by E. F. Benson
“I did the organization, the head work of the thing,” said Toby. “That’s the rub.”
“Bosh!”
“Lily, you are really very vulgar and common in your language sometimes,” said Toby. “I have often meant to speak to you about it; it makes me very unhappy.”
“Indeed! Try and cheer up. But really, Toby, and quite seriously, I wish you would settle to do something; I don’t care what. Go into the Foreign Office.”
“Languages,” said Toby; “I don’t know any.”
“Or some other office, or buy a farm, and work it properly, and try to make it pay. Give your mind seriously to something. I hate a loafer. Besides, a profession seems to me the greatest luxury in the world.”
“Plain folk like me don’t care for luxuries,” said Toby. “I’m not like Kit. Kit is perfectly happy without the necessaries of life, provided she has the luxuries.”
This diversion was more successful. Lily was silent a moment.
“Toby, I’m afraid I don’t like your sister-in-law,” she said at length.
Toby plunged with fervour into the new topic.
“Oh, there you make a great mistake,” he said. “I allow Kit is not exactly a copy-book-virtue person, but—well, she’s clever and amusing, and she is never a bore.”
“I don’t trust her.”
“There, again, you make a mistake. I don’t say that everybody should trust her, but I am sure she would never do a shabby thing to you or me, or—”
“Or?” said Lily, with the straightforwardness which Kit labelled “uncomfortable.”
“Or anybody she really liked,” said Toby. “Besides, Lily, I owe her something; she brought us together. As I have told you, she simply insisted on introducing me, though I didn’t want to be introduced at all.”
Lily made the sound which is usually written “pshaw!”
“As if we shouldn’t have met!” she said. “Toby, our meeting was in better hands than hers.”
“Well, she hurried the better hands up,” said Toby, “and I am grateful for that. If it had not been for her, we should not have been introduced at that dance at the Hungarians, and I shouldn’t probably have dined at Park Lane the night after; I should have gone to the Palace instead, so there would have been one, perhaps two, evenings wasted.”
“Well, I’ll make an effort to like her more,” said Lily.
“Oh, but that’s no manner of use,” said Toby. “You may hold your breath, and shut your eyes, and try with both hands, and never get a yard nearer liking anybody for all your trying. And it’s the same with disliking.”
“Do you dislike anyone, Toby?” asked Lily, with a touch of wistfulness, for Toby’s habit of universal friendliness always seemed to her extremely enviable.
Toby considered a moment.
“Yes,” he said.
“Who is that?”
“Ted Comber,” said Toby.
Lily drew her brows together. Toby’s promptness in singling out this one person seemed hard to reconcile with his wide forbearance.
“Now why?” she asked. “Tell me exactly why.”
“He ain’t a man,” said Toby gruffly. “Surely, Lily, we can talk about something pleasanter.”
“Yes, I’m sure we can,” she replied fervently. “I quite share your view. Oh, Toby, promise me something!”
“All right,” said Toby, taken off his guard.
“Hurrah! That you will instantly get a profession of some sort. Dear Toby, how nice of you! There’s the gong, and I’m simply ravenous.”
Toby got up rather stiffly.
“If you consider that fair,” he remarked, “I wonder at you. At least, I don’t wonder, for it’s extraordinary how little sense of honour women have.”
“I know. Isn’t it terrible?” said Lily. “Toby, it was nice of you to order that crab. I adore crab. Oh, there’s mamma! I suppose she must have crossed last night. I didn’t expect her till this evening.”
Mrs. Murchison had been to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, and was very communicative and astounding about it. She began by saying how delicious it had been at Beyrout, and Lily, whose real and tender affection for her mother did not blunt her sense of humour, began to giggle helplessly.
“Bayreuth, I should say,” continued Mrs. Murchison without a pause. “Lily dearest, if you laugh like that you’ll get a piece of crab in your windgall. Well, as I was saying, Lady Conybeare, it was all just too beautiful. You may be sure I studied the music a good deal before each opera; it is impossible to grasp it otherwise—the life-motive and all that. Siegfried Wagner conducted; they gave him quite an ovarium. But some people go just in order to say they have been, without thinking about the music. Garibaldi to the general, I call it.”
