The British Barbarians | Page 9

pause, "Well, we've a great many very nice furnished houses about here
to let, but not many lodgings. Brackenhurst's a cut above lodgings,
don't you know; it's a residential quarter. But I should think Miss
Blake's, at Heathercliff House, would perhaps be just the sort of thing
to suit you."
"Oh, thank you," the stranger answered, with a deferential politeness
which charmed Philip once more by its graceful expressiveness. "And
could you kindly direct me to them? I don't know my way about at all,
you see, as yet, in this country."
"With pleasure," Philip replied, quite delighted at the chance of solving

the mystery of where the stranger had dropped from. "I'm going that
way myself, and can take you past her door. It's only a few steps. Then
you're a stranger in England?"
The newcomer smiled a curious self-restrained smile. He was both
young and handsome. "Yes, I'm a stranger in your England," he
answered, gravely, in the tone of one who wishes to avoid an awkward
discussion. "In fact, an Alien. I only arrived here this very morning."
"From the Continent?" Philip inquired, arching his eyebrows slightly.
The stranger smiled again. "No, not from the Continent," he replied,
with provoking evasiveness.
"I thought you weren't a foreigner," Philip continued in a blandly
suggestive voice. "That is to say," he went on, after a second's pause,
during which the stranger volunteered no further statement, "you speak
English like an Englishman."
"Do I?" the stranger answered. "Well, I'm glad of that. It'll make
intercourse with your Englishmen so much more easy."
By this time Philip's curiosity was thoroughly whetted. "But you're not
an Englishman, you say?" he asked, with a little natural hesitation.
"No, not exactly what you call an Englishman," the stranger replied, as
if he didn't quite care for such clumsy attempts to examine his
antecedents. "As I tell you, I'm an Alien. But we always spoke English
at home," he added with an afterthought, as if ready to vouchsafe all the
other information that lay in his power.
"You can't be an American, I'm sure," Philip went on, unabashed, his
eagerness to solve the question at issue, once raised, getting the better
for the moment of both reserve and politeness.
"No, I'm certainly not an American," the stranger answered with a
gentle courtesy in his tone that made Philip feel ashamed of his
rudeness in questioning him.

"Nor a Colonist?" Philip asked once more, unable to take the hint.
"Nor a Colonist either," the Alien replied curtly. And then he relapsed
into a momentary silence which threw upon Philip the difficult task of
continuing the conversation.
The member of Her Britannic Majesty's Civil Service would have given
anything just that minute to say to him frankly, "Well, if you're not an
Englishman, and you're not an American, and you're not a Colonist,
and you ARE an Alien, and yet you talk English like a native, and have
always talked it, why, what in the name of goodness do you want us to
take you for?" But he restrained himself with difficulty. There was
something about the stranger that made him feel by instinct it would be
more a breach of etiquette to question him closely than to question any
one he had ever met with.
They walked on along the road for some minutes together, the stranger
admiring all the way the golden tresses of the laburnum and the rich
perfume of the lilac, and talking much as he went of the quaintness and
prettiness of the suburban houses. Philip thought them pretty, too (or
rather, important), but failed to see for his own part where the
quaintness came in. Nay, he took the imputation as rather a slur on so
respectable a neighbourhood: for to be quaint is to be picturesque, and
to be picturesque is to be old-fashioned. But the stranger's voice and
manner were so pleasant, almost so ingratiating, that Philip did not care
to differ from him on the abstract question of a qualifying epithet. After
all, there's nothing positively insulting in calling a house quaint, though
Philip would certainly have preferred, himself, to hear the Eligible
Family Residences of that Aristocratic Neighbourhood described in
auctioneering phrase as "imposing," "noble," "handsome," or
"important-looking."
Just before they reached Miss Blake's door, the Alien paused for a
second. He took out a loose handful of money, gold and silver together,
from his trouser pocket. "One more question," he said, with that
pleasant smile on his lips, "if you'll excuse my ignorance. Which of
these coins is a pound, now, and which is a sovereign?"

"Why, a pound IS a sovereign, of course," Philip answered briskly,
smiling the genuine British smile of unfeigned astonishment that
anybody should be ignorant of a minor detail in the kind of life