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Poor relations

by Compton MacKenzie · English · Gutenberg #38816 · 639,511 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Poor relations

Author: Compton MacKenzie


        
Release date: February 9, 2012 [eBook #38816]
                Most recently updated: March 16, 2013

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POOR RELATIONS ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images available at the Interent
Archive.)









POOR RELATIONS

[Illustration: image of the book's cover]

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

POOR RELATIONS

SYLVIA & MICHAEL

PLASHERS MEAD

SYLVIA SCARLETT

Harper & Brothers _Publishers_




POOR RELATIONS

By COMPTON MACKENZIE

Author of "SYLVIA SCARLETT" "SYLVIA AND MICHAEL"
ETC.

[Illustration: colophon]

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON




POOR RELATIONS

Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers

Printed in the United States of America

Published February, 1920

B-U

THIS THEME IN C MAJOR WITH VARIATIONS IS INSCRIBED TO THE ROMANTIC AND
MYSTERIOUS MAJOR C BY ONE WHO WAS PRIVILEGED TO SERVE UNDER HIM DURING
MORE THAN TWO YEARS OF WAR

CAPRI, APRIL 30, 1919.




POOR RELATIONS




_Poor Relations_




CHAPTER I


There was nothing to distinguish the departure of the _Murmania_ from
that of any other big liner leaving New York in October for Liverpool or
Southampton. At the crowded gangways there was the usual rain of
ultimate kisses, from the quayside the usual gale of speeding
handkerchiefs. Ladies in blanket-coats handed over to the arrangement of
their table-stewards the expensive bouquets presented by friends who, as
the case might be, had been glad or sorry to see them go. Middle-aged
gentlemen, who were probably not at all conspicuous on shore, at once
made their appearance in caps that they might have felt shy about
wearing even during their university prime. Children in the first
confusion of settling down ate more chocolates from the gift boxes lying
about the cabins than they were likely to be given (or perhaps to want)
for some time. Two young women with fresh complexions, short skirts, tam
o' shanters, brightly colored jumpers, and big bows to their shoes were
already on familiar terms with one of the junior ship's officers, and
their laughter (which would soon become one of those unending oceanic
accompaniments that make land so pleasant again) was already competing
with the noise of the crew. Everybody boasted aloud that they fed you
really well on the _Murmania_, and hoped silently that perhaps the sense
of being imprisoned in a decaying hot-water bottle (or whatever more or
less apt comparison was invented to suggest atmosphere below decks)
would pass away in the fresh Atlantic breezes. Indeed it might be said,
except in the case of a few ivory-faced ladies already lying back with
the professional aloofness of those who are a prey to chronic headaches,
that outwardly optimism was rampant.

It was not surprising, therefore, that John Touchwood, the successful
romantic playwright and unsuccessful realistic novelist, should on
finding himself hemmed in by such invincible cheerfulness surrender to
his own pleasant fancies of home. This was one of those moments when he
was able to feel that the accusation of sentimentality so persistently
laid against his work by superior critics was rebutted out of the very
mouth of real life. He looked round at his fellow passengers as though
he would congratulate them on conforming to his later and more
profitable theory of art; and if occasionally he could not help seeing a
stewardess with a glance of discreet sympathy reveal to an inquirer the
ship's provision for human weakness, he did not on this account feel
better disposed toward morbid intrusions either upon art or life, partly
because he was himself an excellent sailor and partly because after all
as a realist he had unquestionably not been a success.

"Time for a shave before lunch, steward?" he inquired heartily.

"The first bugle will go in about twenty minutes, sir."

John paused for an instant at his own cabin to extract from his suitcase
the particular outrage upon conventional headgear (it was a deerstalker
of Lovat tweed) that he had evolved for this voyage; and presently he
was sitting in the barber shop, wondering at first why anybody should be
expected to buy any of the miscellaneous articles exposed for sale at
such enhanced prices on every hook and in every nook of the little
saloon, and soon afterward seriously considering the advantage of a pair
of rope-soled shoes upon a heeling deck.

"Very natty things those, sir," said the barber. "I laid in a stock once
at Gib., when we did the southern rowt. Shave you close, sir?"

"Once over, please."

"Skin tender?"

"Rather tender."

"Yes, sir. And the beard's a bit strong, sir. Shave yourself, sir?"

"Usually, but I was up rather early this morning."

"Safety razor, sir?"

"If you think such a description justifiable--yes--a safety."

"They're all the go now, and no mistake ... safety bicycles, safety
matches, safety razors ... they've all come in our time ... yes, sir,
just a little bit to the right--thank you, sir! Not your first crossing,
I take it?"

"No, my third."

"Interesting place, America. But I am from Wandsworth myself. Hair's
getting rather thin round the temples. Would you like something to
brisken up the growth a bit? Another time? Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.
Parting on the left's it, I think?"

"No grease," said John as fiercely as he ever spoke. The barber seemed
to replace the pot of brilliantine with regret.

"What would you like then?" He might have been addressing a spoilt
child. "Flowers-and-honey? Eau-de-quinine? Or perhaps a friction? I've
got lavingder, carnation, wallflower, vilit, lilerk...."

"Bay rum," John declared, firmly.

The barber sighed for such an unadventurous soul; and John, who could
not bear to hurt even the most superficial emotions of a barber, changed
his mind and threw him into a smiling bustle of gratification.

"Rather strong," John said, half apologetically; for while the friction
was being administered the barber had explained in jerks how every time
he went ashore in New York or Liverpool he was in the habit of searching
about for some novel wash or tonic or pomade, and John did not want to
make him feel that his enterprise was unappreciated.

"Strong is it? Well, that's a good fault, sir."

"Yes, I suppose it is."

"What took my fancy was the natural way it smelled."

"Yes, indeed, painfully natural," John agreed.

He stood up and confronted himself in the barber's mirror; regarding the
fair, almost florid man, rather under six feet in height, with sanguine
blue eyes and full, but clearly cut, lips therein reflected, he came to
the comforting conclusion that he did not look his forty-two years and
nine months; indeed, while his muffled whistle was shaping rather than
uttering the tune of _Nancy Lee_, he nearly asked the barber to guess
his age. However, he decided not to risk it, pulled down the lapels of
his smoke-colored tweed coat, put on his deerstalker, tipped the barber
sufficiently well to secure a parting caress from the brush, promised to
meditate the purchase of the rope-soled shoes, and stepped jauntily in
the direction of the luncheon bugle. If John Touchwood had not been a
successful romantic playwright and an unsuccessful realistic novelist,
he might have found in the spectacle of the first lunch of an Atlantic
voyage an illustration of human madness and the destructive will of the
gods. As it was, his capacity for rapidly covering the domestic offices
of the brain with the crimson-ramblers of a lush idealism made him
forget the base fabric so prettily if obviously concealed. As it was, he
found an exhilaration in all this berserker greed, in the cries of
inquisitive children, in the rumpled appearance of women whom the bugle
had torn from their unpacking with the urgency of the last trump, in the
acrid smell of pickles, and in the persuasive gesture with which the
glistening stewards handed the potatoes while they glared angrily at one
another over their shoulders. If a cynical realist had in respect of
this lunch observed to John that a sow's ear was poor material for a
silk purse, he would have contested the universal truth of the proverb,
for at this moment he was engaged in chinking the small change of
sentimentality in just such a purse.

"How jolly everybody is," he thought, swinging round to his neighbor, a
gaunt woman in a kind of draggled mantilla, with an effusion of
good-will that expressed itself in a request to pass her the pickled
walnuts. John fancied an impulse to move away her chair when she
declined his offer; but of course the chair was fixed, and the only sign
of her distaste for pickles or conversation was a faint quiver, which to
any one less rosy than John might have suggested abhorrence, but which
struck him as merely shyness. It was now that for the first time he
became aware of a sickly fragrance that was permeating the atmosphere, a
fragrance that other people, too, seemed to be noticing by the way in
which they were looking suspiciously at the stewards.

"Rather oppressive, some of these flowers," said John to the gaunt lady.

"I don't see any flowers at our end of the table," she replied.

And then with an emotion that was very nearly horror John realized that,
though the barber was responsible, he must pay the penalty in a
vicarious mortification. His first impulse was to snatch a napkin and
wipe his hair; then he decided to leave the table immediately, because
after all nobody _could_ suspect him, in these as yet unvexed waters, of
anything but repletion; finally, hoping that the much powdered lady
opposite swathed in mauve chiffons was getting the discredit for the
fragrance, he stayed where he was. Nevertheless, the exhilaration had
departed; his neighbors all seemed dull folk; and congratulating himself
that after this first confused lunch he might reasonably expect to be
put at the captain's table in recognition of the celebrity that he could
fairly claim, John took from his pocket a bundle of letters which had
arrived just before he had left his hotel and busied himself with them
for the rest of the meal.

His success as a romantic playwright and his failure--or, as he would
have preferred to think of it in the satisfaction of fixing the guilty
fragrance upon the lady in mauve chiffons, his comparative failure--as a
realistic novelist had not destroyed John's passion for what he called
"being practical in small matters," and it was in pursuit of this that
having arranged his letters in two heaps which he mentally labeled as
"business" and "pleasure" he began with the former, as a child begins
(or ought to begin) his tea with the bread and butter and ends it with
the plumcake. In John's case, fresh from what really might be described
as a triumphant production in New York, the butter was spread so thickly
that "business" was too forbidding a name for such pleasantly nutritious
communications. His agent had sent him the returns of the second week;
and playing to capacity in one of the largest New York theaters is
nearer to a material paradise than anything outside the Mohammedan
religion. Then there was an offer from one of the chief film companies
to produce his romantic drama of two years ago, that wonderful riot of
color and Biblical phraseology, _The Fall of Babylon_. They ventured to
think that the cinematographer would do his imagination more justice
than the theater, particularly as upon their dramatic ranch in
California they now had more than a hundred real camels and eight real
elephants. John chuckled at the idea of a few animals compensating for
the absence of his words, but nevertheless ... the entrance of
Nebuchadnezzar, yes, it should be wonderfully effective ... and the
great grass-eating scene, yes, that might positively be more impressive
on the films ... with one or two audiences it had trembled for a moment
between the sublime and the ridiculous. It was a pity that the offer had
not arrived before he was leaving New York, but no doubt he should be
able to talk it over with the London representatives of the firm. Hullo
here was Janet Bond writing to him ... charming woman, charming
actress.... He wandered for a few minutes rather vaguely in the maze of
her immense handwriting, but disentangled his comprehension at last and
deciphered:

THE PARTHENON THEATRE.

Sole Proprietress: Miss Janet Bond.

_October 10, 1910._

DEAR MR. TOUCHWOOD,--I wonder if you have forgotten our talk at Sir
Herbert's that night? I'm so hoping not. And your scheme for a real
Joan of Arc? Do think of me this winter. Your picture of the scene with
Gilles de Rais--you see I followed your advice and read him up--has
_haunted_ me ever since. I can hear the horses' hoofs coming nearer and
nearer and the cries of the murdered children. I'm so glad you've had a
success with _Lucrezia_ in New York. I don't _think_ it would suit me
from what I read about it. You know how _particular_ my public is.
That's why I'm so anxious to play the Maid. When will _Lucrezia_ be
produced in London, and where? There are many rumours. Do come and see
me when you get back to England, and I'll tell you who I've thought of
to play Gilles. I _think_ you'll find him very intelligent. But of
course everything depends on your inclination, or should I say
inspiration? And then that wonderful speech to the Bishop! How does it
begin? "Bishop, thou hast betrayed thy holy trust." Do be a little
flattered that I've remembered that line. It needn't _all_ be in blank
verse, and I think little Truscott would be so good as the Bishop. You
see how _enthusiastic_ I am and how I _believe_ in the idea. All good
wishes.

Yours sincerely and hopefully,

JANET BOND.

John certainly was a little flattered that Miss Bond should have
remembered the Maid's great speech to the Bishop of Beauvais, and the
actress's enthusiasm roused in him an answering flame, so that the cruet
before him began to look like the castelated walls of Orleans, and while
his gaze was fixed upon the bowl of salad he began to compose _Act II._
_Scene I_--_Open country. Enter Joan on horseback. From the summit of a
grassy knoll she searches the horizon._ So fixedly was John regarding
his heroine on top of the salad that the head steward came over and
asked anxiously if there was anything the matter with it. And even when
John assured him that there was nothing he took it away and told one of
the under-stewards to remove the caterpillar and bring a fresh bowl.
Meanwhile, John had picked up the other bundle of letters and begun to
read his news from home.

65 HILL ROAD,

St. John's Wood, N.W.,

_October 10_.

DEAR JOHN,--We have just read in the _Telegraph_ of your great success
and we are both very glad. Edith writes me that she did have a letter
from you. I dare say you thought she would send it on to us but she
didn't, and of course I understand you're busy only I should have liked
to have had a letter ourselves. James asks me to tell you that he is
probably going to do a book on the Cymbalist movement in literature. He
says that the time has come to take a final survey of it. He is also
writing some articles for the _Fortnightly Review_. We shall all be so
glad to welcome you home again.

Your affectionate sister-in-law,

BEATRICE TOUCHWOOD.

"Poor Beatrice," thought John, penitently. "I ought to have sent her a
line. She's a good soul. And James ... what a plucky fellow he is!
Always full of schemes for books and articles. Wonderful really, to go
on writing for an audience of about twenty people. And I used to grumble
because my novels hadn't world-wide circulations. Poor old James ... a
good fellow."

He picked up the next letter; which he found was from his other
sister-in-law.

HALMA HOUSE,

198 Earl's Court Square, S.W.,

_October 9_.

DEAR JOHN,--Well, you've had a hit with _Lucrezia_, lucky man! If you
sent out an Australian company, don't you think I might play lead? I
quite understand that you couldn't manage it for me either in London or
America, but after all you _are_ the author and you surely have _some_
say in the cast. I've got an understudy at the Parthenon, but I can't
stand Janet. Such a selfish actress. She literally doesn't think of any
one but herself. There's a chance I may get a decent part on tour with
Lambton this autumn. George isn't very well, and it's been rather
miserable this wet summer in the boarding house as Bertram and Viola
were ill and kept away from school. I would have suggested their going
down to Ambles, but Hilda was so very unpleasant when I just hinted at
the idea that I preferred to keep them with me in town. Both children
ask every day when you're coming home. You're quite the favourite uncle.
George was delighted with your success. Poor old boy, he's had another
financial disappointment, and your success was quite a consolation.

ELEANOR.

"I wish Eleanor was anywhere but on the stage," John sighed. "But she's
a plucky woman. I _must_ write her a part in my next play. Now for
Hilda."

He opened his sister's letter with the most genial anticipation, because
it was written from his new country house in Hampshire, that county
house which he had coveted for so long and to which the now faintly
increasing motion of the _Murmania_ reminded him that he was fast
returning.

AMBLES,

Wrottesford, Hants,

_October 11_.

MY DEAR JOHN,--Just a line to congratulate you on your new success. Lots
of money in it, I suppose. Dear Harold is quite well and happy at
Ambles. Quite the young squire! I had a little coolness with
Eleanor--entirely on her side of course, but Bertram is really such a
_bad_ influence for Harold and so I told her that I did not think you
would like her to take possession of your new house before you'd had
time to live in it yourself. Besides, so many children all at once would
have disturbed poor Mama. Edith drove over with Frida the other day and
tells me you wrote to her. I should have liked a letter, too, but you
always spoil poor Edith. Poor little Frida looks very peaky. Much love
from Harold who is always asking when you're coming home. Mama is very
well, I'm glad to say.

Your affectionate sister,

HILDA CURTIS.

"She might have told me a little more about the house," John murmured to
himself. And then he began to dream about Ambles and to plant
old-fashioned flowers along its mellow red-brick garden walls. "I shall
be in time to see the colouring of the woods," he thought. The
_Murmania_ answered his aspiration with a plunge, and several of the
rumpled ladies rose hurriedly from table to prostrate themselves for the
rest of the voyage. John opened a fourth letter from England.

THE VICARAGE,

Newton Candover, Hants,

_October 7_.

MY DEAREST JOHN,--I was so glad to get your letter, and so glad to hear
of your success. Laurence says that if he were not a vicar he should
like to be a dramatic author. In fact, he's writing a play now on a
Biblical subject, but he fears he will have trouble with the Bishop, as
it takes a very broad view of Christianity. You know that Laurence has
recently become very broad? He thinks the village people like it, but
unfortunately old Mrs. Paxton--you know who I mean--the patroness of the
living--is so bigoted that Laurence has had a great deal of trouble with
her. I'm sorry to say that dear little Frida is looking thin. We think
it's the wet summer. Nothing but rain. Ambles was looking beautiful when
we drove over last week, but Harold is a little bumptious and Hilda does
not seem to see his faults. Dear Mama was looking _very_ well--better
than I've seen her for ages. Frida sends such a lot of love to dearest
Uncle John. She never stops talking about you. I sometimes get quite
jealous for Laurence. Not really, of course, because family affection is
the foundation of civil life. Laurence is out in the garden speaking to
a man whose pig got into our conservatory this morning. Much love.

Your loving sister,

EDITH.

John put the letter down with a faint sigh: Edith was his favorite
sister, but he often wished that she had not married a parson. Then he
took up the last letter of the family packet, which was from his
housekeeper in Church Row.

39 CHURCH ROW,

_Hampstead, N.W._

DEAR SIR,--This is to inform you with the present that everythink is
very well at your house and that Maud and Elsa is very well as it leaves
me at present. We as heard nothink from Emily since she as gone down to
Hambles your other house, and we hope which is Maud, Elsa and myself you
wont spend all your time out of London which is looking lovely at
present with the leaves beginning to turn and all. With dutiful respects
from Maud, Elsa and self, I am,

Your obedient servant,

MARY WORFOLK.

"Dear old Mrs. Worfolk. She's already quite jealous of Ambles ...
charming trait really, for after all it means she appreciates Church
Row. Upon my soul, I feel a bit jealous of Ambles myself."

John began to ponder the pleasant heights of Hampstead and to think of
the pale blue October sky and of the yellow leaves shuffling and
slipping along the quiet alleys in the autumn wind; to think, too, of
his library window and of London spread out below in a refulgence of
smoke and gold; to think of the chrysanthemums in his little garden and
of the sparrows' chirping in the Virginia-creeper that would soon be all
aglow like a well banked-up fire against his coming. Five delightful
letters really, every one of them full of good wishes and cordial
affection! The _Murmania_ swooped forward, and there was a faint tingle
of glass and cutlery. John gathered up his correspondence to go on deck
and bless the Atlantic for being the pathway to home. As he rose from
the table he heard a voice say:

"Yes, my dear thing, but I've never been a poor relation yet, and I
don't intend to start now."

The saloon was empty except for himself and two women opposite, the
climax of whose conversation had come with such a harsh fitness of
comment upon the letters he had just been reading. John was angry with
himself for the dint so easily made upon the romantic shield he upheld
against life's onset; he felt that he had somehow been led into an
ambush where all his noblest sentiments had been massacred; five bells
sounded upon the empty saloon with an almost funereal gravity; and, when
the two women passed out, John, notwithstanding the injured regard of
his steward, sat down again and read right through the family letters
from a fresh standpoint. The fact of it was that there had turned out to
be very few currants in the cake, for the eating of which he had
prepared himself with such well-buttered bread. Few currants? There was
not a single one, unless Mrs. Worfolk's antagonism to the idea of Ambles
might be considered a gritty shred of a currant. John rose at once when
he had finished his letters, put them in his pocket, and followed the
unconscious disturbers of his hearth on deck. He soon caught sight of
them again where, arm in arm, they were pacing the sunlit starboard side
and apparently enjoying the gusty southwest wind. John wondered how long
it would be before he was given a suitable opportunity to make their
acquaintance, and tried to regulate his promenade so that he should
always meet them face to face either aft or forward, but never amidships
where heavily muffled passengers reclined in critical contemplation of
their fellow-travellers over the top of the last popular novel. "Some
men, you know," he told himself, "would join their walk with a mere
remark about the weather. They wouldn't stop to consider if their
company was welcome. They'd be so serenely satisfied with themselves
that they'd actually succeed ... yes, confound them ... they'd bring it
off! Yet, after all, I suppose in a way that without vanity I might
presume they _would_ be rather interested to meet me. Because, of
course, there's no doubt that people _are_ interested in authors. But,
it's no good ... I can't do that ... this is really one of those moments
when I feel as if I was still seventeen years old ... shyness, I suppose
... yet the rest of my family aren't shy."

