Knight Without Armour

It was a distinguished gathering, in a small way—professors and professors’ wives, a Harley Street surgeon, a titled lawyer, journalists, a few M.P.’s—all, of course, dominated by the patriarchal figure of Sir Henry himself. He was now seventy-seven, broad- shouldered, straight-backed, with leonine head and flashing eye—a truly eminent Victorian who had survived, wonderfully preserved, into the new reign. He had long ago reached the age when people said that he ‘still’ did things. He still owned the Pioneer, which, after a stormy career in the ’sixties and ’seventies, had settled down, like Sir Henry himself, to an old age of ever-slightly-increasing respectability and ever-slightly-diminishing circulation.

The odd part of it (to A.J.) was the way Philippa Warren had suddenly fitted herself into Sir Henry’s scheme of things. She seemed already to take both him and his views equally for granted; she was at once casual and proprietary, like a guide displaying a museum piece; she realised quite simply that Sir Henry had become an institution and that visitors liked to hear him gossip in an intimate way about great names that were already in the history books. She would give him conversational cues, such as—’That’s rather what Matthew Arnold used to tell you, isn’t it, Sir Henry?’—or—’Sir Henry, I’m sure Mr. So-and-so would like to hear about your meeting with Thackeray.’ She rarely expressed opinions of her own, but she knew exactly, like a well-learned lesson, the precise attitude of Sir Henry towards every topic of the day. It was almost uncanny, and from the beginning A.J. found himself queerly fascinated. She had a clear, icy mind; she could compress her ideas into an epigram where others might have needed to employ a speech. On hearing about the Barrowhurst and Cambridge nickname she immediately called him ‘A.J.’ and expected him to call her ‘Philippa’; he was certain, from the first half-hour of the dinner-party, that they were destined for the most intimate of friendships.

After a week he was less positive, and after a month he was frankly puzzled and doubtful. He seemed so early to have reached an unsurmountable barrier; she would talk about anything and everything with the utterest frankness, yet somehow, after it all, he felt that it had no connection with getting to know her. Sir Henry, of course, never ceased to sing her praises. She was the model secretary; how he had ever managed so many years with that fellow Watts, he could hardly think. The scene in the library every morning at ten o’clock when Philippa arrived to begin work was almost touching. Sir Henry, stirred to a gallantry that had never been his in earlier days, would greet her with a benign smile, pat her shoulder and ask after her health, and, if he imagined or chose to imagine that she looked tired, would ring for a glass of sherry. And she on her side grudgingly yet somehow gratefully permitted time to be wasted on such courtesies.

A.J. agreed that she was marvellous. Her merely physical effect on the old man was remarkable; there came a sparkle into his eyes and a springiness into his walk that had not been seen since the first Jubiles. A.J. judged, too, that she did other things; Sir Henry’s occasional articles in the Press (writing was one of those things he ‘still’ did) became more frequent, more varied, and—if that were possible—more characteristic of him than ever. Once A.J. glanced over her shoulder when she was working; she was preparing notes, she said, for some centenary article on Elizabethan literature that Sir Henry had promised to write. In neat, verbless phrases she had selected just the material he would need—’Marlowe in his worst moments grandiloquent and turgid’—’Fairy Queen a monument of literary atavism’—’Titus Andronicus probably not Shakespeare’s’—and so on. Sir Henry did the rest, and how well he did it, too, and with what a sublime flavour of personality! A.J. kept the article when it appeared, underlining such sentences as—’I do not think it can be denied that in his less happy moments Marlowe was occasionally guilty of a certain grandiloquence of phraseology—almost, I might say, turgidity’—’I cannot but think that the Faerie Queene, regarded from a strictly literary viewpoint, is in some sense atavistic’—and—’I have yet to discover any arguments that would lead me to suppose that Titus Andronicus was, in its entirety, a work by the master-hand that penned Lear and Othello.’