‘Collingwood Road, eh?’ said Mr Harvey.
Mr Colby nodded emphatically. In the darkness, his round, bowler-hatted head looked like a goblin’s.
‘We don’t live in Collingwood Road, of course. We’re right at the other side of the place. More on the edge of the country. Our bedroom and the room you’re sleeping in tonight, ol’ man, look out right across the fields and woods. In the spring, as Mrs Colby was saying to me only the other day, it’s as pretty as a picture.’
Mr Harvey unburdened himself of a remark. ‘A good idea,’ said Mr Harvey approvingly, ‘these Garden Cities.’
‘Holmdale,’ said Mr Colby with some sternness, ‘is not a Garden City. You don’t find any long-haired artists and such in Holmdale. Not, of course, that we don’t have a lot of journalists and authors live here, but if you see what I mean, they’re not the cranky sort. People don’t walk about in bath-gowns and slippers the way I’ve seen them at Letchworth. No, sir, Holmdale is Holmdale.’
Perhaps the unwonted exercise—they were walking at nearly four miles an hour—coupled with the cold and bracing air of Holmdale—had induced an unusual belligerence in Mr Harvey. ‘I always understood,’ said Mr Harvey argumentatively, ‘that the place’s name was Holmdale Garden City.’
‘When you said was,’ said Mr Colby, ‘you are right. The place’s name is Holmdale, Harvey. Holmdale pure and Holmdale simple. At the semi-annual general meeting of the shareholders—Mrs Colby and I have got a bit tucked away in this and go to all the meetings—the one held last July, it was decided that the words Garden City should be done away with. I supported the motion strongly; very, very strongly! And fortunately it was carried.’ Mr Colby laughed a reassuring, friendly laugh and once more put his left hand upon Mr Harvey’s right arm. ‘So you see, Harvey,’ said Mr Colby, ‘that if you want to get on in Holmdale you mustn’t call it Holmdale Garden City.’
‘I see,’ said Mr Harvey. ‘Quite.’
They were now at the end of Collingwood Road—a long sweep, flanked by small, neat, undivided gardens and small, neat-seeming, shadowy houses. Beneath a street lamp—a curious and most ingeniously un-street-lamplike lamp—which was only the third that they had passed in the whole of their three-quarter mile walk, Mr Colby stopped to look at his watch.
‘Very good time,’ said Mr Colby. ‘Harvey, you’re a bit of a walker! I always take my time here and I find I’ve beaten last night’s walk by fully half a minute. Now we haven’t far to go. We shall soon be toasting our toes and perhaps having a drop of something.’
‘That,’ said Mr Harvey warmly, ‘will be very nice.’
They crossed the narrow, suddenly rural width of Marrowbone Lane and so came to the beginning of Heathcote Rise.
‘At the top here,’ said Mr Colby, ‘we turn off to the right and then we’re home.’
‘Ah!’ said Mr Harvey.
‘The only thing about this walk,’ said Mr Colby glancing about him in the darkness with the air of one who knows the place so well that clear vision is not required, ‘the only thing about this walk that I don’t like, is this bit. Of course you can’t see it, Harvey, but I assure you Heathcote Rise isn’t—well—isn’t, as you might say, worthy of the rest of Holmdale. I don’t think anyone could call me snobbish, but I must say that I think it rather extraordinary of the authorities to let this row of labourers’ cottages go up here. They ought to have kept that sort of thing for The Other Side.’
‘The other side,’ said Mr Harvey, ‘of what?’
‘The railway, of course,’ said Mr Colby. ‘You see, the idea is to have what you might call an industrial quarter one side of the railway and a—well—a superior residential quarter on this side of the railway. Very good notion, don’t you think, ol’ man?’
‘Splendid!’ said Mr Harvey.
‘Round here. Round here,’ Mr Colby, with increasing jocularity, swung Mr Harvey to his left. They entered the dark and box-hedged mouth of what seemed to be a narrow passage. They came out after ten yards of this into a small rectangle. So far as Mr Harvey was able to see, this rectangle was composed of small and uniform houses all ‘attached’ and all looking out upon a lawn dotted with raised flower beds. Round the lawn were small white posts having a small white chain swung between them. All the square ground-floor windows showed pinkly glowing lights. Mr Harvey wondered for a moment whether all the housewives of The Keep—he knew his friend’s address to be No. 4, The Keep—had chosen their curtains together.