This took John's thoughts back to his relations, but to a much less
complacent point of view of them than before that maliciously apposite
remark overheard in the saloon had lighted up the group as abruptly and
unbecomingly as a magnesium flash. However inconsistent he might appear,
he was afraid that he should be more critical of them in future. He
began to long to talk over his affairs with that girl and, looking up at
this moment, he caught her eyes, which either because the weather was so
gusty or because he was so ready to hang decorations round a simple fact
seemed to him like calm moorland pools, deep violet-brown pools in
heathery solitudes. Her complexion had the texture of a rose in
November, the texture that gains a rare lucency from the grayness and
moisture by which one might suppose it would be ruined. She was wearing
a coat and skirt of Harris tweed of a shade of misty green, and with her
slim figure and fine features she seemed at first glance not more than
twenty. But John had not passed her another half-dozen times before he
had decided that she was almost a woman of thirty. He looked to see if
she was wearing a wedding ring and was already enough interested in her
to be glad that she was not. This relief was, of course, not at all due
to any vision of himself in a more intimate relationship; but merely
because he was glad to find that her personality, of which he was by now
more definitely aware than of her beauty (well, not beauty, but charm,
and yet perhaps after all he was being too grudging in not awarding her
positive beauty) would be her own. There was something distinctly
romantic in this beautiful young woman of nearly thirty leading her own
life unimpeded by a loud-voiced husband. Of course, the husband might
have had a gentle voice, but usually this type of woman seemed a prey to
bluffness and bigness, as if to display her atmosphere charms she had
need of a rugged landscape for a background. He found himself glibly
thinking of her as a type; but with what type could she be classified?
Surely she was attracting him by being exceptional rather than typical;
and John soothed his alarmed celibacy by insisting that she appealed to
him with a hint of virginal wisdom which promised a perfect intercourse,
if only their acquaintanceship could be achieved naturally, that is to
say, without the least suggestion of an ulterior object. _She had never
been a poor relation yet, and she did not intend to start being one
now._ Of course, such a woman was still unmarried. But how had she
avoided being a poor relation? What was her work? Why was she coming
home to England? And who was her companion? He looked at the other woman
who walked beside her with a boyish slouch, wore gold pince-nez, and had
a tight mouth, not naturally tight, but one that had been tightened by
driving and riding. It was absurd to walk up and down forever like this;
the acquaintance must be made immediately or not at all; it would never
do to hang round them waiting for an opportunity of conversation. John
decided to venture a simple remark the next time he met them face to
face; but when he arrived at the after end of the promenade deck they
had vanished, and the embarrassing thought occurred to him that perhaps
having divined his intention they had thus deliberately snubbed him. He
went to the rail and leaned over to watch the water undulating past; a
sudden gust caught his cap and took it out to sea. He clapped his hand
too late to his head; a fragrance of carnations breathed upon the salt
windy sunlight; a voice behind him, softly tremulous with laughter,
murmured:

"I say, bad luck."

John commended his deerstalker to the care of all the kindly Oceanides
and turned round: it was quite easy after all, and he was glad that he
had not thought of deliberately letting his cap blow into the sea.

"Look, it's actually floating like a boat," she exclaimed.

"Yes, it was shaped like a boat," John said; he was thinking how absurd
it was now to fancy that swiftly vanishing, utterly inappropriate piece
of concave tweed should only a few seconds ago have been worn the other
way round on a human head.

"But you mustn't catch cold," she added. "Haven't you another cap?"

John did possess another cap, one that just before he left England he
had bought about dusk in the Burlington Arcade, one which in the velvety
bloom of a July evening had seemed worthy of summer skies and seas, but
which in the glare of the following day had seemed more like the shreds
of barbaric attire that are brought back by travelers from exotic lands
to be taken out of a glass case and shown to visitors when the
conversation is flagging on Sunday afternoons in the home counties. Now
if John's plays were full of fierce hues, if his novels had been sepia
studies of realism which the public considered painful and the critics
described as painstaking, his private life had been of a mild uniform
pink, a pinkishness that recalled the chaste hospitality of the best
spare bedroom. Never yet in that pink life had he let himself go to the
extent of wearing a cap, which, even if worn afloat by a colored
prizefighter crossing the Atlantic to defend or challenge supremacy,
would have created an amused consternation, but which on the head of a
well-known romantic playwright must arouse at least dismay and possibly
panic. Yet this John (he had reached the point of regarding himself with
objective surprise), the pinkishness of whose life, though it might be a
protest against cynicism and gloom, was eternally half-way to a blush,
went off to his cabin with the intention of putting on that cap. With
himself for a while he argued that something must be done to imprison
the smell of carnations, that a bowler hat would look absurd, that he
really must not catch cold; but all the time this John knew perfectly
well that what he really wanted was to give a practical demonstration of
his youth. This John did not care a damn about his success as a romantic
playwright, but he did care a great deal that these two young women
should vote him a suitable companion for the rest of the voyage.

"Why, it's really not so bad," he assured himself, when before the
mirror he tried to judge the effect. "I rather think it's better than
the other one. Of course, if I had seen when I bought it that the checks
were purple and not black I dare say I shouldn't have bought it--but, by
Jove, I'm rather glad I didn't notice them. After all, I have a right to
be a little eccentric in my costume. What the deuce does it matter to me
if people do stare? Let them stare! I shall be the last of the lot to
feel seasick, anyway."

John walked defiantly back to the promenade deck, and several people who
had not bothered to remark the well-groomed florid man before now asked
who he was, and followed his progress along the deck with the easily
interested gaze of the transatlantic passenger.

For the rest of the voyage John never knew whether the attention his
entrance into the saloon always evoked was due to his being the man who
wore the unusual cap or to his being the man who had written _The Fall
of Babylon_; nor, indeed, did he bother to make sure, for he was
fortified during the rest of the voyage by the company of Miss Doris
Hamilton and Miss Ida Merritt and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

"Now am I attributing to Miss Hamilton more discretion than she's really
got?" he asked himself on the last night of the passage, a stormy night
off the Irish coast, while he swayed before the mirror in the creaking
cabin. John was accustomed, like most men with clear-cut profiles, to
take advice from his reflection, and perhaps it was his dramatic
instinct that led him usually to talk aloud to this lifelong friend.
"Have I in fact been too impulsive in this friendship? Have I? That's
the question. I certainly told her a lot about myself, and I think she
appreciated my confidence. Yet suppose that she's just an ordinary young
woman and goes gossiping all over England about meeting me? I really
must remember that I'm no longer a nonentity and that, though Miss
Hamilton is not a journalist, her friend is, and, what is more,
confessed that the sole object of her visit to America had been to
interview distinguished men with the help of Miss Hamilton. The way she
spoke about her victims reminded me of the way that fellow in the
smoking-saloon talked about the tarpon fishing off Florida ... famous
American statesmen, financiers, and architects existed quite
impersonally for her to be caught just like tarpon. Really when I come
to think of it I've been at the end of Miss Merritt's rod for five days,
and as with all the others the bait was Miss Hamilton."

John's mistrust in the prudence of his behavior during the voyage had
been suddenly roused by the prospect of reaching Liverpool next day. The
word positively exuded disillusionment; it was as anti-romantic as a
notebook of Herbert Spencer. He undressed and got into his bunk; the
motion of the ship and the continual opening and shutting of cabin doors
all the way along the corridor kept him from sleep, and for a long time
he lay awake while the delicious freedom of the seas was gradually
enslaved by the sullen, prosaic, puritanical, bilious word--Liverpool.
He had come down to his cabin, full of the exhilaration of a last quick
stroll up and down the spray-whipped deck; he had come down from a long
and pleasant talk all about himself where he and Miss Hamilton had sat
in the lee of some part of a ship's furniture the name of which he did
not know and did not like to ask, a long and pleasant talk, cozily
wrapped in two rugs glistening faintly in the starlight with salty rime;
he had come down from a successful elimination of Miss Merritt, his
whole personality marinated in freedom, he might say; and now the mere
thought of Liverpool was enough to disenchant him and to make him feel
rather like a man who was recovering from a brilliant, a too brilliant
revelation of himself provoked by champagne. He began to piece together
the conversation and search for indiscretions. To begin with, he had
certainly talked a great deal too much about himself; it was not
dignified for a man in his position to be so prodigally frank with a
young woman he had only known for five days. Suppose she had been
laughing at him all the time? Suppose that even now she was laughing at
him with Miss Merritt? "Good heavens, what an amount I told her," John
gasped aloud. "I even told her what my real circulation was when I used
to write novels, and I very nearly told her how much I made out of _The
Fall of Babylon_, though since that really was a good deal, it wouldn't
have mattered so much. And what did I say about my family? Well, perhaps
that isn't so important. But how much did I tell her of my scheme for
_Joan of Arc_? Why, she might have been my confidential secretary by the
way I talked. My confidential secretary? And why not? I am entitled to a
secretary--in fact my position demands a secretary. But would she accept
such a post? Now don't let me be impulsive."

John began to laugh at himself for a quality in which as a matter of
fact he was, if anything, deficient. He often used to chaff himself,
but, of course, always without the least hint of ill-nature, which is
perhaps why he usually selected imaginary characteristics for genial
reproof.

"Impulsive dog," he said to himself. "Go to sleep, and don't forget that
confidential secretaries afloat and confidential secretaries ashore are
very different propositions. Yes, you thought you were being very clever
when you bought those rope-soled shoes to keep your balance on a
slippery deck, but you ought to have bought a rope-soled cap to keep
your head from slipping."

This seemed to John in the easy optimism that prevails upon the borders
of sleep an excellent joke, and he passed with a chuckle through the
ivory gate.

The next day John behaved helpfully and politely at the Customs, and
indeed continued to be helpful and polite until his companions of the
voyage were established in a taxi at Euston. He had carefully written
down the Hamiltons' address with a view to calling on them one day, but
even while he was writing the number of the square in Chelsea he was
thinking about Ambles and trying to decide whether he should make a dash
across London to Waterloo on the chance of catching the 9:05 P.M. or
spend the night at his house in Church Row.

"I think perhaps I'd better stay in town to-night," he said. "Good-by.
Most delightful trip across--see you both again soon, I hope. You don't
advise me to try for the 9:05?" he asked once more, anxiously.

Miss Hamilton laughed from the depths of the taxi; when she laughed, for
the briefest moment John felt an Atlantic breeze sweep through the
railway station.

"_I_ recommend a good night's rest," she said.

So John's last thought of her was of a nice practical young woman; but,
as he once again told himself, the idea of a secretary was absurd.
Besides, did she even know shorthand?

"Do you know shorthand?" he turned round to shout as the taxi buzzed
away; he did not hear her answer, if answer there was.

"Of course I can always write," he decided, and without one sigh he
busied himself with securing his own taxi for Hampstead.




CHAPTER II


"I've got too many caps, Mrs. Worfolk," John proclaimed next morning to
his housekeeper. "You can give this one away."

"Yes, sir. Who would you like it given to?"

"Oh, anybody, anybody. Tramps very often ask for old boots, don't they?
Some tramp might like it."

"Would you have any erbjections if I give it to my nephew, sir?"

"None whatever."

"It seems almost too perky for a tramp, sir; and my sister's boy--well,
he's just at the age when they like to dress theirselves up a bit. He's
doing very well, too. His employers is extremely satisfied with the way
he's doing. Extremely satisfied, his employers are."

"I'm delighted to hear it."

"Yes, sir. Well, it's been some consolation to my poor sister, I mean to
say, after the way her husband behaved hisself, and it's to be hoped
Herbert'll take fair warning. Let me see, you _will_ be having lunch at
home I think you said?"

John winced: this was precisely what he would have avoided by catching
the 9:05 at Waterloo last night.

"I shan't be in to lunch for a few days, Mrs. Worfolk, no--er--nor to
dinner either as a matter of fact. No--in fact I'll be down in the
country. I must see after things there, you know," he added with an
attempt to suggest as jovially as possible a real anxiety about his new
house.

"The country, oh yes," repeated Mrs. Worfolk grimly; John saw the
beech-woods round Ambles blasted by his housekeeper's disapproval.

"You wouldn't care to--er--come down and give a look round yourself,
Mrs. Worfolk? My sister, Mrs. Curtis--"

"Oh, I should prefer not to intrude in any way, sir. But if you insist,
why, of course--"

"Oh no, I don't insist," John hurriedly interposed.

"No, sir. Well, we shall all have to get used to being left alone
nowadays, and that's all there is to it."

"But I shall be back in a few days, Mrs. Worfolk. I'm a Cockney at
heart, you know. Just at first--"

Mrs. Worfolk shook her head and waddled tragically to the door.

"There's nothing else you'll be wanting this morning, sir?" she turned
to ask in accents that seemed to convey forgiveness of her master in
spite of everything.

"No, thank you, Mrs. Worfolk. Please send Maud up to help me pack. Good
heavens," he added to himself when his housekeeper had left the room,
"why shouldn't I be allowed a country house? And I suppose the next
thing is that James and Beatrice and George and Eleanor will all be
offended because I didn't go tearing round to see them the moment I
arrived. One's relations never understand that after the production of a
play one requires a little rest. Besides, I must get on with my new
play. I absolutely _must_."

John's tendency to abhor the vacuum of success was corrected by the
arrival of Maud, the parlor-maid, whose statuesque anemia and impersonal
neatness put something in it. Before leaving for America he had
supplemented the rather hasty preliminary furnishing of his new house by
ordering from his tailor a variety of country costumes. These Maud, with
feminine intuition superimposed on what she would have called her
"understanding of valeting," at once produced for his visit to Ambles;
John in the prospect of half a dozen unworn peat-perfumed suits of tweed
flung behind him any lingering doubt about there being something in
success, and with the recapture of his enthusiasm for what he called
"jolly things" was anxious that Maud should share in it.

"Do you think these new things are a success, Maud?" he asked, perhaps a
little too boisterously. At any rate, the parlor-maid's comprehension of
valeting had apparently never been so widely stretched, for a faint
coralline blush tinted her waxen cheeks.

"They seem very nice, sir," she murmured, with a slight stress upon the
verb.

John felt that he had trespassed too far upon the confines of Maud's
humanity and retreated hurriedly. He would have liked to explain that
his inquiry had merely been a venture into abstract esthetics and that
he had not had the least intention of extracting her opinion about these
suits _on him_; but he felt that an attempt at explanation would
embarrass her, and he hummed instead over a selection of ties, as a bee
hums from flower to flower in a garden, careless of the gardener who
close at hand is potting up plants.

"I will take these ties," he announced on the last stave of _A Fine Old
English Gentleman_.

Maud noted them gravely.

"And I shall have a few books. Perhaps there won't be room for them?"

"There won't be room for them, not in your dressing-case, sir."

"Oh, I know there won't be room in that," said John, bitterly.

His dressing-case might be considered the medal he had struck in honor
of _The Fall of Babylon_: he had passed it every morning on his way to
rehearsals and, dreaming of the triumph that might soon be his, had
vowed he would buy it were such a triumph granted. It had cost L75, was
heavy enough when empty to strain his wrist and when full to break his
back, and it contained more parasites of the toilet table and the
writing desk than one could have supposed imaginable. These parasites
each possessed an abode of such individual shape that leaving them
behind made no difference to the number of really useful articles, like
pajamas, that could be carried in the cubic space lined with blue
corded silk on which they looked down like the inconvenient houses of a
fashionable square. Therefore wherever John went, the fittings went too,
a glittering worthless mob of cut-glass, pigskin, tortoiseshell and
ivory.

"But in my portmanteau," John persisted. "Won't there be room there?"

"I might squeeze them in," Maud admitted. "It depends what boots you're
wanting to take with you, sir."

"Never mind," he sighed. "I can make a separate parcel of them."

"There's the basket what we were going to use for the cat, sir."

"No, I should prefer a brown paper parcel," he decided. It would be
improper for the books out of which the historical trappings of his
_Joan of Arc_ were to be manufactured to travel in a lying-in hospital
for cats.

John left Maud to finish the packing and went downstairs to his library.
This double room of fine proportions was, as one might expect from the
library of a popular writer, the core--the veritable omphalos of the
house; with its fluted pilasters, cream-colored panels and
cherub-haunted ceiling, the expanse of city and sky visible from three
sedate windows at the south end and the glimpse of a busy Hampstead
street caught from those facing north, not to speak of the prismatic
rows of books, it was a room worthy of art's most remunerative triumphs,
the nursery of inspiration, and, save for a slight suggestion that the
Muses sometimes drank afternoon tea there, the room of an indomitable
bachelor. When John stepped upon the wreaths, ribbons, and full-blown
roses of the threadbare Aubusson rug that floated like gossamer upon a
green carpet of Axminster pile as soft as some historic lawn, he was
sure that success was not a vacuum. In his now optimistic mood he hoped
ultimately to receive from Ambles the kind of congratulatory benediction
that the library at Church Row always bestowed upon his footsteps.
Indeed, if he had not had such an ambition for his country house, he
could scarcely have endured to quit even for a week this library, where
fires were burning in two grates and where the smoke of his Partaga was
haunting, like a complacent ghost, the imperturbable air. John possessed
another library at Ambles, but he had not yet had time to do more than
hurriedly stock it with the standard works that he felt no country house
should be without. His library in London was the outcome of historical
research preparatory to writing his romantic plays; and since all works
of popular historical interest are bound with a much more lavish
profusion of color and ornament even than the works of fiction to which
they most nearly approximate, John's shelves outwardly resembled rather
a collection of armor than a collection of books. There were, of course,
many books the insides of which were sufficiently valuable to excuse
their dingy exterior; but none of these occupied the line, where romance
after romance of exiled queens, confession after confession of
morganatic wives, memoir after memoir from above and below stairs,
together with catch-penny alliterative gatherings as of rude regents and
libidinous landgraves flashed in a gorgeous superficiality of gilt and
text. In order to amass the necessary material for a play about Joan of
Arc John did not concern himself with original documents. He assumed,
perhaps rightly, that a Camembert cheese is more palatable and certainly
more portable than a herd of unmilked cows. To dramatize the life of
Joan of Arc he took from his shelves _Saints and Sinners of the
Fifteenth Century_ ... but a catalogue is unnecessary: enough that when
the heap of volumes chosen stood upon his desk it glittered like the
Maid herself before the walls of Orleans.

"After all," as John had once pointed out in a moment of exasperation to
his brother, James, the critic, "Shakespeare didn't sit all day in the
reading-room of the British Museum."

An hour later the playwright, equipped alike for country rambles and
poetic excursions, was sitting in a first-class compartment of a London
and South-Western railway train; two hours after that he was sitting in
the Wrottesford fly swishing along between high hazel hedges of
golden-brown.

"I shall have to see about getting a dog-cart," he exclaimed, when after
a five minutes' struggle to let down the window with the aid of a strap
that looked like an Anglican stole he had succeeded in opening the door
and nearly falling head-long into the lane.

"You have to let down the window _before_ you get out," said the driver
reproachfully, trying to hammer the frameless window back into place and
making such a noise about it that John could not bear to accentuate by
argument the outrage that he was offering to this morning of exquisite
decline, on which earth seemed to be floating away into a windless
infinity like one of her own dead leaves. No, on such a morning
controversy was impossible, but he should certainly take immediate steps
to acquire a dog-cart.

"For it's like being jolted in a badly made coffin," he thought, when he
was once more encased in the fly and, having left the high road behind,
was driving under an avenue of sycamores bordered by a small stream, the
water of which was stained to the color of sherry by the sunlight
glowing down through the arches of tawny leaves overhead. To John this
avenue always seemed the entrance to a vast park surrounding his country
house; it was indeed an almost unfrequented road, grass-grown in the
center and lively with rabbits during most of the day, so that his
imagination of ancestral approaches was easily stimulated and he felt
like a figure in a painting by Marcus Stone. It was lucky that John's
sanguine imagination could so often satisfy his ambition; prosperous
playwright though he was, he had not yet made nearly enough money to buy
a real park. However, in his present character of an eighteenth-century
squire he determined, should the film version of _The Fall of Babylon_
turn out successful, to buy a lawny meadow of twenty acres that would
add much to the dignity and seclusion of Ambles, the boundaries of which
at the back were now overlooked by a herd of fierce Kerry cows who
occupied the meadow and during the summer had made John's practice
shots with a brassy too much like big-game shooting to be pleasant or
safe. After about a mile the avenue came to an end where a narrow curved
bridge spanned the stream, which now flowed away to the left along the
bottom of a densely wooded hillside. The fly crossed over with an
impunity that was surprising in face of a printed warning that
extraordinary vehicles should avoid this bridge, and began to climb the
slope by a wide diagonal track between bushes of holly, the green of
which seemed vivid and glossy against the prevailing brown. The noise of
the wheels was deadened by the heavy drift of beech leaves, and the
stillness of this russet world, except for the occasional scream of a
jay or the flapping of disturbed pigeons, demanded from John's
illustrative fancy something more remote and Gothic than the eighteenth
century.

"Malory," he said to himself. "Absolute Malory. It's almost impossible
not to believe that Sir Gawaine might not come galloping down through
this wood."

Eager to put himself still more deeply in accord with the romantic
atmosphere, John tried this time to open the door of the fly with the
intention of walking meditatively up the hill in its wake; the door
remained fast; but he managed to open the window, or rather he broke it.

