The Rain-Girl. Herbert George Jenkins
at the recollection of the scene; Lady Drewitt's anger, his cousin, Lord Drewitt's lifting of his eyebrows, the snap in Edward Seymour's ferret-like little eyes, Mrs. Edward's look of frightened interrogation directed at Lady Drewitt, and her subsequent endeavour to mirror her aunt's disapproval. It was all so comical, so characteristic.
He had found it impossible to explain what had led up to his decision. He could not tell Lady Drewitt and the Seymours that the trenches had revolutionised his ideas, that a sort of intellectual Bolshevism had taken possession of him, that he now took a more detached and impersonal view of life, that things which had mattered before were not the things which mattered now. They would not have understood.
H could not explain that "out there" everything had taken on a new value and new standards had been set up, that in a flash the clock had been put back centuries; food and life alone had mattered. A few yards away Death had lain in wait to flick them out with a disdainful finger, and every man, some consciously, others instinctively, was asking himself the great riddle—Why?
Instead of endeavouring to explain all this, Beresford had contented himself by saying that the War had made a difference, had somehow changed him, made him restless. He had been purposely vague, remembering Lady Drewitt's habit of clutching at a phrase as a peg for her scorn and ridicule. He had been conscious of making out a very poor case for himself, and mentally he cursed his cousin, Lord Drewitt, for his silence. He at least must have understood, he had been through it all.
Lady Drewitt listened with obvious impatience. At last she had broken out with:
"Richard, you're a fool." The words had been rapped out with conviction rather than acrimony.
"Logically I suppose I am, Aunt Caroline," he had replied, as he signalled to Drewitt to circulate the port in his direction.
"What are you going to live on?" Lady Drewitt demanded. "You've no money of your own."
"Perhaps he proposes to borrow from you, Aunt," Lord Drewitt had said, as he lighted another cigarette.
Lady Drewitt ignored the remark.
"But, Richard, I don't understand." Mrs. Edward Seymour had puckered up her pretty, washed-out face. "Where are you going to, and what shall you do?"
"He wants to become a vagabond," snapped Lady Drewitt, "tramping from town to town, like those dreadful men we saw last week when motoring to Peterborough."
"I see;" but there was nothing in Mrs. Edward's tone suggestive of enlightenment.
"It's the war," announced Edward Seymour, a peevish-looking little man with no chin and a forehead that reached almost to the back of his neck, who by virtue of a post at the Ministry of Munitions had escaped the comb of conscription.
Lord Drewitt screwed his glass into his eye and gazed at Seymour with interest.
"Don't be a fool, Edward," snapped Lady Drewitt; and Mrs. Edward Seymour looked across at her husband, disapproval in her eye. It was hidden from none that the Seymours were "after the old bird's money," as Jimmy Pentland put it. It was he who had christened them "the Vultures," a name that had stuck.
"What do you propose to do when you have spent all your money?" Lady Drewitt had next demanded.
"In all probability," said Lord Drewitt, "he will get run in and come to us to bail him out. Personally I hate police-courts. I often wonder why they instruct magistrates in law at the expense of hygiene."
Lady Drewitt had looked across the table with a startled expression in her eyes. It had suddenly dawned upon her that unpleasant consequences to herself might ensue from this rash determination on the part of her nephew to seek his future happiness amidst by-ways and hedges.
"It seems to me——" began Edward Seymour, in a thin, protesting voice.
"Never mind what it seems to you," said Lady Drewitt, whereat Edward Seymour had collapsed, screwing up his little features into an expression of pain. Mrs. Edward had caught him full in the centre of the left shin with the sharply pointed toe of her shoe.
At Drewitt House Mrs. Edward's feet were never still when her husband was within range. Lord Drewitt had once suggested that he should wear shin-guards, Mrs. Edward's methods of wireless telegraphy being notorious. Sometimes she missed her spouse, as other guests knew to their cost. Once she had landed full on the tibia of a gouty colonial bishop, whose language in a native dialect had earned for him the respect of every man present, when later translated with adornments by one of the company.
"If Edward had spent days and nights in the trenches," Lord Drewitt had said, as, with great intentness, he peeled a walnut, "he would understand why Richard shrinks from the Foreign Office."
"It would be impossible," Beresford said, "to settle down again to the monotony of a life of ten till four after after—the last four years."
"Unless, of course, you happen to be a fountain," Lord Drewitt had interpolated, without looking up from his walnut.
"I said it was the war," broke in Edward Seymour, looking triumphantly across at his wife, emboldened by the knowledge that his legs were tucked safely away beneath his chair.
"And what do you propose to do?" Lady Drewitt had demanded, with the air of one who knew she had propounded a conundrum to which there is no answer.
"Oh," said Beresford airily, "I shall just walk into the sun. You see, Aunt Caroline," he said, bending forward, "I've only got one life and——"
"And how many do you suppose I have?" Lady Drewitt had demanded scornfully, snapping her jaws in a peculiarly unpleasant way she had.
"I repeat, Aunt Caroline," he had proceeded imperturbably, "that I have only one life, and rather than go back to the F.O. I prefer to——"
"Seek nature in her impregnable fastnesses," suggested Lord Drewitt, looking across at his cousin with a smile.
"Impregnable fiddlesticks," Lady Drewitt had cried derisively, "he will get his feet wet and die of bronchitis or pneumonia."
"And we shall have to go down to the inquest," said Lord Drewitt, "and lunch execrably at some local inn. No, Richard, you mustn't do it. I cannot risk our aunt's digestion."
Lady Drewitt always discouraged the idea that life contained either sentiment or ideals. To be intangible in conversation with her was impossible. She admitted of no distinction between imagination and lying. To her all extremes were foolish, optimists and pessimists being equally culpable. She pooh-poohed anything and everything that was not directly or indirectly connected with Burke (once she would have admitted "L'Almanach de Gotha"). Burke to her girlish eyes had always been the open sesame to happiness.
As for the Seymours, they were merely Lady Drewitt's echoes. Lord Drewitt had once said they reminded him of St. Paul's definition of love.
As Beresford smoked his own cigarettes and drank Lady Drewitt's excellent port, he was conscious that there were a hundred and one reasons that he might have advanced to any one but his aunt. It would have been foolish to tell her that within him had been awakened a spirit of romance and adventure, that the wanderlust was upon him.
She would merely have said that he must see Sir Edmund Tobbitt, her pet physician, and have forbidden him to use German words in her presence.
"And how do you propose to live whilst you are pursuing your ridiculous Nature, exposing yourself to all sorts of weather?" Lady Drewitt had next demanded.
"Well, I've got nearly two hundred pounds," Beresford had replied, "and by the time I've sold my books and things I shall have fully another hundred."
"You're going to sell everything," gasped Mrs. Edward Seymour.
"Yes, all but the clothes I wear and an extra suit I shall carry with me," Beresford had smilingly retorted, enjoying the look of consternation upon his cousin's face. "When I leave London there will not remain in it a shilling's worth of my property."
"Richard, you're a fool." Lady Drewitt seemed to find comfort in the phrase.