The Prisoners of Hartling/Chapter 3

RTHUR remembered the bridge and the lake now that he saw them again. He had had some vague recollection of an immense sheet of water and an equally immense bridge that he had vaguely connected—he thought, mistakenly—with his boyhood visits to Hartling. The only other thing he remembered was a colossal elephant's pad in the hall. He found it still there, and in the interval of twenty years, it had diminished less than the lake. The detail of the house itself had apparently left little impression on his boyish mind. As he glanced round the hall, he had an uncertain feeling of being familiar with that massive staircase, but he had no idea how the rooms were placed.

His bags had gone round to some other entrance with the car; and as he gave his keys to the butler Arthur realised the splendid support of his expensive outfit. It made a difference, gave him assurance, a sense of being at home in these surroundings. That outfit was worth the money if only for the one week-end. It would have been absolutely rotten to have spent his whole time in trying to live down shabby clothes.

There seemed to be a perfect crowd of people in the room into which he was shown by the butler after having elected to go straight in to tea. He presumed it was a regular week-end party.

His aunt got up when he was announced and came across the room to greet him. She was a little tired-looking woman with a distinct likeness to his own mother, who had died in the first year of the war. He had always attributed that gray, pinched, slightly distracted air, in his mother's case, to the difficulties of life in a country parish on insufficient means; but as his aunt had the same air it was probably a family characteristic.

Mrs Kenyon's voice and manner also reminded him of his mother.

"How you've altered, Arthur," she said in a low, even voice.

"In twenty years, aunt," he reminded her cheerfully, "one grows a certain amount."

"I've seen you since then," she said quietly, "in town. Your poor mother brought you to see me off at Charing Cross: your first year at the hospital, I think it was. Now, come and have some tea."

She led him towards the tea-table as she spoke, and introduced him in passing to her husband, a bald, rather untidy man, who was lying back in an arm-chair. "How're you?" he said indifferently to the newly recovered nephew. "Little chap in knickerbockers, about three foot nothing, last time I saw you."

Arthur smiled his acknowledgment of this reminiscence with, he hoped, an effect of not caring whether he was remembered or not. These people were certainly not effusive; but probably this was their usual manner. The more money you had the less you troubled about manners and personal appearance. His uncle had been wearing a soft, rather crumpled collar and old flannel bags. Miss Kenyon, the eldest of the family, was presiding at the tea-table. She was a tall, white-haired woman of sixty or so, with what Arthur mentally described to himself as a "domineering expression." She hardly smiled as she shook hands with him.

"I remember your first visit here very well," she said, and he grasped at the opportunity to avoid the usual futilities of an opening conversation.

"Only the vaguest recollection of it myself, Miss Kenyon," he replied brightly, as he accepted the tea she offered him. "I dare say that's because my earlier memories have been rather overlaid by the experiences of the last six years." He felt that he had taken rather a sound line. He could see chances of quite good talking ahead, supported by a backing of medical and psychological authority.

Miss Kenyon, however, cut him off by saying in her cold, clear voice, "One wouldn't expect you to remember much, you were only five."

He couldn't believe it. "Oh! surely a lot more than that," he protested. "About nine or ten, I thought."

"Jubilee year," Miss Kenyon affirmed quietly, but with an air of final authority. "In August."

Arthur did not care to contradict her again, but he was still unconvinced. "Was it really?" he asked. "Astonishing how one forgets!"

Miss Kenyon was not to be deceived by this simulation of agreement.

"Don't you remember, Hannah?" she asked, turning to her sister-in-law, who had sat down near them, and was apparently brooding over the emptiness of life.

Mrs Kenyon started. "Remember, Esther? Oh! when Arthur came before," she said. "Not very distinctly, I am afraid. But he was quite a little fellow, in a holland tunic. I remember that because he got himself very dirty one morning, and poor Emily hadn't got a change for him."

Miss Kenyon nodded calmly. "In any case," she remarked, "we can verify the date without difficulty. I shall have a note of it in my diary."

"Esther is always accurate in her facts," her sister-in-law murmured. "Her memory is simply wonderful."

Miss Kenyon did not acknowledge this compliment. She was looking out through the great bay-window that was one of the principal features of the room in which they were sitting. Her expression was one of conscious authority—supreme, unquestionable.

Arthur felt snubbed, and, for the moment could think of no other suitable topic of conversation. Perhaps it would be advisable to admit that he was wrong, before he tried another subject.

