Knight Without Armour Read online

  JAMES HILTON

  KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOUR

  First published by Ernest Benn Ltd., London, 1933

  * * *

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  Part IV

  Part V

  * * *

  PART I

  PROLOGUE

  “There died on the 13th inst. at Roone’s Hotel, Carrigole, Co. Cork, where he had been staying for some time, Mr. Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill, in his forty-ninth year. Mr. Fothergill was the youngest son of the Reverend Wilson Fothergill, of Timperleigh, Leicestershire. Educated at Barrowhurst and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he was for a time a journalist in London before seeking his fortune abroad. Since 1920 he had been closely associated with the plantation rubber industry, and was the author of a standard work upon that subject.”

  So proclaimed the obituary column of The Times on the morning of October 19th, 1929. But The Times gets to Roone’s a day and a half late, and Fothergill was already beneath the soil of Carrigole churchyard by then. There had been some slight commotion over the burial; an English priest had wired at the last moment that the man was a Catholic. This seemed strange, for he had never been noticed to go to Mass; but still, there was the telegram, and since most Carrigole folk were buried as Catholics anyway, the matter was not difficult to arrange.

  There was also an inquest. Fothergill had apparently died in his sleep; one of the maids took up his cup of tea in the morning and actually left it on his bedside table without knowing he was dead. She told the district coroner she had said—“Here’s your tea, sir,” and that she thought he had smiled in answer. Nobody found out the truth till nearly noon. Then a doctor who happened to be staying at the hotel saw the body and said it must have been lifeless for at least ten hours.

  Just in time for the inquest a London doctor arrived to testify that Fothergill had consulted him some weeks before about a heart complaint. It was the sort of thing that might finish off anyone quite suddenly, so of course all was clear, on the evidence, and the verdict ’Death from natural causes’ came in with record speed.

  The whole affair provided an acute though temporary sensation at Roone’s Hotel, which, though the season was almost over, chanced to be fairly full at the time owing to a cruiser in harbour. Roone himself was rather peeved; he was just beginning to work up his place after the many years of ‘trouble,’ and it certainly did him no good to have guests dying on him in such a way. He was especially annoyed because it had all got into the Dublin and London papers—that, of course, being due to Halloran, Carrigole’s too ambitious journalist, who would (Roone said) sell his best friend’s reputation for half a guinea.

  As for the dead man, Roone could only shrug his shoulders. Rather crossly he told the occupants of his crowded private bar how little he knew about the fellow. Never set eyes on him till the September, when he had arrived from Killarney one evening with a small suitcase. Evidently hadn’t meant to stop long, and at the end of a week had sent to London for more luggage. Very quiet sort, civil and all that, but somehow not the kind of chap a fellow would naturally take to…Yes, practically teetotal, too—nearly as bad for business as the Cook’s people who came loaded with coupons for all they took and drank nothing but water. “Although, by the way,” Roone added, “he did come in here for a nightcap the evening before—I remember serving him.”

  “Yes, I remember too,” put in a plus-foured youth. “I made some casual remark to him about something or other just to be polite, that was all—but he hardly answered me. Rather surly, I thought at the time.”

  At which Mrs. Roone intervened, tartly: “Of course it was easy to see what he was stopping on here for, and more shame to him, I say.”

  Everyone in the bar nodded, for everyone had been waiting for that matter to be mentioned. There had been an American girl staying at the hotel with her mother; the two had been the only guests with whom the dead man had struck up any sort of acquaintance. He had gone for drives and picnics with them; he had taken his meals at their table; he had sometimes danced with the girl in the evenings. He was after her, Mrs. Roone said, bluntly, and as he had plenty of money the artful old mother was trying to hook him.

  “Oh, so he had money, then?” enquired the youth in plus- fours.

  “Money? Why do you suppose that London doctor came all the way here to give evidence at the inquest if it wasn’t for, a fine fat fee? As a matter of fact, there were some people here a few weeks ago who said for sober truth they knew he was worth half a million—all made out of rubber, so they said.” Mrs. Roone’s voice rose to a shriek as she added: “Half a million indeed, and old enough to be the girl’s father, as well as liable to drop dead at any minute! Disgraceful, I say!”

