Читать книгу Ancestor Jorico - William J. Locke - Страница 4

Table of Contents

The dinner-party was no less than a family gathering convened by my second cousin, Commander Sir Gregory Binkley, whose father, the eminent surgeon and first baronet, was my first cousin. This relationship doesn’t matter; but there are others, which, as I warned you, will have to be appreciated. Why he invited me, I don’t quite know; certainly not for my beautiful elderly eyes; possibly because he wanted to rope in Lady Jane Crowe, who stood to him in the same degree of relationship as myself.

He lived in a dull, conventional house in Queensborough Terrace, off the Bayswater Road, and all its appointments were dull and conventional. The few inherited odds and ends of good furniture and pictures seemed to protest against their surroundings and wish to goodness they could get away like their former mistress. For Lady Binkley had got away, got away with a vengeance, and there had been a painful divorce suit; and now she was, as far as I could hear, as merry as ten grigs with her new husband, a lusty engineer who was bridging cataracts somewhere in Africa. I may say at once that she doesn’t come into the story otherwise than as a factor in Commander Sir Gregory Binkley’s warped view of mundane things. I know he was fond of her in his fussy disciplinarian way, and her defection was as amazing and as upsetting of standards and as destructive of values as would be the indecorous flight of naked young witches on broomsticks through the solemn halls wherein Houses of Convocation are wont to assemble. Instead of reflecting, like a reasonable being—myself, for instance: “Hasn’t the fault lain in my own fussy disciplinarianism?” he became more and more fussy and disciplinarian than ever. As an old soldier, I’ve had to carry out, God knows, enough discipline in my time; but, once across the threshold of my own home, I leave all that sort of thing to my wife. After nearly thirty years of marriage, I shoulder arms to her and to my daughters like the rawest of recruits. And I wouldn’t have it otherwise. The three of them regard me as the most helpless of pet lambs, and I’ve always wallowed in domestic comfort. But Binkie ...

Here, by the way, is yet another thing to be explained. But it’s remarkably simple. Could a man answering formally to the name of Binkley avoid being called “Binkie”? Of course not.

I must come to the dinner-party.

You know the type of house. A passage. Dining-room to your left. The passage continuing into vague dimness. A carpeted flight of stairs by the dining-room, twisting at right angles half-way up, and then the landing of the double drawing-room.

Ushered by the butler, I found, although I was not late, the company already assembled. Gregory, otherwise Binkie, a spare, short man with sparse hair and restless eyes, welcomed me cordially. He had asked Jane—Lady Jane Crowe—but she was in bed with a cold. Toby, of course, I knew. But Hettie Dalrymple and her brother, Nicholas Egerton?

I think I had seen them as children. I knew more or less about them. She was a widow, of about thirty-two, with a small boy of ten, and was hard put to it to make a living. She was fair, pink-skinned, plump and pleasing, with blue eyes that smiled perhaps a trifle roguishly. I liked her at once. Her brother, Nicholas, many years younger, was a pale, anxious, indetermined, lanky youth, with indeterminate mouse-coloured hair. He called me “sir,” most politely.

“That’s the lot,” said Binkie. “The four of us are the only lineal descendants of old John Gregory Jorico, whose name I bear. You, Tom, I’ve asked because you may give us the benefit of your advice and experience. Pity Jane couldn’t come too; I’ve made a most important discovery.”

The butler announced that dinner was served.

“What’s it all about?” I asked.

“We’ll dine first and then I’ll tell you,” said Binkie, in his crisp, quarter-deck manner.

We dined, not excitingly, but not too badly. The cook maintained the house’s level of dull and undistinguished comfort. There were only the five of us. From Binkie’s invitation one might reasonably have expected a family gathering of twenty. I sat next to Hettie Dalrymple. I must give Binkie credit for his champagne, a rosy Clicquot of 1911. How on earth he thought of getting the rare stuff, or managed to get it, is a mystery. It unlocked tongues. Half-way through the meal we found ourselves discussing the general damnability of the post-war world. I looked at the three men cousins, and judged their ages, fairly correctly, as I soon discovered. Gregory Binkley was forty-four; Toby thirty-five, and young Nicholas five-and-twenty. I belong to a generation that, war or no war, would be on the shelf. If there hadn’t been a war, I might possibly be putting up a gouty foot on a wooden foot-rest, still provided by the United Services Club. As the war has deprived me of the means to consume the amount of port adequate to the cultivation of gout, I walk about freely.

