Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 18
SORRELL had a few grizzled hairs on his temples, and his eyebrows had grown bushy.
He sat at a desk in the little room where in the early days he had spent so many hours with Thomas Roland's books, and he looked out upon the same garden and the same trees. Everything was the same—and yet different. He saw the sunlight caught in the purple cups of the tulips, the shadows of the trees lying placidly upon the grass, the wallflowers all crimson and gold. Someone was mowing the grass, a figure in a white sweater and grey flannel trousers that went to and fro with an air of lightness as though the twelve-inch mower were a child's toy.
Sorrell had been making entries in a ledger. He was wearing a blue serge suit. A box of cigarettes lay on the desk, and he put down his pen, and lighting a cigarette, leaned back in his chair.
It was Christopher who was pushing that mower to and fro, just for the satisfaction of spending his youth on the job, and with the idea of keeping fit. He had grown and grown amazingly, and this towering up and spreading of the little fellow had never ceased to astonish Sorrell. He had watched the boy changing into the man.
"Strong," he thought,—"I was never as strong as that."
The transfiguration had had its subjective reactions upon the father, for in watching the growth of the boy, Sorrell had seen in him an increasing likeness to the mother. Christopher had inherited Dora Sorrell's fineness of body. She had given him her physical glow, the nice co-ordination of movement, the texture of skin and hair. This likeness worried Sorrell not a little, for though Kit was more his father's son in his mental make-up, the physical resemblance was there, with all its implications.
The entering of a maid with a tea-tray interrupted Sorrell's thoughts. The girl was pretty and new to the Pelican, and to her Sorrell was very much Mr. Sorrell, a person who was head porter, and yet something more than head porter. He had authority, how much authority no one quite knew,—but when Mr. Roland was away, and he was away fairly frequently, Sorrell ceased to wear the Pelican uniform, and was seen in a blue serge suit.
"Shall I tell Mr. Christopher?"
Sorrell pushed his chair back.
"I'll call him, Minnie,—thanks."
He leaned forward over the desk, knowing that his wish was to place himself between Christopher and the figure of the eternal woman, even as he had denied this girl the chance of running out into the garden to get a smile from his son. But was it wise? He knew that he was jealous for the boy who was becoming the man, and that his life's work and purpose were built into Christopher's career. Kit was his job, his business, his ambition, something schemed for and greatly loved, and yet the father looked at him with a man's eyes. "I can save him—so much," was the thought at the back of his mind,—but it was chastened by that very necessary touch of scepticism. "Was it wise—or possible—to save people from themselves?" Sorrell was for ever warning himself against playing the hen with the duckling.
"Kit.—Tea."
Christopher swung the mower round in the direction of the window. He smiled,—and waved a hand,—and after a satisfied glance at the stretch of smooth turf, he came towards his father, collecting a coat from a garden seat. He had his mother's walk, that easy, gliding walk that had made Sorrell think of a ship in full sail in calm weather. The direct route to the tea-tray lay through the window, and Kit climbed in through the window.
"I'm twenty minutes up on old Bowden, pater."
Sorrell had taken the armchair beside the tea-table.
"You are more than twenty years younger."
Kit smiled. He was at the age when youth tries its strength on every imaginable labour. It was exuberant,—full of an emulous curiosity, but quite without arrogance. His mother had been arrogant.
Sorrell poured out the tea, beholding himself as both mother and father to Christopher who, as yet, had shown no signs of wishing to put up the badge of the Red Heart.
"Mr. Roland's not back yet?"
"No."
Kit, eating buttered toast with the air of a young man considering some very serious problem, came out of his silence to suppose that Mr. Roland must be making a great deal of money.
"Here?"
Sorrell was refilling the teapot.
"I was thinking of Cherry of Chelsea. It has been running nine months. Almost as big a hit as Chu Chin Chow."
"He was made to make hits. Some men are. But Roland's not in town."
"That's a jolly nice car of his," said Kit rather irrelevantly, reaching for more toast.
A thrush was singing in one of the trees, and Kit turned a quick head with the swiftness of a young thing whose consciousness is sensitive to colour and to music.
"Hear that,—pater! Cherry,—Cherry, Cherry. That's where Mr. Roland got that song."
He refrained from the buttered toast for half a minute in order to whistle a few bars of the song that was being whistled all over the earth.
How do your red shoes go?"
