While these thoughts were passing through his head, Devine had been speaking to Weston, in a low voice, but no lower than was to be expected of a man discussing hospitable arrangements in the presence of a guest. It ended with a grunt of assent from Weston. Ransom, to whose other difficulties a merely social embarrassment was now being added, turned with the idea of making some remark. But Weston was now speaking to the boy.
‘You have given enough trouble for one night, Harry,’ he said. ‘And in a properly governed country I’d know how to deal with you. Hold your tongue and stop snivelling. You needn’t go into the wash-house if you don’t want——’
‘It weren’t the wash-house,’ sobbed the half-wit, ‘you know it weren’t. I don’t want to go in that thing again.’
‘He means the laboratory,’ interrupted Devine. ‘He got in there and was shut in by accident for a few hours once. It put the wind up him for some reason. Lo, the poor Indian, you know.’ He turned to the boy. ‘Listen, Harry,’ he said. ‘This kind gentleman is going to take you home as soon as he’s had a rest. If you’ll come in and sit down quietly in the hall I’ll give you something you like.’ He imitated the noise of a cork being drawn from a bottle—Ransom remembered it had been one of Devine’s tricks at school—and a guffaw of infantile knowingness broke from Harry’s lips.
‘Bring him in,’ said Weston as he turned away and disappeared into the house. Ransom hesitated to follow, but Devine assured him that Weston would be very glad to see him. The lie was barefaced, but Ransom’s desire for a rest and a drink were rapidly overcoming his social scruples. Preceded by Devine and Harry, he entered the house and found himself a moment later seated in an arm-chair and awaiting the return of Devine, who had gone to fetch refreshments.
Chapter Two
The room into which he had been shown revealed a strange mixture of luxury and squalor. The windows were shuttered and curtainless, the floor was uncarpeted and strewn with packing-cases, shavings, newspapers and boots, and the wall-paper showed the stains left by the pictures and furniture of the previous occupants. On the other hand, the only two arm-chairs were of the costliest type, and in the litter which covered the tables, cigars, oyster-shells and empty champagne-bottles jostled with tins of condensed milk and opened sardine-tins, with cheap crockery, broken bread, and teacups a quarter full of tea and cigarette-ends.
His hosts seemed to be a long time away, and Ransom fell to thinking of Devine. He felt for him that sort of distaste we feel for someone whom we have admired in boyhood for a very brief period and then outgrown. Devine had learned just half a term earlier than anyone else that kind of humour which consists in a perpetual parody of the sentimental or idealistic clichés of one’s elders. For a few weeks his references to the Dear Old Place and to Playing the Game, to the White Man’s Burden and a Straight Bat, had swept everyone, Ransom included, off their feet. But before he left Wedenshaw Ransom had already begun to find Devine a bore, and at Cambridge he had avoided him, wondering from afar how anyone so flashy and, as it were, ready-made, could be so successful. Then had come the mystery of Devine’s election to the Leicester fellowship, and the further mystery of his increasing wealth. He had long since abandoned Cambridge for London, and was presumably something ‘in the city.’ One heard of him occasionally and one’s informant usually ended either by saying, ‘A damn clever chap, Devine, in his own way,’ or else by observing plaintively, ‘It’s a mystery to me how that man has got where he is.’ As far as Ransom could gather from their brief conversation in the yard, his old schoolfellow had altered very little.
He was interrupted by the opening of the door. Devine entered alone, carrying a bottle of whiskey on a tray with glasses, and a syphon.
‘Weston is looking out something to eat,’ he said as he placed the tray on the floor beside Ransom’s chair, and addressed himself to opening the bottle. Ransom, who was very thirsty indeed by now, observed that his host was one of those irritating people who forget to use their hands when they begin talking. Devine started to prise up the silver paper which covered the cork with the point of a corkscrew, and then stopped to ask:
‘How do you come to be in this benighted part of the country?’
‘I’m on a walking-tour,’ said Ransom; ‘slept at Stoke Underwood last night and had hoped to end at Nadderby to-night. They wouldn’t put me up, so I was going on to Sterk.’
‘God!’ exclaimed Devine, his corkscrew still idle. ‘Do you do it for money, or is it sheer masochism?’
‘Pleasure, of course,’ said Ransom, keeping his eye immovably on the still unopened bottle.
‘Can the attraction of it be explained to the uninitiate?’ asked Devine, remembering himself sufficiently to rip up a small portion of the silver paper.
‘I hardly know. To begin with, I like the actual walking——’
‘God! You must have enjoyed the army. Jogging along to Thingummy, eh?’
‘No, no. It’s just the opposite of the army. The whole point about the army is that you are never alone for a moment and can never choose where you’re going or even what part of the road you’re walking on. On a walking-tour you are absolutely detached. You stop where you like and go on when you like. As long as it lasts you need consider no one and consult no one but yourself.’
‘Until one night you find a wire waiting at your hotel saying, “Come back at once,”’ replied Devine, at last removing the silver paper.
‘Only if you were fool enough to leave a list of addresses and go to them! The worst that could happen to me would be that man on the wireless saying, “Will Dr. Elwin Ransom, believed to be walking somewhere in the Midlands——”’
‘I begin to see the idea,’ said Devine, pausing in the very act of drawing the cork. ‘It wouldn’t do if you were in business. You are a lucky devil! But can even you just disappear like that? No wife, no young, no aged but honest parent or anything of that sort?’
‘Only a married sister in India. And then, you see, I’m a don. And a don in the middle of long vacation is almost a non-existent creature, as you ought to remember. College neither knows nor cares where he is, and certainly no one else does.’
The cork at last came out of the bottle with a heart-cheering noise.
‘Say when,’ said Devine, as Ransom held out his glass. ‘But I feel sure there’s a catch somewhere. Do you really mean to say that no one knows where you are or when you ought to get back, and no one can get hold of you?’
Ransom was nodding in reply when Devine, who had picked up the syphon, suddenly swore. ‘I’m afraid this is empty,’ he said. ‘Do you mind having water? I’ll have to get some from the scullery. How much do you like?’
‘Fill it up, please,’ said Ransom.
A few minutes later Devine returned and handed Ransom his long-delayed drink. The latter remarked, as he put down the half-emptied tumbler with a sigh of satisfaction, that Devine’s choice of residence was at least as odd as his own choice of a holiday.
‘Quite,’ said Devine. ‘But if you knew Weston you’d realize that it’s much less trouble to go where he wants than to argue the matter. What you call a strong colleague.’
‘Colleague?’ said Ransom inquiringly.
‘In