Similarly men were divided in their judgment of him. Some liked him very much, they couldn't quite say why. Others spoke of him contemptuously, like Major Armstrong had done. This was due partly to certain women being inclined to run after him—and therefore to jealousy on behalf of the professional lady-killer of the military species—and partly to a vague feeling that he was enigmatic—Sphynx-like, as some women said. He was too silent sometimes, especially if the conversation amongst men tended towards racy stories; he was sarcastic and nimble-witted when he did speak. And he was not easily bullied. If he encountered an insolent person, he gave full effect to his five feet eight inches, the look from his grey eyes was unwavering as though he tacitly accepted the challenge, there was an invisible rapier hanging from his left hip, a poise of the body which expressed dauntless courage.
Honoria's stories of his skill in fencing, riding, swimming, ball-games, helped him here. They were perfectly true or sufficiently true—mutatis mutandis—and when put to the test stood the test. David indeed found it well during this first season in Town to hire a hack and ride a little in the Park—it only added one way and another about fifty pounds to his outlay and impressed certain of the Benchers who were beginning to turn an eye on him. One elderly judge—also a Park rider—developed an almost inconvenient interest in him; asked him to dinner, introduced him to his daughters, and wanted to know a deal too much as to his position and prospects.
On the whole, it was a distinct relief from a public position, from this increasing number of town acquaintances, this broader and broader track strewn with cunning pitfalls, to lock up his rooms and go off to Wales for the Easter holidays. Easter was late that year—or it has to be for the purpose of my story—and David was fortunate in the weather and the temperature. If West Glamorganshire had looked richly, grandiosely beautiful in full summer, it had an exquisite, if quite different charm in early spring, in April. The great trees were spangled with emerald leaf-buds; the cherries, tame and wild, the black-thorn, the plums and pears in orchards and on old, old, grey walls, were in full blossom of virgin white. The apple trees in course of time showed pink buds. The gardens were full of wall-flowers—the inhabited country smelt of wall-flowers—purple flags, narcissi, hyacinths. The woodland was exquisitely strewn with primroses. In the glades rose innumerable spears of purple half-opened bluebells; the eye ranged over an anemone-dotted sward in this direction; over clusters of smalt-blue dog violets in another. Ladies'-smocks and cowslips made every meadow delicious; and the banks of the lowland streams were gorgeously gilded with king-cups. The mountains on fine days were blue and purple in the far distance; pale green and grey in the foreground. Under the April showers and sun-shafts they became tragic, enchanted, horrific, paradisiac. Even the mining towns were bearable—in the spring sunshine. If man had left no effort untried to pile hideosity on hideosity, flat ugliness on nauseous squalor, he had not been able to affect the arch of the heavens in its lucid blue, all smokes and vapours driven away by the spring winds; he had not been able to neutralize the vast views visible from the miners' sordid, one-storeyed dwellings, the panorama of hill and plain, of glistening water, towering peaks, and larch forests of emerald green amid the blue-Scotch pines and the black-green yews.
David in previous letters, looking into his father's budget, had shown him he could afford to keep a pony and a pony cart. This therefore was waiting for him at the little station with the gardener to drive. But in a week, David, already a good horseman, had learnt to drive under the gardener's teaching, and then was able to take his delighted father out for whole-day trips to revel in the beauties of the scenery.
They would have with them a wicker basket containing an ample lunch prepared by the generous hands of Bridget. They would stop at some spot on a mountain pass; tether the pony, sit on a plaid shawl thrown over a boulder, and feast their eyes on green mountain-shoulders reared against the pale blue sky; or gaze across ravines not unworthy of Switzerland. Or they would put up pony and cart at some village inn, explore old battlemented churches and churchyards with seventeenth and eighteenth century headstones, so far more tasteful and seemly than the hideous death memorials of the nineteenth century. And ever and again the old father, looking more and more like a Druid, would recite that charming Spring song, the 104th Psalm; or fragments of Welsh poetry sounding very good in Welsh—as no doubt Greek poetry does in properly pronounced Greek, but being singularly bald and vague in its references to earth, sea, sky and flora when translated into plain English.
David expressed some such opinions which rather scandalized his father who had grown up in the conventional school of unbounded, unreasoning reverence for the Hebrew, Greek and Keltic classics. From that they passed to the great problems, the undeterminable problems of the Universe; the awful littleness of men—mere lice, perhaps, on the scurfy body of a shrinking, dying planet of a fifth-rate sun, one of a billion other suns. The Revd. Howel like most of the Christian clergy of all times of course never looked at the midnight sky or gave any thought to the terrors and mysteries of astronomy, a science so modern, in fact, that it only came into real existence two or three hundred years ago; and is even now only taken seriously by about ten thousand people in Europe and America. Where, in this measureless universe—which indeed might only be one of several universes—was God to be found? A God that had been upset by the dietary of a small desert tribe, who fussed over burnt sacrifices and the fat of rams at one time; at another objected to censuses; at another and a later date wanted a human sacrifice to placate his wrath; or who had washed out the world's fauna and flora in a flood which had left no geological evidence to attest its having taken place. "Did you ever think about the Dinosaurs, father?" said David at the end of some such tirade—an outburst of free-thinking which in earlier years might have upset that father to wrath and angry protest, but which now for some reason only left him dazed and absent-minded. (It was the Colonies that had done it, he thought, and the studio talk of that dilettante architect. By and bye, David would distinguish himself at the Bar, marry and settle down, and resume the orthodox outlook of the English—or as he liked to call it—the British Church.)
"The Dinosaurs, my boy? No. What were they?"
David: "The real Dragons, the Dragons of the prime, that swarmed over England and Wales and Scotland, and Europe, Asia, and North America—and I dare say Africa too. One of the most stupendous facts of what you call 'creation,' though perhaps only one amongst many skin diseases that have afflicted the planet—Well the Dinosaurs went on developing and evolving and perfecting—so Rossiter says—for three million years or so—Then they were scrap-heaped. What a waste of creative energy!..."
Father: "Ah it's Rossiter who puts all these ideas into your head, is it?"
David (flushing); "Oh dear no! I used to think about them at (is about to say 'Newnham,' but substitutes 'Malvern')—at Malvern—"