And directly dinner was finished, he had suggested that they should take their coffee and liqueurs on the lawn under the cedar. There was excuse enough—it was a wonderful night—but Greatorex, the leader-writer, who had acquired a habit of always looking for secret motives, was probably right in calling the move to the garden “a clever dodge.”
“Dodge?” enquired young Fell listlessly. He had sat through dinner with a melancholy air of wondering how people could be interested in spirits whether of the dead or of the Russians; but Greatorex had been too much engrossed in drawing his own inferences to take any notice of Fell’s distraction.
“Rather,” he said, taking Fell’s arm. “Gives Harrison the chance of slipping off when he can’t stand it any longer. In a room, it’s a bit pointed to get up and go away, but out here Vernon’ll probably find himself addressing Harrison’s empty chair.”
Fell sighed. “What’s he want—Vernon, I mean?” he asked indifferently.
Greatorex was willing enough to explain. “He wants to bring Harrison to book,” he said, leading his companion down towards the sunk fence out of earshot of the rest of the party. “You see, Vernon has been tremendously interested in that book of Schrenck-Notsing’s. You’ve seen it, I expect? It’s all about materialisations. Extraordinary stuff. They did get amazing results. The book’s full of photographs of the materialisations. Licked Crookes’s Katie King into a cocked hat. Well, Vernon’s been writing about it all over the place. Says it proves that there is a form of matter unknown to science, and that until the sceptics have disproved that, they had better shut up about the problem of immortality and so on. And then Harrison came out with a leader in the Supplement, pooh-poohing the whole affair. Clever stuff, of course, but not very sound on the logical side.”
“And Vernon wants to pin him down, I suppose?” Fell commented tepidly.
“He wants to have a straight argument,” Greatorex said, and then sinking his voice to a confidential note, he continued, “And if you ask me, Fell, Harrison’s afraid of spiritualism. I’ve seen him tackled before, and he loses his temper. He doesn’t want to listen! You know the look that comes into a fellow’s face when he’s shutting his mind against you—a sort of resolution and concentration as if he’d got his eye on his own ideal somewhere in the middle distance, and did not mean to look away from it....” He paused in the very heart of his account of Harrison’s perversity, suddenly struck by the application of his description to the present expression on Fell’s face. “Pretty much the look you’re wearing now, in fact,” he concluded drily. “Sorry if I’ve been boring you.”
Fell came back to a realisation of his lapse with a slight start. “No, no, rather not, Greatorex,” he said. “I mean it wasn’t that; the truth is I’m rather worried. I was thinking....” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the sunset, and added, “That, somehow, made me feel as if....”
Greatorex thrust his hands into the pockets of his dinner-jacket and turned round to observe the phenomenon that had distracted Fell’s attention. For a moment his prominent nose and rather small head came out as an emphatic silhouette against the afterglow in the North-West; and to Fell, already deep in the languors of sentiment, presented an air of picturesque romance.
Since Fell had come out from the high-lights and conventional influences of the house, his determination had begun to give way. In the atmosphere of the dining-room, he had felt certain that he would be right in doing what he had come down here expressly to do. Phyllis was no wife for a Civil Servant in his position. He had seen the consequences of such marriages in the Service. They kept a man back. If he married her, he would lose just that extra fillip of influence which would make the difference between special appointments and the common routine of promotion that would leave him no better prospect than an ultimate income of at best ten or twelve hundred pounds a year. One could not expect Lady Ulrica, for example, to continue the patronage she seemed, at present, so willing to lend him, if he made a marriage of that kind. He had seen it all so clearly while they were at dinner, and although his heart had failed him at the thought of his coming interview with Phyllis—she was so sweet and so gentle and she loved him with such an amazing singleness and rapture—he had been sure that he must give her up before his honour was entangled.