Knight Without Armour (33 page)

“Yes, I see. But that would take time.”

“You are in a hurry?”

“No—not really—but I must get away.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

The Harvard man stared at the desk, thinking how typically Russian the
reply was—so like a piece out of a Chekov play—in fact, to be
candid, more than a little imbecile. Contenting himself with a final rally of
his official self, he rejoined: “I trust there has been no mistake of
any kind. We have it noted here that you came with the child, that you denied
that you were the child’s father, and that you indicated that the child
was without parents. That being so—”

“Oh yes, quite,” answered A.J., taking up his paper parcel.
“It doesn’t matter, I assure you.”

And, after all, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He was just
passing out of the office after a perfunctory good-day, when the other called
him back. “Just a moment. I don’t know whether—you see, you
said you didn’t know where you were going to—”

“Yes?”

“Well, perhaps in that case you’d consider staying on here for
a little while?”

“Why?”

“Well, you’d be pretty useful as an interpreter. The pay would
be a dollar a day, and you could feed and sleep here, of course.”

“Thanks. I’ll stay.”

Such an instant acceptance seemed rather to disconcert the young man, but
he managed to express his pleasure, and soon afterwards set A.J. to work on a
pile of letters waiting to be deciphered from the Russian.

Thus A.J. became part of the American Relief detachment at Pavlokoff. His
jobs, besides the translating and answering of letters, included the
receiving and questioning of applicants for assistance, and he was also
called for by anybody and everybody in all linguistic emergencies of every
kind. He worked hard and was rather a success. Yet at the end of six months
nobody knew him any better than at the beginning. The Harvard graduate, as
well as many of the doctors and nurses, made innumerable efforts to break
down the harrier and become intimate; hut, though always polite, A.J. never
yielded an inch. They all concluded that he must be slightly mad, yet they
all trusted him to a degree oddly inharmonious with such a conclusion.

One day in April the Harvard man approached him with an item of news that
he evidently felt sure would lead to confidences. “Oh, I put through an
enquiry,” he began, trying to appear very official, “about that
young girl you were interested in. It seems she was in the first batch sent
over to America. She must be there by now. Very lucky for her—I
don’t think they’re intending to send any more.”

A.J. made no comment, and the other went on: “Yes, that’s
right—she must have crossed on the
Bactria
some weeks ago. She
hadn’t any name that our people knew of, so she was given
one—’Mary Denver’—Denver being the city she was to be
sent to on arrival the other side. Of course that’s only
provisional—doubtless she’ll eventually take the name of the
family that adopts her. I could find out who they are, I daresay though
strictly speaking it would be against the rules.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” was all that A.J. said.

In the summer of 1919 the American Relief detachment was ordered home.
A.J. had by that time saved up two hundred and fifty American dollars. When
the time approached for the break-up of the organisation, he was rather
surprised to find that he disliked the prospect of wandering vaguely about
the earth again, even with American money in his pocket; he had grown so used
to the clean, orderly rhythm of events with the Americans, to the daily
baths, and the breakfast cereals, and the card-indexing system. Decadence,
perhaps, but excusable. He felt too tired to break out of the comfortable
groove, too uninterested ever again to find his own way about the world; he
wanted just to be told quietly to do certain things, and to be given regular
meals and a bed in return for doing them.

He applied for permission to go to America with the others, but though the
heads of the medical staff strongly supported his application, it was turned
down because of his supposedly Russian nationality. Then he told them,
suddenly communicative after all those months of reticence, that he was not
Russian but English by birth and parentage, and that his real name was
Fothergill. The psycho-analyst doctor, who had all along been deeply
interested in his case, was more than ever interested now. He questioned him
further, about his birth, education, family, and so on, and to every question
A.J. gave full and simple, answers, no longer wishing to conceal anything if
concealment were to mean being flung back into the chaos of the world
around.

