“And in ten days you won’t recognise yourself,” he said. “You look pulled down, and no wonder, if you’ve been working in London all August. Anyhow, this isn’t the least like London, and you are going to do no work. You are going to sit in the garden, and go for immense slow walks, and listen to my practically incessant and wholly fatuous conversation.”
But it was difficult for him to conceal the shock that Philip’s appearance gave him. He looked so horribly tired and so old. The suffering of this last month had made him haggard and heavy-eyed, and what was worse, the hatred that had been his soul’s guest had made his face hard and bitter, and yet for all the hardness it was strangely enfeebled: it had lost the look of strength and life that had always been so characteristic of it. The vital principle had been withdrawn from it; all that it expressed was lethal, negative.
Philip’s weary eyes looked round on the garden and the low, thatched house where dinner was already being laid in the verandah.
“So this is the Hermitage,” he said. “Dear God, you have found peace.”
Then he broke off suddenly, and began again in a different voice, a voice that was like his face, bitter and hard and old.
“Yes, I’ve been overworking,” he said, “and as I told you, yesterday I suddenly collapsed. I think my work has got on my brain too much; I didn’t sleep well. London was dreadfully hot and stuffy, too. But I’ve made a pot of money this month. Those fools on the Stock Exchange say that August is a slack month. Of course it is if you are slack. But certainly from a business point of view I’ve had an all-round time. I brought some of them back, too, from their deer-forests and fishings in double-quick time. And they were mostly too late even then. Good joke, too, my going off suddenly like this, and leaving them grilling in London.”
Merivale could not quite let this pass; besides, he must answer somehow. He laughed.
“I don’t altogether agree with your idea of humour,” he said. “Was it really—from a humorous point of view—worth while?”
Philip’s face did not relax.
“It was from a business point of view,” he said.