Three months of diplomacy had left Carstairs responsible and enigmatic.
"Don't be professional," I said.
"I'm not free to say," he answered. "You may take it he left his country for his country's good, and, if he goes back, click!" He made the gesture of handcuffs snapping over his wrists.
I made no comment. Since that day I should be sorry to count up the number of men who have gambolled a longer or shorter distance on Draycott's road. They have waylaid me at the House or Club, sometimes on the quayside at Calais—threadbare, furtive and spirituous, even at ten in the morning. They have all been offered the opening of a lifetime and need but twenty pounds for their outfit; and they have all accepted half a crown with gratitude, and most have returned unblushingly once a week until the day when they were met with blank refusal. Draycott's case was the first of my experience—and the most complete.
After four-and-twenty hours in London I crossed to Ireland and joined my mother and sister in Kerry. Our meeting was in the nature of a conseille de famille, to decide what we were going to do and where we were going to do it. Health and the habit of years mapped out my mother's course for her—the Riviera for the winter, Italy for the spring and Lake House, County Kerry, for the summer and autumn. It was a placid but tolerable programme, and Beryl, who had left school two months before, adopted it eagerly. My mother then came to the remaining and unanswerable question:
"What about you, George?"
As so often with men of weak initiative, the question—with a little judicious delay—was answered for me. My uncle and former guardian wrote from an address in the County Clare, inviting himself to come for an indefinite period and shoot an unstated number of snipe with me. My mother, who secretly feared and openly resented Bertrand's overbearing manner and restlessly critical tongue, sighed—and accepted her fate. He arrived grumbling at the eight-mile drive, and in the course of ten days left not one stone upon another. The food, the beds, the hours, the shooting—there was nothing too great or too small for his exasperating notice—Beryl was twice reduced to tears, and my mother developed questionable headaches and a taste for lying hours at a time in her room. At heart Bertrand was one of the kindest men I have ever met, but his humour was of the Johnsonian, sledgehammer type, to be met with methods of equal brutality or treated with passive indifference. On the whole I was well treated. For one thing, I seldom have the energy to lose my temper; for another, he had been responsible for me during the greater part of my sentient life, so that, when he poured scorn on English public schools and universities, I could point out that I went to Melton and Oxford at his bidding.
"And so now you've written a book," he growled one night after dinner. "What d'you want to do that for?"
"Money," I said "'No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.'"
"H'm. You won't make money out of that kind of book."