The Rich Are with You Always (23 page)

  She stifled all the arguments that clamoured to be expressed and laughed instead. "Oh, Sam!"

  "Look how all the big houses are shuttered," he went on, undeterred. "Just one or two beginning to open. It's obvious that all the great families are away. But could you guess that from the villages? Now, you go into an English village and you can tell at once whether the quality families are away or in residence. The whole atmosphere is dry and dead when they're gone. Here, it makes no difference."

  She followed him with great, amused, pitying eyes. "What does that tell you?"

  "It tells me that the English can recognize quality and respond to it. Here they are rich peasants, middling peasants, and poor peasants. And"—he quelled an interruption from her—"it tells me that in England, despite the upheavals of these years, we shall never have revolution. But here, however good the conditions of life, they will never free themselves from the terror of it. You laugh at the English road sweeper in his tall hat and Chesterfield coat cast out by a duke ten years back; I tell you there's enough cold ambition in that to douse any revolutionary heat. But here, where everyone is citizen…" He shook his head. "It's folly."

  She smiled, determined not to get drawn. "I miss the smell of the oaks," she said. "A month ago they were stupendous."

  He nudged her gently. "Don't give out you don't know what I mean. You move among the quality yourself now. You hunt with them. You know what…"

  "Hah!" Her single scornful cry cut him short. He had touched the open-sesame nerve at last. "Hunt! I'll tell you about hunting, Sam. And quality. In any field of sixty, taken at haphazard, you'll find no more than half a dozen who really understand what they're there for. Three of them'll be hunt servants, one of them a farmer, and two—two out of fifty-odd—two will be folk of quality. The rest are there to enjoy 'a slashin' good trot' or to gossip or to cut a dash or to kill time or because they lack the brains to think up anything better. They have no notion of the true business of a hunt; they'd be happier on a drag scent if they were honest."

  Sam tried to pacify her, banking her down with his hands. "I oughtn't to have said about hunting," he said. "I forgot. It was a bad example."

  "To the contrary, it was a very good example. You talk about the English country being dead until the big families come down, and you are right. Where do they come down from? From London society, from German spas, from Alpine walks and Italian museums. And they're back in the saddle and after Charley James Fox five days a week. And they bring the villages to life with an ideal of leisure and sport. That's what your crossing sweeper puts on with the duke's castoffs—the notion that the ideal life is sport and leisure. Just give that belief a good century to soak into the bones of the English workingman and you can kiss England farewell. She'll drown in a flood of
quality
."

  He looked at her in astonishment. "It is Nora Stevenson, isn't it? Nora Telling? The lass as once told me she could never get through
Rule Britannia
for the lump it brought to her throat?"

  She blushed. "You're right," she said. "I don't mean to attack England. But," she rallied, "I don't think it right to criticize France for being different."

  "Not different," he said smugly. "Just inferior."

  His condescension rankled with her and, after willing herself not to rise to it for several furlongs, she taunted him with the words, "You have the heart of a servant, Sam."

  He laughed at once, good-naturedly. "Aye," he said. "And a good one too. Don't leave me money, Nora love. Nor give me any. You'd ruin me." And later he said, "I'm happier at what I do than any man I know. Many rich folk stop with the Nelsons. There's naught would make me change stations with any on 'em."

  She squeezed his arm. "I'm happy for you," she said. "To have an untroubled mind and sleep easy—it's a champion gift."

  "And you?" he asked.

  She sighed. "I'm not troubled by conscience," she said. "But there's responsibility. Stevenson gives work to nine thousand. That's a lot of men—and wives and bairns—to depend on the wisdom or folly of just two people."

  It sobered Sam. "Eay, I'd never thought," he said.

  "Still"—she sat up and rearranged herself with determination—"I'm free of it for a day or two. Look at this wonderful scenery."

  They gazed around over a sea of heather and down into twisting wooded dells where waters dashed and complained unseen, and up along rocky escarpments where trees and shrubs clung perilously to sheer faces of granite.

  "I'll tell you what this is like," she said. "It's like Killiecrankie. Have you ever been there?"

  He shook his head.

  "Well, that part of the Scotch Highlands is very like this."

  It was late afternoon and the slanting sun fell across the valleys, modelling them starkly and throwing the hot green of the sunstruck woods against the deep, rich turquoises and blues of the shaded hollows. The trees and the heath were alive with the shrill of birdsong, though the only birds they could actually see were the harriers, sitting in complacent silence on the craggy summits, and the kestrels, teetering on the updraughts overhead.

  "These folk don't deserve it," he said.

  She pinched his arm until he withdrew it in protest, laughing. "We must be there soon," she said.

  He looked around, remembering something. "The valleys of Vire," he said. "What's 'valleys' in French?"

  "
Vaux
. I think."

He tugged at the coachman's shirt.
"Les vaux de Vire, m'sieu?"
he asked.

"Why?" Nora asked.

"D'you hear any singing?"

"No. Why? Only birds."

  "It's something your Monsieur Rodet told me last night. There used to be some right jolly singing in these parts and that's where we get the word vaudeville from. Vaudeville—vaux de Vire. He says. I don't suppose it's true. He also said they make all the shirts for the French army here."

