Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 21
CHRISTOPHER SORRELL came up from the river with two other men in dark-blue blazers. The 3rd May boat had been rowing a course; the crew had done so fast a time that their coach had shown an unexpected enthusiasm, and had blessed them from the towing-path.
"Well rowed, you men."
His smirk over the stop-watch had been inspired by the discovery that his crew—the third crew—had rowed over in three seconds less than the second crew. At the First Trinity boat-house he had gathered his men together and had allowed this piece of news to escape.
"Damned well rowed—all of you."
He had smiled particularly at Kit, the No. 5, who was standing with his oar over his shoulder, and his shorts well daubed with grease from his slide. Sorrell was the coach's pet heavyweight. He had guts and style. The coach—great man that he was, had let it be known in high quarters that Sorrell was one of the best of the "freshers," and ought to have a chance in the Trials.
The three large and healthy young creatures turned into Jesus Lane. Kit's digs overlooked Jesus College, but the two second-year men who were with him kept in Nevil's Court.
"Coming round after 'hall'?"
Kit diverged towards the houses.
"No,—I'm swatting."
"Good lord,—what for?"
"Because I like it. Just that."
His still radiant smile flew back at them as he crossed the road, and his seniors accepted it. Sorrell was a good lad. His seriousness was without offence. He could row himself out with the same seriousness with which he read, and youth has no quarrel with a fellow whose blade can shift a good wedge of water, and who is not too cocky about it. You could rag Sorrell—and get that smile, and healthy physical retaliation with it. No one had ever seen him ruffled or malicious. He boxed as he rowed—with the same smiling seriousness.
A fellow named Burgoyne had the rooms below Christopher, and when Kit noticed a big blue saloon waiting outside the house, he assigned it to Burgoyne or to Burgoyne's people. The rich fellow below him had many friends. Hypothetical mothers and aunts and sisters and sisters' friends were always arriving in cars to look up Bertie and have lunch with him. Many of them were rather flashy ladies, ultra modern young gentlewomen with flat chests and shingled hair, who sat on Burgoyne's window sill and smoked cigarettes. They were a cause of offence to Kit.
"Confound the women."
Their clothes and their chatter and the faint yet disturbing feminine aroma of them interfered with his work.
Kit ran up the steps and opened the front door. Burgoyne's part of the house struck him as being unexpectedly peaceful, and he could only suppose that the whole carload of colour had gone on the river. Kit had arrived at the foot of the stairs when Mrs. Jowett, his landlady, appeared from below. She was a stout person, swarthy, with a broad nose and an expansive mouth, perennially interested in all "young gentlemen." She had cared for Hindus and gentlemen of colour, and she had survived. Her only quarrel with Kit was that she could apply to him the word "worthy."
"A lady to see you, sir."
"A lady!"
"She's upstairs. Been here an hour."
"What's her name?"
"Duggan."
Kit looked mystified.
"What sort of—person, Mrs. Jowett?"
The landlady gave him one of her large and much-creased smiles.
"Well,—a lady, sir. That's her car."
Kit went slowly upstairs, wondering who the woman could be, and wishing her elsewhere at the moment. He wanted to change, and he wanted his tea, and he had his chemistry lecturer's notes to look through.
He opened the sitting-room door and saw his mother.
She was sitting by the window in one of the big wickerwork chairs his father had given him, and she seemed to fill it, sumptuously and easily, her black dress contrasting with the purple and orange cretonne. He noticed that her hair was grey, and that she was smiling at him.
Kit stood very still in the open doorway. He seemed to have nothing to say. He was astonished, conscious of nine dead years, and of those other memories that had puzzled and hurt him until Sorrell had somehow made him understand.
"I'm a ghost,—my dear Christopher."
He closed the door, remembering that Mrs. Jowett had ears and that she used them, and when he had closed the door he stood with his back to it.
"I hadn't any idea"
They looked at each other, but their points of view were very different. Christopher was a vivid person; he stood five feet eleven; he looked very big in his rowing togs; he had the glow of youth and of extreme fitness. He was more than a good-looking fellow. His mother had despised the so-called handsome men, knowing how thin and poor the shell is, and that a good getter of the world's gear ma have apelike features. Ugly men can hug hard. And she saw in Kit the likeness of herself, a superficial likeness. He had her glowing skin, the same blue of the eye.
"Heavens, how you've grown!"
