“I have got to go down and see Tod,” he said. “I like that wife of his; but she has no sense of humor. How much better principles are in theory than in practice!”
Flora repeated softly, as if to herself:
“I’m glad I have none.” She was at the window leaning out, and Felix took his place beside her. The air was full of scent from wet leaves, alive with the song of birds thanking the sky. Suddenly he felt her arm round his ribs; either it or they – which, he could not at the moment tell – seemed extraordinarily soft…
Between Felix and his young daughter, Nedda, there existed the only kind of love, except a mother’s, which has much permanence – love based on mutual admiration. Though why Nedda, with her starry innocence, should admire him, Felix could never understand, not realizing that she read his books, and even analyzed them for herself in the diary which she kept religiously, writing it when she ought to have been asleep. He had therefore no knowledge of the way his written thoughts stimulated the ceaseless questioning that was always going on within her; the thirst to know why this was and that was not. Why, for instance, her heart ached so some days and felt light and eager other days? Why, when people wrote and talked of God, they seemed to know what He was, and she never did? Why people had to suffer; and the world be black to so many millions? Why one could not love more than one man at a time? Why – a thousand things? Felix’s books supplied no answers to these questions, but they were comforting; for her real need as yet was not for answers, but ever for more questions, as a young bird’s need is for opening its beak without quite knowing what is coming out or going in. When she and her father walked, or sat, or went to concerts together, their talk was neither particularly intimate nor particularly voluble; they made to each other no great confidences. Yet each was certain that the other was not bored – a great thing; and they squeezed each other’s little fingers a good deal – very warming. Now with his son Alan, Felix had a continual sensation of having to keep up to a mark and never succeeding – a feeling, as in his favorite nightmare, of trying to pass an examination for which he had neglected to prepare; of having to preserve, in fact, form proper to the father of Alan Freeland. With Nedda he had a sense of refreshment; the delight one has on a spring day, watching a clear stream, a bank of flowers, birds flying. And Nedda with her father – what feeling had she? To be with him was like a long stroking with a touch of tickle in it; to read his books, a long tickle with a nice touch of stroking now and then when one was not expecting it.
That night after dinner, when Alan had gone out and Flora into a dream, she snuggled up alongside her father, got hold of his little finger, and whispered:
“Come into the garden, Dad; I’ll put on goloshes. It’s an awfully nice moon.”
The moon indeed was palest gold behind the pines, so that its radiance was a mere shower of pollen, just a brushing of white moth-down over the reeds of their little dark pond, and the black blur of the flowering currant bushes. And the young lime-trees, not yet in full leaf, quivered ecstatically in that moon-witchery, still letting fall raindrops of the past spring torrent, with soft hissing sounds. A real sense in the garden, of God holding his breath in the presence of his own youth swelling, growing, trembling toward perfection! Somewhere a bird – a thrush, they thought – mixed in its little mind as to night and day, was queerly chirruping. And Felix and his daughter went along the dark wet paths, holding each other’s arms, not talking much. For, in him, very responsive to the moods of Nature, there was a flattered feeling, with that young arm in his, of Spring having chosen to confide in him this whispering, rustling hour. And in Nedda was so much of that night’s unutterable youth – no wonder she was silent! Then, somehow – neither responsible – they stood motionless. How quiet it was, but for a distant dog or two, and the stilly shivering-down of the water drops, and the far vibration of the million-voiced city! How quiet and soft and fresh! Then Nedda spoke:
“Dad, I do so want to know everything.”
Not rousing even a smile, with its sublime immodesty, that aspiration seemed to Felix infinitely touching. What less could youth want in the very heart of Spring? And, watching her face put up to the night, her parted lips, and the moon-gleam fingering her white throat, he answered:
“It’ll all come soon enough, my pretty!”
To think that she must come to an end like the rest, having found out almost nothing, having discovered just herself, and the particle of God that was within her! But he could not, of course, say this.
“I want to FEEL. Can’t I begin?”
How many millions of young creatures all the world over were sending up that white prayer to climb and twine toward the stars, and – fall to earth again! And nothing to be answered, but:
“Time enough, Nedda!”
“But, Dad, there are such heaps of things, such heaps of people, and reasons, and – and life; and I know nothing. Dreams are the only times, it seems to me, that one finds out anything.”
“As for that, my child, I am exactly in your case. What’s to be done for us?”
She slid her hand through his arm again.
“Don’t laugh at me!”
“Heaven forbid! I meant it. You’re finding out much quicker than I. It’s all folk-music to you still; to me Strauss and the rest of the tired stuff. The variations my mind spins – wouldn’t I just swap them for the tunes your mind is making?”
“I don’t seem making tunes at all. I don’t seem to have anything to make them of. Take me down to see ‘the Tods,’ Dad!”
Why not? And yet – ! Just as in this spring night Felix felt so much, so very much, lying out there behind the still and moony dark, such marvellous holding of breath and waiting sentiency, so behind this innocent petition, he could not help the feeling of a lurking fatefulness. That was absurd. And he said: “If you wish it, by all means. You’ll like your Uncle Tod; as to the others, I can’t say, but your aunt is an experience, and experiences are what you want, it seems.”
Fervently, without speech, Nedda squeezed his arm.
CHAPTER IV
Stanley Freeland’s country house, Becket, was almost a show place. It stood in its park and pastures two miles from the little town of Transham and the Morton Plough Works; close to the ancestral home of the Moretons, his mother’s family – that home burned down by Roundheads in the Civil War. The site – certain vagaries in the ground – Mrs. Stanley had caused to be walled round, and consecrated so to speak with a stone medallion on which were engraved the aged Moreton arms – arrows and crescent moons in proper juxtaposition. Peacocks, too – that bird ‘parlant,’ from the old Moreton crest – were encouraged to dwell there and utter their cries, as of passionate souls lost in too comfortable surroundings.
By one of those freaks of which Nature is so prodigal, Stanley – owner of this native Moreton soil – least of all four Freeland brothers, had the Moreton cast of mind and body. That was why he made so much more money than the other three put together, and had been able, with the aid of Clara’s undoubted genius for rank and station, to restore a strain of Moreton blood to its rightful position among the county families of Worcestershire. Bluff and without sentiment, he himself set little store by that, smiling up his sleeve – for he was both kindly and prudent – at his wife who had been a Tomson. It was not in Stanley to appreciate the peculiar flavor of the Moretons, that something which in spite of their naivete and narrowness, had really been rather fine. To him, such Moretons as were left were ‘dry enough sticks, clean out of it.’ They were of a breed that was already gone, the simplest of all country gentlemen, dating back to the Conquest, without one solitary conspicuous ancestor, save the one who had been physician to a king and perished without issue – marrying