade’s social psychology. Britain abandoned the Gold Standard on 21 September 1931, and a cross-party National Government imposed spending cuts during the sterling crisis. Unemployment peaked around 3 million in 1932, particularly in coal, shipbuilding, and steel. Although the South East recovered faster, regional disparities deepened. Retail prices fell and real wages stabilized for some, encouraging modest consumer recovery by the mid-1930s. The novel mirrors this uneven stabilization: lower-middle-class families stretch budgets, delay purchases, and rely on affordable leisure such as the cinema and public parks, creating a tone of cheerfulness tinged with anxiety about precarious employment and fragile savings.
Interwar social policy and housing reform reconfigured British cities. The Housing Act 1930 (Greenwood Act) accelerated slum clearance; London County Council estates such as Becontree in Dagenham ultimately housed over 100,000 people. Across the 1930s, millions of new suburban homes altered class mixing and commuting patterns. The 1934 Unemployment Act centralized assistance and extended the controversial means test, provoking protests in areas like the Rhondda (1935). The Jarrow March (October–November 1936) saw around 200 men walk some 300 miles to London, highlighting regional distress. Walpole’s story-world reflects these conditions through depictions of civic duty, charitable committees, and the moral pressure to appear respectable while confronting the realities of relocation, rent, and relief.
The rise of European fascism and Britain’s homegrown authoritarian fringe unsettled public life. Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932; its Blackshirts were met by mass resistance at the Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936 in East London. Abroad, the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) polarized opinion: Britain adhered to non-intervention (August 1936), yet roughly 2,500 volunteers from Britain joined the International Brigades and around 3,800 Basque children found refuge in Britain in May 1937. The novel channels these currents in drawing-room debates and neighborhood committees, where pacifism, anti-fascism, deference to authority, and humanitarian impulses contend within families and friendship circles.
The abdication crisis of 1936 thrust constitutional and moral issues into everyday conversation. Edward VIII abdicated on 11 December 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, and George VI was crowned on 12 May 1937. The BBC, chartered in 1927, carried royal broadcasts that reached millions; by 1939 there were about 9 million licensed radio sets. Weekly cinema admissions approached 19–20 million by 1938, with newsreels shaping public understanding. Walpole, a cultural insider knighted in 1937, knew how mass media fused national drama with domestic ritual. The Joyful Delaneys captures households gathered round the wireless and cinema queues, revealing how monarchy, celebrity, and civic identity intertwined in a newly mediated public sphere.
The climacteric of appeasement and rearmament defined British life from 1936 to 1939. After German troops entered the Rhineland on 7 March 1936 and annexed Austria on 12 March 1938, the Sudeten crisis culminated in the Munich Conference of 29–30 September 1938, where Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini negotiated the cession of the Sudetenland. Chamberlain’s return on 30 September, with the phrase peace for our time, briefly calmed fear while deepening national division over appeasement. Meanwhile, the Air-Raid Precautions Act 1937 obliged local authorities to plan for bombing. From autumn 1938, millions of gas masks were issued; by September 1939, about 38 million had been distributed. Anderson shelters, first introduced in February 1939, were installed across back gardens; sandbags banked public buildings; blackout rehearsals became routine. Evacuation planning—Operation Pied Piper—was refined after Munich and executed in the first days of September 1939, when roughly 1.5 million people, including some 800,000 children, left vulnerable cities. The Joyful Delaneys reflects this tightening coil of preparation: volunteer wardens train, householders test masks, and ordinary conversations tilt toward maps, sirens, and the price of tinned goods. Walpole uses these details not for melodrama but to register how domestic intimacy absorbs geopolitics—how a family lunch can be punctuated by talk of shelters, how a shopping trip detours past sandbagged doorways. The result is a portrait of a society that wants peace yet learns to inventory its cupboards, embodying both national prudence and the fatigue that presaged wartime resilience.
Shifts in gender and generational roles also inform the novel’s social canvas. Political enfranchisement had advanced with the Representation of the People Act 1918 and the Equal Franchise Act 1928; the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937 eased divorce. Women’s clerical and retail employment expanded, even as marriage bars persisted in parts of the civil service and banking. The Education Act 1936 planned to raise the school-leaving age to 15, though war delayed implementation. Walpole’s own cosmopolitan life—wartime service in Russia in 1916–1917, a Hollywood stint and cameo in 1935, residence in the Lake District, and a knighthood in 1937—equipped him to trace how public modernity reworks private loyalties, especially for daughters and sons seeking new vocations.
The book functions as a quiet social and political critique by juxtaposing buoyant domestic rituals with structural insecurity. It probes the moral costs of appeasement-era comfort, showing how respectability and good manners can obscure unemployment, the means test, and the unequal burden of housing change. Conversations about monarchy and media expose anxieties over authority and spectacle, while scenes of charitable work question paternalist solutions to systemic distress. The looming emergency of 1938–1939 reveals class divides in access to safety, mobility, and information. Without polemic, Walpole discloses the fragility beneath middle-class optimism, indicting complacency and urging civic seriousness in a society on the threshold of war.
The Joyful Delaneys
CHAPTER I
HOW FRED DELANEY TALKED TO MR. MUNDEN, A POET —AND THEN HAD BREAKFAST WITH HIS FAMILY
‘Happy New Year!’ Fred Delaney said, standing in the doorway and smiling at the in-no-way beautiful person of Mr. Munden.
He had switched on the electric light, and the illumination revealed Patrick Munden[1] lying half in, half out of the bedclothes. No, he was not beautiful, his thin pointed face unshaven, his black hair spread about the pillow, his lean body protected from the cold by pyjamas, grey with blood-red stripes, by no means so fresh as they should be. The light pressed on Munden’s eyes and he opened them, stared wildly about him, then, cursing, buried his face in the pillow.