"I've a jolly good mind to get a motor," he exclaimed, savagely.

Every knight errant's horse in the neighborhood bolted at the thought,
and by the time John had reached the top of the hill and emerged upon a
wide stretch of common land dotted with ancient hawthorns in full
crimson berry he was very much in the present. For there on the other
side of the common, flanked by shelving woods of oak and beech and
backed by rising downs on which a milky sky ruffled its breast like a
huge swan lazily floating, stood Ambles, a solitary, deep-hued,
Elizabethan house with dreaming chimney-stacks and tumbled mossy roofs
and garden walls rising from the heaped amethysts of innumerable
Michaelmas daisies.

"My house," John murmured in a paroxysm of ownership.

The noise of the approaching fly had drawn expectant figures to the
gate; John, who had gratified affection, curiosity and ostentation by
sending a wireless message from the _Murmania_, a telegram from
Liverpool yesterday, and another from Euston last night to announce his
swift arrival, had therefore only himself to thank for perceiving in the
group the black figure of his brother-in-law, the Reverend Laurence
Armitage. He drove away the scarcely formed feeling of depression by
supposing that Edith could not by herself have trundled the
barrel-shaped vicarage pony all the way from Newton Candover to Ambles,
and, finding that the left-hand door of the fly was unexpectedly
susceptible to the prompting of its handle, he alighted with such
rapidity that not one of his smiling relations could have had any
impression but that he was bounding to greet them. The two sisters were
so conscious of their rich unmarried brother's impulsive advance that
each incited her own child to responsive bounds so that they might meet
him half-way along the path to the front door, in the harborage of which
Grandma (whose morning nap had been interrupted by a sudden immersion in
two shawls, and a rapid swim with Emily, the maid from London, acting as
lifebuoy down the billowy passages and stairs of the old house) rocked
in breathless anticipation of the filial salute.

"Welcome back, my dear Johnnie," the old lady panted.

"How are you, mother? What, another new cap?"

Old Mrs. Touchwood patted her head complacently. "We bought it at
Threadgale's in Galton. The ribbons are the new hollyhock red."

"Delightful!" John exclaimed. "And who helped you to choose it? Little
Frida here?"

"Nobody _helped_ me, Johnnie. Hilda accompanied me into Galton; but she
wanted to buy a sardine-opener for the house."

John had not for a moment imagined that his mother had wanted any
advice about a cap; but inasmuch as Frida, in what was intended to be a
demonstrative welcome, prompted by her mother, was rubbing her head
against his ribs like a calf against a fence, he had felt he ought to
hook her to the conversation somehow. John's concern about Frida was
solved by the others' gathering round him for greetings.

First Hilda offered her sallow cheek, patting while he kissed it her
brother on the back with one hand, and with the other manipulating
Harold in such a way as to give John the impression that his nephew was
being forced into his waistcoat pocket.

"He feels you're his father now," whispered Hilda with a look that was
meant to express the tender resignation of widowhood, but which only
succeeded in suggesting a covetous maternity. John doubted if Harold
felt anything but a desire to escape from being sandwiched between his
mother's crape and his uncle's watch chain, and he turned to embrace
Edith, whose cheeks, soft and pink as a toy balloon, were floating
tremulously expectant upon the glinting autumn air.

"We've been so anxious about you," Edith murmured. "And Laurence has
such a lot to talk over with you."

John, with a slight sinking that was not altogether due to its being
past his usual luncheon hour, turned to be welcomed by his
brother-in-law.

The vicar of Newton Candover's serenity if he had not been a tall and
handsome man might have been mistaken for smugness; as it was, his
personality enveloped the scene with a ceremonious dignity that was not
less than archidiaconal, and except for his comparative youthfulness (he
was the same age as John) might well have been considered
archiepiscopal.

"Edith has been anxious about you. Indeed, we have all been anxious
about you," he intoned, offering his hand to John, for whom the sweet
damp odors of autumn became a whiff of pious women's veils, while the
leaves fluttering gently down from the tulip tree in the middle of the
lawn lisped like the India-paper of prayer-books.

"I've got an air-gun, Uncle John," ejaculated Harold, who having for
some time been inhaling the necessary breath now expelled the sentence
in a burst as if he had been an air-gun himself. John hailed the
announcement almost effusively; it reached him with the kind of relief
with which in childhood he had heard the number of the final hymn
announced; and a robin piping his delicate tune from the garden wall was
welcome as birdsong in a churchyard had been after service on Sundays
handicapped by the litany.

"Would you like to see me shoot at something?" Harold went on, hastily
cramming his mouth with slugs.

"Not now, dear," said Hilda, hastily. "Uncle John is tired. And don't
eat sweets just before lunch."

"Well, it wouldn't tire him to see me shoot at something. And I'm not
eating sweets. I'm getting ready to load."

"Let the poor child shoot if he wants to," Grandma put in.

Harold beamed ferociously through his spectacles, took a slug from his
mouth, fitted it into the air-gun, and fired, bringing down two leaves
from an espalier pear. Everybody applauded him, because everybody felt
glad that it had not been a window or perhaps even himself; the robin
cocked his tail contemptuously and flew away.

"And now I must go and get ready for lunch," said John, who thought a
second shot might be less innocuous, and was moreover really hungry. His
bedroom, dimity draped, had a pleasant rustic simplicity, but he decided
that it wanted living in: the atmosphere at present was too much that of
a well-recommended country inn.

"Yes, it wants living in," said John to himself. "I shall put in a good
month here and break the back of Joan of Arc."

"What skin is this, Uncle John?" a serious voice at his elbow inquired.
John started; he had not observed Harold's scout-like entrance.

"What skin is that, my boy?" he repeated in what he thought was the
right tone of avuncular jocularity and looking down at Harold, who was
examining with myopic intensity the dressing-case. "That is the skin of
a white elephant."

"But it's brown," Harold objected.

John rashly decided to extend his facetiousness.

"Yes, well, white elephants turn brown when they're shot, just as
lobsters turn red when they're boiled."

"Who shot it?"

"Oh, I don't know--probably some friend of the gentleman who keeps the
shop where I bought it."

"When?"

"Well, I can't exactly say when--but probably about three years ago."

"Father used to shoot elephants, didn't he?"

"Yes, my boy, your father used to shoot elephants."

"Perhaps he shot this one."

"Perhaps he did."

"Was he a friend of the gentleman who keeps the shop where you bought
it?"

"I shouldn't be surprised," said John.

"Wouldn't you?" said Harold, skeptically. "My father was an asplorer.
When I'm big I'm going to be an asplorer, too; but I sha'n't be friends
with shopkeepers."

"Confounded little snob," John thought, and began to look for his
nailbrush, the address of whose palatial residence of pigskin only Maud
knew.

"What are you looking for, Uncle John?" Harold asked.

"I'm looking for my nailbrush, Harold."

"Why?"

"To clean my nails."

"Are they dirty?"

"Well, they're just a little grubby after the railway journey."

"Mine aren't," Harold affirmed in a lofty tone. Then after a minute he
added: "I thought perhaps you were looking for the present you brought
me from America."

John turned pale and made up his mind to creep unobserved after lunch
into the market town of Galton and visit the local toyshop. It would be
an infernal nuisance, but it served him right for omitting to bring
presents either for his nephew or his niece.

"You're too smart," he said nervously to Harold. "Present time will be
after tea." The sentence sounded contradictory somehow, and he changed
it to "the time for presents will be five o'clock."

"Why?" Harold asked.

John was saved from answering by a tap at the door, followed by the
entrance of Mrs. Curtis.

"Oh, Harold's with you?" she exclaimed, as if it were the most
surprising juxtaposition in the world.

"Yes, Harold's with me," John agreed.

"You mustn't let him bother you, but he's been so looking forward to
your arrival. _When_ is Uncle coming, he kept asking."

"Did he ask _why_ I was coming?"

Hilda looked at her brother blankly, and John made up his mind to try
that look on Harold some time.

"Have you got everything you want?" she asked, solicitously.

"He hasn't got his nailbrush," said Harold.

Hilda assumed an expression of exaggerated alarm.

"Oh dear, I hope it hasn't been lost."

"No, no, no, it'll turn up in one of the glass bottles. I was just
telling Harold that I haven't really begun my unpacking yet."

"Uncle John's brought me a present from America," Harold proclaimed in
accents of greedy pride.

Hilda seized her brother's hand affectionately.

"Now you oughtn't to have done that. It's spoiling him. It really is.
Harold never expects presents."

"What a liar," thought John. "But not a bigger one than I am myself," he
supplemented, and then he announced aloud that he must go into Galton
after lunch and send off an important telegram to his agent.

"I wonder ..." Hilda began, but with an arch look she paused and seemed
to thrust aside temptation.

"What?" John weakly asked.

"Why ... but no, he might bore you by walking too slowly. Harold," she
added, seriously, "if Uncle John is kind enough to take you into Galton
with him, will you be a good boy and leave your butterfly net at home?"

"If I may take my air-gun," Harold agreed.

John rapidly went over in his mind the various places where Harold might
be successfully detained while he was in the toyshop, decided that the
risk would be too great, pulled himself together, and declined the
pleasure of his nephew's company on the ground that he must think over
very carefully the phrasing of the telegram he had to send, a mental
process, he explained, that Harold might distract.

"Another day, darling," said Hilda, consolingly.

"And then I'll be able to take my fishing-rod," said Harold.

"He is so like his poor father," Hilda murmured.

John was thinking sympathetically of the distant Amazonian tribe that
had murdered Daniel Curtis, when there was another tap at the door, and
Frida crackling loudly in a clean pinafore came in to say that the bell
for lunch was just going to ring.

"Yes, dear," said her aunt. "Uncle John knows already. Don't bother him
now. He's tired after his journey. Come along, Harold."

"He can have my nailbrush if he likes," Harold offered.

"Run, darling, and get it quickly then."

Harold rushed out of the room and could be heard hustling his cousin all
down the corridor, evoking complaints of "Don't, Harold, you rough boy,
you're crumpling my frock."

The bell for lunch sounded gratefully at this moment, and John, without
even washing his hands, hurried downstairs trying to look like a hungry
ogre, so anxious was he to avoid using Harold's nailbrush.

The dining-room at Ambles was a long low room with a large open
fireplace and paneled walls; from the window-seats bundles of drying
lavender competed pleasantly with the smell of hot kidney-beans upon the
table, at the head of which John took his rightful place; opposite to
him, placid as an untouched pudding, sat Grandmama. Laurence said grace
without being invited after standing up for a moment with an expression
of pained interrogation; Edith accompanied his words by making with her
forefinger and thumb a minute cruciform incision between two of the
bones of her stays, and inclined her head solemnly toward Frida in a
mute exhortation to follow her mother's example. Harold flashed his
spectacles upon every dish in turn; Emily's waiting was during this meal
of reunion colored with human affection.

"Well, I'm glad to be back in England," said John, heartily.

An encouraging murmur rippled round the table from his relations.

"Are these French beans from our own garden?" John asked presently.

"Scarlet-runners," Hilda corrected. "Yes, of course. We never trouble
the greengrocer. The frosts have been so light ..."

"I haven't got a bean left," said Laurence.

John nearly gave a visible jump; there was something terribly suggestive
in that simple horticultural disclaimer.

"Our beans are quite over," added Edith in the astonished voice of one
who has tumbled upon a secret of nature. She had a habit of echoing many
of her husband's remarks like this; perhaps "echoing" is a bad
description of her method, for she seldom repeated literally and often
not immediately. Sometimes indeed she would wait as long as half an hour
before she reissued in the garb of a personal philosophical discovery
or of an exegitical gloss the most casual remark of Laurence, a habit
which irritated him and embarrassed other people, who would look away
from Edith and mutter a hurried agreement or ask for the salt to be
passed.

"I remember," said old Mrs. Touchwood, "that beans were a favorite dish
of poor Papa, though I myself always liked peas better."

"I like peas," Harold proclaimed.

"I like peas, too," cried Frida excitedly.

"Frida," said her father, pulling out with a click one of the graver
tenor stops in his voice, "we do not talk at table about our likes and
dislikes."

Edith indorsed this opinion with a grave nod at Frida, or rather with a
solemn inclination of the head as if she were bowing to an altar.

"But I like new potatoes best of all," continued Harold. "My gosh, all
buttery!"

Laurence screwed up his eye in a disgusted wince, looked down his nose
at his plate, and drew a shocked cork from his throat.

"Hush," said Hilda. "Didn't you hear what Uncle Laurence said, darling?"

She spoke as one speaks to children in church when the organ begins; one
felt that she was inspired by social tact rather than by any real
reverence for the clergyman.

"Well, I do like new potatoes, and I like asparagus."

Frida was just going to declare for asparagus, too, when she caught her
father's eye and choked.

"Evidently the vegetable that Frida likes best," said John, riding
buoyantly upon the gale of Frida's convulsions, "is an artichoke."

It is perhaps lucky for professional comedians that rich uncles and
judges rarely go on the stage; their occupation might be even more
arduous if they had to face such competitors. Anyway, John had enough
success with his joke to feel much more hopeful of being able to find
suitable presents in Galton for Harold and Frida; and in the silence of
exhaustion that succeeded the laughter he broke the news of his having
to go into town and dispatch an urgent telegram that very afternoon,
mentioning incidentally that he might see about a dog-cart, and, of
course, at the same time a horse. Everybody applauded his resolve except
his brother-in-law who looked distinctly put out.

"But you won't be gone before I get back?" John asked.

Laurence and Edith exchanged glances fraught with the unuttered
solemnities of conjugal comprehension.

"Well, I _had_ wanted to have a talk over things with you after lunch,"
Laurence explained. "In fact, I have a good deal to talk over. I should
suggest driving you in to Galton, but I find it impossible to talk
freely while driving. Even our poor old pony has been known to shy. Yes,
indeed, poor old Primrose often shies."

John mentally blessed the aged animal's youthful heart, and said, to
cover his relief, that old maids were often more skittish than young
ones.

"Why?" asked Harold.

Everybody felt that Harold's question was one that should not be
answered.

"You wouldn't understand, darling," said his mother; and the dining-room
became tense with mystery.

"Of course, if we could have dinner put forward half an hour," said
Laurence, dragging the conversation out of the slough of sex, "we could
avail ourselves of the moon."

"Yes, you see," Edith put in eagerly, "it wouldn't be so dark with the
moon."

Laurence knitted his brow at this and his wife hastened to add that an
earlier dinner would bring Frida's bed-time much nearer to its normal
hour.

"The point is that I have a great deal to talk over with John," Laurence
irritably explained, "and that," he looked as if he would have liked to
add "Frida's bed-time can go to the devil," but he swallowed the impious
dedication and crumbled his bread.

Finally, notwithstanding that everybody felt very full of roast beef and
scarlet-runners, it was decided to dine at half-past six instead of
half-past seven.

"Poor Papa, I remember," said old Mrs. Touchwood, "always liked to dine
at half-past three. That gave him a nice long morning for his patients
and time to smoke his cigar after dinner before he opened the dispensary
in the evening. Supper was generally cold unless he anticipated a night
call, in which case we had soup."

All were glad that the twentieth century had arrived, and they smiled
sympathetically at the old lady, who, feeling that her anecdote had
scored a hit, embarked upon another about being taken to the Great
Exhibition when she was eleven years old, which lasted right through the
pudding, perhaps because it was trifle, and Harold did not feel inclined
to lose a mouthful by rash interruptions.

After lunch John was taken all over the house and all round the garden
and congratulated time after time upon the wisdom he had shown in buying
Ambles: he was made to feel that property set him apart from other men
even more definitely than dramatic success.

"Of course, Daniel was famous in his way," Hilda said. "But what did he
leave me?"

John, remembering the L120 a year in the bank and the collection of
stuffed humming birds at the pantechnicon, the importation of which to
Ambles he was always dreading, felt that Hilda was not being
ungratefully rhetorical.

"And of course," Laurence contributed, "a vicar feels that his
glebe--the value of which by the way has just gone down another L2 an
acre--is not his own."

"Yes, you see," Edith put in, "if anything horrid happened to Laurence
it would belong to the next vicar."

Again the glances of husband and wife played together in mid-air like
butterflies.

"And so," Laurence went on, "when you tell us that you hope to buy this
twenty-acre field we all realize that in doing so you would most
emphatically be consolidating your property."

"Oh, I'm sure you're wise to buy," said Hilda, weightily.

"It would make Ambles so much larger, wouldn't it?" suggested Edith.
"Twenty acres, you see ... well, really, I suppose twenty acres would be
as big as from...."

"Come, Edith," said her husband. "Don't worry poor John with comparative
acres--we are all looking at the twenty-acre field now."

The fierce little Kerry cows eyed the prospective owner peacefully,
until Harold hit one of them with a slug from his air-gun, when they all
began to career about the field, kicking up their heels and waving their
tails.

"Don't do that, my boy," John said, crossly--for him very crossly.

A short cut to Galton lay across this field, which John, though even
when they were quiet he never felt on really intimate terms with cows,
had just decided to follow.

"Darling, that's such a cruel thing to do," Hilda expostulated. "The
poor cow wasn't hurting you."

"It was looking at me," Harold protested.

"There is a legend about Francis of Assisi, Harold," his Uncle Laurence
began, "which will interest you and at the same time...."

"Sorry to interrupt," John broke in, "but I must be getting along. This
telegram.... I'll be back for tea."

He hurried off and when everybody called out to remind him of the short
cut across the twenty-acre field he waved back cheerfully, as if he
thought he was being wished a jolly walk; but he took the long way
round.

It was a good five miles to Galton in the opposite direction from the
road by which he had driven up that morning; but on this fine autumn
afternoon, going down hill nearly all the way through a foreground of
golden woods with prospects of blue distances beyond, John enjoyed the
walk, and not less because even at the beginning of it he stopped once
or twice to think how jolly it would be to see Miss Hamilton and Miss
Merritt coming round the next bend in the road. Later on, he did not
bother to include Miss Merritt, and finally he discovered his fancy so
steadily fixed upon Miss Hamilton that he was forced to remind himself
that Miss Hamilton in such a setting would demand a much higher standard
of criticism than Miss Hamilton on the promenade deck of the _Murmania_.
Nevertheless, John continued to think of her; and so pleasantly did her
semblance walk beside him and so exceptionally mild was the afternoon
for the season of the year that he must have strolled along the greater
part of the way. At any rate, when he saw the tower of Galton church he
was shocked to find that it was already four o'clock.




CHAPTER III


The selection of presents for children is never easy, because in order
to extract real pleasure from the purchase it is necessary to find
something that excites the donor as much as it is likely to excite the
recipient. In John's case this difficulty was quadrupled by having to
find toys with an American air about them, and on top of that by the
narrowly restricted choice in the Galton shops. He felt that it would be
ridiculous, even insulting, to produce for Frida as typical of New
York's luxurious catering for the young that doll, the roses of whose
cheeks had withered in the sunlight of five Hampshire summers, and whose
smile had failed to allure as little girls those who were now
marriageable young women. Nor did he think that Harold would accept as
worthy of American enterprise those more conspicuous portions of a
diminutive Uhlan's uniform fastened to a dog's-eared sheet of cardboard,
the sword belonging to which was rusting in the scabbard and the gilt
lancehead of which no longer gave the least illusion of being metal.
Finally, however, just as the clock was striking five he unearthed from
a remote corner of the large ironmonger's shop, to which he had turned
in despair from the toys offered him by the two stationers, a toboggan,
and not merely a toboggan but a Canadian toboggan stamped with the image
of a Red Indian.

"It was ordered for a customer in 1895," the ironmonger explained.
"There was heavy snow that year, you may remember."

If it had been ordered by Methuselah when he was still in his 'teens
John would not have hesitated.

"Well, would you--er--wrap it up," he said, putting down the money.

"Hadn't the carrier better bring it, sir?" suggested the ironmonger.
"He'll be going Wrottesford way to-morrow morning."

Obviously John could not carry the toboggan five miles, but just as
obviously he must get the toboggan back to Ambles that night: so he
declined the carrier, and asked the ironmonger to order him a fly while
he made a last desperate search for Frida's present. In the end, with
twilight falling fast, he bought for his niece twenty-nine small china
animals, which the stationer assured him would enchant any child between
nine and eleven, though perhaps less likely to appeal to ages outside
that period. A younger child, for instance, might be tempted to put them
in its mouth, even to swallow them if not carefully watched, while an
older child might tread on them. Another advantage was that when the
young lady for whom they were intended grew out of them, they could be
put away and revived to adorn her mantelpiece when she had reached an
age to appreciate the possibilities of a mantelpiece. John did not feel
as happy about these animals as he did about the toboggan: there was not
a single buffalo among them, and not one looked in the least
distinctively American, but the stationer was so reassuring and time was
going by so rapidly that he decided to risk the purchase. And really
when they were deposited in a cardboard box among cotton-wool they did
not look so dull, and perhaps Frida would enjoy guessing how many there
were before she unpacked them.

