Читать книгу Old Pybus - Warwick Deeping - Страница 15

Table of Contents

Mr. Conrad drove over to Windover.

Mr. John Pybus’s presence at Castle Craven within a morning’s drive of both Windover Hall and Chlois Court was a family complication, and Conrad was a cautious fellow.

Turning in at the lodge gates between two stone pillars capped with griffins, he saw before him the famous avenue of beeches arched like a great green tunnel. Always there was a soft, cool movement of air under the spreading boughs of the old trees. The grey trunks were spaced like the pillars of a temple, and the cool drift of the air between them made young Lance Pybus imagine that he was feeling the breath of the divine afflatus.

He was an imaginative lad; he had a temperament.

Mr. Conrad Pybus, proof against all such fancies, saw the redness of the Queen Anne house glowing at the end of the avenue. The old brick-work had the sun upon it, and the sashes of its windows were very white. Chlois Court was bastard Gothic conceived by some early Victorian, and though Conrad’s house had a more dramatic exterior than his brother’s, Conrad was a little envious of that old red brick-work. It was so mellow. It suggested that Probyn himself had mellowed more gracefully than had his younger brother. Yes, there was something Georgian about Probyn. He had developed a country manner, or what he conceived to be a country manner.

Conrad stopped his car on the gravel to the east of the yew hedge and the terrace. Through the square openings in the yew hedge he had glimpses of Probyn’s lawns, and the flower borders, and the pleached limes of the Dutch garden. It was all very still, and slightly autumnal, with the dew yet upon it, and some of the old trees showing here and there a tinge of yellow. Conrad’s broad nostrils seemed to narrow. Always it appeared to him that Probyn’s head gardener got better results than his man did at Chlois Court. Damn the fellow! Still, his dahlias were always better than Probyn’s. Jealousy can include the most trivial of details.

You might be jealous of your brother, but you entered his house informally, and Conrad walked towards the terrace, but in the angle that the yew hedge made with the south-east corner of the house young Lance was reading Noel Coward’s plays. He had tucked a deck-chair into this sheltered corner. His flannel trousers were well up to his knees; his dark blue socks were the socks of a rowing man. He wore a white, blue-edged Trinity blazer.

“Hallo, Conrad.”

“Hallo, my lad.”

There was a sulkiness in these salutations, for Probyn’s son had the knack of making his uncle feel aggressive and uncomfortable. Eton and Trinity! This second edition of the Pybus text-book had received the author’s corrections. It was a more complete and polished product. It could lounge in a chair, and glancing up casually address its uncle as “Hallo, Conrad.” Young prig!

“Father in?”

“Try the library.”

Lance Pybus resumed his reading, and his uncle walked on towards the French window of the library. He disliked his nephew, because Lance—even as a child—had been a creature of queer aloofness, the kind of boy who watched you and listened to you with a mysteriously grave face, and remained insultingly silent. At least Conrad had felt his nephew’s silence to be an offence. It had given him the feeling of being spied upon, criticised, ridiculed. The boy had never been anything else but a reticent, conceited, embarrassing young brute, and the young man looked like being worse than the boy. Probyn and Dot had spoilt him. Obviously. But Lance’s very looks were very disturbing to his uncle. There was something challenging in the eager, upward lift of the head. His dark hair gave the impression of being blown back. It was like the head of youth running swiftly against the wind. His broad face, with its large and sensitive mouth and short nose, had a young matureness, a reticent but sparkling obstinacy. And there were those very blue eyes, either very bright and near or very distant. They were the eyes of that incorruptible old man—his grandfather.

Meanwhile, Lance turned his head to watch his Uncle Conrad’s progress along the terrace. Conrad turned his toes out; he had the walk of a man who would be very fat at five and fifty; his neck was too short; he had a greasiness.

Yes—that was it, a suggestion of greasiness, for if Lance was an offence to his uncle, Conrad was far more subtly unpleasing to his brother’s son. It was a question of temperament, of fibre, of vibrations. Lance might baffle the older man, but Conrad Pybus was no mystery to the nephew. It was as though those very blue eyes looked right through Mr. Conrad’s thick and soapy skin, and saw——Yes, what exactly did he see? Perhaps it was more feeling than seeing, a shrinking, a scorn, an indignation, a revulsion from a nature that was essentially garish and vulgar. For as a boy Lance had been absurdly fastidious; he would shrink away from the touch of certain people; he had loathed fat meat, or the smell of vinegar. Conrad had been one of the persons who had nauseated him.

Beneath a lounging exterior there was swiftness and fire. He had a dignity of his own, a very definite attitude towards life. It included a mental bearing upon his father’s business, the “Jason Wools,” and the “Sign of the Golden Fleece.” He disliked the Pybus advertisements in the daily papers. They were not redeemed even by their publication in the advertising pages of Punch. Why tamper with an old Greek legend? Why throw Medea overboard, and stamp a golden fleece in red upon your packing cases? Why commercialise Jason? No doubt Jason had been nothing but a fighting merchant adventurer. But these modern Jasons with their custard powders and their pills, and their blatant shoutings, and their quite foolish, cheap exaggerations! What a modest age! Language was ceasing to be able to express the stupendous virtues of soaps and motor cars and bottled beer and shoddy.

Lance might have a temperament, but he was a fighter. There were certain people and properties that he could not abide, cheap people, louts and their loutish English voices, all raw and crude creatures, the sploshed faces one sees in a city, faces that Nature did not think it worth her while to finish. In fact, he hated ugliness. He had been known to fly into sudden passionate rages. It was known among his intimates at Eton that, mocked at by three louts who had come in a char-a-banc to see the house the King lived in, he had fought the three of them in a side street. And though the three of them had set upon him in chorus, having the peculiar sense of honour of their class, he had come away prettily battered, but with his young male pride in the ascendant. He had seen the three flinch from him and from his berserker scorn of them.

Nearly ten years ago he had seen Cyrano played in London. Cyrano was one of his great men.

Meanwhile it occurred to him to wonder what Uncle Conrad wanted with his father at ten o’clock on a September morning. Mr. Conrad must have left Chlois Court directly after breakfast, and he was a late riser. He was one of those fellows who got out of bed like a wallowing beast emerging from a mudhole.

Lance frowned. There are occasions when a young man has qualms, and an unpleasant realization of what those qualms imply.