Chapter 3

THE ENTERTAINMENT OF MR. DIRECK REACHES A CLIMAX

Section 1

Breakfast was in the open air, and a sunny, easy-going feast. Then the
small boys laid hands on Mr. Direck and showed him the pond and the
boats, while Mr. Britling strolled about the lawn with Hugh, talking
rather intently. And when Mr. Direck returned from the boats in a state
of greatly enhanced popularity he found Mr. Britling conversing over his
garden railings to what was altogether a new type of Britisher in Mr.
Direck's experience. It was a tall, lean, sun-bitten youngish man of
forty perhaps, in brown tweeds, looking more like the Englishman of the
American illustrations than anything Mr. Direck had met hitherto. Indeed
he came very near to a complete realisation of that ideal except that
there was a sort of intensity about him, and that his clipped moustache
had the restrained stiffness of a wiry-haired terrier. This gentleman
Mr. Direck learnt was Colonel Rendezvous. He spoke in clear short
sentences, they had an effect of being punched out, and he was refusing
to come into the garden and talk.

"Have to do my fourteen miles before lunch," he said. "You haven't seen
Manning about, have you?"

"He isn't here," said Mr. Britling, and it seemed to Mr. Direck that
there was the faintest ambiguity in this reply.

"Have to go alone, then," said Colonel Rendezvous. "They told me that he
had started to come here."

"I shall motor over to Bramley High Oak for your Boy Scout festival,"
said Mr. Britling.

"Going to have three thousand of 'em," said the Colonel. "Good show."

His steely eyes seemed to search the cover of Mr. Britling's garden for
the missing Manning, and then he decided to give him up. "I must be
going," he said. "So long. Come up!"

A well-disciplined dog came to heel, and the lean figure had given Mr.
Direck a semi-military salutation and gone upon its way. It marched with
a long elastic stride; it never looked back.

"Manning," said Mr. Britling, "is probably hiding up in my rose garden."

"Curiously enough, I guessed from your manner that that might be the
case," said Mr. Direck.

"Yes. Manning is a London journalist. He has a little cottage about a
mile over there"--Mr. Britling pointed vaguely--"and he comes down for
the week-ends. And Rendezvous has found out he isn't fit. And everybody
ought to be fit. That is the beginning and end of life for Rendezvous.
Fitness. An almost mineral quality, an insatiable activity of body,
great mental simplicity. So he takes possession of poor old Manning and
trots him for that fourteen miles--at