  "What a lot we learn when we travel," she said.

Murray's "not good" had been, if anything, kindly. The rooms were so filthy Nora had to lift her skirts as she walked. She made the innkeeper's wife sweep the floor and then tried to order her to scrub it, but the woman refused, saying something of which the only intelligible word was
Anglaise.
Sam saw the horses well stabled and looked at the rooms and beds for Honorine and the coachman before he went to his own.

  "Mr. Nelson always does that," he said. "A master relies on his horses and his servants."

  "He and Stevenson are of a pair," Nora replied. "When John surveys a line, he always looks at the lodgings and victuallers beside the way." The food was good, though they had to drink everything—wine and café au lait—from bowls. Cups and glasses seemed to be unheard of.

  The beds were alive with fleas and lice, but they were well prepared for that. As soon as they arrived they had sprinkled spirits of naphtha (nearly a shilling's worth, as Nora said) into every corner and fold of the linen and mattresses; by bedtime, half an hour's assiduous hunting was enough to rid both beds of a small pile of dead or twitching livestock.

  Sam poked a particularly large louse. "Grey badgers, we used to call 'em. Remember?"

  She looked to see if he was joking.

  "Didn't we?" he asked uncertainly.

  "Grey badgers," she said, "were those dried peas we ate on mid-Lent Sunday. I'll never be able to eat them again now—thank you very much."

  "No, that was Carling peas."

  "In Manchester, when we moved there. But in Leeds they were always called grey badgers."

  "Take your word for it." He shook his head and sighed. "How soon we forget."

  "Speak for yourself," she said. "To me it's like yesterday still."

After breakfast it was a quick run down through Avranches to the coast. The view as they came down out of the hills, with the plains of Brittany beyond, was the most splendid they had yet seen. In the centre, rising out of its vast desert of sand, with the sea sparkling miles beyond, giving dramatic point to the whole, was the fairy-castle abbey of Mont St. Michel. They were so keen to reach it that they drove through Avranches without stopping. Beyond, driving through dunes of salt scrub and tamarisk, they seemed to have come to a world a thousand miles from the green and granite uplands near Vire.

  And then they were out onto the sand, as smooth as a table and as firm as the driveway at Thorpe.

  "It's like a castle in a legend," she said excitedly, looking at the intricate ranks of turrets, ramparts, battlements, and spires that crowned the little island.

  "It's like a toy," he said. "You feel you could just pluck it up like a toy."

  "Good thing the tide is out."

  The inn was as clean and as pleasant as the one at Vire had been "not good." They had a light lunch of meat loaf, cold herring salad, and blancmange, washed down with cider and a sort of apple brandy from the Calvados hills they had driven through yesterday. It was stronger than it tasted, and Nora felt a little lightheaded as they walked up the twisting cobbled street to the abbey.

  Inside it was not nearly as impressive as it had promised to be from a distance. Its fifty years of service as a political and criminal prison had not dealt kindly with the building. Most of the great chambers had been cut up into floors and workshops for the five hundred common-law prisoners who now worked there as weavers, hatters, and bootmakers. Nora and Sam, and their guide, were constantly having to press against walls and into doorways as files of soldiers and rank-smelling convicts were marched by. The Salle des Chevaliers, with its massive pillars and soaring groined vaults, was entirely filled with looms. The clack of the shuttles, the beating of the heddles, the clatter of the sheds, and the choking, lint-laden air—it was all too strongly reminiscent for Nora and Sam of their days of poverty in the mills at Stockport. The wonderful romanesque church, the crowning of the island, was a cockroach-infested eating hall for the prisoners. Rancid fat, slopped gruel, and rotting scraps lay everywhere. Earlier in the century the nave had been a two-floor straw-hat factory, but that had burned out eleven years ago. The whole upper part was still black with soot.

  Outside, on the terrace created by the demolition in 1780 of the last three bays of the nave, the guide pointed to the ruins of the Women's Prison; formerly a hostelry, built in the twelfth century, it had collapsed in 1817. He gave a revoltingly vivid account of the event—the only occasion on which he came alive during their whole tour. "The view of Tombelaine and the Channel Islands," he said, turning to the sea and relapsing into his professional torpor, "is especially magnificent."

  But he was right. The smooth sands and the warm salt breeze beckoned them irresistibly.

  "Oh, Sam," Nora said, "let's walk to the edge of the sea. When is high water?" She turned to the guide. "High tide?
La marée haute?"

  He pulled out a watch. "Now," he said. "Half an hour ago. It's falling again."

  "But it's miles away. Does it not surround this island?"

  The man smiled and pointed to the ghost of a half-moon in the eastern sky. "Only at full moon and new moon," he said.

  "What superstitious nonsense!" Nora sneered when they were walking out over the sands, northward from the Mount.

  "It's not superstition," Sam told her. And he explained the whole business of neap tides and spring tides.

  The sea was going out faster than they could walk so that, when they were a mile from the island, the waters, which had been only two or at most three miles away and plainly visible, had moved almost out of sight. They turned then and began to stroll back.