Selected Stories (85 page)

Thirty joyous young voices shouted appeal to someone to leave their ‘pipes of parsley ‘ollow – ‘ollow – ‘ollow!' Mr Sperrit had to raise his voice above the din.

‘Well, if I asked you to stay
here
, I should never hear the last of it from Rhoda. She's a little cracked, of course, but the soul of devotion and capable of anything.
Ne sit ancillae,
⁶
you know.'

‘Thank you. Then I'll go. I'll walk.' He stumbled out dazed and sick into the winter twilight, and sought the square house by the brook.

It was not a dignified entry, because when the door was unchained and Rhoda exclaimed, he took two valiant steps into the hall and then fainted – as men sometimes will after twenty-two hours of strong emotion and little food.

‘I'm sorry,' he said when he could speak. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, his head on Rhoda's lap.

‘Your 'ome is your castle, sir,' was the reply in his hair. ‘I smelt it wasn't drink. You lay on the sofa till I get your supper.'

She settled him in a drawing-room hung with yellow silk, heavy with the smell of dead leaves and oil lamp. Something murmured soothingly in the background and overcame the noises in his head. He thought he heard horses' feet on wet gravel and a voice singing about ships and flocks and grass. It passed close to the shuttered bay-window.

‘But each will mourn his own, she saith,
And sweeter woman ne'er drew breath
Than my son's wife, Elizabeth…
Cusha – cusha – cusha – calling.'

The hoofs broke into a canter as Rhoda entered with the tray. ‘And then I'll put you to bed,' she said. ‘Sidney's coming in the morning.' Midmore asked no questions. He dragged his poor bruised soul to bed and would have pitied it all over again, but the food and warm sherry and water drugged him to instant sleep.

Rhoda's voice wakened him, asking whether he would have ‘'ip, foot, or sitz', which he understood were the baths of the establishment. ‘Suppose you try all three,' she suggested. ‘They're all yours, you know, sir.'

He would have renewed his sorrows with the daylight, but her words struck him pleasantly. Everything his eyes opened upon was his very own to keep for ever. The carved four-post Chippendale bed, obviously worth hundreds; the wavy walnut William and Mary chairs – he had seen worse ones labelled twenty guineas apiece; the oval medallion mirror; the delicate eighteenth-century wire fireguard; the heavy brocaded curtains were his – all his. So, too, a great garden full of birds that faced him when he shaved; a mulberry tree, a sun-dial, and a dull, steel-coloured brook that murmured level with the edge of a lawn a hundred yards away. Peculiarly and privately his own was the smell of sausages and coffee that he sniffed at the head of the wide square landing, all set round with mysterious doors and Bartolozzi
⁷
prints. He spent two hours after breakfast in exploring his new possessions. His heart leaped up at such things as sewing-machines, a rubber-tyred bath-chair in a tiled passage, a malachite-headed Malacca cane, boxes and boxes of unopened stationery, seal-rings, bunches of keys, and at the bottom of a steel-net reticule a little leather purse with seven pounds ten shillings in gold and eleven shillings in silver.

‘You used to play with that when my sister brought you down here after your measles,' said Rhoda as he slipped the money into his pocket. ‘Now, this was your pore dear auntie's business-room.' She opened a low door. ‘Oh, I forgot about Mr Sidney! There he is.' An enormous old man with rheumy red eyes that blinked under downy white eyebrows sat in an Empire chair, his cap in his hands. Rhoda withdrew sniffing. The man looked Midmore over in silence, then jerked a thumb towards the door. ‘I reckon she told you who I be,' he began. ‘I'm the only farmer you've got. Nothin' goes off my place 'thout it walks on its own feet. What about my pig-pound?'

‘Well, what about it?' said Midmore.

‘That's just what I be come about. The County Councils are getting more particular. Did ye know there was swine fever at Pashell's? There
be
. It'll 'ave to be in brick.'

‘Yes,' said Midmore politely.

‘I've bin at your aunt that was, plenty times about it. I don't say she wasn't a just woman, but she didn't read the lease same way I did. I be used to bein' put upon, but there's no doing any longer 'thout that pig-pound.'

‘When would you like it?' Midmore asked. It seemed the easiest road to take.

