III

Arthur remembered the bridge and the lake now that he saw them again.

He had had some vague recollection of an immense sheet of water and

an equally immense bridge that he had vaguely connected--he thought,

mistakenly--with his boyhood visits to Hartling. The only other thing

he remembered was a colossal elephant's pad in the hall. He found it

still there, and in the interval of twenty years, it had diminished

less than the lake. The detail of the house itself had apparently left

little impression on his boyish mind. As he glanced round the hall, he

had an uncertain feeling of being familiar with that massive staircase,

but he had no idea how the rooms were placed.

His bags had gone round to some other entrance with the car; and as he

gave his keys to the butler Arthur realised the splendid support of his

expensive outfit. It made a difference, gave him assurance, a sense of

being at home in these surroundings. That outfit was worth the money if

only for the one week-end. It would have been absolutely rotten to have

spent his whole time in trying to live down shabby clothes.

There seemed to be a perfect crowd of people in the room into which he

was shown by the butler after having elected to go straight in to tea.

He presumed it was a regular week-end party.

His aunt got up when he was announced and came across the room to greet

him. She was a little tired-looking woman with a distinct likeness to

his own mother, who had died in the first year of the war. He had

always attributed that gray, pinched, slightly distracted air, in his

mother's case, to the difficulties of life in a country parish on

insufficient means; but as his aunt had the same air it was probably a

family characteristic.

Mrs Kenyon's voice and manner also reminded him of his mother.

"How you've altered, Arthur," she said in a low, even voice.

"In twenty years, aunt," he reminded her cheerfully, "one grows a

certain amount."

"I've seen you since then," she said quietly, "in town. Your poor

mother brought you to see me off at Charing Cross: your first year at

the hospital, I think it was. Now, come and have some tea."

She led him towards the tea-table as she spoke, and introduced him

in passing to her husband, a bald, rather untidy man, who was lying

back in an arm-chair. "How're you?" he said indifferently to the newly

recovered nephew. "Little chap in knickerbockers, about three foot

nothing, last time I saw you."

Arthur smiled his acknowledgment of this reminiscence with, he hoped,

an effect of not caring whether he was remembered or not. These people

were certainly not effusive; but probably this was their usual manner.

The more money you had the less you troubled about manners and personal

appearance. His uncle had been wearing a soft, rather crumpled collar

and old flannel bags. Miss Kenyon, the eldest of the family, was

presiding at the tea-table. She was a tall, white-haired woman of sixty

or so, with what Arthur mentally described to himself as a "domineering

expression." She hardly smiled as she shook hands with him.

"I remember your first visit here very well," she said, and he grasped

at the opportunity to avoid the usual futilities of an opening

conversation.

"Only the vaguest recollection of it myself, Miss Kenyon," he replied

brightly, as he accepted the tea she offered him. "I dare say

that's because my earlier memories have been rather overlaid by the

experiences of the last six years." He felt that he had taken rather a

sound line. He could see chances of quite good talking ahead, supported

by a backing of medical and psychological authority.

Miss Kenyon, however, cut him off by saying in her cold, clear voice,

"One wouldn't expect you to remember much, you were only five."

He couldn't believe it. "Oh! surely a lot more than that," he

protested. "About nine or ten, I thought."

"Jubilee year," Miss Kenyon affirmed quietly, but with an air of final

authority. "In August."

Arthur did not care to contradict her again, but he was still

unconvinced. "Was it really?" he asked. "Astonishing how one forgets!"

Miss Kenyon was not to be deceived by this simulation of agreement.

"Don't you remember, Hannah?" she asked, turning to her sister-in-law,

who had sat down near them, and was apparently brooding over the

emptiness of life.

Mrs Kenyon started. "Remember, Esther? Oh! when Arthur came before,"

she said. "Not very distinctly, I am afraid. But he was quite a little

fellow, in a holland tunic. I remember that because he got himself very

dirty one morning, and poor Emily hadn't got a change for him."

Miss Kenyon nodded calmly. "In any case," she remarked, "we can verify

the date without difficulty. I shall have a note of it in my diary."

"Esther is always accurate in her facts," her sister-in-law murmured.

"Her memory is simply wonderful."

Miss Kenyon did not acknowledge this compliment. She was looking out

through the great bay-window that was one of the principal features

of the room in which they were sitting. Her expression was one of

conscious authority--supreme, unquestionable.

Arthur felt snubbed, and, for the moment could think of no other

suitable topic of conversation. Perhaps it would be advisable to admit

that he was wrong, before he tried another subject.

