Chapter IV

Three days later, Miss Haddon and Claude Melville were feeding chickens--under protest.

"I mean to give it up, of course," the former said. "It's a degrading pursuit; it's almost as bad as the 'things that Jimmy does,' the things that give him such a marvellous complexion and keep his figure so magnificent."

She threw a handful of grain to the frenzied denizens of the enlarged meat-safe before them, and added in a tone of pensive reflectiveness:

"Why is it, I wonder, that these actions which, as you have taught me, are unworthy of thinking people, tend to make the body so beautiful, the eyes so bright and clear, the cheeks rose-tinted, the limbs straight and supple?"

All the time that she was speaking her glance crept musingly over Claude's tall, but weak-looking and rather flaccid form, seeming to pause on his thin undeveloped arms, his lanky legs, and his slightly yellow face. That face began to flush. She sighed.

"There must be something radically wrong in the scheme of the universe," she continued. "But, of course, one ought to live for the mind and for subtle sensations, even though they do make one look an object."

Her eyes were on the chickens now, who were fighting like feathered furies, pouncing, clucking, running for safety, grain in beak, or, with a fiery anxiety, chasing the favoured brethren who had secured a morsel and were hoping to be permitted to swallow it. Claude glanced at her furtively out of the corner of his eye, and endeavoured, for the first time in his life, to stand erect and broaden his rather narrow chest.

Silently he resolved to give instructions to his tailor not to spare the padding in his future coats. He was glad, too, that knee-breeches, for which he had occasionally sighed, had not come into fashion again. After all, modern dress had its little advantages. Miss Haddon was still scattering grain, rather in the attitude of Millet's "_Sower_," and still talking reflectively.

"We must try to convert Jimmy," she said. "I have a good deal of influence over him, Mr Melville. We must try to make him more like you, more thoughtful, more inactive, more frankly sensual, more fond of sofas, in the future than he has been in the past. Do you know, I am ashamed to say it, but I don't believe I have ever seen Jimmy lying on a sofa. Poor Jimmy! Look at that hen! She is choking. Hens gulp their food so! And then, he's inclined to be persistently unselfish. That must be stopped too. I have learnt from you that to be decadent one must be acutely and untiringly selfish. The blessings of selfishness! What a volume might be written upon them! Mr Melville, all chickens must be decadent, for all chickens are entirely selfish. It is strange to think that the average fowl is more advanced in ethics--is it ethics I mean?--than the average man or woman, is it not? And we ate a decadent at dinner last night. I feel almost like a cannibal."

She threw away the last grain, and was silent. But suddenly Claude spoke.

"Miss Haddon," he said, and his voice had never sounded so boyish to her before, "you have been laughing at me for nearly a week." He paused, then he went on, rather unevenly, in the up-and-down tones induced by stifled excitement, "and I have never found it out until this moment. I suppose you think me a great fool. I daresay I have been one. But please don't--I mean, please let us give up acting our farce."

"But have we reached the third act?" she said.

They were walking through the garden, among the crocuses and violets now.

"I am sure I don't know," he answered, trying to seem easy. "Perhaps it is a farce in one act."

"Perhaps it is not a farce at all, my dear boy," she said very gently and with a sudden old-world gravity that was not without its grace.

They reached the house. She put her basket down on the oak table in the wide hall, and faced him in the eager way that was natural to her, and that was so youthful.

"Mr Melville--Claude," she said, as she held out her hand, clad in a very countrified brown glove, with a fan-like gauntlet, "of all Jimmy's friends I think I shall like you the best. People who have acted together ought to be good comrades."

He took the hand. That seemed necessary.

"But I haven't been acting," he said.

"Oh, yes, you have," she answered, "and I have only been on the stage for a week; while you--well, I suppose you have been on it for at least two or three years. I am taking my farewell of it this morning, and you--?"

The boy's face was deeply flushed, but he did not look, or feel, actually angry.

"I don't know about myself yet," he said.

"Think it all over," the old lady exclaimed. "And now let us have lunch. I am hungry."

* * * * *

Jimmy arrived that evening.

"How old are you, Claude?" he exclaimed, clapping his friend on the back.

"I am not sure," Claude replied. "But I almost begin to wish that I were sixty-four."

THE TEE-TO-TUM