"Stupid of me," he tried. "But as I was saying just now, the experiences of the past few years have rather altered one's scale of values. I probably mixed up my visit here with some other visit I paid with my mother when I was a bit older. One does that, sometimes."

He paused. Miss Kenyon was regarding him with a quiet, detached interest. It was evident that she had no further intention of interrupting him if he cared to go on talking, but that he must not ex- pect any sort of response.

Arthur dropped his thesis with a slight sense of irritation and turned to his aunt.

"Aren't there some cousins of mine I ought to know?" he asked.

She indicated her two children with what Arthur thought to be a singular lack of enthusiasm. "That is Hubert by the fireplace. Elizabeth is over there in the window. I will introduce you to them when you have finished your tea."

Arthur took stock of his two cousins with attention. He was beginning to wonder if he were not in for an uncommonly depressing week-end. His observations of the third generation did little to reassure him.

Hubert was a young man of about twenty-five, with a long, melancholy face. He was dressed in rough tweeds, and wearing cloth gaiters, that gave him the look of a man whose interests lay among horses. And in Arthur's experience men who talked about horses were quite unable to talk about anything else. Elizabeth, a rather pretty girl, probably two or three years younger than her brother, was more interesting, but she, too, had the same expression of lassitude.

Arthur, still brightly aware of his newly recovered youth, felt as if he would like to take her by the arm and run with her out into the sunlight; shake her, make her sing and dance, force her to show some signs of enjoying her consciousness of life.

"And the little man talking to Hubert, who is he?" Arthur had no urgent desire to hurry the introduction to his cousins, and he was thoroughly enjoying the various cakes provided for tea.

He had not tasted cakes like these since the war. Also, Miss Kenyon had now gone from the table and left the room, and he felt more free to talk. Aunt Hannah might be rather dull but she was at least reasonably polite.

"That's Charles Turner," she told him. "He married Mr Kenyon's second daughter, Katherine—she's over there in the window by Elizabeth. Charles is the uncle of the present Lord Greening, you know."

Arthur did not know, but he nodded as he replied, "Are they staying here for the week-end?"

"Oh! no," Mrs Kenyon said. "We all live here. There is no one from outside here this week-end—except yourself."

Was that the reason for their tepidity? Arthur reflected. He was some one "from the outside" intruding upon the family circle. Perhaps, in spite of their wealth, the Kenyon family mixed very little with the outside world. They were a complete group living within the of that ten-foot brick wall, self-sufficient, and it might be a little self-conscious in the presence of a stranger. That general air of lassitude and of—there was some other element in it that he could not quite define—might be the effect of shyness which, as he knew, often took strange forms. Not that Miss Kenyon had appeared to suffer from any known form of shyness. She was evidently an overbearing woman.

"You're quite a large family party, aunt," he commented to keep the conversation going.

Mrs Kenyon blinked as if he had in some way touched upon a sore subject. She gave, however, no hint of that in her reply. "And there's Eleanor, whom you haven't seen yet," she said. "She acts as a sort of secretary to Mr Kenyon. She's the daughter of James, the second son. He and his wife are both dead, and so is their elder daughter Margery." She looked at her son as she added, "Charles and Katherine have a son too, but he does not live with us. He is acting as a clerk to a stock-broker. Quite a good position, I believe. Have you finished your tea? I am sure Hubert is waiting to talk to you."

"All but, aunt," Arthur said. "Sorry to bother you with all these questions, but I want to know who's who to begin with. And Mr Kenyon? He isn't down here of course."

"He never takes tea," Mrs Kenyon said; "and we don't see a great deal of him at any time. I don't mean that he is in any way an invalid or a recluse, you know, but at his age …"

"Oh! precisely," Arthur agreed. His aunt's sentence had tailed out into nothing, in much the same tone as that of the chauffeur when he had hesitated over precisely the same words. At his age. … The inference undoubtedly was that anything might happen when a man reaches the age of ninety-one.

"He keeps awfully fit, though, doesn't he?" Arthur went on.

"Yes. He's remarkably well and active …" his aunt replied, paused again, and then concluded firmly, u but you will see him at dinner."

Arthur noted again that effect of some unstated contingent.

Possibly his aunt, also, was a trifle uneasy about the old man's health.

"I've really finished at last, Aunt Hannah," he said, with a smile.

She did not return the smile, but rose at once with an appearance of relief. Arthur felt as if he ought to apologise for having bored her.

