“Really?” replied his interlocutor with interest. “Mad on it myself once. As a boy, of course. Silly game though, really, I agree with you.” He followed the direction of William’s eyes. “Ah, the early morning worm!” he continued brightly. “And defying all the rules of its calling by refusing to act as provender for the early bird. Highly unprofessional conduct! There’s a lesson for all of us in that worm, William, if I could only think what it is. I’ll come back and tell you when I’ve had time to go into the matter properly.”
William grunted moodily. There were many things in this world of which William disapproved; but Mr. Roger Sheringham had a class all to himself. The gospel of laughter held no attractions for that stern materialist and executioner of greenfly.
Roger Sheringham remained singularly unperturbed by the sublime heights of William’s disapproval. With hands thrust deep into the pockets of a perfectly incredible pair of gray flannel trousers he sauntered off among the rose beds, cheerfully poisoning the fragrant atmosphere with clouds of evil smoke from the peculiarly unsavoury pipe which he wore in the corner of his rather wide mouth. William’s eloquent snorts followed him unheeded; Roger had already forgotten William’s existence.
There are many who hold that eight o’clock in the morning is the most perfect time of a summer’s day. The air, they advance, is by that time only pleasantly warmed through, without being burned to a cinder as it is an hour or two later. And there is still quite enough dew sparkling upon leaf and flower to give the poets plenty to talk about without forcing them to rise at six o’clock for their inspiration. The theory is certainly one well worth examination.
At the moment when this story opens Mr. Roger Sheringham was engaged in examining it.
Not that Roger Sheringham was a poet. By no means. But he was the next worst thing to it—an author. And it is part of an author’s stock-in-trade to know exactly what a rose garden looks like at eight o’clock on a summer morning—that and everything else in the world besides. Roger Sheringham was refreshing his mental notes on the subject.
While he is doing so let us turn the tables by examining him. We are going to see quite a lot of him in the near future, and first impressions are always important.
Perhaps the first thing we notice about him, even before we have had time to take in his physical characteristics, is an atmosphere of unbounded, exuberant energy; Roger Sheringham is evidently one of those dynamic persons who seem somehow to live two minutes to everybody else’s one. Whatever he happens to be doing, he does it as if it were the only thing that he had ever really intended to do in life at all. To see him now, looking over this rose garden, you would think that he is actually learning it by heart, so absorbedly is he gazing at it. At least you would be ready to bet that he could tell you afterwards just how many plants there are in each bed, how many roses on each plant, and how many greenfly on each rose. Whether this habit of observation is natural, or whether it is part of the training of his craft, there can be no doubt that Roger possesses it in a very high degree.
In appearance he is somewhat below the average height, and stockily built; with a round rather than a long face, and two shrewd, twinkling gray eyes. The shapeless trousers and the disreputable old Norfolk jacket he is wearing argue a certain eccentricity and contempt for convention that is just a little too self-conscious to be quite natural without going so far as to degenerate into a pose. The short-stemmed, big-bowled pipe in the corner of his mouth seems a very part of the man himself. Add that his age is over thirty and under forty; that his school had been Winchester and his university Oxford; and that he had (or at any rate professed) the profoundest contempt for his reading public, which was estimated by his publishers at a surprisingly large figure—and you have Roger Sheringham, Esq., at your service.
The sound of footsteps approaching along the broad gravel path, which separated the rose garden from the lawn at the back of the house, roused him from his studious contemplation of early morning phenomena. The next moment a large, broad-shouldered young man, with a pleasing and cheerful face, came into sight round the bend.