‘Happy New Year!’ Delaney said again.
‘What the hell——’
‘Eight-thirty. You asked me as a special favour to call you.’
Munden raised his head and stared at Delaney. It was not a bad-looking face. The blue eyes were good, the forehead broad and clear, the chin finely pointed. He looked clever and peevish and hungry. He stretched himself, his open pyjama jacket showing a chest skeletonic and hairy. He rubbed his eyes with a hairy wrist.
‘Oh, it’s you, is it? Let me sleep, can’t you?’
Delaney watched him with genial good temper.
‘I’m doing you a favour. You said last night it would be the greatest of your life. You have to see the editor of something or other at ten sharp.’
‘He can go to hell. Turn the light off and let me sleep.’
‘You said I was to drag you out of bed if necessary—that your whole life depended on your getting there at ten.’
‘Well, it doesn’t. Let me sleep, can’t you?’
‘All right. But I’ll leave the light on ...
‘No, don’t go.’ Munden sat up, blinking. ‘How damnably fresh you look! It’s revolting. You were up till three, I don’t doubt——’
‘I was,’ Delaney said cheerfully. ‘I don’t need a lot of sleep.’
‘Well, I do.... Oh, blast! Why did I ever tell you anything about it?’
‘You were very serious. Most earnest. You said you must begin the New Year properly.’
‘Speaking of which, can you lend me a fiver?’ Munden asked. ‘Only for a week.’
‘Afraid I haven’t got such a thing,’ Delaney said, laughing.
‘Hang it all, I paid you the rent only a week ago——’
‘Thanks very much. But those are the terms, you know. If you don’t pay you go. Although we’d hate to lose you.’
Munden sighed.
‘Look in the trousers, old man, will you? They’re hanging over the chair. See if there’s anything there.’
Delaney looked in the trousers and found half a crown, some coppers, a lipstick and a half-filled packet of cigarettes. He laid these things on the dressing-table.
‘You don’t use lipstick, I hope, Patrick?’
‘No, of course not. What do you think I am? How much is there?’
‘Two and ninepence halfpenny.’
‘I’ll make them advance something on the two articles. You wouldn’t like to buy a Chrysler[2], would you?’
‘A Chrysler? Whatever for?’
‘It’s a marvellous bargain. Ponsonby’s only had it a year and simply not used it at all. He’d let you have it for one-fifty and I’d get a commission.’
Delaney laughed. ‘We go round in our Morris—just as we always have—same old family, same old Morris.’
Munden looked at him with curiosity. ‘I don’t understand you, Fred. You own this house; every bit of it is let to people who pay their rent. You’re none of you what I’d call extravagant and yet you never have any cash.’ He stared resentfully. He went on: ‘You’re a horrid sight—so cheerful and clean and bright. You’re all like that. I ought to hate the lot of you. So unintellectual too. You never read a book, have horrible bourgeois politics, believe in things, in England, beautiful virginal girls, Dickens, cricket, football.... Oh, God! You’re vile! I don’t know why I go on living here.’
‘You live here, Patrick,’ Delaney said, ‘because you get this room damn cheap, it’s a first-class address, and you like us—you can have breakfast with us if you want to.’
‘I don’t need your charity,’ Munden said. ‘What I really want to know is why you look so disgustingly happy, all of you? What is there to be happy about?’
‘Oh, the usual things. Little things mostly. For instance, I’m hungry and I’m going down to a good breakfast.’
‘No. Wait a minute. I really want to know ...’
‘Want to know what?’
‘Why you Delaneys are so cheerful and why I don’t hate you for it.’
‘Why should you hate us for being cheerful?’
‘How can you be cheerful with the state the world’s in?’
Delaney turned to the door. ‘Here, I’ve really got to go. You’re properly awake now. I’ve done my job. Anyway,’ he went on, ‘the world’s been in a mess plenty of times before and will be again. As a family we’re just like anybody else. I’ve got the hell of a temper, and you should see Meg when I come back at three in the morning, and Kitty can raise the deuce——’
‘Kitty’s a darling,’ Munden said morosely. ‘Whenever I make love to her she laughs.’
‘Yes, Kitty can look after herself,’ Delaney said, smiling.
‘No. But don’t you understand?’ Munden began to get excited. ‘You’re going against the whole trend of the world. We shall all be Communists soon. Those of us who are left. The next war——’
‘All right,’ Delaney said. ‘You go on talking to yourself. I’ve heard all this so many times. Meanwhile there’s my breakfast ...’
Munden got up and leaned his long bony legs over the bed. He stretched his long bony arms and yawned. His hair stood up on end. Some of it tickled his eyes.
‘You’re wonderful for your years,’ he said to Delaney.
‘I’m only fifty-two.’
‘You look about forty.’
He was right. Delaney was fine for his years. He still had plenty of hair, brown and curly. His eyes were bright blue, his cheeks ruddy, his body tall, straight, muscular, non-corpulent. He had beautiful hands, and when he smiled he wrinkled at the corners of his eyes. His nose was straight and his mouth soft-lined but not weak. His clothes were excellent—easy, well-fitting, fresh as flowers in the spring, but, beyond all things, comfortable. He looked what he was, an active, care-free, good-natured Irish gentleman, who might have the devil of a temper, whose heart was good, conscience easy, sentimental a bit, quarrelsome a bit, honest, careless, and of an excellent digestion.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ Munden said peevishly. ‘I might get my clothes from your tailor, be shaved by the best barber in London, have a bath twice a day, walk for miles. I’d never look straight from the canvas as you do.... Not that I want to,’ he added. ‘You’re the type—good healthy Englishman—that to-day is an absurd anachronism. In another fifty years your type will be extinct, thank God. You’re loathed by the whole world. Americans detest you, Germans spit on you, Italians despise you——’
‘I’m not English. I’m Irish,’ Delaney said mildly.
