Chapter V: The Fools’ Progress (1)

I

Lois said:

“I hate to disturb you, dear, but isn’t it time you went to dress?”

“I expect so,” said Hubert without moving.

“Very well, then. . . .”

He sniffed appreciatively the warmth of the peat fire and turned a gloomy eye upon the uninviting dusk beyond the window.

“I don’t want to go,” he said, not for the first time.

“I’m sorry if it bores you, but I really think you should.”

Lois spoke with decision, looking a little like her mother. There was already a hint of the same massive contours about her jaw. He, for his peace of mind, did not observe it for he had risen to tap the barometer.

“I shouldn’t wonder if there was a frost to-night,” he protested.

“Take the foot-warmer and the fur rug,” she advised.

Making a final effort against the benevolent pressure which was forcing him out of his house on so unpleasant an evening, he turned on her and said:

“Look here! I don’t really see why I should go. They don’t particularly expect me. It won’t be in the least rude if I don’t turn up. They don’t want me. They are your friends, you know; and if you don’t go, I don’t see why I should. And it’s the kind of thing that bores me stiff.”

“I’m sorry I can’t come,” she pleaded, “but I really oughtn’t to, you know. It wouldn’t be a suitable party for a young woman in my interesting condition.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use such vulgar expressions,” he complained. “I can’t think where you pick them up. ‘Interesting condition’ is very low.”

“I got it out of Dickens: it’s mid-Victorian. But I could say much worse. I could say ‘in the family way.’ ‘A party in the family way.’ . . .”

Hubert drew himself up into a mid-Victorian husband and thundered:

“Be silent, ma’am, and don’t pollute my house with such coarse expressions. . . .”

He was interrupted by the parlourmaid who came to carry out the tea. Hastily he left off being Mr. Caudle and picked up the London _Mercury_. Lois crossed to the window and drew the blue linen curtains, shutting out the chilly twilight. She could afford to make jokes about her condition, since it scarcely troubled her at all. Though she was nearly seven months gone, her cheeks still bloomed and she moved buoyantly.

The clock struck, and Hubert remarked with relief:

“It’s only six. I needn’t dress yet.”

“The car is ordered for a quarter to seven, and you’ll take all of three quarters of an hour.”

“But that will get me up to town at seven-thirty, and I don’t need to be there before nine, surely?”

“You’ll want dinner first. Aren’t you dining at Eaton Square? I told Mother you would be, when I rang her up this morning.”

“Uncommonly officious of you, Lois! I never authorized you to say such a thing. I’d meant to dine here and go up afterward, if I felt inclined, and if it wasn’t too cold. But this absolutely pledges me. I suppose your mother is expecting me now?”

“I’m afraid so, dear.”

“All the same, I don’t see why I should have to go to the Martins’ if I don’t want to. What, exactly, do you expect me to do when I get there?”

“Oh, my dear Hubert! We’ve been into all this before.”

“Yes, you’ve told me what I ought to do, but not how I’m to do it. I’m to lead the fellow round, I suppose, and introduce him to all the people you and your mother think he ought to know.”

“That’s the idea.”

“And what earthly good do you think that’s going to do him or them? Haven’t you learnt by this time that it’s quite impossible for the family to run him?”

“But, Hubert, this is the whole object of getting him and Dolly to come and live at Hampstead.”

“I never could see any object in their living at Hampstead.”

“Of course, Chelsea would have been better, but Dolly had all these ideas about the children getting good air. And there are artists at Hampstead. But the point of the whole thing is to get him into congenial society; to get him to meet more people and get known a little. I’ve been so pleased about his getting this invitation to the Martins’. It’s just the sort of thing we want. He will meet exactly the right people.”

“All right, let him meet them! What good do you think that will do? What sort of impression is James likely to make on the right people, or they on him? Can’t you see that he would much sooner stay at home with his Dolly?”

“Dolly is invited too, to-night.”

“Is she? Then I don’t really think I need go. She’ll look after him quite capably. I sha’n’t go. I’ll run up and dine with your mother and come back.”

“Oh, Hubert, please! Remember James is my stepbrother.”

“Whom you’ve always understood. I know.”

“Don’t interrupt! Yes, I do understand him. I discovered him long before any one else, now didn’t I? Ages before you did.”

“It’s a pity you didn’t discover him a little sooner over that Braxhall affair.”

She put her hand over his mouth and stopped him. The smouldering bitterness in his heart was instantly quenched: he caught her fingers and kissed them.

“All right!” He sighed. “I’ll do my best; I promise I will. I’ll go. Only you see, I don’t think it will do any good. I’m coming to the conclusion that our cue is to leave him absolutely alone. He’s of age, and a married man, and what not, and I shouldn’t wonder if he knows what he wants better than we do. Honestly, my dear, I think your mother is making a mistake in trying to turn him into a tame family genius at this time of day. But I’ll do what I can.”

“It’s just that he needs to know a few more people and go about rather more,” repeated Lois with conviction. “He’s never been among really congenial people—creative artists.”