‘Here we are! Here we are! Here we are!’ said Mr Colby in a sudden orgy of exuberance. He had stopped before a small and crimson door over which hung by a bracket a very shiny brass lantern. He released the arm of Mr Harvey and fumbled for his key chain, but before the keys were out the small red door opened.
‘Come in, do!’ said Mrs Colby. ‘You must both be starved!’
They came in. The small hall was suddenly packed with human bodies.
‘This,’ said Mr Colby looking at his wife and somehow edging clear, ‘is Mr Harvey. Harvey, this is Mrs Colby.’
‘Very pleased,’ said Mr Harvey, ‘to meet you.’
‘So am I, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Colby. She was a plump and pleasant and bustling little person who yet gave an impression of placidity. Her age might have been anywhere between twenty-eight and forty. She was pretty and had been prettier. She stood looking from her husband to her husband’s friend and back again.
Mr Colby, whose christian name was George, was forty-five years of age, five feet five and a half inches in height, forty-one and a half inches round the belly and weighed approximately ten stone and seven pounds. He had pleasing and kindly blue eyes, a good forehead and a moustache which seemed, although really it was not out of hand, too big for his face.
Mr Harvey was forty years old, six feet two inches in height, thirty inches round the chest and weighed, stripped, nine stone and eleven pounds. Mr Harvey was clean-shaven. He was also bald. His face, at first sight rather a stern, harsh, hatchet-like face, was furrowed with a myopic frown and two deep-graven lines running from the base of his nose to the corners of his mouth. When Mr Harvey smiled, however, which was quite frequently, one saw, as just now Mrs Colby had seen, that he was a man as pleasant and even milder natured than his host.
‘This,’ said Mr Colby throwing open the second door in the right-hand wall, ‘is the sitting-room. Come in, Harvey, ol’ man.’
Mr Harvey squeezed his narrowness first past his hostess and then his host.
‘You coming in, dear?’ said Mr Colby.
His wife shook her head. ‘Not just now, father. I must help Rose with the supper.’
‘Where’s the boy?’ said Mr Colby.
‘Upstairs,’ said the boy’s mother, ‘finishing his home lessons. It’s the Boys’ Club Meeting after supper and he wants to get the work done first.’
‘If we might,’ said Mr Colby with something of an air, ‘have a couple of glasses …’
Mrs Colby bustled away. Mr Colby went into the sitting-room with his friend. Mr Colby impressively opened a cupboard in the bottom of the writing desk and took from the cupboard a black bottle and a syphon of soda water. Mrs Colby entered with a tray upon which were two tumblers. She set the tray down upon the side table. She raised the forefinger of her right hand; shook it once in the direction of her husband and once, a little less roguishly, at Mr Harvey.
‘You men!’ said Mrs Colby.
Mr Colby and his guest lay back in their chairs, their feet stretched before the fire. In each man’s hand was a tumbler. They were very comfortable, a little pompous and entirely happy. To them, when the glasses were nearly empty, entered Master Lionel Colby; a boy of eleven years, well-built and holding himself well; a boy with an engaging round face and slightly mischievous, wondering blue eyes which looked straight into the eyes of anyone to whom he spoke. Lionel obviously combined in his person, and also probably in his mind, the best qualities of his parents. He shook hands politely with Mr Harvey. He reported, with some camara
derie but equal politeness, his day’s doings to his father.
‘Homework done?’ said Mr Colby.
Lionel shook his head. ‘Not quite all, daddy. I came down because mother told me to come and say how-do-you-do to Mr Harvey.’
Mr Colby surveyed his son with pride. ‘Better run up and finish it, son. Then come down again. What are you going to do at the Boys’ Club tonight?’
The round cheeks of Lionel flushed slightly. Lionel’s blue eyes glistened. ‘Boxing,’ said Lionel.
The door closed gently behind Lionel.
‘That,’ said Mr Harvey with genuine feeling, ‘is a fine boy, Colby!’
Mr Colby made those stammering, slightly throaty noises which are the middle-class Englishman’s way when praised for some quality or property of his own.
‘A fine boy!’ said Mr Harvey again.
