Title:      Old Pybus (1928)
Author:     Warwick Deeping
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Title:      Old Pybus (1928)
Author:     Warwick Deeping






To

THE MARY IN MY WIFE




CHAPTER I


1


Mr. Conrad Pybus collected pictures, and being the possessor of two
"Constables," and three "Cotmans," he had some right to stretch out
a large hand and to indicate the picture that was hung against the
blue horizon.

"That's Castle Craven--over there.  Rather like a thing by
Constable.  What?"

In spite of the largeness of his hand and the largeness of the car
in which he sat, he spoke with an assurance which failed of its
effect.  He was shy of the woman beside him.  She was leaning
forward in the coupé, her dark thinness and her pallor joining to
disconcert Mr. Conrad Pybus's vague yet ample correctness.  She was
smiling, and when she smiled the angles of her long and expressive
mouth curved deep into either cheek.  It was a curious smile,
showing a gleam of teeth, but not as the conventional beauty
displays them, all to the front as though advertising a musical
comedy or a dentifrice.  As a small nephew put it:  "Aunt Ursy
laughs in her cheeks."  She did, with a kind of slanting, upward,
ironic swiftness, as though the two corners of her mouth were
retracted by a couple of hooks.

Mr. Pybus's hand, sheathed in wash-leather, seemed to fascinate
her.  Extended, palm turned towards the landscape, it suggested the
hand of a policeman on point duty, pontifically presenting a whole
street to some hesitating motorist.  But with the gloved hand the
illusion ended.  The blue-and-white striped shirt-cuff, nicely
protruding from the blue sleeve, marked the particular Pybus.  No
man could have been better tailored.  His hats came from Pont's in
St. James's Street.

She examined him with one swift and inclusive stare while he
remained for a moment in that attitude of civic dignity, presenting
her to Castle Craven, that hill town, grey under a kind of blue
murk, the lapis of a horizon that was tumbled with clouds.  She saw
the red gold gleam of a wheat field, ripe on a green hillside.  The
world seemed a welter of hill-tops, green and grey and silver, or
bewigged with smooth beech woods.  The distances appeared immense.

But beside her and very much in the foreground was Conrad Pybus,
solid and obvious, all black and white, a heavy man who could not
sit comfortably in her presence.  He had been trying so hard to
impress her.  He wanted her to marry him.  And she, with the
merciless eyes of a woman who had no illusions, saw him as a
glorified and rather flashy stockbroker's clerk, a morning-paper
man, worth perhaps fifteen thousand pounds a year.  He had a place--
Chlois Court--in Berkshire.

She allowed herself to agree with him.

"All those clouds massed up there.  Rather fine.  How much have we
done?"

"Oh--about seventy.  You wouldn't know it in this 'bus, would you?
An hour and a half.  Not so bad."

His large, white face, with its unblinking blue eyes and a very
black moustache, reminded her somehow of the face of a chef.  But
why a chef?  How oddly one associated things!  Only--that particular
sort of face seemed to call for a chef's white cap.  She smiled.

"You are going to give me lunch there?"

His right hand reached for the gear lever.

"Of course.  Saracen's Head.  I wired them before we started."

The car went softly down into the valley where the Brent ran under
the grey span of an old bridge between the steep greenness of
overhanging trees.  "Aunt Ursy" was peering into a little mirror.
She had one of those ivory skins that are proof against sunburn or
worry, and neither her skin nor her hair needed attention.  Conrad
Pybus was showing her how he could handle a car on the narrow
steeps of the ascent into Castle Craven.  He was very conscious of
her sitting there, squinting at her sleek face in that provoking
little mirror.  Yes, she was "it," as much "it" as the car he was
driving, but she would take more handling.  Oh--yes--much more
handling.  He might be a new man, but Chlois Court had a ripe and
proper atmosphere.

While she, consummate worldling, but coolly honest, as many
worldlings are, watched a high stone garden-wall glide by, its
greyness tufted with Siberian wallflower and draped with aubrietia.
Colour!  Of course!  The man had no colour.  Moreover, he possessed
one of those heavy white skins which resemble greasy vellum.  Hence
the "chef complex."  Yes--that settled it; for, whatever she might
be, she was like most women, richly fastidious, a saint in her
æsthetics, if something of a vagrant in her morals.

Meanwhile Conrad Pybus's blue car, with its black coupé and silver
snout, climbed the steep and tortuous Bridge Street into Castle
Craven.  He drove with a confident care.  He was doing the thing
well, and it was no use doing things badly in the presence of
Ursula Calmady.

"Might be the Brooklands test-hill.  Oh--you idiot!"

Baulked by a Ford van that pulled out in front of him without a by-
your-leave or a signal, he had to hold the car on the steep hill.
The lady glanced at his face.  He had the air of saying to himself
things that in her presence could not be said.

She smiled to herself.

"No--my dear, no.  You are not a bad sort, but in six months you
would be saying those things aloud."

The car moved on, and she allowed herself to feel self-revealed in
the dignity of Castle Craven.  Its very steepness was dramatic and
Shakespearean.  Between little grey crowded houses, the cobbled
street swept up and through the black throat of an old gate.  There
was a sudden enlargement of the sky.  The tall houses drew back
under the smiling white clouds.  A church tower with six pinnacles,
each topped by a gilded vane, made a glittering against the
blueness.  In the centre of the great space a market cross rallied
the town.  There were houses of stone and houses of Georgian brick,
and a row of pollarded limes shading the fronts of a line of shops.
On the left a golden head swinging on an iron bracket overhung the
broad pavement.  A little farther on the White Hart Inn wore upon
the top of its white-pillared portico a turban of flowers.  Two red
'buses, and half-a-dozen cars were drawn up by the Cross.

The obvious Pybus drew in towards the Saracen's Head.

"Well, here we are."

He was made to measure.


2


Double glass doors opened from the vestibule into the hall of the
Saracen's Head.  Directly opposite to you as you entered was the
office, with the registration book open upon the counter, and the
fluffy fair head of Miss Vallence--the book-keeper and reception
clerk--visible between a green-baize letter-board and a time-table
of the local 'bus service.  A strip of faded red carpet stretched
from the glass doors to the office.  Four cane chairs and two
smokers' tables were arranged symmetrically, one either side of
this red strip of carpet.

On the right and the left, passages led to the lounge and the
coffee-room.  A flight of stairs, covered with the same red carpet,
disappeared between two green china pedestals supporting
aspidistras in cherry-coloured pots.  Between one of these
pedestals and the office window, with a big brass gong hanging
behind him like a halo, a little man in a black alpaca coat stood
for some eight hours each day.

He was the hotel "boots," but his activities were various.  He was
a sort of watch-dog and cicerone.  Whenever a car drew up he would
go out to meet it.  He carried up luggage, and carried it down
again.  He sold odd stamps, and provided luggage labels, and
distributed the morning papers, and was sent upon errands.  The
Saracen's Head knew him as John.  His rather big and well-polished
black boots had--in that particular place between the china
pedestal and the office window--impressed a blurred, worn mark upon
the carpet.  His digressions were frequent and various, but
returning from them he would resume his place by the brass gong
like a spider returning to the centre of his web.

His appearance was not a little remarkable.  Imagine the head of a
Roman emperor upon the body of a boy of fourteen.  He was old, how
old nobody knew.  His brilliantly white hair fitted his big head
like a legal wig.  He had very blue eyes, and a grey, inscrutable,
resolute face.

"John--!"

"Yes, miss,"--or, "Yes, sir."

He had manners and dignity in an age which is peculiarly lacking in
both of them.  Understanding people put him down as having been a
servant in some house of quality, a footman, or perhaps a groom.
There was something about him that suggested horses.  Moreover, he
could stand quite still under the eyes of the hotel's loungers, and
such stillness is rare.  He might appear a funny little old fellow
in his black alpaca coat and grey trousers, and very clean as to
the collar, but not so funny as many a young fellow-my-lad might
think.  You took him courteously, or you did not take him at all.
Those blue eyes of his could be as disconcerting as the eyes of
Marius were to the slave.


3


It happened that this old Roman was standing in his usual place in
front of the brass gong when Mr. Conrad Pybus's car pulled up at
the kerb.  The blue bonnet was the colour of a French soldier's
tunic.  Every sort of car pulled up at the Saracen's Head, and
their cargoes were as various as the cars.  But this was a car of
quality, and old John walked along the strip of carpet and out down
the two well-whitened steps.  He did not hurry.  He was both brisk
and deliberate.

"Allow me, madam."

The lady was in the act of opening the door of the coupé.  Old John
saw her and not the man, for--in the act of leaning forward she
obscured the figure of Mr. Conrad Pybus.  She was a gentlewoman--as
well as a lady.  She exhaled an indefinable perfume, and was smart
with an exquisite and simple rightness.  Her dark and jocund eyes
smiled at old John from under the brim of a black hat.  She was
wearing a simple tweed suit in which purples and browns were
blended.

John held the door open for her.

"Any luggage, madam?"

There was something roguish in her glance.

"No; no luggage, thank you."

"Very good, madam.  The lounge is on the left.  I will show the
gentleman the garage."

She crossed the pavement and went up the two white steps, and old
John stood holding the handle of the coupé door.  He was looking at
Mr. Conrad Pybus.  His blue eyes seemed to grow very large with a
staring, challenging intensity.  Mr. Pybus started back, but his
eyes were the eyes of a man profoundly astonished and nonplussed.
Also--he was profoundly disturbed.  His big white face seemed to
hang there in the interior of the coupé like a bladder of lard.  A
gloved hand rested tentatively on the knob of the gear lever.

There was an extraordinary stillness.  It may have lasted for ten
seconds.  Then the interlocked glances of the two men seemed to
fall apart, or rather--the younger man's eyes flinched from the
older one's.  Old John was closing the door when a voice
intervened.

"Oh, I have left my bag."

She had come back for her vanity bag, and old John recovered it
from the seat, and closed the door of the coupé with a gesture of
crisp fierceness.

"The garage is on the left, sir, through the arch."

Mr. Pybus, staring straight ahead through the windscreen, pulled
the gear lever over.

"Are you taking lunch, sir?"

"I am."

"You'll find a side door in the yard, sir.  Gentlemen's lavatory
just inside, first on the right."

Old John, turning with deliberation, walked back into the hotel,
and his white head regained its yellow halo as he resumed his place
in front of the brass gong.


4


That he as a man should sit calmly down to lunch after cutting his
own father was beyond Mr. Conrad Pybus's capacity.  Obviously he
was not himself, or rather--he was too much himself.  He had
reverted--and without realising his reversion--to the little
barbarisms of the struggling 'thirties, when he had scuffled with
life in his shirt-sleeves.

Moreover, he was so very conscious of Lady Ursula, sitting opposite
him at the little table in a recess by the window.  A card with
"Reserved" printed upon it remained propped against a vase full of
purple and white asters.  Yes; she too was so confoundledly
reserved, such a woman of elevation and of quality, poised like
Diana before his moonfaced homage.  For the last three months he
had been trying so hard to place himself on some sort of feeling of
equality with her, to impress her, to realise himself as Conrad
Pybus, Esq., of Chlois Court.

Then--consider the immoderate obstinacy of that absurd old man!
How could a fellow have foreseen such a damnable coincidence?  To
hear yourself saying:  "Hallo--Dad," to a little old fellow who
cleaned the boots, and saying it in the presence of that most
elusive and ironic goddess.  Besides--it wasn't as though he and
Probyn had not attempted to do something for the old curmudgeon.

The head-waiter was standing at Mr. Conrad's elbow.

"Lunch, sir?"

"Take that card away."

"Certainly, sir."

"I ordered lunch by wire--a special lunch."

"Yes, sir.  I know all about it, sir.  The wine is on ice."

George, of the Saracen's Head, had a soothing voice, and a sleepy
and humorous eye.  He knew his world.  Obviously the gentleman was
in a fractious mood, being the kind of new gentleman who raised his
voice and made a fuss when things were not going well.  George's
sleepy eye observed the lady.  She was putting one of the asters in
place with an air of doing what came natural to her.  Her face had
the glimmer of an inward smile.

"Soup or hors d'oeuvres, sir?"

Mr. Pybus was posed.  He bungled his French, and realised that he
had bungled it when his lady made her choice.  And he was most
absurdly annoyed.  First--a wild oddity of a father bobbing up like
the ghost of his own past, and then a fool of a waiter tricking him
into speaking of hors doovres!  He became throaty and self-
conscious.

"I must apologize for this--place.  Had it recommended to me by
Pelham.  Doesn't do to take an ipse dixit."

She looked him straight in the face.

"Don't you like it?"

"Flyblown--like most of these country pubs."

That something had upset him was as obvious as was the heavy white
solidity of his countenance.  She wondered what it was.  Not that
it mattered.  The loutishness in certain sorts of men is easily
rediscovered.  He glared; he examined the table silver; almost she
expected to see him take up a spoon and polish it with a corner of
the tablecloth.  And she was amused.  Always she had loved
mischief, but mischief without malice, and it seemed to her that
she was watching a materialization of the real Conrad Pybus, of the
man who sat in his office chair in his shirt sleeves and smoked
rank cigars, and bullied people.  His voice appeared to slip back
into his throat and to become thick and aggressive.  She was
vividly aware of his crudities, of the inherent vulgarities of the
man, and suddenly she wondered how she had been persuaded to spend
the day in his car.  She hadn't been persuaded.  She had been
provoked by an impulse, an ironical curiosity.  And here she was
sitting opposite to him, and feeling the hot waves of his extreme
discomfort pouring over her.  Moreover, what was the use of
ordering wine to be iced if you had not been schooled to suppress
the common heats of the body?

She glanced over her shoulder at the window.

"Don't you find it very hot in here?"

He did.  He was perspiring.  He expended a further portion of his
heat upon the waiter.

"Open that window, will you?"

"Certainly, sir."