“If I only had something to remember the war by,” said Gregory, “I shouldn’t groan about modern conditions. Talk about the silent Navy. It’s a damn sight too silent. Either I was boxed up in a battleship in Scapa Flow, or I was working my head off in an office in the Admiralty. Never heard a shot fired in anger! Bored, my God! I even missed the bit of spurious excitement at Jutland. Lots of us like that. When it was all over they paid us to clear out. Toby’s the lucky one. He has got some memories to live upon.”

“I trot ’em out of my sub-consciousness as little as I can,” said Toby.

Binkie persisted. “Still, if you hadn’t got ’em you’d find present circumstances pretty hard to stick. You’ve told me as much.”

“I think it makes my present job all the more grotesque,” said Toby, with a laugh.

I intervened. “And our young friend, Nicholas—what does he think about it?”

“I was too young to get into the war, sir,” replied the boy, flushing a little. “I was still at school when it was over.”

Heavens! thought I. Was what it pleased us to call Armageddon such ancient history as all that? And then I reflected that, the minimum age of service being 18, scarcely anyone born after the year 1900 could have taken part in it.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I’m at a loose end, sir, like so many of us.”

“Take up a hobby, my boy, as I’ve done,” said Binkie.

“I’d take up any old hobby you like, Cousin Gregory,” said Nicholas, flushing, “if I could make a living at it.”

“I thought you were fixed up,” said Toby. “Big preparatory school, wasn’t it?”

The boy’s flush deepened. He fiddled about with his bread. Hettie Dalrymple bent across the round table.

“He was till a few days ago. Then he had to chuck it.”

“Chuck up a perfectly good job these days? Why?” asked Binkie.

“First it was a beast of a job, very much underpaid,” flashed Hettie, “and then the Head, who had commanded a battalion of Y.M.C.A.s——”

I smiled. “He couldn’t have done that, my dear.”

She waved an impatient feminine hand. “Something inglorious, anyhow. A Chinese Labour battalion at Brest, or a Rest Camp at Monte Carlo—what does it matter? He was a Colonel and has suffered from military swelled head ever since. Well, he insulted Nick the other day, and Nick knocked him down on the hearthrug, and as far as I can see that’s the end of Nick’s scholastic career.”

In her indignation she waved away the dish that was handed and drank some champagne. The boy, somewhat uncomfortable, turned to me, his left-hand neighbour.

“He wasn’t quite as bad as my sister makes out. He started as a padre and then got a general commission. It was sporting enough of him. But I think power spoiled him. When he got his battalion—it was a Labour battalion—he must have had an awful lot of duds as officers under him. And so he returned to civil life with the impression that all of us under him must be duds too. I stood it as long as I could, three years, ever since I went down from Cambridge. Then he tried to tick me off—I think that’s what you used to call it—in his best military manner, for something I’d never done. I resented it. He called me a liar and I went for him.” He smiled with wry humour. “Saving your presence, sir, that’s all I’ve got out of the war.”

“What’s wrong with you young people of the present generation,” said Binkie, “is that you won’t begin to understand what discipline means.”

“Oh, don’t talk damned nonsense,” cried Toby. “If the General said that, I’d defer politely to an old standard. But he has far too much common sense. And you, you’re far too young. You’re only forty-four. You belong to our generation. Discipline! We’re sick of discipline. We’ve this infernal modern world standing over us like a sergeant-major. We don’t want any individual Colonels or even Lieutenant-Generals”—he threw me a disarming laugh—“to discipline us. We’re out for independence, self-assertion. Damn the sergeant-major. It was all very well in the old days to bow to routine and accept thankfully whatever Providence offered you. I must say that Providence did its best. But now it doesn’t. We’ve got to fend for ourselves.”

