The Derelict (Bottome, Century Magazine, 1917)/Chapter 1

EOFFREY AMBERLEY was at an age when it did not strike him as surprising that everything should happen exactly as he wanted it to happen. Probably other things, too, he thought to himself, would go on happening in the same satisfactory way, though he doubted if he should ever feel again quite the same high pitch of satisfaction and ecstasy.

It was n't only that he was happy. Other young men had been fairly well off and engaged to be married to girls with whom they were in love; but what distinguished Geoffrey's happiness was that what pleased Geoffrey should, for the first time in his life, please the rest of his family.

It is an isolating thing in a world of average intelligence to be stupid; but it is a far more isolated position—it is even a hostile one—to be cleverer than your own family. Families are tolerant of their fools; they may be proud of, but they always resent, an intellectual superior in their bosom. Not that the Amberleys were in the least proud of Geoffrey; they merely resented him. They might have been proud of him if he had done well the things that they cared to do, but the things Geoffrey did well were the things no Amberley cared to do at all. He painted pictures; and no real Amberley would have so taken to heart the absence of approval of other Amberleys. They simply went their way; and if anybody got into it, they knocked him down.

But Geoffrey cared intensely what his family thought of him, and the things that got into Geoffrey's way could n't be knocked down. They were awkward, intangible things that stuck into his heart of hearts forever.

What he did n't like was to see anything ugly; what he did like with an embarrassing delight was to see things that were beautiful. The rest of his family did n't know what was beautiful and what was not. They had a simpler standard. If one liked pork, one killed pigs, and there was an end of it. This indelibility of fact seemed to Geoffrey sublime, but he never reached it. He continued to like pork and to try to prevent pigs being killed. It was an attitude that made the whole of his family suspicious of him. Lady Amberley had a private theory that Geoffrey was not so strong as the others, and always urged him to take second helpings at meals; but Sir Thomas, with sterner insight, felt that Geoffrey was morally unsound.

"Mark my words," he said to his wife, with an unaccountable flight of imagery, "one of these days Geoffrey will put his foot into it."

It was at Oxford that his foot first presented itself as off the proper course. He took a very good second, but he could no longer keep it a secret that he knew successfully how to draw. A magazine actually took some of his illustrations.

The Amberleys bore it extremely well from the moment they saw it was going to pay, but they never liked it. There is all the difference in the world between a peculiarity that takes things off your shoulders and a peculiarity that is likely to put them on; still, even the less noxious kind of peculiarity is a peculiarity.

Geoffrey's earnings took him to Paris, and kept him there for two years with very little assistance from a belated allowance. Sir Thomas was n't stingy, but he declined to see any necessity for Geoffrey's going to Paris when there were plenty of subjects to draw in England.

When he found that Geoffrey was really getting on, he gave him an extra hundred a year. Geoffrey did n't need it then, and there had been earlier times when he had needed it; but he wrote a suitable letter of thanks, and returned to England a few months later with a picture that had won the much-coveted Salon prize.

Sir Thomas inspected his son's work in London; he disliked it very much, but he at once bought two of the least objectionable and quietest pictures, and gave them as wedding presents to his nieces. They had to have something.

Sir Thomas understood both his other sons, Tom, who helped him with the estate and kept hounds, and Billy, who was the fast one of the family. There had always been a fast Amberley. Billy spent too much money, drank too much whisky, and liked driving unchaperoned young ladies with big hats and uncertain hair upon the front seat of a four-in-hand. Sir Thomas knew there was no harm in Billy, but a son who neither kept hounds nor caused scandals might be up to any trick.

Sir Thomas did not understand his daughters, because it is not necessary to understand girls,—they get on all right without it,—but he was very generous to them, and allowed each of them to keep a dog.

Now Geoffrey looked forward to his interview with his father for the first time in his life. Sir Thomas might not approve of French prizes or Post-impressionist art, but he would be quite certain to approve of Emily Dering. The whole family approved of Emily. His mother considered her a distinguished young woman, and Lady Amberley did not easily distinguish young women. She lumped them generally into two classes, the kind that are all right and nobody ever looks at, and the kind that everybody looks at and who are not very good for one's boys.

Emily, on the contrary, was both pleasant to the eye and yet could be desired to make one's boys wiser. Geoffrey's sisters idolized her. She chose their Mudie books for them and lived in London, and yet when she came to stay with them she walked miles and played an excellent game of tennis. She had had four hundred a year left her by her grandmother, and would be an heiress when her parents died. They were rather young and very pleasant parents, and great personal friends of Sir Thomas and Lady Amberley's; still, there was no harm in remembering that their death would set loose an indefinite supply of remarkably good investments.

The point that filled Geoffrey with surprise as well as with delight was that he himself liked the marriage, liked with ardor, for the first time he could remember, what all his family would accept with satisfaction.

He adored Emily. She was clever and charming, and yet never gave him the impression of yesterday's cigarette ashes and insufficiently combed hair, which he had supposed were the necessary accompaniments of intellectual women. Still less did she remind him of those awful hours, under mulberry-trees, at garden parties, with some of his sisters' less enlightened friends. These young women had looked beautifully clean, but their innumerable baths had apparently washed the color out of their minds.

