Bye-Ways Part 42

The boy began to feel exceedingly confused. Yet he had never been less bored. Miss Haddon might be stout and sixty-four. Nevertheless, her net personality was far less wearisome than that of many a town-bred sylph.

Unconsciously Claude ate with a hearty appet.i.te, indulged immoderately in excellent roast beef, and even swallowed a beautifully-cooked Spanish onion without thinking of the committal of a crime. During dessert Miss Haddon gave him a racy description of a rural cricket match and of the supper and speeches which followed it, and he found himself laughing heartily and wishing he had been there. He pulled himself up short with a sudden sensation of horror, and his hostess rose to go into the drawing-room.

"Shall we play Halma or Ek Bahr?" she asked; "or would they be out of order? I wish particularly to conform to all your tenets."

"Dear lady, please, we have no tenets," he protested. "Do remember that, or you will never become what you wish. But I do not care for any games."

"Then shall we sit down and each read a volume of the 'Yellow Book'?"

She hastened towards a table to find copies of that work, but something in her brisk and anxious movement caused Claude to exclaim hurriedly:

"Please--please teach me Halma."

That night he went up to bed flushed with triumph.

Miss Haddon had allowed him to win a couple of games. Never before had he felt so absolutely certain of the unusual acuteness of his intellect.

IV

Three days later, Miss Haddon and Claude Melville were feeding chickens--under protest.

"I mean to give it up, of course," the former said. "It's a degrading pursuit; it's almost as bad as the 'things that Jimmy does,' the things that give him such a marvellous complexion and keep his figure so magnificent."

She threw a handful of grain to the frenzied denizens of the enlarged meat-safe before them, and added in a tone of pensive reflectiveness:

"Why is it, I wonder, that these actions which, as you have taught me, are unworthy of thinking people, tend to make the body so beautiful, the eyes so bright and clear, the cheeks rose-tinted, the limbs straight and supple?"

All the time that she was speaking her glance crept musingly over Claude's tall, but weak-looking and rather flaccid form, seeming to pause on his thin undeveloped arms, his lanky legs, and his slightly yellow face. That face began to flush. She sighed.

"There must be something radically wrong in the scheme of the universe,"

she continued. "But, of course, one ought to live for the mind and for subtle sensations, even though they do make one look an object."

Her eyes were on the chickens now, who were fighting like feathered furies, pouncing, clucking, running for safety, grain in beak, or, with a fiery anxiety, chasing the favoured brethren who had secured a morsel and were hoping to be permitted to swallow it. Claude glanced at her furtively out of the corner of his eye, and endeavoured, for the first time in his life, to stand erect and broaden his rather narrow chest.

Silently he resolved to give instructions to his tailor not to spare the padding in his future coats. He was glad, too, that knee-breeches, for which he had occasionally sighed, had not come into fashion again. After all, modern dress had its little advantages. Miss Haddon was still scattering grain, rather in the att.i.tude of Millet's "_Sower_," and still talking reflectively.

"We must try to convert Jimmy," she said. "I have a good deal of influence over him, Mr Melville. We must try to make him more like you, more thoughtful, more inactive, more frankly sensual, more fond of sofas, in the future than he has been in the past. Do you know, I am ashamed to say it, but I don't believe I have ever seen Jimmy lying on a sofa. Poor Jimmy! Look at that hen! She is choking. Hens gulp their food so! And then, he's inclined to be persistently unselfish. That must be stopped too. I have learnt from you that to be decadent one must be acutely and untiringly selfish. The blessings of selfishness! What a volume might be written upon them! Mr Melville, all chickens must be decadent, for all chickens are entirely selfish. It is strange to think that the average fowl is more advanced in ethics--is it ethics I mean?--than the average man or woman, is it not? And we ate a decadent at dinner last night. I feel almost like a cannibal."

She threw away the last grain, and was silent. But suddenly Claude spoke.

