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 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.’
A.J. was kept fairly busy during the years that followed. Sir Henry got him reviewing jobs on the Comet and other papers, besides which he wrote occasionally for the Pioneer and was also understood to be at work upon a novel. But the plain truth soon became apparent that he was no good at all as a journalist. He was too conscientious, if anything; he read too carefully before he reviewed, and he gave his opinions too downrightly—he had none of Sir Henry’s skill in praising with faint damns. Nor had he the necessary journalistic flair for manufacturing an attitude at a moment’s notice; he would say ‘I don’t know’ or ’I have no opinion’ far oftener than was permissible in Fleet Street. He even, after several years, gave up his projected novel for the excellent but ignominious reason that he could not make up his mind what it was to be about. But for the fact that Sir Henry was behind him, his journalistic career would hardly have lasted very long. Aitchison, the Comet editor, could never use more than a fraction of the stuff he sent in, though personally he liked the youth well enough and was sorry to see him slaving away at tasks for which he had so little aptitude.