MR. WRENN looked up from his plate with a sudden start, a wild and febrile glare of horror in his eyes. Old theatregoers, had any such been present, would have been irresistibly reminded by his demeanour of the late Sir Henry Irving in The Bells.
It was breakfast time at San Rafael; and, as always at this meal, the air was charged with an electric unrest. It is ever thus at breakfast in the suburbs. The specter of a fleeting train broods over the feast, turning normally placid men into temporary neuropaths. Meeting Mr. Wrenn in Fleet Street after lunch, you would have set him down as a very pleasant, quiet, elderly gentleman, rather on the mild side. At breakfast, Bengal tigers could have picked up hints from him.
“Zatawittle?” he gasped, speaking in the early morning patois of Suburbia, which is the English language filtered through toast and marmalade.
“Of course, it wasn’t a whistle, darling,” said Kay soothingly. “I keep telling you you’ve lots of time.”
Partially reassured, Mr. Wrenn went on with his meal. He finished his toast and reached for his cup.
“Wassatie?”
“Sure your washrah?”
“I put it right yesterday.”
At this moment there came faintly from afar a sweet, musical chiming.
“There’s the college clock striking the quarter,” said Kay.
Mr. Wrenn’s fever subsided. If it was only a quarter-past he was on velvet. He could linger and chat for a while. He could absolutely dally. He pushed back his chair and lighted a cigarette with the air of a leisured man.
“Kay, my dear,” he said, “I’ve been thinking—about this young fellow Shotter.”
Kay jumped. By an odd coincidence, she had herself been thinking of Sam at that moment. It annoyed her to think of Sam, but she constantly found herself doing it.
“I really think we ought to invite him to dinner one night.”
“No!”
“But he seems so anxious to be friendly. Only yesterday he asked me if he could drop round some time and borrow the garden roller. He said he understood that that was always the first move in the suburbs toward establishing good neighbourly relations.”
“If you ask him to dinner I shall go out.”
“I can’t understand why you dislike him so much.”
“Well, I just do.”
“He seems to admire you tremendously.”
“Does he?”
“He keeps talking about you—asking what you were like as a child and whether you ever did you hair differently and things of that kind.”
“Oh!”
“I rather wish you didn’t object to him so much. I should like to see something of him out of office hours. I find him a very pleasant fellow myself, and extremely useful in the office. He has taken that Aunt Ysobel page off my hands. You remember how I used to hate having to write that?”
“Is that all he does?”
Mr. Wrenn chuckled.
“By no means,” he said amusedly.
“What are you laughing at?”
“I was thinking,” explained Mr. Wrenn, “of something that happened yesterday. Cordelia Blair called to see me with one of her usual grievances——”
“Oh, no!” said Kay sympathetically. Her uncle, she knew, was much persecuted by female contributors who called with grievances at the offices of Pyke’s Home Companion; and of all these gifted creatures, Miss Cordelia Blair was the one he feared most. “What was the trouble this time?”
“Apparently the artist who is illustrating Hearts Aflame had drawn Leslie Mordyke in a lounge suit instead of dress clothes.”
“Why don’t you bite these women’s heads off when they come bothering you? You shouldn’t be so nice to them.”
“I can’t, my dear,” said Mr. Wrenn plaintively. “I don’t know why it is, but the mere sight of a woman novelist who is all upset seems to take all the heart out of me. I sometimes wish I could edit some paper like Tiny Tots or Our Feathered Chums. I don’t suppose indignant children come charging in on Mason or outraged canaries on Mortimer.... But I was telling you—when I heard her voice in the outer office, I acquainted this young fellow Shotter briefly with the facts, and he most nobly volunteered to go out and soothe her.”
“I can’t imagine him soothing anyone.”
“Well, he certainly had the most remarkable effect on Miss Blair. He came back ten minutes later to say that all was well and that she had gone away quite happy.”
“Did he tell you how he had managed it?”
“No.” Another chuckle escaped Mr. Wrenn. “Kay, it isn’t possible—you don’t imagine—you don’t suppose he could conceivably, on such a very slight acquaintance, have kissed her, do you?”
“I should think it very probable.”
“Well, I’m bound to own——”
“Don’t laugh in that horrible, ghoulish way, uncle!”
