Captain Patch was a tall, copper-headed young man, who gazed with a certain beaming friendliness at everybody, out of very short-sighted brown eyes from behind a powerful pair of thick lenses. He had something of the happiness, and the engaging ugliness, of a young Clumber spaniel.
As Mrs. Fazackerly had told us he would, he got on well with everybody.
It was at the Dheera Dhoon tennis party that he was first introduced to the neighborhood. The Kendals were evidently rather glad of that, when they saw how very popular Mrs. Fazackerly’s paying guest seemed likely to become.
“I think you met him at our house, didn’t you?” they said, firmly, when Sallie Ambrey, in her casual way, spoke as though she and Martyn had known the newcomer for years.
After a time it became known that Captain Patch was writing a novel.
“He writes, I believe,” people told one another with tremendous and mysterious emphasis, quite as though nobody in Cross Loman had ever got beyond pothooks and hangers.
“Of course, he’ll put us all into his book,” said Mrs. Kendal, with her large, tolerant smile. “We expect that. Novelists are always on the look-out for what they call copy, we know.”
Mrs. Fazackerly, closely interrogated, admitted that she knew Captain Patch was writing, but that he did not seem to require quiet, or solitude, or even a writing table. Quite often he sat under the pink May tree on the circular bench in the garden, with a pencil and a small notebook. At intervals he wrote in the notebook, and at intervals he talked to Father. He did not seem to mind interruptions.
“Come, come!” said the Kendals, rather severely at this. They knew better than that, even though authors had been hitherto unknown in Cross Loman. But then Nancy Fazackerly’s statements were never to be relied upon.
“She likes to put herself forward,” was the trenchant verdict of the Kendals. “I don’t believe she knows anything at all about his writing. She only wants to sound as though she did.”