Hubert was silent, since he disagreed with her. He sat by her side and absorbed regretfully the beauty and comfort of his home, still but half resigned to his enforced departure. They were in the living room. There was nothing so Victorian as a drawing room in Hubert’s house; only a library, a hall dining room, a music room, and a living room, besides a billiard room in the garden, and quite enough too, as Dolly had observed when she heard of it. The house, which was called Killigrew’s Croft, suited Hubert and Lois very well. It was in Buckinghamshire, near Amersham, within easy reach of town, yet sufficiently out of it to pass as country. Outside it was rather ordinary and suggested the placid comfort of a retired stockbroker. But the interior was very Georgian. The carpetless floors, the severe whitewashed walls, the Russian linen, the black divans with their brilliant cushions, the John drawings, and the peat fires were all there. Hubert liked it immensely, and felt that it was exactly right. So, had he been born a generation earlier, would he have regarded a Morris paper and Willow Pattern china. But he did not suppose that his house was at all individual, having spent his life in homes exactly like it. Lois, born in Manchester, and reared at Lyndon, was still inclined to regard it as unique. She thought it a great deal more tasteful than the home of her girlhood, and often argued with Hubert about it. She could not grasp his admiration for a house so unlike his own.

“Looking at this, one would never think you admired Lyndon,” she would say, comparing the yellow washed walls of her living room with the Chinese paper in Agatha’s drawing room, all strange birds and exotic vegetation. “It’s so crowded! Every sort of style, all mixed up. Think of those lacquered cabinets and the Queen Anne Talbois cheek by jowl in Agatha’s bedroom.”

“I never was in Agatha’s bedroom,” said Hubert wistfully. “What was it like?”

“Like nothing on earth. A wonderful Elizabethan bed, all hung with old Italian tapestries. And, I think, an Aubusson carpet. And a Louis Quinze dressing table, and a crystal jug and basin from somewhere in Hungary. And, by way of pictures, a Gainsborough portrait, and a landscape, Cotman, I think, and ‘The Rake’s Progress’ in funny little black frames all along the chimneypiece. And a good deal of carved jade and ivory lying around. It was just like all the other rooms in the house, only she had seized on the very best things.”

“I can’t imagine it.”

“Just a muddle! Not any clear expression of one kind of culture. If all the things had been English, or all French, or all Chinese!”

“But that’s England, you know, Lois. Just that! There’s nothing in England so English as a house like Lyndon. A medley of races and civilizations and ideas, all chucked together anyhow, and yet—not chaos—but a whole—a living, individual whole.”

“I didn’t know you were so patriotic.”

“No more did I. I’ve always considered myself rather cosmopolitan. But when I think of Lyndon I feel sorry. Sorry all that should go. It’s so absolutely ours, you know, and it’s melting like snow in the sun. Now a room like this,” he waved a hand round his living room, “you might find in any capital in Europe at the present moment.”

“Well, if you are so discontented with it, change it! It’s yours. You say you admire Lyndon, but you don’t copy it, I notice.”

“Copy Lyndon? Oh, Lord! Copy Lyndon! My dear girl, I couldn’t! It can’t be copied, that’s just it. One man didn’t make it; it’s been the work of generations. The smell of it! That smell of stone passages and beer! No one can build a new house and put a smell like that into it. Think of all the storms it has weathered! It’s survived the landscape gardening of the eighteenth century, and the flagrant bad taste of the Regency, and Victoria’s upholstered mahogany, and the æsthetic monsoon of my childhood, Walter Crane and all that, yes, and the recent deluge of peasant handicrafts and chromatic barbarism. These impermanent things go over it in waves. Our house, for instance, is just part of a wave, and quite a nice wave too. But Lyndon is a rock. The whole effect remains essentially the same, though it emerges from each wave with a few more things scattered over it as relics of the epoch. Lovely things—the best that each particular tide has produced. . . . Pity it should go!”

“Why do you talk of it going? Nobody wants to burn it down.”

“A house dies with its family. Lyndon has come to an end. It’s nothing better than a museum now. And a museum isn’t a living thing: it’s a mausoleum for bygone cultures.”

“John may go back there in the spring, Mother says. So it won’t have been empty for so very long. Six months can’t turn it into a museum, surely?” she asked, with some derision.

“N—no,” he replied uncertainly.

He had always thought of Lyndon as Agatha’s house, rather than John’s, and, to him, its history was ended upon the day when she fled to Corsica with her accursed cousin. But he knew better than to air this idea, especially when Lois was already a little irritated. It was, in truth, hard upon her to have to listen to these glorifications of Lyndon when she had spent so much of her rebellious youth in trying to escape from it.

Pondering upon these conversations, he sat beside her, holding her hand in somnolent content until the clock struck a quarter past six. Pressure was again exerted by his wife. “You positively must dress,” she urged, and he capitulated.

Upon his way to town, however, his indignation boiled up again. It was bad enough that he should be forced to spend the evening with the Martins. He had begun to grow out of the atmosphere of guarded Bohemianism in which they moved, and expected to be bored. But it was monstrous that he should have to dine with his mother-in-law as well. He raged dimly against the conspiracy of women which netted him in. He had always hated Eaton Square, and just now he knew that there would be long, unsparing inquiries about Lois and her health. Besides, he might see John, and he hated meeting John. He knew that he ought to be sorry for the fellow; that his was the gesture of the Levite who passed by on the other side; but he could not help it. John was too unfortunate; it was impossible to forget that his wife had deserted him in a particularly heartless manner, and that he was dying by inches. It was really tactless of him, all things considered, to hang about London in this way. He should have buried himself and his sorrows in some decently distant place. He was not, it seemed, too ill to shoot in the country at week-ends. Hubert thought that he should stay there altogether.

