The Dawn of Reckoning (12 page)

What
a man! She stared at him from the shadows of the settee,
hating him fiercely. And Philip was laughing like a schoolboy—she could
never make him laugh like that…Something about Booze!…

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at Mrs. Monsell. That lady was
smiling.

An hour later he had gone. They were not to see him again
before his departure for the South Pole. His last words to her had been a
casual and ordinary “Good-bye,” accompanied by an equally casual and ordinary
handshake. Philip walked down the drive with him, and the two stopped talking
for some while. Their laughter echoed weirdly above the roaring of the wind,
and Stella, undressing in her bedroom, shivered as she heard it.

The next morning as she came down to breakfast Philip met her in the hall.
“By the way, Stella,” he remarked, methodically opening his morning’s letters
with a paper-knife: “Did you go to meet Ward last night on his way back from
the hospital?”

“Yes,” she answered, with suddenly awakened interest.

“Why?” He spoke the word very quietly, still manipulating the
paper-knife.

She gave him the answer that she had given Ward the night before, only
less sharply.

“Because I wanted to…That’s enough reason, isn’t it?”

The paper-knife stopped suddenly, and he looked round with a look that she
had never seen on his face before. Then, very slowly, he walked across the
room to her and took her by the arm. “Of course it is, Stella,” he said,
smiling. “Let’s come and have some breakfast…”

She began to feel that she did not understand Philip. Almost
as soon as Ward had set sail from Gravesend in the little thousand-ton boat
that was, if he were lucky, to take him to Antarctica, Philip began to be
different. She did not assume any significant connection between the two
happenings, though she guessed that Philip was missing the company of his
friend. She was, on the whole, baffled by the new Philip, though he charmed
her by his almost childlike strangeness.

One day he said to her: “Stella, do you remember that I promised to marry
you as soon as I was successful?”

“Yes, of course I do. And since then you haven’t mentioned it.”

He smiled his nervous smile. “I’m going to mention it now. May I marry
you, Stella,
before
I’m successful?”

“
Philip
!” She took hold of his sleeve and gave his arm a quick
caress. “Of course you may. You can marry me whenever you like—
I
shan’t object. But why this despondency about your prospects?”

He answered slowly: “Not despondency, Stella. Only that I’ve been thinking
things out carefully. And I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps I shall
succeed better with you than on my own. It is so
hard
for me to
succeed in anything.”

“And is success the only reason why you want to marry me?”

He looked down at her rather sadly and said: “Good God, no. I love
you…You’ll never understand how much…I want you…Will you marry me as
soon as it can be arranged?”

And then he suddenly knelt down at her feet and burst into tears. It was a
weird mingling of the comic and the tragic; of old-fashioned Victorian
gallantry and a touch of half-clumsy pathos that was all his own. She was
stirred, as a mother by a shy child who has come to her for protection. For
Philip, surely, was only a child, driven by the buffetings of a hard world
into her own calm embrace.

She stooped down and kissed his forehead, and for the first time he
offered her his lips to kiss, again as a child might have done. “I’ll marry
you to-morrow if you want,” she said, choking back a sob. “You poor old
Philip—I’m so glad you want me.”

He said, with a calm smile “Then I have s-succeeded in s-something at
l-last.”

They were married a month later and went to live in a
comfortable flat in Kensington. Philip had a private income of some two
thousand a year, so that his efforts for success had no financial urge. Very
soon after the marriage, Mrs. Monsell decided she would like to live in town,
and as Philip preferred the country an easy exchange was effected, Mrs.
Monsell taking the Kensington flat and Philip and Stella returning to
Chassingford.

Stella was wonderfully and ecstatically happy. She could never have
believed that marriage was so beautiful, and that her strange, childish
Philip would make so wonderful a husband. And he, on his side, seemed equally
happy. The two of them went about together everywhere, entertained modestly,
and were certainly popular amongst those who knew them intimately. Philip,
however, was still regarded as a political opponent by many Chassingford
people, and his somewhat austere manner with strangers prevented him from
achieving any boisterous popularity. For this he was no doubt profoundly
thankful, though he was becoming increasingly aware of the value of such
popularity in political life.