"Miss Haddon," he said, and his voice had never sounded so boyish to her before, "you have been laughing at me for nearly a week." He paused, then he went on, rather unevenly, in the up-and-down tones induced by stifled excitement, "and I have never found it out until this moment. I suppose you think me a great fool. I daresay I have been one. But please don't--I mean, please let us give up acting our farce."

"But have we reached the third act?" she said.

They were walking through the garden, among the crocuses and violets now.

"I am sure I don't know," he answered, trying to seem easy. "Perhaps it is a farce in one act."

"Perhaps it is not a farce at all, my dear boy," she said very gently and with a sudden old-world gravity that was not without its grace.

They reached the house. She put her basket down on the oak table in the wide hall, and faced him in the eager way that was natural to her, and that was so youthful.

"Mr Melville--Claude," she said, as she held out her hand, clad in a very countrified brown glove, with a fan-like gauntlet, "of all Jimmy's friends I think I shall like you the best. People who have acted together ought to be good comrades."

He took the hand. That seemed necessary.

"But I haven't been acting," he said.

"Oh, yes, you have," she answered, "and I have only been on the stage for a week; while you--well, I suppose you have been on it for at least two or three years. I am taking my farewell of it this morning, and you--?"

The boy's face was deeply flushed, but he did not look, or feel, actually angry.

"I don't know about myself yet," he said.

"Think it all over," the old lady exclaimed. "And now let us have lunch.

I am hungry."

Jimmy arrived that evening.

"How old are you, Claude?" he exclaimed, clapping his friend on the back.

"I am not sure," Claude replied. "But I almost begin to wish that I were sixty-four."

THE TEE-TO-TUM

I

Jack Burnham was quite determined not to marry Mrs Lorton, and if there was one thing in the world upon which she had rigidly set her heart it was upon refusing him. There were several things about her which he deliberately disliked. In the first place, she was a widow, and he always had an uneasy suspicion that widows, like dynamite, were mysteriously dangerous. Then her Christian name was Harriet, and she never took afternoon tea. The former of these two facts indicated, according to his ideas, that her parents were people of bad taste, the latter that she possessed notions that were against nature. Also, she was well informed, and knew it. This condition of the mind, he considered, should be the blessed birthright of the male s.e.x, and he looked upon her as an usurper. She didn't wear mourning, which implied that she was forgetful--of dead husbands. Then--well, that was about all he had against her, and it was quite enough.

As for her, the whole nature of her protested eloquently against the way he waxed his moustache, against the colour of his brown hair, and of his brown boots, against his lounging gait, and his opinion of Mr Gladstone. He had a certain arrogance about him, when with her, which arose in truth from his fear of her intellectual prowess. This led her to dub him intolerably conceited. She desired to humble him, and considered that she could best do so by refusing his offer of marriage.

But she must first persuade him to propose. That was the difficulty.

They were constantly meeting in London. You always constantly meet your enemies in London. And, when they met, they always devoted a great deal of time to the advancement of the tacit and polite quarrel between them.

They argued with one another in Hyde Park on fine mornings, and were really disgusted with one another at dinner parties and "At Homes." He thought her fast--at b.a.l.l.s; and she had once considered him blatant--at a Marlborough House garden party. This last fact, indeed, put the coping stone to the feud between them, for Mrs Lorton expressed her opinion to a friend, and Burnham, of course, got to know of it. To be thought blatant at Marlborough House was really intolerable. One might as well be p.r.o.nounced to have had a heathen air at Lambeth Palace.

Distinctly, Jack Burnham and Harriet Lorton were acutely antagonistic.

Yet, there must surely have been some strange, unknown link of sympathy between them, for they both caught the influenza on the same day--it was a Sunday morning--and both permitted it to develop into double pneumonia.

After all, spar as we may, are we not all brothers and sisters?

The double pneumonia ought to have drawn them together; but, as he lived in Piccadilly and she in Queen's Gate, and each was thoroughly self-centred--nothing produces egoism so certainly as influenza--neither knew of the illness of the other.