by Guy McCrone
For reply, Denise took Lucy’s arm and turned her round towards the town. “Come on in somewhere out of this wind. To Rumpelmayer’s or anywhere where we can get a cup of chocolate.”
“Can he write?” Lucy asked as, with the wind at her back, Denise’s arm through her own and the great dog dragging on the lead, they were, all of them, scarves and veils flying, propelled towards the town.
“I don’t know. Yes, I think so. He’s going to do some more for me. Then I may get a better idea.”
“You see, I’m specially interested,” Lucy said.
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you when we get inside.”
Rumpelmayer’s was full, noisy and redolent of French coffee beans, French perfume and French cigarettes. All the town, it seemed, felt cold and had come in to drink an eleven o’clock cup of something hot. British residents abounded; for in those days Mentone was more than half British. English cathedral town spinsters in cotton gloves. Rich provincial dowagers with villas for the winter. Italians, the women heavy with furs, the men gold-ringed and possessive. Parisian women, stiffly corseted, heavy-featured, and fashionable. A family of Middle West Americans, the parents rich and homely, beaming on their young people, and all of them enjoying the lark of being in this Europe that was so sure of itself. A few cosmopolitans, well dressed, distinguished, and of a nationality it was impossible to determine. Overindulged children, running out of control, and threatening to entangle themselves with the waitresses wheeling cake-trolleys or balancing steaming trays.
At last they had found a place, given their order, tied the great dog to the iron centre leg of the marble table, and now they could settle down.
“Do you like Robin Hayburn?” Lucy asked, as it seemed irrelevantly, looking at her friend.
“Yes. Very much. Why?” Denise smiled a little as she returned the intent look.
“You see, in a way, I belong to the same solemn Scotch background as he does,” Lucy said. “Not a type that breeds artists.”
“No, I daresay not.”
“And yet I ran away from home to become a singer.”
Why was Mrs. Hamont saying this, Denise wondered? “Well, I didn’t run away,” she said. “But I stayed away, which came to much the same thing.”
Her companion pulled off her gloves, looking abstractedly at the people about her as she did so. “I paid for it, in a way. But I did what I wanted to do.”
Her friend smiled. She said: “Sometimes paying is worth it.”
After a time Lucy came back to earth. “Denise, I’ll tell you something,” she said. “I nearly married that boy’s uncle! Queer to think, isn’t it?”
“Well, why didn’t you?”
Lucy shrugged. “The Moorhouses—his name was Moorhouse—all made money. And turned so appallingly respectable and self-important that they would never have put up with a gipsy like me.”
“So you liked him, but couldn’t stand his people? Was that it?”
“Well, that’s—I don’t know—yes, that’s about as real a reason as any. Shall I pour out this, Denise?”
“Yes, please. But you still feel sore about it sometimes?”
Again Lucy shrugged. “I’m a fool to feel anything.”
“But maybe you wouldn’t mind seeing that boy getting a little education just to annoy them? Is that what you’re getting at, Mrs. Hamont?”
Lucy Hamont looked up from the cup she was tasting. “Well, shaped to another pattern in spite of them, shall we say? How delicious hot chocolate can be on a cold morning!” she added smiling.
Chapter Nine
PHœBE HAYBURN had been bewildered by her husband. That Henry should, as it now seemed to her, suddenly want to blossom before the world, giving himself the importance of a country house; that he should want to become a social somebody, was incomprehensible to her. The Henry she knew wore old clothes, had the habit of wanting meals at any odd moment, and thought of nothing but his work.
Yet, had Phœbe been a different kind of woman, she would have understood that her husband, like many another brilliant man, moved along the single track of his brilliance.
And for Henry, the track of his brilliance had run straight, ever since he had refounded his father’s firm of Hayburn and Company, and given to it all the forces he possessed. Hayburn and Company had grown steadily, and Henry’s sense of achievement had grown with it. For years it had been quite enough that he should count more and more in the world of Glasgow engineering, to which his every fibre belonged.
