Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/265

 wisdom that brought little humorous crinkles round Roland's happy eyes.

"You and your son's hands are curiously alike. But he will do more—with his."

"I hope so," said Sorrell, while Kit, who was standing behind his father's chair, laid a hand on Sorrell's shoulder.

"If so—it's because of his hands. He has given me the chance."

Christopher went often to the house in Chelsea, for it offered him the contrasts that he craved, music, colour, understanding, a glimpse of a beautiful feminine thing, and talks with a man who had outgrown his crudities. You hadn't to explain yourself to Thomas Roland, and Kit was finding that it was possible to spend half your life trying to explain things to people who seemed to have gramophone records inside them instead of souls.

Roland lent him books and gave him an occasional theatre ticket. Also Kit met people in the Chelsea house, people who mattered, who had done things. He was not a great talker; in fact he listened better than he talked, but Thomas Roland's friendship gave him an entry into another world, the world of art and music, and of affairs.

He was asked to other houses and to dances, and he came to know Norah Fast and her circle, and Viner the essayist, and Phyllis Compton the actress. He fell in love with Phyllis Compton, and fell out of it when he came to realize the extent of her vanity. Women were troubling him not a little, but he kept his troubles to himself. Only once did he speak of them to his father.

"I can't help it, pater, but women are the very devil. It didn't worry me much up at Cambridge,—but London!"

"Yes," said Sorrell, "I know. It's like going about hungry, and seeing a basket of fruit at every corner."

"You don't think me a beast?"

"I have been through it, old chap. Besides—it isn't beastly. It's the meanness and the concealment and the treacheries that make it beastly."

They were out walking and had paused at the end of a woodland path where bracken grew, and the ground fell away into a deep green valley. Sorrell paused to light a pipe, while Kit's glances seemed to sink into the landscape.