‘Want’s a new wick,’ he said. ‘There’s going to be bad trouble in India, I’m afraid.’
‘India seems to be getting almost more trouble than it’s worth to us.’
The General turned his face with its high but small cheek-bones; his eyes rested on her, and his thin lips beneath the close little grey moustache smiled.
‘That often happens with trusts, Dinny. You’ve got very nice legs.’
‘So I ought, dear, considering you and mother.’
‘Mine are all right for a boot – stringy. Did you ask Mr Desert down?’
‘No, not today.’
The General put his hands into his side-pockets. He had taken off his dinner jacket and was wearing an old snuff-coloured shooting coat; Dinny noticed that the cuffs were slightly frayed, and one leather button missing. His dark, high-shaped eyebrows contracted till there were three ridges right in the centre of his forehead; he said gently:
‘I don’t understand that change of religion, you know, Dinny. Milk or lemon?’
‘Lemon, please.’
She was thinking: ‘Now is the moment, after all. Courage!’
‘Two lumps?’
‘Three, with lemon, Dad.’
The General took up the tongs. He dropped three lumps into the cup, then a slice of lemon, put back the tongs, and bent down to the kettle.
‘Boiling,’ he said, and filled up the cup; he put a covered spoonful of tea into it, withdrew the spoon and handed the cup to his daughter.
Dinny sat stirring the thin golden liquid. She took a sip, rested the cup on her lap, and turned her face up to him.
‘I can explain it, Dad,’ she said, and thought: ‘It will only make him understand even less.’
The General filled his own cup, and sat down. Dinny clutched her spoon.
‘You see, when Wilfrid was far out in Darfur he ran into a nest of fanatical Arabs, remaining from the Mahdi times. The chief of them had him brought into his tent and offered him his life if he would embrace Islam.’
She saw her father make a little convulsive movement, so that some of the tea was spilled into his saucer. He raised the cup and poured it back. Dinny went on:
‘Wilfrid is like most of us nowadays about belief, only a great deal more so. It isn’t only that he doesn’t believe in Christianity, he actually hates any set forms of religion, he thinks they divide mankind and do more harm and bring more suffering than anything else. And then, you know – or you would if you’d read his poetry, Dad – the war left him very bitter about the way lives are thrown away, simply spilled out like water at the orders of people who don’t know what they’re about.’
Again the General made that slight convulsive movement.
‘Yes, Dad, but I’ve heard Hubert talk in much the same way about that. Anyway, it has left Wilfrid with a horror of wasting life, and the deepest distrust of all shibboleths and beliefs. He only had about five minutes to decide in. It wasn’t cowardice, it was just bitter scorn that men can waste each other’s lives for beliefs that to him seem equally futile. And he just shrugged and accepted. Having accepted, he had to keep his word and go through the forms. Of course, you don’t know him, so I suppose it’s useless.’ She sighed and drank thirstily.
The General had put his own cup down; he rose, filled a pipe, lit it, and stood by the hearth. His face was lined and dark and grave. At last he said:
‘I’m out of my depth. Is the religion of one’s fathers for hundreds of years to go for nothing, then? Is all that has made us the proudest people in the world to be chucked away at the bidding of an Arab? Have men like the Lawrences, John Nicholson, Chamberlayne, Sandeman, a thousand others, who spent and gave their lives to build up an idea of the English as brave men and true, to be knocked into a cocked hat by every Englishman who’s threatened with a pistol?’
Dinny’s cup clattered on its saucer.
‘Yes, but if not by every Englishman, Dinny, why by one? Why by this one?’
Quivering all over, Dinny did not answer. Neither Adrian nor Sir Lawrence had made her feel like this – for the first time she had been reached and moved by the other side. Some age-long string had been pulled within her, or she was infected by the emotion of one whom she had always admired and loved, and whom she had hardly ever seen stirred to eloquence. She could not speak.
‘I don’t know if I’m a religious man,’ the General went on; ‘the faith of my fathers is enough for me’ – and he made a gesture, as if adding, ‘I leave myself aside’ – ‘but, Dinny, I could not take dictation of that sort; I could not, and I cannot understand how he could have.’