A sigh came from the other bed.
‘I didn’t say “I think I’m going”,’ came a whisper from Mr Knight. ‘I said “Darling, I think I’m dying”.’
Still good-tempered, still urgent, Mrs Knight accepted the correction: she told me of the visit of the doctor, of his opinions, encouragements, and warnings, her own activity, Mr Knight’s behaviour. Oddly enough, despite her hero-worship of her husband, her narrative was strictly factual, and pictured him as comporting himself with stoicism perceptably less than average. After his one protest he did not object or open his eyes again, until at last he said, faintly but firmly: ‘Darling, I should like to talk to Lewis just for a little while.’
‘As long as it doesn’t tire you.’
‘I don’t think it need tire me, if we’re careful,’ said Mr Knight — with a concern that equalled hers.
‘Perhaps it won’t be too much for you,’ she said. ‘Anyway I shan’t be far away.’
With injunctions to me, she removed herself to the sitting-room: but she did not go out of sight, she left the door open and watched as though she were a policeman invigilating an interview in gaol. Very painstakingly Mr Knight hitched his head higher upon the pillow; his eyes were no longer shut, he appeared to be staring out of the window, but he gave me an oblique glance that was, just as I remembered it, shrewd, malicious, and sharp with concealed purpose.
‘I don’t receive much news nowadays, naturally, Lewis, but all I hear of you suggests that you’re prospering.’
He began again, just as I remembered, some distance from the point; I was ready for him to weave deviously until his opening came. ‘Should you say that, allowing for the uncertainties of life and not claiming too much, that that was true?’
‘In many ways it is.’
‘I am glad for you, I am glad.’
In part, I thought, he meant it; he had always had an affection for me. Then, probing again, he said: ‘In many ways?’
‘In more than I reckoned on.’
‘There is bound to be much that you and I find difficulty in asking each other, for reasons that would distress us both to think of, and yet I should like to think that you perhaps have known what it is to have the gift of a happy marriage?’
I was sure that this was not the point he was winding towards. He asked it quite gently, and in the same tone I said yes, I was coming to know it.
‘It is the only good fortune I’ve been given, but I’ve been given it more completely than most men,’ said Mr Knight. ‘And if you will let me tell you, Lewis, there is nothing to compare with it.’
He was whispering, his wife could not hear: but again, singular as it might have seemed to a spectator, he meant it. He went on: ‘I seem to remember, forgive my meanderings if I am wrong, that I caught sight of the announcement of a birth in The Times — or the Telegraph, was it? Or perhaps both? — that somehow I connected with your name. Could that possibly be so?’
I said yes.
‘I seem to remember, though again you must forgive any mistakes I make, it was of the male sex?’
I said yes.
‘It seems to come back to me that you announced his names as Charles George Austin. Somehow, not knowing anything of your recent adventures, of course, I connected the name George with that eccentric figure Passant, whom I recalled as being an associate of yours in the days that I first heard about you.’
Yes, I said, we had called him after George Passant.
‘Not bad,’ Mr Knight gave a satisfied smile, ‘for an old man in a country vicarage, long out of touch with all of you and the world.’
But he was still skirmishing, right away from his point of attack. He went on: ‘I hope your boy gives you cause to be proud of him. You may be one of those parents whose children bring them happiness.’
Then he changed direction again. He said, in a light, reflective tone: ‘Sometimes, when I’ve heard mention of an achievement of yours, I go back to those days when you first came into my house, should you say that’s because I’ve had nothing to occupy me? Does it occur to you that it was a quarter of a century ago? And sometimes, with all respect to your achievements and acknowledgement of the position you’ve secured for yourself, I find myself wondering, Lewis, whether all that time ago you did not contemplate even more of the world’s baubles than — well, than have actually accrued to you. Because at that age there was a formidable power within you. Of course I know we all have to compound with our destinies. But still, I sometimes felt there might have been hours when you have looked at yourself and thought, well, it could have gone worse, but nevertheless it hasn’t gone perfectly, there have been some disappointments one didn’t expect.’
I was wondering: was this it? I replied: ‘Yes. At that age I should have expected to cut more of a figure by now.’
‘Of course,’ Mr Knight was reflecting, ‘you’ve carried a heavy private load so much of your life. And I suppose, if you’d been going to take a second wind and really go to the top, you wouldn’t at your present age have readjusted yourself to a wife and child.’
Was this it? Had he got me there simply to remind me that my public career had not been wonderful?
If so, I could bear it, more easily than he imagined. But somehow I thought he was still fencing. It was just that at seventy, believing himself ill, taking such care of his life that he had no pleasure left, he nevertheless could not resist, any more than in the past, tapping the barometer of an acquaintance’s worldly situation. And he was, also as in the past, just as good at it as Rose or Lufkin. He had never been outside his parish, he had been too proud and vain to compete, but at predicting careers he was as accurate as those two masters of the power-ladder.
Curiously, when any of the three of them made mistakes, it was the same type of mistake. They all tended to write men off too quickly: they said, with a knell not disagreeable to themselves, he’s finished, and so far as his climbing the ladder in front of him went, they were nearly always right. But they forgot, or undervalued, how resilient human beings were. Herbert Getliffe would never be a judge: Gilbert Cooke would never be more than an assistant secretary: George Passant would stay as a managing clerk at eight or nine hundred a year until he retired: but each of them had reserves of libido left. They were capable of breaking out in a new place: it was not so certain as the prognosticians thought that we had heard the last of them.
‘Should you say,’ Mr Knight continued to delve, ‘we are likely to hear more of you in high affairs?’
‘Less rather than more,’ I said.
His lids drooped down, his expression had saddened.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘if it hadn’t been for my daughter, you would have got a better start.’
‘It would have made no difference in the end,’ I replied.
‘I can’t help thinking how you must have been held back.’
‘In the long run, I should have done much the same,’ I said.
Just for an instant he turned his head and looked at me with eyes wide open.
‘I think of her and ask myself about her,’ he said. ‘And I’ve wondered if you do also.’
At last. This was the point. Now he had led up to it, it turned out not to be a dig at me.
‘I have done often,’ I said.