Sorrell was thinking of that first night at the "Pelargonium" when he and Kit had sat in the stalls, and watched Roland's comic opera unfold its coloured music. The piece had been an amazing success. It flowed, and laughed, and made love. It was full of a thrush's song on a May morning, and of cherry-coloured bodices, and green petticoats and red shoes. Cherry of Chelsea! And Cherry herself like a piece of exquisite old china. The play had been running for nearly a year, and Cherry's lips were as red as ever. Extraordinary man—Roland!
"The new thing of his ought to hit them,"—and Kit began to whistle a melody—"Blackbird this time. Suppose he's gone off for an inspiration."
"No," said his father gravely, "he has gone to buy an hotel."
Kit fell into another of his reflective moods, consuming cake instead of toast, knees drawn up and elbows resting on them, his inward eyes desiring to know why Mr. Roland bothered about hotels when he could write music that set half the world tapping with its feet and swaying a bewitched body. Sorrell was looking out of the window. He and Kit were such good friends that they were able to keep their silences intact, or to let their eyes meet with a sudden understanding smile. Kit's hand, reaching out for more cake, had a healthy grasp on the pleasant realities of life. The boy had a dignity of his own, a happy seriousness. He could run like a swift dog, or lie down and curl himself up like a tired one. Things did not seem to worry him.
"Just like some of the fellows in the war," thought his father; "the fellows without imagination. I used to be on wires, and biting my moustache. But he has imagination. In three weeks time he goes into action. It does not seem to worry him."
In fact Sorrell was much more concerned over Christopher's first serious adventure than was Kit himself. Success or failure? Mr. Porteous too was very excited over Christopher's chances of carrying off a scholarship at Trinity, for Kit was his Benjamin of pupils.
"Anyway—he won't get panic, and sit there staring at the clock."
Kit himself was rather silent about the immediate future. He had allowed it to be known that "Maths" worried him just a little, but he was neither over-confident nor fearful. He had worked hard and he had kept fit, and he had great faith in Mr. Porteous,—and what more could a fellow da? The thing was to keep calm, and not to get rattled.
Porteous was impressed by Christopher's calmness, and he and Sorrell had analysed it over their pipes.
"It's not bovine, my dear chap,—otherwise I should have been worried. You know as well as I do,—and better. He's highly strung. All the people who are worth while—are."
To Mr. Porteous Christopher appeared as a healthy young athlete, trained to the last ounce, ready to stroll on to the track and wait for the starting pistol. He would not be free from quiverings of excitement, but he would not let himself be flustered.
"You see,—Sorrell, he has an unusual sense of responsibility. He knows that it is your race as well as his. I have watched him for two years. That gravity—of his—even when he smiles."
Sorrell's face had had one of its luminous moments.
"What do you think yourself, Porteous? Frankly?"
Mr. Porteous had rubbed his bald head.
"One doesn't like to talk about certainties. He may be up against one or two smug little prodigies who will fizzle out when they are ten years older,—just when he is beginning. But I look on it as a five to one chance."
A fanatical look had come into Sorrell's eyes.
"Scholarship or no scholarship—he shall get there. I can manage it."
So, Christopher returned to his lawn-mower, and Sorrell lit a pipe and sat down again at his desk. He had come to love his desk, its orderliness, its solidity, its neat files and ledgers and docketed bills. It was a rock upon which he was building a new reputation.
"I wonder if you would take over the accounts, Stephen?"
Roland had made that suggestion more than a year ago, and Sorrell had not hesitated to seize this new opportunity. During the last few months he had become more and more responsible for the interior economy of the hotel; he had taken over the catering; he checked and paid the bills. He was becoming a master of detail. He had begun to know when electric light was being wasted, or the consumption of coal suggested extravagance. He had the market prices of food-stuffs at his fingers' ends, and none of the Winstonbury tradesmen dared to play tricks with him. He was too wide awake and too thorough.
He loved detail. His fingers, long and straight and sensitive, the ungual phalanges bent slightly back, were the fingers of a man with a passion for exactness. His ledgers and note-books were as neat as his finger nails. While Christopher went to and fro across the grass, Sorrell smoked his pipe and examined a sheaf of bills, turning them over with a deft and deliberate first finger.
He made frequent notes.
"Tea. Up four pounds in the week.
"Laundry. Charged for fifty-three more towels.
"Seven table-napkins missing.
"Butcher. Pushing on that inevitable half-penny. See him about it."
