Bolton Spa, justly famous for the infamous savour of the waters which so magically get rid of painful deposits in the joints and muscles of the lame and the halt, and for the remedial rasp of its saline baths in which the same patients are pickled daily to their great relief, had been crammed all the summer, and the proprietors of its hotels and boarding houses had been proving that for them at least rheumatism and its kindred afflictions had a silver if not a golden lining. Never had Wentworth and Balmoral and Blenheim and Belvoir entertained so continuous a complement of paying guests, and even now, though the year had wheeled into mid-October, and the full season was long past, Mrs. Oxney was still booking rooms for fresh arrivals at Wentworth during the next two months. In fact she did not know when she would get off on her holiday, and as long as this prosperous tide continued to flow, she cared very little whether she got off at all. Though she did not want money, she liked it, and though she liked a holiday, she did not want it.
The existence, or rather the names, of Balmoral, Blenheim and Belvoir was a slight but standing grievance with Mrs. Oxney, the sort of grievance which occasionally kept her awake for half an hour should it perch in her drowsy consciousness as she composed herself to sleep and begin pecking at her mind. 'For naturally,' so she thought to herself in these infrequent vigils, 'if a lady or gentleman was thinking of coming to Bolton Spa, and wanted comfort and, I may say, luxury when they are taking their cure, they would look at the Baths Guide-book, and imagine that Balmoral and Blenheim and Belvoir and Wentworth were all much of a muchness. And then if they chose any of the others they would find themselves in a wretched little gimcrack semi-detached villa down in the hollow, with only one bathroom and that charged extra, and the enamel all off, and cold supper on Sunday and nobody dressing for dinner. Not that it's illegal to call yourself Balmoral, far from it; for there is nothing to prevent you calling your house "Boiled Rabbit" or "Castor Oil," but those who haven't got big houses ought to have enough proper feeling not to mis-call them by big names.'
Mrs. Oxney's grievance was as well founded as most little vexations of the kind, for certainly Wentworth was a very different class of house from Balmoral and Blenheim and Belvoir, which, though it might possibly be libellous to call them gimcrack, could not be described as other than semi-detached. There could not be any divergence of opinion over that point or over the singleness of their bathrooms and the cold supper on Sunday. Wentworth, on the other hand, was so entirely and magnificently detached that nobody would dream of calling it detached at all: you might as well call a ship at sea detached. The nearest house to it was at least a hundred yards away, and on all sides but one more like a quarter of a mile, and the whole of that territory was 'grounds.' It had gardens (kitchen and flower) it had tennis courts (hard and soft) a croquet-lawn (hard or soft according to the state of the weather) and a large field in which Colonel Chase had induced Mrs. Oxney to make five widely sundered putting-greens, one in each corner and one in the middle, like the five of diamonds. The variety of holes therefore was immense, for you could play from any one hole to any other hole, and thus make a round of twenty holes, a total unrivalled by any championship course, which, so the Colonel told Mrs. Oxney, had never more than eighteen. As for bathrooms, Wentworth already had twice as many as any of the semi-detached villas with those magnificent but deceptive names, and Mrs. Oxney was intending to put in a third, while in contrast with their paltry cold supper on Sunday, the guests at Wentworth enjoyed on that day a dinner of peculiar profusion and delicacy, for there was a savoury as well as a sweet, and dessert. All these points of superiority made it a bitter thought that visitors could be so ill-informed as to class Wentworth with establishments of similar title.
But throughout this summer Mrs. Oxney had seldom brooded over this possible misconception, for, as she was saying to her sister as they sat out under the cedar by the croquet-lawn, she asked nothing more than to have Wentworth permanently full. She was a tall grey-haired woman, who, as a girl, with a mop of black hair, a quick beady eye, and a long nose had been remarkably like a crow. But now the black hair had turned a most becoming grey, the beady eye was alive with kindliness, and the long nose was rendered less beak-like by the filling out of her face. From her mouth, when she talked to her guests came a perennial stream of tactful observations, and she presented to the world a very comely and amiable appearance. Her sister, Amy Bertram, who, like herself, was a widow, and ran the house in rather subordinate partnership with her, was still crow-like, but, unlike Mrs. Oxney, had a remarkable capacity for seeing the dark side of every situation, and for suitably croaking over it.
She shook her head over Margaret's contented retrospect.
"Things may not be so bad just for the moment," she said, "and as most of the rooms are engaged up till Christmas, we may get through this year all right. But we must be prepared to be very empty from then onwards, for a good season like this is always followed by a very empty one. How we shall manage to get through the spring is more than I can tell you: don't ask me. And I do hope, Margaret, that you'll think twice before putting in that extra bathroom. It will be a great expense, and you must reckon on spending double the estimate."
"Nonsense, my dear," said Margaret. "They've contracted for a fixed sum--and high enough too--for doing everything down to a hot towel-rail, and they've got to carry it out."
Amy shook her head again.