He supposed that John was right, on the whole, not to plunge into the scandals of a divorce. It was decent of him, anyhow. But it made the affair so unofficial: so preposterously delicate. One never knew where one was. It was impossible to talk to any one of the Clewer connection for five minutes without getting on dangerous ground. The thing had become a question of clan loyalty, and everybody in the family was expected to lie fluently in the cause. It was a silly fiction, this upholding of Agatha’s respectability in the public eye, for the whole story was bound to come out sooner or later. She was showing no disposition to leave her cavalier, and her reputation could only be held together as long as she was content to lie concealed in Corsica. Hubert racked his brains to remember the details of the official explanation. Supposing Stella Martin were to ask him to-night how long Agatha would be abroad! Should he say he didn’t know? Or was he supposed to know? He ought to have asked Lois.

But he did not, willingly, discuss Agatha with his wife. Within the tribal group there was, of course, no charity for the lost mistress of Lyndon. It seemed to him sometimes that they were almost too hard on her. He knew that she had behaved badly; she could scarcely have behaved worse; but he could never listen to the abuse which the other women poured out upon her without a pang, the stirrings of an emotion which was not condemnatory. He remembered how lovely, how unlucky, and how kind she had been. Yes, and still so young. He would much rather not think of her at all.

Instead he thought of James, aggrievedly. Why should he be burdened with James? He did not mind having him as a brother-in-law, at a convenient distance. Sometimes he was rather proud of the connection. But taking him about was another matter. It made one so horribly conspicuous. Wrapped in these gloomy reflections he arrived in Eaton Square, and, as the car drew up, resolved that his boy should marry an orphan. He would do for his son what no one had done for him; he would see to it that the lad never met any young woman encumbered with surviving relations.

He was relieved not to find John among the chesterfields in the drawing room. When last he had dined there he had sat for a quarter of an hour with John. Three times he had asked nervously whether there was anything in the evening paper. John had told him thrice, with a kind of abstracted patience; that rubber was still going down. That had been the whole of the conversation between them. To-night, however, Marian trailed in alone. She wore the kind of informal dinner gown which suggests a solitary meal. She had aged conspicuously during the past months; her elaborate brown hair was now flecked with gray, and a settled melancholy made her face look heavier. But she was still a fine woman, with every appearance of vigour and health. Trouble had not bowed her white shoulders or dimmed her little blue eyes. She said that John had gone for a week to Sussex to stay with friends.

“I like him to get the change and the interest,” she said, “though I feel he’s hardly fit for it. He should really be nearer to good doctors. It would be very awkward if—if he was taken ill or anything when he was staying with people. But he won’t give in, poor boy, or be treated like an invalid. It’s pitiful! Now, tell me how Lois is.”

Hubert immediately regretted John, whose presence would have protected him. He said:

“Lois is very well.”

“Is she getting about a certain amount?” asked Marian tenderly.

“Oh, yes. She seems to be very energetic and active. We go quite longish walks.”

“She must be careful not to overdo it.”

Marian sounded disapproving, but he rejoined brightly:

“She’s taking every care of herself, I’m sure.”

“It must be a very anxious time for you.”

“Oh, no,” he protested, “I’m not anxious. She seems so well.”

But she was quite determined that he should be anxious, anxiety being, in her opinion, the only proper state of mind for him.

“If it wasn’t for John,” she said, “I could be with you a great deal more.”

“Thank God for John,” thought Hubert; “he has his uses.”

“It would be a great relief to me if I could be with Lois and make quite sure . . .”

“Dinner is served, my lady.”

“She’ll begin again in the dining room,” thought Hubert as he armed her downstairs.

But he had forgotten the servants. She could not begin again while they were present. Indeed, she ate most of her meal in silence, for she was so preoccupied with John’s misfortunes, James’s misdoings, and Lois’s condition as to be really unable to talk of anything else. Hubert was permitted to enjoy the very good food in peace, and when, at length, they were left alone together, he short-circuited a return to Lois by plunging into the question of James.

“I understand,” he said, “that I am, as it were, to chaperon him at this party?”

“Oh, Hubert, if you would! And if you’d give him a hint, just a little hint, now and then, how to behave, it would be so kind. I’m so glad he’s been asked; this sort of thing is so good for him. I’m rather disappointed, you know, in the results of the Hampstead move. I had hoped for better things. It was such a piece of work to get them to move at all. He was so stubborn; I don’t think he’d have given in if their landlord at Bramfield hadn’t given them notice. Then I talked to Dorothy, and got her to see all the educational advantages of having the children near London. Just imagine, she and James had contemplated sending them to the little village school near by! I was horrified. I didn’t like to say what I thought to Dorothy, for of course she was at a National School herself, but I spoke to James and asked him how he could think of it. And he said she had been to the school one day to have a look at it herself, and was quite satisfied with it. It was a very small school, and he said”—Marian blushed at such coarseness—“he said that she only saw one child that she was at all doubtful about, and she caught it coming out and had a look at its head, and was quite reassured.”

“Not really?” said Hubert with a grin.

“I don’t see anything funny in it,” said Marian. “I feel it’s all rather sad. What is to become of those poor little children? Still, I persuaded Dorothy in the end. I pointed out what a much better studio James could have, which she appreciated. She admitted that it was always rather difficult getting models, and so on, when they lived so far out in the country. And, of course, when she saw reason the battle was won. He always does what she wishes.”

“But you aren’t satisfied with the result?”

