Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/302

 And these months of waiting, of trailing about wards and corridors, this pen and paper game, the clerkliness, while the real work went on about him, and he envied the men who did it, and sometimes came near hating them. He felt like a dog waiting for a bone, some little job to be thrown at him by a man who had more jobs than he needed. He looked back with regret to his house-surgeon days when he had dabbled his hands in the live blood of surgery, and had even been allowed to carry through occasional minor operations.

Meanwhile, his father wrote monthly cheques, and Kit had come both to love and to hate those cheques. He had fancied that he had seen a significant frailness in his father, a wilting of that thin figure.

At Chelsea, after one of those Sunday suppers, he walked up and down the red and black music-room like a young lion in a cage. He had Tom Roland to himself for half an hour while Cherry played music to her marvellous new baby.

"Haven't you noticed? You must have noticed."

It behoved Thomas Roland to say that Kit's father was not so young as he used to be. But did that matter? Age has a phase of its own, compensations, happinesses. You slackened your stroke, or you took to a punt instead of an eight-oar.

"But it matters to me," said Kit.

"It would—my lad. I'm not quarrelling with you minding,—but it is not easy for us to see the insides of our elders. Oh,—I'm not preaching. Look on it as physiological."

"You mean—he is growing old?"

"About as pleasantly as a man could."

Kit stood by the piano, staring at the keyboard where Cherry's ands used to flutter. He looked extraordinarily grave the realization of the fact that his father was growing old had produced in him a feeling of shock.

"Of course," he said.

And then he resumed his walking up and down.

"Here am I tied up like a dog, waiting for somebody to let me off the chain. I want results."

"They'll come."

"Nine years, Roland, and he is still keeping me."