Knight Without Armour

When he was discharged at the end of the week he hoped and rather expected that Philippa, at any rate, would have some word of sympathy for him. Instead of that, she greeted him very frigidly. “What an extraordinary thing to do!” was all she commented. Sir Henry was far from frigid; he was as furious as a man of eighty dare permit himself to be. He had A.J. in the library for over an hour telling him what he thought. A.J. must clear out—that was the general gist of the discourse; Sir Henry would no longer permit their names to be connected in any way. If A.J. chose to emigrate (which seemed the best solution of the problem), Sir Henry would give him a hundred pounds as a final expression of regard—but it was to be definitely final—no pathetic letters begging for more. A.J. said: “You needn’t fear that, anyhow.” In the midst of the rather unpleasant discussion, Philippa entered the library, fresh and charming as usual, whereupon Sir Henry, his mood changing in an instant, remarked: “Perhaps, my dear, we had better tell Ainsley our piece of news.”

She barely nodded and Sir Henry went on, more severely as he turned to A.J.—“Philippa has done me the honour of promising to be my wife.”

A.J. stared speechlessly at them both. He saw the green-shaded desk-lamp spinning round before his eyes and the expanse of bookshelves dissolving into a multi-coloured haze. Then he felt himself going hot, shamefully hot; he managed to stammer: “I—I must—congratulate you—both.”

Philippa was not looking at him.

His eyes kept wandering from one to the other of them; she was so beautiful, he perceived now, and Sir Henry, with all his sprightliness, was so monstrously old. He had never noticed before how hideous were those rolls of fat between his chin and his neck, and how he very slightly slobbered over his sibilants.

“Yes, I congratulate you,” he repeated.

He went out for lunch, paced up and down in Regent’s Park during the afternoon, and spent the evening at a restaurant and a music-hall. Towards midnight he went to the Comet office and asked to see Aitchison. Aitchison, a hard-bitten Scotsman of sixty, smiled rather cynically when A.J. suggested being sent abroad as a foreign correspondent; he guessed the reason, and personally thought it not at all a bad idea that A.J. should live down his notoriety abroad. There was, of course, no moral stigma attached to a seven-day sentence for trying to rescue a suffragette, but the boy had made a fool of himself and one can be laughed out of a profession as well as drummed out. The foreign correspondent notion, however, was hopeless; A.J. would be as useless, journalistically, abroad as at home. Aitchison knew all this well enough, and when A.J. further went on to suggest being sent out to the Far East to report the Russo-Japanese War which had just begun, he laughed outright. It was impossible, he answered; jobs like that required experience, and A.J. possessed none; reporting a war wasn’t like writing a highbrow middle about the stained-glass at Chartres. Besides, it would all be far too expensive; the Comet wasn’t a wealthy paper and probably wouldn’t have a correspondent of its own at all. To which A.J. replied that, as for money, he had a little himself and was so anxious to try his luck that he would willingly spend it in travelling out East if the Comet would give him credentials as its correspondent and take anything he sent that was acceptable. Aitchison thought this over and quickly reached the conclusion that it was an ideal arrangement—for the Comet. It was, to begin with, a way of getting rid of A.J., and it was also a way by which the Comet could obtain all the kudos of having a war-correspondent without the disagreeable necessity of footing the bill for his expenses—though, of course, if A.J. did send them anything good the Comet would be delighted to pay for it. And in haste less A.J. should see any flaw in this most admirable scheme, Aitchison accepted, adding: “Naturally you’ll bear in mind the policy of this paper—we don’t much care for the Russians, you know. Not much use you sending us stuff we can’t print, especially when it’ll cost you God knows how much a word to cable.”

A.J. left for Siberia at the beginning of April. Sir Henry declined either to approve or to disapprove of the arrangement; all he made clear was that A.J. could not expect any more chances, and that, if he wanted the hundred pounds, he must go abroad as one of the prime conditions. Siberia was undoubtedly abroad; its prospects for the emigrant were A.J.’s affair entirely. During the last week of hectic preparation that preceded the departure A.J. saw rather little of the old man, and the final good-byes both with him and with Philippa were very formal.