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That was their world. Captain Nicholas Coventry’s is quite another.

“Families, when a child is born

Wont it to be intelligent.

I, through intelligence,

Having wrecked my whole life,

Only hope the baby will prove

Ignorant and stupid.

Then he will crown a tranquil life

By becoming a cabinet minister.

“That, Eliza dear, is a poem written about a thousand years ago by the Chinese poet Su Tung-p’o. I have a remarkable memory for poetry, as you must often have noticed—and especially when it concerns myself. I, too, have been ruined by my intelligence.”

He was standing, in shirt and trousers, arranging his black tie in front of the glass while his daughter, Lizzie, sat in a chair near his bed reading a book with a green paper back.

When he had tied his tie Nicholas turned round and looked at a small oil painting that rested against the arm of the sofa at the bed-foot. The sofa was of a faded rose colour, and the painting, which was by Sickert, was a study in dark red and yellow of a London street. It was in dull colours save for a bright green doorway in the foreground.

“That,” he said, “is a little masterpiece. I saw it in your cousin Romney’s room and I asked him whether I might take it away for half an hour and look at it. He has four Sickerts that he bought when the going was good, before the prices went up. He may forget about this one. Sickert is the only living painter that England possesses. That is a masterpiece.”

He went over to his bed to pick up his coat and waistcoat. He looked over her shoulder to see what it was that she was reading—the César Birotteau of Balzac.

“That’s rather a stiff one. Such a lot of business in it.”

“I like all the details,” she said. “I like books that tell you everything.”

Then he laughed, for on the bed beside her there were three books. He picked them up. One was The Head Girl of the School, by Edith Thompson; another, With Redskin and Tomahawk, by Henry Reeve; and the third, Sea-Spray and Daffodils, by Dorothy Merle.

“My God!” he said. “Did Aunt Grace give you these?”

“Yes,” said Lizzie, looking up and smiling. “She says she has many more of the same kind.”

“How do you like supper with Edward?” he asked.

“I like Edward. He’s intelligent.”

“Intelligent!” Nicholas cried. “I should have thought that the last thing he was.”

“Oh, no!” She put her book down, that she might think more clearly. “Not intelligent, of course, about books and people and places. He’s never been anywhere, and he’s never read anything at all. But intelligent about his daily life. He can make me see it, the silly things they do. They wear high hats and they stick pins into one another. Also they think more about kicking a ball than anything else. I laughed when he told me, and then he laughed, too. I like Edward. He’s very young for his age.”

“And you’re old for yours, don’t forget,” her father said. “Anyway, over here. We have to behave ourselves, Eliza. This will suit me for some time to come. If only I can stop my tricks ...”

He stood looking at the Sickert, thinking his thoughts. His tricks were picking and stealing, making fun of those around him, interfering maliciously with their lives because they were so stupid and it was such fun to see what they would do! He wished no one in the world any harm, and when he encountered an intelligence as good as his own he greeted it instantly, as one robber baron, in the old days, greeted another. For it did not appear to him conceivable that in these days you could be, if intelligent, also moral. He could be kindly, generous, enthusiastic, but stupidity, old-fashionedness, roused his contempt, and his contempt could make him cruel. And as to the affections, he loved only Lizzie and himself. The world, he would say, had made him an outlaw—his hand was against every man’s—but he liked it to be so! He had lived on his fellow humans, robbed and pillaged them his whole life long. He remembered how, when a child of five, he had stolen a small tortoiseshell box that belonged to his mother, and how greatly astonished he had been that no one discovered the theft. It had been so easy, and he had felt so pleasant to everyone after it! So all his life he had continued. He had been discovered once or twice, and the consequences of these discoveries were still with him—but that only made life the more exciting and amusing!

In general he had not been discovered. What happened as a rule was that someone invited Lizzie and himself to stay, found his company so charming that the visit was prolonged and prolonged. And then—oh, then the atmosphere changed. He wasn’t so popular. Nothing could be exactly charged against him but some too venturesome love-making, some uncertainty about a check or a bibelot, or, more often, quarrels among the people with whom he was staying (who, until his visit, had been most harmonious!)—such trifles as these led to his departure. ... Lizzie and himself, they moved on somewhere else!