"Then you'll find, if you keep them to the contract there'll be bad workmanship somewhere. I know what plumbers are. The taps will leak, and the towel-rail be cold. Besides I can't think what you want with a third bathroom. It seems to me that it's just to humour Colonel Chase who would like one nearer his bedroom. I'm sure the other bathrooms are hardly used at all as it is. Most of our guests don't want a bath if after breakfast they are going to soak for a quarter of an hour down at the establishment. I shouldn't dream of putting another in. And Miss Howard is sure to make a fuss if there's hammering and workmen going on all day and night next her room."
Mrs. Oxney felt this point was worth considering, for though it was worth while to please Colonel Chase, it was certainly not worth while to displease Miss Howard. These two were not guests who came for a three weeks' cure and were gone again, but practically permanent inmates of Wentworth, who had lived here for more than a year, and when their interests conflicted, it was necessary to be wary.
"I'm sure I don't want to fuss Miss Howard," she said, "though I don't know how I can get out of it now. I've promised the Colonel, that there shall be a new bathroom put in, and I let him choose that white tile-paper--"
Amy gave a short hollow croak.
"That's the most expensive of all the patterns," she said.
"And lasts the longer," said Mrs. Oxney. "But it might be as well to put it off till after Christmas, for Miss Howard is sure to go down to Torquay for a couple of weeks then, and it could be done in her absence."
"As like as not she won't be able to get away," said Mrs. Bertram, "for if the coal-strike goes on, the railways will all have stopped long before that. I saw a leader in the paper about it this morning, which said there wasn't a ray of hope on the whole horizon. Not a ray. And the whole horizon. Indeed I don't know what we shall do as soon as the cold weather begins, as it's bound to do soon, for after a warm autumn there's always a severe winter. How we shall keep a fire going for the kitchen I can't imagine: I could wish there weren't so many rooms booked up till Christmas. And as for hot water for the baths--"
"Oh, that's coke," said Mrs. Oxney. "As soon as we start the central heating, it and the bath water are run by the same furnace. You know that quite well, so where's the use of saying that? There's plenty of coke. You just try to get into the coke-cellar, and shut the door behind you. You couldn't do it."
Amy sighed: there was resignation more than relief in her sigh.
"Anyhow the coal is getting low enough," she said to console herself. "I'm sure I don't see how we shall keep the house open at all, when we have to begin fires in the rooms, unless you mean to burn coke in them. There's Miss Howard: she likes the drawing-room to be nothing else but an oven by after breakfast, and there's the Colonel as grumpy as a bear if the smoking-room isn't fit to roast an ox in after tea. I'm not sure that it wouldn't be better to shut Wentworth up altogether when the frosts begin. There's nothing that makes guests so discontented as a cold house. Once get the reputation for chilliness, and ruin stares at you. People coming here for the cure won't stand it. They'll pack up and go to the Bolton Arms or to Balmoral. Better say that we're closed. Belvoir too: I was walking along the road to the back of it yesterday, and the coal-cellar door was open. Crammed: I shouldn't like to say how many tons. Where they get it from I don't know: some underhand means, I'm sadly afraid."
Mrs. Oxney had not been attending much to her sister's familiar litanies, but the thought of those semi-detached hovels, suggested by the mention of Belvoir, put a bright idea into her head.
"I'll tell you what I shall do," she said. "I shall take a whole page in the Baths Guide-book to Bolton, and advertise Wentworth properly, so that everybody shall know that it isn't an ordinary boarding house in a row with the butcher's opposite. Golf links, twenty holes, two tennis courts, one hard, croquet-lawn, kitchen- and flower-gardens, and a tasteful view of the lounge."
"It will be very expensive," said Mrs. Bertram, who was really enthusiastic about this idea of her sister's, but was compelled by all the dominant instincts of her nature to see the objection to any course of action.
"Not a bit," said Mrs. Oxney. "It will pay for itself ten times over. Let people know they can play lawn-tennis all the winter--"
"Not if it snows," said Mrs. Bertram.
"Amy, let me finish my sentence. Tennis all the winter, and the breakfast lounge as well as the drawing-room and central heating and no extras for baths and three bathrooms, and standing in its own grounds--"
"But they all stand in their own grounds," said Mrs. Bertram.
"Stuff and nonsense, Amy. Grounds mean something spacious, not a gravel path leading round a monkey-puzzle. And no cold supper on Sundays. I shall say that too."
That point was debated: to say that there was no cold supper on Sunday night implied, so Mrs. Bertram sadly surmised, that there was cold supper all the week, and nothing at all on Sundays, and such a misconception would be lamentably alien to the effect that this sumptuous advertisement was designed to produce. Mrs. Oxney therefore agreed to word this differently or omit altogether, and hurried indoors to find the most tasteful view of the lounge for the photographer.