“Well, you see, I wanted him to know more people. You’ve no idea, Hubert, how curious people are about him. People who’ve seen his pictures. I’ve been asked about him so often by people who are anxious to meet him. But I don’t know. It seems hopeless! Living at Hampstead hasn’t done him a bit of good; it hasn’t altered him in the very least. As I say to people . . . that unfortunate marriage! It will be a drag on him all his life. It makes his house quite impossible. I took Mrs. Downsmith there the other day to call, and really that girl has absolutely no idea how to do things. Tea! You should have seen it! Shrimp paste in a pot, and we were offered eggs. And after tea they played us tunes upon that awful gramophone. I really didn’t know which way to look, and I could see that Mrs. Downsmith thought it all most extraordinary. Coming home I said what I could about artists’ households being always rather Bohemian, and she said: ‘Bohemian isn’t the word I’d have used somehow.’”

“No, it’s the respectability which baffled her, I expect. If James and his family lived in romantic squalor in a one-room studio, they would be much more conventional.”

“It’s very sad. But I feel that if we could get him right away—away from his wife . . .”

“She’s invited to-night.”

“Oh, is she? I am sorry. That is unfortunate! It’s quite unnecessary that she should be asked to places with him. That is a pity!”

“But he won’t go anywhere without her.”

“Oh dear, how difficult it all is! Of course, people can’t be expected to invite her to their houses. She oughtn’t to expect it. Can’t she see what a drag she is on him?”

“But she’s quite respectable.”

“Y—yes. But impossible socially. It would have been better . . .”

Marian broke off and did not state what would have been better. Hubert inferred that Dolly would have been less of a drawback if she had come from a meaner stock or were not properly married.

Coffee came in. Marian had instituted a small coffee-making machine on a wheeled table and brewed the drink herself before leaving the dining room. Agatha had had one at Lyndon, and there were coffee percolators now at Braxhall and Killigrew’s Croft. But Hubert thought it a pity. They none of them did it properly; even Lois fussed over it. No woman could make coffee as the peccant Agatha had made it, lazy and amused, with one eye on the bubbling percolator and all her attention for her guests. He could even remember tenderly the evening when, absorbed in somebody’s witty conversation (it must surely have been his own) she had forgotten to fasten something or other and the whole thing had blown up, spattering half-a-dozen shirt fronts. Alas, poor Agatha! It was dreadful to think of her abdication; to imagine her drinking her coffee in some grubby Corsican inn, counting Lyndon well lost for love of the insignificant, the quite undeserving Blair. Hubert would not believe it.

A moment later he learnt that he need not believe it, for Agatha was no longer in Corsica.

“There is one thing,” said Marian mysteriously, as she poured two cupfuls of water into the percolator, “that I wish you’d tell Lois. That is, if you think that it won’t upset her in any way.”

“Yes?” he said, hurrying her past Lois.

“I couldn’t tell her this morning on the telephone, because one never knows what the servants may not overhear. One has to speak so clearly; I’ve often been annoyed about it. But I’ve heard that Agatha and—and her cousin are back in town. I’m keeping it from John, of course.”

“Oh, really?” murmured Hubert, feeling uncomfortable, but strangely excited.

“If it’s true, it’s most inconsiderate of them,” pursued Marian weightily. “The least they could do was to keep away. But I met Lady Peel yesterday, and she told me that she had just been with Ellen, with Mrs. Cocks, I mean, and that she said that she was expecting Agatha home shortly. It was most awkward for me, because I had just said she would be abroad some months longer. I thought Lady Peel looked a little queerly at me. It’s a pity that Mrs. Cocks has not got a more reticent nature. I can never be quite sure how much she tells people.”

“But perhaps Agatha is coming home alone,” suggested Hubert.

“I’m afraid not. I mean I’m afraid they are both coming, and it’s too much to hope that they are not coming together. I was determined to make sure, so I sent Miss Barrington, who is absolutely discreet, round to Harley Street this morning to ask when he was expected back. She saw a parlourmaid who said he was coming to-day or to-morrow, she believed, but that she didn’t think he was coming there, and he wouldn’t be seeing patients yet awhile, and she could forward letters but couldn’t give an address. So it looks like it.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “It does look rather like it.”

“Will you tell Lois, or shall I write a note to her?”

“Oh, I’ll tell her.”

Hubert could not see why the tidings should disturb his wife to any great extent.

“Of course, it’s hard on John,” he added with some compunction.

“I shall keep it from him as long as possible. It’s very upsetting for us all. I only hope Lois . . .”

“It’s really time I got off,” exclaimed Hubert, glancing at the clock. “I’d better get to this place punctually, hadn’t I? No knowing what James mightn’t be up to if I left him to himself.”

And he fled.

2

On his way to Chelsea Hubert’s brain was busy with this new development of affairs. Ought he to tell anybody who inquired to-night that Agatha was now back in London? And what on earth was going to happen next? Of one thing he was certain, knowing the family: there would be scenes and indignant letters and diplomatic discussions. What a confounded nuisance it all was.

Penetrating into the main reception room of Stella Martin’s house in Cheyne Walk, he peered nervously through the heavy fog of cigarette smoke in search of his inconvenient brother-in-law. The heat of the room made him feel rather giddy, and he was deafened by the high, staccato symphony of cultured conversation. He could not see Dolly or James anywhere. Freaks he saw, of every sort and size; freaks who would make even James look almost normal. He saw celebrities, and minor celebrities, and people who looked like celebrities but couldn’t be, since he did not know them. At last he saw his hostess and made his way over to her.

