Poor Relations. Compton Mackenzie
and shutting of cabin doors all the way along the corridor kept him from sleep, and for a long time he lay awake while the delicious freedom of the seas was gradually enslaved by the sullen, prosaic, puritanical, bilious word—Liverpool. He had come down to his cabin, full of the exhilaration of a last quick stroll up and down the spray-whipped deck; he had come down from a long and pleasant talk all about himself where he and Miss Hamilton had sat in the lee of some part of a ship's furniture the name of which he did not know and did not like to ask, a long and pleasant talk, cozily wrapped in two rugs glistening faintly in the starlight with salty rime; he had come down from a successful elimination of Miss Merritt, his whole personality marinated in freedom, he might say; and now the mere thought of Liverpool was enough to disenchant him and to make him feel rather like a man who was recovering from a brilliant, a too brilliant revelation of himself provoked by champagne. He began to piece together the conversation and search for indiscretions. To begin with, he had certainly talked a great deal too much about himself; it was not dignified for a man in his position to be so prodigally frank with a young woman he had only known for five days. Suppose she had been laughing at him all the time? Suppose that even now she was laughing at him with Miss Merritt? "Good heavens, what an amount I told her," John gasped aloud. "I even told her what my real circulation was when I used to write novels, and I very nearly told her how much I made out of The Fall of Babylon, though since that really was a good deal, it wouldn't have mattered so much. And what did I say about my family? Well, perhaps that isn't so important. But how much did I tell her of my scheme for Joan of Arc? Why, she might have been my confidential secretary by the way I talked. My confidential secretary? And why not? I am entitled to a secretary—in fact my position demands a secretary. But would she accept such a post? Now don't let me be impulsive."
John began to laugh at himself for a quality in which as a matter of fact he was, if anything, deficient. He often used to chaff himself, but, of course, always without the least hint of ill-nature, which is perhaps why he usually selected imaginary characteristics for genial reproof.
"Impulsive dog," he said to himself. "Go to sleep, and don't forget that confidential secretaries afloat and confidential secretaries ashore are very different propositions. Yes, you thought you were being very clever when you bought those rope-soled shoes to keep your balance on a slippery deck, but you ought to have bought a rope-soled cap to keep your head from slipping."
This seemed to John in the easy optimism that prevails upon the borders of sleep an excellent joke, and he passed with a chuckle through the ivory gate.
The next day John behaved helpfully and politely at the Customs, and indeed continued to be helpful and polite until his companions of the voyage were established in a taxi at Euston. He had carefully written down the Hamiltons' address with a view to calling on them one day, but even while he was writing the number of the square in Chelsea he was thinking about Ambles and trying to decide whether he should make a dash across London to Waterloo on the chance of catching the 9:05 P.M. or spend the night at his house in Church Row.
"I think perhaps I'd better stay in town to-night," he said. "Good-by. Most delightful trip across—see you both again soon, I hope. You don't advise me to try for the 9:05?" he asked once more, anxiously.
Miss Hamilton laughed from the depths of the taxi; when she laughed, for the briefest moment John felt an Atlantic breeze sweep through the railway station.
"I recommend a good night's rest," she said.
So John's last thought of her was of a nice practical young woman; but, as he once again told himself, the idea of a secretary was absurd. Besides, did she even know shorthand?
"Do you know shorthand?" he turned round to shout as the taxi buzzed away; he did not hear her answer, if answer there was.
"Of course I can always write," he decided, and without one sigh he busied himself with securing his own taxi for Hampstead.
CHAPTER II
"I'VE got too many caps, Mrs. Worfolk," John proclaimed next morning to his housekeeper. "You can give this one away."
"Yes, sir. Who would you like it given to?"
"Oh, anybody, anybody. Tramps very often ask for old boots, don't they? Some tramp might like it."
"Would you have any erbjections if I give it to my nephew, sir?"
"None whatever."
"It seems almost too perky for a tramp, sir; and my sister's boy—well, he's just at the age when they like to dress theirselves up a bit. He's doing very well, too. His employers is extremely satisfied with the way he's doing. Extremely satisfied, his employers are."
"I'm delighted to hear it."
"Yes, sir. Well, it's been some consolation to my poor sister, I mean to say, after the way her husband behaved hisself, and it's to be hoped Herbert'll take fair warning. Let me see, you will be having lunch at home I think you said?"
John winced: this was precisely what he would have avoided by catching the 9:05 at Waterloo last night.
"I shan't be in to lunch for a few days, Mrs. Worfolk, no—er—nor to dinner either as a matter of fact. No—in fact I'll be down in the country. I must see after things there, you know," he added with an attempt to suggest as jovially as possible a real anxiety about his new house.
"The country, oh yes," repeated Mrs. Worfolk grimly; John saw the beech-woods round Ambles blasted by his housekeeper's disapproval.
"You wouldn't care to—er—come down and give a look round yourself, Mrs. Worfolk? My sister, Mrs. Curtis—"
"Oh, I should prefer not to intrude in any way, sir. But if you insist, why, of course—"
"Oh no, I don't insist," John hurriedly interposed.
"No, sir. Well, we shall all have to get used to being left alone nowadays, and that's all there is to it."
"But I shall be back in a few days, Mrs. Worfolk. I'm a Cockney at heart, you know. Just at first—"
Mrs. Worfolk shook her head and waddled tragically to the door.
"There's nothing else you'll be wanting this morning, sir?" she turned to ask in accents that seemed to convey forgiveness of her master in spite of everything.
"No, thank you, Mrs. Worfolk. Please send Maud up to help me pack. Good heavens," he added to himself when his housekeeper had left the room, "why shouldn't I be allowed a country house? And I suppose the next thing is that James and Beatrice and George and Eleanor will all be offended because I didn't go tearing round to see them the moment I arrived. One's relations never understand that after the production of a play one requires a little rest. Besides, I must get on with my new play. I absolutely must."
John's tendency to abhor the vacuum of success was corrected by the arrival of Maud, the parlor-maid, whose statuesque anemia and impersonal neatness put something in it. Before leaving for America he had supplemented the rather hasty preliminary furnishing of his new house by ordering from his tailor a variety of country costumes. These Maud, with feminine intuition superimposed on what she would have called her "understanding of valeting," at once produced for his visit to Ambles; John in the prospect of half a dozen unworn peat-perfumed suits of tweed flung behind him any lingering doubt about there being something in success, and with the recapture of his enthusiasm for what he called "jolly things" was anxious that Maud should share in it.
"Do you think these new things are a success, Maud?" he asked, perhaps a little too boisterously. At any rate, the parlor-maid's comprehension of valeting had apparently never been so widely stretched, for a faint coralline blush tinted her waxen cheeks.
"They seem very nice, sir," she murmured, with a slight stress upon the verb.
John felt that he had trespassed too far upon the confines of Maud's