CHAPTER X.

DATCHERD’S RETURN.

On the last day of April, Eddy procured an Irish Nationalist to address the Club on Home Rule. He was a hot-tempered person, and despised English people and said so; which was foolish in a speaker, and rather discounted his other remarks, because the Club young men preferred to be liked, even by those who made speeches to them. His cause, put no doubt over-vehemently, was on the whole approved of by the Club, Radically inclined as it in the main was; but it is a noticeable fact that this particular subject is apt to fall dead on English working-class audiences, who have, presumably, a deeply-rooted feeling that it does not seriously affect them either way. Anyhow, this Nationalist hardly evoked the sympathy he deserved in the Club. Also they were inclined to be amused at his accent, which was unmodified Wexford. Probably Eddy appreciated him and his arguments more than anyone else did.

So, when on the second day of May Eddy introduced an Orangeman to speak on the same subject from another point of view, the audience was inclined to receive him favourably. The Orangeman was young, much younger than the Nationalist, and equally Irish, though from another region, both geographically and socially. His accent, what he had of it, is best described as polite North of Ireland, and he had been at Cambridge with Eddy. Though capable of fierceness, and with an Ulster-will-fight look in the eye, the fierceness was directed rather against his disloyal compatriots than against his audience, which was more satisfactory to the audience. And whenever he liked he could make them laugh, which was more satisfactory still. From his face you might, before he spoke, guess him to be a Nationalist, so essentially and indubitably south-west Irish was the look of it. To avert so distressing an error he did speak, as a rule, quite a lot.

He spoke this evening with energy, lucidity, humour, and vehemence, and the Club listened appreciatively. Gradually he worked them up from personal approval of himself to partial approval of, or at least sympathy with, his cause. He went into the financial question with an imposing production of figures. He began several times, “The Nationalists will tell you,” and then proceeded to repeat precisely what the Nationalist the other night _had_ told them, only to knock it down with an argument that was sometimes conclusive, often would just do, and occasionally just wouldn’t; and the Club cheered the first sort, accepted the second as ingenious, and said “Oh,” good-humouredly, to the third. Altogether it was an excellent speech, full of profound conviction, with some incontrovertible sense, and a smattering of intelligent nonsense. Not a word was dull, and not a word was unkind to the Pope of Rome or his adherents, as is usual, and perhaps essential, in such speeches when produced in Ireland, and necessitates their careful expurgating before they are delivered to English audiences, who have a tolerant, if supercilious, feeling towards that misguided Church. The young man spoke for half an hour, and held his audience. He held them even when he said, drawing to the end, “I wonder do any of you here know anything at all about Ireland and Irish politics, or do you get it all second-hand from the English Radical papers? Do you know at all what you’re talking about? Bad government, incompetent economy, partiality, prejudice, injustice, tyranny--that’s what the English Radicals want to hand us over to. And that is what they will not hand us over to, because we in Ulster, the most truly and nationally Irish part of Ireland, have signed this.” He produced from his breast-pocket the Covenant, and held it up before them, so that they all saw the Red Hand that blazed out on it. He read it through to them, and sat down. Cheers broke out, stamping of feet, clapping of hands; it was the most enthusiastic reception a speaker had ever had at the Club.

Someone began singing “Rule Britannia,” as the nearest expression that occurred to him of the patriotic and anti-disruptive sentiments that filled him, and it was taken up and shouted all over the room. It was as if the insidious influence of Kipling, the National Service League, the Invasion Pictures, the Primrose League, and the Blue Water School, which had been eating with gradual corruption into the sound heart of the Club, was breaking out at last, under the finishing poison of Orangeism, into an eruption which could only be eased by song and shout. So they sang and shouted, some from enthusiasm, some for fun, and Eddy said to his friend the speaker, “You’ve fairly fetched them this time,” and looked smiling over the jubilant crowd, from the front chairs to the back, and, at the back of all, met the eyes of Datcherd. He stood leaning against the door, unjubilant, songless, morose, his hands in his pockets, a cynical smile faintly touching his lips. At his side was Sidney Pollard, with very bright eyes in a white face, and a “There, you see for yourself” air about him.

Eddy hadn’t known Datcherd was coming down to the Club to-night, though he knew he had arrived in England, three weeks before he had planned. Seeing him, he rose to his feet and smiled, and the audience, following his eyes, turned round and saw their returned president and master. Upon that they cheered again, louder if possible than before. Datcherd’s acknowledgment was of the faintest. He stood there for a moment longer, then turned and left the room.