The window was opened, but he continued to give her the impression
of a man lunching in a London grill-room on a hot August day.  She
surmised that the salad would be flat, and it was.  And again he
expanded more heat upon the waiter, quite unnecessary heat.  She
was feeling the freshness of the hill-town air whispering round her
shoulders, and she had all the essential and clear coolness of her
breed, but she began to be infected by his flushes and his
discomforts.  It was like travelling in a stuffy and crowded
railway carriage next to some stout person who mopped and panted.

"Beastly lunch--I'm afraid--I'm sorry."

She assured him that the lunch was excellent.  But what had upset
him?  Not that she asked the question.  She had ceased from wishing
to ask Mr. Conrad Pybus any questions.  She had become too
conscious of his incongruities.  He continued to remain in a heat
of frettings and apologetics, and while applying the coolness of
her easy voice to the fevered forehead of conversation, she
considered Mr. Conrad Pybus as a social specimen.  He reminded her
of some common child who had been carefully drilled and prompted
for some social occasion, and whose niceness crumbled and fell to
pieces under the stress of sudden publicity.  She saw him as a
moist, awkward figure, eating with uneasy ferocity, using its table
napkin too frequently on that very black moustache, pulling bread
to pieces with its bolster fingers.  She was reminded of the simile
of a man sitting upon a hot-plate.  He fizzled.

"Hang it--this meat's a bit off."

"Is it?  Really--I think you must be just a little unfortunate."

Her incorrigible self was conscious of inward whisperings.  A bit
off!  Oh, delicious and splurging Pybus!  Almost she feared for his
aspirates.  And with the cool air on her neck and shoulders she
thought of Chlois Court, and his pictures, and his library with its
multitudinous classics all bound in red leather.  Culture--culture
spelt with a very big K, Teutonic, a little pathetic.  And yet, in
spite of his carefulness and his contrivings, the trotter protruded
in proximity to the trough.

But she began to wish for the end of the meal.  She decided that
the day's adventure had reached its climax, and that he needed
cooling under the trees of Chlois Court.

"Really--it has been a delightful drive."

He asked her if she would care to wander round Castle Craven.
There was the castle, and the Master Mostyn museum--"Pre-historic
stuff, you know."  Smiling her own smile she assured him that she
had to be back for tea.  Could he manage it?  Of course he could
manage it.  He showed a sudden restiveness.  He brought out a black
leather wallet and put it back again.  He asked her if she would
like a liqueur with her coffee.

"A Kümmel, please."

He called the waiter.

"Two Kümmels and two coffees."

"In the lounge, sir?"

"No--here."

His restiveness seemed to increase.  Frowning over his Stilton he
actually missed a remark of hers.

"Wonder if you'd excuse me a moment.  I'm a bit doubtful about the
petrol."

"Of course."

"My chap's a careless idiot.  There's a petrol pump in the yard.
I'll get the fellow in charge to fill me up."

"Please do."

He placed an open cigarette-case in front of her, but forgot the
matches.

"Won't be a minute."

She smiled at his departing back.


5


Mr. Conrad Pybus appeared in the hall of the Saracen's Head rather
with the air of a man who had pocketed some of the table silver and
was determined that no one should know it.  He strolled.  He lit a
cigar.  He had come out in search of the little old man with the
big white head and the black alpaca jacket, but the father of
Probyn and Conrad Pybus had gone to his dinner.

The son strolled to the street door, stood on the white steps for a
minute, and listened to Castle Craven's old heart beating to the
new rhythm.  A dirty young man in a blue French cap and a soiled
brown mackintosh passed by with his modern music and his odours;
the detonations of his machine seemed to strike against the faces
of the old houses and to reverberate from one side of the square to
the other.

"Filthy things," thought the man on the doorstep.

Certainly.  Filthy, yet useful.  But where was that incorrigible
old man, that Diogenes out of his tub, that John Pybus of the
invincible blue eyes?  Was it possible that he was still a little
afraid of his father?  He--Conrad Pybus, Esq., of Chlois Court,
afraid of an hotel "boots!"  But was it not the unexpected and the
incalculable that one feared?  Yet, he wanted to explain.  It was
necessary that he should explain Ula Calmady, and the awkwardness
of the contretemps, and the need for shutting one eye.  His father
had always been such an uncompromising old devil.  He had always
insisted upon keeping both those very blue eyes wide open.

Mr. Conrad strolled back up the strip of red carpet.  He was for
tempting a second encounter.  He spoke to Miss Vallance in the
office.

"Excuse me--porter anywhere about?"

"Gone to his dinner, sir.  I'll ring."

"Oh--don't bother.  It was about some petrol.  I can manage."

He took the passage leading to the old coaching yard, where the
blue car stood in the shade of a high wall, and as he emerged into
the yard he saw a little figure crossing it.  The son removed the
cigar from between his thickish lips.

"Here--I say--one moment--"

John Pybus paused, turned, and looked at his son.

"Did you call, sir?"

Mr. Conrad strolled heavily across the cobbles.  He was very
conscious of that grey, resolute face with its incorruptible blue
eyes.  As a man of the world and a man of business--big business--
he would have chosen to wink at his father--but then--you might
just as well have winked at Jehovah.

"I say--just a moment--"

His voice insinuated.  It suggested a smooth yet stealthy gesture.
The yard appeared deserted.

"Just a moment--"

Old Pybus seemed to stand very square on his heels.

"I don't know you, sir."

And he went on and by his son, looking up slantwise into his face
like a veteran marching past some very young general who had seen
no red blood spilt.



CHAPTER II



1


Old John Pybus's father--Peter Paul Pybus--whom someone had
nicknamed the "Cato of Booksellers' Row"--had--as a counterblast
against his own parents' partiality for apostolic names--christened
his own son John Julian Apostasius.  For Peter Paul had gone beyond
mere nonconformity.  He had been a Bradlaugh man in the days when
such hardihood might seriously damage a man's pocket, and in
associating his son with the Emperor Julian--called the Apostate--
he had defied both his wife and society.  Peter Paul had relented
so far as to allow the "John," for as Mrs. Mary had asserted--"How
could a boy go to a Christian school labelled Julian--Apostasius!"
Peter Paul had agreed that it would not be fair to the child, and
that a good, stout simple name should be added as a sort of handle.

In those days, before the coming of Kingsway, and the "Waldorf,"
and Bush House, Peter Paul Pybus had had a shop in Booksellers'
Row.  Boys from the city schools had come to Mr. Pybus for
secondhand copies of Ovid and Thucydides, but they had been obliged
to go elsewhere for their cribs, for Mr. Pybus had held strong
views upon education and had refused to pander to the lazy.  A
little, brown, snuffy shop in the very narrow part of the street,
it had had a certain reputation with collectors of first editions.
The reputation of the shop had been the reputation of Peter Paul
Pybus.  Packed full of literary gossip, obtained from heaven knows
where, he had taken an interest in all the literary scandals and
sensations of two generations.  He could have told you just how and
why Buchanan attacked Rossetti, and how Tennyson liked to
administer rhythmical smacks to a pretty and feminine shoulder when
declaiming his own verse.  Mr. Peter Paul would never allow
Tennyson his poetry.  "Suburban stuff, sir.  Give me Browning."

One of John Julian's early recollections was of a certain shop that
was opened in the Row directly opposite the bookshop of Peter Paul.
John was fifteen at the time, and the shop had puzzled him.  It
offered you French novels of a sort, and queer little boxes of
artificial sweets.  It was a surreptitious shop, and people peered
into it surreptitiously.  It attracted the schoolboys who came to
buy school-books.  John Julian would sometimes catch two or three
of them sniggering outside it, and waiting for some other boy who
had sneaked in to buy photographs.

John remembered asking his father about that shop, and his father's
frozen face, and the rasp of his voice.

"There isn't any such shop, sir--"

"But--there is.  Haven't you been across--?"

Peter Paul had gripped his son by both shoulders.  "Dog's vomit--my
lad.  Step over it.  I say there is no such shop."

And for Mr. Peter Paul Pybus there was not.  He had a habit of mind
that was Cromwellian, and he passed on a part of it to his son.

The elder Pybus and his wife died somewhere in the 'eighties, and
John Julian inherited the business, and took to himself a wife.
And he, too, was something of an oddity.  He stood five feet three,
and he married a woman of five feet eleven.  It was said in jest by
their intimates that John Pybus had to fetch the step-ladder out of
the shop when he wanted to kiss his wife.  But her height was her
only distinction, and it is more than probable that John Julian was
disappointed in his marriage.  Poor Edith Pybus was both weak and
argumentative, and she argued at the wrong moments.  She set out to
spoil the two boys whom John Julian had given her, and over the
upbringing of these two boys there were many clashings.  Not for
nothing had John the head of a Roman emperor.  And he was a
Victorian.  He had a sort of moral earnestness, an extraordinary
sense of honour and of public duty, and like his father he was
absolutely fearless.  The mother, sentimental and flabby, had set
herself with the boys against the father.  She gave them sweets
after their canings.  She tried to smuggle their offences out of
sight.

"Boys will be boys, John."

Whereas John Julian believed that most boys--his own included--were
little savages and howling egoists, and that no man is made without
good and appropriate lickings.  Nor should this be set down to
hardness of heart.  He tried to be more wisely kind to his two boys
than was their foolish, conspiring, jealous mother.

He sent the two youngsters to a goodish school, but he was never on
such terms with them as he had been with his own father.  They were
big youths; they appeared to take after their mother; at the ages
of sixteen and fourteen they were able to look down upon their
little Roman-headed father.  During those earlier years, when he
had felt more the mate of his wife, John Julian had allowed her to
choose the babies' names.  Hence Probyn and Conrad.

John Pybus had trouble with them from the time of their going to
school, and as they grew taller and more full of the arrogance of
the awkward age, the trouble increased.  They had inherited the
concentrated, lower-middle-class snobbery of their mother; they had
a loudness; they quarrelled; they purloined each other's ties and
collars.  Conrad was a bully.  Both of them were perfectly familiar
with the secrets of the shop across the way.  In fact, at the age
of seventeen, Probyn was the possessor of a collection of indecent
photographs which had to be hidden away under a loose board in his
bedroom.

So that when the wife died, and the two young bounders were put out
into the world--Probyn with a wholesale woollen firm, Conrad as a
clerk in a shipping office--John Julian felt a little weary of
them, and of the narrowness of the Row.  In fact, it is probable
that it was the pulling down of the Row that sent him into the
country.  He sold the London business, and took over a shop in the
Dorsetshire town of Winterbourne.  For many years he sold books to
the Dorset folks; but the market was limited, and if he managed to
keep himself and his housekeeper, he did little more.  He wrote
regularly to his sons, and saw them occasionally.  More than once
they borrowed money from him--or rather--he gave it, and would not
hear of its return.  Probyn married the daughter of a speculative
builder who was scattering villas about the Surrey suburbs.  They
had one son, Lancelot, prophetically shortened by his mother to
"Lance."  Conrad was unmarried.  He liked his adventures, but he
liked them cheap.  A fellow could be a very devil among the shop-
girls on Yarmouth beach, and if you were careful--.  Conrad was
careful.


2


But of John Pybus's ultimate and final quarrel with his sons no one
knew and no one cared.

Why should they care?  John Pybus had never asked for pity.  As a
gladiator he had gone down fighting, and fate had dragged him out
by the heels, and finding him still alive had decreed that he
should live as one of the arena slaves and scatter sand over pools
of blood.

On that August day he had met one of his own sons in the arena, and
the man of the 'forties had fled from the man of the 'seventies.
Old Pybus had watched Mr. Conrad get with some hurriedness into his
car and bundle out into the market square.  Mr. John resumed his
halo.  He was on duty by the brass gong when Conrad, having
recovered the lady, shepherded her with heavy impressiveness out of
the Saracen's Head.  They passed Mr. John Pybus standing by the
gong.  They went together down the strip of red carpet.  Mr. Conrad
was still apologizing.

"Beastly place!"

His father was wondering whether a woman with that dainty and
whimsical face could bring herself to bargain across the counter
with a shopman.  He felt a liking for the gentlewoman.  She had
smiled and looked at him and spoken.  He was an old man.  His
impulse was to accost her and to say:  "That fellow's a rotter.
Turn him adrift."  But, then, Conrad Pybus was not exactly a
rotter, but a person of property, and it was probable that a woman
who could wear her clothes as the lady wore them had her own
philosophy.

George, the waiter, coming out for a few words with old John, who
was treated rather as a sage and a great man by those who worked
with him, spread a palm in which lay a shilling.

"Gave me that--he did, for a special lunch, and the wine iced, and
him with a lady."

Yes, Conrad had always been careful, and old Pybus's thoughts went
back to the occasion when he had quarrelled finally, and like a
Cromwell, with the carefulness of Conrad and the punctiliousness of
Probyn.  It had happened during those Winterbourne days, in the
second year of the war.  Mr. Pybus had been in difficulties at the
time, for his selling of books--never very brisk--had languished
with the war.  But the quarrel between John Pybus and his sons had
had nothing to do with business, though business had been at the
back of it.

For John Pybus was old English.  When there was war there was war,
and if his country was involved in it, then it was his--John
Pybus's war, and his sons' war.  He was an old-fashioned patriot.
Also--he was--or had been a bit of a Puritan.  Also--he was blue-
eyed and resolute against the bully, were he emperor or Bolshevist.
So Mr. Pybus had been able to speak of the war as Armageddon
without cribbing an obvious bleat from the popular press.  St.
George for England!

Absurd, great little old man, facing bankruptcy, yet able to lose
himself in the great tragedy, and to get up at recruiting meetings
and speak to the young men.  "I am a man of peace--but I charge you--
take up the sword."  For a year he was a kind of fiery cross at
Winterbourne, and so successfully fiery that he was sought for to
set alight other and damper districts.

