each other all their lives? He had it from Blanche (with her second
refusal) that she was not, and never had been, engaged. And a fellow who
only wrote to her once in a year--still, they must have been darned
intimate, and this funny affair would bring them together again quicker
than anything.
Say, what a funny affair it was when you came to think of it! Funny all
through, it now struck Toye; beginning on board ship with that dream of
Cazalet's about the murdered man, leading to all that talk of the old
grievance against him, and culminating in his actually finding the
implements of the crime in his inspired efforts to save the man of whose
innocence he was so positive. Say, if that Cazalet had not been on his
way home from Australia at the time!
Like many deliberate speakers, Toye thought like lightning, and had
reached this point before he was a hundred yards from the hotel; then he
thought of something else, and retraced his steps. He retraced them even
to the table at which he had sat with Cazalet not very many minutes ago;
the waiter was only now beginning to clear away.
"Say, waiter, what have you done with the menu that was in that
toast-rack? There was something on it that we rather wanted to keep."
"I thought there was, sir," said the English waiter at that admirable
hotel. Toye, however, prepared to talk to him like an American uncle of
Dutch extraction.
"You thought that, and you took it away?"
"Not at all, sir. I 'appened to observe the other gentleman put the
menu in his pocket, behind your back as you were getting up, because I
passed a remark about it to the head waiter at the time!"
IX
FAIR WARNING
It was much more than a map of the metropolis that Toye carried in his
able head. He knew the right places for the right things, from his
tailor's at one end of Jermyn Street to his hatter's at the other, and
from the man for collars and dress shirts, in another of St. James', to
the only man for soft shirts, on Piccadilly. Hilton Toye visited them
all in turn this fine September morning, and found the select team
agreeably disengaged, readier than ever to suit him. Then he gazed
critically at his boots. He was not so dead sure that he had struck the
only man for boots. There had been a young fellow aboard the _Kaiser
Fritz_, quite a little bit of a military blood, who had come ashore in
a pair of cloth tops that had rather unsettled Mr. Toye's mind just on
that one point.
He thought of this young fellow when he was through with the soft-shirt
man on Piccadilly. They had diced for a drink or two in the
smoking-room, and Captain Aylmer had said he would like to have Toye see
his club any time he was passing and cared to look in for lunch. He had
said so as though he would like it a great deal, and suddenly Toye had a
mind to take him at his word right now. The idea began with those boots
with cloth tops, but that was not all there was to it; there was
something else that had been at the back of Toye's mind all morning, and
now took charge in front.
Aylmer had talked some about a job in the war office that enabled him to
lunch daily at the Rag; but what his job had been aboard a German
steamer Toye did not know and was not the man to inquire. It was no
business of his, anyway. Reference to a card, traded for his own in
Southampton Water, and duly filed in his cigarette-case, reminded him of
the Rag's proper style and title. And there he was eventually
entertained to a sound, workmanlike, rather expeditious meal.
"Say, did you see the cemetery at Genoa?" suddenly inquired the visitor
on their way back through the hall. A martial bust had been admired
extravagantly before the question.
"Never want to see it again, or Genoa either," said Captain Aylmer. "The
smoking-room's this way."
"I judge you didn't care a lot about the city?" pursued Toye as they
found a corner.
"Genoa? Oh, I liked it all right, but you get fed up in a couple of
days neither ashore nor afloat. It's a bit amphibious. Of course you can
go to a hotel, if you like; but not if you're only a poor British
soldier."
"Did you say you were there two days?" Toye was cutting his cigar as
though it were a corn.
"Two whole days, and we'd had a night in the Bay of Naples just before."
"Is that so? I only came aboard at Genoa. I guess I was wise," added
Toye, as though he was thinking of something else. There was no sort of
feeling in his voice, but he was sucking his left thumb.
"I say, you've cut yourself!"
"I guess it's nothing. Knife too sharp; please don't worry, Captain
Aylmer. I was going to say I only got on at Genoa, and they couldn't
give me a room to myself. I had to go in with Cazalet; that's how I saw
so much of him."
