Some time after lunch, for which Dinny and her aunt were late, Adrian and the four younger ladies, armed with such shooting sticks as had been left by the ‘guns,’ proceeded down a farm lane towards where the main ‘drive’ of the afternoon would debouch. Adrian walked with Diana and Cicely Muskham, and ahead of them Dinny walked with Fleur. These cousins by marriage had not met for nearly a year, and had in any case but slender knowledge of each other. Dinny studied the head which her aunt had recommended to her. It was round and firm and well carried under a small hat. The pretty face wore a rather hard but, she decided, very capable expression. The trim figure was as beautifully tailored as if it had belonged to an American.
Dinny felt that she would at least get common-sense from a source so neat.
“I heard your testimonial read in the Police Court, Fleur.”
“Oh! that. It was what Hilary wanted, of course. I really don’t know anything about those girls. They simply don’t let one. Some people, of course, can worm themselves into anybody’s confidence. I can’t; and I certainly don’t want to. Do you find the country girls about you any easier?”
“Round us they’ve all had to do with our family so long that one knows pretty well all there is to know before they do themselves.”
Fleur scrutinised her.
“Yes, I daresay you’ve got the knack, Dinny. You’ll make a wonderful ancestress; but I don’t quite know who ought to paint you. It’s time someone came along with the Early Italian touch. The pre-Raphaelites hadn’t got it a bit; their pictures lacked music and humour. YOU’LL have to be done with both.”
“Do tell me,” said Dinny, disconcerted, “was Michael in the House when those questions were asked about Hubert?”
“Yes; he came home very angry.”
“Good!”
“He thought of bringing the thing up again, but it was the day but one before they rose. Besides, what does the House matter? It’s about the last thing people pay attention to nowadays.”
“My father, I’m afraid, paid terrific attention to those questions.”
“Yes, the last generation. But the only thing Parliament does that really gets the Public now, is the Budget. And no wonder; it all comes back to money.”
“Do you say that to Michael?”
“I don’t have to. Parliament now is just a taxing machine.”
“Surely it still makes laws?”
“Yes, my dear; but always after the event; it consolidates what has become public practice, or at least public feeling. It never initiates. How can it? That’s not a democratic function. If you want proof, look at the state of the country! It’s the last thing Parliament bothers about.”
“Who does initiate, then?”
“Whence doth the wind blow? Well, the draughts begin in the coulisses. Great places, the coulisses! Whom do you want to stand with when we get to the guns?”
“Lord Saxenden.”
Fleur gazed at her: “Not for his beaux jeux, and not for his beau titre. Why, then?”
“Because I’ve got to get at him about Hubert, and I haven’t much time.”
“I see. Well, I’ll give you a warning, my dear. Don’t take Saxenden at his face value. He’s an astute old fox, and not so old either. And if there is one thing he enjoys more than another, it’s his quid pro quo. Have you got a quid for him? He’ll want cash down.”
Dinny grimaced.
“I shall do what I can. Uncle Lawrence has already given me some pointers.”
“‘Have a care; she’s fooling thee,’” hummed Fleur. “Well, I shall go to Michael; it makes him shoot better, and he wants it, poor dear. The Squire and Bart will be glad to do without us. Cicely, of course, will go to Charles; she’s still honey-moonish. That leaves Diana for the American.”
“And I hope,” said Dinny, “she’ll put him off his shots.”
“I should say nothing would. I forgot Adrian; he’ll have to sit on his stick and think about bones and Diana. Here we are. See? Through this gate. There’s Saxenden, they’ve given him the warm corner. Go round by that stile and come on him from behind. Michael will be jammed away at the end, he always gets the worst stand.”
She parted from Dinny and went on down the lane. Conscious that she had not asked Fleur what she had wanted to, Dinny crossed to the stile, and climbing over, stalked Lord Saxenden warily from the other side. The peer was moving from one hedge to the other in the corner of the field to which he had been assigned. Beside a tall stick, to a cleft in which was attached a white card with a number on it, stood a young keeper holding two guns, and at his feet a retriever dog was lying with his tongue out. The fields of roots and stubble on the far side of the lane rose rather steeply, and it was evident to Dinny — something of an expert — that birds driven off them would come high and fast. ‘Unless,’ she thought, ‘there’s fresh cover just behind,’ and she turned to look. There was not. She was in a very large grass field and the nearest roots were three hundred yards away at least. ‘I wonder,’ she thought, ‘if he shoots better or worse with a woman watching. Shouldn’t think he had any nerves.’ Turning again, she saw that he had noticed her.
“Do you mind me, Lord Saxenden? I’ll be very quiet.”
The peer plucked at his cap, which had special peaks before and behind.
“Well, well!” he said. “H’m!”
“That sounds as if you did. Shall I go?”
“No, no! That’s all right. Can’t touch a feather today, anyway. You’ll bring me luck.”
Dinny seated herself on her stick alongside the retriever, and began playing with its ears.
“That American chap has wiped my eye three times.”
“What bad taste!”
“He shoots at the most impossible birds, but, dash it, he hits ’em. All the birds I miss he gets on the horizon. Got the style of a poacher; lets everything go by, then gets a right and left about seventy yards behind him. Says he can’t see them when they sit on his foresight.”
“That’s funny,” said Dinny, with a little burst of justice.
“Don’t believe he’s missed today,” added Lord Saxenden, resentfully. “I asked him why he shot so darned well, and he said: ‘Why! I’m used to shoot for the pot, where I can’t afford to miss.’”
“The ‘beat’s’ beginning, my lord,” said the young keeper’s voice.
The retriever began to pant slightly. Lord Saxenden grasped a gun; the keeper held the other ready.
“Covey to the left, my lord,” Dinny heard a creaky whirring, and saw eight birds stringing towards the lane. Bang-bang . . . bang — bang!
“God bless my soul!” said Lord Saxenden: “What the deuce —!”
Dinny saw the same eight birds swoop over the hedge at the other end of the grass field.
The retriever uttered a little choked sound, panting horribly.
“The light,” she said, “must be terribly puzzling!”
“It’s not the light,” said Lord Saxenden, “it’s the liver!”
“Three birds coming straight, my lord.”
Bang! . . . Bang — bang! A bird jerked, crumpled, turned over and pitched four yards behind her. Something caught Dinny by the throat. That anything so alive should be so dead! Often as she had seen birds shot, she had never before had that feeling. The other two birds were crossing the far hedge; she watched them vanish, with a faint sigh. The retriever, with the dead bird in his mouth, came up to the keeper, who took it from him. Sitting on his haunches, the dog continued to gaze at the bird, with his tongue out. Dinny saw the tongue drip, and closed her eyes.
Lord Saxenden said something inaudibly.
Lord Saxenden said the same word more inaudibly, and, opening her eyes, Dinny saw him put up his gun.
“Hen pheasant, my lord!” warned the young keeper.
A hen pheasant passed over at a most reasonable height, as if aware that her time was not yet.
“H’m!” said Lord Saxenden, resting the butt on his bent knee.
“Covey to the right; too far, my lord!”
Several shots rang out, and beyond the hedge Dinny saw two birds only flying on, one of which was dropping feathers.
“That’s a dead bird,” said the keeper, and Dinny saw him shade his eyes, watching its flight. “Down!” he said; the dog panted, and looked up at him.
Shots rang out to the left.
“Damn!” said Lord Saxenden, “nothing comes my way.”
“Hare, my lord!” said the keeper, sharply. “Along the hedge!”
Lord Saxenden wheeled and raised his gun.
“Oh, no!” said Dinny, but her words were drowned by the report. The hare, struck behind, stopped short, then wriggled forward, crying pitifully.
“Fetch it, boy!” said the keeper.
Dinny put her hands over her ears and shut her eyes.
“Blast!” muttered Lord Saxenden. “Tailored!” Through her eyelids Dinny felt his frosty stare. When she opened her eyes the hare was lying dead beside the bird. It looked incredibly soft. Suddenly she rose, meaning to go, but sat down again. Until the beat was over she could go nowhere without interfering with the range of the shots. She closed her eyes again; and the shooting went on.
“That’s the lot, my lord.”
Lord Saxenden was handing over his gun, and three more birds lay beside the hare.
Rather ashamed of her new sensations, she rose, closed her shooting stick, and moved towards the stile. Regardless of the old convention, she crossed it and waited for him.
“Sorry I tailored that hare,” he said. “But I’ve been seeing spots all day. Do you ever see spots?”
“No. Stars once in a way. A hare’s crying is dreadful, isn’t it?”
“I agree — never liked it.”
“Once when we were having a picnic I saw a hare sitting up behind us like a dog — and the sun through its ears all pink. I’ve always liked hares since.”
“They’re not a sporting shot,” admitted Lord Saxenden; “personally I prefer ’em roast to jugged.”
Dinny stole a glance at him. He looked red and fairly satisfied.
‘Now’s my chance,’ she thought.
“Do you ever tell Americans that they won the war, Lord Saxenden?”
He stared frostily.
“Why should I?”
“But they did, didn’t they?”
“Does that Professor chap say so?”
“I’ve never heard him, but I feel sure he thinks so.”
Again Dinny saw that sharp look come on his face. “What do you know about him?”
“My brother went on his expedition.”
“Your brother? Ah!” It was just as if he had said to himself out loud: ‘This young woman wants something out of me.’
Dinny felt suddenly that she was on very thin ice.
“If you read Professor Hallorsen’s book,” she said, “I hope you will also read my brother’s diary.”
“I never read anything,” said Lord Saxenden; “haven’t time. But I remember now. Bolivia — he shot a man, didn’t he, and lost the transport?”
“He had to shoot the man to save his own life, and he had to flog two for continual cruelty to the mules; then all but three men deserted, stampeding the mules. He was the only white man there, with a lot of Indian half-castes.”
And to his frosty shrewd eyes she raised her own suddenly, remembering Sir Lawrence’s: ‘Give him the Botticellian eye, Dinny!’
“Might I read you a little of his diary?”
“Well, if there’s time.”
“When?”
“To-night? I have to go up after shooting tomorrow.”
“Any time that suits you,” she said, hardily.
“There won’t be a chance before dinner. I’ve got some letters that must go.”
“I can stay up till any hour.” She saw him give her a quick, all-over glance.
“We’ll see,” he said, abruptly. And at this minute they were joined by the others.
Escaping the last drive, Dinny walked home by herself. Her sense of humour was tickled, but she was in a quandary. She judged shrewdly that the diary would not produce the desired effect unless Lord Saxenden felt that he was going to get something out of listening to it; and she was perceiving more clearly than ever before how difficult it was to give anything without parting from it. A fluster of wood-pigeons rose from some stooks on her left and crossed over to the wood by the river; the light was growing level, and evening sounds fluttered in the crisper air. The gold of sinking sunlight lay on the stubbles; the leaves, hardly turned as yet, were just promising colour, and away down there the blue line of the river glinted through its bordering trees. In the air was the damp, slightly pungent scent of early autumn with wood smoke drifting already from cottage chimneys. A lovely hour, a lovely evening!
What passages from the diary should she read? Her mind faltered. She could see Saxenden’s face again when he said: “Your brother? Ah!” Could see the hard direct calculating insensitive character behind it. She remembered Sir Lawrence’s words: “Were there not, my dear? . . . Most valuable fellows!” She had just been reading the memoirs of a man, who, all through the war, had thought in moves and numbers, and, after one preliminary gasp, had given up thinking of the sufferings behind those movements and those numbers: in his will to win the war, he seemed to have made it his business never to think of its human side, and, she was sure, could never have visualised that side if he HAD thought of it. Valuable fellow! She had heard Hubert talk, with a curling lip, of ‘armchair strategists’— who had enjoyed the war, excited by the interest of combining movements and numbers and of knowing this and that before someone else did, and by the importance they had gained therefrom. Valuable fellows! In another book she had lately read, she remembered a passage about the kind of men who directed what was called progress: sat in Banks, City offices, Governmental departments, combining movements and numbers, not bothered by flesh and blood, except their own; men who started this enterprise and that, drawing them up on sheets of paper, and saying to these and those: ‘Do this, and see you dam’ well do it properly.’ Men, silk-hatted or plus-foured, who guided the machine of tropic enterprise, of mineral getting, of great shops, of railway building, of concessions here and there and everywhere. Valuable fellows! Cheery, healthy, well-fed, indomitable fellows with frosty eyes. Always dining, always in the know, careless of the cost in human feelings and human life. ‘And yet,’ she thought, ‘they really must be valuable, or how should we have rubber or coal, or pearls or railways or the Stock Exchange, or wars and win them!’ She thought of Hallorsen; he at least worked and suffered for his ideas, led his own charges; did not sit at home, knowing things, eating ham, tailoring hares, and ordering the movements of others. She turned into the Manor grounds and paused on the croquet lawn. Aunt Wilmet and Lady Henrietta appeared to be agreeing to differ. They appealed to her:
“Is that right, Dinny?”