The morning hours between breakfast and lunch were always the least populated time of the day at Wentworth, for the majority of its guests were patients who went down to the baths in the morning to drink the abominable waters or lie pickling in tubs of brine, and returned, some in the motor-bus, and the more stalwart on their feet, in time to have an hour's prescribed rest before lunch. The two permanent inmates of the house, Colonel Chase and Miss Alice Howard were, so far from being patients, in the enjoyment of the rudest health, but they too, were never at home on fine mornings like this, for Miss Howard had left the house by ten o'clock with her satchel of painting apparatus and a small folding stool, which when properly adjusted never pinched her anywhere or collapsed, and sketched from Nature till lunch-time. On her return she put up on the chimney-piece of the lounge the artistic fruit of her labours for the delectation and compliments of her fellow-guests. These water-colour sketches were, for the most part, suave and sentimental, and represented the church tower of St. Giles's, seen over the fields, or trees with reflections in the river, or dim effects of dusk (though painted by broad daylight, since it was impossible to get the colours right otherwise) with scattered lights gleaming from cottage windows, and possibly a crescent moon (body-colour) in the west. Garden-beds, still-life studies of petunias and Mrs. Oxney's cat were rarer subjects, but much admired.
Colonel Chase's occupations in the morning were equally regular and more physically strenuous, for either he bicycled seldom less than thirty miles, or walked not less than eight as recorded by his pedometer. He had two pedometers, one giddily affixed to the hub of his bicycle's hind-wheel, and the other, for pedestrian purposes, incessantly hung by a steel clip into his waistcoat pocket: this one clicked once at each alternate step of his great strong legs, and it was wonderful how far he walked every day. Thus, though his fellow-guests at Wentworth could not, as in Miss Howard's case, feast their eyes on the actual fruit of his energy since this would have implied the visualization of so many miles of road, they could always be (and were) informed of the immense distances he had traversed. This he felt sure, was a source of admiring envy to the crippled and encouraged them to regain their lost activity. Mrs. Holders, for instance, who, a fortnight ago, had only just been able to hobble down to the Bath establishment on two sticks and was always driven up again in the motor-bus, and who now was able, on her good days, to walk both ways, with the assistance of only one stick, had great jokes with him about her increasing mobility. She used to say that when she came back in the spring, she would go out with him for his walk in the morning, and take her treatment in the afternoon when he was resting. She seemed to take the greatest interest in his athletic feats, and used to drink in all he said with an air of reverent and rapt attention. Occasionally, however, when Colonel Chase was least conscious of being humorous (though no one could be more so if he wished) she gave a little mouse-like squeak of laughter and then became intensely serious again. This puzzled him till he thought of what was no doubt the right explanation, namely, that Mrs. Holders had suddenly thought of something amusing, which had nothing to do with him and his conversation. For the rest, she was a middle-aged, round-about little personage, with a plain vivacious face and highly-arched eyebrows, so that she looked in a permanent state of surprise though nobody knew what she was surprised about. Miss Howard thought of her as 'quaint' and Mrs. Holders did not think of Miss Howard at all.
There had lately been a tree felled in the field where the twenty-hole golf links lay, and when her sister went indoors to select a tasteful view of the lounge, Mrs. Bertram walked through the garden and out on to the links to see what it was worth in the way of logs for the fires in this shortage of coal. The tree had been dead for more than a year, and she had repeatedly urged Margaret to have it cut down while it was still sound, and had not degenerated into touchwood. But Mrs. Oxney had been very obstinate about it, weak but obstinate, for a green woodpecker had built in it and she said it would be such a shame to cut it down, and completely upset the poor dickie-bird's domestic arrangements. Then, when the woodpecker had quite finished with it, Colonel Chase said it made a first-rate hazard for the seventeenth and nineteenth holes (the long diagonals across the field) which meant that he was the only player who could loft his ball over it without going round, and it was not till yesterday that Mrs. Oxney had steeled herself to the destruction of this magnificent bunker. Now, of course, as Mrs. Bertram had woefully anticipated, the tree was no more than a great cracknell kept together by bark, and the Colonel might just as well have been left to go on soaring over it or hitting into it as before.
As she walked back to the house from this depressing expedition she heard the hoot of the motor-bus which brought back the patients from the baths, announcing its return. There were the usual three occupants (since Mrs. Holders had taken to walking up) Mr. Kemp and his down-trodden daughter Florence, both habitual guests at Wentworth, and Mr. Bullingdon who was paying his first visit to Bolton Spa. Though he was quite a young man, Mrs. Bertram felt sure that a bath chair would soon be his only mode of locomotion, but in spite of his poor knees, which made him move as if he was performing a cake-walk with his two sticks for a partner, he was full of jokes and gaiety. He laughed at himself in the most engaging manner, and said that he really wasn't sure that he wanted to get better, since he attracted so much flattering attention, wherever he went, by reason of his antics. Apart from these flippant allusions to his own afflictions, he never talked about arthritis at all, which was a great contrast to Mr. Kemp whose idea of pleasant conversation was to pin a listener into a corner from which escape was difficult, and, beginning with the 3rd of March, 1920, which was the date on which he first felt a throbbing in his left hip, recount the progress of his rheumatisms. He had visited Harrogate, Buxton, Bath, Droitwich, Aix and Marienbad, and none of these had really done him any good, but there was still a chance that Bolton in combination with some of the others and Bournemouth for the winter, might benefit him. Just as Mrs. Bertram reached the door, he was balanced on the step of the motor-bus, and warning Mr. Bullingdon about a certain malignant masseur at Aix.
