Old Pybus E-Book

Deeping Warwick

• Herausgeber: Raanan Editeur
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Old Pybus is a 1928 novel by the English author Warwick Deeping. It centers around a London bookshop proprietor and relationship with his sons. He is estranged from them as they refused to enlist in World War I. Many years later, now a hotelier, he meets a young book-lover who stops into his inn. Unbeknownst to him, it is his grandson...|Wikipedia|

Leseprobe

SOMMMAIRE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

WARWICK DEEPING

OLD PYBUS

1928

Raanan Éditeur

Digital book964| Publishing 1

To the Mary in my Wife

Chapter One

1

Mr. Conrad Pybus collected pictures, and being the possessor of two “Constables,” and three “Cotmans,” he had some right to stretch out a large hand and to indicate the picture that was hung against the blue horizon.

“That’s Castle Craven—over there. Rather like a thing by Constable. What?”

In spite of the largeness of his hand and the largeness of the car in which he sat, he spoke with an assurance that failed of its effect. He was shy of the woman beside him. She was leaning forward in the coupé, her dark thinness and her pallor joining to disconcert Mr. Conrad Pybus’s vague yet ample correctness. She was smiling, and when she smiled the angles of her long and expressive mouth curved deep into either cheek. It was a curious smile, showing a gleam of teeth, but not as the conventional beauty displays them, all to the front as though advertising a musical comedy or a dentifrice. As a small nephew put it: “Aunt Ursy laughs in her cheeks.” She did, with a kind of slanting, upward, ironic swiftness, as though the two corners of her mouth were retracted by a couple of hooks.

Mr. Pybus’s hand, sheathed in wash-leather, seemed to fascinate her. Extended, palm turned towards the landscape, it suggested the hand of a policeman on point duty, pontifically presenting a whole street to some hesitating motorist. But with the gloved hand the illusion ended. The blue-and-white striped shirt-cuff nicely protruding from the blue sleeve, marked the particular Pybus. No man could have been better tailored. His hats came from Pont’s in St. James’s Street.

She examined him with one swift and inclusive stare while he remained for a moment in that attitude of civic dignity, presenting her to Castle Craven, that hill town, grey under a kind of blue murk, the lapis of a horizon that was tumbled with clouds. She saw the red gold gleam of a wheat field, ripe on a green hillside. The world seemed a welter of hill-tops, green and grey and silver, or bewigged with smooth beech woods. The distances appeared immense.

But beside her and very much in the foreground was Conrad Pybus, solid and obvious, all black and white, a heavy man who could not sit comfortably in her presence. He had been trying so hard to impress her. He wanted her to marry him. And she, with the merciless eyes of a woman who had no illusions, saw him as a glorified and rather flashy stockbroker’s clerk, a morning-paper man, worth perhaps fifteen thousand pounds a year. He had a place—Chlois Court, in Berkshire.

She allowed herself to agree with him.

“All those clouds massed up there. Rather fine. How much have we done?”

“Oh,—about seventy. You wouldn’t know it in this ’bus, would you? An hour and a half. Not so bad.”

His large, white face, with its unblinking blue eyes and very black moustache, reminded her somehow of the face of a chef. But why a chef? How oddly one associated things! Only—that particular sort of face seemed to call for a chef’s white cap. She smiled.

“You are going to give me lunch there?”

His right hand reached for the gear lever.

“Of course. Saracen’s Head. I wired them before we started.”

The car went softly down into the valley where the Brent ran under the grey span of an old bridge between the steep greenness of overhanging trees. “Aunt Ursy” was peering into a little mirror. She had one of those ivory skins that are proof against sunburn or worry, and neither her skin nor her hair needed attention. Conrad Pybus was showing her how he could handle a car on the narrow steeps of the ascent into Castle Craven. He was very conscious of her sitting there, squinting at her sleek face in that provoking little mirror. Yes, she was “it,” as much “it” as the car he was driving, but she would take more handling, O—yes—much more handling. He might be a new man, but Chlois Court had a ripe and proper atmosphere.

While she, consummate worldling, but coolly honest, as many worldlings are, watched a high stone garden-wall glide by, its greyness tufted with Siberian wallflower and draped with aubrietia. Colour! Of course! The man had no colour. Moreover, he possessed one of those heavy white skins which resemble greasy vellum. Hence the “chef complex.” Yes—that settled it, for, whatever she might be, she was like most women, richly fastidious, a saint in her æsthetics, if something of a vagrant in her morals.

Meanwhile Conrad Pybus’s blue car, with its black coupé and silver snout, climbed the steep and tortuous Bridge Street into Castle Craven. He drove with a confident care. He was doing the thing well, and it was no use doing things badly in the presence of Ursula Calmady.

“Might be the Brooklands test-hill. Oh—you idiot!”

Balked by a Ford van that pulled out in front of him without a by-your-leave or a signal, he had to hold the car on the steep hill. The lady glanced at his face. He had the air of saying to himself things that in her presence could not be said.

She smiled to herself.

“No—my dear, no. You are not a bad sort, but in six months you would be saying those things aloud.”

The car moved on, and she allowed herself to feel self-revealed in the dignity of Castle Craven. Its very steepness was dramatic and Shakespearean. Between little grey crowded houses, the cobbled street swept up and through the black throat of an old gate. There was a sudden enlargement of the sky. The tall houses drew back under the smiling white clouds. A church tower with six pinnacles, each topped by a gilded vane, made a glittering against the blueness. In the centre of the great space a market cross rallied the town. There were houses of stone and houses of Georgian brick, and a row of pollarded limes shading the fronts of a line of shops. On the left a golden head swinging on an iron bracket overhung the broad pavement. A little farther on the White Hart Inn wore upon the top of its white-pillared portico a turban of flowers. Two red ’buses, and half-a-dozen cars were drawn up by the Cross.

The obvious Pybus drew in towards the Saracen’s Head.

“Well, here we are.”

He was made to measure.