“No. When the balls touch you just go on playing, but you mustn’t move Lady Henrietta’s ball, Auntie, in hitting your own.”
“I said so,” said Lady Henrietta.
“Of course you said so, Hen. Nice position I’m in. Well, I shall just agree to differ and go on,” and Aunt Wilmet hit her ball through a hoop, moving her opponent’s several inches in so doing.
“Isn’t she an unscrupulous woman?” murmured Lady Henrietta, plaintively, and Dinny saw at once the great practical advantages inherent in ‘agreeing to differ.’
“You’re like the Iron Duke, Auntie,” she said, “except that you don’t use the word ‘damn’ quite so often.”
“She does,” said Lady Henrietta; “her language is appalling.”
“Go on, Hen!” said Aunt Wilmet in a flattered voice.
Dinny left them and retired towards the house.
When she was dressed she went to Fleur’s room.
Her aunt’s maid was passing a minute mowing-machine over the back of Fleur’s neck, while Michael, in the doorway of his dressing-room, had his fingers on the tips of his white tie.
Fleur turned.
“Hallo, Dinny! Come in, and sit down. That’ll do, thank you, Powers. Now, Michael.”
The maid faded out and Michael advanced to have a twist given to the ends of his tie.
“There!” said Fleur; and, looking at Dinny, added: “Have you come about Saxenden?”
“Yes. I’m to read him bits of Hubert’s diary to-night. The question is: Where will be suitable to my youth and —”
“Not innocence, Dinny; you’ll never be innocent, will she, Michael?”
Michael grinned. “Never innocent but always virtuous. You were a most sophisticated little angel as a kid, Dinny; looked as if you were wondering why you hadn’t wings. Wistful is the word.”
“I expect I was wondering why you’d pulled them off.”
“You ought to have worn trouserettes and chased butterflies, like the two little Gainsborough girls in the National Gallery.”
“Cease these amenities,” said Fleur; “the gong’s gone. You can have my little sitting-room next door, and, if you knock, Michael can come round with a boot, as if it were rats.”
“Perfect,” said Dinny; “but I expect he’ll behave like a lamb, really.”
“You never can tell,” said Michael; “he’s a bit of a goat.”
“That’s the room,” said Fleur, as they passed out. “Cabinet particulier. Good luck! . . .”
Seated between Hallorsen and young Tasburgh, Dinny had a slanting view of her Aunt and Lord Saxenden at the head of the table, with Jean Tasburgh round the corner on his right. “She was a ‘leopardess’ oh! so fair!” The tawnied skin, oblique face, and wonderful eyes of the young woman fascinated her. They appeared also to fascinate Lord Saxenden, whose visage was redder and more genial than Dinny had seen it yet. His attentions to Jean, indeed, were throwing Lady Mont to the clipped tongue of Wilfred Bentworth. For ‘the Squire,’ though a far more distinguished personality, too distinguished to accept a peerage, was, in accordance with the table of precedence, seated on her left. Next to him again Fleur was engaging Hallorsen; so that Dinny herself was exposed to the broadside of young Tasburgh. He talked easily, directly, frankly, like a man not yet calloused by female society, and manifested what Dinny described to herself as ‘transparent admiration’; yet twice at least she went into what he described as a ‘near-dream,’ her head turned high, and motionless, towards his sister.
“Ah!” he said. “What do you think of her?”
“Fascinating.”
“I’ll tell her that, she won’t turn a hair. The earth’s most matter-of-fact young woman. She seems to be vamping her neighbour all right. Who is he?”
“Lord Saxenden.”
“Oh! And who’s the John Bull at the corner on our side?”
“Wilfred Bentworth, ‘the Squire,’ they call him.”
“And next to you — talking to Mrs. Michael?”
“That’s Professor Hallorsen from America.”
“He’s a fine-looking chap.”
“So everybody says,” said Dinny, drily.
“Don’t you think so?”
“Men oughtn’t to be so good-looking.”
“Delighted to hear you say that.”
“Why?”
“It means that the ugly have a look in.”
“Oh! Do you often go trawling?”
“You know, I’m terribly glad I’ve met you at last.”
“At last? You’d never even heard of me this morning.”
“No. But that doesn’t prevent you from being my ideal.”
“Goodness! Is this the way they have in the Navy?”
“Yes. The first thing they teach us is to make up our minds quickly.”
“Mr. Tasburgh —”
“Alan.”
“I begin to understand the wife in every port.”
“I,” said young Tasburgh, seriously, “haven’t a single one. And you’re the first I’ve ever wanted.”
“Oo! Or is it: Coo!”
“Fact! You see, the Navy is very strenuous. When we see what we want, we have to go for it at once. We get so few chances.”
Dinny laughed. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Then you weren’t at Zeebrugge?”
“I was.”
“I see. It’s become a habit to lay yourself alongside.”
“And get blown up for it.”
Her eyes rested on him kindly.
“I am now going to talk to my enemy.”
“Enemy? Can I do anything about that?”
“His demise would be of no service to me, till he’s done what I want.”
“Sorry for that; he looks to me dangerous.”
“Mrs. Charles is lying in wait for you,” murmured Dinny, and she turned to Hallorsen, who said deferentially: “Miss Cherrell,” as if she had arrived from the moon.
“I hear you shot amazingly, Professor.”
“Why! I’m not accustomed to birds asking for it as they do here. I’ll maybe get used to that in time. But all this is quite an experience for me.”
“Everything in the garden lovely?”
“It certainly is. To be in the same house with you is a privilege I feel very deeply, Miss Cherrell.”
“‘Cannon to right of me, cannon to left of me!’” thought Dinny.
“And have you,” she asked, suddenly, “been thinking what amend you can make to my brother?”
Hallorsen lowered his voice.
“I have a great admiration for you, Miss Cherrell, and I will do what you tell me. If you wish, I will write to your papers and withdraw the remarks in my book.”
“And what would you want for that, Professor Hallorsen?”
“Why, surely, nothing but your goodwill.”
“My brother has given me his diary to publish.”
“If that will be a relief to you — go to it.”
“I wonder if you two ever began to understand each other.”
“I judge we never did.”
“And yet you were only four white men, weren’t you? May I ask exactly what annoyed you in my brother?”
“You’d have it up against me if I were to tell you.”
“Oh! no, I CAN be fair.”
“Well, first of all, I found he’d made up his mind about too many things, and he wouldn’t change it. There we were in a country none of us knew anything about, amongst Indians and people that were only half civilised; but the captain wanted everything done as you might in England: he wanted rules, and he wanted ’em kept. Why, I judge he would have dressed for dinner if we’d have let him.”
“I think you should remember,” said Dinny, taken aback, “that we English have found formality pay all over the world. We succeed in all sorts of wild out of the world places because we stay English. Reading his diary, I think my brother failed from not being stolid enough.”
“Well, he is not your John Bull type,” he nodded towards the end of the table, “like Lord Saxenden and Mr. Bentworth there; maybe I’d have understood him better if he were. No, he’s mighty high-strung and very tight held-in; his emotions kind of eat him up from within. He’s like a race-horse in a hansom cab. Yours is an old family, I should judge, Miss Cherrell.”
“Not yet in its dotage.”
She saw his eyes leave her, rest on Adrian across the table, move on to her Aunt Wilmet, and thence to Lady Mont.
“I would like to talk to your uncle the Curator about old families,” he said.
“What else was there in my brother that you didn’t like?”
“Well, he gave me the feeling that I was a great husky.”
Dinny raised her brows a little.
“There we were,” went on Hallorsen, “in the hell of a country — pardon me! — a country of raw metal. Well, I was raw metal myself, out to meet and beat raw metal; and he just wouldn’t be.”
“Perhaps couldn’t be. Don’t you think what was really wrong was your being American and his being English? Confess, Professor, that you don’t like us English.”
Hallorsen laughed.
“I like YOU terribly.”
“Thank you, but every rule —”
“Well,” his face hardened, “I just don’t like the assumption of a superiority that I don’t believe in.”
“Have we a monopoly of that? What about the French?”
“If I were an orang-outang, Miss Cherrell, I wouldn’t care a hoot whether a chimpanzee thought himself superior.”
“I see; too far removed. But, forgive me, Professor, what about yourselves? Are you not the chosen people? And don’t you frequently say so? Would you exchange with any other people in the world?”
“I certainly would not.”
“But isn’t that an assumption of a superiority that WE don’t believe in?”
He laughed. “You have me there; but we haven’t touched rock-bottom in this matter. There’s a snob in every man. We’re a new people; we haven’t gotten your roots and your old things; we haven’t gotten your habit of taking ourselves for granted; we’re too multiple and various and too much in the making. We have a lot of things that you could envy us besides our dollars and our bathrooms.”
“What ought we to envy you? I should very much like it made clear to me.”
“Well, Miss Cherrell, we know that we have qualities and energy and faith and opportunities that you just ought to envy; and when you don’t do it, we feel we’ve no use for that kind of gone-dead, bone-superior attitude. It’s like a man of sixty looking down his nose at a youth of thirty; and there’s no such God-darned — pardon me! — mistake as that.”
Dinny sat looking at him, silent and impressed.
“Where,” Hallorsen went on, “you British irritate us is that you’ve lost the spirit of enquiry; or if you’ve still gotten it, you have a dandy way of hiding it up. I judge there are many ways in which we irritate you. But we irritate your epidermis and you irritate our nerve centres. That’s about all there is to it, Miss Cherrell.”
“I see,” said Dinny; “that’s terribly interesting and I daresay quite true. My aunt’s getting up, so I must remove my epidermis and leave your nerve centres to quiet down.” She rose, and over her shoulder smiled back at him.
Young Tasburgh was at the door. At him too she smiled, and murmured: “Talk to my friend the enemy; he’s worth it.”
In the drawing-room she sought out the ‘leopardess,’ but converse between them suffered from the inhibition of a mutual admiration which neither wished to show. Jean Tasburgh was just twenty-one, but she impressed Dinny as older than herself. Her knowledge of things and people seemed precise and decided, if not profound; her mind was made up on all the subjects they touched on; she would be a marvellous person — Dinny thought — in a crisis, or if driven to the wall; would be loyal to her own side, but want to rule whatever roost she was in. But alongside her hard efficiency Dinny could well perceive a strange, almost feline fascination that would go to any man’s head, if she chose that it should. Hubert would succumb to her at once! And at that conclusion his sister was the more doubtful whether she wished him to. Here was the very girl to afford the swift distraction she was seeking for her brother. But was he strong enough and alive enough for the distractor? Suppose he fell in love with her and she would have none of him? Or suppose he fell in love with her and she had all of him! And then — money! If Hubert received no appointment or lost his commission what would they live on? He had only three hundred a year without his pay, and the girl presumably nothing. The situation was perverse. If Hubert could plunge again into soldiering, he would not need distraction. If he continued to be shelved, he would need distraction but could not afford it. And yet — was not this exactly the sort of girl who would carve out a career somehow for the man she married? So they talked of Italian pictures.
“By the way,” said Jean, suddenly, “Lord Saxenden says you want him to do something for you.”
“Oh!”
“What is it? Because I’ll make him.”
Dinny smiled.
“How?”
Jean gave her a look from under her lashes.
“It’ll be quite easy. What is it you want from him?”
“I want my brother back in his regiment, or, better — some post for him. He’s under a cloud owing to that Bolivian expedition with Professor Hallorsen.”
“The big man? Is that why you had him down here?”
Dinny had a feeling that she would soon have no clothes on.
“If you want frankness, yes.”
“He’s rather fine to look at.”
“So your brother said.”
“Alan’s the most generous person in the world. He’s taken a toss over you.”
“So he was telling me.”
“He’s an ingenuous child. But, seriously, shall I go for Lord Saxenden?”
“Why should you worry?”
“I like to put my fingers into pies. Give me a free hand, and I’ll bring you that appointment on a charger.”
“I am credibly informed,” said Dinny, “that Lord Saxenden is a tough proposition.”
Jean stretched herself.
“Is your brother Hubert like you?”
“Not a scrap; he’s dark, and brown-eyed.”
“You know our families intermarried a long way back. Are you interested in breeding? I breed Airedales, and I don’t believe much in either the tail male or the tail female theories. Prepotency can be handed down through either male or female, and at any point of the pedigree.”
“Perhaps, but except for not being covered with yellow varnish, my father and my brother are both very like the earliest portrait we have of a male ancestor.”
“Well, we’ve got a Fitzherbert woman who married a Tasburgh in 1547, and she’s the spit of me except for the ruff; she’s even got my hands.” And the girl spread out to Dinny two long brown hands, crisping them slightly as she did so.
“A strain,” she went on, “may crop out after generations that have seemed free from it. It’s awfully interesting. I should like to see your brother, if he’s so unlike you.”
