Title: Sorrell and Son (1925)
Author: Warwick Deeping (1877-1950)
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Title: Sorrell and Son (1925)
Author: Warwick Deeping (1877-1950)







CHAPTER I


1


Sorrell was trying to fasten the straps of the little brown
portmanteau, but since the portmanteau was old and also very full,
he had to deal with it tenderly.

"Come and sit on this thing, Kit."

The boy had been straddling a chair by the window, his interest
divided between his father's operations upon the portmanteau and a
game of football that was being played in Lavender Street by a
number of very dirty and very noisy small boys.

Christopher went and sat.  He was a brown child of eleven, with a
grave face and a sudden pleasant smile.  His bent knees showed the
shininess of his trousers.

"Have to be careful, you know," said Sorrell.

The father's dark head was close to the boy's brown one.  He too
was shiny in a suit of blue serge.  His long figure seemed to curve
over the portmanteau with anxiously rounded shoulders and sallow
and intent face.  The child beside him made him look dusty and
frail.

"Now, the other one, old chap.  Can't afford to be rough.  Gently
does it."

He was a little out of breath, and he talked in short jerky
sentences as he pulled carefully at the straps.  A broken strap
would be a disaster, for the clasp of the lock did not function,
and this dread of a trivial disaster seemed to show in the
carefulness of the man's long and intelligent hands.  They were
cautious yet flurried.  His breathing was audible in the room.

"That's it."

The words expressed relief.  He was kneeling, and as he looked up
towards the window and saw the strip of sky and the grimy cornice
of grey slates of the house across the way, his poise suggested the
crouch of a creature escaping from under some huge upraised foot.
For the last three years, ever since his demobilization, life had
been to Sorrell like some huge trampling beast, and he--a furtive
thing down in the mud, panting, dodging, bewildered, resentful and
afraid.  Now he had succeeded in strapping that portmanteau.  They
were slipping away from under the shadow of the great beast.
Something had turned up to help the man to save his last made-to-
measure suit, his boy, and the remnant of his gentility.

Horrible word!  He stroked his little black moustache, and
considered the portmanteau.

"Well,--that's that, son."

He smiled faintly, and Kit's more radiant smile broke out in
response.  To the boy the leaving of this beastly room in a beastly
street was a glorious adventure, for they were going into the
country.

"It will want a label, pater."

"It will.  'Sorrell and son, passengers, Staunton'!"

"How's it going to the station?"

Sorrell rose, dusting the knees of his trousers.  Each night he
folded them carefully and put them under the mattress.

"I've arranged with Mr. Sawkins.  He'll take it early and leave it
in the cloak-room."

For Sorrell still kept his trousers creased, nor had he reached
that state of mind when a man can contemplate with unaffected
naturalness the handling of his own luggage.  There were still
things he did and did not do.  He was a gentleman.  True, society
had come near to pushing him off the shelf of his class-
consciousness into the welter of the casual and the unemployed,
but, though hanging by his hands, he had refused to drop.  Hence
Mr. Sawkins and Mr. Sawkins' coster's barrow, transport for the
Sorrell baggage.

"What time is the train, pater?"

"Ten twenty."

"And what time do we get to Staunton?"

"About three."

"And where are we going to stay?"

"Oh,--I shall get a room before fixing up with Mr. Verity.  He may
want us to live over--over the shop."

There were times when Sorrell felt very self-conscious in the
presence of the boy.  The pose he had adopted before Christopher
dated from the war, and it had survived various humiliations,
hunger, shabbiness, and the melodramatic disappearance of
Christopher's mother.  Sorrell turned and looked at himself in the
mirror on the dressing table.  He patted his dark hair.  "Over--the
shop."  Yes, the word had cost him an effort.  "Captain Sorrell,
M.C."  To Christopher he wished to remain Captain Sorrell, M.C.  He
felt moved to explain to the boy that Mr. Verity's shop at Staunton
was not an ordinary shop.  Mr. Verity dealt in antiques; the
business had flavour, perfume; it smelt of lavender and old rose-
leaves and not of cheese or meat.  Mr. Verity--too--appeared to be
something of a character, an old bachelor, with a preference for a
man of some breeding as a possible assistant.  Also, Mr. Verity was
a sentimentalist--a patriotic sentimentalist.  He had been in
correspondence with the Ex-Officers' Association, and Stephen
Sorrell had been offered the job.

He was going down to Staunton to discover whether he and Mr. Verity
would harmonize.

Sorrell adjusted the wings of his bow tie, and considered the
problem of Christopher and Mr Verity's shop.  Should he be frank
with the boy, or keep up the illusion of their separateness from
the common world?  He could say that he was going into business
with Mr. Verity, and that in these days a shop--especially an
antique shop--was quite a la mode.

Yells from the Street broke in upon his meditations.  Someone had
scored a goal, and someone else had refused to accept the validity
of the goal.

"Damn those kids!" said the man.

He looked at his own boy.

"Pater."

"Yes."

"Shall I go to school at Staunton?"

"Of course.  I expect there will be a Grammar School at Staunton.
I shall arrange it when I have settled things with Mr. Verity."

"Will it be a gentleman's school, pater?"

"O, yes; we must see to that."

There was a pause in the adventure, for on this last evening in
London there was nothing left for them to do, and on warm evenings
Lavender Street did not smell of herbs.  Its smells were very
various and unoriginal.  It combined the domestic perfumes of
boiled cabbage and fried fish with an aroma of horse-dung and
rancid grease.  It was a stuffy street.  The clothes and bodies of
most of its inhabitants exuded a perfume of stale sweat.

The boy had the imagined scent of the country in his nostrils.

"Let's go out."

"Where to?"

"Let's go and look at the river."

They went, becoming involved for a moment in a mob of small boys
who were all yelling at once and trying to kick a piece of sacking
stuffed with paper.  Kit was pushed against his father, but
reacting with sensitive sturdiness, upset one of the vociferous
crew into the gutter where he forgot Kit's shove in the business of
eluding other feet.

Sorrell noticed that the boy was flushed.  He was conscious of
himself as of something other than those Lavender Street children.
He did not want to be touched by them.

"We'll be out of it to-morrow, son."

"I'm glad," said the boy.

Sorrell was thinking of Christopher's schooling, and he was still
thinking of it when they paused half-way across Hungerford Bridge
and stood leaning on the iron rail.  The boy had had to go to a
Council school.  He had hated it, and so had Sorrell, but for quite
different reasons.  With the man it had been a matter of resentful
pride, but for the boy it had meant contact with common children,
and Kit was not a common child.  He had all the fastidious nauseas
of a boy who has learnt to wash and to use a handkerchief, and not
yell "cheat" at everybody in the heat of a game.

Sorrell stood and dreamed, and yet remained aware of the kindling
face of the boy who was watching the life of the river, a pleasure
steamer going up-stream, a man straining at a sweep upon a barge, a
police-boat heading for the grey arches of Waterloo Bridge.  To
Sorrell the scene was infinitely familiar yet bitterly strange.
The soft grey atmosphere shot through with pale sunlight was the
atmosphere of other evenings, and yet how different!  His inward
eyes looked through the eyes of the flesh.  To him London had
always seemed most beautiful here, a city of civic stateliness,
mellow, floating upon the curve of the river.  He had loved the
blue black dusk and the lights, the dim dome of St. Paul's like the
half of a magic bubble, the old "shot" towers, the battered redness
of the Lion brewery, the opulence of the Cecil and the Savoy, the
green of the trees in Charing Cross Gardens.

He remembered that he had dined and danced at the Savoy.

Spacious days!  Khaki, and women who had seemed more than women on
those life-thirsty nights when he had been home on leave.
Odalisques!

Women!  How through he was with women!

He remembered a night when he had taken his wife to the Savoy.  Two
years ago his wife had left him, and her leaving him had labelled
him a shabby failure.  She had had no need to utter the words.  And
all that scramble after the war, the disillusionment of it, the
drying up of the fine and foolish enthusiasms, the women going to
the rich fellows who had stayed at home, the bewilderment, the
sense of bitter wrong, of blood poured out to be sucked up by the
lips of a money-mad materialism.

He looked at the face of his boy.

"Yes, it's just a scramble," he thought, "but an organized
scramble.  The thing is to keep on your feet and fight, and not to
get trampled on in the crush.  Thank God I have got only one kid."

Kit, head up, his cap in his hand, was smiling at something, the
eager and vital boy with the clear eyes and fresh skin.  To him
life was beginning its adventure.  He saw the river and the city in
the splendour of their strength and their mystery.  The Savoy and
the Cecil were still palaces of the great and adventurous unknown,
and Sorrell, full of the grim business of existence, felt a sudden
deep tenderness towards the boy.

"I suppose it's egotism," he thought, "but I'll try to give him a
better chance in the scramble than I have had.  After all we are
more honest in our egotism,--these days, the thing is not to love
your neighbour, but to be able to make it unsafe for him to try and
down you.  Co-operation in bargaining, organized grab.  But you
have to bargain with some sort of weapon in your hand."

Standing there beside his boy and watching the light and the life
upon the river, Sorrell felt himself to be weaponless.  What was he
but a pair of hands, and a rather frail body in a shabby suit of
clothes?  He thought of his wounds, wounds of the flesh and of the
spirit.

He met Kit's smile.

"I say, pater, is there a river at Staunton?"

"A small one."

He was realizing that the niche at Mr. Verity's might also be a
very small one, but at least it was a niche in the social
precipice.



2


Sorrell and son arrived at Staunton about three in the afternoon.
Amid the clatter of empty milk cans Sorrell addressed himself to
the porter who was removing the brown portmanteau from the luggage
van, but the porter either did not or would not trouble to hear
him.

"Do you mind being careful with that?  The straps--"

The porter swung the portmanteau out of the van and let it fall
with a full flop upon the platform, and like Judas it burst
asunder, and extruded a portion of its contents upon the asphalt.

Sorrell looked sad.

"You shouldn't have done that, you know."

It was a bad omen, and he bent down to recover a boot, a clothes
brush and a tobacco tin, and to stuff the crumpled nakedness of an
unwashed shirt back into the gaping interior.  The porter, full of
sudden compunction, bent down to help him.

"I'll find you a bit of cord.  The stitching of the straps must
have been rotten."

Christopher stood and looked on while Sorrell and the porter
applied first aid to their piece of luggage.  The incident had
touched the boy; he had seen that look in his father's eyes, and he
felt--somehow--that it was not the portmanteau but his father who
had gaped and betrayed a whole clutter of painful and shabby
problems.  Poor old pater!  But his boy's tenderness was touched
with pride.

Sorrell was putting the porter's contrition to other uses.  Before
reaching Staunton he had counted the ready money that remained to
him, and it amounted to thirteen shillings and five-pence.

"Do you know of any lodgings; clean, but not too dear?"

The porter was knotting a length of cord round the body of the
portmanteau.

"Staying here?  What sort of lodgings?"

"I am taking up a post in the town.  A bed-sitting-room for me and
the boy.  I don't mind how plain it is--"

"I've got an aunt," said the porter, "who lets lodgings.  There's a
room up at the top.  Fletcher's Lane.  Not a hundred yards off."

"Would she board us?"

"Feed you?"

"Yes."

"She might.  Look here,--I'm going off duty in ten minutes or so.
I'll show you the way."

"I'm very much obliged to you."

Sorrell gave him the five pennies.

"Thank you, sir.  I'll pop this round for you on my shoulder."

No. 7, Fletcher's Lane, accepted the Sorrells and packed them away
in a big attic-like room under the roof.  It had a dormer window
with a view of the cathedral towers and the trees of the Close, and
between the cathedral and the dormer window of No. 7 every sort of
roof and chimney ran in broken reds and greys and browns.  The room
was clean, and with a white coverlet on the bed, a square of
linoleum in the centre of the floor, and a smaller piece in front
of the yellow washstand.  The chest of drawers had lost a leg and
most of its paint, and when you opened a top drawer it was
necessary to put a knee against one of the lower drawers to prevent
the whole chest from toppling forward.

The landlady asked Sorrell if he would like tea, and he glanced at
his wrist watch.

"I have to go out first.  Would half-past five do?"

"Nicely.  Will you take an egg to it?"

"Yes, an egg each, please.  And could I have a little hot water?"

The hot water was forthcoming in a battered tin jug, and Sorrell
washed himself, brushed his clothes and hair, wiped the dust from
his boots, and glanced at himself in the little mirror.  First
impressions were important, and he wanted to make a good impression
upon Mr. Verity.  His blue suit was old and shiny, but it was well
cut, and the trousers were creased.

"I'm just going round to see Mr. Verity.  You might unpack, old
chap."

Christopher was leaning out of the window and inhaling the newness
and the freshness of Staunton.

"Yes,--I will, pater."

"We'll have some tea when I come back, and a stroll round.  This is
only a temporary roost."

"It's better than Lavender Street," said the boy.

Mr. Verity's shop was in the Market Square, and Sorrell, on turning
out of Fletcher's Lane found himself in Canon's Row.  A passing
postman, questioned as to the whereabouts of the Market Square,
jerked a thumb and said "Straight on."  Sorrell did not hurry.  He
was pleasurably excited, and as he strolled up Canon's Row he saw
the short, broad High Street opening out before him.  It was all
red and white and grey.  The Angel Inn thrust out a floating golden
figure.  Higher up, a clock projected from the Market Hall with its
stone pillars and Dutch roof, and its statue of William of Orange
in a niche in the centre of the south wall.  The Market Square
spread itself, a great sunny space into which the more shadowy High
Street flowed.  It was surrounded by old houses that had been built
when Anne and the Georges reigned.  In the centre the market cross
carried time back to the Tudors.  A vine covered one little low
house, and another was a smother of wistaria.  There were queer bay
windows, white porches, leaded hoods, and at the end the chequered
Close threw a massive and emphatic shadow.  Above and beyond, the
towers caught the sunlight, rising from the green cushion of old
limes and elms, and backed by brilliant white clouds in a sky of
brilliant blue.

Sorrell paused outside the Angel Inn, for the old town pleased him.
Not a bad spot to settle in, to listen to the bells, and to feel
that life was less of a hectic scramble.  And dabbling in old
things, handling old china and glass and Sheffield plate, the
creations of dead craftsmen who had not hurried.  No doubt old
Verity had absorbed the atmosphere of oak and mahogany, maple and
walnut.  He might have a richly brocaded soul.

Sorrell strolled on into the Market Square.  He looked about him,
and then crossed the cobbles and questioned a policeman who was on
traffic duty.

"Mr. Verity's shop?"

"Over there,--near the gate."

Sorrell was half-way across the Market Place when he realized that
there was something queer about Mr. Verity's shop.  He saw it as a
red house with a white cornice and white window sashes, and painted
in white letters on a black fascia-board "John Verity--Dealer in
Antiques."  But the shop was shut, the windows were screened by
black shutters.

Sorrell glanced at the other shops.  No, it was not early closing
day; the other shops were open.

He crossed the rest of the space more quickly, and sighting a black
door beside the shop, with a brass bell handle in the white door-
jamb, he pulled the bell.  He was puzzled, aware of a sudden
suspense, and when the door opened he found himself staring at the
face of a woman who had been weeping.

"Is Mr. Verity in?"

The woman's eyelids flickered.

"Mr. Verity died this morning."

Sorrell's mouth hung open.

"What--!"

"Yes--sudden--.  It must have been his heart.  He fell down the
stairs--O,--dear--"

She began to whimper, while Sorrell stood there with a blank face.
He realized that the woman was closing the door.

He blurted something.

"I've just come down.  I was to be--the assistant.  It's very--I'm
sorry--"

"It was so sudden," said the woman.  "Of course--without him--
nothing--you know.  I'm sorry.  Have you come far?"

"From London."

"Dear, dear, and you will have to go all the way back--for nothing.
It's awkward, but there it is.  If you'll excuse me--now."

She closed the door, and Sorrell stood staring at it.



3


Sorrell's first feeling was one of bitter resentment against old
Verity for dying in so sudden and inconvenient a fashion, but
before he had recrossed the Market Square he had realized the
absurdity of his anger.  It died away, leaving him with a sense of
emptiness at the pit of his stomach, and a chilly tremor quivering
down his spine.

He was trembling.  His knees were so weak under him that when he
passed through the gateway of the Close, and saw a seat under a
lime tree, he made towards it and sat down.  He felt helpless,
bewildered, for the disappointment,--coming as the last of many
such disappointments, seemed to have fallen on him with the
cumulative weight of the whole series.  He put a hand into a pocket
for his pipe and pouch.  His fingers moved jerkily, and when he lit
a match his hand was so unsteady that he had difficulty in lighting
his pipe.

The nausea of an intense discouragement was upon him, he felt
tired, so tired that his impulse was to lie down and to admit
defeat, and to allow himself to be trampled into the mud of
forgetfulness.  His senses were dulled, and the whole atmosphere of
this quiet old town had changed.  Half an hour ago he had been
vividly aware of the blueness of the sky and of the tranquil white
domed clouds floating above tower and tree, but now the objective
world seemed vague and grey.  His feeling of despair cast a shadow.

He thought of Christopher waiting in that upper room for his tea.

He shrank from the idea of facing the boy, of going back there with
a hang-dog illusion dead in his eyes.

All the sordid and trivial realities of the business buzzed round
him like flies.  He had thirteen shillings in his pocket; he would
owe the woman for food and a night's lodging; there would be the
cost of the tickets back to London; that damned portmanteau needed
mending; and if they returned to London there was nowhere for them
to go.

He realized the nearness of a panic mood.

He got up.  "When you are in a blue funk, do something."  That was
one of the human tags brought back from France.  He remembered that
he had won his M.C. by "doing something" as a protest against the
creeping paralysis of intense fear.

He walked back to Fletcher's Lane, and climbing the stairs, paused
for a moment outside the door of the room.  He was trembling.  He
heard the woman moving somewhere below, and leaning over the
banisters he called to her.

"We are ready for tea, please."

His own voice surprised him.  It was resonant, and it had a quality
of cheerfulness, and it seemed to express the upsurging within him
of some subconscious element that was stronger than his conscious
self.  He opened the door and went in.

The boy was standing by the window.  He had unpacked their
belongings; a nightshirt and a pair of pyjamas lay on the bed;
brushes, a razor, a comb, and three old pipes were arranged upon
the dressing-table.

Father and son looked at each other.

"Well, my son, what about tea?"

Kit continued to look at his father; his eyes were very solemn.

"Mr. Verity's dead," said the father; "he died this morning.  So--
Staunton's a wash-out.  Well, what about tea?"

The boy's face seemed to flush slightly.  His lips moved, it was as
though he was aware of something in his father, something fine and
piteous, a courage, something that made him want to burst into
tears.

"Sorry, pater."

His lips quivered.

"We--we'll have to make the best of it."

And suddenly--with a kind of fierceness, Sorrell caught his son and
kissed him.



4


Afterwards, they went out and sat in the cathedral and wandered
about the Close under the shade of the elms and limes.  The evening
was very still, and the sunlight sifted through the trees and lay
gently upon the mown grass.  Swans cruised upon the moat
surrounding the Bishop's palace.  There was the sheen of water, and
the mellowness of old red walls seen through the dappled foliage of
trees.  The canons' houses, sealed away in pleasant security, gave
through their gateways glimpses of their gardens.  Jackdaws circled
about the towers, their cries dropping from above into the deeps of
a green tranquillity.

A sunset filled the lacework of the leaves with red and gold, and
the smooth and stately security of the Close caught moments of
mystery.  Sorrell and the boy were sitting on a seat above the
water, with a slope of vivid grass going down to it, and a weeping
willow trailing its branches in a stream of yellow light.  It
seemed to Sorrell that no one who lived near the shadowy splendour
of these towers and trees could know what poverty was, or hunger,
or the filthy dread that oozes like slime over a man's soul.  Life
seemed so secure here, so incredibly secure.

He sat there, a shabby man beside a shabby child, and yet the
shabbiness had fallen from him, the shabbiness of little, suburban
make-believes.  He had discovered a sudden and helpful frankness.
He had undressed his soul before his boy.

They sat and talked.

"I'm not going to bother about the crease in my trousers my son.
Keeping up appearances.  I don't care what the job is, but I am
going to get it."

The thing that astonished him was the way that the boy understood.
How was it that he understood?  It was almost womanish, a kind of
tenderness, and yet manly, as he had known manliness at its best
during the war.

"It was because of me--pater."

"Captain Sorrell, M.C."

"But you will still be Captain Sorrell, M.C., to me, daddy.  If you
swept the streets--"

"Honour bright?"

"Honour bright."

Sorrell held Kit's head against his shoulder.

"Seems to me, kid, that you and I have got to know each other as we
never did before.  Thanks to poor old Verity.  I was so damned
afraid that you were going to be ashamed of me--"

The boy smiled.

"Dear old pater--I'll help."

"Think of that poor old portmanteau!  What its feelings must have
been--when it burst open!  But I have been burst open to-day, Kit.
You have had a look at the inside of me.  Yesterday--I was a sort
of shabby gentleman.  That's finished."

Christopher meditated some profound thought.

"I don't mind--just bread and butter."

"No jam?"

"No."

"Well, somehow--I think it was worth it," said Sorrell, "quite
worth it.  You and I know where we are."

The sunset was dying behind them, and the dusk and the shadows of
the great trees seemed to meet upon the water.  The Sorrells left
the seat and wandered away together, united by a sudden understanding
of each other and by a sympathy that was frank and tender.

"I am always going to tell you things, Kit; no more make-believe."

"And I'll tell you things, too, pater," said the boy--"everything."

"No secrets?"

"No secrets."

It was the beginning of the great comradeship between them, and for
the first time for many months Sorrell felt a happiness that
surprised him.  The shock of the day's disappointment had passed.
The human relationship suddenly realized between his boy and
himself swallowed up the sense of defeat.  His courage returned.
As they wandered in the dusk of the Close under the darkening trees
he felt Kit's nearness, a nearness of spirit as well as of body.

"If I had not had the boy--" he thought.

Kit's hand touched his sleeve.

"Look--"

They had turned into a stone flagged path that ran at the backs of
the old houses on one side of the Market Square.  Gravestones and
brick tombs showed between them and the houses.  A high yew hedge
screened many of the lower windows but Kit's eyes were fixed upon a
broad, arched window that was visible beyond the hedge.  The window
was brilliantly lit, and glowed with streaks of colour, orange,
green, blue, cerise.  A figure in black was moving amid the streaks
of colour.

"What's that?" the boy asked.

Sorrell smiled.  They were looking across the old graves into the
window of a Staunton modiste's showroom, and it would seem that the
modiste had received a consignment of silk "jumpers."  She was
unpacking them and hanging them up on the stands in her showroom
where they glowed brilliantly like jewels in a case.

"Clothes--Kit."

"They look like bunches of flowers," said the boy.

They passed on, and out by an iron gate into one of the Staunton
streets, and so back to Fletcher's Lane, where Sorrell sat and
smoked while Christopher undressed and went to bed.

Sorrell sat there for a long while after the boy had fallen asleep.

"Yes--there's my job," he reflected.

Undressing very quietly so as not to wake his son, he slipped into
the bed beside the boy and lay wondering how he would solve the
problems of the morrow.




CHAPTER II


1


When Sorrell placed two rashers of bacon on Christopher's plate he
found himself reflecting that he and his son were eating this meal
on credit, and unless some sort of job was to be discovered in
Staunton he might have to visit the sign of the three golden balls.

At the end of the meal he lit his pipe and glanced down the list of
the advertisements in a copy of the Staunton Argus.  Someone was
advertising for a chauffeur; a farmer needed a cowman, and a number
of ladies were asking for cooks and housemaids, but Sorrell had to
recognize his own limitation.  He could not drive a car, or milk a
cow, or cook a dinner.  Indeed, when he came to consider the
question there were very few things that he could do.  Before the
war he had sat at a desk and helped to conduct a business, but the
business had died in 1917, and deny a business man his office chair
and he becomes that most helpless of mortals--a gentleman of
enforced leisure.

At the top right hand corner of the page Sorrell noticed a
paragraph that might have some bearing on his case.  It appeared
that there was a private Employment Agency in Staunton, conducted
by a Miss Hargreaves at No. 13, the High Street.  Sorrell tore off
the corner of the paper, slipped the notice into his waistcoat
pocket, and passed the rest of the paper across the table to
Christopher.

"I am going out."

The boy understood.

"I'll be here when you come back."

No. 13 proved to be a stationer's shop, one half of its window
brilliant with the wrappers of cheap novels.  Its doorway looked
across the road into the arched entry of the "Angel" yard, and Miss
Hargreaves, from the moment when she pulled up her blind in the
morning till she pulled it down at night, lived in the gilded
presence of the inn's angelic figurehead.  Sorrell entered the
shop.  It was long and rambling and dark, and on dull days a light
was needed in the far corner where the circulating library lived in
a tall recess.  There were no customers in the shop, and the young
woman behind the counter, turning a pair of myopic eyes on Sorrell,
moved instinctively towards where the daily papers were kept.

"Daily Mail?"

That was the sound she expected Sorrell to make, but he surprised
her by uttering other words.

"I believe you run an employment agency."

"Yes," said the girl, "that's so."

She glanced in the direction of a kind of desk or cage at the back
of the shop where a woman's head was visible.

"You had better see Miss Hargreaves--there."

As Sorrell approached the desk Miss Hargreaves raised her head,
showing him the face of a woman of five and forty.  She was thin
and wiry, with brown eyes of a hungry hardness, and her nose marked
out a little red triangle with its congested tip and network of
minute blood-vessels.

"Good morning."

He was a stranger, and to this woman all strange men were
interesting, yet as Sorrell looked into her brown eyes he felt
himself growing inarticulate.

"I want to consult you--"

"You are wanting a servant?"

"No,--the fact is--"

But at this moment they were interrupted by the rush of a vital
presence into the shop, something highly scented and with the
suggestion of the soft friction of silks.  Its movements were large
and easy and swift, and bringing with them a sense of disturbing
and adventurous liveness.  It was at Sorrell's elbow, compelling
him to glance over his shoulder.  He saw the mass of tawny hair,
the broad and handsome face, the red mouth, the blue of the eyes.
There was something brutal in the face, a vivacity, a sensual
energy.  He felt as though a gust of wind had blown into the dark
shop, and that this large, blonde creature was stifling his
courage, overlaying it as though it were a feeble infant.  He
turned to the cage, only to find that Miss Hargreaves was all eyes
for the newcomer.

The thin woman was smiling.  Her face suggested some inward
excitement.

"Morning--Flo--dear--.  How are you?"

"Do I look ill?"

There was some element of sympathy between these two women,
contrasts though they were, but the lady of the tawny head was
studying Sorrell.  She stood aside, leaning easily against the
wainscoting, her blue knitted coat vivid against the old brown
wood.

"This gentleman--first.  Mine's not business."

Sorrell wished her with the devil.  He felt her eyes upon him, and
had he followed the line of least resistance he would have bolted
from the shop.  To stand there and blurt out his shabby business
while she embarrassed him and made him acutely self-conscious!

"Damn!" he thought, "haven't I decided to plunge?"

Miss Hargreaves was fingering the leaves of a ledger, and waiting
upon his silence.

"You said you wished to engage--"

"I want a situation."

"Oh--?  For yourself?  I'm sorry,--but--only domestic service--you
know."

"Of course," said Sorrell, stiff as a frightened cat, "that's what
I mean; a place as valet, or footman or something of that sort."

He felt that the two women despised him, especially that big,
blonde creature with her blueness and her hard world-wise eyes.
Why couldn't she clear out and leave him to the thin woman in the
cage?

Miss Hargreaves pretended to glance through the entries in her
ledger.

"I'm afraid I have nothing of that sort--nothing at all."

"I see."

"Why not try the Labour Exchange?"

"I might.  Thank you.  Sorry to have troubled you.  Good morning."

He turned abruptly, his back to the blonde woman and made for the
doorway.  He noticed how the worn boards of the floor squeaked
under his feet, an uncomfortable sound caused by a discomfited man.
He arrived at the doorway.  A voice reached after him like a
restraining hand.

"Hallo--one moment--"

Sorrell turned in the doorway, and saw the blonde woman sailing
down the shop, and he stood aside to let her pass, thinking that
his necessity was, no concern of hers, but she paused by a
revolving stand of picture postcards, and taking one at random,
gave Sorrell the full stare of her blue eyes.

"Serious?" she asked.

He looked at her rather blankly.

"I beg your pardon?"

Her smile puzzled him.

"Well--if you are--come across to the 'Angel' in a quarter of an
hour.  There's a job--vacant."

She passed out, almost brushing against him, and he watched her
cross the road and enter the arched gateway of the Angel Inn.  She
turned to the left towards a doorway, but she did not look back,
and he wondered why she had left him with a feeling of having been
crushed against a wall.  She had suggested immense strength, a
brutal and laughing vitality.

Sorrell went back suddenly into the shop, and along its dark length
to the woman in the cage.

"Excuse me--would you mind telling me--?"

She caught his meaning.

"That's Mrs. Palfrey, she runs the 'Angel.'"

"Oh.  Have you any idea--"

Miss Hargreaves looked at him queerly.

"They want an odd man--for the luggage and the boots and things--"

He stared at her thin face.

"Well,--why didn't you--"

"Because I didn't know," she said tartly.  "If it is any use to
you--well--there it is."



2


Sorrell stood on the footway and looked across at the Angel Inn.

The exterior of the building pleased him.  It had the creamy
whiteness of last year's paint, and a well proportioned cornice
that threw a definite shadow.  The window sashes were painted
maroon, and from the centre of the facade an old iron balcony
projected like the poop of a ship.  The gilded angel appeared to
have floated from off this balcony, and there could be no doubt as
to the rightness of the angel's political opinions.  She was a
solid Tory angel who had pointed the way heavenwards to generations
of Staunton crowds, carrying with her the eloquence of many
triumphant Tory orators.

Sorrell's glance travelled towards the arched entry, by which
coaches and carriages had entered and left the inn in the old days.
Above this entry a fine semi-circular window overhung the footwalk,
two tall Ionic pillars, painted white, supporting it.  Sorrell
noticed that the curtains were of green taffeta.  The window was
fitted with window boxes, but the flowers in the boxes were dead.

He strolled up the street, across the Market Square and into the
Close.  He was undecided.  He had glanced for a moment at the
shuttered windows of Mr. Verity's shop, only to realize how rapid
had been the drop in his expectations.  Odd man at a provincial
pub!  Assuredly he was landing with a bump at the very bottom of
the social precipice.

He sat down on the seat and watched the swans, casual and stately
creatures gliding as they pleased.

"Well--anyway," he reflected, "if one starts at the bottom one has
the satisfaction of feeling that one cannot drop any farther."

He thought of Christopher.

"I said I would get a job.  Any kind of job may be a ladder--to push
the boy up.  Or if he can climb up off my shoulders--"

He rose and walked back to the Angel Inn, and turning in at the
arched entry, found a doorway on his left that led into a broad
passage.  He was to learn to know that passage very well, and to
hate it and its slippery oil-cloth, and the stairs that went up
from it into the darkness.  A lounge enlarged itself on the right,
the windows looking into the courtyard; and opening from the other
side of the lounge were the office, the passage to the kitchen, the
"Cubby Hole," and the back entrance to the "bar"!

Sorrell paused in the passage, with his back to a map of the
surrounding country.  Two or three visitors were seated in the
lounge, smoking and reading the daily papers.  A ruddy woman in a
leather coat was turning over the pages of a Michelin guide.
Sorrell noticed that the tables in the lounge had an uncared-for
look.  Tobacco ash and used matches littered the trays.  There were
the marks of glasses.  The chair nearest to him needed the hands of
an upholsterer.  Moreover, the place had a distinctive and stuffy
smell.

Sorrell approached the office window, and as he did so a man
appeared at the doorway of the "Cubby Hole."  His suffused and
injected eyes sighted Sorrell.

"Good morning, sir."

"Good morning," said Sorrell.

The man was in his shirt sleeves, unshaven, and his close-cropped
head glistened white between his heavy shoulders; in fact his head
seemed attached directly to his broad, short body without the
interposition of a neck.  His shortness made his bulk more evident,
and even the effort of speaking appeared to render him short of
breath, for Sorrell saw the labouring of the ballooned waistcoat.
The man was not old, and yet he made Sorrell think of some poor,
obese, mangy old dog with bleared eyes and panting flanks.

"What can I do for you, sir?"

His bluffness had a certain pathos.  He appeared the master, a
hearty, loud voiced creature, and he was nothing but an obedient
sot.

"Mrs. Palfrey told me to call.  It's about--"

"About what--!"

"She is needing a man."

"Oh,--ah,--that's it."

The brain behind the blotched face functioned very slowly, nor did
the suffused blue eyes express any emotion.  They did not change
their look of solemn obfuscation.

The man moved to the door on which "The Cubby Hole" was painted in
black letters.  He opened it.

"Flo."

"Hallo."

"Someone to see you, a fellow after Tom's place."

"Show him in."

As Sorrell responded to the gesture of a fat hand he divined the
fact that this poor, rotten shell of a man--the bruised and swollen
fruit--was Florence Palfrey's husband.



He closed the door and stood by it, holding his hat in his hand.
It was a darkish room, with one window looking out upon a yard, and
beneath the window ran a long sofa full of crimson coloured
cushions.  The woman was sitting on the sofa fiddling with some
piece of needlework.

She did not tell Sorrell to sit down.

"Well, what's your trouble been?" she asked abruptly.

He answered her with equal abruptness.

"Is that any business of yours?"

Her eyes seemed to take in his thinness, the black and whiteness of
his rather solemn face with its little moustache and neatly brushed
black hair.  His quick reaction to her insolence did not displease
her.

"Do you want this job?" she asked.

"That depends--"

"On your pride, my lad.  Gentleman and ex-officer and all that!"

She pretended to fiddle with her needlework, and he looked down at
her and met her occasional and baffling glances.  He could not make
her out.  Her immense vitality, the brutal glow of her handsome
strength made him feel like an inexperienced and shy boy.  Why had
she told him to come to her?  Was it pity, good nature?

"I want work," he said.

"Married?"

"No.  But I have got a boy."

She gave him a comprehending stare.

"What made you come to Staunton?"

"I had a berth offered me.  At Verity's.  I came down yesterday.
He was dead."

She reflected for a moment, her head bent over her work.

"Rather a comedown for you."

"That's my affair."

He had a feeling that she was amused at finding a man-creature in
the corner of her cage.

"What about references, a character?"

"I could get you references from the Ex-Officers' Association.  My
name is Sorrell, Captain Sorrell."

"You will have to drop the 'captain.'  Temporary, I suppose?"

"Yes.  And what is the job?"

She dallied over revealing the details of the post he was to fill,
as though it piqued her to discover at her leisure how much mauling
the man-thing could bear.

"Of course--you are pretty raw.  The thing is--you won't be able to
put on side.  A man who cleans the boots in my house doesn't put on
side."

"Point No. 1," he said, "I clean the boots."

"And carry up luggage."

"Yes."

"And keep an eye on the yard and the garage.  By the way--know
anything of billiards?"

"I play."

"Then you know how to mark.  Then--there is the 'Bar.'  You will
have to scrub that out every morning, and give a hand sometimes
with the drinks."

"Right."

She felt him growing stiffer with the swallowing of each detail.
His pale face confronted her with an air of defiance.  With each
scratch of the claw he forced himself to a grimmer rigidity.  He
refused to wince.

"Anything else?"

"Oh--any odd job I may want done."

"Yes."

"And you will call me 'madam.'"

She gave him a stare, and in it was a brutal curiosity.  He was
like a slave in the arena, down in the sand, and she was wondering
whether he would cry for mercy.

"Very well, madam.  And may I ask--what I get out of the job?"

"Thirty bob a week--and your keep."

"Is that all?"

"Tips.  Don't forget the tips.  If a man's obliging--"

She gave an indescribable twitch of the shoulders.

"It's a posh job--in the right place.  You'll live in--of course."

Sorrell stood fingering his hat.

"And what about my boy?"

"I'm not engaging a boy.  We don't have children here.  You can
board him out somewhere, and he can go to school.  How old?"

"Eleven."

"Very well; it's up to you, Sorrell.  I can fill this place ten
times over in half an hour."

She saw the white teeth under the little black moustache, and she
understood how he was feeling.  He hated her.  He could have struck
her in the face, and his suppressed passion gave her the sort of
emotion that she found pleasurable.  She liked using her claws on
men, driving them to various exasperations, and not for a long time
had she had such a victim.

"I'll take it," he said.  "When shall I start?"

She had turned on the sofa to place a finger on the push of an
electric bell.  Sorrell heard the distant "burr" of it.  She sat as
though waiting for someone in order to keep him waiting.

"What did you say?"

Her manner was offhand.

"I asked you--madam--when I should start?"

"Right away.  I'll give you an hour to fix up that kid of yours."

"Thank you," he said, and opened the door to go.

But she called him back as her husband entered the room.

"I've taken this man on.  He is going to fetch his things."

Mr. Palfrey, stertorous and staring, was nothing but a fat figure
of consent.

"Right, my dear."

"That's all, Sorrell.  Be back in an hour."

It took Sorrell five minutes to reach the upper room of the house
in Fletcher's Lane, and he found Christopher at the window looking
out upon the world of Staunton's roofs.

"I have got a job, Kit."

The boy gave him that happy, radiant smile.

"I am glad, pater.  What is it?"

Sorrell took one of the first steps towards the greater courage.

"I'm porter at the Angel Hotel."




CHAPTER III


1


It took Stephen Sorrell the best part of a week to understand the
"atmosphere" of the Angel Inn at Staunton.

It was a little world in itself, a world dominated by that woman of
blood and of brass, Florence Palfrey.  The other humans were
little, furtive figures, scuttling up and down passages and in and
out of rooms.  There were the two waitresses, the cook, the two
chambermaids, and the apathetic young lady who helped in the bar.
Poor, besotted John Palfrey, waddling about like a pathetic yet
repulsive old dog, a creature of wind and of nothingness, was a
voice and nothing more.  He was perpetually fuddled.  His hands
trembled; his swollen waistcoat was never properly buttoned; even
his gossipings in the "Cubby Hole" were like the blunderings of a
brainless animal.  Sometimes Sorrell found him in tears.

"What is it, sir?"

"I've lost--my slippers--.  It's that damned pup--again."

He gulped.

"Who cares--?  I'm--I'm asking you?  Not a blessed--soul--"

Sorrell would find his slippers for him, or his pipe, though he
could not dry the poor creature's silly tears.  There were times
when he himself was on the edge of tears, tears of rage or of
exhaustion.  He went to bed each night, worn out in mind and in
body, so tired that he would lie awake and listen to the cathedral
clock, or to the noises of his own body.  The work was new to him;
he was on the go from morning to night; the luggage pulled him to
pieces.  Moreover, the food was execrable, and those slovenly meals
snatched anyhow and at any time in the slimy kitchen, turned sour
in his tired stomach.  Very often he was in pain.

But the thing that astonished him was the dirtiness of the place.
From the street the Angel suggested cleanliness and comfort; the
paint was fresh, the door-step white, but an observant eye might
have noticed the dead flowers in the window boxes.  Within, a
cynical slovenliness prevailed.  It was not safe to look under the
carpets, or to reflect upon the blankets hidden by the treacherously
clean sheets.  There were places that smelt.  As for the kitchen,
and that awful dark and greasy hole where the dishes were washed,
they made Sorrell wonder at the innocence of the people who ran
their cars into the Angel yard and ate the Angel dinner, and slept
in the Angel beds.

The place had a sly filthiness.  It was like a wench in silk
stockings and lace whose ablutions were of the scantiest.  Yet
there was money in the "house."  Trade was good; Florence Palfrey
never gave you the impression that she had to deny herself
anything.  She was brazen, voracious, insatiable, an animal with
bowels full of fire.  It was she who made out the bills, and in
most of them there was some flagrant item against which the easy
English visitor should have protested.  In nine cases out of ten
they remained mute and paid.  Florence Palfrey knew her world.  She
bluffed.  She chanced the protest, knowing that people would pay
and go away and grumble and forget.  She knew the world's moral
cowardice, its inertia.

Sorrell soon realized that the Angel as an hotel did not matter.
The coffee-room, the commercial-room, the bedrooms were of no
importance; what mattered was the bar.

Men came to booze.

In fact the "Cubby Hole" of the Angel Inn was a pivot, a fly-trap,
a cave into which all sorts of male things crowded, and drank, and
made silly noises and sillier laughter, and looked with lustful
eyes at Florence Palfrey.  At night the room would be full of them,
and even in the daytime it was rare for the room beside the bar to
be empty.  This cavity had a secret, conspiratorial air.  The men
who sneaked into it dreamed of catching old Palfrey's wife in a
mood of consent, and of exciting moments among the red cushions.

The "Cubby Hole" filled Sorrell with nausea.

He began to know the names and the faces and the callings of the
men who drifted into it.  There was Romer--the managing clerk to
Spens and Waterlove, a polite person with restless brown eyes and
an unpleasant tongue.  He had an amazing collection of stories.
Biles, who owned the big butcher's shop in High Street, would slip
in with his red, greasy and furtive face, and would spill silly
compliments from his coarse lips.  Sadler the "vet" went away each
night stiffly drunk, moving like a figure on wires, his eyes fierce
in his thin and debauched face.  But there were dozens of them,
farmers, tradesmen, commercial travellers, young bloods, all
slinking in like dogs, drinking, and lounging and lusting.

"The fools--!"

Sorrell called them fools, and his scorn of them was part of his
own pain.  He had to mark for some of them in the billiard room, to
listen to their dirty stories, to fetch them drinks.  It was their
amusement, and his torture, for often he was dropping with fatigue
and boredom, and yearning for the fools to go to bed.  And he would
hear the laughter in the "Cubby Hole," and the splurgings of these
tradesmen who made love like bullocks.

"Floe--on thou shining river."

That was Medlum's jest, Medlum who kept the book-shop and sold
prayer-books and Bibles and pretty-pretty art tourist guides, and
who had a wife and seven children.  He was a sandy man who looked
as though he had been dipped in a bleaching vat, all save his mouth
which was thin and red and lascivious.

They spent much money.

They would send poor old Palfrey up to bed, bemused, shuffling in
his slippers, grabbing at the handrail.  Often Sorrell would have
to help John Palfrey up the stairs, listening to his pantings and
to his fuddled confidences.

"She don't care--not a damn.  I've got water in me--.  I'm like a
grape, Steve.  What did the doctor call it?  Ass--i-tis.--Wish I
were dead."

He would pause at the top of the stairs, panting, and staring
solemnly at Sorrell.

"You mark my words--.  A coffin--in six months I'm asking you--.
Who cares--?"

He would weep.

"You're a good chap,--Steve.  Don't know why.  God,--I feel sick."

There were other things that Sorrell began to understand.  Women
came to the "Cubby Hole"; Miss Hargreaves from across the way, red
nosed, excited, ready with thin, hard giggles; the lady who kept
the fruit shop and who looked like an over-ripe plum, and who was
always protesting that she could not bear to be tickled.  "I'll
scream."

These earthly souls soon ceased to puzzle him, but the woman of
brass remained an enigma.  She bullied these people, even when she
treated them with brutal good-humour.  She knew exactly how to
handle each fool-man, and how to repulse some flushed face that was
breathing too near to hers.  There were times when Sorrell felt
that she despised the whole crowd as much as he did.

And since a man must wonder, he went in pursuit of her motives.
Did her huge vitality suck something from her herd of swine?  Was
it money?  Did it cause poor Palfrey to disobey his doctor's orders
and to shuffle nearer to the inevitable coffin?

She was shrewd, like a strong and cunning animal.  She never lost
her dignity, or allowed the amorous clowns to take liberties.

"I have seen something like her before," he thought.  "Where--?"

One wet night he remembered.  The den was full of her Circe troop,
and Sorrell, going in with a tray of glasses, saw her sitting on
the sofa and looking over the heads of her adorers.  Yes, he
remembered.  He had seen a lioness at the London Zoo, couched, and
looking just like that, savagely and superbly indifferent.  He
could remember the way the tawny beast's eyes had looked over the
heads of the humans fidgeting and chattering outside the railings,
those tame people, those monkeys.  The lioness, couched up above,
eyes fixed upon some distance of her own, had ignored them.

But she met Sorrell's eyes, and a sudden glitter came into them.

He was closing and locking the hotel door when he heard her calling
him.

"Stephen!"

He went to the door of the den.  She was sitting on the sofa,
yawning, and with the naturalness of a fine animal.

"What damned fools!"

She looked at him, and picked up a cigarette from the table.

"I want a match."

He produced a box, and striking a match, held it for her to light
her cigarette.  She blew smoke.  Her eyes lifted suddenly, and he
saw the big black pupils and the vivid blue of each iris.

"You look fagged."

"It's the end of the day."

"You ought to get off more.  You work too hard."

Sorrell's eyes dropped.

"If I could get out for an hour--after tea.  There's my boy; I
don't see much of him--"

Instantly he was aware of the fact that he had offended her.

"O--your boy!  What's he doing?"

"Going to school."

"The Council School?"

"Well, it's that--or--"

"A summons.  All right,--clear out for an hour each day.  Have you
locked up?"

"Yes, madam."

He had a glimpse of her profile as he passed the door on his way to
the stairs.  She was smoking and looking at and through the wall
opposite her.  The corner of her mouth was drawn down and she was
frowning.



2


Sorrell had particular moments in the day when life was worth
living.  One of the moments was when he got to his attic at night,
and counted up the day's tips and entered the amount in a little
black note-book; the other moment of happiness came to him with a
daily glimpse of the clean, frank face of his boy.

Kit would come to the arched entry, and Sorrell would meet him
there, and Kit would see his father in the old, familiar blue serge
suit grown more shiny and less neatly creased about the trousers.
There were times when Sorrell wore an apron, but he contrived to
appear before Christopher minus the apron.  His pride allowed
itself this little satisfaction.

They would stand together for five minutes beside one of the white
Ionic pillars supporting the bow window of the dining-room, the boy
looking up into his father's face.  He was an observant child, and
his love for Sorrell had undergone a transfiguration.  Christopher
noticed changes in his father's face; it looked more waxy; there
were little wrinkles as of a troublesome knot of effort lying
between the eyebrows.  Sorrell was thinner; he stooped more.

But Sorrell's eyes smiled.

"How's she feeding you, son?"

Christopher had no complaint to make of the food that Mrs. Barter
gave him at No.13 Fletcher's Lane.  She was a good woman.

"She's been mending my shirts, pater."

"Ha," said Sorrell, "has she!"--and glanced at the boy's suit.
Yes, that fresh face contrasted with the shabby clothes.

"Time I took you to the tailor, my lad.  I think I can manage it
next week."

Christopher could not analyse all that lay behind his father's
eyes, but he felt the warmth of the love in them.  He noticed that
his father's eyes had a filminess, a veiled and secret delight, a
moment of deep dreaming.  They were the eyes of a man who was
thirsty, and to whom the boy brought pure, clean water.  Christopher
refreshed him.  His candid eyes and the brown warmth of his clear
skin were unblemished fruit after the rottenness of those squashed
and purple souls, those men who made Sorrell think of faces trodden
on by an ever-passing crowd of sordid and unclean thoughts.  His boy
had youth, a future, possibilities; he was the sun in the east.

And poor Palfrey!

"My God!" Sorrell thought; "one must hold on to something, even if
it is nothing but a clean shirt and a piece of soap."

Christopher never asked questions, awkward and embarrassing
questions.  He accepted his father's job, and he understood the
significance of it far more subtly than Sorrell knew.  It reacted
on the boy, and deepened his sensitive seriousness.

At school he was very careful of his clothes.  He did not say much
about the school.  It was all right.  Better than London.  What did
he do in the evenings?  O,--went for walks, mostly.  There were
woods outside the town, and the river.

Those few minutes were very precious to Sorrell, but they
tantalized him.  His boy was so apart from him all through the day,
and whenever they met he would look eagerly at that frankly radiant
face for the shadow of any possible blemish.

He felt so responsible, greedily responsible.  The boy's clean eyes
made the life at the Angel possible.

On one occasion when he had walked a little way along the footpath
with Christopher he became aware of a face at a window.  The woman
was watching them.  He caught her bold, considering eyes fixed on
the boy.

He went back rather hurriedly into the passage, and met her there.

"That your kid, Stephen?"

"Yes, madam."

"He's not a bit like you.  The mother's dead, I suppose?"

"I divorced her," said Sorrell, pale and stiff about the lips.

Usually, it was about eleven at night when he went slowly up the
narrow staircase to the top landing where the staff slept.  He
carried a candle.  Sometimes he would hear giggling and chattering
in one of the girl's rooms, but he always went straight to his own,
shut the door, put the candlestick on the chair, sat down on the
bed and turned out his pockets.  At this hour he did his precious
calculations.  His little black note-book was a model of neatness,
with credit and debit entries.


     July 7.  Wages    L1 10 0     Christopher--Board L1 0 0

       "  7.  Tips         4 6     Tobacco  ..  ..       2 0

       "  8.    "          3 0     Tooth brush  ..       1 0

       "  9.    "            0     Christopher--Boots  1 0 0

       " 10.    "          7 0

       " 11.    "          5 6

       " 12.    "          1 0

       " 13.    "          9 0


He found that his tips averaged about twenty-five shillings a week.
He paid Mrs. Barter a pound a week for Christopher's keep.  He
spent a few odd shillings on himself.  He was contriving to save
about a pound a week.  L52 a year?  If his health held out?

Already he had a plan for his boy, an objective that showed like a
distant light through the fog of the days' confusion.

"It's my business to do my job thoroughly," he thought, "in order
to get Kit a better one.  I'll save every damned penny."

Life, the life that should have appealed to the cruder of his own
appetites, had ceased to attract him, and all his energy appeared
to concentrate itself and to flow in one particular channel.  He
developed a peculiar passion for thoroughness, even though he might
curse the inanimate things upon which he had to exercise this
thoroughness.  Queerly enough, much of his thinking and his
philosophizing were done while he was cleaning the various pairs of
boots and shoes left outside the bedroom doors.  He did not mind
this job,--though scrubbing the bar floor made his gorge rise.  It
was like cleaning out a pen where unclean animals had left their
ordure.  But boots--!  Boots had character.  He got into the way of
estimating the owners of the boots by their footgear.  He had a
preference for neat brown shoes, gentlemen's shoes, and his
favourites came in for more polish.  Young women's shoes--were they
ever so chic--gave him no thrills.  The boots he detested were the
boots worn by a particular type of middle-aged commercial
traveller, men who trod heavily and whose waistcoats bulged.  He
never put a hand inside one of these "swine's trotters" as he
called them.

But with a free hour each day snatched from the Lioness's rather
jealous paws, Sorrell began to see more of Christopher.  He took
his hour off from eight till nine, for he had found that too many
motorists arrived after tea and he was not there to handle the
luggage and to carry it up from the garage.  He wished to be in
evidence because of the subsequent tips.  But in these long summer
evenings he and Christopher wandered together; sometimes they chose
the Close, on other evenings they wandered out a little way into
the country; if it was wet Mrs. Barter let them sit in her parlour.
She was kind to Sorrell she offered to do his mending for him.

Christopher loved trees.  There was a particular elm in the Close,
a green giant with a ring seat round its bole, under which the boy
liked to sit.  Nor was Sorrell sorry to sit.  It conserved boot
leather, and rested his tired feet.  Kit had noticed on their short
country rambles that his father walked as though his feet hurt him.
He had noticed--too--that one of the boots was patched.

"Your turn next--pater?"

"What for, son?"

"Boots," said the boy.

He had fatherly moments towards Sorrell.  He too had his plans,
vague ambitions, and impulse that pushed him towards some
magnificent job in the doing of which he would earn much money.  He
had sensed the effort in his father's life; he dreamed of taking
his share of the effort.

"I can start work at fifteen, pater."

Sorrell was astonished.

"I hope not," he said, and glancing from the boy's face to the
spreading branches of the elm he saw life and its effort
symbolized.

"Most people grow like cabbages.  Look at this tree.  How many
years--eh?  O,--it was not in a hurry.  We--are not going to be in
a hurry."

The boy's eyes were questioning.

"Not as long as that--With you--sweating--and doing everything--"

"It's my job, Kit."

He looked mysterious.

"I've got plans.  The thing is--Well, you don't know yet,--what you
will want to do--I mean.  No blind alleys, or office stools."

"You mean--dad--what I would like to be?"

"That's it."

"Seems--one's got to earn money."

"Wait a bit.  There's something better: how you earn it.  The real
job matters more than the money."

"Yes," said Christopher very solemnly, "the sort of thing you love
doing.  Well,--I suppose I shall find out."




CHAPTER IV


1


An incident that occurred about five weeks after Sorrell's arrival
at the Angel startled him into a sudden aliveness towards the drift
of other people's temperamental whimsies.

It was early in the morning, before the paying part of the hotel
had descended to his breakfast, and Sorrell was down on his knees
in the lounge cleaning up the spilt contents of one of the ash
trays.  Someone had knocked it off the table the previous night.
The two waitresses were busy in the coffee-room, and one of them, a
little sallow girl, with a shock of black, bobbed hair, running out
towards the kitchen with a serviette over her arm, saw Sorrell
kneeling.  He had had glances from the girl; she was always passing
him in the passage, but Sorrell was too tired for life's little
frills.  He had forgotten the fact that he might be attractive to
women.  Anyhow, the girl slipped the napkin over Sorrell's eyes,--
and drawing it tight, bent down till her mop of black hair touched
his head.

"Guess who it is--?"

She giggled, but before Sorrell had made any effort to free
himself, the napkin was whisked away, and he had a glimpse of
Millie's slim legs disappearing urgently down the passage leading
to the kitchen.  Someone had come down the stairs, and was passing
behind him, and glancing round, he saw Florence Palfrey going
towards the office.

It was the most trivial of incidents, a mere piece of hoydenish
mischief, but when the staff of the Angel sat down to its midday
meal Sorrell realized that the little dark girl was not present.

"What's become of Millie?"

The other waitress gave him a sour look.

"You--ought to know."

"But I don't know."

"She--sacked her."

"What for?"

"Romping."

Not much was said, though it was obvious that the other girls felt
themselves injured by the peremptory ejection of a comrade, but
they were afraid of the Lioness, and they mistrusted Sorrell--the
man.  He became aware of the mistrust; it made him uncomfortable;
moreover he had felt a sudden, sordid tremor of fear.

That which had happened to Millie might happen to him, and he knew
that for the boy's sake such a thing must not happen.

The keenness of his own anxiety was a humiliation, and he accepted
the humiliation, explaining it to himself quite frankly as though
he were explaining the wearing of a shabby suit of clothes.  He was
alarmed at the possibility of his being pushed out into the street,
of losing his thirty shillings, his keep, and his tips.  Yet this
fear shocked him.  That a man should be afraid of being evicted
from such a caravanserai!  He had not realized how much the Angel
Inn had become his "straw," and that he was ready to cling to it
with the instinctive terror of a man who feared the unknown.

That afternoon he spent himself in a passion of activity.  He went
about eagerly looking for work.  He made work.  He attacked the
various slovenlinesses of the place.

He was aware of the constant nearness of the woman.  She--too--
appeared to be in a restless and active mood.  She kept coming out
of the office or the "Cubby Hole," going out or up the stairs and
returning.  She saw Sorrell in all sorts of postures and places, on
his knees polishing the "surround" of the lounge, cleaning the
glass panels of the doors, carrying out the aspidistras and washing
them in the yard.  She had one particular glimpse of him doubled up
under the big walnut table in the passage, but what he was doing
there she did not pretend to know.

Though she passed him a dozen times that afternoon she neither
spoke to him nor appeared to look in his direction, but each of
them was conscious of the other.  The feline intuition of the woman
divined Sorrell's fear.  He was like some busy thing in a cage,
propitiatory, eagerly turning a wheel.  Also, she knew that he was
cursing her, himself, and his activities.

