‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Then you weren’t at Zeebrugge?’
‘I was.’
‘I see. It’s become a habit to lay yourself alongside.’
‘And get blown up for it.’
Her eyes rested on him kindly.
‘I am now going to talk to my enemy.’
‘Enemy? Can I do anything about that?’
‘His demise would be of no service to me, till he’s done what I want.’
‘Sorry for that; he looks to me dangerous.’
‘Mrs Charles is lying in wait for you,’ murmured Dinny, and she turned to Hallorsen, who said deferentially: ‘Miss Cherrell,’ as if she had arrived from the moon.
‘I hear you shot amazingly, Professor.’
‘Why! I’m not accustomed to birds asking for it as they do here. I’ll maybe get used to that in time. But all this is quite an experience for me.’
‘Everything in the garden lovely?’
‘It certainly is. To be in the same house with you is a privilege I feel very deeply, Miss Cherrell.’
‘ “Cannon to right of me, cannon to left of me!” ’ thought Dinny.
‘And have you,’ she asked, suddenly, ‘been thinking what amend you can make to my brother?’
Hallorsen lowered his voice.
‘I have a great admiration for you, Miss Cherrell, and I will do what you tell me. If you wish, I will write to your papers and withdraw the remarks in my book.’
‘And what would you want for that, Professor Hallorsen?’
‘Why, surely, nothing but your goodwill.’
‘My brother has given me his diary to publish.’
‘If that will be a relief to you – go to it.’
‘I wonder if you two ever began to understand each other.’
‘I judge we never did.’
‘And yet you were only four white men, weren’t you? May I ask exactly what annoyed you in my brother?’
‘You’d have it up against me if I were to tell you.’
‘Oh! no, I can be fair.’
‘Well, first of all, I found he’d made up his mind about too many things, and he wouldn’t change it. There we were in a country none of us knew anything about, amongst Indians and people that were only half civilized; but the captain wanted everything done as you might in England: he wanted rules, and he wanted ’em kept. Why, I judge he would have dressed for dinner if we’d have let him.’
‘I think you should remember,’ said Dinny, taken aback, ‘that we English have found formality pay all over the world. We succeed in all sorts of wild out of the world places because we stay English. Reading his diary, I think my brother failed from not being stolid enough.’
‘Well, he is not your John Bull type,’ he nodded towards the end of the table, ‘like Lord Saxenden and Mr Bentworth there; maybe I’d have understood him better if he were. No, he’s mighty high-strung and very tight held-in; his emotions kind of eat him up from within. He’s like a racehorse in a hansom cab. Yours is an old family, I should judge, Miss Cherrell.’
‘Not yet in its dotage.’
She saw his eyes leave her, rest on Adrian across the table, move on to her Aunt Wilmet, and thence to Lady Mont.
‘I would like to talk to your uncle the Curator about old families,’ he said.
‘What else was there in my brother that you didn’t like?’
‘Well, he gave me the feeling that I was a great husky.’
Dinny raised her brows a little.
‘There we were,’ went on Hallorsen, ‘in the hell of a country – pardon me! – a country of raw metal. Well, I was raw metal myself, out to meet and beat raw metal; and he just wouldn’t be.’
‘Perhaps couldn’t be. Don’t you think what was really wrong was your being American and his being English? Confess, Professor, that you don’t like us English.’
Hallorsen laughed.
‘I like you terribly.’
‘Thank you, but every rule –’
‘Well,’ his face hardened, ‘I just don’t like the assumption of a superiority that I don’t believe in.’
‘Have we a monopoly of that? What about the French?’
‘If I were an orang-outang, Miss Cherrell, I wouldn’t care a hoot whether a chimpanzee thought himself superior.’
‘I see; too far removed. But, forgive me, Professor, what about yourselves? Are you not the chosen people? And don’t you frequently say so? Would you exchange with any other people in the world?’
‘I certainly would not.’
‘But isn’t that an assumption of a superiority that we don’t believe in?’
He laughed. ‘You have me there; but we haven’t touched rock-bottom in this matter. There’a a snob in every man. We’re a new people; we haven’t gotten your roots and your old things; we haven’t gotten your habit of taking ourselves for granted; we’re too multiple and various and too much in the making. We have a lot of things that you could envy us besides our dollars and our bathrooms.’