Half an hour later they had started.
‘My cousin Jack,’ said Sir Lawrence, ‘ought to be left to the nation. In Washington there’s a museum with groups of the early Americans under glass smoking the communal pipe, holding tomahawks over each other, and that sort of thing. One might have Jack – ’ Sir Lawrence paused: ‘That’s the trouble! How could one have Jack preserved? It’s so difficult to perpetuate the unemphatic. You can catch anything that jumps around; but when there’s no attitude except a watchful languor – and yet a man with a God of his own.’
‘Form, and Muskham is its prophet.’
‘He might, of course,’ murmured Sir Lawrence, ‘be preserved in the act of fighting a duel. That’s perhaps the only human activity formal enough.’
‘Form’s doomed,’ said Yule.
‘H’m! Nothing so hard to kill as the sense of shape. For what is life but the sense of shape, Mr Yule? Reduce everything to dead similarity, and still shape will “out”.’
‘Yes,’ said Yule, ‘but “form” is shape brought to perfection-point and standardized; and perfection bores our bright young things.’
‘That nice expression. But do they exist outside books, Mr Yule?’
‘Don’t they! And yawn-making – as they’d call it! I’d sooner attend City dinners for the rest of my life than spend a weekend in the company of those bright young things.’
‘I doubt,’ said Sir Lawrence, ‘whether I’ve come across them.’
‘You should thank God. They never stop talking day or night, not even in their couplings.’
‘You don’t seem to like them.’
‘Well,’ said Yule, looking like a gargoyle, ‘they can’t stand me any more than I can stand them. A boring little crowd, but, luckily, of no importance.’
‘I hope,’ said Sir Lawrence, ‘that Jack is not making the mistake of thinking young Desert is one.’
‘Muskham’s never met a bright young thing. No; what gets his goat about Desert is the look of his face. It’s a deuced strange face.’
‘Lost angel,’ said Sir Lawrence. ‘ “Spiritual pride, my buck!” Something fine about it.’
Yule nodded. ‘I don’t mind it myself; and his verse is good. But all revolt’s anathema to Muskham. He likes mentality clipped, with its mane plaited, stepping delicately to the snaffle.’
‘I don’t know,’ murmured Sir Lawrence, ‘I think those two might like each other, if they could shoot each other first. Queer people, we English!’
Chapter Fourteen
WHEN, about the same time that afternoon, Adrian entered his brother’s parish and traversed the mean street leading to the Vicarage of St Augustine’s-in-the-Meads, English people were being almost too well illustrated six doors round the corner.
An ambulance stood in front of a house without a future, and all who had something better to do were watching it. Adrian made one of the party. From the miserable edifice two men and a nurse were bearing the stretched-out body of a child, followed by a wailing, middle-aged, red-faced woman and a growling, white-faced man with a drooping moustache.
‘What’s up?’ said Adrian to a policeman.
‘The child’s got to have an operation. You’d think she was goin’ to be murdered, instead of havin’ the best that care can give her. There’s the Vicar. If he can’t quiet ’em, no one can.’
Adrian saw his brother come out of the house and join the white-faced man. The growling ceased, but the woman’s wails increased. The child was ensconced by now in the ambulance, and the mother made an unwieldy rush at its door.
‘Where’s their sense?’ said the policeman, stepping forward.
Adrian saw Hilary put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. She turned as if to deliver a wide-mouthed imprecation, but a mere whimper issued. Hilary put his arm through hers and drew her quietly back into the house. The ambulance drove away. Adrian moved up to the white-faced man and offered him a cigarette. He took it with a ‘Thanks, mister’, and followed his wife.
All was over. The little crowd had gone. The policeman stood there alone.
‘The Vicar’s a wonder,’ he said.
‘My brother,’ said Adrian.
The policeman looked at him more respectfully.
‘A rare card, sir, the Vicar.’
‘I quite agree. Was that child very bad?’
‘Won’t live the day out, unless they operate. Seems as if they’d saved it up to make a close run. Just an accident the Vicar happening on it. Some people’d rather die than go into ’ospitals, let alone their children.’