Lady Conybeare, a fresh-faced, dark-eyed woman of not more than fifty, healthy as a sea-wind, and in her wholesome way as tyrannical, cast an appealing look at Toby. Toby was one of the few people who did not in the least fear her, and she was proportionately grateful. She had tried to spoil him as a child, and now depended on him. He had warned her what calls would be made on her gravity during Mrs. Murchison’s visit, and she had promised to do her best.
“So few people appreciate Garibaldi,” she said with emphatic sympathy.
“Yes it is so,” said Mrs. Murchison, flying off at a tangent. “When I was a girl I used to adore him, and wore a photograph of him in a locket. But that is all gone out; it went out with plain living and high thinking;” and she helped herself for the second time to Toby’s crab and drank a little excellent Moselle.
“But Bayreuth was very fatiguing,” she went on; “or is it Beyrout? Until one has heard the operas once, it is a terrible effort of attention. C’est le premier fois qui coûte. Really, I felt quite exhausted at the end of the circle, and I was so glad to get back to dear, delightful, foggy old London again, where one never has to attend to anything. And it looked so beautiful this morning as I drove down the Embankment. I see they have put up a new statue at the corner of Westminster Bridge—Queen Casabianca, or some such person.”
Toby choked suddenly and violently.
“I’ve said something wrong, I expect,” remarked Mrs. Murchison genially. “Tell me what it is, Lord Evelyn, or I should say Lord Toby.”
“Toby, please.”
“Well, Toby— Dear me! How funny it sounds, considering I only saw you first in June! Ah, dear me, since first I saw your face, what a lot has happened! But if it’s not Casabianca, who is it?”
“Boadicea, I think,” said Toby.
“Dear me! So it is. How stupid of me! She comes in the Anglo-Saxon history, does she not? and she used to bleed beneath the Roman rods in the blue poetry book—or was it pink? I never can remember. But how it all comes back to one! Caractacus, too, and Alfred and the cakes, and the seven hills.”
Mrs. Murchison beamed with happiness. She knew very well the difference between being a unit among a large house-party, and staying as an only guest, and this cottage by the sea seemed to her to be the very incarnation of the taste and culture of breeding. She knew also that several rich and aspiring acquaintances of hers were spending a week at Stanborough, and she proposed after lunch to stroll along the beach towards there, and perhaps call at the hotel on the links. Her friends were sure to ask where she was staying, and it would be charming to say:
“Oh, down at the cottage with Lady Conybeare. So delicious and rustic; there is no one there except Lily and dear Toby. Of course we are very happy about it. And don’t you find a hotel quite intolerable?”
In the pause that followed Mrs. Murchison ran over her plans.
“What a charming place this is,” she went on; “and how delightful to be near Stanborough! Lord Comber is there; he told me he was going on there from Beyrout. At the Links Hotel, I think he said.”
Toby looked up.
“Is Comber there?” he asked. “Are you sure?”
His cheerful face had clouded, and his tone was peremptory.
“Of cour
se I am sure,” said Mrs. Murchison. “Dear me, how annoyed you look, Lord—I mean Toby. And I thought he was such a friend of your sister-in-law’s and all. What is the matter?”
“Nothing—nothing at all,” he said quickly.
But he looked at his mother and caught her eye.
“What a very odd place for Lord Comber to come to!” said Lily, who had grasped “watering-place” with greater distinctness than Mrs. Murchison.
“I am sure I don’t see why,” said she. “Stanborough is extremely bracing and fashionable. I saw they had quite a list of fashionable arrivals there in the World yesterday. Isn’t it so, Toby?”
“Perhaps he has come to play golf,” said Toby in a tone of resolute credulity.
“Golf?” asked Mrs. Murchison vaguely. “Oh, that’s the game, isn’t it, where you dig a sandpit, and then hit the ball into it and swear? So somebody told me. It sounds quite easy.”
Toby laughed.
“A very accurate description,” he said. “I’m going to play this afternoon. Hear me swear!”