All these particulars, together with the doctor’s earnest
recommendation, were sent to the American Embassy at Constantinople, with the
request that the hitherto mysterious but now elucidated Fothergill should be
given a visa and allowed to proceed with the Relief detachment to America,
where his services would continue to be of value. After a week or so came a
somewhat curious reply. The visa could not be granted, but one of the
attachés had been so interested in the case that he had got into touch with a
friend of his in a British Military Mission. This friend knew the Fothergill
family, it appeared, and knew, further, that one of them, presumably a
brother of the applicant, had been an officer in Palestine during the War,
and was now, he believed, stationed in Cairo awaiting demobilisation.

The American doctor informed A.J. of this, and suggested that he should
proceed to Cairo on the trail of the long-lost brother. A.J. agreed, willing
enough for anything, and after some further delay was provided with a
visa
from the British authorities at Constantinople.

He left Odessa on August 11th, 1919, and arrived in Cairo a week later.
Captain William Fothergill had been informed, and the two men met at
Shepheard’s Hotel. Neither, of course, could recognise the other, but
by the time the second cocktail appeared they were in no doubt as to their
proved brotherhood. As befitted Englishmen in such an emergency, they were
restrained almost to the point of being embarrassed. “I suppose you
must have had all sorts of adventures, living in Russia throughout the
Revolution?” Captain William Fothergill remarked, with one finger
running down the wine- list; and A.J. answered: “Oh yes, a
few.”

Captain Fothergill was apt to be equally cursory about his own personal
affairs: he owned rubber and coconut plantations in Sumatra which he had had
to leave in the hands of a ‘damned artful Dutchman’ during the
period of his war service. Now, of course, he was only waiting for
demobilisation to be off to Singapore by the first available boat.
“Seems to me you might as well come along too, if you’re at a
loose end,” he said, and A.J. replied: “Yes, all right, I
don’t mind. Will there be any job for me?”

“Oh Lord, yes, I can find you plenty to do. Ever looked after
niggers’”

“No.”

“I don’t mean real niggers—just Chinks and Malays, you
know. Queer fellers—all right as long as they’ve got someone to
keep a strict eye on ’em. If you can do that, you’ll be worth
your weight in gold on any rubber plantation.”

Captain Fothergill’s demobilisation papers arrived before the end of
the month, and the two brothers caught a boat for Singapore, by way of
Colombo, at the beginning of October.

From the “Golden Arrow” at Victoria there
stepped a man whom the porters, even on that plutocratic platform, singled
out, attracted not so much by a leather handbag plastered with foreign
hotel-labels as by a certain unanalysable but highly significant quietness of
manner. And the voice was equally quiet. “Taxi—yes, and there are
a trunk and two large suit-cases in the van. The name is Fothergill.”
To the driver a few moments later he said merely: “The Cecil.” It
was the only hotel he could remember from the London of his youth.

They gave him a lofty bedroom overlooking the dazzling semicircle of the
Embankment, and he spent the first few minutes gazing down at the trams and
the electric advertisements across the river. He was a little tired after the
journey, and a little thrilled by the sensation of being in London again. He
changed, though not into evening clothes, and dined in the grill-room,
chatting desultorily with the waiter. Then he smoked a cigar in the lounge
and went up to his room rather early. In bed with a novel, he heard Big Ben
chime several successive quarters; then he switched off the light and tried
to believe that this small, comfortable, well-carpeted, and entirely
characterless hotel bedroom was somehow different from all the dozens of
similar ones he had occupied in other cities.

