The Dawn of Reckoning (4 page)

Many a calm hour during the University vacations she used to squat down on
the hearth-rug in the library with her head propped up comfortably against
Philip’s legs, while he treated her to learned talks about English history,
politics, and literature. Not always were these talks enthrallingly
interesting, and sometimes Mrs. Monsell used to say, in her pert mocking
manner: “My dear Philip, I’m sure you must bore that girl dreadfully.” But if
Stella were present she always took up the defence. “Sometimes Philip is most
dreadfully
boring,” she admitted once, “but he is so nice to be bored
by.”

Outsiders, seeing the extent to which the two were together, gave many
warnings and much advice. “She really is extraordinarily pretty,” said the
wife of the vicar of Chassingford. “But aren’t you afraid that Philip will
fall madly in love with her?”

To which Mrs. Monsell replied characteristically “My dear, I assure you I
should be perfectly delighted if Philip ever did anything half so
sensible.”

Philip’s rooms at Cambridge were at the top of the corner
staircase of Christ’s, with windows that faced on the one side the
delightful, not quite rectangular quadrangle, and on the other the junction
of two narrow and busy streets. Opposite on the same staircase was another
set of rooms, and these were occupied, as the inscription on the door
announced, by a certain “A. Ward.”

They had come up to Christ’s together, Philip from his years of private
tuition and study, and Aubrey Ward from one of the lesser public-schools.
Though tenants of adjacent rooms they hardly spoke during their first year,
except for an occasional greet ing on the stairs; and indeed, it seemed that
they had little, if anything at all, in common. Philip was a “reading” man,
taking no part in sports of any kind, and allowing himself no recreation save
now and then a grim walk over the ploughed fields to Madingley. Ward, on the
other hand, was a keen Rugby player (having more than once been tried for the
University team), and the leading figure not only in most of the College
sports but in all the College “rags.”

The “gyp” who attended both sets of rooms was never tired of giving Philip
information about his neighbour. “I must say ‘e’s a very fair man, is Mr.
Ward, and very generous an’ open-‘anded. You’d think ‘e was so quiet an’ shy
when you speak to by ‘imself, but crikey, when ‘e lets ‘imself go!—I
never seed a gentleman get so mad as he can when there’s a rag or anythin’
on…No, ‘e don’t drink—‘e’s a teetotaller. The other gentlemen bring
beer and wines up to ‘is room when ‘e ‘as a party, but he ‘as lemonade
‘imself. I know ‘cos ‘e ‘as me to wait on ‘em…But crikey, ‘e can get
noisier on lemonade than what all the others put together can on whisky!”

One night during Philip’s second year, Ward was holding a large party in
his rooms to celebrate the success of the College hockey team. It began about
eight o’clock and became progressively noisier until midnight. About that
time Philip, who was reading late, heard the party breaking up, and from the
way they clattered and clumped down the narrow winding stairs he guessed that
they were all pretty drunk. Five minutes later they were racing round the
quadrangle, shouting and catcalling, and in a little while Philip heard them
clumsily reascending the stairs to Ward’s rooms. Ward had sported his oak,
but they hammered on it with their fists till he came to the door. “Come out
and let’s have a rag,” one of them yelled ferociously, and others shouted,
“Let’s raid the porter’s lodge!”—“Come on, Ward, and rag the Dean,”
etc.

Then Philip heard Ward’s voice, very quiet and calm: “No, it’s too late.
Go back to bed, you fellows, I’m not coming.”

Then a voice cried out: “I say, who’s this man next door? ‘P.
Monsell’—Anybody heard of ‘P. Monsell’—Who is he, anyway? Come
on, boys, let’s rag P. Monsell’s rooms!”

Somebody pushed open the door, and Philip, putting down his book, turned
to face a recklessly drunken crowd.

He turned very pale. It was not that he was afraid, for he was no coward,
and would certainly have defended himself if anybody had set about him. It
was rather that, as his mother had often said, he lacked a certain “tact,”
the power of dealing ingeniously with a difficult situation. As one of the
men staggered and almost fell into his room, knocking over in doing so a
table with crockery on it, he did not know whether to smile and treat the
matter as a joke or to allow himself to get angry. Really, he was embarrassed
almost up to the point of panic.

