[BOOK II]
HIGH SUMMER
[CHAPTER I]
SECOND PHASE OF THE ADVENTURE
Now might young Henry be considered by any observer of average intelligence to be fairly launched into the world—he is in love, he is confidential secretary to a gentleman of importance, he has written ten chapters of a romantic novel and he is living in chambers all on his own. It has been asserted again and again that the Great War of 1914 turned many thousands of boys into old men long before their time. The exact contrary may also be proved to be true—namely that the War caught many boys in their teens, held them in a sort of vise for five years, keeping them from life as it is usually lived, teaching them nothing but war and then suddenly flinging them out into a Peace about which they were as ignorant as blind puppies. Boys of eighteen chronologically supposed to be twenty-four and superficially disguised as men of forty and disillusioned cynical men at that, those were to be found in their thousands in that curious tangled year of 1920. Henry thought he was a man; he was much less a man than he would have been had no war broken out at all.
On the afternoon following the tea party just now described he left Hill Street about four o'clock, his head up and his chest out, a very fine figure indeed had it not been that, unknown to himself, his tie had stepped up to the top of his collar at the back of his neck and there was a small smudge of ink just in the right corner of his nose. He had had a very happy day, very quiet, very peaceful, and he was encouraged to believe that he had been a great success. It was true that Sir Charles had addressed very few words to himself and that Lady Bell-Hall had addressed so many during luncheon that he had felt like a canary peppered with bird-seed, but he did not expect Sir Charles to speak very often, nor did he mind how frequently the funny little woman in the bonnet spoke, so long as she liked him. It had all been very easy, and the letters had been entrancing, so entrancing that Berkeley Square seemed to be Princes Street, and he could see through the open door Sir Walter's hall and Maria Edgeworth announced and the host's cheery welcome and glorious smile, and the laughter of the children, and Maria dragged into the circle and forced to sing the Highland song with the rest of them, and Honest John hurrying down Castle Street wrapped up against the cold, and the high frosty sky and the Castle frowning over all.
He had been there—surely he had been there in an earlier incarnation, and now this. . . . He was pulled up by a taxi ringing at him fiercely, and by the press of carriages at the Piccadilly turning.
He was swung suddenly on to the business of the moment, namely that he was going to make his first serious attempt at breaking through into the mysteries of Peter Street, then definitely to do or die—although as a matter of honest fact he had no intention whatever of dying just yet. He was borne into Shaftesbury Avenue before he knew where he was, borne by the tide of people, men and women happy in the bright purple-hued spring afternoon, happy in spite of the hard times and the uncertain future, borne along, too, by the cries and sounds, the roll of the omnibuses, the screams of the taxis, the shouting of the newsboys, the murmur of countless voices, the restless rhythm of the unceasing life beneath the brick and mortar, the life of the primeval forests, the ghosts of the serpents and the lions waiting with confident patience for the earth to return to them once more.