Colonel Julian and Other Stories (15 page)

She must have known what was coming. About half-past six my Uncle Silas and my grandfather and Ponto Pack had another jug of beer in the shade of the laurel trees and my Uncle Silas, wet-lipped, bloodshot eye wickedly cocked, began to talk about ‘gittin' the belly-band mended while we think on it.' It did not seem to me to be a thing that wanted thinking on at all, and I do not think my grandmother thought so either. She had put on her grey silk dress with
the parma violet stitching at the collar and her little high hat with michaelmas daisies on the brim, and it was time now to be thinking of ‘walking up street'. To walk up street on the Sunday of Nenweald Fair was a gentle, ponderous, respectable, long-winded custom, and it was something about which neither my Uncle Silas, my grandfather nor Ponto Pack seemed, I thought, very enthusiastic.

‘You go steady on up,' Silas said. ‘We'll come on arter we git the belly-band mended.'

‘If everything was as right as that belly-band nobody would hurt much,' she said.

‘It's too 'nation hot yit for traipsing about,' Silas said.

‘Onaccountable hot,' Ponto said. ‘Most onaccountable.'

Ten minutes later the trap went jigging past us up the street, my Uncle Silas wearing his black-and-white deerstalker sideways on, so that the peaks stuck out like ears, and Ponto, bowler hat perched on the top of his head like a cannon ball, looking more than ever like some pink-eyed performing pig. My grandfather pretended not to see us and my grandmother said:

‘What one doesn't think of, the other will. The great fool things.'

We seemed to take longer than ever that sultry evening to make the tour under the chestnut trees about the crowded market-place. I always got very bored with the gossiping Sunday-starched crowd of bowler hats and parasols, and I kept thinking how nice it would be if my Uncle Silas were to come back with Jenny and I could do my trick of giving her sugar, in full view of everybody, off the top of my head. But Silas never came and by ten o'clock I was yawning and my grandmother had even stopped saying darkly, whenever there was something nice to listen to, ‘Little pigs have got big ears,' as if I hadn't the vaguest idea of what she meant by that.

I went to bed with a piece of cold Yorkshire pudding to eat and fell asleep with it in my hands. It is hard to say now what time I woke up, but what woke me was like the thunder of one crazy dream colliding with another somewhere at the foot of the stairs. The piece of cold Yorkshire pudding was like a frog crawling on my pillow, and I remember wanting
to shriek about it just at the moment I heard my Uncle Silas roaring in the front passage:

‘Git up, old gal! Git up there! Pull up, old gal!'

A terrifying sound as of madly-beaten carpets greeted me at the top of the stairs. It was my grandmother beating Ponto Pack across the backside with what I thought was the stick we used for stirring pig-swill. She could not get at my Uncle Silas because Silas was leading Jenny up the stairs; and she could not get at my grandfather because he was lying like a sack of oats on Jenny's back. Ponto was pushing Jenny with his round black backside sticking out like a tight balloon and my Uncle Silas kept bawling:

‘Git underneath on her, Ponto. You ain't underneath on her.'

Every time Ponto seemed about to git underneath on her my grandmother hit him again with the swill-stick. I thought he did not seem to mind very much. He laughed every time my grandmother hit him and then pushed himself harder than ever against Jenny's hind-quarters and called with pig-like fruitiness to my Uncle Silas, tugging at the bridle on the stairs :

‘Can't budge the old gal, Silas. Most aggravatin' onaccountable.'

‘Get that mare out of my house, you drunken idiots!' my grandmother shrieked.

‘Gotta git George to bed fust,' Silas said. ‘Must git George to bed.'

‘Get that horse off my stair-carpet!'

‘Gotta git George to bed. Good gal!' Silas said. ‘Come on now, good gal. Tchck, tchck! Up, mare! That's a good gal.'

