Two in a Train

by Warwick Deeping

  “Now—that’s really very clever of you. A hobby of yours, I suppose.”

  She left him to lower and fasten the bonnet flap while she wiped her hands on a rag soaked in petrol from a flooded carburettor.

  “Not exactly, but I like to know how things work.”

  Mr. Verulam adjusted the bonnet flap.

  “The B.B.C. and Brooklands are the gods of the new generation. I must confess that I’m a little Elizabethan.”

  With her glance on his very stout legs draped in badly cut grey flannel trousers she chose to wonder what the Virgin Queen would have done with him. Made him a bishop, or had him soused in the Thames?

  She said: “We’d better be pushing on. Pat likes her bathe, and there may be tennis. I think I had better lead the way. I drive rather fast.”

  He gave her a little urbane and complacent bow.

  “The honour is yours, Miss Hyde.”

  As far as the driving went she played hide-and-seek with him. He had the blue tail of her car in view for the space of two minutes, and though he hunted her to the limit of forty miles an hour, she became lost in the landscape. Mr. Verulam was not a fearless driver. Something flinched in him when the speed became adventurous, but he could console himself by condemning all those young sensationalists who delighted only in speed and in noise.

  Miss Hyde arrived at Melfont some seven minutes ahead of him. Leaving her car by the porte-cochère she waved to a group that was gathered for tea under one of the cedars. A tall, jocund, golden woman in the late thirties came sailing to meet her.

  “Late, my dear.”

  Miss Hyde showed a row of strong, white teeth.

  “Had an adventure. Found the great man stranded on the road. He should be here in five minutes.”

  “What, the hyperbolical Paul?”

  “Yep. Behemoth in grey bags. He’s rather marvellous, my dear. But he was hot and cross when I found him, with a beautiful splodge of grease on his hat. I cleaned his distributor for him. Shall I put the car away?”

  “No—Jobson will do it for you. Come and have tea.”

  “I’d like a wash first. His confounded car was filthy.”

  “All right. You’re in the Amber Room. Know your way.”

  Miss Hyde washed so expeditiously that she was able to join the party under the cedar tree before Mr. Verulam arrived. It was not a large party, being what the journalists would describe as small and select. It provided a tennis or a bridge four for the week-end, with a fifth person in reserve. Mr. Verulam was to meet his hostess, Miss Joanna Hyde, Major Ian Calthrop, and Mr. Rupert Byng. The names of the four were abbreviated to Pat, Joan, Jack and Billy.

  Mr. Verulam arrived. His hostess went to meet him. He was led across to the cedar and introduced to his fellow-guests. He gave the party a little comprehensive and condescending bow as though he was receiving a deputation. He had failed to discover the grease on his hat. The two lean, brown, out-of-door men discovered other greasiness in him.

  “You and Joan have met already.”

  Mr. Verulam shone upon the maiden.

  “We have had that pleasure.”

  His use of the plural was significant. He sat down, and with complete and ponderous complacency began to make conversation. In fact, he made all the conversation while a footman provided him with tea. Major Calthrop and Mr. Byng became strangely mute. Miss Hyde lit a cigarette, and listened as to the running of an engine. The Duchess maintained her jocund, golden smile.

  Mr. Verulam had stepped immediately upon the appropriate pedestal. He wore the laurel wreath and twanged the lyre. The other men exchanged a silent stare.

  The Duchess used the velvet glove. Mr. Verulam was showing a partiality for sweet cakes, and the party proposed to bathe. She mentioned the plan.

  “Oh, Mr. Verulam, we’re all going to bathe. Yes, in the lake. You’ll join us?”

  He hesitated.

  “Delightful! But I must confess I forgot my bathing costume.”

  Major Calthrop was suavely helpful.

  “I can lend you one, Verulam. Of course, you swim.”

  There was something in the suggestion that penetrated Mr. Verulam’s pride.

  “Oh, certainly. Very kind of you. I accept.”

  And he continued to devour sweet cakes.

  Major Calthrop and Mr. Byng got up and strolled across to the house, it being the major’s duty to hunt up a reserve bathing dress, while Mr. Byng accompanied him in order to ask questions and to escape from the atmosphere of too much Verulam.