‘You were born in London, your father was born in London, your grandfather was born in London.’
‘Yes, London’s my city, thank God. And this house is my house. One more year of battle, beginning this minute. Do you know, Patrick, we never thought we’d keep her this last year, Meg and I?’
‘Keep her—keep who?’
‘Why, the house. Everyone wants her. Dollinger and Druitt are just aching to tear her down and build filthy flats over her corpse. Margraves would give us almost anything for her. Wunder and Thompson are at us every week——’
‘Well, why don’t you sell her? You and Meg torture yourselves making both ends meet, so you tell me. Get a nice fat cheque for her and live in the country where you belong. She’s bound to go sooner or later. Everything’s going. Nothing but shops here soon. You can hear Shepherd Market’s dying groans now if you listen.’
‘We’ll keep her, we’ll keep her![1q]’ Delaney cried. ‘Do you know Delaneys have lived in this house for two hundred and fifty years? Do you know the William and Mary clock[3] in our dining-room has been on that same Adam fireplace for nearly two hundred years?’
‘Well, what of it?’ said Munden contemptuously. ‘Isn’t that just what’s wrong with you? You and your clocks! Your William and Mary world is done for, completely finished, and the sooner it’s buried the better. There’s no British aristocracy any more, thank God. There’s no leisure, no money, no old culture, no beautiful England. There’s a new raw world, with every man for himself and all of us living under the shadow of imminent death. That tickles a man’s vitals, that’s something to watch and share in—the whole of civilization going down together with a crash-bang. That’s truth, that’s reality, that’s poetry!’
Munden was quite excited now and was walking about the room, tossing his head and hugging his meagre body with his long arms.
‘I’ve got you out of bed anyway,’ said Delaney. He turned at the door for one last word. ‘As to the end of civilization, what rot you poor fellows talk! Civilization doesn’t end like that. There are changes, of course, but nothing that’s ever happened in a place dies. The history in this house is deathless. Anyway, Meg and I are going to keep it, save it for another year of its lovely life if we ourselves die in the process.’
‘Yes, you stuff it with decaying bodies and call that life. “Going, going, gone, gentlemen!” The British aristocracy! Who wants to watch the last agonies, catch the final groan, the wheezy whimper, the faint whistle through the air as the life expires! By God, that’s good!’
Munden wheeled round. ‘There’s stuff for a poem there!’
‘There’s stuff for a poem,’ Delaney said, ‘in every inch of the ground from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner. Isn’t it pleasant to think, Patrick, of how, not very long ago as time is, the Anglo-Saxons knew this very place where we are as Bulinga-Fen, a horrible marshy swamp? Do you know that round Buckingham Palace the ground is still water-logged?’ As Delaney worked himself up a faint touch of brogue could be caught. Munden had moved into the bathroom, and Delaney came to the other side of the bed and began to shout. ‘Yes, and think of Hay Hill where the Prince Regent was robbed once—Aye Hill it is really—the Aye Bourne, and so you get Tyburn. Well, there was a stream ran all the way down from Hampstead through Marylebone, across Oxford Street, Stratford Place, lower part of Brook Street, Bruton Mews to the foot of Hay Hill. It ran through May Fair and entered the Green Park in the hollow of Piccadilly (there was a stone bridge over it). Then on, under Buckingham Palace to the Thames. All the way from Hampstead heights to the Thames. It’s still running. The Early Britons bathed in it and you can still see a trickle of it under the ventilators of Green Park. The Aye Bourne, the meadowlands of Mayfair, the milkmaids’ song where the Ritz is, the reaper whistling in Half Moon Street, hares coursed down Bond Street——’
‘Oh, damn and blast!’ Munden said. ‘What did I use a new razor-blade for?’
‘And then,’ continued Delaney, who, his bright eyes shining, had advanced to the bathroom door (he must raise his voice now against the running bath-water), ‘what about Old Q? He would sit with his muffs and his stockings from Paris and his three-cornered hat in his Piccadilly window ogling the women, his head shaded by a parasol, held by a powdered footman—or old General Blücher, sitting in an armchair on the top of a flight of steps at the hall door, smoking a pipe and acknowledging the salutations of the passer-by? Or the crowd breaking the windows of Apsley House and learning that Wellington’s Duchess lay dead inside and going quietly away, or Palmerston riding his horse every morning down Piccadilly to the House of Commons ... and who started it all? Do you know that, Pat? Ever heard of Robert Baker? He was a tailor, my lad, who in 1615 was rated at twenty pence for ten acres of agricultural land behind the King’s Mews at the Town’s End. That started it all round here, for the King’s Mews went from Trafalgar Square to the Haymarket, and Mr. Baker, tailor, built many houses and one of them was called “Piccadilly.” There his residence was at the corner of Windmill Street, and perhaps they were mocking the tailor for setting himself up in the world and his house was a nickname after a ruff or collar called “Pickadel” ...’
Munden raised his face from the bath in which he was now lying. ‘My dear Fred, you may be my landlord, but that’s no reason at all why you should also be my schoolmaster....’
‘And then there’s Baroness Burdett-Coutts’ white cockatoo which my father used to see hanging every day inside the window overlooking Green Park. A mob of rioters stopped in the street once to argue whether it was real or sham and, having stopped, they raised a cheer for the Baroness and forgot the riot.’
