Before twenty-four hours had passed Uncle Percy had made his mark not only upon his own family, but upon Polchester. One walk up the High Street and everyone was asking who was that “big, red-faced man”? But it was not only that he was big and red-faced; he moved with such complete assurance. He was more like our Archdeacon Brandon (although, of course, not nearly so handsome) than anyone who had been to our town for years. He had just the archdeacon’s confidence; it would have been interesting to watch the two men together.

He took charge of the Cole family in simply no time at all. For one thing he smoked all over the house. Uncle Samuel had been hitherto the only smoker in the family household, and it was understood that he smoked only in his studio. But Uncle Percy smoked everywhere—and cigars—and big black terribly-smelling cigars too! He appeared on the very first morning, just as the bell rang for breakfast, clad only in a dressing-gown with a great deal of red chest exposed, and thus confronted Aunt Amy on the way to dining-room prayer. He arrived for breakfast an hour late and ordered fresh tea. He sat in his brother’s study most of the morning, talking and smoking. He forced his way into Uncle Samuel’s studio and laughed at his pictures. (Of course, Uncle Samuel was in London.)

“Call them pictures?” he cried all through luncheon. “Those daubs of paint? Why, I could do better myself if I shut my eyes and splashed coloured ink on the canvas. And I know something about painting, mind you. Wasn’t a bad hand myself at it once. Gave it up because I hadn’t time to waste! Call them pictures!”

For this Aunt Amy almost forgave him his naked chest.

“It’s what I’ve always said,” she remarked, “only no one would listen to me. Samuel’s pictures are folly, folly!”

During the first day both Hamlet and Jeremy were fascinated. Hamlet recovered from his first fit of horror, smelt something in the stockings and knickerbockers in which Uncle Percy now appeared that fascinated him. He followed those stockings all round the house, his nose just a little ahead of his body, and he had to move quickly because Uncle Percy was never still for a moment. Uncle Percy, of course, laughed at Hamlet.

“Call that a dog!” he cried. “I call it a dog-fight!” and laughed immoderately.

But Hamlet bore him no grudge; with his beard projecting and his eyes intent on the pursuit, he followed the stockings. Such a smell! and such calves! Both smell and calves were new in his experience—to lick the one and bite the other! What a glorious ambition!

Jeremy, on his part, was at the beginning dazzled. He had never before seen such superb despotism! For those twenty-four hours he admired it all immensely—the unceasing flow of words, the knowledge of every imaginable quarter of the globe, the confident, unfaltering answer to every possible question, the definite assumption of universal superiority, the absence of every doubt, hesitation or shyness.

Jeremy was as yet no analyser of human nature, but, young as he was, he knew his own shynesses, awkwardnesses and reticences, and for twenty-four hours he did wish he were like his Uncle Percy. He even envied his calves and looked at his own in his bedroom looking-glass to see how they were getting along.

It cannot, however, be denied that every member of the Cole family went that night to bed feeling desperately weary; it was as though they had spent a day with a thunder-storm or sat for twelve hours in the very middle of Niagara Falls, or lodged for an hour or two in the west tower of the cathedral amongst the bells. They were tired. Their bedrooms seemed to them strangely, almost ominously silent.

It was as though they had passed quite suddenly into a deaf and mute world.

On the second day it might have been noticed, had there been anyone here or there especially observant, that Uncle Percy was beginning to be bored. He looked around him for some fitting entertainment and discovered his brother Herbert.

Although it was twenty years since he had seen his brother, it was remarkable with what swiftness he had slipped back into his childhood’s attitude towards him. He had laughed at him then; he laughed at him now with twice his original heartiness because Herbert was a clergyman, and clergymen seemed to Uncle Percy very laughable things. Our colonies promote a directer form of contact between individuals than is our custom at home; it is a true word that there are no “frills” in the colonies. You let a man know what you think of him for good or ill without any disguise. Uncle Percy let his brother know what he thought of him at once, and he let everyone else know too—and this was, for his brother, a very painful experience.

The Rev. Herbert Cole had been brought up in seclusion. People had taken from the first trouble that his feelings should not be hurt, and when it was understood that he was “destined for the ministry,” a mysterious veil had been drawn in order that for the rest of his days he never should see things as they were. No one, for twenty long years, had been rude to him. If he wanted to be angry he was angry; if things were wrong he said so; if he felt ill he said so; if he had a headache he said so; and if he felt well he didn’t say so quite as often as he might have done. He believed himself to be a good honest God-fearing man, and on the whole he was so. But he did not know what he would be were anyone rude to him; he did not know until Percy came to stay with him. He had, of course, disliked Percy when they were small boys together, but that was so long ago that he had forgotten all about it; and during the first twenty-four hours he put everything down to Percy’s high animal spirits and delight at being home again and pleasure at being with his relations.

It was not until luncheon on the second day that he began to realize what was happening. Over the chops he said something in his well-known definite authoritative manner about “the Church not standing it, and the sooner those infidels in Africa realized it the better.”

“Bosh!” said Uncle Percy. “Bosh!”

“My dear Percy ...” began Mr. Cole.

“Don’t ‘dear Percy’ me,” came from the other end of the table. “I say it’s bosh! What do you know of Africa or of the Church for the matter of that? You’ve never been outside this piffling little town for twenty years and wouldn’t have noticed anything if you had. That’s the worst of you miserable parsons—never seeing anything of life or the world, and then laying down the law as though you were God Almighty. It fair makes me sick! But you were always like that, Herbert. Even as a boy you’d hide behind some woman’s skirts and then lay claim to someone else’s actions. Don’t you talk about Africa, Herbert. You know nothing about it whatever. Here, Helen, my girl, pass up the potatoes!”

