Sorrell and Son (Alfred A. Knopf, printing 9)/Chapter 25

by George Warwick Deeping

XXV

1

MAURICE PENTREATH took life far too seriously. Both he and Sorrell "kept" on the same staircase in the Great Court at Trinity and on the night before the Science Tripos opened, Kit, who had not touched a book for the last three days, and had spent his time play ing tennis and loafing on the river, found Pentreath reading at eleven o'clock at night.

"I should chuck it, Maurice."

Pentreath's eyes looked blurred and sunken.

"It's so final, so very final. One's chances don't recur."

Kit took Pentreath's book away; it was Jukes Browne's Geology.

"Go to bed, old thing. You'll be all muzzy in the morning. Look here, after the papers to-morrow, I'm going to make you play tennis."

Pentreath walked about the room like a restless dog.

"It's my memory, Sorrell. I wish I had your memory. It's maddening. There are times when I can't fix facts. I never can be sure, oligocene or eocene, the right order, I mean. My memory plays tricks."

"Go to bed, old chap," said Kit.

Christopher enjoyed the Tripos, for he felt like a well-trained boxer, confident and strong, and he had no panic moods and no fear of the clock. He would walk in, sit down, calmly read the paper through, and then punch his answers out with deliberate steadiness. Pentreath sat opposite him and away on the right, and Pentreath's face made him think of a frightened swimmer who doubted whether he would reach the shore. Maurice was always looking fearfully at the clock.

Christopher carried off a first class, Pentreath a third. Kit saw the lists, went off to wire to his father, and walked back to Trinity to face his friend. Pentreath's breakfast had not been touched, and Kit found him in bed huddled up, his hair over his face.

"Congratulations. You're through."

He saw that someone had told Pentreath the news, and that Pentreath was sick with shame. A third!

"They'll feel so let down at home, Sorrell."

"My dear old chap, exams aren't everything."

Christopher saw that his friend wished to be left alone, and he closed the door on Pentreath, and going out by way of the "backs" he took the field path to Grantchester. His elation was far less deep than poor Pentreath's shame, the nice, Arthurian Pentreath with the sensitive mouth and the finely cut features, the brother of that little devil of a Molly. Kit's mood was one of frank and solid self-satisfaction, and as he walked with the vigorous leisureliness of an athlete who has won his race and can go out of training, it seemed to him that his success had been absurdly easy. He had been conscious of no feeling of effort. He had worked hard and steadily.

But he did recognize the fact that his first-class in the Science Tripos was not an isolated result, but a little peak in a series of peaks. It represented continuity; it had been foreshadowed years ago when his father had cleaned boots at the Angel Inn; Mr. Porteous too had had a very great share in it. Kit stood on the bridge and watched the water froth into the mill pool, and all the world that was green.

"The old pater will be pleased."

He agreed that it was his father's victory as well as his own. Sorrell had served his years as a gladiator in the world's arena, and Kit had watched him, and had absorbed the unsentimental lesson of that eternal spectacle. Man was a jealous beast. Take away his sword, and he fights with his wits, with a pen, with a bank balance. In the future it was probable that he would fight group against group, the collier against the carpenter, or the massed fools against the superior few. Kit had had his successes, and had blundered unconsciously against the jealousy of other men. It had surprised him, but he had taken note of it, and drawn his own conclusions.

"The pater was right," he thought; "go straight for your mark—and don't stop to argue. But you must carry a punch in your fist. Poor old Pentreath has lost his punch."

His consciousness centred itself for a moment upon his right hand, and he held it out and examined it as though it were the hand of a stranger. Kit's hands were very like his father's, but the fingers were stronger, and not recurved at the tips. Sorrell's hands had had to clutch at his chances and hold on to them; his son's fingers were straighter and more creative. Kit's hands combined sensitiveness and strength; they were dexterous, capable of fine and precise movements, yet very steady. They were to be a surgeon's hands, and for the best part of two years Kit had had the training of them ever-present in his mind, and in the physiology lab and the dissecting-room he had gained a nice skill with forceps and scalpel. Dissecting was an art, laying bare the delicate tissue until you had made a picture, and Kit had perfected this skill. The Demonstrators of Anatomy had used his dissections for the benefit of other students. Poor Pentreath, eager and too much in a hurry, and never quite able to overcome a loathing of the pickled carcases, was always floundering, or niggling away with an uncertain scalpel.

Kit smiled at his own right hand. You had to have something behind the hand, and he felt that he had.

He remembered an afternoon at Roland's house when Cherry had told his hand, turning it over and over, and prodding it with the soft tip of a beautifully manicured finger, while Roland had quizzed them both.

"You are going to do things with your hands," she had said to Kit.

He remembered his smiling—"I mean to."