‘A good enough lad,’ said Mr Colby. His tone was almost offensively casual. ‘Did I happen to tell you, Harvey, that he was top of his class for the last three terms and that the headmaster, Dr Farrow, told me himself that Lionel is one of the best scholars he’d had in the last twenty years? Not, mind you, Harvey, that he isn’t good at games. He’s captain of the second eleven and they tell me he’s going to be a very good boxer. I must say—although it isn’t really for me to say it—that a better, quieter, more loving lad it’d be difficult to find in the length and breadth of Holmdale.’
‘A fine boy!’ said Mr Harvey once more.
III
At nine o’clock in the Trumpington Hall, Master Lionel Colby had the immense satisfaction of having proved himself so immeasurably superior to his opponent, a boy three years older and a full stone heavier than himself, that Sergeant Stubbs had stopped the bout.
‘I only wish,’ said Lionel to himself, ‘that dad and mum had been there.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lionel aloud to his cronies, with a self-condemnatory swagger quite delicious, ‘I didn’t realise I was hitting so hard.’
At nine o’clock in the Holmdale Theatre—a building so modern in conception, so efficient in arrangement, and so pleasantly strange in decoration that earnest Germans made special trips to England to see it—the curtain was going down upon the first act of the Yeomen of the Guard as performed by the Holmdale Mummers. With supers, the cast of the Yeomen of the Guard, as performed by the Holmdale Mummers, amounted to seventy-four. There were in the theatre somewhere between two hundred and fifty and three hundred people, two hundred and twenty-two of whom were relatives of the cast.
At nine o’clock in the library of The Hospice, which was the large house of Sir Montague Flushing, K.B.E., the chairman of the Holmdale Company Limited, Sir Montague himself, was concluding a small and informal speech to those six of his fellow directors who had, that night, dined with him. Sir Montague was saying:
‘… and so I think that we may, gentlemen, very fairly congratulate ourselves upon drawing near to the conclusion of a very successful year. It is true that this year, as in the past, we have been unable to pay any dividend upon Ordinary Shares. It is also true that we have had to mortgage a thousand acres of building land on the Collingwood site, but, in opposition to these two facts, we have the increased and ever increasing influx of citizens. We have the success of our (a), (b) and (d) building schemes and we have the satisfaction of knowing that before many more months are out we shall be a fully self-contained borough with an Urban District Council of its own.
‘I am sure you will join with me, gentlemen, in giving thanks to Mr Dartmouth for his untiring efforts towards this very desirable end. When I tell you that Mr Dartmouth is to be the Clerk to the new Urban District Council, nominally giving up his position as Secretary to the Company, I am sure that you will appreciate how very helpful the new situation may prove.’
Sir Montague sits down. There is no clapping because this is an informal meeting, but there is a hearty and hive-like bumble of appreciation. Sir Montague’s manservant—the only manservant in Holmdale as this is the only library—makes slow and steady round. The glasses of Sir Montague, the Managing Director, Mr Dartmouth, the Company’s Secretary who is soon to be Clerk to the Council, and the other Directors—Mr Archibald Barley, Colonel Fairfax, Mr Cuthbert Mellon, Mr Ernest May and Mr Charles E. Lordly—are filled. A prosperous enough gathering of men who have, in the manner of all big fish in small ponds, persuaded themselves that their pond is the world.
At nine o’clock in the Maxton Hall, which is on The Other Side, Mr James Wildman is concluding a speech to an earnest audience. Mr Wildman is saying:
‘… And now to come to the peroration of my remarks. I can only hope that I have done some little service to the cause, by making certain-sure that all of my audience tonight will be fighting heart and soul, tooth and nail for the Silk Workers. (Applause.)
‘Before I sit down I should like to add to my final and concluding remarks the final statement that before I sit down I should like to say that, in conclusion, and quite apart from my proper subject, it would give me great pleasure to add that I consider Holmdale Garden City (What’s that, Mr Chairman?). I beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, I should have said Holmdale, that I consider Holmdale to be a proper move in the right direction. It has not been my pleasure and privilege to visit this salubrious spot before this occasion of this, my auspicious visit tonight, but now that I have paid a visit to Holmdale Gar … I beg your pardon, Mr Chairman, to Holmdale, I feel that it would not be right for me to conclude my remarks and to sit down without expressing my appreciation of the very salubrious qualities of this … er … Holmdale. It seems to me that here you have pleasant homes for jaded workers; pleasant homes set in delightfully rusticating surroundings. It seems to me, in fact, that here you have the beginning of what some of our more educated friends would call the millennium. When I looked about me on my pleasant walk here with Mr Todd here up from the station to this hall where I was to address you tonight I took the opportunity of keeping—as I always do—my eyes open. What I saw was a very pleasant, clean and delightful town set down in the heart of England’s fair green countryside. It has been my painful lot, Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, to have most of my life’s work laid down in the paths of the great cities, and I cannot tell you, I cannot even hope to properly or even with any degree of truthfulness tell you how much I opened my eyes at this very aptly named Holmdale of yours. It is, if I may coin the phrase, Holmdale by name and Holmdale by nature. It is a home town of little, clean, nice, decent, orderly homes; homes for that backbone of England, the working man … God bless him!’