Had a large iron thunderbolt crashed through the ceiling and broken the room to pieces consternation could not have been more general. Mr. Cole at first simply did not believe the evidence of his ears, then as it slowly dawned upon him that his brother had really said these things, and before a mixed company (Emily was at that moment handing round the cabbage), a dull pink flush stole slowly over his cheeks and ended in fiery crimson at the tips of his ears.

Mrs. Cole and Amy were, of course, devastated, but dreadful was the effect upon the children. Three pairs of eyes turned instantly towards Mr. Cole and then hurriedly withdrew. Mary attacked once again the bone of her chop, already sufficiently cleaned. Helen gazed at her uncle, her eyes full of a lovely investigating interest. Jeremy stared at the tablecloth. He himself could not at once realize what had occurred. He had been accustomed for so long now to hear his father speak with authority upon every conceivable topic and remain uncontradicted. Even when visitors came—and they were so often curates—his opinions were generally confirmed with a “Quite so,” or “Is that so indeed?” or “Yes, yes; quite.” His first interest now was to see how his father would reply to this attack. They all waited.

Mr. Cole feebly smiled.

“Tee. Tee. Violent as ever, Percy. I dare say you’re correct. Of course, I never was in Africa.”

Capitulation! Complete capitulation! Jeremy’s cheeks burnt hot with family shame. Was nobody going to stand up to the attack? Were they to allow it to pass like that? They were apparently. The subject was changed. Bread-and-butter pudding arrived. The world went on.

Uncle Percy himself had no conception that anything unusual had occurred. He had been shouting people down and bullying them for years. Something subconsciously told him that his brother was going to be easy game; perhaps deep down in that mighty chest of his something chuckled; and that was all.

But for Jeremy that was not all. He went up to his room and considered the matter. Readers of this chronicle and the one that preceded it will be aware that his relations with his father had not been altogether happy ones. He had not quite understood his father, and his father had not quite understood him, but he had always felt awe of his father and had cherished the belief that he must be infinitely wise. Uncle Samuel was wise too, but in quite another way. Uncle Samuel was closer, far closer, and he could talk intimately to him about every sort of thing, but people laughed at Uncle Samuel quite openly and said he was no good, and Uncle Samuel himself confessed this.

His father had been remote, august, Olympian. It was true that last Christmas he had hit his father and tried to bite him; but that had been in a fit of rage that was madness, neither more nor less. When you were mad you might do anything. His father had been august—but now?

Jeremy dared not look back over the luncheon scene, dared not face once again the nervous flush, the silly laugh, the feeble retort. His father was a coward and the honour of the family was at stake.

After that luncheon outburst, however, the situation moved so swiftly that it went far beyond poor Jeremy. I don’t suppose that Uncle Percy was aware of anything very much save his own happiness and comfort, but to any outsider it would have seemed that he now gave up the whole of his time and energy to baiting his brother. He was not a bad man nor deliberately unkind, but he loved to have someone to tease, as the few women for whom in his life he had cared had discovered in time to save themselves from marrying him.

I say that he was unconscious of what he was doing; and so in a fashion was the Cole family unconscious. That is, Mrs. Cole and Aunt Amy and the children realized that Uncle Percy was being rude, but they did not realize that the work of years was, in a few days, being completely undone. So used to custom and tradition are we that in our daily life we will accept almost any figure in the condition in which we receive it and then proceed to add our own little “story” to the structure already presented to us.

Mrs. Cole did not wish, Aunt Amy even did not wish, to see their Herbert “a fool”; very much better for their daily life and happiness that he should not be one, and yet in a short two days that was what he was, so that Aunt Amy, without realizing it, spoke sharply to him and Mrs. Cole disagreed with him about the weather prospects. Of course the women did their best to stand up for him and defend him in his weak attempts at resistance, but, after all, Percy was a visitor and wouldn’t be here for long, and “hadn’t been home for such a time that naturally his way of looking at things couldn’t be quite ours,” and then at Sunday supper they were forced to laugh against their will, but “one was glad of anything by Sunday evening to make things a little bright,” at Percy’s account of Herbert when he was a boy tumbling out of the wagonette on a picnic and nobody missing him until they got home that night. It was funny as Percy told it. Poor Herbert! running after the wagonette and shouting and nobody noticing, and then losing himself and not getting home until midnight. Aunt Amy was forced to laugh until she cried, and even Mrs. Cole, regarding her husband with tender affection, said: “So like you, Herbert, dear, not to ask somebody the way!”

The only member of the family who did not see something funny in all of this was Jeremy. He was conscious only of his father. He was aware exactly of how he was feeling. He so thoroughly himself detested being laughed at, especially when it was two to one—and now it was about five to one! As he watched his father’s white face with the slow flushes rising and falling, the pale nervous eyes wandering in their gaze from place to place, the expression of bewilderment as Uncle Percy’s loud tones surged up to him, submerged him and then slowly withdrew, Jeremy was reminded of his own first evening at Thompson’s, when in the dormitory he had been suddenly delivered up to a wild troop of savages who knew neither law nor courtesy. As it had been with him then, so was it with his father now.

Uncle Percy had all the monotony of the unimaginative. One idea was enough for him, and his idea just now was to take it out of “old Herbert.” I can only repeat that he did not mean it unkindly; he thought that he was being vastly amusing for the benefit of those poor dull women who never had any fun from one year’s end to the other. His verdict, after he had left him and gone on somewhere else, would be: “Well, I gave those poor mugs a merry week. Hard work, but one must do one’s best.”

Meanwhile Jeremy watched his father.