Meanwhile his own sons procrastinated.  Probyn could not be spared,
but he was doing his best to be spared, though he was thirty-seven
and a married man.  Conrad spoke of joining the Royal Naval
Reserve.  The letters that old Pybus wrote to them were not models
of tact.  Your Cromwellian soul does not trouble about the squeak
of a boot.  He could not understand at first why sons of his had
not been among the first hundred thousand, but when he did
understand it, he took up the scourge.  He bought a third-class
return ticket to London, but he had to follow Probyn to Yorkshire,
in order to have it out with the elder son.  Probyn, a little
sheepish and sententious, had very good excuses.  It appeared that
he had become indispensable; his father-in-law had put up some
money, and Probyn had interests.  Wool was a necessity--you know,
and so was a man who could give the army what it wanted.  Conrad,
unearthed somewhere near Fenchurch Street, was less explanatory
than his brother.  He was busy, arrogantly and perspiringly busy.
Ships--you old fool--ships and more ships!  He did not call this
meddling old fire-eater a fool, but he implied it.  Besides, he was
a careful fellow; he was out to make money.

John Pybus returned to Winterbourne with a very fierce blue eye.
He had said things to his sons, things which would not be
forgotten.  He had called them shirkers, gun-shies, opportunists.
Such burs stick even to sleek jackets.

And then--when speaking at an open-air meeting in a certain rather
backward town, old Pybus met the new English.  He was heckled.  A
young man with a little ginger moustache and prominent teeth, who
was something in a Somersetshire coal-mine, reared a head and asked
questions.

"I'd like to ask the speaker--whether he has any sons."

"Two," said old Pybus promptly, like an old Roman confronting the
Gauls.

"And are they in the army?"

"No--they're not.  And be damned to them."


3


Early in 1917 John Pybus sold himself up, lock, stock and barrel,
and after paying all his creditors, disappeared from Winterbourne
with some twenty-five pounds in his pocket.  He disappeared, too,
out of the lives of his sons.  He had cursed them and, without
wishing that the old fellow's curses would come home to roost, they
found it convenient to remain estranged.  Not that they made no
effort to find the old man, or failed to make a magnanimous
gesture.  Probyn, softer-fibred than his brother, happening to be
in the south-west on business, broke a journey at Winterbourne on
one reeking December day, and found the little book-shop in other
hands.  Squeezed in between two bigger buildings rather like a
child in a crowded railway carriage, it reproached Probyn.  It
looked cold and grey.  His father's name had disappeared.  The
paint was cracked and peeling, and Probyn was wearing a fur-lined
coat.

He had made inquiries.  His father's putting-up of the shutters had
signalized a voluntary bankruptcy.  John Pybus had departed with
honour, but no one knew what had become of him.  It took Probyn
three months to discover that his father was earning a living as a
tram-conductor in a midland town.  Probyn held out a filial and
magnanimous hand.

It was repulsed.  John Pybus was not to be pitied.  He was quite
capable of working.  He had no intention of accepting three pounds
a week and obscurity in a south-coast watering-place or a London
suburb.  He said in effect:  "You can keep your money; the money
that ought to have gone to the men out there in the trenches."

Obstinate old man.  After that there was silence, and the silence
lasted for ten years.  The two Pybus sons had made use of their
opportunities.  Probyn had bought and sold mills; he had a place at
Windover in Bucks; in 1920 he was knighted; Dolly Pybus became Lady
Pybus; Lancelot was at Eton.  Conrad, still a bachelor, and in the
cream and the plumpness of the forties, had translated sundry
shipping deals into a country estate and culture, and some two
hundred thousand pounds safely stowed away.  So did some of our
great men arrive during those extraordinary years, while old Pybus
drifted about England, an obscure and resolute philosopher.  He
came to rest at last at Castle Craven.  He liked the large sky and
the rolling country, and the cheerful human bustle of the inn, and
the little stone cottage he was allowed to occupy between the
garden of the Saracen's Head and the Castle Field.  He had a niche.
He was both a nobody and a somebody.  He had books, and one or two
intimates.  He had a patron and protector--though he did not need
one--Mr. Backhouse, miller, seed and cake merchant, and man of
property, who owned the Saracen's Head, and kept Pounds, the
cockily-servile young manager, very much at heel.

To some of the irreverent know-alls Conrad and Sir Probyn Pybus
were referred to as "Shipping and Shoddy."  But no one knew that
they had a little old curmudgeon of a father who was "boots" at a
country hotel.  The paternal Pybus was supposed to be dead.  He had
become a mythical figure.  Lady Pybus allowed it to be known that
her father-in-law had been something of a literary man, a
connoisseur, and a merchant who had traded in rare books.  Oh, no,
there had been no soiling of the Pybus fingers.  The Herald's
College had traced the Pybus family into Lincolnshire, good old
stock with a somewhat Dutch flavour.  Lancelot was to go to
Cambridge--Trinity, of course.  He was a dear boy, and so clever.
Lady Pybus's father had built himself a mansion on a Surrey hill.
All was well with the Pybus world.


4


After his tea each evening, John Pybus fed the pigeons.  White
fantails, blue rocks and half-breeds, they came to him from the red
roofs of the inn's stables and outhouses, and from the ruins of the
castle.  They swarmed and fluttered about the old man, alighting
upon his shoulders and his hands, and often his white head would be
crested with one of the birds.  He fed them with bread-crumbs and
odd handfuls of corn.  With his short pipe stuck in his mouth he
would stand in the midst of these wheeling, fluttering, strutting
birds, and so thick were they at times that he appeared as in a
cloud of living snowflakes.

Any time of the day he had only to take his stand in the stone-
paved yard or broad passage between his cottage and the inn garden,
and whistle his pigeon call, and half a dozen birds would come to
him.  There were some of them ready to follow him into the cottage,
but since the fantails shed white feathers and John Pybus had a
passion for tidiness, he allowed them as far as his doorstep, but
no farther.

The cottage was half stone, half red brick, with a pan-tiled roof.
The kitchen faced the inn.  The window of the living-room looked
out over John Pybus's patch of garden, and beyond it to the green
slopes of the castle field and to the castle itself, with its walls
tufted with wallflower and snapdragon.  Some very old ash trees
grew among the ruins.  The Hart Royal tower still showed its
crenellations black against the sunset.  Beyond it the ground fell
steeply to the river, the banks deep with the shade of beeches, and
always there was a murmuring of water and the play of the wind in
the trees.

Mr. John Backhouse had put Mr. John Pybus into the cottage.  In the
old days the head ostler had occupied it, but since hardly a horse
came into the inn yard, and the garage attendant had seven children
and lived out in Bridge Street, the cottage was at Mr. Pybus's
service.

Mr. Backhouse had--with characteristic abruptness and a twitching
of his grey eyebrows--announced the fact to Mr. Pounds.

"I'm putting Pybus into Castle Cottage."

That was in the days when Charlie Pounds had believed that, as
manager of the Saracen's Head, he had a right to argue with Mr.
Backhouse.

"I thought of sleeping the girls in it.  There are three rooms,
counting the sitting-room--"

Mr. Backhouse did not argue.  He was laconic, and wasted no breath.
If a person disagreed with a statement of his he just repeated the
statement.

He said:  "I'm putting Pybus into Castle Cottage."

Pounds, who had a face rather like a cake of Castile soap, with two
sultanas for eyes, had begged to object.

"It's waste of good room, sir."

Mr. Backhouse had twitched his long eyebrows, and had asked Mr.
Pounds if he happened to be deaf.

"Did you hear what I said?"

"I did, sir."

"Well, don't waste my time."

John Pybus made his own bed.  It was a very simple affair: a camp-
bed of green canvas, with one army blanket below and one above and
a pair of cotton sheets between them.  His furniture, too, was of
the simplest; a couple of Windsor chairs, an oak table very worm-
eaten, a five-tier deal book-case full of books, a basket chair
with a red cushion, a square of green cord carpet to cover the
floor.  His bedroom floor had no carpet.  On the living-room
mantelpiece in front of a little gilt-framed mirror he kept a
calendar, his pipes, a tobacco tin, and three photographs, the
photos of his wife and his two sons.  It was an ironic, yet human
touch.

He fetched in his own water and swept his own floors, though help
was available.  The women liked John Pybus.  He was a clean and
handsome old man.  They spoke of him always as Mr. Pybus, and in an
irreverent age that was no light tribute.  One of the chambermaids--
Sally Summerscales, a sturdy little dark-eyed thing, insisted on
occasional tidyings up, more for the love of the thing than because
the cottage needed it.  But she darned John Pybus's socks, and
patched his shirts, and fussed over him as some women fuss over a
man for the sake of human self-expression.  She was a mixture of
shrewdness and of unsophisticated curiosity.  Mr. Pybus was an
oddity, but to Sally he was an interesting and picturesque oddity.
She chattered to him and told him about her love affairs, and asked
his advice about them, and never took it when it was given.

From the first she had been interested in the photographs on Mr.
Pybus's mantelpiece.  She had asked about them.

"My wife--Sally."

"She's dead, is she?"

"Thirty years or more."

"And who are the gentlemen?"

"My two sons.  They were killed in the war."

"Poor fellows," said Sally, going closer to look at Conrad and
Probyn, and stroking her square chin with a crooked first finger.
"They are not a bit like you, Mr. Pybus."

"They took after their mother."

"So you're all alone?"

"Yes, quite alone, Sally."

"It does seem hard."

"No company is better than poor company."

Sally supposed that it was.  And Mr. Pybus was not quite like
ordinary men.  She had discovered the gentleness in him, but it was
the gentleness of some stout old tree sunning itself in the light
of a tranquil evening.  He had his thoughts and his books, and the
belief that nothing could matter to him very seriously any more.
He put on spectacles to read with.

He read a great deal by the light of a paraffin lamp with a green
shade, sitting in the basket chair with the red cushion, and
wearing horn-rimmed spectacles.  He read poetry and philosophy.  He
was a great admirer of Blake.  He was both classical and modern.
He subscribed to one of the London libraries, and each month he had
a box of books sent down.  He was amazingly up to date in his
knowledge of social tendencies and of scientific thought.  His
interest in life as life was deep and unabated.



CHAPTER III


1


Mr. Conrad drove over to Windover.

Mr. John Pybus's presence at Castle Craven within a morning's drive
of both Windover Hall and Chlois Court was a family complication,
and Conrad was a cautious fellow.

Turning in at the lodge gates, between two stone pillars capped
with griffins, he saw before him the famous avenue of beeches
arched like a great green tunnel.  Always there was a soft, cool
movement of air under the spreading boughs of the old trees.  The
grey trunks were spaced like the pillars of a temple, and the cool
drift of the air between them made young Lance Pybus imagine that
he was feeling the breath of the divine afflatus.

He was an imaginative lad; he had a temperament.

Mr. Conrad Pybus, proof against all such fancies, saw the redness
of the Queen Anne house glowing at the end of the avenue.  The old
brick-work had the sun upon it, and the sashes of its windows were
very white.  Chlois Court was bastard Gothic, conceived by some
early Victorian; and though Conrad's house had a more dramatic
exterior than his brother's, Conrad was a little envious of that
old red brickwork.  It was so mellow.  It suggested that Probyn
himself had mellowed more gracefully than had his younger brother.
Yes, there was something Georgian about Probyn.  He had developed a
country manner, or what he conceived to be a country manner.

Conrad stopped his car on the gravel, to the east of the yew hedge
and the terrace.  Through the square openings in the yew hedge he
had glimpses of Probyn's lawns, and the flower borders, and the
pleached limes of the Dutch garden.  It was all very still, and
slightly autumnal, with the dew yet upon it, and some of the old
trees showing here and there a tinge of yellow.  Conrad's broad
nostrils seemed to narrow.  Always it appeared to him that Probyn's
head gardener got better results than his man did at Chlois Court.
Damn the fellow!  Still, his dahlias were always better than
Probyn's.  Jealousy can include the most trivial of details.

You might be jealous of your brother, but you entered his house
informally, and Conrad walked towards the terrace; but in the angle
that the yew hedge made with the south-east corner of the house
young Lance was reading Noel Coward's plays.  He had tucked a deck-
chair into this sheltered corner.  His flannel trousers were well
up to his knees; his dark blue socks were the socks of a rowing
man.  He wore a white, blue-edged Trinity blazer.

"Hallo, Conrad."

"Hallo, my lad."

There was a sulkiness in these salutations, for Probyn's son had
the knack of making his uncle feel aggressive and uncomfortable.
Eton and Trinity!  This second edition of the Pybus text-book had
received the author's corrections.  It was a more complete and
polished product.  It could lounge in a chair, and glancing up
casually address its uncle as "Hallo, Conrad."  Young prig!

"Father in?"

"Try the library."

Lance Pybus resumed his reading, and his uncle walked on towards
the french window of the library.  He disliked his nephew, because
Lance--even as a child--had been a creature of queer aloofness, the
kind of boy who watched you and listened to you with a mysteriously
grave face, and remained insultingly silent.  At least Conrad had
felt his nephew's silence to be an offence.  It had given him the
feeling of being spied upon, criticized, ridiculed.  The boy had
never been anything else but a reticent, conceited, embarrassing
young brute, and the young man looked like being worse than the
boy.  Probyn and Dot had spoilt him.  Obviously.  But Lance's very
looks were very disturbing to his uncle.  There was something
challenging in the eager, upward lift of the head.  His dark hair
gave the impression of being blown back.  It was like the head of
youth running swiftly against the wind.  His broad face, with its
large and sensitive mouth and short nose, had a young matureness, a
reticent but sparkling obstinacy.  And there were those very blue
eyes, either very bright and near or very distant.  They were the
eyes of that incorruptible old man--his grandfather.

Meanwhile, Lance turned his head to watch his Uncle Conrad's
progress along the terrace.  Conrad turned his toes out; he had the
walk of a man who would be very fat at five and fifty; his neck was
too short; he had a greasiness.

