He was duly at Transham station in time for the London train, and, after a minute consecrated to looking in the wrong direction, he saw his mother already on the platform with her bag, an air-cushion, and a beautifully neat roll.
'Travelling third!' he thought. 'Why will she do these things?'
Slightly flushed, she kissed Felix with an air of abstraction.
"How good of you to meet me, darling!"
Felix pointed in silence to the crowded carriage from which she had emerged. Frances Freeland looked a little rueful. "It would have been delightful," she said. "There was a dear baby there and, of course, I couldn't have the window down, so it WAS rather hot."
Felix, who could just see the dear baby, said dryly:
"So that's how you go about, is it? Have you had any lunch?"
Frances Freeland put her hand under his arm. "Now, don't fuss, darling! Here's sixpence for the porter. There's only one trunk--it's got a violet label. Do you know them? They're so useful.
You see them at once. I must get you some."
"Let me take those things. You won't want this cushion. I'll let the air out."
"I'm afraid you won't be able, dear. It's quite the best screw I've ever come across--a splendid thing; I can't get it undone."
"Ah!" said Felix. "And now we may as well go out to the car!"
He was conscious of a slight stoppage in his mother's footsteps and rather a convulsive squeeze of her hand on his arm. Looking at her face, he discovered it occupied with a process whose secret he could not penetrate, a kind of disarray of her features, rapidly and severely checked, and capped with a resolute smile. They had already reached the station exit, where Stanley's car was snorting.
Frances Freeland looked at it, then, mounting rather hastily, sat, compressing her lips.
When they were off, Felix said:
"Would you like to stop at the church and have a look at the brasses to your grandfather and the rest of them?"
His mother, who had slipped her hand under his arm again, answered:
"No, dear; I've seen them. The church is not at all beautiful. I like the old church at Becket so much better; it is such a pity your great-grandfather was not buried there."
She had never quite got over the lack of 'niceness' about those ploughs.
Going, as was the habit of Stanley's car, at considerable speed, Felix was not at first certain whether the peculiar little squeezes his arm was getting were due to the bounds of the creature under them or to some cause more closely connected with his mother, and it was not till they shaved a cart at the turning of the Becket drive that it suddenly dawned on him that she was in terror. He discovered it in looking round just as she drew her smile over a spasm of her face and throat. And, leaning out of the car, he said:
"Drive very slowly, Batter; I want to look at the trees."
A little sigh rewarded him. Since SHE had said nothing, He said nothing, and Clara's words in the hall seemed to him singularly tactless:
"Oh! I meant to have reminded you, Felix, to send the car back and take a fly. I thought you knew that Mother's terrified of motors."
And at his mother's answer:
"Oh! no; I quite enjoyed it, dear," he thought: 'Bless her heart!
She IS a stoic!'
Whether or no to tell her of the 'kick-up at Joyfields' exercised his mind. The question was intricate, for she had not yet been informed that Nedda and Derek were engaged, and Felix did not feel at liberty to forestall the young people. That was their business.
On the other hand, she would certainly glean from Clara a garbled understanding of the recent events at Joyfields, if she were not first told of them by himself. And he decided to tell her, with the natural trepidation of one who, living among principles and theories, never quite knew what those, for whom each fact is unrelated to anything else under the moon, were going to think.
Frances Freeland, he knew well, kept facts and theories especially unrelated, or, rather, modified her facts to suit her theories, instead of, like Felix, her theories to suit her facts. For example, her instinctive admiration for Church and State, her instinctive theory that they rested on gentility and people who were nice, was never for a moment shaken when she saw a half-starved baby of the slums. Her heart would impel her to pity and feed the poor little baby if she could, but to correlate the creature with millions of other such babies, and those millions with the Church and State, would not occur to her. And if Felix made an attempt to correlate them for her she would look at him and think: 'Dear boy! How good he is! I do wish he wouldn't let that line come in his forehead; it does so spoil it!' And she would say: "Yes, darling, I know, it's very sad; only I'm NOT clever."
And, if a Liberal government chanced to be in power, would add: "Of course, I do think this Government is dreadful. I MUST show you a sermon of the dear Bishop of Walham. I cut it out of the 'Daily Mystery.' He puts things so well--he always has such nice ideas."
And Felix, getting up, would walk a little and sit down again too suddenly. Then, as if entreating him to look over her want of 'cleverness,' she would put out a hand that, for all its whiteness, had never been idle and smooth his forehead. It had sometimes touched him horribly to see with what despair she made attempts to follow him in his correlating efforts, and with what relief she heard him cease enough to let her say: "Yes, dear; only, I must show you this new kind of expanding cork. It's simply splendid.
It bottles up everything!" And after staring at her just a moment he would acquit her of irony. Very often after these occasions he had thought, and sometimes said: "Mother, you're the best Conservative I ever met." She would glance at him then, with a special loving doubtfulness, at a loss as to whether or no he had designed to compliment her.