gentle and obedient with Bunty to mark the difference. Pussy, not caring one way or the other about the actual clout, was enchanted to discover that it gave her such an unexpected hold on him, and preened herself in his tantrums, experimentally teasing him back into resentment whenever his naturally resilient heart threatened to bound back into good-humor. By the end of the evening George’s hands were itching to repeat the treatment upon Dominic, and Bunty’s to duplicate it upon Pussy. It was wonderful what Helmut could do in the way of putting cats among pigeons, even when he was dead.
These stresses seemed slight, and were slight; they seemed to pass, and they did pass; but they also recurred. And what might be the atmosphere up at the Hollinses’ farm, for instance, if it was like this even here, in this scarcely affected family?
Bunty did a little scolding and persuading in two directions, and received a double stream of indignant confidences, all of which she kept faithfully, without even wanting to reconcile them. She said what she thought, and listened to what you thought, and that was the beautiful thing about her.
“I only wanted to help him,” said Dominic. “You’d have thought I was trying to muck things up for him, instead of that. And I
“Now, you understand him a great deal better than that, if you’d be perfectly honest with yourself,” said Bunty serenely. “He’s worried that you should be spending your time thinking about this particular subject, and whether you like it or not, you know quite well it’s on your account he’s worrying. He’d be a great deal happier if you didn’t have to think about it at all—and frankly, so would I.”
“I don’t have to,” said Dominic. “I want to.”
“Why? Is it a nice thing to think about?”
He considered this with some surprise, and admitted: “No, not nice, I suppose. But it’s there, and how can you
“It can’t be done,” she agreed, smiling.
“Well, but he won’t see that. You can see it, why can’t he?”
“He can,” said Bunty. “He does. That’s what worries him. He wouldn’t be so unreasonable about it if he wasn’t fighting a losing battle.”
“Well, if I’m not allowed to talk about it,” said Dominic, between a prophecy and a threat, “I shall think about it all the more. And anyhow, he shouldn’t have hit me.”
“And you shouldn’t have given him that final piece of lip. And the one wasn’t particularly like your father, and the other wasn’t particularly like you—was it?”
Dominic, aware that he was being turned from his course, but unable to detect the exact mechanism by which she steered him, gave her a long, wary look, and suddenly colored a little, and again as suddenly grinned. “Oh, Mummy, you are a devil!”
“And you,” said Bunty, relieved, “are a dope.”
George wasn’t quite so easy, because George was seriously worried. Maybe he would eventually get used to the idea that his son had senses and faculties and wits meant to be exercised, sooner or later, beyond the range of his protective supervision; but at the moment he was still contesting the suggestion that the time for such a development had arrived.
“It’s sheer inquisitiveness,” he said stubbornly, “and unhealthy inquisitiveness, at that. You don’t want him to grow into a morbid Yank-type adolescent, do you?—lapping up sensation like ice cream?”
“Not the least fear of that,” said Bunty, with equal firmness. “Dom got pulled into this, whether he liked it or not. Do you think you could just forget about it, if you were in his shoes?”
“Maybe not forget about it, but I could keep my fingers out of it when I was told, and he’d better, or else —”
“I doubt very much if you could have done anything of the kind,” said Bunty severely. “The same conscience which makes you try to head him off now would have kept you in it up to the neck then. So for goodness’ sake, even if you feel you must slap him down, at least don’t misrepresent him.”
George, as a matter of fact, and as she very well knew, already regretted his momentary loss of temper; but he had not changed his mind.
Two
« ^ »
The local inhabitants were left to George because he knew them every one, and they all knew him. Such a degree of familiarity raises as many new difficulties as it eliminates old ones, but at least both sides know where they stand.
He went up to see Hollins on the day after the inquest. Mrs. Hollins met him in the yard, and brought him into the kitchen and sat down with him there with the simplicity of every day, as if she did not even know that a man she had hated was dead; and yet she had had dealings with the police before, and could certainly recognize the occasion. George began the interview wondering about her calm, and ended understanding it. She had been through such extravagances of persecution, suspicion and compression already that nothing in this line was any longer a novelty to her, and therefore there was nothing to get excited about. It was as simple as that. Her linked hands, rather plump and dark upon the edge of the table, had unusual tensions, but it did not seem to him that they had much to do with his visit; her eyes were certainly wide, luminous and haunted, but he thought by older things than the death of Helmut Schauffler. On the whole it seemed to him that she was not steeling herself up toward a crisis, but relaxing from one.
“You’ll want to see Chris, I dare say,” she said. “He’ll be in pretty soon now, all being well. Let me make the tea a little early for once. You’d like some, wouldn’t you?”
He didn’t object. The easier the atmosphere remained, the better pleased he would be; and she had a kind of graciousness which he wished to assist and preserve for her sake and his own, instead of putting clumsy official fingers through it. They sat in the hearth of the big, dark farmhouse kitchen, under the warped black beams stuck