"Better than a Noah's Ark," said John, hopefully.

"Oh yes, much better, sir. A much more suitable present for a young
lady. In fact Noah's Arks are considered all right for village treats,
but they're in very little demand among the gentry nowadays."

When John was within a quarter of a mile from Ambles he told the driver
of the fly to stop. Somehow he must creep into the house and up to his
room with the toboggan and the china animals; it was after six, and the
children would have been looking out for his return since five. Perhaps
the cows would have gone home by now and he should not excite their
nocturnal apprehensions by dragging the toboggan across the twenty-acre
field. Meanwhile, he should tell the fly to wait five minutes before
driving slowly up to the house, which would draw the scent and enable
him with Emily's help to reach his room unperceived by the backstairs. A
heavy mist hung upon the meadow, and the paper wrapped round the
toboggan, which was just too wide to be carried under his arm like a
portfolio, began to peel off in the dew with a swishing sound that would
inevitably attract the curiosity of the cows were they still at large;
moreover, several of the china animals were now chinking together and,
John could not help feeling with some anxiety, probably chipping off
their noses.

"I must look like a broken-down Santa Claus with this vehicle," he said
to himself. "Where's the path got to now? I wonder why people wiggle so
when they make a path? Hullo! What's that?"

The munching of cattle was audible close at hand, a munching that was
sometimes interrupted by awful snorts.

"Perhaps it's only the mist that makes them do that," John tried to
assure himself. "It seems very imprudent to leave valuable cows out of
doors on a damp night like this."

There was a sound of heavy bodies moving suddenly in unison.

"They've heard me," thought John, hopelessly. "I wish to goodness I knew
something about cows. I really must get the subject up. Of course, they
_may_ be frightened of _me_. Good heavens, they're all snorting now.
Probably the best thing to do is to keep on calmly walking; most animals
are susceptible to human indifference. What a little fool that nephew of
mine was to shoot at them this afternoon. I'm hanged if he deserves his
toboggan."

The lights of Ambles stained the mist in front; John ran the last fifty
yards, threw himself over the iron railings, and stood panting upon his
own lawn. In the distance could be heard the confused thudding of hoofs
dying away toward the far end of the twenty-acre meadow.

"I evidently frightened them," John thought.

A few minutes later he was calling down from the landing outside his
bedroom that it was time for presents. In the first brief moment of
intoxication that had succeeded his defeat of the cattle John had
seriously contemplated tobogganing downstairs himself in order to
"surprise the kids" as he put it. But from his landing the staircase
looked all wrong for such an experiment and he walked the toboggan down,
which lamplight appeared to him a typical product of the bear-haunted
mountains of Canada.

Everybody was waiting for him in the drawing-room; everybody was
flatteringly enthusiastic about the toboggan and seemed anxious to make
it at home in such strange surroundings; nobody failed to point out to
the lucky boy the extreme kindness of his uncle in bringing back such a
wonderful present all the way from America--indeed one almost had the
impression that John must often have had to wake up and feed it in the
night.

"The trouble you must have taken," Hilda exclaimed.

"Yes, I did take a good deal of trouble," John admitted. After all, so
he had--a damned sight more trouble than any one there suspected.

"When will it snow?" Harold asked. "To-morrow?"

"I hope not--I mean, it might," said John. He must keep up Harold's
spirits, if only to balance Frida's depression, about whose present he
was beginning to feel very doubtful when he saw her eyes glittering with
feverish anticipation while he was undoing the string. He hoped she
would not faint or scream with disappointment when it was opened, and he
took off the lid of the box with the kind of flourish to which waiters
often treat dish-covers when they wish to promote an appetite among the
guests.

"How sweet," Edith murmured.

John looked gratefully at his sister; if he had made his will that night
she would have inherited Ambles.

"Ah, a collection of small china animals," said Laurence, choosing a cat
to set delicately upon the table for general admiration. John wished he
had not chosen the cat that seemed to suffer with a tumor in the region
of the tail and disinclined in consequence to sit still.

"Yes, I was anxious to get her a Noah's Ark," John volunteered, seeming
to suggest by his tone how appropriate such a gift would have been to
the atmosphere of a vicarage. "But they've practically given up making
Noah's Arks in America, and you see, these china animals will serve as
toys now, and later on, when Frida is grown-up, they'll look jolly on
the mantelpiece. Those that are not broken, of course."

The animals had all been taken out of their box by now, but a few paws
and ears were still adhering to the cotton-wool.

"Frida is always very light on her toys," said Edith, proudly.

"Not likely to put them in her mouth," said John, heartily. "That was
the only thing that made me hesitate when I first saw them in Fifth
Avenue. But they don't look quite so edible here."

"Frida never puts anything in her mouth," Edith generalized, primly.
"And she's given up biting her nails since Uncle John came home, haven't
you, dear?"

"That's a good girl," John applauded; he did not believe in Frida's
sudden conquest of autophagy, but he was anxious to encourage her in
every way at the moment.

Yes, the gift-horses had shown off their paces better than he had
expected, he decided. To be sure, Frida did not appear beside herself
with joy, but at any rate she had not burst into tears--she had not
thrust the present from her sight with loathing and begged to be taken
home. And then Harold, who had been staring at the animals through his
glasses, like the horrid little naturalist that he was, said:

"I've seen some animals like them in Mr. Goodman's shop."

John hoped a blizzard would blow to-morrow, that Harold would toboggan
recklessly down the steepest slope of the downs behind Ambles, and that
he would hit an oak tree at the bottom and break his glasses. However,
none of these dark thoughts obscured the remote brightness with which he
answered:

"Really, Harold. Very likely. There is a considerable exportation of
china animals from America nowadays. In fact I was very lucky to find
any left in America."

"Let's go into Gallon to-morrow and look at Mr. Goodman's animals,"
Harold suggested.

John had never suspected that one day he should feel grateful to his
brother-in-law; but when the dinner-bell went at half-past six instead
of half-past seven solely on his account, John felt inclined to shake
him by the hand. Nor would he have ever supposed that he should one day
welcome the prospect of one of Laurence's long confidential talks. Yet
when the ladies departed after dessert and Laurence took the chair next
to himself as solemnly as if it were a fald-stool, he encouraged him
with a smile.

"We might have our little talk now," and when Laurence cleared his
throat John felt that the conversation had been opened as successfully
as a local bazaar. Not merely did John smile encouragingly, but he
actually went so far as to invite him to go ahead.

Laurence sighed, and poured himself out a second glass of port.

"I find myself in a position of considerable difficulty," he announced,
"and should like your advice."

John's mind went rapidly to the balance in his passbook instead of to
the treasure of worldly experience from which he might have drawn.

"Perhaps before we begin our little talk," said Laurence, "it would be
as well if I were to remind you of some of the outstanding events and
influences in my life. You will then be in a better position to give me
the advice and help--ah--the moral help, of which I stand in
need--ah--in sore need."

"He keeps calling it a little talk," John thought, "but by Jove, it's
lucky we did have dinner early. At this rate he won't get back to his
vicarage before cock-crow."

John was not deceived by his brother-in-law's minification of their
talk, and he exchanged the trim Henry Clay he had already clipped for a
very large Upman that would smoke for a good hour.

"Won't you light up before you begin?" he asked, pushing a box of
commonplace Murillos toward his brother-in-law, whose habit of biting
off the end of a cigar, of letting it go out, of continually knocking
off the ash, of forgetting to remove the band till it was smoldering,
and of playing miserable little tunes with it on the rim of a
coffee-cup, in fact of doing everything with it except smoke it
appreciatively, made it impossible for John, so far as Laurence was
concerned, to be generous with his cigars.

"I think you'll find these not bad."

This was true; the Murillos were not actually bad.

"Thanks, I will avail myself of your offer. But to come back to what I
was saying," Laurence went on, lighting his cigar with as little
expression of anticipated pleasure as might be discovered in the
countenance of a lodging-house servant lighting a fire. "I do not
propose to occupy your time by an account of my spiritual struggles at
the University."

"You ought to write a novel," said John, cheerfully.

Laurence looked puzzled.

"I am now occupied with the writing of a play, but I shall come to that
presently. Novels, however...."

"I was only joking," said John. "It would take too long to explain the
joke. Sorry I interrupted you. Cigar gone out? Don't take another. It
doesn't really matter how often those Murillos go out."

"Where am I?" Laurence asked in a bewildered voice.

"You'd just left Oxford," John answered, quickly.

"Ah, yes, I was at Oxford. Well, as I was saying, I shall not detain you
with an account of my spiritual struggles there.... I think I may
almost without presumption refer to them as my spiritual progress ...
let it suffice that I found myself on the vigil of my ordination after a
year at Cuddesdon Theological College a convinced High Churchman. This
must not be taken to mean that I belonged to the more advanced or what I
should prefer to call the Italian party in the Church of England. I did
not."

Laurence here paused and looked at John earnestly; since John had not
the remotest idea what the Italian party meant and was anxious to avoid
being told, he said in accents that sought to convey relief at hearing
his brother-in-law's personal contradiction of a charge that had for
long been whispered against him:

"Oh, you didn't?"

"No, I did not. I was not prepared to go one jot or one tittle beyond
the Five Points."

"Of the compass, you mean," said John, wisely. "Quite so."

Then seeing that Laurence seemed rather indignant, he added quickly,
"Did I say the compass? How idiotic! Of course, I meant the law."

"The Five Points are the Eastward Position...."

"It was the compass after all," John thought. "What a fool I was to
hedge."

"The Mixed Chalice, Lights, Wafer Bread, and Vestments, but _not_ the
ceremonial use of Incense."

"And those are the Five Points?"

Laurence inclined his head.

"Which you were not prepared to go beyond, I think you said?" John
gravely continued, flattering himself that he was re-established as an
intelligent listener.

"In adhering to these Five Points," Laurence proceeded, "I found that I
was able to claim the support of a number of authoritative English
divines. I need only mention Bishop Ken and Bishop Andrews for you to
appreciate my position."

"Eastward, I think you said," John put in; for his brother-in-law had
paused again, and he was evidently intended to say something.

"I perceive that you are not acquainted with the divergences of opinion
that unhappily exist in our national Church."

"Well, to tell you the truth--and I know you'll excuse my frankness--I
haven't been to church since I was a boy," John admitted. "But I know I
used to dislike the litany very much, and of course I had my favorite
hymns--we most of us have--and really I think that's as far as I got.
However, I have to get up the subject of religion very shortly. My next
play will deal with Joan of Arc, and, as you may imagine, religion plays
an important part in such a theme--a very important part. In addition to
the vision that Joan will have of St. Michael in the first act, one of
my chief unsympathetic characters is a bishop. I hope I'm not hurting
your feelings in telling you this, my dear fellow. Have another cigar,
won't you? I think you've dipped the end of that one in the
coffee-lees."

Laurence assured John bitterly that he had no reason to be particularly
fond of bishops. "In fact," he went on, "I'm having a very painful
discussion with the Bishop of Silchester at this moment, but I shall
come to that presently. What I am anxious, however, to impress upon you
at this stage in our little talk is the fact that on the vigil of my
ordination I had arrived at a definite theory of what I could and could
not accept. Well, I was ordained deacon by the Bishop of St. Albans and
licensed to a curacy in Plaistow--one of the poorest districts in the
East End of London. Here I worked for three years, and it was here that
fourteen years ago I first met Edith."

"Yes, I seem to remember. Wasn't she working at a girls' club or
something? I know I always thought that there must be a secondary
attraction."

"At that time my financial position was not such as to warrant my
embarking upon matrimony. Moreover, I had in a moment of what I should
now call boyish exaltation registered a vow of perpetual celibacy.
Edith, however, with that devotion which neither then nor at any crisis
since has failed me expressed her willingness to consent to an
indefinite engagement, and I remember with gratitude that it was just
this consent of hers which was the means of widening the narrow--ah--the
all too narrow path which at that time I was treading in religion. My
vicar and I had a painful dispute upon some insignificant doctrinal
point; I felt bound to resign my curacy, and take another under a man
who could appreciate and allow for my speculative temperament. I became
curate to St. Thomas's, Kensington, and had hopes of ultimately being
preferred to a living. I realized in fact that the East End was a
cul-de-sac for a young and--if I may so describe myself without being
misunderstood--ambitious curate. For three years I remained at St.
Thomas's and obtained a considerable reputation as a preacher. You may
or may not remember that some Advent Addresses of mine were reprinted in
one of the more tolerant religious weeklies and obtained what I do not
hesitate to call the honor of being singled out for malicious abuse by
the _Church Times_. Eleven years ago my dear father died and by leaving
me an independence of L417 a year enabled me not merely to marry Edith,
but very soon afterwards to accept the living of Newton Candover. I will
not detain you with the history of my financial losses, which I hope I
have always welcomed in the true spirit of resignation. Let it suffice
that within a few years owing to my own misplaced charity and some bad
advice from a relative of mine on the Stock Exchange my private income
dwindled to L152, while at the same time the gross income of Newton
Candover from L298 sank to the abominably low nett income of L102--a
serious reflection, I think you will agree, upon the shocking financial
system of our national Church. It may surprise you, my dear John, to
learn that such blows from fate not only did not cast me down into a
state of spiritual despair and intellectual atrophy, but that they
actually had the effect of inciting me to still greater efforts."

John had been fumbling with his check book when Laurence began to talk
about his income; but the unexpected turn of the narrative quietened
him, and the Upman was going well.

"You may or may not come across a little series of devotional
meditations for the Man in the Street entitled Lamp-posts. They have a
certain vogue, and I may tell you in confidence that under the pseudonym
of The Lamplighter I wrote them. The actual financial return they
brought me was slight. Barabbas, you know, was a publisher. Ha-ha! No,
although I made nothing, or rather practically nothing out of them for
my own purse, by leading me to browse among many modern works of
theology and philosophy I began to realize that there was a great deal
of reason for modern indifference and skepticism. In other words, I
discovered that, in order to keep the man in the street a Christian,
Christianity must adapt itself to his needs. Filled with a reverent
enthusiasm and perhaps half-consciously led along such a path by your
conspicuous example of success, I have sought to embody my theories in a
play, the protagonist of which is the apostle Thomas, whom when you read
the play you will easily recognize as the prototype of the man in the
street. And this brings me to the reason for which I have asked you for
this little talk. The fact of the matter is that in pursuing my studies
of the apostle Thomas I have actually gone beyond his simple rugged
agnosticism, and I now at forty-two years of age after eighteen years as
a minister of religion find myself unable longer to accept in any
literal sense of the term whatever the Virgin Birth."

Laurence poured himself out a third glass of port and waited for John to
recover from his stupefaction.

"But I don't think I'm a very good person to talk to about these
abstruse divine obstetrics," John protested. "I really haven't
considered the question. I know of course to what you refer, but I think
this is essentially an occasion for professional advice."

"I do not ask for advice upon my beliefs," Laurence explained. "I
recognize that nobody is able to do anything for them except myself.
What I want you to do is to let Edith, myself, and little Frida stay
with you at Ambles--of course we should be paying guests and you could
use our pony and trap and any of the vicarage furniture that you thought
suitable--until it has been decided whether I am likely or not to have
any success as a dramatist. I do not ask you to undertake the Quixotic
task of trying to obtain a public representation of my play about the
apostle Thomas. I know that Biblical subjects are forbidden by the Lord
Chamberlain, surely a monstrous piece of flunkeyism. But I have many
other ideas for plays, and I'm convinced that you will sympathize with
my anxiety to be able to work undisturbed and, if I may say so, in close
propinquity to another playwright who is already famous."

"But why do you want to leave your own vicarage?" John gasped.

"My dear fellow, owing to what I can only call the poisonous behavior of
Mrs. Paxton, my patron, to whom while still a curate at St. Thomas's,
Kensington, I gave an abundance of spiritual consolation when she
suffered the loss of her husband, owing as I say to her poisonous
behavior following upon a trifling quarrel about some alterations I made
in the fabric of _my_ church without consulting her, I have been subject
to ceaseless inquisition and persecution. There has been an outcry in
the more bigoted religious press about my doctrine, and in short I have
thought it best and most dignified to resign my living. I am therefore,
to use a colloquialism,--ah--at a loose end."

"And Edith?" John asked.

"My poor wife still clings with feminine loyalty to those accretions to
faith from which I have cut myself free. In most things she is at one
with me, but I have steadily resisted the temptation to intrude upon the
sanctity of her intimate beliefs. She sees my point of view. Of her
sympathy I can only speak with gratitude. But she is still an
old-fashioned believer. And indeed I am glad, for I should not like to
think of her tossed upon the stormy seas of doubt and exposed to
the--ah--hurricanes of speculation that surge through my own brains."

"And when do you want to move in to Ambles?"

"Well, if it would be convenient, we should like to begin gradually
to-morrow. I have informed the Bishop that I will--ah--be out in a
fortnight."

"But what about Hilda?" John asked, doubtfully. "She is really looking
after Ambles for me, you know."

"While we have been having our little talk in the dining-room Edith has
been having her little talk with Hilda in the drawing-room, and I think
I hear them coming now."

John looked up quickly to see the effect of that other little talk, and
determined to avoid for that night at least anything in the nature of
little talks with anybody.

"Laurence dear," said Edith mildly, "isn't it time we were going?"

John knew that not Hilda herself could have phrased more aptly what she
was feeling; he was sure that in her opinion it was indeed high time
that Edith and Laurence were going.

Laurence went over to the window and pulled aside the curtains to
examine the moon.

"Yes, my dear, I think we might have Primrose harnessed. Where is
Frida?"

"She is watching Harold arrange the animals that John gave her. They are
playing at visiting the Natural History Museum."

John was aware that he had not yet expressed his own willingness for the
Armitage family to move into Ambles; he was equally aware that Hilda was
trying to catch his eye with a questioning and indignant glance and that
he had already referred the decision to her. At the same time he could
not bring himself to exalt Hilda above Edith who was the younger and he
was bound to admit the favorite of his two sisters; moreover, Hilda was
the mother of Harold, and if Harold was to be considered tolerable in
the same house as himself, he could not deny as much of his forbearance
to Laurence.

"Well, I suppose you two girls have settled it between you?" he said.

Hilda, who did not seem either surprised or elated at being called a
girl, observed coldly that naturally it was for John to decide, but that
if the vicarage family was going to occupy Ambles extra furniture would
be required immediately.

"My dear," said Laurence. "Didn't you make it clear to Hilda that as
much of the vicarage furniture as is required can be sent here
immediately? John and I had supposed that you were settling all these
little domestic details during your little talk together."

"No, dear," Edith said, "we settled nothing. Hilda felt, and of course I
can't help agreeing with her, that it is really asking too much of John.
She reminded me that he has come down here to work."

The last icicle of opposition melted from John's heart; he could not
bear to think of Edith's being lectured all the way home by her husband
under the light of a setting moon. "I dare say we can manage," he said,
"and really, you know Hilda, it will do the rooms good to be lived in. I
noticed this afternoon a slight smell of damp coming from the
unfurnished part of the house."

"Apples, not damp," Hilda snapped. "I had the apples stored in one of
the disused rooms."

"All these problems will solve themselves," said Laurence, grandly. "And
I'm sure that John cannot wish to attempt them to-night. Let us all
remember that he may be tired. Come along, Edith. We have a long day
before us to-morrow. Let us say good-night to Mama."

Edith started: it was the first time in eleven years of married life
that her husband had adopted the Touchwood style of addressing or
referring to their mother, and it seemed to set a seal upon his more
intimate association with her family in the future. If any doubts still
lingered about the forthcoming immigration of the vicarage party to
Ambles they were presently disposed of once and for all by Laurence.

"What are you carrying?" he asked Frida, when they were gathered in the
hall before starting.

"Uncle John's present," she replied.

"Do not bother. Uncle John has invited us to stay here, and you do not
want to expose your little animals to the risk of being chipped. No
doubt Harold will look after them for you in the interim--the short
interim. Come, Edith, the moon is not going to wait for us, you know. I
have the reins. Gee-up, Primrose!"

"Fond as I am of Edith," Hilda said, when the vicarage family was out of
hearing. "Fond as I am of Edith," she repeated without any trace of
affection in accent or expression, "I do think this invasion is an
imposition upon your kindness. But clergymen are all alike; they all
become dictatorial and obtuse; they're too fond of the sound of their
own voices."

"Laurence is perhaps a little heavy," John agreed, "a little suave and
heavy like a cornflour shape, but we ought to do what we can for Edith."

He tactfully offered Hilda a share in his own benevolence, in which she
ensconced herself without hesitation.

"Well, I suppose we shall have to make the best of it. Indeed the only
thing that _really_ worries me is what we are to do with the apples."

"Oh, Harold will soon eat them up," said John; though he had not the
slightest intention of being sarcastic, Hilda was so much annoyed by
this that she abandoned all discussion of the vicarage and talked so
long about Harold's inside and with such a passionate insistence upon
what he required of sweet and sour to prevent him from dropping before
her very eyes, that John was able fairly soon to plead that the hour was
late and that he must go to bed.