Yes--that was it, a suggestion of greasiness, for if Lance was an
offence to his uncle, Conrad was far more subtly unpleasing to his
brother's son.  It was a question of temperament, of fibre, of
vibrations.  Lance might baffle the older man, but Conrad Pybus was
no mystery to the nephew.  It was as though those very blue eyes
looked right through Mr. Conrad's thick and soapy skin, and saw--
Yes, what exactly did he see?  Perhaps it was more feeling than
seeing, a shrinking, a scorn, an indignation, a revulsion from a
nature that was essentially garish and vulgar.  For as a boy Lance
had been absurdly fastidious; he would shrink away from the touch
of certain people; he had loathed fat meat, or the smell of
vinegar.  Conrad had been one of the persons who had nauseated him.

Beneath a lounging exterior there was swiftness and fire.  He had a
dignity of his own, a very definite attitude towards life.  It
included a mental bearing upon his father's business, the "Jason
Wools," and the "Sign of the Golden Fleece."  He disliked the Pybus
advertisements in the daily papers.  They were not redeemed even by
their publication in the advertising pages of Punch.  Why tamper
with an old Greek legend?  Why throw Medea overboard, and stamp a
golden fleece in red upon your packing cases?  Why commercialize
Jason?  No doubt Jason had been nothing but a fighting merchant
adventurer.  But these modern Jasons with their custard powders and
their pills, and their blatant shoutings, and their quite foolish,
cheap exaggerations!  What a modest age!  Language was ceasing to
be able to express the stupendous virtues of soaps and motor-cars,
and bottled beer and shoddy.

Lance might have a temperament, but he was a fighter.  There were
certain people and properties that he could not abide, cheap
people, louts and their loutish English voices, all raw and crude
creatures, the sploshed faces one sees in a city, faces that Nature
did not think it worth her while to finish.  In fact, he hated
ugliness.  He had been known to fly into sudden passionate rages.
It was known among his intimates at Eton that, mocked at by three
louts who had come in a char-a-banc to see the house the King lived
in, he had fought the three of them in a side street.  And though
the three of them had set upon him in chorus, having the peculiar
sense of honour of their class, he had come away prettily battered,
but with his young male pride in the ascendant.  He had seen the
three flinch from him and from his berserker scorn of them.

Nearly ten years ago he had seen Cyrano played in London.  Cyrano
was one of his great men.

Meanwhile it occurred to him to wonder what Uncle Conrad wanted
with his father at ten o'clock on a September morning.  Mr. Conrad
must have left Chlois Court directly after breakfast, and he was a
late riser.  He was one of those fellows who got out of bed like a
wallowing beast emerging from a mudhole.

Lance frowned.  There are occasions when a young man has qualms,
and an unpleasant realization of what those qualms imply.


2


Sir Probyn Pybus was writing a letter when he became aware of his
brother standing at the open window.

"Hallo, Conrad."

Probyn was red where his brother was sallow.  Tall and ruddy and
rather spare, he had a smooth geniality and very fine manners
which, though put on like the shopwalker's frock coat, fitted him
with some naturalness.  His right eye had a slight cast in it.  His
eyes were of that colour which is neither blue nor green nor grey,
but a blending of all three.  He smiled a great deal.  He had what
Ula Calmady called "the civic manner"; you might count upon seeing
him in mayoral robes, and upon his having his portrait painted in
those robes.  As a matter of fact, his portrait had been painted by
Wycherly, and had been hung in the Academy.

"Come in, my dear fellow."

He had become a euphuist.  He had got into the way of speaking as
though he was receiving endless deputations, or presenting prizes.
When he shook hands he did it with a kind of genial éclat, bending
slightly at the hips, but keeping the upper part of himself rigid.

"You are early."

He smiled at his brother.  His strabismic eye, and his grizzled,
clipped moustache, and his ruddiness, and his general air of
condescending prosperity were very familiar to Conrad.  He had been
called "Collars and Cuffs Pybus" at school.  But now he was very
much the merchant prince and country gentleman, wearing his Harris
tweeds and floppy hats, and boots with thick soles to them, and
decorative waistcoats.  On the estate he carried either a gun or a
thick ash stick.  He bred cattle and took prizes at agricultural
shows.  Every morning at eleven, accompanied by his agent, he went
over the farm and the gardens.  Yorkshire saw him less and less
these days, for he had been lucky in his subordinates, and he liked
to think of himself as the great man in the background.

Conrad looked out of temper.  He threw his hat into a chair, and
chose a cigarette from the silver box on his brother's writing-
desk.  Probyn's library was not so full of books as was the library
at Chlois Court.  Its atmosphere was different: it suggested,
rather, the country gentleman, the squire, farmer, fisherman,
sportsman, knight.  It had a mellowness, the vague and genial
shrewdness of its owner's swivel-eye.

"You do a devil of a lot of writing, Probyn."

"Necessity, my dear chap.  Responsibilities--"

Conrad sat down in a leather chair.  When Probyn talked of his
responsibilities--the younger brother was moved to exclaim "Bosh!"
He was inclined to be abrupt with Probyn, perhaps because his
brother's civic manner irritated him.  There was too much clanking
of gold chains.

"I've seen the old man."

Probyn put down his pen.

"Our father?"

"Our reverend parent--if you like.  He cut me dead."

Probyn looked shocked.

"You don't say so.  But where--?"

"Castle Craven.  He's 'boots' at a local pub.  I'd turned in there
for lunch with Ula Calmady.  Beastly awkward."

Probyn got out of his chair and went and stood with his back to the
window.  He had a liking for being on his feet when any alarm was
sounded.

"By Jove!" he said.  "By Jove.  What a predicament!  And he cut
you?"

"Dead.  That's to say--"

"You spoke?"

"I wanted a word or two.  He spat in my face like an old tom-cat."

Probyn made a smooth, deprecating gesture with one hand.  Conrad
still retained so many of his crudities.  He was apt to go off the
deep end.  He had not cultivated a nice, gentlemanly restraint.

"My dear fellow!  Awkward--of course.  But then--mark you, he is--
our father."

His brother's eyes gave him a transient, scornful glance.

"Obviously.  I thought you ought to know.  I thought you might like
to go over--"

"It's conceivable--"

"You'd look a fool--"

"My dear fellow--that point is debatable."  In moments of stress
John Pybus's two sons differed in their attitudes and gestures.
Conrad sat heavily and aggressively in the club-chair, his big
hands spread upon the padded arms like two bunches of bananas.
Probyn, looking down and to one side, stroked with his fingers the
left lapel of his brown tweed coat as though smoothing the fine nap
of the cloth.  He was for conciliation, smoothness.  Conrad was
both cautious and truculent.

"It made me look a fool--caught with a woman like Ula Calmady."

Probyn raised his eyebrows.

"But--you didn't--?"

"Is it likely?  But how the devil--?  Well, you see--when I drove
up--the old chap came out and opened the car door.  We just glared--"

"Very awkward.  But--my dear fellow, it makes me feel conscious of
a kind of humiliation.  'Boots.'  He's an old man."

"He's still a damned tough one."

"My dear fellow, I think we ought to remember--"

Conrad gave his brother a stare, and became explanatory and
aggrieved.  Yes, it was a fact that he and Lady Ursula Calmady had
been seeing a good deal of each other.  He had been minded to bring
the affair to a climax on that particular day, and the last thing
that he had expected was an anti-climax such as the resurrection of
old John!  Because you couldn't do anything with old John.  He had
no instinct for life's business subtleties.  You might have tipped
another sort of man the wink, a man who was capable of seeing the
humour of the thing.  "Say, dad, I want to hook this fish.  Mum's
the word.  You take me?"  Conrad did not put it quite so baldly,
but he made Probyn look a little uncomfortable.  After all, who was
Ursula Calmady?  A woman of good family and of the world.  Might it
not have been better if Conrad had been bold and frank?  Taken the
situation by the collar.

Conrad looked contemptuous.

"Well, would you have done it?"

He had Probyn straddling a fence.

"Very awkward.  You remember, when I attempted a rapprochement?  I
sometimes think that he was a little bit touched in the head."

Conrad threw the end of his cigarette into the grate, and reached
for another.

"He began it.  After all, a fellow needn't lie down under his
father's curses.  Besides--the whole business was absurd.  But
there it is.  Of course, he thought me a beastly snob.  But why
should I pick the old beggar off the pavement at such a damnable
awkward moment--?  'Say, Lady Ula, this is my old man.  He's a bit
of an oddity, of course.'  No, damn it, let's be honest.  The old
chap cut us adrift.  Ridiculous rot, too.  I believe he was a bit
jealous of us.  He was always a rotten bad business man.  But the
question is--"

"Exactly," said Probyn, as though meeting a deputation.  "The
situation must be considered."


3


Lance had left Noel Coward's book of plays lying face downwards in
the deck-chair.

He happened to be wearing tennis shoes, and in strolling along the
terrace towards the Dutch garden he came within the range of those
two voices.  He was thinking of other things.  Had he been asked
the question he would have replied that there was but little
likelihood of his being interested in anything that Uncle Conrad
might have to say to his father.  At that critical moment, when he
was about to pass in front of the library window, he had paused to
watch the sunlight making a chequer on the grass under one of the
cedars.  He observed such things.  It seemed to him that life might
be spent in observing birds, and the effects of sunlight, and the
changing colours of the year.

Somewhere, at the back of his consciousness he heard Conrad's thick
voice saying:

"It made me look like a fool, caught with a woman like Ula
Calmady."

Lance came back to his realities.  He had no intention of listening
to his uncle's confidences.  The very suggestion that there should
be any relationship whatsoever between Conrad and a woman could be
nothing but an offence to a young man who had gone three times as a
boy to hear Gwen Ffrangçon Davies sing in The Immortal Hour.  Ula
Calmady?  The name had the flavour of a night-club, and Lance could
associate his uncle with night-clubs.  Well, it might be humorous.
That fat bounder!  And Lance was about to pass on when he heard
something more singular.  He could not help hearing it.  With one
of those flashes of intuition he realized that he had a right to
hear it.

They were speaking of his grandfather.

But his grandfather was supposed to be dead.

Lance did not remember old John Pybus.  As a very young child he
had seen him but twice, and the memories had faded.  There was no
portrait of the old man in the house.


4


Beyond the old bowling-green that was now a tennis-court, and the
brick and stone Georgian shadow-house with its lead cupola, someone
with French feeling had long ago planned a "Bosquet."  Planted with
old yews, box and holly, it held at the end of its little secret
path a dim and windless space paved with worn flagstones.  The
white figure of a marble nymph poised upon a pedestal, and half
lost in the dark foliage, seemed both to advance and to retreat.  A
moss-stained stone seat stood in a square recess.

Lance stared at the figure of the marble girl, but at the moment it
was no more to him than a white blur contrasting with the dark
foliage.  His face was very grave.  The Bosquet was a favourite
retreat of his, with its shadows and silence and its moist green
gloom.  It smelt of box.  It seemed to symbolize the change that
had come over him during the last year; he had been conscious of a
withdrawing, of a significant aloofness.  He had retreated so much
more into himself, a new and rather mysterious self.  There were
times when in one of his fanciful moods he could see himself as a
young faun lurking in these thickets and peering out at those other
human figures moving in the unmysterious sunlight.  He had had
qualms, doubts, discomforts.  He had a new pair of eyes and a
reinformed consciousness.  He had been seeing his mother and father
as strangers.  He seemed to have been making rather shocking and
disturbing discoveries.  These people of his!  How was it?  And how
beastly of him!  To be suddenly ashamed of your father and mother,
to be able to see all their weak points, to be vividly and hotly
conscious of certain defects!  Was he an infernal prig?  He had not
wanted to see that which a something in himself was compelling him
to see.  He could not help it.  And at times he would feel a sudden
rush of tenderness and compassion, impulses of affection that
alternated with moods of silent hostility.

Ten minutes ago he had been standing outside the library window
listening to the self-revealments of his father and his uncle.  His
grandfather was alive.  That unknown and rather mysterious old man
whom he had been brought up to think of as an eccentric bibliophile
continued to exist as "boots" at a country inn.  An anomalous
figure, a figure which appeared peculiarly disconcerting to those
two other men!  But how, and why?  What were the motives that could
persuade a man to cut his own father?

And what of his own father?  It would appear that Sir Probyn
regarded the situation as one that required tactful handling.  They
ought to do something for the old man.  Certainly.  But what?

"Well--if you think you can resurrect him after all these years!
Have him to live with you, what?  Besides, he'd turn you down."

This had come from Uncle Conrad.

"Most disconcerting, my dear fellow."

"Call it--an infernal complication.  I'd put down three hundred a
year to pension the old boy--but I'm damned if I want him living
within a morning's drive of me--as boots at a pub.  No, it's not
our fault--"

Sir Probyn had allowed that such proximity could not be permitted.
Something would have to be done.  Should the situation become known
it would create a false impression, an unpleasant atmosphere.  The
world could not be expected to understand old John Pybus's
eccentric stubbornness.  The world would think--

"It likes to think its bloodiest," said Conrad; "especially about
successful men like us."


5


Lance sat down on the moss-stained stone seat.  He still seemed to
hear his father's voice suavely conspiratorial and bland.  Sir
Probyn had said that he would drive over to Castle Craven--by
himself, of course--and visit the Saracen's Head.  He had suggested
the making of certain proposals to John Pybus, proposals that
included independence, a settled income of--say--£500 a year, and a
little house on the south coast or in the suburbs.  Conrad had
agreed to the proposals, but had shown a scepticism.  You might
take this old horse to the water, but you could not make him drink.

And to Lance Pybus hidden in the Bosquet came the consciousness of
shame.  His father and his uncle were ashamed of their father--
while he--!  But was his the same kind of shame?  Was he not
ashamed of their shame?  Yet, what did he know of old John Pybus,
this grandfather of his who was "boots" at a country inn?  Might
not the old boy be a shabby reprobate, an impossible old man, a
very solid skeleton hanging in the family cupboard?

A fellow had to be fair.  And in fairness to those others he had to
remember those qualms of his own, those very personal memories of
the stuffy, stuccoed, semi-detached house at Putney which had been
followed by a very new and raw red villa-mansion on the outskirts
of an industrial town.  Eton and Trinity and Windover Hall, and
these beech woods, and the pleasant spaciousness and beauty, and
the intimate aloofness of this very Bosquet had come to him as the
result of his father's climbings.  Material success.  His father
had always been generous.