Stella Martin was a lively, pretty woman with long earrings and a cigarette perennially falling out of the corner of her mouth. She had been a great friend of Hubert’s in his salad days, but he had begun lately to find her rather boring. She had become Lois’s appendage, and he still liked her well enough when she was not trying too desperately to avoid the commonplace. He often complained to Lois that the woman positively collected shady characters. Lois had disagreed with him and said that Stella surrounded herself with men of talent.

“But the ladies . . .” he had expostulated.

Lois admitted that the ladies were sometimes rather odd, but maintained that they were the kind of ladies who have had, throughout the ages, a particular attraction for men of talent. And, anyhow, it was very conventional of Hubert to object to them. Hubert, who had begun to discover that there is, nowadays, a certain distinction in conventionality, did not wilt under this taunt as much as she had hoped. He agreed.

“We have a pretty amusing crowd to-night,” said Stella. “You know most of them, don’t you? I’m sorry Lois couldn’t come, but I think she was very wise not to turn out this wicked night. It’s much too cold. It was nice of you to come, Hubert.”

“She was very sorry to have to give it up.”

“She must come up and have tea with me one day when I can have her all to myself. Mr. and Mrs. Clewer are here, by the way; I don’t see them at the minute, but I know I’ve shaken hands with them.”

“Oh, they are here?”

“Yes, or at least they were. You’ll find them if you look. And Lawrence Argony may drop in later on. It will be a great feather in my cap if he does, for you know he never will go to evening parties. Have you seen his portrait of Garry Shandon? I haven’t, but, after all I’ve heard, I’m longing to. Mick says Garry is rather vexed about it. But I don’t know what else he expected, do you?”

She turned to other guests, and Hubert resumed his search for Dolly and James. He came to the conclusion that Stella’s ladies were rather more respectable than usual. Listening to their vehement conversation and watching the bobbing of their bobbed heads, he decided that he was in for an evening with London’s women of talent. Though he saw a few who might be said to have one foot in the demi-monde, he was sure that they had got in to-night upon some intellectual ticket. They must have written an autobiography or a novel or something. Friends greeted him, and he found himself pouring forth, a little absently, a small but regular stream of witty remarks. Half of his mind was occupied with the thought of Lois and his nice quiet house where he would rather have been. He was immensely pleased to find that he could think of his home with such a pang, and his impersonation of a man about town at a party in Chelsea was spiced by the thought of the domestic fellow that he really was. Then he caught sight of Dolly, with James beside her, sitting on a distant divan. Very mournful they looked, in this strange galley, and their faces, when they perceived him, lit up with a ludicrous relief. He crossed over to them and they made room for him with alacrity.

“Oh, but I’m glad you’ve come,” cried Dolly. “We were just wondering if it was too soon for us to go. It’s so awkward us not knowing any of these people.”

“Well, I can introduce you to any amount,” said Hubert, mindful of his mission and trying not to look at James’s dress clothes. “That’s a friend of mine over there. The man with the eyebrows. Binns, the architect. Shall I effect an introduction?”

“No, don’t,” said James. “I want to look at him. He’s got a very nice head, especially at the back. I couldn’t see it if I was talking to him.”

“James says all the people here are out of drawing,” said Dolly doubtfully.

“They are certainly a queer-looking lot,” said Hubert, agreeably convinced that he looked quite normal himself.

“You may say so,” she affirmed with more ease. “I never saw anything like them. I said to James when we first come in: ‘Well, the Zoo isn’t in it!’ Not but what it isn’t a very nice party,” she added, remembering her manners. “I always tell James it’s good for us to go into company once in a while. But we are still so upside down, getting into the new house; it was quite a job getting here at all to-night.”

“D’you think my clothes smell too much of camphor?” asked James. “Dolly was very worried about it.”

“It’s the first time he’s had them on in years,” she explained. “That’s why they fit so sort of loose on the shoulders. In the army they made him hold himself so straight.”

“And for the same reason they fit sort of tight in front,” said James.

Hubert sniffed and said doubtfully:

“I smell something—but it isn’t like camphor exactly.”

“Oh, I expect that’s Sanitas,” explained James cheerfully. “I sprinkled on a little. I thought it would drown the camphor.”

“Which was silly,” commented Dolly. “If anybody has to smell of anything, camphor’s better than Sanitas.”

“And how is the new house getting on?” asked Hubert.

“Oh, nicely, thank you. There’s a studio for James that we’ve got ever so nice. Better than anything we’ve had before.”

“It’s quite a good house,” said James. “And Dolly has made it look exactly like our last one, so there is nothing to worry about. I thought at first I shouldn’t like it, but I do quite.”

“There’s a basement kitchen, though,” said Dolly, “which is a nuisance. I don’t like the children getting all their meals down there. I said to old Lady Clewer, ‘Well, I don’t think the kitchen’s very nice.’ And she said, ‘Perhaps you won’t be in it so much now.’ But, as I say, wherever else should I be? But, as we’ve a room on the ground floor that we don’t need, I’m having a nice little electric range put in there, and a sink, and I’ll do most of my cooking there, and we’ll get our meals handy. It’s nice and sunny. The garden at the back isn’t up to much, but there’s always the Heath for the children to play on. Sonny has fallen into that pond already, but that’s only what’s to be expected.”