Captain Sorrell, M.C.!

She was moved to brutal laughter, but her laughter was silent.
There were thoughts in her too that purred.  She had Sorrell on his
knees, and she could tell him to get up or remain there, to come or
go.  And there were inclinations in her that were whetted by her
sense of power.

"Damn the woman!  Is she going to--?"

He had a queer feeling that her passings and repassings were not
haphazard.  They concerned him.  She took notice of him by ignoring
him; her seeming indifference had an intimate and veiled
significance.

He had carried in a pair of steps and was polishing one of the big
mirrors in the lounge.  He saw himself in it, his anxious, sallow
face, the sweep of the hand carrying the wash-leather.  He threw
silent abuse at his own reflection, that sedulously active and
worried creature.

"You wretched failure,--you grovelling idiot!  Rushing about to
create a good impression--"

Suddenly, he saw her figure drift into the mirror.  She was
standing behind him, looking at him.  He fancied that he detected
amusement in her eyes, the kind of amusement a lioness might be
expected to enjoy if a lioness had a sense of humour.

"Very busy to-day,--Stephen?"

"Yes, madam."

He went on with his polishing, believing that he was going to hear
about the silly incident of the morning.  He waited.  She stood and
watched him for fully a minute, and he felt the back of his neck
and his ears all flushed.  Confound her!  What did she want?  Why
didn't she go away, or stick her claws into him and have done with
it?

He reached up to a far corner of the glass, and when next he
searched for her reflection, he found that she had gone.  He was
conscious of relief, but the sense of relief was only partial.  He
felt her somewhere.  Where?

The door of the "Cubby Hole" was wide open, and he could see a part
of the interior reflected in the mirror, a strip of green carpet, a
red cushion, part of the frame and glass of the window.  She was in
there, sitting on the sofa, watching him.  He saw the gleam of her
hair, and two eyes, very dark, like the eyes of a creature watching
him from the gloom of a wood.  He fancied that she smiled.

He tried to concentrate his senses upon the mere glassy surface of
the mirror, and to keep his vision and its accompanying thoughts
from passing through to the deeps of it where the woman was, but he
could not help focussing her.  She remained there, watching him,
enigmatic, motionless, like a great tawny cat.  Sorrell decided to
leave the mirror.  He came down the steps, and was folding them up
when he heard her voice.

"Stephen--"

"Yes, madam."

"There is a glass in here.  It hasn't been touched since--since--"

She laughed as he stood in the doorway with the steps and bucket.

"Since Adam and Eve."

Sorrell obeyed her with an air of great briskness.  The mirror was
over the mantelpiece, a gilt-framed thing of the "Regency" period,
and when he got on the steps he found that the top of the frame was
black with dust.  Florence Palfrey had picked up a paper that had
been lying on the sofa, but instead of reading it she fanned
herself with it, for the day was hot.

"Anyone in the lounge?"

"No."

Sorrell came down the steps to dip his leather in the bucket.

"Very warm to-day."

She did not reply, but watched him get to work, and his movements
told her that he was nervous.  She was satisfied in a part of
herself.  And then she began to talk to him with an air of casual
intimacy, and in a way that she had never talked before.  He was
both Captain Sorrell, M.C., and her "boots" and porter.

"Rather different from the war, Stephen."

He agreed.  He felt strangely alert.

"How did you get your M.C.?"

"I didn't know--"

"Oh,--I know most things.  Well?  How?"

"Oh, in a trench raid."

"Were you raiding the others?"

"No, madam, the others were raiding us."

He was working hard at the mirror, with his back to her, and
somehow he felt he had to keep a distance, though he could not
analyze the feeling.

"Well,--what happened?  Don't be so dashed modest."

"The Germans came into our trench."

"Yes."

"And they stuck some of our chaps.  It's a nasty tool, the bayonet.
And there was a bit of a panic.  I was in a deuce of a funk."

"That's funny!"

"It wasn't at all funny.  But something seemed to go off inside me--
and I saw red."

She nodded her head.  She was considering him, eyes half closed and
fiercely languid.

"So you can see red.  Well,--I shouldn't have thought it.  It's
rather--interesting.  You must have been stronger then."

"I was.  But it's not mere beef--"

"No.  Not bullock's strength.  Wounded--I suppose?"

"Twice."

"Badly?"

"A bit of H.E. in the chest--the second time.  I had to come home--
after that."

He both felt and heard the rustling of the paper as she fanned
herself, a disturbing sound, like the rustling of leaves or lace.
He had finished cleaning the mirror, and he came down the steps
rather hurriedly, folded them up, and grabbed the bucket.

"Anything else, madam?"

She observed him steadily above the rustling paper.

"No.  You are an odd fish, Stephen."

He stared, and she laughed.

"Odd as odd.  Go and see if you can find anything else to polish."



2


From that day Sorrell began to perceive Florence Palfrey more and
more vividly as the tawny creature, the lioness who had him shut up
in her cage.  She did not say much, but she managed to convey to
him the impression that he was dependent on her, and that she had
but to raise a paw--.  Her way of dealing with him was both subtle
and simple; it mingled moments of provocation and of caressing
cruelty with sudden flashes of naked intimacy.  Her badness was so
unclothed at times that it frightened him.

For Sorrell was thinking of the boy, and his thoughts turned to
escape from any entanglement, a shabby affair with a woman who was
both elemental and cynical.  He did not want it.  He was tired of
life as a merely personal adventure, and when this thing loomed
over him he realized that he was living vicariously, and that the
very roots of the will to live drew their substance front the youth
of his boy.

He was frightened.

For he had a most absurd feeling that he was being kept and fed and
played with in order to be devoured.  He divined her ruthlessness,
her ferocity, her stealthy, amused strength.  For some reason he
had piqued her, and he wondered why.  Was she intrigued by the fact
that he was a gentleman handling luggage and cleaning boots?  Or
had the obvious men, the blatant, butcherly people who stormed into
her den ceased to pique her?  He could imagine a lioness being
bored and looking about her for some new sort of victim.

Moreover, Sorrell was helping poor old Palfrey up to bed, and
though Florence Palfrey's husband might be no thing of loveliness,
the very act of helping a man begets a sense of comradeship.  John
Palfrey was derelict; no one bothered about him now; he might shout
feebly down the stairs with that husky voice of his, and no one
would take any notice.

"Hallo,--hot water,--shaving water--"

On more than one occasion Sorrell found him standing on the landing
in his old blue dressing-gown, weeping.

"I--want--my breakfast."

He had it in his bedroom, and it was Sorrell who took upon himself
the duty of carrying up poor Palfrey's shaving water and his
breakfast tray, for in Palfrey he saw the husk of a man, a man who
had been devoured.

"You're a good chap.  Steve.  I'm of no account now.  Who cares?"

"I do, sir."

Palfrey made a sudden clutch at his arm.

"Don't you ever marry, Steve; don't you ever let a woman get you.
She'll eat you up."

And Sorrell understood.

It happened one evening when he had helped the dying man to bed
that Sorrell found Florence on the landing outside the door.  The
landing was badly lit, and she was standing by the stairs with one
hand on the rail as though in the act of pausing.  She was in low-
necked dress of black, with her arms bare to the shoulders.

Sorrell still had his hand on the handle of John Palfrey's door.
Her sudden presence there agitated him; he felt that he had to get
by her quickly and go downstairs.  He could smell the particular
scent she used.

He walked towards her,--and remaining where she was she closed the
stairs to him unless he should push rudely past close to the wall.

"Put him to bed, have you?"

She looked Sorrell full in the eyes as though her stare could beat
down any independence that was in him.

"He won't last long now."

Her tone was callously significant.  It was as though she was
trying to convey to him her appreciation of his soft-heartedness,
to humour something childish in him, even while she conspired with
him as to the future.  O, well, she could lie sleekly in her cage
and wait for this odd fish who boasted a sort of absurd integrity
of his own.

Sorrell felt shocked.  Something flamed in him; he could have
struck her, thrown her down the stairs, with furious abuse, but
behind her he seemed to see the face of his boy.

"It is pretty rotten for a man--" he said.

He felt ashamed before her.  His eyes looked over into the well of
the stairs, and then--with an abrupt and awkward "Excuse me," he
pushed past her and went below.

He felt that he needed air, to be alone somewhere under the stars,
and daring the desertion of his post he went out into the High
Street, and along it into the Market Square.  The place was
deserted.  He saw a great yellow moon hanging in the tops of the
elms, and beside it the blackness of the cathedral towers.  He
walked up and down, hatless, and in his shirt sleeves.  He felt
that he wanted to rush round to Fletcher's Lane, and catch up
Christopher and hold him.

"The one clean thing left to me," he thought.

His lips made a movement as of spitting.

"Good God!  That a man should be left to die like that,--like a
piece of rotting meat in a corner!  If I should have to die like
that?  Damn her--!"

He was in a fever to escape,--but how?  Necessity held him chained.
If he broke the chain and plunged?  He was saving money, just a
little money, and if he could win a breathing space he might have
time to look about him.  It was the boy who mattered.  If he the
man--surrendered--and allowed himself to be cajoled and to be
devoured--?

But why this niceness?  How easy it would be for him--She had
hinted so broadly.  But his soul's exclamation was a "Pah!"  To
step into that poor sot's shoes, and to be pushed eventually over
the edge of all decencies when the feline creature was tired of
him.

No.  He struggled.  The nature of the struggle was vague and
elemental, and he did not visualize it as one of those primitive
crises in a man's life when something that is stronger than his
mere appetites pushes him a step higher up the precipice.  He clung
to a prejudice, and to the one human thing that mattered.  He was
not going down into the dubious muck, and to feel himself smeared
with it when he met the eyes of his boy.

"Damn her," he said, "I'll fight through," and he went back to the
hotel with his eyes staring as they had stared at horrible moments
during the war.



3


Sorrell's frenzy of activity continued.  It seemed as though he
were trying to lose himself in a desperate combat with the
multifarious slovenliness of the Angel Inn, to hide himself in the
dust cloud of his own energy.  He was never still.  He ran round
and round in his cage, sweeping, polishing, tidying, carrying
things.  His indefatigable activity impressed itself even upon the
loungers in the "Cubby Hole."

"That chap of yours seems full of juice, Flo."

"Well,--why not?  He doesn't belong to a Trade Union."

"Queer sort of beggar.  Looks at you as though he thought your pub
wanted a wash."

"That's not unlikely."

"Oh,--I say!  That's a bit thick.  Hallo, Bob, old bean.  Crush in
here.  What's yours?"

In this vulgar world Sorrell's nausea became too chronic and too
real.  He began to be afraid of his meals, and to wake at night
with a knotted pain under his ribs.  He thought of going to see a
doctor, but it was not a doctor that he needed, and he knew it, but
he did arrive at the more economical expedient of slipping into a
chemist's shop.  There were no other customers, and Sorrell made
his confession across trays of soap and washing gloves and
toothbrushes.

"I've got indigestion.  Can you give me something?"

The chemist was a colourless little man with thin and peculiarly
compressed lips.

"Pain after meals?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Oh, it varies."

He met the man's scrutinizing eyes.

"Look as though you wanted a tonic.  Run down.  I'll give you
something."

Sorrell sacrificed a precious three and ninepence for a bottle of
tonic and some tablets.

"Help you to get rid of the wind, you know."

The stuff did him no good, for he was worried, and overworking
himself, and eating bad food and rushing about after he had eaten
it.  The constant pain and the discomfort began to depress him; he
felt less and less of a man, and more and more of a sick animal in
a cage.  He had moods of melancholic apathy when a voice within him
played tempter, saying--"What's the use?  You are a failure.  Even
your wretched body is a failure, Why not give in, slide, go down
the shoot?  After all, what is the fuss about?  A woman and a boy
and an adventure that most men would laugh at?  You're a fool."

Kit saw a change in his father.  Sorrell's eyes looked strained,
and the whites of them were muddy; he stooped more, and appeared
uneasy when he was sitting on the seat under the elm.  A
discouraged figure.  And yet Christopher did not like to ask
questions.

"The work makes you rather tired, pater."

"Oh,--a bit.  I shall get used to it."

"Couldn't there be--something else?"

"I've got a plan," said Sorrell.

He was always talking about that plan.  The more difficult it
seemed of attainment the more obsessed was he by the contemplation
of it.  His plan was like a hypothetical sun invisible during the
greater part of an English summer, but there, and liable to shine
some day next year.  He forced himself to appear confident before
the boy, for he realized that Christopher was the only living
person who believed in him, and he wanted Christopher to go on
believing in him, especially when he was in danger of ceasing to
believe in himself.  It was suggestion, the dear--trusting stimulus
of youth.

One day he was sick, and he went about with a face all pinched and
the colour of cream, making himself do things.  He was tidying up a
disorder of papers in the commercial room when the woman glided in.

"You don't look well, Stephen."

There was a seductive kindness in her voice, and he mumbled
something about his dinner not having agreed with him.

"You fuss too much," she said.

He went on tidying the papers, feeling that her presence radiated a
false sunlight.

"You--might--do much less--if you cared, you odd fish."

He understood her.

"It's my job," he said.

"As you please."

When she left him he sat down in one of the chairs, and held his
head in his hands.




CHAPTER V


1


Sorrell was leaning against one of the white Ionic pillars that
supported the bow window when the claret-coloured car drew up
outside the Angel Hotel.  The car was a two-seater, and in it sat a
man wearing a grey suit and a soft grey hat.  He was very brown.
He beckoned to Sorrell.

"Any rooms here?"

"Yes, sir."

The quality of Sorrell's voice surprised the man, and he showed his
surprise by looking at Sorrell for half a second longer than was
necessary.

"Right.  The car won't be in the way here?"

"No, sir.  Would you care to go straight into the garage?"

"Presently," said the man.

He climbed out and stood on the pavement, glancing up at the
windows of the hotel.  He appeared to be about Sorrell's age, one
of those square men, but not too square, with a fresh brown skin,
blue eyes, and a firm but human mouth.  He moved easily, and you
gathered from his steady eyes and his rather measured movements
that he was a deliberate person, no great talker, a man with
courage, but one who never rushed at life haphazard.  There was
something about the man that attracted Sorrell, his freshness, his
obvious strength, the calm way his eyes looked at you and then gave
you a sudden and pleasant smile.  Sorrell had known one or two such
men in the war.  They had made good soldiers.

The man entered the hotel, and Sorrell remained by the car.  He
liked the colour of it, and the compact brightness of the dash-
board, and the neatly covered leather hood.  He himself would have
liked to possess such a car, but he did not grudge the man in grey
the possession of it.

Sorrell heard the pleasant and deliberate voice at his elbow.

"All right.  I'll drive in."

From the way the newcomer looked about him in the Angel yard,
Sorrell divined his disapproval.  Nor did Sorrell approve of the
yard.

"No lock ups?"

"No, sir."

"I want an inner tube mending."

"I'll take it round to a garage for you, sir.  Luggage in the
dicky?"

"Yes."

Sorrell extracted the luggage, a massive leather kit-bag, a
suitcase, and an attache case.

"Do you know the number of your room, sir?"

"Fifteen."

The visitor paused at the office window to sign his name in the
registration book, while Sorrell carried the luggage upstairs.  No.
15 was no better and no worse than the average bedroom at the
Angel, and though Sorrell had grown accustomed to the rooms, there
were moments when he appreciated their depressing casualness.  He
unfastened the straps of the kit-bag, and went downstairs, to find
the visitor talking to Mrs. Palfrey, and Sorrell came by the
impression that it was the woman who had begun the conversation.

He turned to Sorrell.

"Which way?"

"This way, sir.  First floor, second room on the left."

The man disappeared up the stairs, and Sorrell glanced at the
visitors' book.

"Thomas Roland.  London."

The handwriting was like the man, broad and deliberate and without
affectation.

Five minutes later Sorrell, who was rearranging the magazines and
papers in the lounge, fancied that he heard a bell ringing with
aggressive persistency.  It was an upstairs bell, and on going to
investigate he found Mr. Roland standing outside the door of No 15.

"Isn't there a maid on duty?"

"There should be, sir."

"I have no towels and no soap, and no one has brought me any hot
water."

"Sorry, sir."

"And look here--at this."

Sorrell looked, and gave a little lift of the shoulders.

"These confounded wenches--.  I'll see to it myself, sir."

He went out on to the landing calling "Maggie--Maggie," but no
Maggie materialized, for she was somewhere below at one of the many
back doors, and busy with the other sex, so Sorrell went to the
chambermaid's closet, and collected towels and hot water, and
purloined a new cake of soap from another bedroom.

Mr. Roland was unpacking his kit-bag and had thrown a pair of
orange and blue striped pyjamas on the bed.

"Thanks."

That was all he said, but he smiled at Sorrell and gave him one of
those quietly observant glances, and Sorrell went below feeling
warmed by something pleasant and human and wholesome in the man.
He wondered who Thomas Roland was, and what he did.

Meanwhile, Roland had paused in his unpacking, and was sitting on
the bed and examining the room as though it interested him.  Its
deficiencies, its perfunctory slipshodness interested him.  He
happened to be interested in rooms, and he was a man of detail.

His mental comments followed immediately upon his visual
perceptions.

"No wardrobe.  Now--where the devil--?  Faded green paint--dirty
paper--strings of pink roses between black and white lines.  One
hook off door.  Carpet--h'm--I wonder what a vacuum cleaner would
fetch out of it.  Brass bed, one knob missing.  Yellow chest of
drawers, one handle missing."

He got up.

"I bet the drawers stick, and that the paper inside them is last
year's Daily Mail."

He was right.

His observations ran on.

"Swing mirror plugged into place with a wad of paper.  Blind torn.
Japanese mats on floor need burning.  Slop pail minus a handle.
Marble top of wash-hand stand stained.  Tooth glass smeary.  Over
washing-stand advertisement of Jeyes' Fluid.  Over mantelpiece,
tariff and advertisement of local tradesmen.  Sheets need mending.
Blankets--yes--just so!"

He resumed his unpacking and his meditations.

"How many of these places have I stayed in during the last month?
A dozen--I suppose.  And only one decently run place in the dozen.
Slovenly holes, especially in these cathedral places.  Here's a
great opportunity under the noses of our innkeepers, and all they
seem to think of is the booze and the 'bar'!"

He put out his boots.

"The cheek of them--too.  Give you every sort of slovenliness and
inattention, and bad food, and then charge you top prices.  Now
take this place.  Nobody seems to care a damn, except that porter
chap.  No supervision, no discipline, no conscience."

His sponge-bag was extracted from a brightly polished cavalry mess
tin, the two halves of which found receptacles for his sponge,
washing gloves, nail-brush and tooth-brush.  He glanced at the
cracked sponge-basin belonging to the inn.

"No thanks!  Obviously--no.  Now--if that tow-headed female
downstairs did her job properly instead of--.  O, well, that's the
curse of these places; a lot of soaking fools, and yellow-headed
women.  But what I never can understand is--why--if people take on
a job--they can't do it properly.  And yet--not three in ten can.
Socialism!  What rot!"

He lit a cigarette and looked out of the window into a back yard
that contained the rotting relics of an old brougham, a pile of
bottles, and a derelict dog-kennel.

"Cheerful prospect!  I wonder what that porter fellow is doing
here?  Queer chap.  Takes trouble, but looks ill.  A gentleman's
voice--and eyes.  Does his job."

It was five o'clock, and Mr. Roland went downstairs into the
lounge, and rang for the waitress, for he desired tea.  He had to
ring twice before a girl appeared as though the last thing in the
world she was expected to do was to answer a bell.

"Tea, please."

"For one?"

"For one."

She went away, and Mr. Roland waited twenty minutes, and when the
tea tray did arrive he noticed that the girl had forgotten to fill
the milk jug.

"I take milk with my tea."

She whisked the jug away.  Sorrell was tucking letters under the
tapes on the green letter-board, and he happened to turn and catch
Mr. Roland's eye.  A faint, sympathetic and understanding smile
seemed to pass between them.

"You haven't forgotten that tube?"

"No, sir.  It has been done.  I put it in the dicky."

"Did you pay?"

"Yes, sir.  Two shillings."

"Thanks."

A two-shilling piece passed from Roland's hand to Sorrell's and
again their eyes met and smiled.

Sorrell felt cheered, though he had no great reason for feeling
cheered.  He went upstairs to No. 15, possessed himself of Mr.
Roland's brown shoes, two pairs of them, and cleaned them as they
had not been cleaned for a month.



2


Dinner was late.

Roland was chatting in the lounge with a big and genial person who
had grown suddenly testy with hunger.  The genial man was asking
his casual acquaintance to explain to him how it was that a certain
stereotyped piece of work that was done day by day could not be
made to keep pace with the clock.

"We abuse machines--but hang it all--they have rhythm."

Roland laughed softly.

"Well--I don't suppose it will be anything great when it does come.
And I think I could give you the menu."

"Guessing?"

"No, the law of averages.  We shall begin with tomato soup, go on
to tough chops--boiled potatoes and cabbage, pass thence to fruit
salad, tinned apricots and stewed prunes.  And we shall finish with
rather bad cheese."

"I don't care what it is," said the testy man.  "I feel inclined to
go and hammer that gong."

The gong sounded at ten minutes to eight, and Roland, strolling
into the dining-room, saw the usual number of small tables arranged
under the window and along the wall.  Each table had a cruet stand
from which most of the plating had long ago been worn away, and a
vase of perfunctory flowers.  A long table occupied the centre of
the room.

Roland waited for the waitress, his pose that of the interested
observer.

"One, sir?"

"Please."

The waitress indicated the long table, and Roland smiled.

"I prefer a table to myself."

"We have only tables for two or four, sir."

"Are all these tables reserved?"

"No."

He smiled again.

"If I can get a bedroom for one--I suppose I can get a table.  You
don't put me in a dormitory--thank you."

He was one of those unusual men who not only thought of things to
say, but actually said them, and said them with a smile.

He was given his table.

"Have you a menu card?"

"No, sir."

"What are we going to have?"

"Tomato soup.  Roast beef and veg.  Fruit salad."

Roland caught the eye of the testy man who was unfolding his napkin
at the next table.

"I gave you the menu.  There is only one alteration."

"What's that?"

"Roast beef instead of chops."

"Ah--!"

"And 'veg.'  A vague and comprehensive word that--veg."

Wandering out afterwards in the cool of the summer evening under a
tumultuous yet quiet sky Roland saw the great trees of the Close
all edged with gold.  He passed in, and stood looking at the
cathedral's western facade, the magnificent windows recessed
between two towers, the arcades and niches, and all that grey and
delicate silence in stone.  The lawns, like rich old velvet,
sheltered by the trees, and refreshed by the mists from the moat of
the palace, were vividly green in spite of the heat of the past
week.  Roland could see the gilded cupola and the clock above the
Tudor gateway of the palace.  He strolled upwards along the canons'
gardens, pausing to look in through the old gateways, and his
chance strollings brought him to the great elm where a man and a
boy were sitting.

Sorrell had been talking to Christopher of Thomas Roland, though he
himself was puzzled by the impulse that moved him to speak to the
boy of a man who was a mere passing stranger.  But he had let the
impulse have its way, and the spread of it had surprised him.  "So
I cleaned his shoes, my son, put such a polish on them."  Kit had
noticed a sort of shine in his father's eyes.  "Strange--how your
heart and your hand go out to some people.  He made me suddenly
feel good, and smooth.  I knew that I could do anything for him,
and that he would never ask me to do anything dirty.  Instinct.  He
looks as though he had come straight out from swimming in the sea,
when it's all blue and the sun makes a glare on the yellow sand."

Roland recognized Sorrell before Sorrell was aware of his nearness,
for Sorrell was leaning forward with his hands clasped between his
knees, and his eyes on the ground.  Roland went towards them, and
Sorrell sensing a presence, looked up, startled but smiling.

"Your boy?"

"Yes, sir.  This is Mr. Roland, Christopher."

Kit stood up and lifted his cap, and he and Mr. Roland took a
steady look at each other.

"Are you at the Angel?"

"No--I have him boarded out," said Sorrell: "we get an hour
together--when I'm off duty."

"So you get an hour?"

"Yes."

Sorrell was looking at Roland's shoes.  He was wondering whether
the other man had noticed the polish that had been put on their
comrades in No. 15.  Roland sat down on the seat, and laid a big
brown hand on Kit's shoulder.

"Sit down, old chap."

He filled a pipe.

"Pretty peaceful here.  Do you ever go to any of the services down
there?"

"Not often."

"I've been," said Kit.  "If you want to be alone--when the organ is
playing."

Roland made a slow movement of the head.

"I know.  Service; a full choir, half a dozen priests, three lonely
women, a verger and a forest of empty chairs.  And the organ notes
quaking, and a boy's voice soaring up to the grey roof like a bird.
Perhaps a few spectators standing at the west end of the nave.  It
always makes me feel queer."

Kit was watching him with solemn eyes.

"Queer?  How?"

"Oh--as though I had fallen suddenly through a trap-door into
another world.  Not our world.  Men saw the sunset through trees in
those days.  I suppose they looked at the stars.  Do you ever look
at the stars?"

His eyes were on Sorrell.

"No--hardly ever.  Never thought about it."

"Quite so."

"Too busy or too tired, and under a roof.  I used to look at them a
lot in the trenches."

"Ah--you were there too," said Roland, lighting his pipe.

And when he had lit it he got up, stood a moment, smiled at the
Sorrells, and tilted his head slightly in the direction of the moat
where the water was dappled with gold.

"Think I'll wander down here.  They still keep the swans--I
suppose?"

"And there are two peacocks, sir."

"In the bishop's garden.  I remember.  So--like us--they survived
the war.  Good night."

The Sorrells watched him go down the path to the water, holding
himself very square and straight, and yet moving with an air of
lightness.

"I like that man," said the boy, "he's--he's--"

Kit searched for some particular word.

"How do you call it, pater, when you feel right up close against
someone you've never met before?"

"Sympathy?"

"No, not quite that.  I can't get it."

"I think I know what you mean," said his father.



3


On the first floor of the Angel Inn, and at the end of a dark
passage there was a little, dim drawing-room, musty and sad, with
engravings of Landseer's pictures on the walls, and a Kidderminster
carpet on the floor.  On the hearth, behind the brass fender, stood
a cheap Japanese screen in black and gold, the centre piece between
a mock-mahogany coal purdonium on the one hand, and an occasional
table on the other.  The wallpaper displayed faded pink roses
blooming in a strangely detached way on a dull grey background.
There were a few books on an octagonal table, a Dunlop guide, bound
copies of the Illustrated London News twenty years old, Tennyson's
poems and a Latin grammar.  How the Latin grammar had got there--
heaven alone knows, but it remained there because no one troubled
to remove it.  A gilt clock that had not ticked since Queen
Victoria died, escaped the dust by standing on the white marble
mantelpiece under a glass case.  Two bronze gentlemen on horseback,
mailed and armed, menaced each other from opposite ends of the
mantelpiece.  The arm-chairs were of that bastard breed in which
each wooden arm bears an excrescence of padding covered tightly
with a material that is reminiscent of a footman's breeches sixty
years ago.

People rarely entered this room.  The windows remained closed, and
it lived shut up with its own dark mustiness.  Occasionally some
lone woman sat in it, and knitted, and looked at the books and put
them back again, but the women who sat in this room had no men
attached to them.  Any man chancing to open the door, looked in,
stared, and, feeling the room's unwedded deadness, fled.  No one
ever left the door of this room open.  They closed it carefully, as
though the room's emptiness were best sealed up.

Sorrell was coming down the stairs when he heard strange sounds
drifting from the dark passage.  There was a piano in the drawing-
room and someone was playing it, and playing it extraordinarily
well, feelingly, and with a strong, rich touch.  Sorrell paused.
Music, such music was so unknown in this haphazard house that he
felt like a man in a factory yard who suddenly hears a blackbird
singing.  It gave him a moment of exquisite pain.  He stood with
quivering throat, and a sense of strange and deep emotion stirring
in him.

The pianist was playing Chopin.  He or she was in the midst of the
First Prelude when Sorrell first paused to listen.  Then came the
Berceuse, and after the Etude in A Flat.  Sorrell, leaning against
the wall, felt his memories going back to the days of his youth
when he had sat and dreamed in Queen's Hall.  Romance.  Those days
when he had imagined--

But who was the pianist?  A car with two or three women in it had
arrived an hour ago, and Sorrell had carried up their luggage, but
these ladies had suggested rag-time rather than Chopin.  He felt
curious.  He approached the drawing-room door, telling himself that
it would be easy for him to enter the room as though in search of
some visitor.  He could wait for an interlude.

Leaning against the wall opposite the door, he let the surge of
those sweet sounds go through him.  A pause came.  He was about to
slip across the passage when the door opened.

It was Mr. Roland who opened the door.  His face had a kind of
radiance, a happy rapture.

"Hallo!"

Sorrell had straightened up.

"Sorry, sir.  I was listening.  Was it you?"

"Yes."

The two men looked at each other, and the light on Thomas Roland's
face seemed to have spread to Sorrell's.  They were together for a
moment in a transcendental world of mystic sounds and symbols.  And
life was drawing them nearer.




CHAPTER VI


1


Thomas Roland was a man of observation, and yet he was more than a
mere observer, and he saw much more than he seemed to see.  He
registered atmospheres.  That was the musical part of him.  The
practical part of him would sit comfortably in a chair behind a
book, and watch without appearing to watch, and his tranquil
solidity was so deceptive that his neighbours saw nothing but a man
and a book.

His interest in life might be catholic, but it was also fastidious
and very quick to seize upon an arresting figure or an intriguing
situation.  He had intended staying two days in Staunton, but his
two days enlarged themselves into a week.

He was interested in Stephen Sorrell, both as a practical man and
as a psychologist, and he became interested in Sorrell's
entanglement.  When he sat in a corner of the lounge and watched,
he could not help being struck by the porter's fanatical activity,
his thoroughness, his air of contending with the Augean slovenliness
of the Angel Inn.  Sorrell was never still.  His thin and slightly
stooping figure went to and fro, with its dark head, pale face, and
intent and rather sorrowful eyes.  He appeared to be always looking
for things to do; he was for ever clearing out the ash trays on the
tables or dusting the tops of the tables, or collecting the
scattered papers and magazines and putting them in order.  Nor was
it mere fussing, or a parade after effect.  The man was driven by
some urgent spirit within him; also he was reacting against some
painful pressure.  That was how Thomas Roland understood it.

Then there was the brass-headed woman, the lioness, the creature
couched in that den.  Roland was puzzled by her attitude towards
Sorrell.  She was for ever harrying the man, finding some petty
excuse for hounding him off on an errand.  She spoke to him with a
queer, intimate brutality.  She was like a woman with a whip who
found an elemental pleasure in flicking the man with it, tormenting
him, as though just to see how much of it he would stand.

"Stephen, run round to Pavits.  The fools have forgotten the fish.
You'd better bring it back."

"Get down on your knees, man, and scrub that hall.  It's a
disgrace."

"Hallo--Stephen.  No. 7 has been complaining that one of the
mudguards on his car has been buckled.  What!  You don't know
anything about it?  What do you think you are here for?"

She showed a sly unfairness in her persecution.  She appeared to
watch Sorrell's activities, and would then descend upon him and
heckle him for not doing the very thing that he was always doing.
She would sweep out of her den and discover a match and a cigarette
end in one of the ash-trays.

"Stephen!"

"Yes, madam."

There would be something very like fear in the man's eyes.

"Why don't you empty these ash-trays?  I've told you a dozen
times."

"I emptied them ten minutes ago, madam."

"O, don't tell me!  Look at that."

Roland wondered why Sorrell stood it.  Also, it seemed to him that
the woman's attitude was illogical.  If she pretended to such a
passion for detail why did she find fault with the one member of
her staff who did his job thoroughly?  Was it because he was a man,
and a man obviously out of his station?  Why didn't she go upstairs
and stimulate the casual energies of the young wenches who swept
the dust under the beds and crammed rubbish behind the grates?  Or
why didn't she supervise the cleaning of the table silver, and
discover that one fork out of three had the remains of some
previous meal between its prongs?

For five days Thomas Roland watched this piece of inter-play
without appearing to watch it.  A tacit sympathy had sprung up
between him and the Angel porter; the one man gave service and gave
it with open hands the other accepted that service and accepted it
as it was given.

Some time after tea on the sixth day when the lounge happened to be
empty, and the lioness had deserted her den, Roland sat and watched
Sorrell over the top of a book.  Sorrell was on one of his usual
rounds, going from table to table, and Roland's eyes studied his
long-fingered and intelligent hands.  They were very quick and
deft, but a little hurried.

He came to Mr. Roland's table, and Roland, putting down his book,
looked up at Sorrell.

"What are you doing here?"

"Tidying up, sir."

"No,--I don't mean that."

There was no resentment in Sorrell's questioning stare.  He emptied
Mr. Roland's ash-tray into the old metal flower-pot he used as a
receptacle.

"I have got a boy.  You saw him."

"The father for the son instead of the son for the father!  I
needn't ask you whether you loathe this job."

"It isn't the job, sir.  The job's necessary."

"But the place.  And yet you stick it.  There's a reason."

"Necessity."

Roland moved easily in his chair.

"Look here, Stephen--.  What's your other name?"

"Sorrell, sir."

"Rank?"

"Does that matter?"

"I'm a deliberate person.  Well, as one man to another--"

"Captain."

"War service--only?"

"Yes."

"Any decorations?"

"M.C."

"I got nothing but a mention in dispatches.  Are you going out to-
night?"

"I expect so, sir."

"Well,--let's meet at that elm tree and have a talk.  If you could
leave your boy at home--for once."

Sorrell stood there looking at the ash-tray that he had emptied.
His face was intensely serious.  His right hand gripped the lapel
of his coat.

"This talk of yours, sir, is it personal?"

"As personal as you please."

"What I mean is--anything--is so--infernally serious to me--When
one is just hanging on, and out of breath.  Like bad weather.--You
are afraid to expect--any sunlight."

The expression of Tom Roland's eyes altered.

"It might depend on what would seem to you to be sunlight.
Relatively.  Suppose you had to do the same sort of job, but in
different surroundings?  Would that be sunlight?"

"Absolutely."

"All right.  We meet about half-past eight.  This place is
impossible."



2


The astonishing thing was that Mr. Roland kept an hotel--or rather
that he was about to keep an hotel.  He sat under the great elm and
explained.

"What did you think I did, man?"

"I hadn't the faintest idea," said Sorrell.

"Nothing--perhaps!  I am rather music-mad, and after the war I
could not settle,--just drifted about.  But I have a practical part
to my soul, and it began to cry out."

He rested his head against the trunk of the tree.  He looked
amused; he was smiling at himself, and to Sorrell, who had been
living in a world that could not smile happily at itself, this
smile was like Tom Roland's music.  It took you into the big, wise
heart of the man.

"Knocking about, a dilettante, scribbling songs, with some sort of
idea that I could write an opera.  And so I can.  But, my dear
chap, the queer way things happen.  The way we react.  One day I
met a man I most cordially detest, a fellow who is a financial,
light--or something.  'Halo, Roland, still scribbling music?'
Well, it set me off.  'Damn these commercial people,' I thought,
'I'd like to prove their game is easier than mine.'  But--you know--
there was a rightness in what that fellow said.  He had knocked a
chip off me.  You can get many a good hint from a man who dislikes
you if you are not too pot-bound to soak it up.  I had been getting
a little--Londonish--shall we call it.  I took my car out--and went
touring, and then the idea was thrown at me.  I had it in my soup;
I found it in my bedroom.  These hotel places!  I went about
wondering if there were half a dozen men in England who could run a
country inn as it might be run.  Well, there seemed to be precious
few.  And so the idea hit me.  'Why not run an hotel, just to show
yourself that you can do it?  An Etude Pratique instead of too much
Chopin.'  Well, that's what I'm doing."

Again that pleasant, roguish smile, and a match held meditatively
to the bowl of a pipe.  A man of few words as a rule, when the
rhythm or verve of a movement took him Roland would break away into
a series of short, sharp sentences, pithy and vigorous.  He
described to Sorrell how, when the idea of managing a country hotel
had come to him, he had set about visualizing the scheme with
complete thoroughness.

"That is where we people with any imagination ought to score over
the commercialists.  If we have any vision--surely it should be
broader and more far seeing than the wall-eyed stare of a mere
money-maker?"

He told Sorrell how he had spent a whole day studying maps and
distances, for he had realized that the motorist was the man to be
caught and catered for.

"It seemed to me that I ought to fix upon a place on one of the
main roads going south-west, half-way between London and Exeter.
I drew a circle round a certain area, and dotted in the most like
centre for my spiders' web.  Then I got in my car and went
exploring."

Another match was needed for his pipe, and as he threw it down he
smiled at Sorrell.

"I'm not boring you?"

"Is it likely?"

Roland went on to describe how he had gone in search of the ideally
situated inn, and how he had found it, an old coaching-house called
the Pelican on the main road on the outskirts of Winstonbury.

"The name took me at once.  Pelican!  Unusual.  And it was sited
just as I wished.  A big old red and white place, part Queen Anne,
part Georgian.  It stood by itself.  It had an atmosphere.  Plenty
of room for expansion.  Other advantages too, a good garden and old
trees.  Our pub-keepers rarely visualize the atmosphere of a
garden.  Stuffy people.  Also--the Pelican catches the eye; three
or four hundred yards of straight road on either side of it.  Also--
it is within two miles of Hadley school,--parents--you know.
Also, Bargrave House--where all the Americans go to do homage to
the memory of one of their great men,--two miles off.  Then take
the road web for the ordinary tourist.  London some hundred miles;
Salisbury thirty or so, Bath about thirty-two; Cheltenham, the
Cotswolds not so very far away, and Amesbury and Stonehenge.
Exeter right down the road south-west.  Gloucester too--and the Wye
valley.  Well,--there you are.  The Pelican had a reputation of
sorts, clean and rather old-fashioned.  I offered to buy."

He paused as though passing to another line of thought, and his
face grew more serious.

"I am putting nearly all my capital into the show.  It is sink or
swim.  But--after all--one ought to be ready to back one's
theories.  There has to be courage in commerce.  It's an adventure.
I am taking the place over in a month.  The end of the season
you'll say.  Queer time!  Well--no.  There are alterations to make,
a lot of building.  Meanwhile I'm going to carry on and get things
organized and ready.  Then--there is the question of the staff."

Roland had realized the importance of a good "staff."  In fact it
was as important as the setting in which it was to function.

"Difficult these days.  But I am being extraordinarily careful in
picking my people.  I want character, conscience, and above all--
smiles.  I want people who'll take a pride in their work--and stay
with me.  I am going to pay good wages, and house and feed my
people well.  Besides--if the thing goes--and we tap the stream on
the road--it is going to be a comfortable and paying proposition
for the staff.  Perhaps--sixty bedrooms--the place full each night,
a constant flux, and tips--mind you--from people who are always
coming and going, people who have been well fed and well looked
after.  I have got my housekeeper and cook.  Also--the head
waitress--a rattling fine woman.  There are the maids, one of the
chief problems.  I want two porters, and I have got one--a head
porter.  He can't join me till February."

Again Roland paused, and his pause was explanatory.

"My one piece of sentiment, this Buck.  My first porter.  An ex-
sergeant major.  He saved my life out there.  I owe him--his
chance.  He'll get it.  The rest depends on--himself."  His mouth
and eyes hardened.

"I'm not a fool, Sorrell.  You know what the war was, managing men.
It is no use being soft.  I am not sure of Buck, but he shall have
his chance.  Now, what about it?  I've watched you.  I don't know
anything about you,--but I do know something of men.  If you think
my job is better than the one--there."

Sorrell sat very still, with his clasped hands between his knees.

"Wait.  I'll tell you my history.  I have nothing much to be
ashamed of."

He told it.

"That's that.  My job--is my job for the boy.  It's my centre-
board--my sheet-anchor.  If you offer me this chance I'll do my
best to see you don't regret it."

"Second porter--?"

"I realize that.  I have learnt a lot---there."

Roland smiled.

"At least you have learnt how--not--to do it.  But--remember--it's
an adventure.  I may go under.  I want people--"

Sorrell nodded a grave head.

"I understand.  You want helpers--not merely employees.  I shall be
a helper.  You have given me--a chance--a chance to get out of
hell.  I'm grateful."

They gripped hands.

"Gratitude!  They say that gratitude is a slave virtue."

"Call it good will, Mr. Roland."

"Ah, that's it--every time."



3


Sorrell was crossing the Market Square, and he paused by the market
cross to look back at the cathedral and its trees.  He felt happy,
most extraordinarily happy.  It was not only the sudden, pleasant
human relationship that had opened before him that had cheered him,
but the feeling of self-congratulation.  The fact that Roland
should have offered him work had given a flick to his self-respect.
What did the nature of the work matter?  He was a hotel porter and
he was a success as a hotel porter.  He had put a plain and human
back into the job, stuck to it in spite of pain and weariness and
persecution, and someone had come and said--"You are the man."

He glanced at old Verity's shop and walked on.  He was going to
tell the boy, and to say to him--"I have been offered a better
job," and he was immensely and absurdly proud of it.  The
afterglow--all yellow above the deep shadows of the old streets--
was the colour of his mood of exultation.  Second porter at the
Pelican at Winstonbury!  The Palfrey menage done with.  To work for
a man for whom he felt respect and liking, and more than that!

Fletcher's Lane was all shadow, with the pale primrose and blue of
the sky above.  He saw a small figure on the footwalk under the
overhang of an old Tudor house, an attentive and expectant figure.
The boy had been waiting for him as though he knew, or had divined
a change in their fortunes.

"Hallo, son!"

Christopher looked at his father, and it seemed to him that his
father's shoulders were straighter, and the flesh of his face more
firm and clear.

"I have got a better job, Kit.  Mr. Roland is opening a new hotel.
We are going there."

The boy's face lit up.

"He asked you to go, pater?"

"Yes."

Christopher snuggled up beside his father.

"He--knows," he said.

And Sorrell smiled.

"Another step nearer--the plan."




CHAPTER VII


1


The Sorrells marched out of Staunton with drums beating and colours
flying, and the little old portmanteau newly bestrapped trundling
to the station in a handbarrow.

The Angel had cast them out, for Sorrell had walked into the lion's
cage, and given notice.

"I have obtained another situation, madam."

She had stared at him fixedly.

"O, have you!  Very well."

"I shall be able to carry on for you until--"

"There is a gap, is there?  No,--I don't do things that way.  Out
you go,--to-night."

She had called him a fool, and he had left her without asking for
his money, a piece of fastidiousness which he did not regret.  He
had packed his belongings and gone out by the back way, and so to
Fletcher's Lane where Mrs. Barter had given him some supper, and he
had slept in Kit's bed.  In the morning Mr. Roland appeared at the
door of No. 13, Fletcher's Lane.

"You left rather suddenly--"

"Well--I thought it only fair, sir, to tell Mrs. Palfrey.  She
turned me out."

"What are you going to do?"

"I thought of going to Winstonbury, sir,--and of putting up there
till you take over."

"Can you manage?"

"Yes."

Roland did not offer help, and Sorrell did not hint at the fact
that he needed it.  Yet both men were satisfied, for neither of
them desired to cadge or to be cadged from.  The relationship
between them began on a plane that was above the baser level of
employer and employed.  The relationship had elements of
sensitiveness, delicacy.

Roland produced a card.

"You'll want a bedroom.  There is a very decent old soul whom I
happen to know.  Garland's the name.  No. 6 Vine Court, off
Baileygate.  Wait; I'll write it down.  And by the way, go to
Bloxom's the tailor in Lombard Street and get measured and tell him
to fit you with the Pelican uniform.  He knows about it.  I'd
better write him a note.  Sure you can manage?"

"Quite sure, sir."

"Good.  I am going on to-day to Bath.  I expect to be in
Winstonbury in a week or so."

Sorrell had exactly three pounds, two shillings and fourpence in
his pocket, for only three days ago he had bought Christopher a new
suit and himself a pair of boots and two new shirts.  But his motto
for the moment was "I'll manage."  He was not going to spoil this
new friendship by cadging, for he regarded the relationship as a
friendship; he might be at the bottom of the ladder, but the first
few rungs of it were made of human stuff.  He cherished the human
sympathy.

Roland went away satisfied.  He was a generous man, and like most
generous men he appreciated an independence that did not attempt
to exploit his generosity.  The world was so full of cadgers, of
people who levied blackmail upon those more capable few whom the
blackmailers described as "Them as 'ave 'ad all the luck."
Roland's interest in Sorrell felt itself justified.  Being of a
cheerful nature he hated snivellers.

So Christopher and his father got aboard a train, and after two
changes, made Winstonbury, that city of new strivings and
adventure.  They saw the square, grey Norman tower of the Abbey,
the clump of beeches on Castle Hill, the soaring spire of St.
Faith's Church.  The old portmanteau was deposited in the cloak-
room, and the Sorrells went in search of Vine Court.

Mrs. Garland opened a green door to them in the narrow face of a
queer, beetle-browed red cottage.  Sorrell showed her Roland's
card.  She had to fetch her spectacles to read it.  They were round
like her face, which was of a high-cheeked rotundity, and with a
spry little nose cocked in the middle of it.  Her head was as neat
as the head of a Dutch doll.

"Step inside."

Yes, she could lodge and feed them, and Mr. Roland's recommendation
was good enough.  Sorrell sent Kit outside, while he spoke frankly
and honestly to Mrs. Garland.

"The fact is I don't take up my new job for three weeks or so, and
I have about two pounds in hand.  It is only fair to tell you this,
but I promise you you will be paid.  I will hand over the two
pounds to you and just keep the odd shillings."

Mrs. Garland looked at him round-eyed.  She had not seen a great
deal of the world, but it seemed to her that Sorrell was an unusual
sort of hotel-porter.  He spoke like a gentleman, a real gentlemen;
the distinction was important.

"I dare say I could manage your food on that.  The room will be
five shillings a week, and two shillings for attendance.  So, at
the end of three weeks--"

"I should owe you twenty-one shillings."

"That's so."

"And by the way--I shall have to board my boy out.  He has no
mother; he's not a noisy youngster, or selfish.  Do you think you
might be able to manage him?  I shall be able to pay you well when
I get settled at the Pelican."

"I might," said the old lady, "there is only me and my daughter in
the house.  She's a waitress at the Pelican, but she sleeps at
home.  Mr. Roland has engaged her.  She's to be head waitress."

"I have heard about her," said Sorrell.

"Have you now?"

"Mr. Roland seems to think a good deal of her."

"Fanny's a good girl.  Well, would you like to look at the room?"

"I should.  I'm sure we shan't give you much trouble."

They called Kit in and went up a narrow pair of stairs into a
little, low, pleasant room, the casement window of which opened on
a garden.  The floor undulated and a beam divided the ceiling into
two equal parts.  The furniture was genuine cottage furniture,
rarely seen outside a curio shop; it was all old, save the bed,
which was a plain, black iron concern.  The window had white
curtains, and the white quilt on the bed was the colour of
swansdown.

The little room had an atmosphere of its own, a quaint and simple
spirituality that was so different from the casual "take it or
leave it" air of the rooms of the Angel Hotel that Sorrell felt
touched, though why a cottage bedroom should have touched him he
was not able to say.  Christopher had gone at once to the window
and was looking down into the garden.

"There's an apple tree, pater."

"So there is."

Mrs. Garland gave a tweak to one of the white curtains.  The apple
tree was a Blenheim, and full of pale gold fruit, each with a blush
of redness on the side towards the sun.

"My man planted that tree.  It's a Blenheim Orange.  Well,--young
gentleman, you didn't take long to find it."

Christopher turned and looked at her.  Mrs. Garland's tone had
accused him of a desire to get up that tree, whereas Kit had been
struck by the beauty of it, and had been guiltless of elemental
greed.

"They are quite safe with me, Mrs. Garland."

"Oh--are they,--my dear!  Well,--I don't mind one or two, so long
as you don't break, the branches."

"But I mean what I say, Mrs. Garland."

"Bless us,--I believe you do."

Sorrell agreed to rent the room.  He said that he was pleased with
it, and taking out his wallet he handed Mrs. Garland his two pound
notes.  She made as though to give them back to him, but Sorrell
asked her to keep them.

"Well,--just as you please.  You can take your meals in my kitchen,
if that will suit you.  It will save me trouble."

"Thank you very much," said Sorrell.

Thereupon he and Christopher went back to the station to fetch the
portmanteau, which Sorrell prepared to hoist upon his shoulder.
Their possessions did not weigh much, and as Sorrell put it to his
son--"I'm getting used to luggage."  Christopher, however, saw
himself as a partner in the adventure, and insisted on helping his
father with the portmanteau, and they returned to Vine Court
carrying it between them.

Mrs. Garland gave them eggs and bacon for tea; in fact the three of
them sat down together, amalgamating very happily in the kitchen,
the window of which showed the apple tree lit up by the afternoon
sunlight.



2


After tea came the event towards which all the other events of the
day had been tending, an exploration of their new world, of this
Darien with the Pacific of the unknown beyond it, and floating upon
the edge of the unknown Mr. Roland's "Treasure Island,"--the
Pelican Inn.

It was Christopher who thought of it as "Treasure Island," and the
symbolized nature of the conception was very evident to his father.
In the train from Staunton they had had a carriage to themselves,
and Sorrell, as though inspired by the hum of the wheels, had
talked much of the future.  He had been very frank with the boy.
He had told him that he regarded the future as Christopher's, and
that the Pelican was a place in which he meant to dig for treasure,
and to gather money for Kit's education.

"You must have your weapon, Kit.  It is no use being able to do
nothing but sit on a stool and scribble figures.  The thing is to
have some sort of knowledge, and a craft which other people can't
get on without.  Then you are a master.  The world has to come and
ask you to do something for it.  You must be a necessity, not a
mere fellow who opens and shuts doors."

Christopher understood much of this but vaguely, but he did
understand the nature of his father's sacrifice.

"I am carrying other people's luggage up and down stairs, Kit, in
order that your job may be a better one.  That's my ambition,--my
goal."

And Kit, in the quiet sturdiness of his young and growing
consciousness, had begun to realize what manner of man his father
was.

The Pelican first showed itself to the Sorrells some three hundred
yards beyond the red brick Unitarian church at the end of Lombard
Street as something that glittered beside a great mount of trees.
The something that glittered proved to be an immense, old-fashioned
sign suspended across the road on an overhead beam that was
supported by two huge oak posts.  Here was the Pelican--that Bird
of Piety--glittering for all the world that passed along the road
to see, men who went west, and men who went east.  Yes, assuredly,
Mr. Roland was no fool.  The very road itself here had a
spaciousness, and the inn--all red and white--with a group of
magnificent trees behind it,--looked south over meadowland to the
hills beyond.  Winstonbury had not splurged in that direction;
there were no prawn-coloured villas or post-war bungalows to spoil
the English landscape.  Moreover, Tom Roland had bought the land on
the other side of the road.

Sorrell and his son stood under an immense chestnut tree and
absorbed the scene.  The leaves of the chestnut were crisped with
gold.  A dipped holly hedge met the red angle of the building,
giving place later to white posts and chains.  The building itself
was in the shape of an L, and the space between the links of the
letter formed a species of court or space, partly flagged and
partly gravelled.  A white cornice topped the rise of the red
walls, and there were dormers in the roof above it, also a copper
cupola with a bell.  A part of the building draped itself with
wistaria and clematis.  The main entry had a hooded porch with
tall, white pillars.  A clipped yew, surrounded by a bright border
of flowers and a small, well-mown lawn, broke the open space
between the road and the building.

Sorrell saw the beauty of it, for the old inn had a presence,
tranquillity.  It was like a stately and gracious old lady who
could smile on the new age and understand it, and impose upon the
new age's restlessness a measure of her own tranquillity.  Several
cars stood on the broad space behind the posts and chains.  Voices
came from beyond the holly hedge but they were not unpleasant
voices.  Green and white curtains fluttered at the windows, and the
crisping leaves of the chestnut dappled the road.

"Mr. Roland's no fool," said Sorrell.

Strolling on, he saw the further possibilities of the place, and
he pointed them out to Christopher.  The Pelican had immense old
stables, solidly built, and easily to be absorbed into the inn.
They were being used as a garage, but Sorrell imagined that Mr.
Roland would lay a jealous hand on all that Georgian brickwork.
There was plenty of room for the erection of an up-to-date garage
beyond the stables where the noise of the cars would be less
troublesome.  Sorrell and Christopher strolled into the yard, and
beyond it they had a glimpse of a kitchen garden and an orchard,
and of a couple of old walnut trees growing in the centre of a
little paddock.

Christopher--the boy--had no doubts as to the future of the
Pelican.  The place had romance.  You could imagine yourself
leaning out of one of those little dormer windows, and watching
people coming and going.  The broad road suggested adventure.
There were fields and woods, and the hills in the distance.  And
wild life, rabbits, birds--perhaps a river where you could fish.

He glowed.

"It's a lovely place, pater."

"I think it is.  The old Pelican will cast a persuasive eye on
people.  And Roland?  Some people seem to change one's luck."

Returning they had a view of Winstonbury against the sunset, the
beeches and the castle mound looking like a huge plumed sable
helmet.  The spire of the church had a trailing crimson oriflamme
attached to it, and all about the town the country lay a bluish
green.

"I like this place," said Kit, "and I like Mrs. Garland and our
bedroom.  Weren't the bacon and eggs good, pater?"

"Very, my son," but Sorrell was thinking of other things.



3


During the next seven days Sorrell and Christopher began to know
Winstonbury very thoroughly.  They had a feeling that it belonged
to them, that it was theirs, with the wise old Pelican keeping
watch upon it.  They explored every corner of the town.  It was a
place of pleasant sounding old names, richly English and romantic.
It smelt of history, and of the old life before commercialism
invented galvanized iron and gas-works.  The names of the streets
fascinated Christopher: Green End, Lombard Street, Baileygate,
Golden Hill, the Tything, Market Row, Vine Court, Barbican, Angel
Alley.

On the second day Sorrell walked into Mr. Bloxom's shop in Lombard
Street, and was measured for his Pelican uniform, a neat dark blue
jacket with light blue lapels and brass buttons, and dark blue
trousers.  Mr. Bloxom was polite to Sorrell.  A porter at a
prosperous hotel was a person to be considered.

"Your Mr. Roland is going to make the Pelican hum, I hear?"

Sorrell did not know the exact noise that a pelican made, but he
did not think that it was a humming bird.

"Mr. Roland's a man of ideas."

"Ha!" said Mr. Bloxom, "we are rather conservative down this way.
How will that feel under the arms?  Don't want it too tight, do
you, for handling luggage and things."

"I think this coat of mine is about right."

He found Mr. Bloxom examining the tailor's mark inside the collar
of his blue serge coat.  That suit had been a post-war extravagance.

"Ponds.  H'm, good people.  I suppose--"

Mr. Bloxom did not complete the sentence--but Sorrell read what was
in his mind.  He supposed that Sorrell had been a valet or porter
at some flats, and that the suit had been passed on to him by some
member of the aristocracy, moneyed or otherwise.

The castle mound became a favourite haunt of the Sorrells.  There
were seats under the beech trees, but Kit and his father preferred
the turf.  Winstonbury lay below them in crowded picturesqueness,
and Kit played a game of his own with the town, treating it as a
sort of jig-saw puzzle.  He began to know all the more prominent
buildings and he could tell exactly where Vine Court lay beyond the
little grey bell-turret of the Grammar School.

Castle Hill was more than a view point.  It formed a height from
which the two Sorrells looked out and down upon the immediate
future, Kit's future.  There was the problem of his schooling.  Was
it to be the old Grammar School of Henry the Eighth's founding,
planted in an old house of the Carmelites, or the town school,
visible from Castle Hill, and lying near the gas-works, an ugly
barrack of a place built of yellow brick, surrounded by an
asphalted playground and iron railings?