  “D’you think the girl was after him too?”

  “Maybe she was. Girls will do anything for money these days.”

  Here a youthful, red-cheeked naval lieutenant interposed. “Personally, Mrs. Roone, I think I’d give her the benefit of the doubt—the girl, I mean. I spoke to her once or twice—danced with her once, too—and she seemed to me a very quiet, innocent sort of kid.”

  He spoke rather shyly, and a colleague, who had drunk quite enough, shouted: “Innocent? Too dam’ innocent for you, eh, Willie?”

  “Anyhow,” answered Mrs. Roone, with final truculence, “the way they both cleared off was quite enough for me. The very afternoon that we were all fussed and bothered about finding the man dead, up comes the old woman to have her bill made out in a hurry—must get away—catching the boat at Queenstown, or something or other. Disappointed, I suppose, because her k trick hadn’t worked in time. I didn’t see the girl before they left.”

  “Well, well, she’s had a narrow escape,” said Roone, drinking, “though maybe not the narrowest she ever will have if she’s going to go about dancing with young naval lieutenants, eh?”

  They all laughed. Just then The Times arrived, and somebody in the bar, opening the paper casually, discovered Fothergill’s obituary. They all crowded round and read it through with growing exasperation—it told so little that they would have liked to know. The son of a country parson, a public-school neither good nor quite bad, Cambridge, journalism, rubber. What could anyone make of it? The youth in plus-fours fully expressed the general opinion when he commented: “Doesn’t sound a particularly exciting career, does it?”

  “And it says nothing about a wife,” said Roone, “so I suppose he never married.”

  That was doubtfully accepted as a probable conclusion.

  “Well, well,” added Roone, pouring more whisky into his soda, “he wasn’t my kind of chap, and I don’t care who hears me say so. Neither a good Catholic nor a good Protestant nor a good anything else, I should say.”

  Which seemed the end of a rather unpleasant matter.

  * * *

  PART II

  Ainsley Jergwin Fothergill was born in 1880. He had five brothers and four sisters, and his father’s living yielded seven hundred a year. His mother died in 1881, having never quite got over her most recent contribution to the family, and the Reverend Wilson, left to keep house with ten children, wandered helplessly about his parish as if he were the last person on earth responsible for his own situation. He was a large, heavily-built man, with fat hands and a bald head; he did his job in a dull, conscientious way, and thrashed his elder children irregularly and without relish. He was an Evangelical and a Gladstonian Liberal; he disliked Dissent, had hated the Oxford Movement, and had a superstitious horror of Rome. It was his habit to preach hour-long sermons explaining the exact meaning of Greek and Hebrew words to a congregation largely composed of farm-labourers.

  A widowed sister came to
keep house for him in due course; her husband had been an army officer, accidentally killed in India in an age when few officers of either service ever died of anything more exciting than cirrhosis of the liver. Aunt Nellie never tired of boasting of her unique bereavement, and it was she who had principal charge of Ainsley. She had been a school teacher in earlier life, and along with two of his sisters the boy obtained from her a fairly complete grounding in reading, writing, simple arithmetic, and the sort of geography that consists in knowing what belongs to England. Barbara and Emily, fifteen months and two and a half years older than their brother respectively, had no aptitude for learning anything of any kind; Ainsley, even by the age of five, had far outstripped them. He was, indeed, a bright, fairly good-looking child—dark-eyed, dark-haired, well- moulded, but perhaps (Aunt Nellie thought, doubtfully) ‘a little foreign- looking.’

