“I smell foul weather,” said Grimshaw.
Within a week the Great War had broken out.
Upworthy remained perfectly calm.
Brian Chandos came home on short leave. His regiment would be one of the first to go. He smoked many pipes with Grimshaw, picking up the old friendship easily, just where he had left it, apparently the same ingenuous youth whom Grimshaw remembered at Winchester. Really a Pacific of essential differences rolled between them, differences of experience. Grimshaw listened to Brian on the coming “show.” As a soldier he seemed to know something about his “job.” As the prospective heir to a fine property his ignorance was immeasurable. He viewed it, as it were, from the wrong end of the telescope. What appeared big to him—the future of foxhunting, for instance, game-preserving, and polo—was negligible to Grimshaw in comparison with decent housing and a better wage for land-workers. Brian cut him short when, tentatively, such reforms were barely outlined:
“Cottages in the rural districts don’t pay, never did. We can’t raise wages without hostilising the farmers—and I ask you, where are we if we do that?” Again and again he silenced argument in Grimshaw by repeating filially: “Mother knows; you talk to her; she’d do anything in reason, anything.”
And at the first dinner at the Manor, rather to Grimshaw’s dismay, Brian said, in a loud voice, as if it were a good joke: “I say, Mums, Old Grimmer is a bit of a Rad. You must take him in hand. He’s an out-and-out reformer.”
Cicely didn’t improve matters by adding:
“And a jolly good thing too. Dr. Pawley says we are antediluvians.”
Pawley was not present, having departed on his holiday. Lady Selina looked down her nose.
“Are you quite sure Dr. Pawley said that, my dear?”