Half-an-hour later, as he stormed through the hall of Montagu House, he was greeted by the menace of Mr Gryce’s voice, creaking, creaking....
“Naturalized or unnaturalized, it’s all the same—the leopard can’t change his spots!”
And the day was rounded to a perfect circle.
II
And after that, Mr Gryce’s voice mixed itself up with pretty well everything; but particularly with Richard’s three meals a day in the dining-room of Montagu Hall. He would like to have disappointed Mr Gryce by occasional absences from meals—taking it for granted that the Inquisitor does feel a certain disappointment at the absence of his victims from the rack; but, remembering David’s remarks on patriotism locally applied, he forced himself to be present for his father’s sake; forced his taciturnity to voluble talk, throwing up a screen between Ferdie and the enemy; or, if that failed, at least grandfather could sometimes be diverted from the muttered arrogance of patriotism—German patriotism—which might at any moment, via Mr Gryce’s hearing, provoke a public scene. Richard dreaded a scene now as much as he had sought it at the incident of Con Rothenburg’s death; it was as though his pugnacity had been wounded, and would not heal, and was raw-sensitive....
Especially raw-sensitive to Mr Gryce; his pores were all open to Mr Gryce, who from merely ignoring the Marcus family, was suddenly subjecting them to active nagging persecution. The recent loss of the “Hampshire,” with Lord Kitchener aboard, had resulted in another wave of anti-German feeling sweeping over the country. Richard hardly wondered at it; he was furiously resentful, furiously suspicious himself over the happening—but that did not prevent him from equal wrath when Mr Gryce considered himself patriotically entitled thereby to bang doors in Aunt Stella’s face.
The truth was that both Richard and Mr Gryce were both afflicted with the same obsession—the internment of enemy aliens; to each of them, the war centred entirely on this point, radiating thence on spokes of lesser interest. But Mr Gryce was on his own territory.
Three meals a day! They met in the hall; they met on the stairs and landings; in the streets round about the house ... but they passed with quickening step, averted eyes, and a twitching sense of the other’s nearness. But those three meals a day had to be stolidly endured. Breakfast was worst, for then Mr Gryce read aloud the papers to his neighbours, and delivered his opinions—all at the Marcus table, for he never spoke to them directly. Richard tried being earlier than Mr Gryce at breakfast ... but then he had to see the pink head and the wisp of white beard travel down the room, sit down at the table, and with a certain unctuous deliberation, unfold the paper; watch him ... and then wait, with a cold sickness of anticipation, for the first rusty creak: “What do you think the Germans have been doing now?——” How many thousand times more would he have to hear Mr Gryce’s vicious inflexion of the word: Germans—(“He doesn’t mean the fighting Germans, the Germans out there; he means us; he means me....”)