"Stupid of me," he tried. "But as I was saying just now, the

experiences of the past few years have rather altered one's scale of

values. I probably mixed up my visit here with some other visit I paid

with my mother when I was a bit older. One does that, sometimes."

He paused. Miss Kenyon was regarding him with a quiet, detached

interest. It was evident that she had no further intention of

interrupting him if he cared to go on talking, but that he must not

expect any sort of response.

Arthur dropped his thesis with a slight sense of irritation and turned

to his aunt.

"Aren't there some cousins of mine I ought to know?" he asked.

She indicated her two children with what Arthur thought to be a

singular lack of enthusiasm. "That is Hubert by the fireplace.

Elizabeth is over there in the window. I will introduce you to them

when you have finished your tea."

Arthur took stock of his two cousins with attention. He was beginning

to wonder if he were not in for an uncommonly depressing week-end. His

observations of the third generation did little to reassure him.

Hubert was a young man of about twenty-five, with a long, melancholy

face. He was dressed in rough tweeds, and wearing cloth gaiters, that

gave him the look of a man whose interests lay among horses. And in

Arthur's experience men who talked about horses were quite unable to

talk about anything else. Elizabeth, a rather pretty girl, probably two

or three years younger than her brother, was more interesting, but she,

too, had the same expression of lassitude.

Arthur, still brightly aware of his newly recovered youth, felt as if

he would like to take her by the arm and run with her out into the

sunlight; shake her, make her sing and dance, force her to show some

signs of enjoying her consciousness of life.

"And the little man talking to Hubert, who is he?" Arthur had no urgent

desire to hurry the introduction to his cousins, and he was thoroughly

enjoying the various cakes provided for tea.

He had not tasted cakes like these since the war. Also, Miss Kenyon had

now gone from the table and left the room, and he felt more free to

talk. Aunt Hannah might be rather dull but she was at least reasonably

polite.

"That's Charles Turner," she told him. "He married Mr Kenyon's second

daughter, Katherine--she's over there in the window by Elizabeth.

Charles is the uncle of the present Lord Greening, you know."

Arthur did not know, but he nodded as he replied, "Are they staying

here for the week-end?"

"Oh! no," Mrs Kenyon said. "We all live here. There is no one from

outside here this week-end--except yourself."

Was that the reason for their tepidity? Arthur reflected. He was some

one "from the outside" intruding upon the family circle. Perhaps, in

spite of their wealth, the Kenyon family mixed very little with the

outside world. They were a complete group living within the enceinte

of that ten-foot brick wall, self-sufficient, and it might be a little

self-conscious in the presence of a stranger. That general air of

lassitude and of--there was some other element in it that he could not

quite define--might be the effect of shyness which, as he knew, often

took strange forms. Not that Miss Kenyon had appeared to suffer from

any known form of shyness. She was evidently an overbearing woman.

"You're quite a large family party, aunt," he commented to keep the

conversation going.

Mrs Kenyon blinked as if he had in some way touched upon a sore

subject. She gave, however, no hint of that in her reply. "And there's

Eleanor, whom you haven't seen yet," she said. "She acts as a sort of

secretary to Mr Kenyon. She's the daughter of James, the second son. He

and his wife are both dead, and so is their elder daughter Margery."

She looked at her son as she added, "Charles and Katherine have a

son too, but he does not live with us. He is acting as a clerk to a

stockbroker. Quite a good position, I believe. Have you finished your

tea? I am sure Hubert is waiting to talk to you."

"All but, aunt," Arthur said. "Sorry to bother you with all these

questions, but I want to know who's who to begin with. And Mr Kenyon?

He isn't down here of course."

"He never takes tea," Mrs Kenyon said; "and we don't see a great deal

of him at any time. I don't mean that he is in any way an invalid or a

recluse, you know, but at his age...."

"Oh! precisely," Arthur agreed. His aunt's sentence had tailed out into

nothing, in much the same tone as that of the chauffeur when he had

hesitated over precisely the same words. At his age.... The inference

undoubtedly was that anything might happen when a man reaches the age

of ninety-one.

"He keeps awfully fit, though, doesn't he?" Arthur went on.

"Yes. He's remarkably well and active ..." his aunt replied, paused

again, and then concluded firmly, "but you will see him at dinner."

Arthur noted again that effect of some unstated contingent.

Possibly his aunt, also, was a trifle uneasy about the old man's health.

"I've really finished at last, Aunt Hannah," he said, with a smile.

She did not return the smile, but rose at once with an appearance of

relief. Arthur felt as if he ought to apologise for having bored her.

