The lift shot them into the arms of another morning coat, and this morning coat piloted them over to a counter where they found peace in the charge of an exceptionally talented shop-girl. For this latter, as soon as she had pierced through Dawkins’ embarrassment and ascertained that they wanted everything, everything, a young lady ought to have, and, seemingly, were not very particular about what they paid for it, rose splendidly to the occasion. She brought a list, which was sent to parents by one of the best girls’ schools in England, of things which the girls had to have, and they worked through this, item by item, the shop assistant nonchalantly, Nina eagerly, and Dawkins sweating at every pore. At each item the shop assistant produced a selection of garments, and Dawkins would hurriedly order the correct number of the best priced ones, in a fashion strange to Nina, who was accustomed to fingerings and mental figurings and prolonged debate. At intervals the assistant ran a tape measure over whatever part of Nina’s anatomy was being clothed at the moment, while Nina put in a word here and there when her surprise permitted it. Drill dresses, for instance. Dawkins vaguely thought that drill dresses could wait for a while, seeing that Nina had no drill to attend, but the shop assistant, coldly, and Nina, excitedly, enlightened him to the fact that all self-respecting little girls wore drill dresses day in and day out. And underclothing. Dawkins, with his stone age knowledge of this sort of thing, thought that frilliness was a sine qua non of underclothing, and was surprised by Nina’s repudiation of subsurface frilliness in any form, and by the shop assistant’s support of her.
But when it came to party frocks the situation was rather reversed, for the arrival of a selection of party frocks was eagerly acclaimed by Nina but coldly regarded by Dawkins. For that sound common sense of his which was his only asset told him that the judgments of a little girl and of a shop assistant and of a mere man might all be at fault when it came to choosing party frocks. He would have preferred not to buy any at all, but Nina grew so woebegone at the disappointment, and the assistant’s eyebrows rose to such a pitch that he gave way; but his common sense saw to it that only the two plainest and neatest frocks were bought. He was not going to run the risk of having Nina overdressed.
Hats were another source of trouble. Dawkins knew nothing at all about hats, and his brain whirled as he was led to where hundreds of hats awaited purchasers. But he stuck manfully to the same principle, and selected the plainest—and it was surprising what a difference it made to Nina to have her shabby old imitation velour replaced by a smart felt.
By the time that underclothes and stockings and hats and dresses had been bought, and shoes had been tried on, there was a mountainous pile of things on the counter waiting to be packed. Dawkins, with a glimmer of forethought, bought a couple of suitcases as well, before proceeding to the less prosaic domain wherein were to be found hair brushes and toilet-table apparatus—to which that invaluable list was still a guide.
And then at last the business was finished, and the monstrous total added, and one of the store’s messengers sent across to the bank with Mr. Dawkins’ check to obtain cash to insure immediate delivery, and Mr. Dawkins himself sank back into a chair in the store’s restaurant and ordered coffee, with milk and biscuits for Nina. He assured himself, as he sighed with fatigue, that he would rather spend a morning on Birds Island than one in a ladies’ store, any day of the week. Then, with their purchases heaped into a taxicab (a new delight for Nina) they came back to the hotel, where the smart little boys jumped to relieve them of their burdens.
Dawkins surveyed the pile of parcels heaped up in Nina’s room with trepidation.
“Are you sure you know what to do with all this?” he asked.
“Of course I am,” said Nina.
“Well, we’ve got to do something with it,” said Dawkins. “I suppose we’d better try to put it away.”
Never was there such an untying of string and such a cutting off of labels, and such an opening and shutting of drawers. Dawkins had a twinkle of intuition.
“What are you going to put on now?” he asked.
“Ooh,” said Nina.
The trim little hat and coat and neat frock which she put on during Dawkins’ discreet retirement suited her marvelously—and they made her look more like El Halcón than ever. Dawkins caught his breath sharply as he came back into the room and saw the slight little figure in the middle of the room before the wardrobe mirror. He was quite embarrassed and uncomfortable about it. The thin face with the pointed chin, the firm lips and straight brows, the gray eyes and the black hair were the Hawk to the life. Dawkins stood stiff and silent while Nina preened herself in front of him.
