§ 2
Tuesday was not so happy a day for Bealby as Monday.
Its shadows began when Mrs. Bowles asked him in a friendly tone when it was clean-collar day.
He was unready with his answer.
“And don’t you ever use a hair brush, Dick?” she asked. “I’m sure now there’s one in your parcel.”
“I do use it sometimes, Mum,” he admitted.
“And I’ve never detected you with a toothbrush yet. Though that perhaps is extreme. And Dick—soap? I think you’d better be letting me give you a cake of soap.”
“I’d be very much obliged, Mum.”
“I hardly dare hint, Dick, at a clean handkerchief. Such things are known.”
“If you wouldn’t mind—when I’ve got the breakfast things done, Mum....”
The thing worried him all through breakfast. He had not expected—personalities from Mrs. Bowles. More particularly personalities of this kind. He felt he had to think hard.
He affected modesty after he had cleared away breakfast and carried off his little bundle to a point in the stream which was masked from the encampment by willows. With him he also brought that cake of soap. He began by washing his handkerchief, which was bad policy because that left him no dry towel but his jacket. He ought, he perceived, to have secured a dish-cloth or a newspaper. (This he must remember on the next occasion.) He did over his hands and the more exposed parts of his face with soap and jacket. Then he took off and examined his collar. It certainly was pretty bad....
“Why!” cried Mrs. Bowles when he returned, “that’s still the same collar.”
“They all seem to’ve got crumpled ’m,” said Bealby.
“But are they all as dirty?”
“I ’ad some blacking in my parcel,” said Bealby, “and it got loose, Mum. I’ll have to get another collar when we come to a shop.”
It was a financial sacrifice, but it was the only way, and when they came to the shop Bealby secured a very nice collar indeed, high with pointed turn-down corners, so that it cut his neck all round, jabbed him under the chin and gave him a proud upcast carriage of the head that led to his treading upon and very completely destroying a stray plate while preparing lunch. But it was more of a man’s collar, he felt, than anything he had ever worn before. And it cost sixpence halfpenny, six dee and a half.
(I should have mentioned that while washing up the breakfast things he had already broken the handle off one of the breakfast cups. Both these accidents deepened the cloud upon his day.)
And then there was the trouble of William. William having meditated upon the differences between them for a day had now invented an activity. As Bealby sat beside him behind the white horse he was suddenly and frightfully pinched. Gee! One wanted to yelp.
“Choc’late,” said William through his teeth and very very savagely. “Now then.”
After William had done that twice Bealby preferred to walk beside the caravan. Thereupon William whipped up the white horse and broke records and made all the crockery sing together and forced the pace until he was spoken to by Mrs. Bowles....
It was upon a Bealby thus depressed and worried that the rumour of impending “men-folk” came. It began after the party had stopped for letters at a village post office; there were not only letters but a telegram, that Mrs. Bowles read with her spats far apart and her head on one side. “Ye’d like to know about it,” she said waggishly to Miss Philips, “and you just shan’t.”
She then went into her letters.
“You’ve got some news,” said Mrs. Geedge.
“I have that,” said Mrs. Bowles, and not a word more could they get from her....
“I’ll keep my news no longer,” said Mrs. Bowles, lighting her cigarette after lunch as Bealby hovered about clearing away the banana skins and suchlike vestiges of dessert. “To-morrow night as ever is, if so be we get to Winthorpe-Sutbury, there’ll be Men among us.”
“But Tom’s not coming,” said Mrs. Geedge.
“He asked Tim to tell me to tell you.”
“And you’ve kept it these two hours, Judy.”
“For your own good and peace of mind. But now the murther’s out. Come they will, your Man and my Man, pretending to a pity because they can’t do without us. But like the self-indulgent monsters they are, they must needs stop at some grand hotel, Redlake he calls it, the Royal, on the hill above Winthorpe-Sutbury. The Royal! The very name describes it. Can’t you see the lounge, girls, with its white cane chairs? And saddlebacks! No other hotel it seems is good enough for them, and we if you please are asked to go in and have—what does the man call it—the ‘comforts of decency’—and let the caravan rest for a bit.”
“Tim promised me I should run wild as long as I chose,” said Mrs. Geedge, looking anything but wild.
“They’re after thinking we’ve had enough of it,” said Mrs. Bowles.
“It sounds like that.”
“Sure I’d go on like this for ever,” said Judy. “’Tis the Man and the House and all of it that oppresses me. Vans for Women....”
“Let’s not go to Winthorpe-Sutbury,” said Madeleine.
(The first word of sense Bealby had heard.)
“Ah!” said Mrs. Bowles archly, “who knows but what there’ll be a Man for you? Some sort of Man anyhow.”
(Bealby thought that a most improper remark.)
“I want no man.”
“Ah!”
“Why do you say Ah like that?”
“Because I mean Ah like that.”
“Meaning?”
“Just that.”
Miss Philips eyed Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Bowles eyed Miss Philips.
“Judy,” she said, “you’ve got something up your sleeve.”
“Where it’s perfectly comfortable,” said Mrs. Bowles.
And then quite maddeningly, she remarked, “Will you be after washing up presently, Dick?” and looked at him with a roguish quiet over her cigarette. It was necessary to disabuse her mind at once of the idea that he had been listening. He took up the last few plates and went off to the washing place by the stream. All the rest of that conversation had to be lost.
Except that as he came back for the Hudson’s soap he heard Miss Philips say, “Keep your old Men. I’ll just console myself with Dick, my dears. Making such a Mystery!”
To which Mrs. Bowles replied darkly, “She little knows....”
A kind of consolation was to be got from that.... But what was it she little knew?...