The Correspondents

In the “eighties of the last century, when Robert Braine was a divinity student at Cambridge, Philip Dell was the only other person in the world who recognised him as a hero.

The two men parted one June day on the long, miserable station at the foot of the hill and never saw each other again, yet their curious relationship persisted for the rest of their long lives.

When Philip was ordained Robert wrote him from Paris and, doubtless because of the gravity of the occasion, forbore to give more than a hint of his own doings, which even so seemed to have a slightly romantic and worldly flavour.

But when Philip wrote a couple of years later to his friend’s home address in Wiltshire, saying that his brief curacy in the north of London was at an end and that he had been offered a remote living in the Norfolk marshes, he received a longer and more enlightening letter in return a month or two afterwards.

In his own note Philip had shyly mentioned his approaching marriage.

“Dorothy is a dear, gentle girl who has been leading our choir,” he had written, his neat hand and precise vocabulary betraying nothing of the tremendous emotional upheaval of his heart.

“I have talked to her earnestly and have warned her of the dullness, and what I fear may sometimes even be the real hardship of our new life in a vast, draughty vicarage with none of the amenities of present-day civilisation, but she, dear sweet creature that she is, is prepared to go through it all for my sake.”

Robert’s letter arrived when the Dells had settled down in their marshland fastness twenty miles from a railway station and as far from the world as if they had gone missioning to China.

I like your wife’s name, he wrote, and I trust you will give her my sincere regards. Forgive me if I say I admire your courage. Frankly, the idea of marriage terrifies me. If you lived my life, my dear fellow, you’d understand me. I almost hesitate to tell you about myself, indeed to a certain extent I am afraid I may not, for the particular branch of the service to which I now belong is devilish secretive.

You will probably be astonished to hear that I have been living in a humble part of Berlin for the past six months and am off to Belgrade in a day or so.

When I was in Germany the exigencies of my profession decreed that I should become for the time being a baker in the employ of a certain peculiarly interesting restauranteur, but in my leisure hours, which were damnably few, believe me, I used to revert to my normal character and mingle with more congenial society.

I met Irna in the house of a certain Baroness and danced with her whenever I got the chance, for beauties of her calibre do not blossom under our leaden skies, believe me. Just at the moment when I was beginning to lose my sleep over the girl, her fiancée, an insufferable Prussian in the Imperial Guard, had the disastrous notion of following me home when I left the ball given in honour of Beaconsfield, who was over for the conference. Imagine my discomfiture when he walked into the bakehouse and found me up to the elbows in dough, utterly incapable of making the true explanation.

That was the end of that romance. For a while I was heartbroken, but I gradually came to realise my Heavensent escape. I think little Greta, the laundress, may have helped matters, but you are a full-fledged parson now so I won’t tell you about her.

Mrs. Dell read the letter after her husband and blushed at it.

“An odious man,” she said. “I can’t believe he was ever a great friend of yours.”

“He not only was, but still is, my love.” Philip spoke with that mild obstinacy which grew on him in later years. “He was an extraordinary fellow, and remains so, it appears. A man like Robert was destined to have adventures. We mustn’t let ourselves get narrow down here. A man in the Secret Service has demands made upon him which are much greater than those put upon the ordinary stick-in-the-mud, like myself. A certain worldliness in Robert is inevitable.”

“A stick-in-the-mud?” Dorothy looked at her husband sharply, and her grey eyes were hurt and dubious. “I thought this was to be our great adventure, Philip?”

The Vicar of Pelham Wick swept aside the accounts of the Industrious Ladies’ Guild which littered his desk and took his wife in his arms.

“I was speaking loosely, my dear,” he said. “For me this life of ours is a tremendous adventure, the only great adventure I could ever have.”

And then because he was an honest man, albeit a tactful one, he added under his breath:

“But I am not Robert and never shall be.”

Philip replied to Robert’s letter in due course. He sent it to the old Wiltshire address and marked it “Please forward”. He wrote very simply, trying to keep any disloyal note of envy out of his quiet paragraphs.

My dear fellow,” he wrote, “I enjoyed your letter. It brought a dash of colour into this placid close. I hardly know what to tell you in return. My cat has built herself a nest like a starling twenty feet up in the ivy on the church and it took three of us—Tom, my gardener; George, the churchwarden; and myself—to get her and her family to safety. There we were, risking our necks and trembling with conscious heroism, while my wife stood below covering her eyes lest one of the tabby babes should fall to destruction. This is the kind of excitement I get down here.

However, everything is relative.

My wife and I see very little company, which is perhaps just as well just now.

Philip hesitated long over this final sentence, his delicacy fighting with his great pride and the secret emotional triumph which was consuming him. In the end he left it as it was, remembering that Dorothy was sensitive.

Robert’s reply arrived nearly two years later.

‘What a mad world it is!” he wrote on the thin foreign paper whose crackling sheets brought the very stuff of romance into the shabby vicarage dining-room.

I am in Paris.

