The College stood not far from Culmouth Cathedral, the biggest building
of the many that surrounded the open grass patch of the Cathedral Green.
It was a restored Georgian house, well in keeping with its
surroundings, and with a square paved court at the back shaded by
immense elm-trees.
Julian Rossiter always went up the shallow stone steps that led to the
big green double door with a sense of satisfaction.
The satisfaction, however, from an artistic point of view, diminished
sensibly and at an ever-increasing rate as he penetrated to the inside
of the dignified red and white exterior.
The large square hall was paved with uncovered stones, and surrounded
by doors of varnished deal, each bearing an announcement in staring
white letters.
"Nearly eleven o'clock," said Mark Easter. "Do you want to look in
at the classes, Sir Julian? Fuller is probably giving a lesson till
eleven."
Sir Julian signed assent, and the two men turned to the stairs, also of
uncarpeted stone.
On the first floor, which produced the same aspect of chilly
cleanliness, a door was held open from the inside by a wooden kitchen
chair, revealing the interior of Classroom No. V., which bore the
white-lettered announcement, "Demonstration Room."
A monotonous female voice, raised to a high, expressionless monotone,
came from beside the large blackboard facing a double row of desks and
forms.
"Gay lengthened for the final syllable _ture_--li-ga-ture. _Through_
the line for a third-place vowel. Is that quite clear?"
An expressionless murmur of assent came in reply.
"Once again then, please, and without putting in the vowels. Are you
ready? Take the same words down again and the vowels to be indicated by
the placing of the outline."
"Aperture--adventure--ligature----"
"Classroom pretty nearly full," said Mark under his breath. "There are
always more students of shorthand than anything else."
"Who's giving the dictation?"
"Miss Farmer."
"It's an uneducated pronunciation. I wish we could get a better class
of teacher."
"Young Cooper is pretty good. He takes French and accountancy and
book-keeping."
"Cooper has two gifts to a degree which I have never seen equalled,"
Sir Julian said grimly. "He has a genius for extracting a personal
application from everything he hears or sees, and he is firmly
convinced that his every action, trivial or otherwise, is worthy of
comment."
Five minutes later an opportunity presented itself for immediate
verification of this pleasing summary.
Brisk, snub-nosed and sandy-haired, Cooper emerged bustling from "No.
II., Book-keeping," just as Mark and Sir Julian turned away from No. V.
"Good morning, Sir Julian. Good morning. I thought you'd be in to-day."
"Is Fuller disengaged?"
"I think so--let me consult my watch." Cooper shot into view a rather
bony wrist with a large watch on it. "I see by my wrist-watch that it's
just on eleven. Let me pop it out of sight again. Fuller will be in his
room, I fancy, but I'll go and find him at once, Sir Julian, and tell
him you're here. I'm just on my way down now, to put these books away.
I'll look into Fuller's room on my way past."
"Thanks," said Julian laconically.
Cooper hastened ahead of them, murmuring as he went:
"I'll just give a knock on Fuller's door, and look in to say Sir
Julian's here, and then I can get rid of all these books ... down the
stairs, and one hand on the books so that they don't slip from under my
arm...."
In an incredibly short space of time he had sped up the stairs again
and made the rather self-evident announcement:
"Run up again to let you know Fuller's there, Sir Julian. I thought I'd
let you know, so I ran up again."
"Right. See you at the meeting, I suppose, Cooper?"
"Yes, Sir Julian. I think I've always attended every meeting since we
first opened here. Half-past eleven, the meeting this morning; that
gives me just half an hour. I leave you here, then, and turn off to
the locker room.... Dear me, a sneeze is coming: now, can I get at a
handkerchief in time?"
They left him rehearsing the procedure of his sneeze in a sub-audible
manner.
"That boy always reminds me of a curate," said Sir Julian unkindly.
In the ground-floor room where the Supervisor sat intrenched behind an
enormous table piled with papers, the subject of the vacant post of
Lady Superintendent was embarked upon.
"The girl I wrote to you about from London, Sir Julian, is practically
a lady," said Fuller, in a very earnest manner, fixing a pair of black,
straight-gazing eyes on his chief. "In a general way, I wouldn't
have a girl who is a lady on the staff for anything you could offer
me, but this one has had three years' experience in Southampton Row,
and has the highest testimonials, and certificates for shorthand and
typewriting and a diploma for French."
"What salary does she want?" said Mark Easter.
"She'd take the figure we decided on, because she wants to come to the
west of England."
"A hundred-and-twenty and exes?"