Now, indeed, he set himself deliberately to the task of making his career.
It was almost pathetic, Stella thought, that he should be so grimly serious
about it, especially when there was no real need why he should trouble about
a career at all. Mrs. Monsell put the matter in her usual mordant way. “Why
on earth he should want to be an M.P., I can’t imagine,” she remarked. “It’s
about as sensible as a deaf man wanting to be a music-teacher. Why doesn’t he
potter about Chassingford and write books that nobody reads, instead of
flinging himself into the struggle for existence? Anyone would think he had
to earn his own living.”

To Stella Philip explained himself differently. “I’m not going to be a
waster. If I thought my private income was going to make me that I’d give it
up. I want to be something more than an amiable country squire.”

“But why politics, Philip?”

“Because—” His face lit up suddenly with a gleam that she had never
seen before, something that transformed his white calm into the still calm
whiteness of fire. “Because—” He paused again, and then resumed, in a
rush of words in which, as usual, he began to stammer slightly: “Stella, deep
down in me I’ve got enormous ambitions. I won’t give them up, whatever
happens. Doesn’t matter how often I fail or how many times it’s hinted to me
that I’m a predestined failure—those ambitions are still there. I want
to get into Parliament. I feel I could do good—even
great
work
there—if I had the chance. Nobody’s going to give me the chance. I’ve
got to fight for it myself, and I know as well as you do that there’s not a
sillier spectacle on earth than me on a public platform. Yet gradually I’m
improving. I’m getting less and less silly, until some day—you
wait!—I’ll do it!—I’ll do it I’ve set my mind on it and nothing
shall stop me. Other men seem to succeed without trying to, but I shall catch
them up in the end, because I am trying a hundred and a thousand times harder
than they!”

He clenched his fists at his side and stared in front of him. “Of all my
ambitions so far, Stella, only one has come to fulfilment. That’s
you
.
And I didn’t win you—you simply gave yourself to me. If I’d had to
fight for you, probably I’d have been fighting still. Do you think I could
have held out against some bold handsome warrior with a successful past, and
a heart—less liable to stop suddenly than mine?”

She answered him by a ripple of laughter. “Why,” she ejaculated, without
pausing to think, “that sounds like Ward!”

Not by a flicker did his face betray any emotion whatever. “Does it?” he
said quietly, and resumed the book from which the conversation had disturbed
him.

Philip’s quest for success was certainly a difficult one in
the sphere he had deliberately chosen. He kept making a fool of himself. He
couldn’t help it. As prospective candidate for the constituency, he was asked
to “kick off” at the annual match between Chassingford Rovers and Felton
United; here, as Kemp assured him, was a unique opportunity for making
himself popular amongst the younger male voters. Unfortunately the day was
wet and the ground greasy, and when, supremely nervous, he ran out to kick
the ball, he missed it. Not only that, but he slipped on the soft turf and
fell ludicrously into a patch of mud, smashing his pince-nez and covering
himself with slime. The spectacle of a nervous, morning-coated gentleman
streaked and spattered with mud moved the crowd to natural laughter; it was
many minutes before even the players were composed enough to start the
game.

Philip, of course, ought to have taken part in the laughter against
himself, thereby making the bad not so bad. Unfortunately again, he had hurt
himself in the fall, and he was by nature incapable of concealing physical
pain. Instead of laughing he groaned, and, with the assistance of a few
cynical onlookers, hobbled back to the stand in a most lugubrious manner.
Kemp could hardly cover up his contempt. Even Stella was disappointed, though
she washed his mud-streaked face in the pavilion and behaved to him very much
as an indulgent mother towards a child who has met with a deserved
mishap.

For some time after the incident it seemed as though Philip’s electoral
chances were absolutely spoiled. Kempt almost said so outright; Stella
thought so secretly; there was even some talk of the local Association asking
him to resign. The opposition, of course, made as much capital as it could
out of the affair; “Monsell in the Mud” was the not very gentlemanly placard
of its current local paper. For a long time Philip’s meetings were
interrupted by derisive references to mud and football.

