Only, first, there was the garden of Peter’s aunt—which sounds like an introductory French exercise—and then Avis came. And, somehow, I had not, in consequence, traversed the scant nine miles that lay as yet between me and Bettie Hamlyn. I kept on meaning to do it the next day.
And the next day after this I really did.
“For I ought to tell Bettie about everything,” I reflected. “No matter if the engagement is a secret, I ought to tell Bettie about it.”
V
When I had done so, Bettie shook her head. “Oh, Robin, Robin!” she said, “how did I ever come to raise a child that doesn’t know his own mind for as much as two minutes? And how dared that Barry-Smith person to slap you, I would like to know.”
“Now you’re jealous, Bettie. You are thinking she infringed upon an entirely personal privilege, and you resent it.”
“Well—but I’ve the right to, you see, and she hadn’t. I consider her to be a boldfaced jig. And I don’t approve of this Avis person either, you understand; but we poor mothers are always being annoyed by slushy, mushy Avises. I suppose there’s a reason for it. She’ll throw you over, you know, as soon as her mother has had an inning or two. That’s why she took her to Europe,” Bettie explained, with a fine confusion of personalities. “Only she just wanted any quiet place where she could take aromatic spirits of ammonia and point out between doses that she has given up her entire life to her child and has never made any demands on her and hasn’t the strength to argue with her, because her heart is simply broken. We mothers always say that; and the funny part is that if you say it often enough it invariably works far better than any possible argument.”
I told her she was talking nonsense, and she said, irrelevantly enough: “Setebos, and Setebos, and Setebos! I don’t think very highly of Setebos sometimes, because He muddles things so. Oh, well, I shan’t cry Willow. Besides there aren’t any sycamore-trees in the garden. So let’s go into the garden, dear. That sounds as if I ate in the back pantry, doesn’t it? Of course you aren’t of any account any more, and you never will be, but at least you don’t look at people as though they were a new sort of bug whenever they have just thought a sentence or two and then gone on, without bothering to say it.”
So we went into Bettie’s garden. It had not changed. …
VI
Nothing had changed. It was as though I had somehow managed, after all, to push back the hands of the clock. Fairhaven accepted me incuriously. I was only “an old student.” In addition, I was vaguely rumoured to write “pieces” for the magazines. Probably I did; “old students” were often prone to vagaries after leaving King’s College; for instance, they told me, Ralph Means was a professional gambler, and Ox Selwyn had lately gone to Shanghai and had settled there—and Shanghai, in common with most other places, Fairhaven accorded the negative tribute of just not absolutely disbelieving in its existence.
Nothing had changed. The Finals were over; and with the noisy exodus of the college-boys, Fairhaven had sunk contentedly into an even deeper stupor, as Fairhaven always does in summer. And, for the rest, the unpaved sidewalks were just as dusty, the same deep ruts and the puddles which never dry, not even in mid-August, adorned Fairhaven’s single street; the comfortable moss upon Fairhaven’s roofs had not varied by a shade; and George Washington or Benjamin Franklin might have stepped out of any one of those brass-knockered doorways without incongruity and without finding any noticeable innovation to marvel at.
Nothing had changed. In the precise middle of the campus Lord Penniston, our Governor in Colonial days, still posed, in dingy marble; and the fracture of the finger I had inadvertently broken off, the night that Billy Woods and I painted the statue all over, in six colours, was white and new-looking. Kathleen Eppes had married her Spaniard and had left Fairhaven; otherwise the same girls were already planning their toilets for the Y.M.C.A. reception in October, which formally presents the “new students” to society at large; and presently these girls would be going to the germans or the Opera House with the younger brother of the boy who used to take them thither. …
Nothing had changed; not even I was changed. For I had soon discovered that Bettie Hamlyn did not care a pin for me in myself. She was simply very fond of me because, at times, I reminded her of a boy who had gone to King’s College; and her reception of me, for the first two days, was unmistakably provisional.
“Very well!” I said.
And I did it. For I knew how difficult it was to deceive Bettie, and in consequence all my faculties rose to the challenge. I did not merely mimic my former self, I was compelled, almost, to believe I was indeed that former self, because not otherwise could I get Bettie Hamlyn’s toleration. Had I paused even momentarily to reflect upon the excellence of my acting, she would have known. So I resolutely believed I was being perfectly candid; and with constant use those older tricks of speech and gesture and almost of thought, at first laborious mimicry, became well-nigh involuntary.
In fine, we could not wipe away five years, but with practice we found that you would very often forget them, and for quite a while. …
I had explained to Bettie’s father I was going to board with them that summer. Had I not been so haphazard in the progress of this narrative, I would have earlier announced that Bettie’s father was the Latin professor at King’s College. He was very old and
