A few days later he received a letter from Antonia which filled him with excitement: . . . Aunt Charlotte is ever so much better, so mother thinks we can go home-hurrah! But she says that you and I must keep to our arrangement not to see each other till July. There will be something fine in being so near and having the strength to keep apart . . . All the English are gone. I feel it so empty out here; these people are so funny-all foreign and shallow. Oh, Dick! how splendid to have an ideal to look up to! Write at once to Brewer's Hotel and tell me you think the same.... We arrive at Charing Cross on Sunday at half-past seven, stay at Brewer's for a couple of nights, and go down on Tuesday to Holm Oaks.
Always your
ANTONIA.
“To-morrow!” he thought; “she's coming tomorrow!” and, leaving his neglected breakfast, he started out to walk off his emotion. His square ran into one of those slums that still rub shoulders with the most distinguished situations, and in it he came upon a little crowd assembled round a dogfight. One of the dogs was being mauled, but the day was muddy, and Shelton, like any well-bred Englishman, had a horror of making himself conspicuous even in a decent cause; he looked for a policeman. One was standing by, to see fair play, and Shelton made appeal to him. The official suggested that he should not have brought out a fighting dog, and advised him to throw cold water over them.
“It is n 't my dog,” said Shelton.
“Then I should let 'em be,” remarked the policeman with evident surprise.
Shelton appealed indefinitely to the lower orders. The lower orders, however, were afraid of being bitten.
“I would n't meddle with that there job if I was you,” said one.
“Nasty breed o' dawg is that.”
He was therefore obliged to cast away respectability, spoil his trousers and his gloves, break his umbrella, drop his hat in the mud, and separate the dogs. At the conclusion of the “job,” the lower orders said to him in a rather shamefaced spanner:
“Well, I never thought you'd have managed that, sir”; but, like all men of inaction, Shelton after action was more dangerous.
“D——n it!” he said, “one can't let a dog be killed”; and he marched off, towing the injured dog with his pocket-handkerchief, and looking scornfully at harmless passers-by. Having satisfied for once the smouldering fires within him, he felt entitled to hold a low opinion of these men in the street. “The brutes,” he thought, “won't stir a finger to save a poor dumb creature, and as for policemen—” But, growing cooler, he began to see that people weighted down by “honest toil” could not afford to tear their trousers or get a bitten hand, and that even the policeman, though he had looked so like a demi-god, was absolutely made of flesh and blood. He took the dog home, and, sending for a vet., had him sewn up.
He was already tortured by the doubt whether or no he might venture to meet Antonia at the station, and, after sending his servant with the dog to the address marked on its collar, he formed the resolve to go and see his mother, with some vague notion that she might help him to decide. She lived in Kensington, and, crossing the Brompton Road, he was soon amongst that maze of houses into the fibre of whose structure architects have wrought the motto: “Keep what you have—wives, money, a good address, and all the blessings of a moral state!”
Shelton pondered as he passed house after house of such intense respectability that even dogs were known to bark at them. His blood was still too hot; it is amazing what incidents will promote the loftiest philosophy. He had been reading in his favourite review an article eulogising the freedom and expansion which had made the upper middle class so fine a body; and with eyes wandering from side to side he nodded his head ironically. “Expansion and freedom,” ran his thoughts: “Freedom and expansion!”
Each house-front was cold and formal, the shell of an owner with from three to five thousand pounds a year, and each one was armoured against the opinion of its neighbours by a sort of daring regularity. “Conscious of my rectitude; and by the strict observance of exactly what is necessary and no more, I am enabled to hold my head up in the world. The person who lives in me has only four thousand two hundred and fifty-five pounds each year, after allowing for the income tax.” Such seemed the legend of these houses.
Shelton passed ladies in ones and twos and threes going out shopping, or to classes of drawing, cooking, ambulance. Hardly any men were seen, and they were mostly policemen; but a few disillusioned children were being wheeled towards the Park by fresh-cheeked nurses, accompanied by a great army of hairy or of hairless dogs.
There was something of her brother's large liberality about Mrs. Shelton, a tiny lady with affectionate eyes, warm cheeks, and chilly feet; fond as a cat of a chair by the fire, and full of the sympathy that has no insight. She kissed her son at once with rapture, and, as usual, began to talk of his engagement. For the first time a tremor of doubt ran through her son; his mother's view of it grated on him like the sight of a blue-pink dress; it was too rosy. Her splendid optimism, damped him; it had too little traffic with the reasoning powers.
“What right,” he asked himself, “has she to be so certain? It seems to me a kind of blasphemy.”
“The dear!” she cooed. “And she is coming back to-morrow? Hurrah! how I long to see her!”
“But you know, mother, we've agreed not to meet again until July.”
Mrs. Shelton rocked her foot, and, holding her head on one side like a little bird, looked at her son with shining eyes.
“Dear old Dick!” she said, “how happy you must be!”
Half a century of sympathy with weddings of all sorts—good, bad, indifferent—beamed from her.
“I suppose,” said Shelton gloomily, “I ought not to go and see her at the station.”
“Cheer up!” replied the mother, and her son felt dreadfully depressed.
That “Cheer-up!”—the panacea which had carried her blind and bright through every evil—was as void of meaning to him as wine without a flavour.
“And how is your sciatica?” he asked.
“Oh, pretty bad,” returned his mother; “I expect it's all right, really. Cheer up!” She stretched her little figure, canting her head still more.
“Wonderful woman!” Shelton thought. She had, in fact, like many of her fellow-countrymen, mislaid the darker side of things, and, enjoying the benefits of orthodoxy with an easy conscience, had kept as young in heart as any girl of thirty.
Shelton left her house as doubtful whether he might meet Antonia as when he entered it. He spent a restless afternoon.
The next day&mdas............