A fair-bearded, red-faced, blue-eyed, grinning giant got out of the
train and catching sight of us ran up and laid a couple of great
sun-glazed hands on my shoulders.
"Hullo! hullo! hullo!" he shouted, and gripping Adrian in his turn,
shouted it again. He made such an uproar that people stuck wondering
heads out of the carriage windows. Then he thrust himself between us,
linked our arms in his and made us charge with him down the quiet
country platform. A porter followed with his suit-case.
"Why didn't you tell me that the Man of Fame was with you?"
"I thought I'd give you a pleasant surprise," said I.
"I met Robson of the Embassy in Constantinople--you remember Robson of
Pembroke--fussy little cock-sparrow--he'd just come from England and was
full of it. You seem to have got 'em in the neck. Bully! Bully!"
Adrian took advantage of the narrow width of the exit to release himself
and I, who went on with Jaffery, looking back, saw him rub himself
ruefully, as though he had been mauled by a bear.
"And how's everybody?" Jaffery's voice reverberated through the subway.
"Barbara and the fairy grasshopper? I'm longing to see 'em. That's the
pull of being free. You can adopt other fellows' wives and families. I'm
coming home now to my adopted wife and daughter. How are they?"
I answered explicitly. He boomed on till we reached the station yard,
where his eye fell upon a familiar object.
"What?" cried he. "Have you still got the Chinese Puffhard?"
The vehicle thus disrespectfully alluded to was an ancient, ancient car,
the pride of many a year ago, which sentiment (together with the
impossibility of finding a purchaser) would not allow me to sell. It had
been a splendid thing in those far-off days. It kept me in health. It
made me walk miles and miles along unknown and unfrequented roads. In
the aggregate I must have spent months of my life doing physical culture
exercises underneath it. You got into it at the back; it was about ten
feet high, and you started it at the side by a handle in its midriff.
But I loved it. It still went, if treated kindly. Barbara loathed it and
insulted it, so that with her as passenger, it sulked and refused to go.
But Susan's adoration surpassed even mine. Its demoniac groans and
rattles and convulsive quakings appealed to her unspoiled sense of
adventure.
"Barbara has gone away with the Daimler," said I, "and as I don't keep a
fleet of cars, I had to choose between this and the donkey-cart. Get in
and don't be so fastidious--unless you're afraid--"
He took no account of my sarcasm. His face fell. He made no attempt to
enter the car.
"Barbara gone away?"
I burst out laughing. His disappointment at not being welcomed by
Barbara at Northlands was so genuine and so childishly unconcealed.
"She'll be back in time for lunch. She had to run up to town on
business. She sent you her love and Susie will do the honours."
His face brightened. "That's all right. But you gave me a shock.
Northlands without Barbara--" He shook his head.
We drove off. The Chinese Puffhard excelled herself, and though she
choked asthmatically did not really stop once until we were half way up
the drive, when I abandoned her to the gardeners, who later on harnessed
the donkey to her and pulled her into the motor-house. We dismounted,
however, in the drive. A tiny figure in a blue smock came scuttling over
the sloping lawn. The next thing I saw was the small blue patch
somewhere in the upland region of Jaffery's beard. Then boomed forth
from him idiotic exclamations which are not worth chronicling,
accompanied by a duet of bass and treble laughter. Then he set her
astride of his bull neck and pitched his soft felt hat to Adrian to
hold.
"Hang on to my hair. It won't hurt," he commanded.
She obeyed literally, clawing two handfuls of his thick reddish shock in
her tiny grasp, and Jaffery lumbered along like an elephant with a robin
on his head, unconscious of her weight. We mounted to the terrace in
front of the house and having established my guests in easy chairs, I
went indoors to order such drink as would be refreshing on a sultry
August noon. When I returned I found Jaffery, with Susan on his knee,
questioning Adrian, after the manner of a primitive savage, on the
subject of "The Diamond Gate," and Adrian, delighted at the opportunity,
dazzling our simple-minded friend with publisher's statistics.