But now the track had run farther. It had borne him out into the wider world of recognition, where men of achievement were given honours, irrespective of what that achievement might be. He had become Sir Henry Hayburn, and he felt that he must live according to his label. Social advancement, for its own sake, or the wish for a more distinguished way of life, had, for Henry, almost nothing to do with it.
Like most one-track people, Henry had no difficulty in believing what he wanted to believe. He was one of those who are accustomed to getting their own way. And such people are seldom inconvenienced by imaginations that illuminate the points of view of others.
Thus, to Henry’s thinking, a frame for the importance to which he had just climbed was not only right, but quite necessary. And if Phœbe did not, at first, see this, she would, of course, quickly come to see it.
And now, practical in all things, he had begun to consider what steps he should take. The two people closest to him, after his wife and son, were his brother Stephen and his brother-in-law David Moorhouse. Again he determined to consult them. Stephen, as Henry saw him, went everywhere and knew everything. And David lived in surroundings such as Henry now sought for himself, and must, surely, have much to tell him that would be useful.
So it came about that, on a bright Saturday morning of early March, Henry asked his telephone clerk to get him Mr. David Moorhouse at Dermott Ships. Presently word came back that Mr. Moorhouse did not usually come into work on Saturday mornings. Well, then, Sir Henry’s brother, Mr. Stephen Hayburn? No. Mr. Stephen Hayburn had not found it necessary to come in this morning either.
It was a part of Henry’s simplicity that he found nothing to criticise in this. He had always looked up to Stephen and David, and what they did must, automatically, be right. “Well, get Mr. Moorhouse at Aucheneame House.”
David received Henry’s telephone call in his dressing-room, where he was having a late breakfast. “What? Coming down in that motor-car of yours with Phœbe for tea? Yes. We will be delighted to see you both. Yes. And you can look in on Stephen and bring him with you. No. I haven’t been at the office for a day or two. Influenza. But it’s very cold weather for that open shandrydan of yours. What? Oh, all right. Have it your own way. We’ll be glad to see you however you like to come.”
At lunch-time Henry told his wife of his intention. “I want to ask David about this house business.”
Again Phœbe showed surprise, for he had said nothing more of houses after his one outburst that evening. “House, Henry?” she asked. “What house?”
“I told you I wanted a country house two or three weeks since,” he said, a note of impatience in his voice—impatience born of the knowledge that he might in the end have to be firm about this.
Phœbe did not reply. She sat looking before her, eating her chop mechanically and pondering. “What we want before a house or anything else,” she said at last, her eyes fixed on vacancy, “is to have Robin home and well again.”
“I don’t see what that has got to do with it.”
“It has everything to do with it for me. And for you, too.”
“Robin’s going to be all right,” Henry said sulkily.
And now, for reasons he could not himself define, Henry became possessed of a smouldering determination to force this. Force the buying of a country property. Force fate. Force himself to expel the fear from his mind that Robin might not live to inherit it. Force Robin, once returned, to follow the track that he, his father, had laid d
own for him. Force him to take his place as the son of Sir Henry Hayburn.
In the dark places of his mind—less confident places—these things had somehow become entangled each with the other.
II
Mrs. Robert Dermott, taking advantage of an unusual burst of March sunshine, sat in front of Aucheneame House, Dumbartonshire, a large, still somewhat raw-looking mansion, that her dead husband, Robert Dermott, the founder of Dermott Ships, had built forty years ago.
Judging that here it would be sheltered, the strong-minded old woman had marched out from the lunch-table before her daughter, Grace Dermott-Moorhouse, could stop her.
Fumbling in her black velvet handbag for her long-distance spectacles, she found them, put them on, shaded her eyes with one hand and sat looking about her. She was still a large woman, still firm of face and purpose. She was glad to be out here alone for a moment, glad to have the sunshine of the early year penetrate her bones, glad to sit and remember.