"No humbug, Kit," said his father; "there is going to be no humbug
between us.  Firstly, it's a question of money.  I dare say I shall
be able to afford the fees later on.  At the Grammar School you
would find yourself with the sons of local tradesmen, clerks and
farmers.  You would learn a little Latin, some mathematics, less
history, and perhaps a smattering of science.  Not much real use in
life.  You would get games.  Now, at the town school,--a lot of
cheap rubbish--.  It's a bit of a problem."

Christopher betrayed a preference for the Grammar School.  It was
a question of aesthetics, of boyish fastidiousness, for at the
Grammar School you had a beautiful old building, the boys looked
clean and wore a neat apple-green school cap.  Kit did not want to
go to school near the gas-works, and play hobbledehoy games in an
asphalted yard.

"I'd get cricket, pater, and footer."

"You would.  But there is one thing that we must face.  You would
be the son of a porter at the Pelican.  They might refuse to take
you.  That's my fault, not yours."

Kit was silent.

"And boys can be terrible snobs.  I shouldn't like to think--"

"It seems rather silly, pater, that a chap should be obliged to go
to school."

"Compulsory stuffing."

"Most chaps don't want to be stuffed.  A fellow is ready enough for
his grub,--but when it comes to lessons--.  Seems to me there is
something wrong, pater."

"How?"

"Well,--if the stuff they taught you at school was like your
dinner--.  So that you wanted to swallow it--hungry for it.  There
are all sorts of things to interest a fellow,--but you don't get
them at school.  It's such tosh, pater."

"I suppose it is.  I was six years at a public school, and I don't
think I learnt anything that was of much use to me afterwards.
They call it 'forming your mind'--character building."

"But couldn't one's mind grow, pater, of itself?  Scrambling about
among interesting things?"

"What interests you, Kit?"

"O,--birds, and the country, and cricket, and all that."

"Not books?  Be honest."

"Not school books, pater."

Sorrell felt challenged.  He knew that he had loathed school books
just as Kit loathed them, but then the conventions of civilization
demanded that a boy should be stuffed with facts that bored him.

"Well, if you are not keen, what is the use?--Still, you have got
to learn to hold your own with other chaps.  And some day, my son,
you will have to make up your mind what you want to be.  And most
things that are worth doing mean education--of a kind."

"I shall work, pater."

"But why--?"

"Because--you will be paying."

Sorrell clasped him across the shoulders.

"A sense of duty?  Is that it?"

"No,--something more, pater.  Because I know you are keen for me to
learn--.  O, you know why."

"I think I do, my son."

They had many more talks on the same subject, and Sorrell confessed
that his own particular ambition was to send Kit to a good
preparatory school, and after that to a public one.  At least--that
was his plan for the moment.  He might change it.  All academic
education had its disadvantages.  He explained them to Kit.

Also, there would have to be an element of concealment.  It could
not be known that Sorrell was the son of an hotel porter.

"You would have to apologize for your father, Kit.  Or--if it were
found out they might ask me to remove you.  Well, we'll see.  I'll
ask Mr. Roland about it."

But the decision was taken by Christopher himself.  He announced it
after three days of solemn heart searchings.

"I'll go to the town school, pater."

"Why?"

"Must I tell you?"

"Not if you don't want to."

"I'm not going to a place--where--."

He flushed and grew suddenly inarticulate, and Sorrell understood.
It was not that Kit was ashamed of his father,--but he was not
going to apologize for him to other boys, or to join in a
concealment.  That would be humbug.

"I shouldn't have to stay there--very long.  I'm nearly twelve
pater.  And then--after that--I should be free to learn what I
wanted to learn."

"I'm not sure that you haven't got it," said his father.



4


Mr. Roland turned up one day without any warning.  The Sorrells,
returning from one of their councils of state upon Castle Hill,
found the red car standing outside the entrance to Vine Court.
Roland himself was sitting in Mrs. Garland's parlour, and Mrs.
Garland was telling him about the Sorrells and how she had agreed
to board the boy.

"Oh, he has arranged that, has he?"

"Yes, sir."

Roland felt relieved.  He had made up his mind to show no
favouritism, and he had half expected Sorrell to ask him to allow
Christopher to live with him at the Pelican.  Sorrell's decision
had saved him the effort of a refusal, for Roland knew that his own
particular weakness was a too sensitive good-nature.

"Well, my lad, getting ready to go to school?"

He held Kit by the arm.

"I am going to the council school, sir."

"You are?  And I hear you have been up Mrs. Garland's apple tree."

"Only once, sir.  And she knew about it."

Kit's three elders laughed, and he wondered why.

Mr. Roland was staying at the Pelican, and he took Sorrell back
with him to show him over the hotel, and in the hotel garden as
they were passing through an archway in one of the yew hedges
Roland paused with a question.

"That boy of yours?  What's your idea?"

"In what way, sir?"

"About the school?"

"The town school.  He decided it himself.  I had thought of trying
the Grammar School,--but I think the boy realized--"

"Did he?"

"We agreed on our motto: no humbug.  He won't have to apologize for
me--at the town school."

"I don't look at it in that way, but the boy's right.  I rather
envy you, Sorrell."

"He is the only thing I have got, sir."

They walked on, and Roland stopped to look at an old mulberry tree
the trunk of which had had to be trussed up with a chain.

"Don't push him too much."

"I know what you mean."

"Education; damned rot--most of it.  The healthy young idlers often
do best in the end.  They don't get all their individuality
compressed into a mould.  If I had a boy--"

He smiled at Sorrell.

"We bachelors and spinsters--!  Well, we do see something of the
game.  I'd let my boy play hard!  I'd have him taught to box; I
wouldn't have him crammed.  Natural growth.  Later I should give
him the best tutor who was to be had."

"And what about his career?"

"Leave it to his natural appetite.  In a clean, straight boy who
has been treated healthily the appetite is bound to develop.
Surely?  And then let him go ahead.  Tell him to go ahead like
blazes."

So, the autumn came and Christopher went to school, and Sorrell, in
his blue coat with the brass buttons, began to carry luggage up and
down the stairs of the Pelican.  He carried it more easily than he
had carried it up the stairs of the Angel Inn at Staunton, for his
heart was lighter.  The new world was a beneficent world because of
the man who ruled it.  And Sorrell, piling logs and coal upon the
fire in the hall, felt the glow and the cheerfulness of it.  In the
garden the old trees were magnificently coloured, and the vivid
grass was flaked with gold.

One of Sorrell's most pleasant memories was of walking in the
garden just as the sun was setting at the end of a still October
day.  Robins were singing, and from the window of a sitting-room
came the sound of music.  Roland was playing Chopin's First
Prelude.  The slanting sun poured through the trees.  The robins
sang.



CHAPTER VIII


1


There followed a winter of strenuous preparation.

The tourist traffic upon the road had dwindled to a very casual
stream, and the Pelican,--during the process of putting on a new
plumage, was glad of the respite.  As Sorrell had foreseen, Mr.
Roland was laying jealous hands upon the Georgian stables and
joining them to the main building, and the transformation gave him
ten more bedrooms and accommodation for the staff.  A new garage
was being built, and two tennis courts and a croquet lawn were to
be laid out in the little paddock.

Roland had his own particular ideas.  One of his first measures was
to eliminate the public bar, and to add the space thus gained to
the lounge.  He decreed that commercial travellers--as such--were
not to be accommodated, and the old commercial room became the card
and smoking room.  The whole place was to be redecorated, and much
of it refurnished and recarpeted, and the various colour schemes
were of Roland's own planning.  He believed in any number of
comfortable chairs, and an atmosphere of rich and pleasant
simplicity.  The china was to be of a plain white biscuit with a
dark blue and gold border.  The bedrooms were black, white and
orange, or white and cerise.  He used soft blues and greens with
touches of purple and old rose in the living-rooms.  All ugly and
wasteful furniture was got rid of.  Two new bathrooms were
installed, and a small library arranged on one side of the hotel
office.

One of Roland's most practical innovations was his attitude towards
the "staff."  He treated the principal members as fellow workers;
he challenged their co-operation, and stimulated their keenness.
There were queer, patriarchal little meetings in his sitting-room--
"My Soviet" he called it laughingly.  The committee consisted of
Mrs. Marks the housekeeper, Fanny Garland the head waitress, Mrs.
Lovibond the cook, Sorrell, and Bowden the gardener.  To them Mr.
Roland was a figure of encouraging and deliberate frankness.  "This
is our show.  I take it that we are all keen on making a success of
our show.  We are all going to benefit by it.  Suggestions.  That's
what I want from you.  Anything to improve the efficiency or the
comfort, or to wash out unnecessary work.  My idea is to make the
Pelican the most famous roadside inn on the south of the Thames.
'Whereto stay?'  'Why,--the Pelican at Winstonbury.  No other place
to touch it'."

Within a month he had the whole staff in his pocket.  He had
extraordinary powers of persuasion; it was the pull of his
personality,--his air of calm and deliberate kindness, his assuming
the other person to be as interested and as efficient as he was.
He never fussed.  He had one of those peculiarly pleasant and
consoling voices.

The women ran about for him like happy slaves.  He treated them all
as though they were gentlewomen, and if they did not say it to each
other they thought him a very great gentleman.

Mrs. Marks, that little dark woman, silently gliding everywhere,
would look at him with the eyes of an intelligent little dog.

Fanny Garland, cheery and big and blonde, spread an atmosphere of
smiling efficiency, using a brisk and philosophical tongue.

"A dirty fork's no use to anybody.  Doesn't it make you feel all
nice inside to see twenty white and glittering tables all laid and
to know that there isn't a spot to be ashamed of anywhere?  If the
job's worth doing--!  Yes, and think of the tips, my dears!"

Bowden the gardener, rather a surly person, thawed gradually like
the soil on a sunny morning after a frost.  He found that Roland
was providing him with a strong lad upon whom he could exercise a
tongue and a passion for dour thoroughness.

"The idea is, Bowden, that we should be self-supporting as to
vegetables."

"We ain't got the ground, sir."

"Well,--you shall have it.  I am going to have the market value of
all the vegetables sent in--checked.  And you will get a percentage
on results."

And Bowden's broad and rather Simian back was bent urgently over
his spade.

To Sorrell those winter months were full of a steady encouragement.
He had good food and a clean bed; he was not overworked; and Kit
was happy with Mrs. Garland, and not too unhappy at the town
school.  Moreover, his job interested him; he was working for a man
who was keen on detail and who appreciated thoroughness.  Also, the
human relationship seemed to matter more and more, and Thomas
Roland and his second porter reached a pleasant and solid
understanding.  Roland talked to Sorrell more than he talked to any
of the others, and always it seemed to Sorrell that their words
went below the surface into the human realities beneath.

"After all," as Roland said, "a man must have a job, and it is the
job that matters.  Not so much what it is--but how a man does it.
That's how it strikes me."

He made Sorrell feel that he respected him and the work he did.

"An objective, sir."

"Of course.  The nice people who want to flatten out all the social
hills and bring us all down to a sort of board-school playground!
No good."

The work went on, the internal economy of the Pelican being so
arranged that the casual few upon the road could be accommodated
while the alterations were being carried out.

Roland was spending a great deal of money, and Sorrell appreciated
the effect that was being produced.  Those sumptuously pleasant
rooms, the great chairs and richly coloured rugs, the clean paint
and paper, those rows of pleasant bedrooms all so fresh and cosy,
the sleekness of the garden, the beautiful cleanness of the freshly
appointed kitchen, the bathrooms and pantries--white tiled and
white enamelled, the linen, the table silver, the hundred and one
nice details!

But was the Pelican going to pay?  Had not Roland the musician and
artist overwhelmed Roland the hotel keeper?

The problem worried Sorrell not a little.  He had begun to identify
himself so thoroughly with the Pelican and all that the Pelican
stood for--.

He was surprised when Thomas Roland showed him that he had divined
his anxiety.

"You think I am overdoing it?"

"I don't know, sir."

For Roland had found Sorrell economizing coal and electric current.
He would go about switching off unnecessary lights.

"I am all in on this adventure.  Either we touch port--or we
founder.  I am going to give people the best--the best I have in
me.  I wouldn't give them shoddy music--.  The pride of the
craftsman."

Sorrell stood looking at the fire upon which he had been carefully
banking a scoopful of "ovoids."  His small but intelligent head was
bent, and its darkness caught the firelight.  His seriousness was a
friend's tribute.

"One always likes to believe, sir, that if we give the best that is
in us--."

"I do believe it--.  After all--it should matter to us most.  If
the best doesn't pay, it is not our fault."

"All people are not as generous, sir."

"I'm not generous, man.  The fact is, I can't bring myself to do a
thing meanly.  Even the fitting up and the running of an hotel--.
Still, I appreciate it--."

Their eyes met.

"Scientific fire building, Stephen!"

He smiled.

"Do you do it because you have a conscience?"

"Partly.  There's another reason."

"I think I know it.  You and I are mixed up together--somehow,
heart and pocket.  Well,--I would not have it otherwise."



2


The other problem that worried Sorrell was the inevitable advent of
George Buck.

The ex-sergeant-major seemed to project a menacing adumbration, and
to Sorrell he suggested the blonde beast dominant, something
hectoring and elephantine.

Buck!

He did not like the name; it was both too male and too American.
He agreed that it was absurd of him to worry about the fellow, and
yet he would catch himself at all sorts of moments creating a
shadowy image of the prospective head-porter.  What was the man
like?  Would Buck be a big, muscular creature, all belly, voice,
and blonde moustache?  Would he order him about?

Sorrell began to dislike the man weeks before he had ever seen him,
and his dislike was instinctive and natural.  George Buck was a
possible menace to his security; he might prove a destroyer of the
pleasant and calm activity that Sorrell had begun to associate with
the Pelican Inn.  He might interfere with the nice little
efficiencies that the second porter was evolving.  Moreover, he
might pocket, a sergeant-majorly share of the tips.

Sorrell was doing quite well in tips, in spite of the enforced
quietness of these months of transfiguration.  He was saving money
fast; he had a Post Office savings book.

But his prophetic hostility to George Buck was not only the
hostility of a dog with a bone towards the bigger dog who was to
share it.  It was as though Sorrell had a premonition, a sensitive
fore-feeling of what the man's presence would mean in the lounge
and the luggage-room and on the stairs and in the staff's quarters.
Buck cast a shadow, a shadow as of something huge and menacing and
hairy.  Even the flicker of a fire at twilight throwing shadows
about the lounge brought on his mood of depression and restlessness.
Or a blustering wind at night.  Sorrell fought against it.  The
thing was becoming an obsession, a clawing monkey at the back of his
mind.

About a week before the head-porter's arrival, Sorrell compelled
himself to speak to Roland.

"I suppose, sir, when that Buck comes--I shall have to take orders--?"

Roland was at the piano, and Sorrell had come in with a fresh
supply of coal.

"Yes,--just a word.  I told you--.  Buck will be responsible.
That's only fair, Stephen."

"Quite fair, sir."

"He's not a bad sort of a chap.  Though, of course, I only knew him
as a sergeant-major.  I want him to have his chance."

Sorrell had a feeling that Tom Roland was maintaining certain
mental reservations with regard to Buck.  He did not quite know his
man.  There was an obligation, or what Roland conceived to be an
obligation, and Sorrell found wisdom in reticence.

"I will do all I can to help him, sir."

"I am sure you will.  So far as I am concerned, Stephen, a man
makes good or cuts his own throat.  I observe things."

He began to play a piece of Debussy's, and Sorrell, after putting
coal on the fire with careful noiselessness, went softly out of the
room.

"Do your job and hang on," he thought.  "Whatever that other man is
he is not going to make me cut my own throat."



3


Ex-Sergeant-Major Buck arrived at the Pelican in the station bus.
He wore a bowler hat and a blue overcoat with a velvet collar, and
he travelled with a solid leather suitcase and a steamer trunk.

Sorrell had gone out to meet the bus, and he stood momentarily
staring, watching an immense blue back emerging from the bus
doorway.  The figure separated itself, and turning showed a face
that was like an uncooked round of beef, with two blue pebbles for
eyes.

"Catch hold, my lad."

The man was holding out his suitcase, and Sorrell, coming suddenly
out of his trance, took the suitcase.

"Are you Mr. Buck?"

"I am.  Suppose you're the chap--under me."

Sorrell nodded.  He was conscious of a sort of nausea.  "Under me!"
Yes, it seemed to him that those two words exactly expressed the
situation.  The man was all that his fears had pictured him to be,
the big, raw-faced creature, all belly, voice, and blonde
moustache.

"You might fetch that trunk down."

"All right."

Buck's eyes rested on him consideringly for a moment, for he had
divined in Sorrell something of that sulkiness that the private
soldier's hatred had struggled to express without daring actual
utterance.  For Buck was less heavy in the uptake than he looked.
"Dumb saucy!  You are that sort, are you?  We'll see about it."
And then Thomas Roland appeared, and Buck clicked the heels of his
brown boots and gave a guardsman's salute, his big hand quivering.

"Come to report, sir."

Roland was smiling.  He held out a hand.

"I'm glad to see you.  Quite like old times, Buck.  We have another
ex-service man here in Sorrell."

Sorrell was struggling with the ex-sergeant-major's trunk, and
loathing it as he had never loathed any other piece of luggage.  He
was aware of Buck watching him.

"Can you manage it?"

"Yes, thanks."

"You don't look as though you could," said the blue eyes.  "Weedy
sort of chap."

He went in with Mr. Roland.



4


During the winter months Sorrell had had time to make the
acquaintance of a number of books, for Roland's sitting-room was
full of them and he had allowed Sorrell to borrow.  Sorrell's
reading was various.  It included Shaw, Edward Carpenter, Maurice
Hewlett, the local history of Winstonbury and its surroundings, and
the Michelin Guide.  He kept a note-book.  In it he had jotted down
the distances between Winstonbury and all the places of note within
a hundred miles of the town.  He knew all the inns.  He would go to
the garage daily and extract from the chauffeurs any information as
to the state of the different roads.

For, if a touring owner-driver appealed to him for information
Sorrell felt a pleasing sense of efficiency when he was able to
reel off the necessary facts.

"Quendon, sir?  Forty-three miles.  Forty-seven if you go by
Langton.  The Langton road is in better condition.  On the other
road they are laying a new water-main at Foxley."

Or--

"Hohndale House, sir?  Open every Thursday from ten till twelve.
You present a card at the lodge.  The Italian gardens and the
Vandykes are worth seeing.  But--of course you know that, sir."

Somewhere in one of Mr. Roland's books he had read that with the
subtilizing of consciousness the field of man's eternal struggle
had changed.  The contest had ceased to be physical and had become
mental, psychical.  Man no longer contended with external forces
and with other men; the struggle was with himself.

He agreed, and he disagreed.

It seemed to him that in his own case the struggle was a double
one.  He had to fight himself, that more primitive part of himself
that wanted to break out into rages, to despair, to grow moody or
cynical, or to run for comfort to some woman.  On the other hand
his battle with the physical and natural forces was only too real.
There was the luggage, and there was ex-Sergeant-Major Buck.

There was tacit war between them from the beginning.

It was most natural.

Each saw in the other a complete representation of all that was
disliked, a collection of characteristics that caused the opposing
prejudices to bristle.  Sorrell was a brain, Buck a voice.  One
man's objective lay twenty years ahead; the other's was immediate
and physical, the satisfying of the grosser appetites.  Their
contrasts did not attract; they repelled.

The struggle began at once, though there was no apparent struggle,
for Buck, like many men of his type, had a good deal of cunning.
He could truckle.  He went about with an air of bluff cheeriness.

"Now then--my lad--."

He took control on the very first day.  There was to be no doubt as
to who was head-porter and who was second.  His bulk rolled briskly
about the place.  In the army he had learned how to convey an
impression of immense activity, while in reality he did nothing.
He used his voice on the others.

He began by being genial to Sorrell, but his geniality was
contemptuous, and intended to be contemptuous.  There was shrewd
malice in the blue eyes.

For to Buck, Sorrell was a type, the type of the over-educated,
sly, argumentative, sullen, weedy, mutinous recruit.  A clever,
circuitous, insolent devil.  Uncomfortably quick, too, a fellow who
needed watching.

If Sorrell found Buck's self-confident bluster offensive, his own
quietness and his reticences were equally offensive to the other
man.

Buck had his own justifications.

"Nasty,--weedy,--supercilious chap.  Ex-officer.  I'll teach him a
thing or two.  Jealous of me.  Of course.  He'll need watching.
He's not the sort of man I want under me, no, not by a long chalk.
Some big, good-natured chap, quick with the luggage, and not too
quick with anything else.  Well,--I think I know a thing or two."

At the back of his mind was a wish to get rid of Sorrell.  He
realized that in spite of the other man's weediness he was a
competitor who was to be respected.



5


In the little room where Sorrell used to clean the boots and brush
clothes there was a window overlooking the garden, and here Sorrell
had been in the habit of reading when there was nothing else that
needed doing.  He had an old Windsor armchair by the window, and
Mrs. Marks had given him an old red cushion.  She liked Sorrell
better than he knew.  And through the window he could glance from
his book to the old trees, or at the yew hedges beyond the lane, or
at the bulbs spearing up in the borders, or at clumps of purple and
yellow crocuses.

He was looking out of this window one afternoon, with his book, one
of Galsworthy's plays, lying folded over his knee, when he was
surprised by a voice.

"You--seem--pretty active--Sorr'l."

That was one of the many petty details that annoyed Sorrell.  Buck
pronounced his name--abbreviating it--so that it sounded like
"Saul."  He had not heard Buck come to the door.  The big man could
be very soft on his feet.

"Quite," was all that Sorrell said.

Buck came into the little room, his bulk seeming to fill it.  He
had the air of a righteous overseer.  Seeing the book he reached
for it deliberately, and picked it off Sorrell's knee.

"Doing a bit of reading.  Well,--this sort of stuff is no use to a
man.  Don't you think, my lad, that you might find something better
to do?"

Sorrell sat still,--but he was quivering.

"Perhaps you'll suggest a job."

Buck threw the book on the window-sill.

"Look here, don't let there be any doubt about it.  I'm responsible
here.  And I'm going to do my job, see.  I've got the 'Skipper's'
interests in my mind.  He's a sport--"

The implication was obvious, but Sorrell kept his temper.  He was
not going to uncover himself to this big creature.

"I agree.  But this is one of Mr. Roland's books."

"Did he lend it you?"

"Yes."

Buck nodded a sage head.

"He's one of the easy sort.  That makes it a bit more obvious,
don't it?  You look about and get busy.  I don't blab,--but I use
my eyes.  You get busy."




CHAPTER IX



1


Sorrell realized that he had changed his animal, that was all.  At
Staunton he had had to contend with a lioness; at Winstonbury his
enemy was a bull.

The lioness had been hated, but the bull was popular.  He was a
playful and genial beast.  He took the head of the table in the
staff's room; he teased the women and made eyes at them; he was
always in evidence when being in evidence was worth while.

He went about with the air of carrying the whole establishment on
his shoulders.  He was excessively polite to all visitors,
especially to the women.  He delighted in the sound of his own
voice.

By the female members of the staff he was spoken of always as "Mr.
Buck."  No doubt he was a very fine figure of a man, and it
astonished Sorrell to find how popular he was.  The average wench
asks for so much and so little.

Yet Buck seemed to fill his position, and to be a convincing figure
in the picture.  He looked well in his uniform; he had a presence;
he could be impressive.  He met people coming in from their cars as
though they were royal persons and he a Lord Mayor.

"Allow me, madam.  Rooms, yes.  Will you speak to the lady in the
office.  I'll have the luggage brought in.  Saul,--luggage."

Buck would wait for the number of the room to be announced.
"Number seven, madam.  First floor.  Turn to the right at the top
of the stairs.  The luggage shall be sent up at once."

His voice would change.

"Saul,--luggage number seven.  At once."

That was just it.  He was efficient and polite and impressive, but
he used Sorrell's narrower shoulders and frailer back.  If he got
hold of anything it was a woman's handbag, or her camera, or an
armful of rugs and umbrellas.  He left the heavy luggage to
Sorrell, and with complete complacency, as though it was the under-
porter's business to act as baggage animal.  Which, no doubt, it
was, but not to the extent of breaking the poor devil's heart and
back.  Sorrell struggled and said nothing.  Vaguely at first, but
more definitely later, he realized that this was part of the
struggle.  Buck was playing a sergeant-major's game well known to
all Tommies, he was putting upon a man though with every appearance
of proper authority; either the man would break and become humble,
or fly out and betray himself.  In the latter case--"Sorry to have
to report, sir," an orderly-room manner, and the Skipper persuaded
it was necessary to enforce discipline.

"Damn him," thought Sorrell; "I'll play his game--and make it
mine."

He changed none of his ways.  He was as indefatigable as ever, or
as much as Buck would allow him to be.

"Don't go fussing about so much, man.  People don't always want you
stepping over their feet."

And Mr. Roland?  Sorrell wondered whether Thomas Roland had noticed
anything, whether he was ever dimly aware of this obscure scuffle
between two unimportant porters.  Why should he notice anything?
Most men, so full of their own affairs, are apt to regard with
impatience the silly disharmonics that seem no more than
unnecessary grit in the machine.

Sorrell was seeing less of Thomas Roland.  Buck had managed to
insinuate himself into Mr. Roland's sitting-room, for he was the
responsible man.  And his extrusion of Sorrell was done with a
bluff and genial neatness.  For such a big thing he was remarkably
smooth and agile.

Moreover there was the matter of largesse.  Most of the departures
took place after breakfast and while Sorrell was labouring on the
stairs with the luggage, Buck, like the senior partner in the firm,
would be attending to the social amenities, helping ladies into
their cars, arranging hand baggage, spreading rugs.  Sorrell would
arrive with the heavy luggage for a particular car, but Buck would
not allow him to remain there.

"Number thirteen--Saul.  Look sharp.  I'll see to this."

So, Sorrell would be sent for more luggage, while Buck gracefully
loaded that which had arrived, and took the tip or tips.

"What about the chap who carried the luggage down?"

If that question were asked Buck would have his answer ready.

"You can give it to me, sir.  We pool our tips."

Needless to say Sorrell never saw that shilling or florin, and
since Buck so contrived it that Sorrell was always fetching and
carrying while he remained at the receipt of custom, Sorrell's
pocket suffered very considerably.  He had been making a pound or
so a week in tips even in the slack season, and the drop in his
revenue was serious.

He took the matter up with Buck.

"We ought to have some arrangement."

"What d'you mean?"

"Well,--I seem to miss most of the tips."

"That's not my fault, my lad.  If people don't pass it over to you--
there must be a reason."

"I expect there is," said Sorrell grimly.

"I'll tell it you.  A sulky face doesn't fetch out the silver--"

"They pool their tips in the dining-room, and upstairs."

Buck trampled with loud dignity upon such a suggestion.

"Think--I--pool--with the chap under me?  Not likely.  I've worked
for my position.  I don't share out,--with the boot-boy."

And Sorrell left it at that, though he felt bitter.

For he had arrived at one of those periods of loneliness when he
felt that the other humans about him had ceased to regard him as a
distinct personality, though the impression was due to the fall in
the level of his self-respect.  He was eclipsed, and by the sort of
man whom he hated and despised.  His sense of failure returned.  He
was repressing himself, going about with a frown, and an air of
melancholy self-absorption.  There were no smiles in life--or at
least it seemed to him that there was no smile, for he did not
smile at other people, and a smile is a flash of vitality.  He
thought that he was being ignored, when it was he who hid himself
behind a gloomy reserve.

Mr. Roland still played Chopin.  He went about as usual, deliberate,
fresh faced, ready with a pleasant word, observing without appearing
to observe.

One morning he spoke to Sorrell.

"Feeling all right, Stephen?"

"Quite, sir."

"I thought you looked tired."

"No,--I'm quite all right, sir."

Roland did not push his inquiries further.

"Take an extra hour off.  Get out with your boy."

"Thank you, sir."

Sorrell was shocked by the sudden rush of mean thoughts.  This was
part of Buck's slyness; he had been hinting to Mr. Roland that
Sorrell was not up to his work, and not capable of handling the
heavy luggage.  And Roland believed him.  He was unaware of what
was going on under his very eyes.

Sorrell tried to rid himself of this meanness, but he was human,
and when the opportunity fell to him, he seized it, for when a man
has an enemy he is justified in making reconnaissances.  He
happened to see Buck going into Mr. Roland's room, and he found
something to polish outside the door of that room.

He could hear what was said.

"What about Sorrell?  It struck me this morning that he looked
ill."

"I don't know about that, sir.  But the fact is--well, I don't like
to have to--"

"I prefer frankness, Buck."

"I don't think he's fit for the work, sir.  Clerking is his job."

"Not strong enough?"

"That's it.  Of course--I take my share--"

"I'm sure you do,--Buck.  I have told Sorrell to take an extra hour
off--."

Sorrell slipped away, raging against the liar, and almost despising
Roland for accepting the lies.  His great Mr. Roland was not so
shrewd and world-wise as he had imagined!

But he caught himself up.

"Don't be a cad.  Stick it.  The fellow will have you beaten unless
you stick it.  Think of the boy."



2


Christopher was his refuge, his secret inspiration.  Sorrell was
off duty from eight till nine, and he had the half of each
alternate Sunday.  Kit would come along the road to meet his
father, and as the evenings lengthened they would wander a short
way into the fields, or climb the Castle Hill and sit and talk for
twenty minutes.  Christopher was rather silent about the school,
and when his father's voice grew intimate the boy would leap two or
three years and carry their gossip into the future.

"I think I'd like to be an engineer, pater."

"What sort of engineer?"

"Oh,--design things.  I went over the electric light works the
other day.  Bert Lumley took me.  His father runs the dynamos."

"Wonderful thing--electricity."

"It seems alive.  It's there--and yet you can't see it.  Like the
blood going round in your body, pater."

"You'd like to work on live things?"

"Yes,--I think so."

But one evening Christopher did not appear upon the road, and when
Sorrell arrived at the cottage in Vine Court he came upon a little
scene that shocked him.  Kit and Mrs. Garland were in the scullery,
and Kit's head was over the sink, and there was a redness, and Mrs.
Garland was using a sponge.

"Hallo!  What's happened?"

Kit gurgled something, but it was Mrs. Garland who explained the
affair.  She was angry.

"That young beast of a Blycroft.  Always tormenting something.
He'd got hold of a cat, and of course our Kit--.  Well,--young
Blycroft's two years older, and a strong young savage."

"I got one in," said Kit, eluding the sponge for a moment.

And then he burst into tears.  He did not explain his tears, but
Sorrell understood them, and his angry heart yearned over the boy.
It was the shame of being licked by a boy whom he despised,
sensitiveness writhing under the bulk of the savage.  Did he not
understand it?  Had he not had to bear it?  For he knew that had
their quarrel come to a vulgar scuffle Buck would overwhelm him as
the Vine Court bully had smothered Kit.

"We must do something about this," he said,--stroking his
moustache.

And all the way home he was thinking over the problem, the age-old
problem of how the brain can outwit the brute.



3


Easter came, with six days of sunshine, and a brisk life upon the
road.  The buds of the chestnuts were bursting, and in the garden
daffodils swung yellow in the wind amid a spreading glimmer of
greenness.  Bowden's pugnacious and swarthy head began to go to and
fro behind his lawn-mower.

There were hyacinths, rose, white and blue in the border close to
the window where Sorrell used to sit and read, and the scent of
them drifted in, but Sorrell and his books saw little of each
other.  For the city people were pushing the noses of their cars
westwards in search of the spring, and the glittering Pelican saw
them swirl and hesitate and pause.

Life became strenuous, and for Sorrell in particular more than
strenuous.  He laboured, groaning inwardly, jaw set, his eyes
taking on a tired and blank stare.  He cursed the people who
travelled with solid trunks; heavy suitcases and kit-bags were not
so bad, but a trunk was an uncompromising brute of a thing.

One evening he had paused on the second landing to get his breath
when he heard a voice behind him.

"Why do you do all the work?"

He turned and looked into the pale face of the housekeeper, Mary
Marks.  She was a plain little woman, reserved, thin lipped, but
with clear dark eyes.  They were very intelligent eyes, and they
had suffered, for somewhere a Percy Marks led a brisk and
lascivious life.  As a rule she was not a woman who offered
sympathy, for she would have resented sympathy.

Sorrell, surprised, stood there panting.

"Pride," he said.

"Oh,--that's very well.  But it's a shame.  A great beast like that
letting you--"

He was astonished at her bitterness.  He had thought that all the
women were on Buck's side, and he felt cheered.

"Then--you have noticed it?"

"Of course.  Why do you do it?"

"Do you think I would ask him--?  He thinks I'll break.  I shan't."

With an effort he picked up the trunk, and getting it on his
shoulder, went swaying along the corridor.  Mary Marks stood and
watched him, and had Sorrell been able to read her mind its fierce
goodwill would have surprised him.  She knew something of men; she
was full of scorn for the fine, breezy fellows, the gentlemen with
the "Hallo, my dear" eyes.

"He won't stand it," she thought.  "Mr. Roland ought to have the
sense to see.  That boy of his keeps him going."

Nor was Mrs. Marks the only woman in the place whose sympathies
were with Sorrell.  It happened one wet Sunday afternoon that
Sorrell had spent his half-day at the Vine Court, and Fanny
Garland--also free--was one of the party.  They had tea together,
Sorrell and Kit, Fanny and her mother.  Sorrell ate very little;
they noticed it; he looked in pain.

Sorrell and Fanny Garland walked back together to the Pelican.
It was raining, and Fanny had an umbrella; she offered half
to Sorrell, frankly, as a comrade; her cheerfulness was a
straightforward virtue, and though Sorrell refused the umbrella she
was not offended.  Most men would have shared it so readily,
thinking it to be an invitation towards other intimacies.  Buck,
for instance.

One of them, probably it was Sorrell, happened to mention the ex-
sergeant-major.

"Him!  You put up with too much.  I know the sort he is."  And then
she added--"I know the length of his rope.  You wait."

Her meaning was an enigma to Sorrell.

"I don't quite take you."

"No?  That fellow will hang himself.  You wait.  If he gets caught--
I don't think Mr. Roland's the sort of man to mince matters--"

Sorrell went to bed wondering how George Buck could be expected to
hang himself.  Also, it was in his mind that Christopher should
have boxing lessons.  A man needed a weapon, and it was a good
thing to be able to use one's fists.

For--he--Sorrell had no weapon, nothing but his dogged patience.
It seemed to him that he would have to let life pull pieces of
flesh from him until life got tired of it.  All that he could do
was to out-live life.




CHAPTER X



1


Sorrell's second persecution had lasted for two months.

The year gave an unusually beautiful spring, the spring that a
gardener prepares for and so rarely enjoys, but to Sorrell the
green budding of the year was a season of strife and humiliation.
George Buck, flourishing like an elm tree, sucked all the
sustenance and the moisture from his weaker rival.

"Saul,--luggage for number twenty-seven."

Sorrell was enduring blindly, but not so blindly as he believed.
The work was now incessant, for the majority of the visitors stayed
only one night, and their baggage had to be carried up one day and
brought down the next.  A strong lad would have thought nothing of
the work, but to Sorrell it was travail and anguish and bitter
sweat.  There were times when his heart and lungs laboured so
heavily that he imagined his old wounds to be bursting, and the
healed tissues tearing themselves apart.  At night he would look
ghastly, and crawl up to his bed with shadows under his eyes.  The
old pain was coming back; he was afraid of his food; he would lie
awake with his heart labouring under his ribs.

But he would not surrender.  Buck's trumpeting voice was an eternal
challenge, and Sorrell felt that the struggle between them was
physical, though their bodies never came into contact.  The man
meant to wear him out, to drive him to some outburst, to so vex and
madden Sorrell that he would fly at him like a tormented animal.
The rest would be so easy.  One punch of the big fist on that
sallow face, and a solemn report made to Mr. Roland.  "Saul's
assaulted me, sir.  I had to hit him--.  I think he is a bit
touched in the head.  Queer.  He won't do the place any good, sir."

Certainly, Sorrell was growing quick-tempered.  There were times
when he was so intensely irritable that he had to hold himself in,
grip something.  It was the irritability of over-tiredness and
dyspepsia.  His impulses could be murderous.  He would find himself
looking at the back of Buck's head and neck; Buck had one of those
round flat heads with the pink skin showing at the crown, and a
great broad neck that bulged slightly over his collar.  An axe, a
hammer,--and one smashing blow on that pink, bald patch--!

Sorrell had to suppress these murderous rages.  He reasoned with
himself.

"Hang on.  Violence won't help you.  The only way to balk the beast
is to refuse to be broken."

But these rages tired him, for intense self-suppression is
exhausting.  He had an air of bored calmness.  But he was beginning
to feel bitter against Thomas Roland.  He had imagined a possible
friendship only to discover that he was of so little importance
that Roland remained blind to his martyrdom.  Self-absorbed, like
most other humans!

Well,--why not complain?

There was a morning when Sorrell paused with his hand on the handle
of Roland's door.  Buck had been teasing him before the women,
making a mock of him, and Sorrell was raging.

"I'll give notice."

He stood there for nearly half a minute, fighting his anger, and
trying to convince himself that this anger was a wound that should
be hidden.  He was about to do the very thing that George Buck
intended him to do.

He overcame the impulse.  He was moving away when the door opened,
and Roland came out.  He looked inquiringly at Sorrell.

"Oh,--Stephen,--you might get that grey suit of mine pressed."

"Yes, sir."

"How's the boy?"

"Very well, sir."

Sorrell's answers were tense and abrupt, like sentences snapped out
by an automaton.  His face had a pale rigidity.

"You haven't borrowed any books lately."

"Not much time, sir."

He was aloof, haughty, but Roland did not appear to notice
Sorrell's attitude, or if he noticed it he hid his awareness.
Sorrell's melancholy eyes reproached him, for Roland looked so
strong and fresh and unhurried, a man who had time to play and
read, but who did not trouble to observe.

"No,--I suppose not," was all he said, "but things change,
Stephen."

"And people," Sorrell added to himself.



2


The rush of visitors quickened, and the crowd was increased by a
number of Americans who came to visit the birthplace of one of
their great men.

Sorrell did not like the Americans.  They were large and noisy and
exacting, and their largeness seemed to extend itself to their
luggage.  They travelled with mountains of luggage, and with great
square massive trunks strapped to the luggage grids of their cars.
They were always shouting and ringing bells.

"Say,--boy,--I want my luggage."

Buck would trumpet an answer.

"Saul,--where's the stuff for number twelve.  Get a move on."

To Sorrell it seemed that he had reached the crisis of his
struggle.  He toiled like Sisyphus, but unlike the man of myth, he
pushed and heaved his rock to its objective.  He panted and
sweated; sometimes his shirt was so wet that he had to go and
change it.  And the luggage became alive; malignantly alive it
played tricks with him, it resisted, it hurt him, jammed his
fingers or bruised his shoulder.  Once or twice he fell, and lay
clutching some gloating burden, rolling with it on the floor, or in
some dark corner on the stairs.  He tried dragging the things up by
the handles, till Buck caught him at it, and hectored him.

"Here, nice for the new carpets.  That ain't the way to handle
baggage, my lad.  Hump it."

Sorrell flared.

"Why don't you give me a hand,--you--"

"Now,--no sauce.  If you can't do the job, my lad,--you say so."

And he stood and watched Sorrell shoulder a trunk and stagger with
it up the stairs.

It happened that a gentlewoman from God's own country arrived one
day in a car like a "Cunarder."  It had a super-trunk strapped
behind it.  The lady came into the lounge and was met by the head-
porter.  It appeared that she was a very important American and
very rich; her moon-face balanced itself above a brief and
immensely fat body; she wore glasses and carried a lap-dog.

The lady wanted a "suite."

"Very sorry, madam, but we have only one vacant room, and that is
on the third floor."

"Waal,--I guess if I'd known--I'd have got on the wire and bought
your little hotel."

But she took the room, and ordered her luggage to be sent up at
once.

Sorrell was unstrapping the super-trunk, a vast black thing, bound
with iron and plastered with labels, when Buck came out.

"What number?"

"Thirty-five."

"Third floor--!"

The two men looked at each other.  Sorrell knew that it would be
absurd for him to try and handle that trunk alone, but he was not
going to ask his enemy to help him.

"All right."

There was a smirk on Buck's face.  He took one end of the trunk and
helped Sorrell to carry it as far as the foot of the stairs, but
here he dropped his end.

"Looks heavier than it is.  Get it up quick; she's one of the puss-
in-boots sort."

Sorrell said nothing.  He felt that he was on the eve of his
Waterloo.  He tried to get the thing on his back, and as though to
make certain of Sorrell's overwhelming, Buck helped to load him.
"That's it; up you go."

Sorrell managed the first flight, though by the time he reached the
first landing his heart was racing.  He felt that he would burst
asunder.  He tried to let the trunk down gently, but it swayed
down, twisting his wrist and striking his ankle with one of its
metal capped corners.

And suddenly Sorrell saw red.  This beastly bit of opulent inertia
seemed to typify life, George Buck and all the damnable and cruel
cussedness of the tormenting forces that seemed eager to break him.
He fell upon the trunk.  He fought it half-way up the second
flight, tearing and pushing the thing up with a mad fury, heaving
it over and over.  Half-way up it jammed, and in trying to force it
farther he slipped and struck his head against it.

"Damn you--!"

He held his head, and burst into sudden, wild sobbing.  He did not
see a face looking down over the railing of the second landing, a
shocked and compassionate face.  A moment later someone was on the
stairs.

"Anyone would think some of the people travelled with their
coffins."

Sorrell glanced up furiously.  He choked.

"What's that?  Coffins--.  I slipped--.  I'll get the damned thing--"

"Wait.  I'll help--"

"You shan't.  By God,--get out of the way,--Mrs. Marks."

He tore at the trunk, heaved it up, leaving a great scar upon the
wall, and the woman, retreating, watched his wildness with scared
eyes.  For he looked like a man storming a breach, mouth awry, eyes
protruding; panting, cursing.  But he did not curse; he had no
breath for it.  He banged the thing over and over, and thrust it up
on to the landing, and there his knees gave way and he had to sit
down hurriedly on the vanquished trunk.

"Oh,--my God--!"

"Put your head down, Steve," said she.

Sorrell put his head between his knees, and the house-keeper,
running into one of the bedrooms, returned with a glass of water.
She stood over Sorrell, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder.

"Drink this, Stephen.  This has got to stop, you know.  I am going
down to tell that mountain of laziness--."

Sorrell's face, still ghastly but slightly smiling, appeared from
between his knees.

"No,--please don't.  I lost my temper, that's all.  I am going to
get this thing up.  I shall be all right in a minute."

"Drink some water.  If you must try and kill yourself--"

His hand shook as he held the glass.

"It's better to be killed--than to give in--to him."

"Oh, is it!  I'm going to help you with that trunk, Stephen.
What's the number of the room?"

"Thirty-five."

And help him she did, for she was a little woman of great
determination, and between them they manoeuvered the "black
coffin"--as she called it--up the last flight and along the passage
to No. 35.  Sorrell knocked.  The American told him to enter; she
had been waiting.

"I guess I thought you had gone to sleep with it," she said.

Sorrell hauled the thing into the room.

"It is rather heavy, madam."

She presented him with sixpence, an ironical sixpence so it seemed
to Sorrell, and he went forth with the coin shut up in his fist to
show it to Mrs. Marks, but the housekeeper had disappeared.  On his
way downstairs he paused to look at the scar on the wall where a
corner of the trunk had bitten into the plaster.  The wallpaper was
a dull red, and Sorrell, pondering the problem, bethought him of a
little plaster of Paris and some red ink.  The rent in the wall was
a wound, but an honourable wound.

Returning to the lounge hall he came upon George Buck leaning
through the office window, talking to Miss Murdoch, the hotel
clerk.  The pink, baldish patch on the crown of his head showed
between his two red and prominent ears.

Sorrell began tidying up the papers and magazines.  He was waiting
for Buck to discover him and to ask the obvious question, and
Sorrell was ready with the answer.

Presently, Buck withdrew his blue bulk from the narrow window.  His
eyes saw Sorrell indefatigably busy, and the gallant glimmer melted
out of them.  They seemed to stare.

"Get that up to number thirty-five, Saul?"

"I did."

Sorrell gave him a queer and twisted smile, glancing round over his
shoulder, and he saw that his enemy was puzzled.



3


Mary Marks knocked at the door of Mr. Roland's sitting-room.

"Come in."

Roland was sitting on the music-stool, his hands resting on the
keyboard.  They were very brown hands.  Beyond him was the open
window between curtains of old gold; the window framed a stretch of
grass, two beds full of purple Darwin tulips, and the trunks of two
old trees.  The atmosphere of room and garden seemed to merge, save
that the old gold of the room was of a deeper quality than the
yellow downpour of the spring sunlight.

"May I speak to you, sir?"

"Why certainly; come in."

The Chinese carpet made Mary Marks think of a bed of flowers.  A
shame to tread on it!  She was sensitive to all beautiful things,
and her hard exterior was a wall that had been built to protect and
to hide what was left to her of her love of beauty.  She closed the
door.  Her eyes looked across the room at Thomas Roland, and in
them was a vague and questioning censure, unwilling censure.  There
were times when she wished to believe that certain people were
better than the common crowd; she asked to be convinced, to be
allowed moments of secret romanticism.  She had thought Roland a
romantic figure, one of those men upon whom women lavish an
instinctive devotion.  She had thought him strong, just, wise,
deliberate, generous.

"Well,--Mrs. Marks?"

His eyes interrogated hers.  His glance, falling upon the severity
of her face, questioned it.  She stood there with her back to the
door, and it seemed to him that he was being reproached.

"It's not my business, sir; not like that other affair."

Roland turned on the music-stool.

"Yet it must be, or you would not have come."

"Perhaps--."

"Tell me.  You have something to tell me."

"It's about Sorrell."

She saw at once that he was not indifferent.

"You don't mean--?"

"O, nothing of that kind, sir.  But that other man--"

"Buck?"

"Yes.  It's unfair,--a shame, all the heavy luggage; the man's not
strong,--physically I mean."

It seemed to her that Roland smiled and yet did not smile.

"I know," he said.

She gave him a quick lift of the head, an intelligent and birdlike
movement.

"About--his being delicate?"

"No.  Buck's share of the work.  I do see things, Mrs. Marks; I'm
not asleep."

"I wondered."

Her eyes were still questioning.  Since he knew what was happening
her impulse was to ask him why he had not interfered, for his
partiality seemed to her a very foolish blindness.  Not to be able
to see which was the better man!  But, perhaps he did see?  She
looked across at him eagerly, tempted to venture farther, yet half
afraid of what he might infer.

"It has made me angry," she said.

Roland stood up, and half turning towards the window, he spoke to
her as though he were speaking to himself.

"No, it is not favouritism.  I'm a deliberate person, Mrs. Marks.
I like to test people, to be sure.  And now--I think--I'm very
nearly sure."

Her face softened.

"He's killing himself.  He won't give in."

"As bad as that?"

"It's pride!"

"I am glad you have told me.  I like to trust people.  Do you think
that unwise?"

She met his steady eyes, and began to wonder why she had doubted.

"No, not in his case.  You see, he has got an object, sir,
something outside himself that matters."

"The boy.  Exactly.  I loathe distrusting people.  I wanted to be
sure.  Now,--listen."

He came and stood near to her, his hands in his pockets, and with
an intimate, wise air.

"I wanted that other man to have his chance.  I had my reasons.
Naturally--I want very good reasons for taking his chance away.
The very strongest reason--"

"You mean--that other affair, sir?"

"I do."

She knew that he was asking her to help him, not ungenerously, but
rather to take sides against his own too human kindness.  It meant
a kicking into the street of a memory, an obligation, and the man
to whom he owed it.  He had always confessed to a fondness for "the
old blackguard."  But not for a mean and bullying blackguard.

"So you see--I want my reason, my justification.  I suppose it is
weak of me."

She stood with a hand along one cheek, looking down at the pattern
of the carpet, but her eyes did not see the carpet.

"I'm sitting up to-night, Mr. Roland."

"You think it--necessary?"

"Oh,--I heard something.  The girl--.  Besides, in a way--I feel
myself responsible."

"To whom?"

"To my job.  I'm not a prude, sir--.  Oh,--I know they have every
right--if a man and a girl are made that way--.  But there--there
is what I am here for.  It's not fair--"

"To whom?"

"To me,--to you."

"And the girl?"

"I'm not thinking of her.  She is only trying to get what she
wants,--but she shall not get it--here.  That's where my job would
suffer."

Roland nodded his strong, square head.

"All right.  I'll sit up too."




CHAPTER XI



1


Thomas Roland's enthusiasm for detail had extended to the dresses
worn by the chambermaids of the Pelican Inn.  Someone in Chelsea
had designed for him this feminine uniform, a simple creation in
blue linen, short in the sleeve and open at the neck.  The white
cap suggested a butterfly's wings, with a knot of black velvet for
the body.

The housekeeper had admired the aesthetics of the costume,--but
when it came to practical politics she regretted the provocation of
such clothes.  For clothes do provoke, both the wearer of them and
the person who has an eye for the way they are worn.  And Mary
Marks felt responsible.  Clare and Kate were steady girls and not
too good looking, but the very flick of Nelly Barrett's neat black
ankles promised her anxieties.

Even Sorrell, who was too tired to be piqued by adventure, and who
had a prejudice against all baby faces, had understood the nature
of Nelly's provocation.  A little, sallow thing with a bobbed head
of jet-black hair, and a yellowish tinge in the skin of her
forearms and her throat, she moved quickly on slim legs and with a
slightly undulating movement of the hips.  She had a way of
swinging her thin forearms as though she were balancing herself
like a dancer on a rope.  She caught the eye with her liveness,
and the mischievous "Come and catch me" of her pert, pale face.
Sorrell had seen other men looking at her as men look at certain
women.  And she, alive to it all, moving with little flicks of the
head, would glance back, self-consciously arch, smiling, showing
her white teeth.

Sorrell was very tired.  A party of motorists who had booked rooms
at the Pelican had wired to say that they would not arrive till
midnight, and Sorrell was sitting up for them.  Everyone had gone
to bed, and he had taken one of the big leather arm-chairs in the
lounge, and had lit a pipe.  A pile of illustrated papers lay on
the copper-topped smoking table beside his chair, and he had been
looking through them idly and with the inattention of a man who was
weary.  He wanted to go to sleep.  The very silence and gloom of
the big lounge invited him to sleep.  A clock ticked somewhere, and
its ticking was the only sound to be heard as the minutes slipped
away.  The window of the office was closed, though the visitors'
book lay open on the ledge.

Everybody was asleep, and Sorrell lay relaxed, thinking of all
those comfortable sleepers up above, and of how good a thing bed
was, and of how long it might be before he would be able to lock
the door and go across the yard to his room in what had been a part
of the old stables.  Buck had a room over there, next to Ponds the
garage attendant.  The female members of the staff slept on the top
floor in a little wing that jutted out from the main building.

Sorrell contemplated the image of George Buck.  The fellow would be
snoring; he could snore most aggressively, so much so that Ponds
had spoken facetiously of fitting a silencer to the big man's
proboscis.  But Sorrell's thoughts revolted from the contemplation
of the persecutor.  Surely he had enough of Buck during the daytime
without sitting there and brooding over him at night?

He closed his eyes; his head sank forward; he fell into a doze, but
it was only for a minute.  Something startled him into wakefulness;
he sat up, listening; he fancied that he could hear a shuffling
sound upon the stairs, but the sound was so indefinite that he
could not be sure that he was not imagining it.  He listened, head
cocked.  Then, something more definite reached him, the creaking
sound made by a stair-tread under a cautious foot.

Sorrell got up.  There were half a dozen possible explanations of
the sound, legitimate explanations.  He walked to the main door and
tried the handle to make sure that it was locked.  There was
another door opening from the yard into the corridor leading to the
kitchen and the service quarters, and Sorrell walked down the
corridor.  Both he and Buck had keys for this side-door, so that
they could come in and out at any hour without calling on any of
the rest of the staff.  Sorrell paused half-way down the corridor;
he had noticed something, a movement of cold night air.  He found
the door half open.

He remembered closing it less than an hour ago.

The possibilities grew more serious.  He asked himself whether the
open door had any connexion with that creaking stair-tread?

He turned and walked back towards the lounge, opening the swing-
door cautiously, and closing it with a carefully restraining hand.
He remembered that there would be a considerable amount of spare
cash in the office safe.  But if a prowler had entered the hotel
why had he gone upstairs?  To pilfer in the bedrooms?

Obviously he ought to investigate, and perhaps rouse Mr. Roland.
Mr. Roland slept on the ground floor in a room that opened from his
sitting-room, and Sorrell was moving towards the broad passage
leading past the public rooms when he heard something more
decisive.  Screams, a woman's screams, faint and far away,--and
coming from above!

His first thought was that he was weaponless.  He ran back into the
lounge, grabbed a poker from the fireplace, and made a dash for the
stairs.  He had reached the first landing and was switching on the
lights when he heard a whole choir of voices coming from above.
There was a man's voice, and an hysterical voice that belonged to
the screamer, and the voices of other women.  Obviously, something
dramatic was happening up there.  A burglar perhaps, caught and
cornered by three or four frightened but eager women?

Sorrell dashed up, switching on lights.  The voices seemed to come
from the staff's quarters, and he turned up the flight of stairs
leading to the outjutting wing.  He fancied that he recognized the
voices.  Lights were on up above.  And then he came suddenly upon
the scene, staged for him above the tread of the top step.

He paused, astonished.

He saw one of the chambermaids in her nightdress, with hair
streaming, and he guessed that it was she who had been screaming.
Her mouth was still voluble, but none of the others were paying any
attention to what she said.  He saw Mrs. Marks fully dressed; Mr.
Roland in his blue and orange dressing-gown, George Buck in shirt
and trousers.  Two other doors were open, and girls' heads were
protruding.

Then--Sorrell understood.



2


The fool lover had blundered into the wrong bedroom.

Also, he had been ambuscaded.  Mrs. Marks' black dress had been
keeping vigil, and Roland's dressing-gown was a mere piece of
camouflage.

Sorrell remained where he was, watching his enemy standing there, a
mass of foolishness, and of cringing plausibility.

"I've apologized to her, sir.  I can't do more than that, can I?
Besides--"

Buck kept glancing at a closed door, the door of Nelly Barrett's
room.  He knew the right door now, because it had remained
discreetly shut.

Sorrell could see nothing of Mr. Roland save his back.  It seemed
to him to be an uncompromising and disgusted back.

"Come downstairs."

He wanted Buck away from the women where his presence was an
offence and a confusion.  He turned to the stairs, and saw Sorrell
and his poker, and a smile came into his eyes.

"We've startled you, Stephen."

"I wondered what it was, sir."

"Come with us.  I shall want you."

Sorrell stood aside to let Roland and the egregious lover pass,
and Buck, evil-eyed, went by him with a stiffening of the neck.
Sorrell followed them down, and when they were away from the
paralysing presence of the women Buck began to blurt more boldly.

"Between men, sir--"

"Well?"

"She asked me to go--"

Roland's voice was abrupt and contemptuous.  What a scene!  The sex
adventure at its worst, caught in a corner, meanly ashamed.

"Shut up, man.  I don't want such explanations."

"I've been spied upon.  Jealousy, sir--"

Roland paused for a moment on the stairs.

"Look here, Buck, you can wait till we are in my room.  There has
been quite enough noise.  People want to sleep."

The lights were on in Mr. Roland's sitting-room, and on seeing the
glass bulbs all aglow Buck's blue eyes became illuminated from
within.  Behind him Sorrell had closed the door, and was leaning
against it, still holding his poker.  Roland was rummaging for a
cigarette.