By this time my Uncle Silas had succeeded in tugging Jenny a quarter of the way upstairs when suddenly, down below, sharp and sickening above the pandemonium of voices, there was a crack like a breaking bone. Ponto Pack roared, ‘Silas, she's hittin' me on the coconut!' and at the same moment Jenny had something like hysterics, whinnying terribly, and fell down on her front knees on the stairs. My Uncle Silas yelled, ‘Why th' Hanover don't you git underneath on her? She'll be down atopt on y'!' and for a moment I thought she was. She gave a great lurch backwards and my grandfather
let out a groan. My grandmother hit Ponto another crack on the head with the swill-stick and suddenly the whole essence of the situation became, to me at any rate, splendidly clear. My Uncle Silas and Ponto were trying to get my grandfather to bed and my grandmother, in her obstinate way, was trying to stop them.

I remembered in that moment the cold Yorkshire pudding. I fetched it from my bedroom and went half-way down the stairs and held it out to Jenny, most coaxingly, in the flat of my hand.

Whether she conceived, at that moment, that I in my white nightshirt was some kind of newly-woken ghost or whether she decided she had had enough of the whole affair, I never knew. Ponto had hardly time to bawl out from the bottom of the stairs, ‘It's most onaccountable, Silas. I can't budge her!' and my Uncle Silas from the top of the stairs, ‘Hold hard, Pont. The old gal's knockin' off fer a mite o' pudden!' when my grandmother, aiming another crack at Ponto's head, hit the mare in her fury a blow above the tail.

The frenzy of her hysterical ascent up three steps of stairs and then backwards down the whole flight was something I shall not forget. My grandfather fell off the mare and the mare fell sideways on him, and then my Uncle Silas fell on the mare. The three of them fell on my grandmother and my grandmother fell on Ponto Pack. My Uncle Silas yelled, ‘Let 'em all come!' and my grandmother hit Ponto twenty or thirty blows on the top of the head with the swill-stick. My grandfather fell off the horse's back and landed with a terrible crash on the umbrella-stand, and the portrait of Gladstone fell down in the hall. The cold Yorkshire pudding fell down the stairs and I fell after it. My aunt came in the front door with a policeman, and Ponto yelled, ‘It's onaccountable, Silas, most onaccountable!' just as the mare broke free and charged the sideboard in the front room.

My Uncle Silas sat on the bottom of the stairs and laughed his head off, and I began to cry because I was sorry for Jenny and thought it was the end of the world.

‘We are surrounded by the most ghastly people,' the Captain said. All across miles of unbroken pasture there was not another house.

Up through the south avenue of elms, where dead trees lifted scraggy bone against spring sky, bluebells grew like thick corn, spreading into the edges of surrounding grass. The wind came softly, in a series of light circles from the west. Here and there an elm had died and on either side of it young green leaves from living trees were laced about smoke-brown brittle branches. In a quadrangle of wall and grass the great house lay below.

‘You never really see the beauty of the house until you get up here,' the Captain said. Though still young, not more than forty-five or so, he was becoming much too fat. His ears were like thickly-veined purple cabbage leaves unfurling on either side of flabby swollen cheeks. His mouth, pink and flaccid, trembled sometimes like the underlip of a cow.

‘They have killed the elms,' he said. ‘Finished them. They used to be absolutely magnificent.'

He stopped for a moment and I saw that he wanted to draw breath, and we looked back down the hill. Down beyond soldierly lines of trees, the tender lucent green broken here and there by the black of dead branches, I could see a flag waving in such intermittent and strengthless puffs of air that it, too, seemed dead. It was quartered in green and scarlet and flew from a small round tower that was like a grey pepperbox stuck in the western arm of the cross-shaped house.

Now I could see, too, that there were four avenues of elms, repeating in immense pattern the cross of the house below. As we stood there, the Captain making gargling noises in his throat, a cuckoo began calling on notes that were so full and hollow that it was like a bell tolling from the elms above us. Presently it seemed to be thrown on a
gust of air from the tip of a tree, to float down-wind like a bird of grey paper.

‘There she goes,' I said.

‘Tank emplacement mostly,' the Captain said. His face shone lividly in the sun, his lip trembling. ‘The place was occupied right, left and centre. We used to have deer too, but the last battalion wiped them out.'

The breath of bluebells was overpoweringly sweet on the warm wind.

‘When we get a little higher you will see the whole pattern of the thing,' the Captain said.

Turning to renew the ascent, he puffed in preparation, his veins standing out like purple worms on his face and neck and forehead.

