Adrian Glynde (3 page)

From time to time Adrian glanced at him when he thought he wasn't looking. He was terribly grand, he thought, with his large black bow and the faultless whiteness of his shirt studded with two pearls: and what made him look grander still was the dinner-jacket he wore—not an ordinary dinner-jacket like Uncle Bob's, but a black velvet one.

Then he glanced at Uncle Bob. It was extraordinary how grand dress clothes made people seem. He had always looked upon Uncle Bob, with his fat, ruddy, cleanshaven face, his contented brown eyes always ready to smile, his brown hair and brown country clothes, as a rough, brown, floppy sort of man. But Uncle Bob in dress clothes, with hair brushed and ruddy face refined almost to pinkness, seemed to be the same kind of person as Grandfather, though so different from him in looks. It pleased Adrian to see Uncle Bob like this and to notice, too, how very much he and the old gentleman liked one another.

Aunt Clara, who had been talking a moment ago, had fallen into a reverie and sat, bare-necked, bare-armed, in black silk, before her empty plate, with eyes mildly gazing at nothing. It was strange to catch her thus off her guard. Adrian, for the first time in his life, examined her face, feeling almost as if it were a face he had never seen before. It was a long, narrow face, made longer and narrower by the hair brushed upwards and backwards from the high brow. Her nose was long and had something of the aquiline incisiveness of her father's, but the mouth had none of the luxuriousness of his: it was narrower
and sterner, the eyes less piercing, and the eyebrows thinner and arched in a slightly disdainful surprise. But the disdainfulness of the brows and the grimness of the mouth did not trouble Adrian, who knew how kind the eyes beneath the brows could be and how ready the mouth was to curl humorously or soften into an indulgent smile for him. She was wearing the pendant he especially admired, the large single diamond slung on a narrow chain about her long neck, and there was the sparkle of another in the black silk at her breast.

Stock the butler, a silent black and white satellite, circulated in the semi-darkness behind their chairs about the shining table. Behind his grandfather Adrian saw the vague gleam of silver on the dark sideboard.

And suddenly he remembered how, one night years ago, when his father and mother were going out to dinner, he had sat in the drawing-room with his father, waiting for his mother to come down. His father was in dress clothes with white tie and white waistcoat, and Adrian still remembered how handsome he looked. His mother, as usual on these occasions, was late, and his father, silent and preoccupied, kept glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. At last there was a light step on the stairs, the door opened, and his mother stood in the doorway in a wonderful dress of pale silky yellow. With her pale golden hair, her pale blue eyes, and her small, exquisitely neat figure, she looked like a fairy princess.

“Am I all right?” she asked, smiling and turning slowly round till she faced them again.

Adrian and his father gazed at her, entranced, and his father, in that delightfully comic way he had of saying so much less than he meant, had replied:

“H … m! Yes, perhaps you'll do.” Then he had turned to Adrian. “What do you say, old man?”

Adrian had nodded judicially. “Yes,” he had answered, “she'll do,” and all three of them had burst out laughing.

His grandfather's voice broke in on this vision of the past.

“But I can never understand,” he was saying, “why sherry should have gone out of fashion. A first-rate sherry is a finer wine than the finest port, and that,” he added, “is saying a very great deal, because a good vintage port is a noble wine. But a port, to be good, must be very good. Your ports from the wood are a horror. One shudders at the bare thought of their insufferable fruitiness: whereas even a tolerable sherry is worth drinking.”

“I quite agree,” said Uncle Bob. The man who invented the proverb
Any port in a storm
had no palate for wine.”

“My
dear
Bob!” said Clara faintly, raising her eyebrows a little higher.

“And the best of all sherries are the pale sherries,” said Bob.

“Undoubtedly,” said Oliver Glynde. “The darker they get, the more closely they approach to something which is not sherry. Some of your pale sherries are, of course, extremely dry—almost too dry for my taste, though occasionally I can enjoy a glass of the very dry, more especially with a biscuit, in the middle of the morning when I am working and don't want to be bothered with luncheon. But a pale, rather full sherry is the best of all. I drew a bottle two days ago, so that it should be ready for your arrival, of a sherry so pale that it is hardly more than straw-coloured, but anything less pale than the flavour can hardly be imagined.”