‘And was it real?’ asked Munden.
‘No. It was sham.’
‘Well, that’s enough. If you won’t lend me five quid, clear out. Only a week, mind.’
‘Afraid not,’ Delaney sighed. ‘Meg will be thinking I’ve overslept. Cheer up, Patrick. The editor will take your articles, I don’t doubt. I read one of them somewhere last week saying that any writers to-day who are not Communists should be ashamed of themselves. Why shouldn’t writers be what they happen to be? Why this sheep and goat division by politics?’
‘Don’t you begin to talk about literature, Fred. I suppose there’s no one in London knows less about it than you do.’
‘Well, I can’t read your poetry, if that’s what you mean,’ said Delaney.
‘It isn’t written for you.’
‘Who is it written for?’
Munden grinned. ‘Damned if I know,’ he said.
Fred Delaney went on down to his breakfast.
Patrick Munden’s attic rooms were at the top of the house, then came the flat of Lady Helen Pake and Lady Millie Pake, then the flat of the Honourable ‘Smoke’ Pullet and ‘Dodie’ Pullet, his wife. Lastly, on the ground floor, was the abiding-place of the Delaneys themselves.
So he must, to reach his breakfast, descend from the top to the bottom of the house—must descend, after leaving Munden’s attic, by the great staircase itself. It always amused them to call it that, although in fact it was not so very large—only ‘quite, quite too beautiful,’ as Millie Pake, sighing gently, used to murmur. They had cleverly—when, in 1930, the great ‘conversion’ had taken place—managed without disturbing the staircase. ‘Like a piece of music,’ their friend Connie Beaminster always said it was. Perhaps it was. As, from below, you looked upwards and saw it turn the corner the rhythm of its movement was musical, and the dark deep patina of the wood, exquisitely simple, profoundly right, was like a Palestrina tune that repeats itself and repeats, but never too often. ‘Rather rot,’ Fred Delaney thought, ‘comparing all these things with one another. A staircase is a staircase.’
But, although he was almost running down, he yet had time to reflect that he was glad (and proud too) that they had been able to keep it as it was. That ‘conversion’ time had been terrible, dividing the big rooms into little ones without destroying too fearfully their character, putting in the baths, the kitchenettes. Poor house, poor house! It had seemed, when the work was in progress, as though a blow had been struck at its very heart; but that young architect, Mortimer, how clever he had been! and how tremendous his bill had been too! Well, no matter—it was all paid for by now, and so long as Munden and the dear old Pakes and the Pullets paid up at the proper time, ends were just met and the house was saved. The day would come when, his ship sailing into port, he would turn them out and restore the house to its own true life again; then Bullock should be master, and to his sons in their turn the house should be handed on....
Whistling, he had reached the door of his own particular dining-room.
Before we go inside with him a word ought to be said about the Delaneys; Margaret—Meg—Mrs. Delaney, her son Bullock, her daughter Kitty.
Meg Delaney was at this time a tall, rather stout, magnificent middle-aged lady who looked, in her more dishevelled moments, like a gipsy fortuneteller at the Derby. Sometimes her raven-black hair was beautifully dressed and her clothes superb. Because of her black hair and high colouring she could wear clothes of gold and orange and crimson. When, altogether at her grandest, she entered a ballroom or was a late guest at a fine party (she was always unpunctual) everyone gasped. She was better than the Queen of Sheba. Her uncle, Lord Renys, a little horsy man, full of oaths, had, when alive, been so proud of her that, if he had had any money, he would have showered her with gifts. But most people adored her even when they were most enraged with her.
She had always had in her a burning fire of happiness—happiness often enough without rhyme or reason. Sometimes this fire died down very low and then she would cry: ‘My God, why, oh, why was I ever born!’ Her tempers were as prodigious as evanescent, her generosities absurdly lavish and sometimes disastrous. She was altogether honest, loyal, courageous and indiscreet. Her behaviour was extravagant and vexing.
But this happiness that she felt and was quite unable to account for, gave her a kind of radiance; it was a happiness entirely without selfishness. She made friends on the instant with anybody—on buses, trains, in shops. Beggars in the street always caught her. You might tell her again and again that they were rolling in riches and, anyway, drank what she gave them—it made no difference. She had always been as poor as a rat herself: her father, Captain Wendover, ‘Mumps’ Wendover, had lived by precarious gambling on the Continent, attended by a succession of beautiful ladies. Her mother having died when Meg Wendover was six, Meg Wendover had kicked herself up into life rather than grown into it. She adored Delaney her husband and her two children, but preserved, with all her impetuosity, warmth of heart, friendliness, a curious, unstained independence.
They were perhaps rather naïve and unsophisticated, these Delaneys; many people thought so and patronized them heartily. Kitty and Bullock had something of this same naïveté.
Kitty, nineteen years of age, was, everyone said, ’very sweet.’ She disliked intensely this description of herself. What she wanted to be was strange, austere, remote, but gaiety would keep breaking in. She was tall and slight, dark in colouring like her mother, with very bright eyes, but not really beautiful, because her nose was snub. Unlike her mother, she was neat and quietly dressed. She was not clever, read but little, cared nothing for music or painting or (the craze at this time in her set) current politics or social economy. She was neither Communist nor Fascist, but tried to listen seriously when her friends ardently discussed these things. She had hosts of friends and was constantly made love to. She was as free in speech and knowledge sexually as were all her friends, but remained virginal, apart, in such matters. One thing about her that her friends thought odd was that she was rigidly teetotal, not from any principles but because she detested the taste of liquor. When a man kissed her she did not resist, but, in some fashion, conveyed to him that he would find someone else more amusing.
