down the paper and asked: “What is it, Maud?”
“Oh, nothing, Pen.”
That sounded dangerous to his peace of mind. With apprehension he asked: “Whom is the letter from?”
“Murdo.”
“What does he say?”
Maud scanned Murdo’s letter again hurriedly. It was written in his bold, impatient hand with two ink splotches from a too vigorously dotted i. … “The children must be getting past the puppy stage,” Murdo had written. “Do bring them up, Maud, with some regard for the past; anything but this grovelling mediocrity of mind, this cheap scepticism without style or quality. A man ought to believe what his parents teach him to believe. Tell my Ishmaelitish brother-in-law that I’ll christen your children yet, in spite of him!” Maud passed the raw material of this letter through the sieve of her sex, the mesh of which is tact, and began:
“Murdo is to go to China from Japan. He thinks trouble is brewing in China.” She gave Pen a smile and a little shrug, in which Murdo’s wish to be in the thick of trouble was delicately transformed into a woman’s humorous comment on the sex in general. “Murdo says his hair is turning grey.” Maud smiled uneasily under the special quality of his look, and uttered the unspoken thought between them.
“We are, too,” she said.
Pen dwelt on the picture of Murdo facing the little death of middle age. “So he goes off to China to find trouble,” he thought.
“Murdo mailed the letter at Shanghai just before sailing. He’s staying with us just long enough to do his business — less than a week. He says the West upsets him. Then he is going back by way of England.”
“I see,” said Pen.… Out of the corner of his eye he observed that Daniel was kicking Alastair under the table — or was it Alastair kicking Daniel? “Boys!” he said sharply. Joanna winced at her father’s tone and came behind his chair, smoothing out the frown from his forehead; she could not bear to see anyone frown. “Daddy, are you good?” she asked anxiously. He could not help smiling.
The children clattered out of the room.
“It will be pleasant to see Murdo again,” said Pen generously.
“Pen, the children will be in their teens before we know it, and we’re not getting younger ourselves. Couldn’t we have them christened? Murdo could do it.” He put his hand over hers, but she stiffened it slightly against him.
“You want it very much, Maud, don’t you?”
“It’s right to. After all, we’re Christians.”
“Do you think Joanna is well enough? … The excitement — you know what the doctor said —”
“We could have it in Ardentinny.”
“Well, since you want it so much.… But mind you, my dear, I’ll have no one for godfather but myself. That’s my responsibility!”
Maud’s eyes glistened with tears. “You’re so just , Pen. You have such true ideas for the children, and yet you always make me feel that you want my beliefs — though I dare say they are often only women’s ideas — to count, too. And I can’t tell you how much … I think almost everyday of my life how lucky the children are to have you to give them a broader view — to give them intellectual breadth, Pen.”
Pen smiled a little ruefully. No one knew how to make him hug his fetters like Maud, he thought.… “You know, Maud, I often think I’ve spent my life ploughing the sky. What seems important to me — loyalty to reason — other people simply do not think about. It seems to me that a zealot who isn’t ruthless enough to stay a zealot is nature’s most abhorred vacuum.”
“Pen?”
“Yes, Maud?”
She hesitated. “We have been fortunate — in each other, I mean.”
Pen squeezed her hand and said: “You ought to know.”
“My father used to say ‘the sweetest fruit comes after frost.’”
“Well — perhaps. That is, if things only happened to one and not in one.… I shouldn’t care what happened if only Joanna —”
But Maud, forcing herself to smile, shook her head at him.
Chapter II
I
The christening was to be held on the afternoon of Murdo’s arrival.
Summer stole into the gloomy drawing room, bringing to those inside the hum of insects and the fanning of a light breeze. An open French window framed a picture of ladies in muslin dresses “looking at the garden” and of the two boys skylarking on the lawn.
The room in which three of the last children of the nineteenth century were to be made children of God embodied the dim gentility of the Victorian age. Here the more Victorian members of the family had by now assembled. The Burnets were contriving to be subtly at home to the Thatchers from New England, whom for the first time they beheld as a clan within a clan in their own territory. No one versed in the delicate antagonisms of “in-laws ” could have failed to observe that this was a family gathering.
About the Thatchers there was a bred-in-the-bone stiffness; they were too much in earnest, too desirous to “do what’s right” to thread their way with finesse through the iridescent web of the social relations. To a Burnet — to Charles Burnet, for instance, who moved carelessly in flannels and blazer through a phalanx of formal cutaways — there was a locked-up look about the expressions of the Thatchers. The faces of the Thatcher women were all that women’s faces should be, gentle and solicitous; and yet always with a shade of obstinacy, of reserved opinion. Studiously affable, they mingled warily with the Burnets, evincing an interest, more than usually proprietary, in Pen’s children, as if subtly to underline the fact that the children were, after all, Thatchers. Their talk was of the family, the never stale epic of Thatcher births, marriages, and deaths.
Several of them were clustered near the fireplace, drawing, perhaps unconsciously, a feeling of family solidarity from the photographs of Thatchers past and present who gazed uncompromisingly from the mantelpiece upon this Burnet room. There Pen was talking to his eldest brother Diodate who had come from Ohio for the christening. Diodate sat in silence, making his presence felt, though he uttered no word, by the decisive severity of his attention. In him the inherited puritan earnestness, informing a more robust nature than Pen’s, had settled solidly into an upright practicality. He began to speak in a deep voice that boomed sepulchrally upon an instantly attentive circle, patting his knee at each point made. “They have — too many — missionaries (pat) — seem to think — they can’t get along without more (pat) — so I don’t help them — when they come to me (decisive pat) — I say let them get together and fight the devil at home (pat) — if that’s what they really want to do” (hands folded, knees crossed: full stop). The ladies confronted with indubitable male logic, fluttered and hastened to agree.… Something very likeable about Diodate: ability, honesty, kindliness.
His son Quentin, too shy to join his cousins on the lawn, stood near his father, swaying backward and forward on his heels and pretending that the Thatchers on the mantelpiece (especially the whiskered ones in the daguerreotypes) were a jury — no, better than