With eyes thrown up and both hands raised, Oliver Glynde made a gesture of ecstasy. “Your great-grandfather, Adrian, bought it forty years ago from a wine-merchant in Canterbury who had bought it fifteen
years previously at the selling-up of a country-house in the neighbourhood. Its origin and name were unknown, but the cellar-book of the house had shown it to be twenty years old when the wine-merchant bought it. How old does that make it?”

“Seventy-five,” said Adrian promptly.

“Yes, seventy-five. I hope I may live to be as old and as magnificently well preserved. My father christened it Canterbury Pale. A port of that age would be undrinkable. Mere cedar-pencil and as thin as a rat.” He glanced at his daughter. “You remember the Canterbury Pale, Clara? You've drunk it more than once.”

Clara's narrow mouth curled into a charming smile. “I am not likely to forget it, Father.”

The old man's eyes twinkled. “Ah, Clara! Like your dear mother, you always had a taste for sherry. Saintsbury is quite right. ‘When ladies
do
know anything about wine,' he says, ‘there is no mistake about their taste.'”

“In that, as in everything,” said Clara, “one can learn only by experience, and in the matter of wine most women have lacked the opportunity. If there had been equality of opportunity, Father, women, at least until they took up smoking, would have been finer judges of wine than men, who spend half the day treating their tongues as if they were haddocks and herrings. But now women have become as disgusting in that respect as men, and every drawing-room and boudoir reeks of bonfires.”

Oliver shook a finger at his daughter. “Beware of detachment, Clara. Faith, we are told, can move mountains, and nitric acid will burn a hole in a five-shilling piece, but these things are innocuous trifles compared with the devastating effects of applied detachment. It is the greatest of all disintegrators. The finest cigar,
regarded with detachment, is undoubtedly a portable bonfire of dead tobacco leaves, but the finest sherry is equally a bunch of grapes which has been stepped on by a Spanish peasant and has, in consequence, gone bad, and a picture by Botticelli is a mess of tinted slime buttered on to a plank. Detachment will take the life and poetry out of anything. Poetry has rescued beef from the mere cow, mutton from the mere sheep, and caviare from the abomination of mere fish-spawn; and the most revolting corruption, when transformed by the title of Stilton cheese, becomes a dainty fit for princes and bishops. But that, mind you, is not to say that poetry, by revealing the new aspects of cow, sheep, and fish-spawn, detaches them from the old. It regards serenely every aspect. The princes and bishops may shrink from bringing a microscope to the luncheon-table on Stilton days, but your true poet—who, so far as I know, does not exist—would wield both microscope and cheese-scoop simultaneously, regarding his helping of Stilton not with horror but with ecstatic wonder, seeing behind lactic acid, maggot, and mite to the fountains of creation.” He glanced with twinkling eyes at Adrian across the green bowl. “Have you ever seen Stilton through a microscope, Adrian?”

“Yes, I have,” said Adrian.

“And eaten it too?”

Adrian smiled. “Yes, but not on the same day.”

Everybody laughed, and Adrian, reassured and flattered, felt that by this brief exchange he and his grandfather had suddenly been drawn closer together.

In the drawing-room afterwards Adrian began to feel extremely sleepy. It already seemed to him a week since he had started from Waldo that morning. The old lady whose conversation had comforted him in the train had sunk already into the limbo of things forgotten, and
his troubles and fears at Wilmore Junction and during the rest of the journey had faded to no more than pale phantoms in the warm light of his new security. As he nestled into the corner of a deep armchair a little detached from the others, their talk came to him in alternate waves of sense and nonsense. The great mirror over the mantelpiece blurred into a cloudy cavern of mellow effulgence, and the shattered ice of the chandelier seemed to swing towards him and then recede, lose focus, and change to a thickly clustered constellation of stars whose iridescent rays grew and shrank, shrank and grew, with the come and go of his consciousness. He felt himself sinking through delicious depths. Then with an effort he roused himself and found Aunt Clara's eyes upon him. The other two were talking.

“Isn't it bed-time?” Her lips shaped the words inaudibly, her brows accenting the query.