No, he did not feel arrogant about it, or full of a facile cocksureness, but he knew what he wanted to do, and how to set about the doing of it, and he had won his first battles.

"The old pater will be pleased."

Appreciation matters, and his father's understanding keenness was no small part of Kit's inspiration.

And while the son was hanging over the mill-pool and looking at the green willows, the father was ringing up Mr. Porteous on the telephone.

"Hallo,—that you——? Kit's got a first. What? You were sure he would?—Well,—so was I—in a way, but then—there is nothing like a certainty. Proud? I am—not a little. These things matter, old chap. We owe a lot to you, you know. Rot? It isn't rot. Come up to dinner."

2

In the autumn of that year Kit became a student of St. Martha's Hospital, with rooms in Brunswick Square.

Sorrell had taken a share in the choice of the rooms, for provided with recommendations by the Dean of the hospital, they had explored all that region that lies between Regent's Park and Oxford Street. Kit's rooms were on the third floor, and his sitting-room overlooked the square, with the morning sun shining in, and Sorrell, remembering the days of his squalid contrivings, had liked the house and its atmosphere. It was kept by a Mrs. Gibbins, a straight up and down woman, who had been none too eager to lodge a medical student, and who had met Sorrell with an air of vague antagonism. Nor were they cheap rooms,—but rather above the level of the ordinary student's finances.

At breakfast Kit could look out at the plane trees turning gold, and the patterning of light upon the sooty trunks. His room had two windows and a mahogany door, a bookcase, and two or three odd chairs. Mrs. Gibbins provided him with breakfast, and a hot meal at night. For the first week or two she observed Kit's comings and goings, for her little sitting-room at the back of the house on the ground floor was situated like a porter's lodge, and when her door was left ajar she could command the foot of the stairs. Mr. Sorrell was very regular in his habits. He came in about six, read till dinner, continued his reading for an hour, and then went out and walked. He would be back in his room and ready for more work by half-past nine. Ada, the middle-aged maid who had been with Mrs. Gibbins for ten years, was able to report that Mr. Sorrell read at meals.

"He's always got a book stuck up against the teapot or the cruet stand."

It would appear that Kit was an earnest and hard-working young man, and Mrs. Gibbins felt relieved. She knew her London, and the young male,—though—for that matter—some of the old ones could be worse than the youngsters. A practical woman who has her living to earn and a house to consider, and two very responsible women as clients on the first and second floors, desires to avoid complications. Young men with latch-keys! Mrs. Gibbins relaxed some of her inevitable hostility.

Each morning at 8.45 Kit plunged into his London. He walked up Guildford Street, half circled Russell Square, and proceeding across Tottenham Court Road, made his way down one of the shaggy streets leading towards the hospital. It was in Russell Square that he struck the flurry of London, the haste of young women and girls and men of all ages and sizes whom the suburbs poured into offices and shops and restaurants. Kit's course lay mostly across the track of these hurrying clerks and shop-girls, but sometimes he went a little way with the crowd. The femininity of it poured round him, those little bobbing hats, the slim legs swinging under those provoking skirts, those London faces pretty or plain, soft or hard, like pale flowers drifting. Sometimes at the same corner he would pass the same girl, or the same group of girls, silent or chattering, always hurrying. Sometimes a girl looked at him, and the look was neither hostile nor friendly.

Kit made a habit of walking very fast, as though he were vaguely conscious of something soft and impeding brushing against the impetus of his youth, and as though the impetus itself had a necessary virtue. His purpose propelled him out of the house in Brunswick Square, and past those tripping feet and little bobbing hats, to the grey forecourt of St. Martha's Hospital. He hung up his hat and coat in the cloak-room, picked up one of the other Cambridge men who had come to St. Martha's, sat through a lecture, dissected, or squinted down a microscope, read a book or talked or ragged for five minutes, and went out to lunch at "Lyons" in Oxford Street. He would spend some of his afternoons in the out-patient departments; he carried a stethoscope; for he had so thorough a knowledge of his anatomy and physiology that he could spare the time for clinical work. The second part of the Cambridge M.B. was to be taken in December and beyond it the first part of the Fellowship challenged his ambition. At half-past four he allowed himself a round of buttered toast and a cup of tea, and after that he would, walk, turning into Hyde Park, and making his way home by Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue. His walking was a straight forward affair, swift and strenuous, a casual avoidance of other people, a scorn of shops and faces. His impetus swung him along, and he cultivated this impetus. Speed seemed to matter; it carried him past and over those insidious interferences.

On Saturdays he played "soccer" for the hospital. He was inoffensively popular, or rather less unpopular than some of the other 'Varsity men who had to meet the young male jealousies of men who had been at neither. He boxed, but less than of old, for he had begun to question its effect on his hands. Once a month he spent a week-end with Sorrell at Winstonbury, and on Sundays he had supper with Thomas Roland at Chelsea. Music had begun to appeal to him very subtly, and colour and pictures. He found pictures in music, and music in pictures. Occasionally he met Pentreath who was at St. Thomas's, a Pentreath who seemed to grow more sensitively serious.