He thought of all the places where he had been with great affection. He bore no one any malice. He might dislike them or despise them (the two were synonymous) at the time, but he soon forgot. And now he had flown, like a homing pigeon, back to his own nest. He had delayed this particular visit unduly simply because he had feared that his boredom would be so appalling! Fanny and Charles, Matthew and Grace, the Old Lady—how awful!

Necessity had driven him. These were hard times the world over. People were not so accommodating as they had been once. They hadn’t the money. The world, in fact, was beginning to be alarmingly full of people like himself. Both Italy and Spain were at the moment uncomfortable for him. He disliked England with its dreadful climate and still more dreadful food. But there it was. The Family might do for a brief while until Louise Brieux forgave him or the Pervises in Sicily saw what a mistake they had made in losing his delightful company!

And now!—well, really, he wasn’t sure. He thought that the visit would not be so bad. They were too extraordinary, these people, after the company that he had been keeping—Fanny and Charles, Matthew and Grace—quite incredible! Their simplicity, their sentiment! Why, they still, in this year of grace 1932, believed in family life! They clung together like a brood of ducks on a stagnant pond! They loved one another! They looked up to one another! Even the young people thought their father and mother wonderful! He liked it, he admired it. It was something so novel and so refreshing that he positively admired it.

It was also something round which his sense of humour might play. Here was a game! He felt his creative power rising in him. He could make something of this, turn these good, simple relations of his into a new pattern.

And the girl was pretty, one of the prettiest he had seen for a long time.

That made him think of something. He said to Lizzie:

“Abel’s turned up already. I’m going to see him tonight.”

Lizzie did not look up from her book, only she said, as though into the very heart of the page: “He has been very quick this time, Papa.”

“Yes, hasn’t he? I don’t know how the devil he finds out. But he won’t get anything out of me. He can do his damnedest.”

Propped against the leg of the looking-glass was Arthur Waley’s 170 Chinese Poems, and Nicholas was learning one of these by heart. This was one of his tricks, a trick of which he was peacock-proud, for he had a quite extraordinary memory which might, had he wished it, have been put to real uses. As it was, he was Macaulay-like in his genius for quotation. He could spout anything, poetry or prose, suiting his words to his company, bawdy with the bawdy (and he could be bawdy!), pious with the pious (satirical then, but they never detected it), and when with those who shared his own enthusiasms—an odd magpie heap, Christopher Marlowe, Proust, Donne, Calverley, Peacock, Joyce’s Ulysses, Webster and Tourneur, Spengler and Amanda M’Kittrick Ros—he could, for a moment, drop his conceit, his malice, his monkey acquisitiveness. Of modern and living English writers he admired only two—the author of His Monkey Wife and the author of The Orators.

But he cared for books as he cared for music and pictures, acquisitively, to snatch these things and make them his and then, like the emperor of all the lovely things in the world, to deal them out, to flash them before the eyes of his subjects. It really seemed to him sometimes that Marlowe and Donne and Webster had written only for himself. That was why he made a pose of despising Shakespeare, because he knew that he was too great for his capture.

He turned round to Lizzie and threw her the book.

“Hear me this,” he said. “Page thirty-two—‘Meeting in the Road.’ ”

Like a child, with his hands clasped in front of him, he repeated:

“In a narrow road where there was not room to pass

My carriage met the carriage of a young man.

And while his axle was touching my axle

In the narrow road I asked him where he lived.

‘The place where I live is easy enough to find,

Easy to find and difficult to forget.

The gates of my house——’ ”

He paused.

“ ‘The gates of my house——’ Damn! What’s next?”

“ ‘—are built of yellow gold,’ ” said Lizzie.

“Oh, yes:

“ ‘—are built of yellow gold,

The hall of my house is paved with white jade,

On the hall table flagons of wine are set,

I have summoned to serve me dancers of Han-tan.

In the midst of the courtyard grows a cassia-tree—

And candles on its branches flaring away in the night.’ ”

He chuckled with satisfaction.

“There! That’s pretty good. I only read it through twice. And now I’ll never forget it again. You’ve got a clever father, my girl.”

He bent down and kissed her.

“Here, you go to bed soon. Don’t sit up all night reading. I’ve got to go out after dinner and see Abel.”

She nodded, and he went out humming.