A most extraordinary thing happened to me. I met Irna again. She is now calling herself Ernestine and is the wife of a man who bids fair to make a name for himself in French politics. Apparently my famous bakery escapade put a stop to her projected marriage with the insufferable young Guardee and I was a little apprehensive at first because I had already heard most of the story.

However, she soon put me at my ease and actually thanked me for my share in the business. I must confess I find her charming. I danced with her at the Imperial Russian Embassy last night and could not help noticing that there was not a man in the room who did not envy me.

Her husband is clever but too old for her. He is the typical bourgeois politician, gross, palefaced, and volatile. I saw him glance at her once or twice last night and I wondered.

Later. Wiltshire.

I put away this note meaning to finish it in a day or so, but much water has flowed under the bridge since then—rather dirty water some of it, I am afraid. I hope I am not going to shock you by this chapter in my chronicles, but you must regard yourself as my father-confessor. Well, as you may imagine, I saw a great deal of Madame Ernestine in the days immediately following our dance, and at last, as seemed inevitable when we met, she softened noticeably towards me and I heard the true story of her monstrous marriage.

The man was a brute and he submitted her to such treatment as I will not harrow you by recounting. I was more than sorry for her and I may have been a little indiscreet in my attentions, but at any rate you maybe assured I did nothing to merit the astonishing behaviour of the husband.

He insulted me in a public place in front of a great many of my more distinguished friends, thus forcing me to retaliate, and before I knew what had happened I found myself with a duel on my hands!

This was a fair, if at first a slightly ridiculous, business, and, God forgive me, I was inclined to treat the whole thing as a thundering lark, but I was not so lighthearted, believe me, when my shot pierced the fellow’s chest and he collapsed dying in his seconds’ arms.

The whole thing was hushed up as much as possible, thanks to my distinguished associates, but I had to get out of the country as quickly as I could and I received a severe wigging from my superior officers in London.

I am now rushing off to St Petersburg as a penance. I heard nothing from Ernestine and can get no word from her. If you can bring yourself to reply to such a rapscallion, write to my brother’s address and he will send on all letters.

Philip thought it prudent to conceal Robert’s communication from Dorothy, but he read it several times himself, for he was still a young man.

He wrote back the following spring when he was happier. “We have a son,” he stated baldly in the midst of a spate of gentle meanderings about his work, the weather and his beloved countryfolk. “I have called him Philip Nathaniel Henry Robert. Our first baby, also a son, died six hours after birth.”

It was the shortest paragraph in the letter and told nothing of the intense emotional drama of that mercifully far-off night twenty-two months before when the dark garden had flickered with the uncertain light of hurricane lanterns bobbing to and fro from the gate, and there had been hushed voices and low, heartrending sounds in the creaky old house.

On that occasion the doctor’s gig had remained in the stable yard until the grey morning had come, bringing bitterness and disillusion and despair with it.

For a considerable time there was no reply from Robert the elder, but one day a long parcel arrived containing a very fine ivory-headed cane pierced for a tassel, and with a card bearing the inscription “For Robert the Younger with his reprobate Uncle’s love.’

There was also a brief note for Philip.

“The enclosed stick was given me by the lineal descendant of Rene de Chevreuse, Duc de Pouilly, whose ancestor had it as a gift from Louis XVI. I did him a trifling service in Beauvais and he insisted that I took it. It was his dearest possession.”

Philip wrote a suitable letter of thanks and hung the stick on the drawing-room wall, where it remained, an object of the deepest veneration, for over thirty years, lending a touch of romantic enchantment to an otherwise prosaic if comfortable room.

From these beginnings the correspondence continued a leisurely course down the years. Philip’s letters remained gentle, pleasant chronicles of a quiet, useful life unstirred by any remarkable occurrence. In his hands even the sensational affair at Cherry’s farm, which began with a double murder and ended with a conviction and a hanging, became a balanced, brief account of a rustic tragedy.

And that much more personal disaster, the death of old George, the churchwarden, in the early days of War, which ended a deep friendship and saddened the blossom whiteness of the spring for ever for the Vicar of Pelham Wick, was never mentioned at all.

Robert, on the other hand, made his colourful experiences live. As the years went on he became a legendary figure.

Ernestine, too, became a heroine. Her daughter turned up in wartime Paris and was miraculously saved from death as a spy by the intercession of her mother and the influence of Robert himself. His youth and vigour were perennial.

The last letter from Robert to reach the Vicarage arrived ten years later. It had all the old fire, if also some of the old floridness of style which the writer had never bothered himself to correct.

“The bad penny turns up once more,” he wrote happily, “looking a great deal the worse for wear, I am afraid, but still as sound as ever, thank God. I am writing this in the train coming home from Geneva.

My travels this time have taken me to Palestine, Rome and Prague, where I think I can truthfully say I did useful work—although my Viennese experience was perhaps not quite so satisfactory, if I must be honest. Still, I got around and shall be off to Washington in a week or two. Not bad for an old ’un, eh?