"And you're writing another? Deep down in another?" asked Jaffery. "Do
you know, Susie, Uncle Adrian has just got to take a pen and jab it into
a piece of paper, and--tchick!--up comes a golden sovereign every time
he does it."
Susan turned her serene gaze on Adrian. "Do it now," she commanded.
"I haven't got a pen," said he.
"I'll fetch you one from Daddy's study," she said, sliding from
Jaffery's knee.
Both Jaffery and Adrian looked scared. I, who was not the father of a
feminine thing of seven years old for nothing, interposed, I think,
rather tactfully.
"Uncle Adrian can only do it with a great gold pen, and poor old daddy
hasn't got one."
"I call that silly," replied my daughter. "Uncle Jaffery, have you got
one?"
"No," said he, "You have to be born, like Uncle Adrian, with a golden
pen in your mouth."
The lucky advent of the Archangel Gabriel, with a grin on his face and a
doll in his mouth--the Archangel Gabriel, commonly known as Gabs, and so
termed on account of his archi-angelic disposition, a hideous mongrel
with a white patch over one eye and a brown patch over the other, with
the nose of a collie and the legs of a Great Dane and the tail of a
fox-terrier, whose mongreldom, however, Adrian repudiated by the bold
assertion that he was a Zanzibar bloodhound--the lucky advent of this
pampered and over-affectionate quadruped directed Susan's mind from the
somewhat difficult conversation. She ran off, forthwith, to the rescue
or her doll; but later (I heard) her nurse was sore put to it to explain
the mystery of the golden pen.
"So much for Adrian. I'm tired of the auriferous person," said I, waving
a hand. "What about yourself? What about the dynamic widow?"
"Oh, damn the dynamic widow," he replied, corrugating his serene and
sunburnt forehead. "I've come down here to forget her. I'll tell you
about her later." Then he grinned, in his silly, familiar way, showing
two rows of astonishingly white, strong teeth, between the hair on lip
and chin.
"Well," said I, "at any rate give some account of yourself. What were
you doing in Albania, for instance?"
"Prospecting," said he.
"In what--gold, coal, iron?"
"War," said he. "There's going to be a hell of a bust-up one of these
days--and one of these days very soon--in the Balkans. From Scutari to
Salonica to Rodosto, the whole blooming triangle--it's going to be a
battlefield. The war correspondent who goes out there not knowing his
ground will be a silly ass. The slim statesman like me won't. See? So
poor old Prescott--you must know Prescott of Reuter's?--anyhow that was
the chap--poor old Prescott and I went out exploring. When he pegged out
with enteric I hadn't finished, so I dumped his widow down at Cettinje
where I have some pals, and started out again on my own. That's all."
He filled another pint tumbler with the iced liquid (one always had to
provide largely for Jaffery's needs) and poured it down his throat.
"I don't call that a very picturesque account of your adventures," said
Adrian.
Jaffery grinned. "I'll tell you all sorts of funny things, if you'll
give me time," said he, wiping his lips with a vast red and white
handkerchief about the size of a ship's Union Jack.
But we did not give him time; we plied him with questions and for the
next hour he entertained us pleasantly with stories of his wanderings.
He had a Rabelaisian way of laughing over must of his experiences, even
those which had a touch of the gruesome, and the laughter got into his
speech, so that many amusing episodes were told in the roars of a
hilarious lion.
Presently the familiar sound of the horn announced the return of
Barbara. We sprang to our feet and descended to meet the car at the
front porch. Jaffery, grinning with delight, opened the door, appeared
to lift a radiant Barbara out of the car like a parcel and almost hugged
her. And there they stood holding on to each other's hands and smiling
into each other's faces and saying how well they looked, regardless of
the fact that they were blocking the way for Doria, who remained in the
car, I had to move them on with the reminder that they had the whole
week-end for their effusions. Adrian helped Doria to alight, and to
Doria then, for the first time, was presented Jaffery Chayne. Jaffery
blinked at her oddly as he held her little gloved fingers in his
enormous hand. And, indeed, I could excuse him; for she was a very
striking object to come suddenly into the immediate range of a man's
vision, with her chiffon and her slenderness, and her black hat beneath
which her great eyes shone from the startling, nervous, ivory-white
face.
