“Well I’m sure you’re old enough to know for yourself now.”
“Good-night, Mother.”
“Good-night, dear.”
Henry, with the book under his arm, went up to bed.
CHAPTER II
THE WINTER AFTERNOON
Extracts from a letter written by Philip Mark to Mr. Paul Alexis in Moscow:—
“... because, beyond question, it was the oddest chance that I should come—straight out of the fog, into the very house that I wanted. That, mind you, was a week ago, and I’m still here. You’ve never seen a London fog. I defy you to imagine either the choking, stifling nastiness of it or the comfortable happy indifference of English people under it. I couldn’t have struck, if I’d tried for a year, anything more eloquent of the whole position—my position, I mean, and theirs and the probable result of our being up against one another....
“This will be a long letter because, here I am quite unaccountably excited, unaccountably, I say, because it’s all as quiet as the grave—after midnight, an old clock ticking out there on the stairs. Landseer’s ‘Dignity and Impudence’ on the wall over my bed and that old faded wall-paper that you only see in the bedrooms of the upper middles in England, who have lived for centuries and centuries in the same old house. Much too excited to sleep, simply I suppose because all kinds of things are beginning to reassert themselves on me—things that haven’t stirred since I was eighteen, things that Anna and Moscow had so effectually laid to rest. All those years as a boy I had just this wall-paper, just this ticking-clock, just these faded volumes of ‘Ivanhoe,’ ‘Kenilworth’, ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and Lytton’s ‘Night and Morning’ that I see huddled together in the window. Ah, Paul, you’ve never known what all that means—the comfort, the safety, the muffled cosiness, the gradual decline of old familiar things from shabbiness to shabbiness, the candles, and pony-traps and apple-lofts and going to country dances in old, jolting cabs with the buttons hopping off your new white gloves as you go ... it’s all back on me to-night, it’s been crowding in upon me all the week—The Trenchards are bathed, soaked, saturated with it all—they ARE IT!... Now, I’ll tell you about them, as I’ve seen them so far.
“Trenchard, himself, is fat, jolly, self-centred, writes about the Lake Poets and lives all the morning with Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey, all the afternoon with the world as seen by himself, and all the evening with himself as seen by the world. He’s selfish and happy, absent-minded and as far from all reality as any man could possibly be. He likes me, I think, because I understand his sense of humour, the surest key to the heart of a selfish man. About Mrs. Trenchard I’m not nearly so sure. I’ve been too long out of England to understand her all in a minute. You’d say right off that she’s stupider than any one you’d ever met, and then afterwards you’d be less and less certain.... Tremendously full of family (she was a Faunder), muddled, with no power over words at all so that she can never say what she means, outwardly of an extremely amiable simplicity, inwardly, I am sure, as obstinate as a limpet ... not a shadow of humour. Heaven only knows what she’s thinking about really. She never lets you see. I don’t think she likes me.