"Don't let him touch your knees with the tips of his fingers," he said, "if you're thinking of going to Aix. I was getting on nicely there, as my daughter will tell you, when my doctor recommended me to have treatment at the hands of this villain. In a week or two he had undone all the good I had derived from Aix, and when I left I wasn't walking much better than you. What was his name, Florence?"
"Jean Cuissot," said Florence in a monotonous voice. She knew her father would ask her that.
"Nonsense: Jean Cuissot was the masseur I went to the year before. No, I believe you're right, it was Jean Cuissot. Judas Iscariot would be a better name for him. Give me your arm, please, unless you want me to stand on this step for the rest of my life. Ah, dear me, I've got a new pain in my ankle this morning. I woke in the night and felt it wasn't comfortable, and expected I should have trouble. Why, there's Mrs. Holders already. She has walked all the way up from the baths. I haven't been able to walk back after my bath since I was at Harrogate two seasons ago, and the hill there is neither so long nor so steep as this. But I used to think nothing of it then. What wouldn't I give to be able to walk up such a hill now!"
Mrs. Bertram who was lending a firm shoulder to Mr. Kemp while his daughter disentangled his sticks which had got muddled up in some inexplicable manner between his legs and the door of the bus, sighed heavily.
"Yes, indeed," she said. "We so seldom appreciate our blessings till they are taken from us, and then we haven't got them to appreciate. But Bolton may set you up yet, Mr. Kemp, you never can tell."
Mr. Bullingdon, now that the doorway of the bus was clear, performed a sort of mystic dance down the steps and on to the ground.
"There we are," he said cheerfully. "You know they ought to engage Mrs. Holders and Mr. Kemp and me for a short turn at a music-hall. It would have an immense success: screams of laughter. There would be a glass of champagne on one side of the stage, and we three toeing the mark on the other. Then at the word 'go', we would start off and see who could grab it first. Mrs. Holders would have to be handicapped though, you and I wouldn't stand a chance against her, Mr. Kemp."
Mr. Kemp was inclined to be offended at the suggestion of his appearing at a music-hall, and his daughter and Mrs. Bertram closed in behind him and propelled him into the house. Besides, as everybody ought to know, champagne was poison to him: you might as well expect him to race for a glass of prussic acid.
With the dispersal of the passengers by the ambulance waggon (as Mr. Bullingdon always flippantly called the bus) to their rooms to rest before lunch, the house was quiet again till the arrival of Miss Howard with her satchel and her camp-stool. The twilight scene on which she had been engaged this sunny morning had been giving her a great deal of trouble, for the dusk, even to her indulgent eye was of a strange soupy quality, as if some dark viscous fluid had been emitted from an unknown source (for she had not intended it) on to the landscape, and the lights from the cottages looked like some curious eruption of orange spots. It was very disappointing, for she had hoped great things from this sketch, but now when she put it up on the chimney-piece of the lounge, the effect was puzzling rather than pleasing. Luckily however, she found that a small flat parcel had arrived for her; this she knew could be nothing else than Evening Bells, which she had sent a week ago to be framed by Mr. Bowen. That, up till now, was certainly her chef-d'œuvre: Mrs. Oxney had declared that she could positively hear the bells, and so Miss Howard had caused to be printed on the mount of this masterpiece, 'The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells'. There was the tower of St. Giles' church reflected in the river, which had caused that pretty thought to come into Mrs. Oxney's mind, and Miss Howard was sure that everybody would like to see 'Evening Bells' again in its gilt frame. So she replaced the soupy twilight in her satchel, and determined to put it under the tap when she went upstairs to see if a thorough washing-down would not render it more translucent. There was half an hour yet before lunch-time, and she tripped into the drawing-room to get a good practise on the mellow but elderly piano.