She smiled on him graciously. "I'm so glad to meet you." Then after a
fraction of a second came the explanation. "I've heard so much of you."
He murmured something into his beard. Meeting his childlike gaze of
admiration, she turned away and put her arm round Barbara's waist. The
ladies went indoors to take off their things, accompanied by Adrian, who
wanted a lover's word with Doria on the way. Jaffery followed her with
his eyes until she had disappeared at the corner of the hall-stairs.
Then he took me by the arm and led me up towards the terrace.
"Who is that singularly beautiful girl?" he asked.
"Doria Jornicroft," said I.
"She's the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in my life."
"I wouldn't find her too astonishing, if I were you," said I with a
laugh, "because there might be complications. She's engaged to Adrian."
He dropped my arm. "Do you mean--she's going to marry him?"
"Next month," said I.
"Well, I'm damned," said Jaffery. I asked him why. He did not enlighten
me. "Isn't he a lucky devil?" he asked, instead. "The most
pestilentially lucky devil under the sun. But why the deuce didn't you
tell me before?"
"You expressed such a distaste for female women that we thought we would
give you as long a respite as possible."
"That's all very well," he grumbled. "But if I had known that Adrian's
fiancée was knocking around I'd have lumped her in my heart with Barbara
and Susie."
"You're not prevented from doing that now," said I.
His brow cleared. "True, sonny." He broke into a guffaw. "Fancy old
Adrian getting married!"
"I see nothing funny in it," said I. "Lots of people get married. I'm
married."
"Oh, you--you were born to be married," he said crushingly.
"And so are you," I retorted.
"I? I tie myself to the stay-strings of a flip of a thing in petticoats,
whom I should have to swear to love, honour and obey--?"
"My good fellow," I interrupted, "it is the woman who swears obedience."
"And the man practises it. Ho! Ho! Ho!"
His laughter (at this very poor repartee) so resounded that the
adventitious cow, in the field some hundred yards away, lifted her tail
in the air and scampered away, in terror.
"And as to the stay-strings, to continue your delicate metaphor, you can
always cut them when you like."
"Yes. And then there's the devil to pay. She shows you the ends and
makes you believe they're dripping blood and tears. Don't I know 'em?
They're the same from Cape Horn to Alaska, from Dublin to Rio."
He bellowed forth his invective. He had no quarrel with marriage as an
institution. It was most useful and salutary--apparently because it
provided him, Jaffery, with comfortable conditions wherein to exist. The
multitude of harmless, necessary males (like myself) were doomed to it.
But there was a race of Chosen Ones, to which he belonged, whose
untamable and omni-concupiscent essence kept them outside the dull
conjugal pale. For such as him, nineteen hundred women at once,
scattered within the regions of the seven circumferential seas. He loved
them all. Woman as woman was the joy of the earth. It was only the silly
spectrum of civilisation that broke Woman up into primary
colours--black, yellow, brunette, blonde--he damned civilisation.
"To listen to you," said I, when he paused for breath, "one would think
you were a devil of a fellow."
"I am," he declared. "I'm a Universalist. At any rate in theory, or
rather in the conviction of what best suits myself. I'm one of those men
who are born to be free, who've got to fill their lungs with air, who
must get out into the wilds if they're to live--God! I'd sooner be
snowed up on a battlefield than smirk at a damned afternoon tea-party
any day in the week! If I want a woman, I like to take her by her hair
and swing her up behind me on the saddle and ride away with her--"
"Lord! That's lovely," said I. "How often have you done it?"
"I've never done that exactly, you silly ass," said he. "But that's my
attitude, my philosophy. You see how impossible it would be for me to
tie myself for life to the stay-strings of one flip of a thing in
petticoats."
"You're a blessed innocent," said I.
Adrian sauntering through the French window of my library joined us on
the terrace. Jaffery, forgetful of his attitude, his philosophy, caught
him by the shoulders and shook him in pain-dealing exuberance. Old
Adrian was going to be married. He wished him joy. Yet it was no use his
wishing him joy because he already had it--it was assured. That
exquisite wonder of a girl. Adrian was a lucky devil, a pestilentially
lucky devil. He, Jaffery, had fallen in love with her on sight. . . .
