For hours he lay awake; a hotch-potch of old grievances boiling and seething in his mind.
Always him, always him, giving in every time: that summer years ago when he had given up golf and Harlech to take them all to Cadiz instead—very few men would have done that! And if they were going to a play always letting one of the children choose what it was to be—and jolly little gratitude he got for it all! Jolly little! Snubbed here, ignored there ... glimpses he had had of other homes came into his head: “hush, dear, don’t worry father”; “now then, Smith, hurry! hurry! The master must not be kept waiting”; “all right, dear, all right, there’s plenty of time.... Gladys dear, just run and fetch your father’s pipe.... Now, Charlie, where’s father’s overcoat? Good-bye darling, I’ll go to the Stores myself this morning and see about it for you ... good-bye, dear, don’t tire yourself ...” whereas here it was: “Well, Dick; I really don’t see how you can have the car this morning—Arnold wants it and he’s so seldom here....” Arnold! Arnold! Arnold! Oh what endless injustice that name conjured up! Actually it was years since they had had Welsh rarebit as a savoury because Arnold had once said the smell made him feel sick ... and oh, the cruelty and injustice on that birthday when the Doña with an indulgent smile had asked him what he would like for dinner (damn her impertinence—as if it wasn’t his own house and his own food and his own money!), and he had chosen ox-tail soup, sole, partridge, roly-poly and marrow-bones—ox-tail soup had been “scrapped” because Arnold didn’t like it, sole because they’d had it the night before, roly-poly because Arnold said it wasn’t a dinner-sweet. As to the marrow-bones—they had not been “scrapped,” indeed, but as every one knows, a dish of marrow-bones is a lottery, and he, Dick, the Birthday King, had drawn a blank—a hollow mockery, in which a tiny Gulliver might have sat dry and safe, not a single drop of grease falling on his wig or his broadcloth. But Arnold’s had been a lordly bone, dropping at first without persuasion two or three great blobs of semi-coagulated amber, and then yielding to his proddings the coyer treasures of its chinks and crannies, what time he had cried triumphantly, “More toast, please, Rendall!” And the Doña had watched him with a touched and gratified smile, as if she were witnessing for the first time the incidence of merit and its deserts. And it was not merely that the unfilial Arnold had wallowed in grease, not offering out of his abundance one slim finger of sparsely besmeared toast to his dry and yearning father, but the Doña had not cast in his direction one glance of pity—and it was his birthday, too!... oh that Arnold! Who was it ... Harry or Guy ... anyway he had heard some one saying that every father feels like a Frankenstein before a grown-up son ... well, not many of them had as much cause as he had ... despised, snubbed whenever he opened his mouth. Oh damn that Arnold! In what did he consider his great superiority to lie? Curious thing how his luck had always been so bad: he had not got into the Fifteen at Rugby because he had put his knee out—so he said; he had failed to get a scholarship at Trinity because his coach had given him the wrong text-book on constitutional history—so he said; he had only got a second in his tripos, because the Cambridge school of history was beneath contempt—so he said. And then the War and all the appalling fuss about him—really, one would have thought he was fighting the Germans single-handed! And Dick, creeping about with his tail between his legs and being made to feel a criminal every time he smiled or forgot for a second that Arnold was in the trenches ... and, anyhow, if he had been so wonderful, why hadn’t he the V.C., or at least the Military Cross?
Arnold was a fraud ... and a damned impertinent one! Well, it was his mother’s fault ... mothers were Bolsheviks, yes, Bolsheviks—by secret propaganda begun in the nursery setting the members of a family against their head. He was nothing to his children—nothing.
Just for a second he got a whiff of the sweet, nauseating, vertiginous, emotion he had experienced at the birth of each of them in turn—an emotion rather like the combined odours of eau de Cologne and chloroform; an emotion which, like all the most poignant ones, had a strong flavouring of sadism; for it sprang from the strange fierce pleasure of knowing that the body he loved was being tortured to bear his children.
Yes, he had loved her ... there had been times ... well, was he going to put up with it for ever? Oh, how badly he had been used.
Then it would all begin over again.
Finally he came to a resolution, the daring of which (such is the force of habit) half frightened him, while it made his eyes in their turn bright and shining with pleasure.
3
The fire of October, which had first been kindled in a crimson semicircle of beeches burning through a blanket of mist on the outskirts of Plasencia, spread, a slow contagion, over all the land. The birch saplings in the garden became the colour of bracken. The border was gold and amethyst with chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies. And in the fields there lingered poppies, which of all flowers look the frailest, yet which are the last to go.