“I say, look what you’ve done…” he began, ineffectually. “Mind that desk
or you’ll smash something else.”

A roar of laughter greeted his protest.

Then all at once there was a scuffle out on the land ing, and he saw Ward,
in dressing-gown and pyjamas, forcing his way through the crowd and into his
room.

“Get back…” said Ward sharply.

No more than that. Somehow they all, even those who were hopelessly drunk,
took notice of him. He stood between Philip and the invaders, with his rather
sunburnt face set very grimly. “Get back,” he repeated, and he gave one of
the foremost men a push that sent him sprawling over the carpet. The crowd on
the landing guffawed with laughter, but Ward did not even smile.

“Somebody help me to pull Briggs out,” he ordered curtly, and one of the
others, less drunk than the rest, took the prostrate figure by the arms and,
with Ward’s assistance, dragged him ignominiously through the doorway.

“Better sport your oak now,” Ward said to Philip, as the last intruder
shuffled his way back on to the landing.

Philip did so, too uncomfortable even to murmur thanks.

Next morning Ward was emptying his letter-box as Philip left
his rooms to attend a lecture. “Quite a little to-do we had last night,
didn’t we?” he said, smiling pleasantly. “Decent fellows, all of them you
know—horribly tight—but didn’t mean any harm. They’ll pay for the
damage to your pots, of course. You must tell me what it comes to.”

“I ought to thank you for clearing them out for me,” said Philip, rather
nonplussed.

“Oh, not at all—not at all,” replied the other, shyly. “You must
come to tea with me soon and meet them when they’re more—er—more
themselves…Really you must.”

Soon afterwards Philip accepted a definite invitation, and found Ward’s
sporting friends genial enough but hardly a type with whom he had much in
common. Ward himself, however, he liked immensely, and during their third
year the two became great friends.

Ever since he was a small boy Philip had learned to mistrust
his body, and to expect it to fail him at critical moments. It was hardly a
surprise, though a bitter disappointment to him, when he fell ill within a
month of the Tripos examinations. “Nervous weakness,” the doctor said, and
remarked cheerfully that a month or two’s rest would effect a complete
cure.

It was possible, of course, to take a degree by means of an “aegrotat,”
and Philip thought that he would be entitled to do this. Unfortunately, he
bungled his interview with his tutor so badly that the latter judged him to
be malingering and refused to sign the necessary statement.

“The aegrotat degree is not simply a matter of form,” he assured Philip
severely. “It is not so easy to obtain as a medical certificate, I dare
say…No, Monsell, I am afraid I cannot recommend you as you suggest.”

So Philip struggled on as best he could, and in the same way struggled
through the hard gruelling of a week-long examination. To his own surprise,
he did not collapse. Nor did he do quite so badly as he expected.

At nine o’clock on a warm June morning he stood with Ward amongst the
waiting crowd by the flank of the Senate House. Through the windows he could
see the dons moving about like slow, mysterious shadows in the dark interior;
St. Mary’s Church across the road chimed the hour, and then, whilst they were
still waiting, the quarter-past. For Philip, at any rate, the seconds crawled
like minutes and the minutes like hours; and meanwhile the sun rose languidly
and the stone wall with the notice-boards began to glare fiercely in the
gathering heat.

There had been evidently some delay, for the official time for posting the
results was nine o’clock, and already it was nearly half-past. As the clang
of the half-hour sounded across the road Philip’s excitement, till then
carefully controlled, began to escape a little. “I’ll tell you what, Ward,”
he said, in sharp gusts of speech, in which his inward perturbation gave him
a slight stammer, “If—if I’ve got through—I’ll have a p-party,
and get my mother and Stella to come up for it.”

“Who’s Stella? I didn’t know you had a sister.”

He told him. They had both been reticent about their private affairs, and
indeed, had known each other for over a year without having more than a vague
idea of each other’s families. Now, in the curiously tense atmosphere of
waiting for the lists to be posted, it was almost a relief to give and accept
confidences. Philip told of his visit three years before to the Balkans and
Hungary, of the trip up the Danube, and of the girl who had tried to drown
herself on the way to Buda. “She’s nearly nineteen now,” he said in
conclusion, “and speaks p-perfect English.”

