“Here we are!” he exulted as we slowed down and turned into a crescent lined with baby poplar and Manitoba maple.
I leaned out and saw a big new house of tapestry brick, looking oddly palatial on its imposing slope of rising ground. My husband stopped, in fact, midway 296 in a foolishly pillared gate that bisected a long array of cobble-stone walls, so that we might get a look at the gardens. They seemed very new gardens, but much of their newness was lost in that mercifully subduing light in which I saw trim-painted trellises and sepulchral white flower-urns and pergolas not yet softened with creepers. There was also a large iron fountain, painted white, which Duncan apparently liked very much, from the way he looked at it. From two of the chimneys I could see smoke going up in the quiet air. In the windows I could see lights, rose-shaded and warm, and beyond the shrubbery somewhere back in the garden a workman was driving nails. His hammer fell and echoed like a series of rifle-shots. From the garage chimney, too, came smoke, and it was plain from the sounds that somebody inside was busy tuning up a car-engine.
I sat staring at the grounds, at the cobble-stone walls, at the tapestry-brick house with the high-shouldered French cornices. It began to creep over me how it meant service, how it meant protection, how it meant guarded lives for me and mine, how it stood an amazingly complicated piece of machinery which took much thought to organize and much money to maintain. And the mainspring behind it 297 all, I remembered, was the man sitting at the mahogany wheel so close to me. Light and warmth and comfort and safety—they were all to come from the conceiting and the struggling of my Dour Man, fighting for an empty-headed family who were scarcely worth it. He was, after all, the stoker down in the hole, and without him everything would stop. So when I saw that he was studying my face with that intent sidelong glance of his, I reached over and put my hand on his knee, as I had done so often, in the old days.
He looked down, at that, with what was almost an appearance of embarrassment.
“I want to play my part,” I said with all the earnestness of my earnest old heart, as he let in his clutch and we started up the winding drive.
“It ought to be a considerable part,” he said as we drew up under a bone-white porte-cochère where a small-bodied Jap stood respectfully impassive and waiting to open the door for us.
My husband got down out of the car. I sat wondering why I should feel so much like a Lady Jane Grey approaching the headsman’s makura.
“Come on, kids!” Duncan called out with a parade of joviality, like a cheer-leader who realized that 298 things weren’t going just right. For Dinkie, I could see, was shrinking back in the padded seat. His underlip was trembling a trifle as he sat staring at the strange new house. But Poppsy, true little woman that she was, smiled appreciatively about at the material grandeurs which confronted her. If she’d had a tail, I’m sure, she’d have been wagging it. And this so tickled her dad that he lifted her out of the car and carried her bodily and triumphantly up the steps.
I waited for Dinkie, whose eye met mine. I did my best to show my teeth, that he might understand how everything was eventually to be for the best. But his face was still clouded as we climbed the steps and passed under the yoke.
The little Jap, whose name, I have since found out, is Tokudo, bowed a jack-knife bow and said “Irashai” as I passed him. And “Irashai” I have also discovered, is perfectly good Japanese for “Welcome.”