The meeting ended, after the usual courtesies and votes of thanks, and Eddy took his friend away.

“You must come and be introduced to Datcherd,” he said. “I wonder where he’s got to.”

His friend looked doubtful. “He could have come and spoken to me in the room if he’d wanted. Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he’d be tired after his journey. He didn’t look extraordinarily cheery, somehow. I think I’ll not bother him.”

“Oh, he’s all right. He only looked like a Home Ruler listening to Orange cheering. I expect they don’t, as a rule, look very radiant, do they?”

“They do not. But you don’t mean he’d mind my coming to speak, surely? Because, if he does, I ought never to have come. You told me they had lectures from all sorts of people on all sorts of things.”

“So they do. No, of course he wouldn’t mind. But that’s the way he’s bound to look in public, as a manifesto, don’t you see. Like a clergyman listening to a Nonconformist preacher. He has to assert his principles.”

“But a Church clergyman probably wouldn’t get a Nonconformist to preach in his church. They don’t, I believe, as a rule.”

Eddy was forced to admit that, unfortunately, they didn’t.

His friend, a person of good manners, was a little cross. “We’ve had him offended now, and I don’t blame him. You should have told me. I should never have come. It’s such rustic manners, to break into a person’s Club and preach things he hates. I could tell he hated it, by the look in his eye. He kept the other end of the room, the way he wouldn’t break out at me and say anything ferocious. No, I’m not coming to look for him; I wouldn’t dare look him in the face; you can go by yourself. You’ve fairly let me in, Oliver. I hate being rude to the wrong side, it gives them such an advantage. They’re rude enough to us, as a rule, to do for the two. _I_ don’t want to have anything to do with his little Radical Club; if he wants to keep it to himself and his Radical friends, he’s welcome.”

“You’re talking nonsense,” Eddy said. “Did it behave like a Radical club to-night?”

“It did not. Which is exactly why Datcherd has every reason to be annoyed. Well, you can tell him from me that it was no one’s fault but your own. Good-night.”

He departed, more in anger than in sorrow--(it had really been rather fun to-night, though rude)--and Eddy went to find Datcherd.

But he didn’t find Datcherd. He was told that Datcherd had left the Club and gone home. His friend’s remark came back to him. “He kept the other end of the room, the way he wouldn’t break out at me and say anything ferocious.” Was that what Datcherd was doing to him, or was he tired after his journey? Eddy hoped for the best, but felt forebodings. Datcherd certainly had not looked cordial or cheerful. The way he had looked had disappointed and rather hurt the Club. They felt that another expression, after three months absence, would have been more suitable. After all, for pleasantness of demeanour, Mr. Datcherd, even at the best of times (which this, it seemed, hardly was) wasn’t a patch on Mr. Oliver.

These events occurred on a Friday evening. It so happened that Eddy was going out of town next morning for a Cambridge week-end, so he would not see Datcherd till Monday evening. He and Arnold spent the week-end at Arnold’s home. Whenever Eddy visited the Denisons he was struck afresh by the extreme and rarefied refinement of their atmosphere; they (except Arnold, who had been coarsened, like himself, by contact with the world) were academic in the best sense; theoretical, philosophical, idealistic, serenely sure of truth, making up in breeding what, possibly, they a little lacked (at least Mrs. Denison and her daughter lacked) in humour; never swerving from the political, religious, and economic position they had taken up once and for all. A trifle impenetrable and closed to new issues, they were; the sort of Liberal one felt would never, however changed the circumstances, become Conservative. A valuable type, representing breeding and conscience in a rough-and-tumble world; if Christian and Anglican, it often belongs to the Christian Social Union; if not, like the Denisons, it will surely belong to some other well-intentioned and high-principled society for bettering the poor. They are, in brief, gentlemen and ladies. Life in the country is too sleepy for them and their progressive ideas; London is quite too wide awake; so they flourish like exquisite flowers in our older Universities and in Manchester, and visit Greece and Italy in the vacations.