In his bedroom, which was sharp-scented with autumnal airs and made him
disinclined for sleep, John became sentimental over Edith and began to
weave out of her troubles a fine robe for his own good-nature in which
his sentimentality was able to show itself off. He assured himself of
Edith's luck in having Ambles as a refuge in the difficult time through
which she was passing and began to visualize her past life as nothing
but a stormy prelude to a more tranquil present in which he should be
her pilot. That Laurence would be included in his beneficence was
certainly a flaw in the emerald of his bounty, a fly in the amber of his
self-satisfaction; but, after all, so long as Edith was secure and happy
such blemishes were hardly perceptible. He ought to think himself lucky
that he was in a position to help his relations; the power of doing kind
actions was surely the greatest privilege accorded to the successful
man. And what right had Hilda to object? Good gracious, as if she
herself were not dependent enough upon him! But there had always been
visible in Hilda this wretched spirit of competition. It had been in
just the same spirit that she had married Daniel Curtis; she had not
been able to endure her younger sister's engagement to the tall handsome
curate and had snatched at the middle-aged explorer in order to be
married simultaneously and secure the best wedding presents for herself.
But what had Daniel Curtis seen in Hilda? What had that myopic and
taciturn man found in Hilda to gladden a short visit to England between
his life on the Orinoco and his intended life at the back of the
uncharted Amazons? And had his short experience of her made him so
reckless that nothing but his spectacles were found by the rescuers?
What mad impulse to perpetuate his name beyond the numerous beetles,
flowers, monkeys, and butterflies to which it was already attached by
many learned societies had led him to bequeath Harold to humanity? Was
not his collection of humming birds enough?

"I'm really very glad that Edith is coming to Ambles," John murmured.
"Very glad indeed. It will serve Hilda right." He began to wonder if he
actually disliked Hilda and to realize that he had never really forgiven
her for refusing to be interested in his first published story. How well
he remembered that occasion--twenty years ago almost to a day. It had
been a dreary November in the time when London really did have fogs,
and when the sense of his father's approaching death had added to the
general gloom. James had been acting as his father's partner for more
than a year and had already nearly ruined the practice by his
inexperience and want of affability. George and himself were both in the
city offices--George in wool, himself in dog-biscuits. George did not
seem to mind the soul-destroying existence and was full of financial
ambition; but himself had loathed it and cared for nothing but
literature. How he had pleaded with that dry old father, whose cynical
tormented face on its pillow smeared with cigar ash even now vividly
haunted his memory; but the fierce old man had refused him the least
temporary help and had actually chuckled with delight amidst all his
pain at the thought of how his family would have to work for a living
when he should mercifully be dead. Was it surprising, when that morning
he had found at the office a communication from a syndicate of
provincial papers to inform him of his story's being accepted, that he
should have arrived home in the fog, full of hope and enthusiasm? And
then he had been met with whispering voices and the news of his father's
death. Of course he had been shocked and grieved, even disappointed that
it was too late to announce his success to the old man; but he had not
been able to resist telling Hilda, a gawky, pale-faced girl of eighteen,
that his story had been taken. He could recall her expression in that
befogged gaslight even now, her expression of utter lack of interest,
faintly colored with surprise at his own bad taste. Then he had gone
upstairs to see his mother, who was bathed in tears, though she had been
warned at least six months ago that her husband might die at any moment.
He had ventured after a few formal words of sympathy to lighten the
burden of her grief by taking the auspicious communication from his
pocket, where it had been cracking nervously between his fingers, and
reading it to her. He had been sure that she would be interested because
she was a great reader of stories and must surely derive a grateful
wonder from the contemplation of her own son as an author. But she was
evidently too much overcome by the insistency of grief and by the
prospect of monetary difficulties in the near future to grasp what he
was telling her; it had struck him that she had actually never realized
that the stories she enjoyed were written by men and women any more than
it might have struck another person that advertisements were all written
by human beings with their own histories of love and hate.

"You mustn't neglect your office work, Johnnie," was what she had said.
"We shall want every halfpenny now that Papa is gone. James does his
best, but the patients were more used to Papa."

After these two rebuffs John had not felt inclined to break his good
news to James, who would be sure to sneer, or to George, who would only
laugh; so he had wandered upstairs to the old schoolroom, where he had
found Edith sitting by a dull fire and dissuading little Hugh from
throwing coals at the cat. As soon as he had told Edith what had
happened she had made a hero of him, and ever afterwards treated him
with admiration as well as affection. Had she not prophesied even that
he would be another Dickens? That was something like sisterly love, and
he had volunteered to read her the original rough copy, which,
notwithstanding Hugh's whining interruptions, she had enjoyed as much as
he had enjoyed it himself. Certainly Edith must come to Ambles; twenty
years were not enough to obliterate the memory of that warm-hearted girl
of fifteen and of her welcome praise.

But Hugh? What malign spirit had brought Hugh to his mind at a moment
when he was already just faintly disturbed by the prospect of his
relations' increasing demands upon his attention? Hugh was only
twenty-seven now and much too conspicuously for his own good the
youngest of the family; like all children that arrive unexpectedly after
a long interval, he had seemed the pledge of his parents' renewed youth
on the very threshold of old age, and had been spoiled, even by his
cross-grained old father, in consequence: as for his mother, though it
was out of her power to spoil him extravagantly with money, she gave him
all that she did not spend on caps for herself. John determined to make
inquiries about Hugh to-morrow. Not another penny should he have from
him, not another farthing. If he could not live on what he earned in the
office of Stephen Crutchley, who had accepted the young spendthrift out
of regard for their lifelong friendship, if he could not become a
decent, well-behaved architect, why, he could starve. Not another penny
... and the rest of his relations agreed with John on this point, for if
to him Hugh was a skeleton in the family cupboard, to them he was a
skeleton at the family feast.

John expelled from his mind all misgivings about Hugh, hoped it would be
a fine day to-morrow so that he could really look round the garden and
see what plants wanted ordering, tried to remember the name of an
ornamental shrub recommended by Miss Hamilton, turned over on his side,
and went to sleep.




CHAPTER IV


Early next morning John dreamed that he was buying calico in an immense
shop and that in a dreamlike inconsequence the people there, customers
and shopmen alike, were abruptly seized with a frenzy of destruction so
violent that they began to tear up all the material upon which they
could lay their hands; indeed, so loud was the noise of rent cloth that
John woke up with the sound of it still in his ears. Gradually it was
borne in upon a brain wrestling with actuality that the noise might have
emanated from the direction of a small casement in his bedroom looking
eastward into the garden across a steep penthouse which ran down to
within two feet of the ground. Although the noise had stopped some time
before John had precisely located its whereabouts and really before he
was perfectly convinced that he was awake, he jumped out of bed and
hurried across the chilly boards to ascertain if after all it had only
been a relic of his dream. No active cause was visible; but the moss,
the stonecrop and the tiles upon the penthouse had been clawed from top
to bottom as if by some mighty tropical cat, and John for a brief
instant savored that elated perplexity which generally occurs to heroes
in the opening paragraphs of a sensational novel.

"It's a very old house," he thought, hopefully, and began to grade his
reason to a condition of sycophantic credulity. "And, of course,
anything like a ghost at seven o'clock in the morning is rare--very
rare. The evidence would be unassailable...."

After toadying to the marvelous for a while, he sought a natural
explanation of the phenomenon and honestly tried not to want it to prove
inexplicable. The noise began again overhead; a fleeting object darkened
the casement like the swift passage of a bird and struck the penthouse
below; there was a slow grinding shriek, a clatter of broken tiles and
leaden piping; a small figure stuck all over with feathers emerged from
the herbaceous border and smiled up at him.

"Good heavens, my boy, what in creation are you trying to do?" John
shouted, sternly.

"I'm learning to toboggan, Uncle John."

"But didn't I explain to you that tobogganing can only be carried out
after a heavy snowfall?"

"Well, it hasn't snowed yet," Harold pointed out in an offended voice.

"Listen to me. If it snows for a month without stopping, you're never to
toboggan down a roof. What's the good of having all those jolly hills at
the back of the house if you don't use them?"

John spoke as if he had brought back the hills from America at the same
time as he was supposed to have brought back the toboggan.

"There's a river, too," Harold observed.

"You can't toboggan down a river--unless, of course, it gets frozen
over."

"I don't want to toboggan down the river, but if I had a Canadian canoe
for the river I could wait for the snow quite easily."

John, after a brief vision of a canoe being towed across the Atlantic by
the _Murmania_, felt that he was being subjected to the lawless
exactions of a brigand, but could think of nothing more novel in the way
of defiance than:

"Go away now and be a good boy."

"Can't I ..." Harold began.

"No, you can't. If those chickens' feathers...."

"They're pigeons' feathers," his nephew corrected him.

"If those feathers stuck in your hair are intended to convey an
impression that you're a Red Indian chief, go and sit in your wigwam
till breakfast and smoke the pipe of peace."

"Mother said I wasn't to smoke till I was twenty-one."

"Not literally, you young ass. Why, good heavens, in my young days such
an allusion to Mayne Reid would have been eagerly taken up by any boy."

Something was going wrong with this conversation, John felt, and he
added, lamely:

"Anyway, go away now."

"But, Uncle John, I...."

"Don't Uncle John me. I don't feel like an uncle this morning. Suppose
I'd been shaving when you started that fool's game. I might have cut my
head off."

"But, Uncle John, I've left my spectacles on one of the chimneys. Mother
said that whenever I was playing a rough game I was to take off my
spectacles first."

"You'll have to do without your spectacles, that's all. The gardener
will get them for you after breakfast. Anyway, a Red Indian chief in
spectacles is unnatural."

"Well, I'm not a Red Indian any longer."

"You can't chop and change like that. You'll have to be a Red Indian now
till after breakfast. Don't argue any more, because I'm standing here in
bare feet. Go and do some weeding in the garden. You've pulled up all
the plants on the roof."

"I can't read without my spectacles."

"Weed, not read!"

"Well, I can't weed, either. I can't do anything without my spectacles."

"Then go away and do nothing."

Harold shuffled off disconsolately, and John rang for his shaving water.

At breakfast Hilda asked anxiously after her son's whereabouts; and
John, the last vestige of whose irritation had vanished in the smell of
fried bacon and eggs, related the story of the morning's escapade as a
good joke.

"But he can't see anything without his spectacles," Hilda exclaimed.

"Oh, he'll find his way to the breakfast table all right," John
prophesied.

"These bachelors," murmured Hilda, turning to her mother with a wry
little laugh. "Hark! isn't that Harold calling?"

"No, no, no, it's the pigeons," John laughed. "They're probably fretting
for their feathers."

"It's to be hoped," said old Mrs. Touchwood, "that he's not fallen into
the well by leaving off his spectacles like this. I never could abide
wells. And I hate to think of people leaving things off suddenly. It's
always a mistake. I remember little Hughie once left off his woollen
vests in May and caught a most terrible cold that wouldn't go away--it
simply wouldn't go."

"How is Hugh, by the way?" John asked.

"The same as ever," Hilda put in with cold disapproval. She was able to
forget Harold's myopic wanderings in the pleasure of crabbing her
youngest brother.

"Ah, you're all very hard on poor Hughie," sighed the old lady. "But
he's always been very fond of his poor mother."

"He's very fond of what he can get out of you," Hilda sneered.

"And it's little enough he can, poor boy. Goodness knows I've little
enough to spare for him. I wish you could have seen your way to do
something for Hughie, Johnnie," the old lady went on.

"John has done quite enough for him," Hilda snapped, which was perfectly
true.

"He's had to leave his rooms in Earl's Court," Mrs. Touchwood lamented.

"What for? Getting drunk, I suppose?" John inquired, sternly.

"No, it was the drains. He's staying with his friend, Aubrey Fenton,
whom I cannot pretend to like. He seems to me a sad scapegrace. Poor
little Hughie. I wish everything wasn't against him. It's to be hoped he
won't go and get married, poor boy, for I'm sure his wife wouldn't
understand him."

"Surely he's not thinking of getting married," exclaimed John in
dismay.

"Why no, of course not," said the old lady. "How you do take anybody up,
Johnnie. I said it's to be hoped he won't get married."

At this moment Emily came in to announce that Master Harold was up on
the roof shouting for dear life. "Such a turn as it give Cook and I,
mum," she said, "to hear that garshly voice coming down the chimney.
Cook was nearly took with the convolsions, and if it had of been after
dark, mum, she says she's shaw she doesn't know what she wouldn't of
done, she wouldn't, she's that frightened of howls. That's the one thing
she can't ever be really comfortable for in the country, she says, the
howls and the hearwigs."

"I'm under the impression," John declared, solemnly, "that I forbade
Harold to go near the roof. If he has disobeyed my express commands he
must suffer for it by the loss of his breakfast. He has chosen to go
back on the roof: on the roof he shall stay."

"But his breakfast?" Hilda almost whispered. She was so much awed by her
brother's unusually pompous phraseology that he began to be impressed by
it himself and to feel the first faint intimations of the pleasures of
tyranny: he began to visualize himself as the unbending ruler of all his
relations.

"His breakfast can be sent up to him, and I hope it will attract every
wasp in the neighborhood."

This to John seemed the most savage aspiration he could have uttered:
autumnal wasps disturbed him as much as dragons used to disturb
princesses.

"Harold likes wasps," said Hilda. "He observes their habits."

This revelation of his nephew's tastes took away John's last belief in
his humanity, and the only retort he could think of was a suggestion
that he should go at once to a boarding-school.

"Likes wasps?" he repeated. "The child must be mad. You'll tell me next
that he likes black beetles."

"He trained a black beetle once to eat something. I forget what it was
now. But the poor boy was so happy about his little triumph. You ought
to remember, John, that he takes after his father."

John made up his mind at this moment that Daniel Curtis must have
married Hilda in a spirit of the purest empirical science.

"Well, he's not to go training insects in my house," John said, firmly.
"And if I see any insects anywhere about Ambles that show the slightest
sign of having been encouraged to suppose themselves on an equal with
mankind I shall tread on them."

"I'm afraid the crossing must have upset you, Johnnie," said old Mrs.
Touchwood, sympathetically. "You seem quite out of sorts this morning.
And I don't like the idea of poor little Harold's balancing himself all
alone on a chimney. It was never any pleasure to me to watch tight-rope
dancers or acrobats. Indeed, except for the clowns, I never could abide
circuses."

Hilda quickly took up the appeal and begged John to let the gardener
rescue her son.

"Oh, very well," he assented. "But, once for all, it must be clearly
understood that I've come down to Ambles to write a new play and that
some arrangement must be concluded by which I have my mornings
completely undisturbed."

"Of course," said Hilda, brightening at the prospect of Harold's
release.

"Of course," John echoed, sardonically, within himself. He did not feel
that the sight of Harold's ravening after his breakfast would induce in
him the right mood for Joan of Arc. So he left the breakfast table and
went upstairs to his library. Here he found that some "illiterate oaf,"
as he characterized the person responsible, had put in upside down upon
the shelves the standard works he had hastily amassed. Instead of
setting his ideas in order, he had to set his books in order: and after
a hot and dusty morning with the rows of unreadable classics he came
downstairs to find that the vicarage party had arrived just in time for
lunch, bringing with them as the advance guard of their occupation a
large clothes basket filled with what Laurence described as "necessary
odds and ends that might be overlooked later."

"It's my theory of moving," he added. "The small things first."

He enunciated this theory so reverently that his action acquired from
his tone a momentous gravity like the captain of a ship's when he orders
the women and children into the boats first.

The moving of the vicarage party lasted over a fortnight, during which
John found it impossible to settle down to Joan of Arc. No sooner would
he have worked himself up to a suitable frame of mind in which he might
express dramatically and poetically the maid's reception of her heavenly
visitants than a very hot man wearing a green baize apron would appear
in the doorway of the library and announce that a chest of drawers had
hopelessly involved some vital knot in the domestic communications. It
was no good for John to ask Hilda to do anything: his sister had taken
up the attitude that it was all John's fault, that she had done her best
to preserve his peace, that her advice had been ignored, and that for
the rest of her life she intended to efface herself.

"I'm a mere cipher," she kept repeating.

On one occasion when a bureau of sham ebony that looked like a blind
man's dream of Cologne Cathedral had managed to wedge all its pinnacles
into the lintel of the front door, John observed to Laurence he had
understood that only such furniture from the vicarage as was required to
supplement the Ambles furniture would be brought there.

"I thought this bureau would appeal to you," Laurence replied. "It
seemed to me in keeping with much of your work."

John looked up sharply to see if he was being chaffed; but his
brother-in-law's expression was earnest, and the intended compliment
struck more hardly at John's self-confidence than the most malicious
review.

"Does my work really seem like gimcrack gothic?" he asked himself.

In a fit of exasperation he threw himself so vigorously into the
business of forcing the bureau into the house that when it was inside it
looked like a ruined abbey on the afternoon of a Bank Holiday.

"It had better be taken up into the garrets for the present," he said,
grimly. "It can be mended later on."

The comparison of his work to that bureau haunted John at his own
writing-table for the rest of the morning; thinking of the Bishop of
Silchester's objection to Laurence, he found it hard to make the various
bishops in his play as unsympathetic as they ought to be for dramatic
contrast; then he remembered that after all it had been due to the
Bishop of Silchester's strong action that Laurence had come to Ambles:
the stream of insulting epithets for bishops flowed as strongly as ever,
and he worked in a justifiable pun upon the name of Pierre Cauchon, his
chief episcopal villain.

"I wonder, if I were allowed to, whether I would condemn Laurence to be
burnt alive. Wasn't there a Saint Laurence who was grilled? I really
believe I would almost grill him, I really do. There's something
exceptionally irritating to me about that man's whole personality. And
I'm not at all sure I approve of a clergyman's giving up his beliefs.
One might get a line out of that, by the way--something about a
weathercock and a church steeple. I don't think a clergyman ought to
surrender so easily. It's his business not to be influenced by modern
thought. This passion for realism is everywhere.... Thank goodness, I've
been through it and got over it and put it behind me forever. It's a
most unprofitable creed. What was my circulation as a realist? I once
reached four thousand. What's four thousand? Why, it isn't half the
population of Galton. And now Laurence Armitage takes up with it after
being a vicar for ten years. Idiot! Religion isn't realistic: it never
was realistic. Religion is the entertainment of man's spirituality just
as the romantic drama is the entertainment of his mentality. I don't
read Anatole France for my representation of Joan of Arc. What business
has Laurence to muddle his head with--what's his name--Colonel
Ingoldsby--Ingersoll--when he ought to be thinking about his Harvest
Festival? And then he has the effrontery to compare my work with that
bureau! If that's all his religion meant to him--that ridiculous piece
of gimcrack gothic, no wonder it wouldn't hold together. Why, the green
fumed oak of a sentimental rationalism would be better than that.
Confound Laurence! I knew this would happen when he came. He's taken my
mind completely off my own work. I can't write a word this morning."

John rushed away from his manuscript and weeded furiously down a
secluded border until the gardener told him he had weeded away the
autumn-sown sweet-peas that were coming along nicely and standing the
early frosts a treat.

"I'm not even allowed to weed my own garden now," John thought, burking
the point at issue; and his disillusionment became so profound that he
actually invited Harold to go for a walk with him.

"Can I bring my blow-pipe?" asked the young naturalist, gleefully.

"You don't want to load yourself up with soap and water," said John.
"Keep that till you come in."

"My South American blow-pipe, Uncle John. It's a real one which father
sent home. It belonged to a little Indian boy, but the darts aren't
poisoned, father told mother."

"Don't you be too sure," John advised him. "Explorers will say
anything."

"Well, can I bring it?"

"No, we'll take a non-murderous walk for a change. I'm tired of being
shunned by the common objects of the countryside."

"Well, shall I bring _Ants_, _Bees_, and _Wasps_?"

"Certainly not. We don't want to go trailing about Hampshire like two
jam sandwiches."

"I mean the book."

"No, if you want to carry something, you can carry my cleek and six golf
balls."

"Oh, yes, and then I'll practice bringing eggs down in my mouth from
very high trees."

John liked this form of exercise, because at the trifling cost of making
one ball intolerably sticky it kept Harold from asking questions; for
about two hundred yards he enjoyed this walk more than any he had ever
taken with his nephew.

"But birds' nesting time won't come till the spring," Harold sighed.

"No," said John, regretfully: there were many lofty trees round Ambles,
and with his mouth full of eggs anything might happen to Harold.

