Concerning his friendship with Westcott a word must be said. About a year ago at the house of a friend of Philip's he had been introduced to a thick-set saturnine man who had been sitting by himself in a corner and appearing entirely bored with the evening's proceedings. His host had thrown Henry at this unattractive guest's head as though he would say: "I dare not offer up any of my more important guests to this Cerberus of a fellow, but here's a young ass who doesn't matter and I don't care whether his feelings are hurt or no." Henry himself was at this time cultivating a supercilious air in public, partly from shyness and partly because he did not wish to reveal how deeply pleased he was at being invited to parties. He liked at once Westcott's broad shoulders, close-cropped hair and nonchalant attitude. The first ten minutes of their conversation was not a success, and then Henry discovered that Westcott had, in the days of his youth, actually known, spoken to, had tea with the God of his, Henry's, idolatry, Henry Galleon. Westcott was perhaps touched by young Henry's ingenuous delight, his eager questions, his complete forgetfulness of himself and his surroundings at this piece of information. He in his turn launched out and talked of the London of fifteen years ago and of the heroes of that time, a time that the war had made historic, curious, picturesque, a time that was already older than crinolines, almost as romantic as the Regency. Their host left them together for the remainder of the evening, feeling that he had most skilfully killed two dull birds with one stone. They departed together, walked from Hyde Park Corner together and by the time that they parted were already friends. That friendship had held firm throughout the succeeding year. As a friendship it was good for both of them. Westcott was very lonely and too proud to go out and draw men in. Henry needed just such an influence as Westcott's, the influence of a man who had known life at its hardest and bitterest, who had come through betrayal, disappointed ambition, poverty and loneliness without losing his courage and belief in life, a man whose heart was still warm towards his fellowmen although he kept it guarded now lest he should too easily be again betrayed.
There was no need to keep it guarded from Henry whose transparent honesty could not be mistaken. Henry restored something of Westcott's lost confidence in himself. Henry believed profoundly in what he insisted on calling Westcott's "genius," and that even the simplest soul on earth should believe in us gives some support to our doubting hopes and wavering ambitions. Henry admitted quite frankly to Westcott that he had not heard of him before he met him. Peter's novels—Reuben Hallard, The Stone House, Mortimer Stant and two others—had been before Henry's time and the little stir that Reuben had made had not penetrated the thick indifference of his school-days. Westcott was not at all sensitive to this ignorance. Before the war he had broken entirely with the literary life and his five years' war service abroad had not encouraged him to renew that intimacy. He had had hard starving days since the Armistice and had been driven back almost against his will to some reviewing and writing of articles.
All men had not forgotten him he discovered with a strange dim pleasure that beat like a regret deep into his soul—the younger men especially because he had been a commercial failure were inclined to believe that he had been an artistic success. Mysterious allusions were made in strange new variegated publications to Reuben Hallard and Mortimer Stant.
He began to review regularly for The Athenæum and The New Statesman, and he did some dramatic criticism for The Nation. He soon found to his own surprise that he was making income enough to live without anxiety in two small rooms in the Marylebone High Street, where he was cared for by a kindly widow, Mrs. Sunning, who found that he resembled her son who was killed in the war and therefore adored him. Even, against his will, all his hopes, there were faint stirrings of a novel in his brain. He did not wish to revive that ambition again, but the thing would come and settle there and stir a little and grow day by day, night by night, in spite of his reluctance and even hostility.
Perhaps in this Henry had some responsibility. Henry was so sure that Peter had only to begin again and the world would be at his feet. One night, the two of them sitting over a small grumbling fire in the Coventry Street attic, Peter spoke a little in detail of his book.
After that Henry never left him alone. The book was born now in Henry's brain as well as in Peter's; it knew its own power and that its time would come.
Peter had by no means confided all his life's history to Henry. The boy only knew that there had been a great tragedy, that Westcott was married but did not know where his wife was or even whether she were still alive. Of all this he spoke to no man.
Gabriel Hunter was a painter of the new and extravagant kind; his wife wore bobbed hair, wrote poetry and cultivated a little Salon in Barton Street, Westminster, where they lived.
The Hunters were poor and their house was very small and quite a small number of people caused it to overflow, but to Henry during the last year the Hunter gatherings had stood to him for everything in life that was worth while. It was one of his real griefs that Millicent wouldn't go to that house, declaring that she hated the new poets and the new painters and the new novelists, that she liked Tennyson and Trollope and John Everett Millais and that as soon as she had a house of her own she was going to collect wax flowers and fruit and horsehair sofas. She said many of these things to irritate Henry and irritate him she did, being able to separate him from his very volcanic temper within the space of two minutes if she tried hard enough.
On every other occasion going to the Hunter's had been synonymous to Henry with going to Paradise. To-night for the first time it seemed to be simply going to Westminster. At last, however, hunger drove him, and at a quarter-past nine he found himself in the Hunters' little hall, all painted green with red stripes and a curtain covered with purple bananas and bright crimson oranges hanging in front of the kitchen stairs.