"And if I hadn't told him that Miss Jornicroft was engaged to you," said
I, "he would have taken her by the hair of her head and swung her up
behind him on the saddle and ridden away with her. It's a little way
Jaffery has."
In spite of sunburn, freckles and pervading hairiness of face, Jaffery
grew red.
"Shut up, you silly fool!" said he, like the overgrown schoolboy that he
was.
And I shut up--not because he commanded, but because Barbara, like
spring in deep summer, and Doria, like night at noontide, appeared on
the terrace.
Soon afterwards lunch was announced. By common conspiracy Jaffery and
Susan upset the table arrangements, insisting that they should sit next
each other. He helped the child to impossible viands, much to my wife's
dismay, and told her apocalyptic stories of Bulgaria, somewhat to her
puzzledom, but wholly to her delight. But when he proposed to fill her
silver mug (which he, as godfather, had given her on her baptism) with
the liquefied dream of Paradise that Barbara, _sola mortalium_, can
prepare, consisting of hock and champagne and fruits and cucumber and
borage and a blend of liqueurs whose subtlety transcends human thought,
Barbara's Medusa glare petrified him into a living statue, the crystal
jug of joy poised in his hand.
"Why mayn't I have some, mummy?"
"Because Uncle Jaff's your godfather," said I. "And your mother's
hock-cup is a sinful lust of the flesh. Spare the child and fill up your
own glass."
"Don't you know," said Barbara, "that this is Berkshire, not the
Balkans? We don't intoxicate infants here to make a summer holiday!"
At this rebuke he exchanged winks with my daughter, and refusing a
handed dish of cutlets asked to be allowed to help himself to some cold
beef on the sideboard. The butler's assistance he declined. No Christian
butler could carve for Jaffery Chayne. After a longish absence he
returned to the table with half the joint on his plate. Susan regarded
it wide-eyed.
"Uncle Jaff, are you going to eat all that?" she asked in an audible
whisper.
"Yes, and you too," he roared, "and mummy and daddy and Uncle Adrian, if
I don't get enough to eat!"
"And Aunt Doria?"
Again he reddened--but he turned to Doria and bowed.
"In my quality of ogre only--a _bonne bouche_," said he.
It was said very charmingly, and we laughed. Of course Susan began the
inevitable question, but Barbara hurriedly notified some dereliction
with regard to gravy, and my small daughter was, so to speak, hustled
out of the conversation. Jaffery by way of apology for his Gargantuan
appetite discoursed on the privations of travel in uncivilised lands. A
lump of sour butter for lunch and a sardine and a hazelnut for dinner.
We were to fancy the infinite accumulation of hunger-pangs. And as he
devoured cold beef and talked, Doria watched him with the somewhat aloof
interest of one who stands daintily outside the railed enclosure of a
new kind of hippopotamus.
The meal over we sought the deep shade of the terrace which faces due
east. Jaffery, in his barbaric fashion, took Doria by the elbow and
swept her far away from the wistaria arbour beneath which the remaining
three of us were gathered, and when he fondly thought he was out of
earshot, he set her beside him on the low parapet. My wife, with the
responsibilities of all the Chancelleries of Europe knitted in her brow,
discussed wedding preparations with Adrian. I, to whom the quality of
the bath towels wherewith Adrian and his wife were to dry themselves and
that of the sheets between which their housemaid was to lie, were
matters of black and awful indifference, gave my more worthily applied
attention to one of a new brand of cigars, a corona corona, that had its
merits but lacked an indefinable soul-satisfying aroma; and I was on the
pleasurable and elusive point of critical formulation, when Jaffery's
voice, booming down the terrace, knocked the discriminating nicety out
of my head. I lazily shifted my position and watched the pair.
"You're subtle and psychological and introspective and analytic and all
that," Jaffery was saying--his light word about an ogre at lunch was not
a bad one; sitting side by side on the low parapet they looked like a
vast red-bearded ogre and a feminine black-haired elf--she had taken off
her hat--engaged in a conversation in which the elf looked very much on
the defensive--"and you're always tracking down motives to their roots,
and you're not contented, like me, with the jolly face of things--"
"For an accurate diagnosis," I reflected, "of an individual woman's
nature, the blatant universalist has his points."
