“The longer you stay the better, both for your father and your mother,” the doctor said. “You can take a lot of strain off Mrs. Oliver. Miss Daphne’s very young—too young for much sick-nursing, I fancy; and the nurse can only do what nurses can do. He wants companionship, and someone who can do for him the sort of job you’ve been doing to-day.”
So Eddy wrote to Arnold that he didn’t know when he would be coming back to London. Arnold replied that whenever he did he could come into his uncle’s publishing house. He added in a postscript that he had met Eileen and Datcherd at the Moulin d’Or, and Eileen had said, “Give Eddy my love, and say I’m sorry. Don’t forget.” Sorry about his father, Arnold understood, of course; but Eddy believed that more was meant by it than that, and that Eileen was throwing him across space her characteristically sweet and casual amends for her bitter words.
He went on with the Synoptic Problem. The Dean’s notes were lucid and coherent, like all his work. It seemed to Eddy an interesting article, and the Dean smiled faintly when he said so. Eddy was appreciative and intelligent, if not learned or profound. The Dean had been afraid for a time that he was going to turn into a cleric of that active sort which is so absorbed in practical energies that it does not give due value to thoughtful theology. The Dean had reason to fear that too many High Church clergy were like this. But he had hopes now that Eddy, if in the end he did take Orders, might be of those who think out the faith that is in them, and tackle the problem of the Fourth Gospel. Perhaps he had had to, while managing Datcherd’s free-thinking club.
“Are you still helping Datcherd?” the Dean asked, in the slow, hindered speech that was all he could use now.
“No. Datcherd has done with me. I managed things badly there, from his point of view. I wasn’t exclusive enough for him,” and Eddy, to amuse his father, told the story of that fiasco.
Daphne said, “Serve you right for getting an anti-suffragist to speak. How could you? They’re always so deadly silly, and so dull. Worse, almost, than the other side, though that’s saying a lot. I do think, Tedders, you deserved to be chucked out.”
Daphne had blossomed into a militant. Mrs. Oliver had been telling Eddy about that the day before. Mrs. Oliver herself belonged to the respectable National Union for Women’s Suffrage, the pure and reformed branch of it in Welchester established, non-militant, non-party, non-exciting. Daphne, and a few other bright and ardent young spirits, had joined the W.S.P.U., and had been endeavouring to militate in Welchester. Daphne had dropped some Jeye’s disinfectant fluid, which is sticky and brown, into the pillar-box at the corner of the Close, and made disagreeable thereby a letter to herself from a neighbour asking her to tennis, and a letter to the Dean from a canon fixing the date (which was indecipherable) of a committee meeting.
Daphne looked critically at breakfast next day at these two results of her tactics, and called them “Jolly fine.”
“Disgusting,” said the Dean. “I didn’t know we had these wild women in Welchester. Who on earth can it have been?”
“Me,” said Daphne. “Alone I did it.”