2

Double glass doors opened from the vestibule into the hall of the Saracen’s Head. Directly opposite to you as you entered was the office, with the registration book open upon the counter, and the fluffy fair head of Miss Vallence—the bookkeeper and reception clerk—visible between a green-baize letter-board and a time-table of the local ’bus service. A strip of faded red carpet stretched from the glass doors to the office. Four cane chairs and two smokers’ tables were arranged symmetrically, one either side of this red strip of carpet.

On the right and the left, passages led to the lounge and the coffee-room. A flight of stairs, covered with the same red carpet, disappeared between two green china pedestals supporting aspidistras in cherry-coloured pots. Between one of these pedestals and the office window with a big brass gong hanging behind him like a halo, a little man in a black alpaca coat stood for some eight hours each day.

He was the hotel “boots,” but his activities were various. He was a sort of watch-dog and cicerone. Whenever a car drew up he would go out to meet it. He carried up luggage, and carried it down again. He sold odd stamps, and provided luggage labels, and distributed the morning papers, and was sent upon errands. The Saracen’s Head knew him as John. His rather big and well-polished black boots had—in that particular place between the china pedestal and the office window—impressed a blurred, worn mark upon the carpet. His digressions were frequent and various, but returning from them he would resume his place by the brass gong like a spider returning to the centre of its web.

His appearance was not a little remarkable. Imagine the head of a Roman emperor upon the body of a boy of fourteen. He was old, how old nobody knew. His brilliantly white hair fitted his big head like a legal wig. He had very blue eyes, and a grey, inscrutable, resolute face.

“John——!”

“Yes, Miss,”—or, “Yes, sir.”

He had manners and dignity in an age which is peculiarly lacking in both of them. Understanding people put him down as having been a servant in some house of quality, a footman, or perhaps a groom. There was something about him that suggested horses. Moreover, he could stand quite still under the eyes of the hotel’s loungers, and such stillness is rare. He might appear a funny little old fellow in his black alpaca coat and grey trousers, and very clean as to the collar, but not so funny as many a young fellow-my-lad might think. You took him courteously, or you did not take him at all. Those blue eyes of his could be as disconcerting as the eyes of Marius were to the slave.

3

It happened that this old Roman was standing in his usual place in front of the brass gong when Mr. Conrad Pybus’s car pulled up at the curb. The blue bonnet was the colour of a French soldier’s tunic. Every sort of car pulled up at the Saracen’s Head, and their cargoes were as various as the cars. But this was a car of quality, and old John walked along the strip of carpet and out down the two well-whitened steps. He did not hurry. He was both brisk and deliberate.

“Allow me, madam.”

The lady was in the act of opening the door of the coupé. Old John saw her and not the man, for—in the act of leaning forward—she obscured the figure of Mr. Conrad Pybus. She was a gentlewoman—as well as a lady. She exhaled an indefinable perfume, and was smart with an exquisite and simple rightness. Her dark and jocund eyes smiled at old John from under the brim of a black hat. She was wearing a simple tweed suit in which purples and browns were blended.

John held the door open for her.

“Any luggage, madam?”

There was something roguish in her glance.

“No; no luggage, thank you.”

“Very good, madam. The lounge is on the left. I will show the gentleman the garage.”

She crossed the pavement and went up the two white steps, and old John stood holding the handle of the coupé door. He was looking at Mr. Conrad Pybus. His blue eyes seemed to grow very large with a staring, challenging intensity. Mr. Pybus stared back, but his eyes were the eyes of a man profoundly astonished and nonplussed. Also—he was profoundly disturbed. His big, white face seemed to hang there in the interior of the coupé like a bladder of lard. A gloved hand rested tentatively on the knob of the gear lever.

There was an extraordinary stillness. It may have lasted for ten seconds. Then the interlocked glances of the two men seemed to fall apart, or rather—the younger man’s eyes flinched from the older one’s. Old John was closing the door when a voice intervened.

“Oh, I have left my bag.”

She had come back for her vanity bag, and old John recovered it from the seat, and closed the door of the coupé with a gesture of crisp fierceness.

“The garage is on the left, sir, through the arch.”

Mr. Pybus, staring straight ahead through the wind-screen, pulled the gear lever over.

“Are you taking lunch, sir?”

“I am.”

“You’ll find a side door in the yard, sir. Gentlemen’s lavatory just inside, first on the right.”

Old John, turning with deliberation, walked back into the hotel, and his white head regained its yellow halo as he resumed his place in front of the brass gong.

4

That he as a man should sit calmly down to lunch after cutting his own father was beyond Mr. Conrad Pybus’s capacity. Obviously he was not himself, or rather—he was too much himself. He had reverted—and without realising his reversion—to the little barbarisms of the struggling thirties when he had scuffled with life in his shirt-sleeves.

Moreover, he was so very conscious of Lady Ursula, sitting opposite him at the little table in a recess by the window. A card with “Reserved” printed upon it remained propped against a vase full of purple and white asters. Yes, she too was so confoundedly reserved, such a woman of elevation and of quality, poised like Diana before his moon-faced homage. For the last three months he had been trying so hard to place himself on some sort of feeling of equality with her, to impress her, to realise himself as Conrad Pybus, Esq., of Chlois Court.

Then—consider the immoderate obstinacy of that absurd old man! How could a fellow have foreseen such a damnable coincidence? To hear yourself saying: “Hallo—Dad,” to a little old fellow who cleaned the boots, and saying it in the presence of that most elusive and ironic goddess. Besides—it wasn’t as though he and Probyn had not attempted to do something for the old curmudgeon.

The head-waiter was standing at Mr. Conrad’s elbow.

“Lunch, sir?”

“Take that card away.”

“Certainly, sir.”

“I ordered lunch by wire—a special lunch.”

“Yes, sir. I know all about it, sir. The wine is on ice.”

George, of the Saracen’s Head, had a soothing voice, and a sleepy and humourous eye. He knew his world. Obviously the gentleman was in a fractious mood, being the kind of new gentleman who raised his voice and made a fuss when things were not going well. George’s sleepy eye observed the lady. She was putting one of the asters in place with an air of doing what came natural to her. Her face had the glimmer of an inward smile.

“Soup or hors d’œuvres, sir?”