"Whereas, I, you see," he continued, "just buzz about life like a
dunderheaded old bumble-bee. I'm always busting myself up against glass
panes, not seeing, as you would, the open window a few inches off. Do
you see what I'm driving at?"
Apparently she didn't; for while she was speaking, he threw away his
corona corona--a dream of a cigar for nine hundred and ninety-nine men
out of a thousand (I glanced at Adrian who had religiously preserved two
inches of ash on his)--and hauled out pipe and tobacco-pouch. I could
not hear what she said. When she had finished, he edged a span nearer.
"What I want you to understand," said he, "is that I'm a simple sort of
savage. I can't follow all these intricate henry Jamesian complications
of feeling. I've had in my life"--he stuck pouch and pipe on the stone
beside him--"I've had in my life just a few men I've loved--I don't
count women--men--men I've cared for, God knows why. Do you know why one
cares for people?"
She smiled, shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.
"The latest was poor Prescott--he has just pegged out--you'll hear soon
enough about Prescott. There was Tom Castleton--has Adrian told you
about Castleton--?"
Again she shook her head.
"He will--of course--a wonder of a fellow--up with us at Cambridge. He's
dead. There only remains Hilary, our host, and Adrian."
As far as I could gather--for she spoke in the ordinary tones of
civilised womanhood, whereas Jaffery, under the impression that he was
whispering confidentially, bellowed like an honest bull--as far as I
could gather, she said:
"You must have met hundreds of men more sympathetic to you than Mr.
Freeth and Adrian."
"I haven't," he cried. "That's the funny devil of it. I haven't. If I
was struck a helpless paralytic with not a cent and no prospect of
earning a cent, I know I could come to those two and say, 'Keep me for
the rest of my life'--and they would do it"
"And would you do the same for either of them?"
Jaffery rose and stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and towered
over her.
"I'd do it for them and their wives and their children and their
children's children."
He sat down again in confusion at having been led into hyperbole. But he
took her shoulders in his huge but kindly hands, somewhat to her
alarm--for, in her world, she was not accustomed to gigantic males
laying unceremonious hold of her--
"All I wanted to convey to you, my dear girl, is this--that if Adrian's
wife won't look on me as a true friend, I'm ready to go away and cut my
throat"
Doria smiled at him with pretty civility and assured him of her
willingness to admit him into her inner circle of friends; whereupon he
caught up his pouch and pipe and lumbered down the terrace towards us,
shouting out his news.
"I've fixed it up with Doria"--he turned his head--"I can call you
Doria, can't I?" She nodded permission--what else could she do? "We're
going to be friends. And I say, Barbara, they'll want a wedding-present.
What shall I give 'em? What would you like?"
The latter question was levelled direct at Doria, who had followed
demurely in his footsteps. But it was not answered; for from the
drawing-room there emerged Franklin, the butler, who marched up straight
to Jaffery.
"A lady to see you, sir"
"A lady? Good God! What kind of a lady?"
He stared at Franklin, in dismay.
"She came in a taxi, sir. The driver mistook the way, and put her down
at the back entrance. She would not give her name."
"Tall, rather handsome, dressed in black?"
"Yes, sir."
"Lord Almighty!" cried Jaffery, including us all in the sweep of a
desperate gaze. "It's Liosha! I thought I had given her the slip."
Barbara rose, and confronted him. "And pray who is Liosha?"
Adrian hugged his knee and laughed:
"The dynamic widow," said he.
"I'll go and see what in thunder she wants," said Jaffery.
But Barbara's eyes twinkled. "You'll do nothing of the sort. She has no
business to come running after you like this. She must be taught
manners. Franklin, will you show the lady out here?"
She drew herself up to her full height of five feet nothing, thereby
demonstrating the obvious fact that she was mistress in her own house.
Presently Franklin reappeared.
"Mrs. Prescott," said he.