She had, of course, very little money but managed cleverly. At present the strongest instinct developed in her was the maternal. She was passionately interested in people, and anyone who was in trouble came to her chiefly because she was never bored and had a practical mind. She was always on the side of the underdog, often very unwisely. She could be impetuous like her mother and then, quite unexpectedly, calm, practical, reserved. She supposed she would have to find a job, but which job was the question. Her only real gifts lay in her relations with people. Some of her friends thought that she would be excellent at Girls’ Clubs and such. But she knew that she would not be good, because as soon as anything was organized she lost her interest in it.
Behind her gaiety, love of life, busy days, devotion to her family, was a private never-expressed wonder and expectation—something was coming, something must be coming, a great event that would, in one instant, change everything. What this event would be she had no idea.
Her brother, Bullock, was in one particular a great disappointment. He had been a small stocky boy, a useful scrum-half at King’s School, Canterbury, where he had received his nickname of Bullock. (His real name was Stephen.) He had then gone to Oxford, been cox in his College’s first boat, and, to everyone’s surprise, had not grown an inch. He had never grown any more and was so short that it would have been ludicrous had he not been broad-shouldered and sturdy-legged. He had a round merry face and was immaculate in his appearance. He had a deep voice rather like his mother’s and the blue eyes of his father.
He made a very small and precarious income by writing ‘funny bits’ for Punch and other publications. He had two gods at whose shrine he worshipped: Surtees and Mr. P. G. Wodehouse. He liked almost every girl in sight but no girl in particular. He would sit, with his short legs crossed, thinking, then suddenly slap his knee, cry aloud ‘By Jove, that’s good!’ whip out a pocket-book and write something down. He worshipped his sister, owned a dachshund called Endless to whom he confided many of his best witticisms; he found most people extraordinarily funny. Especially poets like Munden seemed to him excruciating, but he had learned that to laugh in people’s faces hurt their feelings, so he would stare, his face very grave, his eyes puckered up, struggling to be polite. He had beautiful manners. To old ladies especially he was quite old-world in his courtesy. Like all the Delaneys he was very happy-go-lucky and refused to be excited when Mussolini was rude to his country or Hitler talked about gun-fodder. He kept his small bedroom as neat as a pin and was apt to be indignant if anyone touched his possessions. He was always busy from morning to night and would comment in an exaggerated way on quite ordinary things like the state of the weather, an accident with the Morris or an incident at his Club.
When Delaney stood inside the room and looked at his family he felt, as he always did on such occasions, a deep affection. The room itself with its cream-coloured walls, the fireplace, the William and Mary clock, the pictures, two Rowlandsons, a large portrait over the fireplace of his grandfather, a fine merry gentleman in a very decorative uniform, his grandmother, an old lady with twinkling eyes, her black corkscrew curls hanging from under a lace cap, a Wilson landscape, the very good Chippendale chairs, the sideboard with the silver breakfast dishes, the dark plum-coloured window-curtains, the fire leaping with a kind of eagerness as though it had never been a fire before and had had no idea what an amusing thing it would prove to be, Endless the dachshund, his black beady eyes fixed in a kind of trance on his master; his family—Kitty, as always officiating, pouring out the coffee, laughing at something her mother had just said; Bullock at the sideboard lifting up the silver covers to see what was there; and Meg—Meg herself—in a loose morning-gown of some dark purple with gold braid at the neck and wrists, a costume that would have seemed tawdry on most women but looked exactly right on her, her black hair piled high on her head (she would not dream of cutting, clipping, bobbing, waving, cropping), her long white hands with the rings that she loved, examining her letters, talking, laughing, swearing, reminiscing, despairing, exulting.... He looked at her and thought how, early that same morning, she had lain in his arms and been like a little child, rubbing her cheek against his, enchanting him with those long slow kisses that were so peculiarly hers. For he had known many, many women in his time and there had never been any one like Meg—no one like Meg for comradeship, gaiety, sensuality, honesty, humour, and that final necessity in life, freedom of soul both given and taken when life demanded it.
She heard the door close and looked up. ‘You’re late, disgracefully late. We are all finished. Here’s a letter from Barty Perrin and he has the cheek to ask for a meal next Friday. He doesn’t like us, but he’d go anywhere rather than pay for his own food....’
Delaney went over and kissed his daughter. ‘Darling, how are you? Did you sleep beautifully? ... Oh, Barty isn’t a bad sort but he hasn’t a bean. He worships you, but you’re so unkind to him. Yes, I’m late. I went up to get Patrick out of bed and he kept me talking....’
‘And,’ Meg went on, ‘here’s a letter from old Alice Pomery. Why, she must be ninety if she’s a day! I can remember her perfectly well at Nice, that time Father won such a lot at the tables and rented that absurd house in the Rue de—Rue de what was its name? Never mind. It was a house like a pair of pink stays set up on end—all ribs. We had the most enormous parties. I used to come down for dessert and old men covered with scent used to pinch my legs. I remember Alice perfectly well. She was a little woman with a face like a pretty pig and she had a French poodle that I adored. She was married then to old Lord Worgan and when he tried to kiss her she’d hold her head back and say “Non. Non. Pas aujourd’hui.” She liked to talk the most excruciating French and no one knew why, and he ran away with a Salvation Army girl from Liverpool or somewhere. Extraordinary how I remember that house. I was supposed to share a room right at the top with a French governess whom Father had engaged, but she was always sleeping with some man or other, so I’d be alone and—terrified! My God, but I was terrified! The house used to shake as though it had an ague, and there were rats. I saw one once, nibbling at the wood of one of the chairs. You didn’t know rats did that, did you, darling? And the whole place smelt of patchouli. There was dust everywhere and plants in pots, dead as anything....’
