He was beginning to get it on the brain.
And certainly there had been plenty of Catchings added to Rackham. To his mind, in those few days during which he still lingered, the new sham timbered front was the Catchings and the beastly sham panelling and sham beams of the new rooms, and the odious antique furniture, and the silly Wardour Street pictures deliberately darkened—all these were the Catchings. He went over them one by one, listing them in his mind, and grimly delighted in the coming luxury, distant or near, of tearing them out by the roots like a lot of bad teeth.
It was a state of things that did not make for better relations, though John was careful to keep off any questions on the novelties, even on the absurd novel name. He would learn its origin in due time. Meanwhile upon anything that mattered he was stubbornly silent, and sufficiently talkative on things that did not.
Aunt Hilda played her part well enough, determined as he was, and successful as he was, in preventing an open quarrel. On the day when she bade him good-bye at the door, and made him promise to write and to return often to visit her, she rejoiced that she had not broken her word to the dead man. She had done her best. And if anything went wrong with John, why she was always there to help. But there is no denying that she was relieved.
As for John, though he had left Rackham silent, he had fallen into a new mood as the train approached London. Her friends and his father’s had given him introductions and he had been told of good and reasonable lodgings; and he had those few hundreds and scores of pounds in his pocket, which are a fortune on the threshold of one’s twentieth year.
But quite unchanged in his heart as he travelled still stood the image of the old Rackham, the real Rackham. And those hurried facts which his father had passed over as though they were too painful for him—sums of money: the real sum owed—£10,000, or say £12,000, £13,000 at the very most—yet £20,000 claimed. Well, £20,000 it legally was and £20,000 he would adhere to.
That £20,000 he would find, make, somehow, somewhere.
At his age 20,000 is like a million, but at his age, also, a million may be found, made, somehow—somewhere. That £20,000 hardened in his soul and became the permanent furniture of it.
How young people fall on their legs no one knows—least of all themselves: no more than cats thrown off a roof. Those who have gone out into the world on their own before they were twenty know that it happens, and that is all they can say.
It happened to John Maple. He went through the string of those adventures which all such lads go through, indifferent to the squalor because he was too young; delighted with the uncertainty, and buoyed up by the novelty of his life. It happened to him also (as it happens to all such) that he was never cut off from his equals in real life as such are cut off in melodrama. There was nothing about not darkening doors again, or shaking dust off feet. He went down often enough to Aunt Hilda’s (thinking himself a noble fellow enough for tolerating Rackham). He made better and better friends with Corton, who always thought of him as the only true Maple. He met his aunt’s friends. His father’s old acquaintances looked him up, and asked him out in London. If you had taken a couple of weeks out of the boy’s life and followed it hour by hour, you would have found such a mosaic as only an early experience of that strange kind knows—there are plenty of us alive to-day who have known it and can remember it. John Maple came to know them all.
Lodgings chosen for their peculiarity, their isolation; a single bare room overlooking London from the height of an old building; a basement; a dusty studio; one changed for another. Odd acquaintances from the most different sorts of worlds. Broken-down actors, young men trying to find work, and trying to forget the time when they were soldiers. Pompous hosts in huge great mausoleums of houses (bad speculations on the Crown property at Kensington—white elephants). Dull Bohemian nights in Chelsea. Much more interesting revolutionary nights sandwiched between foreign and domestic spies in reeking cellars off Houndsditch. One or two really interesting parties in the houses of such people, for instance, as Charles Baker, who had been his father’s friend for years before the exile, and who was still in Parliament and still ridiculing it, but whose real point was that he could paint; or tea with another friend of his father’s of very many years’ standing, Lady Pattle, the widow of the Admiralty Judge. There he met everybody—and there, incidentally, he met Bo.
Lady Pattle liked pretty well everything, but if she liked one thing more than another it was people who could talk crisply and dress crisply.
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