Eddy found it peaceful to be with the Denisons. To come back to London on Monday morning was a little disturbing. He could not help a slight feeling of anxiety about his meeting with Datcherd. Perhaps it was just as well, he thought, to have given Datcherd two days to recover from the shock of the Unionist meeting. He hoped that Datcherd, when he met him, would look less like a Home Ruler listening to Orange cheering (a very unpleasant expression of countenance) than he had on Friday evening. Thinking that he might as well find out about this as soon as possible, he called at Datcherd’s house that afternoon.

Datcherd was in his library, as usual, writing. He got up and shook hands with Eddy, and said, “I was coming round to see you,” which relieved Eddy. But he spoke rather gravely, and added, “There are some things I want to talk to you about,” and sat down and nursed his gaunt knee in his thin hands and gnawed his lips.

Eddy asked him if he was much better, thinking he didn’t look it, and if he had had a good time. Datcherd scarcely answered; he was one of those people who only think of one thing at once, and he was thinking just now of something other than his health or his good time.

He said, after a moment’s silence, “It’s been extremely kind of you to manage the Club all this time.”

Eddy, with a wan smile, said apologetically, “You know, we really did have a Home Ruler to speak on Wednesday.”

Datcherd relaxed a little, and smiled in his turn.

“I know. In fact, I gather that there are very few representatives of any causes whatever whom you have _not_ had to speak.”

“I see,” said Eddy, “that Pollard has told you all.”

“Pollard has told me some things. And you must remember that I spent both Saturday and Sunday evenings at the Club.”

“What,” inquired Eddy hopefully, “did you think of it?”

Datcherd was silent for a moment. Perhaps he was remembering again how kind it had been of Eddy to manage the Club all this time. When he spoke, it was with admirable moderation.

“It hardly,” he said, “seems quite on the lines I left it on. I was a little surprised, I must own. We had a very small Club on Sunday night, because a lot of them had gone off to some service in church. That surprised me rather. They never used to do that. Of course I don’t mind, but----”

“That’s Traherne,” said Eddy. “He got a tremendous hold on some of them when he came down to speak. He’s always popular, you know, with men and lads.”

“I daresay. What made you get him?”

“Oh, to speak about rents and wages and things. He’s very good. They liked him.”

“That is apparent. He’s dragged some of them into the Church Socialist League, and more to church after him. Well, it’s their own business, of course; if they like the sort of thing, I’ve no objection. They’ll get tired of it soon, I expect.... But, if you’ll excuse my asking, why on earth have you been corrupting their minds with lectures on Tariff Reform, National Service, Ulsterism and Dreadnoughts? Didn’t you realise that one can’t let in that sort of influence without endangering the sanity of a set of half-educated lads? I left them reading Mill; I find them reading Kipling. Upon my word, anyone would think you belonged to the Primrose League, from the way you’ve been going on.”

“I do,” said Eddy simply.

Datcherd stared at him, utterly taken aback.

“You _what_?”

“I belong to the Primrose League,” Eddy repeated. “Why shouldn’t I?”

Datcherd pulled his startled wits together, and laughed shortly.

“I beg your pardon. The mistake, I suppose, was mine. I had somehow got it into my head that you were a Fabian.”

“So I am,” said Eddy, patiently explaining. “All those old things, you know. And most of the new ones as well. I’m sorry if you didn’t know; I suppose I ought to have mentioned it, but I never thought about it. Does it matter?”

Datcherd was gazing at him with grave, startled eyes, as at a maniac.

“Matter? Well, I don’t know. Yes, I suppose it would have mattered, from my point of view, if I’d known. Because it just means that you’ve been playing when I thought you were in earnest; that, whereas I supposed you took your convictions and mine seriously and meant to act on them, really they’re just a game to you. You take no cause seriously, I suppose.”

“I take all causes seriously,” Eddy corrected him quickly. He got up, and walked about the room, his hands deep in his pockets, frowning a little because life was so serious.

“You see,” he explained, stopping in front of Datcherd and frowning down on him, “truth is so pervasive; it gets everywhere; leaks into everything. Like cod-liver oil spilt in a trunk of clothes; everything’s saturated with it. (Is that a nasty comparison? I thought of it because it happened to me the other day.) The clothes are all different from each other, but the cod-liver oil is in all of them for ever and ever. Truth is like that--pervasive. Isn’t it?”