Said I: “My dear Toby, you’re fending for yourself and apparently making a fairly good thing out of it. But, as far as I can make out from things you’ve told me, you seem to be as much disgruntled with life as Binkie and our friend, Nicholas.”

Mrs. Dalrymple laid her fingers on my arm.

“I don’t think, General, you’re taking my young brother’s case seriously.”

I protested. “Indeed I do, my dear cousin. A hundred years ago an old soldier in my present position would have said: ‘Dammit, madam. A lad of spirit. Knocked the schoolmaster’s head off! Splendid! Send him to me and I’ll see him through.’ But, my dear, although these are my real and sincere feelings, the expression of them would be worse than futile in this more sophisticated epoch.”

“It sounds as if you were making a speech,” she said with laughing impertinence.

“It does,” said I. “But if you think a soldier’s only job is to hack people about with a sword, you’re mistaken. He has to talk and talk and talk, and that’s how I’ve got the hang of it.”

“But the Navy is always silent,” she remarked with a glance at our host.

We laughed at the mild jest. I began to like Hettie Dalrymple exceedingly. She was loyal, full of life, responsive, with a little gay sense of humour.

The talk drifted into conventional channels. Presently she said:

“Toby says he’s fed up with women. That’s why he scowled at me when he came in. But I’m fed up with men—and I defy any of you to have seen a trace of a scowl on my face.”

“Why this hidden misanthropy?” I asked.

She explained that she spent her working days in the masculine environment of the advertising department of a young publishing firm. She had to deal with an outside world of men. Some were charming, most indifferent, a few peculiarly horrid. She wrinkled a delicate nose. The intellectuals in journalism are not generally found in the rough and tumble of advertising staffs.

“On the whole—with the exception of the sexual primitives who give one a certain amount of trouble and business delays—I can’t complain of men. But if only one could meet a woman now and then, and interrupt the silly talk and say: ‘My dear, what a pretty hat! Where did you get it?’ you’ve no idea what a joy it would be. But as a man, I suppose you can’t understand.”

“My dear,” said I. “I’ve a wife and two daughters. I’ll pay you a salary to come and admire their hats and gowns. It’ll save me Heaven knows what.”

“I’ll come for nothing if they’ll let me,” she laughed.

“My wife will write to you tomorrow,” said I.

I know not why, but reflection on the niceties of the English language swept across my mind. Had I said “shall write,” I should have asserted myself as the Grand Bashaw of my harem. By saying “will” I was merely prophesying my dear wife’s suave response to my request.

Coffee came and some abominable prematurely aged brandy. I thought of the rosy champagne. Quantum mutatus ab illo! But I learned later that the wine had been the choice of that prescient connoisseur, his father, and that the brandy was supplied to him, half a dozen bottles at a time, by an obscure wine merchant round the corner. Binkie had no use for the æsthetics of life. A primrose by the river’s brim was to him, as to Peter Bell, but a damned primrose. Food, so long as he could chew it, and it didn’t reek of horrible flavour, was just food. Wine was wine, and brandy was brandy. What more could anybody want?

Perhaps, in the same way, a wife had been to Binkie a wife and nothing more. Wherefore the lady had left him for an engineer with a more highly developed æsthetic perception.

Binkie began to fidget. I could see that he wanted to get to the business of the evening by the way he glanced at our cups and glasses. When the cigars were handed round he said to me:

“Don’t be afraid—we can smoke them upstairs. Hettie won’t mind.”

Then presently: “No more brandy, anybody? Then shall we go?”

We went up to the drawing-room, where he marshalled the four of us as if we were children about to be entertained by a conjurer. There was even a table holding his properties—books and papers—beside the fireplace, where he soon took up his position.

“The first thing I want to know is how many of you have heard of Captain John Gregory Jorico and his curious will, whereby he left a fortune of half a million of money.”

I shook my head. He wasn’t my ancestor, and I had never heard of him.

Toby laughed. “My mother used to refer vaguely to some such legend in her family.”

“Nick and I were both too young to remember our mother, and our father never mentioned the matter.”

“Good,” said Binkie. “What I’m going to say will come to you with all the greater surprise.”

He turned to the table. I felt disappointed that there was no hat on it, from which he might have extracted a rabbit.