“I should like to meet her,” said Ward quietly.

A uniformed figure appeared at the door of the Senate House, carrying an
array of printed sheets, and a simultaneous burst of cheers went up and
continued as he picked his way through the throng to the notice-boards.
“Y-you go and see,” said Philip, puffing nervously at a cigarette. “I think
I’d rather wait here than f-face that crowd.”

“All right,” answered the other, laughing. He strolled over to the excited
jostling group, stood on tiptoe, and tried to read down the lists as they
were put up. His whole attitude was as if he were no more than casually
interested in them.

Three minutes later he returned.

“We shall have that party, Monsell,” he said.

“
What!
”

“You got through all right…And so have I. Let’s go and send some wires.
Then perhaps we might knock off for the day and go on the river…”

He was like a boy in his excitement.

“Have I just got a p-pass?” inquired Philip nervously.

“Oh, yes, you’re through, you needn’t worry. Jolly good, I call it.
Considering how you’ve been ill.”

“Yes…” He agreed limply. “By the way, what did you get?”

“Oh, a first—much better than I expected.”

Philip held out his hand. “Yes,” he said, smiling bravely. “We
will
have that p-party. In your honour if not in m-mine.”

“Oh, nonsense, man. You’re through—that’s the main thing.”

Was it? He looked at the blue sky over the Market Square and suddenly the
very sunlight seemed to grow dark and dim before his eyes.

The week that intervened between the announcement of the
result and Philip’s party was an anti climax. There seemed to be nothing at
all to do. Each outgoing train left Cambridge emptier, and in a few days the
place had all the forlorn air of a ball room from which all but the last
revellers have departed. It was all right for Ward; he had his plans cut and
dried for the future—two years at a London hospital, and then, perhaps,
a year or so of specialisation, and finally a house-surgeonship or else the
ordinary unexciting life of the general practitioner.

But Philip’s plans were vague in the extreme. He was twenty-five years
old—rather older, that is, than most undergraduates attaining their
degrees; he had had by no means a distinguished career, though he could
regard that as chiefly a result of bad luck, The Civil Service did not
attract him, despite the high position that his father had held in it; nor
did journalism or the law, even supposing he could have obtained an entry
into either of those professions. Sufficient money to do as he liked, without
the necessity of earning a living, rather accentuated than eased the
difficulty of the problem.

One sphere of life had always lured him, and that was politics. He had the
half didactic, half administrative mind, the mind that delights in schemes
and paper formulations of all kinds. In another age he would have found a
patron and been nominated for a “rotten” borough. As it was, the way to
success seemed barred by the utter unthinkability of his ever winning an
election. He was too nervous, too slow in speech, too unready for any
combative emergency. “My dear boy,” said his mother, “why on earth should you
choose a profession in which you will be even more a failure than in any
other? Take my advice and be either a diplomat or a stockbroker. And if you
can’t make up your mind which, have another year at Cambridge to think about
it…Or travel…Or write books…Or marry…Or do anything you like.”

“
Marry
?—And whom should I marry?”

“I should have thought, Philip,” she answered severely, “that there were
some things which even you would have felt capable of deciding for
yourself.”

But with all her mordant cleverness she totally failed to understand him.
She did not realise that beneath his slowness and willingness to listen to
advice, he hail a quiet and definite will of his own, in subservience to
which he would spend himself wholly and absolutely, and with all the greater
fierceness in that he would count and mark down every atom of the coast. In
short, he was an idealist, and Mrs. Monsell did not understand the breed.

The party was arranged. Mrs. Monsell motored up with Stella,
and Philip met them at the “White Horse” Hotel, where they all lunched
together. Somehow the realisation that Stella was beautiful had never
occurred to him quite so keenly as it did during those first moments of
seeing her after his failure. Perhaps it was because he had never previously
had so much time to think of anything outside his work; or perhaps it was
some subtle alchemy in the Cambridge atmosphere that was making her more
beautiful and himself more perceptive of it. At any rate, as he watched her
across the table during lunch, he thought it strange that for so long he had
missed something in her that he was seeing then.