  Timperleigh was a dull village in the midst of passable hunting country, and the Reverend Wilson, despite his small income, managed to hunt once a week during the season. It meant that the elder children could not be sent to a good school, but that did not trouble him. He hunted in the same joyless, downright manner as he preached and thrashed. Sometimes the hunt would meet in the rectory drive and the children would run about among the horses and dogs and have their heads patted by high-up gruff voiced men in scarlet coats. Ainsley liked this, but not quite so much as he enjoyed having tea in the kitchen with Cook. She was called Cook, but she was really only a good-natured person of middle age who, being also mentally deficient, had been willing for years to do all the rough work of the household in return for a miserably poor wage. Ainsley was fond of her, and the look of the large rectory kitchen, with the window-panes slowly changing from grey to black and the firelight flickering on all the pots and dish-covers, gave him a comfortable feeling that he was certain only Cook could share. And her talk seemed far more thrilling than any fairy-story; she had been born in Whitechapel, and she made Whitechapel seem a real place, full of real people and real if horrible happenings; whereas Capernaum, which his father talked about in Sunday sermons, and Gibraltar, which Aunt Nellie insisted belonged to England, were vague, shadowy, and impossible to believe in.

  When Ainsley was seven, his father was killed in a hunting mishap. Aunt Nellie, behind a seemly grief, was again rather thrilled; next to being trampled to death on an Indian polo-ground, to die on the hunting-field was perhaps the most socially eligible of all earthly exits. The boy, quite frankly, felt no grief at all; he had had hardly anything to do with his father, having not yet attained the age of chastisement. Nor was he old enough to realise the problem presented by the existence of himself and his nine brothers and sisters. There was practically no money, not even an insurance; the family, in terms of hard cash, was scarcely better off than that of a deceased farm-labourer. Fortunately the Reverend Wilson had been one of as large a family as his own, and communication was soon and inevitably opened up with uncles and aunts, many far distant and some almost mythical. After long and peevish negotiations, the family was divided somehow or other amongst such relatives, until only the two youngest remained Then, in sheer desperation, a letter was written to Sir Henry Jergwin, whose wife had been Aunt Helen, and after whom the youngest Fothergill had been hopefully but so far fruitlessly named. Could Sir Henry do anything for Barbara, aged eight, and for Ainsley Jergwin, aged seven? The great man commanded the children to visit him at his London house; they were taken there by Aunt Nellie and solemnly exhibited. After a week he decided; he would have the boy, but not the girl. So Barbara, after further struggles, was pushed on to one of the other uncles, while Ainsley came to live at a big Victorian house in Bloomsbury already inhabited by his uncle, a secretary, a butler, a cook, a coachman, three maids, and a gardener.

  Sir Henry, in fact, was tolerably rich. He had always cultivated influential friendships in the City, and he was also editor and proprietor of the Pioneer, a weekly paper of Liberal views. Sixty-three years of age, with a vigorous body, an alert mind, a mellow booming voice, and an impressively long and snow-white beard, he was almost as well known as he wished to be. He entertained; he was invited to speak at public dinners; he knew everybody; Garibaldi had stayed a night at his house; Gladstone had knighted him. Besides all this, his reputation as a man of letters stood high—and curiously high, for he had written nothing that could be considered really first-rate. Only, all along, he had had the knack of making the most of everything he did; even a very mediocre poem he had once composed had managed an entry into most of the anthologies. Somehow, too, he had got himself accepted as an authority on Elizabethan literature; he had edited the Hathaway edition of Shakespeare, and thousands of schoolchildren had fumbled over his glossaries. Surmounting and in addition to all else, the man was a character; should any big controversy arise in the Press, he was always asked for his opinion, and always, without fail, gave it. His views, though unexciting, stood for something that still existed in far greater proportions than the brilliant youngsters realised—a certain slow and measured solemnity that flowed in the bloodstream of every Englishman who had more than a thousand pounds in Consols.

  Sir Henry had begotten no children; he took Ainsley in the spirit of a martyr bearing his cross, and in the same spirit engaged a German governess. This capable person added history and music to the list of things the boy was supposed to have been taught; later on a beginning was made with French and German. The great Sir Henry rarely saw either him or her; sometimes, however, Ainsley was conducted into the library ‘to see the books’ and to be called ‘my little man’ and smiled at. “These,” explained Sir Henry, on more than one such occasion, sweeping his arm towards the rows of shelves, “are my best friends, and some day you will find them your best friends also.” Ainsley was never quite certain whether this was a promise or a threat.

  When he was twelve, Sir Henry sent him to Barrowhurst.

