# Fortitude (Walpole)/Book 3/Chapter 8

CHAPTER VIII
BLINDS DOWN
I
IT was not until Stephen Westcott had rejoiced in the glories (so novel and so thrilling) of his first birthday and “The Stone House” had been six months before the public eye that the effect of this second book could be properly estimated. Second books are the most surely foredoomed creatures in all creation and there are many excellent reasons for this. They will assuredly disappoint the expectations of those who enjoyed the first work, and the author will, in all probability, have been tempted by his earlier success to try his wings further than they are, as yet, able to carry him.
Peter's failure was only partial. There was no question that “The Stone House” was a remarkable book. Had it been Peter's first novel it must have made an immense stir; it showed that he was, in no kind of way, a man of one book, and it gave, in its London scenes, proof that its author was not limited to one kind of life and one kind of background. There were chapters that were fuller, wiser, in every way more mature than anything in “Reuben Hallard.”
But it was amazingly unequal. There were places in it that had no kind of life at all; at times Peter appeared to have beheld his scenes and characters through a mist, to have been dragged right away from any kind of vision of the book, to have written wildly, blindly.
The opinion of Mrs. Launce was perhaps the soundest that it was possible to have because that good lady, in spite of her affection for Peter, had a critical judgment that was partly literary, partly commercial, and partly human. She always judged a book first with her brain, then with her heart and lastly with her knowledge of her fellow creatures. “It may pay better than ‘Reuben Hallard,’ she said, “there's more love interest and it ends happily. Some of it is beautifully written, some of it quite ​unspeakably. But really, Peter, it's the most uneven thing I've ever read. Again and again one is caught, held, stirred—then, suddenly, you slip away altogether—you aren't there at all, nothing's there, I could put my finger on the places. Especially the first chapters and the last chapters—the middle's splendid—what happened to you? . . . But it will sell, I expect. Tell your banker to read it, go into lots of banks and tell them. Bank clerks have subscriptions at circulating libraries always given them . . . but the wild bits are best, the wild bits are splendid—that bit about the rocks at night . . . you don't know much about women yet—your girls are awfully bad. By the way, do you know that Mary Hollins is only getting £100 advance next time? All she can get, that last thing was so shocking. I hear that that book about an immoral violet, by that new young man—Rondel, isn't it?—is still having a most enormous success—I know that Barratt's got in a whole batch of new copies last night—I hear . . .”
Mrs. Launce was disappointed—Peter could tell well enough. He received some laudatory reviews, some letters from strangers, some adulation from people who knew nothing whatever. He did not know what it was exactly that he had expected—but whatever it was that he wanted, he did not get it—he was dissatisfied.
He began to blame his publishers—they had not advertised him enough; he even, secretly, cherished that most hopeless of all convictions—that his book was above the heads of the public. He noticed, also, that wherever he might be, this name of Rondel appeared before him, Mr. Rondel with his foolish face and thin mother in black, was obviously the young man of the moment—in the literary advertisements of any of the weekly papers you might see The Violet novel in its tenth edition and “The Stone House” by Peter Westcott, second edition selling rapidly.
He was again bewildered, as he had been after the publication of “Reuben Hallard” by the extraordinary variance of opinions amongst reviewers and amongst his own personal friends. One man told him that he had no style, that he must learn the meaning and feeling of words, another told him that his characters were weak but that his style was “splendid—a real knowledge of the value and ​meaning of words.” Some one told him that he knew nothing at all about women and some one else that his women were by far the best part of his work. The variety was endless—amongst those who had appeared to him giants there was the same uncertainty. He seemed too to detect with the older men a desire to praise those parts of his work that resembled their own productions and to blame anything that gave promise of originality.
For himself it seemed to him that Mrs. Launce's opinion was nearest the truth. There were parts of it that were good, chapters that were better than anything in “Reuben Hallard” and then again there were many chapters where he saw it all in a fog, groped dimly for his characters, pushed, as it seemed to him, away from their lives and interests, by the actual lives and interests of the real people about him. This led him to think of Clare and here he was suddenly arrested by a perception, now only dimly grasped, of a change in her attitude to his writings. He dated it, thinking of it now for the first time, from the birth of young Stephen—or was it not earlier than that, on that evening when they had met Cards at that supper party, on that evening of their first quarrel?
In the early days how well he remembered Clare's enthusiasm—a little extravagant, it seemed now. Then during the first year of their married life she had wanted to know everything about the making of “The Stone House.” It was almost as though it had been a cake or a pie, and he knew that he had found her questions difficult to answer and that he had had it driven in upon him that it was not really because she was interested in the subtleties of his art that she enquired but because of her own personal affection for him; if he had been making boots or a suit of clothes it would have been just the same. Then when “The Stone House” appeared her eagerness for its success had been tremendous—there was nothing she would not do to help it along—but that, he somewhat ironically discovered, was because she liked success and the things that success brought.