She stopped quite suddenly and stared at her husband.
‘How beautiful you are, Fred! So fresh and cool. Give me a kiss, darling.’
Fred kissed her. Her warm arm lay against his cheek.
Then he remarked: ‘It’s New Year’s Day.’ No one said anything, so he repeated it: ‘It’s New Year’s Day.’
Kitty smiled at him over the coffee. ‘Of course, darling, we know that. I was with the Whartons at Quaglino’s[4] and we drank the New Year in over and over again.’ She wrinkled her forehead. ‘Nice place. Nice people—but I don’t know. I agree with Endless. Breakfast’s better than supper.’
‘Why, if that’s all you’ve got to say about the New Year! Don’t you realize? We’ve kept the house for another year—and now we’ve got to keep it for a year more! Caesar asked for a rise last night—I’m afraid he’ll have to go.’
Bullock lifted his face from his plate. ‘Caesar go, Father? Oh, impossible! We’ll never get anyone as good again! Why, I’d rather give him what I make out of my writing. I would really.’
Delaney shook his head. ‘It’s all very well. Give Caesar more and then the General will want more, and then everything topples over!’
Meg tore off her two diamond rings and pushed them beside Delaney’s plate.
‘Sell these, darling,’ she said in her richest contralto. This was a gesture she’d often made before. They all laughed, and Endless, who realized that excitement was in the air, gave a series of short staccato barks.
‘No, it’s all very well,’ Fred Delaney went on. ‘Patrick says we’re fools to hold on to the house as we do when we could get a nice fat sum and live comfortably in Sussex or somewhere. But he doesn’t understand. He knows nothing about the past. He’s no feeling for London or any place. He’s as detached as a bird in the air. All he thinks of is his beastly unintelligible poetry....’
Meg caught her husband’s hand and held it fast.
‘It’s all right, darling. You shall have your London. You shall have your house—even though I have to sell my body to keep it for you. That’s what Bridget is always saying: “I’d sell my body to give Harry what he wants.” So silly—no one would give her a penny for her old body. But what I want to know’—here she leaned her firm bosom right over the table, her purple robe floating about her—‘is—what does Caesar want a rise for? We pay him nobly—nobly! Don’t we pay him nobly, Fred? You have all those things in your head. What do we pay him and why does he want a rise?’
‘We pay him,’ Delaney said, ‘well, I don’t know about nobly. But quite enough. Of course he says he will stay with us even if we pay him nothing at all. But it’s his mother. She can’t ever forget she was lodge-keeper at Wintersmoon. She’s the greatest old boor the world has ever known, and Caesar says she has neuritis and he has to buy a lot of things for her.’
‘Pay him! Pay him!’ Meg cried. ‘Raise his wages. We’ll raise the rent on the Pullets.’
‘You know we can’t, darling. It’s a miracle they pay us as it is. How they live I can’t imagine.’
‘They were at Quaglino’s last night,’ Kitty remarked. ‘Looking as swell as anything. Dodie was as near nude as not to matter, but what she did have on was lovely. Must have cost her a fortune. Two wisps of something and a silver band. They danced together all the evening.’
‘Raise their rent,’ Meg said. ‘Then they’ll go and we’ll get somebody else. “Smoke” Pullet always frightens me. One day he’ll be desperate. I can see it growing behind his eyes. They’re nice. I like them. But I don’t want their climax here. You know, children, this is a happy house. It is really. There isn’t a soul inside it’s got a farthing—all the same it’s a darling house, a darling house. I never was so happy anywhere.’
Bullock, who had finished his breakfast, came from the fire and laid his cheek for a moment against his mother’s.
‘Sweetheart, it isn’t the house that’s happy, it’s you. You really are a radiant woman.’
‘I know.’ Delaney looked at them all. ‘Patrick says we’re revolting. He says we’re selfish, self-centred, behind the times. The world is falling, falling. Civilization is going out with a bang. And here we are happy, contented.’
‘And what did you say?’ Kitty asked.
‘I said that yes, we were happy. We had small minds and were pleased with small things. I said, too, that the world has often fallen to pieces before but nevertheless the seasons returned punctually and were charming at each return, that our digestions were good, and we couldn’t be called the rich mocking the poor because there was probably no one in all London poorer than we were. All the same, perhaps we’re smug.’ He looked at Meg and laughed. ‘Darling, are you smug?’
She was slipping her diamond rings on and off her fingers. She looked up aimlessly.
‘Am I? I don’t know what I am. Who knows what they are anyway?’
And then the door opened.
First there was Caesar. Caesar’s real name was Rudge and he was butler, footman, messenger boy, shoe-cleaner, gossip and friend to the Delaney family. He was known also as the Dickens character, being a remarkable combination of Weller, Pickwick, Poor Joe, Traddles, Mark Tapley and now and again (Delaney said) Silas Wegg, all these raised on a basis of Cockney. He had been in service from birth, his mother being lodge-keeper at Wintersmoon in the days of the old Duke of Romney. He had been simply no age at all when he had helped in the pantry, and then in cocked hat and gaiters sat in the back of the trap that went to the station for luggage, and then (wonderful promotion) had been the Duke’s own body-servant under Sellars (how deeply he had loathed Sellars! how truly he had worshipped the old white-haired Duke!).