Miss Alice Howard was a pathetic person, though she would have been very much surprised if anyone had told her so. She had been an extremely pretty girl, lively and intelligent and facile, but by some backhanded stroke of fate she had never married, and now at the age of forty, though she had parted with her youth, she had relinquished no atom of her girlishness. She hardly ever walked, but tripped, she warbled little snatches of song when she thought that anyone might be within hearing in order to refresh them with her maidenly brightness, and sat on the hearth-rug in front of the fire, even though there was a far more comfortable seat ready. It was not that she felt any profound passion for tripping, warbling and squatting, but from constantly telling herself that she was barely out of her teens she had got to believe in her girlishness and behaved accordingly. Her imagination (here was the root of the matter) was incessantly exercised on herself, and she imagined all sorts of things about herself that had little or no foundation in fact. She could scarcely have told you how or when, for instance, she began to believe that she was closely connected with a noble house, but certainly all Wentworth believed it now. They could have had no other informant but her, and Miss Howard very nearly believed it, too, so constantly had she made rich little allusions which implied it. She had a commodious semi-detached villa of her own, conveniently close to the station at Tunbridge Wells, but it was lonely work to live there by herself, and she had let it furnished for the last year, and hoped to do so again for the next. The occupant was a gentleman on the Stock Exchange called Mr. Gradge, who lived there with his sister, but she always referred to them as "my tenants," and to the semi-detached villa as 'my little place' in Kent. She thus contrived to produce the impression that the villa was a small ancestral manor-house, and sometimes lamented that the monstrously swollen taxes of late years had caused so many country houses to be shut up or let: she thought herself very lucky to be able to let her little place in Kent near (though it really was 'at') Tunbridge Wells. Miss Howard, in fact, though girlish, suffered from the essentially middle-aged disease of fabrication, and whether she looked at her physical image in the tall looking-glass in her bedroom, or contemplated herself in the mirror of her mind, she now saw what she had got to believe about herself.
She was quite alone in the world without near relations or any intimate friend, and, with the little place in Kent let to her tenants, she lived at Wentworth for the greater part of the year, spent a month at a similar boarding house at Torquay which she called her Christmas holidays, and had another holiday in a third boarding-house in South Kensington for a fortnight of the London season. From there she came back to Wentworth quite worn out with gaiety; everyone had been so kind and pleased to see her, and how her cousins had scolded her for insisting on going back to Bolton after so short a visit. But she was much happier at Wentworth than anywhere else, for she had come to be, not only in her own eyes, but in Mrs. Oxney's and those of the other guests a sort of incarnation of all the Muses. She painted, she sang and played, she danced to the strains of the gramophone with any sound pair of legs among the guests, or, if there happened to be none, she was quite willing to execute a pas seul in the lounge after dinner, which Mrs. Oxney, who always said the agreeable thing, considered equal to the best Russian dancing. And then there was her lawn-tennis, though she shook her head at the suggestion that she should enter at Wimbledon next year, for that would mean giving up so much of her sketching and her music. And then there was her croquet and her golf . . .
She sat down at the piano after removing her hat (shaped like an inverted waste-paper basket and trimmed with three sorts of grapes, pink, blue and orange) and deftly encouraged her pale brown hair to drop in rebellious disorder over her forehead and nearly conceal the ear that was like a pink shell. She ran her hands over the keys: someone had told her--or had she invented it for herself?--that she had a 'butterfly touch,' and when the butterflies alighted on one or two flowers where the careless things were trespassing, Miss Howard said 'Naughty'! to them, and made them do it again. She was supposed to have an amazing power of improvisation, and these industrious little practices with the soft pedal down, while everyone was resting upstairs, certainly developed her gift. There were some fragments from Chopin which were landmarks for the improvisation when it seemed to be wandering and put it back on the road again. Miss Howard could scarcely tell sometimes whether certain bits belonged to her own butterflies or Chopin's, and if she couldn't tell she felt sure that nobody else at Wentworth could. Presently the gong in the lounge announced that lunch was ready (Miss Howard would have winced at that brazen booming if anyone had been present) but she took no notice of the summons, for she knew that Mrs. Oxney would probably come tiptoeing in, and find her quite lost in her music, sitting there with dreamy eyes fixed on the ceiling, and a smile hovering--just that--on her mouth.
It all happened just as she anticipated: out of the corner of a dreamy eye she saw Mrs. Oxney enter, and sit down with a long elaborate creak beside the door, but she did not officially see her until she stumbled over a chromatic run. She gave a little start and an exclamation of surprise.
"Oh, Mrs. Oxney," she said, "how did you steal in without my noticing? And how wicked of you to creep into the corner and listen to my bunglings! Fingers so naughty and stiff this morning. I could slap the tiresome things for being so stupid. Is it nearly lunch-time? Have you come in to tell me to run upstairs and brush my hair and wash my hands? Must I?"
"Certainly you needn't, for you've given me such a treat," said Mrs. Oxney. "I could listen to you playing for ever, Miss Howard. Tiddle-iddle-iddle-iddle-iddle! I call it wonderful without a note to guide you. I wish my fingers were as naughty as that. As for its being lunch-time, why, the gong rang five minutes ago, but I couldn't punish myself by interrupting you."
Miss Howard was perfectly aware that Mrs. Oxney was a musical imbecile, but in spite of that her appreciation gave her strong satisfaction. She was also aware that the gong had sounded five minutes ago, and so she gave another little exclamation of surprise at the astonishing news.
"Fancy!" she said. "But when I get to the piano I become so stupid and absent-minded. I came in so hungry half an hour ago, hoping it was lunch-time and I declare I've no feeling of hunger left now. Music feeds me, I think: even my feeble little strummings are meat and drink to me. Yes: little bits of Chopin. How lovely to have known Chopin! I wish I had known Chopin."
