“And Mr. Datcherd may come with me, mayn’t he? He’s interested in other people’s clubs. Do you read Further? And do you like his books?”
“Yes, rather,” Eddy comprehensively answered all three questions. All the same he was smitten with a faint doubt as to Mr. Datcherd’s coming. Probably Hillier’s answer to the three questions would have been “Certainly not.” But after all, St. Gregory’s didn’t belong to Hillier but to the vicar, and the vicar was a man of sense. And anyhow anyone who saw Mrs. Le Moine must be glad to have a visit from her, and anyone who heard her play must thank the gods for it.
“I do like his books,” Eddy amplified; “only they’re so awfully sad, and so at odds with life.”
A faint shadow seemed to cloud her face.
“He is awfully sad,” she said, after a moment. “And he is at odds with life. He feels it hideous, and he minds. He spends all his time trying and trying can he change it for people. And the more he tries and fails, the more he minds.” She stopped abruptly, as if she had gone too far in explaining Hugh Datcherd to him. Eddy had a knack of drawing confidences; probably it was his look of intelligent sympathy and his habit of listening.
He wondered for a moment whether Hugh Datcherd’s sadness was all altruistic, or did he find his own life hideous too? From what Eddy had heard of Lady Dorothy, his wife, that might easily be so, he thought, for they didn’t sound compatible.
Instinctively, anyhow, he turned away his eyes from the queer, soft look of brooding pity that momentarily shadowed Hugh Datcherd’s friend.
From in front, snatches of talk floated back to them through the clear, thin air. Miss Hogan’s voice, with its slight stutter, seemed to be concluding an interesting anecdote.
“And so they both committed suicide from the library window. And his wife was paralysed from the waist up—is still, in fact. Most unwholesome, it all was. And now it’s so on Charles Harker’s mind that he writes novels about nothing else, poor creature. Very natural, if you think what he went through. I hear he’s another just coming out now, on the same.”
“He sent it to us,” said Arnold, “but Uncle Wilfred and I weren’t sure it was proper. I am engaged in trying to broaden Uncle Wilfred’s mind. Not that I want him to take Harker’s books, now or at any time.... You know, I want Eddy in our business. We want a new reader, and it would be so much better for his mind and moral nature than messing about as he’s doing now.”