The Young Enchanted: A Romantic Story

by Hugh Walpole

This Mr. King was little in stature, but great in demeanour. His head was bald save for a few black hairs very carefully arranged upon it, as specimens are laid out in the Natural History Museum. His face also was bald, in the strictest sense of the word; that is, not only did no hairs grow upon it but it seemed impossible that any hairs ever had grown upon it. His eyes were sharp, his mouth deprecating and his chin insignificant. He wore, it seemed, the same suit of black, the same black tie, the same stiff white shirt from year's end to year's end. He showed no human emotion whether of anger, regret, disappointment, expectation or sorrow.

He told no jolly stories of other tenants nor of life about town such as Henry would have liked him to tell. He had, Henry was sure, a great contempt for Henry. He was not, from any point of view, a lovable human being.

Henry did what he could for his room, he was proud of it, felt very kindly towards it and wanted to clothe it with beauty. It is difficult, however, to make a room beautiful unless the wall-paper and the carpet contribute something. Henry had a nice writing-table that his Uncle Timothy had given him, a gate-legged table from his sister Katherine and a fine Regency bookcase stolen by him from his Westminster home. He had three pictures, a Japanese print, a copy of Mr. Belcher's drawing of Pat O'Keefe, "The Wild Irishman," and a little water-colour by Lovat Frazer of a king and queen marching into a banquet-hall and attended by their courtiers. This last, splendid in gold and blue, green and red was the joy of Henry's heart and had been given him by his sister Millicent on his last birthday.

In the bookcase there were, on the whole, the books that you would expect—the poems of Swinburne, Dowson, and Baudelaire, some of the 1890 novelists and one or two moderns. But he was also beginning to collect a few rare editions, and he had Clarissa and The Mysteries of Udulpho and The Monk in their original bindings, and an early Pilgrim's Progress, a rather rare Donne and a second Vicar of Wakefield. These were his greatest treasures. He had only two photographs in his room—his sisters and that of his greatest and perhaps his only friend. These stood one on either side of the very plain alarm-clock that took the middle of the mantelpiece.

Henry, as he sat on his bed, looking before him out of the little window across to the corner gables of the Comedy Theatre, appeared very much the same crude and callow youth that he had seemed on going up to Oxford just before the war.

He had not yet caught up to his size which had leapt ahead of his years when he was about sixteen. He was still long, lean, and untidy, his black hair refusing any kind of control, his complexion poor with a suspicion of incipient pimple, his ears too red, his hands never quite clean. The same and yet not at all the same.

The hint of beauty that there had been when he was nineteen in the eyes and mouth and carriage of neck and shoulders was now, when he was twenty-six, more clearly emphasized. At first sight Henry seemed an untidy and rather uncleanly youth; look again and you would see quite clearly that he would be, one day, a distinguished man. His untidiness, the way that his trousers bagged at the knee, that he carried, like some knight with his lady's favour, the inevitable patch of white on his sleeve, that his boots were not rightly laced and his socks not sufficiently "suspended"—these things only indicated that he was in the last division of the intermediate class, between youth and manhood.

The war had very nearly made him a man, and had not the authorities discovered, after his first wound in 1915, that he was quite hopeless in command of other men but not at all a fool at intelligence he would have been a man complete by this time. The war smartened him a little but not very much, and the moment he was free he slipped back into his old ways and his old customs with a sigh of relief.

But there again not entirely. Like his cousin John, who was killed in Galicia in 1915, stretcher-bearing for the Russians, he was awkward in body but clean in soul. The war had only emphasized something in him that was there before it, and the year and a half that he spent with his family in the Westminster house after the Armistice was the most terrible time of his life. No one knew what to do with him. His mother had had a stroke in the spring of 1917 and now lay like a corpse at the top of the old house, watching, listening, suffering an agony of rebellion in her proud and obstinate soul. With her influence gone, his grandfather and his great-aunt Sarah dead, his two aunts Betty and Anne living in the country down at Walton-on-Thames, his father more and more living his own life in his study, his sister Katherine married and involved now entirely in her own affairs, Henry felt the big house a mausoleum of all his hopes and ambitions. Return to Oxford he would not. Strike out and live on his one hundred and fifty pounds he would at the first possible moment, but one thing after another prevented him. He remained in that grim and chilly house mainly because of his sister Millicent, whom he loved with all his heart and soul, and for whom he would do anything in the world.