The Children

As the big liner hung over the tugs swarming about her in the bay of Algiers Martin Boyne looked down from the promenade deck on the troop of first-class passengers struggling up the gangway their faces all unconsciously lifted to his inspection. “Not a soul I shall want to speak to--as usual!” Some men’s luck in travelling was inconceivable. They had only to get into a train or on board a boat to run across an old friend; or what was more exciting make a new one. They were always finding themselves in the same compartment or in the same cabin with some wandering celebrity with the owner of a famous house of a noted collection or of an odd and amusing personality--the latter case being of course the rarest as it was the most rewarding. There was for instance Martin Boyne’s own Great-Uncle Edward. Uncle Edward’s travel-adventures were famed in the family. At home in America amid the solemn upholstery of his Boston house Uncle Edward was the model of complacent dulness; yet whenever he got on board a steamer or into a train (or a diligence in his distant youth) he was singled out by fate as the hero of some delightful encounter. It would be Rachel during her ill-starred tour of the States; Ruskin on the lake of Geneva; the Dean of Canterbury as Uncle Edward with all the appropriate emotions was gazing on the tomb of the Black Prince; or the Duke of Devonshire of his day as Uncle Edward put a courteous (but probably pointless) question to the housekeeper showing him over Chatsworth. And instantly he would receive a proscenium box from Rachel for her legendary first night in Boston or be entreated by Ruskin to join him for a month in Venice; or the Dean would invite him to stay at the Deanery the Duke at Chatsworth; and the net result of these experiences would be that Uncle Edward if questioned would reply with his sweet frosty smile: “Yes Rachel had talent but no beauty”; or: “No one could be more simple and friendly than the Duke”; or: “Ruskin really had all the appearances of a gentleman.” Such were the impressions produced on Uncle Edward by his unparalleled success in the great social scenes through which for a period of over sixty years he moved with benignant blindness. Far different was the case of his great-nephew. No tremor of thought or emotion would in similar situations have escaped Martin Boyne: he would have burst all the grapes against his palate. But though he was given to travel and though he had travelled much and his profession as a civil engineer had taken him to interesting and out-of-the-way parts of the world and though he was always on the alert for agreeable encounters it was never at such times that they came to him. He would have loved adventure but adventure worthy of the name perpetually eluded him; and when it has eluded a man till he is over forty it is not likely to seek him out later.