What right had he to criticize his father?  He could remember the
double and secret shame of the last May Week when Sir Probyn and
Lady Pybus had put up at the "University Arms," and his people had
met the people of his friends, and he had been conscious of
torturing differences.  His mother talked too much and too loudly.
His father--!  What a beastly sensitiveness was his!  Surely you
ought to be able to respect your father, and especially the human
foibles of your father?  Wasn't it a question of affection?  Why
these hypersensitive qualms, this feeling of vague antagonism?

Which was the more vulgar, a pretentious shame, or snobbish
mortification in the presence of that shame?

For Lance was in the first flush of his season of ideals.  He meant
to take life with immense seriousness.  He was serious.  There were
the realities, or what seemed to him to be the realities, love,
beauty, endeavour, the following of your inspiration, accomplishment.
He had a young dignity.  Youth can have a stateliness of its own,
inward pageantry, a graciousness of movement.  It is the age of
protest, of a passionate questioning, of eyes that look up and out.
Its very defects are active, not passive.

"A man ought to know.  I--myself--ought to know.  Let's be honest."

He was a far more subtle creature than his parents, and perhaps he
knew it.  Their reactions were so obvious.  And a part of his
trouble was that while he saw--or thought he saw--these two people
as two rather mechanical figures moved by the most simple of
impulses--they understood him not at all.  Their visualizing of him
was arbitrary and conventional.  He was the son, the heir, the
gilded youth, success in the flesh, Eton and Trinity, the future
dictator, the wearer of the Golden Fleece.  They had no knowledge
of the bird in him, of the musician, the saint, the child of
original sin, the scribbler, the dreamer, the rebel.  They wanted
him to be the conventional son, the "Lance, old lad"--the nicely
polished product of their material union.  And he wasn't.

Well--what of it?  He got up off that Roman seat, and walking like
a young prophet full of inward stirrings out into the sunlight,
turned instinctively towards the Dutch garden and the splash of its
little fountain.


6


His mother was there.

She, too, liked glitter, and was pleased as a child is pleased by
it.  Lance could remember her in a purple dress all covered with
silver sequins, but now her stoutness had to be more decorously
draped.  But at night--on state occasions--she had taken to wearing
a tiara.  It seemed that any bright thing or any gaily-coloured
object had an irresistible lure.  Had she had her way she would
have covered herself with pieces of lace, and ribbons and scarfs,
and brooches and bangles, but the sophisticated simplicity of the
day and her modiste had compelled her to refrain.

The french, panelled drawing-room of Windover had not satisfied
Lady Pybus.  She had filled it with lacquered furniture, and
brilliant cushions and tuffets, and painted shades with gold
fringes, and orange and blue rugs upon a black and polished floor.
Her exuberant taste had invaded the Dutch garden.  Liking comfort
and shelter and the splash of water she had had erected upon one of
the little panels of grass at the end of the water cistern an
orange and black striped hammock bed.  She was in the act of
settling herself under the awning when her son came to one of the
openings in the pleached lime hedge.

Lady Dot was very plump.  She wore very short skirts.  Her bobbed
head of very fair hair stood out like a nimbus.  She was one of
those women with a high colour and a beaked nose, and eyes of hard,
bright blue.  Her voice was rather high pitched, decisive, and a
little brusque, never changing its tone or its timbre and, like her
voice, she was without modulations.  She was a woman who always set
out to manage people or a situation with the same assurance with
which--had she been a cottage woman--she would have washed her
children and put them to bed.  She was utterly without shadow
effects.  She said at once and with confidence exactly what came
into her head.

And her son, standing there at one of the green windows, saw a very
stout pair of legs in flesh-coloured stockings, and that atrocity
of a hammock bed, an orange blot in the centre of the sunk garden.
It was an atrocity, insulting all those old, tired, gentle colours,
the grey of the stone, the soft rust red of the old bricks, the
lily leaves, the grass, the dark clipped yews, the lavender, the
water.

He had dared to call the thing an atrocity.

"My dear, you're too squeamish.  Besides--if I want to be comfy--"

She might have had it put anywhere but in that perfect little
garden made for the gentlewoman of another day, and for brocades of
old rose and grey and lavender, the subtle shades of twilight
moods.  His mother was all full noon.  Had he tried to tell her
some of the intimate truths that a young man never tells to a
mother, she would have exclaimed, "How--absurd!  Really--my dear--
you ought to see a doctor."  Having no reticence, and being a woman
who was quite ready to discuss her husband with other women, she
did not understand the reticences of her son.  In fact she was not
aware of his reserve.  Lance had silent moods, and silence to Lady
Dot was merely the absence of anything that needed saying.

Her son watched the swaying of the hammock bed, the subsidence of
the cushions, and his mother's very large and flesh-coloured legs
arranging themselves.  He thought "She shouldn't wear those
stockings," and while he was thinking of it she looked up and
discovered him.  She was able at all times to find an immediate use
for anybody.

"Lance, old lad, I've forgotten the oil of lavender.  Get it--will
you?"

"Yes, mater."

"And you might see if Mills has put a man to mend the holes in the
stop-netting.  The Ashleys are coming in this afternoon."

He was half-way to the house when he heard her calling:

"Lan-cie--Lan-cie."

He hated being called Lancie.

"Hallo."

"If Conrad's still there--tell him I have a bone to pick with him.
Send him down here."



CHAPTER IV


1


John Pybus had gone to the bank.

At half-past eleven every Saturday morning he would appear at the
doorway of the Saracen's Head wearing a hard felt hat and a black
coat, for this was both an official and a personal occasion.  He
would cross the cobbles of the market square and, passing between
two of the pollarded lime trees, enter the Castle Craven branch of
Barclay's Bank.  John Pybus had a banking account.  He received a
pound a week, his cottage, and his food; and his tips amounted to
quite a comfortable little sum.  His needs were few; tobacco and
his books his only luxuries, though to John Pybus they were
necessities.

The sallow young cashier treated him with respect.

"Good morning, Mr. Pybus."

"Good morning to you."

John Pybus would bring out of his pocket a canvas bag which, when
emptied upon the counter, would produce a pound note or two, some
silver, and a few coppers.  He carried the paying-in-slip
separately, all the details neatly filled in, and the cashier knew
that there was no need to check Mr. Pybus's figures.  The old man
had a cheque-book, and it is possible that he wrote three cheques a
year.  He had never been known to draw a cheque to self.  The money
remained on the right side of the counter.

"Very muggy to-day, Mr. Pybus."

Mr. Pybus would reply with a "Very" or an "I agree with you," and
after giving the cashier a nod and a glance from his blue eyes,
would walk out of the bank and back to the inn, and hang up his
felt hat, and change from the cloth coat to the alpaca.  He would
be away for ten minutes, never more.  He was not interfered with.
Mr. Pounds, the manager, had realized that interference was neither
necessary nor advisable.

John Pybus was hanging up his felt hat when Miss Vallence hailed
him from the office.

"John--"

"Yes, miss."

"A gentleman's called to see you.  He's in the lounge."

Mr. Pybus gave her a stare.

"What name?"

"He didn't give any name.  He said you'd know him."

That she was curious about his visitor John Pybus was well aware,
for Miss Vallence was curious about everybody.  It was part of her
business to be curious about people, especially when you never knew
whether a lady and gentleman were man and wife.  "It's always the
man that looks sheepish.  The women are as bold as brass.  Besides--
a case is such a noosance.  It isn't nice."  Miss Vallence made
John Pybus think of a very yellow canary shut up in a cage, ever
ready to pipe "Sweet-sweet," but keeping a black eye brightly upon
the realities.

John Pybus changed into his alpaca coat and walked towards the
lounge.  He had his suspicions.  A gentleman who gave no name when
inquiring for the hotel "boots" would probably be a Pybus.  And
after all--a name was superfluous; but when John Pybus saw Probyn
sitting alone in the lounge, with that swivel eye of his pointed
like a gun over the top of the daily paper, John Pybus was not
surprised.

He said, "Good morning, sir.  Anything I can do for you?"

Probyn rose rather hurriedly, leaving the paper on the round table.
It is probable that he saw his opportunity in the emptiness of the
lounge.  He held out a hand.

"After all these years--surely?  I heard from Conrad.  I was--
distressed."

John Pybus made no attempt to take his son's hand, and Probyn, with
an expostulating and embarrassed smile, withdrew it.

"Well, as you please.  I wished to make the first move.  Are we
unreconcilable?  It seems a pity."

Old Pybus watched his son's face.

"Lunching here?"

"No, at the White Hart.  I left my car there."

"You'd get a better lunch here."

"You think so?"

"But you wouldn't enjoy it.  Conrad didn't.  I'm just going to have
my dinner."

Probyn had the air of a man being heckled at a political meeting.
He continued to smile; he looked hot; he stood, bending slightly,
with his hands on his hips.

"Do you know how many years--?"

"About ten," said old Pybus promptly; "my memory and my digestion
are as good as ever.  As I was saying--I was just going to have my
dinner."

Probyn made some sort of polite noise.

"Usually--I have it with the rest of the staff; but if you have
anything to say--"

"Believe me--I have."

"Very well.  I'll take my dinner to the cottage.  You can come and
see me eat it."


2


So, Sir Probyn, looking rather like a man who had lost his
chauffeur, had to stand in the coaching-yard while his father was
collecting his dinner in the kitchen.  Old John came out of a side
door into the yard, with a plate of roast beef, greens and potatoes
in one hand, and a slice of bread with a piece of Cheshire cheese
on it in the other.  He jerked his white head at Probyn.

"This way, sir."

Incorrigible old derider of the higher conventions!  The plate was
very full of gravy, and old Pybus walked with great deliberation,
assuming that his son was treading on hot pebbles.

"Musn't spill the gravy--you know--sir."

Probyn cleared his throat.

"You always loved irony."

"Not a bit of it.  Gravy's gravy.  Like to soak my bread in it at
times.  So they made you a knight."

"They did."

"Saw it in a paper.  What did they do it for?"

"As a recognition--I gather--"

"Public services, patriotism, self-sacrifice.  Didn't buy it, did
you, Probyn?"

"The gibe is unworthy--"

"Ooops--mind the gravy!  Boiled potatoes to-day--you see.
Personally, I prefer them mashed--with butter.  Plenty of butter."

And Probyn, following in step behind him, was thinking--"You old
devil!  Just the same as ever.  What am I doing here?  Wasting my
time--of course.  But I'll do the generous thing.  I can always
remind myself that I did make an effort.  Why on earth can't the
old fellow be--respectable.  No tact, no consideration.  Never
had."

Over the grey cobbles between the ancient red brick walls Probyn
followed his father, who persisted in going at a snail's pace,
talking the while as though wielding a playful scourge.

"Democratic age, sir.  But a handle is as much a handle as ever.
Your dustman has to be Mr. This, and your bricklayer's labourer Mr.
That, when they are mentioned by the local press for getting run
over when drunk, or for growing a prize pumpkin.  And the scullery-
maid is Miss So and So.--Bosh, isn't it?  Better a plain Bill Sikes
and a Nancy Lee.  Mr. John Pybus!  What use--what bloody use--as
the vulgar would put it--is the Mr. to me?  But then--of course--a
knighthood--"

They had reached the green door of Castle Cottage, and old Pybus
turned and looked wickedly at his son, though there was no
wickedness in him.

"This gravy!  Both hands full.  Mind opening the door, sir."

Probyn opened it.  He saw the red-tiled floor, and the Windsor
chairs, and the dahlias in the little garden on the southern side
glowing like velvet and cloth of gold beyond the lattice windows.
He was thinking at the moment of that saying of Conrad's that old
John was jealous of his sons, and had always been jealous of them.
Big fellows looking down at him.  Yes, little men were often touchy
and self-centred and arrogant.

"Take a chair, sir.  You'll excuse me going on with my dinner.
Have to be back on duty at a quarter to one."

Probyn let his father pass, and then closed the door, but he did
not sit down.  He was looking at the two photos on the mantelpiece.
John Pybus saw the look.

"My two sons, sir; killed in the Great War--both of them."

Probyn made a movement as of pulling down his waistcoat and
settling his collar.

"You won't accept sentiment.  Can't we delete the irony and come to
realities.  I'm a business man."

"Exactly," said his father, and sat down to his dinner.  "And
what's the business to-day?  I think I know, my lad.  Much better
leave me alone.  I shan't interfere with you."

His son, standing by the window, and looking out at his father's
little garden, felt the muteness of a discredited motive.  As a boy
Probyn had been a plausible youngster, full of florid yet ingenious
excuses, but always his father had poked a finger at the
fabrication, and the thing had burst like a bladder.  Besides, few
motives are single and direct, and Probyn's motives were mixed.  He
had good nature.  He liked to feel well with himself, and he was
wishing to feel well with himself in his attitude towards his
father.  He would rather do the generous thing.  Moreover, there
was Lance to be considered, and Lance's mother, who had said with
abruptness that she would never have the old man in her house.

Meanwhile, John Pybus was contentedly eating his dinner, and Probyn
knew that something had to be said.  He turned and sat down in one
of the Windsor chairs.

"May I put it to you, father, that I should like to make things
easier."

"Easier?"

Old Pybus paused with a piece of potato on his fork.

"Easier!  I'm not complaining.  I've got all I want.  How could you
make it easier?"

"There is no need for you to remain--"

The blue eyes fixed him.

"Pension me off.  Put me comfortably on the shelf somewhere?  I'm
quite contented here.  You need not worry, my lad.  I am not going
to complicate the new coat of arms."

Probyn winced.  For with unerring aim his father had thrown a stick
and knocked down and marked out the principal motive.

"You're not fair to me.  If you remember--on a previous occasion--I
attempted--"

John Pybus gazed at him fixedly for a moment, and then went on with
his dinner.  He had every appearance of enjoying it.