I called at Juan-les-Pins on my way out and had a few days with Ernestine in her lovely villa. I lost my heart to her once more. Even at sixty-five she is lovely. And although I did not approve of the greasy-haired young puppies who console her widowhood (her third husband, the Comte del Montator, died two years ago, as I may have told you), I found her a stimulating companion. What gaiety! What youth!

She was kind enough to say she still thought of me as a young man, and, God bless her, I believe she does.

When I left her I found myself strangely dissatisfied with my life. Perhaps I should have settled down. I have lived, yet what have I now? No honours, no fortune, no companion for my age. Only my magnificent memories. Still, in my normal moments these suffice me. I said I had lived; I have, you know.”

Three months after this, and before Philip had found time to reply, a telegram from Wiltshire arrived.

“Robert Braine sinking,” it said briefly. “Would greatly appreciate it if you could come.” And it was signed “Ernestine”.

The news struck a note of flat calamity, such as had not been sounded at the Vicarage of Pelham Wick for many years. The hero was dying. It was the end of an era, the passing of Romance.

As Philip stood helplessly by, watching Dorothy packing his necessities, he found that he was reacting to the emergency in an unusual way. Robert’s dying affected him as his living had done. Philip had not been to London for ten years, and never to Wiltshire, and he contemplated the journey now with excitement.

Nor was this the cold, blank sense of loss that old George’s death had brought widi it. Robert’s death was high tragedy: two friends parted for a lifetime, but still friends and united at a deathbed. It was poignant, almost exhilarating.

As Dorothy fastened the suitcase her eyes were shining.

“I’m glad she went to him,” she said.

“Ah, Ernestine,” said Philip softly and shook his head.

All through the long confusing journey, with its terrifying passage through the City, he thought of Robert and he was ashamed of himself for being so old. Two years of Robert’s memories would fill a column: his own life might be written in a chapter.

It was dark when he arrived at the small country railway station and the grim-faced youth who met him explained that there was very little time. After a terrifying ride, he climbed out on to a moss-grown drive and walked up two shallow steps to an old elm door, which stood open.

As he stood hesitating a light flickered at the far end of the stone hall and an old woman came forward, an oil lamp held high over her head.

“Mr. Dell?” she said in a harsh, respectful voice with a country twang in it. “Will you come in here, please, sir?”

He followed her into a dusty study and she set the lamp down on a table. She was a tall, gaunt woman and her manner was authoritative, after the way of very old servants.

“I didn’t like to tell you at the door, sir,” she said, ‘but he’s gone. He dropped off an hour ago.”

Philip nodded. It seemed he had expected the news. Yet he was conscious of a sense of deep disappointment. Robert was gone. The dramatic reunion was not to be. The elderly housekeeper insisted on taking him upstairs to the big overcrowded bedroom where books, ornaments and little wicker tables besieged an enormous patriarchal bed.

The old man who sat beside it rose respectfully as they entered and the woman glanced at Philip.

‘This is my husband, sir,” she said. “We’ve looked after the poor Master for fifty years.”

Philip was puzzled.

“I only knew Mr. Robert,” he said. “I never met his brother.”

“That would be Mr. Richard,” observed the housekeeper placidly. “He died when I was a girl. Mr. Robert’s been what you might call a recluse all his life. I don’t think he’s been outside the garden these twenty years. We took the liberty of sending for you, sir, because you were the only person he ever wrote to. He was a wonderful, quiet, thoughtful man, were Mr. Robert. He’d take the services at one time, but when the curate came he retired, as you might say.”

Philip stood very still.

“Was Mr. Robert the vicar of the parish?” he inquired unsteadily.

The woman blinked at him.

“Why, o” course he were, sir,” she said. “Just like his father and grandfather were before him. They were all wonderful retiring gentlemen. Never took but little interest in the parish. It was always as if their thoughts were far away. And Mr. Robert, he was just the same.”

A great inspiration came to Philip.

“You,” he said to the woman, “you are Ernestine?”

“Yes, sir,” she said primly. “My surname was Ernest and the Master’s mother thought it unsuitable for a woman, so she called me Irna in the German fashion, and afterwards the Master changed it to Ernestine. When I married John here we’d all got used to it… Would you care to see the Master’s face, sir? He were a very old man.”

“No,” said Philip suddenly. “No. I’d rather think of him as I remember him.”

The old servants bowed to his very natural request.

Dorothy came to meet Philip at Norwich station.

“How tragic missing him after all,” she said. “Still, I’m so glad you went, dear. Tell me, did you see Ernestine?”

To the best of his knowledge Philip had never told a direct lie in his life, but truth is a graceful mistress, capable of many disguises.

“Yes,” he said softly. “I saw her. Only for a moment. She went away almost as soon as I recognised her.”

“What was she like?”

Dorothy’s old eyes were bright and childlike in her excitement.

Philip put his thin arm round her.

“A creature of romance,” he said, “but not the type who could ever have satisfied me.”