  “What on earth made Pat ask that fellow——?”

  Calthrop smiled.

  “Oh, Pat must have her buffoon, you know. She picked him up at one of her parties, and thought him priceless.”

  “Fungoid—I should say.”

  “Besides, Bill, Joan and Paul should be sympatica, both being scribblers of books.”

  He glanced mischievously at Mr. Byng.

  “Probably she’ll take him in tow. Possibly he doesn’t know that Richard Clarendon and Joan Hyde are one and the same person.”

  They climbed the stairs together, the soldier still smiling, Mr. Byng darkly combative.

  “You mean it is Pat’s idea that Verulam might be useful to Joan?”

  “Not exactly. I think Joan might be of much more use to Verulam. There’s a situation in it.”

  Mr. Byng went into his room, and leaving the door open, stood by the window and observed the three under the cedar. Apparently, Mr. Verulam had completed his assault on the sugar. They were standing, and Mr. Verulam was holding forth. The duchess made a persuasive movement in the direction of the house.

  Mr. Byng walked to Major Calthrop’s door.

  “Jack?”

  “Hallo.”

  “Do you think the fellow can swim?”

  “Oh, probably. He looks as though he couldn’t sink.”

  “Well, I think Pat might have postponed him till next week end.”

  “Pat is a bit of a Puck, you know.”

  Possibly it was unkind of Major Calthrop to provide Mr. Verulam with a bathing costume of purple and orange stripes running horizontally. The great man appeared a little swollen in the costume, even when wearing a red and black silk dressing-gown. They went down to the lake to a spot where two diving boards were fixed. There was a pause. The Duchess and Joanna had precedence. They went in off the high board, and Major Calthrop and Mr. Byng waited upon Mr. Verulam.

  He hesitated. And then he trundled on fat feet along the lesser board. It sagged beneath him. He stood poised for a moment, and then went in as flat as a pancake and with a prodigious ventral flop.

  That, in a measure, was his debut, and he appeared spluttering with shining pate and a flash of yellow teeth, and as Calthrop had suggested he was incapable of sinking. He had buoyancy; he was not to be submerged or suppressed. He attached himself to Miss Hyde, and swam beside her like some golden galleon as far as the island. He even babbled about books.

  Mr. Byng was left cruising solus.

  Later, they played tennis, and Mr. Verulam played tennis, and Mr. Byng had to fetch the balls that the great man smote into space. Mr. Verulam’s tennis was spectacular and inaccurate, and rather like his prose. He partnered Miss Hyde, and though the Duchess and Major Calthrop won three love sets against them Mr. Verulam was not depressed. Mr. Byng, observing him with malevolent amusement, realized that the great man was great because nothing could deflate him.

  Then came dinner, and Mr. Verulam sat on the Duchess’s right, and talked still more about books. Mr. Verulam spoke of other people’s novels as fiction, but when he himself produced a novel it was literature. The conversation was conducted in the direction of the work of the moderns, nor did Mr. Verulam realize that this Juno of a woman was luring him towards a pit. Possibly she should not have dug this pit but Mr. Verulam’s trampling complacence provoked the digging of pits.

  He gave a little discourse on the novel. And then the name of Richard Clarendon cropped up, and Mr. Verulam floun
dered, but he did not know that he was floundering. Had he remembered his history he might have associated the names of Clarendon and Hyde.

  He said—“Oh, yes, Clarendon. In the interests of real literature one tries to suppress the Clarendons. Sugared slime, you know.”

  He did not observe the momentary silence, nor the curious look Miss Hyde gave him. The Duchess went on to deepen the discussion. Her voice was golden and deliberate.

  “I must say I rather liked ‘Luna Maris.’ ”

  Mr. Verulam beamed upon her. He would have said that “Luna Maris” was a dreadful book, but you did not say such things to your hostess, however innocent she might be.

  “Yes, perhaps a little less succulent than the others.”

  But the great lady continued. Of course she read Mr. Verulam’s weekly literary articles in The Mentor. Yes, she remembered that he had attacked Mr. Clarendon very mercilessly. He had been witty and facetious. “The Sickle of the Moon” had been parodied into “The Sickly Moon”—“Unadulterated Smith” had been re-christened “Unadulterated Glucose.”

