ADRIENNE TONER

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“COME down to Coldbrooks next week-end, will you, Roger?” said Barney Chadwick. He had been wandering around the room, pausing once to glance at the César Franck on the piano and once at the window to look down at the Thames, and his voice now, though desultory in intention, betrayed to his friend preoccupation and even anxiety. “There is going to be an interesting girl with us: American; very original and charming.”

Roger Oldmeadow sat at his writing-bureau in the window, and his high dark head was silhouetted against the sky. It had power and even beauty, with moments of brooding melancholy; but the type to which it most conformed was that of the clever, cantankerous London bachelor; and if he sometimes looked what he was, the scholar who had taken a double first at Balliol and gave brain and sinew to an eminent review, he looked more often what he was not, a caustic, cautious solicitor, clean-shaved and meticulously neat, with the crisp bow at his collar, single eyeglass, and thin, wry smile.

There was a cogitative kindness in his eyes and a latent irony on his lips as he now scrutinized Barney Chadwick, who had come finally to lean against the mantelpiece, and it was difficult before Roger Oldmeadow’s gaze at such moments not to feel that you were giving yourself away. This was evidently what Barney was trying not to feel, or, at all events, not to show. He tapped his cigarette-end, fixing his eyes upon it and frowning a little. He had ruffled his brown hair with the nervous hand passed through it during his ramble, but ruffled or sleek Barney could never look anything but perfection, just as, whether he smiled or frowned, he could never look anything but charming. In his spring-tide grey, with a streak of white inside his waistcoat and a tie of petunia silk that matched his socks, he was a pleasant figure of fashion; and he was more than that; more than the mere London youth of 1913, who danced the tango and cultivated Post-Impressionism and the Russian ballet. He was perhaps not much more; but his difference, if slight, made him noticeable. It came back, no doubt, to the fact of charm. He was radiant yet reserved; confident yet shy. He had a slight stammer, and his smile seemed to ask you to help him out. His boyhood, at twenty-nine, still survived in his narrow face, clumsy in feature and delicate in contour, with long jaw, high temples and brown eyes, half sweet, half sleepy. The red came easily to his brown cheek, and he had the sensitive, stubborn lips of the little boy at the preparatory school whom Oldmeadow had met and befriended now many years ago.

In Oldmeadow’s eyes he had always remained the “little Barney” he had then christened him—even Barney’s mother had almost forgotten that his real name was Eustace—and he could not but know that Barney depended upon him more than upon anyone in the world. To Barney his negations were more potent than other people’s affirmations, and though he had sometimes said indignantly, “You leave one nothing to agree about, Roger, except Plato and Church-music,” he was never really happy or secure in his rebellions from what he felt or suspected to be Oldmeadow’s tastes and judgments. Oldmeadow had seen him through many admirations, not only for books and pictures, but for original girls. Barney thought that he liked the unusual. He was a devotee of the ballet, and had in his rooms cushions and curtains from the Omega shop and a drawing by Wyndham Lewis. But Oldmeadow knew that he really preferred the photograph of a Burne-Jones, a survival from Oxford days, that still bravely, and irrelevantly, hung opposite it, and he waited to see the Wyndham Lewis replaced by a later portent. Barney could remain stubbornly faithful to old devotions, but he was easily drawn into new orbits; and it was a new star, evidently, that he had come to describe and justify.