“That chap in the corner, George. No! the other corner! The man in a cherry-coloured coat. He watched you! He’d look silly if I stuck a poker through his Gizzard!”
“He’d look,” I reflected, “much as he does now. As though he was amused.”
He replaced his glasses, which had fallen at his emotion, and glared at his antagonists. “What are they? What are they all, the lot of ’em? Dead as Mutton! They just stuck in the mud. They didn’t even rise to the Reformation. The old out-of-date Reformation! Move with the times!—they moved against the times.
“Just a Family of Failure,—they never even tried!
“They’re jes’, George, exactly what I’m not. Exactly. It isn’t suitable.... All this living in the Past.
“And I want a bigger place too, George. I want air and sunlight and room to move about and more service. A house where you can get a Move on things! Zzzz. Why! it’s like a discord—it jars—even to have the telephone.... There’s nothing, nothing except the terrace, that’s worth a Rap. It’s all dark and old and dried up and full of old-fashioned things—musty old idees—fitter for a silver-fish than a modern man.... I don’t know how I got here.”
He broke out into a new grievance. “That damned vicar,” he complained, “thinks I ought to think myself lucky to get this place! Every time I meet him I can see him think it.... One of these days, George I’ll show him what a Mod’un house is like!”
And he did.
I remember the day when he declared, as Americans say, for Crest Hill. He had come up to see my new gas plant, for I was then only just beginning to experiment with auxiliary collapsible balloons, and all the time the shine of his glasses was wandering away to the open down beyond. “Let’s go back to Lady Grove over the hill,” he said. “Something I want to show you. Something fine!”
It was an empty sunlit place that summer evening, sky and earth warm with sundown, and a pe-wit or so just accentuating the pleasant stillness that ends a long clear day. A beautiful peace, it was, to wreck for ever. And there was my uncle, the modern man of power, in his grey top-hat and his grey suit and his black-ribboned glasses, short, thin-legged, large-stomached, pointing and gesticulating, threatening this calm.