"So it was you--you--who gave me away."

Roland turned sharply.

"Buck, I don't want a scene.  Don't be a fool."

"I was just telling a rat, sir--"

"Sorrell had nothing to do with it.  You have no one to thank but
yourself.  You will go to-morrow, after breakfast."

The big man seemed to hang there like a red sun, hesitating between
a glare of rage and a fog of servility.  He could not bring himself
to look at Sorrell.  His neck, with its roll of fat, had a purplish
tinge.  He glowed.  Like most common men, he took refuge in
sentimentality.  "Do the gentleman behind his back,--but slobber
him up in the public."

"And I saved your life, sir."

Roland was looking at him through a little cloud of cigarette
smoke.

"You did.  That's why I offered you this place.  I never expect
gratitude.  Sportsmanship's better--"

"Gratitoode!"

He extended a fat hand.

"Chucking me out--because I'm made like a man, not like that
parsnip there.  I'm no angel; don't pretend to it."

"Nor am I,--Buck.  But then--"

"Because a girl--a hot little bit--.  Why, it's human nature--.  To
hell with--"

"Buck," said Roland, interrupting him with that deliberate voice of
his, "I'm not quarrelling with your morals.  Sex is nature.  It's
no more immoral to go with a woman than to eat your dinner--
provided--"

Buck tried to speak, but Roland had not finished.

"Provided--you don't hurt anybody.  There's the woman to be
considered.  And--me, the job, the hotel.  You are not a sportsman.
That's my point."

"I beg to differ, sir."

"Oh, of course.  But you are not a sportsman.  I've known that for
some time now.  You're a greedy animal.  That's that."

He nodded at Sorrell, and Sorrell opened the door.

"You shall have your money in the morning, before you go.  Now,
clear out to your room."

"Well, sir, I never thought you would treat me like this."

"Buck, I'm not a fool."

The big man went out with a kind of pitying swagger, and Roland,
smiling faintly, made a sign to Sorrell that he was to remain.

"I want to speak to you, Stephen.  By the way, have those people
arrived yet?"

"No, sir."

"Wait, isn't that a car?"

"I think it is--"

"Well, go and get them fixed up, and then come back here, unless
you are too tired."

"I'm not too tired, sir."

"Good.  I have a few things to say."



3


Sorrell dealt with the late arrivals and their luggage, and never
had luggage seemed so light.  He was beyond tiredness; he felt that
he had climbed above things physical, and that he was on the peak
of months of moiling and of effort, looking down and back and
upwards in an air that was clear and stimulating.  The bull had
gone the way of the lioness, and he was left in happy relationship
with a man.

Roland's door was ajar, and Sorrell knocked.

"Come in, Stephen."

He saw a decanter of whisky, a siphon, and two glasses on the
table; also a box of cigarettes.  Sorrell closed the door, for he
felt that Mr. Roland wished him to close it upon the sealing of a
new and more intimate comradeship.

"How do you like yours, Stephen?"

"Not too strong, sir."

"Well, help yourself.  That's a good thing over.  My one mistake,
and yet--it had to be."

His voice expressed relief.  The dirty business was over, the make-
believe done with.

"I suppose you thought I didn't know--?"

He was filling his glass, and he looked up and across the table at
Sorrell.

"But I did know.  You will have to forgive me my one blind eye.
That blackguard was giving you hell.  But--I wanted him to hang
himself; I wanted to be sure."

He raised his glass.

"There's forgiveness in a good drink.  Your health, Stephen."

"The same to you, sir."

"Then you do forgive me?"

"I had began to wonder--"

"Yes,--I felt that.  Besides--I didn't quite know how bad it was.
Well,--that's all over."

He pushed the cigarettes towards Sorrell.

"Sit down, man.  You don't know what a relief this is.  How I
loathe that class--in the mass.  We are outside the pale to them.
Their sense of honour--such as it is--does not include us.  It
wasn't always so."

He went and sat on his music-stool, while Sorrell took one of the
chairs.

"We are fair game to most of them, we who have anything, or can do
anything a little better than the crowd.  We are to be robbed, lied
to, blackmailed, slandered.  Isn't that so?"

"I suppose it is.  But--not all--."

"Oh,--I know.  Some of us have the remnants of souls.  I have good
people here; I know it.  They don't look on me as their natural
enemy.  To me it is the individual that matters.  Breed.  O, well,
what is it?  A fastidiousness, a sense of humour and a sense of
proportion, the knowledge that hitting a better man than yourself
with a pick-handle doesn't make for progress.  Beauty.  Wisdom.
Disdain and pity instead of scorn.  You know."

Suddenly, he laughed, and his laughter was quiet and self-amused.

"Declamation!  But, hang it, character does count.  You and I
understand each other; or--at least--I think we do.  You are out
for your boy."

Sorrell nodded.

"That--kept me going.  That--and the hope--"

"That someone realized--"

"Yes."

"Oh,--I realized--.  So it comes to this--I offer you Buck's
place,--and I shall think myself lucky to get you.  Well,--what
about it?"

"There is only one answer to that.  But I ought to tell you,--I'm
not much good with the heavy luggage--."

"My dear chap--"

He raised his glass.

"You have more in you than a cart-horse.  I have my eye on a big
good-natured cart-horse.  It's your head I want, Stephen, and your
heart,--and your grit--my dear chap."



4


Sorrell woke to see white clouds moving in a blue sky, for he slept
with blind up and his window wide open, but on this particular
morning he lay for five minutes looking at the sky.

"I'm first porter at the Pelican."

He smiled.  What a very humble pride was this, and how modest a
triumph, and yet he had had to work and struggle for it and to
suffer.

Fragments of Thomas Roland's philosophy drifted through his head.

"It is not so much the job, but the way you do the job, that
matters."

Yes, wasn't that true.  That much misused and obscured phrase--
"The dignity of labour!"  But the dignity was in the soul of the
labourer, not in the matter he worked upon, and a man who cleaned
boots with love and care was worthy of the respect of kings.  To be
respected for the way you did your job, to be respected by a man
like Thomas Roland.

This little room of his had a new atmosphere, a suggestion of
homeliness and of security.  He foresaw it becoming more intimately
part of himself and his schemes, a little corner where he would
collect his books and his trifles, and sit at a table and enter his
takings in his ledger.

He got up and washed with a sense of exhilaration.  No more--
"Saul,--luggage number So and So," no one to mess him about, no
more bovine interference.  He was lord of his own job.

"News for the boy," he thought, as he sluiced water over his head.
"I ought to be able to make five pounds a week,--two hundred and
fifty a year.  The odd fifty will do for me.  Why,--there's his
education.  He will be thirteen next November.  Say twelve years,
and at twenty-five he ought to be armed and ready."

While he was shaving he heard voices below.  Mr. Roland was up
early.  He had come to hasten the departure of the adventurous
lover.

"Here's a month's money, Buck.  Is your luggage ready?  I have told
Ponds to drive you to the station."

"You seem in a hell of a hurry, sir, to get rid of me."

"Buck,--if I had made such a fool of myself before a lot of women--"

Sorrell saw the ex-sergeant-major off with his leather trunk and
his suit-case, his blue overcoat over his arm, a sulky animal,
trying to look aggrieved.  "Damned lot of humbugs!"  The car
whirled him out and away under the glittering symbol of the
Pelican, and Sorrell, going to his work, felt the blessedness of
the day's labour.

"My job.  I'm responsible."

Mr. Roland, strolling into the lounge, found him with his coat off,
whistling softly, and polishing everything that it was possible to
polish.

"You sound very cheerful, Stephen."

"I am, sir."

They exchanged a look of liking and respect.

"I am going over to Bath to see the fellow I have in mind.  His
name is Hulks.  A good lad--I think.  He will take all his orders
from you.  The understanding is that he will be luggage-porter."

Sorrell gave him a smile of gratitude.

"I can manage some of the luggage, sir.  There is one point--.
I should like your advice--"

"Well?"

"About tips--.  They pool theirs in the dining-room, between the
three.  Fanny Garland takes two-fifth, and the other two girls
halve the rest."

"They agreed to that?"

"Yes, and between Hulks and myself--what sort of proportion would
you think fair?"

"Three-fifths to you, and two-fifths to him."

"Will you put it to him, sir, or shall I?"

"I'll do it.  It will be more official, Stephen."

"Thank you, sir."

At eight o'clock that evening Sorrell met his son on the road where
Winstonbury's old water-mill still took the river upon the paddles
of its great black dripping wheel.  A stone wall separated the
mill-pool from the road, and Sorrell and Kit stood by the wall,
looking at the still water and the green willows.

"Buck's gone, Kit.  I'm head porter now."

He had his arm across the boy's shoulders.

"It will make a difference.  I shall be able to give you something
better than that school--that's to say--if the old Pelican pays."

Kit looked up at his father.  More and more was he coming to
realize what manner of man his father was, and the knowledge was
giving that radiant smile of his a sacred seriousness.

"You don't seem to think of yourself, pater."

"Oh,--I'm a means to an end, my lad.  I've got an object in life.
I'm to be envied."

Kit pondered a moment.

"And I'm the object--I mean--my--"

"That's it."

"I'll try and not waste your money, pater.  I know how hard you
have to work."




CHAPTER XII



1


There followed some weeks of peace, and once more Sorrell became a
"person."  The stoop went out of his shoulders; his eyes were
clear; he sat at the head of the staff table and was addressed as
"Mr. Sorrell."  He had not realized his own incipient dignity, or
that he was developing a certain "presence," and that the women
respected him.  They forgave him his rather silent attitude, his
air of gentlemanly reserve, for after all he was a gentleman, born
and in action, and his long, thin figure and dark and intelligent
head were topped by a halo of mystery.  For Sorrell was something
of a mystery, and women love a mystery, especially when their
intuition divines a kind and staunch reality at the back of it.

He was much discussed on the back stairs and in the kitchen.

"He's devoted to that boy of his."

"And a nice kid he is too.  He's got such eyes, and a big laughing
mouth.  When he gets a bit older the women will want to kiss him."

It was not evident that the women wished to kiss Sorrell.  He was
more than a sex-man, and even the working women of to-day are more
practically romantic than were their mothers.  It seemed that
Sorrell was not a marrying man; like Mr. Roland he was married to
his job; but there were one or two women who were interested in his
attitude towards marriage.  Fanny Garland for one, fresh faced,
cheerful, wholesomely ambitious.  She had reasons for asserting to
her secret self that she and Sorrell would make very good partners,
that Sorrell's boy liked her and that she liked the boy.  Both of
them were saving money--.  Even Miss Murdoch--"the girl in the
cage,"--who lived in rooms in Winstonbury and walked out each
morning to immure her pale primrose gentility in the Pelican
office, had a secret partiality for Sorrell.  In fact--she did not
hide it.  From her cage her tired eyes watched life, the life that
could come and go as it pleased.  She envied it its freedom, but
without bitterness, for she had not the vitality to be bitter.  And
she would watch Sorrell, and her pale face would light up whenever
something brought him to the window of her cage.

She thought him "distinguished," yes, even in the Pelican's blue
uniform.

But the chief contributor to Sorrell's peace of mind was Mr.
Roland's "stout lad," Albert Hulks.  The breadth and strength of
him were comforting, as was his infinite good nature, and from the
first glimpse of his great rosy face Sorrell had every cause to
bless him.  Albert was a modest creature.  He hadn't much head, and
he said so, but his good temper and his strength were of more value
to the man who had the head.  Albert dealt with the luggage; it was
nothing to him; he enjoyed man-handling it; he had the vigour of a
young steam-engine.  His attitude towards life too--was so easy.

He had two or three characteristic phrases.

"I'm not worrying.  You leave it to me--I'll tackle it.  Keep
smiling."

Bert was proud of his strength, and was ready to spend it with
healthy enthusiasm, for no one had persuaded him that he ought to
bottle it up, and dole it out in careful drops.  He admired Sorrell
and they got on famously.

"O, yes--I've got a back, but he's got a head, some head."

They were straight with each other over the tips, agreeing to keep
a box in the office into which each slipped his takings, and the
box was opened each night and the money shared out, three-fifths to
Sorrell, and two fifths to Hulks.

Had any interfering "Friend of the people" challenged Bert's
attitude towards Sorrell and their work, he might have looked
puzzled.

"Being exploited--am I?  Don't see it, chum.  I've got the back and
he's got the head.  Besides--he got a bit smashed up in the war.
Dicky inside, see.  Carrying luggage upstairs don't hurt me.  He's
got the head piece.  We get on champion.  What's wrong with that?"

The plain fellow's good nature had solved the problem.

Sorrell now found himself with more leisure, for Mr. Roland had not
objected to his porters so arranging the work that one of them
should be off duty twice a day.

"I leave it to you, Stephen.  I know you'll not let me down."

Sorrell's free hours were from twelve till half-past one, and from
eight till half-past nine.  The evenings were sacred to Kit, but
that midday hour he spent reading in his room, or in wandering
about the garden.  He knew very little about gardens, and on one
occasion he had drawn a rare and hoarse chuckle from the churlish
Bowden.

"What are those things--sunflowers?"

"Sunflowers!  Don't 'ee know an artichoke?"

But Sorrell enjoyed the garden.  He used to wander up and down a
broad grass walk in the vegetable garden, where vegetables and
fruit and flowers were intermixed.  Sweet peas grew here, and Fanny
Garland, coming out to cut flowers for her table vases, would see
Sorrell walking up and down, and usually he had a little black
note-book in his hand.

She wondered whether he wrote poetry.

But Sorrell found his poetry in figures.  He was enjoying the
romance of hard cash.  These little glittering sixpences,
shillings, florins, and half-crowns, they were the stars above his
immediate world, and of far more significance and import than the
stars.  His means to an end, his material plunder for immaterial
needs.  For with his savings he was going to arm his son against a
world that babbled of socialism and still clutched a knife or a
club.

Skill and knowledge were to be Kit's "arms," some craft in which he
should use hand and brain, and could say to the miner "Bring coal,
or my skill is not for you," or to the baker "Bread, or you die."
For Sorrell's sufferings and struggles had not led him towards the
illusion of socialism.  He had seen too much of human nature.
Labour, becoming sectionalized, would split into groups, and group
would grab from group, massing for the struggle instead of fighting
a lone fight.  Only the indispensable and individual few would be
able to rise above this scramble of the industrial masses.  It is
the few who matter and who will always matter.  So Sorrell thought.

Social service?  O, yes, ten thousand years hence--perhaps.  But
for the moment--arms--and not too much trust in your neighbour.

So, he wandered in the garden and carried his little book, and
discovered the delight of scientific hoarding for the benefit of
his pride and for the future of his son.


"Week ending June 23.

 Wages ..  ..  ..  ..  .. L2 10 0
 Share of Tips ..  ..  .. L5  3 6"


Sacred symbols!  He was not unconscious of the flowers and of the
fruit, or of old Bowden putting in an extra hour each day--not for
love--but because of his percentages.  His figures set him dreaming
dreams.  Tips averaging L5 a week in summer!  With good health he
might count on an income of L250 to L300 a year, with his keep and
his uniform thrown in.  Kit was costing him about twenty-five
shillings a week; his own personal expenses were very small.  That
should leave him at least L5 a week to play with.

"Save half--and use the other half on education."

He began to think that he might launch out on his first adventure.

He wanted to take the boy away from the town school.



2


Sorrell spoke to Thomas Roland on the subject, and each man found
that the other had very definite views on education, and that on
some points they differed.

"What is your idea, Stephen?"

"A private tutor for a year or two."

"Can you afford it?"

"I might--if I can find a good local man."

"And what about games?"

Yes, that was a difficulty.  Neither man believed in mass
production as applied to education, but Roland did believe in
games.

"Getting kicked on the shins, you know, and learning to keep your
temper, and not to squeal 'off-side' on every possible occasion.  A
boy wants it."

"All boys?"

"I think all boys ought to know how to take punishment."

"I want my boy to be something more than a healthy young animal
with nice manners."

"Health and good manners are not a bad foundation, Stephen."

"Better than being a half-educated young prig with no manners.  I
grant it.  But I want my boy to be a free man.  I want him to be in
a position to be able to say 'Go to hell' to both capital and
labour."

"Do you want to send me to hell, Stephen?"

"You are a free man, sir; that's different.  But it has always
seemed to me that half one's youth is wasted; fooled away, rotted
with boredom.  A boy just drifts, or is pushed along by his
parents.  You stuff him with things in which he has no interest--.
Why, at eighteen, after seven years at a public school--"

"Exactly.  But my sympathies are with the boy who refuses to be
stuffed--.  He comes in fresh and big at the finish."

"Yes,--I don't want to stuff the boy.  If he had two or three hours
coaching a day--and could then run free--He's keen on country
things--birds--and the river.  I can have him taught to box and to
swim, and perhaps to manage a horse.  My idea is to give him plenty
of fresh air--and enough book stuff, until he shows some
inclination.  Or--I might send him to a good school for a year or
two--after he has had a year or two's coaching."

He smiled.

"The business would be--to get him in, the son of a hotel porter."

"I think you could camouflage that," said Mr. Roland.

Sorrell began to make inquiries in Winstonbury.  Neither he nor Mr.
Roland knew anything of the inner life of the place, for to the
people who lived in the Queen Anne and Georgian houses of the
Minster Close the Pelican was nothing more than a glorified "pub."
Sorrell knew a few of the tradesmen, and one of the doctors.  It
occurred to him that Mr. Towner, who kept the book-shop in Angel
Row, might be considered some sort of a guide to the intellectual
possibilities of Winstonbury.

Mr. Towner was able to offer a suggestion.  It arose from the fact
that he was one of the few Victorians left in Winstonbury who put
on a top hat and went to church on Sundays, and his church was St.
Peter's.  St. Peter's had a curate.

"There's Mr. Porteous.  I believe he takes pupils."

Sorrell jotted down the Rev. Robert Porteous's address, and that
same evening, having changed into mufti, he hunted out the curate's
house in Gold Hill Lane.  It was an old stone cottage with a leaded
porch, sad and austere, and overshadowed by a great elm that seemed
to bend over it menacingly.

A young woman of thirty or so answered the door.

"Is Mr. Porteous in?"

"Yes."

"Can I see him?"

She appeared flustered, and upon her pinched face was visible the
vague fear of a woman whom poverty and conventional pride had
turned into a social coward.  The Porteouses kept no servant; they
could not afford one.  This shabby girl with the red yet refined
hands strove to be both a servant and a lady; her sensitiveness had
been banked up in a narrow channel; she was ashamed of things that
were not shameful; she had let herself be overawed by other
people's cake-stands and carpets.

"I'm not quite sure.  What name--please?"

"Sorrell--Captain Sorrell."

"Will you come in--"

All her movements were self-conscious and secretive.  She could do
nothing naturally, and even when she showed Sorrell into a stuffy
little drawing-room she seemed to be drawing curtains, preparing
pathetic and futile excuses.

"Mr. Porteous's sermon, you know."

"I don't want to disturb him."

"I'll go and see."

She closed the door with care, and departed to find her father, who
was engaged upon something far more practical than the writing of
sermons.  For Mr. Porteous, in his shirt sleeves, and wearing the
oldest trousers he possessed, was attacking a choked flue in the
kitchen range.  Somewhat sooty about the face, he was enjoying
himself like a child, for Mr. Porteous--robust and stout and bald--
with a little fringe of butter-coloured curls waving over his
occiput, cared not a damn for social niceties.  His lack of
pretence was a great trouble to his daughter.  "Father's so
unconventional."  He was.  Hence--his poverty, his obscure,
fumbling life in a back street in Winstonbury.

"A Captain Sorrell to see you."

Mr. Porteous withdrew a flue-brush.  He looked hot and cheerful.

"Sorrell?  Don't know the name.  What's he want?"

"I didn't ask him."

"All right.  I'll go and see."

He would have gone as he was had not his daughter insisted that a
sooty face and hands were sacrilegious, and that he must put on a
collar and slip a pair of detachable cuffs over the sleeves of his
grey flannel shirt.

"You can't go in like that."

Mr. Porteous showed a very neat set of false teeth.

"I'm a bounder, my dear; I know it.  Who was it said that Peter and
Paul were bounders?  Anyhow--I take off my hat to him."

Miss Porteous sighed.

In the interview that followed Sorrell and Mr. Robert Porteous
discovered in each other a mutual surprise, and also an element of
delight in their surprise.

"You'll excuse me--but our kitchen flue was stopped up.  A rather
sooty undertaking.  What can I do for you, Captain Sorrell?"

Sorrell was absorbing Mr. Porteous, the squareness and the
muscularity of him, his short, slightly bowed and stalwart legs,
his round face and vast bald head with its butter-coloured halo.
An uncouth, clumsy, powerful, yet intelligent figure, with boyish
and bright blue eyes.

"I hear you take pupils, sir."

"I do when I can get 'em, day pupils."

"I have a boy.  I'm head porter at the Pelican Inn."

"Head porter.  Splendid!"

Mr. Porteous made a movement as of bouncing in his chair.  His
false teeth gleamed.  For years Winstonbury had been trying to
suppress him, to squash him into a decent dullness, but Mr.
Porteous's joy in life was of such a resiliency that the natural
and eager swell of it returned.  To him it was really splendid that
a captain should be a hotel porter.

"How old's the boy?"

"Nearly thirteen.  At present he is at the town school.  It was a
question of funds."

Porteous nodded.

"I know all about that, sir.  Or I shouldn't be using a flue-brush,
hey--what!  What's your idea?"

Sorrell explained his ideas to this round and sympathetic and
vigorous man whose head was bigger than any other head in
Winstonbury.  Mr. Porteous was a learned failure, as the world
understands failure.  His unconventionality and the uncouth vigour
of his exterior had rendered him unacceptable to the gods behind
his God.

"In brief--you want your boy coaching for a good school?"

"That's it."

"Any special subject?"

"He has not developed any special inclination--yet."

"So much the better.  I can give him anything from Sanscrit to the
Differential Calculus.  But you said something about boxing--"

"Yes--but--"

"I can teach him to box."

"You can, sir?"

"Well--I was the middle-weight man of my years at Cambridge.
Knocked out the Dark Blue in the first round--two years running.
He's a Cabinet Minister--to-day."

They smiled at each other.

"I think you are the very man I want, sir.  I don't wish my boy to
be pushed into a groove--"

"Quite so.  I shan't bore him, my dear chap.  I'm never bored.
Light a pipe."

Then came the question of fees.  Sorrell began a little tentatively,
only to find that there was no need for him to be tentative with
Mr. Porteous.

"I like teaching, my dear chap.  I get paid for it.  Fees?  Well,--
what can you afford?"

"Would two guineas a week--?"

"That would satisfy me.  Two and a half hours in the morning and
two in the afternoon.  I may have to go out sometimes, but the boy
can carry on.  Method's the thing.  Now, what about you?"

"How--sir?"

"I shan't be bleeding you--?"

"No.  I can manage two guineas quite well."

"Well,--that's that," said Mr. Porteous; "come and watch me finish
my flue."




CHAPTER XIII



1


So Christopher left the town school, and went daily to Mr.
Porteous's stone house in Gold Hill Lane, and there he began to
learn that which no schoolmaster had ever taught him before--
method.  For this unconventional clergyman was not only a great
scholar, but a born teacher.  He was full of enthusiasms, and his
enthusiasms communicated themselves to Kit.

They sat in a big, bare room on the first floor.  The room had no
carpet; it was lined with books; it had two windows, one of which
looked into a dark and damp garden, and the other into a yard.  The
windows had no curtains.  A long plain deal table, clothless,
stretched from the fireplace to one of the windows.

Kit and Mr. Porteous sat opposite each other, for when Kit was at
work on Latin prose and algebra, Mr. Porteous would be amusing
himself with Einstein's theory or a book of MacDougal's on
psychology.

"Psycho-physical parallelism.  What's that, Sorrell?"

"Don't know, sir."

"As a matter of fact it's rot.  To be able to realize that a theory
is rot saves one a lot of trouble.  Now, what about ten minutes'
boxing?  You haven't hit me yet."

The table would be pushed back, and Christopher--wearing gloves
that looked half as big as his head, would be given the most
practical of demonstrations.  In spite of his fifty-five years Mr.
Porteous was very quick on his feet.

"Better than quadratic equations, Sorrell?"

"A bit, sir."

"Even when I tap you on the nose--like that!  You ought to have
blocked that blow."

So far as Christopher was able to discover there was only one
living creature that could annoy Mr. Porteous and make him lose his
smiling poise, and that creature was the common house-fly.  In his
attitude to the house-fly Mr. Porteous was a thorough pragmatist.
The pink sheen of his bald head seemed to attract the unclean
insects, and with words of wrath he would rise to vigorous attack.
The windows would be closed, and yesterday's paper folded into a
swatting stick, and Mr. Porteous would bound about the room,
flapping and slamming and declaiming.

"Filthy things, Sorrell.  They wipe their feet on your food, and
are sick on your sugar.  Take that, Beelzebub.  Ha, you carrier of
germs!"

He kept it up until no single fly was left alive in the schoolroom,
and then he would sit down with a beaming smile and the air of
having accomplished something, and peace would return.  It was a
peaceful room, a happy room in spite of its austerity.

For Christopher was very sensitive to atmospheres, even more so
than was his father.  He had inherited his mother's strong
physique, and his father's temperament, and in after years he often
looked back to that bare room with its uncarpeted floor and its
kitchen chairs and deal table.  He would remember the ink marks on
the table, and the cracked pane of glass in the window overlooking
the yard--the result of some devastating blow with yesterday's
Daily Mail--the green mould on the bricks of the yard, the greenish
light that seemed to filter down through the great elm.  Mr.
Porteous's room--and the life therein coincided with the last
months of Kit's rather impersonal outlook on life.  The atmosphere
was clear and happy, but a little colourless and cold, for as yet
sex was but vaguely present, no more than a faint glow rising above
the boy's horizon.

Mr. Porteous had attained to mental and physical celibacy.  He
lived in his work and his books and his rotund enthusiasms, in the
Boys' Club which he ran, and to which Christopher was introduced.
As a social force in the polite sense Mr. Porteous was a failure,
for he was not pleasing to women, but in his setting of Kit's feet
upon the path of true knowledge, and in his influence upon many of
the Winstonbury boys, the curate did great work.

He made Christopher play football with the Club boys, and
encouraged him to box with them, and with the gloves Mr. Porteous
taught him a lesson.  Sorrell's son was apt to flinch, not from the
blows, but from physical contact with a less sensitive human.  He
was fastidious, proud, a creature of vivid impressions and strong
feelings.

Porteous noticed it.  There was one particular boy whom Kit seemed
quite unable to tackle--a little, loutish youngster with a face
like a frog.

"Sorrell,--what's the matter with you--when you box with Bugson?"

Kit flushed.

"I don't quite know.  I think it's his face, sir."

"Ugly.  I tell you what it is--you don't like the idea of being hit
on the nose by a boy--well--what shall we say--a boy whom you
despise."

Kit's colour deepened.

"That's true, sir.  It's silly,--but directly you put me up to box
Bugson I feel helpless--."

"You flinch, or rather--the pride in you flinches.  You must get
over that, Sorrell.  Personally I don't like young Bugson; I don't
like his name or his face or his nature.  But we have to put up
with the Bugsons.  They are here--there--everywhere.  You'll meet
cohorts of them--later.  But don't you see, Sorrell--that it is
foolish to let oneself be upset by the Bugsons.  Go in--and hit.
Don't flinch from a thing because it's ugly--and makes you feel
squeamish.  We oughtn't to give way to the Bugsons."

Christopher took these words of wisdom to heart.  He boxed the
frog-faced boy two nights later, and though smiling, he let his
natural hatred overcome his sensitive impulse towards recoil.  Kit
was a strong boy, and capable of explosive and emotional bursts of
vigour.  After that evening he had no fear of Bugson.  He had
punched the frog face, and punched it hard.

To his father he drew even closer during these months.  Sorrell had
each alternate Sunday free, and he and Christopher would start off
on some expedition into the country or to some neighbouring town.
They did a great deal of talking.  Mr. Porteous had brought no
overclouding of the happy candour with which they could look into
each other's eyes.

"No secrets, Kit."

"No, pater."

"Porteous tells me you are getting on very well."

"He makes things look different,--interesting.  He'll tell you a
funny tale in the middle of the 5th Prop."

"Jam on the bread."

"Besides--he seems so keen, pater, that he makes one keen."

As to the future Sorrell was very frank with the boy.  He discussed
it with him,--not as a father--but as a fellow of Kit's own age who
had had the benefit of a man's experience.

"It is no use being a smug.  When you have found out what you want
to do--then go at it like blazes."

"It will come,--I suppose," said Kit.  "Mr. Porteous says I'm not
to trouble my head--beyond letting him fill it.  But--then--you
see, pater,--I know you want me to be good at something."

"I want you to be good at the thing which will pull you.  Lots of
chaps don't get the chance to do the thing they want to do.  Just
bread-and-butter jobs."

There were occasions when Sorrell went to smoke a pipe with Robert
Porteous, and the more he saw of the man the more he liked and
respected him.  As yet the tutor had not discovered any special
aptitude in Christopher, or as he put it "No monkey tricks," but he
had discovered virtues that were much more important.

"The boy can't help doing well, my dear chap.  He's got grit.  He
doesn't slink.  He is one of those boys who develop--an early sense
of responsibility.  It's quite quaint in him,--no--not a bit
priggish.  He realizes what you are doing,--and I believe the
ruling thought at the back of his mind,--no--don't let's say
'thought'--let's say feeling--is that he is not going to let you
down.  You are a great man to him."

"I'm an hotel porter--!"

"The time will come when he will think even more of the hotel
porter."

"I hope he will."

"Sorrell," said Mr. Porteous with emphasis, "surely--you don't
doubt it?"

Sorrell was looking out of the window into the dusky little garden.

"Women," he said, "one has to remember--that some day--there may be
a woman."

For he had been fore-feeling these possibilities very strongly
during the last few months.  Lying with Kit on some hillside or
under a tree, he would became aware of the boy as a vigorous and
separate personality.  He was on the edge--too--of the great
adventurous sea of sex.

"I suppose that some day," Sorrell thought, "a woman will take him
away from me.  That's life.  Have I any right to complain?  Isn't
it my job to make life as full and as rich for him as I can?  But
what sort of woman will it be?  That's his affair.  I'm not going
to be the fool father, throaty and pompous.  But I hope it will be
a woman who won't want to leave the hotel porter at the bottom of
the back stairs."

Needless to say he did not speak of this to Christopher, for when
sex dawns certain reticences are born with it.  The fig leaf is
symbolical.



2


Late in the autumn the most unexpected of coincidences emphasized
Sorrell's sense of the imminence of woman.

About four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon a big silver-coloured
car with red wheels turned into the space behind the posts and
chains.  It had been raining and the hood of the car was up.  A man
in a leather coat emerged, a man with a ginger-coloured moustache,
blurs of redness on each cheek, and the angry eyes of the heavy
drinker.  Sorrell, who was standing by one of the lounge windows,
went out to meet him.

"Got a room here?"

"Double or single, sir?"

"Double."

"Yes,--on the first floor, sir."

"Right.  Where's the garage?"

"Round to the left, sir.  Shall I bring in the luggage?"

"Yes,--I'll go and have a look at the room."

"There is the office, sir.  I expect it will be No. 7."

Sorrell went out towards the car.  A woman was seated in it, but it
was dark under the hood, and he had begun to speak to her before he
realized who she was.

"The gentleman has decided to stay, madam.  The luggage--"

The woman in the car was Christopher's mother.

She was the least embarrassed of the two.  In fact she had
recognized Sorrell and had adjusted herself to meet the situation
while he was approaching the car.  She appeared amused.

"Well--fancy meeting--you--here!  Are you the porter?"

"I am."

She had changed very little, save that she looked more highly
coloured, and more expensively dressed.  Fatter, too, but Dora
Sorrell had always been a solid creature.  He remembered in a flash
that it was her fine solidity, her glow, the fineness of skin and
flesh that had first attracted him.  She was beautifully built.  In
the old days he had often though of her as a ship cleaving life
with her bosom.  And now her blue eyes looked at him ironically,
yet with just a trace of compassion.

"Do you want to be introduced to my second?"

He retorted with a question.

"How long are you staying?"

"O,--just the night.  Don't get windy, Stephen.  Arthur does not
know you from Adam.  We can leave it at that.  He's coming."

Sorrell got hold of the two leather suit-cases, and carried them
into the hotel.  His successor, in passing him, had spoken of a
trunk on the luggage grid, and Sorrell sent Hulks out for the
trunk.  The incident had disturbed him, perhaps because of the
surprise of it, though emotionally this chance meeting with
Christopher's mother had been negative.

But the rampant sex of her!  Those bold, clear eyes, the nose
broadening slightly at the nostrils, the luscious yet shrewd mouth!
She was the very essence of sex, and in the mother Sorrell had seen
the physical prototype of the son, and it was this impression of
her sex, forced upon him after all these years, that had disturbed
him.  Would Kit inherit those impulses from his mother, that
mixture of passion and shrewd, worldwise contriving?

The second husband had entered his name in the visitors' book.

"Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Sampits--London."

Some time after tea Sorrell strolled across to the garage and
looked at the silver-coloured car with the red wheels.  It was a
Heartwell, one of the de luxe machines, and most sumptuously
fitted.  Ponds,--the garage man, came and stood at Sorrell's elbow.

"Some bus?"

Sorrell nodded a meditative head.

"How much would that cost?"

"Round about twelve hundred.  Don't she glisten?"

It was evident that Dora had not mismanaged the business side of
her second romance.  She had obtained material self-expression, and
it had been the lack of it that had caused the inevitable rift in
her first marriage.  She was not a bad woman, only a highly sexed
one, and Sorrell had never satisfied her sex and its various
desires; he had realized that there had been much that had seemed
lovable in Dora.  For the first four years they had been very happy
together.

Yet her second husband was obviously a hard liver; a full-fleshed,
damn-your-eyes sort of man.  Generous, no doubt, ostentatiously
generous.  They suited each other.

It occurred to Sorrell to wonder whether they had any children

Also, did the mother ever think of the boy?

He hoped not.

Sorrell saw nothing more of the pair until half an hour before
dinner.  He was putting coal on the lounge fire when he heard a
woman's voice behind him.

"Can you sell me some stamps?"

He turned quickly.

"Certainly, madam."

She was in evening dress, a black and gold affair, and her fine
throat and shoulders showed soft and white.  The big lounge was
nearly empty.  Her sang-froid was perfect.  She watched Sorrell
take out his pocket-book.  No one was very near to them.  She threw
one sweeping and easy glance around her.

"Thank you.  A nice place you have got here.  Is he--here?"

Sorrell's eyes met hers.

"No, madam--."

"At school--perhaps?"

"Yes."

She smiled faintly, instantly divining his antagonism and the cause
of it.

"Of course--it is no use my asking you--."

"None at all--."

Sampits came into the lounge to find the porter putting away his
pocket-book, and his wife placing stamps on two or three letters.
Sampits' shirt front bulged.  The sides of his trousers were widely
braided.

"I say--can you get us a couple of drinks?"

"Certainly, sir."

"What's it to be, Do?  An orange cocktail?"

"Yes, that will do me."

"Very good, sir."

Sorrell had no further speech with Kit's mother, and the silver car
carried them off next day, yet when Sorrell placed the two suit-
cases in the back seat and Sampits was paying Ponds for petrol,
Dora beckoned to her first husband.  She slipped a five-pound note
into his hand, and nodded meaningly.  Her nod meant "The boy."

Sorrell went in thoughtfully, with the note crumpled in his hand.
He met Hulks' rosy face clapped against the side of a trunk that
was balanced on his shoulder.  Hulks had just taken unto himself a
girl, one of the waitresses.

When Hulks returned from strapping the trunk on to a car Sorrell
gave him the five-pound note.

"A swanker gave me this.  You can have the lot, Bert."

"Me?  Why?"

"My contribution to the ring, you know.  And the best of luck, old
lad."

Hulks stared at him.

"Was it the bloke with the silver car?"

"Yes."

"Why, he gave me five bob.  He starts getting squiffy pretty early.
But--I say--"

"You keep it, Bert.  It is a little return for the way you have
backed me up."



3



Some time in November news that was more disturbing than the
meteoric passing of his divorced wife brought back the little
intent frown to Sorrell's forehead.  Mr. Roland called him one
evening into his sitting-room.  There was whisky, a syphon, and
glasses on the table, and two armchairs were drawn up before the
fire.

"I want to talk about things, Stephen.  Help yourself and sit
down."

Roland's room was full of bachelor comforts, but Sorrell, as he
helped himself to a whisky and soda, had a feeling that Mr. Roland
was about to speak of uncomfortable things.  For there were certain
doubts that of late had grown to a distant shadowiness in his mind.
Sorrell was a man of detail.  He kept in his little note-book a
daily record of the number of people who passed through the hotel.

"We are not paying our way, Stephen."

"I wondered, sir."

The soda from the syphon hissed into Mr. Roland's glass.  He was as
deliberate as usual, but his quiet blue eyes had a calculating
look.  Sorrell, in front of the fire, felt a chilly sensation
trickling down his spine.

"You are a man with a head--.  Besides, one wants to talk sometimes.
Have you any idea--?"

"We have never been quite full up, sir."

"No."

"And the figures have been dropping."

"I expected that.  Look here,--I have been working out a table of
averages.  A statistician could draw a nice series of curves from
them.  Anyhow--it shows our position pretty clearly."

He picked up a paper and crossing to the fire, sat down, his glass
in his hand.

"I find that with forty out of our sixty rooms occupied we cover
expenses.  Our summer average was 47, our autumn 36, our present
29.  Take three four-monthly periods.  That gives an average of 37,
which means that we are losing roughly at the rate of three rooms a
day."

"Do you count double and single rooms, sir?"

"I have allowed for that."

"Well, is that so bad, sir, for the first year?"

"No,--but is our winter average going to stand at 29?  I look at it
like this.  We ought to be full for six months, and half full for
the other six months.  That would give an average of 45.  Five--
daily--on the right side."

"I see that.  But--next--season--?"

"That's the problem."

"What about cutting expenses?"

"I don't want to do that.  Cheese-paring.  All wrong.  One ought to
go out for the generous success.  I hate doing things meanly."

Sorrell sat staring at the fire, as though to pluck inspiration
from the glow of it.  He heard Mr. Roland say that he had
contemplated the possibility of running the Pelican at a loss for
two years, but if at the end of two years the balance was still
against him he would have to consider ending the adventure.

Sorrell seemed to see the old gulf opening again, and swallowing
himself and all those dearly conceived schemes.  Kit's education
sacrificed.  Yes, and after all the desperate fights that he had
fought upon the stairs, and his hard-won victories over the lioness
and the bull.

"What about more advertising, sir?"

"I shall try it."

"The slack time in the winter is the trouble.  Couldn't you run the
place for hunting people?"

Roland's blue eyes seemed to focus the idea.

"Sorrell,--that's worth thinking about.  But--what we want is
something original,--even though it is something quite silly."

"Yes,--something original, sir,--something to get the place known."

Sorrell went to his room in a gloomy mood, worried by the thought
of slipping back from the foothold he had established.

A startling advertisement!  If only it were possible to erect a
huge stentophone somewhere, and set it shouting "Stop at the
Pelican, Winstonbury."

But would the public listen?  Were people such sheep as they
seemed?  Was not the Englishman still somewhat of a person who
resented being shouted at?

There might be subtler ways,--but what were they?




CHAPTER XIV



1


The number of the Pelican bedrooms occupied during the winter
months averaged twenty-three.  Mr. Roland was losing money
steadily, and Sorrell saw the old black gulf reopening under his
feet.  Moreover, his income from tips had fallen by half, and after
paying Mr. Porteous and Mrs. Garland he had little to boast of in
the way of savings.

Yet his dread of disaster made him work the harder.  His
thoroughness was fanatical, nor was he the only member of the
Pelican's staff who had no desire to seek work elsewhere.  An
enlightened self interest reinforced the popularity of Thomas
Roland, and Mrs. Marks and Fanny Garland were every whit as keen as
Sorrell to make the Pelican a place of comfort and of efficiency.
As a matter of fact Tom Roland had received but one solitary
complaint during the course of six months, and this was from an
American who thought that he had bought the earth.

The responsible members of the staff knew nearly as much as Sorrell
did, and Fanny Garland, in her abrupt and cheerful way, put her
philosophy into words.

"It must pay if Roland holds on long enough.  I've been in a dozen
places--on and off--and not one of them was a patch on the Pelican.
Charged their people much the same prices too.  You should have
seen some of the kitchens and the bedrooms!  All I can say is if
people don't know the difference between a place like this--and the
ordinary take it or leave it pub--"

"People are such easy fools," said Mrs. Marks.  "They go on taking
the same second-rate stuff,--and grumbling.  Honesty doesn't always
pay."

"It depends on who you are dealing with," Sorrell put in.  "Mr.
Roland's idea is to run a place properly for the people who can
appreciate it."

"Ah,--there you are!  But the wrong people have got the money, my
lad.  Why,--look at some of the lot I had last night.  Didn't know
how to feed themselves properly.  You have only got to shove an
underdone steak and some chipped potatoes and a glass of beer under
their noses.  They're not educated up to our standard."

Sorrell laughed.  There was a lot of wisdom in Fanny's words, for
the Englishman can be such a creature of good-natured inertia that
he will accept what is second-rate and not trouble to encourage the
enterprising person who offers him something better.  It is a
mistake to offer first-class material to second-class minds.

Fanny would have her say.

"We have to cater for the swank crowd, and the grocers and the
butchers who can afford to chuck money about and mean to do it.  If
a place is too gentlemanly it makes 'em feel uncomfortable.  There
aren't any gentlefolk these days."

"A few, my dear," said Sorrell.

"Precious few.  Not enough for us to live on.  Our job is to get
the fat people in the big cars, the people with plenty of money and
no manners.  What's the matter?  We might be able to teach 'em
manners.  Besides, you can always put your tongue in your cheek."

Sorrell wondered if Fanny Garland was right.  He went so far as to
put her points before Mr. Roland, but Mr. Roland would not alter
his atmosphere, or attempt to adapt it to a postwar society.

"She says we are too gentlemanly, sir.  I understand what she
means.  Too much like a good old club in Pall Mall."

"Quite.  But I am not going to adjust--downwards--Stephen.  I won't
do it.  The other people can adjust upwards--or stay away.  Besides,
hang it all, we give them the best--"

"Well, sir, a man who has left the sty rather late--may feel a bit
uneasy in a drawing-room."

"I know what you mean.  If we are all 'bar' and I had two or three
fluffy-haired fascinators and a 'loud speaker,' and went about in
my shirt sleeves with a grinning alcoholic face?  Quite so.  Making
the new aristocracy feel at home.  Not for me, Stephen."

"I feel the same, sir,--but then--"

"I know.  You have got that boy of yours.  We'll hang on as we
are.  I don't believe--yet--that giving people the best--means
bankruptcy."

The spring came and the Pelican's average rose gradually to 33.
The Easter holidays took it to 57, and Sorrell's forehead began to
clear, but a week later the average had fallen to 39.  Yet Sorrell
happened to know that the George and the Black Bear, two very
indifferent inns in Winstonbury itself, were doing good trade.
Gossip reached him.  The tobacconist from whom he bought his
tobacco, a rosy and garrulously cheerful person, asked him bluntly
whether "Roland hadn't bitten off more than he could chew?"

Sorrell said something sarcastic.

"That depends on what the public wants."

"The public knows what it wants," said the fat man arrogantly.

"The trouble is that it doesn't."

"Well,--I'm not worrying.  It's not my funeral."

He beamed.  He appeared to regard anyone else's failure as a
tribute to his own self-complacency.

"Too swanky, you know,--too refined.  Hardly trouble to serve a
caller with a drink.  A regular snob-hole I call it."

Sorrell guessed that certain unwelcomed commercial travellers had
been talking.  Roland had offended a large and mobile class of
customers in closing the commercial room.

A snob-hole!

Yes,--but wasn't snobbery of a sort universal?  Refine it slightly
and it became a useful aspiration.  Carry it still higher and it
shows itself as man's love of mystery, beauty, queerness, something
a little different from himself.  Snobbery is the footstool at the
feet of reverence.

To put it in the language of the journalist--"What the Pelican
needed was to become the Motorists' 'Mecca,' the goal of the
sentimental, sensation-loving public, a place where some
astoundingly romantic or astoundingly sordid thing had happened.
If you could put up a notice across the road 'The notorious Nemo
murdered his French mistress here,' or 'It was here that the Bishop
stayed when he spent the night with a Lady from London.'"

Sorrell's mood was growing cynical.  Failure, undeserved failure,
would be both bitter and absurd.



2


Yet the Pelican was to have her picture on the illustrated pages of
the daily papers, and Sorrell, when he looked back in after days on
the ironical splurge of life's coincidences, was moved to a little,
mischievous laughter.

It happened in May.  A light blue two-seater car drew up
tentatively outside the hotel, and a neat, sallow-faced man with a
smudge of black hair on his upper lip, got out and approached the
porch.  Behind him, in the car, he had left one of the most
pleasantly pretty creatures Sorrell had ever seen, a soft, short-
nosed, merry, insouciant, child-eyed little lady who looked out on
life wisely from under the brim of her black "cloche" hat.  She had
an air of extraordinary unaffectedness, as though she had come
straight out of a convent, and found life wonderful, and innocent
and good.

The neat and sprightly man with the minute black moustache
addressed himself to Sorrell.  "Is the manager in?"

"I think so, sir."

Thomas Roland was at the piano, and since the owner of the blue car
had asked to see him privately, Sorrell took the stranger to
Roland's room.  The man's face was vaguely familiar to Sorrell, but
he could not remember where he had seen him before.  During the
war--perhaps?  He returned to the lounge so as to be ready to deal
with the two light trunks strapped to the luggage grid of the blue
car, should he of the little moustache and the quick and restless
eyes decide to put up at the Pelican.

Five minutes later Sorrell saw Roland and the stranger mounting the
stairs together, and when they reappeared Roland was laughing, and
offering his cigarette-case to the visitor.

"That's quite all right.  I'll have everything arranged.  Stephen,
will you take this gentleman's luggage up to No. 1."

The blue car was put away in the garage, and the two young things
vanished into the garden, where Fanny Garland was told to take tea
out to them under one of the chestnut trees.  Sorrell was
redescending the stairs after carrying up the luggage when he saw
Roland beckoning to him from the end of the passage.

"Stephen--"

"Sir?"

"One moment; come to my room."

Roland was smiling.

"Guess who our new visitors are."

"Honeymooners."

"Well, yes,--but rather important honeymooners.  They are here
incognito.  Guess."

"I seem to have seen the man's face."

"I expect you have.  Ever heard of Ethel and Duck?"

"Not Ethel Frobisher and Duncan Scott?  Why--that's the man of
course."

"Just so.  The wedding has been a world event.  But you wouldn't
expect a couple of cinema super-stars to be running away from
publicity."

"I could understand it,--personally."

"That's the position, Stephen.  Scott put it to me--straight up.
'We want to get away from the confounded reporters and their
cameras.  We're just fed up with it.  We want to be our two selves
for a week.  See?'"

Sorrell nodded.

"Don't tell any of the others, Stephen.  I am fixing them up a
little private suite.  I have promised Scott that he shall have
peace here."

Sorrell understood Roland's laughter, for it was kind laughter,
even though these two immensely rich young people could have bought
the unprofitable Pelican Hotel and thought no more of it than of
buying a box of chocolates.  Bedrooms No. 1 and 2 were turned into
a little private suite.  All meals were sent up to the two lovers,
the World's Pet Lovers, for that was what they were.

Sorrell confessed to human curiosity.  He was interested in these
two young things who were so bored by the world's frenzied favours
that they had fled away together into the green deeps of an English
countryside.  He watched them in the garden.  They appeared to him
quite ordinary young people, and very much in love with each other
and that,--in spite of the fact that Duck had been making public
love to Ethel for the last three years, playing the gallant rescuer
in all sorts of situations, and posing in a sentimental embrace at
the end of some hundreds of reels.  To Sorrell it all seemed
incredible--and rather absurd.  That it should have been necessary
for special police to be detailed to control the crowds when these
two arrived at a London railway terminus or departed from one!
Thousands of people scuffling, and pushing and cheering, men with
cameras climbing on other men's shoulders; girls throwing flowers!
There was but one other person in the world who inspired the same
furore.  The World's Pet Lovers!  Little Ethel Frobisher making the
romance seem "his" to the milk-boy, the clerk, and the collier.
Duck, filling factory girls with the delight of being loved just
like that.

As Mr. Roland had put it--"The wedding had been a world event."
And then--the two had disappeared, slipped into that little blue
car and fled, yearning wisely to be themselves, to be able to sit
under a tree and feel natural--or to feel nothing at all.  No
cameras, no crowds.

The suggestive temptation struck Sorrell with mischievous
abruptness.  Obviously, the human heart of the world would not be
content to be left in the steps of the church.  It would be crying
to the purveyors of news--"The honeymoon!  We want to hear about
the honeymoon.  Where--are--Ethel and Duck?  Where?  We want to
know."

Sorrell stood leaning against his porter's desk, scribbling
nothings on an odd piece of paper.

If it were known that Ethel Frobisher and Duncan Scott were
staying--or hiding in the Pelican at Winstonbury?  What a coup for
the press-man or the photographer!  What an advertisement for the
Pelican!



3


Sorrell was tempted, and so much was he tempted that he knocked
that evening on Mr. Roland's door.  He had a smile on his face, a
mischievous and surreptitious smile.

"Has it occurred to you, sir--?  The two upstairs?"

"In what way, Stephen?"

Sorrell had closed the door, and was holding the handle.  "Suppose
it were known--?  I know it is a silly world,--but the news would
be all over the country in two days.  And look at this--?"

With one hand he unfurled the chief page of a popular morning
daily, and Mr. Roland was able to read the headlines at a distance
of five yards.


                    THE WORLD'S LOVERS MARRIED.

                           GREAT SCENES.

              WHERE HAVE ETHEL AND DUCK GONE FOR THEIR

                            HONEYMOON?


Roland rubbed his deliberate chin.

"Yes, quite so, Stephen," he said:  "I see the idea.  I suppose a
million or two people are interested in this honeymoon.  The
mysterious and romantic disappearance of the World's Lovers!  But
it can't be done."

"But what a chance--!"

"I know.  I suppose we shall never have such another chance of
getting the old Pelican up in the sky like a Daily Mail smoke
advertisement,--but it can't be done."

"Not if--I did it?"

"Stephen, you Jesuitical rogue!  No, I promised Scott to keep
quiet.  He's a very decent little chap.  I had dinner with them."

"I see--"

"They asked me.  They have a sense of fun.  I enjoyed my dinner.
And Mrs. Scott has a nice taste in music.  We had our coffee down
here, and she played Debussy to us.  You see?"

Sorrell folded up his sheet of paper.

"It's a pity,--but you are quite right, sir.  How long are they
staying?"

"A week."

"Well,--towards the end of the week there wouldn't be any harm in
getting a local photographer to take a few snapshots.  Besides--I
happen to know the reporter who sends up any local news to the
Daily Sun--.  It would be a magnificent coup for him, and for us--"

Roland looked up at him with droll and ironical gravity.

"The man of ideas!  You ought to be a publicity agent, Stephen.
But it is worth considering.  I can't see how it can hurt anybody.
Wait--I'll go up and ask them."

He did, and Sorrell, following him half way up the first flight of
stairs heard amused voices, and a girl's laughter.  It seemed that
the World's Lovers had a sense of fun.  Moreover, the man who was
hiding them deserved his reward.

Roland caught Sorrell on the stairs, and behind Sorrell Mr. Roland
saw the face of Sorrell's son.

"Nothing like frankness, Stephen."

"They are willing--?"

"Yes,--I have permission to introduce a tame photographer on the
sixth day.  They are rather amused at the idea of our getting some
reflected glory.  When they leave here--no one will know where they
are going."

Sorrell stood rubbing his right cheek.  He was visualizing other
possibilities.

"It will be all over the world.  Their 'first hiding-place on the
great honeymoon.'  We could have one or two of the plates enlarged
and hung up--"

"Stephen," said Mr. Roland, "I believe you would like me to hang a
banner across the road.  'This is the place where Duck and Ethel
stayed on their honeymoon.'"

Sorrell looked at him solemnly.

"So few good chances--.  It is pretty beastly to have been down in
the mud.  Is there anything to be ashamed of in seizing one's
chances?"

"I know," said Tom Roland,--"I know."




CHAPTER XV



1


Ethel Frobisher and Duncan Scott were peculiarly wise young people,
and not in the least like the "Duck and Ethel" of the shop-boy's
world, wonderful creatures who lived in an atmosphere of champagne
and motor-cars, yachts and fur coats, Monte Carlo and mystery.  The
common man dreams of a heaven paved with gold; the wise man would
be well content with a heaven of flowers.  Nor is it unnatural that
the poor, envious industrial crowd should clutch at material
things.  And, no doubt, the shop-girl viewed Ethel Frobisher as a
sort of super-courtezan, loaded with sensual love and diamonds, a
gorgeous butterfly, the symbol of all the garish and sensational
life that exists only in the mind of the poor little materialist.

Scott was a Balliol man; and had been a schoolmaster, and Ethel
Frobisher had come from a Somersetshire parsonage.  Both had a
sense of humour, and an ironical appreciation of "fame" as it had
befallen themselves.  They laughed over it.  There was nothing
American in their mental make-up.

To "Ethel and Duck" Mr. Roland brought other refreshments than the
Pelican could offer, and they accepted him with delight and a sense
of happy relief.  Escaping from a world of cads and of bounders it
was pleasant to meet this placid and humorous person to whom it was
not necessary to explain the fact that a bowl of roses, or a piece
of music, or a rolling puppy might be utterly satisfying things.

They spent the evenings in Roland's den, talking and making music,
and laughing at life and each other.

"Guess my wife's ambition, Roland?"

It was to have a garden and a paddock and a small car and two dogs,
and to grow Darwin tulips and Hybrid Teas and Phloxes, and to go up
to town three days in every month, and never to enter a picture-
house.

"That dream ought to be realized--rather easily."

"We are giving ourselves another three years,--and then we shall
retire."

"And break the great public's heart?"

"Before it breaks ours," said the wife.

Duncan was going to grow fruit.  In some ways they were most
amazingly unsophisticated.  Fame had disagreed with them, as too
many sweets disagree with a healthy child, or too much wine with a
work-loving man.  Both were the happy victims of an incurable
simplicity.  They had had a surfeit of sensation, of notoriety, of
cheap splendour; they had come to resent being regarded as the
spoilt darlings of Demos.  It was their very simplicity, their
vital sense of fun that had made them beloved.

Roland pointed this out, when their child-like intimacies included
him in their philosophy of life.

"But--ought you to retire?"

They gave him to understand that it was not "the job" that bored
them, but the whole atmosphere in which they were expected to work
and play and breathe.  It was too horribly artificial, and tainted,
and commercialized.  They had made up their minds to leave it
before the taint spread to their souls.

"For--it does--you know," said the wife; "you may say to yourself
'It shan't'--but it does.  Imperceptibly.  Like autumn in a garden--.
Before you know where you are everything is rotten."

Scott had his own peculiarities.  He hated what he called "Being
messed about."  He had a passion for doing the small things of life
for himself, tinkering at his car, making his own early cup of tea.
To him a "valeted world" was his idea of Hades.  He hated crowds,
he--the crowd's film-hero.  He liked old clothes and old books, and
an old pipe.

"And they expect me to smoke a pipe studded with diamonds--and to
dress like their idea of a Bond Street lord!  A sort of bastard
creature, a mixture of a duke--an actor and a jockey."