Sorrell had fallen to the fascination of figures and of "curves." He had plotted a series of curves, a grocery curve, a linen curve, a coal curve, a gas curve. The amount of meat consumed each week could be discovered at a glance. Sorrell's room was like a "staff" orderly room, the walls covered with typed notes and diagrams.
His day was not unlike an "orderly officer's" day in the army. He inspected everything, the kitchen, the meat, the vegetables sent in by Bowden, the store-room, the public rooms, the bathrooms and lavatories, the garage, the oil and petrol store. His knowledge of the Pelican's anatomy and physiology was becoming so complete and intimate that he was on the way to being an expert.
Ever and again he paused and watched his son. A well-mown lawn was as Satisfying as a well-kept ledger, and Sorrell had come to know that it was the inward thoroughness that mattered, doing the job thoroughly, even though no one saw the objective results of it. A queer thing that inward pride, that scorn of all slackness and of all shuffling, that daily struggle with man's fatal inertia. Your job was like a ship; you had to sail it in all weathers, when you felt sick, and when your moods were like baffling and uncertain winds.
It seemed to Sorrell that Christopher had this passion for thoroughness. He had never been childish. Sorrell hated childishness, especially that most exasperating form of it, the childishness of grown-up children. The dreamy, drowsy, inconsequential imbeciles!
Neither was Christopher a prig.
"Anything's better than priggishness."
Kit had finished his mowing, and Sorrell saw him wiping the blades and knife of the machine with an oily rag.
Sorrell had asked for a week's holiday.
"I should like to go up with the boy"—and Thomas Roland said "Of course."
Mr. Porteous saw them off from Winstonbury station, exuding optimism, and taking great care not to suggest to Christopher that there was any likelihood of his being nervous. Sorrell had written to reserve rooms at the Bull,—and when they had dined, Kit took his first stroll along King's Parade, and past Caius to the great gate of Trinity.
They stood under the archway and looked across the Great Court, its greyness and its green lawns very tranquil under the evening sky. Wallflowers were in bloom about the fountain. The roof of the hall and of the Master's house were dark against a sheet of pale gold.
Christopher looked solemn. One of the moments to be remembered was his first glimpse of the Great Court of Trinity, though the significance of that stately quadrangle was to grow less and less in after years. A time would come when Christopher's memory of the college would grow strangely cold, as though only the shadow of himself had ever dwelt there. Later, he would wonder why the picture of the great college lacked glamour. Proud of it as he always was,—but not with the pride of a lover.
And on that first evening the spacious dignity of the place frightened him, nor did he ever succeed in arriving at a feeling of intimacy, though he spent a year in rooms in the Great Court. The college presented itself as a very large and stately old lady, a super-grandmother, to be respected as one respects a formidable social figure.
It is possible that Christopher was not a social creature, or not the true child of this prodigious old lady. In after years a Bloomsbury Square, or the Charing Cross Road left him with a sense of glamour that his college had lacked. For Kit's blood was not grey, nor was he quite like the mass of young men who wore the dark blue gown. He belonged to no ous aoe class, nor would he ever belong to any particular class, for he had absorbed from his father a little of the aloofness of the man who has had to fight for his own hand. To Kit his three years were to be mere ante-rooms to the larger outlook; he worked better than he played, though he was utterly without smugness.
Sorrell and Kit made their way through Nevil's Court and across the river to the "backs." The grass and the foliage were approaching the greyness of the winter, and a few idle punts and canoes went to and fro. Here—too—were Tennyson's immemorial elms, and Tennyson's black bat night descending. Clare Bridge with its stone balls was a ghost bridge upon the pale silver of the water King's Chapel made its presence felt, like an obtruding cliff.
"Are those chaps in the boats undergraduates, pater?"
"I suppose so," said Sorrell.
He felt himself to be very raw, but his feeling of rawness was soothed by the thought that Christopher was coming here, and that there was nothing that Christopher need be ashamed of.
"Taking it easy—those fellows."
"And why not?" asked his father.
"I thought one read in the evening."
Sorrell pinched Kit's arm.
"All work and no play"
"Supposing your work's your play, pater?"
"Some day. I want you to row or play footer. And Ox?"
