“I thought he seemed rather nice.”
“He’s a smart-alec. Education in England spoils so many Canadians—except Rhodes scholars, who come back and get Government jobs right away. There’s a kind of nice simplicity about a Canadian that education abroad seems to destroy. Lots of boys go through our Canadian universities and come out with the bloom still on them, but when they go abroad they always come home spoiled. Isn’t that so, Roscoe?”
“What I always say is,” said Roscoe, “it takes all kinds to make a world. I like Solly. He’s a nice boy.”
“Oh Roscoe, you like everybody,” said his wife.
“Well, that’s pretty nearly true, hon.”
The interior of St Agnes’ was, by Mrs Forrester’s standards, lacking in Taste. The personal preference shown in the matter of furniture and decoration was that of Mr Webster, for his wife had been dead for more than ten years. He liked things that were heavy, and he liked dark wood, intricately patterned wallpaper, and an atmosphere of over-furnishing which Griselda called “clutter”. He liked books and had a great many of them. He liked Persian and Chinese carpets, and his rooms were silent with them. He liked leather, and there was plenty of it in his house, on chairs, on fenders, on books and even on lampshades. The house was dark and somewhat oppressive in atmosphere, but it was as he desired it. Griselda had been permitted to decorate a combined bedroom and sitting-room for herself in her own taste. Freddy’s bedroom was austere, for she had cleared the nursery pictures of kittens and rabbits out of it, and had added little save a bookcase which contained her favourite works on wine and the liturgy of the Church of England as it might be if the revision of the Prayer Book could be recalled. The only picture she hung in her room was a colour print of The Feeding of the Infant Bacchus, by Poussin; the podgy godling, swigging at his bowl, was not her ideal of a wine-taster; nevertheless, something in the picture appealed to her deeply. At the head of her bed hung a little ivory crucifix.
No, Mrs Forrester would have found St Agnes’ sadly lacking in Taste, and she would have thought it a pity, for obviously a great deal of money had been spent to make it as it was.
Most of the people who thought about the matter at all imagined that the Websters dined in great state every night. But on this evening, after the successful assault upon The Shed by the Little Theatre, Mr Webster and his daughters were eating sandwiches and drinking coffee from a thermos in the large, gloomy dining-room. It was the servants’ night out. Mr Webster rather enjoyed these picnics.
“The Little Theatre people were here this afternoon, Daddy,” said Griselda.
“Oh. Did they approve of my garden?”
“Mphm. They’d like to do the play on the upper lawn, against the background of big trees.”
“Well, they’ll do as little harm there as anywhere. What is this bloody stuff?”
“Some kind of fish goo.”
“Aren’t there any peanut butter sandwiches?”
“Yes, but I think they’re meant for us. You aren’t supposed to like peanut butter. It isn’t a masculine taste.”
“I like it. Give me one.”
“Daddy,” said Freddy; “don’t you think you’d better say a word to Tom about keeping them out of The Shed? All the valuable tools are in there.”
“I don’t suppose they’ll take them,” said Mr Webster.
“No, but they might spoil them, messing about. Anyhow, you know how Tom hates people in The Shed.”
“Tom will have to get used to it.”
“Freddy was rude to Mrs Forrester this afternoon,” said Griselda.
“Good,” said her father.
“Don’t encourage her, Daddy. She’s above herself.”
“She was rude to me first,” said Freddy; “I get sick of being treated like a baby. I’ve got just as much brains as you, Gristle, and I ought to be treated with as much respect.”
“When you are older, dear,” said Griselda, with a maddening air of maturity.
“Nuts,” retorted Freddy, rudely; “there’s only four years between us. If I had a great big bosom like yours, and a fanny like a bumblebee, people would swarm over me just the way they do over you.”
“If you are waiting for that, I fear that you will wait indeed,” said Griselda. “It’s plain now that you are the stringy type. Your secondary sexual characteristics, if and when they come, will be poor things at best.”
“Children, don’t speak so coarsely,” said Mr Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters’ speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.
The play is going to be directed by a woman,” said Griselda. “She looks very sensible and doesn’t say much, which is odd, because she seems to be a friend of Mrs Forrester’s. A Miss Valentine Rich. Lived here ages ago. She’s been working in professional theatre in the States. Do you know anything about her, Daddy?”
“If you ever looked inside a newspaper, Gristle,” said Freddy, “you’d know that she is quite famous in a modest sort of way. She’s a good actress. She doesn’t often play leads, but she gets feature billing, if you know what that is, which I doubt. And she directs. She’s directed some awfully good stuff. She did a performance of The White Divell two years ago, and the critics all said the direction was fine, even if the actors were rotten and it flopped.”
“If she’s so good, why weren’t the actors good?”
“Perhaps she can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; we shall see on our own upper lawn, quite soon. Anyway Americans can’t act that sort of thing. They are utterly without flair.” Freddy grandly dismissed the American stage.
“I think I’ve heard of her,” said Mr Webster. “Her grandfather died about six weeks ago. Old Dr Savage. He was quite a bigwig at Waverley a long time ago. He wasn’t seen much during recent years.”
“She’s come back to sell up his things,” said Freddy. “She is his heir. There’ll probably be an auction. Do you suppose it will bring in much, Daddy?”
“Impossible to tell. Not likely. Professors rarely have interesting furniture. She might get a few thousands, if the sale went well.”
“He probably had a lot of interesting books,” said Freddy; “if she has an auction may I go, Daddy? I mean, may I have a little money, just in case something interesting turned up?”
“You have the instincts of a packrat, Freddy,” said Griselda. “What do you want with dirty old books out of a dead professor’s house? Aren’t there enough books here already? And how do you know so much about Miss Rich?”
“My eyes are turned outward, toward the world,” said Freddy. “Yours are turned inward, toward yourself. In the innermost chamber of your spirit, Gristle, you kneel in constant adoration before a mirror.”
Griselda smiled lazily, and threw a fish sandwich at her sister. When this simple meal was finished, the Webster family dispersed to entertain itself. Mr Webster went to his library, and sat down to rummage through some volumes of the Champlain Society’s publications. This was his favourite reading. Unlike many men of wealth in Canada he had never sought gold in the wilderness or lived an explorer’s life among guides and Indians; he did not like to hunt or fish. But exploration in an armchair was his pastime, and accounts of the hardships of others were full of interest to him.
For a time Freddy shared the room with him, quietly taking down one book after another until she had gleaned all the information the library contained about the late Dr Adam Savage. It was not much; he was named in a History of Waverley as a professor of Greek, as a contemporary of a number of other professors who, in their turn, were named as contemporaries of his. It is a habit of the writers of such histories to list the names of dead pedagogues as Homer listed the ships, hoping for glory of sound rather than for the illumination of their audience. In the memoirs of a politician who had been a Waverley man, Dr Savage was referred to as “grand”, but this was unconvincing; to politicians any teacher whom they have subsequently surpassed in notoriety is likely to appear grand. Otherwise there was nothing. Dr Savage was dead indeed. Freddy bade her father goodnight, and went to her own room.