She put up her gloved hands and laughed,—but Kit's face maintained an embarrassed and stubborn seriousness. He stood and stared. He was looking at his mother across those nine years. There were many ne that astonished him, and held him in a state of inarticulate staring. She looked quite old. He felt himself in the presence of a stranger. There was no whimper of welcome in him. He was embarrassed, suspicious, immobile, at a loss to meet her sudden intrusion into his life. He had not needed her, and did not need her. He found himself looking at her and thinking—"So—this is the woman who let my father down. What does she want? How did she know?"
His mother was drawing off her gloves, and her down ward glance was like the dropping of a veil. She had seen many things, that serious and curiously stern young face, the puzzled and candid eyes. She was full of swift and impatient comments. "What, if he is like me outside,—and like his father—inside? Serious? Too beastly serious." She smoothed out her gloves and her temper. Had she expected him to rush at her and to cry—"Mother"? Of course not! She made herself look smooth. She was the well-dressed, presentable woman of forty-nine, the sort of woman he might see any day in Regent Street, plump and pleasant, a woman who went to church on occasion, but who was nicely up to date. She had a house in South Audley Street. She went to the Riviera. She played Bridge. She had two or three nice girls who came and nested in her chairs, and called her Aunt Dora.
"I happened to be in Cambridge."
He crossed the room, and stood resting his hands on the back of the other arm-chair. There was the same attentive, self-questioning stare in his eyes.
"Yes,—I'm up at Trinity."
"So I had heard."
She raised her eyes and gave him a tentative and slightly droll smile.
"I have been staying at the Pelican."
"Oh?"
"Your father looks very well. We had one or two talks."
His silence held her poised. His lips moved,—and grew still. Then, he asked her a question, one of those terribly direct questions that are so disconcerting to the sophisticated.
"Did he ask you to come and see me?"
She met the question full faced, but he had noticed a momentary flicker of hesitation.
"I think he understood."
She watched his face. He seemed to be making some calculation.
"I had a letter from him this morning."
"So you know."
"No."
The faint creases about—her eyes and mouth seemed to deepen.
"Well,—I should have thought. You men are queer. Secretive creatures"
She laughed, and playing with her gloves, looked up at him as she had learned to look at men at certain moments. Her voice was humorously reproachful.
"My dear,—there are things that seem extraordinary. At my age—one ceases to be surprised,—yes, even at one's self. One grows kinder. So you have been rowing?"
He was looking at his hands resting on the chair.
"Yes."
"In strict training—I suppose. I'm staying at the University Arms. Would your rowing prevent you having a little dinner with me?"
He raised his eyes till they met hers.
"I have to dine in hall."
"I see. Well,—come in afterwards."
She waited like a gambler on the throw of his next words, smiling, maturely debonaire.
"I have an exam in June. I'm reading hard."
She flicked a playful glove at him.
"You horribly serious boy. As if I want to interfere? Why,—after all,—I used to stop your crying when you were cutting a bad tooth. Well, my dear, let's leave it at that. I have kept my poor man waiting nearly two hours."
She rose, and he crossed the room and opened the door for her, the youth in him rigid.
"I'm—sorry."
She gave him a quick, kind glance.
"My dear,—if life doesn't teach one sportsmanship, what's the use?"
When she had gone Kit stood in the doorway of his room staring at nothing. His eyes looked like the eyes of those northern men that grow blue and fierce when they dwell upon the sea of their own equivocal thoughts.
Christopher dined in hall with the crew of the third May boat, and he had so little to say for himself and was so absent, that little Peabright the cox, who sat opposite, twittered at him like a friendly and mischievous bird.
"Buck up, Sorrell; you're late."
Christopher gave the little man a solemn and tolerant smile.
"All right, Peaby; I'm a bit slow in the water to-night."
Stroke, on Christopher's right, a ruddy, dark lad with roving eyes, grinned affectionately.
"Sorrell's doing calculations. I can feel him doing 'em behind me before we reach Grassy. Like this. If we row thirty, and gain two inches each stroke on Emmanuel 2, and Emmanuel 2 are rowing thirty-three, whereabouts in the Long Reach do we bump them?"
"We'll bump them before Ditton," said Kit; "you give us ten good ones, Skinny, when we get round Grassy."
And he relapsed into mysterious obscurity.
