“Then there’s Julian Wilford — he has a strip of river beyond me — a man on the Stock Exchange.” Tony Westram ran through the brief list of his guests with a short description of each of them.
“Besides them, there’s a niece who makes her home with me. Lady Olivia Stanton. She’s coming across the lawn to us now.”
Mark saw a young woman, in a white dress with a big hat shading her face, approaching them.
“I had better tell you a little about her, so don’t look, or she’ll guess,” continued Westram, lowering his voice. “She has had pretty bad luck all round. Old Porlock was her father. He threw away every bean he had over the gee-gees and died a year after her mother. Then she lost the only man she ever cared about in the Boer War, and I am afraid nothing matters very much to her now — or ever will.” He raised his voice. “Olivia, I want to introduce Mark Thewliss to you.”
Olivia Stanton had no claim to be considered beautiful, but she had a pleasant, delicate face, with fine grey eyes, and however heavy her woes had been, she carried no sign of them. She greeted Mark Thewliss with a friendly smile and a firm clasp of the hand.
“I am glad that you found time to come,” she said. “A little intellect is always badly needed at Gissens at this time of the year.”
“You haven’t seen Angela, I suppose?” Tony Westram interposed.
“I have, but she’s not fit to be seen. She’s with the keeper at the hatchery.” Olivia Stanton turned to Mark with a whimsical pity. “Everybody here is mad about the trout for the moment, and it’s my duty to warn you that something pretty bad is being planned for you. The outlook’s gloomy. So you had better let me give you some tea whilst you are a free man.”
For that afternoon, however, he remained a free man He took his tea in a long, cool drawing-room and was taken for a walk by Olivia Stanton afterwards. He found himself, to his surprise — for he was still naïve in many ways — talking to her about his dyes and his difficulties with the German patents, giving her a glimpse of his early struggles, and sketching with some humour William Mardyke and his associates.
“All this,” he cried, looking round upon the park and the house in its orderly and complete beauty, “all this is absolutely new to me” — he drew in a breath— “and wonderful. I didn’t know what I had missed.”
It was the season of the mayfly, the dusk long lingering into darkness, the river softly glimmering, the air sweet with the smell of hay and flowers. Dinner was a go-as-you-please affair.
Angela Westram came late to it, a lovely tall slip of a girl with brown hair and blue eyes and all the joy of her seventeen years brimming over. She was clothed in a frock of pale blue crepe de Chine with light-coloured stockings and blue shoes, and a necklace of old amber and silver encircled her young throat. Mark Thewliss was presented to her, and she looked at him very gravely and sedately, and nodded her head as though some serious doubt she had was set at rest.
“I am pleased to meet you,” she said with a rather pretty touch of conferring a great favour upon him.
Derek Crayle appeared later and had not even changed into a dinner jacket. He made his apology. There would still be the last of the light after dinner was finished, and there was a pool of which he had great hopes. The talk was all of the river, of Dusty Millers and Brown Devons, of fat old pike which wanted a rifle taken to them, and of big trout which lay in full view under the banks, motionless as yoghis on an Indian hill-side and like them, liberated from temptation.
“This must be all jargon to Thewliss,” Tony Westram at last expostulated.
“All education is jargon to the beginner,” said Derek sententiously.
“Alas! I am not even a beginner,” Thewliss returned.
“You will be to-morrow,” Angela declared firmly.
“I am going to spend the morning teaching Mr. Thewliss to cast a line on the lawn.”
She smiled with a charming tyranny across the table at the guest.
“I warned you, Mr. Thewliss,” said Olivia. “You had still time to turn your car round and flee to the Bath Road.”
“Never!” Thewliss returned, and he bowed with humility to Angela. “You will have an extremely willing duff er for your pupil.”
Angela frowned.
“But you must take it very seriously, Mr. Thewliss,” she said, rebuking him for his levity. “It is intensely important that you should catch a trout in this river with a dry fly by to-morrow night.”
“Why?” asked Tony in surprise.
