A Voice Like Velvet. Martin Edwards

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      Locking the drawer and putting the key in his pocket, he sat down in his armchair and idly took up the newspaper. His latest adventure was spread about wherever there wasn’t any war news. He sat frowning and wanting to think about Marjorie and the future, but his thoughts were flooded with memories of Celia—and the past.

      Mr Bisham, amidst the stress of present problems, found it comfortable to tell himself he ought never to have met Celia. In the same way, it was comfortable to think that Marjorie ought never to have met that dreadful fellow Captain Bud. One of the first things she had suggested was that she and Ernest should tell each other everything they thought conducive to a successful second marriage. To this he had agreed; and whereas he had told her everything except the darkest secret in his life, she had told him absolutely everything. But if you were going to say that all couples who made dreadful marriages ought never to have met each other, it wasn’t going to get you anywhere. So perhaps it was better to think how character forming it was, or how character damaging. It was a kind of fast trick pulled by Life, or Fate, which had a perverted sense of humour at times; it was rather like a man who knows you are sincere and so pulls a fast one. It was true that later on it could make it up to the victims, who lay flat on their beds feeling rather tired. Life was a great one at timing, too, better than the very best actor. These little jokes always happened at the psychological moment; either you were broke, or desperate in some other way; Fate waved a wand shaped like a devil’s tail—and the trouble began. And the worst of it was it could go on and on; for, easy as it always was to get into trouble, it was perfectly frightful trying to get out of it. It was like trying to reland on a rocky coast when the storm was at its height. As a boy, Mr Bisham thought that his one and only bit of trouble was likely to be his father. He had much in common with Marjorie, for his mother had died before he had been old enough to know her, and for some hidden reason which even Bess didn’t know, Mr Bisham Senior had kept no photographs of her and never spoke of her. Even more queerly, Bess had herself been banished the Putney house when still a girl, and sent to a relative in far away Norfolk. Ernest knew nothing of her existence until he was adult, so strange were the ways of fathers. He never even contemplated enquiring about his mother, for his father was a formidable kind of man who didn’t go in for talking. He went in for silences. He was very high up in one of the Ministries, and his work in the Great War appeared to have been of a vital and secret nature. There were clues of various kinds that he had made the name of Bisham a very strong and reliable one, and perhaps it was the very knowledge of this that had perversely inspired Ernest to his unusual hobby, which he had first regarded, sinfully, indeed, as a profession. There were plenty of clues, too, that people were afraid of Mr Bisham Senior, and this also seemed to be a sort of challenge. Clerks would call at the Putney house, moving rather furtively, and they would timidly ask if they might be ushered into the Presence. And one of them always asked, pale, ‘What kind of mood is he in this morning, young man?’

      The house in Putney was square and formidable itself, cold through unnecessary coal economy, and all the doors seemed frightened to open. Where the Bisham relations hid, never came to light, and it was only later that he discovered Norfolk was the place. The only touch of humanity at all was old Mrs Clarkson and a series of charwomen who crept about with buckets to do the doorsteps. They stayed till they could stand the silences no longer and then fled from the place. Mrs Clarkson seemed to stand it; Ernest always supposed she was adaptable, like an old cat, and he grew very fond of her. She was always there all through his prep school days at Harrogate, and his public school days, and whenever he came back for holidays she looked after his clothes and tried hard to take the place of a mother or an aunt. She was a beady-eyed old thing with a witchlike chin, and he still remembered her frequent position, peeping at keyholes in his interest, to see how the latest silence was getting on within. Ernest got through unbelievable silences, usually with Havelock Ellis propped up against the water-jug, and now and again a spot of Meredith. It had long since dawned on him that life wasn’t playing fair by him. What was the use of being taught the public school notion that you must always be a sportsman and a gentleman, if life didn’t keep to the same rules? He was still at his public school when it occurred to him he might have to take the matter into his own hands sooner or later, but before he was quite ready to do so a schoolboyish incident set a strange train of thought seeping through his young mind. He was dared to climb through the Headmaster’s study window one wintry night and steal his birch. His reaction to this challenge startled even himself. He at once accepted the challenge and with an outward air of complete calm proceeded to accomplish the unnerving feat. He still remembered the intensity of his feelings in the darkness of that awe-inspiring study; the speaking furniture and the distant footsteps in the quadrangle outside: his noiseless return, with the birch prized out of the locked cupboard with a bit of wire. Moreover, on a second challenge, he calmly took it back again. And he remembered being asked: ‘But I say, man, weren’t you dead scared of being caught? It would have meant six of the best!’

      ‘I knew I wouldn’t be caught,’ he had answered, modestly but firmly.

      ‘Burglars always get caught!’

      ‘No! You only hear about the ones who get caught!’

      He was still sure of this and applied it to every crime. He was quite satisfied that an intelligent person could go all through life and not be caught—providing he wasn’t a fool and used his brains. He believed in the power of circumstances, and Fate, but not in this one direction. He believed a man could achieve anything he really wanted to achieve, if his mind was constantly applied to it. There was no question of getting caught. Yet this did not detract from the thrill—for he had no proof of his belief until life was over.

      Arriving home with these newly forming beliefs after his last term at school, he decided it was time to take his life in his hands so far as his father was concerned. Ever inclined to be impulsive, he took it into his hands after a singularly long silence at breakfast, by hurling Havelock Ellis across the room. It landed with a report like a revolver shot up against the buff wall. Mr Bisham Senior, however, carefully counted four minutes by his gold watch before looking up and saying, economically:

      ‘Well?’

      It was rather bad luck on Ernest to achieve such a discouraging start, especially when he had planned it all so carefully through many agonized nights. But having launched his attack, so to speak, he made a brave attempt to push ahead with it, despite enemy resistance at once hardening. He pleaded, simply, that as his school days were now at an end, he felt he would now like to take his life into his own care and keeping. What he also meant was that he would like a bit of income to do it with, but his nerve went before he could get this out. Deeds didn’t unnerve him, words did. His father looked gaunt, distinguished, eminently successful—and completely unlovable. Ernest knew what he himself must look like in contrast: a pale, scraggy and overgrown youth full of the usual inhibitions and frustrations, and yet at the same time an up-to-date edition of the very man he detested.

      He failed, however, to achieve a bridgehead.

      At any rate, he achieved one ambition that morning: he made his father speak! And it was amusing to remember now that his father told him scathingly—in answer to a remark about refusing to go to college or to any Ministry either: ‘I should have thought you would have wanted the name of Bisham to be a household word! I know I did, when I was your age!’ How queerly prophetic! It was a household word now all right: it went into every room, in cottage and castle; it even went into that very dining-room, likely as not, in that sinister house in Putney! Life, then, had the pleasing habit of righting itself, and apologizing for what it had done before. Did it stay right, and penitent? That was the next intriguing wonder. But in the days of the Putney house, life had seemed, as it often did to worried youth, most unlikely ever to right itself. In a burst of rage and daring he walked out of the house. Rather, he ran out of it. It was brave to think that he had walked out without any money at all, even though he had only gone along to Mrs Clarkson’s peculiarly smelly house off Hammersmith Broadway. He wasn’t the first person to have taken such a risk, and he wouldn’t be the last; СКАЧАТЬ