"That's right."
"Free to come at once?"
"To-morrow, if we want her."
"That's good. She's prepared to undertake a certain amount of tuition,
and supervision of the staff, of course?"
"Quite."
"Well, Sir Julian," said Mark Easter, turning to him, "shall we put it
to the directors?"
Sir Julian made no immediate reply, and Fuller, nothing if not intent
upon his business, laid both arms upon the paper-bestrewn table, leant
well forward, and began in an earnest and expostulating tone:
"I see you're hesitating, sir. I wish you could have had a personal
interview with the young lady, for I really was most favourably
impressed--most favourably. As I say, a superior young woman is always
an influence, if there's no nonsense about her, and Miss Marchrose
certainly has none, so far as I could judge. Of course, sir, the
decision rests with you, but I must say I should like to give her a
trial. I believe we might do worse."
"What sort of age is she?"
"She told me she was twenty-eight," said Fuller, with a grin that
revealed dazzling teeth in his swarthy face, and thereby considerably
increased his already marked resemblance to a Southern State negro.
"I should have preferred an older woman."
"I doubt if she'll ever see thirty again, sir," said Fuller simply.
"Well, Fuller, I know you've the interests of the College very
much at heart, and I'm quite willing to give her a trial on your
recommendation," said Julian. "We'll put it before the directors at the
meeting."
"Thank you, Sir Julian. I thought you'd probably trust my judgment,"
Fuller remarked, with satisfaction. "And I don't think you will regret
it. She struck me as being a thorough woman of business, most capable,
and as hard as nails."
At this final qualification Sir Julian looked rather glum, irresistibly
reminded of the heroine of that episode which had wrought so much havoc
in the household of his wife's relatives.
"However," he remarked to Mark Easter, as they went towards the
committee-room at the appointed hour, "I really do trust Fuller's
judgment, so far as the good of the College goes, though I haven't his
own implicit belief in his absolute infallibility."
"He thinks the whole show rests on him," said Mark Easter, and added
with belated justice, "And for the matter of that, I really don't know
where we should get another man like him. He's a nailer for work."
"I hope his protégée will be a success. If he talks to the directors
about her being practically a lady, as distinguished, I suppose, from a
'young lady in business,' he'll fetch that old snob Bellew."
"He probably won't mention it," said Mark Easter shrewdly. "He looks
upon it as a disadvantage in the abstract, but he told me yesterday
that he thought he could explain it if any objection were raised."
"Fuller would think he could explain it," Sir Julian rejoined drily,
"if the creation of the world were in question."
The committee-room was a long, low annexe to the main body of the
building, with the usual green-baize covered table placed lengthways
down the middle of the room, mahogany chairs at regular intervals round
it, an armchair at the head for the chairman, and on the table the
usual disposition of clean blotting-paper, pencils, note-books, and a
carafe of water covered with an inverted glass.
A clock ticked on the chimneypiece.
Young Cooper was the sole occupant of the room, and observed brightly,
"No one has arrived yet, sir, but I see the clock gives it as two
minutes to the half-hour."
"Got an agenda there, Cooper?" said Mark, and proceeded to study the
typewritten slip of paper.
Sir Julian went to the chair at the head of the table.
He also looked idly at the agenda, listening the while with the rather
revolted fascination with which young Cooper's peculiar style of
sub-audible self-communion always inspired him.
"I must move my chair or pull down the blind--sun coming right in
through the window. If I lift it--so--that oughtn't to interfere with
anyone else. Just caught the edge of the carpet, though--that won't
do ... put the chair-leg down on it, and then we're all right."
"Now, Sir Julian, it's just striking the half-hour."
"I hear it."
"So do I," agreed Cooper agreeably, as the clock on the chimneypiece
chimed loudly. "I'm just going to the window, to see if Mr. Bellew's
car is in sight."
Having, as usual, suited the action to the word, Cooper was shortly
able to announce that the car was there, and that he would come back to
the table and see if the blotting-paper was straight.
"They'll draw on it," he said mournfully. "They always do. That's a
thing I couldn't do myself, even if I weren't taking down the Minutes.
I couldn't pay attention if I were drawing."
They did draw on the blotting-paper.
Sir Julian, leaning back at the head of the table, giving only half his
attention to the meeting, which followed lines so habitual as to have
become almost routine, watched with idle amusement the verification of
Cooper's resignedly doleful prophecies.