Then when the book had not succeeded—or only so very little—her interest had, of a sudden, subsided. “Oh! I suppose you've got to go and do your silly old writing . . . ​I think you might come out with me just this afternoon. It isn't often that I ask anything of you. . . .” He did not believe that she had ever really finished “The Stone House.” She pretended that she had—“the end was simply perfect,” but she was vague, nebulous. He found the marker in her copy, some fifty pages before the end.
She was so easily impressed by every one whom she met that perhaps the laughing attitude of Cards to Peter's books had something to do with it all. Cards affected to despise anything to do with work, here to-day, gone to-morrow—let us eat and drink . . . dear old Peter, grubbing away upstairs—“I say, Mrs. Westcott, let's go and rag him. . . .” And then they had come and invaded his room at the top of the house, and sometimes he had been glad and had flung his work down as though it were of no account . . . and then afterwards, in the middle of some tea-party he had been suddenly ashamed, deeply, bitterly ashamed, as though he had actually wounded those white pages lying up there in his quiet room.
He was at this time, like a man jostled and pushed and turned about at some riotous fair; looking, now this way, now that, absorbed by a thousand sights, a thousand sounds—and always through it all feeling, bitterly in his heart, that something dear to him, somewhere in some place of silence, was dying—
Well, hang it all, at any rate there was the Child!
II
At any rate there was the Child!
And what a child! Did any one ever have a baby like it, so fat and round and white, with its head already covered with faint golden silk, its eyes grey and wondering—with its sudden gravities, its amazing joys and terrific humour, the beauty of its stepping away, as it did, suddenly without any warning, behind a myriad mists and curtains, into some other land that it knew of. How amazing to watch it as it slowly forgot all the things that it had come into the world remembering, as it slowly realised all the laws that this new order of things demanded of its obedience. Could any one who had been present ever forget ​its crow of ecstasy at the first shaft of sunlight that it ever beheld, at its first realisation of the blue, shining ball that Peter bought, at its first vision, through the window, of falling snow!
Peter was drunk with this amazing wonder. All the facts of life—even Clare and his work—faded before this new presence for whose existence he had been responsible. It had been one of the astonishing things about Clare that she had taken the child so quietly. He had seen her thrilled by musical comedy, by a dance at the Palace Music Hall, by the trumpery pathos of a tenth-rate novel—before this marvel she stood, it seemed to him, without any emotion.
Sometimes he thought that if it had not been for his reminder she would not have gone to kiss the child good-night. There were many occasions when he knew—with wonder and almost dismay—that she was afraid of it; and once, when they had been in the nursery together and young Stephen had cried and kicked his heels in a tempest of rage, she had seemed almost to cling to Peter for protection.
There were occasions when Peter fancied that the baby seemed the elder of the two, it was at any rate certain that Stephen Westcott was not so afraid of his mother as his mother was of him. And yet, Peter fancied, that could Clare only get past this strange nervous fear she would love the baby passionately—would love him with that same fierceness of passion that she flung, curiously, now and again upon Peter himself. “Let me be promised,” she seemed to say, “that I will never have any trouble or sorrow with my son and I will love him devotedly.” Meanwhile she went into every excitement that life could provide for her. . . .
It was on a March afternoon of early Spring after a lonely tea (Clare was out at one of her parties) that Peter went up to the nursery. He had just finished reading the second novel by that Mr. Rondel whose Violet sensation had occurred some two years before. This second book was good—there was no doubt about it—and Peter was ashamed of a kind of dim reluctance in his acknowledgment of its quality. The fellow had had such reviews; the book, although less sensational than its predecessor had ​hit the public straight in the middle of its susceptible heart. Had young Rondel done it all with bad work—well, that was common enough—but the book was good, uncommonly good.
He sent the nurse downstairs and began to build an elaborate fortress on the nursery floor. The baby lay on his back on a rug by the fire and contemplated his woollen shoe which he slowly dragged off and disdainfully flung away. Then, crowing to himself, he watched his father and the world in general.
He was amazingly like Peter—the grey eyes, the mouth a little stern, a little sulky, the snub nose, the arms a little short and thick, and that confident, happy smile.
He watched his father.
To him, lying on the rug, many, many miles away there was a coloured glory that ran round the upper part of the wall—as yet, he only knew that they gave him, those colours, something of the same pleasure that his milk gave him, that the warm, glowing, noisy shapes beyond the carpet gave him, that the happy, comfortable smell of the Thing playing near him on the floor gave him. About the Thing he was eternally perplexed. It was Something that made sounds that he liked, that pressed his body in away that he loved, that took his fingers and his toes and made them warm and comfortable.
