CHAPTER V
Cliffe Kennedy, entering the Tube at Charing Cross, caught sight of Mr Otto Redbury between the bobbing hats and swaying bodies that crowded up the carriage; and immediately pushed his way to a strap which directly overhung that gentleman’s head.
Cliffe always asserted that on the occasion Deb took him to call, he had discovered a tricky fascination about Mr Redbury; this was clearly an opportunity to refresh the emotion.
Otto waved the evening paper at him, in jubilant greeting.
“Anozzer vamous fictory!”
“The little grandchild Wilhelmine has made the phrase immortal,” murmured Cliffe. “How lucky for her that she rhymed with village green.”
Otto looked uneasy; not comprehending the reference, but wishing that somebody had informed the young man that the Redbury grandchild was better referred to in public as Minnie. He changed the subject.
“You live somevere on zis line, Mr Gennedy? I get out at Pelzize Bark.”
“Oooo ... nice!” gurgled Cliffe. Otto looked interrogative.
Cliffe serenely covered his lapse from manners. “Hampstead is my station. Our house is on the Heath itself. You must come and make friends with my mother, Mr Redbury. She’d like you so much. Come to lunch one day. Come on Saturday.”
Mr Redbury beamed and puffed out his meagre chest, anticipating the conquest of Mrs Kennedy. This was undoubtedly a very pleasant and discriminating young man.... “but I always vind blenty in gommon viz English people—the good old shtock;”—sentiment reserved for the after benefit of Trudchen; and to impress Beatrice.
“Yoo-stone!” bawled the guard. A number of passengers squeezed their way out; and Cliffe dropped lightly on to the vacated seat beside Otto.
“My dear mother’s a widow, so don’t bring your wife. She was deeply attached to my poor father, and can’t bear the sight of any woman less fortunate in a husband alive.”
Otto, groping after what was complimentary in this outburst, came to the conclusion that the clang of the gates had obliterated its part meaning.
“Besides,” Cliffe ran on, in a rapid confidential undertone, “why be for ever bound by the conventions?—Look at all the jaded joyless faces——” A rubicund Jack Tar opposite grinned broadly, thrust his tongue in his cheek, his arm round his girl beside him, and rolled an expressive eye in Cliffe’s direction. “The day’s routine, and the jolting train, and a dreary little home in Camden Town, and the evening paper, and another day—and another, and yet another.... What those faces want, Mr Redbury, and I see you agree with me, is Paganism—joie de vivre—a gallop with the centaurs!”
His companion, who would have turned peevish and retired into his bathroom stronghold at the very first encounter with a centaur, nodded sagely....
“O glorious Life!” rhapsodized Cliffe, stretching forth his arms, oblivious of his neighbours’ discomfort and astonishment.
“Wass-vot? who vere you viz last night?” chuckled Otto, his eyes mere slits of lewd curiosity.
“Last night ... last night ...” ecstatically—then came an imperceptible halt, as Cliffe discarded a comparatively innocent evening spent at home with Philip Gibbs’ “Soul of the War,” in favour of his almost equally harmless adventure with Deb at Seaview the week-end before. This would serve, touched up with scarlet and purple; it was additionally spiced by the reflection of how Otto’s whetted tongue would loll out, metaphorically speaking, if he knew that the heroine of this presented drama of Real Life as it isn’t, was Deb Marcus, his late partner’s daughter, and a friend of his own daughter Nell.
“Two of us—and the great scented common rolling away from our doors to a star-stabbed sky. Two of us—for when the little Dryad so long immersed in the oak-tree of tradition, sprang out at last into my arms, her hair wildly ablow, and with lips red as blood, then all the pettier issues of the Philistines were trampled, I say trampled, Mr Redbury, under the wings which sprang godlike from our exultant shoulder blades!... (Oh God! what a sentence!...)”
“Camden Town!”
The morbidly interested school-girl on Cliffe’s left was reluctant to alight—but that happened to be her station, and she dared not be late for supper.
Otto, as the train gathered speed again, turned to Cliffe expectantly, as a hint that confidences might be resumed. Of course he disapproved of these casual rollicking nights spent unchaperoned save by the rolling common ... disapproved and was biliously envious: but—but—his look was akin to a nudge in the ribs—and Kennedy, always obliging, discarded poetic eloquence in favour of the one-dog-to-another style obviously more suited to the temperament of Mr Redbury. He was thoroughly enjoying his own pose of the young-Bohemian type he most abominated in practice.
“You know how it is——” was sufficient to sound the new note of waggishness. “You’ve heard the old joke about hanging pictures, Mr Redbury—I bet you have——”
“Ho! ho! ho!” from Otto.
“We were—hanging pictures ... and missed the train home—the last train but one——”
“And the last drain of all vent too late, eh?”
“Well—there it is, you see—you can’t bring a girl home at any hour—especially if her father’s at all particular—as fathers sometimes are—as fathers sometimes are, Mr Redbury.”
And Otto chuckled and winked and coughed and cleared his throat, and settled his cuffs, and chuckled again, as though the lives of Hedda and Nell were never rendered a burden to them by the paternal injunction: “Home by nine o’clock, and bed at ten”—and interposed a swaggering if somewhat laboured anecdote of his own secret unorthodoxy—“We dake it for granted this is between you and me, yong vellow!”
“Belsipark!” The doors flew ajar.
Cliffe replied with a corresponding drop into gravity: “I trust equally in your discretion regarding the confidence I have placed in you, Mr Redbury——”
“... Of course he’ll prattle—but I mentioned no names,” as Otto, trotting up the platform towards the exit, cast through the window of the compartment a look of unutterable fraternity and knowingness.