Mr. Pybus was posed. He bungled his French, and realised that he had bungled it when his lady made her choice. And he was most absurdly annoyed. First—a wild oddity of a father bobbing up like the ghost of his own past, and then a fool of a waiter tricking him into speaking of hors doovres! He became throaty and self-conscious.

“I must apologise for this—place. Had it recommended to me by Pelham. Doesn’t do to take an ipse dixit.”

She looked him straight in the face.

“Don’t you like it?”

“Flyblown—like most of these country pubs.”

That something had upset him was as obvious as was the heavy white solidity of his countenance. She wondered what it was. Not that it mattered. The loutishness in certain sorts of men is easily rediscovered. He glared; he examined the table silver; almost she expected to see him take up a spoon and polish it with a corner of the tablecloth. And she was amused. Always she had loved mischief, but mischief without malice, and it seemed to her that she was watching a materialisation of the real Conrad Pybus, of the man who sat in his office chair in his shirt-sleeves and smoked rank cigars, and bullied people. His voice appeared to slip back into his throat and to become thick and aggressive. She was vividly aware of his crudities, of the inherent vulgarities of the man, and suddenly she wondered how she had been persuaded to spend the day in his car. She hadn’t been persuaded. She had been provoked by an impulse, an ironical curiosity. And here she was sitting opposite to him, and feeling the hot waves of his extreme discomfort pouring over her. Moreover, what was the use of ordering the wine to be iced if you had not been schooled to suppress the common heats of the body?

She glanced over her shoulder at the window.

“Don’t you find it very hot in here?”

He did. He was perspiring. He expended a further portion of his heat upon the waiter.

“Open that window, will you?”

“Certainly, sir.”

The window was opened, but he continued to give her the impression of a man lunching in a London grill-room on a hot August day. She surmised that the salad would be flat, and it was. And again he expended more heat upon the waiter, quite unnecessary heat. She was feeling the freshness of the hill-town air whispering round her shoulders, and she had all the essential and clear coolness of her breed, but she began to be infected by his flushes and his discomforts. It was like travelling in a stuffy and crowded railway carriage next to some stout person who mopped and panted.

“Beastly lunch—I’m afraid—I’m sorry.”

She assured him that the lunch was excellent. But what had upset him? Not that she asked the question. She had ceased from wishing to ask Mr. Conrad Pybus any questions. She had become too conscious of his incongruities. He continued to remain in a heat of frettings and apologetics, and while applying the coolness of her easy voice to the fevered forehead of conversation, she considered Mr. Conrad Pybus as a social specimen. He reminded her of some common child who had been carefully drilled and prompted for some social occasion, and whose niceness crumbled and fell to pieces under the stress of sudden publicity. She saw him as a moist, awkward figure, eating with uneasy ferocity, using its table napkin too frequently on that very black moustache, pulling bread to pieces with its bolster fingers. She was reminded of the simile of a man sitting upon a hot-plate. He fizzled.

“Hang it—this meat’s a bit off.”

“Is it? Really—I think you must be just a little unfortunate.”

Her incorrigible self was conscious of inward whisperings. A bit off! Oh, delicious and splurging Pybus! Almost she feared for his aspirates. And with the cool air on her neck and shoulders she thought of Chlois Court, and his pictures, and his library with its multitudinous classics all bound in red leather. Culture—culture spelt with a very big K, Teutonic, a little pathetic. And yet, in spite of his carefulness and his contrivings, the trotter protruded in proximity to the trough.

But she began to wish for the end of the meal. She decided that the day’s adventure had reached its climax, and that he needed cooling under the trees of Chlois Court.

“Really—it has been a delightful drive.”

He asked her if she would care to wander round Castle Craven. There was the castle, and the Master Mostyn museum—“Pre-historic stuff, you know.” Smiling her own smile she assured him that she had to be back for tea. Could he manage it? Of course he could manage it. He showed a sudden restiveness. He brought out a black leather wallet and put it back again. He asked her if she would like a liqueur with her coffee.

“A Kummel, please.”

He called the waiter.

“Two Kummels and two coffees.”

“In the lounge, sir?”

“No—here.”

His restiveness seemed to increase. Frowning over his Stilton he actually missed a remark of hers.

“Wonder if you’d excuse me a moment. I’m a bit doubtful about the petrol.”

“Of course.”

“My chap’s a careless idiot. There’s a petrol pump in the yard. I’ll get the fellow in charge to fill me up.”

“Please do.”

He placed an open cigarette-case in front of her, but forgot the matches.

“Won’t be a minute.”

She smiled at his departing back.

5

Mr. Conrad Pybus appeared in the hall of the Saracen’s Head rather with the air of a man who had pocketed some of the table silver and was determined that no one should know it. He strolled. He lit a cigar. He had come out in search of the little old man with the big white head and the black alpaca jacket, but the father of Probyn and Conrad Pybus had gone to his dinner.

The son strolled to the street door, stood on the white steps for a minute, and listened to Castle Craven’s old heart beating to the new rhythm. A dirty young man in a blue French cap and a soiled brown mackintosh passed by with his modern music and his odours; the detonations of his machine seemed to strike against the faces of the old houses and to reverberate from one side of the square to the other.

“Filthy things,” thought the man on the doorstep.

Certainly. Filthy, yet useful. But where was that incorrigible old man, that Diogenes out of his tub, that John Pybus of the invincible blue eyes? Was it possible that he was still a little afraid of his father? He—Conrad Pybus, Esq., of Chlois Court, afraid of an hotel “boots”! But was it not the unexpected and the incalculable that one feared? Yet, he wanted to explain. It was necessary that he should explain Ula Calmady, and the awkwardness of the contretemps, and the need for shutting one eye. His father had always been such an uncompromising old devil. He had always insisted upon keeping both those very blue eyes wide open.

Mr. Conrad strolled back up the strip of red carpet. He was for tempting a second encounter. He spoke to Miss Vallence in the office.

“Excuse me—porter anywhere about?”

“Gone to his dinner, sir. I’ll ring.”

“Oh—don’t bother. It was about some petrol. I can manage.”

He took the passage leading to the old coaching yard, where the blue car stood in the shade of a high wall, and as he emerged into the yard he saw a little figure crossing it. The son removed the cigar from between his thickish lips.