From Aucheneame the ground sloped gently to the River Clyde less than a quarter of a mile away. Immediately in front of her was a wide lawn terminating at a wall and dotted here and there with low, trimmed shrubbery. Below that, a long field, at the foot of which were the main road and the railway track running close together. And beyond these came the sand-flats or the shallow waters of the river itself, depending upon whether the tide was out or in.
It was in now, and the great steamers that had been lying waiting in deep water at the Tail of the Bank farther down were now moving upstream towards Glasgow.
“Granny, what are you doing out here? You’ll catch cold. Come in at once!” Her grand-daughter, Meg Dermott-Moorhouse, a long-legged girl of fifteen, stood in front of her.
Mrs. Dermott did not remove the hand that was shading her eyes; she merely said: “Meg, come and sit down beside me, and tell me if any of these boats belong to us.”
“What? To Dermott Ships?”
“Of course. What else do you think I meant?”
Meg sat down as she was told and examined the markings of a vessel as it moved down there in front of them. “No, that’s not ours,” she said. “But, wait—there’s something coming down. Yes, that’s a Dermott boat.”
“I wonder where it’s going.”
“China, probably. I was in the office for a minute yesterday, and I heard someone say on the telephone that there would be a sailing for China at the weekend.”
Mrs. Dermott smiled approval, her eyes still on the great cargo-steamer as it churned its way down the muddy channel. Yes. Meg was Robert Dermott’s grand-daughter. Pity she wasn’t a boy. She was alert, and would have done well in business.
Sparrows were noisy in the shrubbery. In the field beyond the wall the farmer, anxious to push on, Saturday afternoon or no Saturday afternoon, was diligently guiding his plough behind two great brown horses. White, complaining seagulls skimmed the clear March air behind him, watching the new-turned furrows. Black rooks, settling at a greater distance, pranced importantly on the fresh earth, croaking and quarrelling over the worms they found there.
“Granny, do you think Father would let me go into Dermott Ships?” Meg said, as though she had guessed something of what her grandmother was thinking.
Mrs. Dermott took off her spectacles, turned to her grand-daughter, looked at her seriously and said: “No, I do not! What makes you ask such a thing?”
“I don’t know. I wish I had been the boy, instead of Dave.”
Her grandmother put on her spectacles again, looked ahead of her, and fell to considering this. Meg was right, of course. Her twenty-one-year-old brother, Robert David Dermott-Moorhouse, was a handsome, misty, indefinite creature. “Well,” she said at length, “we can’t change that, can we?”
“I don’t want to be polished and finished and dressed-up and married off to some stupid young man!”
“My dear child!” the old woman exclaimed, turning once more. “Who’s been talking to you? What on earth have you been reading? And who’s going to force you to marry anybody, stupid or clever?”
“You can say what you like, but that’s what happens among our kind of people. And I don’t see much fun in it.” Meg kicked the gravel beneath her gloomily.
“Nonsense! You’ll have great fun! I had a splendid life of it running committees and helping your grandfather, and watching him building up Dermott Ships step by step.” But still, the old woman was pleased with her grand-daughter.
“That’s all very well, Granny. Times are changing.”
“They’re not going to be any more difficult. They’re going to be easier.”
“How do you know?”
Old Mrs. Dermott took to looking about her yet again. Yes. The child was right. Times were changing. The pace kept on getting quicker. Even the face of this quiet valley kept changing. Down there, beyond the road, they were building a row of workmen’s cottages. Her husband had always been sympathetic about workers’ conditions. But in his time there would have been ways and means of stopping what must inevitably become a blemish on the view from Aucheneame House here. And farther down the road, but still within sight, someone was building a shed where, they said, you would be able to get your motor-car mended and buy the oil or whatever it was that made it go.
She was deep in memories, thinking of the time when, long years since, she and Robert Dermott had driven down thus far and chosen the site of this house as a place that could never possibly be desecrated, where the city would never reach them, when she was roused by her grand-daughter saying: “What I really need is a college education.”