“No,” said Datcherd, with vehemence. “No. Truth is _not_ like that. If it were, it would mean that one thing was no better and no worse than another; that all progress, moral and otherwise, was illusive. We should all become fatalists, torpid, uncaring, dead, sitting with our hands before us and drifting with the tide. There’d be an end of all fight, all improvement, all life. But truth is _not_ like that. One thing _is_ better than another, and always will be. Democracy _is_ a better aim than oligarchy; freedom _is_ better than tyranny; work _is_ better than idleness. And, because it fights, however slowly and hesitatingly, on the side of those better things, Liberalism is better than Toryism, the League of Young Liberals a better thing to encourage among the young men of the country than the Primrose League. You say truth is everywhere. Frankly, I look at the Primrose League, and all your Tory Associations, and I can’t find it. I see only a monumental tissue of lies. Lying to the people for their good--that’s what all honest Tories would admit they do. Lying to them for their harm--that’s what we say they do. Truth! It isn’t named among them. They’ve not got minds that can know truth when they see it. It’s not their fault. They’re mostly good men warped by a bad creed. And you say one creed is as good as another.”

“I say there’s truth in all of them,” said Eddy. “Can’t you see the truth in Toryism? I can, so clearly. It’s all so hackneyed, so often repeated, but it’s true in spite of that. Isn’t there truth in government by the best for the others? If that isn’t good what is? If it’s not true that one man’s more fitted by nature and training to manage difficult political affairs than another, nothing’s true. And it’s true that he can do it best without a mass of ignorant, uninstructed, sentimental people for ever jerking at the reins. Put the best on top--that’s the gist of Toryism.” Datcherd was looking at him cynically.

“And yet--you belong to the Young Liberals’ League.”

“Of course I do. Do you want me to enlarge on the gist and the beauties of Liberalism too? I could, only I won’t, because you’ve just done so yourself. All that you’ve said about its making for freedom and enlightenment is profoundly true, and is why I am a Liberal. I insist on my right to be both. I am both. I hope I shall always be both.”

Datcherd said, after a thoughtful moment, “I wish we had had this conversation three months ago. We didn’t; I was reckless and hasty, and so we’ve made this mess of things.”

“_Is_ it a mess?” asked Eddy. “I’m sorry if so. It hasn’t struck me in that light all this time.”

“Don’t think me ungrateful, Oliver,” said Datcherd, quickly. “I’m not. Looking at things as you do, I suppose it was natural that you should have done as you have. Perhaps you might have let me a little more into your views beforehand than you did--but never mind that now. The fact that matters is that I find the Club in a state of mental confusion that I never expected, and it will take some time to settle it again, if we ever do. We want, as you know, to make the Club the nucleus of a sound Radical constituency. Well, upon my word, if there was an election now, I couldn’t say which way some of them would vote. You may answer that it doesn’t matter, as so few are voters yet; but it does. It’s what I call a mess; and a silly mess, too. They’ve been playing the fool with things they ought to be keen enough about to take in deadly earnest. That’s your doing. You seem to have become pretty popular, I must say; which is just the mischief of it. All I can do now is to try and straighten things out by degrees.”

“You’d rather I didn’t come and help any more, I suppose,” said Eddy.

“To be quite frank, I would. In fact, I wouldn’t have you at any price. You don’t mind my speaking plainly? The mistake’s been mine; but it _has_ been a pretty idiotic mistake, and we mustn’t have any more of it.... I ought never to have gone away. I shan’t again, whatever any fools of doctors say.”

Eddy held out his hand. “Goodbye. I’m really very sorry, Datcherd. I suppose I ought to have guessed what you would feel about all this.”

“Honestly, I think you ought. But thank you very much, all the same, for all the trouble you’ve taken.... You’re doing some reviewing work now, aren’t you?” His tone implied that Eddy had better go on doing reviewing work, and desist from doing anything else.

Eddy left the house. He was sorry, and rather angry, and badly disappointed. He had been keen on the Club; he had hoped to go on helping with it. It seemed that he was not considered fit by anyone to have anything to do with clubs and such philanthropic enterprises. First the Vicar of St. Gregory’s had turned him out because he had too many interests besides (Datcherd being one), and now Datcherd turned him out because he had tried to give the Club too many interests (the cause the vicar stood for being one). Nowhere did he seem to be wanted. He was a failure and an outcast. Besides which, Datcherd thought he had behaved dishonourably. Perhaps he had. Here he saw Datcherd’s point of view. Even his friend the Ulsterman had obviously had the same thought about that. Eddy ruefully admitted that he had been an idiot not to know just how Datcherd would feel. But he was angry with Datcherd for feeling like that. Datcherd was narrow, opinionated, and unfair. So many people are, in an unfair world.

