§ 3
The men-folk when they came were nothing so terrific to the sight as Bealby had expected. And thank Heaven there were only two of them and each assigned. Something he perceived was said about someone else, he couldn’t quite catch what, but if there was to have been someone else, at any rate there now wasn’t. Professor Bowles was animated and Mr. Geedge was gracefully cold, they kissed their wives but not offensively, and there was a chattering pause while Bealby walked on beside the caravan. They were on the bare road that runs along the high ridge above Winthorpe-Sutbury, and the men had walked to meet them from some hotel or other—Bealby wasn’t clear about that—by the golf links. Judy was the life and soul of the encounter, and all for asking the men what they meant by intruding upon three independent women who, sure-alive, could very well do without them. Professor Bowles took her pretty calmly, and seemed on the whole to admire her.
Professor Bowles was a compact little man wearing spectacles with alternative glasses, partly curved, partly flat; he was hairy and dressed in that sort of soft tweedy stuff that ravels out—he seemed to have been sitting among thorns—and baggy knickerbockers with straps and very thick stockings and very sensible, open air, in fact quite mountainous, boots. And yet though he was short and stout and active he had a kind of authority about him, and it was clear that for all her persuasiveness his wife merely ran over him like a creeper without making any great difference to him. “I’ve found,” he said, “the perfect place for your encampment.” She had been making suggestions. And presently he left the ladies and came hurrying after the caravan to take control.
He was evidently a very controlling person.
“Here, you get down,” he said to William. “That poor beast’s got enough to pull without you.”
And when William mumbled he said, “Hey?” in such a shout that William for ever after held his peace.
“Where d’you come from, you boy, you?” he asked suddenly, and Bealby looked to Mrs. Bowles to explain.
“Great silly collar you’ve got,” said the Professor, interrupting her reply. “Boy like this ought to wear a wool shirt. Dirty too. Take it off, boy. It’s choking you. Don’t you feel it?”
Then he went on to make trouble about the tackle William had rigged to contain the white horse.
“This harness makes me sick,” said Professor Bowles. “It’s worse than Italy....”
“Ah!” he cried and suddenly darted off across the turf, going inelegantly and very rapidly, with peculiar motions of the head and neck as he brought first the flat and then the curved surface of his glasses into play. Finally he dived into the turf, remained scrabbling on all fours for a moment or so, became almost still for the fraction of a minute and then got up and returned to his wife, holding in an exquisite manner something that struggled between his finger and his thumb.
“That’s the third to-day,” he said, triumphantly. “They swarm here. It’s a migration.”
Then he resumed his penetrating criticism of the caravan outfit.
“That boy,” he said suddenly with his glasses oblique, “hasn’t taken off his collar yet.”
Bealby revealed the modest secrets of his neck and pocketed the collar....
Mr. Geedge did not appear to observe Bealby. He was a man of the super-aquiline type with a nose like a rudder, he held his face as if it was a hatchet in a procession, and walked with the dignity of a man of honour. You could see at once he was a man of honour. Inflexibly, invincibly, he was a man of honour. You felt that anywhen, in a fire, in an earthquake, in a railway accident when other people would be running about and doing things he would have remained—a man of honour. It was his pride rather than his vanity to be mistaken for Sir Edward Grey. He now walked along with Miss Philips and his wife behind the disputing Bowleses, and discoursed in deep sonorous tones about the healthiness of healthy places and the stifling feeling one had in towns when there was no air.