Then had come changed times and Wildherne Poole had married, the old Duke had died, hard days had followed. Wintersmoon had been closed for a long while and was only open again in part. Then that Duke had died and his son, still a boy, reigned in his stead, or rather his mother, the Duchess (a fine good woman surely), reigned in his stead.
All this Caesar had constantly from his old mother with whom he lived in two rooms above the news-vendor’s in Shepherd Market. Caesar was short, bony, but very cheerful-featured. No beauty with his large mouth and sharp little Cockney eyes, but he was a faithful devoted soul, feeling proud—even in these days—of his place as a family servant. There were still many of his kind in London, born into service and proud of it, thinking it no degradation, hating more than anything else ‘the bloody Bolshies.’ ‘What nonsense!’ Caesar would say to Mrs. Ganter, the cook, known as The General. ‘Men’s born to be different. Start ’em all level, and in no time at all one’s up, one’s down. Share and share alike! I’d like to see Ma share anything she’s got with anyone else.’
He liked all four Delaneys and would work himself to the bone for them, but finances were a terrible problem with him. His old mother was always ‘fancying something’—food, drink, a book or a trinket. And if she didn’t get it she’d cry and say that no one loved her any more and it would be better if she’d died long before. Her whims and fancies cost money. Moreover Caesar wasn’t sure, but he fancied that for the first time in his life he was really in love ... no, he couldn’t be sure, but it looked a little like it.
Dressed in his official black suit, his funny ugly grinning face glitteringly shaved, he looked a respectable retainer. He introduced the visitors without a word, as well he might, for they were part of the family. There were three of them—Larry Delaney, Fred’s brother, Phyllis his wife, and an exceedingly pretty, slim, shy-looking girl. Larry Delaney resembled his brother in his fair curly hair, rosy countenance, general freshness, but he was stouter and coarser. You could see at once, however, that he had all his elder brother’s cheerful indifference to the dangers of to-morrow and enjoyment of the present hour. He looked a little less of a person than Fred, shallower, less important. He earned a precarious living by acting as a sort of middle-man in Society. That is he went, with Phyllis his wife, everywhere, discovered that someone wanted to sell something, persuaded someone else that that was exactly what he or she wanted to purchase, and then brought buyer and seller together. He then received a commission. Practically everything in Mayfair was for sale—pictures, furniture, silver—you could enter no house or flat in Mayfair nowadays without someone saying to you, ‘Don’t you love that Turner water-colour? I happen to know you could have it for almost a song. It’s a damned shame, but Dodo’s being forced to sell almost all her lovely old things.’ So that it was positively dangerous now in any house or flat to look at anything with too personal an appreciation because at once someone said, ‘Do you like that? Rather lovely, don’t you think? I’ll have a word with Doris after lunch and see if I can’t persuade her....’
Things being as they are, Larry Delaney’s job should have been a lucrative one. There were, however, a number of drawbacks to it as a career, one of the principal being that people were curious about payment. Also a sort of Exchange and Mart went on, so that he would receive a note:
Darling Larry—I’m sure Sophy won’t mind if I delay in paying for the bit of tapestry which really isn’t as nice as I first thought it. I have by the way a really lovely Charles II musical box which has been in the family ever since Charles gave it himself to my great-great (ever so many greats) Aunt who was his Mistress you know for quite a while. Don’t you think Sophy would like the musical box? I’m sure it’s worth a lot more than the tapestry. After all, it was a gift from a King! Do see what you can do about it, darling Larry.
And then, of course, he was as likely as not to get no commission at all. However, Phyllis and he worked very hard and went about everywhere and, perhaps, didn’t do so badly.
Lastly there was the exquisite silent girl with the white face, red lips and wide-open startled eyes. She was a Miss Alice Van Renn, whose old mother was an energetic silly snobbish widow. Mother and daughter had two rooms in Half Moon Street. The old lady was aristocratic and poor. The girl Alice had a kind aunt who had paid for her ‘finishing’ in Paris. Thence she had but lately returned. Fred Delaney, in fact, had never seen her before, and now he stared at this lovely thing in his doorway as though he had been struck from heaven.
Alice Van Renn had such perfect features that she was almost unreal. Although her colouring was pale, yet it was exquisite. To stroke her cheek was the first natural desire of any natural male, and Delaney was a very natural male indeed. No one knew whether Alice was brilliantly clever or exquisitely stupid, for she spoke but little. What was heavenly, maddening, to every man was that she appeared to be in a kind of trance; she was as yet unawakened. To be the first to achieve that awakening, there was an ambition!
In any case at this particular moment Fred Delaney stood with his mouth a little open, staring, and Meg Delaney saw that it was so.
‘Happy New Year!’ said everybody.
And so, with that ancient greeting, new events in the Delaney family began.
CHAPTER II
BROCKET’S
On that same New Year morning, not very far from the Delaneys’ breakfast-table, at the precise moment when Fred Delaney gazed for the first time, open-mouthed, at Miss Alice Van Renn, Mr. Claude St. John Willoughby woke up in his bed at Number Twenty-three White Horse Street, Shepherd Market[5], to find Brocket standing in his doorway looking at him, even as Patrick Munden had found Fred Delaney.
A very different greeting this, however, from the other: not at all friendly—quite the contrary.
Claude St. John Willoughby sat up and rubbed his eyes.
Mr. Brocket in his shirt-sleeves and only-too-familiar brown apron said in a voice intended to be elegantly and even classically ironic, but, in reality, thick, beery and brutal:
‘I was only wondering when your lordship intended to rise and allow ’is room to be done—no offence, but it’s past nine o’clock.’