Pentreath had rooms in a quiet corner of Clapham. He gave Sorrell to understand that he found Clapham less distracting, and more safe.

"I need not go north of the river, you know. Down there it is very dowdy and dull."

Kit confessed that he passed through the centre of the spider's web once each day. He spoke of Piccadilly Circus, and Shaftesbury Avenue, and Pentreath looked at him anxiously. To Kit it seemed that his friend was both fascinated and afraid.

"I wonder you dare. I promised my mater——. All those beastly women——!"

Pentreath's fear of his own desire, the trembling of his niceness on the edge of the elemental, were not without their effect on Kit. Pentreath's inward excitements and repressions were disturbing.

"They can't run away with you, old chap."

"It is the lights—too. The glare,—and the faces that come on you suddenly. And the eyes, looking at you from under the shadow——. You must think me a silly fool, Sorrell,—but there is an unholy fascination, a beauty, a damnable beauty——"

"You take it too seriously."

Pentreath's face had a pinched look.

"I can't help it. It—is—serious. Cambridge was different,—rather like an old house in an old garden. You weren't provoked there."

Kit nodded a sagacious young head.

"Suggestion, Maurice."

"That's it. Everything in London pushes you over the edge, the colour, the women, the shops, the lights,—even the food and the drink. I'm working ten hours a day, and living on fruit and brown bread and water."

Most young men would have laughed, but Christopher did not laugh at Pentreath's fear of that which was in him. He had seen the Pentreath home and touched the Pentreath tradition, and he knew that his friend was passionately sincere. Maurice had ideals; he wanted to think of all women as he thought of his sisters, pale, sweet, Burne-Jonesian, and he was terrified when he saw the Rossetti woman.

"One ought not to feel tempted, Sorrell. When I think of my people——"

"Why don't you get engaged? One can't help these things, you know. Everybody feels like it. I have lots of talk with my pater."

He found Pentreath's eyes looking at him with astonishment.

"You have talked to your father——?"

"Yes——."

"About all this?"

"We understand each other."

"My dear chap—I couldn't. In our family—some things are not mentioned."

Kit left Pentreath thinking that he had not been affected by his friend's quivering confusion, but he was to find that in some subtle way his friend's problem was to become his own. Pentreath had spoken of the lights and the beauty and the shadows, and the eyes, and the dim faces, and the play of the colours. Seduction. The natural desire of the young male. The flick of a skirt, a face seen suddenly at a street corner, those shapely ankles with the soft curves of the muscles above them, the shadow of a fur about a white throat, little half moons of dark hair showing under a hat! Kit began to find that he had to walk harder and faster and that he had to resist a desire to loiter and to look.

Moreover, he was lonely, and he was young. When he shut himself in at night with his books he would find himself thinking of the vivid lights and the faces.

There were times when he felt that he was missing things, life, adventure.

There were men at the hospital who had mischievous and debonair tales to tell.

"Old Landon's been having a time of it. A girl in a flat, some old chap's special——."

Kit would put his hands over his ears, and glue his eyes to his book. Anatomy! Arteries, the blood, the heart! A redness! Hair—and its structure. A girl's hair!

One night he turned up unexpectedly at Thomas Roland's, and there was something in his eyes and in the excited restraint of his young manhood that caused the older man to wonder.

"I wish you would play to me, sir."

Roland sat down and played Debussy, thinking that Kit's too personal cry might be smoothed by the more impersonal beauty of Debussy's music.

3

Like Prosper le Gai every young man must ride out in the spring of the year and meet his Isoult or his Malfry, symbolical figures in the tapestry of life's happenings, yet Sorrell himself passed through a period of unrest during his son's first weeks in London. It was as though he felt all that Kit might feel, and feeling it realized his own helplessness. The young man had mounted his horse, and all those years of proud planning and building were to be put to the test, like a bridge or a sea-wall in flood time. Sorrell could do nothing but stand and watch, while trying to reassure himself as to the soundness of the foundations. There were times when he would address himself with scornful severity.

"Don't be an ass. Every man has to face life for himself, and make his choices."

But it troubled him to remember how he himself had gone astray in making the supreme choice, and that in making it he had wronged both himself and Kit's mother. He had thrust his incompatibilities into Dora's life, and she had had her legitimate grievance. What a pity that she was not other than she was, and able to take a share——! But that again was the trouble. She would emphasize in Kit all those qualities that make for dispersion and failure, and produce those half-lives, those wounded efforts and dreary bafflements.

"He has got to go through with it all," was all that Sorrell could say.