“We had to paper the whole house,” said James. “Mamma wanted us to distemper it, but we don’t like distemper.”

“No,” rejoined his wife. “Just like a prison or a hospital! A nice bright paper is ever so much more cheerful. Eh, James! There’s Mr. Argony!”

The big gun of Stella’s party was making his way slowly through the room, growling replies to the greetings which washed round him like a tide.

“He does do it well,” said James appreciatively. “Just like Sissy feeding chickens.”

“Do you know him then?” asked Hubert in surprise.

“Oh, yes,” Dolly told him. “He often comes to tea with us. He and James like to get a good talk. You know what men are! Talk the hind leg off a donkey and then have the face to bring it up against the women. They go on about these pictures of theirs.”

Lawrence had by now perceived them, and, shaking himself free from his ardent acquaintances, he joined their group. Hubert, who knew him slightly, offered his greetings. The great man stared at the trio, his heavy eyebrows shot out in a frown of perplexity. He seemed to find them unexpected. Having revolved them in his mind for a second or two, he exploded:

“I have it! Brothers-in-law.”

“Stepbrothers-in-law,” corrected James. “His wife is my stepmother’s daughter.”

“His wife is your stepmother’s daughter?” repeated Mr. Argony. “His—wife—is—your—stepmother’s—daughter? HIS WIFE. . . . Oh, quite so! Quite so! How are you, Mrs. Clewer? I’m glad I found you here, James, for I came especially to find you. Someone told me you’d be here. Can you come round to my place to-morrow? I’ve got to talk to you about something.”

“To-morrow is Sunday,” calculated James. “I can’t come in the morning.”

“Well, don’t come in the morning. Come in the afternoon.”

“But I could come in the morning,” went on James laboriously, “if I went to chapel in the evening. Dolly, shall we do that?”

“Oh, settle it between you,” said Lawrence amicably. “Any time will suit me. I shall be in all day.”

“When are you coming to tea with us again?” asked Dolly. “You haven’t been, not for a long while.”

“Oh, I’ll come soon,” he assured her, and was taken away by his hostess.

Hubert was able to put the question which had been burning within him ever since he became aware of an intimacy between Lawrence Argony and the Clewers.

“I suppose you’ve heard of this portrait of Garry Shandon?” he said. “Nobody’s seen it yet, of course, but——”

“I have,” said James.

“You have?”

“Yes,” said James, adding kindly, “it’s very good.”

Hubert gave it up and resolved to tell Lois that never again would he undertake the social pilotage of James. It was absurd! It was like a minnow trying to steer a whale. He was relieved when he saw Stella descending upon them with a black-and-white-striped lady in tow.

“You three have monopolized this divan long enough,” she declared. “I must break you up. Hubert, this is Mrs. Taylor, who wants to know if it’s true that you and Lois have been to Madeira, and if it’s nice there. Mr. Clewer, there are some people in the next room who are dying to meet you. . . .”

She carried off poor James who, in his dismay, was almost clinging to his wife.

Hubert, marooned upon the divan with the lady who wanted to know about Madeira, found it very difficult to keep his attention fixed. Fortunately she did not require much to set her going. He bent upon her an interested eye, and occupied his mind with the idea of James and Lawrence Argony. If only he could manage to convince Lois that this friendship was of his making, how pleased she would be! But he could not claim to have had any hand in it; James had brought it off without the help of his relations. Still this was, surely, the sort of thing she wanted. She would be glad when she heard of it.

“In those days,” said a voice at his side, “my state of mind was one of wonder without curiosity.”

“How very uncomfortable!” he murmured, noting that he was no longer listening to Mrs. Taylor but to a good-looking elderly man with gray whiskers. Stella must have substituted this new one at some moment when he was not attending.

“Curiosity,” said the stranger, “is necessary before any great work of art can be produced. I trust you agree with me?”

“Quite!” concurred Hubert. “Exactly!”

His mind reverted to a picture of Dolly blowing the children’s noses, and spreading their jam for them, while James and Argony growled technicalities at each other across the kitchen tablecloth. Or did they have tea in the parlour on these occasions? Perhaps Argony got an egg, being a fellow worker.

“But don’t you think,” said the lady with the Spanish comb (at what point had they absorbed her into the group?), “don’t you think that the individual must realize himself before he can create?”

“He must, indeed,” said the gray whiskers. “There must be no repressions, no inhibitions. . . .”

They seemed to be so beautifully occupied with each other that Hubert thought he could slip away unnoticed. He became aware that Dolly was beckoning to him across the room. She was standing half hidden by a curtain drawn across the door of a small conservatory, and she struck him as being a trifle flushed and in some distress. When he had joined her, her agitation was manifest.

“I want to go home,” she said wrathfully. “I want to get away from here. Let’s find James and be off.”

“Come and sit in here,” said Hubert soothingly. “Come and rest a little and let me try and get you an ice or some coffee.”

He moved to take her into the conservatory but she drew back quickly.

“No,” she said. “I can’t go back in there. He’s inside still.”

“Who is?”

“That young fellow.” A fleeting smile crossed her troubled face.

“Fact is, we’d better move away. He can’t get out very well till we’ve gone.”

“But what has he done?”

“Well . . . that’s asking! Though it isn’t so much what he’s done as what he said. He ought to be ashamed of himself, and so I told him.”

