2
“Why didn’t you tell me Mr. Munroe was a Catholic?” said the Doña as she was putting on her things for mass.
“How could I have told you when I didn’t know myself?” answered Dick from his bed.
“Well, he is, anyhow ... and what we’re going to do with him to-day with you in bed ... it’s very odd, every time you invite any one down who isn’t your precious Hugh Mallam or one of your other cronies you seem to catch a cold. Poor Dick, you won’t be able to play golf to-morrow!” and with this parting thrust the Doña left the room.
But Dick was too comfortable to be more than momentarily ruffled.
There he lay: bathed, shaved, and wrapped in an old padded dressing-jacket of the Doña’s (sky-blue, embroidered in pink flowers), which he had surreptitiously rescued from a jumble sale, against his own colds.
At the foot of the bed snored ’Snice, at his elbow stood a siphon and a long glass into which four or five oranges had been squeezed, and before him lay a delicious day—no Church (“I say, Dick! That’s the treat that never palls!” Hugh Mallam used to say), an excellent luncheon brought up on a tray, then a sleep, then tea, then, say, a game of Bézique with little Anna ... but the best thing of all that awaited him was a romance of the Secret Service.
He put on his eyeglasses and glanced through the headings of the chapters: Mr. ?; A Little Dinner at the Savoy; The Freckled Gentleman Takes a Hand; Double Bluff.
Yes; it promised well. It was always a good sign if the chapters took their headings from the language of Poker.
With a little sigh of content he began to read. Had he but known it, it was a most suitable exercise for a Sunday morning; for, in the true sense of the word, it was a profoundly religious book.
On and on he read.
The bedroom, unused to denizens at midday, seemed, in its exquisite orderliness, frozen into a sedate reserve. The tide of life had left it very clean and glistening and still: not a breath rustled the pink cretonne curtains; the autumn roses in a bowl on the dressing-table might have been made of alabaster; the ornaments on the mantelpiece stood shoulder to shoulder without a smile at their own incongruity—a small plaster cast of Montañes’ Jesùs del Gran Poder beside a green china pig with a slit in its back, which had once held the savings of the little Lanes; with an equal lack of self-consciousness, an enlarged photograph of Arnold straddling in the pads of a wicket-keeper hung on the wall beside an engraving in which the Virgin, poised in mid-air, was squeezing from her breast a stream of luminous milk into the mouth of a kneeling monk; and everywhere—from among the scent-bottles on the dressing-table, beside a chromograph of Cadiz on the wall—everywhere smiled the lovely face of Pepa.
’Snice stirred at his feet, and, laying down his book, Dick dragged his smooth, brown, unresisting length to the top of the bed.
A member of his Club, who was an eminent physician was always talking about the importance of “relaxing.” “Pity he can’t see ’Snice,” thought Dick, as he lifted one of the limp paws, then, letting go, watched it heavily flop down on to the counterpane. “’Snice! ’Snice!” he repeated to himself; and then began to chuckle, as, for the thousandth time, he realised the humour of the name.
“’Snice,” meaning “it’s nice,” had been the catch-word at the Pantomime one year; and Arnold or Concha or some one had decided that that was what Fritz, as he was then called, was constantly trying to say; so, in time, ’Snice had become his name.
Yes, they certainly were very amusing, his children; he very much enjoyed their jokes. But recently it had been borne in upon him that they did not care so very much about his. He often felt de trop in the billiard-room—his own billiard-room; especially when Arnold was at home.
He suddenly remembered how bored he and Hugh Mallam used to be by his own father’s jokes—or, rather, puns; and those quotations of his! Certain words or situations would produce automatically certain quotations; for instance, if his austere and ill-favoured wife or daughter revoked at Whist, it would be, “When lovely woman stoops to folly!” And, unfortunately, his partner’s surname was Hope; unfortunately, because every time one of them said, “Mr. Hope told me so,” it would be, “Hope told a flattering tale.”
But surely he, Dick, wasn’t as tedious as that? He rarely made a pun, and never a quotation; nevertheless, he did not seem to amuse his children.
Good Lord! He would be fifty-seven his next birthday—the age his father was when he died. It seemed incredible that he, “Little Dickie,” should be the age of his own father.
Damn them! Damn them! He didn’t feel old—and that was the only thing that mattered.
He stuck out his chin obstinately, put on his eyeglasses again, and, returning to his novel, was very soon identified, once more, with the hero, and hence—inviolate, immortal, taboo. Whether hiding in the bracken, or lurking, disguised, in low taverns of Berlin, what had he to fear? For how could revolvers, Delilahs, aeroplanes, all the cunning of Hell or the Wilhelm Strasse, prevail against one who is knit from the indestructible stuff of shadows and the dreams of a million generations? He belonged to that shadowy Brotherhood who, before Sir Walter had given them names and clothed them in flesh, had hunted the red deer, and followed green ladies, in the Borderland—not of England and Scotland, but of myth and poetry. As Hercules, he had fought the elements; as Mithras, he had hidden among the signs of the Zodiac; as Osiris, he had risen from the dead.
No; the hero of these romances cannot fall, for if he fell the stars would fall with him, the corn would not grow, the vines would wither, and the race of man would become extinct.