It was Toye's third separate and independent attempt to introduce the
name and fame of Cazalet as a natural topic of conversation. Twice his
host had listened with adamantine politeness; this time he was enjoying
quite the second-best liqueur brandy to be had at the Rag; and he leaned
back in his chair.
"You were rather impressed with him, weren't you?" said Captain Aylmer.
"Well, frankly, I wasn't, but it may have been my fault. It does rather
warp one's judgment to be shot out to Aden on a potty job at this time
o' year."
So that was where he had been? Yes, and by Jove he had to see a man
about it all at three o'clock.
"One of the nuts," explained Captain Aylmer, keeping his chair with fine
restraint. Toye rose with finer alacrity. "I hope you won't think me
rude," said the captain, "but I'm afraid I really mustn't keep him
waiting."
Toye said the proper things all the way to the hat-stand, and there took
frontal measures as a last resort. "I was only going to ask you one
thing about Mr. Cazalet," he said, "and I guess I've a reason for
asking, though there's no time to state it now. What did you think of
him, Captain Aylmer, on the whole?"
"Ah, there you have me. 'On the whole' is just the difficulty," said
Aylmer, answering the straight question readily enough. "I thought he
was a very good chap as far as Naples, but after Genoa he was another
being. I've sometimes wondered what happened in his three or four days
ashore."
"Three or _four_, did you say?"
And at the last moment Toye would have played Wedding Guest to Aylmer's
Ancient Mariner.
"Yes; you see, he knew these German boats waste a couple of days at
Genoa, so he landed at Naples and did his Italy overland. Rather a good
idea, I thought, especially as he said he had friends in Rome; but we
never heard of 'em beforehand, and I should have let the whole thing
strike me a bit sooner if I'd been Cazalet. Soon enough to take a
hand-bag and a tooth-brush, eh? And I don't think I should have run it
quite so fine at Genoa, either. But there are rum birds in this world,
and always will be!"
Toye felt one himself as he picked his way through St. James' Square. If
it had not been just after lunch, he would have gone straight and had a
cocktail, for of course he knew the only place for _them_. What he did
was to slue round out of the square, and to obtain for the asking, at
another old haunt, on Cockspur Street, the latest little time-table of
continental trains. This he carried, not on foot but in a taxi, to the
Savoy Hotel, where it kept him busy in his own room for the best part of
another hour. But by that time Hilton Toye looked more than an hour
older than on sitting down at his writing-table with pencil, paper and
the little book of trains; he looked horrified, he looked distressed,
and yet he looked crafty, determined and immensely alive. He proceeded,
however, to take some of the life out of himself, and to add still more
to his apparent age, by repairing for more inward light and leading to a
Turkish bath.
Now the only Turkish bath, according to Hilton Toye's somewhat
exclusive code, was not even a hundred yards from Cazalet's hotel; and
there the visitor of the morning again presented himself before the
afternoon; now merely a little worn, as a man will look after losing a
stone an hour on a warm afternoon, and a bit blue again about the chin,
which of course looked a little deeper and stronger on that account.
Cazalet was not in; his friend would wait, and in fact waited over an
hour in the little lounge. An evening paper was offered to him; he took
it listlessly, scarcely looked at it at first, then tore it in his
anxiety to find something he had quite forgotten--from the newspaper
end. But he was waiting as stoically as before when Cazalet arrived in
tremendous spirits.
"Stop and dine!" he cried out at once.
"Sorry I can't; got to go and see somebody," said Hilton Toye.
"Then you must have a drink."
"No, I thank you," said Toye, with the decisive courtesy of a total
abstainer.
"You look as if you wanted one; you don't look a bit fit," said Cazalet
most kindly.
"Nor am I, sir!" exclaimed Toye. "I guess London's no place for me in
the fall. Just as well, too, I judge, since I've got to light out again
straight away."
"You haven't!"
"Yes, sir, this very night. That's the worst of a business that takes
you to all the capitals of Europe in turn. It takes you so long to flit
around that you never know when you've got to start in again."
"Which capital is it this time?" said Cazalet. His exuberant geniality
had been dashed very visibly for the moment. But already his high
spirits were reasserting themselves; indeed, a cynic with an ear might
have caught the note of sudden consolation in the question that Cazalet
asked so briskly.