  Mr. Verulam simpered. Yes, that had been so. He had castigated Mr. Clarendon. And he was beginning to speak of some of his own books, when the voice of Mr. Byng broke in.

  “Who is Clarendon, anyway?”

  The table appeared to wait upon Mr. Verulam. He shrugged.

  “I believe it is a pseudonym, and perhaps better so——”

  Mr. Byng was persistent.

  “But these disguises don’t cover anything in these days. Especially when publicity is—it, and we all parade in a circus.”

  Again Mr. Verulam shrugged.

  “I take Clarendon as Clarendon, be it he or she.”

  He implied that the identity of the author of “Luna Maris” was quite unimportant. The fellow might be a mere best-seller, but after all——

  Miss Hyde was heard. She asked a question.

  “That piques me. Do—give us—your impression. Would you say that Clarendon is male or female?”

  Mr. Verulam answered her at once.

  “Oh, male, undoubtedly. Only the male could produce such sentimental stuff.”

  Afterwards, in a corner of the billiard-room Mr. Byng spoke feelingly to Miss Joanna Hyde.

  “He spifflicated you, Jo. What are you going to do about it?”

  She appeared bored with Mr. Byng.

  “Oh—I might convert him to Clarendon. It would be very easy.”

  “And greasy.”

  “Don’t be coarse. But there’s just one thing I want to find out.”

  “And that?”

  “Nothing doing.”

  “Let me assist?”

  “What an obsolete idea. The noble fellow is out of fashion.”

  But it was apparent to the house party that she was prepared to be kind to Mr. Verulam, so kind that Mr. Verulam began to put on proud flesh, for Miss Hyde was an unusually attractive young woman, and not one of the mawkish sort that wrote great men sentimental letters, but a somewhat fierce, untamed Diana. Mr. Verulam had dreamed at times of an affair with so free and sophisticated a mistress. He believed that he would be equal to the most passionate of occasions, and Miss Hyde was all that he was not, dark, slim, swift, and a little enigmatic.

  Mr. Byng began to discover that his own romantic tendencies were to be postponed, and that the week-end was all veal and Verulam. It annoyed him, and considerably so. Even if Joan was making a fool of the fellow——! But was she? The modern young woman may prefer power to passion, or choose to both have her cake and eat it, and Mr. Byng supposed that Verulam might be useful to Joanna. He and his associates had their own little literary Olympus upon which the favoured few were exalted before the eyes of an adoring public.

  Mr. Byng went about very much solus, and with an inward voice that exclaimed—“Damn the fellow.”

  By the morning of the Sunday Mr. Verulam was becoming more than a little forward and foolish. He—the world’s ordained bachelor, was flirting with the idea of a little house in Chelsea, and a cottage in the country. Diana, the moon goddess, seemed to be sitting meekly at his feet. She gazed at him with dark, deep eyes. Joanna! What a sweet, devoted, domestic name!

  She was spinning her web, and he was blind.

  On the Sunday afternoon she lay in a hammock, and Mr. Verulam reposed in a deck-chair beside her. A hand seemed to hang provokingly over the edge of the hammock.

  Mr. Verulam observed it.

  He said—“Modernity is just a phase. You emancipated women are as old as time.”

  She showed her baby’s eyes.

  “Am I as old as all that? And if we are going to be sentimental let’s copy that book you condemned—‘The Sickle of the Moon.’ You remember how Iris and Peter took a houseboat?”

  Mr. Verulam attempted to hedge.

  “A houseboat, was it? My memory——”

  “Oh, but you must remember, for I can remember your slashing review in The Mentor. Now, what happened when Iris and Peter went down to Marlow?”

  He simpered.

  “Can’t we proceed without Iris and Peter. Let us be Paul and Joanna.”

  She swayed gently and gazed at the sky.

  “No, let me have my whim. After the houseboat incident, what happened next?”

  Mr. Verulam shrugged.

  “Really, I can’t contain all Clarendon. When I have dealt with a book like that——”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Well, I remember Iris and Peter and some of their sentimental adventures.”

  She laughed softly, and Mr. Verulam wondered why.

  “Yes, of course you’re such a busy man. You can’t be expected to remember all the books you review. Besides—you have to write your own inevitable books.”