He went home and told Arnold, who said, “Of course. I can’t think why you didn’t know how it would be. I always told you you were being absurd, with your Blue Water lunatics, and your Food Tax ante-diluvians, and your conscription captains. (No, don’t tell me about it’s not being conscription; now is not the moment. You are down, and it is for me to talk.) You had better try your hand at no more good works, but stick to earning an honest livelihood, as long as they will give you any money for what you do. I daresay from a rumour I heard from Innes to-day, that it won’t be long. I believe the _Daily Post_ are contemplating a reduction in their literary staff, and they will very probably begin with you, unless you learn to restrain your redundant appreciations a little. No paper could bear up under that weight of indiscriminate enthusiasm for long.”

“Hulbert told me I was to criticize more severely,” said Eddy. “So I try to now. It’s difficult, when I like a thing, to be severe about it. I wonder if one ought.”

But he was really wondering more what Eileen Le Moine thought and would say about his difference with Datcherd.

He didn’t discover this for a week. He called at 3, Campden Hill Road, and found both its occupants out. They did not write, as he had half expected, to ask him to come again, or to meet them anywhere. At last he met Eileen alone, coming out of an exhibition of Max Beerbohm cartoons. He had been going in, but he turned back on seeing her. She looked somehow altered, and grave, and she was more beautiful even than he had known, but tired, and with shadowed eyes of fire and softness; to him she seemed, vaguely, less of a child, and more of a woman. Perhaps it was Greece.... Somehow Greece, and all the worlds old and new, and all the seas, seemed between them as she looked at him with hardening eyes. An observer would have said from that look that she didn’t like him; yet she had always liked him a good deal. A capricious person she was; all her friends knew that.

He turned back from the entrance door to walk with her, though she said, “Aren’t you going in?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve seen them once already. I’d rather see you now, if you don’t mind. I suppose you’re going somewhere? You wouldn’t come and have tea with me first?”

She hesitated a moment, as if wondering whether she would, then said, “No; I’m going to tea with Billy’s grandmother; she wants to hear about Greece. Then Billy and I are taking Jane to the Academy, to broaden her mind. She’s never seen it yet, and it’s time her education was completed.”

She said it coldly, even the little familiar mockery of Jane and the Academy, and Eddy knew that she was angry with him. That he did not like, and he said quickly, “May I go with you as far as Gordon Place?” (which was where Billy’s grandmother lived), and she answered with childish sullenness, “If we’re going the one way at the one time I suppose we will be together,” and said no more till he broke the silence as they crossed Leicester Square in the sunshine with, “Please, is anything the matter, Eileen?”

She turned and looked at him, her face hard in the shadow of the sweeping hat-brim, and flung back ironically, “It is not. Of course not; how would it be?”

Eddy made a gesture of despair with his hands.

“You’re angry too. I knew it. You’re all angry, because I had Tariff Reformers and Orangemen to lecture to the Club.”

“D’you tell me so?” She still spoke in uncomfortable irony. “I expect you hoped we would be grateful and delighted at being dragged back from Greece just when Hugh was beginning to be better, and to enjoy things, by a letter from that miserable Pollard all about the way you had the Club spoilt. Why, we hadn’t been to Olympia yet. We were just going there when Hugh insisted on calling for letters at Athens and got this. Letters indeed! Bridget and I didn’t ask were there any for us; but Hugh always will. And of course, when he’d read it nothing would hold him; he must tear off home by the next train and arrive in London three weeks sooner than we’d planned. Now why, if you felt you had to go to spoil Hugh’s club, couldn’t you have had Pollard strangled first, the way he wouldn’t be writing letters?”

“I wish I had,” said Eddy, with bitter fervour. “I was a fool.”

“And worse than that, so you were,” said Eileen, unsparingly. “You were unprincipled, and then so wanting foresight that you wrecked your own schemes. Three weeks more, and you might have had twenty-one more captains and clergymen and young men from Ulster to complete the education of Hugh’s young Liberals. As it is, Hugh thinks you’ve not done them much harm, though you did your best, and he’s slaving away to put sense into them again. The good of Greece is all gone from him already; worry was just what he wasn’t to do, and you’ve made him do it. He’s living already again at top speed, and over-working, and being sad because it’s all in such a silly mess. Hugh cares for his work more than for anything in the world,” her voice softened to the protective cadence familiar to Eddy, “and you’ve hurt him in it. No one should hurt Hugh in his work, even a little. Didn’t you know that?”