‘Any time or other suits me, I reckon. He ain't thrivin' where he is, an' I paid eighteen shillin' for him.' He crossed his hands on his stick and gave no further sign of life.

‘Is that all?' Midmore stammered.

‘All now – excep” – he glanced fretfully at the table beside him – ‘excep' my usuals. Where's that Rhoda?'

Midmore rang the bell. Rhoda came in with a bottle and a glass. The old man helped himself to four stiff fingers, rose in one piece, and stumped out. At the door he cried ferociously: ‘Don't suppose it's any odds to you whether I'm drowned or not, but them floodgates want a wheel and winch, they do. I be too old for liftin' 'em with the bar – my time o' life.'

‘Good riddance if 'e was drowned,' said Rhoda. ‘But don't you mind him. He's only amusin' himself. Your pore dear auntie used to give 'im ‘is usual – 'tisn't the whisky
you
drink – an' send 'im about ‘is business.'

‘I see. Now, is a pig-pound the same thing as a pig-sty?'

Rhoda nodded. ‘'E needs one, too, but 'e ain't entitled to it. You look at ‘is lease – third drawer on the left in that Bombay cab'net – an' next time 'e comes you ask 'im to read it. That'll choke 'im off, because 'e can't!'

There was nothing in Midmore's past to teach him the message and significance of a hand-written lease of the late ‘eighties, but Rhoda interpreted.

‘It don't mean anything reelly,' was her cheerful conclusion, ‘excep' you mustn't get rid of him anyhow, an' 'e can do what 'e likes always. Lucky for us 'e
do
farm; and if it wasn't for ‘is woman – ‘

‘Oh, there's a Mrs Sidney, is there?'

‘Lor,
no
! The Sidneys don't marry. They keep. That's his fourth since – to my knowledge. He was a takin' man from the first.'

‘Any families?'

‘They'd be grown up by now if there was, wouldn't they? But you can't spend all your days considerin' ‘is interests. That's what gave your pore aunt ‘er indigestion. 'Ave you seen the gun-room?'

Midmore held strong views on the immorality of taking life for pleasure. But there was no denying that the late Colonel Werf's seventy-guinea breechloaders were good at their filthy job. He loaded one, took it out and pointed – merely pointed – it at a cock-pheasant which rose out of a shrubbery behind the kitchen, and the flaming bird came down in a long slant on the lawn, stone dead. Rhoda from the scullery said it was a lovely shot, and told him lunch was ready.

He spent the afternoon gun in one hand, a map in the other, beating the bounds of his lands. They lay altogether in a shallow, uninteresting valley, flanked with woods and bisected by a brook. Up stream was his own house; down stream, less than half a mile, a low red farm-house squatted in an old orchard, beside what looked like small lock-gates on the Thames. There was no doubt as to ownership. Mr Sidney saw him while yet far off, and bellowed at him about pig-pounds and floodgates. These last were two great sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook, which were prised up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip of iron, and when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the water. Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some conjuring trick. This, too, was his very own.

‘I see,' he said. ‘How interesting! Now, what's that bell for?' he went on, pointing to an old ship's bell in a rude belfry at the end of an outhouse. ‘Was that a chapel once?' The red-eyed giant seemed to have difficulty in expressing himself for the moment and blinked savagely.

‘Yes,' he said at last. ‘My chapel. When you 'ear that bell ring you'll 'ear something. Nobody but me ud put up with it – but I reckon it don't make any odds to you.' He slammed the gates down again, and the brook rose behind them with a suck and a grunt.

Midmore moved off, conscious that he might be safer with Rhoda to hold his conversational hand. As he passed the front of the farm-house a smooth fat woman, with neatly parted grey hair under a widow's cap, curtsied to him deferentially through the window. By every teaching of the Immoderate Left she had a perfect right to express herself in any way she pleased, but the curtsey revolted him. And on his way home he was hailed from behind a hedge by a manifest idiot with no roof to his mouth, who hallooed and danced round him.

‘What did that beast want?' he demanded of Rhoda at tea.

‘Jimmy? He only wanted to know if you 'ad any telegrams to send. ‘E'll go anywhere so long as 'tisn't across running water. That gives 'im ‘is seizures. Even talkin' about it for fun like makes 'im shake.'

