Part 60 (2/2)

”By the way, Teddie,” said Ingpen, pulling lightly at his short beard, ”I heard a rumour that you were going to stand for the Town Council in the South ward. Why didn't you?”

Edwin looked a little confused.

”Who told you that tale?”

”It was about.”

”It never came from me,” said Edwin.

Hilda broke in eagerly:

”He was invited to stand. But he wouldn't. I thought he ought to. I begged him to. But no, he wouldn't. And did you know he refused a J.P.s.h.i.+p too?”

”Oh!” mumbled Edwin. ”That sort o' thing's not my line.”

”Oh, isn't it!” Ingpen exclaimed. ”Then whose line is it?”

”Look at all the rotters in the Council!” said Edwin.

”All the more reason why you should be on it!”

”Well, I've got no time,” Edwin finished gloomily and uneasily.

Ingpen paused, tapping his teeth with his finger, before proceeding, in a judicial, thoughtful manner which in recent years he had been developing:

”I'll tell you what's the matter with you, old man. You don't know it, but you're in a groove. You go about like a shuttle from the house to the works and the works to the house. And you never think beyond the works and the house.”

”Oh, don't I?”

Ingpen went placidly on:

”No, you don't. You've become a good specimen of the genus 'domesticated business man.' You've forgotten what life is. You fancy you're at full stretch all the time, but you're in a coma. I suppose you'll never see forty again--and have you ever been outside this island? You went to Llandudno this year because you went last year.

And you'll go next year because you went this year. If you happen now and then to worry about the failure of your confounded Liberal Party you think you're a blooming broad-minded publicist. Where are your musical evenings? When I asked you to go with me to a concert at Manchester last week but one, you thought I'd gone dotty, simply because it meant your leaving the works early and not getting to bed until the unheard-of-time of one thirty a.m.”

”I was never told anything about any concert,” Hilda interjected sharply.

”Go on! Go on!” said Edwin raising his eyebrows.

”I will,” said Ingpen with tranquillity, as though discussing impartially and impersonally the conduct of some individual at the Antipodes. ”Where am I? Well, you're always buying books, and I believe you reckon yourself a bit of a reader. What d'you get out of them? I daresay you've got decided views on the transcendent question whether Emily Bronte was a greater writer than Charlotte. That's about what you've got. Why, dash it, you haven't a vice left. A vice would interfere with your lovely litho. There's only one thing that would upset you more than a machinery breakdown at the works----”

”And what's that?”

”What's that? If one of the hinges of your garden-gate came off, or you lost your latchkey! Why, just look how you've evidently been struck all of a heap by this servant affair! I expect it occurred to you your breakfast might be five minutes late in the morning.”

”Stuff!” said Edwin, amiably. He regarded Ingpen's observations as fantastically unjust and beside the mark. But his sense of fairness and his admiration of the man's intellectual honesty would not allow him to resent them. Ingpen would discuss and dissect either his friends or himself with equal detachment; the detachment was complete. And his a.s.sumption that his friends fully shared his own dispa.s.sionate, curious interest in arriving at the truth appealed very strongly to Edwin's loyalty. That Ingpen was liable to preach and even to hector was a drawback which he silently accepted.

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