"Well, why didn't you ever ask your mamma to get him to come down to your place in Kent?" asked Mrs. Oxney. "He'd have liked to hear you play, I'll be bound."
Miss Howard gave her silvery little laugh.
"Dear thing!" she said. "Chopin was a friend of great-grandmamma--let's see, which was it?--yes, great-grandmamma Stanley. She went to see him at Majorca or Minorca."
"I have made a mistake then," said Mrs. Oxney, "but you're so good-natured, Miss Howard. And I've come to trespass on your good nature, too."
"You shan't be prosecuted," said Miss Howard gaily. "Trespass away."
"Well, it's this then," said Mrs. Oxney. "There's to be an entertainment at the Assembly Rooms next week, and the Committee deputed me to ask you if you wouldn't play at it. Such a treat it would be, and I'm sure everybody in Bolton would flock to hear you. It's for a good object too, the Children's Hospital in the town."
"How you all work me!" said Miss Howard, immensely pleased at being asked and beginning to fix on the waste-paper basket. "It's sheer bullying, for you know I couldn't refuse to do anything for the dear mites. How I shall have to practice if I'm to be made to play in public!"
"So much the better for Wentworth," said Mrs. Oxney. "Then I may tell them that you will? I do call that kind. And what bits will you play? They'd like it best, I'll be bound, if you played one of your own beautiful improvisations. That would be a thing people couldn't hear at an ordinary concert, 'Improvisations by Miss Howard'! And then that wouldn't call for any practice at all."
"Dear thing," said Miss Howard again. "If you only knew how it takes it out of me. Such dreaming and yet such concentration. But you shall have your way."
Meals were served with military punctuality at Wentworth and the pianist and her impresario were very late to Colonel Chase's high indignation, for if people were late, the service was delayed, and the punctual suffered for the inconsiderateness of the laggard. At breakfast, which, from habits formed in India he called Chota-hazri, unpunctuality did not matter, but tiffin (lunch) was another affair. He was also soured this morning by the fact that the giddy pedometer on his bicycle had got out of order. He had felt super-normally energetic when he went out for his ride and had pedalled away in the most splendid form for nearly three hours, feeling certain that he was breaking his previous record of thirty-five miles and anticipating many congratulations on this athletic feat, which would give so much pleasure to others as well as himself. . . . But, when, on arrival at Wentworth, he had got off his bicycle with rather trembling knees and completely out of breath, to feast his eyes on the disc which would surely register thirty-six miles at least, he found its idiotic hand pointing to the ridiculous figure of nine miles and a quarter. It was most aggravating; he would have to take the wretched instrument to be repaired this afternoon, instead of resting after lunch, and very likely it would not be ready by tomorrow morning so that once more he would not know how far he had been. That would play the deuce with his aggregate for the month which he sedulously entered in a notebook. At one end of it was the record of the miles he had bicycled, and upside down at the other the miles he had walked, and now it would appear that he had only bicycled nine and a quarter miles on October 17th, and perhaps none at all on October 18th.
These depressing reflections, combined with Miss Howard's unpunctuality, caused him to utter a mere grunt to her salutation as she tripped by his table with all the grapes in her hat wagging, and sat down at her own table in the window where she could see the church tower, and feed the sweet birdies with crumbs when she had fed herself.
"And how many miles did you go this morning, Colonel?" she asked as she unfolded her napkin. Interest in his prowess always pleased him, and of course she did not know how wicked the pedometer had been.
"Most aggravating!" he said. "That wretched instrument of mine got out of order, and after nearly three hours of the hardest riding I've ever done, it registered nine miles and a quarter."
There was a general murmur of sympathy with him and of indignation with the pedometer. Unfortunately Mrs. Holders tried to say something amusing: she could not have done anything more dangerous. Reckless in fact: highly culpable.
"Nine and a quarter miles in under three hours?" she said. "I should call that very good going. I've often been less."
That was like an application of the bellows to Colonel Chase's smouldering wrath. If there was one subject which must be treated with deference and respect it was his bicycling, and he burst into flame.
"Considerably less I should think, ma'am," he said. "Waitress, I said bread and butter pudding half an hour ago, and I don't see why I should be kept waiting till tea-time because others don't come in to lunch."
"He's gone off into one of his tantrums," whispered Mrs. Oxney to her sister. "Run into the kitchen, Amy, and bring it yourself and a nice jug of cream with it."
Miss Howard was grieved at this piece of rudeness. Howards never behaved like that. Such a peppery old thing: as if anybody cared how many miles he went on his bicycle. Sometimes she wished he would ride away for hundreds of miles in a straight line and never come back. And then sometimes she thought that if he had only a clever young wife to look after him, she would soon cure him of his roughnesses. So she put her nose slightly in the air, and ate curried chicken with great elegance in a spoon, which Colonel Chase said was the right way to eat curry.