“I do think I look nice,” she said, “I do, really, don’t I—er—”
They both realized the difficulty at the same moment.
“Do you know,” said Nina, “I don’t know what to call you?”
“That’s so,” said Dawkins.
“Of course,” said Nina, “I could call you Mr. Dawkins, but I don’t want to.”
“Neither do I,” said Dawkins. “You’d better think of something else.”
“You know,” said Nina, “you’re just like my daddy. Shall I—”
“No, no, no, of course not,” said Dawkins, horrified. The bare idea of comparing him to the Hawk seemed like blasphemy to him, and it was worse still that the Hawk’s daughter should do the comparing. Dawkins did not fully realize that Nina’s faint remembrance of her father (who had never paid much attention to her, anyway) was almost obliterated by her imagings of him, and would soon be quite overlayed by her memories of Dawkins.
Nina was quite hurt by Dawkins’ vehemence.
“All right then,” she said reproachfully, “you choose, instead.”
“Better call me uncle, I think, old lady,” he said, full of contrition, and uncle it was. She tried it once or twice, tentatively, during lunch.
And at lunch further matters occupied Mr. Dawkins’ mind. He knew absolutely nothing about the upbringing of children, beyond a vague idea that they ought to have plenty of milk and that they ought to sleep in the afternoon. This latter notion, of course, was laughed to scorn when he suggested it to her, cautiously.
“Why,” she said, ’ “I go to school in the afternoon, generally, so of course I can’t go to bed then, can I?”
Dawkins could only agree and start a fresh line of thought on how to spend the afternoon. He fell back on the eternal resource of London uncles, brevet or otherwise.
“What about the zoo?” he asked, and Nina’s face lit up with joy at the suggestion. She had never been to the zoo, she said, although all the other girls she knew had been (even Dawkins could gather from her expression the fact that the “other girls” had not been too kind about it, either) and she did so want to go. So the zoo it was, as soon as lunch was finished, with Dawkins’ right forefinger tightly clutched in Nina’s warm little paw.
“We’ve seen everything” said Nina, ecstatically to herself, as they saw the lions fed, and the sea-lions, and as she had rides on both the camel and the elephant. “I like the elephant best, I think, because the camel’s nearly ugly.” They had a wonderful tea together as it grew dark, smiling across the table at each other too happy even to talk, like the pair of children they were. And in the bus coming back Nina several times nearly went to sleep, and even Dawkins nodded now and then—what with shopping and the zoo and sleepless nights he was as tired as even Birds Island had made him. Nina went off to bed when they reached the hotel without a murmur, and when Dawkins came in to “tuck her in” she put up her arms to him and drew him eagerly down and kissed him with three big kisses because she was so happy. After that Dawkins spent the evening reading ponderously a book which had caught his eye on the bookstall in the hall —The Management of Children. Some of it was so far above Dawkins’ head that he felt bewildered and inferior. He made a note, however, of the titles of several similar books advertised on the wrapper for future purchase and consumption, and made a dogged attempt to digest all the
stuff about “the development of character” and soon.
That day established a precedent, and the four succeeding days passed in a similar swift and glorious panorama. They went to the Tower of London and St. Paul’s and the British Museum and Westminster Abbey, and some of it they enjoyed and some of it bored them. And they wandered hand in hand round the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and neither of them suspected that they were happy because they were together and had each of them some one to cherish. They ascribed their happiness, if either of them thought about it at all, to the museums and the churches. And in the evenings Mr. Dawkins toiled steadily through books on child management, scratching his head in bewilderment over Montessori, and musing over solemn translations from the German, and here and there gaining a gleam of light, but mostly working out his conclusions by the aid of his stolid common sense. The books gave him some useful data about diet and clothing which otherwise he could only have obtained by hard experience at Nina’s expense: the sweet question, for instance. When Dawkins was a child, children were restricted regarding sweets because sugar was bad for the teeth. Dawkins now read (the theory was only contradicted in one of the books, and Dawkins weighed the evidence by the method of counting heads) that sugar never did any one’s teeth any harm, but that sweets were deleterious because they necessitated eating between meals. All the books had something to say about eating between meals, and Dawkins’ orderly mind thoroughly agreed with them. So that he kept Nina off sweets with what tact he could raise. It seemed rather hard on Nina, somehow. And he read about what a child ought to wear, and the evils of tight clothing (and he sought desperately in his mind for details of what he had bought that morning at the stores) and the right temperature of a child’s bath (he bought a bath thermometer at the next opportunity) and how long a child ought to sleep, and what games a child ought to play, and what books a child ought to read (none of the authorities agreed with any other on these two points) and he frankly dodged reading the Chapters about the Religion of a Child and about What a Child Ought to Know. At present he could not nerve himself to the consideration of these two matters, and his common sense was outraged at the oily emphasis which various books laid on them. The knowledge he was accumulating did not hinder him, fortunately, from seeing to it that Nina changed her clothes when they came in out of the rain dripping wet; that was quite an achievement.