His cousin Hubert greeted him, as Arthur had expected, without

enthusiasm. He turned almost at once to the Hon. Charles Turner, hoping

that there he might perhaps find some kind of response.

Turner was a small man whose age might have been anything between sixty

and seventy, but he at least, obviously took trouble over his dress,

and his rather elvish face was crinkled into an expression that gave

promise of a rather satirical humour. Once or twice Arthur had caught

Turner's gaze resting upon him with a slightly quizzical look.

"You've gone in for medicine, I hear," Turner began, and without

waiting for a reply, continued: "Depressing kind of profession, isn't

it? Always listening to other people's complaints?"

Arthur had never considered that aspect of the doctor's life. "Oh! I

don't know," he said. "There are other things besides diagnosis. I

mean...."

"Oh! quite," Turner cut in; "but you're always with sick people. That's

what you're for. Don't you find yourself getting in the way of looking

at every one as a possible patient?"

"Lord, no," Arthur replied, laughing. "You don't get so wrapped up in

it as all that."

"_You_ don't, perhaps," Turner said. "You're young yet, and I dare say

you can drop your work when you are away from it. But I know a fellow,

a Harley Street specialist, great authority on the heart...."

"Sir Stephen Hunt?" Arthur put in.

"That's the chap," Turner agreed. "Well, he's a terrible fellow. You'll

see him looking round a dinner table and spotting symptoms. I remember

sitting near him at dinner one night, and after the women had gone, he

leant over to me and said, 'D'you know how long Lady Spendale has been

suffering from'--let's see what did he call it--some sort of goitre?"

"Exophthalmic, possibly," Arthur supplied.

"I believe it was. She had rather protuberant eyes, I remember."

"That's it," Arthur confirmed him.

"Well, naturally I didn't even know she'd got it, if she had," Turner

continued. "But what I mean is--ghastly sort of life to lead, always

trying to spot something wrong with people's hearts or what not. Now,

d'you mean to tell me honestly that you can help looking out for

symptoms like that, more or less? Supposing I'd got protuberant eyes,

for instance?"

"That's such a frightfully obvious thing," Arthur objected. "As a

matter of fact, there aren't so many diseases that can be diagnosed

like that at sight. And--and--well, one rather gets out of the way of

looking for them when one's off duty. As a student, I'll admit, one

did a certain amount of showing off; kind of a game, you know, trying

to spot the symptoms you'd just been reading up. But one soon dropped

that."

"H'm! Well! And so you like doctoring, do you? Got a practice, or

what?" Turner asked.

"No, nothing at the moment," Arthur said. "I've been helping a friend

down in Peckham, but I've chucked that for the time being."

"Loose end? What?" Turner inquired.

"Got some notion of going to Canada," Arthur said.

Turner pursed his mouth and looked down at his neat patent-leather

shoes. "Fine climate and splendid opportunities there," he commented

softly. "Free, open-air life and all that sort of thing. Just suit a

vigorous young chap like you, I should say."

Hubert Kenyon, who had been gloomily listening to the conversation

without attempting to join in it, drew a long breath and exhaled it in

a deep sigh.

"That how you feel about it?" Arthur inquired.

"I? Oh! How d'you mean?" Hubert asked.

"Blowing a bit, weren't you, at the mention of Canada?" Arthur said.

"Oh! That! I don't know," Hubert replied, without throwing much light

on the meaning of his sigh.

The conversation was dropping again. Arthur felt the silence coming,

and did not care. He was a guest and it was the family's duty to

entertain him. But what was the matter with them all? Or with him?

He looked down the room. Miss Kenyon had come back, and they were all

sitting about, reading or working in an uninterested kind of way--doing

something or other as if it did not matter whether the thing was

done or not. What was it the place and the people reminded him of?

Yes! It was that boarding-house he had stayed in at Scarborough one

winter. He had been there for a week with his mother. But that was a

very different kind of place, and those were very different people.

This room was beautifully designed and furnished, and these relations

and connections of his were all rich and presumably care-free.

Nevertheless there was something that reminded him of that Scarborough

boarding-house. Something in the pose of those indifferently diligent

women, perhaps?

The voice of Hubert broke in on his meditations.

"I don't know what we're waiting here for?" he said. "Care to come and

have a look at the garden?"

"Thanks. Yes, I should," Arthur replied cheerfully.

He had it now. They all had the effect of waiting for something; for

some climax, or change, or interruption; of waiting interminably for

some known or unknown crisis that might never develop. Mr Turner was

politely yawning as he stooped to pick up the _Times_.