Yule’s humorous mug expanded, but he was silent.
“Exactly!” said Sir Lawrence: “No one knows nowadays. He said: ‘Why, Caingey, old boy, you look like a boiled porpoise with parsley sauce.’ Yes, and what did Mr. Sawyer answer in Market Harboro, when the Honourable Crasher drove at the turnpike gate, saying: ‘It’s open, I think’?”
Yule’s face, as of indiarubber, expanded further, and he was still more silent.
“Dear, dear! Jack?”
“He said: ‘I think not’.”
“Good!” Sir Lawrence sank into a chair. “And was it? No. Well! Have you arranged to steal that mare? Fine! And when you get her over?”
“I shall put her to the most suitable sire standing. I shall mate the result with the most suitable sire or mare I can find. Then I shall match the result of that mating privately against the best of our present thoroughbreds of the same age. If I’m proved right I ought to be able to get my Arab mares entered in the Stud Book. I’m trying to get three mares, by the way.”
“How old are you, Jack?”
“Rising fifty-three.”
“I’m sorry. This is good coffee.”
After that the three sat silent, awaiting the real purpose of this visit.
“I’ve come, Mr. Yule,” said Sir Lawrence, suddenly, “about that affair of young Desert’s.”
“Not true, I hope?”
“Unfortunately, yes. He makes no bones about it.” And, turning his monocle on Jack Muskham’s face, he saw there exactly what he had expected.
“A man,” said Muskham slowly, “ought to keep his form better than that, even if he IS a poet.”
“We won’t go into the rights and wrongs, Jack. Let it go at what you say. All the same”—and Sir Lawrence’s manner acquired strange gravity—“I want you two to keep mum. If it comes out, it can’t be helped, but I beg that you’ll neither of you say anything.”
“I don’t like the look of the fellow,” said Muskham shortly.
“That applies to at least nine-tenths of the people we see about; the reason is not adequate.”
“He’s one of those bitter, sceptical young moderns, with no real knowledge of the world and no reverence for anything.”
“I know you hold a brief for the past, Jack, but don’t bring it into this.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I didn’t want to mention it, but he’s engaged to my favourite niece, Dinny Cherrell.”
“That nice girl!”
“Yes. We none of us like it, except my boy Michael, who still swears by Desert. But Dinny has got her teeth into it, and I don’t think anything will budge her.”
“She can’t be allowed to marry a man who’s bound for Coventry the moment this comes out.”
“The more he’s taboo, the closer she’ll stick to him.”
“I like THAT,” said Muskham. “What do you say, Yule?”
“It’s no affair of mine. If Sir Lawrence wants me to say nothing, I shall say nothing.”
“Of course it’s no affair of ours; all the same, if making it known would stop your niece, I’d do it. I call it a damned shame!”
“It would have just the opposite effect, Jack. Mr. Yule, you know a lot about the Press. Suppose this story leaks into the Press, as it well may; what then?”
Yule’s eyes snapped.
“First they’ll tell it vaguely of a certain English traveller; then they’ll find out whether it’s denied by Desert; then they’ll tell it of him, with a good many details wrong, but not so wrong as all that. If he admits it, he can’t object. The Press is pretty fair, and damned inaccurate.”
Sir Lawrence nodded. “If I knew anyone going in for journalism, I should say: ‘Be strictly accurate, and you will be unique.’ I have not read any absolutely accurate personal paragraphs in the papers since the war.”
“That’s their dodge,” said Yule; “they get a double shot—first the inaccurate report and then the correction.”
“I loathe the Press,” said Muskham. “I had an American press-man here. There he sat, and short of kicking him out—I don’t know what on earth he made of me.”
“Yes, you date, Jack. To you Marconi and Edison are the world’s two greatest malefactors. Is it agreed, then, about young Desert?”
“Yes,” said Yule; and Muskham nodded.
Sir Lawrence passed swiftly from the subject.
“Nice country about here. Are you staying long, Mr. Yule?”
“I go back to Town this afternoon.”
“Let me take you.”
“Willingly.”
Half an hour later they had started.
“My cousin Jack,” said Sir Lawrence, “ought to be left to the nation. In Washington there’s a museum with groups of the early Americans under glass smoking the communal pipe, holding tomahawks over each other, and that sort of thing. One might have Jack—” Sir Lawrence paused: “That’s the trouble! How could one have Jack preserved? It’s so difficult to perpetuate the unemphatic. You can catch anything that jumps around; but when there’s no attitude except a watchful languor—and yet a man with a God of his own.”
“Form, and Muskham is its prophet.”
“He might, of course,” murmured Sir Lawrence, “be preserved in the act of fighting a duel. That’s perhaps the only human activity formal enough.”
“Form’s doomed,” said Yule.
“H’m! Nothing so hard to kill as the sense of shape. For what IS life but the sense of shape, Mr. Yule? Reduce everything to dead similarity, and still shape will ‘out’.’
“Yes,” said Yule, “but ‘form’ is shape brought to perfection-point and standardised; and perfection bores our bright young things.”
“That nice expression. But do they exist outside books, Mr. Yule?”
“Don’t they! And yawn-making—as they’d call it! I’d sooner attend City dinners for the rest of my life than spend a week-end in the company of those bright young things.”
“I doubt,” said Sir Lawrence, “whether I’ve come across them.”
“You should thank God. They never stop talking day or night, not even in their couplings.”
“You don’t seem to like them.”
“Well,” said Yule, looking like a gargoyle, “they can’t stand me any more than I can stand them. A boring little crowd, but, luckily, of no importance.”
“I hope,” said Sir Lawrence, “that Jack is not making the mistake of thinking young Desert is one.”
“Muskham’s never met a bright young thing. No; what gets his goat about Desert is the look of his face. It’s a deuced strange face.”
“Lost angel,” said Sir Lawrence. “‘Spiritual pride, my buck!’ Something fine about it.”
Yule nodded. “I don’t mind it myself; and his verse is good. But all revolt’s anathema to Muskham. He likes mentality clipped, with its mane plaited, stepping delicately to the snaffle.”
“I don’t know,” murmured Sir Lawrence, “I think those two might like each other, if they could shoot each other first. Queer people, we English!”
CHAPTER 14
When, about the same time that afternoon, Adrian entered his brother’s parish and traversed the mean street leading to the Vicarage of St. Augustine’s-in-the-Meads, English people were being almost too well illustrated six doors round the corner.
An ambulance stood in front of a house without a future, and all who had something better to do were watching it. Adrian made one of the party. From the miserable edifice two men and a nurse were bearing the stretched-out body of a child, followed by a wailing, middle-aged, red-faced woman and a growling, white-faced man with a drooping moustache.
“What’s up?” said Adrian to a policeman.
“The child’s got to have an operation. You’d think she was goin’ to be murdered, instead of havin’ the best that care can give her. There’s the Vicar. If he can’t quiet ’em, no one can.”
Adrian saw his brother come out of the house and join the white-faced man. The growling ceased, but the woman’s wails increased. The child was ensconced by now in the ambulance, and the mother made an unwieldly rush at its door.