Strolling alone across the Great Court Kit considered the problem of his mother. For nine years she had been less than a shadow, and suddenly she had appeared before him as a woman of strange yet mature liveness. Never in his life had he felt more rigid and less impulsive than during those few minutes when he had stood looking down at her, feeling himself most strangely full of his father. The logic of youth can be very merciless, and Kit was not a sentimentalist. He was too big and vital to be sentimental. And what were the facts as he saw them? His mother had deserted his father at a time of wounds and misfortune. She had gone away with another man. Nine years had passed, and Sorrell had been both mother and father to him.
And she had talked of sportsmanship. What right had she? He had been utterly ill at ease with her, and through the haze of his astonishment he had felt himself groping in the presence of someone who had an illusive motive, a cleverness that was strange to him, something plump and persuasive. And yet, after all, she was his mother. She might be expected to feel some interest in him. But what sort of interest? After nine years? Rather late in the day,—surely? And he did not think that he needed her interest. It roused no response in him. The man that was Christopher took sides, and his nascent manhood was on the side of his father.
Christopher passed through the Great Court, and across Sydney Street into Jesus Lane. The long May evening spread before him its clear, persuasive light, and he knew that the water would be lying very still and black under the willows and the bridges, but he went to his rooms. He threw his cap and gown into one chair, and himself into the other. Through the open window he watched clouds flushing a sky of pale azure.
Presently, he reached for a note-book scribbled full of chemical formulæ, for he had told his mother that he had work to do, and when you had made such a statement it behoved you to be consistent. But what an extraordinary situation was this, that he should be sitting there, mugging chemistry, while his mother waited less than a mile away, the mother whom he had not seen for nine years! Those nine years! Yet, it was those nine years that had inhibited any impulse that might have pushed him towards her. As it was, he shrank from the idea of seeing her again; he fest and self-conscious, awkwardly and obstinately shy of her.
But he could not read. His youth had been too deeply stirred, and his young self challenged, and the carbon and hydrogen molecules were jostled by live thoughts.
Why had not his father mentioned his mother to him in that last letter?
What was the meaning of Sorrell's silence?
Their compact had never yet miscarried. "No secrets." Kit the man was the son of Kit the boy.
"Perhaps it never occurred to him that she would come up here."
Kit's impulse was to sit down and write to his father, and he threw his chemistry notes aside, and got out a writing-pad and his fountain-pen. He sat curled up in the chair with the pad on his knee, full of an immense and questioning seriousness.
Sounds of wild life began in the room below. Three or four live young men had returned with Burgoyne and were letting loose their liveliness. A gramophone began to play, and voices in chorus to ask the whole of the impending night that most vital question—"Why did I kiss that girl?"
"Confound them!" said Kit, frowning in the dusk over his writing-pad and biting the top of his pen.
"Why—O—why," sang the voices.
"Because—you are blithering idiots, above," replied a voice from above.
The eternal question blew itself out, and four irresponsible young men big with youth cast about for other methods of self-expression.
"Let's go up and rag old Solly."
They arrived, tumbling up the stairs, and stood bunched in Christopher's doorway, sighting him as a shadowy figure in a chair with a writing-pad on his knee.
"Pomes," said one of them, "pomes to Alice."
"Hallo,—old H2O."
"O, get out," said Kit, "I'm busy. Go and put on another fox-trot."
They fell upon him and there was a minute's commotion during which Kit with perfect good temper gave as good as he got, and having extricated himself and pulled Burgoyne's coat over his head, thrust him vigorously between the legs of a Rugger "blue."
"Kiss her—now, old thing."
Someone switched on the light, and got hold of Kit's writing-pad but Kit's voice became suddenly unplayful.
"Drop that."
"Dear old pater"
"Drop it"
The farceur dropped it, not merely because Sorrell was a marked man with the gloves, but also because he was a decent lad.
"Right O, Solly."
Kit smiled at him.
"Quits, you chaps. I'll come down presently when I have finished a letter."
Hot and satisfied, they left him with a wildly ruffled head and went below. The gramophone resumed its melody.
"Why did I kiss?"
Kit wrote his letter, and the inward refrain of it was—"Why did—she—come here?"
"What puzzled me—pater—was why you had not talked about it in your letter.
"She asked me to dinner, but I said that I had to dine in hall, and when she asked me to go in after dinner, I said I had to read. "It made me feel queer and churlish, but the fact is I was pretty well astonished. She seemed like a stranger.
"I asked her whether you knew about her coming here, and she did not give me a straight answer.