These last words were said with a tang like the slap of a wave on a rock. Mr. Willoughby looked at Brocket and thought how loathsome he was. Brocket had the build of a prize-fighter, but instead of the jolly purple countenance set about with a crooked nose and a cauliflower ear that you might expect, his skin had the thick grey-white consistency of dough, and his head was especially unpleasant, being bald like a tonsured priest’s, with a fringe of grey hair round a faintly yellow poll, grey hair that appeared, unless you looked at it very steadily, to be always a trifle on the move.
He was clean-shaven, and the end of his wide-nostrilled nose, his lips, and his hands were always damp. He appeared during most of the day in his shirt-sleeves and a grey waistcoat on which there were yellow stains. His sleeves were rolled up and revealed brawny but unhealthy-pallored arms. On these also grey hairs crawled. His vast middle was always bound around with a faded brown apron. He wore in the morning slippers that gave him the appearance of webbed-feet, for they were sliced at the toes because of his corns. His slippers could be heard flap-flapping all over the house.
He was a bachelor but was reputed a devil with the women and immensely rich. This last was, in all probability, untrue, but he did own Number Twenty-three and let it out to bachelor gentlemen. Within Number Twenty-three he ruled like the God of the Israelites. Everyone trembled at his approach, more especially if he had had a drop or two. The bachelor gentlemen at present his tenants were: on the ground floor, Colonel Badget; on the second floor, Mr. Best; on the third floor, Major Pierson; and on the top floor, Mr. Willoughby.
Brocket behaved like a self-indulgent sensualist to his tenants. Of some he made favourites, others he tortured. At this present time Mr. Best was his favourite and Mr. Willoughby he tortured.
You may ask then—Why did Mr. Willoughby remain there? He remained because, in the first place, he was growing old (he had passed his seventieth birthday) and to change quarters now was an alarming business; secondly, because he was poor and his room was cheap; thirdly, because Brocket had a sort of terrible fascination for him; fourthly, because he could not conceive of saying: ‘Mr. Brocket, I think I will go away now.’
His room was cheap, but it was not very pleasant. It possessed only one small window and, being immediately under the roof, was very hot in summer, very cold in winter. He had to share the bath with Major Pierson on the third floor, and although Major Pierson had known this when he engaged his rooms, he was sometimes unagreeable about it.
There was not a great deal of space. There was a wash-stand, a table, an easy chair, two straight chairs, a glass cabinet behind which Claude Willoughby kept his treasures, and a wardrobe. On the mantelpiece were photographs of his mother, a girl to whom he had once been engaged, and a setter dog that he had once loved. Over the mantelpiece was an old engraving of Longton Hall in Derbyshire, once the family place, the house where he had been born. Everything was extremely neat and tidy. He himself sitting up in bed, his Adam’s-apple moving nervously within his bony neck, his few grey hairs still tidy on his head, his faint brown eyes anxious and concerned, was very neat and orderly. His thin bony hands were almost bloodless against the dark rug with which he covered the bed on cold nights. He raised one hand now to stroke nervously his short grey brush-moustache.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Something must have happened to the alarm-clock.’
‘Something must,’ said Brocket bitterly. ‘Didn’t you ’ear the girl come in? There’s your breakfast been on the table a hour if a minute—and stone cold by now.’
‘No, I didn’t hear the girl,’ Mr. Willoughby said with dignity. ‘Happy New Year!’ he added courteously.
Brocket studied him. ‘Marvellous how these old boys go on living,’ he thought. ‘You’d have thought he’d have been dead long ago.’
However, he didn’t want Mr. Willoughby to die. He paid the rent regularly, moreover Brocket felt a kind of sadistic affection for the old boy. He loved to see the look of timorous uncertainty creep into those brown eyes, he liked to raise his voice suddenly so that the old boy jumped, he liked to begin a complaint slowly, cumulatively, and then listen, with a glowering brow, to Mr. Willoughby’s slow, stammering explanations. Yes, he almost loved him. Mr. Willoughby was one of his principal daily entertainments.
However, this morning he had work to do, so with a grunt he departed and his slippers flip-flappered down the stairs.
Claude was delighted when he was gone. He raised his thin arms and yawned. Then, very carefully, for he had always, when he woke in the morning, a touch of lumbago[7], he got out of bed, felt for his brown dressing-gown, his faded green slippers, brushed his few grey locks with his old silver brushes, washed his face and hands and brushed his teeth, and then, humming a little tune (as though in pleasure at the departure of Brocket) sat down to his breakfast. It was not, of course, very agreeable: the tea was lukewarm, the toast was tough, and the two pieces of bacon had congealed round the one egg so that the dish looked like a very unappetizing surrealist painting. Nevertheless he was hungry and there was the Oxford Marmalade which oversleeping could not affect.
All the same how very odd that he had not heard the girl enter! She made always such a clatter! The way that she breathed through her nose was enough alone to waken him. And, being an old man, he was wide awake and staring at six o’clock as a rule. He had, however, gone to bed rather late last night. He had found at the newsvendor’s in Shepherd Market (they maintained a Lending Library; so obliging and kind they always were!) the reminiscences of old Colonel Blake called Random Shots and Tender Memories, and had sat up reading the book. It had brought the old delightful past so vividly back to him that his eyes had filled with tears as he read. He had known so many of the places and people that Reggie Blake had known. He remembered, as though it were yesterday, Ernest Cassell calling Reggie ‘a Tom Cat with a Hundred Tails,’ because Reggie had been an indefatigable raconteur—bit of a bore that way!
But there it was. He had sat up remembering old times, and so his breakfast was cold! There were, however, many pleasant things and one of the pleasantest was his Daily Telegraph. An extravagance, perhaps; but if so, his only one.