They made Roland feel very fatherly towards them, as towards two
fortunate but unspoilt children.  He bequeathed to the wife his
piano and all the flowers in his garden, and to the husband his own
little lock-up garage where Duncan could play about in private with
the works of the blue two-seater.  He provided them with a luncheon
basket when they went picnicking.  The vases in room No. 1 were
full of his flowers.

Bowden complained.

"That there young woman's bin at my toolips."

"I gave her permission."

"Why can't she let 'em grow where they was meant to grow?"

"Because she wants to paint them, Bowden."

"Paint 'em?  Paint Clara Butt and William Pitt?  Ain't they good
enough?"

"Portraits, Bowden?"

"Yar,--why can't she let 'em alone.  Treadin' on the beds--too."

Roland, laughing, told the little lady that she was in disgrace.

"My gardener doesn't approve of your painting the lily."

"I'm so sorry.  I only took a flower here and there.  The next
time--I'll ask him.  What's his name?"

"He goes by the name of Bowden."

She did dare to ask "His Surliness" for tulips.

"Please, Mr. Bowden,--Mr. Roland says that I may have three or four
tulips.  Would you cut them for me?  I don't want to spoil your
beds."

Bowden cut her a dozen, which was rank treachery to all the grumpy
ideals of his gardener's soul.  For when Ethel smiled, the whole
world smiled with her, and her smile went all over the world.

Such was their honeymoon, the simplest of affairs, a kind of rustic
reaction from the glare of the studio and the searchlights of the
Press.  They had played pathos to the public, and it so happened
that they were to play pathos to each other, and to touch the great
heart of the world--in reality, as well as in romance.

Sorrell saw them start out on that sunny May morning, with a
luncheon basket in the dicky.  A dilapidated looking lorry was
lumbering Londonwards, and the blue car overtook it, just where the
broad straight road began to curve, and a row of Lombardy poplars
raised their spires against the blue of the distant hills.  In
fact, Sorrell saw the thing happen not two hundred yards from the
hotel.  He heard the note of Scott's horn and saw the grey bulk of
the lorry swerve suddenly across the road.  It caught the blue car
amid-ships, and drove it against one of the poplars.

Scott was slightly cut about the face with broken glass, but with
his little wife things were different.  The lorry had smashed the
side of the car, and the radiator had struck her.

Sorrell ran.

But before he reached the place Scott had got his wife out of the
wrecked car and was carrying her towards the hotel.

He looked as he had never looked on the films, with his partner
lying like a wounded bird in his arms.

"Man,--get a doctor, 'phone,--hurry."

And the driver of the lorry, a man with a face like "Old Bill," was
standing in the middle of the road, staring at the wreckage, and
repeating the same words over and over again, though there was no
one there to hear them.

"The bloomin' link-rod dropped.  I can't think how it came to
'appen.  Just when they was passin' me--too.  The bloomin' link-
rod--"



2


This accident on the London road within half a mile of Winstonbury
was to give the Pelican an advertisement such as Sorrell had never
dreamed of.

He had mounted a bicycle and ridden into the town for a doctor,--
two doctors.  The whole place was in a flurry, and when the
Winstonbury doctors had seen the little lady and taken counsel with
her husband there were 'phone messages and telegrams to London.
For half an hour Sorrell was standing by the telephone with Duncan
Scott fidgeting and smoking cigarettes beside him.

"Through yet?"

"No, sir."

"O,--damn it--!  Offer the girl a five-pound note, anything--"

"Through now, sir."

Scott grabbed the receiver from him.

"Hallo--hallo, is that Sir Magnus?--It is?  Thank God--.  We have
had a smash.  The doctors--here,--pretty gloomy.  Could you come
down at once?  Me?  No, my wife--Ethel.--What?  You will come?
O,--that's great--.  At once.  They're afraid--."

With all these comings and going, these alarms and anguishes, the
inevitable truth filtered out.  No one thought of concealing it,
and two hours after the accident had happened Sorrell was caught by
a local reporter.

"I say--is it a fact?"

"What?"

"The injured lady is Ethel Frobisher?"

"It is a fact.  They were here on their honeymoon."

"Great Scott--!  If I'd known--.  Here's a scoop!"

The reporter dashed out to examine the site of the accident, and to
interview the lorry driver who was still moping at the side of the
road, and Sorrell thought no more of him for the moment.  His self
and its affairs were obscured by his human involvement in the
morning's tragedy.  He had seen the little lady carried in and up
the stairs by a man with a face whose whiteness was streaked with
red.

Sir Magnus Ord came down by car.  It seemed that the case was as
serious as it could be, and Ord wished to move the little lady to
the quietest room in the hotel, away from the road and overlooking
the garden.  It was arranged.  People moved out to give place to
her.  Two nurses arrived from Winstonbury.  A little crowd of
interested humans began to move out from Winstonbury, to gather
round the wrecked car and to stare at the Pelican windows.  Hulks
came to tell Sorrell that he had found three men taking photographs
in the garden, and what was he to do about it?

By eight o'clock, when the Winstonbury shops had closed, a
considerable crowd stippled the white road and the broad grass
verges.  Sorrell found his son sitting on one of the black chains,
a little figure by itself, youthfully interested.

"Is she going to die, pater?"

"How did you hear about it, Kit?"

"Oh, everybody's talking about it.  I saw her in The Great Love--
you know.  Only two weeks ago, pater.  Fanny Garland took me."

"I suppose it depends on the doctors."

"I think--it must be rather fine to be a doctor," said the boy,
reflectively.

The Winstonbury Evening Argus began the great game of "headlines."


      DUCK AND ETHEL IN GRAVE MOTOR SMASH AT WINSTONBURY.


But the Evening Argus' hoot was a mere rustic bleat when the London
press took up the cry; Sorrell became a student of "headlines."


             TERRIBLE ACCIDENT TO ETHEL FROBISHER.

             TRAGIC ENDING TO THE GREAT HONEYMOON.

        THE WHOLE WORLD GRIEVES WITH THE WORLD'S LOVER.


By mid-day Sorrell was able to count some forty cars strung along
the side of the road between the Lombardy poplars and the Pelican.
The number steadily increased, and so did the noise they made when
the later arrivals had to find room somewhere and began to use the
space beside the inn as a field of manoeuvre.  People crowded into
the hotel,--and asked to be given lunch.  Knots of them stood
staring at the piece of grass where the accident had happened, and
from which the crumpled car had been removed.  The bark of one of
the poplars had been torn, and from the gash curious people pulled
fragments of splintered wood.  Even the hotel garden was invaded.
Roland found a lot of women staring up at the bedroom windows and
talking in loud voices.

"That's it,--that's her window.  I saw the nurse--."

They walked over the flower beds.

Roland lost his temper.  He went out to them.

"Haven't you ladies any sense of decency?"

He cleared them out, and had the garden doors locked and the gate
chained,--but when the garden had achieved silence the lounge
became like Babel.  People were standing there as though it were
the deck of a channel steamer, and the passage leading to the
dining-room the gangway to the quay.

Roland stood on the stairs.

"Ladies and gentlemen--"

No one paid the least attention, and he had to shout.

"Ladies and gentlemen--may I be permitted to remind you that a
woman is--dying.  A little silence, please--.  If you will go out
by that door--."

With Sorrell and Hulks to help him he got the lounge cleared, and
he ordered the hotel doors to be locked.

"Hulks, get a chair and sit down by that door.  The only people you
will allow in or out are the people staying here."

The noise and the hustle then concentrated themselves outside the
hotel.  Cars were drawn up two deep, with a central passage between
them through which the passing traffic sorted itself out slowly.
Roland rang up the Police Inspector at Winstonbury.

"Will you come and clear this road.  We have a mob of cars and
people here.  And what we want is--silence."

The Inspector came out in person, with a couple of constables, and
the road was cleared--and the traffic kept on the move.  And yet
though persuasion was used, human and reasonable persuasion, people
stood backed at a little distance like cattle turning stupidly to
stare, and passing cars would slow up and attempt to stop outside
the hotel.

Roland stood inside the locked front door with his hands in his
pockets.

"Here's your nice--sensational--civilization," he said to Sorrell.
"Cattle--!"

"Cattle can read, sir."

"Damn it--let us give them something to read."

During the afternoon a ladder was reared against the great cross-
beam supporting the sign of the Pelican, and Albert Hulks ascended
the ladder and hung up two boards so that travellers from west and
east could read what was printed upon them.


                       SILENCE--PLEASE.

                        ILLNESS--HERE.

                     THIS HOTEL IS CLOSED.

                     PLEASE PASS--QUIETLY.


The appeal had considerable effect.



3


The Press of the country had resumed control of the lives of "Ethel
and Duck," and the autocrat of the Daily Sun, having heard of the
crowds and of Mr. Roland's notice-boards, dared to admonish his
readers.


                     GIVE ETHEL A CHANCE.


The illustrated pages of the various papers produced photographs of
the wrecked car, and of the poplar tree with the wound on its trunk
indicated by a black cross.  There were pictures of the Pelican
Inn, and of the crowded road, and of Sir Magnus Ord leaving his
car.  Sorrell read what the driver of the motor lorry had to say
about the accident, and what a local garage proprietor thought
about it, and what he himself was supposed to have said about it.
One paper produced a photograph of Thomas Roland--"The Man who
asked for Silence."  Gentlemen of the press were discovered
entering the hotel by back doors, and even by a passage window, and
one adventurer was found outside the door of Ethel's room, waiting
to question one of the nurses.

Scott, slipping out noiselessly with that tense, stiff, patched
face of his, walked into the gatherer of news.

"Excuse me, sir, but how--?"

"What do you want--?"

"I'm a journalist, sir."

"O--hell," said the husband softly, "can't you people let us
alone?"

For there was just a little flicker of hope fluttering like a bird
in that silent room.  The flame still lived, and poor Scott seemed
to stand watching the flame, and holding his breath.  If his wife
rallied sufficiently there was to be an operation, and to Scott
every noise or sound of movement of the hotel was like a gust of
wind troubling that feeble flame.  When he was not sitting in his
wife's room he had a chair in the corridor, and he spent the whole
of the first night in that chair.

It is almost impossible to silence an hotel, however considerate
people may be, and Sir Magnus Ord's pet fad was a professional
detestation of all noise.  Discords impinging upon the brain, and
helping to exhaust it.  His prejudice against all noise added
itself to Scott's suppressed anguish of restlessness.  He appealed
to Roland.

"I say, how many people have you in the hotel?"

"About twenty.  I have turned away all new-comers."

"Look here, my dear chap,--I'll rent the whole of your hotel for
three weeks--if you can persuade everyone to clear out.  It's not a
question of money."

"It isn't.  I'll do it."

"I say,--Roland, you--"

"That's all right.  There is only one thing that matters.  I'll go
and interview all the people staying here and get them to move."

"And you'll charge me--."

"For your two rooms, and your board, and for the two nurses--."

"No, no--that's nonsense."

"Well, it's my nonsense.  I like to do a thing thoroughly."

"But--my dear man--I'm rolling--"

"That doesn't make any difference."

"But I can't let you shut up the whole place for three weeks--."

"That is what I am going to do."

Scott's face twitched.  He gave in, but he gave in with a
passionate reservation.  He was not going to quarrel with a beau
geste,--but some day he would reply to it.

"I shan't forget this--, old chap."

"My dear lad,--I want her to have every chance.  I'm not going to
sell you her chance.  That's all.  I'll turn the staff out into the
annexe."

And that was what he did, and that evening the little lady rallied.
The flame grew bigger, and Scott, walking up and down the carpeted
corridor on his bare feet, or sitting in his chair, blessed the
silence and felt that there was some healing virtue in it.  No
gusts of noise causing that little flame to waver.  Old Ord had
smiled at him.  "To-morrow,--if she goes on rallying through the
night."

About dusk, Sorrell, moving quietly across the empty lounge, saw a
dim white face behind the glass of the hotel door.  He moved to
wave the intruder away, and recognized his son.  Softly he unlocked
and opened the door.

"What do you want, Kit?"

They spoke in whispers.

"How is--she?"

"Better.  There is to be an operation."

Kit looked immensely solemn.

"An operation--."

"Yes--if she can bear it.  And if--she can--."

Christopher's eyes had a far away look.

"I think I'd like to be a doctor, pater."

"Would you?"

"And mend things,--save people."

They gazed steadily into each other's eyes.

"It's good business, Kit,--an idea.  Now, run along, old chap.
Perhaps there will be good news to-morrow."



4


There was good news.  The little lady had rallied remarkably during
the night and the very eminent surgeon who had been waiting on the
threshold of her room for Nature's beckoning finger, went in and
laid his succouring hands upon her.  Scott, unable to keep still
while the operation was in progress, wandered about the garden and
in and out of Roland's room.  When in the garden he was for ever
looking up at the window of his wife's room, for one of the nurses
had promised to wave a handkerchief if things seemed to be going
well.

Roland, who was writing letters at his desk, found Scott leaning in
at his window.

"She's waved--!"

"I'm glad."

"Isn't it great?"

He resumed his pacings up and down the grass, and round the flower
beds and under the vivid green fringes of the beeches and the
chestnuts.  He had a peculiar, gliding walk of his own, the
movement of a dancer, gay and debonair, and Roland noticed that his
characteristic movements had come back to him.  He had trailed; now
he went like a winged Mercury.  This was the vivid Duncan of
romance, the world's happy hero.

Roland watched and smiled.

"Sorrell ought to be satisfied," he thought.  "Fortune has sent us
her favourite children."

Moreover, Fortuna appeared to have taken her place beside the Pious
Pelican poised on the oak beam.  The eminent surgeon was returning
to town; he had the satisfied air of a man who had dined well, and
Duncan walked at his elbow as though he wished to embrace him.

"So--you think--sir--really--?"

"We are not out of the wood yet, but everything has gone off most
satisfactorily."

"Then--you really do think?"

"I think your wife will recover."

Duncan saw the great man into his car and at this happy moment a
small, spry man waylaid him just as the car was moving off.

"Excuse me, sir--."

Scott turned on him with an excited laugh.

"What are you, the Mail, or the Express, or the Grocers' Journal?"

"The Daily Sun, sir."

"Right.  Well,--they think she is going to live."

"I am very glad to hear it, sir."

"Good chap.  Everybody's been most amazingly good.  I wish I could
thank everybody--."

The pressman was being given a priceless interview, and he knew it.
He had arrived at a happy moment.

"We could do that for you, sir."

"Of course you can," and Duck looked at him with big eyes as though
for the first time in his life he had discovered the virtues of the
Press.

"Heard about Mr. Roland,--I suppose?"

"The proprietor.  No,--but--."

"Shut up the whole hotel, turned everybody out, to give Ethel the
best chance.  I offered to hire the whole hotel for three weeks."

"Indeed, sir--!"

"But Mr. Roland wouldn't hear of it.  Made us a present of three
weeks silence.  What do you think of that?  I could tell you what I
think--.  He's a great man."

That Duck was over-excited, and exultant, and on the edge of
laughter or tears was as obvious to the little pressman as was the
unique personal atmosphere of the interview.  He had got the real
sob stuff.  He could give the great public a picture of "Duck--the
Live Man."

He did so, and he did more.

The Daily Sun came out with pictures of the Pelican and of Mr.
Roland.


                 THE MAN WHO HAS GIVEN HIS HOTEL

                        TO DUCK AND ETHEL

                      FOR THREE WHOLE WEEKS.


When Sorrell saw the Daily Sun he realized that--somehow--without
thinking about it--Mr. Roland had done a great thing.  And he had
done it thoroughly and without meanness.  A little journalist had
sent the magic bread back across the waters.

Sorrell took the paper to Roland, and if anything Roland appeared
annoyed.

"I suppose you are pleased, Stephen."

"I can't afford to grumble, sir.  If this does not make us--nothing
will."




CHAPTER XVI



1


Each morning a neat little bulletin in Thomas Roland's writing was
pinned on a board outside the hotel, and the eighth of these
bulletins declared Mrs. Duncan Scott to be out of danger.

The surly Bowden sent her up armfuls of flowers.  She had asked to
see Thomas Roland, and with Duncan sitting at the head of her bed
she gave the owner of the Pelican Inn that worldwide smile of hers.

"What a horrible nuisance I have made of myself.  You have been so
good--"

"Not a bit of it."

"Duncan has been telling me--.  You must let us make a fair return--.
Mustn't he, dear?"

Roland held one of her hands.

"My dear little lady--I am getting my return.  Don't you realize
that you have made the Pelican the most talked of hotel in the
British Isles.  See what it is to be Ethel Frobisher."

At the end of three weeks they were able to carry her out into the
gardens where she lay in a long chair padded with cushions under
the shade of one of the old trees.  And it was she who insisted
upon Roland opening the doors of the Pelican to the public.

"I shan't be able to prevent people coming into the garden to stare
at you," he said.

She laughed.  Life seemed so good that she was ready to be
tolerant.

"I don't think I shall mind.  After all--"

"It is not unpleasant to be--?"

"Oh--within reason.  One's human, you know.  I really did create a
sensation?"

"An enormous sensation.  At one time I thought that we should have
to barricade the place and put up a machine-gun."

He stood looking down at her, whimsical and fatherly.

"Curiosity.  That's a good sign."

"How?"

"I do believe that you are just a little bit curious as to whether
people will come and stare."

"Perhaps I am."

"Yes,--one must have an audience.  If we can't pose before other
people, we have to pose before ourselves."

"That's rather horrid of you."

"Not in the least.  I'm one of those persons who poses to himself.
I find it most important that I should look well in my own mirror.
While--you--"

"But do I pose?  I've always tried--"

"My dear little lady I did not say you posed.  You are one of those
fortunate persons who cannot help doing the natural thing.  That's
the secret."

"Of what?"

"Of your fame.  You get half the world tumbling over itself to see
a little woman whose naturalness is not a pose.  Most of us are
swathed up like mummies.  But you must have your audience.  Why
not?"

So the embargo was removed, and on the second day the Pelican's
nest was full, and some thirty people had to be turned away.  It
would appear that the little lady had slipped a magic nest-egg into
the circle of Thomas Roland's enterprise and that the fortune that
was to be hatched from it was to be neither transient nor illusive.

And yet, as Roland said to Sorrell, afterwards--"It wasn't our
thoroughness or our hard work, Stephen, that saved us, but luck,
and the noise made by a section of a sensation-mongering press."

Sorrell thought it over, and was moved to disagree with him.

"No,--I think it was the human touch.  It is always the human touch
that matters."

"Yes,--my dear chap,--but that was our luck.  That it should have
happened here to Ethel.  Thousands of people might have been
smashed up--and have died here--and the great public would not have
cared a damn."

"But why should they?"

"That's one of my points.  We don't care.  Like the war.  Life's
got too crowded and confused.  You have to make such a great noise
in order to be heard,--and I loathe noise.  Short of blowing
Vesuvius into the middle of Naples!  Well,--Ethel blew up the
Sensational Press for us, made it explode."

"She has done something more than that," said Sorrell, "she has
blown up my boy."

"Oh?  How?  He wants to be a film star?"

"No, he wants to be a doctor."

"And achieve dramatic cures?"

"I think there is more in it than that."

Christopher had taken unto himself an autograph book, which meant
that he had taken to hero worship, yet at the back of his mind
Kit's most convincing hero was his father.  Convincing because his
heroism was not too obvious; it had that quality of steadfastness;
it was like the seaman's heroism, the practical and unselfconscious
heroism of the man doing his job in foul weather and in fair.  Kit
had his admirable enthusiasms.  That Dicker the Hampshire fast
bowler, and Blackett the "heavyweight" who travelled with a circus,
had put their fists to Kit's book, was the ripe joy of the moment.
Sorrell had never had his photo in the papers.  He did not appear
in a roped space wearing a purple and orange dressing-gown, and
yet, as Christopher matured, his father became to him--not quite a
great man--but something more human, a very lovable one.  His own
life was permeated by his father's patient and indomitable purpose.

But for the moment Kit desired a particular autograph, and when
Sorrell was told, he offered his services.

"I dare say I could get it for you."

"But, if you don't mind, pater, I would rather try and get it
myself."

"You'll have to be introduced, my son."

"Shall I?"

"I'll ask Mrs. Scott."

Sorrell was one of those men who became a "person," and in after
years habitues who pulled up at the Pelican would greet him as
"Stephen." It was a familiarity that assured liking and respect.
Stephen was a character, a person of importance, a man who never
forgot anything and who did not react to the size of a tip.  The
Little Lady was one of the first to discover and to recognize the
"Stephen" in Sorrell.  He carried out her chair cushions; Roland
had told her his history; to her Stephen was very much a person.

"I wonder if you would grant me a favour, madam?"

She liked the dignity with which he managed to invest his job.

"What is it, Stephen?"

"My boy wants your autograph."

"Well,--if you will bring his book."

"The fact is--he wants to collect it in person."

"Tell him to come.  Tea time.  I invite him to tea with us."

"It is very good of you, madam."

So, Christopher came to tea with Ethel and Duncan, and sat on a
green garden chair under one of the chestnuts, and was fed on
raspberry jam and iced cakes, and gazed upon the Little Lady with
the eyes of a boy's adoration.  He was shy without being awkward.
It was plain that he thought her to be the most wonderful creature
in all the world, just as wonderful as she was in the "Pictures."
He fell in love with her; she was of more significance than the
cakes.

The Little Lady soon had him talking in his wise and rather
deliberate way, for Christopher never chattered.  He was a silent
and watchful child.

"I hear you are going to be a doctor."

"Yes,--I've decided--"

"And what made you want--?"

Christopher coloured and looked at her with the full candour of his
serious eyes.

"You."

"Me?  But--how--?"

"Well,--you see, everybody wanted you to get well, and Sir Magnus
Ord was the only man who could get you well.  He can do things.  It
must be great to be able to do things like that--when everybody
else is feeling--just--helpless."

"So you want to be a second Sir Magnus Ord?"

"Well,--I don't suppose I shall be such a great surgeon,--but I
should like to mend people."

"People like me?" she asked, with a gleam of the eyes.

"Sometimes,"--and he added quietly, "that would make up for the
others."

"That's a rather remarkable kid," she said to Roland later.

"The son of a rather remarkable father.  An hotel porter!  But what
a porter!" he answered.



2


When the Scotts left the Pelican Inn at the end of June it was like
the departure of the fairy Prince and Princess.  Every member of
the staff received a five-pound note,--and the whole staff
collected outside the hotel to say good-bye to the Little Lady and
her man.  They shook hands with everybody.  Bowden arrived with a
great bunch of roses, and wearing a clean collar.  Kit had
persuaded Mr. Porteous to allow him to take leave of his equations
and the Gallic campaigns of Caesar.  He stood, devotedly gazing.

The new car carried them off, and the cook--who was a
sentimentalist--laid her emotion upon Mr. Bowden's bachelorhood.

"She's as good as she's pretty."

And Kit,--with his youth throbbing to the sad but sacred moment,
thought the cook a very wise woman.

Afterwards, the Pelican settled down to solid business, and
Christopher went back to Mr. Porteous with an even stronger
inclination towards the sign of the Rod and the Serpent.  The hotel
had been full for the last three weeks, and it continued in that
happy state all through the summer and autumn, and even in November
its average was 45.  Sorrell had opened an account with the branch
of the Midland Bank at Winstonbury.  Mr. Roland was composing an
operetta and building stables with a dozen loose boxes and quarters
for grooms.  For he had adopted Sorrell's suggestion, obtained an
interview with the local M.F.H. and come to an understanding with
him.  The Master had business instincts, and the Hunt needed funds.
An up-to-date hotel in the district ready to cater for those people
from among whom any who could be persuaded to hunt with the
Winstonbury pack would be an advantage to both parties.  Roland
agreed to advertise the Pelican as a hunting-hotel, and the Master
promised to give it his official recommendation.

"But don't sink too much capital, Mr. Roland.  In these Bolshie
days--we wasters who have the courage to try and break our necks--"

"But your coats are the right colour, sir.  And I shan't make it a
bricklayer's job.  Timber and asbestos sheeting.  If possible,--I
should like you to give the Pelican two meets a season."

"I think we can manage that."

So Mr. Roland's brown and white stables went up with quite moderate
dispatch, and in November the hounds met at the Pelican.  Kit
dragged Mr. Porteous away from the austere schoolroom where a
paraffin oil stove made a stuffy heat and threw a pattern on the
ceiling.  They watched the waving tails of the hounds and the red
coats of the whips move off to draw the Bar Holt wood.  Kit went
with the foot-followers, and after scrambling over gates and
plodding across muddy fields was lucky enough to see a fox with the
pack in full cry.  He returned some time in the dusk to find Mr.
Porteous and to tell him about it, for Mr. Porteous' fat little
legs had not carried him very far.

In December the Pelican was singled out again by Fortune, for
Royalty came west for a gallop with the Winstonbury pack, and
Royalty stabled two horses in the Pelican stables and slept in a
Pelican bed.  In fact it was the very bed which the Little Lady had
made historic.  And again, there were pictures of the Pelican in
the daily papers, showing a coyly smiling young Prince in the act
of raising his top-hat to the spectators.

Half of Stephen Sorrell's head and body appeared on one of these
pictures, but his good fortune occupied the middle of the plate.

The Pelican's December average was forty-three.  The winter proved
an open one.  A dozen or more hunting men and women came down
regularly.  Parents who arrived to visit their sons at Hadley
School began to develop the Pelican habit.  Mr. Roland was planning
a Christmas season, and Sorrell's tips were pouring regularly into
the Winstonbury branch of the Midland Bank.  The cashier was
becoming conversational across the counter.

In January Sorrell had an interview with the manager.  He was
admitted into the manager's private room.  The manager expressed
himself as only too ready to arrange the purchase of War Loan for
him.

"A hundred pounds of 4 1/2, 1925-45, Mr. Sorrell.  The order shall
go up at once to our brokers."

In February Albert Hulks married his waitress, and Mr. Roland's
operetta was performed by the Winstonbury Musical and Dramatic
Society.  Mr. Porteous took the part of "Fra Domenico"; he wore a
black beard and had a voice like Big Ben.  Christopher and his
father sat in the five-shilling seats, and Christopher's only
disappointment was the Little Lady who was not playing the part of
"Francesca."  The lady who took the part of Francesca smiled all
the time, but her smile was not the smile of Ethel Frobisher.



3


Christopher had been with Mr. Porteous for a year and a half when
Sorrell decided to send him for two years to one of the best of the
private schools.  Christopher was fourteen.  In eighteen months Mr.
Porteous had given him so solid a grounding that he could have held
his own with any boy of sixteen.

Sorrell had taken a long time to make up his mind, and Kit's mind
had been included in the process.  It was not merely a question of
the wisdom of the step, but of how the boy felt about it.  Feelings
matter.  There were the advantages and the disadvantages to be
considered, and Mr. Porteous was co-opted to serve on the Sorrell
Committee.

Nor was it a mere question of education, but a problem of class
prejudices and of social "atmosphere."

As Sorrell put it to Porteous--"Envy--not love--is becoming more
and more the driving force.  That's how I view it.  One has to
weigh up hatreds and prejudices."

Porteous was not wholly in favour of the school.

"What's it going to give him?"

"Experience--of a sort.  Confidence.  He will mix with boys of the
class that is going to be his,--and yet I don't want him to belong
to any particular class."

"Can you help it?"

"I know what you mean.  Our voices, our faces, our very way of
wearing our clothes put us in a certain category.  Because I have
set out to give my boy advantages--I shall expose him to hatred and
envy."

"My dear chap!"

"Isn't it true?  The world has entered on a period of envy and
bitterness.  Industrialism and education--of a sort--have bred it."

"So you think of sending him to school--"

"Where he will not be exposed to class hatred.  My idea is to keep
him there two years.  Then he can come back to you for another year
or so, before he tackles the real adventure."

"Doctoring?"

"That seems to hold."

"A University first?"

"I don't know--yet."

"That will expose him to the sneers of the new young working-class
intellectuals.--'A college man.'"

"I think that he will be exposed to that--in any event.  As I see
it--the social war is going to grow more and more bitter.  You will
be damned by the crowd class--even for having a certain sort of
voice and face."

"Rather a gloomy view--!"

"No,--not gloomy,--but a little grim.  Life is bound to sort people
out, and the envious fools will always end up as the under-dogs.  I
don't mean my boy to be an under-dog."

Yet, the incident that finally decided both father and son in the
choice of the path that Christopher was to follow, was a trivial
one, and yet to Sorrell convincingly significant.

The incident occurred at a boys' football match in which Mr.
Porteous's boys' club was playing the Winstonbury council school.
Kit was playing for the boys' club, and Sorrell was watching the
game.  He had a knot of noisy youngsters near him who began to jeer
at one particular player.

They called him "Collars and Cuffs."  They mocked him every time he
came near them or when he had the ball.

"Now then--Nosy."

"Haw--Mr. Fellah."

What was more Sorrell saw that the boys of the council school team
had Christopher marked.  They made a dead set at him; he was
something alien; he did not belong to their class pack.  He was
different.

Sorrell saw his son "fouled," on more than one occasion, and the
boys near him gloated and laughed, but when Kit showed legitimate
spirit in a charge or a tackle they snarled at him.

"Foul--!"

"Dirty!"

"Play the game--'Collars.'"

"His father's only a por-tah."

Sorrell walked back with his son after the game, and a few pregnant
confidences passed between them.

"Do you like playing with those boys, Kit?"

"No--I don't, pater."

"All right.  We'll alter that."

For Sorrell had seen that these sons of working men hated the son
of the ex-officer.  They hated his face, his voice, his pride, his
very good temper.  They hated him for his differences, his innocent
superiorities.

Hatred, a cheaply educated hatred was loose in the world.

The obvious thing was to educate the boy above it,--and if possible
to make him triumphant over it.  Sorrell and Kit arrived at their
decision.



4


Mr. Launcelot Lowndes, M.A., the "head" of St. Benedict's at
Westbourne received a letter from a Captain Sorrell who appeared to
be staying at the Pelican Hotel--Winstonbury.  The letter had been
written on the hotel notepaper, and by the hand of an educated man.

Mr. Lowndes promptly replied to it.  He sent Captain Sorrell a
booklet on St. Benedict's with photos of the school playing-field,
the gymnasium, the chapel, the type of dormitory that was used, and
the infirmary.  He gave Captain Sorrell all the necessary
information as to fees, and they were heavy.  The extras connected
with the school games amounted to a considerable figure.  St.
Benedict's engaged the services of a games master who was an old
Oxford "blue."

Mr. Lowndes informed Captain Sorrell that there would be a few
vacancies at the beginning of the summer term.

Sorrell and his son talked it over.

"There is no reason why anyone should know, Kit, that I am an hotel
porter."

Christopher was troubled.  He was neither ashamed of his father,
nor did he wish to conceal his father or to apologize for him.  If
St. Benedict's demanded the concealment of the elder Sorrell's
means of earning a livelihood,--well,--he would rather not go
there.

Sorrell argued it out with him.

"A school like this has certain advantages; I want you to enjoy
them.  My job here must not stand in the way.  You can tell the
other boys that your father is a retired officer who lives at
hotels.  There is no reason why we should put all our cards on the
table."

"But, supposing, pater--?"

"They found out?  Why should they?  You see, if you go up to
Cambridge later,--it won't hurt you to have been at this school.
When you leave I want you to coach with Mr. Porteous for a
scholarship."

There was a part of Christopher that was keen to go to St.
Benedict's.  He would be able to play games there without being
singled out for mean little persecutions; he would be able to make
friends; he would not have to perform on the footer field with a
lot of young louts who were more keen to kick him than they were to
kick the ball.  The atmosphere would be different, the clothes, the
cleanliness, the traditions.  Certain things would be bad form.
Sorrell had explained all this.  He said that it was quite good
that certain things should be considered to be bad form.  "Like not
cleaning your teeth or not using a handkerchief, you know."

The end of it was that Kit decided that he would like to go to St.
Benedict's, and to St. Benedict's he went, rigged out with a
school-kit, and wearing the orthodox bowler and black socks.  He
had his cap, and blazer with the purple and green colours of the
school.  He had his "sports-box," and a pound in pocket-money.

Sorrell had spent two days in town with him, and he saw him off at
Victoria for the Sussex sea-coast town.

"Good-bye--old chap."

Kit's lips quivered a little.  He kissed his father.

"I shan't forget you are Captain Sorrell, M.C.  I'll work hard."

"And play hard,--the big game, you know.  Our game, my son."




CHAPTER XVII



1


There followed for Stephen Sorrell a season of happy accomplishment.
He was able to pause and to think, not as a man thinks in some
hustling crisis, but calmly and pleasantly.  He strolled instead of
walking.  The Pelican had become very prosperous; the bird's
feathers were turning to gold.

In one week in August Sorrell had taken nearly ten pounds in tips.

That was a solid basis upon which to build reveries, and at eight
o'clock each evening Sorrell would change into a blue serge suit
and a soft hat and walk out along the great black road that led
Londonwards.  These evening walks became dear to him.  The road was
a spacious terrace along which he paced, and looked out on life and
the landscape.  When it rained and blew he still took that walk,
but he loved most those evenings when there was no wind, and a half
moon shone in a sky of horizontal greyness.  There were the distant
chalk-hills, sometimes seen, sometimes obscured, and of the quality
of tarnished silver.  They seemed to set a soft and impartial limit
to the landscape, like death closing in life.

The green world would turn to grey and from grey to black.  The
further trees merged into one dim mass.  Sometimes the nearer trees
remained distinct and green.  There were the tall poplars, and an
occasional old spruce or pine striking an individual note.  The
wires hummed, and cattle pulled softly at the grass.  Dim flowers
looked out of a gently flowing dimness.

An occasional car would rush by, full of plethoric people hurrying
dinnerwards.

A star or two would appear, and lights, the lights in cottage
windows.

There were times when he was made to realize the incredible
dreariness of the English country.  Its beauty vanished in slush
and slime, and man would thank God for man-made London, or some
such place as the Pelican where you could eat and drink and feel
alive.  These Northern countries!  And those horrible northern
towns, full of people who were becoming conscious of their own
horrible ugliness, and who were beginning to utter savage and
resentful cries.  Winstonbury was still somewhat English, not
Wellsian, or a snarling, love-your-brother sort of town, but love
him, with reservations.  Hate him if he happens to have five
shillings in his pocket, or is a little more clever and energetic
than his neighbours.

Sorrell philosophized.  He thought of that other young life away
over yonder, of his boy whose face was not a half-finished smudge.
Kit was going to be a good-looking fellow, with his large and
expressive mouth, and his rather silent but smiling frankness.  Kit
would be a complete person, not a plaster-cast of a man whom Life
had got bored with and not troubled to finish.

When the grey chalk-hills showed, Sorrell would think of boundaries
and of the finality of a man's experiences.  Death, oblivion,
extinction--perhaps, a melting into a soft greyness.  And all man's
passionate little tricks to escape it, his myths, his gods and his
immortalities, his theosophies, and spiritisms.  A yearning, a
chilliness--after life's full meal.  The soft dusk, the
obliterating darkness, the unknown and the unknowable.

"Consciousness is less," he thought, "than the planks of a boat
between you and the deep waters.  Some day you will sink,
disappear, be forgotten.  You will be less than some tree that once
grew here.

"Accept.  Do your job.  Then, be ready to close your eyes and
sleep."

He was a pragmatist.  The satisfaction of life lay in accomplishment.
He was content to gaze at the unknown as he looked at the distant
chalk-hills, and he felt no urge to climb them.  The whole world of
the senses might be an illusion, but man's business was to behave as
though it were real.  The job mattered, the thing you had set out to
accomplish, and not for yourself alone.  Fighting mattered, striving,
enduring, loving the few, disdaining the many.  When struggle ceases
men cease to be men.

Besides, who could tell where life ended?  Death might be the
opening of a door, especially to those who climbed to it after a
life of stubborn effort.  And without effort there might be no
door?  Or was death like a sieve, letting the finer spirits
through, and throwing the baser back upon the muck-heap?

He was conscious of a sense of maturity, of a feeling of mellowness
within himself.  He could look at women without desiring them too
fiercely.  The money he made was a spiritual essence stored up for
his son; opportunities, wings, arms, a buckler to ward off
humiliation.  His whole life orientated itself towards this other
rising, younger life.

He found Kit's letters vastly interesting.  They were not the
letters of a boy who could think of nothing but footer and cricket.
Kit observed and asked questions.

There were some questions which Sorrell could not answer, and he
said so.  There were others, human appeals which he had to answer.

For when Christopher came back to Winstonbury on his first holiday
it seemed to Sorrell that the boy was troubled.  Roland had allowed
him to live at the Pelican, and he occupied a little bedroom next
to his father.

It was sex that was troubling Christopher, and all that sex
implied,--his mother, other fellows' mothers.

Sorrell had dipped into Freud, and his inclination was to laugh at
Freud, but he took Christopher much more seriously.

He told him everything, cleanly and frankly.  He tried to make the
boy feel the dignity of sex, and Christopher did feel it.

There were things at the school that had disgusted him.  He
appeared to be one of those boys who pass straight through the
half-way house of sex, and come almost at once to a feeling of the
mystery of woman.

He asked to be told about his mother.

And Sorrell told him.  He tried to be utterly impartial.  He gave
his view of marriage as a great comradeship.

"Your mother and I were not comrades.  It wasn't our fault, or
rather--it was both our faults."

As for the so-called "oedipus complex," it did not appear to exist
in Kit.  Nor had it existed in Sorrell.  And yet it did not seem to
him that either he or his son were abnormal.  He rather thought
that the abnormality could be looked for on the Continent and in
the mental make-up of a certain sort of Continental youth who grew
up to be a professor.

Desire was desire, and it could be clean, if you did not shut it up
in a box till it turned musty.

He asked Christopher if he would like to leave St. Benedict's and
come back to Mr. Porteous.

"No,--I'm all right there now, pater.  Now--that I've had these
talks.  It is not being sure about things--"

"Work is the cleanest of all things, the game you are playing or
the job you are going to do."

"I see that in a sort of way.  But I suppose one has feelings--"

"Get your feelings to back up your job."

"You--and mother, pater--?"

"We didn't back each other.  We were after different jobs; we
played the game differently.  Some day--you will have to think of
the job and the woman--.  If you can get them both--happily--into
the same boat--"

"Pulling together,--pater?  But--then--there are things--you know--."

"All sorts of things," said Sorrell; "you will have to go through
with them, Kit.  We all have to.  But because a girl has baby eyes--
and pretty curly hair--.  No, that's not everything; it may be no
more than your dinner or your early morning tub.  It is better to
be keener on your job--than on girls.  It's so difficult for me to
explain.  But get the job before you get the girl--the real girl--
I mean."

They left it at that, but each knew that there was a shadow-land
before them, and the consoling thought in the heart of each was
that if they kept shoulder to shoulder--the shadow-land would pass.



2


Once or twice a year Sorrell packed a prosperous-looking suit-case,
put on a lounge suit made for him by Toole's, and a bowler hat, and
white spats and a pair of washleather gloves, and took three days'
holiday.  He travelled first-class to Westbourne; in fact, on these
occasions he made himself appear as a gentleman of leisure and of
means.  He put up at the Salisbury Hotel on the sea-front, so that
Kit should be able to say "My pater's staying at the Salisbury,"
for the Salisbury was the proper place for parents to stay at.  Kit
dined with his father, and Sorrell put on a dinner jacket, and in
the lounge--afterwards--smoked a cigar, looking amused at life.

If it happened to be "school-day," Sorrell would take a taxi to St.
Benedict's and stroll on to the school playing-field with the air
of being something of an old hand.  He looked and was the
gentleman; in fact, much more so than many other fathers.

He watched Christopher win the school quarter-mile for boys under
sixteen.

He talked to Mr. Lowndes.

"Yes, Sorrell is doing very well."

Sorrell was not drawn to Mr. Lowndes.  Nor did the "Head" appear to
be the sort of man who wished to draw people.  He took you by the
collar--so to speak, and held you at arm's length, and talked at
you.  He had very blue and rather prominent eyes, and a high and
baldish forehead, and a fine chin.  He was rather young for a
headmaster, sure of himself to the point of arrogance, confident in
attack.  Mr. Lowndes always attacked.  He set out to impress
people.  He appeared to have views and opinions ready upon every
question that you might raise, and he gave you his opinions with an
air of saying--"Now--you can go home--and be reassured on that
point for the rest of your life."

He had his inquisitorial side.  His blue eyes searched people out.
His class-consciousness was so narrow and yet so complete, that it
made him careful and suspicious.

"The tradition of the 'school,' my dear sir."

His "tone" was unimpeachable.  Looking down at you, for he was very
tall, he seemed to be demanding that you should ascend to his
level.  To the average parent he was tactfully condescending.

"Tact," was one of his favourite words--"Value" was another.
Everything had to have "value," the Lowndes' value.

Sorrell suspected him of being the most agile snob.

In conversation he had a way of cross-examining a parent, while
pretending to show ordinary social interest.  He liked to know
exactly what he had got, and Sorrell puzzled him not a little.
Obviously, Sorrell was a gentleman, but queer, reserved, a fellow
who lived at hotels, and who lacked a domestic centre of gravity.

"I suppose you get a good deal of hunting at Winstonbury?"

"O, not bad country.  I'm not allowed to ride now.  The war--you
know."

"Ah--the war!"

That was a favourite trick of Mr. Lowndes, the repeating of the
last three words or so of the other person's sentence.

Mr. Phelps, the games master, was a much more easy person.  A
little, wiry man with very thin legs, he looked like a boy.  He was
not very clever, but full of infinite good nature--and he made most
comic jokes.  Mr. Lowndes never made jokes.  He thought Phelps a
good fellow, but rather a tame monkey.

Christopher and Mr. Phelps were excellent friends, for Mr. Phelps
had discovered that Christopher could box, and fight even better
then he could box.

"Your kid's a great little man, Mr. Sorrell.  He's in my 'house'--
you know.  A fatherly sort of kid."

Sorrell liked Phelps, and not only because Phelps liked his boy.
He was tempted to tell Phelps his secret,--and he did tell him, and
the games master thought the better of him for it.  He had been in
the war.

"Well,--I think you are doing a fine thing,--old chap.  But--one
word; I shouldn't let Lowndes know--"

"I think I know what you mean."

"He's the most filthy snob.  Only took me on because I was a rugger
'blue,' and my uncle's a baronet.  You talk to him about me,--I bet
you he'll drag in the baronet."

Christopher had one particular friend, a boy named Summervell, a
sensitive and rather gentle creature, with long dark eyelashes and
stag's eyes.  Summervell was no good at games, though he had to
play them; his passion was music.  Christopher would bring
Summervell with him to the Salisbury to sit at the table in the
window and dine with them.  It was obvious to the father that
Christopher felt protective towards this fragile and sensitive boy,
the only son of a widow who had to live on an inadequate pension.

"Poor old Peter's mater is not too well off."

He confided to his father the tragic story of a pair of torn
trousers; the only decent pair of trousers that Summervell
possessed that term.

"I passed him on one of my pairs, pater."

"All right.  I'll write and tell Thompson's to send you another
pair."

Christopher had every right to think of his father as the most
understanding and generous of men.



3


Christopher had been a year and a half at St. Benedict's when his
father received a letter from Mr. Phelps, the games master.  The
envelope was marked "Confidential."


"MY DEAR MR. SORRELL,--It seems a beastly sort of thing to write
about, but some of the boys here have found out that you are head-
porter at an hotel.

"Apparently half a dozen of them have been ragging your boy about
it ever since the opening of the term.  How I found out was through
surprising a fight going on one night in my house-dormitory.  As a
matter of fact your boy got the best of it.

"There are times, my dear sir, when I loathe being a master,--and
sometimes I loathe boys.  Not all of them.  Personally, I think
Christopher had played St. George to the Dragon,--but the 'Head'
has heard about it.

"I thought that the only decent thing I could do was to write and
warn you.  We have had a solemn conference, and a lot of palaver,--
the 'Tradition of the School,' you know, and all that.  I tried to
point out that the 'tone' of the school was not suffering,--but I
got sat upon.

"I hope you will understand me--"


Mr. Lowndes' letter arrived a day later.  It was ingenious and
patronizing.  It flowed from a higher level to what must be
presumed to be a lower one.


"MY DEAR MR. SORRELL,--This is one of the most painful letters that
I have ever had to write--etc.

"I think for the boy's sake you should remove him.  Boys are
sensitive creatures, my dear sir,--and when a sensitive boy is made
to feel himself to be in a false position--"


Sorrell wrote off at once both to Christopher and to Mr. Lowndes.
Nor was there any anger in his letter to the "Head."  He was
wondering how deeply Christopher had been hurt and he felt that the
fault was his.

Sorrell met his son at Winstonbury station.  Kit was smiling.  His
hands came out quickly to meet his father's.

"I'm sorry, old chap, it was all my fault."

Kit held his father's arm.

"How did it happen--?"

"O, Barrington Smith--primus, was motoring with his people,--and
they put up at the Pelican."

"I see.  Did they make it rather beastly--for you?"

"O, not so bad, pater.  I rather enjoyed some of it, especially
when I got Barrington Smith hiding under his bed.  Mr. Phelps came
in.  He saw me off at the station."

"Did he?  Good chap."

"And he gave me his boxing-gloves.  He asked to be remembered to
you, pater.  He said some rather--"

"I ought to have foreseen this," said Sorrell.

"Dear old pater,--why--I enjoyed it."

"What?"

"Telling one or two of the swine that you were worth ten of their
gov'nors.  Besides--I had a whole lot of the fellows on my side.
We have nothing to be ashamed of."

"Sure."

"Well,--you should let me tell you what Mr. Phelps said about--"

So Kit returned to Mr. Porteous, and Mr. Porteous and Sorrell began
to talk of scholarships and sizarships.

"My dear sir, it's a certainty," said the tutor, "if the boy makes
up his mind to go through with it.  Trinity or Caius or Pembroke.
I'll get hold of all the necessary information.  Nearly two clear
years.  If he doesn't get a scholarship I'll eat my hat."




CHAPTER XVIII



1


Sorrell had a few grizzled hairs on his temples, and his eyebrows
had grown bushy.

He sat at a desk in the little room where in the early days he had
spent so many hours with Thomas Roland's books, and he looked out
upon the same garden and the same trees.  Everything was the same--
and yet different.  He saw the sunlight caught in the purple cups
of the tulips, the shadows of the trees lying placidly upon the
grass, the wallflowers all crimson and gold.  Someone was mowing
the grass, a figure in a white sweater and grey flannel trousers
that went to and fro with an air of lightness as though the twelve-
inch mower were a child's toy.

Sorrell had been making entries in a ledger.  He was wearing a blue
serge suit.  A box of cigarettes lay on the desk, and he put down
his pen, and lighting a cigarette, leaned back in his chair.

It was Christopher who was pushing that mower to and fro, just for
the satisfaction of spending his youth on the job, and with the
idea of keeping fit.  He had grown and grown amazingly, and this
towering up and spreading of the little fellow had never ceased to
astonish Sorrell.  He had watched the boy changing into the man.

"Strong," he thought,--"I was never as strong as that."

The transfiguration had had its subjective reactions upon the
father, for in watching the growth of the boy, Sorrell had seen in
him an increasing likeness to the mother.  Christopher had
inherited Dora Sorrell's fineness of body.  She had given him her
physical glow, the nice co-ordination of movement, the texture of
skin and hair.  This likeness worried Sorrell not a little, for
though Kit was more his father's son in his mental make-up the
physical resemblance was there, with all its implications.

The entering of a maid with a tea-tray interrupted Sorrell's
thoughts.  The girl was pretty and new to the Pelican, and to her
Sorrell was very much Mr. Sorrell, a person who was head porter,
and yet something more than head porter.  He had authority, how
much authority no one quite knew,--but when Mr. Roland was away,
and he was away fairly frequently, Sorrell ceased to wear the
Pelican uniform, and was seen in a blue serge suit.

"Shall I tell Mr. Christopher?"

Sorrell pushed his chair back.

"I'll call him, Minnie,--thanks."

He leaned forward over the desk, knowing that his wish was to place
himself between Christopher and the figure of the eternal woman,
even as he had denied this girl the chance of running out into the
garden to get a smile from his son.  But was it wise?  He knew that
he was jealous for the boy who was becoming the man, and that his
life's work and purpose were built into Christopher's career.  Kit
was his job, his business, his ambition, something schemed for and
greatly loved, and yet the father looked at him with a man's eyes.
"I can save him--so much," was the thought at the back of his
mind,--but it was chastened by that very necessary touch of
scepticism.  "Was it wise--or possible--to save people from
themselves?"  Sorrell was for ever warning himself against playing
the hen with the duckling.

"Kit.--Tea."

Christopher swung the mower round in the direction of the window.
He smiled,--and waved a hand,--and after a satisfied glance at the
stretch of smooth turf, he came towards his father, collecting a
coat from a garden seat.  He had his mother's walk, that easy,
gliding walk that had made Sorrell think of a ship in full sail in
calm weather.  The direct route to the tea-tray lay through the
window, and Kit climbed in through the window.

"I'm twenty minutes up on old Bowden, pater."

Sorrell had taken the armchair beside the tea-table.

"You are more than twenty years younger."

Kit smiled.  He was at the age when youth tries its strength on
every imaginable labour.  It was exuberant,--full of an emulous
curiosity, but quite without arrogance.  His mother had been
arrogant.

Sorrell poured out the tea, beholding himself as both mother and
father to Christopher who, as yet, had shown no signs of wishing to
put up the badge of the Red Heart.

"Mr. Roland's not back yet?"

"No."

Kit, eating buttered toast with the air of a young man considering
some very serious problem, came out of his silence to suppose that
Mr. Roland must be making a great deal of money.

"Here?"

Sorrell was refilling the teapot.

"I was thinking of Cherry of Chelsea.  It has been running nine
months.  Almost as big a hit as Chu Chin Chow."

"He was made to make hits.  Some men are.  But Roland's not in
town."

"That's a jolly nice car of his," said Kit rather irrelevantly,
reaching for more toast.

A thrush was singing in one of the trees, and Kit turned a quick
head with the swiftness of a young thing whose consciousness is
sensitive to colour and to music.

"Hear that,--pater!  Cherry,--Cherry, Cherry.  That's where Mr.
Roland got that song."

He refrained from the buttered toast for half a minute in order to
whistle a few bars of the song that was being whistled all over the
earth.


     "Cherry,--Cherry of Chelsea,
      How do your red shoes go?"


Sorrell was thinking of that first night at the "Pelargonium" when
he and Kit had sat in the stalls, and watched Roland's comic opera
unfold its coloured music.  The piece had been an amazing success.
It flowed, and laughed, and made love.  It was full of a thrush's
song on a May morning, and of cherry-coloured bodices, and green
petticoats and red shoes.  Cherry of Chelsea!  And Cherry herself
like a piece of exquisite old china.  The play had been running for
nearly a year, and Cherry's lips were as red as ever.  Extraordinary
man--Roland!

"The new thing of his ought to hit them,"--and Kit began to whistle
a melody--"Blackbird this time.  Suppose he's gone off for an
inspiration."

"No," said his father gravely, "he has gone to buy an hotel."

Kit fell into another of his reflective moods, consuming cake
instead of toast, knees drawn up and elbows resting on them, his
inward eyes desiring to know why Mr. Roland bothered about hotels
when he could write music that set half the world tapping with its
feet and swaying a bewitched body.  Sorrell was looking out of the
window.  He and Kit were such good friends that they were able to
keep their silences intact, or to let their eyes meet with a sudden
understanding smile.  Kit's hand, reaching out for more cake, had a
healthy grasp on the pleasant realities of life.  The boy had a
dignity of his own, a happy seriousness.  He could run like a swift
dog, or lie down and curl himself up like a tired one.  Things did
not seem to worry him.

"Just like some of the fellows in the war," thought his father;
"the fellows without imagination.  I used to be on wires, and
biting my moustache.  But he has imagination.  In three weeks' time
he goes into action.  It does not seem to worry him."

In fact Sorrell was much more concerned over Christopher's first
serious adventure than was Kit himself.  Success or failure?  Mr.
Porteous too was very excited over Christopher's chances of
carrying off a scholarship at Trinity, for Kit was his Benjamin of
pupils.

"Anyway--he won't get panic, and sit there staring at the clock."

Kit himself was rather silent about the immediate future.  He had
allowed it to be known that "Maths" worried him just a little, but
he was neither over-confident nor fearful.  He had worked hard and
he had kept fit, and he had great faith in Mr. Porteous,--and what
more could a fellow do?  The thing was to keep calm and not to get
rattled.

Porteous was impressed by Christopher's calmness, and he and
Sorrell had analyzed it over their pipes.

"It's not bovine, my dear chap,--otherwise I should have been
worried.  You know as well as I do,--and better--.  He's highly
strung.  All the people who are worth while--are."

To Mr. Porteous Christopher appeared as a healthy young athlete,
trained to the last ounce, ready to stroll on to the track and wait
for the starting pistol.  He would not be free from quiverings of
excitement, but he would not let himself be flustered.

"You see,--Sorrell, he has an unusual sense of responsibility.  He
knows that it is your race as well as his.  I have watched him for
two years.  That gravity--of his--even when he smiles."

Sorrell's face had had one of its luminous moments.

"What do you think yourself, Porteous?  Frankly?"

Mr. Porteous had rubbed his bald head.

"One doesn't like to talk about certainties.  He may be up against
one or two smug little prodigies who will fizzle out when they are
ten years older,--just when he is beginning--.  But I look on it as
a five to one chance."

A fanatical look had come into Sorrell's eyes.

"Scholarship or no scholarship--he shall get there.  I can manage
it."

So, Christopher returned to his lawn-mower, and Sorrell lit a pipe
and sat down again at his desk.  He had come to love this desk, its
orderliness, its solidity, its neat files and ledgers and docketed
bills.  It was a rock upon which he was building a new reputation.

"I wonder if you would take over the accounts, Stephen?"

Roland had made that suggestion more than a year ago, and Sorrell
had not hesitated to seize this new opportunity.  During the last
few months he had become more and more responsible for the interior
economy of the hotel; he had taken over the catering; he checked
and paid the bills.  He was becoming a master of detail.  He had
begun to know when electric light was being wasted, or the
consumption of coal suggested extravagance.  He had the market
prices of food-stuffs at his fingers' ends, and none of the
Winstonbury tradesmen dared to play tricks with him.  He was too
wide awake and too thorough.

He loved detail.  His fingers, long and straight and sensitive, the
ungual phalanges bent slightly back, were the fingers of a man with
a passion for exactness.  His ledgers and note-books were as neat
as his finger nails.  While Christopher went to and fro across the
grass, Sorrell smoked his pipe and examined a sheaf of bills,
turning them over with a deft and deliberate first finger.

He made frequent notes.

"Tea.  Up four pounds in the week.

"Laundry.  Charged for fifty-three more towels.

"Seven table-napkins missing.

"Butcher.  Pushing on that inevitable halfpenny.  See him about
it."

Sorrell had fallen to the fascination of figures and of "curves."
He had plotted a series of curves, a grocery curve, a linen curve,
a coal curve, a gas curve.  The amount of meat consumed each week
could be discovered at a glance.  Sorrell's room was like a "staff"
orderly room, the walls covered with typed notes and diagrams.

His day was not unlike an "orderly officer's" day in the army.  He
inspected everything, the kitchen, the meat, the vegetables sent in
by Bowden, the store-room, the public rooms, the bathrooms and
lavatories, the garage, the oil and petrol store.  His knowledge of
the Pelican's anatomy and physiology was becoming so complete and
intimate that he was on the way to being an expert.

Ever and again he paused and watched his son.  A well-mown lawn was
as satisfying as a well-kept ledger, and Sorrell had come to know
that it was the inward thoroughness that mattered, doing the job
thoroughly, even though no one saw the objective results of it.  A
queer thing that inward pride, that scorn of all slackness and of
all shuffling, that daily struggle with man's fatal inertia.  Your
job was like a ship; you had to sail it in all weathers, when you
felt sick, and when your moods were like baffling and uncertain
winds.