It was Something moreover from which delicious things hung—things that he could clutch and hold and pull. He was perplexed but he knew that when this Thing was near him he was warm and happy and contented and generally went to sleep. His eyes slowly travelled round the room and rested finally upon a round blue ball that hung turning a little from side to side, on a nail above his bed. This was, to him, the final triumph of existence—to have it in his hand, to roll it round and round, to bang it down upon the floor and watch it jump, this was the reason why one was here, this the solution of all perplexities. He would have liked to have it in his hands now, so crowing, he smiled pleasantly at the Thing on the floor beside him and then looked at the ball.
Peter got up from his knees, fetched the ball down and rolled it along the floor. As it came dancing, curving, ​laughing along young Stephen shrieked with delight. Would he have it in his hands or would it escape him and disappear altogether?” Would it come to him? . . . It came and was clutched and held and triumphed over.
Peter sat down by his son and began to tell him about Cornwall. He often did this, partly because the mere mentioning of names and places satisfied some longing in his hearty partly because he wanted Cornwall to be the first thing that young Stephen would realise as soon as he realised anything. “And you never can tell, you know, how soon a child can begin. . . .”
Stephen, turning the blue ball round and round in his fingers, gravely listened. He was perfectly contented. He liked the sounds that circled about him—his father's voice, the rustle of the fire, the murmur of something beyond the walls that he could not understand.
“And then, you see, Stephen, if you go up the hill and round to the right you come to the market-place, all covered with shiny cobbles and once a week filled with stalls where people sell things. At the other end of it, facing you, there's an old Tower that's been there for ages and ages. It's got a fruit stall underneath it now, but once, years ago there was fighting there and men were killed. Then, if you go past it, and out to the right, you get into the road that leads out of the town. It goes right above the sea and on a fine-day—”
“Peter!”
The voice broke like a stone shattering a sheet of glass. The ball dropped from young Stephen's hands. He felt suddenly cold and hungry and wanted his woollen shoe. He was not sure whether he would not cry. He would wait a moment and see how matters developed.
Peter jumped to his feet and faced Clare: Clare in a fur cap from beneath which her golden hair seemed to burn in anger, from beneath which her eyes, furiously attacked his. Of course she had heard him talking to the baby about Cornwall. They had quarrelled about it before . . . he had thought that she was at her silly tea-party. His face that had been, a few moments before, gentle, humorous, happy, now suddenly wore the sullen defiance of a sulky boy.
​Her breast was heaving, her little hands beat against her frock.
“He shan't,” she broke out at last, “hear about it.”
“Of all the nonsense,” Peter answered her slowly. “Really, Clare, sometimes I think you're about two years old—”
“He shan't hear about it,” she repeated again. “You don't care—you don't care what I think or what I say—I'm his mother—I have the right—”
The baby looked at them both with wondering eyes and to any outside observer would surely have seemed the eldest of the three. Clare's breath came in little pants of rage—“You know—that I hate—all mention of that place—those people. It doesn't matter to you—you never think of me—”
“At any rate,” he retorted, “if you were up here in the nursery more often you would be able to take care that Stephen's innocent ears weren't insulted with my vulgar conversation—”
It was then that he saw, behind Clare, in the doorway, the dark smiling face of Cards.
Cards came forward. “Really, you two,” he said, laughing. “Peter, old man, don't be absurd—you too, Clare” (he called her Clare now).
The anger died out of Clare's eyes: “Well, he knows I hate him talking about that nasty old town to the baby—” Then, in a moment, she was smiling again—“I'm sorry, Peter. Cards is quite right, and anyhow the baby doesn't understand—”
She stood smiling in front of him but the frown did not leave his face.
“Oh! it's all right,” he said sullenly, and he brushed past them up the stairs, to his own room.
III
From the silence of his room he thought that he could hear them laughing about it downstairs. “Silly old Peter—always getting into tempers—” Well, was he? And after all hadn't it been, this time, her affair? Stephen and he had been happy enough before the others had come ​in. What was this senseless dislike of Clare's to Cornwall? What could it matter to her? It was always cropping up now. He could think of a thousand occasions, lately, when she had been roused by it.