He imagined that his anxiety resembled the anxiety of a father whose one and beloved son had gone to the trenches. Nothing that he could do would alter the inevitable. But why the inevitable? Was not the whole problem unnatural, the product of conventions and repressions?

He was grateful to the woman who understood him, and whose understanding came as a surprise and an assuagement. In the winter darkness he would hear a soft tapping of fingers upon his window, and he would rise and let her in.

"You're worried about Kit."

Her supreme common sense was like a cool hand laid upon his forehead.

"London, you know, Fanny."

"Well,—what about it? Didn't you have your share of London?"

"I did."

"And here you are. You had to worry it out. So will Kit."

"I know. But one longs to give the boy the right solution."

"There isn't a right solution,—only one's own—my dear. We are not as young as we were. Interference doesn't work. What worked in our day,—see——? Kit's got ballast."

"I have tried to help him in every way."

"Yes,—and a boy like Kit will find out how to help himself. Don't you see——? We have to."

Moreover, she insisted upon the woman's point of view, and was at pains to remind Sorrell that there was a woman's point of view.

"You men talk, Stephen, as though it was all our fault. The old Eve idea. You men run after us, and then curse oe for making you do it,—which we don't, not always. Be fair."

Sorrell agreed that it was dangerous to generalize, and that each sex had to suffer because of the other, and that neither cynicism nor idealism can be relied upon to control the energy of life. The problem was so to direct it that it did not drive people over precipices and into quagmires.

"My whole point is that I don't believe in a man marrying until he is well up the ladder."

"You want him to think more of his job than of his wife?"

"Well,—doesn't a man——?"

"And meanwhile——"

Sorrell gave a little shrug of the shoulders.

"Perhaps I am prejudiced, Fanny. Life's so big, and for the last ten years or so I have had my eyes on one little figure. Whatever happens he will always get the best from me."

She bent down and kissed his forehead.

"You are a good man, Stephen. I think yours is the sort of goodness that helps other people to make good. If I were Kit's mother——"

"You would be worrying like anything."

"Perhaps. Perhaps not. People who have been brought up cleanly don't like dirt. And they don't like the sour taste that comes after too much drink. Start a lad with a clean stomach—and it will want to keep itself clean. Don't worry too much."

4

None the less, when Kit came down to Winstonbury for a week-end the whole of Sorrell's consciousness would be exposed like a sensitive plate hidden behind a lens, ready to register every secret impression.

One winter morning while Sorrell was tying his tie in front of his cottage window, he had one of those moments of illumination, for the world outside his window seemed more real than reality. Real because he saw it in a sudden garment of mystery, and the dimness of the dawn, grey, gradual, yet like the soul of itself, a moon still shining somewhere upon the leafless trees, the grass frosted between night and dawn. The illusion of the material reality departed from him while he stood there. It was as though everything were spirit. He felt the beauty of feeling and of seeing as he did, the illimitable significance of the human interplay. All was gradualness and growth, and no measure of worrying could make a tree shoot its leaves in winter. The seasons came and went, but all that a man loved went on, like the sap, sleeping or rising.

He watched a streak of sky grow blue.

"Kit will be here to-day," he thought.

5

Kit came.

He seemed older, and yet to Sorrell his face was the face of Kit the child.

"Pater,—I want to ask you to do something."

"What is it, old chap?"

"It's about money."

Kit stood at the window and held the curtain aside to watch the sunset, much as his father had watched the dawn. The young outline of his face had a tender severity, and the tenderness was for sky and trees. Sorrell, bending over a kettle that was beginning to hiss over the sitting-room fire, looked up and sideways at his son.

"I say—it's jolly here—That sky——. One sees so little sky in London."

Sorrell was wondering why Kit needed money.

"I have arranged for you to have a horse to-morrow if you care to ride."

"I'd rather walk, pater,—if you can spare the time."

"I think so."

Sorrell waited. Kit lingered at the window, but not with any air of avoiding his father, and Sorrell watched the kettle.

"How much do you want, Kit?"

"What,—pater?"

"Cash, old chap."

Kit turned suddenly, and leaned against the window casing.

"I don't want money. You are so jolly generous to me. I want you to pay Mrs. Gibbins's bills for me, if I have them sent down. Will you?"

The kettle was boiling, and Sorrell filled the teapot.

"Yes,—but why?"

"Reasons, pater. I can manage my lunches and teas and tobacco and things on a pound a week. If you would send me up a postal order for a pound—every week."

Sorrell placed the teapot on the table. They drew chairs up to the fire and sat down.

"Just as you please, old chap. There's no need for economy——"

Kit reached for the black-currant jam.

"I don't think one wants too much money in London, pater. Just as well knock about without it, especially when you want to get on with your job. Do you mind?"

"I think you are wise," said his father.