“That, my father, is for the moment your daughter’s secret. When it is disclosed, you will all marvel at my wisdom. But the trout must be caught first, Mr. Thewliss.”
“Miss Angela, I answer you with an Eastern saying,”
Mark replied. “If it can be done, it is done. If it can’t be done, it shall be done.” And upon that the little company rose from the table.
Mark Thewliss kept himself awake as long as he could that night after he had gone to bed. He was in a world which was quite strange to him and very lovely; and he was hedonist enough to wish to prolong the first sweet savour of it. He knew the magic of a summer night at sea in the loneliness of great waters. But that of the country-side had a beauty of its own. The quiet rustle of birds in the leaves of the tree, as though they feared to invite an enemy, the hoot of owls, the sudden gush of clear melody from a nightingale, the regular tiny swish of cattle cropping the grass, and every now and then the gurgle of the river running by at the edge of the lawn — all these sounds floated in at his open window and enchanted him. The scent of hay and flowers made the room sweet. He had a sensation that the whole wide earth was consciously refreshing itself in the cool of the night against the coming day; and he felt very near to it, and had a sympathy with it, as though the earth were his brother. He lay folded in peace and clean, the dust of a long tramp brushed from his tired body.
And it was not lonely like the sea. He realised for the first time the four walls of loneliness within which he, Mark Thewliss, had lived for so long and with so ignorant a contentment. He had missed the grace of life. This one evening at Gissens had already taught him that. There had been no straining after wit, not an attempt at an epigram, not a saying to be remembered. But there had been friendliness, a natural give-and-take of conversation, and, above all, an ease, an admirable, inimitable, unhampered ease. In the society which he had frequented people watched their manners; they were a little over-careful of their propriety, they looked upon stiffness as — horrible phrase, but so completely appropriate — as comme il faut.
“I must certainly have a country house of my own—” he came to that conclusion rather drowsily as the clock upon the stables struck the hour of midnight. “Yes, and young people to make it, with their gaiety and high spirits, a house alive;” and upon this unprobed resolve he fell asleep.
But it was awake with him next morning; and Mark was well aware that when the intentions of the night were also the intentions of the morning he must take them into serious account. He had no time, however, for reflection that forenoon. He spent it under Angela’s supervision. She was indeed waiting for him upon the lawn, with a trout-rod in her hand.
“We must get to work,” she said with a touch of severity in her voice. “We are not so early as we might have been.”
“I believe the proper phrase is that I overslept myself,” Thewliss answered meekly.
She taught him first of all to get his line out by example and instruction, very gently but very firmly; so that he felt like a clumsy little boy on his first day at school. Then she marked out a circle in white and the more arduous course began. How to drop his fly upon that circle so that it should seem of its own accord to flutter down; how to make the cast so that the line should uncoil in the most delicate of spirals, and not so much fall as lay itself imperceptibly upon the grass, and only that after the fly at the end of it had settled — these were problems which provoked much disappointment in Angela, much sympathy in Olivia Stanton and much humility in Mark
Thewliss.
“I shall never do it,” he cried.
The intricacies of the fly-fisherman’s craft were not to be mastered in one assiduous morning.
“You are getting on very well,” said Olivia.
“And you’ll certainly catch a fish before the day’s out,” declared Angela.
They were talking thus at luncheon when a letter was brought in to Mark Thewliss. It was addressed to his house in London.
“Your servants thought it might be important, sir,” said Tony Westram’s butler, “and sent it on by special messenger.”
“Thank you,” said Mark, turning the letter over and then laying it beside his plate on the table.
“You had better open it,” said Tony. “I’d lay a thousand pounds to a penny I could tell you the contents.”
Mark opened the envelope and read the letter, and a smile crept over his face.
“Oh, you’re not going away this afternoon!” cried Angela in the greatest anxiety. “You really can’t.”
“If he does, you needn’t cry about it, Angela.” Derek Crayle remarked dryly. “For I think he has caught his fish already.”