But on the sixth morning Dawkins was embarrassed by the necessity of leaving Nina to look after herself while he attended to business. He did the best he could; he established her in a corner of the lounge with a pile of magazines from the bookstall, and he countered her promise to be good and not go away by his own that he would be as quick as possible, but his conscience troubled him deeply as he made his way to the safe-deposit for a further batch of precious stones and thence to Mr. Carver’s office.
His conscience did not even cease from troubling him during the excitement of a duel with Carver. Carver was still suspicious about Dawkins and his diamonds, but his suspicion was gradually being allayed by the absence of difficulty in the disposing of them. Dawkins, on the other hand, did not trust Carver at all, and the interview was enlivened by Dawkins’ demands to see checks and memoranda of sales. Carver found that Dawkins knew just as much as he did about secret commissions and private rebates (which, if Carver had known it, was not very surprising, seeing that Dawkins had left England under a cloud because of operations of this nature), and his commercial pride was touched at Dawkins’ frank distrust of him as expressed by his refusal to let Carver have more than a few stones at a time. But in one respect the interview was eminently satisfactory for Dawkins came away with a check for nine thousand pounds and with the imminent prospect of receiving more yet.
Dawkins found that the possession of nine thousand pounds was, unexpectedly, curiously sobering, and it was a very thoughtful Dawkins who returned to the hotel where a very lonely and restless Nina awaited him in the desolate hotel lounge. All the decisions toward which he had been struggling so painfully lately came to him with a rush, even as Nina sprang from her chair and ran toward him. He sat down heavily beside her and characteristically plunged straight into the business. Frankness came more readily to him than the heavily rehearsed diplomacy with which he had encountered Mr. Simpson and Mr. Carver. He began to announce the conclusions reached during a whole series of thoughtful nights.
Chapter XII
“Look here, Nina,” he said, “we’ve got to settle down.”
Nina raised no objection at first; she waited for more details, so that Dawkins continued heavily with his plan.
“We’ve got to find a house,” said Dawkins, “and furnish it, and we’ve got to find some one to look after you, a governess or something,—no, Nina, you mustn’t make a face like that, old lady,—and you’ve got to go to school and we mustn’t spend any more time just yet hanging about round hotels.”
The expression “hotel children” was unknown to Dawkins, but his fumbling efforts at foresight had been successful inasmuch as they had called up before him a vision of what Nina might grow into if her present way of life were prolonged for a year or two.
“But why?” said Nina plaintively. “Why have we got to do all that? Why can’t you look after me like you do now? I don’t believe you want to.”
Dawkins steeled himself against the disappointment in her pinched little face and sternly kept the argument on a prosaic level.
“Do you know, old lady,” he said solemnly, “that I can be put in prison if I don’t send you to school?”
“Ooh,” said Nina. That made a difference.
“And if we don’t have a house,” he went on, “you’ll have to go to a boarding-school, and then we won’t see each other at all, not for months and months.”
Nina did not notice the anxiety in Dawkins’ blue eyes, for she was too busy with her own thoughts, but the anxiety was there right enough. The thought of losing Nina to a boarding-school after having so surprisingly won her was hateful to Dawkins, but—but—she might want to go.