“Oh, do please tell me what he said,” cried Hubert, edging round the curtain to get a look at the young fellow. “I’m dying to know.”

“Oh, I couldn’t! Not to any one! Excepting only James. But this is a shocking place! It is really. I want to get out of it quick. The sights I saw when I was sitting in that conservatory! I never did.”

“But it can’t have been anything so very bad. . . .”

“Oh, I don’t know. I thought when I first come in: Well, they look a godless lot! And I thought right.”

Surveying her comely face and sturdy, supple figure, sharply outlined against the black curtain, Hubert felt a kind of sympathy for the unknown culprit. There was something very attractive about her—primitive but compelling. And it must have been uncommonly difficult to find anything to talk to her about.

“How did you get there?” he asked.

“Oh, Mrs. Martin introduced him and took James away. Do let’s find James! I can’t think where he can be. I haven’t seen him this half-hour.”

“Perhaps he’s in the other room.”

They set off in search and Dolly, perceiving Mr. Argony in the middle of a group, ran up to him, crying:

“Oh, Mr. Argony! You haven’t seen James anywhere, I suppose?”

The people who were being fortunate enough to engage Mr. Argony’s attention were deeply outraged and looked the intruder up and down with amazement. She was so provincial, in her ready-made tea frock; so plainly not of their world. Lawrence, however, beamed and reflected:

“James, when last I saw him, was sitting with a lady in a small recess on the stairs. A remarkably beautiful lady, as far as I remember. He is probably there still. You’d better look after him, Mrs. Clewer.”

Profoundly disturbed, she returned to Hubert and whispered: “He’s sitting on the stairs with a beautiful lady! Isn’t that a funny thing for him to do? I’ve never known him to do it before. Whatever can have come over him?”

“Perhaps it’s this godless house,” suggested Hubert maliciously.

“It might be. You never know,” she said mournfully. “It’s what I said—this is a dreadful place. He’s usually as quiet . . . But with all these hussies . . .!”

She glared at the nearest, but he reassured her.

“That one is all right. All that powder is only camouflage. She writes history books and is a notable matron. She has five perfectly good children at home.”

Dolly sniffed. In order to pacify her he suggested: “Shall I go and inspect James and his lady? Then I can report on the state of affairs.”

“He never sat on stairs before.”

“I rather thought Argony said a recess on the stairs. That is better than actual stairs, don’t you think? More dignified?”

“I don’t think that’s any better, I don’t.”

“Oh, yes, it is. They are probably sitting on two chairs.”

“It might be a sofa. There was a sofa in that conservatory.”

“Well, I’ll go and have a look.”

He made his way out on to the landing where some intelligent person had turned off most of the lights. Upon each stair he fell over a couple of fellow guests, and his passage through the obscurity was marked by a continual stream of apologies. He became aware that Stella’s party was not entirely confined to the middle-aged. The younger generation was there all right, but it had not favoured the strong illumination of the rooms above. Reaching a view of the recess he perceived that Argony had been perfectly right. Even in that dim light he could identify one of its occupants as James; the large face looming over the crumpled shirt front could belong to no one else. The other, a mysterious feminine presence, was half concealed behind a curtain, but, despite the dark and a distance of several yards, Hubert got the impression that she was a lovely creature. Their attitude was intimate and absorbed—their conversation eager. Hubert hovered uncertainly, a thousand new-born surmises seething in his brain, and then approached them.

A better view of the lady gave him pause, and he jerked backward, speechless, wondering if he could run away. There was no time, however, for she had turned, recognized him, and half risen. He pulled himself together and advanced to greet her, wondering if sisters-in-law are not, on the whole, the most trying sort of relation.

“I heard you were expected back to-day or to-morrow,” he said. “But I didn’t think I’d see you here.”

“I came hoping to find my mother,” she explained. “I went round to South Kensington, but she was out and the maid rather thought she would be here. So, as I know Mrs. Martin fairly well, I came straight on. But I hear she hasn’t come. She must have gone somewhere else!”

“I haven’t seen her,” said Hubert. “Then you got back to England . . .?”

“This morning.”

“They had an awful crossing,” appended James. “She says Blair boasted all the way across France that he was never sick, and then he was much sicker than she was.”

“Oh, yes . . .” said Hubert uneasily.

Agatha slipped a hand through James’s arm.

“Is Dolly here?” she asked.

“Oh, yes! I’ll go and find her and tell her you are here,” he said joyously. “She will be pleased.”

“Tell her that I’m going in two minutes, but I’d love to see her first,” Agatha called after him.

Hubert was left alone with her in the recess. Instinctively he drew the curtain farther across, shielding her from the observation of passers on the stairs. She laughed a little as she saw his gesture and sank on to her corner of the sofa, motioning him to sit by her side. Her composure relieved him. He had thought distractedly that he would not know what to say to her: he now remembered her facility for silence. He need say nothing at all if he so preferred it. He felt stealing over him that potent serenity which he had almost forgotten, and which was part of the charm she exerted. He told himself that she was beyond criticism; beyond it, at least, when one was with her. In retrospect, when one had forgotten a little what she was really like, it might be possible to condemn her. It seemed to him as though this alcove was too small a place in which to cabin all her marvellous beauty. She was fairer than ever before.

Presently it occurred to her to ask:

“How’s Lois?”

“Lois is very well,” he told her, with a certain hesitation.

“She’s not here to-night?”

“No. She’s down at Killigrew’s Croft.”