And then, while Probyn was trying to sort out his motives and to
make a respectable pattern out of them, his father asked him a
question.

"How's your boy?"

"Lance.  He's up at Cambridge."

"Putting him in the business?"

"It's there for him.  You won't be offended if I say that it is a
very fine business."

Old Pybus broke bread.

"Hope he'll like it.  Though making money's not living, Probyn.  I
suppose--he is all--that you want him to be?"

"I have no fault to find."

"Splendid.  The perfect little gentleman, God bless him!  Got his
own car--I suppose?"

"He has.  It's justified.  Lance isn't--"

The blue eyes observed him.

"I wish you luck with him, Probyn.  There is no bitterness between
me and your boy.  Don't spoil him."

Probyn's colour seemed to come quickly.

"Really--father!  You did not spoil us, did you?"

"But your mother did.  There--there--let us leave it at that.  I
suppose when a boy is up at Cambridge--he wouldn't be pleased to
have it known that his grandfather--.  Quite natural.  I'm not
quarrelling with the prejudice.  What do you make the time?"

Probyn pulled out a gold watch.

"Five and twenty minutes to one."

"Thanks.  I must eat my cheese.  You need not worry about me,
Probyn.  Never was better in my life.  I shan't intrude.  No wish
to.  Besides--no one here need be told--that because my name's
Pybus--you take me?  No obligation anywhere."

His big white head caught the sunlight.  He smiled.

"My good wishes to your boy--anyway.  He's young.  A fresh start.
New blood.  Hope he'll miss our mistakes.  Good luck to him!"


3


Lance had been writing.

This room on the third floor was very much his own, impulsively
untidy; the room of a young man who, with a freedom of gesture,
distributed his belongings where and how he would.  Furnished much
like a college keeping-room, it had an additional door which
communicated with his bedroom, and a south and an east window, each
filled with that green English landscape.  For writing he used a
deal table covered with a powder-blue cloth, which he could move
from window to window as his mood shifted.  The east window gave
him more open country, the south the beech avenue, the park and the
distant woods.  The general colour of the room was a soft and
indefinite rose.  An oak bureau, in which Lance kept his private
papers, stood between the passage door and the south window.

"My son writes--you know."

Lady Pybus allowed the information to be broadcast.  It was an
interesting and refined fact, or a kind of gentlemanly trick which
was allowable, provided it was not taken too seriously.  Lady Pybus
was a little proud of it.  Lance helped to edit one of the
Cambridge magazines.  He spoke at the "Union," gravely and a little
fiercely on subjects that were in the empyrean so far as his mother
was concerned.  She had never read any of his work.  He never
showed it to her.  He was funny and secretive about his scribbling.

That morning he had written at the top of a page--

"Who will hold up the sky for me when I go for the Apples of the
Hesperides?"

What a question to ask!  And for a Pybus!  His mother would have
looked brightly blank over it.  If the apples were golden apples,
and there was any difficulty about them, Lance had better ask his
father to write a cheque.

But Lance himself had got no further with it that morning.  He was
standing at the east window looking down at a car that was standing
on the gravel.  So his father was taking the Buick.  There were
three cars in the Windover garage, the Daimler, the Buick, and
Lance's little Talbot.  His father was going alone.  Lance saw
Wyman the chauffeur standing aside, and his father at the steering-
wheel pulling on a pair of wash-leather gloves.  It was unusual for
his father to drive a car, especially so without Wyman beside him.
Sir Probyn drove rather badly, and was helpless when trouble
occurred.

To Lance the suggestion was irresistible.  His father was driving
over alone to Castle Craven to seek out old John Pybus and to
persuade him to be respectably buried in some suburban villa.
Youth confronted one of its problems.  What manner of man was this
John Julian Apostasius Pybus?  The name had the flavour of old
vellum.  For to Lance the fiercedly sensitive, with his almost
uncanny insight into the workings of his father's mind, the
discovery of his grandfather had quickened certain curiosities.

He watched the blue Buick slide into the black slot of the beech
avenue.  He was conscious of a restlessness.  Standing idly beside
the table and tapping it with his fingers, he looked at what he had
written, and at the white space below it.

"Just what I am," he thought, "a question and a blank sheet.  What
does one write on the page of one's self?  What can one write
without knowing?"

He turned the page.  He was in no mood to sit in a chair and
scribble.  Going down and calling one of the dogs, he made for the
open country.


4


Sir Probyn was back at Windover by four o'clock.  He looked tired.
He glanced at a picture paper while he drank his tea; and Lance was
as silent as his father.  Lady Pybus, who treated her menfolk like
children, was yet full of rare retrainings.  She read the daily
paper, yet she could never refrain from reading portions of it
aloud, and from making comments upon the tendencies of the day.

"Really!  I call it absolutely scandalous!  They ought to do
something," the "They" being the Government, or Scotland Yard, or
Public Opinion, or the Press.  Lady Pybus reposed upon public
opinion as upon a pillow.

Lance escaped.  He strolled round to the garage where the Buick,
covered with dust, was standing under the glass shelter for Wyman
to wash her down.  Lance happened to know the Buick's mileage, for
he had driven her the previous day.  The speedometer recorded the
fact that his father had driven 113.6 miles.  A map and route-book
spread upon the tail of the two-seater gave the distance to Castle
Craven as 66 miles.

The coincidence appeared conclusive.

Windover dined at 7.30.  Lance, on his way downstairs after
dressing, heard his mother's door open.  His father came out, but,
turning back with his hand on the handle, answered some question of
his wife's.

"What?  No other alternative.  Well, one could not have done more.
He always was a little eccentric."

Lance heard his own name uttered by his mother's voice.  His
father's back was turned, and Lance continued a swift and soft
descent.

"Quite so.  Much better that he shouldn't."

So they were not going to tell him.  He was to be given no key to
the family cupboard and, somehow--he resented this exclusion.  What
did they mistrust?  His common sense or his curiosity or his
youthfulness?  Or was it parental consideration?  He had no wish to
be considered in that sort of way.  But parental prejudices are
regular and universal, a part of the social scheme.  Fashions
change, but the passion to possess and to cover up is always in the
picture.  His mother danced and wore short skirts.  That was about
the only difference between her and his maternal grandmother.

After dinner, Lance went up to his room and shut the door, but he
did not switch on the lights.  He carried a chair to the open south
window and, straddling the chair, looked at a sky that grew
brilliant with stars.

"I want to see for myself," he thought.

Yes, that was life, seeing things for yourself.



CHAPTER V


1


Lance drove fast.  He had youth's swiftness and its love of
swiftness without youth's recklessness.  He had, too, much
imagination to be reckless, for the reckless are those who cannot
see round life's corners.  With the chalk hills and high beech
woods behind him he crossed Oxfordshire, going west.  He had no
great love for flat country, with its root crops and its stubbles
and its endless cattle in endless fields.  He was out upon
adventures; he pushed the little Talbot hard; his hair, blown back
from his bare head, made the swiftness of the adventure visible.

Then, with the hill country rising to him once more, he came to
Castle Craven.  Capturing its steepness, and captured by its
soaring austerity, he pulled up in its market square.  He sat there
a moment, conscious of the grey town's atmosphere, as of something
splendid and spacious, yet intimate.  Those six soaring pinnacles,
each with its gold wind-vane, the blue spaces of the sky, the white
clouds sailing, a wind ruffling his hair.  The town made him think
of a ship at sea, sailing that rolling landscape, with the wind
alive in her rigging.

Over on his left the portico of the White Hart wore its turban of
flowers.  The Saracen's Head was a little lower down.  Lance parked
his car by the Cross, and walked across to the White Hart.  He was
drawing a bow at a venture.

In the office of the White Hart a girl, looking up from a ledger,
saw this young man with the wind still in his blue eyes and his
hair.

"Can you tell me whether you have anyone named Pybus here?"

The girl came to the office window.  She had a rather sullen face.

"Staying here?"

"No, on your staff."

He smiled, and she felt compelled to smile back at him.

"Oh--you must mean the Saracen's Head?"

"Do I?  Thanks so much."

"Old John--the 'boots.'  Everyone calls him Mr. Pybus."

"Out of respect--I suppose!"

"Well--I suppose so.  I've heard--"

But her sullenness hid a sensitive self-consciousness, and
overwhelming her suddenly, it sent her back to her ledger.

"The Saracen's Head's a few yards down."

"Thanks so much."

She watched him walk towards the hotel door, and she allowed
herself to wonder who he was, and what he wanted with old Pybus.
Such a good-looking lad and not in the ordinary way.  Interesting.
He had a mouth that was irresistible to some women; they thought of
him as lying with his head in their arms.  Moreover, he had the
"County" look, that indefinable air.  It was probable that he
belonged to some family which had employed old Pybus, and had
remained interested in him.  Not like this beastly ledger!  She
scratched in a "bath" and a "breakfast," and wished that she had
kept Lance there a little longer.  He had one of those faces which
seem to light up from within.  Most of the faces that the girl of
the ledger saw were so dead.

Lance went back to the Talbot, and drove it into the "Saracen's"
yard.  This time he varied his approach shot.  He returned to the
square, and entering by the front door, saw John Pybus in his usual
place with the brass gong like a halo behind his big head.

Lance said.

"Can I get tea here?"

He had a pleasant, quick courtesy, because he felt a natural
respect for people, especially for old people.

"Certainly, sir.  Would you like it in the lounge?"

"I should--please."

"For one, sir?"

"Yes, for one."

Old Pybus looked hard at him, but knew him not from Adam.

"I'll tell the waiter, sir."

"Thanks.  Are you the manager?"

"No, the 'boots,' sir."

"I have left my car in the yard.  If it's in the way--"

"I'll see the garage man, sir.  Plenty of room to-day.  Not
staying?"

"No--not staying."

Lance walked into the lounge thinking "So--that's my grandfather!"
But what an unexpected figure!  And so unexpected did Lance find it
that he sat down in one of the lounge chairs with his blue eyes
staring.  He was conscious of a curious excitement.  He had come
over to Castle Craven, with a self-created image of an old man in
his mind, and when he tried to recover that image he found that it
had vanished.  All that he could remember about it was that it had
been large and murky and just a little sinister, and that it had
included some of the features of his uncle and his father.  It had
been a composite image.  And instantly the reality had effaced it--
that vivid little, upright figure, so clean and alert, with its
striking head and fearless eyes.

He was both astonished and excited.  There were other people in the
lounge, touring motorists full of chatter; but Lance was conscious
of a stillness, a kind of inward silence.  It seemed to him that
something incalculable and significant had occurred.  He was still
on the threshold of the adventure when the waiter came and stood by
him.

"Tea, sir?"

Lance came out of his stare.

"Yes, please."

The waiter was turning away when Lance detained him.

"I say, I have left my car in the yard.  There's a map in it.
Would you mind asking the porter."

"Gone to his tea--I think, sir."

"I mean--the little old man with the big head."

"Yes, sir--old Mr. Pybus; gone to his tea, sir."

"Never mind, I'll get it myself."

He went for the map, but saw no sign of his grandfather's big white
head.  He was a little disappointed.  It was possible that this was
going to be a rather baffling business.  How did one get to know an
old man who was "boots" at a country hotel?  How did you approach
him?  For to Lance the inspiration of the adventure lay in the
temporary hiding of his own identity; he wanted to approach his
grandfather as a stranger, to look at him with clear, impartial,
yet eager eyes.  For the situation was unique.  Here was the
original and almost mythical Pybus, a rather mysterious old fellow,
waiting to be discovered and explored by his own grandson who had
appeared as a casual young man in a car.

Lance's excitement had its tinge of emotion.  Also, it was
sublimated curiosity suffused with a sense of the picturesque and
the singular.  He had the qualities of an artist, a quick eye for
the dignity and the spacing of a situation.  He sat down to his
tea.  He reviewed his first impression of the old man, and it was
that of a white head seen against a background of gold.  A
venerable head with a halo.  Yes, that was the inspired word--
Venerable.  From that moment he christened his grandfather--"The
Venerable."


2


When, after hurrying through his tea, Lance went out into the hall,
his grandfather was absent.  He strolled to the door, filled and
lit a pipe, and considered the situation.  Too direct an approach
would appear clumsy.  If he waited it was probable that his
grandfather would return to his place by the brass gong, but how
public would be the opportunity!  How could you ever begin to talk
intimately to an hotel "boots" in such a place?

Well, why not explore?  He might happen upon his grandfather in one
of the passages, or in the coaching yard; he could get into
conversation with him, ask him about the castle.  The way to the
castle ruins lay through the Saracen yard.  Lance followed the
inspiration, but it failed at first to show him that little old
figure in the alpaca coat.  He strolled to the end of the yard,
past a group of loitering chauffeurs who were chaffing one of the
Saracen maids.  He both saw and heard a fluttering of wings, and
rounding the red angle of an old brick coachhouse, came suddenly
upon his grandfather, the centre of a cloud of birds.  Old Pybus
was feeding his pigeons.

Lance's head went up.  He had a way of throwing it back when
anything arrestive--a face, a landscape, or a picture--caught his
attention.  His eyes lit up, and in the smile of them there was a
sudden quality of tenderness.  Father Time and the pigeons!  He saw
one bird perched like a living crest on the old man's white head.
The birds were on his hands and shoulders and round his feet, and
old Pybus's face wore an absorbed and meditative smile.

Lance had paused, and when he walked slowly on, it was with a
feeling of exultation.  Here was his chance, and what a chance!  It
seemed to him that he was going to speak to someone who straightway
would be a friend, an old man whose hands were stretched out to
these fluttering birds.  How unexpected and how suggestive!  But
would the birds be shy of a stranger?

Again he paused, standing a little way off.

"Shall I frighten them?"

Old Pybus looked up and round.

"You, sir?  No.  They are only shy of children."

"The catapult boy.  Little beasts."

"I was one, sir.  It's natural--at that age.  What's natural--has
to be thought of."

Lance drew nearer.

