On Tuesday Lewisham returned from Vigours' at five--at half-past six he would go on to his science class at Walham Green--and discovered Mrs. Chaffery and Ethel in tears. He was fagged and rather anxious for some tea, but the news they had for him drove tea out of his head altogether.
"He's gone," said Ethel.
"Who's gone? What! Not Chaffery?"
Mrs. Chaffery, with a keen eye to Lewisham's behaviour, nodded tearfully over an experienced handkerchief.
Lewisham grasped the essentials of the situation forthwith, and trembled on the brink of an expletive. Ethel handed him a letter.
For a moment Lewisham held this in his hand asking; questions. Mrs. Chaffery had come upon it in the case of her eight-day clock when the time to wind it came round. Chaffery, it seemed, had not been home since Saturday night. The letter was an open one addressed to Lewisham, a long rambling would-be clever letter, oddly inferior in style to Chaffery's conversation. It had been written some hours before Chaffery's last visit his talk then had been perhaps a sort of codicil.
"The inordinate stupidity of that man Lagune is driving me out of the country," Lewisham saw. "It has been at last a definite stumbling block--even a legal stumbling block. I fear. I am off. I skedaddle. I break ties. I shall miss our long refreshing chats--you had found me out and I could open my mind. I am sorry to part from Ethel also, but thank Heaven she has you to look to! And indeed they both have you to look to, though the 'both' may be a new light to you."
Lewisham growled, went from page 1 to page 3--conscious of their both looking to him now--even intensely--and discovered Chaffery in a practical vein.
"There is but little light, and portable property in that house in Clapham that has escaped my lamentable improvidence, but there are one or two things--the iron-bound chest, the bureau with a broken hinge, and the large air pump--distinctly pawnable if only you can contrive to get them to a pawnshop. You have more Will power than I--I never could get the confounded things downstairs. That iron-bound box was originally mine, before I married your mother-in-law, so that I am not altogether regardless of your welfare and the necessity of giving some equivalent. Don't judge me too harshly."
Lewisham turned over sharply without finishing that page.
"My life at Clapham," continued the letter, "has irked me for some time, and to tell you the truth, the spectacle of your vigorous young happiness--you are having a very good time, you know, fighting the world--reminded me of the passing years. To be frank in self-criticism, there is more than a touch of the New Woman about me, and I feel I have still to live my own life. What a beautiful phrase that is--to live one's own life!--redolent of honest scorn for moral plagiarism. No _Imitatio Christi_ in that ... I long to see more of men and cities.... I begin late, I know, to live my own life, bald as I am and grey-whiskered; but better late than never. Why should the educated girl have the monopoly of the game? And after all, the whiskers will dye....
"There are things--I touch upon them lightly--that will presently astonish Lagune." Lewisham became more attentive. "I marvel at that man, grubbing hungry for marvels amidst the almost incredibly marvellous. What can be the nature of a man who gapes after Poltergeists with the miracle of his own silly existence (inconsequent, reasonless, unfathomably weird) nearer to him than breathing and closer than hands and feet. What is _he_ for, that he should wonder at Poltergeists? I am astonished these by no means flimsy psychic phenomena do not turn upon their investigators, and that a Research Society of eminent illusions and hallucinations does not pursue Lagune with sceptical! inquiries. Take his house--expose the alleged man of Chelsea! _A priori_ they might argue that a thing so vain, so unmeaning, so strongly beset by cackle, could only be the diseased imagining of some hysterical phantom. Do _you_ believe that such a thing as Lagune exists? I must own to the gravest doubts. But happily his banker is of a more credulous type than I.... Of all that Lagune will tell you soon enough."
Lewisham read no more. "I suppose he thought himself clever when he wrote that rot," said Lewisham bitterly, throwing the sheets forcibly athwart the table. "The simple fact is, he's stolen, or forged, or something--and bolted."
There was a pause. "What will become of Mother?" said Ethel.
Lewisham looked at Mother and thought for a moment. Then he glanced at Ethel.
"We're all in the same boat," said Lewisham.
"I don't want to give any trouble to a single human being," said Mrs. Chaffery.
"I think you might get a man his tea, Ethel," said Lewisham, sitting down suddenly; "anyhow." He drummed on the table with his fingers. "I have to get to Walham Green by a quarter to seven."
"We're all in the same boat," he repeated after an interval, and continued drumming. He was chiefly occupied by the curious fact that they were all in the same boat. What an extraordinary faculty he had for acquiring responsibility! He looked up suddenly and caught Mrs. Chaffery's tearful eye directed to Ethel and full of distressful interrogation, and his perplexity was suddenly changed to pity. "It's all right, Mother," he said. "I'm not going to be unreasonable. I'll stand by you."
"Ah!" said Mrs. Chaffery. "As if I didn't know!" and Ethel came and kissed him.
He seemed in imminent danger of universal embraces.
"I wish you'd let me have my tea," he said. And while he had his tea he asked Mrs. Chaffery questions and tried to get the new situation into focus.
But even at ten o'clock, when he was returning hot and jaded from Walham Green, he was still trying to get the situation into focus. There were vague ends and blank walls of interrogation in the matter, that perplexed him.
He knew that his supper would be only the prelude to an interminable "talking over," and indeed he did not get to bed until nearly two. By that time a course of action was already agreed upon. Mrs. Chaffery was tied to the house in Clapham by a long lease, and thither they must go. The ground floor and first floor were let unfurnished, and the rent of these practically paid the rent of the house. The Chafferys occupied basement and second floor. There was a bedroom on the second floor, formerly let to the first floor tenants, that he and Ethel could occupy, and in this an old toilet table could be put for such studies as were to be prosecuted at home. Ethel could have her typewriter in the subterranean breakfast-room. Mrs. Chaffery and Ethel must do the catering and the bulk of the housework, and as soon as possible, since letting lodgings would not square with Lewisham's professional pride, they must get rid of the lease that bound them and take some smaller and more suburban residence. If they did that without leaving any address it might save their feelings from any return of the prodigal Chaffery.
Mrs. Chaffery's frequent and pathetic acknowledgments of Lewisham's goodness only partly relieved his disposition to a philosophical bitterness. And the practical issues were complicated by excursions upon the subject of Chaffery, what he might have done, and where he might have gone,............