Dinny smiled.
“I’ll get him to drive over from Condaford and fetch me. You may not think him worth your wiles.”
And at this moment the men came in.
“They do so look,” murmured Dinny, “as if they were saying: ‘Do I want to sit next to a female, and if so, why?’ Men are funny after dinner.”
Sir Lawrence’s voice broke the hush:
“Saxenden, you and the Squire for Bridge?”
At those words Aunt Wilmet and Lady Henrietta rose automatically from the sofa where they had been having a quiet difference, and passed towards where they would continue the motion for the rest of the evening; they were followed closely by Lord Saxenden and the Squire.
Jean Tasburgh grimaced: “Can’t you just see Bridge growing on people like a fungus?”
“Another table?” said Sir Lawrence: “Adrian? No. Professor?”
“Why, I think not, Sir Lawrence.”
“Fleur, you and I then against Em and Charles. Come along, let’s get it over.”
“You can’t see it growing on Uncle Lawrence,” murmured Dinny. “Oh! Professor! Do you know Miss Tasburgh?”
Hallorsen bowed.
“It’s an amazing night,” said young Tasburgh on her other side: “Couldn’t we go out?”
“Michael,” said Jean, rising, “we’re going out.”
The night had been justly described. The foliage of holmoaks and elms clung on the dark air unstirring; stars were diamond bright, and there was no dew; the flowers had colour only when peered into; and sounds were lonely — the hooting of an owl from away towards the river, the passing drone of a chafer’s flight. The air was quite warm, and through the cut cypresses the lighted house stared vaguely. Dinny and the sailor strolled in front.
“This is the sort of night,” he said, “when you can see the Scheme a bit. My old Governor is a dear old boy, but his Services are enough to kill all belief. Have you any left?”
“In God, do you mean?” said Dinny: “Ye-es, without knowing anything about it.”
“Don’t YOU find it impossible to think of God except in the open and alone?”
“I HAVE been emotionalised in church.”
“You want something beyond emotion, I think; you want to grasp infinite invention going on in infinite stillness. Perpetual motion and perpetual quiet at the same time. That American seems a decent chap.”
“Did you talk about cousinly love?”
“I kept that for you. One of our great-great-great-great-grandfathers was the same, under Anne; we’ve got his portrait, terrible, in a wig. So we’re cousins — the love follows.”
“Does it? Blood cuts both ways. It certainly makes every difference glare out.”
“Thinking of Americans?”
Dinny nodded.
“All the same,” said the sailor, “there isn’t a question in my mind that in a scrap I’d rather have an American with me than any other kind of foreigner. I should say we all felt like that in the Fleet.”
“Isn’t that just because of language being the same?”
“No. It’s some sort of grain and view of things in common.”
“But surely that can only apply to British-stock Americans?”
“That’s still the American who counts, especially if you lump in the Dutch and Scandinavian-stock Americans, like this fellow Hallorsen. We’re very much that stock ourselves.”
“Why not German-Americans, then?”
“To some extent. But look at the shape of the German head. By and large, the Germans are Central or Eastern Europeans.”
“You ought to be talking to my Uncle Adrian.”
“Is that the tall man with the goatee? I like his face.”
“He’s a dear,” said Dinny. “We’ve lost the others and I can feel dew.”
“Just one moment. I was perfectly serious in what I said at dinner. You ARE my ideal, and I hope you’ll let me pursue it.”
Dinny curtsied.
“Young Sir, you are very flattering. ‘But —’ she went on with a slight blush —‘I would point out that you have a noble profession —’”
“Are you never serious?”
“Seldom, when the dew is falling.”
He seized her hand.
“Well, you will be one day; and I shall be the cause of it.”
Slightly returning the pressure of his hand, Dinny disengaged hers, and walked on.
“Pleached alley — can you stand that expression? It seems to give joy to so many people.”
“Fair cousin,” said young Tasburgh, “I shall be thinking of you day and night. Don’t trouble to answer.”
And he held open a French window.
Cicely Muskham was at the piano, and Michael standing behind her.
Dinny went up to him.
“If I go to Fleur’s sitting-room now, could you show Lord Saxenden where it is, Michael? If he doesn’t come by twelve, I shall go to bed. I must sort out the bits I want to read to him.”
“All right, Dinny. I’ll leave him on the door-mat. Good luck!”
Fetching the diary, Dinny threw open the window of the little sitting-room and sat down to make her selections. It was half-past-ten, and not a sound disturbed her. She selected six fairly long passages which seemed to illustrate the impossible nature of her brother’s task. Then, lighting a cigarette, she waited, leaning out. The night was neither more nor less ‘amazing’ than it had been, but her own mood was deeper. Perpetual motion in perpetual quiet? If that, indeed, were God, He was not of much immediate use to mortals but why should He be? When Saxenden tailored the hare and it had cried, had God heard and quivered? When her hand was pressed, had He seen and smiled? When Hubert in the Bolivian wilds had lain fever-stricken, listening to the cry of the loon, had He sent an angel with quinine? When that star up there went out billions of years hence, and hung cold and lightless, would He note it on his shirt-cuff? The million million leaves and blades of grass down there that made the texture of the deeper darkness, the million million stars that gave the light by which she saw that darkness, all — all the result of perpetual motion in endless quiet, all part of God. And she herself, and the smoke of her cigarette; the jasmine under her nose, whose colour was invisible, and the movement of her brain, deciding that it was not yellow; that dog barking so far away that the sound was as a thread by which the woof of silence could be grasped; all — all endowed with the purpose remote, endless, pervading, incomprehensible, of God!
She shivered and withdrew her head. Sitting down in an armchair, with the diary in her lap, she gazed round the room. Fleur’s taste had remodelled it; there was fine colour in the carpet, the light was softly shaded and fell pleasantly on her sea-green frock and hands resting on the diary. The long day had tired her. She lay back tilting up her face, looking drowsily at the frieze of baked China Cupids with which some former Lady Mont had caused the room to be encircled. Fat funny little creatures they seemed to her — thus tied by rosy chains to the perpetual examination of each other’s behinds from stated distances. Chase of the rosy hours, of the rosy —! Dinny’s eyelids drooped, her lips opened, she slept. And the discreet light visiting her face and hair and neck revealed their negligence in slumber, their impudent daintiness, as of the fair Italians, so very English, whom Botticelli painted. A tendril of short ripe hair had come apart, a smile strayed off and on to the parted lips; eyelashes, a little darker than the hair, winked flutteringly on cheeks which seemed to have a sort of transparence; and in the passing of her dreams, the nose twitched and quivered as if mocking at its slight tiptilt. Uplifted thus, the face looked as if but a twist were needed to pluck it from its white stalk of neck . . . .
With a start her head came to the erect. He who had been ‘Snubby Bantham’ was standing in the middle of the room, regarding her with a hard blue unwinking stare.
“Sorry,” he said; “sorry! You were having a nice snooze.”
“I was dreaming of mince pies,” said Dinny. “It’s terribly good of you to come at whatever time of night it is.”
“Seven bells. You won’t be long, I suppose. D’you mind if I smoke a pipe?”
He sat down on a sofa opposite to her and began to fill his pipe. He had the look of a man who meant her to get it over, and was going to reserve judgment when she had. She better understood at that moment the conduct of public affairs. ‘Of course,’ she thought, ‘he’s giving his quo and he doesn’t see his quid. That’s the result of Jean!’ And whether she felt gratitude to the ‘leopardess’ for having deflected his interest, or whether a sort of jealousy, neither she nor any other woman would have told. Her heart was beating, however, and in a quick, matter-of-fact voice she began. She read through three of the passages before she looked at him again. His face, but for the lips sucking at his pipe, might have been made of a well-coloured wood. His eyes still regarded her in a curious and now slightly hostile way, as if he were thinking: ‘This young woman is trying to make me feel something. It’s very late.’
With an increasing hatred of her task Dinny hurried on. The fourth passage was — except for the last — the most harrowing, at least to herself; and her voice quivered a little as she finished it.
“Bit thick that,” said Lord Saxenden; “mules have no feelings, you know — most extraordinary brutes.”
Dinny’s temper rose; she would not look at him again. And she read on. This time she lost herself in that tortured recital, thus put into sound for the first time. She finished, breathless, quivering all over with the effort of keeping her voice controlled. Lord Saxenden’s chin was resting on his hand. He was asleep.
She stood looking at him, as he not long before had looked at her. For the moment she was on the point of jerking his hand from under his chin. Her sense of humour saved her, and gazing at him rather as Venus gazes at Mars in Botticelli’s picture, she took a sheet of notepaper from Fleur’s bureau, wrote the words: ‘So sorry I exhausted you. Good-night,’ and laid it with infinite precaution on his knee. Rolling up the diary, she stole to the door, opened it and looked back, faint sounds, that would soon be snoring, were coming from him. ‘Appeal to his feelings and he sleeps,’ she thought: ‘That’s exactly how he must have won the war.’ And, turning, she found herself staring up at Professor Hallorsen.
When Dinny saw Hallorsen’s eyes fixed, over her head, on the sleeping peer, she swallowed a gasp. What was he imagining of her, stealing thus at midnight away from a man of title in a little private room? His eyes, now looking into hers, were extremely grave. And, terrified lest he should say: “Pardon me!” and rouse the sleeper, she clutched the diary, put her finger to her lips, murmured: “Don’t wake the baby!” and glided down the passage.
In her room she laughed her fill, then sat up and reviewed her sensations. Given the reputation of the titled in democratic countries, Hallorsen probably thought the worst. But she did him some rather remarkable justice. Whatever he thought of her would not go beyond him. Whatever he was — he was a BIG dog. She could imagine him at breakfast tomorrow, saying gravely: “Miss Cherrell, I am delighted to see you looking so well.” And, saddened by her conduct of Hubert’s affairs, she got into bed. She slept badly, awoke tired and pale, and had her breakfast upstairs.
During country house parties one day is very like another. The men put on the same kind of variegated tie and the same plus fours, eat the same breakfast, tap the same barometer, smoke the same pipes and kill the same birds. The dogs wag the same tails, lurk in the same unexpected spots, utter the same agonised yelps, and chase the same pigeons on the same lawns. The ladies have the same breakfast in bed or not, put the same salts in the same bath, straggle in the same garden, say of the same friends with the same spice of animosity, “I’m frightfully fond of them, of course”; pore over the same rock borders with the same passion for portulaca; play the same croquet or tennis with the same squeaks; write the same letters to contradict the same rumours, or match the same antiques; differ with the same agreement, and agree with the same difference. The servants have the same way of not being visible, except at the same stated moments. And the house has the same smell of pot-pourri, flowers, tobacco, books, and sofa cushions.
Dinny wrote a letter to her brother in which she said nothing of Hallorsen, Saxenden, or the Tasburghs, but discoursed in lively fashion of Aunt Em, Boswell and Johnson, Uncle Adrian, Lady Henrietta, and asked him to come over for her in the car. In the afternoon the Tasburghs came in for tennis, and not until the shooting was over did she see either Lord Saxenden or the American. But he who had been ‘Snubby Bantham’ gave her so long and so peculiar a stare from the corner where he was having tea, that she knew he had not forgiven her. Careful not to notice, she was at heart dismayed. So far she seemed to have done Hubert nothing but harm. ‘I’ll let Jean loose on him,’ she thought, and went out to find ‘the leopardess.’ On her way she came on Hallorsen, and hastily deciding to regain her ground with him, said:
“If you had come up a little earlier last night, Professor Hallorsen, you could have heard me read some of my brother’s diary to Lord Saxenden. It might have done you more good than it did him.”
Hallorsen’s face cleared.
“Why,” he said, “I’ve been wondering what soporific you had administered to that poor lord.”
“I was preparing him for your book. You ARE giving him a copy?”
“I judge not, Miss Cherrell; I am not that interested in his health. He may lie awake for me. I have very little use for any man that could listen to you and go to sleep on it. What does he do in life, this lord?”
“What does he do? Well, he is what I think you call a Big Noise. I don’t quite know where he makes it, but my father says he is a man who counts. I hope you have been wiping his eye again today, Professor, because the more you wipe his eye the better chance my brother has of recovering the position he lost by going on your expedition.”
“Is that so? Do personal feelings decide these things over here?”
“Don’t they over there?”
“Why — yes! But I thought the old countries had too much tradition for that.”
“Oh! we wouldn’t ADMIT the influence of personal feelings, of course.”
Hallorsen smiled.
“Isn’t that just wonderful? All the world is kin. You would enjoy America, Miss Cherrell; I would like the chance to show it you some day.”
He had spoken as if America were an antique that he had in his trunk; and she did not quite know how to take a remark which might have no significance or an absurdly great one. Then by his face she saw that he meant it to have the absurdly great one; and, revealing her teeth, answered:
“Thank you, but you are still my enemy.”
