“I’m very sorry for him, Dad; he really is in love.”
“Still a common complaint,” said the General drily: “Did you see they’ve more than balanced the Budget? It’s an hysterical age, with these European crises for breakfast every other morning.”
“That’s the papers. The French papers, where the print is so much smaller, don’t excite one half so much. I couldn’t get the wind up at all when I was reading them.”
“Papers, and wireless; everything known before it happens; and headlines twice the size of the events. You’d think, to judge from the speeches and the ‘leaders,’ that the world had never been in a hole before. The world’s always in a hole, only in old days people didn’t make a song about it.”
“But without the song would they have balanced the Budget, dear?”
“No, it’s the way we do things nowadays. But it’s not English.”
“Do we know what’s English and what isn’t, Dad?”
The General wrinkled up his weathered face, and a smile crept about the wrinkles. He pointed at the pigsties.
“Those are. Done in the end, but not before they must be.”
“Do you like that?”
“No; but I like this hysterical way of trying to cure it even less. You’d think we’d never been short of money before. Why, Edward the Third owed money all over Europe. The Stuarts were always bankrupt. And after Napoleon we had years to which these last years have been nothing, but they didn’t have it for breakfast every morning.”
“When ignorance was bliss!”
“Well, I dislike the mixture of hysteria and bluff we’ve got now.”
“Would you suppress the voice that breathes o’er Eden?”
“Wireless? ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new. And God fulfils himself in many ways,’” quoted the General, “‘lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’ I remember a sermon of old Butler’s at Harrow on that text—one of his best, too. I’m not hidebound, Dinny, at least I hope not. Only I think everything’s talked out too much. It’s talked out so much that it’s not felt.”
“I believe in the Age, Dad. It’s dropped its superfluous clothes. Look at those old pictures in The Times lately. You smelt dogma and flannel petticoat.”
“Not flannel,” said the General, “in my day.”
“You should know, dear.”
“As a matter of fact, Dinny, I believe MINE was the really revolutionary generation. You saw that play about Browning? There you had it; but that was all gone before I went to Sandhurst. We thought as we liked, and we acted as we thought, but we still didn’t talk. Now they talk before they think, and when it comes to action, they act much as we did, if they act at all. In fact, the chief difference between now and fifty years ago is the freedom of expression; it’s so free now, that it takes the salt out of things.”
“That’s profound, Dad.”
“But not new; I’ve read it a dozen times.”
“‘You don’t think the war had any great influence, then, sir?’ They always ask that in interviews.”
“The war? It’s influence is pretty well over by now. Besides, the people of my generation were already too set. The next generation was wiped or knocked out—”
“Not the females.”
“No, they ran riot a bit, but they weren’t really in the thing. As for your generation, the war’s a word.”
“Well, thank you, dear,” said Dinny. “It’s been very instructive, but it’s going to hail. Come along, Foch!”
The General turned up the collar of his coat and crossed over to the carpenter who had cut his thumb. Dinny saw him examining the bandage. She saw the carpenter smile, and her father pat him on the shoulder.
‘His men must have liked him,’ she thought. ‘He may be an old buffer, but he’s a nice one.’
CHAPTER 28
If Art is long, Law is longer. The words Corven v. Corven and Croom rewarded no eye scanning the Cause List in The Times newspaper. Undefended suits in vast numbers occupied the attention of Mr. Justice Covell. At Dornford’s invitation Dinny and Clare came to the entrance of his court, and stood for five minutes just inside, as members of a cricket team will go and inspect a pitch before playing in a match. The judge sat so low that little but his face could be seen; but Dinny noticed that above Clare’s head in the witness-box would be a sort of canopy, or protection from rain.
“If,” said Dornford, as they came out, “you stand well back, Clare, your face will be hardly visible. But your voice you should pitch so that it always carries to the judge. He gets grumpy if he can’t hear.”
It was on the day after this that Dinny received a note delivered by hand at South Square.
“Burton’s Club: 13.iv.32.
“DEAR DINNY—
“I should be very glad if I could see you for a few minutes. Name your own time and place and I will be there. Needless to say it concerns Clare.
“Sincerely yours,
“GERALD CORVEN.”
Michael was out, but she consulted Fleur.
“I should certainly see him, Dinny. It may be a death-bed repentance. Let him come here when you know Clare will be out.”
“I don’t think I’ll risk his seeing her. I’d rather meet him somewhere in the open.”
“Well, there’s the Achilles, or the Rima.”
“The Rima,” said Dinny. “We can walk away from it.”
She appointed the following afternoon at three o’clock, and continued to wonder what he wanted.
The day was an oasis of warmth in that bleak April. Arriving at the Rima, she saw him at once, leaning against the railing with his back to that work of art. He was smoking a cigarette through a short well-coloured holder in meerschaum, and looked so exactly as when she had seen him last that, for no reason, she received a sort of shock.
He did not offer to take her hand.
“Very good of you to come, Dinny. Shall we stroll and talk as we go?”
They walked towards the Serpentine.
“About this case,” said Corven, suddenly, “I don’t want to bring it a bit, you know.”
She stole a look at him.
“Why DO you, then? The charges are not true.”
“I’m advised that they are.”
“The premises may be; the conclusions, no.”
“If I withdraw the thing, will Clare come back to me, on her own terms?”
“I can ask her, but I don’t think so. I shouldn’t myself.”
“What an implacable family!”
Dinny did not answer.
“Is she in love with this young Croom?”
“I can’t discuss their feelings, if they have any.”
“Can’t we speak frankly, Dinny? There’s no one to hear us except those ducks.”
“Claiming damages has not improved our feelings towards you.”
“Oh! that! I’m willing to withdraw everything, and risk her having kicked over, if she’ll come back.”
“In other words,” said Dinny, gazing straight before her, “the case you have framed—I believe that is the word—is a sort of blackmailing device.”
He looked at her through narrowed eyes.
“Ingenious notion. It didn’t occur to me. No, the fact is, knowing Clare better than my solicitors and the enquiry agents, I’m not too convinced that the evidence means what it seems to.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes, but I told you before, or Clare anyway, that I can’t and won’t go on with nothing settled, one way or the other. If she’ll come back I’ll wipe the whole thing out. If she won’t, it must take its chance. That’s not wholly unreasonable, and it’s not blackmail.”
“And suppose she wins, will you be any further on?”
“No.”
“You could free yourself and her at any time, if you liked.”
“At a price I don’t choose to pay. Besides, that sounds extremely like collusion—another awkward word, Dinny.”
Dinny stood still.
“Well, I know what you want, and I’ll ask Clare. And now I’ll say good-bye. I don’t see that talking further will do any good.”