On the second day he sought audience of his aunt.
"Aunt Lora, this cannot continue."
"Why? Have you decided to become a tramp again?"
"You are taking an unjustifiable advantage of my misfortune in being helpless to resent it to-"
"When you were a small boy, Hailey, you came to visit me once, and behaved like a perfect little devil. I took advantage of your misfortune in being helpless to resent it to spank you with a clothes- brush. My mistake was that I stopped the treatment before I had cured you. The treatment has now begun again, and will continue till you are out of danger."
"Aunt Lora, you cannot realize the humiliation of my position."
"Nonsense! Use your imagination. Try to think you're a pioneer out in the West."
"I have no ambition to be a pioneer out in the West."
"Your real trouble, Hailey, is that you think the society beneath you."
"I am not accustomed to hob-nob with cooks."
"It is exceedingly good of my cook to let you hob-nob with her. She knows you came here without reference, after having been a tramp. It shows she is not a snob."
Hailey returned to his hewing of wood and drawing of water.
For a rather excessively fastidious young man with an extremely high opinion of himself there are more congenial walks in life than that of odd-job man in a country house.
The duties of an odd-job man are extensive and peculiar. He is seldom idle. If the cook does not require him to chop wood, the gardener commandeers him for potato-digging. He cleans the knives; he cleans the shoes; he cleans the windows; he cleans the dog. In a way his is an altruistic life, for his primary mission is to scatter sweetness and light, and to bestow on others benefits in which he himself cannot share; but it is not an easy one.
Hailey did all these things and others besides. His work began at an hour which in happier days he had looked on as part of the night, and it ended when sheer mental fatigue made it impossible for those in command over him to think up anything else for him to do. When this happened, he would light his pipe and stroll moodily in the garden. It was one small count in his case against Fate that he, once known for his nice taste in cigars, should be reduced to a cheap wooden pipe and the sort of tobacco they sell in English villages.
His was not a nature that adapted itself readily to deviations from habit, particularly when such deviations involved manual labour. There were men of his acquaintance in New York who would have treated his predicament in a spirit of humorous adventure. But then they were men whose idea of enjoyment was to camp out in lonely woods with a guide and a fishing-rod. Newport was the wildest life that Hailey had ever known. He hated discomfort; he hated manual labour; he hated being under orders; and he hated the society of his social inferiors. To treat his present life in a whimsically adventurous spirit was beyond him.
Of all its disagreeable features, possibly that which he resented most was the sense of inferiority which it brought with it. In the real fundamentals of existence, he now perceived, such as reducing unwieldy blocks of wood to neat faggots and putting a polish on a shoe, he was useless. He, Hailey Bannister, respected in Wall Street as a coming man, was continually falling short of even the modest standard of efficiency set up by his predecessor, Mr. Nixon. The opinion below- stairs was that Herbert had been pretty bad, but that Hailey was unspeakable. They were nice about it-but impatient, distinctly impatient; and it wounded Hailey. He tried to tell himself that the good opinion of the masses was not worth having, but he could not bring himself to believe it. For the first time in his life he found himself humble, even apologetic. It was galling for a young man's self-esteem to be in Rome and fail through sheer incompetence to do as the Romans do. There were moments when a word of praise from the cook would have given Hailey more satisfaction than two successful deals in Wall Street.
It was by chance rather than design that Sybil chose the psychological moment for re-entering his life. His moods since his arrival had alternated between a wild yearning for her and positive dislike. But one night, as he stood smoking in the stable-yard, he was longing for her with a sentimental fervour of which in the days of his freedom he had never been capable. It had been a particularly hard day, and, as he stood poisoning the summer night with his tobacco, a great loneliness and remorse filled him. He had treated Sybil badly, he told himself. He went over in his mind episodes of their life together in New York, and shuddered at the picture he conjured up of himself. No wonder she shunned him.
And, as he stood there, she came to him.
"Hailey!"
She was nervous, and he did not wonder at it. A girl coming to speak to the sort of man he had just been contemplating might have been excused if she had called out the police reserves as an escort.
"Yes?"
He was horrified at the gruffness of his voice. He had meant to speak with tender softness. It was this bad tobacco.
"Hailey, dear, I've brought you this."
Wonderful intuition of Woman! It was the one thing he desired-a fat cigar, and, as his trained senses told him, a cigar of quality. He took it in a silence too deep for words.
"We were calling on some people. The man's study-door was open, and I saw the box-I hadn't time to take more than one-I thought you would like it."
Hailey could not speak. He was overcome. He kissed her.
He was conscious of a curious dizziness.
In the old days kissing Sybil had always been one of his daily acts. He had done it the first thing in the morning, last thing at night. It had not made him dizzy then. He had never even derived any particular pleasure from it, especially in the morning, when he was a little late, and the car was waiting to take him to business and the butler standing by with his hat and cane. Then it had sometimes been almost a nuisance, and only his rigid conscientiousness had made him do it. But now, in the scented dusk of this summer night-well, it was different. It was intensely different.
"I must go back," she said, quickly. "Aunt Lora is waiting for me."
Reluctantly he released her, and the night swallowed her up. It was a full minute before he moved.
He became aware of something in his right hand. It was the broken remnants of a crushed cigar.
They fell into the habit of meeting in the garden after dark. All day he looked forward to these moments. Somehow they seemed to supply something which had always been lacking in his life. He had wooed Sybil in the days before their marriage in ballrooms and drawing- rooms. It had seemed quite satisfactory to him at the time, but this- this stealthy coming together in the darkness, these whispered conversations under the stars-this was what he had always been starving for. He realized it now.
His outlook on life seemed to change. He saw things with different eyes. Quite suddenly it was borne in upon him how amazingly fit he felt. In New York he had been exacting in the matter of food, critical, and hard to please. Now, if supper was a trifle behind time, he had to exercise restraint to keep himself from raiding the larder. Hitherto unsuspected virtues in cold mutton were revealed to him. It might be humiliating for a young man highly respected in Wall Street and in the clubs of New York to chop wood, sweep leaves, and dig potatoes, but these things certainly made for health.
Nor had his views on the society in which he moved remained unaltered. The cook-what a good, motherly soul, always ready with a glass of beer when the heat of the day made work oppressive. The gardener-what a sterling conversationalist! The parlour-maid-what a military expert! That night at supper, when the parlour-maid exposed Germany's entire plan of campaign, while the cook said that she never did hold with war, and the gardener told the story of his uncle who had lost a leg in the Indian Mutiny, was one of the most enjoyable that Hailey had ever spent.