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"I seek after noumena," repeated Chaffery with great satisfaction, and gesticulated with his hand, waving away everything but that. "I cannot do with surfaces and appearances. I am one of those nympholepts, you know, nympholepts ... Must pursue the truth of things! the elusive fundamental ... I make a rule, I never tell myself lies never. There are few who can say that.
"I don't want to give any trouble to a single human being," said Mrs. Chaffery. "I think you might get a man his tea, Ethel," said Lewisham, sitting down suddenly; "anyhow." He drummed on the table with his fingers. "I have to get to Walham Green by a quarter to seven." "We're all in the same boat," he repeated after an interval, and continued drumming.
He was mean; he allowed only a weekly twenty-five shillings for housekeeping, and sometimes things grew unsatisfactory at the week-end. There seemed to be little sympathy between mother and daughter; the widow had been flighty in a dingy fashion, and her marriage with her chief lodger Chaffery had led to unforgettable sayings.
His picture began to shape itself into Ethel, and her mysterious mother, and the vague dexterous Chaffery holding him back, entangled in an impalpable net from that bright and glorious ascent to performance and distinction. Leaky boots and the splash of cabs for all his life as his portion! Already the Forbes Medal, the immediate step, was as good as lost....
Chaffery guided her house by the oracular items of "Inquire Within upon Everything," but Lewisham considered that work unscientific. Ethel was also of opinion that much might be learnt from the sixpenny ladies' papers the penny ones had hardly begun in those days.
Then he was aware that Lagune was asking them all to sit down. Already seated at the table was the Medium, Chaffery, a benevolent-looking, faintly shabby gentleman with bushy iron-grey side-whiskers, a wide, thin-lipped mouth tucked in at the corners, and a chin like the toe of a boot. He regarded Lewisham critically and disconcertingly over gilt glasses.
She explained if Lagune dismissed her she was to go into the country to an aunt, a sister of Chaffery's who needed a companion. Chaffery insisted upon that. "Companion they call it. I shall be just a servant she has no servant. My mother cries when I talk to her. She tells me she doesn't want me to go away from her. But she's afraid of him. 'Why don't you do what he wants? she says."
Any more than a railway map will run a train a mile." "Eh?" said Lewisham. "Map run a train a mile of course, yes. No, it won't." "That is precisely my case," said Chaffery. "That is the case of your pure knave everywhere. We are not fools because we know.
You really must concede a certain possibility of wider views to a man more than twice your age. But here's supper. For a little while at any rate we'll call a truce." Ethel had come in again bearing an additional chair, and Mrs. Chaffery appeared behind her, crowning the preparations with a jug of small beer.
At the end of the evening whisky and hot water were produced, and Chaffery, now in a mood of great urbanity, said he had rarely enjoyed anyone's conversation so much as Lewisham's, and insisted upon everyone having whisky. Mrs. Chaffery and Ethel added sugar and lemon. Lewisham felt an instantaneous mild surprise at the sight of Ethel drinking grog. At the door Mrs.
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