Thewliss looked up and laughed.
“Yes, but there are some kinds of fishes one puts back. This is one of them.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Tony Westram broke in incredulously:
“Too small?”
“For a younger man, no. For me, yes.”
“By gad!”
Tony Westram hardly knew whether he was standing on his head or his heels.
“It’s the Under-Secretaryship, of course.”
“For the Colonies. Yes.”
“And you are refusing it. Office in your first Parliament! Aren’t you taking a big risk?”
“Yes,” Mark answered.
One thing was clear to all of that company, however surprised they might be. Thewliss was not speaking on the spur of the moment out of a wild vanity. His voice was too quiet, his manner too dispassionate and tranquil. He had reviewed the question of refusal or acceptance of just this offer very carefully from all its angles.
“Yes, I am taking a big risk. Of course I am nowhere at all yet,” he explained with a sudden smile, “but I shouldn’t be even there if I hadn’t breakfasted and lunched and dined on big risks for the greater part of my life.”
He suddenly saw Olivia Stanton watching him steadily with her quiet eyes. She was the only one of the party who had uttered no word of surprise or doubt. She had sat quite silent, and Mark read in her face both comprehension and approval. She smiled at him when their eyes met, to assure him of her agreement; and unexpectedly another thought, born of his night-time fancies and quite foreign to the discussion of the propriety of his action, sprang into his mind He glanced quickly from her to Angela, who was sitting at her side, taking them both into a single picture and making of the picture a pattern or image of which he yearned for a copy. Here, too, it seemed that Olivia Stanton understood him. For the blood rushed into her face, and she lowered her eyes. It was the matter of a moment, but an unforgettable moment for both of them; and Angela, who was so impressed by the enormity of Mark’s conduct that she had forgotten the paramount need that he should land a trout, covered altogether Olivia’s confusion.
“Do you know that my father has been twenty years in the House of Commons, and no one has ever offered him anything?” she cried.
“It’s a scandal,” cried Thewliss.
“And that he would jump out of his skin for an Under-Secretaryship?” Angela continued.
“Oh, shame, shame! Go into the corner, Angela,” Derek Crayle ordered, amidst a splutter of laughter.
“But she’s right,” exclaimed Tony, joining in the laugh. “I would. I have got the House of Commons in my bones, worse luck!”
“And you’re refusing one.” Angela went on staring at Mark with round, incredulous eyes. “If I knew you better, and my manners weren’t so terribly refined, I should ask you a very pointed question.”
“Ask it!” said Thewliss nobly. “I am strong.”
“Very well, then,” said Angela. “It is a mere suggestion. I may be entirely wrong. But — aren’t you — a little dippy?”
Cries of protest broke from Tony, from Derek Crayle, from the fellow on the Stock Exchange, even from Olivia.
“Let us have no noise!” Mark replied, holding up his hand for silence. “I must consider that question very carefully. No...no...Miss Angela, I may be rash — but dippy? No! I beg you to follow my argument closely. I am nominally the junior partner, but actually the bright guiding spirit, of one of the most eminent firms devoted to the production of synthetic dyes. I have all the chemistry and organisation of Germany to fight. It must have escaped your memory that in this very year of grace the Bayer Farbenfabrik has discovered that benzoylated oxyanthraquinones have all the properties of vat dyes? Arising out of that answer I ask you what will become of Mardyke and Campion, to say nothing of England, if I take my hand from the steering wheel and melt into a departmental underling? Phut is the only reply. Excuse me if I say to you tush! Also, I can’t afford it.”
“Ah!” said Angela with a start. “That alters the whole position,” and once more she wrapt herself in mysteries.