It seemed to Sorrell that Christopher had this passion for
thoroughness.  He had never been childish.  Sorrell hated
childishness, especially that most exasperating form of it, the
childishness of grown-up children.  The dreamy, drowsy,
inconsequential imbeciles!

Neither was Christopher a prig.

"Anything's better than priggishness."

Kit had finished his mowing, and Sorrell saw him wiping the blades
and knife of the machine with an oily rag.



2


Sorrell had asked for a week's holiday.

"I should like to go up with the boy"--and Thomas Roland said "Of
course."

Mr. Porteous saw them off from Winstonbury station, exuding
optimism, and taking great care not to suggest to Christopher that
there was any likelihood of his being nervous.  Sorrell had written
to reserve rooms at the Bull,--and when they had dined, Kit took
his first stroll along King's Parade, and past Caius to the great
gate of Trinity.

They stood under the archway and looked across the Great Court, its
greyness and its green lawns very tranquil under the evening sky.
Wallflowers were in bloom about the fountain.  The roof of the hall
and of the Master's house were dark against a sheet of pale gold.

Christopher looked solemn.  One of the moments to be remembered
was his first glimpse of the Great Court of Trinity, though the
significance of that stately quadrangle was to grow less and less
in after years.  A time would come when Christopher's memory of the
college would grow strangely cold, as though only the shadow of
himself had ever dwelt there.  Later, he would wonder why the
picture of the great college lacked glamour.  Proud of it as he
always was,--but not with the pride of a lover.

And on that first evening the spacious dignity of the place
frightened him, nor did he ever succeed in arriving at a feeling of
intimacy, though he spent a year in rooms in the Great Court.  The
college presented itself as a very large and stately old lady, a
super-grandmother, to be respected as one respects a formidable
social figure.

It is possible that Christopher was not a social creature, or not
the true child of this prodigious old lady.  In after years a
Bloomsbury Square, or the Charing Cross Road left him with a sense
of glamour that his college had lacked.  For Kit's blood was not
grey, nor was he quite like the mass of young men who wore the dark
blue gown.  He belonged to no particular class, nor would he ever
belong to any particular class, for he had absorbed from his father
a little of the aloofness of the man who has had to fight for his
own hand.  To Kit his three years were to be mere ante-rooms to the
larger outlook; he worked better than he played, though he was
utterly without smugness.

Sorrell and Kit made their way through Nevil's Court and across the
river to the "backs."  The grass and the foliage were approaching
the greyness of the winter, and a few idle punts and canoes went to
and fro.  Here--too--were Tennyson's immemorial elms, and
Tennyson's black bat night descending.  Clare Bridge with its stone
balls was a ghost bridge upon the pale silver of the water.  King's
Chapel made its presence felt, like an obtruding cliff.

"Are those chaps in the boats undergraduates, pater?"

"I suppose so," said Sorrell.

He felt himself to be very raw, but his feeling of rawness was
soothed by the thought that Christopher was coming here, and that
there was nothing that Christopher need be ashamed of.

"Taking it easy--those fellows."

"And why not?" asked his father.

"I thought one read in the evening."

Sorrell pinched Kit's arm.

"All work and no play--"

"Supposing your work's your play, pater?"

"Some day.  I want you to row or play footer.  And box."

Sorrell smiled to himself.  He had talked a good deal to Porteous,
and Porteous, never having been an academic person,--had kept alive
the memory of his vivid youth.  Disgraceful "rags," and most
unparsonic adventures!  Your tailor might be of more importance
than your tutor.  And to be a first-boat man, cycling along the
towing-path and shouting at the Lent crew you had been training.
"Keep it long,--keep--it--long.  Damn you,--five,--you're late."
It was necessary to be neither a funk nor a sugarer, and to be able
to wear the particular sort of suit and tie and waistcoat that gave
you the proper atmosphere.  Kit should have the proper atmosphere,
a good tailor, good digs, the privilege of giving an occasional
dinner, enough pocket-money to make life easy in the company of
idle young men.  Not that they were idlers in the conventional
sense.

"Playing hard is just as good as working hard.  I'd like you to box
against Oxford, like Porteous did."

"All right, pater; I'll have a shot at it.  You see, I think I know
what I want to do."

They strolled back by way of Queen's, Kit's arm linked in his
father's.

"Did you know,--pater--?  I mean--"

"I was blind as a bat.  Pushed into a job by my people."

"You have never pushed me."

"God forbid.  Send you up like a carrier-pigeon, Kit.  Let you get
your sense of direction.  Fly straight and fast--"

Kit pressed his father's arm.

"Dear old pater--.  I'm not much good at saying things,--but you
are a brick to me."

"O,--that's all right," said Sorrell, swallowing something in his
throat.

During the days that followed he sat on the edge of his suspense,
and admired the morale of his son.  Kit ate excellent dinners.  It
was he who behaved like the reassuring parent.  He reported on each
day's ordeal with tranquil frankness.

"I have done better than I thought I should, pater.  If Mr.
Porteous had seen the papers, they couldn't have suited me better."

"Many other fellows in?"

"O, quite a lot.  I've a chap next me who sniffs all the time.
Regular as clockwork."

They spent the evenings on the river, or in wandering about the
colleges, and Kit's eyes had ceased to be troubled.  It was as
though he were getting the feel of the place, measuring the size of
all these ancient buildings.  He looked at the blazers and scarves
in the outfitters' windows, at the books and the pipes and the
marmalade pots.  He had heard that he would smoke a pipe and eat a
great deal of squish.  He measured the other fellows whom he saw
strolling about.  They seemed to him to have become less
stupendous,--more human.  Would he be a middle or heavy-weight?
And would he wear one of those light blue blazers?

On the Sunday they went to King's chapel.

"The music gets there," Kit said afterwards to his father.

"Where, my son?"

"O,--somewhere.  Where it was meant to.  It's like a fellow
climbing up."

Sorrell had felt the music to be like the desire of his heart;
ascending, spreading, exulting.



3


Thomas Roland was breakfasting when Sorrell brought him the news.

"Kit has won his scholarship."

Roland lingered a moment in his chair, before pushing it back and
rising from the table.  He saw Sorrell as a man intensely pale, an
inarticulate yet exultant figure, holding an official letter with a
hand that trembled.

"By Jove, old man,--I'm glad."

Roland's hand went out.  They did not look at each other, but stood
close together, Roland very conscious of the other man's restrained
emotion.

"I thought he would, you know."

"I hoped so," said Sorrell, staring out of the window; "we owe a
good deal to you.  I have always felt--"

"My dear chap--"

"It's true."

For the sake of doing something Roland turned to the breakfast-
table and emptied his coffee-cup.

"Look here,--we must have a little dinner to-night.  Ask Porteous.--
Where's the boy?"

"Gone to tell Porteous.  Do you mind if I take an hour off?  I want
to see Porteous."

There was a smile at the back of Roland's eyes.

"Take the whole day.--By the way--Stephen--.  O, we'll talk about
that later.  I expect Porteous will be floating about like a
cherub."

"He's a great little man," said Sorrrell.

The broad road into Winstonbury was Sorrell's Via Sacra on that
summer morning.  The Roman celebrated his son's first triumph.
"Seven years," he thought; "and this!  Tears in the boy's eyes when
I told him.  Oh,--I'm happy,--happy--"

At the little stone house he found Kit sitting on one end of the
long deal table in the study, and Bob Porteous in his shirt
sleeves, flourishing a baton made out of yesterday's paper, his
honey-coloured head shining like a planet.  He was exuberant in his
elation.  He had got very hot; he had taken off his coat; he had
kept smacking the table, the walls, and the windows with his paper
truncheon.  The little man could not keep still.

"I told you so,--my dear fellow.  What,--what!  Look at him--.
Scholar of Trinity!  Much cooler than we are.  Get up, you rascal,
and dance on the table."

He punched Sorrell's chest.

"Licked all the little smug fellows!  One of 'em sniffed all day--I
hear.  What are we going to do about it?"

"Roland is giving a dinner."

"By Jove,--that's it.  Kit,--I'll box you three rounds after
dinner.  Scholar of Trinity!"

Triumphantly he flattened a fly on the page of a Hebrew dictionary
that was lying open on the table.




CHAPTER XIX



1


Fanny Garland opened Sorrell's door.

"Bowden has sent these in," she said.

Sorrell turned in his chair.  He was sitting at his desk, and Fanny
had surprised him in a moment of meditation.  She had her arms full
of flowers, purple and white iris, wallflowers, rose-red pyrethrum.
Her round and pleasant face smiled at him over them.  Fanny was
growing plump and mature; she had little wrinkles under her eyes,
but even her wrinkles had kindness.

"Flowers.--Bowden sent them in--"

"Yes,--for the table,--Kit's dinner."

"Good of Bowden.--You are all being very good to us."

He rose, and stood looking at the flowers, but with an air of
inattention, for the coming of Fanny Garland had not broken the
current of his thought.  Indeed, a double stream was running
through his mind, each with its separate emotion, and as a result
his eyes were happily yet gravely vague.

"They are being very good to us."

But the other current was the stronger.  He had been sitting there
alone, seeing Kit in mortar-board and gown crossing the Great Court
of Trinity, Kit the son of an hotel porter, and Sorrell's wish had
been that the hotel porter might be blotted out.  Was it snobbery?
He did not think so.  The world of men--of young men--values
accomplishment.  Half our democratic posing is fulsome humbug.  The
captain matters more than the deck steward.

He became aware of Fanny's smiling eyes.

"What are you laughing at?"

Her smile became kind laughter.

"I don't wonder," she said,--"I don't wonder.  I bet--you are up in
the clouds a bit.  And quite right too.  But I want to decorate the
table."

Sorrell stared.

"Well,--why not do it?" said his stare.

She pressed her round, fresh face against the flowers.

"I don't like to go in.  Fact is--he's singing one of those songs
of his, the songs in the new piece he is writing.  If there is one
thing that riles him--"

Sorrell pulled out his watch.

"Half-past six.  I don't think he'll mind.  Not to-night."

"Well,--you come and open the door for me."

"All right.  I will."

They paused in the passage to listen to Thomas Roland's singing.
He was in a gaillard mood, and his deep voice seemed to carry more
than the mere burden of the song, for it was the voice of a man who
was happy.  A generous voice, it swept Sorrell back in a flash to
the day when Roland had arrived in that claret-coloured car, and to
his own struggles with Florence Palfrey and the confusion of the
Angel Inn.  Thomas Roland sang as though he had no regrets, and
with the voice of a sea-rover.

Sorrell raised a hand,--but Fanny Garland held up a finger.  She
wanted to hear the whole of the song.


     "There was an old man who lived in a box
      On a hill--on a hill.
      Its walls were white and its windows blue,
      And round about it orange trees grew,
      Above the sea--so still--so still."


The great posy of flowers breathed on Fanny Garland's bosom.  She
looked at Sorrell, and moved a hand in time to the music, but
Sorrell's eyes were not seeing her.  The memories of the past were
winding upwards to the triumphant peak of the day's good hope, and
through all these memories of uplift and endeavour Thomas Roland's
voice sounded like the voice of a romantic rover.  Some men brought
good luck, a happy concatenation of circumstances.  They willed
good things.

Fanny was nodding at him.

"Now--you dreamer--now," said her smile.

There was a pause in the singing, and Sorrell knocked.

"Come in."

Roland sang the words, and the opening door showed him sitting at
the piano, with the old gold curtains framing the green of the
garden.  He seemed to glow, and as he looked at Sorrell his eyes
had a mischievous tenderness.

"What's this?"

"Flowers, sir."

"It is twenty to seven, sir,--and I want to lay the table--for our
Mr. Christopher's dinner."

Roland stood up, gaillard and sly.

"Did you pick all that, Fanny?  My word, there will be a storm!"

"Bowden picked them himself, sir."

"Marvellous!  Well,--I had better go and pick the champagne.  And,--
Stephen--"

He paused with a hand on Sorrell's shoulder.

"Will you warn everybody that I want them all to come in here after
dinner and drink Kit's health."

He was looking into Sorrell's eyes as though he had other news for
him, but was holding it back until the end of the feast.

"A real 'bump' supper, Stephen.  Yo-ho!"

The drinking of Kit's health was only a part of the Pelican parade.
Kit made a speech of five words.  "Thanks--awfully--all of you."
He blushed, and all the women wanted to kiss him.  They drank
Sorrell's health, and Mr. Porteous's health, and Mr. Porteous made
a speech and flourished his serviette like a victorious flag.  They
drank Mr. Roland's health, with musical honours, Mr. Porteous
crashing at the piano.  They drank the staff's health, and good
luck to the Pelican.  Bells rang and were ignored.

It was the happiest of evenings, but for Sorrell the crowning
happiness was yet to come.



2


Christopher had gone to bed, and Roland and Sorrell had seen Mr.
Porteous fifty yards along the Winstonbury road, and were strolling
back under the stars.  The night was full of the smell of new-mown
hay, and about the Pelican the great trees were asleep.

Roland,--breathing deeply because of the night's fragrance, paused,
and in pausing looked up at the shadowy shape of the Pelican
hanging from the cross-beam.

"Good bird, excellent bird."

His voice seemed to vibrate with concealed laughter.

"The wise people won't allow us to believe in luck, Stephen.
I should like to drown some of the wise people in champagne."

The paying portion of the Pelican had gone to bed, and the windows
were dark.  Rowland, slipping a hand under Sorrell's arm, walked
with him so that they entered the door together, like partners and
equals.

"We had better lock up.  And then a pow-wow and a last pipe."

He locked the door, while Sorrell shot the bolts, and though the
evening had passed Sorrell had a feeling that it would revive and
rise to a second climax.  He had divined in Thomas Roland the
almost roguish reticence of a man who was hiding a dramatic finale.
Yes,--and enjoying it, gloating over it.

Roland's room showed deserted chairs, and empty glasses, old
Porteous's table-napkin trailing across a dish of fruit, and
Bowden's flowers a splash of colour in the centre of the whiteness.
Roland closed the door.  He edged towards the sideboard with an
attentive glance at Sorrell.

"Have a whisky,--Stephen."

His teeth showed white in his brown face.

"I'm going to.  All right.  Fill your pipe.  It has been a great
evening."

He filled the glasses, and transferring himself and his to the
hearthrug, watched Sorrell packing tobacco into the bowl of a pipe.
Yes, the fellow's fingers were just a little jerky and excited.
Had he any idea--?

"Sit down, old chap."

Sorrell sat down on the edge of one of the big armchairs.

"I haven't thanked you--"

"Leave it at that."

There was silence between them, and Sorrell, glancing up, found
Roland looking down at him over the edge of his glass.

"I suppose you have saved a little money, Stephen?"

Sorrell struck a match.

"An odd thousand.  It's for the boy."

"Just so.  Well,--let's talk business.  That New Forest place is
going to boom.  I told you that I have had my eye on an hotel at
Salisbury,--and on another at Bath."

"I think you did."

"I'm simply spilling with money.  Obviously, the thing is to turn
the whole show into a company, with the shares held by three or
four interested people.  'The Roland Hotels.'  How's that strike
you?"

Sorrell sat very still, staring at the bowl of his pipe.

"It should be a sound idea."

"So--I think.  And as you will be running the Pelican--I shall want
you on the board.  I have another man in mind.  The three of us
should do."

Sorrell's eyes rose slowly to Roland's face.  He was very pale.

"You mean--me, to manage here?"

"Exactly.  You know the business inside out by now.  You are the
very man for it.  Obviously."

Again, there was silence between them, and the silence was
understandable.  It said more than words.  They had worked together
for six years.

Sorrell was smiling, but his smile had a glimmer as of tears.

"It's just like you--.  To tell me--on an evening like this--.  My
dear chap,--I--"

Roland pretended to drink.

"Rather a good stroke of business for me, Stephen, getting you as
manager, and co-director.  I think so."

"Roland," said Sorrell, getting up suddenly out of his chair,--"I
think I'm a little--drunk.  If you had known--"

He went and stood at the open window.

"It is what--.  Well,--the boy--.  I'm not a snob,--but perhaps you
can understand--when he goes up to Trinity--this autumn--.  To be
able to say--"

He paused,--and half turning, looked at Roland with shining eyes.

"You are trusting me.  You are giving me my chance.  You shan't
regret it--"

"My dear chap--!"

"Oh,--I know--"

"Good God, man,--I'm getting something out of it,--too, a friend
and a partner.  We are white men, Stephen.  What's money but a
means to an end.  You can put just as much or as little as you
please into our show.  The Roland Hotels, Limited.--What!"

He laughed, and raised his glass.

"Here's to the old Pelican."



3


It pleased Thomas Roland to speak of their enterprise as an
Elizabethan gentleman adventurer spoke of his ships, lovingly, and
with a feeling for the roll of the sea and the names of the ships
that sailed it.  The Pelican, whose master was Captain Sorrell, the
Royal Oak, the White Hart, the Lion.  The Royal Oak had been
launched at Brockenhurst in the Forest, and Roland was sailing with
her for a season to see that all was shipshape.  The Lion was to be
launched at Salisbury in the spring.  The White Hart was still upon
the stocks.  Meanwhile, Roland had taken a little house at Chelsea,
engaged an ex-service man and his wife, proposing to make the
Chelsea house his headquarters.

"In memory of 'Cherry,' my dear Steve.  The young lady is still
earning me a great deal of money."

Whether Cherry existed in the flesh was a question that did not
trouble Stephen, though he could imagine her existence, the
insouciant, red-lipped love of a man who did not choose to marry.
Perhaps Cherry was sharing in the building and staging of the next
colour fantasia, The Blue Box, which was to be produced at the
"Pelargonium" in the autumn.  Certainly, Thomas Roland had his head
and his hands well filled,--and between bursts of song, was to play
the rover in his car, visiting his ships and surveying their
cargoes.

Christopher had gone up to Trinity, and was in rooms in Jesus Lane.
Sorrell had seen him lodged there, had bought him two immense
armchairs, and had had a long talk with Kit's tutor.  Christopher's
immediate objectives were the Science Tripos, and the first two
parts of the M.B.  Mr. Porteous, who could have taught a dog with
no hind legs to walk, had grounded Kit in physics and chemistry.
Also, Kit had elected to box and to row, and could be seen
strolling down to the First Trinity boat-house in striped trousers
and dark-blue blazer, to be tubbed and lectured by eloquent and
serious young men.  He weighed twelve stone three, and he received
his notice to row in one of the scratch eights at the end of a
fortnight's tubbing.

Sorrell, captain in a double sense, and in occupation of Roland's
little suite at the Pelican, felt that life had enlarged itself.
His salary as manager was L500 a year, with a bonus of ten per
cent. on the Pelican's profits.  He had sold out all his War Stock,
and had taken a share in the capitalization of the Roland Hotels.
How much the enterprise would bring him he did not know.  The
Pelican was a little gold mine; the Royal Oak was finding fair
weather, and Roland was talking buoyantly of twenty per cent.

Roland was a solid man now, very solid, and so ballasted with
capital that nothing could blow him over.  He was a proof of the
old saying that--"Money breeds money," but Roland had used his
imagination.  He could meet any tooth-brush merchant and smile in
his face.

"O, Roland, the chap who writes that musical stuff."

But Roland was proof against the commercialists' envious patronage,
for there were the Roland Hotels.  The tooth-brush merchant had to
swallow them; they were not musical stuff; they stuck in the
unimaginative man's gizzard.

Exactly!

Sorrell had picked up one or two of Roland's characteristic words.
It was obvious that his son was up at Trinity, and could refer to
his father as "Captain Sorrell.  Interested in hotels, a director.
In with Roland,--you know,--the Roland.  Quite a big show."

Kit could speak with the voice of a sea-captain.  There was no need
for him to hand out basins.

At times a man's outlook on life is so narrowed by the press of
circumstance that his consciousness peers through a slit at the
immediate happenings that concern him.  Like a gunner in a steel
turret, a part of the machine, he lays his gun upon the obvious
target.  So it had been with Sorrell for many years, but now he had
become aware of an enlarging of his consciousness.  He had leisure.
The sky had grown more spacious above his head.  He could sit on
his quarter-deck and look about him, and see his ship moving,
swinging her prow against blue horizons.  He issued orders, and the
urge of every proud man is to issue orders.

A deep contentment took the place of the facile cheerfulness of the
good-natured slave.

He was a person.  Other people knew that he had to be considered.
Moreover, he was popular, whatever that may mean.  He had never
bothered himself about popularity; he had bothered about his job.

Good food was brought him with great punctuality.  Fanny Garland,
sonsy and smiling, saw to that.  He had flowers on the table.
Albert Hulks treated the sitting-room fire as though it were a
sacred flame in a temple.  He had a green and gold quilt on his
bed; and tea and thin bread and butter were brought him in the
morning.

Someone else cleaned the boots.

And he liked it.  Years of sweat had made him so honest about the
realities that he was quite ready to desert his philosopher's tub
when something pleasanter and more sweetly smelling offered itself.

He began to allow himself little relaxations, small human luxuries,
and he found that he could work harder when the bearings of life
were oiled.  He bought an occasional book, and began to collect
china, and old prints.  Winstonbury had its "antique" shop, run by
a depressed little man who suffered from chronic dyspepsia, and
whose face suggested that he lived on sulphur tablets.  His name
was Grapp.  The antique trade offered chances that he was too
congealed to seize.

Sorrell was often in the shop, and it was not long before he came
to realize that it was a dead business.  Grapp had no enterprise.
Frequently Americans came to the Pelican and wandered into
Winstonbury in search of plunder.

Grapp hated Americans.  They disturbed his quaking interior.

"Rhubarb and aloes,--my dear sir."

But there were times when Sorrell pondered the problem of Grapp,
and the opportunities that Grapp was missing.

"A fellow with energy could turn that business inside out within
six months.  Fill up the shop with good stuff,--and swank a bit.
If I had a share in it I should put up a case of photographs in the
Pelican lounge,--and push the Yankees along."

It was an idea, and Sorrell let it simmer.

Also, he had other outlets.  The stern purpose in him had mellowed.
He had friends in Winstonbury, houses in which he felt himself at
home.  He spent one evening each week with Robert Porteous.  He
kept up his friendship with old Mrs. Garland in Vine Court, for she
had had a share in Kit's success, in that she had fed the boy well.

Sorrell found himself standing outside the red cottage in Vine
Court on one autumn afternoon.  Mrs. Garland had influenza, and
Sorrell had come to inquire for her, and to leave her a bunch of
grapes.

Fanny opened the door.

"Oh,--it's you!  I came here early--to spoil her a little."

She held the door open, looking at him with a soft glimmer of the
eyes.  "I brought these."

"Grapes.  How good of you.  She's asleep just now, and I have sent
Aunt Eva home."

The little sitting-room was just as Sorrell had first known it,
save that Fanny had bought her mother a comfortable new sofa
upholstered in green and blue.  It stood under the window.  Fanny
was putting Sorrell's grapes on a plate.  She was wearing a soft
green jumper, with the sleeves rolled up, and Sorrell could not
help noticing the pleasant plumpness of her arms.  She had a comely
neck, and her fair, bobbed hair hung over it.

"You'll stay and have tea."

They had tea together, sitting on the sofa.  Kit's apple tree, full
of yellow fruit, caught the light of the sunset.  The greenness of
it was enriched by the ripe apples, even as a woman is enriched by
desire.

They talked of Kit, and then fell to talking of each other, softly,
while the dusk began to fall.  Fanny's hair became a shadowy
wreath, and her arms and throat grew whiter.

The dusk seemed to draw them towards a pleasant, human intimacy.
They discussed life, sitting sideways on the sofa, and looking into
each other's faces.  The body of each seemed to relax.  Fanny's
fair head drooped gradually towards the padded back.

"Sleepy?"

She smiled at him.  "Are you?"

He found a cushion and placed it under her head, and their voices
grew softer.

"I'm not a marrying man."

He was explaining himself to her, and she listened, with the inward
smile of a woman who has learnt to laugh at an old-fashioned man's
dear pomposities.

"Does it matter,--Steve?  I'm not a marrying woman.  In these days--"

He saw her hand pull the curtains gently across the window.




CHAPTER XX



1


Sorrell was writing letters.  He had finished his weekly report to
Thomas Roland, and had begun a letter to his son, but when he had
covered the first page his thoughts began to wander.  Kit's last
letter lay upon the desk, a grave yet gossipy chronicle of
Christopher's moods and doings, for he was able to write to his
father with a happy frankness.

"You understand things, pater."

Precious words from a son, and Sorrell had taken them to his
heart with a smiling humility.  So, he understood things.  His
sensitiveness responded to the sensitiveness of his son.  Like
all individuals,--lone fighters, he had hated interference,
intolerance,--but unlike so many men of a proud temper, he hated
imposing himself upon others.  "Neither to rule, nor to be ruled,"
was his ideal, though life had taught him the necessity of imposing
himself--his will--upon others.  But with Kit it was different, and
Sorrell had fought all impulses towards autocracy, and his wisdom
had served him well.  In refusing to possess his son like a tyrant
he had come to possess him in the only way that mattered.  Kit had
no fear of his father; Sorrell had remained the one person on earth
to whom he hurried to tell things.  Their intimacy had grown deeper
as Kit's roots went deeper.

This last letter of Kit's was responsible for Sorrell's wandering
thoughts.  There was one most significant paragraph in it.


"They want me to row in the 3rd May boat.  Of course--I have felt
rather bucked about it, because our lot did rather badly in the
Lents.  But I have decided that it can't be done.  It isn't that I
don't feel sure of pulling through the first M.B. in June.  I'm out
for a place.  Don't you agree with me?"


Sorrell was not quite sure whether he did agree, because he was not
quite sure what Kit wanted.  His son was a creature of intelligence,
and capable of choosing.

Sorrell bit the end of the pen, with his eyes on the flower beds
under his window.  Yes, the choice was with Christopher.

He began to write.


"Do just what you wish to do.  I know that it is not wise--at
times--to split one's energy.  The thing is to concentrate.  You
know that as well as I do, old chap.  But sometimes one can
compromise.  I'm pulled both ways.  I'd like to see you rowing in
one of the May boats,--and I'd like you to get a place in the M.B.
Greedy parent!  But it is a question of how you feel.  It is not my
business to coach your feelings."


It made Sorrell happy to realize that he could write to his son
with such easy frankness, and that the invisible tie between them
seemed to be growing stronger.  His whole wish was to play the man
to the man in Christopher.  He raised his head and let his eyes
rest upon the garden, for with the mellowing of his middle age he
was becoming more of a garden lover, for there is no more pleasant
place than a garden for the ripening of a man's thoughts.  To be
able to see the massive old tree trunks rising from the sweep of
well-cared for grass, and to watch the play and pattern of the
shadows, and the ebb and flow of the light among the leaves,--such
contemplation pleased him.  It gave him the same smooth feeling as
did the glaze on an exquisite piece of old china, or the silky
warmth of the skin of a woman's arm.  It was good to enjoy such
beauty, not greedily, but with magnanimous insight.

The Pelican's visitors made use of the garden, and occasionally the
soul of it was offended, but since a lover of flowers increases as
Adam and Eve grow older, and the Pelican's visitors were mostly
mature people, Sorrell had little cause to complain.  It is the
child who is a garden's natural enemy, and Sorrell did not
encourage children.  The Pelican was so proudly placed that she
could refuse children.  They were a nuisance.  This serenely
efficient rest-house had no use for childishness.

Blessed maturity.

And at this very moment maturity presented itself before Sorrell's
eyes in the shape of a voluminous lady dressed in black who was
trailing slowly across the lawn in the direction of a seat under
one of the chestnut trees.  He had a view of her broad back, and
her robust curves defying the most cunning of corsages.  A
Rubenesque figure, sumptuous and solid, with masses of blonde grey
hair swathed under a black flower-pot hat!  A visitor, obviously,
and a recent arrival.

She turned, and seated herself, and Sorrell's eyes suddenly
hardened.  He realized that she was looking across the lawn in the
direction of his window, and that she could see him sitting at his
desk.

He lowered his head and pretended to go on writing, while he
considered the significance of this unwelcome appearance, this
abrupt recrudescence of an unfortunate past.  He scribbled nothings
on a sheet of paper, occasionally glancing under ominous eyebrows
at the figure on the seat.  She sat there, wholly at ease, her
broad face turned towards him.  He fancied that she smiled.

He got up with a "Damn the woman," and went out of the room.  At
the foot of the stairs he met Hulks with a big leather trunk on his
shoulder, and he made inquiries as to the trunk and its owner.

"Lady just arrived in a big Murchester saloon, sir.  Booked for a
week.  Miss Murdoch has put her in No. 3."

Sorrell was scanning the trunk.  It was plastered with Riviera
hotel labels, and on its lid was painted in big black letters "D.
Duggan."

He walked out to the garage and looked at the car.  Its chauffeur,
dressed in black livery, was reversing the big, dark blue machine
into one of the lock-ups.

Sorrell spoke to him.  "Is that Mrs. Duggan's car?"

The chauffeur replied, without troubling to look at him.

"It is."

Sorrell went back to his sitting-room, and sat down at his desk.
The woman had not moved from the seat, but as he drew up his chair
he saw her rise and advance diagonally across the grass.  Her
movements appeared very deliberate and unselfconscious, but Sorrell
knew that however circuitous her movements might appear they were
directed towards his window.

"I suppose it's inevitable," he thought; "but she won't get any
change out of me."

He set himself to finish his letter to Kit, compelling himself to
concentrate upon it, and he had arrived at the "Yours affectionately"
when the figure in black appeared at the window. She had followed
the path between the beds planted with standard roses, tulips,
myosotis, and violas, and to a casual observer she would have
appeared as a lover of flowers, strolling at her leisure.  Her poise
was one of interest; her back ignored the window.

Sorrell scribbled his signature, blotted it,--and began folding up
the sheet ready for its envelope.  He had decided that he would
leave her the initiative.  His wisest course was to sit tight and
to allow her as few openings as possible.

She turned to look at the flower-bed under his window, and he could
not but admire her deliberation and her poise.  Her eyes rose with
a natural inevitableness to his.  He was pressing down the flap of
the envelope.

She smiled.  He noticed that her blonde hair was powdered with
grey.  Knowing her of old he would have expected her to have had
those grey hairs treated.  Her acceptance of this greyness seemed
to make her more dangerous.

"Still here."

He gave her an almost imperceptible nod and a steady stare of the
eyes, and she drew up like a fine ship ready to use her guns or to
parley.

"You have changed."

He turned the envelope over and proceeded to address it.

"One does.  Both of us.  Married again?"

The leisureliness of her reply balanced his casualness.

"Let us see,--I was Sampits.  Now I am Duggan.  Mr. Duggan died
last December.  I suppose I shall remain Mrs. Duggan."

Sorrell raised steady eyes, and seemed to observe her.

"Is it necessary?"

She smiled.

"Really--that is very gallant of you."

"Not at all."

In their historic quarrels of ten years ago Kit's mother had nearly
always bested Sorrell, and had sailed out of action leaving him
with his more sensitive temper shot to pieces.  She had controlled
her fire more coolly; she had cared less; she had carried heavier
guns.  Her serene and healthy selfishness had given her a notable
advantage over a worried and highly strung man, a scrupulous idiot,
and a failure.  But the woman who stood there, scanning him with an
air of amused slyness, had a kinder outlook upon life, because life
had given her much that she had desired.  She was the mature cat on
the cushion.  She had an air of comfortable softness.  Almost, she
could refer to herself playfully as an old woman.

"I am greyer than you are, Stephen."

"You are older than I am."

"That's not quite so gallant."

She was firing blank shot at him, and the battle between them was
now more restrained and less vivid, but Sorrell was aware of it as
a battle.  He was waiting for her to ask the inevitable question,
and the fact that she did not ask it left him to meditate upon her
tactics.  He felt pretty sure of her objective.

"Have you been running this place for long?"

"About a year."

"You do it pretty well.  I know something about hotels."

Judging by the labels on her trunk she did.  Moreover, she could
afford to stay at de luxe hotels.  Messrs. Sampits and Duggan had
behaved very generously.

"What time's dinner here, Stephen?"

Her voice was friendly.  Her whole attitude suggested that they
should agree to regard life as a humorous and ironical experience.

"Seven-thirty."

"Thanks."

Sorrell rose from his chair.

"Just a word,--do you mind addressing me as Mr. Sorrell."

"Not in the least.  I am much more easy to get on with than I used
to be.  And you--?"

He stood with his hands resting on the desk, and looking at her
with deliberate steadfastness.

"I'm the boy's father."



2


An hour later returning from a wander in the Abbey beech-woods,
Sorrell decided that he had acted wisely in hoisting his flag.

"Just as well let her know that I'm an enemy.  I suppose it is
fairly obvious what she is after.  That grey in her hair.  No,--I'm
damned if I will let her meddle."

During dinner Sorrell went and stood in the passage, and
reconnoitred the dining-room through the doorway.  Mrs. Duggan had
a little table by one of the windows.  Her back was towards him.
She was in evening dress, black velvet, with a rope of pearls round
her throat, looking a very handsome person carrying her years with
graceful resignation.  If it was a pose it was admirably conceived,
and as admirably adopted.  He saw her give one of the waitresses a
pleasant upward smile.  The girl smiled back at her.

Sorrell retired to his sitting-room.  He had asked Fanny Garland to
postpone the serving of his dinner, and he sat on the window-ledge
and sorted out his impressions.

Yes, Dora Duggan had mellowed.  She had become something of the
smiling duchess, an opulent and handsomely self-assured person.
She dressed well.  She had some exquisite jewellery, and a sense of
humour.  Dangerous creatures,--women!  He divined the dangerousness
of Kit's mother, the subtle interference she might exert, the
seductions she could employ.

Fanny came in with his soup.  She noticed his narrowed, intent
face, and the way he looked at her as though all women were under
suspicion.

"Shut the door, Fanny, will you."

His eyes swept the garden.  He stood a moment, smoothing his
moustache.

"Noticed No. 3?"

Fanny had.

"What do you think of her?  As a woman--"

She was puzzled,--defensive.

"Why do you want to know?"

"I'll tell you,--when you have told me--"

"She looks rather a good sort.  But--of--course--  A bit of an old
soldier--too."

"A good sort!"

He sat down with the briskness of impatience.

"You and I--understand each other.  Not a word to anybody, old
girl.  That--is Kit's mother."

He glanced up at her, meaningly.

"Married twice--since she left me.  Widow.  Pots of money.  Not
bothering about her grey hair.  Sails down here in her two thousand
pound car.  What do you make of that?"

Fanny's shrewd fresh face was solid with thought.

"Well--if you ask me--"

"I'm asking you--as a woman--"

"She's after the boy."

"Exactly," said Sorrell, picking up his soup spoon.

Life happens less crudely than our descriptions of it suggest, and
the human diagrams that we draw lack the subtlety of colour and
movement.  It was easy for Sorrell to rush at a conclusion, and to
make a sketch of Dora Duggan as he saw her, and to compare it with
the Dora Sorrell of his married days.  In his mental diary he wrote
her down a vampire, a woman, who, having had all the satisfactions
she desired from men and sex, was seeking other satisfactions.
That red mouth of hers was ready to feed upon the young vitality of
her son.

The thought enraged him.  He was offended by the infernal audacity
of her intriguing reappearance.  To return, smiling, after a
digression that had lasted ten years, sleekly and handsomely
prosperous and self-assured, and ready to claim the inevitable
flesh-bond.

He could hear her saying--"After all, Stephen, I am his mother."
She would say it deliberately, flaunting her grey hairs and her
glowing, maternal maturity, suggesting that both he and she had
arrived at that autumnal season when life ripens to a bland
magnanimity.  "I'm growing an old woman, Stephen.  I'm through with
my adventure.  Why not let bygones be bygones?"

Had she other children, young Sampits or young Duggans?  Or, now
that her wildness was passing, was Christopher to be the one
creature to be desired, a young man to be debauched by the maternal
passions of a woman who was growing old?

Well, he had hoisted his flag, and he would wait for her to attack.
She had engaged her bedroom for a week.  Obviously there would be
developments in the course of these seven days.

Sorrell decided that he would neither seek nor avoid her.  He would
order his life as though she had not reappeared on the figure of it
with her perilous, easy opulence.

On the first day of the seven they had no speech with each other.
Sorrell passed Kit's mother in the lounge, wrapped up in a
magnificent musquash coat, and waiting for her car.  She was going
out for the day.

He gave her a vague, stiff bow, and she smiled at him, pulling on
her gloves.

"Good morning, Mr. Sorrell.  What do you think of the weather?"

"The glass is high."

"I am driving over to Bath to lunch with some friends."

Sorrell received the information with the impersonal politeness of
a hotel manager.  He hoped that her drive would be a pleasant one;
he was in motion while he expressed this formal wish; his courtesy
was the Parthian politeness of a busy man in a hurry.

On the evening of the same day he had a glimpse of Kit's mother
sitting in a corner of the lounge, and looking up over a book at
Albert Hulks.  She was talking to Hulks who had taken to himself
all the Sorrell traditions.  Hulks had an ash-tray in one big hand,
and with the other he was feeling for his wallet.

"Stamps!" thought Sorrell: "I remember that day when she bought
stamps from me,--and tried to find out--.  Of course--she can make
Hulks talk."

It would be easy for Kit's mother to discover the facts about her
son.  All that she had to do was to involve Hulks or Bowden in a
friendly gossip, and ask what had become of that nice boy--Mr.
Sorrell's son.  "I remember him when I was here before."  And she
would be told that Christopher had won a scholarship at Cambridge,
and that he was up at Trinity.

Two more days passed, and Sorrell was compelled to discover in her
an aloofness that equalled his own.  They saw each other in the
distance, and while appearing to ignore the presence of the other,
were not deceived by this mutual disregard.  They appeared to avoid
all opportunities of meeting.

Her presence in the hotel made Sorrell restless.  He felt her about
him, watching without appearing to watch, insinuating even in her
aloofness.  She was like a cat who sat and stared and seemed to see
nothing; while nothing was lost upon her.  He was unpleasantly
aware of her as a creature gliding about in the jungle, leaving him
to guess at her movements and her motives.  By sitting still he had
presented her with the initiative, and the power of holding him in
suspense.

He was considering the question of writing to Kit, or of making a
sudden descent upon him at Cambridge.

But what could he say?

"The woman--who was your mother--is staying here at the Pelican.  I
think she would like you to resume your sonship.  Personally, I do
not wish you to have anything to do with her."

But would such frankness be wise?  His whole purpose had been to
perfect a complete comradeship between himself and his son, and to
eliminate the shadow of the paternal tyranny.  He had chosen the
part of friend and counsellor; he had renounced the self-sufficient
privilege of issuing orders.  Christopher was very dear to him, and
he believed himself to be very dear to Christopher.  Why not trust
to this mutual confidence and affection?  Play the new Adam, and
let Eve try her wiles?  All life is willing and choosing, and
Christopher would have to will and to choose.

On the fourth day something happened.  The woman came and sat on
the seat under the chestnut tree when Sorrell was sitting at his
desk.  She had a book.  She pretended to read, while he made a
pretence of writing letters, but the space between them was crossed
by their mutual consciousness of an inevitable and approaching
skirmish.

Sorrell rose from his chair.  She saw his figure disappear from the
window, but when he came out by way of the garden door, and crossed
the grass towards her, her head was bent over her book.  She
allowed him to believe that she was unaware of his approach.

He paused in front of her.

"How do you find this place?  Comfortable?"

Her quick and upward smile assured him that she had been taken
unawares.

"Oh, it's you!  Yes--I'm very comfortable.  So far as my experience
goes--it is the best-run country hotel in England."

Her smile continued.  She moved to one end of the seat,--and the
space left was an invitation.

"But a hotel is always a hotel."

Her book was closed and laid upon the seat, and the upward glance
she gave him still had the edge of a smile.

"Do you ever suffer from curiosity--?"

She divined his guardedness towards her.

"Funny thing, life!  Here--we are--like a couple of strangers--.
You and I--.  Do you remember those days at Shanklin?"

"Nearly twenty years ago."  He sat down.

"O,--well, we were incompatibles.  I'm afraid I gave you some bad
times--.  I was much more greedy for life."

He was looking towards his window, and not at her.

"So you are never curious--?"

"About what?"

"What sort of success or failure I made of things--afterwards.
Never thought--?"

"Why should I?"

He felt that she was smiling.

"So you never forgave me.  Poor old Stephen!  You married an
explosive person.  But when one comes to a certain stage--"

His silence neither encouraged nor repulsed her.  He was letting
her make all the thrusts.

"One begins to look back--instead of forward."

"You think so?"

"Well, I do.  Of course--it depends--.  A woman grows rather
lonely."

She observed his profile.  She had dropped one little stone into
the pool of his silence, but so far as she could judge it had
stirred no ripples.

"Suppose you just drift about now?" he said.

"I?  Not a bit of it.  I'm the comfy cat, my dear man.  A house in
South Audley Street.  Three months at Cannes--perhaps,--and a few
days in my car.  Friends,--yes--.  A busy old bachelor like you--
doesn't bother.  I'm so well off."

He remained utterly irresponsive, a man with a blank yet alert
face, and a judicial manner.  She gave him a little humorous sigh,
observed him ironically with her fine eyes, but diverged to other
topics.  He had shown no sign of reacting either to sentiment or to
the hint of her prosperity.  It seemed to her that he took himself
with the same old, desperate seriousness.  And he was desperately
serious in his desire to keep her and Christopher apart.

"Hopeless--as ever--with women," she decided.  "No idea of
compromise."

She began to talk about the late Mr. Sampits, and when she had
exhausted her second husband, she went on to speak of the late Mr.
Duggan.  She told Sorrell the most trivial and intimate details of
her two subsequent marriages, overwhelming him with the steady and
self-interested loquacity of the hotel-bore, and she did it so
naturally that Sorrell, growing bored, began to wonder at himself
for sitting there and listening to her.  He heard how Sampits had
died of alcoholic nephritis, and how Duggan's chief characteristic
had appeared to be a prejudice in favour of the old-fashioned
night-shirt.  He heard what sort of clothes they wore, and what
they ate, and what they would not eat, and he found himself yawning
with immense surprise at her banal confidences.

Why--on earth--was she telling him all this?  She began to appear
to him as little more than a stout and rather immodest person, just
like dozens of other elderly women who loved to hold some helpless
listener blockaded in a gossip's corner.  She seemed to become less
and less dangerous the more she bored him with her crude
outpourings.  The world was full of such women.  He had seen them
by the score in the lounge of the Pelican, sitting down solidly to
exhaust the patience of some too good-natured listener.

After half an hour of it he glanced at his watch.

"I'm sorry--but I have to--"

She drew her breath and smiled upon him.

"Of course--.  You must be such a busy man.  We have had quite a
nice talk, haven't we?  And, O, before I forget, my friends at Bath
have asked me to go on there to-morrow.  Will it inconvenience you--
if I give up my room--?"

"Not in the least.  We are turning people away every day."

It was not till he had smoked a pipe after tea that Sorrell grasped
the curious fact that she had never mentioned Christopher.  She had
talked of no one but herself and her dead men-folk.  Curious!  Had
he been an alarmist, and was she just a fat commonplace egoist who
asked for nothing but an audience?  People grew fat in mind as well
as in body.  It seemed to him that he had exaggerated her
significance.




CHAPTER XXI


1


Christopher Sorrell came up from the river with two other men in
blue blazers.  The 3rd May boat had been rowing a course; the crew
had done so fast a time that their coach had shown an unexpected
enthusiasm, and had blessed them from the towing-path.

"Well rowed, you men."

His smirk over the stop-watch had been inspired by the discovery
that his crew--the third crew--had rowed over in three seconds less
than the second crew.  At the First Trinity boathouse he had
gathered his men together and had allowed this piece of news to
escape.

"Damned well rowed--all of you."

He had smiled particularly at Kit, the No. 5, who was standing with
his oar over his shoulder, and his shorts well daubed with grease
from his slide.  Sorrell was the coach's pet heavy-weight.  He had
guts and style.  The coach--great man that he was, had let it be
known in high quarters that Sorrell was one of the best of the
"freshers," and ought to have a chance in the Trials.

The three large and healthy young creatures turned into Jesus Lane.
Kit's digs overlooked Jesus College, but the two second-year men
who were with him kept in Nevil's Court.

"Coming round after 'hall'?"

Kit diverged towards the houses.

"No,--I'm swotting."

"Good lord,--what for?"

"Because I like it.  Just that."

His still radiant smile flew back at them as he crossed the road,
and his seniors accepted it.  Sorrell was a good lad.  His
seriousness was without offence.  He could row himself out with the
same seriousness with which he read, and youth has no quarrel with
a fellow whose blade can shift a good wedge of water, and who is
not too cocky about it.  You could rag Sorrel--and get that smile,
and healthy physical retaliation with it.  No one had ever seen him
ruffled or malicious.  He boxed as he rowed--with the same smiling
seriousness.

A fellow named Burgoyne had the rooms below Christopher, and when
Kit noticed a big blue saloon waiting outside the house, he
assigned it to Burgoyne or to Burgoyne's people.  The rich fellow
below him had many friends.  Hypothetical mothers and aunts and
sisters and sisters' friends were always arriving in cars to look
up Bertie and have lunch with him.  Many of them were rather flashy
ladies, ultra modern young gentlewomen with flat chests and
shingled hair, who sat on Burgoyne's window-sill and smoked
cigarettes.  They were a cause of offence to Kit.

"Confound the women."

Their clothes and their chatter and the faint yet disturbing
feminine aroma of them interfered with his work.

Kit ran up the steps and opened the front door.  Burgoyne's part of
the house struck him as being unexpectedly peaceful, and he could
only suppose that the whole carload of colour had gone on the
river.  Kit had arrived at the foot of the stairs when Mrs. Jowett,
his landlady, appeared from below.  She was a stout person,
swarthy, with a broad nose and an expansive mouth, perennially
interested in all "young gentlemen."  She had cared for Hindus and
gentlemen of colour, and she had survived.  Her only quarrel with
Kit was that she could apply to him the word "worthy."

"A lady to see you, sir."

"A lady!"

"She's upstairs.  Been here an hour."

"What's her name?"

"Duggan."

Kit looked mystified.

"What sort of--person, Mrs. Jowett?"

The landlady gave him one of her large and much creased smiles.

"Well,--a lady, sir.  That's her car."

Kit went slowly upstairs, wondering who the woman could be, and
wishing her elsewhere at the moment.  He wanted to change, and he
wanted his tea, and he had his chemistry lecturer's notes to look
through.

He opened the sitting-room door and saw his mother.

She was sitting by the window in one of the big wicker-work chairs
his father had given him, and she seemed to fill it, sumptuously
and easily, her black dress contrasting with the purple and orange
cretonne.  He noticed that her hair was grey, and that she was
smiling at him.

Kit stood very still in the open doorway.  He seemed to have
nothing to say.  He was astonished, conscious of nine dead years,
and of those other memories that had puzzled and hurt him until
Sorrell had somehow made him understand.

"I'm a ghost,--my dear Christopher."

He closed the door, remembering that Mrs. Jowett had ears and that
she used them, and when he had closed the door he stood with his
back to it.

"I hadn't any idea--"

They looked at each other, but their points of view were very
different.  Christopher was a vivid person; he stood five feet
eleven; he looked very big in his rowing togs; he had the glow of
youth and of extreme fitness.  He was more than a good-looking
fellow.  His mother had despised the so-called handsome men,
knowing how thin and poor the shell is, and that a good getter of
the world's gear may have ape-like features.  Ugly men can hug
hard.  And she saw in Kit the likeness of herself, a superficial
likeness.  He had her glowing skin, the same blue of the eye.

"Heavens, how you've grown!"

She put up her gloved hands and laughed,--but Kit's face maintained
an embarrassed and stubborn seriousness.  He stood and stared.  He
was looking at his mother across those nine years.  There were many
things that astonished him, and held him in a state of inarticulate
staring.  She looked quite old.  He felt himself in the presence of
a stranger.  There was no whimper of welcome in him.  He was
embarrassed, suspicious, immobile, at a loss to meet her sudden
intrusion into his life.  He had not needed her, and did not need
her.  He found himself looking at her and thinking--"So--this is
the woman who let my father down.  What does she want?  How did she
know?"

His mother was drawing off her gloves, and her downward glance was
like the dropping of a veil.  She had seen many things, that
serious and curiously stern young face, the puzzled and candid
eyes.  She was full of swift and impatient comments.  "What, if he
is like me outside,--and like his father--inside?  Serious?  Too
beastly serious."  She smoothed out her gloves and her temper.  Had
she expected him to rush at her and to cry--"Mother"?  Of course
not!  She made herself look smooth.  She was the well-dressed,
presentable woman of forty-nine, the sort of woman he might see any
day in Regent Street, plump and pleasant, a woman who went to
church on occasion, but who was nicely up to date.  She had a house
in South Audley Street.  She went to the Riviera.  She played
Bridge.  She had two or three nice girls who came and nested in her
chairs, and called her Aunt Dora.

"I happened to be in Cambridge--"

He crossed the room, and stood resting his hands on the back of the
other arm-chair.  There was the same attentive, self-questioning
stare in his eyes.

"Yes,--I'm up at Trinity."

"So I had heard."

She raised her eyes and gave him a tentative and slightly droll
smile.

"I have been staying at the Pelican."

"Oh?"

"Your father looks very well.  We had one or two talks."

His silence held her poised.  His lips moved,--and grew still.
Then, he asked her a question, one of those terribly direct
questions that are so disconcerting to the sophisticated.

"Did he ask you to come and see me?"

She met the question full faced, but he had noticed a momentary
flicker of hesitation.

"I think he understood."

She watched his face.  He seemed to be making some calculation.

"I had a letter from him this morning."

"So you know."

"No."

The faint creases about her eyes and mouth seemed to deepen.

"Well,--I should have thought--.  You men are queer.  Secretive
creatures--"

She laughed, and playing with her gloves, looked up at him as she
had learned to look at men at certain moments.  Her voice was
humorously reproachful.

"My dear,--there are things that seem extraordinary.  At my age--
one ceases to be surprised,--yes, even at one's self.  One grows
kinder--.  So you have been rowing?"

She was looking at his hands resting on the chair.

"Yes."

"In strict training--I suppose.  I'm staying at the University
Arms.  Would your rowing prevent you having a little dinner with
me?"

He raised his eyes till they met hers.

"I have to dine in hall."

"I see.  Well,--come in afterwards."

She waited like a gambler on the throw of his next words, smiling,
maturely debonaire.

"I have an exam, in June.  I'm reading hard."

She flicked a playful glove at him.

"You horribly serious boy.  As if I want to interfere?  Why,--after
all,--I used to stop your crying when you were cutting a bad tooth.
Well, my dear, let's leave it at that.  I have kept my poor man
waiting nearly two hours."

She rose, and he crossed the room and opened the door for her, the
youth in him rigid.

"I'm sorry--"

She gave him a quick, kind glance.

"My dear--if life doesn't teach one sportsmanship, what's the use?"

When she had gone Kit stood in the doorway of his room staring at
nothing.  His eyes looked like the eyes of those northern men that
grow blue and fierce when they dwell upon the sea of their own
equivocal thoughts.



2


Christopher dined in hall with the crew of the third May boat, and
he had so little to say for himself and was so absent, that little
Peabright the cox, who sat opposite, twittered at him like a
friendly and mischievous bird.

"Buck up, Sorrell; you're late."

Christopher gave the little man a solemn and tolerant smile.

"All right, Peaby; I'm a bit slow in the water to-night."

Stroke, on Christopher's right, a ruddy, dark lad with roving eyes,
grinned affectionately.

"Sorrell's doing calculations.  I can feel him doing 'em behind me
before we reach Grassy.  Like this.  If we row thirty, and gain two
inches each stroke on Emmanuel 2, and Emmanuel 2 are rowing thirty-
three, whereabouts in the Long Reach do we bump them?"

"We'll bump them before Ditton," said Kit; "you give us ten good
ones, Skinny, when we get round Grassy."

And he relapsed into mysterious obscurity.

Strolling alone across the Great Court Kit considered the problem
of his mother.  For nine years she had been less than a shadow, and
suddenly she had appeared before him as a woman of strange yet
mature liveness.  Never in his life had he felt more rigid and less
impulsive than during those few minutes when he had stood looking
down at her, feeling himself most strangely full of his father.
The logic of youth can be very merciless, and Kit was not a
sentimentalist.  He was too big and vital to be sentimental.  And
what were the facts as he saw them?  His mother had deserted his
father at a time of wounds and misfortune.  She had gone away with
another man.  Nine years had passed, and Sorrell had been both
mother and father to him.

And she had talked of sportsmanship.  What right had she--?  He had
been utterly ill at ease with her, and through the haze of his
astonishment he had felt himself groping in the presence of someone
who had an illusive motive, a cleverness that was strange to him,
something plump and persuasive.  And yet, after all, she was his
mother.  She might be expected to feel some interest in him.  But
what sort of interest?  After nine years?  Rather late in the day,--
surely.  And he did not think that he needed her interest.  It
roused no response in him.  The man that was Christopher took
sides, and his nascent manhood was on the side of his father.

Christopher passed through the Great Court, and across Sydney
Street into Jesus Lane.  The long May evening spread before him its
clear, persuasive light, and he knew that the water would be lying
very still and black under the willows and the bridges, but he went
to his rooms.  He threw his cap and gown into one chair, and
himself into the other.  Through the open window he watched clouds
flushing a sky of pale azure.

Presently, he reached for a note-book scribbled full of chemical
formulae, for he had told his mother that he had work to do, and
when you had made such a statement it behoved you to be consistent.
But what an extraordinary situation was this, that he should be
sitting there, mugging chemistry, while his mother waited less than
a mile away, the mother whom he had not seen for nine years!  Those
nine years!  Yet, it was those nine years that had inhibited any
impulse that might have pushed him towards her.  As it was, he
shrank from the idea of seeing her again; he felt stiff and self-
conscious, awkwardly and obstinately shy of her.

But he could not read.  His youth had been too deeply stirred, and
his young self challenged, and the carbon and hydrogen molecules
were jostled by live thoughts.

Why had not his father mentioned his mother to him in that last
letter?

What was the meaning of Sorrell's silence?

Their compact had never yet miscarried.  "No secrets."  Kit the man
was the son of Kit the boy.

"Perhaps it never occurred to him that she would come up here."

Kit's impulse was to sit down and write to his father, and he threw
his chemistry notes aside, and got out a writing-pad and his
fountain-pen.  He sat curled up in the chair with the pad on his
knee, full of an immense and questioning seriousness.

Sounds of wild life began in the room below.  Three or four live
young men had returned with Burgoyne and were letting loose their
liveliness.  A gramophone began to play, and voices in chorus to
ask the whole of the impending night that most vital question--"Why
did I kiss that girl?"

"Confound them!" said Kit, frowning in the dusk over his writing-
pad and biting the top of his pen.

"Why--O--why," sang the voices.

"Because--you are blithering idiots," replied a voice from above.

The eternal question blew itself out, and four irresponsible young
men big with youth cast about for other methods of self-expression.

"Let's go up and rag old Solly."

They arrived, tumbling up the stairs, and stood bunched in
Christopher's doorway, sighting him as a shadowy figure in a chair
with a writing-pad on his knee.

"Pomes," said one of them, "pomes to Alice."

"Hallo--old H20."

"O, get out," said Kit, "I'm busy.  Go and put on another fox-
trot."

They fell upon him and there was a minute's commotion during which
Kit with perfect good temper gave as good as he got, and having
extricated himself and pulled Burgoyne's coat over his head, thrust
him vigorously between the legs of a Rugger "blue."

"Kiss her--now, old thing."

