Ambrose said that he had thought of North Devon, of tramping over Exmoor, visiting the Doone country, and perhaps of working down to Dartmoor.
“You couldn’t do better. You ought to try your hand at fishing: wonderful sport in some of those streams. It mightn’t come off at first, but with your eye and sense of distance you’ll soon make a fine angler. If you do have a turn at the trout, get hold of some local man and make him give you a wrinkle or two. It’s no good getting your flies from town. Now, when I was fishing in Hampshire—”
Mr. Horbury went on; but the devil of gaiety had already dictated a wonderful scheme to Ambrose, and that night he informed Nelly Foran that she must alter her plans; she was to come with him to France instead of spending a fortnight at Blackpool. He carried out this mad device with an ingenuity that poor Mr. Palmer would certainly have called “diabolical.” In the first place, there was to be a week in London—for Nelly must have some clothes; and this week began as an experience of high delight. It was not devoid of terror, for masters might be abroad, and Ambrose did not wish to leave Lupton for some time. However, they neither saw nor were seen. Arriving at St. Pancras, the luggage was left in the station, and Ambrose, who had studied the map of London, stood for a while on the pavement outside Scott’s great masterpiece of architecture and considered the situation with grave yet humorous deliberation. Nelly proved herself admirably worthy of the adventure; its monstrous audacity appealed to her, and she was in a state of perpetual subdued laughter for some days after their arrival. Meyrick looked about him and found that the Euston Road, being squalid and noisy, offered few attractions; and with sudden resolution he took the girl by the arm and steered into the heart of Bloomsbury. In this charmingly central and yet retired quarter they found rooms in a quiet byway which, oddly enough, looked on a green field; and under the pleasant style of Mr. and Mrs. Lupton they partook of tea while the luggage was fetched by somebody—probably a husband—who came with a shock of red, untidy hair from the dark bowels of the basement. They screamed with mirth over the meal. Mr. Horbury had faults, but he kept a good table for himself, his boys and his servants; and the exotic, quaint flavour of the “bread” and “butter” seemed to these two young idiots exquisitely funny. And the queer, faint, close smell, too, of the whole house—it rushed out at one when the hall door was opened: it was heavy, and worth its weight in gold.
“I never know,” Ambrose used to say afterwards, “whether to laugh or cry when I have been away for some time from town, and come back and smell that wonderful old London aroma. I don’t believe it’s so strong or so rare as it used to be; I have been disappointed once or twice in houses in quite shabby streets. It was there, of course, but—well, if it were a vintage wine I should say it was a second growth of a very poor year—Margaux, no doubt, but a Margaux of one of those very indifferent years in the early ’seventies. Or it may be like the smell of grease-paints; one doesn’t notice it after a month or two. But I don’t think it is.
“Still,” he would go on, “I value what I can smell of it. It brings back to me that afternoon, that hot, choking afternoon of ever so many years ago. It was really tremendously hot—ninety-two degrees, I think I saw in the paper the next day—and when we got out at St. Pancras the wind came at one like a furnace blast. There was no sun visible; the sky was bleary—a sort of sickly, smoky yellow, and the burning wind came in gusts, and the dust hissed and rattled on the pavement. Do you know what a low public-house smells like in London on a hot afternoon? Do you know what London bitter tastes like on such a day—the publican being evidently careful of his clients’ health, and aware of the folly of drinking cold beverages during a period of extreme heat? I do. Nelly, poor dear, had warm lemonade, and I had warm beer—warm chemicals, I mean. But the odour! Why doesn’t some scientific man stop wasting his time over a lot of useless rubbish and discover a way of bottling the odour of the past?
“Ah! but if he did so, in a phial of rare crystal with a stopper as secure as the seal of Solimaun ben Daoud would I preserve one most precious scent, inscribing on the seal, within a perfect pentagram, the mystic legend ‘No. 15, Little Russell Row.’ ”
The cat had come in with the tea-tray. He was a black cat, not very large, with a decent roundness of feature, and yet with a suggestion of sinewy skinniness about him—the Skinniness of the wastrel, not of the poor starveling. His bright green eyes had, as Ambrose observed, the wisdom of Egypt; on his tomb should be inscribed “The Justified in Sekht.” He walked solemnly in front of the landlady, his body describing strange curves, his tail waving in the air, and his ears put back with an expression of intense cunning. He seemed delighted at “the let,” and when Nelly stroked his back he gave a loud shriek of joy and made known his