The transference of the vicarage family was at last complete, and John
was penitently astonished to find that Laurence really did intend to pay
for their board; in fact, the ex-vicar presented him with a check for
two months on account calculated at a guinea a week each. John was so
much moved by this event--the manner in which Laurence offered the check
gave it the character of a testimonial and thereby added to John's sense
of obligation--that he was even embarrassed by the notion of accepting
it. At the same time a faint echo of his own realistic beginnings
tinkled in his ear a warning not to refuse it, both for his own sake and
for the sake of his brother-in-law. He therefore escaped from the
imputation of avarice by suggesting that the check should be handed to
Hilda, who, as housekeeper, would know how to employ it best. John
secretly hoped that Hilda, through being able to extract what he thought
of as "a little pin money for herself" out of it, might discard the
martyr's halo that was at present pinching her brains tightly enough, if
one might judge by her constricted expression.

"There will undoubtedly be a small profit," he told himself, "for if
Laurence has a rather monkish appetite, Edith and Frida eat very
little."

Perhaps Hilda did manage to make a small profit; at any rate, she seemed
reconciled to the presence of the Armitages and gave up declaring that
she was a cipher. The fatigue of moving in had made Laurence's company,
while he was suffering from the reaction, almost bearable. Frida, apart
from a habit she had of whispering at great length in her mother's ear,
was a nice uninquisitive child, and Edith, when she was not whispering
back to Frida or echoing Laurence, was still able to rouse in her
brother's heart feelings of warm affection. Old Mrs. Touchwood had
acquired from some caller a new game of Patience, which kept her gently
simmering in the lamplight every evening; Harold had discovered among
the odds and ends of salvage from the move a sixpenny encyclopedia that,
though it made him unpleasantly informative, at any rate kept him from
being interrogative, which John found, on the whole, a slight advantage.
Janet Bond had written again most seriously about Joan of Arc, and the
film company had given excellent terms for _The Fall of Babylon_.
Really, except for two huffy letters from his sisters-in-law in London,
John was able to contemplate with much less misgivings a prospect of
spending all the winter at Ambles. Beside, he had secured his dog-cart
with a dashing chestnut mare, and was negotiating for the twenty-acre
field.

Yes, everything was very jolly, and he might even aim at finishing the
first draft of the second act before Christmas. It would be jolly to do
that and jolly to invite James and Beatrice and George and Eleanor, but
not Hugh--no, in no circumstances should Hugh be included in the
yuletide armistice--down to Ambles for an uproarious jolly week. Then
January should be devoted to the first draft of the third act--really it
should be possible to write to Janet Bond presently and assure her of a
production next autumn. John was feeling particularly optimistic. For
three days in succession the feet of the first act had been moving as
rhythmically and regularly toward the curtain as the feet of guardsmen
move along the Buckingham Palace Road. It was a fine frosty morning, and
even so early in the day John was tapping his second egg to the metrical
apostrophes of Uncle Laxart's speech offering to take his niece, Joan,
to interview Robert de Baudricourt. Suddenly he noticed that Laurence
had not yet put in his appearance. This was strange behavior for one who
still preserved from the habit of many early services an excited
punctuality for his breakfast, and lightly he asked Edith what had
become of her husband.

"He hopes to begin working again at his play this morning. Seeing you
working so hard makes him feel lazy." Edith laughed faintly and
fearfully, as if she would deprecate her own profanity in referring to
so gross a quality as laziness in connection with Laurence, and perhaps
for the first time in her life she proclaimed that her opinion was only
an echo of Laurence's own by adding, "_he_ says that it makes him feel
lazy. So he's going to begin at once."

John, whose mind kept reverting iambically and trochaically to the
curtain of his first act, merely replied, without any trace of awe, that
he was glad Laurence felt in the vein.

"But he hasn't decided yet," Edith continued, "which room he's going to
work in."

For the first time a puff of apprehension twitched the little straw that
might be going to break the camel's back.

"I'm afraid I can't offer him the library," John said quickly. "_And you
shall see the King of France to-day_," he went on composing in his head.
"No--_And you shall see King Charles_--no--_and you shall see the King
of France at once--no--and you shall see the King of France forthwith.
Sensation among the villagers standing round. Forthwith is weak at the
end of a line. I swear that you shall see the King of France.
Sensation._ Yes, that's it."

The top of John's egg was by this time so completely cracked by his
metronomic spoon that a good deal of the shell was driven down into the
egg: it did not matter, however, because appetite and inspiration were
both disposed of by the arrival of Laurence.

"I wish you could have managed to help me with some of these things," he
was muttering reproachfully to his wife.

The things consisted of six or seven books, a quantity of foolscap, an
inkpot dangerously brimming, a paper-knife made of olive wood from
Gethsemane, several pens and pencils, and a roll of blotting paper as
white as the snow upon the summit of Mont Blanc, and so fat that John
thought at first it was a tablecloth and wondered what his
brother-in-law meant to do with it. He was even chilled by a brief and
horrible suspicion that he was going to hold a communion service. Edith
rose hastily from the table to help her husband unload himself.

"I'm so sorry, dear, why didn't you ring?"

"My dear, how could I ring without letting my materials drop?" Laurence
asked, patiently.

"Or call?"

"My chin was too much occupied for calling. But it doesn't matter,
Edith. As you see, I've managed to bring everything down quite safely."

"I'm so sorry," Edith went on. "I'd no idea...."

"I told you that I was going to begin work this morning."

"Yes, how stupid of me ... I'm so sorry...."

"Going to work, are you?" interrupted John, who was anxious to stop
Edith's conjugal amenity. "That's capital."

"Yes, I'm really only waiting now to choose my room."

"I'm sorry I can't offer you mine ... but I must be alone. I find...."

"Of course," Laurence agreed with a nod of sympathetic knowingness. "Of
course, my dear fellow, I shouldn't dream of trespassing. I, though
indeed I've no right to compare myself with you, also like to work
alone. In fact I consider that a secure solitude provides the ideal
setting for dramatic composition. I have a habit--perhaps it comes from
preparing my sermons with my eye always upon the spoken rather than upon
the written word--I have a habit of declaiming many of my pages aloud to
myself. That necessitates my being alone--absolutely alone."

"Yes, you see," Edith said, "if you're alone you're not disturbed."

John who was still sensitive to Edith's truisms tried to cover her last
by incorporating Hilda in the conversation with a "What room do you
advise?"

"Why not the dining-room? I'll tell Emily to clear away the breakfast
things at once."

"Clear away?" Laurence repeated.

"And they won't be laying for lunch till a quarter-to-one."

"Laying for lunch?" Laurence gasped. "My dear Hilda! I don't wish to
attribute to my--ah--work an importance which perhaps as a hitherto
unacted playwright I have no right to attribute, but I think John at any
rate will appreciate my objection to working with--ah--the bread-knife
suspended over my head like the proverbial sword of Damocles. No, I'm
afraid I must rule out the dining-room as a practicable environment."

"And Mama likes to sit in the drawing-room," said Hilda.

"In any case," Laurence said, indulgently, "I shouldn't feel at ease in
the drawing-room. So I shall not disturb Mama. I had thought of
suggesting that the children should be given another room in which to
play, but to tell the truth I'm tired of moving furniture about. The
fact is I miss my vicarage study: it was my own."

"Yes, nobody at the vicarage ever thought of interrupting him, you see,"
Edith explained.

"Well," said John, roused by the necessity of getting Joan started upon
her journey to interview Robert de Baudricourt, "there are several empty
bedrooms upstairs. One of them could be transformed into a study for
Laurence."

"That means more arranging of furniture," Laurence objected.

"Then there's the garret," said John. "You'd find your bureau up there."

Laurence smiled in order to show how well he understood that the
suggestion was only playfulness on John's side and how little he minded
the good-natured joke.

"There is one room which might be made--ah--conducive to good work,
though at present it is occupied by a quantity of apples; they, however,
could easily be moved."

"But I moved them in there from what is now your room," Hilda protested.

"It is good for apples to be frequently moved," said Laurence, kindly.
"In fact, the oftener they are moved, the better. And this holds good
equally for pippins, codlins, and russets. On the other hand it means I
shall lose half a day's work, because even if I _could_ make a temporary
beginning anywhere else, I should have to superintend the arrangement of
the furniture."

"But I thought you didn't want to have any more furniture arranging to
do," Hilda contested, acrimoniously. "There are two quite empty rooms at
the other end of the passage."

"Yes, but I like the room in which the apples are. John will appreciate
my desire for a sympathetic milieu."

"Come, come, we will move the apples," John promised, hurriedly.

Better that the apples should roll from room to room eternally than that
he should be driven into offering Laurence a corner of the library, for
he suspected that notwithstanding the disclaimer this was his
brother-in-law's real objective.

"It doesn't say anything about apples in the encyclopedia," muttered
Harold in an aggrieved voice. _"Apoplexy treatment of, Apothecaries
measure, Appetite loss of. This may be due to general debility,
irregularity in meals, overwork, want of exercise, constipation, and
many other...."_

"Goodness gracious me, whatever has the boy got hold of?" exclaimed his
grandmother.

"Grandmama, if you mix Lanoline with an equal quantity of Sulphur you
can cure Itch," Harold went on with his spectacles glued to the page.
"And, oh, Grandmama, you know you told me not to make a noise the other
day because your heart was weak. Well, you're suffering from
flatulence. The encyclopedia says that many people who are suffering
from flatulence think they have heart disease."

"Will no one stop the child?" Grandmama pleaded.

Laurence snatched away the book from his nephew and put it in his
pocket.

"That book is mine, I believe, Harold," he said, firmly, and not even
Hilda dared protest, so majestic was Laurence and so much fluttered was
poor Grandmama.

John seized the opportunity to make his escape; but when he was at last
seated before his table the feet of the first act limped pitiably;
Laurence had trodden with all his might upon their toes; his work that
morning was chiropody, not composition, and bungling chiropody at that.
After lunch Laurence was solemnly inducted to his new study, and he may
have been conscious of an ecclesiastical parallel in the manner of his
taking possession, for he made a grave joke about it.

"Let us hope that I shall not be driven out of my new living by being
too--ah--broad."

His wife did not realize that he was being droll and had drawn down her
lips to an expression of pained sympathy, when she saw the others all
laughing and Laurence smiling his acknowledgments; her desperate effort
to change the contours of her face before Laurence noticed her failure
to respond sensibly gave the impression that she had nearly swallowed a
loose tooth.

"Perhaps you'd like me to bring up your tea, dear, so that you won't be
disturbed?" she suggested.

"Ah, tea ..." murmured Laurence. "Let me see. It's now a quarter-past
two. Tea is at half-past four. I will come down for half an hour. That
will give me a clear two hours before dinner. If I allow a quarter of an
hour for arranging my table, that will give me four hours in all.
Perhaps considering my strenuous morning four hours will be enough for
the first day. I don't like the notion of working after dinner," he
added to John.

"No?" queried John, doubtfully. He had hoped that his brother-in-law
would feel inspired by the port: it was easy enough to avoid him in the
afternoon, especially since on the first occasion that he had been taken
for a drive in the new dogcart he had evidently been imbued with a
detestation of driving that would probably last for the remainder of his
life; in fact he was talking already of wanting to sell Primrose and the
vicarage chaise.

"Though of course on some evenings I may not be able to help it," added
Laurence. "I may _have_ to work."

"Of course you may," John assented, encouragingly. "I dare say there'll
be evenings when the mere idea of waiting even for coffee will make you
fidgety. You mustn't lose the mood, you know."

"No, of course, I appreciate that."

"There's nothing so easily lost as the creative gift, Balzac said."

"Did he?" Laurence murmured, anxiously. "But I promise you I shall let
nothing interfere with me _if_--" the conjunction fizzed from his mouth
like soda from a syphon, "_if_ I'm in the--ah--mood. The
mood--yes--ah--precisely." His brow began to lower; the mood was upon
him; and everybody stole quietly from the room. They had scarcely
reached the head of the stairs when the door opened again and Laurence
called after Edith: "I should prefer that whoever brings me news of tea
merely knocks without coming in. I shall assume that a knock upon my
door means tea. But I don't wish anybody to come in."

Laurence disappeared. He seemed under the influence of a strong mental
aphrodisiac and was evidently guaranteeing himself against being
discovered in an embarrassing situation with his Muse.

"This is very good for me," thought John. "It has taught me how easily a
man may make a confounded ass of himself without anybody's raising a
finger to warn him. I hope I didn't give that sort of impression to
those two women on board. I shall have to watch myself very carefully in
future."

At this moment Emily announced that Lawyer Deacle was waiting to see Mr.
Touchwood, which meant that the twenty-acre field was at last his. The
legal formalities were complete; that very afternoon John had the
pleasure of watching the fierce little Kerry cows munch the last grass
they would ever munch in his field. But it was nearly dusk when they
were driven home, and John lost five balls in celebrating his triumph
with a brassy.

Laurence appeared at tea in a velveteen coat, which probably provided
the topic for the longest whisper that even Frida had ever been known to
utter.

"Come, come, Frida," said her father. "You won't disturb us by saying
aloud what you want to say." He had leaned over majestically to
emphasize his rebuke and in doing so brushed with his sleeve Grandmama's
wrist.

"Goodness, it's a cat," the old lady cried, with a shudder. "I shall
have to go away from here, Johnnie, if you have a cat in the house. I'd
rather have mice all over me than one of those horrid cats. Ugh! the
nasty thing!"

She was not at all convinced of her mistake even when persuaded to
stroke her son-in-law's coat.

"I hope it's been properly shooed out. Harold, please look well under
all the chairs, there's a good boy."

During the next few days John felt that he was being in some indefinable
way ousted by Laurence from the spiritual mastery of his own house. John
was averse from according to his brother-in-law a greater forcefulness
of character than he could ascribe to himself; if he had to admit that
he really was being supplanted somehow, he preferred to search for the
explanation in the years of theocratic prestige that gave a background
to the all-pervasiveness of that sacerdotal personality. Yet ultimately
the impression of his own relegation to a secondary place remained
elusive and incommunicable. He could not for instance grumble that the
times of the meals were being altered nor complain that in the smallest
detail the domestic mechanism was being geared up or down to suit
Laurence; the whole sensation was essentially of a spiritual eviction,
and the nearest he could get to formulating his resentment (though
perhaps resentment was too definite a word for this vague uneasiness)
was his own gradually growing opinion that of all those at present under
the Ambles roof Laurence was the most important. This loss of importance
was bad for John's work, upon which it soon began to exert a
discouraging influence, because he became doubtful of his own position,
hypercritical of his talent, and timid about his social ability. He
began to meditate the long line of failures to dramatize the immortal
tale of Joan of Arc immortally, to see himself dangling at the end of
this long line of ineptitudes and to ask himself whether bearing in mind
the vastness of even our own solar system it was really worth while
writing at all. It could not be due to anything or anybody but Laurence,
this sense of his own futility; not even when a few years ago he had
reached the conclusion that as a realistic novelist he was a failure had
he been so profoundly conscious of his own insignificance in time and
space.

"I shall have to go away if I'm ever to get on with this play," he told
himself.

Yet still so indefinite was his sense of subordinacy at Ambles that he
accused his liver (an honest one that did not deserve the reproach) and
bent over his table again with all the determination he could muster.
The concrete fact was still missing; his capacity for self-deception was
still robust enough to persuade him that it was all a passing fancy, and
he might have gone plodding on at Ambles for the rest of the winter if
one morning about a week after Laurence had begun to write, the door of
his own library had not opened to the usurper, manuscript in hand.

"I don't like to interrupt you, my dear fellow.... I know you have your
own work to consider ... but I'm anxious for your opinion--in fact I
should like to read you my first act."

It was useless to resist: if it were not now, it would be later.

"With pleasure," said John. Then he made one effort. "Though I prefer
reading to myself."

"That would involve waiting for the typewriter. Yes, my screed
is--ah--difficult to make out. And I've indulged in a good many erasures
and insertions. No, I think you'd better let me read it to you."

John indicated a chair and looked out of the window longingly at the
birds, as patients in the hands of a dentist regard longingly the
sparrows in the dingy evergreens of the dentist's back garden.

"When we had our little talk the other day," Laurence began, "you will
remember that I spoke of a drama I had already written, of which the
disciple Thomas was the protagonist. This drama notwithstanding the
probably obstructive attitude of the Lord Chamberlain I have rewritten,
or rather I have rewritten the first act. I call the play--ah--_Thomas_."

"It sounds a little trivial for such a serious subject, don't you
think?" John suggested. "I mean, Thomas has come to be associated in so
many people's minds with footmen. Wouldn't _Saint Thomas_ be better, and
really rather more respectful? Many people still have a great feeling of
reverence for apostles."

"No, no, _Thomas_ it is: _Thomas_ it must remain. You have forgotten
perhaps that I told you he was the prototype of the man in the street.
It is the simplicity, the unpretentiousness of the title that for me
gives it a value. Well, to resume. _Thomas. A play in four acts. By
Laurence Armytage._ By the way, I'm going to spell my name with a y in
future. Poetic license. Ha-ha! I shall not advertise the change in the
_Times_. But I think it looks more literary with a y. _Act the First.
Scene the First. The shore of the Sea of Galilee._ I say nothing else. I
don't attempt to describe it. That is what I have learnt from
Shakespeare. This modern passion for description can only injure the
greatness of the theme. _Enter from the left the Virgin Mary._"

"Enter who?" asked John in amazement.

"The Virgin Mary. The mother ..."

"Yes, I know who she is, but ... well, I'm not a religious man,
Laurence, in fact I've not been to church since I was a boy ... but ...
no, no, you can't do that."

"Why not?"

"It will offend people."

"I want to offend people," Laurence intoned. "If thy eye offend thee,
pluck it out."

"Well, you did," said John. "You put in a _y_ instead."

"I'm not jesting, my dear fellow."

"Nor am I," said John. "What I want you to understand is that you can't
bring the Virgin Mary on the stage. Why, I'm even doubtful about Joan of
Arc's vision of the Archangel Michael. Some people may object, though
I'm counting on his being generally taken for St. George."

"I know that you are writing a play about Joan of Arc, but--and I hope
you'll not take unkindly what I'm going to say--but Joan of Arc can
never be more than a pretty piece of medievalism, whereas Thomas ..."

John gave up, and the next morning he told the household that he was
called back to London on business.

"Perhaps I shall have some peace here," he sighed, looking round at his
dignified Church Row library.

"Mrs. James called earlier this morning, sir, and said not to disturb
you, but she hoped you'd had a comfortable journey and left these
flowers, and Mrs. George has telephoned from the theater to say she'll
be here almost directly."

"Thank you, Mrs. Worfolk," John said. "Perhaps Mrs. George will be
taking lunch."

"Yes, sir, I expect she will," said his housekeeper.




CHAPTER V


Mrs. George Touchwood--or as she was known on the stage, Miss Eleanor
Cartright--was big-boned, handsome, and hawklike, with the hungry look
of the ambitious actress who is drawing near to forty--she was in fact
thirty-seven--and realizes that the disappointed adventuresses of what
are called strong plays are as near as she will ever get to the tragedy
queens of youthful aspiration. Such an one accustomed to flash her dark
eyes in defiance of a morally but not esthetically hostile gallery and
to have the whole of a stage for the display of what well-disposed
critics hailed as vitality and cavaliers condemned as lack of repose,
such an one in John's tranquil library was, as Mrs. Worfolk put it,
"rather too much of a good thing and no mistake"; and when Eleanor was
there, John experienced as much malaise as he would have experienced
from being shut up in a housemaid's closet with a large gramophone and
the housemaid. This claustrophobia, however, was the smallest strain
that his sister-in-law inflicted upon him; she affected his heart and
his conscience more acutely, because he could never meet her without a
sensation of guilt on account of his not yet having found a part for her
in any of his plays, to which was added the fear he always felt in her
presence that soon or late he should from sheer inability to hold out
longer award her the leading part in his play. George had often
seriously annoyed him by his unwillingness to help himself; but at the
thought of being married for thirteen years to Eleanor he had always
excused his brother's flaccid dependence.

"George is a bit of a sponge," James had once said, "but Eleanor!
Eleanor is the roughest and toughest loofah that was ever known. She is
irritant and absorbent at the same time, and by gad, she has the
appearance of a loofah."

The prospect of Eleanor's company at lunch on the morning after his
return to town gave John a sensation of having escaped the devil to fall
into the deep sea, of having jumped from the frying-pan into the fire,
in fact of illustrating every known proverbial attempt to express the
distinction without the difference.

"It's a great pity that Eleanor didn't marry Laurence," he thought.
"Each would have kept the other well under, and she could have played
Mary Magdalene in that insane play of his. And, by Jove, if they _had_
married, neither of them would have been a relation! Moreover, if
Laurence had been caught by Eleanor, Edith might never have married at
all and could have kept house for me. And if Edith hadn't married, Hilda
mightn't have married, and then Harold would never have been born."

John's hard pruning of his family-tree was interrupted by a sense of the
house's having been attacked by an angry mob--an illusion that he had
learnt to connect with his sister-in-law's arrival. To make sure,
however, he went out on the landing and called down to know if anything
was the matter.

"Mrs. George is having some trouble with the taxi-man, sir," explained
Maud, who was holding the front-door open and looking apprehensively at
the pictures that were clattering on the walls in the wind.