“Here—I say—one moment——”

John Pybus paused, turned, and looked at his son.

“Did you call, sir?”

Mr. Conrad strolled heavily across the cobbles. He was very conscious of that grey, resolute face with its incorruptible blue eyes. As a man of the world and a man of business—big business—he would have chosen to wink at his father—but then—you might just as well have winked at Jehovah.

“I say—just a moment——”

His voice insinuated. It suggested a smooth yet stealthy gesture. The yard appeared deserted.

“Just a moment——”

Old Pybus seemed to stand very square on his heels.

“I don’t know you, sir.”

And he went on and by his son, looking up slantwise into his face like a veteran marching past some very young general who had seen no red blood spilt.

Chapter Two

1

Old John Pybus’s father—Peter Paul Pybus—whom someone had nicknamed the “Cato of Bookseller’s Row”—had—as a counterblast against his own parents’ partiality for apostolic names—christened his own son John Julian Apostasius. For Peter Paul had gone beyond mere nonconformity. He had been a Bradlaugh man in the days when such hardihood might seriously damage a man’s pocket; and in associating his son with the Emperor Julian—called the Apostate—he had defied both his wife and society. Peter Paul had relented so far as to allow the “John,” for as Mrs. Mary had asserted “How could a boy go to a Christian school labelled Julian—Apostasius!” Peter Paul had agreed that it would not be fair to the child, and that a good, stout simple name should be added as a sort of handle.

In those days, before the coming of Kingsway, and the “Waldorf” and Bush House, Peter Paul Pybus had had a shop in Bookseller’s Row. Boys from the city schools had come to Mr. Pybus for second-hand copies of Ovid and Thucydides, but they had been obliged to go elsewhere for their cribs, for Mr. Pybus had held strong views upon education and had refused to pander to the lazy. A little, brown, snuffy shop in the very narrow part of the street, it had had a certain reputation with collectors of first editions. The reputation of the shop had been the reputation of Peter Paul Pybus. Packed full of literary gossip, obtained from heaven knows where, he had taken an interest in all the literary scandals and sensations of two generations. He could have told you just how and why Buchanan attacked Rossetti, and how Tennyson liked to administer rhythmical smacks to a pretty and feminine shoulder when declaiming his own verse. Mr. Peter Paul would never allow Tennyson his poetry. “Suburban stuff, sir. Give me Browning.”

One of John Julian’s early recollections was of a certain shop that was opened in the Row directly opposite the book-shop of Peter Paul. John was fifteen at the time, and the shop had puzzled him. It offered you French novels of a sort, and queer little boxes of artificial sweets. It was a surreptitious shop, and people peered into it surreptitiously. It attracted the school-boys who came to buy school-books. John Julian would sometimes catch two or three of them sniggering outside it, and waiting for some other boy who had sneaked in to buy photographs.

John remembered asking his father about that shop, and his father’s frozen face, and the rasp of his voice.

“There isn’t any such shop, sir——”

“But—there is. Haven’t you been across——?”

Peter Paul had gripped his son by both shoulders.

“Dog’s vomit—my lad. Step over it. I say there is no such shop.”

And for Mr. Peter Paul Pybus there was not. He had a habit of mind that was Cromwellian, and he passed on a part of it to his son.

The elder Pybus and his wife died somewhere in the ’eighties, and John Julian inherited the business, and took to himself a wife. And he, too, was something of an oddity. He stood five feet three, and he married a woman of five feet eleven. It was said in jest by their intimates that John Pybus had to fetch a step-ladder out of the shop when he wanted to kiss his wife. But her height was her only distinction, and it is more than probable that John Julian was disappointed in his marriage. Poor Edith Pybus was both weak and argumentative, and she argued at the wrong moments. She set out to spoil the two boys whom John Julian had given her, and over the upbringing of these two boys there were many clashings. Not for nothing had John the head of a Roman emperor. And he was a Victorian. He had a sort of moral earnestness, an extraordinary sense of honour and of public duty, and like his father he was absolutely fearless. The mother, sentimental and flabby, had set herself with the boys against the father. She gave them sweets after their canings. She tried to smuggle their offences out of sight.

“Boys will be boys, John.”

Whereas John Julian believed that most boys—his own included—were little savages and howling egoists, and that no man is made without good and appropriate lickings. Nor should this be set down to hardness of heart. He tried to be more wisely kind to his two boys than was their foolish, conspiring, jealous mother.

He sent the two youngsters to a goodish school, but he was never on such terms with them as he had been with his own father. They were big youths; they appeared to take after their mother; at the ages of sixteen and fourteen they were able to look down upon their little Roman-headed father. During those earlier years, when he had felt more the mate of his wife, John Julian had allowed her to choose the babies’ names. Hence Probyn and Conrad.

John Pybus had trouble with them from the time of their going to school, and as they grew taller and more full of the arrogance of the awkward age, the trouble increased. They had inherited the concentrated, lower-middle-class snobbery of their mother; they had a loudness; they quarrelled; they purloined each others’ ties and collars. Conrad was a bully. Both of them were perfectly familiar with the secrets of the shop across the way. In fact, at the age of seventeen Probyn was the possessor of a collection of indecent photographs which had to be hidden away under a loose board in his bedroom.

So that when the wife died, and the two young bounders were put out into the world, Probyn with a wholesale woollen firm, Conrad as a clerk in a shipping office, John Julian felt a little weary of them, and of the narrowness of the Row. In fact, it is probable that it was the pulling down of the Row that sent him into the country. He sold the London business, and took over a shop in the Dorsetshire town of Winterbourne. For many years he sold books to the Dorset folk, but the market was limited, and if he managed to keep himself and his housekeeper, he did little more. He wrote regularly to his sons, and saw them occasionally. More than once they borrowed money from him—or rather—he gave it, and would not hear of its return. Probyn married the daughter of a speculative builder who was scattering villas about the Surrey suburbs. They had one son, Lancelot, prophetically shortened by his mother to “Lance.” Conrad was unmarried. He liked his adventures, but he liked them cheap. A fellow could be a very devil among the shop-girls on Yarmouth beach, and if you were careful—Conrad was careful.

