Upstairs, Jimmy was smoking and staring into his fire. Somehow, he felt very disappointed, as though he had been working on a false assumption, and must readjust his ideas and then start afresh. He was little more at home than he had been the previous night in the hotel.
CHAPTER V
The hours of Jimmy's stay with the Marlows dragged by slowly. The children, four boys, proved uninteresting in the extreme, whilst between himself and Laura Marlow, May's sister-in-law, there was little in common. Two other guests, an elderly aunt and uncle of Henry's, arrived in time for dinner on the second night, and Jimmy retired more and more into the background, or, rather, he found himself in the background by a kind of natural sequence. No one wanted to put him there; in fact, both his brother-in-law and his sister were kindness itself; but he was the outsider in the party, sharing none of the interests of the others.
He had been invited for a week, at least, longer if possible; yet at the end of three days he was longing for an excuse to get back to town, where he intended to take rooms; but no excuse presented itself, and so he stayed on, spending most of his time in the billiard-room, a part of the house seldom used in the daytime, writing, or trying to write, some of the articles which Douglas Kelly had suggested. He had sent his copy in to the Record, and each morning, immediately after breakfast, he strolled down to the little news agent's shop to buy a copy of the paper—Mr. Marlow took no halfpenny journals—but when Sunday came round it had not appeared.
The Marlows were regular church-goers, at least Mrs. Marlow was, and her husband always accompanied her when he was not away at the seaside, golfing. May took her religion as part of her settled order of existence. She had been bred up in it, and she would have resented any attack on it as fiercely as she would have resented the abolition of class distinctions. She believed in it, and, in a sense, she loved it; but, with the one exception of her father's tragic death, her way through life had been so smooth that she had never felt the need of its consolations, and, consequently, had never analysed it in any way. Doubt had never entered into her mind, because her creed seemed to suit her circumstances so admirably. The well-dressed congregation, the well-trained choir, the cushioned seats and reserved pews, the suave, optimistic rector, and deferential curates—these were all part of a nicely balanced state of society which kept motor-cars, or at least broughams, and paid its tradesmen's bills by cheque on the first of the month.
Henry Marlow seldom, if ever, gave the matter a thought; but he subscribed generously when asked by the rector, and he kept the Ten Commandments scrupulously, so far as his home life was concerned. He respected the Church, as something which stood for solidity and the security of property, like Consols and the Mansion House, and he regarded Dissenters in much the same light as he did outside brokers, as persons who should be watched by the police. He did not try to worship both God and Mammon simultaneously; but, wholly unconsciously, he divided his life into two parts, that which he spent in the City, and that which he spent outside the Square Mile, and so avoided the difficulty.
Jimmy, on the other hand, had heard very few services during the last ten years, and of those the majority had been read by a layman, and had begun with the words "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord." Lack of opportunity had kept him from attending in the first case, and, after a while, having lost the habit of his boyhood, he had ceased to think of taking such opportunities as did offer.
"I think it must be five years at least since I went to anything but a funeral service," he remarked to May, as they walked towards the big red-brick church.