Cliffe Kennedy, entering the Tube at Charing Cross, caught sight of Mr
Otto Redbury between the bobbing hats and swaying bodies that crowded up
the carriage; and immediately pushed his way to a strap which directly
overhung that gentleman’s head.
Cliffe always asserted that on the occasion Deb took him to call, he had
discovered a tricky fascination about Mr Redbury; this was clearly an
opportunity to refresh the emotion.
Otto waved the evening paper at him, in jubilant greeting.
“Anozzer vamous fictory!”
“The little grandchild Wilhelmine has made the phrase immortal,” murmured
Cliffe. “How lucky for her that she rhymed with village green.”
Otto looked uneasy; not comprehending the reference, but wishing that
somebody had informed the young man that the Redbury grandchild was
better referred to in public as Minnie. He changed the subject.
“You live somevere on zis line, Mr Gennedy? I get out at Pelzize Bark.”
“Oooo ... nice!” gurgled Cliffe. Otto looked interrogative.
Cliffe serenely covered his lapse from manners. “Hampstead is my station.
Our house is on the Heath itself. You must come and make friends with my
mother, Mr Redbury. She’d like you so much. Come to lunch one day. Come
on Saturday.”
Mr Redbury beamed and puffed out his meagre chest, anticipating the
conquest of Mrs Kennedy. This was undoubtedly a very pleasant and
discriminating young man.... “but I always vind blenty in gommon viz
English people—the good old shtock;”—sentiment reserved for the after
benefit of Trudchen; and to impress Beatrice.
“Yoo-stone!” bawled the guard. A number of passengers squeezed their way
out; and Cliffe dropped lightly on to the vacated seat beside Otto.
“My dear mother’s a widow, so don’t bring your wife. She was deeply
attached to my poor father, and can’t bear the sight of any woman less
fortunate in a husband alive.”
Otto, groping after what was complimentary in this outburst, came to the
conclusion that the clang of the gates had obliterated its part meaning.
“Besides,” Cliffe ran on, in a rapid confidential undertone, “why be for
ever bound by the conventions?—Look at all the jaded joyless faces——” A
rubicund Jack Tar opposite grinned broadly, thrust his tongue in his
cheek, his arm round his girl beside him, and rolled an expressive eye
in Cliffe’s direction. “The day’s routine, and the jolting train, and a
dreary little home in Camden Town, and the evening paper, and another
day—and another, and yet another.... What those faces want, Mr Redbury,
and I see you agree with me, is Paganism—joie de vivre—a gallop with the
centaurs!”
His companion, who would have turned peevish and retired into his
bathroom stronghold at the very first encounter with a centaur, nodded
sagely....
“O glorious Life!” rhapsodized Cliffe, stretching forth his arms,
oblivious of his neighbours’ discomfort and astonishment.
“Wass-vot? who vere you viz last night?” chuckled Otto, his eyes mere
slits of lewd curiosity.
“Last night ... last night ...” ecstatically—then came an imperceptible
halt, as Cliffe discarded a comparatively innocent evening spent at
home with Philip Gibbs’ “Soul of the War,” in favour of his almost
equally harmless adventure with Deb at Seaview the week-end before. This
would serve, touched up with scarlet and purple; it was additionally
spiced by the reflection of how Otto’s whetted tongue would loll out,
metaphorically speaking, if he knew that the heroine of this presented
drama of Real Life as it isn’t, was Deb Marcus, his late partner’s
daughter, and a friend of his own daughter Nell.
“Two of us—and the great scented common rolling away from our doors to a
star-stabbed sky. Two of us—for when the little Dryad so long immersed
in the oak-tree of tradition, sprang out at last into my arms, her hair
wildly ablow, and with lips red as blood, then all the pettier issues
of the Philistines were trampled, I say trampled, Mr Redbury, under the
wings which sprang godlike from our exultant shoulder blades!... (Oh God!
what a sentence!...)”
“Camden Town!”
The morbidly interested school-girl on Cliffe’s left was reluctant to
alight—but that happened to be her station, and she dared not be late for
supper.
Otto, as the train gathered speed again, turned to Cliffe expectantly,
as a hint that confidences might be resumed. Of course he disapproved of
these casual rollicking nights spent unchaperoned save by the rolling
common ... disapproved and was biliously envious: but—but—his look was
akin to a nudge in the ribs—and Kennedy, always obliging, discarded
poetic eloquence in favour of the one-dog-to-another style obviously more
suited to the temperament of Mr Redbury. He was thoroughly enjoying his
own pose of the young-Bohemian type he most abominated in practice.
“You know how it is——” was sufficient to sound the new note of
waggishness. “You’ve heard the old joke about hanging pictures, Mr
Redbury—I bet you have——”
“Ho! ho! ho!” from Otto.
“We were—hanging pictures ... and missed the train home—the last train
but one——”
“And the last drain of all vent too late, eh?”
“Well—there it is, you see—you can’t bring a girl home at any
hour—especially if her father’s at all particular—as fathers sometimes
are—as fathers sometimes are, Mr Redbury.”
And Otto chuckled and winked and coughed and cleared his throat, and
settled his cuffs, and chuckled again, as though the lives of Hedda and
Nell were never rendered a burden to them by the paternal injunction:
“Home by nine o’clock, and bed at ten”—and interposed a swaggering if
somewhat laboured anecdote of his own secret unorthodoxy—“We dake it for
granted this is between you and me, yong vellow!”
“Belsipark!” The doors flew ajar.
Cliffe replied with a corresponding drop into gravity: “I trust equally
in your discretion regarding the confidence I have placed in you, Mr
Redbury——”
“... Of course he’ll prattle—but I mentioned no names,” as Otto, trotting
up the platform towards the exit, cast through the window of the
compartment a look of unutterable fraternity and knowingness.