2

But of John Pybus’s ultimate and final quarrel with his sons no one knew and no one cared.

Why should they care? John Pybus had never asked for pity. As a gladiator he had gone down fighting, and fate had dragged him out by the heels, and finding him still alive had decreed that he should live as one of the arena slaves and scatter sand over pools of blood.

On that August day he had met one of his own sons in the arena, and the man of the forties had fled from the man of the seventies. Old Pybus had watched Mr. Conrad get with some hurriedness into his car, and bundle it out into the market square. Mr. John resumed his halo. He was on duty by the brass gong when Conrad, having recovered the lady, shepherded her with heavy impressiveness out of the Saracen’s Head. They passed Mr. John Pybus standing by the gong. They went together down the strip of red carpet. Mr. Conrad was still apologising.

“Beastly place!”

His father was wondering whether a woman with that dainty and whimsical face could bring herself to bargain across the counter with a shopman. He felt a liking for the gentlewoman. She had smiled and looked at him and spoken. He was an old man. His impulse was to accost her and to say “That fellow’s a rotter. Turn him adrift.” But, then, Conrad Pybus was not exactly a rotter, but a person of property, and it was probable that a woman who could wear her clothes as the lady wore them, had her own philosophy.

George, the waiter, coming out for a few words with old John, who was treated rather as a sage and a great man by those who worked with him, spread a palm in which lay a shilling.

“Gave me that—he did, for a special lunch, and the wine iced, and him with a lady.”

Yes, Conrad had always been careful, and old Pybus’s thoughts went back to the occasion when he had quarrelled finally and like a Cromwell with the carefulness of Conrad and the punctiliousness of Probyn. It had happened during those Winterbourne days in the second year of the war. Mr. Pybus had been in difficulties at the time, for his selling of books—never very brisk—had languished with the war. But the quarrel between John Pybus and his sons had had nothing to do with business, though business had been at the back of it.

For John Pybus was old English. When there was war there was war, and if his country was involved in it, then it was his—John Pybus’s war, and his sons’ war. He was an old-fashioned patriot. Also, he was—or had been—a bit of a Puritan. Also—he was blue-eyed and resolute against the bully, were he emperor or Bolshevist. So, Mr. Pybus had been able to speak of the war as Armageddon without cribbing an obvious bleat from the popular press. St. George for England!

Absurd, great little old man, facing bankruptcy, yet able to lose himself in the great tragedy, and to get up at recruiting meetings and speak to the young men. “I am a man of peace—but I charge you—take up the sword.” For a year he was a kind of fiery cross at Winterbourne, and so successfully fiery that he was sought for to set alight other and damper districts.

Meanwhile his own sons procrastinated. Probyn could not be spared, but he was doing his best to be spared, though he was thirty-seven and a married man. Conrad spoke of joining the Royal Naval Reserve. The letters that old Pybus wrote to them were not models of tact. Your Cromwellian soul does not trouble about the squeak of a boot. He could not understand at first why sons of his had not been among the first hundred thousand, but when he did understand it, he took up the scourge. He bought a third-class return ticket to London, but he had to follow Probyn to Yorkshire, in order to have it out with the elder son. Probyn, a little sheepish and sententious, had very good excuses. It appeared that he had become indispensable; his father-in-law had put up some money, and Probyn had interests. Wool was a necessity—you know, and so was a man who could give the army what it wanted. Conrad, unearthed somewhere near Fenchurch Street, was less explanatory than his brother. He was busy, arrogantly and perspiringly busy. Ships—you old fool—ships and more ships! He did not call this meddling old fire-eater a fool, but he implied it. Besides, he was a careful fellow; he was out to make money.

John Pybus returned to Winterbourne with a very fierce blue eye. He had said things to his sons, things which would not be forgotten. He had called them shirkers, gunshies, opportunists. Such burs stick even to sleek jackets.

And then—when speaking at an open-air meeting in a certain rather backward town, old Pybus met the new English. He was heckled. A young man with a little ginger moustache and prominent teeth, who was something in a Somersetshire coal-mine, reared a head and asked questions.

“I’d like to ask the speaker—whether he has any sons.”

“Two,” said old Pybus promptly, like an old Roman confronting the Gauls.

“And are they in the army?”

“No—they’re not. And be damned to them.”

3

Early in 1917 John Pybus sold himself up, lock, stock and barrel, and after paying all his creditors, disappeared from Winterbourne with some twenty-five pounds in his pocket. He disappeared too out of the lives of his sons. He had cursed them, and without wishing that the old fellow’s curses would come home to roost, they found it convenient to remain estranged. Not that they made no effort to find the old man, or failed to make a magnanimous gesture. Probyn, softer-fibred than his brother, happening to be in the south-west on business, broke a journey at Winterbourne on one reeking December day, and found the little book-shop in other hands. Squeezed in between two bigger buildings rather like a child in a crowded railway carriage, it reproached Probyn. It looked cold and grey. His father’s name had disappeared. The paint was cracked and peeling, and Probyn was wearing a fur-lined coat.

He had made inquiries. His father’s putting-up of the shutters had signalised a voluntary bankruptcy. John Pybus had departed with honour, but no one knew what had become of him. It took Probyn three months to discover that his father was earning a living as a tram-conductor in a midland town. Probyn held out a filial and magnanimous hand.

It was repulsed. John Pybus was not to be pitied. He was quite capable of working. He had no intention of accepting three pounds a week and obscurity in a south-coast watering place or a London suburb. He said in effect: “You can keep your money, the money that ought to have gone to the men out there in the trenches.”

Obstinate old man. After that there was silence, and the silence lasted for ten years. The two Pybus sons had made use of their opportunities. Probyn had bought and sold mills; he had a place at Windover in Bucks; in 1920 he was knighted; Dolly Pybus became Lady Pybus; Lancelot was at Eton. Conrad, still a bachelor, and in the cream and the plumpness of the forties, had translated sundry shipping deals into a country estate and culture, and some two hundred thousand pounds safely stowed away. So did some of our great men arrive during those extraordinary years, while old Pybus drifted about England, an obscure and resolute philosopher. He came to rest at last at Castle Craven. He liked the large sky and the rolling country, and the cheerful human bustle of the inn, and the little stone cottage he was allowed to occupy between the garden of the Saracen’s Head and the castle field. He had a niche. He was both a nobody and a somebody. He had books, and one or two intimates. He had a patron and protector—though he did not need one—Mr. Backhouse, miller, seed and cake merchant, and man of property, who owned the Saracen’s Head, and kept Pounds, the cockily-servile young manager, very much at heel.