Hallorsen put out his hand, but she had drawn back.
“Miss Cherrell, I am going to do all I can to remove the unpleasant impression you have of me. I am your very humble servant, and I hope some day to have a chance to be something else to you.”
He looked terribly tall, handsome, and healthy, and she resented it.
“Let us not take anything too seriously, Professor; it leads to trouble. Forgive me now, I have to find Miss Tasburgh.”
With that she skimmed away. Ridiculous! Touching! Flattering! Odious! It was all crazy! Whatever one did would be all criss-crossed and tangled, to trust to luck was best, after all!
Jean Tasburgh, who had just finished a single with Cicely Muskham, was removing a fillet from her hair.
“Come along to tea,” said Dinny; “Lord Saxenden is pining for you.”
At the door of the room where tea was being served, however, she herself was detached by Sir Lawrence, who, saying he had seen nothing of her yet, invited her to his study to look at his miniatures.
“My record of national characteristics, Dinny; all women, you see: French, German, Italian, Dutch, American, Spanish, Russian; and I should immensely like one of you, Dinny. Would you sit to a young man?”
“I?”
“You.”
“But why?”
“Because,” said Sir Lawrence, scrutinising her through his monocle, “you contain the answer to the riddle of the English lady, and I collect the essential difference between national cultures.”
“That sounds terribly exciting.”
“Look at this one. Here’s French culture in excelsis; quick intelligence, wit, industry, decision, intellectual but not emotional aestheticism, no humour, conventional sentiment but no other, a having tendency — mark the eye; a sense of form, no originality, very clear but limited mental vision — nothing dreamy about her; quick but controlled blood. All of a piece, with very distinct edges. Now here’s an American of rare type, tip-top cultured variety. Notice chiefly a look as if she had an invisible bit in her mouth and knew it; in her eyes is a battery she’ll make use of but only with propriety. She’ll be very well preserved to the end of her days. Good taste, a lot of knowledge, not much learning. See this German! Emotionally more uncontrolled, and less sense of form than either of those others, but has a conscience, is a hard worker, great sense of duty, not much taste, some rather unhandy humour. If she doesn’t take care she’ll get fat. Plenty, of sentiment, plenty of good sound sense too. More capacious in every way. She isn’t perhaps a very good specimen. I can’t get one. Here’s my prize Italian. She’s interesting. Beautifully varnished, with something feral, or let’s say — natural, behind. Has a mask on, prettily shaped, prettily worn, liable to fall off. Knows her own mind, perhaps too well, gets her own way if she can, and if she can’t, gets somebody else’s. Poetic only in connection with her senses. Strong feelings, domestic and otherwise. Clear-eyed towards danger, plenty of courage but easily unnerved. Fine taste, subject to bad lapses. No liking for Nature, here. Intellectually decisive, but not industrious or enquiring. And here,” said Sir Lawrence, suddenly confronting Dinny, “I shall have my prize English specimen. Do you want to hear about her?”
“Help!”
“Oh! I’ll be quite impersonal. Here we have a self-consciousness, developed and controlled to the point when it becomes unselfconsciousness. To this lady Self is the unforgivable intruder. We observe a sense of humour, not devoid of wit, which informs and somewhat sterilises all else. We are impressed by what I may call a look not so much of domestic as of public or social service, not to be found in our other types. We discover a sort of transparency, as if air and dew had got into the system. We decide that PREcision is lacking, precision of learning, action, thought, judgment, but that DEcision is very present. The senses are not highly developed; the aesthetic emotions are excited more readily by natural than by artificial objects. There is not the capacity of the German; the clarity of the French woman; the duality or colour of the Italian; the disciplined neatness of the American; but there is a peculiar something — for which, my dear, I will leave you to discover the word — that makes me very anxious to have you in my collection of cultures.”
“But I am not in the least cultured, Uncle Lawrence.”
“I use the infernal word for want of a better, and by it I don’t mean learning. I mean the stamp left by blood plus bringing-up, the two taken strictly together. If that French woman had had your bringing-up, she yet wouldn’t have had your stamp, Dinny; nor would you with her bringing-up have had her stamp. Now look at this pre-war Russian; more fluid and more fluent than any of the others. I found her in the Caledonian Market. That woman must have wanted to go deep into everything, and never wanted to stay there long. I’ll wager she ran through life at a great pace, and, if alive, is still running; and it’s taking much less out of her than it would take out of you. The face gives you the feeling that she’s experienced more emotions, and been less exhausted by them than any of the others. Here’s my Spaniard; perhaps the most interesting of the lot. That’s woman brought up apart from man; I suspect she’s getting rare. There’s a sweetness here, a touch of the convent; not much curiosity, not much energy, a lot of pride, very little conceit; might be devastating in her affections, don’t you think, and rather difficult to talk to? Well, Dinny, will you sit to my young man?”
“If you really want me to, of course.”
“I do. This is my hobby. I’ll arrange it. He can come down to you at Condaford. I must get back now and see ‘Snubby’ off. Have you proposed to him yet?”
“I read him to sleep last night with Hubert’s diary. He dislikes me intensely. I daren’t ask him anything. Is he really ‘a big noise,’ Uncle Lawrence?”
Sir Lawrence nodded mysteriously. “Snubby,” he said, “is the ideal public man. He has practically no feelers, and his feelings are always connected with Snubby. You can’t keep a man like him down; he will always be there or thereabouts. India-rubber. Well, well, the State needs him. If we were all thin-skinned, who would sit in the seats of the mighty? They are hard, Dinny, and full of brass tacks. So you’ve wasted your time?”
“I think I’ve tied a second string to my bow.”
“Excellent. Hallorsen’s off too. I like that chap. Very American, but sound wood.”
He left her, and, unwilling to encounter again either the india-rubber or the sound wood, Dinny went up to her room.
Next morning by ten o’clock, with the rapidity peculiar to the break-up of house-parties, Fleur and Michael were bearing Adrian and Diana off to Town in their car; the Muskhams had departed by train, and the Squire and Lady Henrietta were motoring across country to their Northamptonshire abode; Aunt Wilmet and Dinny alone were left, but the Tasburghs were coming to lunch and bringing their father.
“He’s amiable, Dinny,” said Lady Mont: “Old School, very courtly, says ‘Nevah,’ ‘Evah,’ like that. It’s a pity they’ve no money. Jean is strikin’, don’t you think?”
“She scares me a little, Aunt Em; knows her own mind so completely.”
“Match-makin’,” replied her aunt, “is rather amusin’. I haven’t done any for a long time. I wonder what Con and your mother will say to me. I shall wake up o’ nights.”
“First catch your Hubert, Auntie.”
“I was always fond of Hubert; he has the family face — you haven’t, Dinny, I don’t know where you get your colourin’— and he looks so well on a horse. Where does he get his breeches?”
“I don’t believe he’s had a new pair since the war, Auntie.”
“And he wears nice long waistcoats. Those short waistcoats straight across are so abbreviatin’. I shall send him out with Jean to see the rock borders. There’s nothin’ like portulaca for bringin’ people together. Ah! There’s Boswell-and-Johnson — I must catch him.”
Hubert arrived soon after noon, and almost the first thing he said was:
“I’ve changed my mind about having my diary published, Dinny. Exhibiting one’s sore finger is too revolting.”
Thankful that as yet she had taken no steps, she answered meekly:
“Very well, dear.”
“I’ve been thinking: If they’re not going to employ me here, I might get attached to a Soudan regiment; or I believe they’re short of men for the Indian Police. I shall be jolly glad to get out of the country again. Who’s here?”
“Only Uncle Lawrence, Aunt Em, and Aunt Wilmet. The Rector and his family are coming to lunch — the Tasburghs, they’re distant cousins.”
“Oh!” said Hubert, glumly.
She watched the advent of the Tasburghs almost maliciously. Hubert and young Tasburgh at once discovered mutual service in Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf. They were talking about it when Hubert became conscious of Jean. Dinny saw him give her a long look, enquiring and detached, as of a man watching a new kind of bird; saw him avert his eyes, speak and laugh, then gaze back at her.
Her aunt’s voice said: “Hubert looks thin.”
The Rector spread his hands, as if to draw attention to his present courtly bulk. “Dear Lady, at his age I was thinnah.”
“So was I,” said Lady Mont; “thin as you, Dinny.”
“We gathah unearned increment, ah-ha! Look at Jean — lithe is the word; in forty years — but perhaps the young of today will nevah grow fat. They do slimming — ah-ha!”
At lunch the Rector faced Sir Lawrence across the shortened table, and the two elder ladies sat one on each side of him. Alan faced Hubert and Dinny faced Jean.
“For what we are about to receive the Lord make us truly thankful.”
“Rum thing — grace!” said young Tasburgh in Dinny’s ear. “Benediction on murder, um?”
“There’ll be hare,” said Dinny, “and I saw it killed. It cried.”
“I’d as soon eat dog as hare.”
Dinny gave him a grateful look.
“Will you and your sister come and see us at Condaford?”
“Give me a chance!”
“When do you go back to your ship?”
“I’ve got a month.”
“I suppose you are devoted to your profession?”
“Yes,” he said, simply. “It’s bred in the bone, we’ve always had a sailor in the family.”
“And we’ve always had a soldier.”
“Your brother’s deathly keen. I’m awfully glad to have met him.”
“No, Blore,” said Dinny to the butler, “cold partridge, please. Mr. Tasburgh too will eat something cold.”
“Beef, Sir; lamb, partridge.”
“Partridge, thank you.”
“I’ve seen a hare wash its ears,” added Dinny.
“When you look like that,” said young Tasburgh, “I simply —”
“Like what?”
“As if you weren’t there, you know.”
“Thank you.”
“Dinny,” said Sir Lawrence, “who was it said the world was an oyster? I say it’s a clam. What’s your view?”
“I don’t know the clam, Uncle Lawrence.”
“You’re fortunate. That travesty of the self-respecting bivalve is the only tangible proof of American idealism. They’ve put it on a pedestal, and go so far as to eat it. When the Americans renounce the clam, they will have become realists and joined the League of Nations. We shall be dead.”
But Dinny was watching Hubert’s face. The brooding look was gone: his eyes seemed glued to Jean’s deep luring eyes. She uttered a sigh.
“Quite right,” said Sir Lawrence, “it will be a pity not to live to see the Americans abandon the clam, and embrace the League of Nations. For, after all,” he continued, pursing up his left eye, “it WAS founded by an American and is about the only sensible product of our time. It remains, however, the pet aversion of another American called Monroe who died in 1831, and is never alluded to without a scoff by people like ‘Snubby.’
“‘A scoff, a sneer, a kick or two,
With few, but with how splendid jeers’—
D’you know that thing by Elroy Flecker?”
“Yes,” said Dinny, startled, “it’s in Hubert’s diary; I read it out to Lord Saxenden. It was just then he went to sleep.”
“He would. But don’t forget, Dinny, that Snubby’s a deuced clever fellow, and knows his world to a T. It may be a world you wouldn’t be seen dead in, but it’s the world where ten million more-or-less-young men were recently seen dead. I wonder,” concluded Sir Lawrence, more thoughtfully, “when I have been so well fed at my own table as these last days; something has come over your aunt.”
Organising after lunch a game of croquet between herself and Alan Tasburgh against his father and Aunt Wilmet, Dinny watched the departure of Jean and her brother towards the rock borders. They stretched from the sunken garden down to an old orchard, beyond which rose a swell of meadow-land.
‘THEY won’t stop at the portulaca,’ she thought.
Two games, indeed, were over before she saw them again coming from a different direction, deep in talk. ‘This,’ she thought, hitting the Rector’s ball with all her force, is about the quickest thing ever known.’
“God bless me!” murmured the smitten clergyman, and Aunt Wilmet, straight as a grenadier, uttered a loud: “Damn it, Dinny, you’re impossible! . . .”
Later, beside her brother in the open car, she was silent, making up her mind, as it were, to second place. Though what she had hoped for had come to pass, she was depressed. She had been first with Hubert until now. She needed all her philosophy watching the smile coming and going on his lips.
“Well, what do you think of our cousins?”
“He’s a good chap. I thought he seemed rather gone on you.’”
“Did you now? When would you like them to come over?”
“Any time.”
“Next week?”
“Yes.”
Seeing that he did not mean to be drawn, she lapsed into savouring the day’s slowly sinking light and beauty. The high land, Wantage, and Faringdon way, was glamoured by level sunlight; and Wittenham Clumps bastioned-up the rise ahead. Rounding to the right, they came on the bridge. In the middle of it she touched his arm:
“That stretch up there is where we saw the kingfishers, Hubert; d’you remember?”
Halted, they gazed up the quiet river, deserted and fit for the bright birds. Falling light sprinkled it through willows on the southern bank. The quietest river, it seemed, in the world, most subdued to the moods of men, flowing with an even clear stream among bright fields and those drooping shapely trees; having, as it were, a bland intensity of being, a presence of its own, gracious and apart.
