Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/243

 He craved to push out the increasing noise of the world and to shut an autocratic door against it. Moreover, by vacating his two rooms he would be able to let them and add to the Pelican's margin. Also, he wanted Kit to have a quiet corner where he could read, a corner of his own.

At the end of the garden stood the old red brick cottage that Bowden had occupied, but the Bowden family knew nothing of Malthus and required a more capacious hive. Sorrell took over the cottage, had it redecorated and furnished very simply, and transferred himself there, turning his old porter's room into a manager's office. He had two of the cottage rooms fitted up for Christopher, so that when Kit came down for the vacations he could spread himself and his books in an atmosphere of his own. The rooms had stained floors and Oriental rugs, white taffeta curtains edged with green, buff-coloured walls, bookshelves, but no pictures. The blank walls were for Kit to fill, if he chose to fill them, and his ultimate filling of them amused his father. On one wall Kit placed a solitary picture, something from some art magazine, a picture of a French peasant coming back from the fields in the blue-green twilight. The remaining walls were covered with anatomical diagrams, sections of creatures' interiors, formulæ, neatly typed lists. Kit had saved and bought himself a typewriter. During the vacations his microscope stood on a little deal table by the window.

But Kit was not what his father called a "stuff-jacket." He had given up rowing because it interfered with his dissecting, but he was boxing for the University and carrying on the Porteous tradition. He played a fair game of tennis, could handle a gun, and swim a mile. His interest in life did not shut itself up in books. He was a great lover of the country and its life, and a keen observer; he would surprise his father on some of their walks by discovering plants and birds and insects that Sorrell would never have noticed. He had enthusiasm, not of the spluttering order, but that quiet, virile ardour that searches and sees.

Kit would get up first and make early morning tea over an oil stove in the cottage kitchen, for he and his father liked the informality of it and the sense of being undisturbed. Often he would sit on the end of Sorrell's bed, and smoke a cigarette and talk. They discussed Kit's work,