  And then, Mr. Verulam, feeling so full of conquest, allowed himself a moment of swashbuckling naughtiness.

  “I’ll let you into a secret. My life is so full of the big things that sometimes I have to delegate the little things.”

  She gave him an oblique glance.

  “Such as reviewing a book?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Someone else does the work and you sign your name?”

  “Oh, of course I edit the article.”

  “But that means that you don’t always read the book?”

  “I glance through it.”

  She smiled, for now she knew that Mr. Verulam had never read “The Sickle of the Moon,” for no such persons as Iris and Peter had appeared in it. The tea-bell rang, and she got quickly out of the hammock before Mr. Verulam could raise his great bulk from the deck-chair. She offered to race him to one of the cedars but he was gallant.

  “I can’t pretend to compete with Atalanta.”

  During tea she was very vivacious. She exchanged a telepathic glance with Mr. Byng, and after tea they strolled away together.

  She said—“I’ve caught him. I’ve got him by the scruff,” and she explained the situation, and Mr. Byng’s humorous face grinned. She went on to say that she would like Mr. Byng to explore Mr. Verulam’s familiarity with “Unadulterated Smith.” It could be done during dinner, and Mr. Byng was to persist and pin Mr. Verulam into a precise corner.

  Mr. Byng laughed softly.

  “I’ll do it. I’ll dissect him”—and he did.

  It must be confessed that during dinner Mr. Verulam grew a little hot and peevish. Mr. Byng was like a terrier scratching at a rabbit hole. He would talk of nothing but “Unadulterated Smith.” Mr. Verulam had reviewed the book, and therefore he should know all about it, but Mr. Verulam was pompous and vague.

  Irritated by Mr. Byng’s persistence he grew petulant.

  “My dear sir, you don’t expect me to remember every trashy novel——”

  “Then—you can’t have read it.”

  “My dear sir——”

  The Duchess, who was in the plot, spoke mellifluously to Mr. Verulam.

  “Don’t you think that this custom—of novelists sitting in judgment on
other novelists—is just a little—indiscreet?”

  Mr. Verulam looked at her suspiciously, but she had so golden an air that he could not think the worst.

  “Dear lady, we are experts.”

  And someone said—it was Mr. Byng—“Even when you don’t read the other fellow’s stuff?”

  Mr. Verulam looked hot.

  “My dear sir, there are some things you don’t understand.”

  In his complacency he had proposed a walk by midnight amid the Melfont yews, but after coffee the party most strangely deliquesced. Nothing was said. The Duchess and Major Calthrop disappeared into the billiard-room. Miss Hyde and Mr. Byng drifted together through one of the French windows. Inexplicably and unexplainedly Mr. Verulam found himself alone.

  Mr. Byng was laughing under one of the cedars.

  “Absolutely—on toast, my dear.”

  “Yes, almost.”

  “A poached egg. Are you going to wreck him?”

  “Is it worth while?”

  “Yes, do, he deserves it.”

  “I might.”

  “Then you ought to——”

  “Oh, yes—play with the balloon before——”

  “May I hear the bang?”

  “I don’t suppose anybody will hear it. But you can sit and observe—at breakfast.”

  But she explained to Mr. Byng that full inflation should precede sudden deflation, and going in she found Mr. Verulam moodily fiddling with the wireless. She was very nice to him, and Mr. Verulam had his stroll by moonlight, and grew saccharine and sentimental, like an overripe gooseberry about to burst. Almost he proposed to Miss Hyde—not marriage—but an experiment in romance, and crooned over her.

  “We’ll meet in town. Dine with me at Roberto’s?”

  She said—“Don’t let’s think of London to-night. Look at the stars winking at us through the yews.”

  Mr. Verulam went to bed feeling that he had made a conquest, and that in a little while the conquest would be consummated, and in the morning a maid brought in his early tea. There was a book on the tray, and Mr. Verulam’s blue eyes looked just a little bleary.

  “Miss Hyde asked me to give you this, sir.”

  Mr. Verulam did not examine the book until the maid had gone. To his surprise he found that it was “Luna Maris,” by Richard Clarendon. His surprise was still more vivid when he found written on the fly-leaf—