“Three thousand years ago,” said Hubert suddenly, “this old river used to be like those I’ve seen in the wilds, an unshaped flow of water in matted jungle.”
He drove on. They had their backs to the sunlight now, and it was like driving into what had been painted for them.
And so they sped on, while into the sky crept the sunset glow, and the cleaned-up fields darkened a little, and gathered loneliness under the evening flight of birds.
At the door of Condaford Grange Dinny got out, humming: “‘She was a shepherdess oh! so fair’,” and looking into her brother’s face. He was, however, busy with the car and did not appear to see the connection.
The outline of a young Englishman of the inarticulate variety is difficult to grasp. The vocal variety is easily enough apprehended. Its manners and habits bulk large to the eye and have but little importance in the national life. Vociferous, critical, ingenious, knowing and advertising only its own kind, it forms an iridescence shimmering over the surface of the bog, and disguising the peat below. It constantly and brilliantly expresses almost nothing; while those whose lives are spent in the application of trained energy remain invisible, but none the less solid; for feelings continually voiced cease to be feelings, and feelings never voiced deepen with their dumbness. Hubert did not look solid, nor was he stolid; even those normal aids to the outline of the inarticulate were absent. Trained, sensitive, and no fool, he was capable of passing quiet judgment on people and events that would have surprised the vocal, but, except to himself, he never passed it. Till quite recently, indeed, he had lacked time and opportunity; but seeing him in a smoking-room, at a dinner-table, or wherever the expressive scintillate, you would know at once that neither time nor opportunity was going to make him vociferous. Going into the war, so early, as a professional, he had missed the expanding influences of the ‘Varsity and London. Eight years in Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, a year of illness and the Hallorsen expedition, had given him a remote, drawn, rather embittered look. He was of the temperament that, in idleness, eats its heart out. With dog and gun or on a horse, he found it bearable, but only just; and without those adventitious aids he wilted. Three days after the return to Condaford he came to Dinny on the terrace, with ‘The Times’ in his hand.
“Look at this!”
Dinny read:
“SIR —
“You will pardon me, I trust, this intrusion on your space. It has come to my knowledge that certain passages in my book, ‘Bolivia and Its Secrets,’ published last July, have grievously annoyed my second-incommand, Captain Hubert Charwell, D.S.O., who had charge of the transport of the expedition. On re-reading these passages I certainly believe that in the vexation caused me by the partial failure of the expedition, and owing to the over-strained state in which I returned from the adventure, I have passed undue criticism on Captain Charwell’s conduct; and I wish, pending the issue of the second and amended edition which I trust will not be long delayed, to take this opportunity of publicly withdrawing in your great journal the gravamen of my written words. It is my duty and pleasure to express to Captain Charwell and the British Army of which he is a member, my sincere apology, and my regret for any pain I may have caused him.
“Sir, Your obedient servant,
“EDWARD HALLORSEN (Professor).
“Piedmont Hotel,
“London.”
“Very handsome!” said Dinny, trembling a little. “Hallorsen in London! What the devil does he mean by this all of a sudden?”
She began pulling yellowed leaves out of an Agapanthus. The danger of doing things for other people was being disclosed to her.
“It almost looks like repentance, dear.”
“That fellow repent! Not he! There’s something behind it.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You!”
Dinny quailed behind her smile.
“I met Hallorsen at Diana’s in London; he was at Lippinghall, too. So I— er — got at him.”
Hubert’s sallowed face went red.
“You asked — you begged —?”
“Oh! no!”
“What then?”
“He seemed to take rather a fancy to me. It’s odd, but I couldn’t help it, Hubert.”
“He’s done this to curry favour with you?”
“You put it like a man and a brother.”
“Dinny!”
Dinny flushed too, angry now behind her smile.
“I didn’t lead him on. He took this highly unreasonable fancy, in spite of plenty of cold water. But, if you ask me, Hubert, he has quite a decent side to him.”
“You would naturally think so,” said Hubert, coldly. His face had resumed its sallow hue and was even a little ashened.
Dinny caught impulsively at his sleeve.
“Don’t be silly, dear! If he chooses to make a public apology for any reason, even such a bad one, isn’t it all to the good?”
“Not when my own sister comes into it. In this thing I’m like — I’m like a —” he put his hands to his head: “I’m in Chancery. Anyone can punch my head, and I can’t move.”
Dinny’s coolness had come back to her.
“You needn’t be afraid that I shall compromise you. This letter is very good news; it takes the wind out of the whole thing. In face of this apology, who can say anything?”
But Hubert, leaving the paper in her hand, went back into the house.
Dinny had practically no ‘small’ pride. Her sense of humour prevented her from attaching value to her own performances. She felt that she ought to have provided against this contingency, though she did not see how.
Hubert’s resentment was natural enough. If Hallorsen’s apology had been dictated by conviction, it would have soothed him; arising from a desire to please his sister, it was only the more galling; and he clearly abhorred the Professor’s fancy for her. Still, there was the letter — an open and direct admission of false criticism, which changed the whole position! At once she began to consider what use could be made of it. Should she send it to Lord Saxenden? Having meddled so far, she decided that she would, and went in to write the covering letter.
‘Condaford Grange. Sept. 21.
‘Dear Lord Saxenden —
‘I am venturing to send you the enclosed cutting from today’s “Times,” for I feel it excuses me to some extent for my effrontery the other evening. I really ought not to have bored you at the end of a long day with those passages of my brother’s diary. It was unpardonable, and I don’t wonder that you sought refuge. But the enclosed will show you the injustice from which my brother has suffered; and I hope you will forgive me.
‘Sincerely yours,
‘Elizabeth Charwell.’
Enclosing the cutting, she looked up Lord Saxenden in ‘Who’s Who,’ and addressed the envelope to his London abode, marking it ‘Personal.’
A little later, trying to find Hubert, she was told that he had taken the car and gone up to London . . . .
Hubert drove fast. Dinny’s explanation of the letter had disturbed him greatly. He covered the fifty odd miles in a little under two hours and reached the Piedmont Hotel at one o’clock. Since he had parted from Hallorsen nearly six months ago, no word had passed between them. He sent his card in and waited in the hall with no precise knowledge of what he wanted to say. When the American’s tall figure approached behind the buttoned boy, a cold stillness possessed his every limb.
“Captain Cherrell,” said Hallorsen, and held out his hand.
With a horror of ‘scenes’ deeper than his more natural self, Hubert took it, but without pressure in his fingers.
“I saw you were here, from ‘The Times.’ Is there anywhere we could go and talk for a few minutes?”
Hallorsen led towards an alcove. “Bring some cocktails,” he said to a waiter.
“Not for me, thank you. But may I smoke?”
“I trust this is the pipe of peace, Captain.”
“I don’t know. An apology that does not come from conviction means less than nothing to me.”
“Who says it doesn’t come from conviction?”
“My sister.”
“Your sister, Captain Cherrell, is a very rare and charming young lady, and I would not wish to contradict her.”
“Do you mind my speaking plainly?”
“Why, surely no!”
“Then I would much rather have had no apology from you than know I owed it to any feeling of yours for one of my family.”
“Well,” said Hallorsen, after a pause, “I can’t write to the ‘Times’ and say I was in error when I made that apology. I judge they wouldn’t stand for that. I had a sore head when I wrote that book. I told your sister so, and I tell you so now. I lost all sense of charity, and I have come to regret it.”
“I don’t want charity. I want justice. Did I or did I not let you down?”
“Why, there’s no question but that your failure to hold that pack together did in fact finish my chance.”
“I admit that. Did I fail you from my fault, or from yours in giving me an impossible job?”
For a full minute the two men stood with their eyes on each other, and without a word. Then Hallorsen again held out his hand.
“Put it there,” he said; “my fault.”
Hubert’s hand went out impulsively, but stopped half way.
“One moment. Do you say that because it would please my sister?”
“No, Sir; I mean it.”
Hubert took his hand.
“That’s great,” said Hallorsen. “We didn’t get on, Captain; but since I’ve stayed in one of your old homes here, I think I’ve grasped the reason why. I expected from you what you class Englishmen seemingly will never give — that’s the frank expression of your feelings. I judge one has to translate you, and I just couldn’t do it, so we went on in the dark about each other. And that’s the way to get raw.”
“I don’t know why, but we got raw all right.”
“Well, I wish it could come all over again.”
Hubert shivered. “I don’t.”
“Now, Captain, will you lunch with me, and tell me how I can serve you? I will do anything you say to wipe out my mistake.”
For a moment Hubert did not speak, his face was unmoved, but his hands shook a little.
“That’s all right,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
And they moved towards the grill-room.
If one thing is more certain than another — which is extremely doubtful — it is that nothing connected with a Public Department will run as a private individual expects.
A more experienced and less simply faithful sister than Dinny would have let sleeping dogs lie. But she had as yet no experience of the fact that the usual effect of letters to those in high places is the precise opposite of what was intended by the sender. Arousing his amour-propre, which in the case of public men should be avoided, it caused Lord Saxenden to look no further into the matter. Did that young woman suppose for a moment that he didn’t see how this American chap was feeding out of her hand? In accordance, indeed, with the irony latent in human affairs, Hallorsen’s withdrawal of the charge had promoted in the authorities a more suspicious and judgmatic attitude, and Hubert received, two days before his year of leave was up, an intimation to the effect that it was extended indefinitely and he was to go on half-pay, pending an enquiry into the matter raised in the House of Commons by Major Motley, M.P. A letter from that military civilian had appeared in reply to Hallorsen’s asking whether he was to assume that the shooting and flogging mentioned in his book had not really taken place, and if so, what explanation could this American gentleman afford of such an amazing discrepancy? This, in turn, had elicited from Hallorsen the answer that the facts were as stated in his book, but that his deductions from them had been erroneous, and that Captain Charwell had been perfectly justified in his actions.
On receiving intimation that his leave was extended, Hubert went up to the War office. He obtained no comfort, beyond the non-official saying of an acquaintance that the Bolivian Authorities were ‘butting in.’ This news created little less than consternation at Condaford. None of the four young people, indeed, for the Tasburghs were still there, and Clare away in Scotland, appreciated the report at its full value, for none of them had as yet much knowledge of the extent to which officialdom can go when it starts out to do its duty; but to the General it had so sinister a significance that he went up to stay at his Club.
After tea that day in the billiard room, Jean Tasburgh, chalking her cue, said quietly:
“What does that Bolivian news mean, Hubert?”
“It may mean anything. I shot a Bolivian, you know.”
“But he tried to kill you first.”
“He did.”
She leaned her cue against the table; her hands brown, slim, and strong, gripped the cushion; suddenly she went up to him and put her hand through his arm. “Kiss me,” she said; “I am going to belong to you.”
“Jean!”
“No, Hubert; no chivalry and that sort of nonsense. You shan’t have all this beastliness alone. I’m going to share it. Kiss me.”
The kiss was given. It was long, and soothing to them both; but, when it was over, he said:
“Jean, it’s quite impossible, until things dry straight.”
“Of course they’ll dry straight, but I want to help dry them. Let’s be married quickly, Hubert. Father can spare me a hundred a year; what can you manage?”
“I’ve three hundred a year of my own, and half pay, which may be cut off.”
“That’s four hundred a year certain; people have married on lots less, and that’s only for the moment. Of course we can be married. Where?”
Hubert stood breathless.
“When the war was on,” said Jean, “people married at once; they didn’t wait because the man was going to be killed. Kiss me again.”
And Hubert stood more breathless than ever, with her arms round his neck. It was so that Dinny found them.
Without moving her arms, Jean said:
“We’re going to be married, Dinny. Where do you think best? A Registry Office? Banns take so much time.”
Dinny gasped.
“I didn’t think you’d propose quite so soon, Jean.”
“I had to. Hubert is full of stuffy chivalry. Dad won’t like a Registry Office; why not a special licence?”
Hubert’s hands on her shoulders held her away from him.
“Be serious, Jean.”
“I am. With a special licence, nobody need know till it’s over. So nobody will mind.”
“Well,” said Dinny, quietly, “I believe you’re right. When a thing has to be, it had better be quickly. I daresay Uncle Hilary would tie you up.”
Hubert dropped his hands. “You’re both cracked.”
“Polite!” said Jean. “Men are absurd. They want a thing, and when it’s offered they carry on like old women. Who is Uncle Hilary?”
“Vicar of St. Augustine’s-inthe-Meads; he has no sense of propriety to speak of.”
“Good! You go up tomorrow, Hubert, and get the licence. We’ll come after you. Where can we stay, Dinny?”
“Diana would have us, I think.”