Lady Conybeare rose, as they had finished lunch.
“Come and see me before you go out, Toby,” she said.
Lily looked from one to the other, and saw the desire of a private word between them.
“Oh, mother, let me take you to the rose-garden!” she said. “Shall we have coffee there as usual, Lady Conybeare?”
“Yes, dear. Take your mother out.”
The two left the room, and Lady Conybeare turned to Toby.
“Well, Toby,” she said.
“I don’t wish to be either indiscreet or absurd, mother,” he answered.
“Nor I,” said she. “Kit told me she was coming to Stanborough for a week, and I asked her, of course, to stay here. She said she had made arrangements to stay at the Links Hotel. Jack is not coming.”
Toby made two bread pellets, and flicked them out of the window with extraordinary accuracy of aim.
“Damn Kit!” he said. “She comes tomorrow, and that beast, I suppose, came a day or two ago. I saw somebody in the distance the day before yesterday who reminded me of him, but I didn’t give another thought to it. No doubt it was he.”
There was a pause.
“But Jack—” said Lady Conybeare, and it cost her something to say it.
“Oh, Jack’s a fool!” said Toby quickly. “You know that as well as I do, mother. Of course, he’s awfully clever, and all that; but I’ll be blowed if my wife ever stops at a seaside hotel with a Comber-man.”
Lady Conybeare stretched out her hand.
“Thank God, I have you, Toby!” she said.
“What a fool Kit is!” said Toby thoughtfully. “There are hundreds of people there, as Mrs. Murchison says. Telegraph for Jack, mother,” he said suddenly.
Lady Conybeare shook her head.
“We have no right, no reason to do that,” she said. “Toby, take the thing in hand. Do your best.”
Toby looked out of the window and hit an imaginary opponent with his closed fist.
“Perhaps we could manage something,” he said. “Don’t say a word to Lily, mother, or to Mrs. Murchison.”
Lady Conybeare smiled rather bitterly.
“Nor wash my dirty linen in public,” she said. “Is that my habit, dear?”
Toby got up and kissed his mother lightly on the forehead.
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
“I know you will.”
And they went out to coffee in the rose-garden.
CHAPTER XIII
TOBY TO THE RESCUE
Half an hour later Toby was on his way to Stanborough, where he was to meet a friend at the club-house, and play a round of golf with him. As soon as that was over, he proposed to make a call at the Links Hotel and demand an interview with Ted Comber. Lily, in this as in all else above the common level of womankind, made no suggestion that she should come round with them. In fact, she voluntarily repudiated such a possibility.
“No proper man wants a girl hanging about when he is playing a game,” she had said. “So if you ask me to come with you—if, in fact, you don’t forbid me to—you’ll be no proper man. Now, shall I come with you? I want to, awfully.”
“Yes—I mean, no,” said Toby, wavering, but deciding right.
Toby was playing with a friend after his own heart, who had just left Oxford, more to the regret of undergraduates than of tutors, and so presumably his departure was really regrettable. He was a hater of cities and five-o’clock teas, capable of riding whatever on this unruly earth had been foaled, but perfectly incapable of what he called “simpering and finesse,” meaning thereby the pretty little social gifts. Furthermore, he was possessed of so much common-sense that at times he might have been unjustly suspected of being clever. Him, as they played, Toby determined to consult under secrecy as to what must be done with the ineffable Comber, and “If Buck and I,” thought he, “aren’t a match for that scented man, I’ll brush my teeth with my niblick. Lord, what a lark!”
Toby, it must be confessed, rather enjoyed the mission with which his mother had entrusted him. He was not naturally of a punitive or revengeful disposition, and, indeed, Lord Comber, had never done anything to him, except exist, which called for vengeance. But the thought of his discomfiture was sweet in his mouth, and, though he had not yet formed the vaguest idea as to how it was to be accomplished, he felt a serene confidence that he and Buck would be able to hatch something immensely unpleasant between them.