“I can’t help it. I could see nothing, you understand, as I was in the inner office; but there were most certainly sounds that suggested——”
Mr. Wrenn broke off. Again that musical chiming had come faintly to his ears. But this time its effect was the reverse of soothing. He became a thing of furious activity. He ran to and fro, seizing his hat and dropping it, picking it up and dropping his brief case, retrieving the brief case and dropping his stick. By the time he had finally shot out of the front door with his hat on his head, his brief case in his hand and his stick dangling from his arm, it was as if a tornado had passed through the interior of San Rafael, and Kay, having seen him off, went out into the garden to try to recover.
It was a pleasant, sunny morning, and she made for her favourite spot, the shade of the large tree that hung over the edge of the lawn, a noble tree, as spreading as that which once sheltered the Village Blacksmith. Technically, this belonged to Mon Repos, its roots being in the latter’s domain; but its branches had grown out over the fence, and San Rafael, with that injustice which is so marked a feature of human affairs, got all the benefit of its shade.
Seated under this, with a gentle breeze ruffling her hair, Kay gave herself up to meditation.
She felt worried and upset and in the grip of one of her rare moods of despondency. She had schooled herself to pine as little as possible for the vanished luxury of Midways, but when she did so pine it was always at this time of the day. For although she had adjusted herself with almost complete success to the conditions of life at San Rafael, she had not yet learned to bear up under the suburban breakfast.
At Midways the meal had been so leisurely, so orderly, so spacious, so redolent of all that is most delightful in the country life of the wealthy; a meal of soft murmurs and rustling papers, of sunshine falling on silver in the summer, of crackling fires in winter; a take-your-time meal; a thing of dignity and comfort. Breakfast at San Rafael was a mere brutish bolting of food, and it jarred upon her afresh each morning.
The breeze continued to play in her hair. Birds hopped upon the grass. Someone down the road was using a lawn mower. Gradually the feeling of having been jolted and shaken by some rude force began to pass from Kay, and she was just reaching the stage where, re-establishing connection with her sense of humour, she would be able to look upon the amusing side of the recent scramble, when from somewhere between earth and heaven there spoke a voice.
“Oo-oo!” said the voice.
Kay was puzzled. Though no ornithologist, she had become reasonably familiar with the distinctive notes of such of our feathered chums as haunted the garden of San Rafael, and this did not appear to be one of them.
“I see you,” proceeded the voice lovingly. “How’s your pore head, dearie?”
The solution of the mystery presented itself at last. Kay raised her eyes and beheld, straddled along a branch almost immediately above her, a lean, stringy man of ruffianly aspect, his naturally unlovely face rendered additionally hideous by an arch and sentimental smile. For a long instant this person goggled at her, and she stared back at him. Then, with a gasp that sounded confusedly apologetic, he scrambled back along the branch like an anthropoid ape, and dropping to earth beyond the fence, galloped blushingly up the garden.
Kay sprang to her feet. She had been feeling soothed, but now a bubbling fury had her in its grip. It was bad enough that outcasts like Sam Shotter should come and camp themselves next door to her. It was bad enough that they should annoy her uncle, a busy man, with foolish questions about what she had been like as a child and whether she had ever done her hair differently. But when their vile retainers went to the length of climbing trees and chirruping at her out of them, the situation, it seemed to her, passed beyond the limit up to which a spirited girl may reasonably be expected to endure.
She returned to the house, fermenting, and as she reached the hall the front doorbell rang.
Technically, when the front doorbell of San Rafael rang, it was Claire Lippett’s duty to answer it; but Claire was upstairs making beds. Kay stalked across the hall, and having turned the handle, found confronting her a young woman of spectacular appearance, clad in gorgeous raiment and surmounted by a bird-of-paradise-feathered hat so much too good for her that Kay’s immediate reaction of beholding it was one of simple and ignoble jealousy. It was the sort of hat she would have liked to be able to afford herself, and its presence on the dyed hair of another cemented the prejudice which that other’s face and eyes had aroused within her.
“Does a guy named Shotter live here?” asked the visitor. Then, with the air of one remembering a part and with almost excessive refinement, “Could I see Mr. Shotter, if you please?”
“Mr. Shotter lives next door,” said Kay frostily.
“Oh, thank yaw. Thank yaw so much.”
“Not at all,” said Kay.
She shut the door and went into the drawing-room. The feeling of being in a world bounded north, east, south and west by Sam Shotter had thoroughly poisoned her day.
She took pen, ink and paper and wrote viciously for a few moments.
“Claire,” she called.
“’Ullo!” replied a distant voice.
“I’m leaving a note on the hall table. Will you take it next door some time?”
“Right-ho!” bellowed the obliging Miss Lippett.