"Why does she take taxis?" John muttered, irritably. "She can't afford
them, and there's no excuse for such extravagance when the tube is so
handy."

At this moment Eleanor reached the door, on the threshold of which she
turned like Medea upon Jason to have the last word with the taxi-driver
before the curtain fell.

"Did Mr. Touchwood get my message?" she was asking.

"Yes, yes," John called down. "I'm expecting you to lunch."

When he watched Eleanor all befurred coming upstairs, he felt not much
less nervous than a hunter of big game face to face with his first
tiger; the landing seemed to wobble like a howdah; now he had fired and
missed, and she was embracing him as usual. How many times at how many
meetings with Eleanor had he tried unsuccessfully to dodge that
kiss--which always seemed improper whether because her lips were too
red, or too full, he could never decide, though he always felt when he
was released that he ought to beg her husband's pardon.

"You were an old beast not to come and see us when you got back from
America; but never mind, I'm awfully glad to see you, all the same."

"Thank you very much, Eleanor. Why are you glad?"

"Oh, you sarcastic old bear!"

This perpetual suggestion of his senility was another trick of Eleanor's
that he deplored; dash it, he was two years younger than George, whom
she called Georgieboy.

"No, seriously," Eleanor went on. "I was just going to wire and ask if I
could send the kiddies down to the country. Lambton wants me for a six
weeks' tour before Xmas, and I can't leave them with Georgie. You see,
if this piece catches on, it means a good shop for me in the new year."

"Yes, I quite understand your point of view," John said. "But what I
don't understand is why Bertram and Viola can't stay with their father."

"But George is ill. Surely you got my letter?"

"I didn't realize that the presence of his children might prove fatal.
However, send them down to Ambles by all means."

"Oh, but I'd much rather not after the way Hilda wrote to me, and now
that you've come back there's no need."

"I don't quite understand."

"Well, you won't mind having them here for a short visit? Then they can
go down to Ambles for the Christmas holidays."

"But the Christmas holidays won't begin for at least six weeks."

"I know."

"But you don't propose that Bertram and Viola should spend six weeks
here?"

"They'll be no bother, you old crosspatch. Bertram will be at school all
day, and I suppose that Maud or Elsa will always be available to take
Viola to her dancing-lessons. You remember the dancing-lessons you
arranged for?"

"I remember that I accepted the arrangement," said John.

"Well, she's getting on divinely, and it would be a shame to interrupt
them just now, especially as she's in the middle of a Spanish series.
Her _cachucha_ is ..." Eleanor could only blow a kiss to express what
Viola's _cachucha_ was. "But then, of course, I had a Spanish
grandmother."

When John regarded her barbaric personality he could have credited her
with being the granddaughter of a cannibal queen.

"So I thought that her governess could come here every morning just as
easily as to Earl's Court. In fact, it will be more convenient, or at
any rate, equally convenient for her, because she lives at Kilburn."

"I dare say it will be equally convenient for the governess," said John,
sardonically.

"And I thought," Eleanor continued, "that it would be a good opportunity
for Viola to have French lessons every afternoon. You won't want to have
her all the time with you, and the French governess can give the
children their tea. That will be good for Bertram's accent."

"I don't doubt that it will be superb for Bertram's accent, but I
absolutely decline to have a French governess bobbing in and out of my
house. It's bound to make trouble with the servants who always think
that French governesses are designing and licentious, and I don't want
to create a false impression."

"Well, aren't you an old prude? Who would ever think that you had any
sort of connection with the stage? By the way, you haven't told me if
there'll be anything for me in your next."

"Well, at present the subject of my next play is a secret ... and as for
the cast...."

John was so nearly on the verge of offering Eleanor the part of Mary of
Anjou, for which she would be as suitable as a giraffe, that in order to
effect an immediate diversion he asked her when the children were to
arrive.

"Let me see, to-day's Saturday. To-morrow I go down to Bristol, where we
open. They'd better come to-night, because to-morrow being Sunday
they'll have no lessons, which will give them time to settle down.
Georgie will be glad to know they're with you."

"I've no doubt he'll be enchanted," John agreed.

The bell sounded for lunch, and they went downstairs.

"I've got to be back at the theater by two," Eleanor announced, looking
at the horridly distorted watch upon her wrist. "I wonder if we mightn't
ask Maud to open half-a-bottle of champagne? I'm dreadfully tired."

John ordered a bottle to be opened; he felt rather tired himself.

"Let us be quite clear about this arrangement," he began, when after
three glasses of wine he felt less appalled by the prospect, and had
concluded that after all Bertram and Viola would not together be as bad
as Laurence with his play, not to mention Harold with his spectacles and
entomology, his interrogativeness and his greed. "The English governess
will arrive every morning for Viola. What is her name?"

"Miss Coldwell."

"Miss Coldwell then will be responsible for Viola all the morning. The
French governess is canceled, and I shall come to an arrangement with
Miss Coldwell by which she will add to her salary by undertaking all
responsibility for Viola until Viola is in bed. Bertram will go to
school, and I shall rely upon Miss Coldwell to keep an eye on his
behavior at home."

"And don't forget the dancing-lessons."

"No, I had Madame What's-her-name's account last week."

"I mean, don't forget to arrange for Viola to go."

"That pilgrimage will, I hope, form a part of what Miss Coldwell would
probably call 'extras.' And after all perhaps George will soon be fit."

"The poor old boy has been awfully seedy all the summer."

"What's he suffering from? Infantile paralysis?"

"It's all very well for you to joke about it, but you don't live in a
wretched boarding-house in Earl's Court. You mustn't let success spoil
you, John. It's so easy when everything comes your way to forget the
less fortunate people. Look at me. I'm thirty-four, you know."

"Are you really? I should never have thought it."

"I don't mind your laughing at me, you old crab. But I don't like you to
laugh at Georgie."

"I never do," John said. "I don't suppose that there's anybody alive who
takes George as seriously as I do."

Eleanor brushed away a tear and said she must get back to the rehearsal.

When she was gone John felt that he had been unkind, and he reproached
himself for letting Laurence make him cynical.

"The fact is," he told himself, "that ever since I heard Doris Hamilton
make that remark in the saloon of the _Murmania_, I've become suspicious
of my family. She began it, and then by ill luck I was thrown too much
with Laurence, who clinched it. Eleanor is right: I _am_ letting myself
be spoilt by success. After all, there's no reason why those two
children shouldn't come here. _They_ won't be writing plays about
apostles. I'll send George a box of cigars to show that I didn't mean to
sneer at him. And why didn't I offer to pay for Eleanor's taxi? Yes, I
am getting spoilt. I must watch myself. And I ought not to have joked
about Eleanor's age."

Luckily his sister-in-law had finished the champagne, for if John had
drunk another glass he might have offered her the part of the Maid
herself.

The actual arrival of Bertram and Viola passed off more successfully.
They were both presentable, and John was almost flattered when Mrs.
Worfolk commented on their likeness to him, remembering what a nightmare
it had always seemed when Hilda used to excavate points of resemblance
between him and Harold. Mrs. Worfolk herself was so much pleased to have
him back from Ambles that she was in the best of good humours, and even
the statuesque Maud flushed with life like some Galatea.

"I think Maud's a darling, don't you, Uncle John?" exclaimed Viola.

"We all appreciate Maud's--er--capabilities," John hemmed.

He felt that it was a silly answer, but inasmuch as Maud was present at
the time he could not, either for his sake or for hers give an
unconditional affirmative.

"I swopped four blood-allys for an Indian in the break," Bertram
announced.

"With an Indian, my boy, I suppose you mean."

"No, I don't. I mean for an Indian--an Indian marble. And I swopped four
Guatemalas for two Nicaraguas."

"You ought to be at the Foreign Office."

"But the ripping thing is, Uncle John, that two of the Guatemalas are
fudges."

"Such a doubtful coup would not debar you from a diplomatic career."

"And I say, what is the Foreign Office? We've got a French chap in my
class."

"You ask for an explanation of the Foreign Office. That, my boy, might
puzzle the omniscience of the Creator."

"I say, I don't twig very well what you're talking about."

"The attributes of the Foreign Office, my boy, are rigidity where there
should be suppleness, weakness where there should be firmness, and for
intelligence the substitution of hair brushed back from the forehead."

"I say, you're ragging me, aren't you? No, really, what is the Foreign
Office?"

"It is the ultimate preserve of a privileged imbecility."

Bertram surrendered, and John congratulated himself upon the possession
of a nephew whose perseverance and curiosity had been sapped by a
scholastic education.

"Harold would have tackled me word by word during one of our walks. I
shall enter into negotiations with Hilda at Christmas to provide for his
mental training on condition that I choose the school. Perhaps I shall
hear of a good one in the Shetland Islands."

When Mrs. Worfolk visited John as usual at ten o'clock to wish him
good-night, she was enthusiastic about Bertram and Viola.

"Well, really, sir, if yaul pardon the liberty, I must say I wouldn't
never of believed that Mrs. George's children _could_ be so quiet and
nice-behaved. They haven't given a bit of trouble, and I've never heard
Maud speak so highly of anyone as of Miss Viola. 'That child's a regular
little angel, Mrs. Worfolk,' she said to me. Well, sir, I'm bound to say
that children does brighten up a house. I'm sure I've done my best what
with putting flowers in all the vawses and one thing and another, but
really, well I'm quite taken with your little nephew and niece, and I've
had some experience of them, I mean to say, what with my poor sister's
Herbert and all. I _have_ put the tantalus ready. Good-night, sir."

"The fact of the matter is," John assured himself, "that when I'm alone
with them I can manage children perfectly. I only hope that Miss
Coldwell will fall in with my ideas. If she does, I see no reason why we
shouldn't spend an extremely pleasant time all together."

Unfortunately for John's hope of a satisfactory coalition with the
governess he received a hurried note by messenger from his sister-in-law
next morning to say that Miss Coldwell was laid up: the precise disease
was illegible in Eleanor's communication, but it was serious enough to
keep Miss Coldwell at home for three weeks. "_Meanwhile_," Eleanor
wrote, "_she is trying to get her sister to come down from_"--the abode
of the sister was equally illegible. "_But the most important thing
is," Eleanor went on, "that little V. shouldn't miss her
dancing-lessons. So will you arrange for Maud to take her every Tuesday
and Friday? And, of course, if there's anything you want to know,
there's always George._"

Of George's eternal being John had no doubts; of his knowledge he was
less sanguine: the only thing that George had ever known really well was
the moment to lead trumps.

"However," said John, in consultation with his housekeeper, "I dare say
we shall get along."

"Oh, certainly we shall, sir," Mrs. Worfolk confidently proclaimed,
"well, I mean to say, I've been married myself."

John bowed his appreciation of this fact.

"And though I never had the happiness to have any little toddlers of my
own, anyone being married gets used to the idea of having children.
There's always the chance, as you might say. It isn't like as if I was
an old maid, though, of course, my husband died in Jubilee year."

"Did he, Mrs. Worfolk, did he?"

"Yes, sir, he planed off his thumb when he was working on one of the
benches for the stands through him looking round at a black fellow in a
turban covered in jewelry who was driving to Buckingham Palace. One of
the new arrivals, it was; and his arm got blood poisoning. That's how I
remember it was Jubilee year, though usually I'm a terror for knowing
when anything did occur. He wouldn't of minded so much, he said, only he
was told it was the Char of Persia and that made him mad."

"Why? What had he got against the Shah?"

"He hadn't got nothing against the Char. But it wasn't the Char; and if
he'd of known it wasn't the Char he never wouldn't of turned round so
quick, and there's no saying he wouldn't of been alive to this day. No,
sir, don't you worry about this governess. I dare say if she'd of come
she'd only of caused a bit of unpleasantness all round."

At the same time, John thought, when he sent for the children in order
to make the announcement of Miss Coldwell's desertion, notwithstanding
Mrs. Worfolk's optimism it was a pity that the first day of their visit
should be a Sunday.

"I'm sorry to say, Viola, and, of course, Bertram, this applies equally
to you, that poor Miss Coldwell has been taken very ill."

That strange expression upon the children's faces might be an awkward
attempt to express their youthful sympathy, but it more ominously
resembled a kind of gloating ecstacy, as they stood like two cherubs
outside the gates of paradise, or two children outside a bunshop.

"Very ill," John went on, "so ill indeed that it is feared she will not
be able to come for a few days, and so...."

Whatever more John would have said was lost in the riotous acclamations
with which Bertram and Viola greeted the sad news. After the first cries
and leaps of joy had subsided to a chanted duet, which ran somehow like
this:

"Oh, oh, Miss Coldwell,

She can't come to Hampstead,

Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah,

Miss Coldwell's not coming:"

John ventured to rebuke the singers for their insensibility to human
suffering.

"For she may be dangerously ill," he protested.

"How _fizzing_," Bertram shouted.

"She might die."

The prospect that this opened before Bertram was apparently too
beautiful for any verbal utterance, and he remained open-mouthed in a
mute and exquisite anticipation of liberty.

"What and never come to us ever again?" Viola breathed, her blue eyes
aglow with visions of a larger life.

John shook his head, gravely.

"Oh, Uncle John," she cried, "wouldn't that be glorious?"

Bertram's heart was too full for words: he simply turned head over
heels.

"But you hard-hearted little beasts," their uncle expostulated.

"She's most frightfully strict," Viola explained.

"Yes, we shouldn't have been able to do anything decent if she'd come,"
Bertram added.

A poignant regret for that unknown governess suffering from her
illegible complaint pierced John's mind. But perhaps she would recover,
in which case she should spend her convalescence at Ambles with Harold;
for if when in good health she was strict, after a severe illness she
might be ferocious.

"Well, I'm not at all pleased with your attitude," John declared. "And
you'll find me twice as strict as Miss Coldwell."

"Oh, no, we shan't," said Bertram with a smile of jovial incredulity.

John let this contradiction pass: it seemed an imprudent subject for
debate. "And now, to-day being Sunday, you'd better get ready for
church."

"Oh, but we always dress up on Sunday," Viola said.

"So does everybody," John replied. "Go and get ready."

The children left the room, and he rang for Mrs. Worfolk.

"Master Bertram and Miss Viola will shortly be going to church, and I
want you to arrange for somebody to take them."

Mrs. Worfolk hesitated.

"Who was you thinking of, sir?"

"I wasn't thinking of anybody in particular, but I suppose Maud could
go."

"Maud has her rooms to do."

"Well, Elsa."

"Elsa has her dinner to get."

"Well, then, perhaps you would ..."

"Yaul pardon the liberty, sir, but I never go to church except of an
evening _some_times; I never could abide being stared at."

"Oh, very well," said John, fretfully, as Mrs. Worfolk retired. "Though
I'm hanged if _I'm_ going to take them," he added to himself, "at any
rate without a rehearsal."

The two children soon came back in a condition of complete preparation
and insisted so loudly upon their uncle's company that he yielded;
though when he found himself with a child on either side of him in the
sabbath calm of the Hampstead streets footfall-haunted, he was appalled
at his rashness. There was a church close to his own house, but with an
instinct to avoid anything like a domestic scandal he had told his
nephew and niece that it was not a suitable church for children, and had
led them further afield through the ghostly November sunlight.

"But look here," Bertram objected, "we can't go through any slums, you
know, because the cads will bung things at my topper."

"Not if you're with me," John argued. "I am wearing a top-hat myself."

"Well, they did when I went for a walk with Father once on Sunday."

"The slums round Earl's Court are probably much fiercer than the slums
round Hampstead," John suggested. "And anyway here we are."

He had caught a glimpse of an ecclesiastical building, which
unfortunately turned out to be a Jewish tabernacle and not open: a few
minutes later, however, an indubitably Anglican place of worship invited
their attendance, and John trying not to look as bewildered as he felt
let himself be conducted by a sidesman to the very front pew.

"I wonder if he thinks I'm a member of parliament. But I wish to
goodness he'd put us in the second row. I shall be absolutely lost where
I am."

John looked round to catch the sidesman's eye and plead for a less
conspicuous position, but even as he turned his head a terrific crash
from the organ proclaimed that it was too late and that the service had
begun.

By relying upon the memories of youthful worship John might have been
able to cope successfully with Morning Prayer, even with that florid
variation of it which is generally known as Mattins. Unluckily the
church he had chosen for the spiritual encouragement of his nephew and
niece was to the church of his recollections as Mount Everest to a
molehill. As a simple spectator without encumbrances he might have
enjoyed the service and derived considerable inspiration from it for the
decorative ecclesiasticism of his new play; as an uncle it alarmed and
confused him. The lace-hung acolytes, the candles, the chrysanthemums,
the purple vestments and the ticking of the thurible affected him
neither with Protestant disgust nor with Catholic devoutness, but much
more deeply as nothing but incentives to the unanswerable inquiries of
Bertram and Viola.

"What are they doing?" whispered his nephew.

"Hush!" he whispered back in what he tried to feel was the right
intonation of pious reproof.

"What's that little boy doing with a spoon?" whispered his niece.

"Hush!" John blew forth again. "Attend to the service."

"But it isn't a real service, is it?" she persisted.

Luckily the congregation knelt at this point, and John plunged down with
a delighted sense of taking cover. Presently he began to be afraid that
his attitude of devotional self-abasement might be seeming a little
ostentatious, and he peered cautiously round over the top of the pew; to
his dismay he perceived that Bertram and Viola were still standing up.

"Kneel down at once," he commanded in what he hoped would be an
authoritative whisper, but which was in the result an agonized croak.

"I want to see what they're doing," both children protested.

Bertram's Etons appeared too much attentuated for a sharp tug, nor did
John feel courageous enough in the front row to jerk Viola down upon her
knees by pulling her petticoats, which might come off. He therefore
covered his face with his hands in what was intended to look like a
spasm of acute reverence and growled at them both to kneel down, unless
they wanted to be sent back instantly to Earl's Court. Evidently
impressed by this threat the children knelt down; but they were no
sooner upon their knees than the perverse congregation rose to its feet,
the concerted movement taking John so completely unawares that he was
left below and felt when he did rise like a naughty boy who has been
discovered hiding under a table. He was not put at ease by Viola's
asking him to find her place in the prayer-book; it seemed to him
terrible to discern the signs of a vindictive spirit in one so young.

"Hush," he whispered. "You must remember that we're in the front row and
must be careful not to disturb the--" he hesitated at the word
"performers" and decided to envelop whatever they were in a cough.

There were no more questions for a while, nothing indeed but tiptoe
fidgetings until two acolytes advanced with lighted candles to a
position on each side of the deacon who was preparing to read the
gospel.

"Why can't he see to read?" Bertram asked. "It's not dark."

"Hush," John whispered. "This is the gospel"

He knew he was safe in affirming so much, because the announcement that
he was about to read the gospel had been audibly given out by the
deacon. At this point the congregation crossed its innumerable features
three times, and Bertram began to giggle; immediately afterward fumes
poured from the swung censer, and Viola began to choke. John felt that
it was impossible to interrupt what was presumably considered the _piece
de resistance_ of the service by leading the two children out along the
whole length of the church; yet he was convinced that if he did not lead
them out their gigglings and snortings would have a disastrous effect
upon the soloist. Then he had a brilliant idea: Viola was obviously much
upset by the incense and he would escort her out into fresh air with
the solicitude that one gives to a sick person: Bertram he should leave
behind to giggle alone. He watched his nephew bending lower and lower to
contain his mirth; then with a quick propulsive gesture he hurried Viola
into the aisle. Unfortunately when with a sigh of relief he stood upon
the steps outside and put on his hat he found that in his confusion he
had brought out Bertram's hat, which on his intellectual head felt like
a precariously balanced inkpot; and though he longed to abandon Bertram
to his well merited fate he could not bring himself to walk up
Fitzjohn's Avenue in Bertram's hat, nor could he even contemplate with
equanimity the notion of Bertram's walking up under his. Had it been a
week-day either of them might have passed for an eccentric
advertisement, but on a Sunday....

"And if I stand on the steps of a church holding this minute hat in my
hand," he thought, "people will think I'm collecting for some charity.
Confound that boy! And I can't pretend that I'm feeling too hot in the
middle of November. Dash that boy! And I certainly can't wear it. A
Japanese juggler wouldn't be able to wear it. Damn that boy!"

Yet John would rather have gone home in a baby's bonnet than enter the
church again, and the best that could be hoped was that Bertram dismayed
at finding himself alone would soon emerge. Bertram, however, did not
emerge, and John had a sudden fear lest in his embarrassment he might
have escaped by another door and was even now rushing blindly home.
Blindly was the right adverb indeed, for he would certainly be unable to
see anything from under his uncle's hat. Viola, having recovered from
her choking fit, began to cry at this point, and an old lady who must
have noted with tender approval John's exit came out with a bottle of
smelling-salts, which she begged him to make use of. Before he could
decline she had gone back inside the church leaving him with the bottle.
If he could have forced the contents down Viola's throat without
attracting more attention he would have done so, but by this time one
or two passers-by had stopped to stare at the scene, and he heard one of
them tell his companion that it was a street conjurer just going to
perform.