Here was no case, he thought gleefully to himself, that called for tact or diplomacy, or any lady-like little weapons, which Comber probably possessed. Brutal means must be used, and he should use them. He regretted intensely that both he and Comber were past the age when their difference could be settled with the straightforward simplicity which says, “Will you go of your own accord, or do you prefer to be kicked?” Dearly would he have liked that, for, indeed, his fists itched after the man.
Anyhow, the cause was good. Comber was to be sat upon, and Kit saved from making an egregious fool of herself. Married women of her age and appearance, reasoned Toby, do not stay alone with people like Comber at watering-places like Stanborough, and Kit’s brother-in-law did not intend that she should do risky things of this description if he could prevent it. Toby’s laudable determination on this point was not due, it must be confessed, to moral scruples. He did not know, and he did not care to know, whether Kit’s flirtation with this man was serious or not. But people, he was aware, talked about them, and certainly, if she and he stayed in a Stanborough hotel for a week in August together, people would have an excellent reason for talking. Still less had he any fancy, supposing the worst came to the worst, for seeing, as his mother said, Conybeare linen, marked very plain, in the public wash-tub.
Also he hated Comber with all the fine intensity with which a healthy, normal young man hates, and is right to hate, those smiling, wobbly, curled and scented of his sex, who powder themselves and take pills, and read ladies’ papers, and are at their best (or worst) in a boudoir—lap-dogs of London. Some women, and perhaps their Creator knows why, appeared, so Toby thought, to like them. Kit liked Comber—here was an instance of it that thrust sore at him. Now, Jack was no saint (here again Toby was not judging on moral grounds), but he was a man. He would shoot straight or ride straight all day, and in the evening he would make himself, it might be, quite scandalously agreeable to other people’s wives. It was not right, and Toby did not defend him, but, anyhow, he behaved like a male. That was where the difference lay.
He remembered how they had all howled at Kit when one evening she had announced that she was going to Stanborough for a week in August to get braced. No, she was not going to take any of her friends with her, and very likely she would not even take a maid. She proposed to live in some stark hotel swept by all the winds that blow, in a bedroom with only a small square of carpet, one damp sandy towel, and windows looking due north, and kept always wide open. She intended to bathe daily before breakfast
in the cold, salt, terrible German Ocean, to sit and walk on the sands all day, and go to bed directly after an eggy high tea, about seven. She would have eggs with her tea, and eggs with her breakfast, and cold roast beef for lunch, and possibly beer. She would not go to stay with Jack’s mother, which was the obvious thing to do, because the house was so comfortable, and she knew she would only sit indoors, and get up late and go to bed late if she did. She wanted to be cold and uncomfortable and early-birdish, and come back braced with a bronzed complexion like a sailor, and blowzy hair. It would be immensely healthy and exceedingly unpleasant.
Toby recollected these amazing plans of Kit’s very precisely. Ted Comber, he also remembered, had been there when she had enunciated them, and when he asked if he might come too, had received an unqualified negative. Thus, whether Kit had or had not made this subsequent arrangement with him mattered not at all. If she had, the Perseus-Toby was coming hot-foot over the downs to deliver her from her self-forged fetters; and if Comber had come without being asked, still more peremptory should be his dismissal. What was to be done was clear to demonstration; how it must be done was a matter for council.
Toby found several friends at the club-house—it was of common occurrence that he found friends in casual and unlikely places—and got generally chaffed and slapped and offered various mixed and stimulating drinks warranted to improve his putting and shut the jaws of the bunkers. But in the course of time they got clear, and drove up the steep hill leading to the first hole. Once started, Toby gave the outlines of the problem to Buck, who was highly and justifiably indignant with him.
“It’s a shabby trick, Toby,” he said, “to bring me up on to this fine turf under the pretence of playing golf, if you want to talk morals. Good God! Fancy talking moral problems on a golf links! If this was a lawn-tennis court, and you were a parson, I could understand it.”
“Oh, don’t be a fool, Buck!” said Toby; “the whole thing is stated—I have told you all—in ten words, and you needn’t allude to it again till we get in. Then you shall say what you advise me to do. But it must be settled today; my sister-in-law comes tomorrow. Just let it simmer.”