To some of the irreverent know-alls Conrad and Sir Probyn Pybus were referred to as “Shipping and Shoddy.” But no one knew that they had a little old curmudgeon of a father who was “boots” at a country hotel. The paternal Pybus was supposed to be dead. He had become a mythical figure. Lady Pybus allowed it to be known that her father-in-law had been something of a literary man, a connoisseur, and a merchant who had traded in rare books. Oh, no, there had been no soiling of the Pybus fingers. The Herald’s College had traced the Pybus family into Lincolnshire, good old stock with a somewhat Dutch flavour. Lancelot was to go to Cambridge—Trinity, of course. He was a dear boy, and so clever. Lady Pybus’s father had built himself a mansion on a Surrey hill. All was well with the Pybus world.

4

After his tea each evening, John Pybus fed the pigeons. White fantails, blue rocks and half-breeds, they came to him from the red roofs of the inn’s stables and outhouses, and from the ruins of the castle. They swarmed and fluttered about the old man, alighting upon his shoulders and his hands, and often his white head would be crested with one of the birds. He fed them with bread-crumbs and odd handfuls of corn. With his short pipe stuck in his mouth he would stand in the midst of these wheeling, fluttering, strutting birds, and so thick were they at times that he appeared as in a cloud of living snowflakes.

Any time of the day he had only to take his stand in the stone-paved yard or broad passage between his cottage and the inn garden, and whistle his pigeon call, and half a dozen birds would come to him. There were some of them ready to follow him into the cottage, but since the fantails shed white feathers and John Pybus had a passion for tidiness, he allowed them as far as his doorstep, but no farther.

The cottage was half stone, half red brick, with a pantiled roof. The kitchen faced the inn. The window of the living-room looked out over John Pybus’s patch of garden, and beyond it to the green slopes of the castle field and to the castle itself with its walls tufted with wallflower and snapdragon. Some very old ash trees grew among the ruins. The Hart Royal tower still showed its crenellations black against the sunset. Beyond it the ground fell steeply to the river, the banks deep with the shade of beeches, and always there was a murmuring of water and the play of the wind in the trees.

Mr. John Backhouse had put Mr. John Pybus into the cottage. In the old days the head ostler had occupied it, but since hardly a horse came into the inn yard, and the garage attendant had seven children and lived out in Bridge Street, the cottage was at Mr. Pybus’s service.

Mr. Backhouse had—with characteristic abruptness and a twitching of his grey eyebrows—announced the fact to Mr. Pounds.

“I’m putting Pybus into Castle Cottage.”

That was in the days when Charlie Pounds had believed that as manager of the Saracen’s Head he had a right to argue with Mr. Backhouse.

“I thought of sleeping the girls in it. There are three rooms, counting the sitting-room——”

Mr. Backhouse did not argue. He was laconic, and wasted no breath. If a person disagreed with a statement of his he just repeated the statement.

He said: “I’m putting Pybus into Castle Cottage.”

Pounds, who had a face rather like a cake of Castile soap, with two sultanas for eyes, had begged to object.

“It’s waste of good room, sir.”

Mr. Backhouse had twitched his long eyebrows, and had asked Mr. Pounds if he happened to be deaf.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I did, sir.”

“Well, don’t waste my time.”

John Pybus made his own bed. It was a very simple affair, a camp-bed of green canvas with one army blanket below and one above and a pair of cotton sheets between them. His furniture, too, was of the simplest; a couple of Windsor chairs, an oak table very worm-eaten, a five-tier deal book-case full of books, a basket chair with a red cushion, a square of green cord carpet to cover the floor. His bedroom floor had no carpet. On the living-room mantelpiece in front of a little gilt-framed mirror he kept a calendar, his pipes, a tobacco tin, and three photographs, the photos of his wife and his two sons. It was an ironic yet human touch.

He fetched in his own water and swept his own floors, though help was available. The women liked John Pybus. He was a clean and handsome old man. They spoke of him always as Mr. Pybus, and in an irreverent age that was no light tribute. One of the chambermaids—Sally Summerscales, a sturdy little dark-eyed thing, insisted on occasional tidyings up, more for the love of the thing than because the cottage needed it. But she darned John Pybus’s socks, and patched his shirts, and fussed over him as some women fuss over a man for the sake of human self-expression. She was a mixture of shrewdness and of unsophisticated curiosity. Mr. Pybus was an oddity, but to Sally he was an interesting and picturesque oddity. She chattered to him and told him about her love affairs, and asked his advice about them, and never took it when it was given.

From the first she had been interested in the photographs on Mr. Pybus’s mantelpiece. She had asked about them.

“My wife—Sally.”

“She’s dead, is she?”

“Thirty years or more.”

“And who are the gentlemen?”

“My two sons. They were killed in the war.”

“Poor fellows,” said Sally, going closer to look at Conrad and Probyn, and stroking her square chin with a crooked first finger. “They are not a bit like you, Mr. Pybus.”

“They took after their mother.”

“So you’re all alone?”

“Yes, quite alone, Sally.”

“It does seem hard.”

“No company is better than poor company.”

Sally supposed that it was. And Mr. Pybus was not quite like ordinary men. She had discovered the gentleness in him, but it was the gentleness of some stout old tree sunning itself in the light of a tranquil evening. He had his thoughts and his books, and the belief that nothing could matter to him very seriously any more. He put on spectacles to read with.

He read a great deal by the light of a paraffin lamp with a green shade, sitting in the basket chair with the red cushion, and wearing horn-rimmed spectacles. He read poetry and philosophy. He was a great admirer of Blake. He was both classical and modern. He subscribed to one of the London libraries, and each month he had a box of books sent down. He was amazingly up to date in his knowledge of social tendencies and of scientific thought. His interest in life as life was deep and unabated.