But, as he paced, with frowning face, back and forwards across the room, there was something more puzzling still that had to be thought about. Why did they quarrel about such tiny things? In novels, in good, reliable novels, it was always the big things about which people fought. Whoever heard of two people quarrelling because one of them wanted to talk about Cornwall? and yet it was precisely concerning things just as trivial that they were always now disputing. Why need they quarrel at all? In the first year there had always been peace. Why shouldn't there be peace now? Where exactly lay Clare's altered attitude to himself, to his opinions, to the world in general. If he yielded to her demands—and he had yielded on many more occasions than was good either for her or himself—she had, he fancied, laughed at him for being so easily defeated. If he had not yielded then she had been, immediately, impossible. . . .
And yet, after their quarrels, there had been the most wonderful, precious reconciliations, reconciliations that, even now at his thought of them, made his heart beat faster. Now, soon, when he went downstairs to dress for dinner, she would come to him, he knew, and beg most beautifully, his pardon. But to-night it seemed suddenly that this kind of thing and happened too often lately. He felt, poor Peter, bewildered. There seemed to be, on every side of him, so many things that he was called upon to manage and he was so unable to manage any of them. He stopped in his treading to and fro and stared at the long deal writing-table at which he always worked.
There, waiting for him, were the first chapters of his new novel, “Mortimer Stant.” In the same way, two years ago, he had stared at the early chapters of “The Stone House,” on that morning before he had gone to propose to Clare. Now there flashed through his mind the wonderful things that he intended “Mortimer Stant” to be. It was to concern a man of forty (in his confident selection of that age he displayed, most stridently, his own youth) and ​Mortimer was to be a stolid, reserved Philistine, who was, against his will, by outside forces, dragged into an emotional crisis.
At the back of his mind he had, perhaps, Maradick for his figure, but that was almost unconscious. “Mortimer Stant” was to represent a wonderful duel between the two camps—the Artists and the Philistines—with ultimate victory, of course, for the Artists. It was to be. . . . Well what was it to be? At present the stolid Mortimer was hidden behind a phalanx of people—Clare, young Stephen, Cards, Bobby, Mrs. Rossiter (tiresome woman), Alice Galleon—That was it. It was hidden, hidden just as parts of “The Stone House” had been hidden, but hidden more deeply—a regular jungle of interests and occupations was creeping, stealthily, stealthily upon him.
And then his eye fell upon an open letter that lay on his table, and, at the sight of it, he was seized with a burning sense of shame. How could he have forgotten?
The letter ran—
My dear Mr. Westcott,
You have not been to see me for many months. Further opportunities may, by the hand of God, be denied you.
Come if you can spare the time.
    Henry Galleon.
The words were written, feebly almost illegibly, in pencil. Peter knew that Bobby had been, for many weeks, very anxious concerning his father's health, and during the last few days he had abandoned the City and spent all his time at home. That letter had come this very morning and Peter had intended to go at once and inquire. The fact that he had left all these months without going to see the old man rose before him now like an accusing hand. He deserved, indeed, whatever the Gods might choose to send him, if he could so wilfully neglect his duty. But he knew that there had been, in the back of his mind, shame. His work had not, so he might have put it to himself, been good enough to justify his presence. There would have been questions asked, questions that he might have found it difficult, indeed, to answer.
But now the sight of that letter immediately enconraged him. Henry Galleon, even though he was too ill to talk, ​would put him right with all his perplexities, would give him courage to cut through all these complications that had been gathering, lately, so thickly about him. “This,” the room seemed to whisper to him, “is your chance. After all, you are given this opportunity. See him once before he dies and your fate will be shown you, clearly, honestly.”
He stepped out of the house unperceived and was immediately conscious of the Spring night. Spring—with a precipitancy and extravagance that seems to be—to own peculiar quality in London—had leapt upon the streets.
The Embankment was bathed in the evening glow. Clouds, like bales of golden wool, sailed down a sky so faintly blue that the white light of a departed sun seemed to glow behind it. The lamps were crocus-coloured against black barges that might have been loaded with yellow prim-roses so did they hint, through their darkness, at the yellow haze around them.
The silence was melodious; the long line of dark houses watched like prisoners from behind their iron bars. They might expect, it seemed, the Spring to burst through the flagstones at their feet.
Peter's heart was lightened of all its burden. He shared the glory, the intoxication of the promise that was on every side of him. On such a night great ambitions, great ideals, great lovers were created.
He saw Henry Galleon, from behind his window, watching the pageant. He saw him gaining new life, getting up from his bed of sickness, writing anew his great masterpieces. And he saw himself, Peter Westcott, learning at last from the Master the rule and discipline of life. All the muddle, the confusion of this lazy year should be healed. He and Clare should see with the same eyes. She should understand his need for work, he should understand her need for help. All should be happiness and victory in this glorious world and he, by the Master's side, should . . .
He stopped suddenly. The house that had been Henry Galleon's was blank and dead.
At every window the blinds were down. . .