  Barrowhurst was not a very old foundation; Liberal and Evangelical in tendency, it had several times entertained Sir Henry as its Speech Day guest of honour. Situated in wild moorland country, it provided a vast change from the atmosphere of governesses and Bloomsbury gardens. At first Ainsley revelled in the freedom suddenly offered him; for the first time in his life he could walk about on his own, read books of his own choosing, and make friends without the frosty surveillance of grown-ups. He did not, however, make many friends. He was rather shy and reserved in manner; amongst the school in general he was for a long time hardly known, and the masters did not care for him, because he soon displayed that worst sin of the schoolboy—an indisposition to fit into one or other of the accepted classifications. He was not exactly troublesome, and his work was always satisfactory; only, somehow or other, he was difficult to get on with; he was apt to ask questions which, though hardly impertinent, were awkwardly unanswerable; he wouldn’t respond, either, to the usual gambits of schoolmasterly approach. For some reason he hated games, yet he wasn’t by any means the too brainy, bookish youngster; on the contrary, he was physically strong and sturdily built, and soon became actually the best swimmer and gymnast the school had known for years.

  There was another Fothergill at the school, of a different family, and Ainsley, to avoid mistakes, always signed his papers with a very large and distinguishable ‘A.J.’ This became such a characteristic that he began to be called ‘A.J.’ by his friends, and the initials finally became an accepted nickname.

  In his third year he suddenly startled everybody by leading a minor rebellion. There was a master at the school named Smalljohn who had a system of discipline for which A.J. had gradually conceived an overmastering hatred. The system was this: Smalljohn stood in front of the class, gold watch in hand, and said, “If the boy who did so-and-so does not declare himself within twenty-five seconds, I shall give the whole form an hour’s detention.” One day, after confessing himself, under such threat of vicarious doom, the author of some trivial misdeed, A.J. calmly informed his fellows that it was the last time he ever intended to do s
uch a thing. Couldn’t they see that the system was not only unfair but perfectly easy to break down if only they all tackled it the right way? And the right way was for no one ever to confess; let them put up with a few detentions—Smalljohn would soon get tired of it when he found his system no longer worked. There are a few Barrowhurst men who will still remember the quiet-voiced boy arguing his case with an emphasis all the more astonishing because it was the first case he had ever been known to argue.

  He carried the others with him enthusiastically, and the next day came the test. He was whispering to a neighbour; Smalljohn heard and asked who it was. Silence. Then: “If the person who whispered does not confess within twenty-five seconds, the whole form will be detained for an hour.” Silence. “Fifteen seconds more….Ten seconds…Five…Very well, gentlemen, I will meet the form at half-past one in this room.”

  After that afternoon’s detention Smalljohn announced: “I am sorry indeed that thirty-three of your number have had to suffer on behalf of a certain thirty-fourth person, whose identity, I may say, I very strongly suspect. I can assure him that I do not intend to let a coward escape, and I am therefore grieved to say that until he owns up I shall be compelled to repeat this detention every day.”

  It was nearing the time of house-matches and detentions were more than usually tiresome. A.J. soon found his enemies active, and even his friends inclined to be cool. After the third detention he was, in fact, rather disgracefully bullied, and after the fourth he gave in and confessed. He had expected Smalljohn to be very stern, and was far more terrified to find him good-humoured. “Pangs of conscience, eh, Fothergill?” he queried, and A.J. replied: “No, sir.”

  “No? That sounds rather defiant, doesn’t it?”

  A.J. did not answer, and Smalljohn, instead of getting into a temper, positively beamed. “My dear Fothergill, I quite understand. You think my system’s unfair, don’t you?—I have heard mysterious rumours to that effect, anyhow. Well, my boy, I daresay you’re right. It is unfair. It makes you see how impossible it is for you to be a sneak and a coward—it brings out your better self—that better self which, for some perverse reason, you were endeavouring to stifle. To a boy who is really not half the bad fellow he tries to make out, my system is perhaps the unfairest thing in the world…Well, you have been punished, I doubt not—for apart from the still small voice, your comrades, I understand, have somewhat cogently expressed their disapproval. In the circumstances, then, I shall not punish you any further. And now stay and have some cocoa with me.”