But there was no time to pursue this, for there was the tooting of a horn, a cloud of dust in the drive, and Sir Henry Hayburn, with his wife and his brother, had come to a standstill in front of Aucheneame.
III
A motor run was an elaborate business. Most people felt compelled to dress for it. Even for the short distance of ten miles or thereabouts, Stephen wore sporting clothes consisting of knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket, and over these a long and heavy leather overcoat. On his head was a leather cap, and he wore goggles. Phœbe, too, was clothed to the ground in leather, and wore a leather pancake on her head, which was held in position by a thick veil, tied beneath her chin and so fixed that her face and hair were covered, thus protecting her entire head from the dust and the March winds. She could safely have opened a hive of bees in this headdress. Henry alone of the three remained much as usual: clad in his old Inverness and his tweed helmet. He had omitted to wear goggles, and, as a result, there were traces of dusty tears upon his cheeks.
The noise of their arrival brought Grace Dermott-Moorhouse out to meet them. “Hullo!” she called, waving and laughing. People still laughed, a little, at the idea of their friends arriving in a motor-car. “Here you are, all you brave people! You must be perished with cold! Come in and get warm at once.” And while the party began to disentangle itself from the rugs and to climb down: “Mother, what are you doing out here? Do you want to get pneumonia?”
Old Mrs. Dermott made no reply to this. But she got up and prepared herself to greet the guests and go inside with them.
“David has had a shocking cold. Influenza, really. I don’t know what to do with him,” Grace continued, apologising thus for the fact that her husband was not here on the doorstep like herself. She kissed Phœbe as best she could through the veil, and led the party indoors.
“You’ll find David in his smoke-room,” she said to the men. “He asked me to send you to him.”
Henry and Stephen found themselves with David in his snuggery. Like most of the rooms in Aucheneame, it was in the worst possible taste. White pine, stuffy, tasselled hangings, and in the one window a palm in a brass pot standing on a cane table. The room of a Victorian Glasgow grandee. Old Robert Dermott had built a large house to add cubits to his dignity, then, seeing the walls up, had, it seemed, let it go at that, handing the interior over to commercial decorators. And neither his daughter nor his son-in-law possessed urge or
knowledge to improve upon what had been done.
But though most of the Aucheneame rooms were large and cold, this one was small and stuffy. The master of the house rose from a green plush chair. David wore a black velvet smoking-jacket with quilted facings. His visitors guessed he had been asleep.
“Hullo,” he said, looking for once a little dishevelled. “Come and sit down. There’s time for a smoke before tea. Cigar?”
Stephen chose the deep chair opposite to the one David had sunk back into, leaving Sir Henry Hayburn bolt upright on a small chair between them. It was nothing to either of them that Henry’s dignity had grown in the eyes of the world. Thus they were surprised when presently he said:
“I want to buy a house. I mean, a place like this with some style to it. And I thought I would like to get your opinion.”
David sat nodding wisely. He felt that this activity would give him time to think over Henry’s words. Well, of course, there was no reason why Henry should not get himself a country house. He could afford it, David supposed. But what good would it do him? Henry and his family weren’t the people for this kind of thing. Their lives seemed, somehow, one continual picnic, a continual improvisation. Henry thought about nothing but his work. He had never held a gun, never sat a horse—so far as David knew—and would never bother to take his proper social place in whatever surroundings he found himself. Phœbe was all impulse, and Robin bookish and arty.
“What does Phœbe think?” he asked, thus to avoid, still longer, the bother of giving his opinion.
“Oh, Phœbe—I don’t know. She’ll get used to the idea.” Henry looked at Stephen.
Stephen’s thoughts had been much like David’s. There was, of course, nothing against Henry getting himself into more imposing surroundings. Still, he too could not help feeling how unsuitable the notion was. Could it be possible that Henry was becoming ambitious? Stephen was as much surprised as Phœbe had been. And really, how much better he, Stephen, could have managed everything. He could have filled a large house with people who were at the same time the right ones and amusing, given pleasant weekend parties and been adored by his gardeners.