"Wonder if they'll come to me?"

"Hold out your hands, sir."

"But there's nothing in them.  Wouldn't that be swindling?"

Old Pybus gave him a quick attentive look.  "There's a piece of
bread in my coat pocket.  Right hand side.  You can have it."

"That's very good of you," said Lance with eyes that saw John Pybus
as his sons had never seen him.

He felt for the bread in his grandfather's pocket, and standing
beside him and crumbling it became a part of the cloud of birds.
His impressions were quick and vivid.  The birds had no fear of
him; they settled upon his wrists and shoulders even as they
settled on his grandfather's, and it seemed to Lance that he and
his grandfather were sharing some beautiful rite.  "You have made
them very trusting."

"I have fed them like this for seven years."

"Every day?"

"Winter and summer--but in winter I feed them before dinner."

"Where do they come from?"

"Our pigeon lofts and the castle.  The castle's full of the blue
birds."

"I was going to look at the castle.  Can I get to it down this
yard?"

"Yes, sir, past my cottage and over the field."

Lance wanted to say to him, "Don't call me sir.  It is I who ought
to call you sir."

"Is that your cottage?"

"Yes, sir."

"Looks out on the castle."

"It does.  The barbican used to be there in the old days.  They
have filled up the ditch."

"Very peaceful.  A place to read or write in."

"That's so," said his grandfather; "I read a lot.  Books stay with
you."

Lance, with a smiling softness of the eyes, looked down at his
grandfather.  But inwardly he was looking up to him.  What a man of
surprises!  With that venerable head and thoughtful face of his,
full of the humility of service, yet resolute in his pride, with
birds and books for his friends, and that ruin close to his
windows.

"What books do you read, sir?"

The "sir" slipped out, and old Pybus's blue eyes gave a curious
flicker.  This young man was unusual, very unusual.  There was
something about him. . . .

"Solid books--most of them.  I read a lot of poetry, Blake and
Whitman."

"Blake's great.  And novels?"

"A few.  Conrad.  There aren't any more Conrads left for me to
read.  And he's dead."

"I know that feeling.  And Hewlett's dead.  What a book--'The
Forest Lovers!'"

"'Rest Harrow' was bigger."

"Different.  And what a figure--with his flowers and his shepherds
and his Wiltshire downs!"

"Talking of figures--Hudson--now."

"Ah, Hudson," said Lance, with a little thrill in his voice.

And--then--suddenly--they looked at each other, and in that look
there was a kindling of the emotions, a question, a wonder.  Each
had a feeling of subtle infection, of a drawing together, of some
mysterious spiritual relationship.  To Lance the thing was becoming
exquisitely real.  For the old man the feeling had a disturbing,
puzzling strangeness.

"Care to see my books?"

"I'd love to."

"I'm free from four till six.  They treat me very well here.  A lad
comes in to help."

"I'm glad of that," said Lance.

His grandfather's blue eyes seemed to grow big and strange.  Why
did he say he was glad?  And he was glad.  You caught the
vibrations of it--in his voice.


3


John Pybus had five shelves of books, but the first things that
Lance happened to notice in that austere little room were the
photos of his father and his uncle on the mantelpiece.  They had
been taken many years ago, but even from the doorway Lance had
recognized the flabby pallor of Conrad's full-moon face, and his
father's oblique glances.  But he paid no heed to them.  He was all
for continuing to be the unknown young man until he and his
grandfather should have come closer to each other.  Meanwhile, he
crossed towards John Pybus's bookshelves, but paused by the window,
one of those broad, low windows that one finds in old cottages.  It
gave to Lance the sheaved splendour of dahlias and tall asters,
with the grey walls of the castle and the gracious curves of the
ash trees rising to a blue and white sky.  The outlook from his
grandfather's window had beauty and tranquillity.  It offered you
glimpses of distant hills, and of the Castle Field, with its banks
and hollows very green in the sheeted sunlight.  It had the
spaciousness and the dignity of a fine picture.

"That's a good thing to live with, sir."

"Yes, you go out to it," said old Pybus, "and it comes in to you.
The older you grow--the more beauty gets you."

"Always?"

"Depends on your eyesight, doesn't it?"

"Insight, sir?"

"That's what I mean."

They smiled at each other, and Lance went on to look at his
grandfather's books.  He felt that he would be knowing his
grandfather in reading the titles of his books.  They were of all
ages and of all kinds, many of them books that Lance had never
heard of, queer old volumes in leather coats, histories, herbals,
gazetteers.  There were the old and the new, Chaucer and Swinburne,
and one or two little volumes of war poetry.  Lance glanced at the
modern, Shaw and Oliver Lodge, and Masefield, and Joseph Conrad,
and a few of the younger school.  The Venerable's taste was both
catholic and varied.  Imagine an hotel "boots" reading D. H.
Lawrence!  Moreover, in a place by themselves, Lance saw books on
contemporary science, sociology, psychology.  The Venerable read
Freud and MacDougal.

Lance picked out Hardy's "Tess."

"Ah, I remember that being published," said his grandfather, "and
the fuss over poor 'Jude.'  I saw Thomas Hardy once."

"Did you?"

"I used to sell books.  Yes, and I had quite a lot of first
editions.  Got some of them still.  Up--there.  Stevenson's
'Treasure Island,' and Conrad's 'Nigger of the Narcissus.'"

"I say--have you!  May I look?"

"Certainly."

"Have you ever written a book?"

"I--sir?"

"Yes."

"No.  Had a try once.  Who hasn't?"

"I scribble rather seriously."

"You do.  Published anything?"

"No, not yet."

"Tried to?"

"No.  I'm not satisfied--yet."

"What's the matter with the work?"

"It doesn't strike me as real.  I just seem to miss things--at
present."

"Plenty of time yet," said the Venerable with a smile.  "Generally,
youth is in such a devil of a hurry."

For twenty minutes they discussed books, and handled them, and
confessed to their intimate, individual passions and prejudices.
The Venerable could not, and would not, read Meredith.  The man was
too clever, boringly clever.  An artificial person.  They argued
about Butler's "The Way of all Flesh," and went on to discuss
Aldous Huxley.  Lance was a romanticist.  No, not of the Monsieur
Beaucaire school.  But wasn't the life of the day full of pungent
romance if you had the eyes to see it?

"Yes, things happen," said his grandfather.  "You can express them
in black and white--or in colour."

Lance was for colour.  But looking out of his grandfather's window
he saw beyond the reds and golds and purples of the Venerable's
garden the shadows of the castle and the ash trees stretching far
across the green of the castle field.  It was half-past five, and
he had sixty miles to cover, and a secret to keep both at Windover
and Castle Craven.

"I shall have to be going.  I've enjoyed this immensely."

"Far to go?"

"It won't take me long.  I say, sir, if I happen to be this way
again--may I come in and talk?"

Old Pybus looked at him queerly.

"Any time you like."

"Thanks--ever so much."

The Venerable walked up the yard with him and watched Lance drive
off.

"See you again, sir."

He waved a hand, and old Pybus stood looking towards the arch of
the gateway.  He had a strange feeling of kinship with the lad.  It
was as though something that he had always known, something that
was his, had dropped down out of the sky.


4


Lance drove home with the sun behind him.

In leaving Castle Craven he seemed to be coming down from a height,
and was reminded of Italy and one of those Tuscan towns with a
shrine or a campanile soaring against the sunset.  His pilgrimage
had been to the feet of the unexpected.  He had discovered a sage.

His own grandfather!  A little old man with the head of a Roman
emperor, an imperial philosopher, a kind of little Marcus Aurelius,
with his flowers and his books and his pigeons.  The Venerable!
The polisher of boots and the bearer of burdens!  For in Lance was
that rare virtue, a passion to reverence men and things.  He
carried a flame.  At that time he had the audacity and the élan of
the idealist.  Also, he had the essential cleanness of a flame.  To
the sex-obsessed and the unpleasantly clever he might appear
something of a fool, lyrical and tiresome, a fellow who never
looked higher than a garter.

He was back at Windover by a quarter-past seven.  He rushed up to
his room to change.  It was a warm, still, September evening, and
in leaning out of his window to look at the world, he observed his
father sitting in a deck chair on the terrace.  His father was
reading a paper, the Financial Times.

Lance drew back.  He had felt himself above his father and able to
look down at him with sudden impartiality.

"Poor old pater!"

Yet he was conscious of antagonism, contempt, compassion.

At dinner they asked him where he had been, and accepted his vague
answer--"Oh, just knocking around, seeing things."  Neither Sir
Probyn nor his wife had sufficient imagination to penetrate beyond
their son's silence.  Besides--it was usual.  He would disappear
for the whole day and have nothing to tell them when he returned.

The poetic age!  Sir Probyn's swivel eye gazed rather dubiously at
the versifier.  Poetry, useless stuff.  The pursuit of it was quite
gentlemanly, but not very productive.  Sir Probyn supposed that it
came of Eton and Trinity, though you did expect a young man of this
tennis-playing, sports-model, slack-trousered generation to be a
little more practical.  Still, Lance was a good oar.  He might be a
scribbler, but he rowed in the Third Trinity May boat and at
Henley.  That was a solid performance.  You had to allow a lad his
head of steam.

But it never occurred to Probyn and his wife that their son had
discovered his grandfather, or that in discovering him Lance might
wish to keep the Venerable in a niche apart from the lares and
penates of his parents.



CHAPTER VI


1


September mist.

Lance, standing at his bedroom window and brushing vigorously at
his insurgent hair, saw the beeches draped in vapour, and the grass
grey with dew.  Also, he saw the Daimler below on the gravel, with
Wyman standing beside it smoking an early and surreptitious
cigarette.  Sir Probyn was driving up to town to attend a board
meeting.

Lance and his father had had a passage of arms over this very board
meeting on the previous evening.  Sir Probyn, pouring out a second
glass of port, had called his son back from the half-opened door.
Something had occurred to remind the elder Pybus that Lance would
be in his last year at Cambridge, and that the serious business of
life was approaching.  Probyn was an opportunist.  It may be that
right eye of his had persuaded him to approach life obliquely.
Also, he was just a little afraid of his son.

"Lance!"

"Yes, pater."

"Just shut the door a moment, will you?"

Lance had closed the door.  He had come and stood by the table with
that air of alert gravity which was so disturbing to his father.
The lad was so full of silences.  Sir Probyn, very conscious of his
son's eyes and of the fact that Lance was being detained there like
a dog called back when it is bent upon some adventure of its own,
had smiled and tried to make an easy movement in his chair.

"I have a board meeting to-morrow.  Care to drive me up?"

"The Buick?"

"No--the Daimler.  Good opportunity.  I'd like you to come with me
and get an idea."

Lance had waited in silence.

"See how these things are done.  Can't begin too early.  You'll be
in your last year."

Sir Probyn had glanced at his son, and then had removed the band
from his cigar.  After all, to an intelligent lad like Lance a hint
should be sufficient.  Probyn was very fond of his son, though with
a rather puzzled and slightly diffident fondness.  He had given the
lad plenty of rope; he had not interfered with his scribbling.  Sir
Probyn always thought of it as scribbling.  But he had plans for
his son, quite gentlemanly plans.  The young Jason should travel;
he should be a man of languages, he should carry the Fleece into
foreign lands.  Experts!  A young merchant prince and director!
But first a year in the mills, and another year in the sales-
manager's office.

Lance had stood looking down at his father.  Only of late had he
begun to visualize himself as a business man; life had been so
easy.  Moreover, there had been a vagueness about the future.
Probyn had not been very definite in his suggestions; again, he had
preferred the oblique method.

"I don't think I should be any good in business, pater."

His father had said, "Oh--!  What do you know about it?" and had
looked at his son, not directly, but as though his glances diverged
and met again behind his son's back.  He had been surprised--as
parents always appear to be surprised--by Lance's abruptness, an
abruptness that had sounded aggressive.

"Don't know much about it, do you, Lance?"

"Not a great deal."

"Thought that you understood, my dear boy.  It has always been in
my mind--"

Lance had pulled some grapes from a dish, and had begun eating
them.  He supposed that he had understood in a way that his father
had intended him to go into the business--but never had he given an
inward consent to anything.  He had been too young to consent to
anything.  He did not know.  He had urges, prejudices, predilections.
He had been full of his rowing, and his inspirations, and his
explorations into the adventure of life.  He had taken things rather
as he had picked up those grapes.

"You see, pater, it's not easy."

He had frowned, while eating skin and pips, and thinking of that
other Pybus.  No, it was not easy, especially for a lad whose man's
cry was to be, "Give me something difficult.  Not the easy thing.
The easy thing's so fatal."

"I have been thinking a good deal lately."

His father had raised bland eyebrows.  Surely it was not necessary
for Lance to think!  The proof of the pudding was in the eating,
and if Lance's eyes were not open to the advantages of business--
well--he had only to look about him.

"Your mother and I have taken it for granted--"

He had been caught by a sudden swift glance.  Such a strange look.

"I don't think you ought to, pater."

"My dear boy!  Don't you appreciate the fact that your mother and
I--"

"You have been very generous."

His father had smiled over the apparent concession.

"Of course--naturally.  We wanted you to have every advantage.
It's our wish--"

Again he had been the target of that steady, searching stare.

"Do you want me to do--what you want me to do or what I--?"

"We want--what's best, Lance."

"Yes, that's just it, pater.  What's best!  But isn't that just
about the hardest--"

"Well, use common sense.  I'm not going to say--that I'm a good
deal older--"

And there Probyn Pybus had left it.  He had never been a man to
push an issue to immediate extremes.  His nature was bland and
circuitous.  Conciliation.  Allow a few suggestive persuasions to
soak in.  Besides, he supposed that most young men began life with
bees in their bonnets; and if you were a shrewd person you allowed
the bees to buzz themselves out.  He had said, "All right, I'll
take Wyman to-morrow," and felt that he had been tactful and kind
and rather subtle.

