“But they can pray, too,” I reminded him.
“If you all pray for it,” answered Dan, “then it will go, not to the fellow that knows most history, but to the fellow that’s prayed the hardest. That isn’t old Florret’s idea, I’m sure.”
“But we are told to pray for things we want,” I insisted.
“Beastly mean way of getting ‘em,” retorted Dan. And no argument that came to me, neither then nor at any future time, brought him to right thinking on this point.
He would judge all matters for himself. In his opinion Achilles was a coward, not a hero.
“He ought to have told the Trojans that they couldn’t hurt any part of him except his heel, and let them have a shot at that,” he argued; “King Arthur and all the rest of them with their magic swords, it wasn’t playing the game. There’s no pluck in fighting if you know you’re bound to win. Beastly cads, I call them all.”
I won no prize that year. Oddly enough, Dan did, for arithmetic; the only subject studied in the Lower Fourth that interested him. He liked to see things coming right, he explained.
My father shut himself up with me for half an hour and examined me himself.
“It’s very curious, Paul,” he said, “you seem to know a good deal.”
“They asked me all the things I didn’t know. They seemed to do it on purpose,” I blurted out, and laid my head upon my arm. My father crossed the room and sat down beside me.
“Spud!” he said – it was a long time since he had called me by that childish nickname – “perhaps you are going to be with me, one of the unlucky ones.”
“Are you unlucky?” I asked.
“Invariably,” answered my father, rumpling his hair. “I don’t know why. I try hard – I do the right thing, but it turns out wrong. It always does.”
“But I thought Mr. Hasluck was bringing us such good fortune,” I said, looking up in surprise. “We’re getting on, aren’t we?”
“I have thought so before, so often,” said my father, “and it has always ended in a – in a collapse.”
I put my arms round his neck, for I always felt to my father as to another boy; bigger than myself and older, but not so very much.
“You see, when I married your mother,” he went on, “I was a rich man. She had everything she wanted.”
“But you will get it all back,” I cried.
“I try to think so,” he answered. “I do think so – generally speaking. But there are times – you would not understand – they come to you.”
“But she is happy,” I persisted; “we are all happy.”
He shook his head.
“I watch her,” he said. “Women suffer more than we do. They live more in the present. I see my hopes, but she – she sees only me, and I have always been a failure. She has lost faith in me.”
I could say nothing. I understood but dimly.
“That is why I want you to be an educated man, Paul,” he continued after a silence. “You can’t think what a help education is to a man. I don’t mean it helps you to get on in the world; I think for that it rather hampers you. But it helps you to bear adversity. To a man with a well-stored mind, life is interesting on a piece of bread and a cup of tea. I know. If it were not for you and your mother I should not trouble.”
And yet at that time our fortunes were at their brightest, so far as I remember them; and when they were dark again he was full of fresh hope, planning, scheming, dreaming again. It was never acting. A worse actor never trod this stage on which we fret. His occasional attempts at a cheerfulness he did not feel inevitably resulted in our all three crying in one another’s arms. No; it was only when things were going well that experience came to his injury. Child of misfortune, he ever rose, Antaeus-like, renewed in strength from contact with his mother.
Nor must it be understood that his despondent moods, even in time of prosperity, were oft recurring. Generally speaking, as he himself said, he was full of confidence. Already had he fixed upon our new house in Guilford Street, then still a good residential quarter; while at the same time, as he would explain to my mother, sufficiently central for office purposes, close as it was to Lincoln and Grey’s Inn and Bedford Row, pavements long worn with the weary footsteps of the Law’s sad courtiers.
“Poplar,” said my father, “has disappointed me. It seemed a good idea – a rapidly rising district, singularly destitute of solicitors. It ought to have turned out well, and yet somehow it hasn’t.”
“There have been a few come,” my mother reminded him.
“Of a sort,” admitted my father; “a criminal lawyer might gather something of a practice here, I have no doubt. But for general work, of course, you must be in a central position. Now, in Guilford Street people will come to me.”
“It should certainly be a pleasanter neighbourhood to live in,” agreed my mother.
“Later on,” said my father, “in case I want the whole house for offices, we could live ourselves in Regent’s Park. It is quite near to the Park.”
“Of course you have consulted Mr. Hasluck?” asked my mother, who of the two was by far the more practical.
“For Hasluck,” replied my father, “it will be much more convenient. He grumbles every time at the distance.”
“I have never been quite able to understand,” said my mother, “why Mr. Hasluck should have come so far out of his way. There must surely be plenty of solicitors in the City.”
“He had heard of me,” explained my father. “A curious old fellow – likes his own way of doing things. It’s not everyone who would care for him as a client. But I seem able to manage him.”
Often we would go together, my father and I, to Guilford Street. It was a large corner house that had taken his fancy, half creeper covered, with a balcony, and pleasantly situated, overlooking the gardens of the Foundling Hospital. The wizened old caretaker knew us well, and having opened the door, would leave us to wander through the empty, echoing rooms at our own will. We furnished them handsomely in later Queen Anne style, of which my father was a connoisseur, sparing no necessary expense; for, as my father observed, good furniture is always worth its price, while to buy cheap is pure waste of money.
“This,” said my father, on the second floor, stepping from the bedroom into the smaller room adjoining, “I shall make your mother’s boudoir. We will have the walls in lavender and maple green – she is fond of soft tones – and the window looks out upon the gardens. There we will put her writing-table.”
My own bedroom was on the third floor, a sunny little room.
“You will be quiet here,” said my father, “and we can shut out the bed and the washstand with a screen.”
Later, I came to occupy it; though its rent – eight and sixpence a week, including attendance – was somewhat more than at the time I ought to have afforded. Nevertheless, I adventured it, taking the opportunity of being an inmate of the house to refurnish it, unknown to my stout landlady, in later Queen Anne style, putting a neat brass plate with my father’s name upon the door. “Luke Kelver, Solicitor. Office hours, 10 till 4.” A medical student thought he occupied my mother’s boudoir. He was a dull dog, full of tiresome talk. But I made acquaintanceship with him; and often of an evening would smoke my pipe there in silence while pretending to be listening to his monotonous brag.
The poor thing! he had no idea that he was only a foolish ghost; that his walls, seemingly covered with coarse-coloured prints of wooden-looking horses, simpering ballet girls and petrified prize-fighters, were in reality a delicate tone of lavender and maple green; that at her writing-table in the sunlit window sat my mother, her soft curls curtaining her quiet face.