silence fell between them … How complete were the silences in that great house! In this room there didn’t even seem to be a clock to break the cloistered stillness. Gently felt in his pocket for Dutt’s pipe, and finding it unemptied, rose and tapped it out against the smouldering log.
‘Suppose we start at the beginning?’ he suggested. ‘Just tell me how you came to start this tapestry business.’
Somerhayes repeated his soft laugh. ‘You realize, then, that the tapestry workshop was the beginning?’ he asked.
‘It’s where you gave up politics, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes … though it goes back further.’
‘Well, go back as far as you want … I’m here to listen.’
Somerhayes nodded and set down his glass on the table.
‘When I was in my teens – that would be in the Thirties – the world was still something of a place to live in. For me, I mean. For the prospective sixth Baron Somerhayes.’
Gently returned the nod … He remembered the Thirties!
‘My father continued to do things in Edwardian style, even up to the war. One was only vaguely aware that a world had changed and a world was dying, and that the standards to which one was born and bred were gravely suspect. Before I went to Oxford I never had any doubt. The social unrest that went on before my eyes did not belong to the world I inhabited. More important, perhaps, were the political events in Europe. They were certainly ominous, and more directly affecting the career of diplomacy for which, following the family tradition, I was being prepared …’
Gently filled his pipe from his magnificent quarter-pound tin and settled himself in the comfortable wing-chair. Somerhayes was not watching him now. Retired into his shadow, his eyes were on the sinking fire, his low, balanced, cultured voice seeming to flow from him without effort or conscious direction. Had he ever talked like this before, this enigmatic man with his lost and wistful eyes? Had he ever before drawn in words the pattern of his bewildered life? He was doing it now, talking, talking. Like a film that had never been unwound, it was coming off its spool.
He had gone up to Oxford, certain and sure of himself. The world had been his, wealth, rank and power to come. He was one of the elect. He was one of a chosen race. Far away had been the rotten tooth of envy and the jealous anger of the mob. And there he had met – whom? A young man, working his way through college. An angry young man, an arguing young man, a young man who thrashed the pretensions of the callow nobleman with the scorpions of Marx and Engels and Lenin and Shaw. And Somerhayes had had no answer to those scathing propositions . His naïve Weltanschauung had taken no notice of such perverse logic. His defences were scattered, his arguments flattened, his comfortable assumptions buried under an avalanche of vicious, destroying fact. And what was a thousand times worse, he was obliged to admire the person who had bowled him over. Jepson, as his name was, appeared to Somerhayes as the epitome of all he would like to be but was not. In despair he made the comparison – himself, the spiritually bankrupt descendant of a family of social bandits; Jepson, the blazing prophet of a robbed and wrathful people. Could he fail to see that one was a dead branch, the other a new and irresistible shoot, in the tree of history?
‘You will observe what a quandary I was in. I dared not follow the direction which my new convictions urged on me. I was not simply a private person. I was the future Lord Somerhayes. My niche was already waiting for me in the Foreign Office, in the Lords, inSociety and in the expectations of a father who had just lost his wife, and was himself already a sick man. How could I deal him such a blow as to declare myself, his only son, a Marxist, and he, my most affectionate parent, a social criminal?’
But something had had to come out of the shock he had received. It was impossible for him to continue
‘Suppose we start at the beginning?’ he suggested. ‘Just tell me how you came to start this tapestry business.’
Somerhayes repeated his soft laugh. ‘You realize, then, that the tapestry workshop was the beginning?’ he asked.
‘It’s where you gave up politics, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes … though it goes back further.’
‘Well, go back as far as you want … I’m here to listen.’
Somerhayes nodded and set down his glass on the table.
‘When I was in my teens – that would be in the Thirties – the world was still something of a place to live in. For me, I mean. For the prospective sixth Baron Somerhayes.’
Gently returned the nod … He remembered the Thirties!
‘My father continued to do things in Edwardian style, even up to the war. One was only vaguely aware that a world had changed and a world was dying, and that the standards to which one was born and bred were gravely suspect. Before I went to Oxford I never had any doubt. The social unrest that went on before my eyes did not belong to the world I inhabited. More important, perhaps, were the political events in Europe. They were certainly ominous, and more directly affecting the career of diplomacy for which, following the family tradition, I was being prepared …’
Gently filled his pipe from his magnificent quarter-pound tin and settled himself in the comfortable wing-chair. Somerhayes was not watching him now. Retired into his shadow, his eyes were on the sinking fire, his low, balanced, cultured voice seeming to flow from him without effort or conscious direction. Had he ever talked like this before, this enigmatic man with his lost and wistful eyes? Had he ever before drawn in words the pattern of his bewildered life? He was doing it now, talking, talking. Like a film that had never been unwound, it was coming off its spool.
He had gone up to Oxford, certain and sure of himself. The world had been his, wealth, rank and power to come. He was one of the elect. He was one of a chosen race. Far away had been the rotten tooth of envy and the jealous anger of the mob. And there he had met – whom? A young man, working his way through college. An angry young man, an arguing young man, a young man who thrashed the pretensions of the callow nobleman with the scorpions of Marx and Engels and Lenin and Shaw. And Somerhayes had had no answer to those scathing propositions . His naïve Weltanschauung had taken no notice of such perverse logic. His defences were scattered, his arguments flattened, his comfortable assumptions buried under an avalanche of vicious, destroying fact. And what was a thousand times worse, he was obliged to admire the person who had bowled him over. Jepson, as his name was, appeared to Somerhayes as the epitome of all he would like to be but was not. In despair he made the comparison – himself, the spiritually bankrupt descendant of a family of social bandits; Jepson, the blazing prophet of a robbed and wrathful people. Could he fail to see that one was a dead branch, the other a new and irresistible shoot, in the tree of history?
‘You will observe what a quandary I was in. I dared not follow the direction which my new convictions urged on me. I was not simply a private person. I was the future Lord Somerhayes. My niche was already waiting for me in the Foreign Office, in the Lords, inSociety and in the expectations of a father who had just lost his wife, and was himself already a sick man. How could I deal him such a blow as to declare myself, his only son, a Marxist, and he, my most affectionate parent, a social criminal?’
But something had had to come out of the shock he had received. It was impossible for him to continue
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