Part 38 (1/2)

X

And while I neglected the development of my uncle's finances--and my own, in my scientific work and my absorbing conflict with the difficulties of flying,--his schemes grew more and more expansive and hazardous, and his spending wilder and laxer. I believe that a haunting sense of the intensifying unsoundness of his position accounts largely for his increasing irritability and his increasing secretiveness with my aunt and myself during these crowning years. He dreaded, I think, having to explain, he feared our jests might pierce unwittingly to the truth.

Even in the privacy of his mind he would not face the truth. He was acc.u.mulating unrealisable securities in his safes until they hung a potential avalanche over the economic world. But his buying became a fever, and his restless desire to keep it up with himself that he was making a triumphant progress to limitless wealth gnawed deeper and deeper. A curious feature of this time with him was his buying over and over again of similar things. His ideas seemed to run in series. Within a twelve-month he bought five new motor-cars, each more swift and powerful than its predecessor, and only the repeated prompt resignation of his chief chauffeur at each moment of danger, prevented his driving them himself. He used them more and more. He developed a pa.s.sion for locomotion for its own sake.

Then he began to chafe at Lady Grove, fretted by a chance jest he had overheard at a dinner. ”This house, George,” he said. ”It's a misfit.

There's no elbow-room in it; it's choked with old memories. And I can't stand all these d.a.m.ned Durgans!

”That chap in the corner, George. No! the other corner! The man in a cherry-coloured coat. He watched you! He'd look silly if I stuck a poker through his Gizzard!”

”He'd look,” I reflected, ”much as he does now. As though he was amused.”

He replaced his gla.s.ses, which had fallen at his emotion, and glared at his antagonists. ”What are they? What are they all, the lot of 'em?

Dead as Mutton! They just stuck in the mud. They didn't even rise to the Reformation. The old out-of-date Reformation! Move with the times!--they moved against the times.

”Just a Family of Failure,--they never even tried!

”They're jes', George, exactly what I'm not. Exactly. It isn't suitable.... All this living in the Past.

”And I want a bigger place too, George. I want air and sunlight and room to move about and more service. A house where you can get a Move on things! Zzzz. Why! it's like a discord--it jars--even to have the telephone.... There's nothing, nothing except the terrace, that's worth a Rap. It's all dark and old and dried up and full of old-fas.h.i.+oned things--musty old idees--fitter for a silver-fish than a modern man....

I don't know how I got here.”

He broke out into a new grievance. ”That d.a.m.ned vicar,” he complained, ”thinks I ought to think myself lucky to get this place! Every time I meet him I can see him think it.... One of these days, George I'll show him what a Mod'un house is like!”

And he did.

I remember the day when he declared, as Americans say, for Crest Hill. He had come up to see my new gas plant, for I was then only just beginning to experiment with auxiliary collapsible balloons, and all the time the s.h.i.+ne of his gla.s.ses was wandering away to the open down beyond. ”Let's go back to Lady Grove over the hill,” he said. ”Something I want to show you. Something fine!”

It was an empty sunlit place that summer evening, sky and earth warm with sundown, and a pe-wit or so just accentuating the pleasant stillness that ends a long clear day. A beautiful peace, it was, to wreck for ever. And there was my uncle, the modern man of power, in his grey top-hat and his grey suit and his black-ribboned gla.s.ses, short, thin-legged, large-stomached, pointing and gesticulating, threatening this calm.

He began with a wave of his arm. ”That's the place, George,” he said.

”See?”

”Eh!” I cried--for I had been thinking of remote things.

”I got it.”

”Got what?”

”For a house!--a Twentieth Century house! That's the place for it!”

One of his characteristic phrases was begotten in him.

”Four-square to the winds of heaven, George!” he said. ”Eh? Four-square to the winds of heaven!”

”You'll get the winds up here,” I said.

”A mammoth house it ought to be, George--to suit these hills.”

”Quite,” I said.

”Great galleries and things--running out there and there--See? I been thinking of it, George! Looking out all this way--across the Weald. With its back to Lady Grove.”