So Lance stood brushing his hair.  His father had ordered the car
for nine, and Lance was late for breakfast, and the Daimler--
standing on the gravel--suggested that it could carry a compromise.
Sir Probyn, with the morning paper propped against the coffee-pot,
was wondering whether his son would come downstairs and say
"Morning, pater, I'd like to drive you up to town."  While upstairs
Lance was passing through one of those experiences that may appear
trivial at the moment.  Being sensitive, he found the doing of
certain things difficult; but also he had youth's ruthlessness and
its scorn of compromise.  He had changed very much in a year.  He
had become more acutely self-conscious, and also more aware of
people and their proclivities.  He had seen people through the eyes
of other young men, and he had begun to see his own people with a
very disturbing clearness.  His father was a far more vivid and
comprehensible figure to Lance than Lance was to his father.  Youth
sees things freshly, with a cruel impartiality, wide awake to all
the tricks of soul and body; and by his son Probyn was seen as a
caricature of himself.  Lance had not asked to see him like that.
It happened so.  It was one of those inevitable discriminations
which make life both humorous and tragic.

"I can't go."

He went downstairs in flannels, and met his father's oblique eyes
looking up at him over the top of the paper.  He helped himself to
porridge while his father finished his second cup of coffee.  They
had wished each other good morning.

Probyn Pybus got up as his son sat down.  He gulped his coffee.  He
folded up the paper with a crumpling testiness.

"Lot of mist this morning.  Meet my board at eleven."

Lance, with a spoon in the sugar-bowl, supposed that the mist would
lift very quickly.  The day promised to be hot.

Sir Probyn--with a characteristic swerve of the right eye, allowed
it to be seen that he was nettled.

"You'll spend the morning scribbling--what?"

Lance looked out of the window.

"Very likely."

His father went out of the room saying something about life being a
serious business, and that every man--however young--should learn
to face responsibilities, the kind of thing that thousands of
fathers have said to thousands of sons.


2


Lady Pybus was a late riser.  When the maid carried in the
breakfast tray she would find that large, fair, overflowing
creature yawning under her lace cap.

"Sir Probyn left for town, Wills?"

"Yes, my lady."

"Where's Mr. Lance?"

"I don't know, my lady."

"No letters?"

"No letters this morning, my lady."

Dolly Pybus continued to ask questions as she had asked them as a
round-eyed and tow-headed little egoist of five.  Growth with her
had been mere enlargement, a doubling or trebling of the little
suburban ego.  She had been a very healthy woman, without subtlety
or reservation, an enlarged child with the mental make-up of a
child who treated her menfolk like dolls.  For years she had been
full of healthy, human satisfactions, and thoroughly enjoying the
climb and the various and expanding vistas it had provided.  She
had delighted in being Lady Pybus; she had been delighted with
Windover; she had been delighted with her boy at Eton.

But life was not what it was.  Fiftyish, she had begun to find life
less amusing; and having no inward life of her own to compensate
for her failing physical reactions, she was growing a little
puzzled and querulous.  Her doctor had dieted her.  She was allowed
only one lump of sugar in her tea.  French pastry was forbidden,
and when she rushed down to Cannes for six weeks in the winter she
was supposed to be content with brown bread and butter.  No eleven
o'clock invasion of the patisserie shop.  No cocktails, and she
needed cocktails.  And modern dancing was not what it was.  She had
taken Lance with her for three weeks last winter, and for some
reason or other her son had refused to dance.  He had been moody.

Lady Pybus put the breakfast tray aside and got out of bed.  She
had become a heavy woman, and heavy in her movements.  She went
first to her mirror, and then to one of the windows.  It was a
beautiful morning; but can anything be more boring and suggestive
than a beautiful morning, September sunlight, autumn, glimmering
trees, youth that is not youth?

Dolly Pybus looked down at the foreshortened Dutch garden.  She saw
Lance there in an old blue and white blazer and flannel trousers.
He was standing by the cistern staring at it, his hands stuffed
into his pockets.  He had his back to the house.  He appeared to be
absorbed in watching the gold-fish moving among the lily leaves,
and the yellow flowers floating on the water.

His figure had a stillness.

His mother watched him.  Lance puzzled her, baffled her.  He was so
"funny" at times.  He had so little to say.  He was always mooning
off somewhere, or shutting himself up in his room.  She could
remember the time when she had boasted to her friends:  "Oh, Lancie
tells me everything."  He had been such a jolly kid, a boy whom you
could take to Gunter's and stuff with food, but now--

She was not a subtle person, and like many mothers when they
discover the grown stranger in their sons she was both perplexed
and resentful.  Vaguely conscious of a sense of loss, she had
attempted to grasp at that which was no longer given.  She was
fussily affectionate.  She wanted to be able to feel and to say:
"I and my boy are such pals."  She took babyish liberties with his
young dignity, and was irritated when he treated her with a kind of
dark reserve.  He would look at her as though he were saying:
"Mater, don't be such a fool."

She was always tweaking the hair of her stranger.  She could not
let him alone.  She would not allow him to be silent or thoughtful.
She twitted him, and was archly familiar.

"Hallo, solemn face!  Who's the girl?"

She was incapable of realizing that she jarred upon her son, and
that she was like a distracting, worrying child to a sensitive man.
All that he knew intuitively she knew not at all.  That little
adjective "funny" described him to her.  Men were funny about this,
or funny about that, or funny about women.  But how exasperating,
just when a something in her craved inarticulately for the youth in
him.

But he was not young.  She was the primitive; while he was Paris
and London and Trinity and St. Francis of Assisi, and Raphael and
Blake, and moonlight on Lake Leman, and Bernard Shaw.  She was
quite incapable of coping with him.

That orange and black hammock-bed for instance?  What was the
objection?  The thing looked nice and bright in the Dutch garden.
Besides--it was comfortable.  And he had called it an atrocity.

Child of impulse that she was, incapable of keeping back anything
that came into her head, she hailed him:

"Lan-cie--Lan-cie!"

He hated being shouted at, especially by his mother.  She was still
the common child of the back street, overblown and overgrown.  "Mau-
die, yer mother wants yer."  He did wish that his mother would give
up shouting.  She shouted at the gardeners, at her menfolk, at
waiters, at the girls who came to play tennis.  She talked over and
through people.

"Lan-cie--Lan-cie!"

After an interval, he turned and looked up at her window.  His
response was mute.

"Lan-cie--I want to go into Aylesbury."

Which meant that she intended him to drive her into Aylesbury, and
he was wanting to go to Castle Craven.

All the urge of his swift complex, and yet simple self, was setting
more and more towards Castle Craven.


3


That extraordinary old man!

How had his grandfather contrived to become what he was, both a
sage and a bearer of burdens?  How wrong it seemed, and yet how
right he made it.  For Lance had seen a swollen person in the
Saracen yard, a sort of over-ripe human mulberry, splutter at his
grandfather.  "Here, where's that soot-case.  Damn it, man, I told
you room No. 3."  And Lance's blood had felt on fire, until, in
watching the Venerable, he had realized that the heat in him was
natural but unnecessary.  His grandfather, looking with one
straight blue glance into that squashed, mulberry face, had
answered with resolute courtesy.

"One suit-case, sir, one kit-bag, one attaché case.  The suit-case
is under that rug, sir.  There is no need to damn anybody."

The swollen person had oozed more purple, and Lance, standing by
the Talbot, and rattling the money in his trouser pockets, had seen
the dignity of his grandfather cut like a knife into that human
pulp.

How was it that the Venerable understood the inwardness of the
thing you were saying almost before you had completed the saying of
it?  And the delight in being understood without explainings, while
catching the gleam in those resolute blue eyes, and in hearing the
right echo come back to you!  What was the subtle nexus between
them?  How was it that in the presence of his grandfather he felt
himself both man and child, and able to reveal his innermost
thoughts with a confidence that was perfect?  His grandfather was
so young, yet not young like the young things.  He could chuckle.
He had a sudden sense of humour.  You felt so near to him in that
little brown room, or when idling under the castle ash trees, or
sitting in the oriel of the Bayard Tower and looking down at the
Brent below.

His grandfather had a peculiar dignity.  You forgot the smallness
of him in contemplating that massive head.  The more you talked to
him the larger he seemed to grow, until the mere physical outlines
ceased to matter, or became a familiar cloak hanging about a soul
of understanding.

Did the Venerable suspect?

For Lance had not told him.  There had been a sensitive courtesy in
the younger man's approach to the elder one.  Lance had felt that
he wanted his grandfather to know Lance the man before he knew him
as Lance--the grandson.  For there was such a surprising sympathy
between them, and yet--somehow--it seemed to have an inevitableness.
Perhaps it had.


4


Sally Summerscales, coming in to scrub the Venerable's kitchen
floor for him, while the Venerable shaved himself before a little
mirror hung by the garden window, made conversation through the
doorway.  Sally on her knees was the Sally of symbolism.

"Your young gentleman been to see you again, Mr. Pybus?"

No, he hadn't, not since last Thursday, but Mr. Pybus was expecting
him.  Sally, flopping down a wet cloth on the red tiles,
straightened on her knees.

"He's got such lovely eyes."

Lovely eyes indeed!  Sally was incorrigible.  And Mr. Pybus nicked
his chin with his razor.

"What do you know about his eyes?"

"Only just passed him in the yard, that's all.  What's his name,
Mr. Pybus?"

"I don't know."

"What!  You don't know his name?"

"I don't."

"Well--I'm blowed.  You're kidding!"

"I'm telling you the truth."

"Where's he come from, Mr. Pybus?"

"I haven't the faintest idea."

"Go on; you can't tell me you don't know his name or where he comes
from.  And he's been here four times."

"Counted them, have you?"

"No--I haven't.  I was told."

"Well--you can take it from me, Sally, that I have told you the
truth--though it is no business of yours, my dear."

There were splashings and scrubbings, and the Venerable, having
washed the remains of the lather from his face, was applying a
small pad of cotton-wool to the cut on his chin.  He made
allowances for Sally, for when a young woman comes in of her own
free will to scrub your floor--and more especially so in these days
when service is called slavery--she is entitled to her graciousness.

"Mr. Pybus--"

"Hallo--"

"I've just had a sort of idea."

"Splendid.  What's the idea, Sally?"

"You haven't noticed it--I suppose?"

"I haven't seen it yet."

"What?"

"Your idea."

"Oh, don't be such a quizz, Mr. Pybus.  I suppose you haven't
noticed that the young gentleman's eyes are awful like yours."

The Venerable was looking at himself in the mirror.  Sally heard
him give a queer little laugh.

"I gather that's a compliment, Sally."

"It's a fact, Mr. Pybus.  You look at him next time."

"I will."

John Pybus was putting on his collar; he was very particular about
his collars.  As for his young friend's eyes, of course he had
noticed them; you could not exchange a dozen words with Lance
without being aware of those eyes and of the spirit behind them.
And old Pybus had thought--"Now, if I had had a son like that!"



CHAPTER VII


1


Lance had left his car in the Saracen yard and had walked down to
the cottage in search of his grandfather.  It was half-past four
and the Venerable's tea-time, and the pigeons waiting upon the
gutters and the ridge-tiles were on the watch for the Venerable's
white head.  A few of them fluttered down to Lance as he stood on
his grandfather's doorstep.

Getting no reply to his knock he walked back to the main yard,
where Sally Summerscales, sitting idly at a window, smiled out upon
him.

"Are you looking for Mr. Pybus, sir?"

"Yes.  He's not at the cottage."

"He's busy, sir.  Put off his tea a quarter of an hour.  A 'sharry'
has just come in.  Thirty of 'em.  We call them 'one-nighters.'"

Sally thought his smile as lovely as his eyes.

"Thank you so much.  I suppose he's in the hotel."

"Looking after the luggage, sir."

Lance entered.  Sally's "one-nighters" and their luggage were
collected in the hall.  They were very much in charge of a brisk
and bald-headed man, who, standing on the third step of the stairs
with a list in his right hand, was assigning his sheep to their
pens.  He knew his party.  He was a humourist in the English
manner.  He drew little twitters of laughter from the women.  "No.
12, Mr. and Mrs. Bibster--please.  No. 13--Miss Soames.  No, as you
were.  That wouldn't be gallant.  Can't put a lady in No. 13, can
we?  Mr. Brown, perhaps--you--will take No. 13?  Thank you, sir.
Turn your pyjamas inside out for luck, sir.  Supposed to be
infallible--they tell me.  No. 14, Mr. and Mrs. Lovejoy, and good
luck to them.  It's a long time since I had a honeymoon."  Lance
saw his grandfather standing in the centre of a circle of suit-
cases and bags.  The strong lad who helped with the luggage was
having his half-day off, and old Pybus had the whole of it to deal
with.

"Luggage for No. 12."

The Venerable was about to ascend the stairs with a suit-case in
either hand when Lance, pushing through the crowd, waylaid his
grandfather.

"All right--I'll do the carrying.  Show me No. 12."

Old Pybus gave him a queer, smiling look.

"You here, sir!  Not one of the party?  I can manage quite well."

He climbed the first three steps, but Lance wilfully got in front
of him.

"I'm serious.  I've done it before.  I was a porter at Southampton
during the General Strike."

His grandfather climbed two more steps.

"There's no strike here, sir, thank you all the same."

"You'll let me carry that luggage.  I ask you to let me."

"You can't do it here, sir."

"But I can."

"It's not your job."

They were alone on the stairs, Lance holding out his hands for the
luggage, the Venerable looking up at his grandson, and refusing to
surrender the burden.

"If you please, sir.  Can't allow it."

Lance was smiling, but there was much behind that smile.

"I suppose I can help my own grandfather--"

He saw the Venerable's figure stiffen where it stood.  The old
man's face had a kind of staring pallor.  He looked straight up at
his grandson.  He seemed to be asking himself and Lance some
momentous question.  "Probyn's boy?"

"Yes."

"Does he know--?"

"No."

Something happened to old John Pybus's face.  A sudden, strange
softness overflowed it.  The blue stare went out of his eyes.  He
allowed his g