Someone switched on the light, and got hold of Kit's writing-pad,
but Kit's voice became suddenly unplayful.

"Drop that."

"'Dear old pater'--"

"Drop it--"

The farceur dropped it, not merely because Sorrell was a marked man
with the gloves, but also because he was a decent lad.

"Righto, Solly."

Kit smiled at him.

"Quits, you chaps.  I'll come down presently when I have finished a
letter."

Hot and satisfied, they left him with a wildly ruffled head and
went below.  The gramophone resumed its melody.

"Why did I kiss--?"

Kit wrote his letter, and the inward refrain of it was--"Why did--
she--come here?"



3


Sorrell sat reading Christopher's letter.


"What puzzled me--pater--was why you had not talked about it in
your letter.

"She asked me to dinner, but I said that I had to dine in hall, and
when she asked me to go in after dinner, I said I had to read.  It
made me feel queer and churlish, but the fact is I was pretty well
astonished.  She seemed like a stranger.

"I asked her whether you knew about her coming here, and she did
not give me a straight answer.

"It seems pretty beastly writing like this,--but I have always told
you things.  There is something in me that can't call her mother.
I can't help it--."


Sorrell laid the letter on his desk, and he remained for a long
while, deep in thought.  Christopher had asked him a very definite
question, and he neither wished nor was able to avoid replying to
it.  That his mood had its moments of exultation was neither here
nor there.  Almost, he was ready to forgive the woman her attempt
to raid his life's store of treasure, for the sake of the
significant ineptitude of the attempt.  At first, Sorrell had been
angry, but Kit's letter had dispersed his anger.

His son was loyal to him, and to explain this loyalty the father
could produce a dozen reasons.  And was not the chief reason to be
found in his own attitude towards Christopher, an attitude of deep
and unselfish affection?  He had refused to treat the boy like
personal property, jealously, with arbitrary patronage.  He had
fought the spirit of the old-man father.  He had never talked down
to Christopher, coerced him against his reason, or worked off upon
the boy a facile pomposity.

They were friends.  This letter was the most signal proof of it.



4


Kit read his father's letter while he was eating his breakfast.  It
was a strange and rare letter for a father to write to a son.


"Kit,--I am not only your father but your friend,--and my wish has
been to put the friend before the father.

"Old chap,--you mean a very great deal to me, more perhaps than you
will ever know, but you are not my cake to have and eat.  Your life
is your own, and my share in it is the love and pride that will
come to me out of it.  All the things that will make you happy are
what I desire--you and your job.  It is a man's job that matters to
him most.

"I have no feeling against your mother--now.  All that is dead.
The only feeling that I should have against her would be--if--she
took you away from your true self and your job.  I don't say that
she would.  But women have powers of persuasion.

"Do what you feel moved to do.  If you wish to see her--see her.
After all--she is your mother, and was--my wife.

"I do not believe that she can come between us.

"Your letter to me was rather a precious document, Kit.  Do you
remember the old brown portmanteau?"


Christopher's bacon and eggs grew cold while he read his father's
letter.  His eyes had a faint mist before them.

His father was a great man.  He loved him.



5


Mrs. Duggan's chauffeur was strapping a trunk to the luggage grid,
while she herself stood at a window, still impatiently dallying
after three days of waiting for the son who never came.  She had
expected him, and when he failed to come to her, her expectation
had grown more urgent and angry.  For she, who never allowed
sentiment to interfere with her appetites, had wished to employ
sentiment in the seduction of her son.

The stare of his blue eyes, his rigid seriousness had remained with
her.  She had seen in him both herself and his father, and the old
jealous clamour had revived.  "Mine" had been her cry.  But she had
understood Kit's obstinate shyness, and in dealing with men she had
discovered the efficacy of attacking by retreating.  She had held
aloof during those three days, unable to believe that the elemental
stuff in Christopher would not bring him to her.  She would handle
him gently.  Let him but tolerate the first, subtle caress, and she
would soon put her shears to his awkward shyness.

She was in love with youth now, and youth found her pleasant and
easy.  She had money to spend and she knew how to fill her car with
young things, to carry a bouquet of youth about town to the
dancing-rooms or the theatre.  Aunt Dora was such a good sort.

And Christopher had not come to be caressed.  The rigid and serious
Sorrell seemed to be holding him back behind the barrier of those
nine years.  She had expected difficulties, a course of careful
persuasion, and she had prepared herself to be patient.

But to be snubbed by Sorrell's son!

A porter came into the room.

"The car is ready, madam."

She prepared to abandon her strong point and to begin her retreat,
and as she passed out through the hotel doorway she became aware of
an abrupt and blind rage, the impatience of the woman elemental in
her passion to possess.  She approached the car.  The chauffeur was
holding open the door.  He touched the peak of his cap.

"Beautiful morning, madam."

"A perfect morning, Gunter."

He arranged a rug over her knees, and closed the door of the
saloon, and as he did so a lad in a dark blue gown came round the
back of the car and appeared at the window.  He raised his mortar-
board, and looked in unsmilingly at his mother.  His lips moved.
She leaned forward and lowered the window.

"I thought it was your car.  I'm just off to a lecture."

She put out a gloved hand, and her face had a soft and secret
radiance.

"Be a good boy, my dear.  I can see that you are."

He took her hand, but she was aware of the irresponsiveness of his
strong young fingers.

"Hope you will have a good drive.  London, is it?"

She was all smiles.

"Of course.  Now, don't be late for your lecture.  Good-bye."

She nodded to the chauffeur, gave a playful pat to Kit's hand, and
sat back smiling at him with easy benevolence.

"My address in town is South Audley Street, No. 107.  Goodbye."




CHAPTER XXII



1


Sorrell was lying in a punt on a luxurious superfluity of red and
blue cushions, his grey hat placed carefully beside him, a good
cigar sending its perfume and blue smoke upwards into the trailing
foliage of a weeping willow.  The punt, propelled by Kit who sat
and dipped a lazy paddle, had glided in under the willow and come
to rest there.  The evening was very warm and still; the soft sheen
of the river between the bridges reflected many other punts and
splashes of colour, reminding Sorrell of those brilliant and quaint
little mosaics made of flower petals pressed upon brown paper under
a piece of glass which a country girl had taught him to arrange
with his childish fingers.  He had dined in hall with Christopher.
Like Calverley he felt that fate could not touch him.  He looked at
his neat brown shoes, and his well-cut, well-pressed grey trousers.
He enjoyed the fretted gold and the greenness of the weeping
willow.  He looked at Kit sitting square to the sunset with the
glow of it upon his face.

"We have arrived," was Sorrell's thought; "every damned piece of
luggage that I struggled with in the old days was worth it.  Life
is good."

A punt-load of parents and young things drifted past them, and the
dark eyes of one of the young things dwelt interestedly upon Kit.
He was worth a girl's glance.  He seemed both aware of the dark
eyes and unaware of them.

"Going to make your bump to-morrow?" asked the voice of Kit's
father.

Christopher came out of a brown study, but his immediate awareness
of life was not concerned with the May races.

"We ought to.  We are faster than our second boat.  They don't
allow it--of course."

His glance raised itself to the glowing tops of the elms, and came
back to survey the river.  There was laughter under Clare bridge,
and someone was splashing water with a paddle.

"I have had a letter from South Audley Street, pater."

"O," said Sorrell beneath the calm drift of his cigar smoke.

"She wants me to spend a few days there when I go down.  A dance or
something."

He looked questioningly at his father.

"Do you want to go?"

"Not much.  Do you think I ought to?"

Sorrell was silent for a few seconds.

"There is no ought about it.  But there need be no reason why you
shouldn't."

"I'm not particularly keen on dancing.  Would you go, pater, if she
asked you?"

His father took a little time to answer the question.

"No,--I don't think I should.  Not prejudice, you know.  I have no
feeling against anybody, so long as they don't interfere.  One of
the things in life is to keep clear of incompatibles."

Kit stroked the water with his paddle.

"You have got to set yourself a course.  Most chaps just drift.
Girls and things.  You know, pater.  And then--there is hurting
people's feelings."

"Quite.  But if you have got feelings, don't make the mistake of
imagining that everybody else has got just the same feelings."

"I suppose they haven't."

"No."

"Some of them play up."

"The takers always play up to the givers."

Kit pondered this saying.

"You are one of the givers, pater."

"O, not always.  Don't throw yourself away on the crowd."

There was much more talk between them under the edge of the dusk,
with the sentimental river dividing the conventional sentiment of
the grey colleges and the green spaces.  Kit paddled the punt
slowly up stream.  They passed other punts with cargoes of hard
young she-things, and Sorrell found himself wondering what Kit
thought of women.  What was his attitude?  Had this sentimental
dusk on this sentimental piece of water the mystery of the old
illusions, and would it make very ordinary young women appear
divinities?  But surely--love--modern love--refused to pose upon
pedestals.  Sorrell could hear the lean, long-limbed girl of the
day saying--"Come off it--you silly ass."

"Drifting,--just drifting," said Kit suddenly, and swinging the
punt round; "what do people want?"

Sorrell surveyed the first stars.

"That is youth's trouble.  It does not know what it wants."

"Didn't you, pater?"

"Vague flashes.  No,--not clearly.  When I look back now I see that
I was in a sort of enchanted fog.  You would rush about and see--
sudden things when the fog lifted for a moment.  A bit of red sky,
or a tree, or a silly full moon, or a girl's face.  And you thought
you wanted the moon or the girl's face.  Perhaps, you got one of
them,--and then the fog came down again, and you went on groping.
But it's worse for two to be groping."

"It's sex," said Kit suddenly, leaning over his paddle, "sex,--
that's what it is."

Sorrell raised himself on one elbow.

"The fog of sex.  You have found that out--!  It took me twenty
years, my son.  But--hush--!"

He laughed.

"We shall shock--the May Flies."

Kit surprised him.

"They take a lot more shocking than one thinks, pater.  We aren't
easily shocked.  Were you?"

"We pretended to be."

"Why--," he dug the paddle into the water and closed his mouth on
some impulsive confession.  Sorrell wondered.  He told himself that
a man got out of date.  The young things had different ways of
arranging the world, and at present they walked instead of dancing,
and eschewed elemental curves.  Obviously, Kit had met other young
things and had parleyed with them.  Sorrell's feeling was that for
Kit woman was not upon a pedestal.

"You are always saying, pater, that the job matters--more than--
other things."

"So it does."

"That's what I think.  But sometimes--a chap--feels he must go head
over heels into--life."

"Of course," said Sorrell.  "The unknown, woman, all that.  The
thing is,--though one does not realize it when one's young, that
one wants--the sensation--not the particular woman.  One wants all
women that ever were.  The sensation is natural,--but marriage--"

He paused, looking beyond Kit at the grey arch of a bridge.

"Marriage is--artificial.  That's the whole trouble.--So--you see--"

"You don't believe in marriage--?"

Sorrell would like to have shrugged his shoulders.

"No,--not till the job is launched.  After that--a comrade--.  But
the other thing,--like one's morning tub.  Not a sort of cement
pool in a Zoo with two bored animals--swimming around.  If you must
take a plunge--be sure--you can get out again--.  Some day you'll
know whether you want to get out.  A few of us do, or think we do.
Not many."



2


Sorrell found himself on the towing path between Grassy and Ditton.
He had suggested going down to watch the boats start, but Kit had
warned him that he might have to run half a mile if he hoped to see
1st Trinity 3 bump Emmanuel 2.

"I should hang about between Grassy and Ditton, pater.  Ask
somebody on the towing path."

Sorrell felt most absurdly excited.  He had watched the boats of
the division paddle down, and he sat on the bank and listened to
the gossip of other interested people.  It was a still, green
English day, with not a breath of wind in the willows, and the
river like glass.  He could see the crowd at Ditton Corner, packed
in the meadow and in the boats along the bank, a gaily-coloured
crowd.

The boom of the starting gun reached him.  He stood up.  He was
trembling.  Absurd parent!

Presently, he saw figures running, the flash of oars rounding the
green curve of Grassy, the nose of an eight.  Young men were
shouting.  The leading boat cleared the corner, but Sorrell was not
interested in this particular boat.  Emmanuel 2 came next, and it
seemed to him that their oars were moving with a scuffling haste.
By George, yes!  Kit's boat was right on top of them.

Sorrell ran.  He ran down to meet the boats, got himself hustled by
an eager crowd of young men in cerise-coloured blazers, in fact he
was nearly pushed into the river.  He was shouting, and waving his
hat.  "First,--First, well rowed, First."  He ran again in the
opposite direction, seeing for a while nothing but Kit with a very
stern face swinging and plugging at No. 5.  The boats were
overlapping.  At Ditton Corner the 1st Trinity cox made his bump,
and the arm of the Emmanuel cox went up.  Both eights drifted close
in to the line of boats, and Sorrell stood on the towing path bank,
waving to Kit bent over his oar and drawing deep breaths.

Kit saw his father, straightened up, and waved a hand.  His face
ceased to be stern, and began to smile.

Sorrell put on his hat.

"I'm a bit excited.  Damn it,--why not?"

Sorrell walked back with his son from the First Trinity boathouse.
He was just a little anxious.  A gruelling game--this rowing, bad--
so he had heard--for young men's hearts.

"Feeling all right, Kit?"

Christopher's smile was reassuring.

"Quite.  We ought to catch the leading boat to-morrow.  Emmanuel
were up on them.  Then we shall be sandwich boat."

"What does that mean?"

"We have to row twice, at the head of the second division and at
the bottom of the first."

Sorrell's sympathies were divided.  An exhausting business, two
races in one day!  But perhaps he was growing old, and youth was
youth.

Kit's boat made their second bump on the second day, but failed to
catch the last boat of the first division.  And there they stuck,
having to row for their lives on the last day in order to keep away
from a fast boat that had made three bumps behind them.  Sorrell
ran all the way up the Long Reach, and he was nearly as "done" as
his son when First Trinity got home with half a length to spare,
and so finished head of the second division.

There was a bump supper that night,--but Kit came back early to his
rooms where Sorrell was sitting in one of the big chairs, smoking
the pipe of peace.

"You're early."

Kit was very sober.

"I have had my rag, a good one.  Let's talk, pater.  There are one
or two things--"

"South Audley Street?"

"Yes,--that,--and others."



3


As for the first part of the examination for the Bachelorship of
Medicine Kit did less well in Physics than he had hoped to do, but
his Chemistry and Biology were satisfactory.  That was his own
opinion, and he conveyed it to his father in a letter written after
the last paper.  The results would he known in a few days, and Kit
was staying up to see the lists.

Duly, they were posted on the Senate House door, and Kit walked
from his digs, and crossed King's Parade with a feeling of
suspense.  He was not thinking of himself so much as of his father,
for time was money, and lost months would mean money, his father's
money.  He saw a small crowd of undergrads on the steps of the
Senate House, and as Kit passed through the iron gates a figure
detached itself from the group.  It belonged to a man named
Gorringe who had worked next to Sorrell in the "stinks" lab, a
cocky and opinionated little man with a profile like a sparrow's.
Gorringe had a sick face.  He did not see Sorrell; he did not want
to see him.

"Pilled," thought Kit, and was not sorry, for Gorringe needed a
course of pilling.

He leaned against the backs of two other men, and peered between
and over their heads.  "Sanger, Smith, Smith, Snaith, Snowden,
Sorrell."  He felt a quick thrill at the sight of his name.  He
went away quietly to the post office, and sent off a telegram to
his father.

"Through."

Sorrell read that one word some two hours later, and he sent the
under-porter on a bicycle to Winstonbury with an answering message.

"Splendid.  Congratulations.--PATER."

Christopher joined him next day at the Pelican, and Mr. Porteous
came to dinner.  Two telegrams had been waiting for Kit; one had
come from Tom Roland who had had the news wired to him by Sorrell;
the other had been sent by Christopher's mother.

Kit had showed it to his father.

"How did she know?"

"Arranged with someone to have the lists watched, I suppose."

"Rather decent of her, pater, after the way I--."

Kit had found no answering approval in his father's eyes, and he
had understood.  Women,--yes, women, even his own mother!  Wanting
their fingers in the pie.

He had torn up his mother's telegram.

But there was that invitation of hers still hanging unanswered in
the air, for he had written to her to say that he had decided to
make no plans until the result of the examination was known.  He
had promised to write later.

Well,--what was he going to do about it?



4


Tucked under his porridge plate Kit discovered an envelope
addressed to him in his father's handwriting, and on opening it he
found that it contained a ten-pound note.

"I say,--pater--"

Sorrell had been pretending to read the morning paper, and he
glanced up at his son's serious face.

"Well,--old man?"

"You know--you oughtn't--to be so jolly good to me--."

"Why not?  Something to celebrate with.  You have worked hard."

Kit got up and, going round the table, bent down and kissed his
father on the forehead.

"You are a sport, pater."

"That's all right," said Sorrell, blushing slightly, and gripping
Kit's shoulder for a moment; "why not go up and spend the week-end
with your mother?"

He saw Kit's face take on an expression of surprised solemnity

"I have been wanting to talk about that."

"Right.  I'm ready.  The porridge is on the sideboard."

Christopher helped himself to porridge, sugared it liberally, and
disposed of half a dozen spoonfuls before he found his voice.

"I think it was rather fine of you, pater, to give me that
opening."

"Not a bit.  If you want to go--."

"I don't want to go.  I mean--if I go--it won't be because I want
to,--but I have a queer feeling that I ought to go--just once."

"Because she is your mother?"

Kit sat silent for a little while, staring hard at the bacon dish.

"No,--because of you--"

It was Sorrell's turn to pause.

"O,--how's that?"

"Well,--supposing she thinks that she could matter as much as you?
I want her to know--what sort of friends you and I are.  It's fair
to her in a way, isn't it, pater?  I don't look upon her as my
mother; I never shall."

Sorrell stared hard at his son.

"Kit," he said presently, "I don't know what to say about it.  You
have got me rather hard--over the heart."

"That's all right," said his son hurriedly, falling fiercely upon
his porridge; "that's all right.  So long as you and I understand
each other--."




CHAPTER XXIII



1


Pounds, Mrs. Duggan's maid, had been with her mistress for three
years.  A little, dried-up slip of a woman with a tight mouth
buttoned up under a Roman nose, she knew her mistress almost as
well as she knew Mrs. Duggan's wardrobe.  Pounds addressed her
ladyship's moods much as she clothed her body, with matronly black
velvet, or tissue of gold and of old rose, and when flesh-coloured
stockings were in fashion Pounds supplied them and suffered my
lady's ankles to assume the responsibility.

On a June morning, with the sun shining, Pounds carried in Mrs.
Duggan's early tea.  She had come to know her mistress's various
voices, and being a facile cynic she reacted to them.  She knew the
winter voice and the spring voice, the "I'm an old woman" plaint,
and the plump autumnal cry of the comfortable egoist.  There was
the Monte Carlo voice, and the Albert Hall voice, and the voice of
"Aunt Dora."  Pounds was an echo in Mrs. Duggan's world, but in her
own world Pounds rent calico and smashed crockery.

"Two lumps of sugar this morning, Pounds."

"Yes, madam."

Pounds popped in the two lumps.  She made the appropriate remark--
"It's a beautiful day, madam," for the voice from the bed expressed
Ascot and a successful frock and strawberries and cream and a punt
on the river and a good appetite and youth and the desire to fool
somebody.

"Tell Randal I shall want the car at eleven."

"Yes, madam."

"Mr. Sorrell may be here for lunch.  And Miss Merrindin.  Tell cook
that.  And we shall be dining at my club."

"Yes, madam."

Pounds was wondering whether the colour of the day should be a
matronly and sumptuous black or something a little more June-like?
What age was Mr. Sorrell?

"What dress, madam?"

"O,--something quiet," said the voice from the bed.

Mrs. Duggan drank her tea and ate two thin slices of bread and
butter.  She was all smiles and rotund beneficence.  She had a
feeling that she had her hand on the thing she wanted, and that a
few careful caresses would make it hers.  Or nearly hers, as much
as a young thing could be hers.  She wanted Kit, and she wanted him
for all sorts of reasons, because he was flesh of her flesh,
because he was young, because he belonged to Sorrell, because
Sorrell had quietly defied her.  She was a woman of strong
appetites; she knew how to be generous; she had some knowledge of
men.  Her appreciation of Christopher had been instantaneous.  Here
was something difficult; his shyness and his reluctance had
inflamed that sort of physical tenderness that was her love.  He
was a comely lad; he resembled her in his body.  She was forty-
nine, and she looked more than forty-nine, for in choosing to chase
money she had had to live with oldish men, and that had aged her.
They had been men who had drunk too much, and who had gone about
like snappy old dogs.  But youth,--the youth of her own son, to
possess it, handle it, feel herself the mistress of it!  A devoted
son!  To be able to score off that absurdly serious father--!

At a quarter past eleven Mrs. Duggan entered her car.

"O,--Pounds,--if Mr. Sorrell should arrive before I return,--show
him his room.  I should be back about half-past twelve."

"Where to, madam?" asked the chauffeur, before closing the door.

"The Halcyon Club."

Christopher's mother was a member of the Halcyon Club.  It was
domiciled in the house of a dead grandee, and inherited an
atmosphere of spaciousness and dignity.  It was a cock and hen
affair, but more hen than cock.  The club gave Saturday night
dances, and Mrs. Duggan dropped in to make sure of her dinner
table.  She wanted the table for four in the corner where the
statue of the Venus de Milo stood in a recess.  She asked for the
steward, and he assured her the table was hers.

"You are quite sure?  Last time--you know--I found Lady Truget in
possession.  And I have a little party."

From the club she drove to Gaiter's in Regent Street and bought
flowers, roses, luscious but conventional red and white roses with
plenty of perfume.  None of your too exotic flowers for a very
serious minded boy.  She called at Fuller's and purchased
chocolates.  She descended at her modiste's, not because she wanted
a dress, but because she was feeling well, and it was a pleasant
thing to do.  "Melanie's" mirrors were kinder than most mirrors;
they made you look less of a fright than you feared you might be.

Then, she told Randal to drive her round the Park.  She lay back
comfortably to consider her preparations.  She decided that it had
been rather subtle of her to ask two charming girls to meet and
amuse Christopher, and she included them in the furnishings and
drapings of her temple of Venus.  She thought that if she meant to
get at the boy she would get at him most successfully through sex,
not crudely, but by way of the pleasant emanations of sex, by
suggesting to him what a good time she could give him.

As for the two girls,--O,--well,--they were very modern.  Lola
Merrindin's vivacity might suffice for a week-end in somebody's
bungalow on the river.  Fluffy Tarrant was like a pot of marmalade,
but she was as hard as the pot.

"I wonder if the boy has arrived?  And what has Steve's attitude
been?  Not liking it much!"

Christopher had arrived.  He was standing with his hands in his
pockets in the middle of his mother's drawing-room, looking at the
photo of the double-chinned captain of industry who had been
Duggan.  Kit's mother had thought it a nice touch,--this putting
out of the family photographs.



2


Christopher did not like the face of the dead Duggan.

His impressions of this opulent room in an opulent house were
peculiarly vivid, perhaps because this was the first occasion upon
which he had experienced the gilding of the lily.  His modernity
had a clean temper, like the knife which he was to use so skilfully
in after years.  So this was where his mother lived upon the
fortunate proceeds of two marriages, after her adventurous
discarding of Kit's father.  The room and its furniture were as
modern as Kit's unsentimental outlook upon life.  The walls were
blue, the furniture gold, the carpet apple green, the cushions and
the curtains black.  It seemed to be full of bolsters and tuffets
and gaudy colours.  Kit had never seen anything like it.  The sofa
was so upholstered that it resembled the overblown and spreading
petals of a flower.

It was a suggestive sofa.

"Oh,--it is all right,--I suppose," he thought, "for a rather
exciting half-hour.  Makes one think of a highly stained
microscopic slide."

He preferred things to look shabbier, less vocal with colour.  He
thought of the shabby old blue trousers his father had worn in the
old days.

A car stopped outside the house, and Kit went to the window.  It
was his mother's car, and something in him grew rigid.  He
retreated to the other end of the room, as far as it was possible
for him to get from the blue door, and he stood there with his
hands in his pockets, his eyes curiously hard.

She burst in upon him.  She had put on tortoiseshell spectacles,
things Kit particularly detested.  The mature and intellectual
touch!

"My dear, well,--here you are.  I've been so busy.  Congratulations.
Now--sit down and tell me all about it."

He had remained at the far end of the room, looking very tall and
stiff in his grey suit.  It was a good suit.  He looked well in it.

"Afraid I'm early."

"Not a bit.  I've two girls coming to lunch.  We have got half an
hour.  Now--sit down and tell me all about it."

She sat down on the voluptuous sofa.

"About--what?"

She was very animated.

"Why--about your wonderful exam.  I hear you were third on the
list."

"That's unofficial.  How did you know?"

"Your tutor told me."

"O," said Kit, and sat down on one of the flimsy gold chairs.  This
highly coloured room was all surface, and without depth, and his
mother's enthusiastic animation reduced Christopher to a mere
surface.  He found himself quite unable to respond to her vivacity,
and since he persisted in sitting there like a graven image of his
own youth, she had to continue her attack.

"I'm sure you must be awfully tired after all that work.  And
rowing--too.  I'm going to give you a real--lazy--jolly week-end.
There will be a little dance to-night at my club, but it will be
over at twelve."

He had told her that he was not much of a dancer.

"Fudge, my dear boy, an athletic child--with your figure.  My two
flappers will--make--you dance."

She thought him monstrously shy, and his seeming shyness did not
displease her.  Her eyes were making an intimate examination of him
while she talked, taking in all the clean texture of his youth and
enjoying it, contrasting it unconsciously with her many impressions
of the oldish men with whom she had lived.  She looked at Kit's
fresh, brown hands with their young skin and supple fingers.  How
different they were from the blue and branny hands of John Duggan,
or the wrinkled skinniness and yellow blotched claws of Arthur
Sampits.  Yes, old age was detestable.  She herself was on the edge
of it, and her urgent vitality craved the young blood of her son.

"You take after me, Kit,--a little--I think."

She was ready to let herself go.  She wanted him to come across and
kiss her.

"In looks--I mean.  Just turn your head a little.  Yes, you have my
ears--exactly."

She laughed.

"You shy thing!"

His self-conscious rigidity became painful.  She was making him
feel a fool, and his glance glazed itself upon those American
goggles of hers.  Why on earth did she wear them?  And talking
about his ears--too!  What perfect rot!

He withdrew his eyes as though he were plucking his glance away
from her.  He surveyed the room.

"I'm going to Vienna for two months.  Rather a sound idea.  The
pater's idea."

She smiled right through this digression.

"To study?"

"The language, and other things.  I don't want to loaf all through
the Long Vac."

"You mustn't work too hard."

"What a fool saying," he thought, and just stared at her.

"The pater had to work pretty hard.  Besides, it's the best thing.
He and I understand each other."

"That must be very nice for you."

There was a pause, and Christopher sat through this pause in the
conversation with a seeming stolidity that neither helped nor
thwarted her.  His mother's animation reasserted itself.  He
listened, with the appearance of an attentive young foreigner who
was unable to understand the language she was using.  He was not
sorry for her.  She was no more than a stranger who was trying to
produce an effect, and instinctively he resisted, though his
resistance was passive.  He was wise as to her intention; though he
could not disentangle all her motives, but his feeling was that she
had made up her mind to win him over, and he did not mean to be won
over.

His mother was growing irritated, but was able to hide it, and when
a young thing in an amber-coloured frock floated into the room,
Mrs. Duggan arose with enthusiasm and kissed her.

"Kit, this is Lola,--Miss Lola Merrindin."

Kit stood up, and bent stiffly at the hips, and his smile was
vague.  He was aware of Lola Merrindin as a very attractive
creature, one of those slim, black, highly mobile young women with
a brilliant white skin and gazelle's eyes.  And her hair had a
slight kink in it.  Her nose spread its eager nostrils with some
breadth above a capacious red mouth.  She smiled a great deal and
showed very white teeth.  She was intensely alive, and she was
never still, flicking herself into varying postures and evanescent
expressions, getting up and sitting down, laughing and then looking
out under her brilliant forehead with elfish and half-sullen
solemnity.

Mrs. Duggan left them together.

"Amuse him, darling.  I must go and tidy up.  Fluffy will be here
any minute."

It was Kit's first experience of this particular type of young
woman, and he sat there and surveyed her with an air of polite
suspicion.  He had a feeling that she was too furiously attractive
to be safe, for how attractive she was the young male in him knew.
Her little nervous movements, the quick provoking tricks of her
eager body, her laughter, her mobile mouth and sidelong and
expressive eyes made his male shyness afraid.  For the young male
can be as timid as a hare.

Miss Merrindin chattered.  She had the voice of a Neapolitan
singing-girl.  Wasn't Aunt Dora a dear?  And wasn't her house
perfectly sweet?  She tried to push Kit into a flow of soul, to
make him talk about the May Races, and dancing, and motor cars and
Wimbledon, but Kit's soul refused to flow.  He sat there and agreed
smilingly with everything she said, and sensed her as a sort of
sexual Chinese cracker jumping around his shyness.

Did he know "Why do I feel wicked?"

No, he didn't.  What was it?

She flung herself at Aunt Dora's piano, and crashed out a Fox Trot,
her whole body vibrating on the stool.  She began to sing, while
Kit sat there like a dolorous and dull dog on the point of howling.

Aunt Dora returned in the midst of all this brightness, followed by
a very thin young woman with a flat, pale face, and a bobbed head
of fiery hair.

Kit was introduced to Miss Tarrant.

They went down to lunch.

The remainder of the day was kaleidoscopic.  At lunch Kit was made
to drink white wine and a liqueur, and he had to confess that he
liked the wine; it assisted his flow of soul.  Lola Merrindin
became less alarming.  After coffee and cigarettes in the new art
drawing-room, they put on hats and packed into Mrs. Duggan's car.
Pound handed in cigarettes, chocolates, rugs.  Kit had proposed
taking one of the swivel seats, but he was made to go to bed in the
deeply cushioned back seat of the saloon between his mother and
Lola Merrindin.  It was a bit of a squeeze, but everybody seemed to
like it.  Fluffy Tarrant occupied one of the swivel seats, and ate
chocolates, or smoked cigarettes.  The car whirled them down to
Maidenhead, with Kit lying comfortably wedged between two perfumed
and exotic creatures.  He felt the pressure of Lola's body, of her
thigh and leg.  She fidgeted a great deal, and her movements
pleasantly disturbed him.  He pretended to quarrel with her over
the chocolate box.  They had a playful struggle.  The smell of her
hair smote him.  His mother smiled.

At Maidenhead they had tea in the garden of one of the hotels.
Fluffy Tarrant took Christopher on the river in a punt with orange
and purple cushions.  It appeared to be her turn.  She looked at
Kit with the considering eyes of a young leopardess; her pose was
one of extreme and cheeky frankness; she pretended to be as old as
Eve.

She told Kit that he was a child.

"You don't know--anything."

She did not say what anything was.  She splashed him with her
paddle, and appeared ironical and sophisticated and superior.  On
the way home she and Lola exchanged seats, and to Kit Miss Tarrant
appeared all thigh-bone.  The pressure was constant; it did not
flicker and jerk and quiver.  It was more ardent or might have
been, yet was less disturbing.  Kit's fate promised that dark women
were to trouble him, dark women with a certain languorous and
appealing type of brown eye.

They dressed and drove to the Halcyon Club.  A young elderly man
with a high forehead, a neat smudge of black hair, and a very small
mouth, was waiting for them in the lounge.  His name was Luke
Sykes.  He was to make the fourth for the postprandial dance.

Kit took an immediate dislike to Mr. Sykes.  He was the sort of man
who looked bored and wearily superior, and who said--"O, really!"
to everything.  He talked about places and people that Kit had
never heard of,--and his trousers were too well braided.

They dined, and emptied two bottles of champagne.  Kit was facing
Miss Tarrant, also the naked statue of Venus, and he would not
acknowledge the presence of the statue, and Miss Tarrant seemed
wickedly aware of his self-suppression.  Lola grew somewhat
excited; she talked a great deal, laughed, jerked that mobile body
of hers, while Kit's mother behaved like an amiable dowager.  Mr.
Sykes seemed somehow shy of Kit, and trailed his bored experiences
through a series of night-clubs, and since Kit knew nothing of
night-clubs his eloquence was limited.

Afterwards they went up to the ball-room and danced.  Kit found
Lola on his bosom.  She seemed to have flung herself at him and
arrived there with one of those rapid and disturbing movements.
She kept smiling and looking at him in the eyes; he saw the shadowy
curves of her nostrils, her red and wavy month.

She danced extraordinarily well, like a Latin girl, and she made
Kit dance better than he knew.  Mr. Sykes and Miss Tarrant were
striding up and down and round-about at a great pace, looking like
a couple of wooden dolls with their thin legs stuck on with pins.
Kit's partner kept up a humming to the music.  She smelt good.  Her
mouth--.  And then Kit trod heavily on her right foot and
apologized.

"I say--I'm awfully sorry.  Did it hurt?"

He felt the warm pressure of her body suddenly increase.  She
smiled in his eyes.

"A bit.--But I don't--mind, Kiddy."

He inhaled the scent of her hair.



3


Christopher woke with a headache.

His memories of the previous night encouraged him to believe that
he had taken part in a rapid-motion picture whose movements had
been quickened by the drinking of too much champagne.

A maid brought him early tea, and made it known to him that Mrs.
Duggan was taking breakfast in bed, and that Kit could have his
breakfast brought up to him if he wished it.  Kit did not wish it.
He got up and had a cold bath, used his tooth-brush vigorously, put
away his tumbled clothes of the previous night, and felt better.
He breakfasted alone on porridge, a boiled egg, tea and toast, and
at the end of the meal Pounds appeared and made an announcement!

"Mrs. Duggan will be down, sir, by twelve."

"I'm going out," said Kit.

"Lunch is at half-past one, sir."

The sun was shining and Kit went out and walked with a concentrated
energy that poured up from below.  He walked without heeding the
outer world, and he seemed to see neither the trees nor the people
nor the dogs nor time motor-cars.  He just walked.  He began to
work up his full speed in Hyde Park, and he went through it, and
across to the Green Park, and over the Mall into St. James's.  He
stood on the bridge spanning the water and watched the various
water-birds.  His headache had gone; his stridings of the morning
had broken his rhythm of those other stridings to syncopated tunes
with a girl pressing close against him.

No. 3, Cheltenham terrace.

No. 3 was the house in which Lola lived, and he happened to know
that he had been walking away from it, and that in spite of the
fact that she had said it to music in the approved fox-trot manner.
Obviously, she had expected him to keep in step, but Kit's mood was
very much out of step with the rapid movements of the previous day.

It wasn't that the young male in him did not desire her.  He had
gone to bed lying upon roses and thorns, but the Kit of the morning
was Sorrell's Kit, the young man who had trained for the May Races,
and for that other and greater race, and with the morning his
father's grip came back to him.

"I must get out of this," was his abrupt reflection.

He remembered that he had to spend the rest of the day with his
mother.  His impatience and his disinclination to go back to her
were so very strong that they permeated his whole consciousness,
compelling him to recognize in her some natural enemy.  He had more
than a suspicion that his mother was offering him bribes, the
enticements that might be expected to make an appeal to a very
young man.  She was trying to get at him through his body, and
through his more disorderly emotions.  Sorrell had never done that.

Kit walked back less rapidly to South Audley Street.  It was one
o'clock, and he found his mother in the drawing-room, looking far
fresher than he felt, and dressed in a shimmery blue dress.  She
smiled at him, and her smile had a confident roguishness, for Kit's
rigidity had disappeared during the last hour at the Halcyon Club.

"You naughty boy!"

She patted the sofa, and the gesture invited him to share it.
Moreover it was borne in upon him that she expected him to kiss
her.

"Well, how's Lola this morning?"

She was accusing him of having slipped off to No. 3, Cheltenham
terrace.

"I haven't seen her."

"Lazy young thing.  Wasn't she up?"

"I have been walking," said Kit; "in the Park."

"And she didn't turn up?  Sly-boots!  Well,--you belong to me to-
day, my dear, and Lola can wait till to-morrow."

"I have got to be back to-morrow," he said stubbornly, refusing to
explain that he had had no arrangement with Miss Merrindin, and
quite determined not to be over-persuaded.

"My dear, there is no hurry."

"Work,--you know."

She patted the sofa, and half jokingly she began to hint that
Sorrell was exercising a fatherly restraint, but Kit did not allow
the innuendo to pass.  It was necessary for him to make a stand.

"No.  The pater and I understand each other.  I'm keen on my work."

"But it's the vacation."

"Oh,--I have plenty of reading to do."

She readjusted her attitude.  She had seen his young reserve unfold
itself on the previous night, but this morning its petals were
firmly closed.  She realized that she would have to vary the
quality of her emotional sunlight, temper it to Kit's peculiarities,
play upon his absurd seriousness.  She remembered that he had not
told her what his future was to be.

"You mean to be so tremendously clever.  I want to hear all about
it.  We will have a nice long drive this afternoon.  Leith Hill or
somewhere like that.  We don't know each other properly yet, Kit,
do we?"

He did not tell her that their mutual ignorance was not his fault.

They drove to Leith Hill by way of Leatherhead, Dorking and
Abinger, sharing the road with a crowd of flurrying Sabbath cars.
Kit kept well in his own corner.  Shut up there with this stranger
who was his mother, a hopeless and inarticulate self-consciousness
possessed him; he resented her attempts to draw him out; he
resisted.  Failing to make him talk as she wished him to talk, she
began to put a touch of pathos into her appeal, nor was her pose
the result of mere self-suggestion.  She had begun to feel more
than she had expected to feel.  She wanted Kit, she wanted to
possess him and his secret self, all the youth shut up in the hard
young casket of his reserve.  She was the mother Pandora.  His
almost sullen aloofness had begun to hurt her.

They walked up to Leith Hill, and she tried to sentimentalize over
the view.  She did it badly.  Her rising emotion was making her
jerky and impulsive.

"It's horrible," she said suddenly, as they were driving back to
the Hatch for tea, "we seem like strangers."

Her sudden fierce frankness frightened him.  He sat, rigid, looking
straight through the glass screen at the road winding between the
pines.

"I'm sorry," he said; "but I don't see--how it could be helped."

"O,--Kit!"

She put out a hand and touched a rigid arm.

"I know--I must seem all wrong to you--"

Kit's face looked old.

"Well,--you see,--I belong to the pater.  He has been such a great
pal to me.  We--we understand each other--"

For a while she said no more.



4


Christopher never spoke to anyone, not even to his father, of that
last emotional scene with his mother.  Whenever he thought of it in
after years it brought him a sense of flushed discomfort.  He would
feel himself shut up in that gaudy room with a woman who gradually
had lost all self-restraint.

He had felt both scorched and cold, so terribly cold.

He had been so cruelly conscious of the unfairness of it, of her
immoderate protestations, her appeals, her attempted caresses.  He
would remember how she had walked about the room, weeping, pressing
a handkerchief to her mouth, looking at him ever and again with a
kind of passionate rage.

"You won't understand.  I--always--wanted you.  You are my boy."

She had flung herself at him suddenly and seized him, her face red
and convulsed.

"He's poisoned you against me.  It wasn't my fault that I couldn't
love him--"

Kit had stood like a prisoner lashed to a tree, rigid, making no
response, while she had hung about him, and wept and raged.  It had
been his first experience of woman as an emotional creature, and he
was never to forget it, and doubtless it coloured his experiences
with other women.  He remained shy of the woman who showed signs of
trying to submerge him in an emotional storm.

He had ended it by breaking away and locking himself in his
bedroom, and he had got out of the house at six o'clock next
morning, and carried his suit-case to Paddington Station.

At Winstonbury he strolled casually into his father's room, and
stood by the window, looking out into the June garden.  He was glad
to be back in this male room, more glad than Sorrell knew.

"Enjoyed yourself, old chap?"

"Not much."

Sorrell asked him no bothering questions, for which wise restraint
Christopher was supremely grateful.

"I think I'll go out for a good grind, pater."

"All right," said his father.

Later in the day, when Sorrell was lighting his after-tea pipe, he
had the wise man's reward.

"I'm not going up there again, pater."

"Just as you like," said Sorrell, drawing a breath of silent and
profound relief.




CHAPTER XXIV



1


Sorrell continued to be interested in figures; in fact his interest
in them grew as their significance increased.

It seemed to him incredible, but the Pelican was earning a profit
of something like L4,000 a year, and the Royal Oak after a year at
sea could sail in with a balance of L700.  The Lion was trying her
spars, and the White Hart had not left the stocks, but the Roland
Hotels declared a dividend of fifteen per cent. and placed a solid
sum to their reserve.

Sorrell's own income, with his interest on his shares and his
percentage of the Pelican's profits, had risen above a thousand
pounds.  He gloated over it with the practical exultation of the
man who has had to kick and struggle, but his soul continued to
kick at everybody and everything connected with the Inland Revenue.
He loathed Schedule D.  He loathed the beastly buff envelope in
which it arrived; he loathed the man who sent it; he almost loathed
himself for making a correct return.  He paid, but he paid with an
inward snarl.  If anyone appreciated the pretty and nicely winged
jibes in Punch, Sorrell appreciated them.

The apportioning of his income was fairly simple.  He wrote L350
down for Kit, L200 for himself.  That left him a very comfortable
margin, and it was the margin that had value.  He had decided to
play with it, but to play cunningly, not to wrap it up in a gilt-
edged napkin, but to behave adventurously.  He was gaining
confidence, and he had his margin.

During the winter he decided to buy Mr. Grapp's antique business,
put in an energetic manager, and refresh the stock.  Lacking the
capital, he went up to Chelsea and saw Thomas Roland whose Blue Box
was as full of money as were Cherry of Chelsea's pockets.  Roland,
laughing roguishly over the money glut, proved a very persuadable
financier, and offered Sorrell what he pleased.  He said that
Christopher was a sufficient security, and Sorrell could pay him
five per cent, and refund the capital at his convenience.

"I know the Pelican won't suffer, Stephen."

"When you have learnt to sail a good ship you stick to her."

Sorrell bought out Mr. Grapp, and put in as manager a man named
Williams, an auctioneer's clerk, who knew the neighbourhood and had
picked up a working knowledge of furniture, old silver, china and
glass.  Williams was a little dark, good-natured and shrewdly
energetic man who had been looking for his chance to climb and had
not found it.  Sorrell arranged to have the curio shop refitted,
redecorated and restocked.  He and Williams between them bought in
some really fine "pieces" in walnut and oak.  The shop became
alive, with liquid capital circulating in its blood vessels.

"Now--go ahead.  I'll see that our American visitors come along to
you."

Williams went ahead.  He knew where old furniture, china, Sheffield
plate and pewter were still to be found in the country towns and
villages, and he knew the ways of the people.  He could haggle with
farmers' wives and crack a joke, and insinuate the thin edge of a
bargain.  He was to prove himself a most successful and
discriminating buyer.

Sorrell had an inspiration in the matter of rechristening the
business.  Some time in the thirteenth century a Benedictine monk
had compiled a chronicle, and it was known as the chronicle of
William of Winstonbury.  Sorrell's ear was caught by the rhythm of
it; the thing sounded like a successful title, and it was
distinctive.  So "William of Winstonbury" was painted in white on
the shop's fascia board.  Sorrell had the shop and certain of their
show pieces photographed, and these photographs were grouped in a
handsome oak frame and hung in the lounge of the Pelican.

During the winter he made a change in his own habit of life.  He
was coming to an age when he appreciated privacy, silence, and
those precious moments of serene aloofness when a man's self sits
and speaks with its very self.  He craved to push out the
increasing noise of the world and to shut an autocratic door
against it.  Moreover, by vacating his two rooms he would be able
to let them and add to the Pelican's margin.  Also, he wanted Kit
to have a quiet corner where he could read, a corner of his own.

At the end of the garden stood the old red brick cottage that
Bowden had occupied, but the Bowden family knew nothing of Malthus
and required a more capacious hive.  Sorrell took over the cottage,
had it redecorated and furnished very simply and transferred
himself there, turning his old porter's room into a manager's
office.  He had two of the cottage rooms fitted up for Christopher,
so that when Kit came down for the vacations he could spread
himself and his books in an atmosphere of his own.  The rooms had
stained floors and Oriental rugs, white taffeta curtains edged with
green, buff-coloured walls, bookshelves, but no pictures.  The
blank walls were for Kit to fill, if he chose to fill them, and his
ultimate filling of them amused his father.  On one wall Kit placed
a solitary picture, something from some art magazine, a picture of
a French peasant coming back from the fields in the blue-green
twilight.  The remaining walls were covered with anatomical
diagrams, sections of creatures' interiors, formulae, neatly typed
lists.  Kit had saved and bought himself a typewriter.  During the
vacations his miscroscope stood on a little deal table by the
window.

But Kit was not what his father called a "stuff-jacket."  He had
given up rowing because it interfered with his dissecting, but he
was boxing for the University and carrying on the Porteous
tradition.  He played a fair game of tennis, could handle a gun,
and swim a mile.  His interest in life did not shut itself up in
books.  He was a great lover of the country and its life, and a
keen observer; he would surprise his father on some of their walks
by discovering plants and birds and insects that Sorrell would
never have noticed.  He had enthusiasm, not of the spluttering
order, but that quiet, virile ardour that searches and sees.

Kit would get up first and make early morning tea over an oil stove
in the cottage kitchen, for he and his father liked the informality
of it and the sense of being undisturbed.  Often he would sit on
the end of Sorrell's bed, and smoke a cigarette and talk.  They
discussed Kit's work, his friends, Tom Roland's music, the hotels,
William of Winstonbury, books, labour, the tendencies of the day as
each saw them, trees, flowers, human eccentricities, women.  Kit
was shy of women.  He had not forgotten Lola Merrindin, and that
emotional adventure with his mother.  They never mentioned Mrs.
Duggan to each other; she had not troubled them again after a final
and unsuccessful attempt on her part to persuade Sorrell that she
was a lonely, reformed and misunderstood woman.

For all that Sorrell knew she might be all she claimed to be, but
he had no intention of helping her to experiment upon Kit.

So far as his experience of life served him Sorrell had gathered
that people did not change.  Their distinctive characteristics
became emphasized or softened.  They grew kinder or more greedy or
more stupid, or more crassly self-absorbed.  During the days of his
portership he had observed human nature as it displayed itself in
an hotel, and his conclusions had made him a tolerant cynic in his
attitude, save to the very few.

To Kit he emphasized the need for independence.  It was the one
god-like quality that a man should strive for.

"Be free.  No foot on your neck.  Get money; go armed.  Get money
and go armed for the sake of the job you love."

Kit understood all this, for he had been a spectator while his
father had fought in the arena.

"Didn't you feel pretty desperate, sometimes, pater?"

"Sick in the stomach, as the Americans say.  But I wanted to put
you on your perch."

"It's a pretty good perch.  I want a first in the Science Trip.
Then--there will be the second M.B. and the first part of the
Fellowship.  And London--"

"Yes, London," said Sorrell thoughtfully.  "Have you ever heard of
fellows being afraid of London?"

Kit nodded.

"Pentreath is,"--Pentreath was one of Kit's friends.

"What is he afraid of?"

"O,--things," said Kit very seriously; "women and all that.  Queer,
isn't it?  Yet, he is perfectly genuine about it.  He's got
sisters.  They take things rather seriously, the Pentreaths.  Good
people, a bit too--too sensitive."

"Cover up your sensitiveness," said his father; "lock it up in a
safe and bring it out only for the few."



2


That summer Kit met Pentreath's people at Henley, and Lady
Pentreath liked him so well that Christopher was invited to spend a
week at their place in Sussex.

Sorrell was pleased.  He did not quarrel with his feeling of
satisfaction over the fact that the son of an hotel porter should
be a friend of the son of Sir Gordon Pentreath, and that Kit should
be a guest at Charneys.  The Pentreaths were good people, serious
people.  They had Quaker blood, and a Victorian tradition that had
striven very hard to adapt itself to the new confusion.

Kit found the Pentreaths very serious but extraordinarily kind.
They were people who felt responsible for other people's
ignorances, not priggishly so, for they were too sensitive and too
well matured to be priggish.  The two elder girls were pale copies
of their mother, fair, cultured, quiet-voiced young women who would
never inspire any man to dare disaster.  Lady Pentreath sat on
innumerable committees, and managed with serene and cold
seriousness to make the normal blatancies of the day appear even
more triumphant.  Sir Gordon was a man of many affairs, a tired and
worried man, a sort of industrial King Arthur troubled by the
inroads of the barbarians.

Charneys was a revelation to Kit, with its beauty, its repose, and
its green other-worldliness.  It was the home of the people who had
dreamed and whose dream was dying, and Maurice--Kit's friend--
seemed to know that it was dying.

He approached life very seriously.  He had elected to take up
medicine instead of joining his father, and the elder Pentreath had
not opposed the digression.  The barbarians were growing too strong
for him.

Lying on his back in the punt on Charney's pool, and watching the
clouds sailing over the tops of the oaks and beeches, Maurice would
confide in Kit.

"It's the venom in things, Sorrell.  When you have tried to be a
friend to your people and they turn and spit in your face.  The
governor feels it.  I'm afraid it is breaking him up."

"You mean--Labour," said Kit,--"Labour with a big L."

"Of course."

"Well,--why doesn't he lay up the ship, pay off the whole mutinous
crew, and retire."

"The Pentreaths don't retire."

"Anyhow--you wouldn't sign on, old chap."

Maurice flinched; he flinched too easily.

"Father and I talked it over.  I offered to give up medicine.  He
was quite frank about it.  He said that the modern industrial
atmosphere is too beastly--and too humiliating for any man with a
sense of fair play.  Besides, I don't think there is any future--"

"You mean?" said Kit.

"Yes--things are too difficult.  We may have to sell this place."

"Like the old Roman Empire."

"Yes,--breaking up."

The Pentreaths were too disinterested to survive.  Sir Gordon's
disillusioned dignity, his son's imaginative scrupulousness,
flinched before the spoilt and greedy children, and looked towards
the shades of some misty Avalon.  But there was one young
Pentreath,--the baby--.

"O,--Molly!"

Maurice was bothered about Molly; he was afraid of Molly.  A little
savage!

And Kit saw Molly Pentreath as a long-legged, fierce young thing of
thirteen, with a queer square head and face, dark and audacious
eyes, and wavy and rebellious mouth.  She was an extraordinary
child,--a little devil.  She appeared to combine an unholy insight
into her elders' interiors, with a violent lack of respect for
anybody or anything.  A wild young egoist, a spitfire, she was the
one live Pentreath with the spirit to fight and to survive.

She observed Kit in ominous silence for the first two days, and
then betrayed her partiality by ragging him, and provoking him to
quarrel.  She put a live slow-worm in his bed, filled his tennis
shoes with flour, and mocked him openly.

Kit laughed.

His laughter both attracted and annoyed her.  She made him play
tennis and golf croquet with her, and she was ready to cheat with
fierce assurance.

She had a supreme contempt for Maurice.  She more or less ignored
her elder sisters.  She scandalized her father.

She called Christopher "Kit-bag" or just "Boy."  She was home from
a very notable school, but the school appeared to have had no
effect upon her.  To Molly most of the world's opinions were tosh.

She inveigled Kit into wild scrambles about the place, up trees,
anywhere.  She went adrift with him in the punt, heaving paddle and
pole into the water.  She would sit with her bony knees tucked up
under her chin, and declaim and argue and mock.

She said the most extraordinary things.

"O,--father!  Poor old father has forgotten how to grind the faces
of the poor."

She was startling in her shrewdness.  She seemed to have a Puckish
intuition.

"Maurice won't cut any ice.  He'll just give sugared powders to old
ladies."

Kit talked back at her.

"You want to play--all the game yourself.  You can't do that."

"O, can't I!"

"You must see the other person's point of view."

"Don't talk tosh.  Poor old pater has always been trying to see his
beastly workmen's point of view.  They are all over him now like a
lot of dogs.  I'd teach 'em."

"How?"

"With a whip, old Kit-bag, a whip."

She hated losing; she could not play a losing game, and this fierce
self-regard of hers led to a half-humorous yet very human incident.
Kit had beaten her twice at golf croquet, and at the end of the
third game when he won on the post she hurled her mallet at him
because he had laughed.

The mallet caught Kit on the head above the right eyebrow.

It hurt him.

She flew at him with sudden contrition, and threw fierce young arms
about his neck.

"O,--Kit, I'm a little beast.  I'm sorry--"

No one witnessed the incident, but Kit had to appear before the
family with a palpable bruise on his forehead.  He told a white lie
about it.

"Silly of me, but I knocked my head against one of the beams in the
boat-house."

Molly waylaid him on the stairs that evening.

"You sport."

She kissed him.



3


Before going back to Cambridge for the autumn term, Christopher
spent a week-end with Thomas Roland in his doll's house at Chelsea.

It was a particularly charming little house, furnished in a style
that Roland called "Twentieth Century Queen Anne."  The music-room
had been formed of two rooms thrown together, and between its two
windows stretched a black and polished floor with a vermilion-
coloured border.  There were two pianos, one in a red lacquer case,
the other in one of rosewood stained black.

Roland gave Christopher music, and a new window upon life, a very
modern window through which "Cherry of Chelsea" might have stepped
with a shingled head and cretonne frock.  That she did appear in
that echoing room was another revealing of the world to Kit.  She
appeared in the person of Iris Gent, the mezzo-soprano who had made
"Cherry" famous, and who was teaching the world to laugh to music
in Roland's "Blue Box."

Roland caused Christopher to think, and to take a step upwards, one
of those hardly perceptible steps that yet bring into view a
broader horizon and leave the young man gazing under the impression
that it is he who has made the discovery.  A few crudities loosened
themselves from Kit during that week-end.  He was breathing an air
of laughing tolerance and breezy humanity for Roland had cast many
skins; the main structure of him was the same, but he had kept his
doors and windows open.

For Roland and "Cherry" were lovers.  Kit saw and wondered and out
of his wonder grew a new attitude towards work and woman.  He
caught the glimmer of a charming intimacy, Roland at the piano,
Iris sitting in one of the window seats, singing, so that her voice
seemed to go through the room like a river of human laughter and
tears and joy.  Her singing brought a thickness into Kit's throat,
and made him shiver.

The thing that astonished him was that these two were not married.
The complete and happy understanding between them was obvious, even
to a young man fresh from the Pentreath atmosphere, and it caused
Kit much searching of soul.  Youth explores, and Kit's questing had
a serious and high ardour.

But the music!  It was like all the laughing wisdom of the ages
translated into sweet sounds, flexible and sensitive, vibrating
high above a cast-iron system.  This music-room suggested the
eternal flux, a vortex with its spirals part of the dim past, and
rising into the future.  Kit felt that Thomas Roland understood
life and the art of living as no young man could understand it.

They sat up till midnight one night, talking, and one phrase of
Roland's stuck in Kit's memory.

"Everything is allowable, provided you take care not to hurt
people, the people who ought not to be hurt."

Kit had asked him a question.

"But suffering?  Oughtn't it to come?  What I mean is,--well--look
at my father--.  I always feel--."

"Your father has had his dose."

"And you, sir?"

"Oh,--I!  Don't let Iris hear you call me sir, you young vagabond.
I have had my share, but I have set my fruit in the sun.  It is the
green apple stage that is painful."

On the morning of his leaving Kit made a request.

"When I come up to hospital, may I drop in here--sometimes?"

He felt that there were things to be learnt, unacademic facts and
fancies, in this house at Chelsea.




CHAPTER XXV



1


Maurice Pentreath took life far too seriously.  Both he and Sorrell
"kept" on the same staircase in the Great Court at Trinity and on
the night before the Science Tripos opened Kit, who had not touched
a book for the last three days, and had spent his time playing
tennis and loafing on the river, found Pentreath reading at eleven
o'clock at night.