"Got to go down to Rome," said Toye, watching the effect of his words.
"But you've just come back from there!" Cazalet looked no worse than
puzzled.
"No, sir, I missed Rome out; that was my mistake, and here's this
situation been developing behind my back."
"What situation?"
"Oh, why, it wouldn't interest you! But I've got to go down to Rome,
whether I like it or not, and I don't like it any, because I don't have
any friends there. And that's what I'm doing right here. I was wondering
if you'd do something for me, Cazalet?"
"If I can," said Cazalet, "with pleasure." But his smiles were gone.
"I was wondering if you'd give me an introduction to those friends of
yours in Rome!"
There was a little pause, and Cazalet's tongue just showed between his
lips, moistening them. It was at that moment the only touch of color in
his face.
"_Did_ I tell you I'd any friends there?"
The sound of his voice was perhaps less hoarse than puzzled. Toye made
himself chuckle as he sat looking up out of somber eyes.
"Well, if you didn't," said he, "I guess I must have dreamed it!"
X
THE WEEK OF THEIR LIVES
"Toye's gone back to Italy," said Cazalet. "He says he may be away only
a week. Let's make it the week of our lives!"
The scene was the little room it pleased Blanche to call her parlor, and
the time a preposterously early hour of the following forenoon. Cazalet
might have 'planed down from the skies into her sunny snuggery, though
his brand-new Burberry rather suggested another extravagant taxicab. But
Blanche saw only his worn excited face; and her own was not at its best
in her sheer amazement.
If she had heard the last two sentences, to understand them at the time
she would have felt bound to take them up first, and to ask how on earth
Mr. Toye could affect her plans or pleasures. But such was the effect of
the preceding statement that all the rest was several moments on the way
to her comprehension, where it arrived, indeed, more incomprehensible
than ever, but not worth making a fuss about then.
"Italy!" she had ejaculated meanwhile. "_When_ did he go?"
"Nine o'clock last night."
"But"--she checked herself--"I simply can't understand it, that's all!"
"Why? Have you seen him since the other afternoon?"
His manner might have explained those other two remarks, now bothering
her when it was too late to notice them; on the other hand, she was by
no means sure that it did. He might simply dislike Toye, and that again
might explain his extraordinary heat over the argument at Littleford.
Blanche began to feel the air somewhat heavily charged with
explanations, either demanded or desired; they were things she hated,
and she determined not to add to them if she could help it.
"I haven't set eyes on him again," she said. "But he's been seen
here--in a taxi."
"Who saw him?"
"Martha--if she's not mistaken."
This was a little disingenuous, as will appear; but that impetuous Sweep
was in a merciful hurry to know something else.
"When was this, Blanche?"
"Just about dark--say seven or so. She owns it was about dark," said
Blanche, though she felt ashamed of herself.
"Well, it's just possible. He left me about six; said he had to see
some one, too, now I think of it. But I'd give a bit to know what he was
doing, messing about down here at the last moment!"
Blanche liked this as little as anything that Cazalet had said yet, and
he had said nothing that she did like this morning. But there were
allowances to be made for him, she knew. And yet to strengthen her
knowledge, or rather to let him confirm it for her, either by word or by
his silence, she stated a certain case for him aloud.
"Poor old Sweep!" she laughed. "It's a shame that you should have come
home to be worried like this."
"I am worried," he said simply.
"I think it's just splendid, all you're doing for that poor man, but
especially the way you're doing it."
"I wish to God you wouldn't say that, Blanche!"
He paid her the compliment of speaking exactly as he would have spoken
to a man; or rather, she happened to be the woman to take it as a
compliment.
"But I do say it, Sweep! I've heard all about it from Charlie. He rang
me up last night."
"You're on the telephone, are you?"
"Everybody is in these days. Where have you lived? Oh, I forgot!" And
she laughed. Anything to lift this duet of theirs out of the minor key!
"But what does old Charlie really think of the case? That's more to the
point," said Cazalet uneasily.
"Well, he seemed to fear there was no chance of bail before the
adjourned hearing. But I rather gathered he was not going to be in it
himself?"