The nice jug of cream had a mollifying effect, and when Miss Howard came out from her lunch, Colonel Chase was explaining to a sycophantic audience where he had gone, and it was unanimously decided that he must have ridden at least thirty-eight miles, which was indeed joyful. He decided in consequence to forgive Miss Howard for being late for lunch, and to show the plenitude of his magnanimity, he strolled across to the chimney-piece to admire Evening Bells.
"I'll enter it as thirty-eight miles then in my logbook," he said, "if you all insist on it. Why there's another of your sketches, Miss Howard, though I think I've seen it before. Very pretty, I'm sure. What's that written underneath it? The mellow lanoline--"
Miss Howard was also ready to forgive, and gave a laughing peal of bells on her own account.
"How can you be so naughty?" she said. "The mellow lin-lan-lone, Colonel. Tennyson you know. Such a sweet poem. I shall have to find it for you."
"I declare I can hear the bells," said Miss Kemp, shamelessly plagiarising from Mrs. Oxney. "Delicious, Miss Howard. So poetical."
Her father who had been examining the sketch from a purely hygienic point of view, shook his head.
"I shouldn't like to go to evening service in that church," he said. "All among the trees, you know, with the river close by. I should wake up with a bad attack of lumbago next morning, I'm afraid. Churches are draughty places at the best of times, and if you walk there you're liable to get heated and then have to sit for an hour in the cold, while if you drive there, as like as not you've got chilly already and that's even worse. I shan't ever forget the chill I got in church at Harrogate. It was a damp morning, and I should have been wiser not to go. I declare it makes me shiver to look at that church of Miss Howard's so close to the river. I might manage morning service there, but it would be very ill-advised to go in the evening."
Colonel Chase had finished the coffee which Mrs. Oxney had sent him as a propitiation. It had arrived with her compliments, for coffee after lunch was an extra.
"Well, I must get down to the town to have my pedometer looked to," he said, "and then how about a few holes at golf, Miss Howard? I'll be back in twenty minutes. That'll make a pretty good day's exercise for me."
"Marvellous!" said Miss Howard.
"But nothing to what I used to do not so many years back in India," he said. "Military duties, parades and what not in the morning, and a polo-match after tiffin, and perhaps a game of rackets after tea, and a couple of hundred at billiards before I got to my bridge. That's the way to keep fit, and get good news from your liver if the ladies will excuse the expression."
Mrs. Holders was not so forgiving as Miss Howard. She waited till he had passed the window pedalling hard with his chest well out, and then gave her mouse-squeak of laughter.
"And it's early closing," she said. "He'll come tiffining back and serve him right for being rude to me. I can't stand rudeness."
Mrs. Oxney who had joined the group round Evening Bells wrung her hands in dismay.
"Oh, what have you done, Mrs. Holders?" she said. "I am sorry. That beautiful hot coffee which I sent the Colonel, why, I might as well never have sent it at all, so vexed he'll be to find it's early closing. And then, if he's not too much upset to play golf, he'll see that I've had his favourite tree cut down, and it's fallen right across the green in the middle of the field, and that'll be another cause for vexation. I must send the gardeners to see if they can't haul it away before he gets back. Dear me, what a day of misfortunes!"
"And little better than touchwood when all's said and done," moaned Mrs. Bertram.
So the two sisters who usually joined the guests in the lounge after lunch for a friendly chat, cut this short, and the one hurried away to despatch gardeners to the scene of the disaster in hopes of clearing it before the Colonel came back from his futile errand to the town, and the other to order hot scones for tea, of which he was inordinately fond. Though dirty weather might be anticipated, Mrs. Holders was quite impenitent, and kept bursting into little squeals of merriment.
"Serve him right, serve him right," she repeated. "He was rude to me, and that's what he gets for it. If those are army manners, give me the Navy."
This was a revolutionary utterance: the red flag seemed to flutter. Colonel Chase had hitherto been regarded at Wentworth as something cosmic, like a thunderstorm or a fine day. You could dislike or be frightened of the thunderstorm, and hide in a dark place till its fury was past, or you could enjoy the fine day, but you had to accept whichever it might happen to be. He was stuffy on the thunderstorm days and sunny on the others, and you must take the weather as it came.
"Here we all are," continued the rebel, "and we've got to be pleasant to each other, and not fly into passions or behave like kings and emperors, however long we've spent in India, and however many tigers and tiffins we have shot. For my part, I never believed much in his story of the tiger which charged him, and which he shot through the heart when it was two yards away. I'm sure I wish evil to nobody, but I shouldn't have minded if the tiger had given him a good nip first, to teach him manners. And why he should have jugs of cream at lunch and hot scones for tea because he lost his temper I don't know. Skim-milk and a bit of dry bread would have been more suitable."
These awful remarks were addressed to Tim Bullingdon only, for the sisters had gone to avert the wrath to come, Miss Howard had taken the soupy twilight-sketch to the tap, and Florence Kemp had gone out with her father to the chairs under the cedar, where she read aloud to him till he went to sleep.
"I wouldn't have been in his regiment for anything," said Tim, cake-walking about the lounge, for gentle exercise though painful was recommended. "I would sooner have been in hell."
