nature's protective mimicry. George was rather small for his ten years. Dark, like his mother, he had her eyes and her thick eyebrows that almost met in the middle, and her pale skin. As for his mind, he seemed to be sometimes alarmingly precocious and sometimes a case of arrested development. In this and many other respects he greatly resembled other boys. The son of a bigamist can have no name, unless it be his mother's maiden name, but George knew nothing of that. He had borne his father's name, and when at the exciting and puzzling period of his mother's marriage he had learnt that his surname would in future be Clayhanger he had a little resented the affront to his egoism. Edwin's explanation, however, that the change was for the convenience of people in general had caused him to shrug his shoulders in concession and to murmur casually: "Oh, well then-!" He seemed to be assenting with loftiness: "If it's any particular use to the whole world, I don't really mind."
"I say, uncle," he began.
Edwin had chosen this form of address. "Stepfather" was preposterous, and "father" somehow offended him; so he constituted himself an uncle.
"Hello, kid!" said he. "Can you find room to keep anything else in your pockets besides your hands?"
George snatched his hands out of his pockets. Then he smiled confidently up. These two were friends. Edwin was as proud as the boy of the friendship, and perhaps more flattered. At first he had not cared for George, being repelled by George's loud, positive tones, his brusque and often violent gestures, and his intense absorption in himself. But gradually he had been won by the boy's boyishness, his smile, his little, soft body, his unspoken invocations, his resentment of injustice (except when strict justice appeared to clash with his own interests), his absolute impotence against adult decrees, his touching fatalism, his recondite personal distinction that flashed and was gone, and his occasional cleverness and wit. He admitted that George charmed him. But he well knew that he also charmed George. He had a way of treating George as an equal that few children (save possibly Clara's) could have resisted. True, he would quiz the child, but he did not forbid the child to quiz. The mother was profoundly relieved and rejoiced by this friendship. She luxuriated in it. Edwin might well have been inimical to the child; he might through the child have shown a jealousy of the child's father. But, somewhat to the astonishment of even Edwin himself, he never saw the father in the child, nor thought of the father, nor resented the parenthood that was not his. For him the child was an individual. And in spite of his stern determination not to fall into the delusions of conceited parents, he could not help thinking that George was a remarkable child.
"Have you seen my horse?" asked George.
"Have I seen your horse? … Oh! … I've seen that you've left it lying about on the hall-table."
"I put it there so that you'd see it," George persuasively excused himself for the untidiness.
"Well, let's inspect it," Edwin forgave him, and picked up from the table a piece of cartridge-paper on which was a drawing of a great cart-horse with shaggy feet. It was a vivacious sketch.
"You're improving," said Edwin, judicially, but in fact much impressed. Surely few boys of ten could draw as well as that! The design was strangely more mature than certain quite infantile watercolours that Edwin had seen scarcely a year earlier.
"It's rather good, isn't it?" George suggested, lifting up his head so that he could just see over the edge of the paper which Edwin held at the level of his watch-chain.
"I've met worse. Where did you see this particular animal?"
"I saw him down near the Brewery this morning. But when I'm doing a horse, I see him on the paper before I begin to draw, and I just draw round him."
Edwin thought:
"This kid is no ordinary kid."
He said:
"Well, we'll pin it up here. We'll have a Royal Academy and hear what the public has to say." He took a pin from under his waistcoat.
"That's not level," said George.
And when Edwin had readjusted the pin, George persisted boldly:
"That's not level either."
"It's as level as it's going to be. I expect you've been drawing horses instead of practising your piano."
He looked down at the mysterious little boy, who lived always so much nearer to the earth's surface than himself.
George nodded simply, and then scratched his head.
"I suppose if I don't practise while I'm young I shall regret it in after life, shan't I?"
"Who told you that?"
"It's what Auntie Hamps said to me, I think… I say, uncle."
"What's up?"
"Is Mr. John coming to-night?"
"I suppose so. Why?"
"Oh, nothing… I say, uncle."
"That's twice you've said it."
The boy smiled.
"You know that piece in the Bible about if two of you shall agree on earth-?"
"What of it?" Edwin asked rather curtly, anticipating difficulties.
"I don't think two boys would be enough, would they? Two grown-ups might. But I'm not so sure about two boys. You see in the very next verse it says two or three, gathered together."
"Three might be more effective. It's always as well to be on the safe side."
"Could you pray for anything? A penknife, for instance?"
"Why not?"
"But could you?" George was a little impatient.
"Better ask your mother," said Edwin, who was becoming self-conscious under the strain.
George exploded coarsely:
"Poh! It's no good asking mother."
Said Edwin:
"The great thing in these affairs is to know what you want, and to want it. Concentrate as hard as you can, a long time in advance. No use half wanting!"
"Well, there's one thing that's poz [positive]. I couldn't begin to concentrate to-night."
"Why not?"
"Who could?" George protested. "We're all so nervous to-night, aren't we, with this At Home business. And I know I never could concentrate in my best clothes."
For Edwin the boy with his shocking candour had suddenly precipitated out of the atmosphere, as it were, the collective nervousness of the household, made it into a phenomenon visible, tangible, oppressive. And the household was no longer a collection of units, but an entity. A bell rang faintly in the kitchen, and the sound abraded his nerves. The first guests were on the threshold, and Hilda was late. He looked at the clock. Yes, she was late. The hour named in the invitations was already past. All day he had feared lest she should be late, and she was late. He looked at the glass of the front-door; but night had come, and it was opaque. Ada tripped into view and ran upstairs.
"Don't you hear the front-door?" he stopped her flight.
"It was missis's bell, sir."
"Ah!"