In the morning he breakfasted in bed, enjoyed a long hot bath, made
himself affable with the hotel-porter, and strode out into the cheerful,
sunny streets. There were so many little odd jobs to do—some of which
he had been saving up for a long time. He saw his lawyer, and made an
appointment to see a Harley Street doctor later on in the week. He called at
a firm of publishers and heard that his book
Rubber and the Rubber
Industry
had crept into a second edition. The publisher asked him to
dinner the following evening; he accepted. Then he bought some tics and
handkerchiefs and a hat of rather more English style than the one he was
wearing. By that time, as it was noon and he was in the Strand, he stepped
down to Romano’s Bar for a glass of sherry and exchanged a few words
with the dark-haired girl who served him. He liked, when he could, to obtain
the intimacy of talking to people without the bother of knowing them, and
that, of course, was always more easily accomplished with one’s
so-called inferiors. The barmaid at Romano’s was a type he
liked—pretty, alert, friendly, and fundamentally virtuous. He asked her
what were the best shows to see, and she gave him the names of several which
he imagined he would be sure to detest exceedingly. Then she asked if this
were his first visit to London, and he rather enjoyed answering: “My
first for twenty-three years. I used to live here.” Afterwards he
lunched at Rule’s in Maiden Lane—the first place he found that
seemed to him very little changed since the old days. In the afternoon he
took a ’bus to the Marble Arch and walked through the September
sunshine to Hyde Park Corner and the Green Park, just in time for tea at
Rumpelmayer’s. And after that there was nothing to do but return to the
Cecil, change into dinner clothes, and begin the journey out to Surbiton.

“There is a good electric service from Waterloo,” she had
written in her letter to him, and the sentence echoed in his mind with
fatuous profundity all the time he was fixing his collar and tie in front of
the bedroom mirror. It was strange to be visiting a person whom you had not
seen for twenty-three years. It had been on impulse that he had written to
her, and he was not sure, even now, that the impulse had been wise. She had
married, of course, a second time—that was something. She had even a
nineteen- year-old daughter. And, if one chanced to think of it, she had the
vote—that vote for which in the past she had clamoured so much. She
would be forty-eight—his own age. Her letter had really told him very
little except that her name was now Newburn, that she would be delighted to
see him, and that there was that good electric service from Waterloo.

When he arrived at Surbiton station an hour later he declined a cab and
enquired the way from a policeman. The walk through placid suburban roads
gave him a chance to meditate, to savour in full the rich unusualness of the
situation. He lit a cigarette, stopped a moment to watch some boys playing
with a dog, kicked a few pieces of orange-peel into the gutter with an
automatic instinct for tidiness; it was past seven before he found the house.
It looked smaller than he had expected (for, after all, hadn’t she
inherited the bulk of old Jergwin’s fortune?); just a detached suburban
villa with sham gables and a pretentious curved pathway between the
garden-gate and the porch. The maid who opened the door to his ring took his
hat and coat and showed him into a drawing-room tastefully if rather
depressingly furnished. He stood with his back to the fire-grate and
continued to wonder what she would look like.

She came in with her daughter. She was rather thin and pale and eager, and
the daughter was a large-limbed athletic-looking girl who moved about the
room as if it were a hockey-pitch.

“Isn’t it romantic, Ainsley, for you to have come back after
all these years?”

He found himself shaking hands and being presented to the girl. “I
suppose it is,” he answered, smiling. Rather to his astonishment he
felt perfectly calm. He began to chatter pointlessly about the journey.
“Found nay way quite easily—as you said, the service is very
good. Didn’t think I’d be here half so quickly. You must be
pretty far out of town, though—twenty miles, I should guess.”

“Twelve,” the girl corrected.

They began to discuss Surbiton. Then the maid brought in complicated and
rather sugary cocktails. They continued to discuss Surbiton. By that time he
was beginning to anticipate the arrival of Mr. Newburn with almost passionate
eagerness, and was rather surprised when they adjourned to the dining-room
without waiting for the gentleman. “Is Mr. Newburn away?” he
asked, noticing that places were only laid for three. The girl answered, with
outright simplicity: “Father died two years ago.”

Well, that was that, and there was nothing for it but to look sympathetic
and change the subject. So, to avoid at all costs the resumption of the
Surbiton discussion, he began to talk about Paris, Vienna, and other cities
he had lived in during recent years. The girl said: “Mother told me you
were in Russia during the Revolution. Do tell us about it!” He smiled
and answered: “Well, ell, you know, there was a revolution and a lot of
shooting and trouble of most kinds—I don’t know that I can
remember much more.” She then said: “I suppose you saw Lenin and
Trotsky?”—and he replied: “No, never—and neither of
them. I’m rather a fraud, don’t you think?”