“And now you’ve chewed something thirty-seven times, I suppose?” she thought, but said politely aloud, “Are your legs troubling you today, Mr. Pepper?”
“My shoulder blades?” he asked, shifting them painfully. “Beauty has no effect upon uric acid that I’m aware of,” he sighed, contemplating the round pane opposite, through which the sky and sea showed blue. At the same time he took a little parchment volume from his pocket and laid it on the table. As it was clear that he invited comment, Helen asked him the name of it. She got the name; but she got also a disquisition upon the proper method of making roads. Beginning with the Greeks, who had, he said, many difficulties to contend with, he continued with the Romans, passed to England and the right method, which speedily became the wrong method, and wound up with such a fury of denunciation directed against the road-makers of the present day in general, and the road-makers of Richmond Park in particular, where Mr. Pepper had the habit of cycling every morning before breakfast, that the spoons fairly jingled against the coffee cups, and the insides of at least four rolls mounted in a heap beside Mr. Pepper’s plate.
“Pebbles!” he concluded, viciously dropping another bread pellet upon the heap. “The roads of England are mended with pebbles! ‘With the first heavy rainfall,’ I’ve told ’em, ‘your road will be a swamp.’ Again and again my words have proved true. But d’you suppose they listen to me when I tell ’em so, when I point out the consequences, the consequences to the public purse, when I recommend ’em to read Coryphæus? No, Mrs. Ambrose, you will form no just opinion of the stupidity of mankind until you have sat upon a Borough Council!” The little man fixed her with a glance of ferocious energy.
“I have had servants,” said Mrs. Ambrose, concentrating her gaze. “At this moment I have a nurse. She’s a good woman as they go, but she’s determined to make my children pray. So far, owing to great care on my part, they think of God as a kind of walrus; but now that my back’s turned—Ridley,” she demanded, swinging round upon her husband, “what shall we do if we find them saying the Lord’s Prayer when we get home again?”
Ridley made the sound which is represented by “Tush.” But Willoughby, whose discomfort as he listened was manifested by a slight movement rocking of his body, said awkwardly, “Oh, surely, Helen, a little religion hurts nobody.”
“I would rather my children told lies,” she replied, and while Willoughby was reflecting that his sister-in-law was even more eccentric than he remembered, pushed her chair back and swept upstairs. In a second they heard her calling back, “Oh, look! We’re out at sea!”
They followed her on to the deck. All the smoke and the houses had disappeared, and the ship was out in a wide space of sea very fresh and clear though pale in the early light. They had left London sitting on its mud. A very thin line of shadow tapered on the horizon, scarcely thick enough to stand the burden of Paris, which nevertheless rested upon it. They were free of roads, free of mankind, and the same exhilaration at their freedom ran through them all. The ship was making her way steadily through small waves which slapped her and then fizzled like effervescing water, leaving a little border of bubbles and foam on either side. The colourless October sky above was thinly clouded as if by the trail of wood-fire smoke, and the air was wonderfully salt and brisk. Indeed it was too cold to stand still. Mrs. Ambrose drew her arm within her husband’s, and as they moved off it could be seen from the way in which her sloping cheek turned up to his that she had something private to communicate. They went a few paces and Rachel saw them kiss.
Down she looked into the depth of the sea. While it was slightly disturbed on the surface by the passage of the Euphrosyne, beneath it was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the bottom was only a pale blur. One could scarcely see the black ribs of wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made by the burrowings of great eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters who came by flickering this way and that.
—“And, Rachel, if anyone wants me, I’m busy till one,” said her father, enforcing his words as he often did, when he spoke to his daughter, by a smart blow upon the shoulder.
“Until one,” he repeated. “And you’ll find yourself some employment, eh? Scales, French, a little German, eh? There’s Mr. Pepper who knows more about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?” and he went off laughing. Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she could remember, without thinking it funny, but because she admired her father.
But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding some employment, she was intercepted by a woman who was so broad and so thick that to be intercepted by her was inevitable. The discreet tentative way in which she moved, together with her sober black dress, showed that she belonged to the lower orders; nevertheless she took up a rocklike position, looking about her to see that no gentry were near before she delivered her message, which had reference to the state of the sheets, and was of the utmost gravity.
“How ever we’re to get through this voyage, Miss Rachel, I really can’t tell,” she began with a shake of her head. “There’s only just sheets enough to go round, and the master’s has a rotten place you could put your fingers through. And the counterpanes. Did you notice the counterpanes? I thought to myself a poor person would have been ashamed