Chapter Three

1

Mr. Conrad drove over to Windover.

Mr. John Pybus’s presence at Castle Craven within a morning’s drive of both Windover Hall and Chlois Court was a family complication, and Conrad was a cautious fellow.

Turning in at the lodge gates between two stone pillars capped with griffins, he saw before him the famous avenue of beeches arched like a great green tunnel. Always there was a soft, cool movement of air under the spreading boughs of the old trees. The grey trunks were spaced like the pillars of a temple, and the cool drift of the air between them made young Lance Pybus imagine that he was feeling the breath of the divine afflatus.

He was an imaginative lad; he had a temperament.

Mr. Conrad Pybus, proof against all such fancies, saw the redness of the Queen Anne house glowing at the end of the avenue. The old brick-work had the sun upon it, and the sashes of its windows were very white. Chlois Court was bastard Gothic conceived by some early Victorian, and though Conrad’s house had a more dramatic exterior than his brother’s, Conrad was a little envious of that old red brick-work. It was so mellow. It suggested that Probyn himself had mellowed more gracefully than had his younger brother. Yes, there was something Georgian about Probyn. He had developed a country manner, or what he conceived to be a country manner.

Conrad stopped his car on the gravel to the east of the yew hedge and the terrace. Through the square openings in the yew hedge he had glimpses of Probyn’s lawns, and the flower borders, and the pleached limes of the Dutch garden. It was all very still, and slightly autumnal, with the dew yet upon it, and some of the old trees showing here and there a tinge of yellow. Conrad’s broad nostrils seemed to narrow. Always it appeared to him that Probyn’s head gardener got better results than his man did at Chlois Court. Damn the fellow! Still, his dahlias were always better than Probyn’s. Jealousy can include the most trivial of details.

You might be jealous of your brother, but you entered his house informally, and Conrad walked towards the terrace, but in the angle that the yew hedge made with the south-east corner of the house young Lance was reading Noel Coward’s plays. He had tucked a deck-chair into this sheltered corner. His flannel trousers were well up to his knees; his dark blue socks were the socks of a rowing man. He wore a white, blue-edged Trinity blazer.

“Hallo, Conrad.”

“Hallo, my lad.”

There was a sulkiness in these salutations, for Probyn’s son had the knack of making his uncle feel aggressive and uncomfortable. Eton and Trinity! This second edition of the Pybus text-book had received the author’s corrections. It was a more complete and polished product. It could lounge in a chair, and glancing up casually address its uncle as “Hallo, Conrad.” Young prig!

“Father in?”

“Try the library.”

Lance Pybus resumed his reading, and his uncle walked on towards the French window of the library. He disliked his nephew, because Lance—even as a child—had been a creature of queer aloofness, the kind of boy who watched you and listened to you with a mysteriously grave face, and remained insultingly silent. At least Conrad had felt his nephew’s silence to be an offence. It had given him the feeling of being spied upon, criticised, ridiculed. The boy had never been anything else but a reticent, conceited, embarrassing young brute, and the young man looked like being worse than the boy. Probyn and Dot had spoilt him. Obviously. But Lance’s very looks were very disturbing to his uncle. There was something challenging in the eager, upward lift of the head. His dark hair gave the impression of being blown back. It was like the head of youth running swiftly against the wind. His broad face, with its large and sensitive mouth and short nose, had a young matureness, a reticent but sparkling obstinacy. And there were those very blue eyes, either very bright and near or very distant. They were the eyes of that incorruptible old man—his grandfather.

Meanwhile, Lance turned his head to watch his Uncle Conrad’s progress along the terrace. Conrad turned his toes out; he had the walk of a man who would be very fat at five and fifty; his neck was too short; he had a greasiness.

Yes—that was it, a suggestion of greasiness, for if Lance was an offence to his uncle, Conrad was far more subtly unpleasing to his brother’s son. It was a question of temperament, of fibre, of vibrations. Lance might baffle the older man, but Conrad Pybus was no mystery to the nephew. It was as though those very blue eyes looked right through Mr. Conrad’s thick and soapy skin, and saw——Yes, what exactly did he see? Perhaps it was more feeling than seeing, a shrinking, a scorn, an indignation, a revulsion from a nature that was essentially garish and vulgar. For as a boy Lance had been absurdly fastidious; he would shrink away from the touch of certain people; he had loathed fat meat, or the smell of vinegar. Conrad had been one of the persons who had nauseated him.

Beneath a lounging exterior there was swiftness and fire. He had a dignity of his own, a very definite attitude towards life. It included a mental bearing upon his father’s business, the “Jason Wools,” and the “Sign of the Golden Fleece.” He disliked the Pybus advertisements in the daily papers. They were not redeemed even by their publication in the advertising pages of Punch. Why tamper with an old Greek legend? Why throw Medea overboard, and stamp a golden fleece in red upon your packing cases? Why commercialise Jason? No doubt Jason had been nothing but a fighting merchant adventurer. But these modern Jasons with their custard powders and their pills, and their blatant shoutings, and their quite foolish, cheap exaggerations! What a modest age! Language was ceasing to be able to express the stupendous virtues of soaps and motor cars and bottled beer and shoddy.

Lance might have a temperament, but he was a fighter. There were certain people and properties that he could not abide, cheap people, louts and their loutish English voices, all raw and crude creatures, the sploshed faces one sees in a city, faces that Nature did not think it worth her while to finish. In fact, he hated ugliness. He had been known to fly into sudden passionate rages. It was known among his intimates at Eton that, mocked at by three louts who had come in a char-a-banc to see the house the King lived in, he had fought the three of them in a side street. And though the three of them had set upon him in chorus, having the peculiar sense of honour of their class, he had come away prettily battered, but with his young male pride in the ascendant. He had seen the three flinch from him and from his berserker scorn of them.

Nearly ten years ago he had seen Cyrano played in London. Cyrano was one of his great men.

Meanwhile it occurred to him to wonder what Uncle Conrad wanted with his father at ten o’clock on a September morning. Mr. Conrad must have left Chlois Court directly after breakfast, and he was a late riser. He was one of those fellows who got out of bed like a wallowing beast emerging from a mudhole.