Old Alderman Bellew, oily and apoplectic, made meaningless circles and
semi-circles with a pencil grasped between the swollen knuckles of
his first and second fingers, and only glanced up once or twice as a
question of finance was touched upon by Fuller, Financial Secretary to
the College as well as Supervisor of Classes.
Another director was yawning almost unconcealedly, until, catching the
eye of the chairman, he assumed an expression of acute concern and
hastily inserted a forefinger into his still open mouth as though in
search of an aching tooth. This simple manœuvre was apparent to Sir
Julian, and his eyes half involuntarily met Mark Easter's laughing blue
ones in an instant's exchange of silent amusement.
Julian looked down again at his own share of blotting-paper, left
immaculate in deference to Cooper's feelings, and his thoughts dwelt
upon Mark Easter.
He thought of the good-looking, light-hearted fellow that Mark had
been all his life, of his casual marriage, embarked upon out of pure
good-nature, with a woman older than himself, and for no better reasons
than the ones that he had once put forward, half apologetically, to
Julian himself.
"She was having such a rotten time when I met her in Ireland--no one
ever asked her to dance, and the other girls all seemed to be younger
and prettier and having more fun. I used to take her for drives, you
know, and then dance with her in the evenings; and upon my word, I was
the only chap that ever took any notice of her, I do believe. And I
really did want to settle down and have a home, and it somehow seemed
more likely she'd take me than one of the pretty little fly-aways who
could get all the fun they wanted before settling down. She was by way
of being a good housekeeper, too, and fond of kids. I'm fond of kids
myself," said Mark Easter wistfully.
Sir Julian wondered, not for the first time, how long that fondness had
survived the shrieking, stamping, bullying era inaugurated by Ruthie,
and the whining, unwashed, question-asking proclivities of her junior.
Mark Easter never spoke of his children except with a sort of
apologetic tolerance, but neither was he often to be seen in their
company.
He was agent to the Rossiter estate, and more often found about his
work and at the College in Culmouth than in his untidy, servant-ridden,
mistressless house.
Julian's thoughts turned for an unwilling moment to the recollection
of the rapidly-growing gossip that had saddled Mark Easter, ten
years ago, with an alternatively morphomaniac, drug-taking inebriate
or homicidally insane partner. To his own ever-increasing, silent
certainty that disaster threatened the only human being whom he cared
for in the world, to Mark's haggard face and prolonged absences from
home.
Then to a grey dawn, when Mark had ridden up to ask in three
inarticulate words for help that Julian had given in almost unbroken
silence. Mrs. Easter had gone away, and there was no more occasion for
furtive surmise, for everyone knew at last that she had been steadily
drinking her way into the home for inebriates that now had sheltered
her for more than seven years.
And Mark, with an elasticity at which Julian had never yet ceased to
marvel, had recovered his habit of easy laughter, his keen interest in
his work, his old enthusiasm for the Commercial and Technical College
schemes.
Sir Julian secretly admired and envied his almost childlike absorption
in the College. He sent sidelong glances from time to time at Mark's
keen, handsome face, at the shrewdness of the gaze which he kept upon
each speaker.
Fairfax Fuller--never was there a worse misnomer, thought Julian,
with a grim half-smile, as he looked at his swarthy-faced
subordinate--Fairfax Fuller might have made a good speaker--say, a
political agent. Kept to his facts, always sound, and with a weight of
personal conviction that told. But there was nothing to look interested
about, Julian reflected, as Mark Easter was looking interested.
Fuller always put forward the same arguments: for a better class of
teacher, for an extension of advertisement, always with the same
implication of his own indispensability as managing Supervisor.
Alderman Bellew was tedious, obviously only speaking at all so as to
impress the fact of his presence on his fellow-directors, and Mark
Easter said nothing, until Miss Marchrose's application for the post of
Lady Superintendent was brought forward by Fuller.
The discussion of the appointment was merely formal, and Sir Julian
gave it formal sanction.
"I think that concludes our business for to-day, gentlemen. Thank you
all very much."
The chairman rose.
"Anything else you want me for, Fuller?" he enquired, as the meeting
dispersed.
"I don't think so, thank you, sir," said Fuller, with a manifest air of
dissatisfaction.
Sir Julian, knowing his Supervisor, lingered.
"Lady Rossiter has kindly asked the members of the staff out to
Culmhayes on Sunday, Sir Julian."
Sir Julian looked quite as much annoyed as did Mr. Fuller.
Few things were, in the opinion either of the Supervisor or of his
employer, less to be commended than Lady Rossiter's benevolent attempts
at keeping in touch with the staff of the College.