Emily was quite as clean, but she had retained her color. She had golden-bronze hair, blue eyes so far apart that they gave to her bright young face an air of noble benevolence, and a complexion which was made up of sun and air and very faint rose color. She would n't have fitted into Geoffrey's idea for a portrait; he preferred less prosperous and more curious types. Emily was like one of his father's favorite works of art—a very round, very ripe peach lying in a sunbeam.

"That," Sir Thomas had said to his son on one occasion, brandishing his stick within an inch of this satisfactory canvas, "is my idea of a picture." It had n't been Geoffrey's idea of a picture, but it had very soon become his idea of a wife. He had asked his father for an interview at his club, and Sir Thomas had come up for the occasion.

"This time," Sir Thomas had said to his wife, "there's sure to be trouble; if it was n't trouble, he would say what it was."

Sir Thomas had prepared for trouble by a solid lunch and by reading three even more solid leaders in the "Times." He was still immersed in this guide to human knowledge when he saw Geoffrey bursting into the room. Geoffrey always came into a room as if he wanted to get there, and all the rest of the family came into rooms as if they did n't.

"Ah," said Sir Thomas, "I was expecting you." Sir Thomas liked to say he was expecting people when they kept an appointment which they had previously made. It crystallized the transaction.

Geoffrey should have replied:

"Yes, it is three o'clock." Instead of which he said: "It's the jolliest day in the world; all the trees are out in the park. Don't you want the window open?"

Sir Thomas looked pained. Trees were naturally out in the park,—where else, should they be?—and he was an open-air man who very much disliked any of it getting into houses. He felt that Geoffrey should have known that if he had wanted the window open it would be open.

"Well," he said a little briskly, shaking his head toward the window, "I hope nothing is wrong. You'd better sit down and tell me all about it. Your letter asked for an interview, but you gave me no idea what it was you wanted. You know I am not fond of surprises."

Geoffrey did n't sit down. He moved about the room. He was aware of his father's pale-blue eyes following him with disapproval. Sir Thomas never moved about a room unless he wished to put something down or pick something up.

"It's not bad," Geoffrey asserted slowly. "On the whole, I am quite sure you 'll like it. It's simply Emily."

Sir Thomas cleared his throat.

"Simply Emily," he repeated. "I don't quite follow. Are you alluding to a musical comedy which you wish me to attend?"

Geoffrey sighed impatiently. That was the worst of the Amberleys. If you were perfectly succinct and to the point, they did n't understand what you meant, and if you gave a subject the right amount of expression, they understood it still less.

"I mean," he said, "that there's nothing in the world I want as much as Emily, and that I 've got her. I can't explain what she sees in me, but I suppose she sees something. Anyhow, she's  taken me on. It only happened yesterday—by the Serpentine in the gardens—the wonderful bit by the bridge."

Sir Thomas gazed solemnly into the space between two leather arm-chairs.

"Has Emily Dering consented to marry you?" he asked. Geoffrey did n't like to explain that he and Emily had never mentioned marriage. The understanding at which they had arrived had glided grotesquely over details, and had taken the form of their simply seeing themselves always together, somewhere near the Serpentine, under the trees. Geoffrey felt instinctively that this view of an engagement would hardly appeal to Sir Thomas.

"Yes, it's all right, sir," he explained; "and what seems to me awfully jolly is that you 'll like it yourself."

Geoffrey regarded his father a little anxiously. Delighted people seldom look so solemnly at leather arm-chairs.

"I think you extremely fortunate," said Sir Thomas, gravely, "to have won the affection of so charming and sensible a person. One can only hope you will retain it. You have made a very wise choice, but one can hardly expect the Derings to feel the same. I shall, however, assist them to do so, as far as it lies in my power, by settling two hundred a year upon Emily when the marriage takes place. This, with what I already give you and your own earnings, added to what Emily herself possesses, will bring your income up to a thousand a year. It is not very much, but many people have begun married life successfully upon even less. When is the marriage to take place?"

"Oh, sometime, or other, I suppose," said Geoffrey, restlessly. Of course he wanted to be married, but he did n't like the idea of a marriage taking place; it made him think of an appointment at the dentist's.

"I should settle the date as soon as possible if I were you," said Sir Thomas. "This is the last of April; June is an excellent month for a wedding. Emily will of course fix her own date, but she will not do so unless you urge it upon her. I disapprove of long engagements. She will be married from Campden Hill, of course; probably, I should suppose, at St. Mary Abbott's, Kensington."

"Oh, damn St. Mary Abbott's, Kensington!" exclaimed Geoffrey,, unexpectedly. Quite apart from the fact that it sounded like a line of poetry, no Amberey would have dreamed of damning a church. They damned dogs, boot-laces, or butlers.

Sir Thomas was seriously annoyed.

"If you are going to approach your marriage in this tone," he said severely, "I shall doubt its ever taking place."

"I can't think why you always do doubt me," said Geoffrey, impetuously kicking at a footstool. "It's jolly unfair. You seem to suppose I don't know my own mind; and yet I always have known it, and done what I wanted with it as well."

"This is the first time," said Sir Thomas, dryly, "that I have ever known you wish to do a really sensible thing; you cannot, therefore, be surprised if I am anxious as to whether you will succeed in doing it or not."

"If Emily were sensible, I dare say I should n't do it," said Geoffrey, recklessly. "Fortunately, she's adorable."

Sir Thomas folded the "Times" carefully and laid it on the nearest table.

"You will find," he said, "in after life that Emily is even more sensible than she is adorable." "Oh, damn after life!" said Geoffrey, even more recklessly.