"It seems pretty beastly writing like this,—but I have always told you things. There is something in me that can't call her mother. I can't help."
Sorrell laid the letter on his desk, and he remained for a long while, deep in thought. Christopher had asked him a very definite question, and he neither wished nor was able to avoid replying to it. That his mood had its moments of exultation was neither here nor there. Almost, he was ready to forgive the woman her attempt to raid his life's store of treasure, for the sake of the significant ineptitude of the attempt. At first, Sorrell had been angry, but Kit's letter had dispersed his anger.
His son was loyal to him, and to explain this loyalty the father could produce a dozen reasons. And was not the chief reason to be found in his own attitude towards Christopher, an attitude of deep and unselfish affection? He had refused to treat the boy like personal property, jealously, with arbitrary patronage. He had fought the spirit of the old-man father. He had never talked down to Christopher, coerced him against his reason, or worked off upon the boy a facile pomposity.
They were friends. This letter was the most signal proof of it.
Kit read his father's letter while he was eating his breakfast. It was a strange and rare letter for a father to write to a son.
"Kit,—I am not only your father but your friend,—and my wish has been to put the friend before the father.
"Old chap,—you mean a very great deal to me, more perhaps than you will ever know, but you are not my cake to have and eat. Your life is your own, and my share in it is the love and pride that will come to me out of it. All the things that will make you happy are what I desire—you and your job. It is a man's job that matters to him most.
"I have no feeling against your mother—now. All that is dead. The only feeling that I should have against her would be—if—she took you away from your true self and your job. I don't say that she would. But women have powers of persuasion.
"Do what you feel moved to do. If you wish to see her—see her. After all—she is your mother, and was—my wife.
"I do not believe that she can come between us.
"Your letter to me was rather a precious document, Kit. Do you remember the old brown portmanteau?"
Christopher's bacon and eggs grew cold while he read his father's letter. His eyes had a faint mist before them.
His father was a great man. He loved him.
Mrs. Duggan's chauffeur was strapping a trunk to the luggage grid, while she herself stood at a window, still impatiently dallying after three days of waiting for the son who never came. She had expected him, and when he failed to come to her, her expectation had grown more urgent and angry. For she, who never allowed sentiment to interfere with her appetites, had wished to employ sentiment in the seduction of her son.
The stare of his blue eyes, his rigid seriousness had remained with her. She had seen in him both herself and his father, and the old jealous clamour had revived. "Mine" had been her cry. But she had understood Kit's obstinate shyness, and in dealing with men she had discovered the efficacy of attacking by retreating. She had held aloof during those three days, unable to believe that the elemental stuff in Christopher would not bring him to her. She would handle him gently. Let him but tolerate the first, subtle caress, and she would soon put her shears to his awkward shyness.
She was in love with youth now, and youth found her pleasant and easy. She had money to spend and she knew how to fill her car with young things, to carry a bouquet of youth about town to the dancing-rooms or the theatre. Aunt Dora was such a good sort.
And Christopher had not come to be caressed. The rigid and serious Sorrell seemed to be holding him back behind the barrier of those nine years. She had expected difficulties, a course of careful persuasion, and she had prepared herself to be patient.
But to be snubbed by Sorrell's son!
A porter came into the room.
"The car is ready, madam."
She prepared to abandon her strong point and to begin her retreat, and as she passed out through the hotel doorway she became aware of an abrupt and blind rage, the impatience of the woman elemental in her passion to possess. She approached the car. The chauffeur was holding open the door. He touched the peak of his cap.
"Beautiful morning, madam."
"A perfect morning, Gunter."
He arranged a rug over her knees, and closed the door of the saloon, and as he did so a lad in a dark blue gown came round the back of the car and appeared at the window. He raised his mortar-board, and looked unsmilingly at his mother. His lips moved. She leaned forward and lowered the window.
"I thought it was your car. I'm just off to a lecture."
She put out a gloved hand, and her face had a's oft and secret radiance.
"Be a good boy, my dear. I can see that you are."
He took her hand, but she was aware of the irresponsiveness of his strong young fingers.
"Hope you will have a good drive. London, is it?"
She was all smiles.
"Of course. Now, don't be late for your lecture. Good-bye."
"She nodded to the chauffeur, gave a playful pat to Kit's hand and sat back smiling at him with easy benevolence.
"My address in town is South Audley Street, No. 107. Good-bye."