His cousin Hubert greeted him, as Arthur had expected, without enthusiasm. He turned almost at once to the Hon. Charles Turner, hoping that there he might perhaps find some kind of response.

Turner was a small man whose age might have been anything between sixty and seventy, but he at least, obviously took trouble over his dress, and his rather elvish face was crinkled into an expression that gave promise of a rather satirical humour. Once or twice Arthur had caught Turner's gaze resting upon him with a slightly quizzical look.

"You've gone in for medicine, I hear," Turner began, and without waiting for a reply, continued: "Depressing kind of profession, isn't it? Always listening to other people's complaints?"

Arthur had never considered that aspect of the doctor's life. "Oh II don't know," he said. "There are other things besides diagnosis. I mean …"

"Oh! quite," Turner cut in; "but you're always with sick people. That's what you're for. Don't you find yourself getting in the way of looking at every one as a possible patient?"

"Lord, no," Arthur replied, laughing. "You don't get so wrapped up in it as all that."

"You don't, perhaps," Turner said. "You're young yet, and I dare say you can drop your work when you are away from it. But I know a fellow, a Harley Street specialist, great authority on the heart …"

"Sir Stephen Hunt?" Arthur put in.

"That's the chap," Turner agreed. "Well, he's a terrible fellow. You'll see him looking round a dinner table and spotting symptoms. I remember sitting near him at dinner one night, and after the women had gone, he leant over to me and said, 'D'you know how long Lady Spendale has been suffering from'—let's see what did he call it—some sort of goitre?"

"Exophthalmic, possibly," Arthur supplied.

"I believe it was. She had rather protuberant eyes, I remember."

"That's it," Arthur confirmed him.

"Well, naturally I didn't even know she'd got it, if she had," Turner continued. "But what I mean is—ghastly sort of life to lead, always trying to spot something wrong with people's hearts or what not. Now, d'you mean to tell me honestly that you can help looking out for symptoms like that, more or less? Supposing I'd got protuberant eyes, for instance?"

"That's such a frightfully obvious thing," Arthur objected. "As a matter of fact, there aren't so many diseases that can be diagnosed like that at sight. And—and—well, one rather gets out of the way of looking for them when one's off duty. As a student, I'll admit, one did a certain amount of showing off; kind of a game, you know, trying to spot the symptoms you'd just been reading up. But one soon dropped that."

"H'm! Well! And so you like doctoring, do you? Got a practice, or what?" Turner asked.

"No, nothing at the moment," Arthur said. "I've been helping a friend down in Peckham, but I've chucked that for the time being."

"Loose end? What?" Turner inquired.

"Got some notion of going to Canada," Arthur said.

Turner pursed his mouth and looked down at his neat patent-leather shoes. "Fine climate and splendid opportunities there," he commented softly. "Free, open-air life and all that sort of thing. Just suit a vigorous young chap like you, I should say."

Hubert Kenyon, who had been gloomily listening to the conversation without attempting to join in it, drew a long breath and exhaled it in a deep sigh.

"That how you feel about it?" Arthur inquired.

"I? Oh! How d'you mean?" Hubert asked.

"Blowing a bit, weren't you, at the mention of Canada?" Arthur said.

"Oh! That! I don't know," Hubert replied, without throwing much light on the meaning of his sigh.

The conversation was dropping again. Arthur felt the silence coming, and did not care. He was a guest and it was the family's duty to entertain him. But what was the matter with them all? Or with him?

He looked down the room. Miss Kenyon had come back, and they were all sitting about, reading or working in an uninterested kind of way—doing something or other as if it did not matter whether the thing was done or not. What was it the place and the people reminded him of? Yes! It was that boarding-house he had stayed in at Scarborough one winter. He had been there for a week with his mother. But that was a very different kind of place, and those were very different people. This room was beautifully designed and furnished, and these relations and connections of his were all rich and presumably care-free. Nevertheless there was something that reminded him of that Scarborough boarding-house. Something in the pose of those indifferently diligent women, perhaps?

The voice of Hubert broke in on his meditations.

"I don't know what we're waiting here for?" he said. "Care to come and have a look at the garden?"

"Thanks. Yes, I should," Arthur replied cheerfully.

He had it now. They all had the effect of waiting for something; for some climax, or change, or interruption; of waiting interminably for some known or unknown crisis that might never develop. Mr Turner was politely yawning as he stooped to pick up the Times.