At nine o’clock in the Baden-Powell Drill Hall, Mr William Farthingale had amassed so many points in the Progressive Whist Drive, organised by the Holmdale Mothers’ Protective Aid Society, that it seemed almost certain that he would run away with the first prize of a massive pair of ebony and silver-backed hair brushes. At nine o’clock in No. 3, Pettifers Lane, Mrs Sterling was, not without grumbling, cooking the late supper of her husband who worked at the Holmdale Electricity Supply Company. At nine o’clock in No. 14, Prester Avenue, Mrs Tildesly-Marshall was announcing to the guests in her drawing-room that Mr Giles Freshwater would now sing—Miss Sophie May accompanying—Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’, after which we will have a little bridge. At nine o’clock in Claypits Road, Miss Ursula Finch, the part proprietor and sole editor of the Holmdale Clarion, locked up the Clarion’s office. At nine o’clock in the surgery of No. 10 Broad Walk, Dr Arthur Reade was assuring the wife of Mr Fox-Powell, the solicitor, that there would be no addition to the family. At nine o’clock in Links Lane, Albert Rogers was kissing Mary Fillimore. At nine o’clock in the parlour of The Cottage in High Collings, Mr Julius Wetherby was having his nightly quarrel with Mrs Julius Wetherby. At nine o’clock in The Laurels Nursing Home, which was on the corner of Collingwood Road and Minters Avenue, Mrs Walter Stilson, wife of the Reverend Walter Stilson, was being delivered of a son. At nine o’clock in the drawing-room of No. 4 Tall Elms Road, Mrs Rudolph Sharp, having been assailed three times tha
t day by an inner agony, was drafting, for the eye of her solicitors, a codicil to her will. And at nine o’clock down by the station, Percy Godly, the black sheep son of Emanuel Godly, the tea-broker, whose house, just outside the bounds of the town at Links Corner, was the envy of all Holmdale, was missing the last train to London.
It was at ten-fifteen that Mrs George Colby first evinced signs of more than normal perturbation. She and her husband and the long and saturnine-seeming Mr Harvey had finished their last rubber of wagerless dummy.
Mrs Colby got suddenly to her feet. Her chair fell with a soft crash to lie asprawl upon the blue carpeted floor. In a voice which sounded somehow as if she were having difficulty with her breath, Mrs Colby said:
‘George! I—I—don’t like it! What can’ve happened to him? George, it’s a quarter past ten!’
Mr Colby looked at his watch. Mr Colby looked at the clock upon the mantelpiece. Mr Colby consulted Mr Harvey. Mr Colby, after two minutes, came to the conclusion that a quarter past ten was irrevocably the time.
‘Don’t you remember, dear,’ said Mr Colby, ‘that time when he didn’t come back until just before ten. The boxing had gone on rather longer than usual. You remember I wrote a stiff P.C. to that Mr Maclellon about it—’
‘I know. I know,’ said Mrs Colby, stooping down and picking up her chair. ‘I know, but it isn’t a few minutes to ten now, George. It’s a quarter past!’ She suddenly left off fumbling with her chair and as suddenly was gone from the room. The door slammed to behind her.
‘I expect,’ said Mr Harvey, looking at his host, ‘that the lad’s up to some devilment. A fine lad that and, personally, Colby, I’ve no use for a boy that hasn’t a bit of the devil in him. I remember when I was a lad—’
‘Clara,’ said Mr Colby, ‘gets that worked up.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘All the same, Harvey, ol’ man, it’s late for the nipper. Have a drink? I’d go out only I expect that’s where Clara’s gone. She’ll find him all right playing Tig at the end of the street or something.’
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