A CLEAN PACK
Basil sat alone in the schoolroom, although it was past bedtime. Nurse, like everybody else, had apparently forgotten him, but Basil, absorbed in his own thoughts, sat on by the dying fire. There were always fires in his grandfather’s house whenever it was in the least cold, and that August it was very cold, so cold that grandfather, getting wet through out shooting, somehow got a chill, was ill only three days, and now was lying dead in the big bedroom over Basil’s head. So Basil had a good deal to think about. It was not that death was new to him—from his earliest infancy it had been impressed upon him that his father was dead—but that he could not by any stretch of fancy imagine what life would be without grandfather—grandfather who was lying with his beautiful hands crossed on his breast in that long, light-colored wooden box upstairs.
Basil resented the fact that grandfather’s coffin should be made of light wood. It seemed incongruous and impertinent, somehow, that anything used by grandfather should be otherwise than old—old and rich-colored and seemly; and the child found himself wondering whether grandfather was annoyed. There were many things in that bedroom calculated to annoy him, Basil reflected. In the first place, when mother took him in that afternoon that he might lay the asters gathered in his own garden at his grandfather’s feet, he remarked that all the blinds were down, and grandfather would have hated that, and the windows were shut, and there was a heavy scent of hot-house flowers. “I fear he’s very uncomfortable,” whispered Basil to himself. “He’ll be glad to get to heaven out of that stuffy room.” For grandfather had loved air as much as he liked fires.
The horizon of Basil’s experience was somewhat limited. It consisted of mother and grandfather, and of “other grandfather,” who lived at Altringham in Cheshire, and was mother’s father.
Every year Basil and mother went to Altringham for six weeks, and life there was so utterly different from what it was with grandfather that Basil never ceased to puzzle over it and to wonder why mother always cried when she came away, and why “other grandfather” always said: “You moost bear with the old heathen, Sophia; he’s been generous enough as regards mooney, and, remember, you can be in the world but not of it.”
There were aunts, too, at Altringham, who made a great fuss of Basil for about three days, and then seemed to find him greatly in the way; while “other grandfather” had a most embarrassing way of suddenly demanding: “Well, yoong mon, and how’s the ciphering?”
Basil loved his mother very dearly, but he could have wished that she took life a little less sadly. A gentle melancholy characterized her every thought, and the child felt rather than understood that her mental attitude toward her father-in-law was that of a deprecating disapproval. Grandfather felt it too, for only a week before Basil had heard him say to one of the gentlemen who were tramping the stubble with him: “We shall never understand each other, my poor little daughter and I, though we’ve lived together seven years. She’s as good as gold, and I don’t think I’m particularly difficile, but there it is—we can never get the same focus for anything.” Basil was walking just behind with the keeper, who blushed up to the roots of his hair as he called out: “I’m here, you know, grandfather.”
Grandfather pulled up short and turned to look at Basil. Then he gave a queer little laugh. “There’s not much Manchester about the boy,” he said, and tramped on.
They all went to London from November till the end of March, and there grandfather generally dined at his club and played whist afterward, while Basil’s mother had supper with him or had friends of her own to dinner, just as she liked. Grandfather could not get on without his rubber. Even in the country, three times a week three broughams drove solemnly up the drive, and three old gentlemen descended therefrom to dine with grandfather and play whist afterwards.
In London on fine nights he walked to his club, and Basil used to watch him go from the nursery window just as he was going to bed; and at the lamp grandfather always stopped and looked up at the curly head pressed against the pane, then he would lift his hat with a grand sweep and walk on, while Basil hugged himself with the delighted conviction that his grandfather was the very handsomest old gentleman in the whole world. And sometimes grandfather would crush his hat over his eyes, while a spasm of pain crossed his clean-shaven, stately old face, and he’d whisper to himself: “My God! how like he is to my poor boy.”