"I should chuck it, Maurice."

Pentreath's eyes looked blurred and sunken.

"It's so final, so very final.  One's chances don't recur."

Kit took Pentreath's book away; it was Jukes Browne's Geology.

"Go to bed, old thing.  You'll be all muzzy in the morning.  Look
here, after the papers to-morrow, I'm going to make you play
tennis."

Pentreath walked about the room like a restless dog.

"It's my memory, Sorrell.  I wish I had your memory.  It's
maddening.  There are times when I can't fix facts.  I never can be
sure, oligocene or eocene, the right order, I mean.  My memory
plays tricks."

"Go to bed, old chap," said Kit.

Christopher enjoyed the Tripos, for he felt like a well-trained
boxer, confident and strong, and he had no panic moods and no fear
of the clock.  He would walk in, sit down, calmly read the paper
through, and then punch his answers out with deliberate steadiness.
Pentreath sat opposite him and away on the right, and Pentreath's
face made him think of a frightened swimmer who doubted whether he
would reach the shore.  Maurice was always looking fearfully at the
clock.

Christopher carried off a first class, Pentreath a third.  Kit saw
the lists, went off to wire to his father, and walked back to
Trinity to face his friend.  Pentreath's breakfast had not been
touched, and Kit found him in bed huddled up, his hair over his
face.

"Congratulations.  You're through."

He saw that someone had told Pentreath the news, and that Pentreath
was sick with shame.  A third!

"They'll feel so let down at home, Sorrell."

"My dear old chap, exams aren't everything."

Christopher saw that his friend wished to be left alone, and he
closed the door on Pentreath, and going out by way of the "backs"
he took the field path to Grantchester.  His elation was far less
deep than poor Pentreath's shame, the nice, Arthurian Pentreath
with the sensitive mouth and the finely cut features, the brother
of that little devil of a Molly.  Kit's mood was one of frank and
solid self-satisfaction, and as he walked with the vigorous
leisureliness of an athlete who has won his race and can go out of
training, it seemed to him that his success had been absurdly easy.
He had been conscious of no feeling of effort.  He had worked hard
and steadily.

But he did recognize the fact that his first-class in the Science
Tripos was not an isolated result, but a little peak in a series of
peaks.  It represented continuity; it had been foreshadowed years
ago when his father had cleaned boots at the Angel Inn; Mr.
Porteous too had had a very great share in it.  Kit stood on the
bridge and watched the water froth into the mill pool, and all the
world that was green.

"The old pater will be pleased."

He agreed that it was his father's victory as well as his own.
Sorrell had served his years as a gladiator in the world's arena,
and Kit had watched him, and had absorbed the unsentimental lesson
of that eternal spectacle.  Man was a jealous beast.  Take away his
sword, and he fights with his wits, with a pen, with a bank
balance.  In the future it was probable that he would fight group
against group, the collier against the carpenter, or the massed
fools against the superior few.  Kit had had his successes, and had
blundered unconsciously against the jealousy of other men.  It had
surprised him, but he had taken note of it, and drawn his own
conclusions.

"The pater was right," he thought; "go straight for your mark--and
don't stop to argue.  But you must carry a punch in your fist.
Poor old Pentreath has lost his punch."

His consciousness centred itself for a moment upon his right hand,
and he held it out and examined it as though it were the hand of a
stranger.  Kit's hands were very like his father's, but the fingers
were stronger, and not recurved at the tips.  Sorrell's hands had
had to clutch at his chances and hold on to them; his son's fingers
were straighter and more creative.  Kit's hands combined
sensitiveness and strength; they were dexterous, capable of fine
and precise movements, yet very steady.  They were to be a
surgeon's hands, and for the best part of two years Kit had had the
training of them ever-present in his mind, and in the physiology
lab, and the dissecting-room he had gained a nice skill with
forceps and scalpel.  Dissecting was an art, laying bare the
delicate tissue until you had made a picture, and Kit had perfected
this skill.  The Demonstrators of Anatomy had used his dissections
for the benefit of other students.  Poor Pentreath, eager and too
much in a hurry, and never quite able to overcome a loathing of the
pickled carcases, was always floundering, or niggling away with an
uncertain scalpel.

Kit smiled at his own right hand.  You had to have something behind
the hand, and he felt that he had.

He remembered an afternoon at Roland's house when Cherry had told
his hand, turning it over and over, and prodding it with the soft
tip of a beautifully manicured finger, while Roland had quizzed
them both.

"You are going to do things with your hands," she had said to Kit.

He remembered his smiling--"I mean to."

No, he did not feel arrogant about it, or full of a facile cock-
sureness, but he knew what he wanted to do, and how to set about
the doing of it, and, he had won his first battles.

"The old pater will be pleased."

Appreciation matters, and his father's understanding keenness was
no small part of Kit's inspiration.

And while the son was hanging over the mill-pool and looking at the
green willows, the father was ringing up Mr. Porteous on the
telephone.

"Hallo,--that you--?  Kit's got a first.  What?  You were sure he
would?--Well,--so was I--in a way, but then--there is nothing like
a certainty.  Proud?  I am--not a little.  These things matter, old
chap.  We owe a lot to you, you know.  Rot?  It isn't rot.  Come up
to dinner."



2


In the autumn of that year Kit became a student at St. Martha's
Hospital, with rooms in Brunswick Square.

Sorrell had taken a share in the choice of the rooms, for provided
with recommendations by the Dean of the hospital, they had explored
all that region that lies between Regent's Park and Oxford Street.
Kit's rooms were on the third floor, and his sitting-room
overlooked the square, with the morning sun shining in, and
Sorrell, remembering the days of his squalid contrivings, had liked
the house and its atmosphere.  It was kept by a Mrs. Gibbins, a
straight up and down woman, who had been none too eager to lodge a
medical student, and who had met Sorrell with an air of vague
antagonism.  Nor were they cheap rooms,--but rather above the level
of the ordinary student's finances.

At breakfast Kit could look out at the plane trees turning gold,
and the patterning of light upon the sooty trunks.  His room had
two windows and a mahogany door, a bookcase, and two or three odd
chairs.  Mrs. Gibbins provided him with breakfast and a hot meal at
night.  For the first week or two she observed Kit's comings and
goings, for her little sitting-room at the back of the house on the
ground floor was situated like a porter's lodge, and when her door
was left ajar she could command the foot of the stairs.  Mr.
Sorrell was very regular in his habits.  He came in about six, read
till dinner, continued his reading for an hour, and then went out
and walked.  He would be back in his room and ready for more work
by half-past nine.  Ada, the middle-aged maid who had been with
Mrs. Gibbins for ten years, was able to report that Mr. Sorrell
read at meals.

"He's always got a book stuck up against the teapot or the cruet
stand."

It would appear that Kit was an earnest and hard-working young man,
and Mrs. Gibbins felt relieved.  She knew her London, and the young
male,--though--for that matter--some of the old ones could be worse
than the youngsters.  A practical woman who has her living to earn
and a house to consider, and two very responsible women as clients
on the first and second floors, desires to avoid complications.
Young men with latch-keys!  Mrs. Gibbins relaxed some of her
inevitable hostility.

Each morning at 8.45 Kit plunged into his London.  He walked up
Guilford Street, half circled Russell Square, and proceeding across
Tottenham Court Road, made his way down one of the shabby streets
leading towards the hospital.  It was in Russell Square that he
struck the flurry of London, the haste of young women and girls and
men of all ages and sizes whom the suburbs poured into offices and
shops and restaurants.  Kit's course lay mostly across the track of
these hurrying clerks and shop-girls, but sometimes he went a
little way with the crowd.  The femininity of it poured round him,
those little bobbing hats, the slim legs swinging under those
provoking skirts, those London faces pretty or plain, soft or hard,
like pale flowers drifting.  Sometimes at the same corner he would
pass the same girl, or the same group of girls, silent or
chattering, always hurrying.  Sometimes a girl looked at him, and
the look was neither hostile nor friendly.

Kit made a habit of walking very fast, as though he were vaguely
conscious of something soft and impeding brushing against the
impetus of his youth, and as though the impetus itself had a
necessary virtue.  His purpose propelled him out of the house in
Brunswick Square, and past those tripping feet and little bobbing
hats to the grey forecourt of St. Martha's Hospital.  He hung up
his hat and coat in the cloak-room, picked up one of the other
Cambridge men who had come to St. Martha's, sat through a lecture,
dissected, or squinted down a microscope, read a book or talked or
ragged for five minutes, and went out to lunch at "Lyons" in Oxford
Street.  He would spend some of the afternoons in the out-patient
departments; he carried a stethoscope; for he had so thorough a
knowledge of his anatomy and physiology that he could spare the
time for clinical work.  The second part of the Cambridge M.B. was
to be taken in December and beyond it the first part of the
Fellowship challenged his ambition.  At half-past four he allowed
himself a round of buttered toast and a cup of tea, and after that
he would walk, turning into Hyde Park, and making his way home by
Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue.  His walking was a straight
forward affair, swift and strenuous, a casual avoidance of other
people, a scorn of shops and faces.  His impetus swung him along,
and he cultivated this impetus.  Speed seemed to matter; it carried
him past and over those insidious interferences.

On Saturdays he played "soccer" for the hospital.  He was
inoffensively popular, or rather less popular than some of the
other 'Varsity men who had to meet the young male jealousies of men
who had been at neither.  He boxed, but less than of old, for he
had begun to question its effect on his hands.  Once a month he
spent a week-end with Sorrell at Winstonbury, and on Sundays he had
supper with Thomas Roland at Chelsea.  Music had begun to appeal to
him very subtly and colour and pictures.  He found pictures in
music, and music in pictures.  Occasionally he met Pentreath who
was at St. Thomas's, a Pentreath who seemed to grow more
sensitively serious.

Pentreath had rooms in a quiet corner of Clapham.  He gave Sorrell
to understand that he found Clapham less distracting, and more
safe.

"I need not go north of the river, you know.  Down there it is very
dowdy and dull."

Kit confessed that he passed through the centre of the spider's web
once each day.  He spoke of Piccadilly Circus, and Shaftesbury
Avenue, and Pentreath looked at him anxiously.  To Kit it seemed
that his friend was both fascinated and afraid.

"I wonder you dare.  I promised my mater--.  All those beastly
women--!"

Pentreath's fear of his own desire, the trembling of his niceness
on the edge of the elemental, were not without their effect on Kit.
Pentreath's inward excitement and repressions were disturbing.

"They can't run away with you, old chap."

"It is the lights--too.  The glare--and the faces that come on you
suddenly.  And the eyes, looking at you from under the shadow--.
You must think me a silly fool, Sorrell,--but there is an unholy
fascination, a beauty, a damnable beauty--"

"You take it too seriously."

Pentreath's face had a pinched look.

"I can't help it.  It--is--serious.  Cambridge was different,--
rather like an old house in an old garden.  You weren't provoked
there."

Kit nodded a sagacious young head.

"Suggestion, Maurice."

"That's it.  Everything in London pushes you over the edge, the
colour, the women, the shops, the lights,--even the food and the
drink.  I'm working ten hours a day, and living on fruit and brown
bread and water."

Most young men would have laughed, but Christopher did not laugh at
Pentreath's fear of that which was in him.  He had seen the
Pentreath home and touched the Pentreath tradition, and he knew
that his friend was passionately sincere.  Maurice had ideals; he
wanted to think of all women as he thought of his sisters, pale,
sweet, Burne-Jonesian, and he was terrified when he saw the
Rossetti woman.

"One ought not to feel tempted, Sorrell.  When I think of my
people--"

"Why don't you get engaged?  One can't help these things, you know.
Everybody feels like it.  I have lots of talk with my pater."

He found Pentreath's eyes looking at him with astonishment.

"You have talked to your father--?"

"Yes--."

"About all this?"

"We understand each other."

"My dear chap--I couldn't.  In our family--some things are not
mentioned."

Kit left Pentreath thinking that he had not been affected by his
friend's quivering confusion, but he was to find that in some
subtle way his friend's problem was to become his own.  Pentreath
had spoken of the lights and the beauty and the shadows, and the
eyes, and the dim faces, and the play of the colours.  Seduction.
The natural desire of the young male.  The flick of a skirt, a face
seen suddenly at a street corner, those shapely ankles with the
soft curves of the muscles above them, the shadow of a fur about a
white throat, little half moons of dark hair showing under a hat!
Kit began to find that he had to walk harder and faster, and that
he had to resist a desire to loiter and to look.

Moreover, he was lonely, and he was young.  When he shut himself in
at night with his books he would find himself thinking of the vivid
lights and the faces.

There were times when he felt that he was missing things, life,
adventure.

There were men at the hospital who had mischievous and debonair
tales to tell.

"Old Landon's been having a time of it.  A girl in a flat, some old
chap's special--."

Kit would put his hands over his ears, and glue his eyes to his
book.  Anatomy!  Arteries, the blood, the heart!  A redness!
Hair--and its structure.  A girl's hair!

One night he turned up unexpectedly at Thomas Roland's, and there
was something in his eyes and in the excited restraint of his young
manhood that caused the older man to wonder.

"I wish you would play to me, sir."

Roland sat down and played Debussy, thinking that Kit's too
personal cry might be smoothed by the more impersonal beauty of
Debussy's music.



3


Like Prosper le Gai every young man must ride out in the spring of
the year and meet his Isoult or his Malfry, symbolical figures in
the tapestry of life's happenings; yet Sorrell himself passed
through a period of unrest during his son's first weeks in London.
It was as though he felt all that Kit might feel, and feeling it
realized his own helplessness.  The young man had mounted his
horse, and all those years of proud planning and building were to
be put to the test, like a bridge or a sea-wall in flood time.
Sorrell could do nothing but stand and watch, while trying to
reassure himself as to the soundness of the foundations.  There
were times when he would address himself with scornful severity.

"Don't be an ass.  Every man has to face life for himself, and make
his choices."

But it troubled him to remember how he himself had gone astray in
making the supreme choice, and that in making it he had wronged
both himself and Kit's mother.  He had thrust his incompatibilities
into Dora's life, and she had had her legitimate grievance.  What a
pity that she was not other than she was, and able to take a share--!
But that again was the trouble.  She would emphasize in Kit all
those qualities that make for dispersion and failure, and produce
those half-lives, those wounded efforts and dreary bafflements.

"He has got to go through with it all," was all that Sorrell could
say.

He imagined that his anxiety resembled the anxiety of a father
whose one and beloved son had gone to the trenches.  Nothing that
he could do would alter the inevitable.  But why the inevitable?
Was not the whole problem unnatural, the product of conventions and
repressions?

He was grateful to the woman who understood him, and whose
understanding came as a surprise and an assuagement.  In the winter
darkness he would hear a soft tapping of fingers upon his window,
and he would rise and let her in.

"You're worried about Kit."

Her supreme common sense was like a cool hand laid upon his
forehead.

"London, you know, Fanny."

"Well,--what about it?  Didn't you have your share of London?"

"I did."

"And here you are.  You had to worry it out.  So will Kit."

"I know.  But one longs to give the boy the right solution."

"There isn't a right solution,--only one's own--my dear.  We are
not as young as we were.  Interference doesn't work.  What worked
in our day,--see--?  Kit's got ballast."

"I have tried to help him in every way."

"Yes,--and a boy like Kit will find out how to help himself.  Don't
you see--?  We have to."

Moreover, she insisted upon the woman's point of view, and was at
pains to remind Sorrell that there was a woman's point of view.

"You men talk, Stephen, as though it was all our fault.  The old
Eve idea.  You men run after us, and then curse us for making you
do it,--which we don't, not always.  Be fair."

Sorrell agreed that it was dangerous to generalize, and that each
sex had to suffer because of the other, and that neither cynicism
nor idealism can be relied upon to control the energy of life.  The
problem was to so direct it that it did not drive people over
precipices and into quagmires.

"My whole point is that I don't believe in a man marrying until he
is well up the ladder."

"You want him to think more of his job than of his wife?"

"Well,--doesn't a man--?"

"And meanwhile--?"

Sorrell gave a little shrug of the shoulders.

"Perhaps I am prejudiced, Fanny.  Life's so big, and for the last
ten years or so I have had my eyes on one little figure.  Whatever
happens he will always get the best from me."

She bent down and kissed his forehead.

"You are a good man, Stephen.  I think yours is the sort of
goodness that helps other people to make good.  If I were Kit's
mother--"

"You would be worrying like anything."

"Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  People who have been brought up cleanly
don't like dirt.  And they don't like the sour taste that comes
after too much drink.  Start a lad with a clean stomach--and it
will want to keep itself clean.  Don't worry too much."



4


None the less, when Kit came down to Winstonbury for a week-end the
whole of Sorrell's consciousness would be exposed like a sensitive
plate hidden behind a lens, ready to register every secret
impression.

One winter morning while Sorrell was tying his tie in front of his
cottage window, he had one of those moments of illumination, for
the world outside his window seemed more real than reality.  Real
because he saw it in a sudden garment of mystery, and the dimness
of the dawn, grey, gradual, yet like the soul of itself, a moon
still shining somewhere upon the leafless trees, the grass frosted
between night and dawn.  The illusion of the material reality
departed from him while he stood there.  It was as though
everything was spirit.  He felt the beauty of feeling and of seeing
as he did, the illimitable significance of the human interplay.
All was gradualness and growth, and no measure of worrying could
make a tree shoot its leaves in winter.  The seasons came and went,
but all that a man loved went on, like the sap, sleeping or rising.

He watched a streak of sky grow blue.

"Kit will be here to-day," he thought.



5


Kit came.

He seemed older, and yet to Sorrell his face was the face of Kit
the child.

"Pater,--I want to ask you to do something."

"What is it, old chap?"

"It's about money."

Kit stood at the window and held the curtain aside to watch the
sunset, much as his father had watched the dawn.  The young outline
of his face had a tender severity, and the tenderness was for sky
and trees.  Sorrell, bending over a kettle that was beginning to
hiss over the sitting-room fire, looked up and sideways at his son.

"I say--it's jolly here--that sky--.  One sees so little sky in
London."

Sorrell was wondering why Kit needed money.

"I have arranged for you to have a horse to-morrow if you care to
ride."

"I'd rather walk, pater,--if you can spare the time."

"I think so."

Sorrell waited.  Kit lingered at the window, but not with any air
of avoiding his father, and Sorrell watched the kettle.

"How much do you want, Kit?"

"What,--pater?"

"Cash, old chap."

Kit turned suddenly, and leaned against the window casing.

"I don't want money.  You are so jolly generous to me.  I want you
to pay Mrs. Gibbins's bills for me, if I have them sent down.  Will
you?"

The kettle was boiling, and Sorrell filled the teapot.

"Yes,--but why?"

"Reasons, pater.  I can manage my lunches and teas and tobacco and
things on a pound a week.  If you would send me up a postal order
for a pound--every week."

Sorrell placed the teapot on the table.  They drew chairs up to the
fire and sat down.

"Just as you please, old chap.  There's no need for economy--"

Kit reached for the black-currant jam.

"I don't think one wants too much money in London, pater.  Just as
well knock about without it, especially when you want to get on
with your job.  Do you mind?"

"I think you are wise," said his father.




CHAPTER XXVI


1


Christopher, having put the second part of the Cambridge M.B.
behind him, and sailed through the Anatomy and Physiology of the
Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, now moved in the thick
of his hospital training.  There were the lectures on medicine and
surgery, pathology and bacteriology, and gynaecology, also the
clinical lectures on the same subjects.  He rolled bandages and
applied splints.  He served as out-patient clerk and dresser, and
later as clerk and dresser in the wards.  In the out-patient
departments of St. Martha's he was brought into touch with the
realities of sickness and disease, and having more vision than the
ordinary medical student he began to understand what was at the
back of these realities.  He saw what London did to people, and
what people did to themselves and to each other.  He saw the
blotched bodies, the sores, the rottennesses, the stigmata stamped
there by poor festering souls.  He saw men and young girls filthy
with venereal disease, and the blurred and shiny faces and angry
eyes of the drunkards.  Often it seemed to him that Fate herded
these people like cattle into the white-tiled galleries and the
out-patient rooms, poor stupid cattle sinned against, ignorantly
sinning.  It was the problem of the ignorant, of the unfit of the
people with uncontrolled lusts and greeds, of ugly lives and ugly
souls and bodies growing out of them, of children who should never
have been born.

"What a mess!" was Kit's feeling about it.

Sometimes pity moved him, sometimes nausea.

He began to have a profound respect for Mr. Kennard, the particular
assistant surgeon to whom he was attached as dresser, and in a
little while Kennard returned that respect.  Sorrell had a
reputation in the hospital.  He was keen, deliberate, ready to
accept small responsibilities.  Most young men funk their
responsibilities, but Kit did not.  Keenness saved him from being
fooled by his self-consciousness.

Kennard impressed upon Kit an example of impartial thoroughness.
Soon there was a tie of sympathy between them, and Kit, staying to
the very last, and after the senior students had drifted away,
would sit on the chair next to the surgeon and be allowed to enter
into a more intimate fellowship.

They talked.

One particular talk they had stuck in Kit's memory.  Kennard had
been examining a pretty French girl who had come with a certain
hideous condition, and the blemishes had shocked Kit.

"It's rather damnable, sir."

"It's life, a side of life.  There's something to avoid, Sorrell."

Kit was frowning.

"It's a question of stopping it, sir."

"Exactly."

"The Socialists--"

Kennard gave him a quick shrewd smile.

"Environment,--O--yes!  And education!  But turning life into an
orderly cabbage patch won't cure appetites.  It might make it
worse.  Life drives us--"

"Well,--what would you do, sir?"

"Try to see that half the babies are not born.  You don't let a
garden get overcrowded with a lot of weedy rubbish."

"But the Socialist cabbage-patch?"

"We are not--all--cabbages, Sorrell.  The world wants cleaning and
replanting,--but the drive of life is different in different
plants.  You have to allow for that.  I would halve the population,
and try to see that the half that remained had a better chance."

"But what about industry,--labour?"

"Ah,--industry!  It may be a question of choosing between Trade--
and health--the higher health.  Waste products.  We manage to use
them--sometimes,--but the waste is always ahead of the use.  Your
feet clogged with the mud of the world's haste and greed and
foolishness.  Stick to the job."

But his contact with the sick and the diseased and the polluted
bred in Kit a seriousness that took unto itself a desire to
understand.  The scope of the healing craft enlarged itself, and it
seemed to him that there could be no finer and more satisfying work
than the surgeon's.  It was not a mere question of skill with the
knife and the knowledge of how and when to use it, but a
sympathetic searching out of causes that cut deeper than the knife.
He felt himself up against the bigness of life and its human
distortions.  His attitude towards it was far more subtle and
mature than the attitude of the ordinary student who was
facetiously interested in disease as a something out of which he
would make money.  Kit saw much of the humour and the pathos, but
he did not see them as his fellows saw them.  He saw much deeper.
He was the son of his father, that father who had struggled with
men and things in order that he--the son--might follow the craft
that called him.

Kit had one quarrel at St. Martha's.  It came upon him in the
person of a fellow named Syme, a fat, sallow, and unclean hulk that
rolled about the place emitting gulps of obscene and husky humour.
And one day Kit fell foul of it.

"Shut up,--you low beast."

Syme was a powerful brute, and demanding honour, was taken on with
gloves in the common-room of the college.  Kit smote him with
exultation and hatred.  He floored the great, sodden fleshly thing,
and was liked the better for it.  Syme stayed away from the
hospital for three days.

A man who could hit as Kit could hit, had every right to be keen,
and to carry off the Caley Medal, and the Jonathan Taylor Prize.
No one quarrelled with his seriousness, especially when it was a
smiling seriousness.  Sorrell, coming up to the Opening of the
Session, and sitting on a fauteuil and listening to a learned
address, saw red gowns and black gowns upon the platform.  The
prizes were presented by a famous legal luminary, and Kit had to
cross the platform twice, collecting his triumphs.

He was cheered and cheered loudly, and Sorrell felt an inward glow,
a mother and father pride mingled.  The job had been worth it.

They dined at Thomas Roland's, with Cherry at the head of the
table, and when they had had music, Cherry told Sorrell's hand.
She looked very wise over it, with a wisdom that brought little
humorous crinkles round Roland's happy eyes.

"You and your son's hands are curiously alike.  But he will do
more--with his."

"I hope so," said Sorrell, while Kit, who was standing behind his
father's chair, laid a hand on Sorrell's shoulder.

"If so--it's because of his hands.  He has given me the chance."

Christopher went often to the house in Chelsea, for it offered him
the contrasts that he craved, music, colour, understanding, a
glimpse of a beautiful feminine thing, and talks with a man who had
outgrown his crudities.  You hadn't to explain yourself to Thomas
Roland and Kit was finding that it was possible to spend half your
life trying to explain things to people who seemed to have
gramophone records inside them instead of souls.

Roland lent him books and gave him an occasional theatre ticket.
Also Kit met people in the Chelsea house, people who mattered, who
had done things.  He was not a great talker; in fact he listened
better than he talked, but Thomas Roland's friendship gave him an
entry into another world, the world of art and music, and of
affairs.

He was asked to other houses and to dances, and he came to know
Norah East and her circle, and Viner the essayist, and Phyllis
Compton the actress.  He fell in love with Phyllis Compton and fell
out of it when he came to realize the extent of her vanity.  Women
were troubling him not a little, but he kept his troubles to
himself.  Only once did he speak of them to his father.

"I can't help it, pater, but women are the very devil.  It didn't
worry me much up at Cambridge,--but London--!"

"Yes," said Sorrell, "I know.  It's like going about hungry, and
seeing a basket of fruit at every corner."

"You don't think me a beast?"

"I have been through it, old chap.  Besides--it isn't beastly.
It's the meanness and the concealment and the treacheries that make
it beastly."

They were out walking and had paused at the end of a woodland path
where bracken grew, and the ground fell away into a deep green
valley.  Sorrell paused to light a pipe, while Kit's glances seemed
to sink into the landscape.

"I see the beauty in woman, pater.  It can't be wrong--somehow, and
yet one is so tied up."

"It's just--woman," said his father; "and it is natural.  I can't
advise you.  But half the women one wants aren't the women one
could live with.  Sex is an incident.  It has gained an artificial
importance from the fact that we have to suppress it."

"You did?"

"Mostly.  Not always.  One can't always.  But I don't think that I
ever hurt anybody.  Mutual agreement.  And then--of course--"

His face looked deeply lined.

"I went and married the wrong woman.  And yet she gave me you.  The
whole thing is such a muddle.  We get hustled through life almost
before we realize it.  If I had it again I should always say to
myself--'Don't hurry.'  It's the hurry that lands one, our hungry
haste.  Besides--there must always be the one--right woman."

"I suppose so," said Kit thoughtfully, "and I have a sort of
feeling, pater, that one owes something to her."



2


Kit had one of Thomas Roland's songs running in his head.


      "I bought my love roses, red roses in June."


It was the month of June, and seven o'clock in the evening, and in
Tottenham Court Road Kit had bought three red roses from a flower
seller.  He saw the sunlight upon the trees and shrubs of the
square, and it seemed to him that they were very green for London
trees.  The sky looked more blue.  Four girls were playing tennis
in the garden, and one of the girls wore a yellow silk jumper, and
had black hair.  The girl in Roland's song had black hair, and so
had the imagined girl who haunted Christopher's heart.

Kit slipped his latchkey into the door.  It seemed a pity to go in
and shut the door, and he knew that if he sat at the window and
tried to read he would find himself watching those girls.

"Oh, it's you, Mr. Sorrell."

Mrs. Gibbins, grown grey, and standing in her doorway like a
grenadier in a sentry box, brought Kit to a pause.  Kit had come to
respect Mrs. Gibbins as a plain and capable woman who did her job,
and who had not turned a sour face upon him when he had been laid
up for a fortnight with an acute attack of "flu."

"I'm glad you have come in.  A gentleman has been waiting to see
you,--since four."

"O," said Kit, appreciating the solemnity of Mrs. Gibbin's face.

"Behaving most queerly too--banging things about.  Ada went up and
found him sobbing."

"Who is it?"

"He wouldn't give a name, said you'd know."

"What age?"

"Oh,--about your age, Mr. Sorrell."

Kit sprinted upstairs, to find the blinds of his room drawn, and
Pentreath extended in the big arm-chair, a long, stiff, desolate
figure, all eyes and ruffled hair.  He did not move, but lay
looking at Kit with a curious and aggressive shamefacedness.  And
Kit, in the out-patient department, had seen women with that look
upon their faces.

He closed the door.

"Hallo,--old chap."

He had not seen Pentreath for three months, but the Pentreath whom
he saw in his chair had a slovenly, unshaven, frightened air.

"What's wrong, old chap?"

Kit had the three roses in his hand, and as he came round the table
he noticed that Pentreath's eyes fixed themselves upon the roses.
They were dilated eyes, full of an inward horror.

"Don't--Sorrell--"

He made a movement with one hand, an hysterical and jerky movement.

"Don't bring those flowers near me.  I can't bear it.  They are so
clean."

"My dear chap,--what's the matter?"

He turned to place the flowers behind a pile of books on a side-
table, and he heard the creaking of Pentreath's chair.

"I'm married."

"Married!"

Kit turned and faced his friend.

"I have been married six months."

"Who to?"

"Oh, a girl I met down there where I keep.  I felt--I had to get
married--"

He was sitting up now, his long arms rigidly extended, and his
hands clasped between his knees.  He looked about the most broken
thing that Kit had ever seen, and yet Kit was wondering--.
Marriage, at twenty-three!  The sensitive Pentreath,--shivering at
the shadow of his own sex!  But why--?

"You have something to tell me--"

"Good God," said the man in the chair, bending forward as in agony;
"something to show you,--Sorrell.  What will I do?"

The irony of it, that his friend should be his first patient,
polluted in body, and shamed in soul!  Kit stood by him, gripping
Pentreath's shoulder, shocked and angry, feeling himself rather
helpless in the face of this sordid horror.

"Steady--old chap.  Keep a grip on things.  Of course--you have
left her?"

Pentreath made a movement.

"What a scene,--Sorrell,--what a scene!  I thought I was saving
myself,--and she has pushed me into a filthy hell.  And she had
such innocent eyes--.  I thought--"

"Do your people know?"

"Sorrell!"

"About the marriage,--! mean?"

"I kept it secret.  And then--when the smash came--how could I--?"

"Smash!  What smash?"

"My father's business.  You must have heard.  It was in the papers.
The bankruptcy proceedings."

"I'm not much of a paper man, old fellow.  I'm sorry, most damnably
sorry.  What happened?  But don't talk about it--unless--"

Pentreath wanted to talk.  The secret soul of him, cracked and
overstrained, seemed to break in Christopher's room.  He became
pathetically garrulous, letting his emotional state expand itself
in excited declamation.  Kit could see the retinal redness of
Pentreath's dark and sensitive eyes.

"Of course--the mater has a little money.  The old place is sold.
They have taken a cottage in the wilds of Sussex.  Elsie is
married--you know.  Freda is at home, no servant, so she does
things.  They are trying to keep Molly on at school; she's sixteen
now--.  And of course--my allowance--.  And I'm in debt; she left
me debts--.  O, my God--Sorrell, what am I to do?"

Kit pondered a moment.  Then he opened the door, and going to the
head of the stairs, called down them to someone below.

"Ada.  Oh, are you there?  My friend is going to have supper with
me.  Can you manage something?  Yes.  Splendid.  Very good of you."

He returned to Pentreath,--and pulling up the blinds, let in the
slanting sunlight.

"No need to keep the blinds down, old chap.  Face the light;
light's good.  I'll look after you."

Pentreath burst into tears.

"You are the only friend, Sorrell--"

"That's all right.  We have got to fix things up.  I can treat you.
No need for anybody to know.  As a matter of fact, too, I don't
spend all that my pater allows me, so I can manage to let you have
a little."



3


Kit took Pentreath back to that back Street in Clapham and stood in
Pentreath's poor little room where the gas spluttered through a
worn-out gas mantle, and the atmosphere of a woman still lingered.

Pentreath had flared into a sudden, futile rage.

"The scent she used.  Beastly!  I've had the windows open.  Of
course--I know now--"

"What was she, old chap?"

"In a shop.  I thought--.  She had such a baby face.  Damn it,--I
can't know anything of women!"

Christopher turned away.  He saw that all the Pentreath photographs
had been arranged upon the mantelpiece,--they were great people for
photographs--the Pentreaths, and Maurice began to tell him that
after the last vile denouement with his wife, he had got out all
his photos.

"She wouldn't have them about.  Said they looked like a whole row
of snobs and of course--after the smash and we began to quarrel--.
I put them away.  Yes, it happened yesterday; I don't know where
she has gone.  I wished her dead.  And then--I got out those
photos, Sorrell; I wanted to feel that I had decent people--.  The
poor old mater--"

He crumpled down in a chair, and Kit pretended to look at the faces
of the Pentreaths, Sir George with that air of tired and
disillusioned dignity, Maurice's mother smiling as at an audience
of working mothers, Elsie sentimental and pensive, Freda rather
like a sandy kitten.--And Molly!  Kit found himself looking more
attentively at Molly Pentreath.  Hers was a recent photo, and it
seemed to him that she looked older than her sisters.  He was
interested.  He saw the broad yet shapely face, two little half-
moons of black hair showing under the brim of the hat, the dark yet
fiery eyes, that wavy and mischievous mouth.  Attractive, yes, a
problematical little devil of a girl, with something of the gloss
of browned steel in her eyes.

"Molly's at school," he found himself saying.

"If Molly knew!" said the voice from the chair.

"She needn't know."

And yet Kit had a feeling that had he such a sorry story to tell he
would rather have told it to Molly than to any of the other
Pentreaths.  She was alive.  She might flay you, but it was better
to be flayed with understanding than to feel that you had wounded
people who would refuse to understand.

"Look here,--old chap, you will have to stay in for a week or two.
I'll come along each day."

"But the hospital!  I'm one of Sir John Durrant's dressers."

Kit's answer was grave, and unanswerable.

"Write to your house-surgeon and say--O, say your people wanted you
down with them.  And what about money?"

Pentreath would not reply.

"You must have some sort of allowance."

"A pound a week,--from the mater.  And an aunt is going to help."

"All right,--I think I shall be able to let you have a pound a
week."

"I'll pay you back."

"When you like.  It is between friends."

On the following evening Christopher took a late train to
Winstonbury.  He had wired to his father, and Sorrell met him at
the station, a rather anxious Sorrell.

"All right, old chap?"

"Quite," and Kit's hand-grip was steady and reassuring.  They sat
up till late, talking over Pentreath's tragedy, though Kit's
opening words had disturbed his father.

"I wonder if I might have a little more money, pater.  You know,--
you let me--"

"Of course--.  How much?"

"It's not for myself.  Pentreath has got himself into a mess."

Christopher thought that he had never seen his father looking so
happy and so well.  A great man, his pater!  There were times when
you felt a kind of inward glow spreading from him and warming you.
He had no fussiness.  Kit looked across at him sitting so much at
his ease in the big chair, one leg crooked over the other, a hand
clasping the bowl of his pipe, so ready to listen, so understanding
in his judgments.

"We can manage it, Kit.  You are absolutely right about wanting to
help Pentreath.  I can do it without docking you of your money."

"But that's too generous.  You see,--I'm not spending much."

"Quite so.  I'm banking it for you.  You can open an account of
your own--if you like."

"No.  I would rather you sent me so much extra, and I can pass it
on to Maurice.  He wants looking after.  Not quite enough sand."

Sorrell smiled.  He was thanking the unknown God for the blessing
of ballast, and for this sturdy structure that was his son.  It was
good to be able to feel as he was feeling.

Manage it?  Of course he could.  The Roland Hotels were paying
thirty per cent., and the profits made by "William of Winstonbury"
had risen by some hundreds of pounds above the Grapp level.

Sorrell curled himself up comfortably in bed.

"Life's good.  Thank God it was the other man's boy.  How damned
selfish we are."




CHAPTER XXVII



1


The night-porter knocked at Christopher's door.

"Hallo!"

"Case, sir."

Kit yawned, and sat up.  He had been called out once before during
the night, and his body resented the second disturbance.  He felt
full of an abominable and delightful desire to sleep.

"Gates."

"Sir?"

"Is it far?"

"Great Plumpton Street, sir, or just off it."

"Foreign or English?"

"English, sir.  I'm keeping the messenger."

"Good."

Kit arose, switched on the light and dressed.  He collected the
black midwifery bag and descended the stairs to the dim vestibule
where the night-porter and a vague feminine figure waited.  Gates,
holding an illustrated magazine, and keeping the place marked with
a fat finger tucked between the pages, opened the street door.  Kit
marched out, with the vague feminine shape following.  The closing
door shut out the band of light, and Sorrell and the messenger were
alone in the darkness of the silent street, and in the midst of
London's most strange silence.

Kit walked briskly.  He knew his direction, and he seemed hardly
aware of the figure at his side, for it was no more than a shadow,
one of London's shadows.  The woman walked beside him consentingly,
glancing occasionally at his silent and preoccupied profile.  They
reached Oxford Street without having exchanged a word.

Halfway across the empty Street the girl paused under an electric
standard.

"Queer, isn't it?"

Kit, coming out of his three o'clock in the morning torpor, became
conscious of her as something more than a shadow, a young woman,
slim, pale, with dark hair and a wavy and expressive mouth.  Her
voice had sounded strange and musical in the hush of the great
silence.  She was looking along the street in the direction of
Oxford Circus.

"You don't often see it like this."

"No," said Kit.

"Just as though the whole world was dead, except us two."

She smiled a sudden upward smile at him before walking on,--but she
had ceased to be a shadow, and in the dimness of one of the many
streets running southwards into Soho, the very dimness of her
emphasized her coming to life.  Her voice had sounded gentle and
sensitive, and his glimpse of her face, pale under the shadowy
hair, had left him very much awake.  Tom Roland had written a song
upon "The pale flowers of London drifting on the flowing streets,"
and the girl's face was flower-like and pale.

"Off Plumpton Street, isn't it?" said Kit, just for something to
say.

"Orange Court."

"I know it.  Those workmen's flats?"

"Yes.  We share one."

"O," said Kit, and was wonderingly silent.

The girl took a look at him as they passed under a lamp.

"Rather young--aren't you?"

He smiled, unprovoked by a challenge that is annoying to most young
men.

"Old enough.  Don't worry."

"Oh,--I'm not worrying.  What's the use of worrying?  Though it is
her first."

Her eyes grew curious, vaguely intimate.

"Rather bad--sometimes--the first, isn't it?"

"Not always."

"She's frightened.  Don't catch me having children, not in these
days."

Kit stared straight ahead.

"Your sister--is it?"

"No.  We live together; makes it easier, sharing one of those
pigeon-holes."

"Of course," said Kit in a voice that committed him to nothing.
They turned into Orange Court, a mere tube of blackness, and the
girl seemed to vanish suddenly into a cleft in the wall.

"Third floor.  I'll go first.  Not much money wasted on light."

Kit groped his way up the stairs after her, and in the darkness
ahead of him she was no more than a movement.  He heard a key
slipped into a door, and saw a finger of light, and with it came a
sudden moaning.

"All right, Gwen; here's the doctor."

Christopher stood in the middle of a minute parlour kitchen.
A white china teapot and a couple of unwashed cups stood on the
table, and a tin kettle purred on a gas-ring.  Two rooms opened
from the kitchen.  One door was closed.  Through the other doorway
Kit had a glimpse of a bed and of a girl's fair head, and the
tumbled curves of a light blue woollen jacket.

He put the bag on the table.

"I'll take your hat."

She was standing close to him, looking up, her two hands extended,
and Kit was conscious of the sudden shock of her appeal.  She had
very liquid brown eyes, such very innocent eyes they seemed to him.
Her long mouth was half plaintive and half humorous.  She had a
little dark mole just under the right lower eyelid, and very white
teeth.

"Thanks."

He picked up the bag and entered the bedroom.



2


Kit's voice called for hot water, and the brown-eyed girl brought
it.  She moved very quietly, and with a suggestion of conscious
shyness.

"Thanks."

She poured water from the kettle into the basin, and tried its
temperature with the tip of a slim finger.

Kit appeared grave and absorbed.  The brown-eyed girl left the
room.  He was aware of her standing in the little kitchen, with a
hand laid along one cheek.  Then, he forgot her for the moment in
the business that had brought him there, and his hands and his
natural kindness were at the mother's service.

"That's all right.  Nothing to worry about."

He washed his hands again, and put on his coat, and stood for a
moment by the bed.

"Some time yet, you know."

He was going, and the fair-haired girl, with a frightened whimper,
turned in the bed.

"O, please,--stay."

Kit looked at her kindly.

"It may be three or four hours yet, and this is my second to-
night."

"O, please don't go.  I'm so frightened.  Mary, tell him not to
go."

Kit found himself in the doorway, looking into the eyes of the
messenger.

"Do stay.  If you want to sleep--there's the sofa.  I'll keep very
quiet.  And if you would like some tea--"

Kit hesitated, his glance moving from her eyes to her mouth, and
from her mouth to the little brown mole under her right eyelid.

"All right.  I oughtn't to.--There might be another case."

"They can send for you.  And aren't there other doctors?"

"Yes."

Her brown eyes seemed to swim with a light that puzzled him.

"Besides, if you went, they might send another doctor, and we'd
rather have you."



3


There was a quietness in the bedroom, one of those pauses when
nature rests from her labour; the mother-to-be had fallen asleep.

Kit sat on the sofa, Mary in an old armchair.  A cup of tea stood
on the table within reach of his hand.

"Why don't you go and lie down?"

She gave a little twist of the shoulders.

"Don't want to.  Let's talk.  We can talk softly."

Kit sipped his tea.  This little flat in Orange Court and its two
occupants intrigued him, for he had adventured into all sorts of
holes and corners during the last three weeks, basements, attics,
grimy rooms in old Georgian houses that had once known patched and
powdered gentlewomen.

He had seen woman in her squalor and her anguish, pathetic,
horrible, clean and unclean.  He had been shocked, and he had been
touched.  He had carried food into one or two dens, and brought
pity and disgust away with him.

As for this workman's flat, it was both unusual and yet sufficiently
usual.  These two girls!  They did not belong to the particular
profession, of that he was sure.  He understood that the mother was
not married.

"Like to smoke?" asked the soft voice from beside the gas range.

"No,--thanks."

He observed the interior of his tea-cup.

"Aren't you tired?"

"Oh,--a bit.  I'm going to see this through.  Expect I shall be a
little sleepy over the programmes and the teas to-morrow."

Kit glanced across at her.

"Your job?"

"Yes,--at the Pelargonium."

"There!  Why that's Roland's place."

"You mean--the--Roland."

"Yes,--I know him."

"Do you," said she, with an intent look, "and Miss Gent perhaps?"

"Yes.  Cherry."

"Wish I was her.  Lovely voice she has.  I sell programmes, and do
half the stalls.  Gwen's in a shop; quite a good job.  Rather bad
luck for her, this."

Kit had a feeling that they were slipping into a swift and
extraordinary intimacy.  He both fought it, and did not fight it.

"I suppose it is," he said.

"Yes, he can't marry her, if he wanted to.  Men don't, do they,--
when this happens?"

"I don't know."

"She doesn't want it either, not really.  Being married!  No
thanks.  Not good enough."

She sat with folded arms, and seemed to reflect upon life, her
pretty head drooping slightly under the curve of her white neck.
Kit replaced his cup on the table, and seized the chance of a
steady look at her, and while he was looking her eyes swept swiftly
to his.  She smiled.  He answered her smile.

"Go to the theatre often."

"No, not very often.  Can't afford the time or the money."

"Oh, you are one of the keen ones," she said wisely, as though she
already knew a great deal about him, and meant to know more; "one
sees a lot of life at the theatre, on the stage--I mean.  Makes you
think.  And then--when you begin thinking--"

Her intelligent smile gave a lustre to her sensuous, flower-like
face.

"You get out of your depth," said Kit.

She considered his assertion.

"That depends.  Seems to me--when you get to the bottom of things--
we all do what we want to do if we can.  And where's the harm?  And
especially--if you don't wallow.  It's the people who wallow, and
those who are all tied up.  Seems--we are more natural since the
war.  We--are."

"Whom do you mean by we?"

"We younger ones.  We are ready to question things, to go on our
own,--women especially.  Some of you men are such dear old
sentimentalists."

She laughed.

"That's that.--Where do you live--in digs?"

"Yes."

"Bit lonely--sometimes?"

He avoided her eyes,--but presently he had to look at her.

"O, yes, damnably so.  But I work hard.  And then--the glitter gets
you, and you want to go mad.  Silly, isn't it?"

"Not a bit."

Her glance was soft.

"Why shouldn't you?  It's natural.  It's the old stuffy people who
were always crying stale fish!--I say,--what's your name?"

"Sorrell."

"That's pretty.  But the other one."

"Christopher--or Kit."

"Mine's Mary,--you know,--Mary Jewett.  Mary,--Mary, quite
contrary.  O,--there's Gwen!"

A little moaning came from the bedroom, and Mary went quickly and
softly in to the other woman, a tenderness in her eyes, leaving Kit
looking very grave.  He heard the two girls' voices, the one
soothing, the other the voice of a woman in pain.  He glanced over
his shoulder.  A hand closed the door, and more than a minute
passed before it was reopened.  The moanings grew louder.

"I think she wants you, Dr. Sorrell."

"Coming," said Kit.



4


The baby was born about eight o'clock, a boy.  It lay whimpering
and kicking on an old jacket at the foot of the bed, and when Kit
had a moment to spare he carried the child to the bedroom door.

"Mary."

She was there, looking very tired and sleepy, with shadows under
her eyes.

"What do I do with it?"

"Wash it.  I suppose you have some clothes."

"O,--yes."

"And I want a big jug of hot water."

She took the baby and Kit's brusqueness into her arms, seeming to
understand the man if she failed in her instincts towards the
child.  Sorrell was tired.  There had been more in the experience
of the night than the bringing of a child into the world, and he
wanted fresh air, a bath, and his breakfast.  He had been close up
against life, contending with it in himself as well as in the
woman.

"Try to get some sleep.  Yes, everything is quite all right."

"You've been so kind, doctor."

He carried the bag and his coat into the kitchen where Mary was
sitting by the stove with the baby on her knees.  She had washed
and dressed it, and was looking at its red and ugly face with an
air of puzzlement and of hostility.

Kit put on his coat.

"I suppose you will be here."

"I've a matinee this afternoon.  There is a woman downstairs who
will come in."

She looked up at him with eyes of weariness.

"And you?"

"I'll come round later in the day."

"I may be out."

She stood up, holding the baby.

"And to-morrow--?  Where's my hat?"

She found him his hat.

"I shall be in most of to-morrow."

He was aware of the fact that her steady gaze had a meaning for
him, and that the brown eyes were softly blurred.  She was very
tired.

"Right.  Get someone in and go to bed.  You want sleep."

"I do."

He turned for a moment at the top of the stairs to see her standing
in the open doorway, vaguely smiling, her head surrounded by a haze
of light, and ten seconds later he was in Orange Court, gripping
the handle of the bag very hard, and walking fast.  The liveness of
London astonished him.  He was thinking of the emptiness and the
silence, and of Mary standing in the middle of Oxford Street with
that flower-like floating face of hers.

A hot bath was welcome.  He splashed about in it,--and emerging,
towelled himself vigorously.

"Suppose she lives on buns and tea."

Well,--what was it to do with him?

At breakfast, in the college dining-room he was absorbed and surly,
eating fiercely, and in no mood for small talk.  Potter, a
confrere, was devouring buttered toast and marmalade on the other
side of the table.

"Been out all night?"

"Pretty well."

"Thought you looked a bit cheap."

It occurred to Kit that he might ask Potter to take over the case,
but the idea roused in him a fierce surge of hostility.  He did not
like Potter; Potter was considered to be a very debonair and
dangerous lad, a fellow who smirked and looked at himself in shop
windows.  Was he going to send Potter to Mary Jewett?

"No,--I'm damned if I will!"



5


Christopher went to his room and slept till one o'clock.  He had
other cases to visit during the afternoon, and it was four o'clock
when he entered Orange Court and climbed the stairs to the little
flat occupied by Gwen and Mary.  A strange woman with a red face
let him in.

"Yes, she's doin' lovely, doctor, 'ad a nice sleep."

The door of Mary's bedroom was open, and he had a glimpse of a
rose-coloured woollen coat hanging from a hook on the door.  The
coat and its colour were Mary.  It sent an instinctive thrill
through him, a pang of desire, and even when he was standing by the
bed and talking to Mary's friend, his consciousness was busy with
Mary, and Mary's bedroom and her clothes, and her mouth, and the
way she smiled.  The baby was asleep beside its mother, and Kit
remembered the awkward way in which Mary Jewett had held the baby,
as though she disliked it.  Her dislike had surprised him.  He had
imagined that all women were sentimental about babies,--mother
love, and all that sort of thing, and for some reason--which he
could not explain, he preferred Mary's hostility.  Kit had no
illusions about babies.  He had seen so many of them of late; red,
raw, wrinkled, absurd creatures, he had found them rather
repulsive.

But his senses were more alert.  He noticed that the pillow was
white, and that the bed had a pretty coverlet; the kitchen was
clean, the brass taps of the range polished, the table covered with
a blue and white cloth.  There was self-respect here, the self-
respect of women who worked.

"You will be coming to-morrow, doctor?"

"Yes,--to-morrow morning."

Before going to bed that night Christopher took half-an-hour's
walk, and he was surprised to find that the quality of his
restlessness had changed.  It was happy and pleasant, and he felt a
peculiar good will towards all the other strollers, as though he
had drunk good wine, and the streets were the paths of a pleasure
garden.  He found himself outside the Pelargonium, where boards
announced that the house was full.  He looked through the glass
doors into the foyer.

"She's in there," he thought; "doing her job.  We are workers, both
of us."

Kit was not called out of bed that night, and he went with a
feeling of freshness and of adventure into Orange Court, and up the
dark stairs.  Mary opened the door to him, a different Mary and yet
the same; she looked prettier; she had more colour, natural colour.
She stood there, looking at him and smiling, and yet there was much
more behind her smile.  It made him feel that he belonged.

"Well,--how's the patient?"

He was shy, and a little formal, but his eyes belied his formality.

"Doing so well.  She's asleep."

"I'm afraid I shall have to wake her."

She brushed close to him as he entered, a nearness that was quite
unstudied and instinctive.  There was a vase full of flowers on the
table, rose-red and white asters.  The door of Mary's bedroom was
open, and her red rose coat was hanging there.

She had observed that quick glance of his.

"I love that colour."

"It ought to suit you--rather well," he said.



6


During the last week of his month's clerkship Christopher saw Mary
Jewett seven times, four times at Orange Court, once outside the
Pelargonium, and on the two other occasions he took her out to tea
at a little place in the Charing Cross Road.  On the last evening
they had wandered,--it was a Sunday--and they had stood by the
parapet in Trafalgar Square, and watched the lights.  Thence they
had idled down to the river, saying little, but feeling the fierce
dear pressure of the young life behind their words.  Sometimes
their arms touched as they walked.

Kit learnt that she was three years older than he was.

"That means a lot,--Mr. Christopher."

"Does it?"

"Makes me feel motherly.  You're such a boy."

"I'm more of a man than you think," he said.

He remembered the time and his duties.

"It is my last night on to-night.  I ought to be back at the
hospital."

"Glad it's over?"

"Very.  The most beastly month--.  But--to-morrow--"

"Free.  So am I.  It is my free evening."

"I say,--I'd like to--.  But would you,--come to a theatre or
something?"

"I get enough theatre."

"Of course.  Well,--a little dinner somewhere?"

"I'd love to."

Once before Kit had visited that little French restaurant in Soho
where both the perfumes and the waitresses were foreign, and some
of the chairs were none too steady on the legs.  Christopher became
the occupant of such a chair.  The lovers laughed over it, leaning
their elbows upon the table and looking into each other's eyes over
a vase of fading flowers.  Mary's hat threw a faint shadow, so that
her forehead and eyes seemed more dim and elusive than her mouth.

"Monsieur?"

Kit ordered dinner, while the painted lady at his elbow jotted down
his choice.

"I want some wine."

"Louis.  Le carte des vins."

A swarthy little wine-waiter tried to persuade Kit to buy bad
champagne, but being the son of an hotel-keeper he had some
knowledge of wine.

"Red or white?"

He looked at Mary, and her eyes seemed half closed.

"Red."

"A bottle of Chateau Ducru."

"Bien, monsieur."

They clinked glasses, and Kit's fingers touched the girl's.  No
words were spoken.  It was the sacramental wine of lovers.

Afterwards, they wandered as though London was a dream city,
brilliant and strange.  They went arm in arm, drifting, pausing
inconsequentially to look in a lighted window--and so to look at
each other.  Their eyes were full of the varying lights of the
night.  In the dim and shadowy places a little intimate sense of
being nearer to each other thrilled in each body.  Once, in a dark
entry between two houses, they stood and kissed, a long kiss,
clinging, Mary's hands upon Kit's shoulders.  He felt and heard the
sigh of the deep breath she drew at the end of that embrace.

"Dear boy--"

"Mary."

They wandered, Kit's arm tucked under hers, and his hand holding
her fingers.  For whole minutes they did not speak.  The houses
seemed to grow higher, the streets narrower and more dark.  They
passed the flaring window of a shop at a corner, and Kit--like a
man at sea--picked up the lights of that shop.  He knew it.  They
were within a hundred yards of Orange Court.

"Dear boy,--why are you trembling?"

He was inarticulate.  He felt her cheek pressing against his
shoulder.

"I know.  I'm like that too."




CHAPTER XXVIII



1


Sorrell knew.

He did not know how he knew, but know he did, intuitively, and with
a quickness that was feminine.

For the thing was never talked of; it lived there in silence, known
and avoided, and yet understood.

A difficult period,--yes, but like all difficult periods not
lacking in its human compensations, for in spite of this silence,
father and son seemed to draw closer to each other.  What was most
valuable was Sorrell's victory over himself, that old man self,
querulous and interfering, angry and possessive, the eternal
Puritan, the foolish parent.  Troubled, he exercised a sensitive
restraint.  He met the old man's preachings and answered them,
placing himself in the spirit beside his son, and not opposite him.

What right had he to interfere or to ask questions?  Was the son
responsible to the father?  Was there not a secret corner in every
life into which no friend can penetrate, though he may stand on the
threshold and listen.

"It is not shame, but decent reticence.  Surely--one can respect
it."

His attitude towards his son had a wise gentleness.  It was as
though he wished Kit to feel a fellowship in the midst of this
silence, and that Kit did feel it was Sorrell's reward.  There were
the same week-ends, the same country rambles, the same talks, with
a sense of deepening affection in the realization of their common
humanity.  In Kit's heart there was the same refrain--"Dear old
pater," and the boyishness of it merged into the fiercer faith of
the man.  That he was both happy and unhappy was one of Kit's
discoveries, the patchwork of life's emotions, the ranging
interplay, the completeness and in the incompleteness of passion.
The day's work follows an exultantly tender night.  Kit felt that
somehow his father knew all this, that he had borne with it, and
was bearing with it in his son.  His silence was the silence of
sympathy.

Kit pondered it all out.

Why did he not tell his father?  He knew that it was possible to
tell him.  He did not want to tell him, and he had a feeling that
his father did not want to be told.  It was as though there existed
between them a tacit agreement to keep the thing like a shaded
lamp, and to refuse its rays penetration into the comradeship they
shared as men.

Sorrell had his moments of curiosity.  He would wonder about this
woman, who she was and what she was, and how much ultimate
significance she had for Kit, yet she remained a shadow, a creature
divined but unseen, a human planet making itself felt in the
emotional firmament.  And Mary Jewett had the same feelings about
Christopher's father, that equall