Adrian shook his head decisively, smiling a plea for indulgence. Aunt Clara smiled back and conveyed wordlessly that he appeared to be very sleepy, but that to-night he might do as he liked. Adrian voicelessly assured her that he wasn't sleepy in the least, and next moment he was enveloped by the soothing drone of the two men's voices and the warmly looming yellow cave over the mantelpiece. He lost foothold, swayed, and sank into sleep.

The three grown-ups contemplated him and exchanged smiles.

“He's a handsome little man,” said Oliver, “a dark-haired miniature of dear Sandy. There's not a trace of The Baggage in him, thank God. Do you think he's going to be happy here, Clara?”

Clara nodded. “Perfectly. He was frightened of you at first, but he has taken to you enormously. I can tell at once with him.”

The old man's eyes glittered suddenly in the firelight. “Poor little chap. With no father and worse than no mother, he's rather at the mercy of life.” Then his face hardened and the eagle came back into it. “And what is your latest news of The Baggage?” he asked. “Does she still favour you with her confidence?”

Clara nodded. “Still!” she said. “And I can't understand why. I have a letter about every three months. I have never disguised my feelings, always behaved to her like a disapproving school ma'am, and in fact, as regards the boy, I've always, as you know, taken a high hand.”

Bob laughed. “That's why Minnie likes you,” he said, “because you all but take a stick to her. Dogs are often the same. Both Rhoda and Betty adore Bishop the keeper, because he's a martinet, but they're barely civil to me who treat them like ladies. You brow-beat Minnie and she respects you: I try to be polite and amiable, and what's the result? She just tolerates me to my face and despises me in her heart.”

“But she probably knows too—because no one can say that Minnie is not diabolically sharp—that you simply think her a fool, while I can't help being enormously entertained by her.”

“Oh, I should be entertained all right,” old Oliver broke in, “if I could forgive her—which I shall never do—for making dear Sandy miserable. Performing cats, performing monkeys, performing vermin are all entertaining. Once, as a very small boy, I saw performing fleas at a show. Some were horses and drew a miniature barouche, two others were coachman and footman, and yet another—a cabinet minister or a duchess no doubt—rode inside. The only difference between them and The Baggage is that they didn't know they were performing, whereas she doesn't know
we
know she is performing. You say she is sharp, Clara: well, perhaps
she is sharp enough to see through others, but her sharpness stops short of realising that others see through her. She mistakes her profound shallowness for depth. Nobody else does, however. Does she show any interest in the boy?”

“Not in her letters to me. Her letters to me, you see, are all about herself—variations on a not very original theme. But once every half-year or so she recollects she is a mother and posts him an essay in the maternal—' My own precious lamb,' and so on.”

“And what is the effect on the boy?”

“Oh, he is glad of the Indian stamps. The letters simply surprise and puzzle him. Naturally he has almost forgotten her by now and can't understand what all the fuss is about. He reads them through once and then leaves them about, and I collect them and put them away. One wonders why, if the lamb is really so precious, Minnie should be willing to leave him about as Adrian does her letters.”

“Willing!” said Bob, laughing softly. “You are unjust to yourself, my dear Clara. You force her to.”

“Yes, and how gracefully she submits. I know my Minnie better than you do, Bob. She prides herself on her skill in compelling us to look after him for her. The point is, of course, that both sides are willing to be coerced, which, as the boy is happy with us and would certainly be miserable with her, is fortunate.”

“Fortunate indeed!” said Oliver. “Happy or not, with her he would certainly be in the worst possible company for a child. In fact, if the poor little devil succeeded in being happy with her, it would be so much the worse for him.”

Clara laughed grimly. “He would at least have the distinction of being the first person who had.”

“You gather, then, that the new husband isn't?”

“That, surely, is a foregone conclusion.”

Oliver nodded. “Especially, I suppose, in India, where her field will be restricted and her activities, in consequence, the more intense.”

“She hints at havoc in military hearts of all ranks. Her fatal attraction, you know!”

“Ah, her attraction!” The old man's lip curled. “She exercises it conscientiously, I admit, as a spinster exercises a poodle. But it's of the kind, I should have supposed, that leaves the heart whole.”