“I’m sorry to have missed her.”

He said nothing, and in the pause which followed she pondered upon the hint of reserve with which he had spoken of his wife. Did that mean that Lois was, inevitably, one of the people who must be relinquished? It could only mean that if she wished it herself. Hubert was not the man to coerce his wife in such a matter. But of course it did! She sighed, for she had been fond of Lois. Still . . . she had come back to face the music. . . .

Clamour without told them of the approach of Dolly and James who, in their rash descent, had fallen foul of the stair haunters. James was heard to ask indignantly:

“Why are all the lights turned off? It’s impossible to see. Oh! Here’s the switch.”

Light flooded the landing and staircase. Dolly stood, doubtfully, in the entrance to the alcove, looking at Agatha with a face in which perplexity and compassion were mingled.

“Well, Agatha,” she murmured, “if this isn’t a surprise!”

“Dear Dolly!” cried Agatha a little breathlessly, “aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Of course I’m glad,” said Dolly, embracing her with gravity. “But I must say——”

She paused, plainly at a loss, and James put in:

“Come upstairs and find some place where we can sit and have a good talk. It’s so dark here.”

“I’d rather stay here if you don’t mind,” said Agatha. “There are so many people that I know upstairs, and I’m so tired. I don’t feel up to meeting them all. And, Hubert, I’d give anything for a drink.”

“I’ll get you a cocktail or something. Dolly, what can I get for you?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say no to an ice, if you could find one. You go too, James, and get us something to eat. I’m quite hungry, now you come to mention it.”

Hubert and James departed and found the illuminated staircase perfectly clear. Faint rustlings and whisperings from the darkness of an upper flight told them whither the youthful horde had migrated. When they returned with plates and glasses, the two women were seated close together upon the alcove, sofa, talking with animation. Hubert heard Dolly say:

“Well, if, as you say, they are wearing them longer in Paris, I suppose they’ll be getting longer over here soon. I must say I’m not sorry. These short skirts don’t suit anybody like me that’s got thick legs.”

They all sat down in the very constricted space and ate their provisions. James observed genially:

“How the Clewer family do collect into lumps! I’ve noticed we always do it. Draw the curtain further across, Dolly, so that nobody can notice that we are all relations. Then Mrs. Martin won’t think she ought to come and break us up.”

On the landing outside hung a picture which had struck Hubert’s attention earlier in the evening. To him it suggested brawn in an advanced stage of decomposition. But to two guests who were coming upstairs it had, apparently, other significances. The party in the alcove overheard the following conversation.

“Fine thing that!”

“Very fine! Lowe!”

A third was evidently being summoned upstairs.

“Come and look at this.”

“Quite good, yes,” said Lowe, after a pause for observation. “A good bit of colour that, when you see it in the right light,” pursued the first speaker, coming down to particulars. “Decent colours!”

“Very fine thing . . . uncompromising sincerity. . . .”

“Yes . . . rather nice colours. Let me see . . .” Lowe hesitated, “. . . it’s a lobster, isn’t it?”

“. . . . Er, no. . . . A Madonna and Child, I believe. But of course that’s immaterial!”

“Oh, quite! That doesn’t signify. Nice colours!”

“Yes. Good colour. . . .”

They drifted on.

Hubert and Agatha heard a strange sound which neither of them had heard before in their lives. Dolly was, possibly, more used to it. James was laughing loudly.

3

Agatha made no long stay at Mrs. Martin’s party but returned early to the small hotel where she and Gerald were staying. She found him at the writing table in their room, deeply absorbed in a publication terrifically entitled Brain, upon which he was making notes. The set of his mouth and the nervous, unconscious tapping of his foot as he read told her that he was working hard. Without an interruption or a greeting she composed herself in an armchair upon the hearth, to wait until he had done. To her surprise a small fire was burning smokily in the grate.

He, jerking himself with an evident effort to a recollection of her presence, inquired abstractedly whether she had seen her mother. She told him of her fruitless quest, and said that she would go round to South Kensington the first thing in the morning.

“Did she leave a message for you?” he asked, frowning.

“No, nothing! But Meadowes seemed to know I was expected back, so she must have got the letter I sent her. No note or anything came for me here, I suppose?”

“Not that I know of.”

“She might have written,” muttered Agatha.

“Was it a nice party you went to?”

“Quite nice.”

“You didn’t stay very late.”

“Not very late. Have you been working all the evening?”

He did not answer and she saw that his attention was returning to _Brain_. Leaning back in her chair she abandoned herself to the melancholy of undisguised fatigue until he said, without looking up from his page:

“You’d better get to bed. Don’t wait for me. I shall be some time yet.”

“I think I’ll wait,” she said. “I want to talk to you when you’ve quite finished.”

The silver travelling clock, one of Agatha’s wedding presents, ticked on the mantelpiece; it looked out of place among Gerald’s pipes and tins of tobacco. The sounds of London outside died away into post-midnight silence. Still his pen scratched and the pages rustled. The fire sank together and she tried with a poker to stir it into a remnant of heat. She was exhausted by her long journey, for French second-class railway carriages were still a new experience to her and the crossing had been a nightmare. The disappointment of missing her mother had been the final blow. This chilling silence staggered her; she had been quite unprepared for it. She had expected stormy recriminations and reproaches, together with the blessed assurance that she had an unfailing partisan. Now everything was uncertain, and she dreaded the interview before her.