‘But why isn't he where he can be properly looked after?'

‘What 'arm's 'e doing? ‘E's a love-child, but ‘is family can pay for 'im. If'e was locked up ‘e'd die all off at once, like a wild rabbit. Won't you, please, look at the drive, sir?'

Midmore looked in the fading light. The neat gravel was pitted with large roundish holes, and there was a punch or two of the same sort on the lawn.

‘That's the ‘unt comin–' 'ome,' Rhoda explained. ‘Your pore dear auntie always let 'em use our drive for a short cut after the Colonel died. The Colonel wouldn't so much because he preserved;
⁸
but your auntie was always an ‘orsewoman till ‘er sciatica.'

‘Isn't there someone who can rake it over or – or something?' said Midmore vaguely.

‘Oh yes. You'll never see it in the morning, but – you was out when they came 'ome an' Mister Fisher – he's the Master – told me to tell you with ‘is compliments that if you wasn't preservin' and cared to ‘old to the old understandin', ‘is gravel-pit is at your service same as before. 'E thought, perhaps, you mightn't know, and it 'ad slipped my mind to tell you. It's good gravel, Mister Fisher's, and it binds beautiful on the drive. We 'ave to draw it, o' course, from the pit, but –'

Midmore looked at her helplessly.

‘Rhoda,' said he, ‘what am I supposed to do?'

‘Oh, let 'em come through,' she replied. ‘You never know. You may want to ‘unt yourself some day.'

That evening it rained and his misery returned on him, the worse for having been diverted. At last he was driven to paw over a few score books in a panelled room called the library, and realized with horror what the late Colonel Werf's mind must have been in its prime. The volumes smelt of a dead world as strongly as they did of mildew. He opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He began at random and read a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down by the fire still reading. It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time – a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore's own criticism), but he read on, fascinated, and behold, from the pages leaped, as it were, the brother to the red-eyed man of the brook, bellowing at a landlord (here Midmore realized that
he
was that very animal) for new barns; and another man who, like himself again, objected to hoof-marks on gravel. Outrageous as thought and conception were, the stuff
seemed to have the rudiments of observation. He dug out other volumes by the same author, till Rhoda came in with a silver candlestick.

‘Rhoda,' said he, ‘did you ever hear about a character called James Pigg – and Batsey?'
⁹

‘Why, o' course,' said she. ‘The Colonel used to come into the kitchen in 'is dressin'-gown an' read us all those Jorrockses.'

‘Oh, Lord!' said Midmore, and went to bed with a book called
Handley Cross
under his arm, and a lonelier Columbus into a stranger world the wet-ringed moon never looked upon.

Here we omit much. But Midmore never denied that for the epicure in sensation the urgent needs of an ancient house, as interpreted by Rhoda pointing to daylight through attic-tiles held in place by moss, gives an edge to the pleasure of Social Research elsewhere. Equally he found that the reaction following prolonged research loses much of its grey terror if one knows one can at will bathe the soul in the society of plumbers (all the water-pipes had chronic appendicitis), village idiots (Jimmy had taken Midmore under his weak wing and camped daily at the drive-gates), and a giant with red eyelids whose every action is an unpredictable outrage.

Towards spring Midmore filled his house with a few friends of the Immoderate Left. It happened to be the day when, all things and Rhoda working together, a cartload of bricks, another of sand, and some bags of lime had been despatched to build Sidney his almost daily-demanded pig-pound. Midmore took his friends across the flat fields with some idea of showing them Sidney as a type of ‘the peasantry'. They hit the minute when Sidney, hoarse with rage, was ordering bricklayer, mate, carts and all off his premises. The visitors disposed themselves to listen.

‘You never give me no notice about changin' the pig,' Sidney shouted. The pig – at least eighteen inches long – reared on end in the old sty and smiled at the company.

‘But, my good man –' Midmore opened.

‘I ain't! For aught you know I be a dam' sight worse than you be. You can't come and be'ave arbit'ry with me. You
are
be'avin' arbit'ry! All you men go clean away an' don't set foot on my land till I bid ye.'