Later on that afternoon, when Thewliss had written and dispatched his letter of refusal and the shadows were lengthening on the garden, he was fetched out to the real business of the day. He was given a split-cane rod, a Dusty Miller was carefully attached to the gut at the end of the line; he was brought as cautiously as any conspirator to the river bank and shown an old fat big trout lying so motionless in a pool of the clear brown water that Thewliss could hardly believe it to be anything but a shadow, too. Then he was led back well out of sight, and encouraged by whispered advices and excitements, he at last made the great anticipated cast. Alas, a thin line cut the still river like a seam with a little splash just over the fat trout’s nose, and the fly, self-confessed a fly with a hook, dropped last of all upon the water, heavy as an obese man from a diving-board.
“Draw it in across his nose,” whispered Angela. “He might...One never knows.”
She was wringing her hands now. Mark wound in his line never so cautiously.
“Bite, you fat dawdler, bite,” she whispered, but the old trout was thinking very selfishly that this was no genuine supper which was offered to him and was indifferent to Angela’s exhortations.
“Try him once more,” she said. “Oh, that’s ever so much better. Now he must...No, he won’t,” and she gave voice to the last unforgivable treachery. “I should like to try the old beast with a nice smelly shrimp.”
Thewliss was moved along to another pool, and once more he failed lamentably. For everybody at Gissens, except Olivia Stanton, who looked on with a detached smile of amusement, life now became serious and intense. Thewliss had got to catch a fish. Tony Westram gave his advice; Derek Crayle put the novice through one or two extra rehearsals on the lawn; Mr. Wilford, who had noticed from afar a fatal jerk of the wrist, came running up with the useful suggestion that Thewliss mustn’t think he was bowling off-breaks at the nets. Thewliss received exhortations enough to make his reason totter on its throne, and each cast was watched with an anxious holding of the breath and followed by a gasp of despair.
No one really cared a threepenny bit whether Mark Thewliss caught a fish or whether he didn’t, so far as his enjoyment or success was concerned. But Angela’s heart for some mysterious reason was set upon this achievement, and it was not endurable that she should be disappointed. Mark Thewliss realised the dreadful position in which he stood as clearly as any of the party. If he did not catch a trout — and he was in the heretical mood to wish that the pike had eaten all the trout in the world — Angela would be disappointed, her day would be spoilt, and humiliation and well-merited disdain would be his lot.
At half-past seven in the evening, when Mark’s right arm was aching as no arms ache except the rheumatical, and a small gloomy procession
followed him along the bank, the miracle happened.
“I’m against trout,” Thewliss cried in a rage, “I challenge them all here and now,” and at random, with a violence and savagery which made the devotees shudder, he whirled the line above his head and cast. And lo I It shot out far and farther and still farther, so that Angela gasped and Tony cried, “By Gad!” And the fly settled upon the water, daintily as a fly should do, and an ingenuous and confiding youngster on the very edge of Westram’s water snapped, and snapped once too often. The end of the rod bent and shook.
“You’ve got him! Oh!” cried Angela, stamping with relief.
“Hook him well,” cried Tony. “Just a little jerk of the wrist. That’ll do;” and in the air there was a flash of silver, and in the same breath, a gurgle of water and a tiny whirlpool as the trout leaped and plunged.
“Let him run now,” said Derek. “And for heaven’s sake, don’t lose him. We can’t have Angela crying over the roast beef and choking herself with a mixture of sobs and Yorkshire pudding.”
No one paid any attention to his ribaldry. The fish ran upstream like an express train, sulked and ran down again.
“Look out!” cried Tony anxiously. “He’s close to a big stone. If he gets your line round it, you’re done.”
“Oh, he can’t be as malevolent as that.” Mark was almost whimpering now that he really had a fish on his line.
“Oh, can’t he?” said Angela. “Bring in your line a little, please I Good!”
For the fish had dashed upstream again. Then followed a minute or two of concentrated anxiety, of violent jerks and plunges and most deceitful inactivities.
“I’ve just got to land him.” Thewliss said, in a voice of which the very accent declared that life would never be the same again if he failed.
“But you shall, you shall,” Angela promised soothingly. “He’s tiring. Yes — yes — he’s coming now...No! Pay out! Pay out!” and her voice rose in despair.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 594