She looked at him now with eyes less hostile but more sad, as if her thoughts had left him and wandered to some other application of this principle. Indeed, as she said it, it had the effect of a creed, a statement of a governing principle of life, that must somehow be preserved intact while all else broke.

“Could I have known it would have hurt him--a few lectures?” Eddy protested against the unfairness of it, losing his temper a little. “You all talk as if Datcherd was the mistress of a girls’ school, who is expected to protect her pupils from the contamination of degrading influences and finds they have been reading Nietsche or _Tom Jones_.”

It was a mistake to say that. He might have known it. Eileen flushed pink with a new rush of anger.

“Is that so? Is that the way we speak of Hugh? I’ll tell him you said so. No, I wouldn’t trouble his ears with anything so paltry. I wonder do you know the way he speaks of you? He thinks you must be weak in the head, and he makes excuses for you, so he does; he never says an unkind word against you, only how you ought to be locked up and not let loose like ordinary people, and how he ought to have known you were like that and explained to you in so many words beforehand the principles he wanted maintained. As if he hadn’t been too ill to explain anything, and as if any baby wouldn’t have known, and as if any honourable person wouldn’t have taken particular care, just when he was ill and away, to run things just the way he would like. And after that you call him a girls’ school mistress....”

“On the contrary,” said Eddy, crossly, “I said he wasn’t. You are horribly unfair. Is it any use continuing this conversation?”

“It is not. Nor any other.”

So, in her excitement, she got into a bus that was not going to Billy’s grandmother, and he swallowed his pride and told her so, but she would not swallow hers and listen to him, but climbed on to the top, and was carried down Piccadilly, and would have to change at Hyde Park Corner.

Eileen was singularly poor at buses, Eddy reflected bitterly. He walked down to the Embankment, too crushed and unhappy to go home and risk meeting Arnold. He had been rude and ill-tempered to Eileen, and sneered at Datcherd to her, and she had been rude and ill-tempered to him, and would never forgive him, because it had been about Datcherd, her friend, loyalty to whom was the mainspring of her life. All her other friends might go by the board, if Datcherd but prospered. How much she cared, Eddy reflected, his anger fast fading into a pity and regret that hurt. For all her bitter words to him had that basis--a poignant caring for Datcherd, with his wrecked health, and his wrecked home, and his hopeless, unsatisfied love for her--a love which would never be satisfied, because he had principles which forbade it, and she had a love for him which would always preserve his principles and his life’s work intact. And they were growing to care so much--Eddy had seen that in Eileen’s face when first he met her at the Leicester Galleries--with such intensity, such absorbing flame, that it hurt and burnt.... Eddy did not want to watch it.

But one thing it had done for him; it had killed in him the last vestiges of that absurd emotion he had had for her, an emotion which had always been so hopeless, and for that very reason had never become, and never would become, love.

But he wanted to be friends. However much she had been the aggressor in the quarrel, however unfair, and unjust, and unkind she had been, still he was minded to write and say he was sorry, and would she please come to lunch and go on being friends.

He turned into Soho Square, and went back to his rooms. There he found a letter from his editor telling him that his services on the _Daily Post_ would not be required after the end of May. It was not unexpected. The _Post_ was economising in its literary staff, and starting on him. It was very natural, even inevitable, that they should; for his reviewing lacked discrimination, and his interest in the Club had often made him careless about his own job. He threw the letter at Arnold, who had just come in.

Arnold said, “I feared as much.”

“What now, I wonder?” said Eddy, not caring particularly.

Arnold looked at him thoughtfully.

“Really, it’s very difficult. I don’t know.... You do so muddle things up, don’t you? I wish you’d learn to do only one job at once and stick to it.”

Eddy said bitterly, “It won’t stick to me, unfortunately.”

Arnold said, “If Uncle Wilfred would have you, would you come to us?”

Eddy supposed he would. Only probably Uncle Wilfred wouldn’t have him. Later in the evening he got a telegram to say that his father had had a stroke, and could he come home at once. He caught a train at half-past eight, and was at Welchester by ten.