Title:      Old Pybus (1928)
Author:     Warwick Deeping
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Date first posted:          June 2006
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OLD PYBUS

by

Warwick Deeping

1928

CHAPTER

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'œuvres, 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 w