The spectacle of his complacency was profoundly disquieting. He was the typical kindly good-natured John Bull. Gently nurtured, well-educated, “intelligent,” ready to take any amount of time and trouble in “getting at facts” and “thinking things out.” And he was a towering bully. Somewhere within his naive pugnacity was the guilty consciousness of being more pleased in downing an opponent than concerned for human welfare. There was no peace of certainty in him. He had scored and was flushed with victory. And all over English politics was this perpetual prizefighting. The power of life and death was in the hands of men playing for victory; for their own side.
Morning and evening in some hotel that big man’s voice boomed incessantly. Behind it a kindly disposition and a set of fixed ideas. No mind.
“Don’t you skeete?”
Making for the bench, bent forward to reach it hands first was the younger Croydon girl; behind her the other, rallentando, balancing to a standstill.
She had greeted them, ere she was aware, with the utmost enthusiasm. Smiling in their way, a gentle relaxation of the features that left them composed, they stood about her, pleased to see and greet a stranger who was also an old friend, renewing their great adventure. At the same time they were innocently rebuking her outbreak.
In her suburban past she had instinctively avoided their kind, scented a snare in their refined gentility, liked them only for the way, in the distance, going decorously in pretty clothes along tree-lined roadways, they contributed to the brightness of spring. Meeting them out here, representative of England, the middle-class counterparts, in their ardent composure, of the hotel people who so strangely had received her as a relative, she wanted in some way to put forth her claim as one who knew of old their world of villa and garden, their gentle enclosed world.
“It’s glorious; we’re having a lovely tame,” said the younger, looking away down the rink: an English rose, thoroughly pretty in the characterless English way, shapely sullen little face, frowning under the compulsion of direct statements. Her hair, that in the train had been a neat bun, hung now in a broad golden plait to her waist where its ends disappeared behind a large black bow like a bird with wings outspread.
And now with one seated close on each side of her it was with difficulty that she attended to their talk so clearly did it exhibit their world as a replica of the one just above it: as a state of perpetual urbane association; conformity to a code in circumstances more restricted, upon a background more uniform, and searched by the light of a public opinion that was sterner than the one prevailing above. All the bourgeois philistine in her came forth to sun itself in their presence, zestfully living their lives, loving their friends and relatives, ignoring everyone who lived outside the charmed circle.
One against the other, they joyously relived the short time whose sunburn had so becomingly accentuated their Blair Leighton fairness. Their stories centred round the success or breakdown of the practical jokes that seemed to be the fabric of life at their hotel … all the old practical jokes: even apple-pie beds. In and out of these stories went Mr. Parry who was presently pointed out upon the ice; a stout little dark man skating about at random, his movements visibly hampered by the burden of his sociability, his eyes turning, to the detriment of his steering, towards everyone he passed in his search for prey.
“He makes us all roar; every evening.”
There were others, some whose names and their roles, as assistants or willing victims of the schemes of Mr. Parry seemed sufficiently to describe them, and, as central decoration in the picture, these two girls newly arrived and certainly Mr. Parry’s most adored recruits, ready trained by a brother in the science of practical joking, yet not hoydenish; demure and sweet and, to his loneliness, the loneliness of an undignified little man, not quite grotesque, and incapable of inspiring romantic affection, figures of romance.
Growing weary of their inexhaustible theme—of waiting for the emergence of some sign of consciousness of the passing moment, a dropping of references backwards or forwards, that would leave them in league together, there as individuals—she pressed them for personal impressions of the adventure in its own right, the movement into strangeness, the being off the chain of accustomed things. They grew vague, lost interest and fell presently into a silence from which she pulled them by an enquiry about the plait.
In the midst of the story of the plait and just as some people were being pointed out who still thought them three sisters, two with their hair up, and one with a plait who did not appear at dinner, came a longing to escape, the sense of a rendezvous being missed, with the scene and the time of day. But her preparations for flight were stayed by their payment for her interest in the plait. They plied her with questions; presently they were offering to lend
