“Nick, old bird,” said he, “I feel as sick and sorry as a lame dog—but there’s something in me that won’t lie down. It keeps on shoving up from under my spirits like bubbly under a cork. And if that old buffer comes and asks me in the morning how many beans make five, it’s a hundred to one I shall make the stupid response: ‘The answer is a lemon.’ I just shan’t be able to help myself.”
CHAPTER VI
A RISING STAR
In the days of his early youth Henry Hope had appeared to those about him to be an old, old man dressed in an Eton suit. His large rimmed spectacles had lent him the air of a scholastic genius, and he was, by habit, pitifully pedantic. In addition he was dignified, and self-reliant to a fault, and he had no ability of any kind at games. But at least his heart was in the right place. More than once his meditative resource had helped Terence and Rouse out of a sad scrape, and accordingly he was their beloved friend.
In the course of the last few years he had been growing up—lengthways, that is to say—and Henry Hope had changed a little from the Henry Hope of old. In the atmosphere of Harley he had grown rather less of a hermit and rather more of a boy. He had opened out. He was still totally devoid of a sense of humour, and he still used grave words both in season and out, but he had become, in one sense at least, human. He was a devotee of the cinema. Also he had decided what he was going to be. He was going to be an actor in film plays. He knew one such actor already, and it seemed to him that this would provide him with an effective introduction into the right clique when the time came. Toby Nicholson was the actor. At one period of his life Toby had turned an honest penny by risking his life before the camera on selected days, and though this was, for obvious reasons, not the line of business in which Henry proposed to make his mark, it was at all events good to feel that he was not totally unacquainted with the way things were done.
Henry, as a matter of fact, was going to be one of those men to whom the ideal way of getting into a room is by way of the skylight, and the ideal way of getting out is through the window (though not, of course, by being pushed through).
It was conceivable that on occasion Henry might consent to act the part of a detective. Generally speaking, however, he would be the man who delays the play all the way through by persistently getting into predicaments through sheer stupidity merely for the sake of showing how to get out of them again.
He would be a man of rapid movement; he would look always to right and left before moving to his front; he would look all round a room before observing a prostrate body at his feet; he would invariably get his eye caught on a keyhole before entering a room. He would point out the way to a friend less keen of vision than he before walking down a long straight road; and at times he would be seen swaying against a wall with half-closed eyes whilst those who had stolen his all made their escape in their own time through an old-world garden, stopping to pick flowers as they went.
Above all there would be one dramatic performance which would constitute his star part. It would consist in a series of scenes turned rapidly upon the reel, each displaying a long wide road, and down these ways Henry would be featured running as never man ran before. His arms would be going like pistons. He would have lost his hat. (This, however, he would find again in time to doff it as indicating that somebody was dead.) Ever and again he would appear to be exhausted. To the lay mind it would seem impossible for any living man to maintain such a consistent speed down all those different roads. Nevertheless Henry would do it. He would do it on different days, of course, but that would not be realised; and he would, moreover, be running to save a soul. This would be known to the audience, who would cheer his attractive likeness every time it appeared at the far end of another road. He conceived that the energy with which he would run would immediately lift him into the front rank of famous players. He had once had a nightmare in which he had slipped up and fallen on the back of his neck whilst at the top of his speed, thus leading the audience to suppose that his performance was a comic one ... and once he had dreamt that owing to a slight stitch he had not been able to run up to form and had arrived twenty-five minutes too late to effect the rescue, for which he had been kicked by the man who had been turning the film all the time in expectation of his arrival; but he had never mentioned these incidents to anyone at all.
He practised a good deal, and it may almost be said that throughout the period covered by this tale he lived under the perpetual hallucination that all his movements were recorded by a camera for reproduction before a gaping audience.
He was under this impression when he shepherded Bobbie Carr and his own close friend, Hallowell, out of the new study. He made the movement a masterpiece of play without words, and when they were safely out of earshot in the corridor he drew himself up with a touch of characteristic dignity and spoke his only sentence. He did not believe in speaking any more than was really necessary at these times—no more, in fact, than it would be necessary for a film to speak, and always in the same crisp manner in which the film habitually does speak.