"Will anything make you stop crying?" he asked his niece in despair.

"I want Bertram," she wailed.

And at that moment Bertram appeared, led out by two sidesmen.

"Your little boy doesn't know how to behave himself in church," one of
them informed John, severely.

"I was only looking for my hat," Bertram explained. "I thought it had
rolled into the next pew. Let go of my arm. I slipped off the hassock. I
couldn't help making a little noise, Uncle John."

John was grateful to Bertram for thus exonerating him publicly from the
responsibility of having begotten him, and he inquired almost kindly
what had happened.

"The hassock slipped, and I fell into the next pew."

"I'm sorry my nephew made a noise," said John to the sidesman. "My niece
was taken ill, and he was left behind by accident. Thank you for showing
him the way out, yes. Come along, Bertram, I've got your hat. Where's
mine?" Bertram looked blankly at his uncle.

"Do you mean to say--" John began, and then he saw a passing taxi to
which he shouted.

"Those smelling-salts belong to an old lady," he explained hurriedly and
quite inadequately to the bewildered sidesman into whose hands he had
thrust the bottle. "Come along," he urged the children, and when they
were scrambling into the taxi he called back to the sidesmen, "You can
give to the jumble sale any hat that is swept up after the service."

Inside the taxi John turned to the children.

"One would think you'd never been inside a church before," he said,
reproachfully.

"Bertram," said Viola, in bland oblivion of all that her uncle had
endured, "when we dress up to-day shall we act going to church, or
finish Robinson Crusoe?"

"Wait till we see what we can find for dressing up," Bertram advised.

John displayed a little anxiety.

"Dressing up?" he repeated.

"We always dress up every Sunday," the children burst forth in unison.

"Oh, I see--it's a kind of habit. Well, I dare say Mrs. Worfolk will be
able to find you an old duster or something."

"Duster," echoed Viola, scornfully. "That's not enough for dressing up."

"I didn't suggest a duster as anything but a supplement to your ordinary
costume. I didn't anticipate that you were going to rely entirely upon
the duster."

"I say, V, can you twig what Uncle John says?"

Viola shook her head.

"Nor more can I," said Bertram, sympathetically.

Before the taxi reached Church Row, John found himself adopting a
positively deferential manner towards his nephew and his niece, and when
they were once again back in the quiet house, the hall of which was
faintly savoury with the maturing lunch he asked them if they would mind
amusing themselves for an hour while he wrote some letters.

"For I take it you won't want to dress up immediately," he added as an
excuse for attending to his own business.

The children confirmed his supposition, but went on to inform him that
the domenical regime at Earl's Court prescribed a walk after church.

"Owing to the accident to my hat I'm afraid I must ask you to let me off
this morning."

"Right-o," Bertram agreed, cheerfully. "But I vote we come up and sit
with you while you write your letters. I think letters are a beastly
fag, don't you?"

John felt that the boy was proffering his own and his sister's company
in a spirit of altruism, and he could not muster enough gracelessness
to decline the proposal. So upstairs they all went.

"I think this is rather a ripping room, don't you, V?"

"The carpet's very old," said Viola.

"Have you got any decent books?" Bertram inquired, looking round at the
shelves. "Any Henty's, I mean, or anything?"

"No, I'm afraid I haven't," said John, apologetically.

"Or bound up Boys Own Papers?"

John shook his head.

"But I'll tell you what I have got," he added with a sudden inspiration.
"Kingsley's _Heroes_."

"Is that a pi book?" asked Bertram, suspiciously.

"Not at all. It's about Greek gods and goddesses, essentially
broad-minded divinities."

"Right-o. I'll have a squint at it, if you like," Bertram volunteered.
"Come on, V, don't start showing off your rotten dancing. Come and look
at this book. It's got some spiffing pictures."

"Lunch won't be very long," John announced in order to propitiate any
impatience at what they might consider the boring entertainment he was
offering.

Presently the two children left their uncle alone, and he observed with
pride that they took with them the book. He little thought that so mild
a dose of romance as could be extracted from Kingsley's _Heroes_ would
before the twilight of that November day run through 36 Church Row like
fire. But then John did not know that there was a calf's head for dinner
that night; he had not realized the scenic capacity of the cistern
cupboard at the top of the house; and most of all he had not associated
with dressing up on Sunday afternoon the histrionic force that Bertram
and Viola inherited from their mother.

"Is it Androm[e]da or Andr[o]meda?" Bertram asked at lunch.

"Andr[o]meda, my boy," John answered. "Perseus and Andromeda."

"I think it would make a jolly good play, don't you?" Bertram went on.

Really, thought John, this nephew was a great improvement upon that
spectacled inquisitor at Ambles.

"A capital play," he agreed, heartily. "Are you thinking of writing it?"

"V and I thought we'd do it instead of finishing Robinson Crusoe. Well,
you see, you haven't got any decent fur rugs, and V's awfully stupid
about having her face blacked."

"It's my turn not to be a savage," Viola pleaded in defense of her
squeamishness.

"I said you could be Will Atkins as well. I know I'd jolly well like to
be Will Atkins myself."

"All right," Viola offered. "You can, and I'll be Robinson."

"You can't change like that in the middle of a play," her brother
argued.

John, who appreciated both Viola's dislike of burnt-cork and Bertram's
esthetic objection to changing parts in the middle of a piece, strongly
recommended Perseus and Andromeda.

"Of course, you got the idea from Kingsley? Bravo, Bertram," he said,
beaming with cordial patronage.

"And I suppose," his nephew went on, "that you'd rather we played at the
top of the house. I expect it would be quieter, if you're writing
letters. Mother said you often liked to be quiet." He alluded to this
desire rather shamefully, as if it were a secret vice of his uncle, who
hurriedly approved the choice of the top landing for the scene of the
classic drama.

"Then would you please tell Mrs. Worfolk that we can have the calf's
head?"

"The what?"

"V found a calf's head in the larder, and it would make a fizzing
Gorgon's head, but Mrs. Worfolk wouldn't let us have it."

John was so much delighted with the trend of Bertram's ingenuity that
he sent for Mrs. Worfolk and told her that the calf's head might be
borrowed for the play.

"I'll take no responsibility for your dinner," said his housekeeper,
warningly.

"That's all right, Mrs. Worfolk. If anything happens to the head I
shan't grumble. There'll always be the cold beef, won't there?"

Mrs. Worfolk turned up her eyes to heaven and left the room.

"Well, I think I've arranged that for you successfully."

"Thank you, Uncle John," said Bertram.

"Thank you, Uncle John," said Viola.

What nice quiet well-mannered children they were, after all; and he by
no means ought to blame them for the fiasco of the churchgoing; the
setting had of course been utterly unfamiliar; these ritualistic places
of worship were a mistake in an unexcitable country like England. John
retired to his library and lit a Corona with a sense that he thoroughly
deserved a good cigar.

"Children are not difficult," he said to himself, "if one tries to put
oneself in their place. That request for the calf's head undoubtedly
showed a rare combination of adaptiveness with for a schoolboy what was
almost a poetic fancy. Harold would have wanted to know how much the
head weighed, and whether in life it preferred to browse on buttercups
or daisies; but when finally it was cooked he would have eaten twice as
much as anybody else. I prefer Bertram's attitude; though naturally I
can appreciate a housekeeper's feelings. These cigars are in capital
condition. Really, Bertram's example is infectious, and by gad, I feel
quite like a couple of hours with Joan. Yes, it's a pity Laurence hasn't
got Bertram's dramatic sense. A great pity."

The sabbath afternoon wore on, and though John did not accumulate enough
energy to seat himself at his table, he dreamed a good deal of wonderful
situations in the fourth act, puffing away at his cigar and hearing from
time to time distant shouts and scamperings; these, however, did not
keep him from falling into a gentle doze, from which he was abruptly
wakened by the opening of the library door.

"Ah, is that tea?" he asked cheerfully in that tone with which the
roused sleeper always implies his uninterrupted attention to time and
space.

"No, sir, it's me," a grim voice replied. "And if you don't want us all
to be drowned where we stand, it being a Sunday afternoon, and not a
plumber to be got, and Maud in the hysterics, and those two young
Tartars screaming like Bedlamites, and your dinner ruined and done for,
and the feathers gone from Elsa's new hat, per-raps you could come
upstairs, Mr. Touchwood. Gordon's head indeed, and the boy as naked as a
stitch!"

John jumped to his feet and hurried out on the landing; at the same
moment Bertram with nothing to cover him except a pudding-shape on his
head, a tea-tray on his arm, a Turkish scimitar at his waist, and the
pinions of a blue and green bird tied round his ankles leapt six stairs
of the flight above and alighting at his uncle's feet, thrust the calf's
head into his face.

"You're turned to stone, Phineus," he yelled. "You can't move. You've
seen the Gorgon."

"There he goes again with his Gordon and his Gladstone," said Mrs.
Worfolk. "How dare you be so daring?"

"The Gorgon's sister," cried Bertram lunging at her with the scimitar.
"Beware, I am invisible."

Whereupon he enveloped the calf's head in a napkin, held the tea-tray
before his face, and darted away upstairs.

"I'm afraid he's a little over-excited," said John, doubtfully.

At this moment a stream of water began to flow past his feet and pour
down upon him from the landing above.

"Why, the house is full of water," he gasped.

"It's what I'm trying to tell you, sir," Mrs. Worfolk fumed. "He's done
something with that there cistern and burst it. I can't stop the
water."

John followed Perseus on his wild flight up the stairs down which every
moment water was flowing more freely. When he reached the cistern
cupboard he discovered Maud bound fast to the disordered cistern, while
Viola holding in her mouth a large ivory paper-knife and wearing what
looked like Mrs. Worfolk's sealskin jacket that John had given her last
Christmas was splashing at full length in a puddle on the floor and
clawing at Maud's skirts with ferocious growls and grunts.

"You dare try to undress me again, Master Bertram," the statuesque Maud
was screaming.

"Well, Andromeda's got practically nothing on in the book, and you said
you'd rather not be the sea-monster," Bertram was arguing. "Andromeda,"
he cried seeing by the manner of his uncle's advance that the curtain
must now be rung down upon the play, "I have turned the monster to
stone. Go on, V, you can't move from now on."

Viola stiffened and without a twitch let the stream of water pour down
upon her, while Bertram planting his foot in the small of her back waved
triumphantly the Gorgon's head, both of whose ears gave way under the
strain, so that John's dinner was soon as wet as he was.

The cistern emptied itself at last; Maud was released; Bertram and Viola
were led downstairs to be dried and on Mrs. Worfolk's recommendation
sent instantly to bed.

"I told you," said Bertram, "that if Miss Coldwell had come, we couldn't
have done anything decent."

What woman, John wondered, might serve as a comparable deterrent? The
fantastic idea of appealing for aid to Doris Hamilton flashed through
his mind, but on second thoughts he felt that there would be something
undignified in asking her to come at such a moment. Then he remembered
how often he had heard his sister-in-law Beatrice lament her
childlessness. Why should he not visit James and Beatrice this very
evening? He owed them a visit, and his domestics were all obviously too
much agitated even to contemplate the preparation of dinner. Mrs.
Worfolk would perhaps be in a better temper when he got back and he
would explain to her that the seal was a marine animal, the skin of
which would not be injured by water.

"I think I'll ask Mrs. James to give us a helping hand this week," John
suggested. "I shall be rather busy myself."

"Yes, sir, and so shall I, trying to get the house straight again which
it looks more like Shooting the Chutes at Earl's Court than a
gentleman's house, I'm bound to say."

"Still it might have been worse, Mrs. Worfolk. They might have played
with another element. Fire, for instance. That would have been much more
awkward."

"And it's thanks to me the house isn't on fire as well," Mrs. Worfolk
shrilled in her indignation. "For if that young Turk didn't come
charging down into the kitchen and trying to tell me that the
kitchen-fire was a serpent and start attacking it tooth and nail. And
there was poor Elsa shut up in the coal-cellar and hollering fit to
break anyone's heart. 'She's Daniel in a tower of brass,' he says as
bold as a tower of brass himself."

"And what were you, Mrs. Worfolk?" John asked.

"Oh, his lordship had the nerve to say I was an atlas. 'Yes,' I said,
'my lord, you let me catch hold of you and I'll make your behind look
like an atlas before I've done with it.'"

"Do you think that Mrs. James could control them?" John asked.

"I wouldn't say as the Lord Mayor himself could control them, but it's
not for me to give advice when good food can be turned into Gordon's
heads. And whatever give them the idea, I don't know, for I'm sure
General Gordon was a very handsome man to look at. Yaul excuse me, sir,
but if you don't want to catch your death, you'd better change your
things."

John followed Mrs. Worfolk's advice, and an hour later he was walking
through the misty November night in the direction of St. John's Wood.




CHAPTER VI


If a taxi had lurked in any of the melancholy streets through which John
was making his way to Hill Road he would have taken refuge in it
gratefully, for there was no atmosphere that preyed upon his mind with
such a sense of desolation as the hour of evening prayer in a
respectable Northern suburb. The occasional footsteps of uninspired
lovers dying away into by-streets; the occasional sounds of stuffy
worship proceeding from church or chapel; the occasional bark of a dog
trying to obtain admittance to an empty house; the occasional tread of a
morose policeman; the occasional hoot of a distant motor-horn; the
occasional whiff of privet-shrubberies and of damp rusty railings; the
occasional effusions of chlorotic gaslight upon the raw air, half fog,
half drizzle; the occasional shadows that quivered upon the dimly
luminous blinds of upper windows; the occasional mutterings of
housemaids in basements--not even John's buoyant spirit could rise above
such a weight of depressing adjuncts to the influential Sabbath gloom.
He began to accuse himself of having been too hasty in his treatment of
Bertram and Viola; the scene at Church Row viewed in retrospect seemed
to him cheerful and, if the water had not reached his Aubusson rug,
perfectly harmless. No doubt, in the boarding-house at Earl's Court such
behavior had been considered impossible. Had not the children talked of
finishing Robinson Crusoe and alluded to his own lack of suitable fur
rugs? Evidently last week the drama had been interrupted by the landlady
because they had been spoiling her fur rugs. John was on the point of
going back to Church Row and inviting the children to celebrate his
return in a jolly impromptu supper, when he remembered that there were
at least five more Sundays before Christmas. Next Sunday they would
probably decide to revive the Argonauts, a story that, so far as he
could recall the incidents, offered many opportunities for destructive
ingenuity. Then, the Sunday after, there would be Theseus and the
Minotaur; if there were another calf's head in the larder, Bertram might
easily try to compel Mrs. Worfolk to be the Minotaur and wear it, which
might mean Mrs. Worfolk's resignation from his service, a prospect that
could not be faced with equanimity. But would the presence of Beatrice
exercise an effective control upon this dressing up, and could he stand
Beatrice for six weeks at a stretch? He might, of course, engage her to
protect him and his property during the first few days, and after that
to come for every week end. Suppose he did invite Doris Hamilton, but,
of course, that was absurd--suppose he did invite Beatrice, would Doris
Hamilton--would Beatrice come? Could it possibly be held to be one of
the duties of a confidential secretary to assist her employer in
checking the exuberance of his juvenile relations? Would not Miss
Hamilton decide that her post approximated too nearly to that of a
governess? Obviously such a woman had never contemplated the notion of
becoming a governess. But had she ever contemplated the notion of
becoming a confidential secretary? No, no, the plan was fantastic,
unreal ... he must trust to Beatrice and hope that Miss Coldwell would
presently recover, or that Eleanor's tour would come to a sudden end, or
that George would have paid what he owed his landlady and feel better
able to withstand her criticism of his children. If all these hopes
proved unfounded, a schoolboy, like the rest of human nature, had his
price--his noiselessness could be bought in youth like his silence later
on. John was turning into Hill Road when he made this reflection; he was
within the area of James' cynical operations.

John's eldest brother was at forty-six an outwardly rather improved, an
inwardly much debased replica of their father. The old man had not
possessed a winning personality, but his energy and genuine powers of
accomplishment had made him a successful general practitioner, because
people overlooked his rudeness in the confidence he gave them and
forgave his lack of sympathy on account of his obvious devotion to their
welfare. He with his skeptical and curious mind, his passion for
mathematics and hatred of idealism, and his unaffected contempt for the
human race could not conceive a worse hell in eternity than a general
practice offered him in life; but having married a vain, beautiful, lazy
and conventional woman, he could not bring himself to spoil his honesty
by blaming for the foolish act anything more tangible than the scheme of
creation; and having made himself a damned uncomfortable bed with a
pretty quilt, as he used to say, he had decided that he must lie on it.
No doubt, many general practitioners go through life with the conviction
that they were intended to devote themselves to original research; but
Dr. Robert Touchwood from what those who were qualified to judge used to
say of him had reason to feel angry with his fate.

James, who as a boy had shown considerable talent, was chosen by his
father to inherit the practice. It was typical of the old gentleman that
he did not assume this succession as the right of the eldest son, but
that he deliberately awarded it to James as the most apparently adequate
of his offspring. Unfortunately James, who was dyspeptic even at school,
chose to imitate his father's mannerisms while he was still a student at
Guy's and helping at odd hours in the dispensary. Soon after he had
taken his finals and had seen his name engraved upon the brass plate
underneath his father's, old Dr. Touchwood fell ill of an incurable
disease and James found himself in full charge of the practice, which he
proceeded to ruin, so that not long after his father's death he was
compelled to sell it for a much smaller sum than it would have fetched a
few years before. For a time he played alternately with the plan of
setting up as a specialist in Harley Street or of burying himself in the
country to write a monograph on British dragon-flies--for some reason
these fierce and brilliant insects touched a responsive chord in James.
He finally decided upon the dragon-flies and went down to Ockham Common
in Surrey to search for _Sympetrum Fonscolombii_, a rare migrant that
was reported from that locality in 1892. He could not prove that it was
any more indigenous than himself to the sophisticated county, but in the
course of his observations he met Beatrice Pyrke, the daughter of a
prosperous inn-keeper in a neighboring town, and married her.
Notwithstanding such a catch--he used to vow that she was more
resplendent than even _Anax Imperator_--he continued to take an interest
in dragon-flies, until his monograph was unluckily forestalled a few
years later. It was owing to an article of his in one of the
entomological journals that he encountered Daniel Curtis--a meeting
which led to Hilda's marriage. In those days--John had not yet made a
financial success of literature--this result had seemed to the
embittered odonatist a complete justification of the many hours he had
wasted in preparing for his never-to-be written monograph, because his
sister's future had for some time been presenting a disagreeable and
insoluble problem. Besides observing dragon-flies, James spent one year
in making a clock out of fishbones, and another year in perfecting a
method of applying gold lacquer to poker-work.

A more important hobby, however, that finally displaced all the others
was foreign literature, in the criticism of which he frequently occupied
pages in the expensive reviews, pages that gradually grew numerous
enough to make first one book and then another. James' articles on
foreign literature were always signed; but he also wrote many criticisms
of English literature that were not signed. This hack-work exasperated
him so much that he gradually came to despising the whole of English
literature after the eighteenth century with the exception of the novels
of George Meredith. These he used to read aloud to his wife when he was
feeling particularly bilious and derive from her nervous bewilderment a
savage satisfaction. In her the critic possessed a perpetual incarnation
of the British public that he so deeply scorned, and he treated his
wife in the same way as he fancied he treated the larger entity: without
either of them he would have been intellectually at a loose end. For all
his admiration of French literature James spoke the language with a
hideous British accent. Once on a joint holiday John, who for the whole
of a channel-crossing had been listening to his brother's tirades
against the rottenness of modern English literature and his paeans on
behalf of modern French literature, had been much consoled when they
reached Calais to find that James could not make himself intelligible
even to a porter.

"But," as John had said with a chuckle, "perhaps Meredith couldn't have
made himself intelligible to an English porter."

"It's the porter's fault," James had replied, sourly.

For some years now the critic with his wife and a fawn-coloured bulldog
had lived in furnished apartments at 65 Hill Road, a creeper-matted
house of the early 'seventies which James characterized as quiet and
Beatrice as handy; in point of fact it was neither, being exposed to
barrel-organs and remote from busses. A good deal of the original
furniture still incommoded the rooms; but James had his own chair,
Beatrice had her own footstool, and Henri Beyle the bulldog his own
basket. The fire-place was crowned by an overmantel of six decorative
panels, all that was left of James' method of applying gold lacquer to
poker-work. There were also three or four family portraits, which John
for some reason coveted for his own library, and a drawer-cabinet of
faded and decrepit dragon-flies. Some bookshelves filled with yellow
French novels gave an exotic look to the drab room, which, whenever
James was not smoking his unusually foul pipes, smelt of gravy and malt
vinegar except near the window, where the predominant perfume was of
ferns and oilcloth. Between the living-room and the bedroom were
double-doors hidden by br

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