Conrad in Quest of His Youth: An Extravagance of Temperament. Merrick Leonard
implored "Toto" to spare her to him just for a week or two. "Toto" said promptly that to spend a couple of months at Sweetbay was exactly what she needed for her cough. So she was won, and there remained only Ted to conquer.
As a young professional man with nothing to do, Ted had naturally been slow to answer the letter. Young professional men make a point of delaying a long time before they answer letters—it shows how busy they are. After they have plenty of work on hand they answer more quickly. When he wrote, he declared that the notion of renewing their boyish memories in such tranquil quarters appealed to him more forcibly than he could say, but he was "so terribly hard pressed that he feared he would get no change until he ran over to Monte Carlo at the end of the term." He was at the Bar, waiting for briefs.
Conrad called at his chambers, and bore him off to dinner. Ted was fortunately independent of his profession, and his immutable purpose was to convince people that it was wearing him to death. In the restaurant he bent over his melon a brow corrugated by the cares of imaginary suits; he frowned at his soup through a monacle as if he were perpending an "Opinion." But it was a dinner of supreme excellence, and then they adjourned to the club. If it had not been Ted's club too, and socially undistinguished, Conrad might have aspired to greater favours now. Invite a man to a club for which he is ineligible himself, and he will remember you with kindliness no less often than he drawls, "A fellow was telling me in Brooks's the other day—" Before they parted, Ted had consented quite cheerfully—for the later Ted—and all was well.
So the evening came when Conrad sat in Mowbray Lodge looking forward to the morrow and the arrival of the train due at twelve fifteen. And he looked forward with more eagerness because the evening—strange to say—was rather melancholy, and the knowledge that he was going to bed in the room where he had slept as a boy induced a mood totally different from the mood he had expected of it. He did not feel a boy as he sat in the silent house, by a bad light, listening to the rain patter on the shrubs. On the contrary he felt increasingly old and increasingly mournful while the long evening wore away. The dreary lamps depressed him, and the sad tick of the clock, and the ceaseless dripping of the rain sent him to the whisky-bottle.
After breakfast next day he bought lamps—several of them—with duplex burners. The roads were a little sloppy, but the sky was blue. He was gratified to reflect that his cousins were doubtless blinking in a black fog; the permanent pleasure of wintering in the country is the thought of how unhappy our friends must be in town. In the forlornest watering-places of the south coast you may notice, on a fine November morning, people folding newspapers briskly, and looking heavenward with a twinkle in their eyes. They are all returning thanks for the sufferings of their friends in London.
The train due at twelve fifteen wound into view at twelve thirty-five.
They were there! Nina, alert, a smile on her thin, shrewd face; Regina, with an air of having travelled under protest; Ted, bowed beneath the weight of the Law Courts.
"So you've come!"
"At last! What a loathsome line!"
"Who's looking after the luggage? Is there a cab to be had?"
"Well, of course. Do you suppose it's a village?"
"How hot it is! You must be smothered in those furs, dear?" This to Nina from 'Gina. 'Gina was always expensively clothed, and badly dressed, but she couldn't vie with the Regent's Park sables. "You must be half dead," she insisted compassionately; "it's as warm as the Riviera."
"We boast of it in our advertisements," said Conrad, "but it isn't. How did you leave Toto and the family?"
He heard that it was a fine day in town too, and secretly resented the fact. The party drove away, another "fly" rumbling with the baggage in their wake.
"The lane!" he exclaimed as he sprang out. "And it's the same as ever."
"I don't remember it a bit," said all three, gazing about them vaguely.
"The garden!" he displayed it in triumph.
"I fancied it was quite big," said Nina. "Funny how wee children's eyes exaggerate, isn't it?" But she had not really been so wee as all that.
"The hall, where Boultbee was always ragging us because we didn't wipe our shoes!" He had thrown the door open before the maid could run upstairs.
"Who was Boultbee?" asked Regina. "What a memory you have!"
They lunched; and they were blithe at luncheon; they discussed a divorce case in smart circles. Regina said hurriedly that there was "another side to the story." She knew no more about it than she had read in the papers, but she now moved on the confines of smart circles, and there are people who can never accustom themselves to advancement, pecuniary or social.
"Her husband is such a scamp," she explained, "such a scamp. I don't defend her, but there's so much that never came out in court. Dear Lady Marminger, her mother, was always against the match; she always felt it would be fatal. I recollect when we were staying at the Abbey once—" She was the most obnoxious variety of snob: the middle-class woman who has married into the fringe of society. If she had written novels, everybody in them who wasn't a duchess would have been a duke.
"One of the cleverest things ever said in the divorce court," Ted began judicially, "was when Hollburn was cross-examining——"
"Oh, the scamp theory is worn out," struck in Nina. "When a woman has married a scamp, her family feel provided with an excuse for everything odious she does all the rest of her life."
"Was when Hollburn was cross-examining—" He was not to be put off.
They were Nina, and 'Gina, and Ted, and Conrad welcomed them with both hands, but he caught himself thinking that for any influence the surroundings had upon the conversation he might as well have invited them to Princes'.
He took Ted to see the summer-house when luncheon was over—the summer-house in which they used to have their conferences when they were such chums—and Ted was a disappointment. The summer-house had withstood the years, but the chum had gone. He was affecting interest, and it hurt—it hurt horribly, because he was Ted and they were where they were. He was led to Rose Villa, where Mary Page had lived. The sound of its name had made their hearts ache once, and the same name was on the same gate-post, visible to the same eyes. He passed it by, telling casual falsehoods about the extent of the practice that he hadn't made, and when the post was pointed out, he murmured: "Oh, is it? By Jove!"—maintained a perfunctory pause for ten seconds, and broke it with, "Well, as I was saying——"
Afterwards they all sauntered to the esplanade, and Conrad owned to himself that it was no animated scene. But the sun shone bright, and when there is beautiful weather in Sweetbay it almost compensates for the absence of everything else there.
"Like spring," he observed; "isn't it? Probably there's a fog in town by now, or it's beginning to snow. We're all well out of it."
"Y-e-s," replied Nina. "You don't find it a little depressing seeing so many people in bath-chairs, do you?"
"'So many people?'" Regina was derisive. "I've only seen seven human beings since we arrived."
"Still the seven were all in bath-chairs," said Nina.
"One expects to meet people in bath-chairs at the seaside," Conrad pleaded.
"But not sick people," she said, "here they are conscientious. It's a pretty little band-stand; what time does the band play?"
"It'll begin in June, I think," he answered.
"June?" cried Regina.
"It's not the season," he pointed out. "Of course it's quiet just now."
"I don't wish to cavil," said Ted, with a forbearing smile, "but when you tell us it is not the season, I am struck by a slight discrepancy in your statements. A few minutes ago you told us it was a winter place."
"Well, so it is, but it's first of all an English place. You mustn't ask for bands to discourse in band-stands all the year round, my dear fellow—such things don't