Chapter III

1

Of course there was always Aunt Percy, as there always had been: Aunt Moira’s old friend and man of affairs, and now Ivor’s trustee and guardian--Mr. Percy Wyndham Fletcher, senior partner of the firm of Fletcher, Combe, and Fletcher, Solicitors, of Bloomsbury Square, W.C. Mr. Fletcher was dead long before it became W.C.I; he would not have liked the change, but he would have said nothing; for Mr. Fletcher never grumbled at Progress, though he sometimes had an irritating way of chuckling at it.

During Ivor’s holidays from school Aunt Percy, as the old gentleman was commonly known, used often to come to dine with Aunt Moira. Ivor liked Aunt Percy enormously, and he had an idea that Aunt Percy had once upon a time liked Aunt Moira enormously. “It’s my belief,” he told young Transome at school, “that my Aunt Moira has given the bird to more men than any other woman of modern times.”

“Sounds like prehistoric times to me,” said Transome. (Typical of young Transome, that kind of remark!)

Why the courtly and so masculine old gentleman was called “Aunt” Percy, even by Lady Moira, no one seemed to know, or to inquire, for the matter of that; for there is, somehow, something so inevitable and _right_--as, say, in an old seal on a mellow parchment--in the very nature of any sweet absurdity which, from some remote past, has attached itself to the years of a man’s life and enwrapped itself about his personality, that it were an offence even to wonder from what ancient quip it sprang.

Now Mr. Fletcher was far from being _gaga_: he was not that tedious old man who takes complacent pleasure in youthful company: was, in fact, very grown-up for his years; but, if he hated anything, it was to be continually reminded of his approaching dotage and dissolution by his juniors continually addressing him as “sir.” Mr. Fletcher did not feel at all like “sir”; and the only advantage that Mr. Fletcher could see in knighthood or baronetcy was that one could then be “How d’you do, Sir Percy?” instead of having that silly “sir” tacked idiotically on to the end of every other sentence by youths who, anyway, hadn’t half the guts he had at his age, he shouldn’t wonder. So, lacking any such aldermanic distinctions, he made shift as “Aunt” Percy; a straight, tall, stoutish and courtly old gentleman of what is called “the old school,” with a great admiration for men of talent and honour, and a special admiration for Henley the poet and the man, dearest of his dead friends; and a great reputation, kept greatly alive by the servants at his clubs, for having been a fast-bowler and a fast liver in the good old days when fast-bowlers were really devilish fast and so on.

Mr. Fletcher was--quite apart from his special interest in a young man whose birth had followed on such romantic stirrings and rebellions, to all of which he had been privy and sympathetic at the time--very fond of Ivor: fond enough of him to lapse from his usual half-humorous manner with his juniors and to treat Ivor as a man. But the old gentleman was perturbed, every now and then, by some gleam of, well, maturity in Ivor, which seemed to him rather out of place in so young an Englishman and more befitting to a Latin intelligence; and so he came by a number of theories about Ivor. One of them was that Ivor had a deep faith in himself, for all that he was so quiet and well-behaved--too quiet and well-behaved, thought Mr. Fletcher, for a young man who had been expelled from Manton: another theory was that Ivor was conceited; and still another that the conceit would soon be knocked out of him. Not by Aunt Percy, though! Oh, no! There are, Mr. Fletcher thought, other women in the world besides Aunt Percy, I shouldn’t wonder. Mr. Fletcher had a great belief in women; and he suspected Ivor’s rather angry-looking stillness. “If I were you,” suggested Aunt Percy, “I wouldn’t think. It seems to make you angry.”

Mr. Fletcher, in the exercise of that unprejudiced good sense to which, as well as to his social sense, he owed his legal prominence, was not at all sure that much good would come of Ivor’s explorations as a writer of prose. Certain stories and essays of his that he had read had seemed to him, though rather remarkable for their polish, not the stuff of a writer, as such; but rather of a young man with whom writing was merely a reflection of his leisure, whereas his main concern hovered about the business of life--or of love, he shouldn’t wonder! Also, and particularly in the bravura essays on _The Decline of Humour_ and _The Function of Daggers_, Mr. Fletcher had been disconcerted by a calm and detached arrogance which, he thought, was confoundedly irritating in a young man who couldn’t, possibly, really know anything. “Parlourtricks!” said Aunt Percy. “Standing on your head! All this theoretical stuff....”

“It’ll run away with you, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mr. Fletcher.

“I wish to God it would!” Ivor suddenly let himself go. “I wouldn’t mind if it was a Carter Patterson van that ran away with me, so long as something did.”

“There’s a man in a new book by Arnold Bennett,” Aunt Percy thoughtfully said, “who was run away with by a Pantechnicon. I don’t remember what happened.”

“It probably ran away with Arnold Bennett until the end of the book,” Ivor suggested nastily.

“In that case,” said Mr. Fletcher shortly, “you had better dine with me. And you might shorten that long face of yours too, young man, for I’ve no mind to waste my dinner in front of some one who looks like an epitaph--and me with one foot down with gout and the other in the grave!”

And so they would dine, about once a fortnight during those two years following Aunt Moira’s death. And sometimes went on to a play, but more frequently sat on and talked, in Mr. Fletcher’s celibate house in Green Street: about dead men, of whom Aunt Percy had known so many, and about books that never die, about which the _ci-devant_ fast-bowler knew a good deal more than fast-bowlers are commonly supposed to know.

And throughout that time the old man, with a restraint quite remarkable in one of his years, directed and advised his young friend as little as he might; just “letting him be,” as Lady Moira had instructed him, to find his bent and feet and friends in his own way. Only once did he visit him in the chambers off Saint James’s Square which he had found for him, saying that they would “do” for him until he came of age; and was extremely surprised and almost displeased at the vast amount of books with which Ivor’s rooms were encumbered. He had known that Ivor spent a great deal of money on books--“But I didn’t realise,” said Aunt Percy, “that you went on and on buying them. You’ll have a lot of knowledge to get rid of, young man....”

Mr. Fletcher came away from his one visit to Ivor’s chambers wondering what influences would finally take the boy out of his solitude and an old man’s company. “Those books are not natural for a boy who took such trouble to get kicked out of school,” thought Mr. Fletcher, as he walked slowly along Jermyn Street, which was always a favourite street of his: an unusually tall and upright old gentleman, magnificently hatted, and easily imaginable as having been a very fast-bowler indeed in his time.