Appearances, however, were discreetly maintained.
"I hope as many of them will come as care for the walk," said Sir
Julian, with gloomy civility.
"I am sure they will be delighted, and it will make a nice beginning
for Miss Marchrose on her first Sunday."
Sir Julian walked away even gloomier than before at the recollection
that his wife's hospitality would not improbably be extended to the
perpetrator of the outrage which had driven Captain Clarence Isbister
to such extreme demonstrations of despair.
"Do you happen to remember--did you notice--what that woman's Christian
name was?" he enquired of Mark Easter.
"The new Superintendent?"
"Yes."
"Let me see. I saw her letter to Fuller--something unusual.... Was it
Pauline?"
"I thought so," said Sir Julian.
It was characteristic both of Sir Julian's dislike to anything
which came, in his opinion, under the extremely elastic heading of
officiousness, and of the care with which he had impressed his dislike
upon Mark Easter, that his companion did not ask him why he thus
dejectedly took for granted the name bestowed at baptism upon Miss
Marchrose. Mark Easter, talkative and open-hearted, was yet the only
man from whom Sir Julian said that he had never received an officious
enquiry or an unasked offer of assistance.
If the remark might be looked upon as a form of the highest
commendation, it was one which Sir Julian had never yet shown any
disposition to make in regard to his wife.
Nothing had as yet persuaded Edna Rossiter of the inadvisability of
addressing personalities to a man whose surface cynicism was used
to cloak extreme sensitiveness, and whose bitterness of speech was
the outcome of such disillusionment of spirit as comes only to those
capable of an idealism as delicate as it is reserved.
"Are you going home, Mark, or will you lunch at the club?"
"The club," said Mark decidedly, with an intonation that brought
before Sir Julian's inner vision a lively picture of the probable
congealed mutton, underdone potatoes, the lumpy milk-pudding of Sarah's
providing, doubtless to be consumed to an accompaniment of senseless
comments and enquiries from Ruthie and Ambrose on the engrossing
subject of "Why, Ben! A Story of the Sexes." As the thought crossed his
mind, Mark observed:
"Iris is coming down here later on. Of course, she wants to be in
London for the publication of her novel, but that won't be out till the
winter, she says. Poor girl! I wish people would not put it into her
head that it is her duty to come and look after me and the children at
intervals."
"Who does put it into her head?"
"Various old aunts. I wish people would mind their own business. Poor
Iris hates the country."
"Is she still living in the flat?"
"Yes, with another girl. I believe they sleep in the boot-hole and
do their own cooking, but it's all a great success, and Iris is very
happy, and has the sort of Bohemian society she likes. It is a much
better arrangement than her being down here with me. I'm not sure,"
said Mark thoughtfully, "that I approve of relations living together
after they are grown-up."
Sir Julian agreed with him so cordially as to suggest that the case in
point was emphatically one in which the proposed arrangement would be
eminently undesirable.
"I don't know that Iris, devoted though she is to them, is the best
possible person to be with the children."
"No," said Julian, with restraint, considering his private opinion to
be that if anything on earth could render Mark Easter's progeny more
insufferable than nature and the maternal shortcomings had already made
them, it was the society of their affected, suburban, and distinctly
underbred young relative. It was a source of continual wonder to him,
what sort of a person the second Mrs. Easter could have been, to
have presented Mark with such a half-sister as the twenty-year-old
perpetrator of "Why, Ben!"
The conclusion, long ago come to by him, that Mark had been afflicted
with the most intolerable set of relations ever owned by man, was
destined to be furnished with yet another proof of validity at the end
of the day.
As the two men came back across the fields of Sir Julian's property
late in the afternoon, Mark whistling under his breath and Julian
silent in the comfortable companionship of long association and mutual
understanding, a sound of hoarse, ceaseless yelling that could have
been produced by no other human larynx than that of Mark Easter's
daughter came from the garden of the villa.
"I'm afraid that's Ruthie," said her parent, sensibly slackening his
pace.
"I'm certain it is."
Ruthie was bent double across the dangerously creaking top bar of the
wooden paling.
She raised a face, flushed and distorted, indeed, as much from her
unnatural position as from her vocal efforts, but unstained by tears,
and proclaimed aloud:
"Daddy, Peekaboo has been such a naughty boy. Sarah is putting him
to bed and I'm singing so that he can hear me from the night-nursery
window. He has written up in ink all over the drawing-room door, and
the dining-room door, and the nursery door, 'The two best books in the
world are "Why, Ben!" and the Bible.'"