CHAPTER III
Mrs. Stayne-Brooker—and Her Ex-Stepson
From Hazarigurh Mr. Charles Stayne-Brooker went straight to Berlin, became the Herr Doktor Stein-Brücker once more, and saw much of another and more famous Herr Doktor of the name of Solf. He then went to South Africa and thence to England, where his daughter was born. Having placed her with the family of an English clergyman whose wife “accepted” a few children of Anglo-Indians, he proceeded to America and Canada, and thence to Vladivostok, Kïaou-Chiaou, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore; then to the Transvaal by way of Lourenzo Marques and to German East Africa. And every step of the way his wife went with him—and who so English, among Englishmen, as jolly Charlie Stayne-Brooker, with his beautiful English wife? . . . What he did, save interviewing stout gentlemen (whose necks bulged over their collars, whose accents were guttural, and whose table-manners were unpleasant) and writing long letters, she did not know. What she did know was that she was a lost and broken woman, tied for life to a base and loathsome scoundrel, by her yearning for “respectability,” her love for her daughter, and her utter dependence for food, clothing and shelter upon the man whom, in her mad folly, she had trusted. By the time they returned to England via Berlin, the child, Eva, was old enough to go to an expensive boarding-school at Cheltenham, and here Mrs. Stayne-Brooker had to leave her when her husband’s “duties” took him, from the detailed study of the Eastern Counties of England, to Africa again. Here he seemed likely to settle at last, interesting himself in coffee and rubber, and spending much of his time in Mombasa and Nairobi, as well as in Dar-es-Salaam, Tabora, Lindi and Zanzibar.
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Meanwhile, Major Hugh Walsingham Greene, an embittered and disappointed man, withdrew more and more into his shell, and, on each successive visit to Leighcombe Priory, more and more abandoned hope of his son’s “doing any good” in life. He was the true grandson of that most distinguished scholar, Dr. Bertram Pym, F.R.S., of Cambridge University, and the true son of his mother. . . . What a joy the lad would have been to these two, with his love of books and his unbroken career of academic successes, and what a grief he was to his soldier father, with his utter distaste for games and sports and his dislike of all things military.
Useless it was for sweet and gentle Miss Walsingham to point to his cleverness and wisdom, or for Amazonian and sporting Miranda Walsingham hotly to defend him and rail against the Major’s “unfairness” and “stupid prejudice.” Equally useless for the boy to do his utmost to please the man who was to him as a god. . . .
When the Major learned that his son had produced the Newdigate Prize Poem, won the Craven and the Ireland Scholarships, and taken his Double First—he groaned. . . .
Brilliant success at Oxford? What is Oxford? He would sooner have seen him miserably fail at Sandhurst and enlist for his commission. . . .
Finally the disappointing youth went to India as private secretary and travelling companion to the great scientist, Sir Ramsey Wister, his father being stationed at Aden.
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Then came the Great War.