“That settles it. We’ll have to go round by Lippinghall, for me to get some clothes, and see Dad. I can cut his hair while I’m talking to him; there won’t be any trouble. Alan can come too; we shall want a best man. Dinny, you talk to Hubert.” Left alone with her brother, Dinny said:
“She’s a wonderful girl, Hubert, and far from cracked, really. It’s breathless, but terribly good sense. She’s always been poor, so it won’t make any difference to her in that way.”
“It isn’t that. It’s the feeling of something hanging over me, that’ll hang over her too.”
“It’ll hang over her worse, if you don’t. I really should, dear boy. Father won’t mind. He likes her, and he’d rather you married a girl of breeding and spirit than any amount of money.”
“It doesn’t seem decent — a special licence,” muttered Hubert.
“It’s romantic, and people won’t have a chance to discuss whether you ought to or not; when it’s done they’ll accept it, as they always do.”
“What about Mother?”
“I’ll tell Mother, if you like. I’m sure she won’t really mind — you’re not being fashionable, marrying a chorus girl or anything of that sort. She admires Jean. So do Aunt Em and Uncle Lawrence.”
Hubert’s face cleared.
“I’ll do it. It’s too wonderful. After all, I’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”
He walked up to Dinny, kissed her almost violently, and hurried out. Dinny stayed in the billiard room practising the spot stroke. Behind her matter-of-fact attitude, she was extremely stirred. The embrace she had surprised had been so passionate; the girl was so strange a mixture of feeling and control, of lava and of steel, so masterful and yet so amusingly young. It might be a risk; but Hubert was already a different man because of it. All the same she was fully conscious of inconsistency; for to herself such a sensational departure would not be possible. The giving of her heart would be no rushing affair. As her old Scotch nurse used to say: “Miss Dinny aye knows on hoo many toes a pussy-cat goes.” She was not proud of that ‘sense of humour not devoid of wit which informed and somewhat sterilised all else.’ Indeed, she envied Jean her colourful decision, Alan his direct conviction, Hallorsen’s robust adventurousness. But she had her compensations, and, with a smile breaking her lips apart, went to find her mother.
Lady Cherrell was in her sanctum next to her bedroom, making muslin bags for the leaves of the scented verbena which grew against the house.
“Darling,” said Dinny, “prepare for slight concussion. You remember my saying I wished we could find the perfect girl for Hubert. Well, she’s found; Jean has just proposed to him.”
“Dinny!”
“They’re going to be married offhand by special licence.”
“But —”
“Exactly, darling. So we go up tomorrow, and Jean and I stay with Diana till it’s over. Hubert will tell Father.”
“But, Dinny, really —!”
Dinny came through the barrage of muslin, knelt down and put her arm round her mother.
“I feel exactly like you,” she said, “only different, because after all I didn’t produce him; but, Mother darling, it is all right. Jean is a marvellous creature, and Hubert’s head over ears. It’s done him a lot of good already, and she’ll see to it that he goes ahead, you know.”
“But, Dinny — money?”
“They’re not expecting Dad to do anything. They’ll just be able to manage, and they needn’t have children, you know, till later.”
“I suppose not. It’s terribly sudden. Why a special licence?”
“Intuition,” and, with a squeeze of her mother’s slender body, she added: “Jean has them. Hubert’s position IS awkward, Mother.”
“Yes; I’m scared about it, and I know your father is, though he’s not said much.”
This was as far as either of them would go in disclosure of their uneasiness, and they went into committee on the question of a perch for the adventuring couple.
“But why shouldn’t they live here until things are settled?” said Lady Cherrell.
“They’ll find it more exciting if they have to do their own washing up. The great thing is to keep Hubert’s mind active just now.”
Lady Cherrell sighed. Correspondence, gardening, giving household orders, and sitting on village committees were certainly not exciting, and Condaford would be even less exciting if, like the young, one had none of these distractions.
“Things ARE quiet here,” she admitted.
“And thank God for it,” murmured Dinny; “but I feel Hubert wants the strenuous life just now, and he’ll get it with Jean in London. They might take a workman’s flat. It can’t be for long, you know. So, Mother dear, you’ll not seem to know anything about it this evening, and we shall all know you do. That’ll be so restful for everybody.” And, kissing the rueful smile on her mother’s face, she went away.
Next morning the conspirators were early afoot, Hubert looking, so Jean put it, as though he were ‘riding at a bullfinch’; Dinny resolutely whimsical. Alan had the handy air of a best man in embryo; Jean alone appeared unmoved. They set forth in the Tasburghs’ brown roadster, dropping Hubert at the station and proceeding towards Lippinghall. Jean drove. The other two sat behind.
“Dinny,” said young Tasburgh, “couldn’t WE have a special licence, too?”
“Reduction on taking a quantity. Behave yourself. You will go to sea and forget all about me in a month.”
“Do I look like that?”
Dinny regarded his brown face.
“Well, in spots.”
“Do be serious!”
“I can’t; I keep seeing Jean snipping a lock and saying: ‘Now Dad, bless me or I’ll tonsure you!’ and the Rector answering ‘I— er — nevah —!’ and Jean snipping another lock and saying: ‘That’s all right then, and I must have a hundred a year or off go your eyebrows!’”
“Jean’s a holy terror. Promise me anyway, Dinny, not to marry anyone else?”
“But suppose I met someone I liked terribly, would you wish to blight my young life?”
“Yes.”
“Not so do they answer on the ‘screen.’”
“You’d make a saint swear.”
“But not a naval lieutenant. Which reminds me: Those texts at the head of the fourth column of the ‘Times.’ It struck me this morning what a splendid secret code could be made out of ‘The Song of Solomon,’ or that Psalm about the Leviathan. ‘My beloved is like a young roe’ might mean ‘Eight German battleships in Dover harbour. Come quickly.’ ‘And there is that Leviathan that takes his pastime therein’ could be ‘Tirpirz in command,’ and so on. No one could possibly decipher it unless they had a copy of the code.”
“I’m going to speed,” said Jean, looking back. The speedometer rose rapidly: Forty — forty-five — fifty — fifty-five —!
The sailor’s hand slipped under Dinny’s arm.
“This can’t last, the car will bust. But it’s a tempting bit of road.”
Dinny sat with a fixed smile; she hated being driven really fast, and, when Jean had dropped again to her normal thirty-five, said plaintively:
“Jean, I have a nineteenth century inside.”
At Folwell she leaned forward again: “I don’t want them to see me at Lippinghall. Please go straight to the Rectory and hide me somewhere while you deal with your parent.”
Refuged in the dining-room opposite the portrait of which Jean had spoken, Dinny studied it curiously. Underneath were the words: “1553, Catherine Tastburgh, née Fitzherbert, ?tate 35; wife of Sir Walter Tastburgh.”
Above the ruff encircling the long neck, that time-yellowed face might truly have been Jean fifteen years hence, the same tapering from the broad cheek-bones to the chin, the same long dark-lashed luring eyes; even the hands, crossed on the stomacher, were the very spit of Jean’s. What had been the history of that strange prototype; did they know it, and would it be repeated by her descendant?
“Awfully like Jean, isn’t she?” said young Tasburgh: “She was a corker, from all accounts; they say she staged her own funeral, and got out of the country when Elizabeth set about the Catholics in the fifteen-sixties. D’you know what was the fate of anyone who celebrated Mass just then? Ripping up was a mere incident in it. The Christian religion! What oh! That lady had a hand in most pies, I fancy. I bet she speeded when she could.”
“Any news from the front?”
“Jean went into the study with an old ‘Times,’ a towel, and a pair of scissors. The rest is silence.”
“Isn’t there anywhere from which we can see them when they come out?”
“We could sit on the stairs. They wouldn’t notice us, there, unless they happen to go up.”
They went out and sat in a dark corner of the stairway, whence through the bannisters they could see the study door. With some of the thrill of childhood Dinny watched for it to open. Suddenly Jean came forth, with a sheet of newspaper folded as a receptacle in one hand, and in the other a pair of scissors. They heard her say:
“Remember, dear, you’re not to go out without a hat today.”
An inarticulate answer was shut off by the closing of the door. Dinny rose above the bannisters: “Well?”
“It’s all right. He’s a bit grumpy — doesn’t know who’ll cut his hair and that; thinks a special licence a waste of money; but he’s going to give me the hundred a year. I left him filling his pipe.” She stood still, looking into the sheet of newspaper. “There was an awful lot to come away. We’ll have lunch in a minute, Dinny, and then be off again.”
The Rector’s manner at lunch was still courtly, and Dinny observed him with admiring attention. Here was a widower well on in years, about to be deprived of his only daughter, who did everything about the house and parish, even to the cutting of his hair, yet he was apparently unmoved. Not a murmur escaped his lips. Was it breeding, benevolence, or unholy relief? She could not be sure; and her heart quailed a little. Hubert would soon be in his shoes. She stared at Jean. Little doubt but that she could stage her own funeral, if not other people’s; still, there would be nothing ungraceful or raucous about her dominations; no vulgar domesticity in the way she stirred her pies. If only she and Hubert had enough sense of humour!
After lunch the Rector took her apart.
“My deah Dinny — if I may call you that — how do you feel about it? And how does your Mothah feel?”
“We both feel it’s a little bit like ‘The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea!’”
“‘In a beautiful pea-green boat.’ Yes, indeed, but not ‘with plenty of money’ I feah. Still,” he added, dreamily, “Jean is a good girl; very — ah — capable. I am glad our families are to be — er — reunited. I shall miss her, but one must not be — ah — selfish.”
“‘What we lose on the swings we gain on the roundabouts,’” murmured Dinny.
The Rector’s blue eyes twinkled.
“Ah!” he said, “yes, indeed; the rough with the smooth. Jean refuses to let me give her away. Here is her birth certificate in case of — ah — questions. She is of age.”
He produced a long yellowed slip. “Deah me!” he added, sincerely: “Deah me!”
Dinny continued to feel doubtful whether she was sorry for him: and, directly after, they resumed their journey.
Dropping Alan Tasburgh at his Club, the two girls headed the car for Chelsea. Dinny had sent no telegram, trusting to luck. On reaching the house in Oakley Street she got out and rang the bell. An elderly maid, with a frightened expression on her face, opened the door.
“Mrs. Ferse in?”
“No, Miss; Captain Ferse.”
“Captain Ferse?”
The maid, looking to right and left, spoke in a low and hurried voice.
“Yes, Miss; we’re dreadfully put about, we don’t know what to do. Captain Ferse came in sudden at lunch time, and we never knew nothing of it, beforehand. The Mistress was out. There’s been a telegram for her, but Captain Ferse took it; and someone’s been on the ‘phone for her twice but wouldn’t give a message.” Dinny sought for words in which to discover the worst.
“How — how does he seem?”
“Well, Miss, I couldn’t say. He never said nothing but ‘Where’s your mistress?’ He LOOKS all right, but not having heard anything, we’re afraid; the children are in and we don’t know where the Mistress is.”
“Wait a minute,” and Dinny went back to the car.
“What’s the matter?” asked Jean, getting out.
The two girls stood consulting on the pavement, while from the doorway the maid watched them.
“I ought to get hold of Uncle Adrian,” said Dinny. “There are the children.”
“You do that, and I’ll go in and wait for you. That maid looks scared.”
“I believe he used to be violent, Jean; he may have escaped, you know.”
“Take the car. I shall be all right.” Dinny squeezed her hand.
“I’ll take a taxi; then you’ll have the car if you want to get away.”
“Right! Tell the maid who I am, and then buzz off. It’s four o’clock.”
Dinny looked up at the house; and, suddenly, saw a face in the window of the dining-room. Though she had only twice seen Ferse, she recognised him at once. His face was not to be forgotten, it gave the impression of fire behind bars: A cut, hard face with a tooth-brush moustache, broad cheek-bones, strong-growing dark slightly-grizzled hair, and those steel-bright flickering eyes. They stared out at her now with a kind of dancing intensity that was painful, and she looked away.
“Don’t look up! He’s in there!” she said to Jean: “But for his eyes he looks quite normal — well-dressed and that. Let’s both go, Jean, or both stay.”
“No; I shall be quite all right; you go,” and she went into the house.
Dinny hurried away. This sudden reappearance of one whom all had assumed to be hopelessly unhinged was staggering. Ignorant of the circumstances of Ferse’s incarceration, ignorant of everything except that he had given Diana a terrible time before his break-down, she thought of Adrian as the only person likely to know enough. It was a long anxious drive. She found her uncle on the point of leaving the Museum, and told him hurriedly, while he stood looking at her with horror.
“Do you know where Diana is?” she finished.
“She was dining to-night with Fleur and Michael. I was going too, but till then I don’t know. Let’s get on back to Oakley Street. This is a thunderbolt.”
They got into the cab.
“Couldn’t you telephone to that Mental Home, Uncle?”
“Without seeing Diana, I daren’t. You say he looked normal?”
“Yes. Only his eyes — but they always were like that, I remember.”
