The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online

holidays spent with friends he had (he hoped) never objected, but Christmas was different. Christmas was, in fact, the time when Mr. Coningsby most nearly realized the passage of time and the approach of age and death. For Christmas every year had been marked by small but definite changes, through his own childhood, his youth, his marriage, his children’s infancy and childhood; and now there were only two possibilities of change—the coming of a third generation or the stopping of Christmas. Each year that Mr. Coningsby succeeded in keeping Nancy and Ralph by him for Christmas postponed either unwelcome change, and enabled him to enter the New Year with the pretense that it was merely the old year beginning over again. But this year his friend’s death had already shaken him, and if he and Sybil and Nancy—an engaged Nancy—were to be without Ralph, the threat of an inevitable solitude would loom very near. There would be a gap, and he had nothing with which to fill the gap or to meet what might come through it; nothing except the fact that he was a Warden in Lunacy, and had all the privileges of a Warden—such as going in to dinner before the elder sons of younger sons of peers. He did not know where, years before, he had picked up that bit of absurd knowledge, in what odd table of precedence, but he knew it was so, and had even mentioned it once to Sybil. But all the elder sons of younger sons of peers whose specters he could crowd into that gap did not seem to fill it. There was an emptiness brought to mind, and only brought to mind, for it was always there, though he forgot it. He filled it with his office, his occupation, his family, his house, his friends, his politics, his food, his sleep. But sometimes the emptiness was too big to be filled thus, and sometimes it rolled up on him, along the street when he left the home in the morning, blowing in at evening through the open window or creeping up outside when it was shut, or even sometimes looking ridiculously at him in the unmeaning headlines of his morning paper. “Prime Minister,” he would read, “Announces Fresh Oil Legislation,” and the words would be for one second all separate and meaningless; “Prime Minister.” What was a Prime Minister? Blur, blot, nothingness, and then again the breakfast-table and The Times and Sybil.
    Ralph’s announced defection therefore induced him unconsciously to desire to make a change for himself, and induced him again to meet more equably than he otherwise might have done Nancy’s tentative hints about the possibility of the rest of them going to Henry’s grandfather. It didn’t strike him as being a very attractive suggestion for himself, but it offered him every chance of having Nancy and Henry as well as Ralph to blame for his probable discomfort or boredom or gloom, and therefore of lessening a concentration on Ralph, Ralph’s desertion, change, age—and the other thing. Sybil, when he consulted her, was happy to find him already half reconciled to the proposal.
    â€œI’m afraid it’ll be very dull for you,” he said.
    â€œOh, I don’t think so,” she answered. “It’ll have to be very dull indeed if it is.”
    â€œAnd of course we don’t know what the grandfather’s like,” he added.
    â€œHe’s presumably human,” Sybil said, “so he’ll be interesting somehow.”
    â€œReally, Sybil,” Mr. Coningsby answered, almost crossly, “you do say the most ridiculous things. As if everybody was interesting.”
    â€œWell, I think everybody is,” Sybil protested, “and things apart from their bodies we don’t know, do we? And considering what funny, lovely things bodies are, I’m not especially anxious to leave off knowing them.”
    Her brother kept the conversation straight. “I gather that he’s old but quite active still, not bed-ridden or