Sorrell smiled to himself. He had talked a good deal to Porteous, and Porteous, never having been an academic person,—had kept alive the memory of his vivid youth. Disgraceful "rags," and most unparsonic adventures! Your tailor might be of more importance than your tutor. And to be a first-boat man, cycling along the towing-path and shouting at the Lent crew you had been training. "Keep it long,—keep—it—long. Damn you,—five,—you're late." It was necessary to be neither a funk nor a sugarer, and to be able to wear the particular sort of suit and tie and waistcoat that gave you the proper atmosphere. Kit should have the proper atmosphere, a good tailor, good digs, the privilege of giving an occasional dinner, enough pocket-money to make life easy in the company of idle young men. Not that they were idlers in the conventional sense.
"Playing hard is just as good as working hard. I'd like you to box against Oxford, like Porteous did."
"All right, pater; I'll have a shot at it. You see, I think I know what I want to do."
They strolled back by way of Queen's, Kit's arm linked in his father's.
"Did you know,—pater? I mean"
"I was blind as a bat. Pushed into a job by my people."
"You have never pushed me."
"God forbid. Send you up like a carrier-pigeon, Kit. Let you get your sense of direction. Fly straight and fast"
Kit pressed his father's arm.
"Dear old pater. I'm not much good at saying things,—but you are a brick to me."
"O,—that's all right," said Sorrell, swallowing something in his throat.
During the days that followed he sat on the edge of his suspense, and admired the morale of his son. Kit ate excellent dinners. It was he who behaved like the reassuring parent. He reported on each day's ordeal with tranquil frankness.
"I have done better than I thought I should, pater. If Mr. Porteous had seen the papers, they couldn't have suited me better."
"Many other fellows in?"
"O, quite a lot. I've a chap next me who sniffs all the time. Regular as clockwork."
They spent the evenings on the river, or in wandering about the colleges, and Kit's eyes had ceased to be troubled. It was as though he were getting the feel of the place, measuring the size of all these ancient buildings. He looked at the blazers and scarves in the outfitters' windows, at the books and the pipes and the marmalade pots. He had heard that he would smoke a pipe and eat a great deal of squish. He measured the other fellows whom he saw strolling about. They seemed to him to have become less stupendous,—more human. Would he be a middle or heavyweight? And would he wear one of those light blue blazers?
On the Sunday they went to King's chapel.
"The music gets there," Kit said afterwards to his father.
"Where, my son?"
"O,—somewhere. Where it was meant to. It's like a fellow climbing up."
Sorrell had felt the music to be like the desire of his heart; ascending, spreading, exulting. Thomas Roland was breakfasting when Sorrell brought him the news.
"Kit has won his scholarship."
Roland lingered a moment in his chair, before pushing it back and rising from the table. He saw Sorrell as a man intensely pale, an inarticulate yet exultant figure, holding an official letter with a hand that trembled.
"By Jove, old man,—I'm glad."
Roland's hand went out. They did not look at each other, but stood close together, Roland very conscious of the other man's restrained emotion.
"I thought he would, you know."
"I hoped so," said Sorrell, staring out of the window; "we owe a good deal to you. I have always felt"
"My dear chap"
"It's true."
For the sake of doing something Roland turned to the breakfast-table and emptied his coffee-cup.
"Look here,—we must have a little dinner to-night. Ask Porteous.—Where's the boy?"
"Gone to tell Porteous. Do you mind if I take an hour off? I want to see Porteous."
There was a smile at the back of Roland's eyes.
"Take the whole day.—By the way—Stephen. O, we'll talk about that later. I expect Porteous will be floating about like a cherub."
"He's a great little man," said Sorrell.
The broad road into Winstonbury was Sorrell's Via Sacra on that summer morning. The Roman celebrated his son's first triumph. "Seven years," he thought; "and this! Tears in the boy's eyes when I told him. Oh,—I'm happy,—happy"
At the little stone house he found Kit sitting on one end of a long deal table in the study, and Bob Porteous in his shirt sleeves, flourishing a baton made out of yesterday's paper, his honey-coloured head shining like a planet. He was exuberant in his elation. He had got very hot; he had taken off his coat; he had kept smacking the table. the walls, and the windows with his paper truncheon. The little man could not keep still.
"I told you so,—my dear fellow. What,—what! Look at him. Scholar of Trinity! Much cooler than we are. Get up, you young rascal, and dance on the table."
He punched Sorrell's chest.
"Licked all the little smug fellows! One of 'em sniffled all day—I hear. What are we going to do about it?"
"Roland is giving a dinner."
"By Jove,—that's it. Kit,—I'll box you three rounds after dinner. Scholar of Trinity!"
Triumphantly he flattened a fly on the page of a Hebrew dictionary that was lying open on the table.