Adrian put his hands up to his head. “It’s too horrible! My poor girl!”
Dinny’s heart began to ache — as much for him as for Diana.
“Horrible too,” said Adrian, “to be feeling like this because that poor devil has come back. Ah, me! This is a bad business, Dinny; a bad business.” Dinny squeezed his arm.
“What is the law about it, Uncle?”
“God knows! He never was certified. Diana wouldn’t have that. They took him as a private patient.”
“But surely he couldn’t come away just when he liked, without any notice being given?”
“Who knows what’s happened? He may be as crazy as ever and have got away in a flash of sanity. But whatever we do,” and Dinny felt moved by the expression on his face, “we must think of him as well as of ourselves. We mustn’t make it harder for him. Poor Ferse! Talk about trouble, Dinny — illness, poverty, vice, crime — none of them can touch mental derangement for sheer tragedy to all concerned.”
“Uncle,” said Dinny, “the night?”
Adrian groaned. “That we must save her from somehow.”
At the end of Oakley Street they dismissed the cab and walked to the door . . . .
On going in Jean had said to the maid: “I’m Miss Tasburgh. Miss Dinny has gone for Mr. Cherrell. Drawing-room upstairs? I’ll wait there. Has he seen the children?”
“No, Miss. He’s only been here half an hour. The children are up in the schoolroom with Mam’selle.”
“Then I shall be between them,” said Jean. “Take me up.”
“Shall I wait with you, Miss?”
“No. Keep a look-out for Mrs. Ferse and tell her at once.”
The maid gazed at her admiringly and left her in the drawing-room. Setting the door ajar Jean stood listening. There was no sound. And she began to move silently up and down from door to window. If she saw Diana approaching she meant to run down to her; if Ferse came up she meant to go out to him. Her heart beat a little faster than usual, but she felt no real nervousness. She had been patrolling thus for a quarter of an hour when she heard a sound behind her, and, turning, saw Ferse just within the room.
“Oh!” she said: “I’m waiting for Mrs. Ferse; are you Captain Ferse?”
The figure bowed. “And you?”
“Jean Tasburgh. I’m afraid you wouldn’t know me.”
“Who was that with you?”
“Dinny Cherrell.”
“Where has she gone?”
“To see one of her uncles, I believe.”
Ferse uttered a queer sound — not quite a laugh.
“Adrian?”
“I think so.”
He stood turning those bright flickering eyes on the pretty room.
“Prettier than ever,” he said, “I’ve been away some time. Do you know my wife?”
“I met her staying at Lady Mont’s.”
“Lippinghall? Is Diana well?”
The words came out with a sort of hungry harshness.
“Yes. Quite.”
“And beautiful?”
“Very.”
“Thank you.”
Looking at him from under her long lashes Jean could see nothing in him from top to toe that gave the impression of derangement. He looked what he was — a soldier in mufti, very neat and self-contained, all — all but those eyes.
“I haven’t seen my wife for four years,” he said, “I shall want to see her alone.”
Jean moved towards the door.
“I’ll go,” she said.
“No!” The word came out with startling suddenness: “Stay there!” And he blocked the doorway.
“Why?”
“I wish to be the first to tell her that I’m back.”
“Naturally.”
“Stay there, then!”
Jean moved back to the window. “Just as you like,” she said. There was a silence.
“Have you heard about me?” he asked, suddenly.
“Very little. I know you haven’t been well.”
He came from the door. “Do you see anything the matter with me?”
Jean looked up, her eyes held his till they went flickering away.
“Nothing. You look very fit.”
“I am. Sit down, won’t you?”
“Thank you.” Jean sat down.
“That’s right,” he said. “Keep your eyes on me.”
Jean looked at her feet. Again Ferse uttered that travesty of a laugh.
“You’ve never been mentally sick, I take it. If you had you’d know that everybody keeps their eyes on you; and you keep your eyes on everybody. I must go down now. Au revoir!”
He turned quickly and went out, shutting the door. Jean continued to sit quite still, expecting him to open it again. She had a feeling of having been worsted, and a curious tingling all over, as if she had been too close to a fire. He did not open the door again, and she got up to do so herself. It was locked. She stood looking at it. Ring the bell? Hammer on it and attract the maid? She decided to do neither, but went to the window and stood watching the street. Dinny would be back soon and she could call to her. Very coolly she reviewed the scene she had been through. He had locked her in because he meant no one to interfere before he saw his wife — suspicious of everyone — very natural! A dim sense of what it meant to be looked on as deranged penetrated her young hard intelligence. Poor man! She wondered if she could get out of the window without being noticed, and, deciding that she couldn’t, continued to stand watching the end of the street for the appearance of relief. And, suddenly, without anything to cause it, a shiver ran through her, the aftermath of that encounter. His eyes! It must be terrible to be his wife. She threw the window wider, and leaned out . . . .
The sight of Jean at the window stayed Dinny and her uncle on the doorstep.
“I’m locked in the drawing-room,” said Jean, quietly; “you might let me out.”
Adrian took his niece to the car.
“Stay here, Dinny. I’ll send her out to you. We mustn’t make a show of this.”
“Take care, Uncle! I feel as if you were Daniel going into —”
With a wan smile Adrian rang the bell. Ferse himself opened the door.
“Ah! Cherrell? Come in.”
Adrian held out his hand; but it was not taken.
“I can hardly expect a welcome,” said Ferse.
“My dear fellow!”
“No, I can hardly expect a welcome, but I’m going to see Diana. Don’t try and prevent me, Cherrell — you or anyone.”
“Of course not! Do you mind if I fetch young Jean Tasburgh? Dinny is waiting for her in the car.”
“I locked her in,” said Ferse, sombrely. “Here’s the key. Send her away.”
He went into the dining-room.
Jean was standing just inside the door.
“Go out to Dinny,” said Adrian, “and take her away. I’ll manage. No trouble, I hope?”
“Only being locked in.”
“Tell Dinny,” said Adrian, “that Hilary is almost sure to be able to put you both up; if you go on there now I shall know where you are if I want you. You have pluck, young lady.”
“Oh, not specially!” said Jean: “Good-bye!” and ran downstairs. Adrian heard the front door close and went slowly down to the dining-room. Ferse was at the window watching the girls start the car. He turned round sharply. The movement was that of a man used to being spied on. There was little change in him, less thin, less haggard, and his hair greyer — that was all. His dress as neat as ever, his manner composed; his eyes — but then — his eyes!
“Yes,” said Ferse, uncannily, “you can’t help pitying me, but you’d like to see me dead. Who wouldn’t? A fellow has no business to go off his chump. But I’m sane enough now, Cherrell, don’t make any mistake.”
Sane? Yes, he seemed sane. But what strain could he stand?
Ferse spoke again: “You all thought I was gone for good. About three months ago I began to mend. As soon as I realised that — I kept dark. Those who look after us”— he spoke with concentrated bitterness —“must be so certain of our sanity that if it were left to them we should never be sane again. It’s to their interest, you see.” And his eyes, burning into Adrian’s seemed to add: ‘And to yours, and to hers?’ “So I kept dark. I had the will-power to keep dark in that place for three months, in my right mind. It’s only this last week or so that I’ve shown them I’m responsible. They want much more than a week before they’ll write home about it. I didn’t want them writing home. I wanted to come straight here and show myself as I am. I didn’t want Diana or anybody warned. And I wanted to make sure of myself, and I have.”
“Terrible!” said Adrian below his breath.
Ferse’s eyes seemed to burn into him again.
“You used to be in love with my wife, Cherrell; you still are. Well?”
“We are just as we were,” said Adrian, “friends.”
“You’d say that anyway.”
“Perhaps. But there is no more to say, except that I’m bound to think of her first, as I always have.”
“That’s why you’re here, then?”
“Gracious, man! Haven’t you realised the shock it will be to her? Perhaps you can’t remember the life you led her before you went in there? But do you think she’s forgotten? Wouldn’t it be fairer to her and to yourself if you came to my room, say, at the Museum, and saw her there for the first time?”
“No; I’ll see her here in my own house.”
“This is where she went through hell, Ferse. You may have been right to keep dark, as you call it, so far as the doctors are concerned, but you’re certainly not right to spring your recovery on her like this.”
Ferse made a violent gesture.
“You want her kept from me.”
Adrian bowed his head.
“That may be,” he said, gently. “But look here, Ferse, you’re just as well able to gauge this situation as myself. Put yourself in her place. Imagine her coming in, as she may at any minute, seeing you without warning, knowing nothing of your recovery, needing time to believe in it — with all her memories of you as you were. What chance are you giving yourself?”
Ferse groaned. “What chance shall I be given, if I don’t take any chance I can? Do you think I trust anyone now? Try it — try four years of it, and see!” and his eyes went swiftly round: “Try being watched, try being treated like a dangerous child. I’ve looked on at my own treatment, as a perfectly sane man, for the last three months. If my own wife can’t take me for what I am — clothed and in my right mind, who will or can?”
Adrian went up to him.
“Gently!” he said: “That’s where you’re wrong. Only SHE knew you at the worst. It should be more difficult for her than for anyone.”
Ferse covered his face.
Adrian waited, grey with anxiety; but when Ferse uncovered his face again he could not bear the look on it, and turned his eyes away.
“Talk of loneliness!” said Ferse. “Go off your chump, Cherrell, then you’ll know what it means to be lonely for the rest of your days.”
Adrian put a hand on his shoulder.
“Look here, my dear fellow, I’ve got a spare room at my digs, come and put up with me till we get things straightened out.” Sudden suspicion grinned from Ferse’s face, an intense searching look came into his eyes; it softened as if with gratitude, grew bitter, softened again.
“You were always a white man, Cherrell; but no, thanks — I couldn’t. I must be here. Foxes have holes, and I’ve still got this.”
Adrian sighed.
“Very well; then we must wait for her. Have you seen the children?”
“No. Do they remember me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do they know I’m alive?”
“Yes. They know that you’re away, ill.”
“Not —?” Ferse touched his forehead.
“No. Shall we go up to them?”
Ferse shook his head, and at that moment through the window Adrian saw Diana coming. He moved quietly towards the door. What was he to do or say? His hand was on the knob when Ferse pushed by him into the hall. Diana had come in with her latchkey. Adrian could see her face grow deadly pale below the casque of her close hat. She recoiled against the wall.
“It’s all right, Diana,” he said quickly, and held open the dining-room door. She came from the wall, passed them both into the room, and Ferse followed.
“If you want to consult me I shall be here,” said Adrian, and closed the door . . . .
Husband and wife stood breathing as if they had run a hundred yards instead of walking three.
“Diana!” said Ferse: “Diana!”
It seemed as if she couldn’t speak, and his voice rose:
“I’m all right. Don’t you believe me?”
She bent her head, and still didn’t speak.
“Not a word to throw to a dog?”
“It’s — it’s the shock.”
“I have come back sane, I have been sane for three months now.”
“I am so glad, so glad.”
“My God! You’re as beautiful as ever.”
And suddenly he gripped her, pressed her hard against him, and began kissing her hungrily. When he let her go, she sank breathless into a chair, gazing at him with an expression of such terror that he put his hands over his face.
“Ronald — I couldn’t — I couldn’t let it be as it was before. I couldn’t — I couldn’t!”
He dropped on his knees at her feet. “I didn’t mean to be violent. Forgive me!”
And then, from sheer exhaustion of the power of feeling, both rose and moved apart.
“We had better talk it over quietly,” said Ferse.
“Yes.”
“Am I not to live here?”
“It’s your house. You must do whatever’s best for you.”
He uttered the sound that was so like a laugh.
“It would be best for me if you and everyone would treat me exactly as if nothing had happened to me.”
Diana was silent. She was silent so long that again he made that sound.
“Don’t!” she said. “I will try. But I must — I must have a separate room.”
Ferse bowed. Suddenly his eyes darted at her. “Are you in love with Cherrell?”
“No.”
“With anyone?”
“No.”
“Scared then?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Naturally. Well, it’s not for God’s playthings to make terms. We take what we can get. Will you wire for them to send my things from that place? That will save any fuss they might want to make. I came away without saying good-bye. There is probably something owing too.”
“Of course. I will see to all that.”
“Can we let Cherrell go now?”
“I will tell him.”
“Let me!”
“No, Ronald, I will,” and she moved resolutely past him.
Adrian was leaning against the wall opposite the door. He looked up at her and tried to smile; he had divined the upshot.
“He is to stay here, but apart. My dear, thank you so much for all. Will you see to that Home for me? I will let you know everything. I’ll take him up to the children now. Good-bye!” He kissed her hand and went out.