‘Tired?' he said. ‘Not too much for you? You don't mind being dragged up here?'

‘Not at all.'

‘One really has to see it from up here. One doesn't grasp it otherwise. That's the point.'

‘Of course.'

‘We shall have a drink when we get back,' he said. He laughed and the eyes, very blue but transparent in their wateriness, were sad and friendly. ‘In fact, we shall have several drinks.'

It was only another fifty yards to the crown of the hill and we climbed it in silence except for the hissing of the Captain's breath against his teeth. All the loveliness of spring came down the hill and past us in a stream of heavy fragrance, and at the top, when I turned, I could feel it blowing past me, the wind silky on the palms of my hands, to shine all down the hill on the bent sweet grasses.

‘Now,' the Captain said. It was some moments before he could get breath to say another word. Moisture had gathered in confusing drops on the pink lids of his eyes. He wiped it away. ‘Now you can see it all.'

All below us, across the wide green hollow in which there was not another house, I could see, as he said, the pattern of the thing. Creamy grey in the sun, the house made its central cross of stone, the four avenues of elms like pennants of pale green flying from the arms of it across the field.

‘Wonderful,' I said.

‘Wonderful, but not unique,' he said. ‘Not unique.'

Not angrily at first but wearily, rather sadly, he pointed about him with both arms. ‘It's simply one of six or seven examples here alone.'

Then anger flitted suddenly through the obese watery-eyed face with such heat that the whole expression seemed to rise to a bursting fester, and I thought he was about to rush, in destructive attack at something, down the hill.

‘It was all done by great chaps,' he said, ‘creative chaps. It's only we of this generation who are such absolute destructive clots.'

‘Oh! I don't know.'

‘Won't even argue about it,' he said. His face, turned to the sun, disclosed now an appearance of rosy calm, almost boy-like, and he had recovered his breath. ‘Once we were surrounded by the most frightfully nice people. I don't mean to say intellectual people and that kind of thing, but really awfully nice. You know, you could talk to them. They were on your level.'

‘Yes.'

‘And now you see what I mean, they've gone. God knows where but they're finished. I tell you everything is a shambles.'

Across from another avenue the cuckoo called downwind again and over the house I saw the flag lifted in a green and scarlet flash on the same burst of breeze. I wanted to ask him about the flag, but he said:

‘It's perfectly ghastly. They've been hounded out. None of them left. All of them gone——'

Abruptly he seemed to give it up. He made gestures of apology, dropping his hands:

‘So sorry. Awfully boring for you, I feel. Are you thirsty? Shall we go down?'

‘When you're ready. I'd like to see the house——'

‘Oh! please, of course. I'd like a drink, anyway.'

He took a last wide look at the great pattern of elm and stone, breathing the deep, almost too sweet scent of the hill.

‘That's another thing. These perishers don't know the elements of decent drinking. One gets invited to the dreariest cocktail parties. The drinks are mixed in a jug and the sherry
comes from God knows where.' Anger was again reddening his face to the appearance of a swollen fester. ‘One gets so depressed that one goes home and starts beating it up. You know?'

I said yes, I knew, and we began to walk slowly down the hill, breathing sun-warm air deeply, pausing fairly frequently for another glance at the scene below.

‘How is it with you?' he said. ‘In your part of the world? Are you surrounded by hordes of virgin spinsters?'

‘They are always with us,' I said.

He laughed, and in that more cheerful moment I asked him about the flag.

‘Oh! it's nothing much.' He seemed inclined to belittle it, I thought. ‘It gives a touch of colour.'

‘I must look at it.'

‘Of course. We can go up to the tower. There's a simply splendid view from there. You can see everything. But we shall have a drink first. Yes?'

‘Thank you.'

‘My wife will be there now. She will want to meet you.'

Slowly we went down to the house. About its deep surrounding walls there were no flowers and the grass had not been mown since some time in the previous summer, but old crucified peaches, and here and there an apricot, had set their flowers for fruiting and it was hot in the hollow between the walls. At the long flight of stone steps, before the front door, the Captain said something in a desultory way about the beauty of the high windows but evidently he did not expect a reply. He leapt up the last four or five steps with the rather desperate agility of a man who has won a race at last, and a moment later we were in the house.