"No. We decided on one of those sportsmen who love rushing in where a
family lawyer like Charlie owns to looking down his nose. I've seen the
chap, and primed him up about old Savage, and our find in the
foundations. He says he'll make an example of Drinkwater, and Charlie
says they call him the Bobby's Bugbear!"
"But surely he'll have to tell his client who's behind him?"
"No. He's just the type who would have rushed in, anyhow. And it'll be
time enough to put Scruton under obligations when I've got him off!"
Blanche looked at the troubled eyes avoiding hers, and thought that she
had never heard of a fine thing being done so finely. This very
shamefacedness appealed to her intensely, and yet last night Charlie had
said that old Sweep was in such tremendous spirits about it all! Why was
he so down this morning?
She only knew she could have taken his hand, but for a very good reason
why she could not. She had even to guard against an equivocally
sympathetic voice or manner, as she asked, "How long did they remand him
for?"
"Eight days."
"Well, then, you'll know the best or the worst to-day week!"
"Yes!" he said eagerly, almost himself again. "But, whichever way it
goes, I'm afraid it means trouble for me, Blanche; some time or other
I'll tell you why; but that's why I want this to be the week of our
lives."
So he really meant what he had said before. The phrase had been no
careless misuse of words; but neither, after all, did it necessarily
apply to Mr. Toye. That was something. It made it easier for Blanche not
to ask questions.
Cazalet had gone out on the balcony; now he called to her; and there
was no taxi, but a smart open car, waiting in the road, its brasses
blazing in the sun, an immaculate chauffeur at the wheel.
"Whose is that, Sweep?"
"Mine, for the week I'm talking about! I mean ours, if you'd only buck
up and get ready to come out! A week doesn't last forever, you know!"
Blanche ran off to Martha, who fussed and hindered her with the best
intentions. It would have been difficult to say which was the more
excited of the two. But the old nurse would waste time in perfectly
fatuous reminiscences of the very earliest expeditions in which Mr.
Cazalet had lead and Blanche had followed, and what a bonny pair they
had made even then, etc. Severely snubbed on that subject, she took to
peering at her mistress, once her bairn, with furtive eagerness and
impatience; for Blanche, on her side, looked as though she had something
on her mind, and, indeed, had made one or two attempts to get it off.
She had to force it even in the end.
"There's just one thing I want to say before I go, Martha."
"Yes, dearie, yes?"
"You know when Mr. Toye called yesterday, and I was out?"
"Oh, Mr. Toye; yes, I remember, Miss Blanche."
"Well, I don't want you to say that he came in and waited half an hour
in vain; in fact, not that he came in at all, or that you're even sure
you saw him, unless, of course, you're asked."
"Who should ask me, I wonder?"
"Well, I don't know, but there seems to be a little bad blood between
Mr. Toye and Mr. Cazalet."
Martha looked for a moment as though she were about to weep, and then
for another moment as though she would die of laughing. But a third
moment she celebrated by making an utter old fool of herself, as she
would have been told to her face by anybody but Blanche, whose yellow
hair was being disarranged by the very hands that had helped to imprison
it under that motor-hat and veil.
"Oh, Blanchie, is that all you have to tell me?" said Martha.
And then the week of their lives began.
XI
IN COUNTRY AND IN TOWN
The weather was true to them, and this was a larger matter than it might
have been. They were not making love. They were "not out for that," as
Blanche herself actually told Martha, with annihilating scorn, when the
old dear looked both knowing and longing-to-know at the end of the first
day's run. They were out to enjoy themselves, and that seemed shocking
to Martha "unless something was coming of it." She had just sense enough
to keep her conditional clause to herself.
Yet if they were only out to enjoy themselves, in the way Miss Blanche
vowed and declared (more shame for her), they certainly had done wonders
for a start. Martha could hardly credit all they said they had done, and
as an embittered pedestrian there was nothing that she would "put past"
one of those nasty motors. It said very little for Mr. Cazalet, by the
way, in Martha's private opinion, that he should take her Miss Blanche
out in a car at all; if he had turned out as well as she had hoped, and
"meant anything," a nice boat on the river would have been better for
them both than all that tearing through the air in a cloud of smoky
dust; it would also have been much less expensive, and far more "the
thing".
