It came into Mr. Direck's head that for a whole day he had scarcely given a thought to Mamie Nelson. And now he was thinking of her—calmly. Why shouldn't one think of Mamie Nelson calmly?
She was a proud imperious thing. There was something Southern in her. Very dark blue eyes she had, much darker than Miss Corner's....
But how tortuous she had been behind that outward pride of hers! For four years she had let him think he was the only man who really mattered in the world, and all the time quite clearly and definitely she had deceived him. She had made a fool of him and she had made a fool of the others perhaps—just to have her retinue and play the queen in her world. And at last humiliation, bitter humiliation, and Mamie with her chin in the air and her bright triumphant smile looking down on him.
Hadn't he, she asked, had the privilege of loving her?
She took herself at the value they had set upon her.
Well—somehow—that wasn't right....
All the way across the Atlantic Mr. Direck had been trying to forget her downward glance with the chin up, during that last encounter—and other aspects of the same humiliation. The years he had spent upon her! The time! Always relying upon her assurance of a special preference for him. He tried to think he was suffering from the pangs of unrequited love, and to conceal from himself just how bitterly his pride and vanity had been rent by her ultimate rejection. There had been a time when she had given him reason to laugh in his sleeve at Booth Wilmington.
Perhaps Booth Wilmington had also had reason for laughing in his sleeve....
Had she even loved Booth Wilmington? Or had she just snatched at him?...
Wasn't he, Direck, as good a man as Booth Wilmington anyhow?...
For some moments the old sting of jealousy rankled again. He recalled the flaring rivalry that had ended in his defeat, the competition of gifts and treats.... A thing so open that all Carrierville knew of it, discussed it, took sides.... And over it all Mamie with her flashing smile had sailed like a processional goddess....
Why, they had made jokes about him in the newspapers!
One couldn't imagine such a contest in Matching's Easy. Yet surely even in Matching's Easy there are lovers.
Is it something in the air, something in the climate that makes things harder and clearer in America?...
Cissie—why shouldn't one call her Cissie in one's private thoughts anyhow?—would never be as hard and clear as Mamie. She had English eyes—merciful eyes....
That was the word—merciful!
The English light, the English air, are merciful....
Merciful....
They tolerate old things and slow things and imperfect apprehensions. They aren't always getting at you....
They don't laugh at you.... At least—they laugh differently....
Was England the tolerant country? With its kind eyes and its wary sidelong look. Toleration. In which everything mellowed and nothing was destroyed. A soft country. A country with a passion for imperfection. A padded country....
England—all stuffed with soft feathers ... under one's ear. A pillow—with soft, kind Corners ... Beautiful rounded Corners.... Dear, dear Corners. Cissie Corners. Corners. Could there be a better family?
Massachusetts—but in heaven....
Harps playing two-steps, and kind angels wrapped in moonlight.
Very softly I and you,
One turn, two turn, three turn, too.
Off we go!....
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE ENTERTAINMENT OF MR. DIRECK REACHES A CLIMAX
§ 1
Breakfast was in the open air, and a sunny, easy-going feast. Then the small boys laid hands on Mr. Direck and showed him the pond and the boats, while Mr. Britling strolled about the lawn with Hugh, talking rather intently. And when Mr. Direck returned from the boats in a state of greatly enhanced popularity he found Mr. Britling conversing over his garden railings to what was altogether a new type of Britisher in Mr. Direck's experience. It was a tall, lean, sun-bitten youngish man of forty perhaps, in brown tweeds, looking more like the Englishman of the American illustrations than anything Mr. Direck had met hitherto. Indeed he came very near to a complete realisation of that ideal except that there was a sort of intensity about him, and that his clipped moustache had the restrained stiffness of a wiry-haired terrier. This gentleman Mr. Direck learnt was Colonel Rendezvous. He spoke in clear short sentences, they had an effect of being punched out, and he was refusing to come into the garden and talk.
"Have to do my fourteen miles before lunch," he said. "You haven't seen Manning about, have you?"
"He isn't here," said Mr. Britling, and it seemed to Mr. Direck that there was the faintest ambiguity in this reply.
"Have to go alone, then," said Colonel Rendezvous. "They told me that he had started to come here."
"I shall motor over to Bramley High Oak for your Boy Scout festival," said Mr. Britling.
"Going to have three thousand of 'em," said the Colonel. "Good show."
His steely eyes seemed to search the cover of Mr. Britling's garden for the missing Manning, and then he decided to give him up. "I must be going," he said. "So long. Come up!"
A well-disciplined dog came to heel, and the lean figure had given Mr. Direck a semi-military salutation and gone upon its way. It marched with a long elastic stride; it never looked back.
"Manning," said Mr. Britling, "is probably hiding up in my rose garden."
"Curiously enough, I guessed from your manner that that might be the case," said Mr. Direck.
"Yes. Manning is a London journalist. He has a little cottage about a mile over there"—Mr. Britling pointed vaguely—"and he comes down for the week-ends. And Rendezvous has found out he isn't fit. And everybody ought to be fit. That is the beginning and end of life for Rendezvous. Fitness. An almost mineral quality, an insatiable activity of body, great mental simplicity. So he takes possession of poor old Manning and trots him for that fourteen miles—at four miles an hour. Manning goes through all the agonies of death and damnation, he half dissolves, he pants and drags for the first eight or ten miles, and then I must admit he rather justifies Rendezvous' theory. He is to be found in the afternoon in a hammock suffering from blistered feet, but otherwise unusually well. But if he can escape it, he does. He hides."
"But if he doesn't want to go with Rendezvous, why does he?" said Mr. Direck.
"Well, Rendezvous is accustomed to the command of men. And Manning's only way of refusing things is on printed forms. Which he doesn't bring down to Matching's Easy. Ah! behold!"
Far away across the lawn between two blue cedars there appeared a leisurely form in grey flannels and a loose tie, advancing with manifest circumspection.
"He's gone," cried Britling.
The leisurely form, obviously amiable, obviously a little out of condition, became more confident, drew nearer.
"I'm sorry to have missed him," he said cheerfully. "I thought he might come this way. It's going to be a very warm day indeed. Let us sit about somewhere and talk.
"Of course," he said, turning to Direck, "Rendezvous is the life and soul of the country."
They strolled towards a place of seats and hammocks between the big trees and the rose garden, and the talk turned for a time upon Rendezvous. "They have the tidiest garden in Essex," said Manning. "It's not Mrs. Rendezvous' fault that it is so. Mrs. Rendezvous, as a matter of fact, has a taste for the picturesque. She just puts the things about in groups in the beds. She wants them, she says, to grow anyhow. She desires a romantic disorder. But she never gets it. When he walks down the path all the plants dress instinctively.... And there's a tree near their gate; it used to be a willow. You can ask any old man in the village. But ever since Rendezvous took the place it's been trying to present arms. With the most extraordinary results. I was passing the other day with old Windershin. 'You see that there old poplar,' he said. 'It's a willow,' said I. 'No,' he said, 'it did used to be a willow before Colonel Rendezvous he came. But now it's a poplar.'... And, by Jove, it is a poplar!"...