"So would I," said Mrs. Holders cordially, "and thought it very agreeable in comparison. By the way, there's an envelope on the writing-table in the smoking-room addressed to his Excellency the Viceroy. That's meant for us to see. Have you seen it?"
"Good Lord, yes," said Tim. "It's been there since yesterday morning. I put it in the waste-paper basket once, but it's back again and getting quite dusty. If it's there tomorrow morning, I shall address another envelope to King George, Personal."
Mrs. Holders squeaked again.
"That would be a beauty for him," she said. "Mind you do it. Here he is back from the town coming up the drive. What a red face!"
Colonel Chase banged the front door and came puffing in to the lounge.
"Pretty state of things," he said. "It seems a perpetual holiday for the working classes. That's what makes them out of hand. Early closing to-day, and late opening tomorrow, I shouldn't wonder, and then comes Sunday, and I shouldn't be surprised if it was a Bank-holiday on Monday."
"Dear me!" said Mrs Holders. "Then you've had your ride for nothing. What a disappointment. Never mind, get a good game of golf."
Colonel Chase flung himself into a chair, and mopped his face.
"And no sign of Miss Howard," he said. "I told her I should be back in twenty minutes. Women have no idea of time. Qui-hi, Miss Howard."
"I expect that's Hindustanee," said Mrs. Holders. "What a pleasure to talk so many languages. Parlez-vous Français, monsieur?"
Colonel Chase had again that horrid sense of uncertainty as to whether Mrs. Holders was not in some obstruse manner poking fun at him, but, as usual, the notion seemed incredible. Then snatches of song were heard from the landing at the top of the stairs, and Miss Howard came tripping along it. The tap-water had done wonders for the viscous fog, and she looked forward to making a success of her sketch after all. It was to be called 'The curfew tolls the knell of parting day'. She carried her bag of golf clubs with her and was quite ready.
The two went out together through the garden to the golf-field. A perfect swarm of gardeners and odd men and chauffeurs and boot-boys were busy hauling the touchwood tree from the middle green.
"Why, what's all this?" said Colonel Chase, stopping short. "My tree, my hazard, my bunker, my favourite hazard. Cut down! Upon my word now! I wonder by whose orders that was done. Ah, there's Mrs. Oxney. What's all this, Mrs. Oxney?"
Mrs. Oxney came forward like Esther before Ahasuerus.
"Oh, dear me, such a sad accident, Colonel," she said, "though it will be all right in a few minutes now. The tree fell right across the green. So clumsy! But they've got it moving. I had to have it cut down: all gone at the root and so dangerous. What should I have felt if it had come crashing down when you were in the middle of one of your beautiful puttings?"
This was an improvisation as brilliant as Miss Howard's on the piano, and far less rehearsed. But it gave little satisfaction.
"Well, you've removed the only decent hazard in the place," he said. "I'm sorry it has happened for I've been toiling all the summer to get a few sporting holes for you. I should have thought you might have had it propped up or something of the sort. No matter. Take the honour, Miss Howard, and let's be off, or it will be dark before we've played our twenty holes."
This inauspicious afternoon finished better than might have been anticipated. The Colonel's favourite hazard, it is true, was laid low, but the trunk now dragged to the edge of the green, was discovered to be a very well-placed bunker, when Miss Howard put the ball underneath it in an unplayable position, and thus enabled Colonel Chase to win the match. Then it was found that Mrs. Oxney's chauffeur who was an ingenious mechanic could put the pedometer to rights with the greatest ease. (He geared it a shade too high, so that for the future when Colonel Chase had ridden seven-eights of a mile it recorded a full mile, and so ever afterwards when he rode thirty-two miles, as he so often did, he could inform admiring Wentworth with indisputable evidence to back him, that he had ridden thirty-six. A pleasing spell of record-breaking ensued.)
After a quantity of hot scones for tea, he retired to his bedroom according to his usual custom for a couple of hours of solid reading before dinner. He took from a small book-shelf above his bed, which contained for the most part old Army lists, an antique copy of Macaulay's Essays which he had won as a prize for Geography at school, and before settling down to read made himself very comfortable in a large armchair with his pipe and tobacco handy. Then he glanced at the news in the evening paper, which for many months now had put him in a towering passion since it so largely concerned the coal strike. All strikers, according to his firm conviction, were damned lazy skunks, who refused to do a stroke of work, because they preferred to be supported in idle luxury by the dole, while Mr. Cook was a Bolshevist, whom Colonel Chase, so he repeatedly affirmed, would have rejoiced to hang with his own hands, having heartily flogged him first. There would soon have been an end of the strike if the weak-kneed Government had only done what he had recommended from the very beginning. Then, in order to quiet and calm his mind he mused over a cross-word puzzle, jotting down in pencil the solutions which seemed to fit. Half an hour generally sufficed to break the back of it, and then he leaned back in his chair, opened Macaulay's Essays at random, and gave himself up to meditation.