“I wouldn’t like that a bit,” said Nina, to Dawkins’ immense relief.
“Well, then,” said Dawkins, “you see we’ve got to have a house, and find a school, and we’ll have to find some sort of lady to look after the house for us, won’t we, and see if your clothes want mending, and mine too, and all that sort of thing?”
“And what’ll you do?” asked Nina.
“Me? Oh, I suppose I’ll play golf.”
Dawkins’ tone was bleak and he felt a little lonely. He could only see an arid future of golf stretching inimitably before him. He could hardly bear to contemplate such a life of inaction, and yet if he were to stay where he could cherish Nina, and lead the respectable life he would have to lead if Nina were not to be gravely handicapped, he could not see how to occupy his time save with golf, which he had never played and for which he felt all the superior contempt usual in the lower middle class in which he had his origin. He had set aside his ambition to lead a filibustering expedition against Eguia; he had even set aside lingering thoughts of pretty ladies with vivid smiles. He was condemning himself, after full consideration, to a life of distasteful inertia, solely for the sake of Nina. And he did not want Nina to know he was making any sacrifice. Anxiously he eyed that small mortal across the table, where she sat considering things.
“Well,” he said, “are we going to have this house?”
“Yes, of course,” said Nina, and she forced a smile. Somehow she did not want Dawkins to know that she was making a sacrifice in giving up the magic domain of hotels and the delights of sightseeing and her warm intimacy with Dawkins. He seemed so keen on the new program that out of love for him she yielded without a murmur—although her estimate of her own wishes and of the situation was much more a thing of intuition than of clear-cut consideration.
“And shall we have a house in London or in the country?” asked Dawkins.
“You choose,” said Nina. She could not guess which he want
ed and so she would not say.
“Sure you don’t mind? Well, we’ll live in the country, then.”
And once these conclusions had been arrived at, the rest developed swiftly enough. That very afternoon found Dawkins and Nina together in a motor-car which bore them swiftly southwestward to where Dawkins had lingering memories of big green friendly downs, smooth and smiling and rounded—not scarped and jagged and inhospitable like the Andes. The country had changed somewhat since his boyhood; there were more houses and more roads, but the big downs were still there, bulking like friendly big brothers over the little houses at their feet. And these two wandered back and forth, finding a house for sale here and a house for sale there, and sometimes (for Nina, with Dawkins’ finger firmly in her hand, this was a magical adventure) even going in and inspecting. Somehow it was wonderfully thrilling to go hand in hand with this nice man through empty houses which reechoed footfalls so curiously, saying, “This would be a nice room for you,” or, “It’s not a very nice view from here,” and all that sort of thing, just as if they were both of them really and truly grown up. The gray evening was just beginning to fall when they reached the Other House (goodness only knew why it was called that, and the estate agent could never tell them) which sat beside a little lane just away from the main road, and seemed, as they neared it in the twilight, to open welcoming arms to them. Other minds might have thought it a very ordinary house, with its gray stone and white paint, save for great Summer Hill lying huge and magnificent just before it, and save for the little river, which, miraculously, ran through the garden and had to be crossed on a little white bridge.
Dawkins looked at Nina and Nina looked at Dawkins as they walked up the path, while the chauffeur yawned hugely in the car behind them. They both had the same sensation, although neither of them knew it of the other. This smiling gray house seemed to be welcoming them. Their footsteps on the gravel sounded somehow different, as they would sound were they at home, and the little river made its voice heard in the evening stillness to tell them that the house was not gaunt and dead, as had been the others they had visited, but warm and alive and kindly. Nina looked at Dawkins and Dawkins looked at Nina, and they walked round the outside of the house. Dawkins noticed that there were no neighboring houses; still they were comfortably near to the town; and there was no interruption of the view to the top of Summer Hill. He peered at the agent’s list and saw that there was just the right number of rooms and all the amenities of civilization. He said just as though he were, against his own wish, denying to Nina some voiced desire of hers (although she had said nothing), “It’s too dark to go inside, old lady. We’ll come again soon,” and they went back to London together, sitting very warm and close under the rugs at the back of the car.