Only he himself never gave up. He did not seem to care whether he were
listened to or laughed at. A certain quality in his dignity made him
impervious to derision. Perhaps if he had had a sense of humour, he would
have laughed at himself. Perhaps he was’ so desperately in earnest that he
saw nothing but the shining goal in front of him. He went on addressing
meetings, facing scornful and insulting interruptions, arguing seriously with
people who had no intention of arguing seriously, treating every man he met
as a gentleman on his own level, but not as a friend—he was incapable
of that.

Another football club invited him to “kick-off” for them. The invitation
was probably made derisively. Philip appeared to see nothing in it but a
plain and courteous request, which lie as courteously accepted. He was
determined there should be no mistakes this time. He practised with a
football in the Hall garden in order to make himself ready for the ordeal. No
doubt the gardeners would see him and spread the tale in the village—he
did not seem to care. “I know nothing about games, and I don’t see why I
should be ashamed of having to learn how to kick a football,” he told Stella.
“There’s many a footballer would have to learn how to make a speech.”

The hour came. Deafening ironical cheers followed his kick; the ball went
spinning across the field and hit the chest of one of the footballers who had
been too intent on watching Philip to notice where the ball was going. This
time the laugh was with Philip, and it seemed as though Providence had
specially intervened on his behalf.

Unfortunately he walked on to the field, interrupting the hardly begun
game, and apologised to the footballer who had been hit, hoping courteously
that he had not been hurt. Roars of stupefied, incredulous laughter! Was it
possible that any man on earth could be such a fool?

Meanwhile, Ward crossed the oceans with his party, fitted
finally at Tasmania, and set sail for the frozen South. Newspaper cables gave
graphic descriptions of the final send-off of the wanderers, and Ward’s
photograph, along with those of others of the party, was in most of the
English illustrated papers. Philip and Stella both followed his progress with
great interest; then there came the last message from the southernmost
outpost of civilization, after which there could be no more news until the
expedition had either failed or succeeded.

Two of the photographs Stella cut out and kept. One had been evidently
posed for; it showed Ward leaning negligently on the deck-rail and smiling
exactly as he had smiled during that rollicking election-campaign at
Chassingford. The other, a snap-shot, showed him standing alone on deck,
gazing Southward without the shadow of a smile, his face set in lines of grim
determination. The two photographs presented a remarkable contrast for anyone
who was interested enough in their subject to notice it. Stella pointed it
out to Philip; he remarked, casually, “Yes, he’ll find it’s no laughing
matter to get to the South Pole.”

Something in his words stirred her to momentary irritation. “I should
imagine he never thought it would be,” she answered quietly.

Autumn and winter swept by, with gales that drove in from
the marshes and littered the Hall lawn with leaves. Happiness still lay over
Stella like the misty fumes of a drug; a pleasure that was half-painful
wafted her from day to day amidst a life that was dreamlike in its
exquisiteness. Philip was an angel of kindness and consideration; his
husband-love entranced her by its delicacy and sweetness; besides that, he
was a child for her to care for and protect. The old Hall seemed to glow on
those windy autumn days with the pure love of an almost perfect idyll. Philip
at work in his study; Stella superintending the household, bustling into all
the rooms (except the study), and telling Venner what wine to serve at
lunch—such quiet, refined tastes, and money enough to satisfy all of
them! Sometimes, Stella, driving past Firs Cottage in her car, caught sight
of the woman to whom, at Ward’s request, she had given a lift; the woman
sometimes cut her dead, and at other times offered a faint, reluctant smile.
Once Stella, acting on momentary impulse, stopped the car at the house and
enquired after the health of the little boy. She could be very charming when
she set herself out to be so, and in a few moments she really thought she had
begun to melt the woman’s rough exterior. They chatted desultorily, and at
length the woman gave Stella a tedious and very detailed description of all
the illnesses her Johnnie had ever had, concluding with the remark: “Ah well,
you ain’t got any children yerself, ma’am, so I don’t suppose…”