Knight Without Armour Read Free Page B

short-lived fencing
club. He had picked up a certain skill with the foils in Germany; it was a
typically odd sort of thing to capture his enthusiasm.
    He took a mediocre pass degree in his third year and then wondered what on
earth came next. Sir Henry was disappointed and made it very clear that he
did not intend to support him any longer. A.J. fully agreed; he did not want
to be supported; he would certainly find something to do of some kind or
other, but he was completely vague about it, and there were so many jobs
which, for one reason or another, were impossible. He did not care for the
services; he had no vocation for the church; his degree was not good enough
for school- mastering or for diplomacy or for the law. Clearly then, very
little remained, and when, in the summer of 1901, he left Cambridge for good,
it was understood that he was to become a journalist and that Sir Henry would
‘find him something.’ In August he went abroad for a month, and
it was while he was doing the conventional Rhine tour that he received a
typewritten letter signed ‘Philippa Warren’ and conveying the
information that Sir Henry’s former secretary, a Mr. Watts, had died of
pneumonia and that she had been appointed instead. He thought little of it,
or of her, except to reflect that Sir Henry’s choice of a female
secretary would probably be based on dignity rather than elegance. At the
beginning of September he returned to London and found there was to be a big
dinner-party on his first evening, which annoyed him slightly, as it meant he
had to unpack everything in a hurry so as to dress. Sir Henry’s sister,
a Mrs. Holdron, was hostess; she said—“Oh, Ainsley, will you take
in Miss Warren?”—and he smiled agreement and tried vaguely to
associate the name with any particular one of the dozen or so strangers to
whom he had been perfunctorily and indistinctly introduced. He had completely
forgotten the Philippa Warren who had written to him.
    The reception room was on the first floor, overlooking the square, and all
its windows were wide open and unshuttered to admit the soft breeze of a
September night. He felt an arm slipped into his and guiding him rather than
being guided through the plush-curtained archway into the long and rather
gloomy corridor that led to the dining-room, Almost simultaneously they both
made the same banal remark about the weather, whereupon she laughed and
added, with a sort of crystal mockery: “I said it first, Mr.
Fothergill.” He laughed back, but could not think of an answer.
    In the dining-room that looked on to the typical brick-walled oblong
garden of London houses, he glanced at her curiously. She was young, and full
of a vitality that interested him. Her dark, roving eyes gave poise, and even
beauty, to a face that might not otherwise have seemed noteworthy. Her nose
was long and well-shaped, but her lips were perhaps too small and thin, just
as her forehead looked too high. She certainly was not pretty. Not till
half-way through the meal did he realise that she must be Sir Henry’s
new secretary.
    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