Hubert Cherrell stood outside his father’s club in Pall Mall, a senior affair of which he was not yet a member. He was feeling concerned, for he had a respect for his father somewhat odd in days when fathers were commonly treated as younger brethren, or alluded to as ‘that old man.’ Nervously therefore he entered an edifice wherein more people had held more firmly to the prides and prejudices of a lifetime than possibly anywhere else on earth. There was little however, either of pride or prejudice, about the denizens of the room into which he was now shown. A short alert man with a pale face and a tooth-brush moustache was biting the end of a pen, and trying to compose a letter to ‘The Times’ on the condition of Iraq; a modest-looking little Brigadier General with a bald forehead and grey moustache was discussing with a tall modest-looking Lieutenant Colonel the flora of the island of Cyprus; a man of square build, square cheek-bones and lion-like eyes, was sitting in the window as still as if he had just buried an aunt and were thinking whether or not he would try and swim the Channel next year; and Sir Conway himself was reading ‘Whitaker’s Almanac.’
“Hallo, Hubert! This room’s too small. Come into the hall.” Hubert had the instant feeling not only that he wanted to say something to his father, but that his father wanted to say something to him. They sat down in a recess.
“What’s brought you up?”
“I want to get married, Sir.”
“Married?”
“To Jean Tasburgh.”
“Oh!”
“We thought of getting a special licence and having no fuss.”
The General shook his head. “She’s a fine girl, and I’m glad you feel like that, but the fact is your position’s queer, Hubert. I’ve just been hearing.”
Hubert noticed suddenly how worn-looking was his father’s face. “That fellow you shot. They’re pressing for your extradition on a charge of murder.”
“What?”
“It’s a monstrous business, and I can’t believe they’ll go on with it in the face of what you say about his going for you — luckily you’ve still got his scar on your arm; but it seems there’s the deuce of a fuss in the Bolivian papers; and those half-castes are sticking together about it.”
“I must see Hallorsen at once.”
“The authorities won’t be in a hurry, I expect.”
After this, the two sat silent in the big hall, staring in front of them with very much the same expression on their faces. At the back of both their minds the fear of this development had lurked, but neither had ever permitted it to take definite shape; and its wretchedness was therefore the more potent. To the General it was even more searing than to Hubert. The idea that his only son could be haled half across the world on a charge of murder was as horrible as a nightmare.
“No good to let it prey on our minds, Hubert,” he said at last; “if there’s any sense in the country at all we’ll get this stopped. I was trying to think of someone who knows how to get at people. I’m helpless in these matters — some fellows seem to know everybody and exactly how to work them. I think we’d better go to Lawrence Mont; he knows Saxenden anyway, and probably the people at the Foreign Office. It was Topsham who told me, but he can do nothing. Let’s walk, shall we? Do us good.”
Much touched by the way his father was identifying himself with his trouble, Hubert squeezed his arm, and they left the Club. In Piccadilly the General said, with a transparent effort: “I don’t much like all these changes.”
“Well, Sir, except for Devonshire House, I don’t believe I notice them.”
“No, it’s queer; the spirit of Piccadilly is stronger than the street itself, you can’t destroy its atmosphere. You never see a top hat now, and yet it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I felt the same walking down Piccadilly after the war as I did as a youngster back from India. One just had the feeling of having got there at last.”
“Yes; you get a queer sort of homesickness for it. I did in Mespot and Bolivia. If one closed one’s eyes the whole thing would start up.”
“Core of English life,” began the General, and stopped, as if surprised at having delivered a summary.
“Even the Americans feel it,” remarked Hubert, as they turned into Half-Moon Street. “Hallorsen was saying to me they had nothing like it over there; ‘no focus for their national influence’ was the way he put it.”
“And yet they HAVE influence,” said the General.
“No doubt about that, Sir, but can you define it? Is it their speed that gives it them?”
“Where does their speed get them? Everywhere in general; nowhere in particular. No, it’s their money, I think.”
“Well, I’ve noticed about Americans, and it’s where most people go wrong, that they care very little for money as money. They like to get it fast; but they’d rather lose it fast than get it slow.”
“Queer thing having no core,” said the General.
“The country’s too big, Sir. But they have a sort of core, all the same — pride of country.”
The General nodded.
“Queer little old streets these. I remember walking with my Dad from Curzon Street to the St. James’ Club in ‘82 — day I first went to Harrow — hardly a stick changed.” And so, concerned in talk that touched not on the feelings within them, they reached Mount Street.
“There’s your Aunt Em, don’t tell her.”
A few paces in front of them Lady Mont was, as it were, swimming home. They overtook her some hundred yards from the door.
“Con,” she said, “you’re lookin’ thin.”
“My dear girl, I never was anything else.”
“No. Hubert, there was somethin’ I wanted to ask you. Oh! I know! But Dinny said you hadn’t had any breeches since the war. How do you like Jean? Rather attractive?”
“Yes, Aunt Em.”
“She wasn’t expelled.”
“Why should she have been?”
“Oh! well, you never know. She’s never terrorised me. D’you want Lawrence? It’s Voltaire now and Dean Swift. So unnecessary — they’ve been awfully done; but he likes doin’ them because they bite. About those mules, Hubert?”
“What about them?”
“I never can remember if the donkey is the sire or the dam.”
“The donkey is the sire and the dam a mare, Aunt Em.”
“Yes, and they don’t have children — such a blessin’. Where’s Dinny?”
“She’s in town, somewhere.”
“She ought to marry.”
“Why?” said the General.
“Well, there she is! Hen was saying she’d make a good lady-inwaitin’— unselfish. That’s the danger.” And, taking a latchkey out of her bag, Lady Mont applied it to the door.
“I can’t get Lawrence to drink tea — would you like some?”
“No thank you, Em.”
“You’ll find him stewin’ in the library.” She kissed her brother and her nephew, and swam towards the stairs. “Puzzlin’,” they heard her say as they entered the library. They found Sir Lawrence surrounded by the works of Voltaire and Swift, for he was engaged on an imaginary dialogue between those two serious men. He listened gravely to the General’s tale.
“I saw,” he said, when his brother-inlaw had finished, “that Hallorsen had repented him of the evil — that will be Dinny. I think we’d better see him — not here, there’s no cook, Em’s still slimming — but we can all dine at the Coffee House.” And he took up the telephone.
Professor Hallorsen was expected in at five and should at once be given the message.
“This seems to be more of an F.O. business than a Police matter,” went on Sir Lawrence. “Let’s go over and see old Shropshire. He must have known your father well, Con; and his nephew, Bobbie Ferrar, is about as fixed a star as there is at the F.O. Old Shropshire’s always in!”
Arrived at Shropshire House Sir Lawrence said:
“Can we see the Marquess, Pommett?”
“I rather think he’s having his lesson, Sir Lawrence.”
“Lesson — in what?”
“Heinstein, is it, Sir Lawrence?”
“Then the blind is leading the blind, and it will be well to save him. The moment there’s a chance, Pommett, let us in.”
“Yes, Sir Lawrence.”
“Eighty-four and learning Einstein. Who said the aristocracy was decadent? I should like to see the bloke who’s teaching it, though; he must have singular powers of persuasion — there are no flies on old Shropshire.”
At this moment a man of ascetic aspect, with a cold deep eye and not much hair, entered, took hat and umbrella from a chair, and went out.
“Behold the man!” said Sir Lawrence. “I wonder what he charges? Einstein is like the electron or the vitamin — inapprehensible; it’s as clear a case of money under false pretences as I’ve ever come across. Come along.”
The Marquess of Shropshire was walking up and down his study, nodding his quick and sanguine grey-bearded head as if to himself.
“Ah! young Mont,” he said, “did you meet that man — if he offers to teach you Einstein, don’t let him. He can no more explain space bounded yet infinite, than I can.”
“But even Einstein can’t, Marquess.”
“I am not old enough,” said the Marquess, “for anything but the exact sciences. I told him not to come again. Whom have I the pleasure of seeing?”
“My brother-inlaw General Sir Conway Cherrell, and his son Captain Hubert Cherrell, D.S.O. You’ll remember Conway’s father, Marquess — he was Ambassador at Madrid.”
“Yes, yes, dear me, yes! I know your brother Hilary, too; a live wire. Sit down! Sit down, young man! Is it anything to do with electricity?”
“Not wholly, Marquess; more a matter of extradition.”
“Indeed!” The Marquess, raising his foot to the seat of a chair, leaned his elbow on his knee and his bearded chin on his hand. And, while the General was explaining, he continued to stand in this attitude, gazing at Hubert, who was sitting with compressed lips, and lowered eyes. When the General had finished the Marquess said:
“D.S.O., I think your uncle said. In the war?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“I shall do what I can. Could I see that scar?”
Hubert drew up his left sleeve, unlinked his shirt cuff and exposed an arm up which a long glancing scar stretched almost from wrist to elbow.
The Marquess whistled softly through teeth still his own. “Narrow escape that, young man.”
“Yes, Sir. I put up my arm just as he struck.”
“And then?”
“Jumped back and shot him as he came on again. Then I fainted.”
“This man was flogged for ill-treating his mules, you say?”
“Continually ill-treating them.”
“Continually?” repeated the Marquess. “Some think the meat-trade and Zoological Society continually ill-treat animals, but I never heard of their being flogged. Tastes differ. Now, let me see, what can I do? Is Bobbie in town, young Mont?”
“Yes, Marquess. I saw him at the Coffee House yesterday.”
“I will get him to breakfast. If I remember he does not allow his children to keep rabbits, and has a dog that bites everybody. That should be to the good. A man who is fond of animals would always like to flog a man who isn’t. Before you go, young Mont, will you tell me what you think of this?” And replacing his foot on the ground, the Marquess went to the corner, took up a canvas that was leaning against the wall, and brought it to the light. It represented with a moderate degree of certainty a young woman without clothes.
“By Steinvitch,” said the Marquess; “she could corrupt no morals, could she — if hung?”
Sir Lawrence screwed in his monocle: “The oblong school. This comes of living with women of a certain shape, Marquess. No, she couldn’t corrupt morals, but she might spoil digestions — flesh sea-green, hair tomato, style blobby. Did you buy her?”
“Hardly,” said the Marquess; “she is worth a good deal of money, I am told. You — you wouldn’t take her away, I suppose?”
“For you, Sir, I would do most things, but not that; no,” repeated Sir Lawrence, moving backwards, “not that.”
“I was afraid of it,” said the Marquess, “and yet I am told that she has a certain dynamic force. Well, that is that! I liked your father, General,” he said, more earnestly, “and if the word of his grandson is not to be taken against that of half-caste muleteers, we shall have reached a stage of altruism in this country so complete that I do not think we can survive. I will let you know what my nephew says. Good-bye, General; good-bye, my dear young man — that is a very nasty scar. Good-bye, young Mont — you are incorrigible.”
On the stairs Sir Lawrence looked at his watch. “So far,” he said, “the matter has taken twenty minutes — say twenty-five from door to door. They can’t do it at that pace in America — and we very nearly had an oblong young woman thrown in. Now for the Coffee House, and Hallorsen.” And they turned their faces towards St. James’s Street. “This street,” he said, “is the Mecca of Western man, as the Rue de la Paix is the Mecca of Western woman.” And he regarded his companions whimsically. What good specimens they were of a product at once the envy and mock of every other country! All over the British Empire men made more or less in their image were doing the work and playing the games of the British world. The sun never set on the type; history had looked on it and decided that it would survive. Satire darted at its joints, and rebounded from an unseen armour. ‘It walks quietly down the days of Time,’ he thought, ‘the streets and places of the world, without manner to speak of, without parade of learning, strength, or anything, endowed with the conviction, invisible, impermeable, of being IT.’
“Yes,” he said on the doorstep of ‘The Coffee House,’ “I look on this as the plumb centre of the universe. Others may claim the North Pole, Rome, Montmartre — I claim the Coffee House, oldest Club in the world, and I suppose, by plumbing standards, the worst. Shall we wash, or postpone it to a more joyful opportunity? Agreed. Let’s sit down here, then, and await the apostle of plumbing. I take him for a hustler. Pity we can’t arrange a match between him and the Marquess. I’d back the old boy.”
“Here he is,” said Hubert.
The American looked very big coming into the low hall of the oldest Club in the world.
“Sir Lawrence Mont,” he said; “Ah! Captain! General Sir Conway Cherrell? Proud to meet you, General. And what can I do for you, gentlemen?”
He listened to Sir Lawrence’s recital with a deepening gravity. “Isn’t that too bad? I can’t take this sitting. I’m going right along now to see the Bolivian Minister. And, Captain, I’ve kept the address of your boy Manuel, I’ll cable our Consul at La Paz to get a statement from him right away, confirming your story. Who ever heard of such darned foolishness? Forgive me, gentlemen, but I’ll have no peace till I’ve set the wires going.” And with a circular movement of his head he was gone. The three Englishmen sat down again.
“Old Shropshire must look to his heels,” Sir Lawrence said.
“So that’s Hallorsen,” said the General. “Fine-looking chap.”
Hubert said nothing. He was moved.