But, there, to see and hear the child after the first day! She looked so
bonny that for a time Martha really believed that Mr. Cazalet had
"spoken," and allowed herself to admire him also as he drove off later
with his wicked lamps alight. But Blanche would only go on and on about
her day, the glories of the Ripley Road and the grandeur of Hindhead.
She had brought back heaps of heather and bunches of leaves just
beginning to turn; they were all over the little house before Cazalet
had been gone ten minutes. But Blanche hadn't forgotten her poor old
Martha; she was not one to forget people, especially when she loved and
yet had to snub them. Martha's portion was picture post-cards of the
Gibbet and other landmarks of the day.
"And if you're good," said Blanche, "you shall have some every day, and
an album to keep them in forever and ever. And won't that be nice when
it's all over, and Mr. Cazalet's gone back to Australia?"
Crueller anticlimax was never planned, but Martha's face had brought it
on her; and now it remained to make her see for herself what an
incomparably good time they were having so far.
"It was a simply splendid lunch at the Beacon, and _such_ a tea at
Byfleet, coming back another way," explained Blanche, who was
notoriously indifferent about her food, but also as a rule much hungrier
than she seemed to-night. "It must be that tea, my dear. It was _too_
much. To-morrow I'm to take the _Sirram_, and I want Walter to see if he
can't get a billy and show me how they make tea in the bush; but he says
it simply couldn't be done without methylated."
The next day they went over the Hog's Back, and the next day right
through London into Hertfordshire. This was a tremendous experience. The
car was a good one from a good firm, and the chauffeur drove like an
angel through the traffic, so that the teeming city opened before them
from end to end. Then the Hertfordshire hedges and meadows and timber
were the very things after the Hog's Back and Hindhead; not so
wonderful, of course, but more like old England and less like the bush;
and before the day was out they had seen, through dodging London on the
way back, the Harrow boys like a lot of young butlers who had changed
hats with the maids, and Eton boys as closely resembling a convocation
of slack curates.
Then there was their Buckinghamshire day--Chalfont St. Giles and
Hughenden--and almost detached experiences such as the churchyard at
Stoke Poges, where Cazalet repeated astounding chunks of its _Elegy_,
learned as long ago as his preparatory school-days, and the terrible
disillusion of Hounslow Heath and its murderous trams.
Then there was the wood they found where gipsies had been camping, where
they resolved that moment to do the same, just exactly in every detail
as Cazalet had so often done it in the bush; so that flesh and flour
were fetched from the neighboring village, and he sat on his heels and
turned them into mutton and damper in about a minute; and after that a
real camp-fire till long after dark, and a shadowy chauffeur smoking his
pipe somewhere in the other shadows, and thinking them, of course, quite
mad. The critic on the hearth at home thought even worse of them than
that. But Blanche only told the truth when she declared that the whole
thing had been her idea; and she might have added, a bitter
disappointment to her, because Walter simply would not talk about the
bush itself, and never had since that first hour in the old empty
schoolroom at Littleford.
(By the way, she had taken to calling him Walter to his face.)
Of other conversation, however, there was not and never had been the
slightest dearth between them; but it was, perhaps, a sad case of
quantity. These were two outdoor souls, and the one with the interesting
life no longer spoke about it. Neither was a great reader, even of the
papers, though Blanche liked poetry as she liked going to church; but
each had the mind that could batten quite amiably on other people. So
there was a deal of talk about neighbors down the river, and some of it
was scandal, and all was gossip; and there was a great deal about what
Blanche called their stone-age days, but again far less about
themselves when young than there had been at Littleford, that first day.
And so much for their conversation, once for all; it was frankly that of
two very ordinary persons, placed in an extraordinary position to which
they had shut their eyes for a week.
They must have had between them, however, some rudimentary sense of
construction; for their final fling, if not just the most inspiring, was
at least unlike all the rest. It was almost as new to Blanche, and now
much more so to Cazalet; it appealed as strongly to their common stock
of freshness and simplicity. Yet cause and effect were alike undeniably
lacking in distinction. It began with cartloads of new clothes from
Cazalet's old tailor, and it ended in a theater and the Carlton.