Lance frowned. There are occasions when a young man has qualms, and an unpleasant realization of what those qualms imply.

2

Sir Probyn Pybus was writing a letter when he became aware of his brother standing at the open window.

“Hallo, Conrad.”

Probyn was red where his brother was sallow. Tall and ruddy and rather spare, he had a smooth geniality and very fine manners which, though put on like the shop-walker’s frock coat, fitted him with some naturalness. His right eye had a slight cast in it. His eyes were of that colour which is neither blue nor green nor grey, but a blending of all three. He smiled a great deal. He had what Ula Calmady called “the civic manner”; you might count upon seeing him in mayoral robes, and upon his having his portrait painted in those robes. As a matter of fact, his portrait had been painted by Wycherly, and had been hung in the Academy.

“Come in, my dear fellow.”

He had become a eupheuist. He had got into the way of speaking as though he was receiving endless deputations, or presenting prizes. When he shook hands he did it with a kind of genial éclat, bending slightly at the hips, but keeping the upper part of himself rigid.

“You are early.”

He smiled at his brother. His strabismic eye, and his grizzled clipped moustache, and his ruddiness, and his general air of condescending prosperity were very familiar to Conrad. He had been called “Collars and Cuffs Pybus” at school. But now he was very much the merchant prince and country gentleman, wearing his Harris tweeds and floppy hats, and boots with thick soles to them, and decorative waistcoats. On the estate he carried either a gun or a thick ash stick. He bred cattle and took prizes at agricultural shows. Every morning at eleven, accompanied by his agent, he went over the farm and the gardens. Yorkshire saw him less and less these days, for he had been lucky in his subordinates, and he liked to think of himself as the great man in the background.

Conrad looked out of temper. He threw his hat into a chair, and chose a cigarette from the silver box on his brother’s writing-desk. Probyn’s library was not so full of books as was the library at Chlois Court. Its atmosphere was different; it suggested, rather, the country gentleman, the squire, farmer, fisherman, sportsman, knight. It had a mellowness, the vague and genial shrewdness of its owners’ swivel eye.

“You do a devil of a lot of writing, Probyn.”

“Necessity, my dear chap. Responsibilities——”

Conrad sat down in a leather chair. When Probyn talked of his responsibilities—the younger brother was moved to exclaim “Bosh.” He was inclined to be abrupt with Probyn, perhaps because his brother’s civic manner irritated him. There was too much clanking of gold chains.

“I’ve seen the old man.”

Probyn put down his pen.

“Our father?”

“Our reverend parent—if you like. He cut me dead.”

Probyn looked shocked.

“You don’t say so. But where——?”

“Castle Craven. He’s ‘boots’ at a local pub. I’d turned in there for lunch with Ula Calmady. Beastly awkward.”

Probyn got out of his chair and went and stood with his back to the window. He had a liking for being on his feet when any alarm was sounded.

“By Jove,” he said. “By Jove. What a predicament! And he cut you?”

“Dead. That’s to say——”

“You spoke?”

“I wanted a word or two. He spat in my face like an old tom-cat.”

Probyn made a smooth, deprecating gesture with one hand. Conrad still retained so many of his crudities. He was apt to go off the deep end. He had not cultivated a nice, gentlemanly restraint.

“My dear fellow! Awkward—of course. But then—mark you, he is—our father.”

His brother’s eyes gave him a transient, scornful glance.

“Obviously. I thought you ought to know. I thought you might like to go over——”

“It’s conceivable——”

“You’d look a fool——”

“My dear fellow—that point is debatable.”

In moments of stress John Pybus’s two sons differed in their attitudes and gestures. Conrad sat heavily and aggressively in the club-chair, his big hands spread upon the padded arms like two bunches of bananas. Probyn, looking down and to one side, stroked with his fingers the left lapel of his brown tweed coat as though smoothing the fine nap of the cloth. He was for conciliation, smoothness. Conrad was both cautious and truculent.

“It made me look a fool—caught with a woman like Ula Calmady.”

Probyn raised his eyebrows.

“But—you didn’t——?”

“Is it likely? But how the devil——? Well, you see—when I drove up—the old chap came out and opened the car door. We just glared——”

“Very awkward. But—my dear fellow, it makes me feel conscious of a kind of humiliation. ‘Boots.’ He’s an old man.”

“He’s still a damned tough one.”

“My dear fellow, I think we ought to remember——”

Conrad gave his brother a stare, and became explanatory and aggrieved. Yes, it was a fact that he and Lady Ursula Calmady had been seeing a good deal of each other. He had been minded to bring the affair to a climax on that particular day, and the last thing that he had expected was an anti-climax such as the resurrection of old John. Because you couldn’t do anything with old John. He had no instinct for life’s business subtleties. You might have tipped another sort of man the wink, a man who was capable of seeing the humour of the thing. “Say, dad, I want to hook this fish. Mum’s the word. You take me?” Conrad did not put it quite so baldly, but he made Probyn look a little uncomfortable. After all, who was Ursula Calmady? A woman of good family and of the world. Might it not have been better if Conrad had been bold and frank? Taken the situation by the collar.

Conrad looked contemptuous.

“Well, would you have done it?”

He had Probyn straddling a fence.

“Very awkward. You remember, when I attempted a rapprochement? I sometimes think that he was a little bit touched in the head.”

Conrad threw the end of his cigarette into the grate, and reached for another.

“He began it. After all, a fellow needn’t lie down under his father’s curses. Besides—the whole business was absurd. But there it is. Of course he thought me a beastly snob. But why should I pick the old beggar off the pavement at such a damnable awkward moment—‘Say, Lady Ula, this is my old man. He’s a bit of an oddity, of course.’ No, damn it, let’s be honest. The old chap cut us adrift. Ridiculous rot, too. I believe he was a bit jealous of us. He was always a rotten bad business man. But the question is——”

“Exactly,” said Probyn, as though meeting a deputation, “the situation must be considered.”

3

Lance had left Noel Coward’s book of plays lying face downwards in the deck-chair.