And next morning he rose from breakfast and started through the Forest to Red Roofs and the task of pinning Jack down to the joint establishment in London. Every step on the familiar road was a gesture of farewell. There was a recognized point in the two-mile walk where even the smoke of the Mill-House chimneys was invisible; another point where he had to jump from stone to stone across a furlong of marsh; and another where the forest thinned imperceptibly and vanished. Over the tops of the last trees appeared a row of small-bricked Tudor chimneys, dusty-grey in the sunshine; then the deep red tiles of the gabled roofs; then the house itself, three-quarters covered in creeper that swung in the breeze and veiled the narrow windows with a curtain of tangled green. It was the perfect frame, Eric thought, for a perfect picture of country toryism; a social analyst could not look at the house without peopling it in imagination with the cadet branch of a rankly conservative family—conventional, godly, sporting, military and, by a freak, unexpectedly evangelical—in a word, with such a family as the Warings. The colonel was returning home from an early gallop; he reined in his horse and walked beside Eric to the gate of the stable-yard, erect and dapper, with a dictatorial voice and a hint of ill-temper in his bearing, his face weather-beaten and the white of his eyes faintly tinged with yellow.
"Hullo! How are you? How's your father? How's the magnum opus?" he asked, as he dismounted and walked towards the house. The three questions never varied, and the colonel derived immense private amusement from the thought that Dr. Lane had given thirty years of his life to an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. "Jack tells me you're going to be a journalist. Dog's life, I've always heard."
"I hope it won't be only journalism," said Eric, who was sensitive enough to be daunted by the misgiving which his proposed career excited first in his parents and now in an unbiased outsider. "I hope to do some rather more original work as well."
"Original? That's bad! Seven-act tragedies and five-volume novels." Colonel Waring had evolved the belief that young men could be coaxed out of their natural shyness by well-timed jocosity. "You must excuse me, I'm going to have my bath. You'll find every one in the smoking-room, I expect."
Eric escaped with relief and ran Jack to earth in the faded dining-room, where he was finishing a late breakfast. His sister ministered to his wants, keeping the food warm in a chafing-dish, plying him with coffee and fetching him clean plates. Mrs. Waring, plump, idle and self-indulgent, was fondly overhauling her son's wardrobe when Eric entered the room.
"Dear Jack, you can't go to Lady Knightrider's until you've ordered yourself some new shirts. These are a disgrace," she protested.
Jack nodded without looking up from his paper.
"I know. I was waiting till I got home so that Agnes could write to my man. I always forget his name. Hullo, Eric! You're bursting with energy this morning. Have some capital kidneys and bacon?"
"I came to talk about where we are going to live," Eric explained, shaking hands with Mrs. Waring.
"But I thought I'd left that to you? Why don't you and Agnes arrange something?" Jack filled a pipe and strolled towards the open window. "The guv'nor seems to have got me elected to the County Club; he rather favours my trying to get a bedroom there."