Читать книгу Northbridge Rectory - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 3

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As everyone knows Northbridge High Street there is no need to describe it, so we will proceed to do so. Northbridge, a famous centre for the wool trade of the South in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had gently declined ever since. It had indeed risen for a short period to eminence as a rotten borough, but now for more than a hundred years its calm had been unbroken. The town and its famous High Street are synonymous, for apart from the odious row of council houses on the Plashington Road and the incredibly small gasometer which has never in human memory inflated itself more than six feet from the ground and is tucked away behind the Church School, a building of which, in saying that the date 1874 is carved in Runic letters upon its Gothic gable we have said quite enough, apart, we may say, from these three modest monstrosities the High Street with its lovely curve is the whole town. At the upper end are the gentry houses, still in many cases inhabited by descendants of the woolstaplers or prosperous graziers who had built them three or four hundred years ago of honey-coloured stone that has weathered to soft greys and browns lightly stained with lichen here and there, the roofs made of thin stone slabs. Just where the street swings round the curve that is known to every tourist, stands the little Town Hall on its twelve stone legs, the little open market place below it. Beyond the Town Hall the houses are newer; late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, flat-fronted, with great sash windows on the ground and first floors, suddenly losing heart on the nursery or servants’ bedroom floor with windows so low that even when the lower sash is pushed up and the upper sash pulled down, there is but a chink of air. These have slate roofs. A good many of them have fine plaster ceilings and there are one or two circular staircases whose curve is like a reflection of the High Street and the despair of every architect that tries to copy them, though their designer left no name. Here live the professional classes, doctors, lawyers, bankers, and so forth, most of whom have rooms in Barchester where they carry on the larger part of their business, attending in Northbridge on the first Wednesday in every month, or Tuesday and Friday from eleven to four. And beyond them the street tails off into the picturesque and insanitary cottages of wood and clay, or lath and plaster, white-washed, with thatched roofs, descendants of the original mud huts of Barsetshire under the Kings of Wessex and not much changed in all those years. Bunces and Scatcherds had lived on the same spot and almost in the same house when Barsetshire was half forest and travellers took the higher paths by the downs to avoid wild beasts and the marshy lands by the river; while the cathedral was building; while wool was sent all over Europe from Barsetshire markets. Each generation had stoutly resisted improvements, and the public feeling which had kept the railway at an extremely inconvenient distance from the town was the same as that which had prophesied woe when the Abbot of Barchester cleared the lower slopes of the downs for sheep runs, and had done its best to frighten away by its own methods, including two very brutal murders for which no one was ever brought to book, the shepherds with new-fangled ways imported by the Abbot from his native Suffolk.

At the end of the High Street is the river. There was a ford hereabouts for as long as history can tell and the antiquity of the original bridge is shown by the fact that the town is called Northbridge and not Northford. It is known to have been burnt in 1066 (locally attributed to the comet), destroyed in the Wars of the Roses (locally attributed, to the joy of antiquaries, to Crooked Dick), and was rebuilt in its present graceful shape about 1816, by a pupil of Rennie. It has six public-houses of which the Mitre is the most important and several sweet shops where you may buy beer by the jug or the bottle. The church stands on a little eminence and behind it is the rectory, an ugly but commodious house whose long garden slopes to the river, while in the town itself are various chapels or conventicles patronised by the lesser tradespeople. Half a mile down the river is Northbridge Manor whose present owner, Mr. Robert Keith, of the well-known Barchester firm of solicitors, will not live there till the war is over.

In every war, however unpleasant, there are a certain number of people who with a shriek of joy take possession of a world made for them. Mrs. Villars, the Rector’s wife, who had come to Northbridge just before the war began, anxious to do her best with the parish work for which her husband’s previous career as a schoolmaster had not prepared her, suddenly found herself, rather to her relief, quite o’ercrowed by a number of women who had during what is mistakenly called The Last War driven ambulances, run canteens, been heads of offices, of teams of land girls, of munition welfare, and had been pining in retirement on small incomes ever since. Under their ferocious, yet benignant reign, evacuee children were billeted, clothed and communally fed; visiting parents were provided with canteens; a cottage hospital was staffed and stocked; National Savings were collected; householders were bullied into Digging for Victory in unsuitable soil; other householders were forced to keep chickens which laid with reluctance and sickened and died with fervour of unknown diseases; stirrup-pumps were tested; blackmail in the shape of entertainments to provide comforts for every branch of the services at home and abroad was levied. In fact, as Miss Pemberton said, If the Government had shown the same Team Spirit as Northbridge the war would have been over long ago. This improbable statement put fresh heart into her hearers who, having talked about nothing but Their Work before, now discussed any other such irrelevant subjects as Germany, Vichy, or the United States even less.

Miss Pemberton was one of Northbridge’s crowning glories. This eminence she had achieved, involuntarily, by three separate paths. In the first place she was literary, having written a life of Edward IV’s queen, Elizabeth Rivers, with great accuracy, an exhausting number of footnotes, and complete dullness, besides several essays on Umbrian Landscape in expensive Quarterlies. In the second place she was unusually short and ugly, habitually dressed in a kind of homespun sackcloth, stout boots and a battered felt hat, and took her walks with a small alpenstock with which it was her practice to poke the dogs of Northbridge off the pavement into the gutter. In the third place, and this was what consolidated her position, she lived with a distinguished philologist who sometimes edited Anthologies.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Villars, the Rectors wife, to Lieutenant Holden of the Barsetshire Regiment who had been billeted on her, “one doesn’t like to use the word ‘live’ exactly.”

“Well, people do live,” said Mr. Holden broad-mindedly.

“What I really mean,” said Mrs. Villars, “is that when Miss Pemberton first came down here she took Punshions, you know that charming little stone cottage that stands back just beyond the Mitre.”

“Why Punshions?” said Mr. Holden, an earnest student of the past, wherever he happened to be.

“Gregory would tell you,” said Mrs. Villars, who could never remember to call her husband The Rector, “all about it. There was a small brewery there up to the end of the last century I think, or some people say it is the name of the family who built it. But she had a spare bedroom because Effie Bunce, whose father is the ferryman, comes by the day and won’t live in. Old Bunce is rather a tyrant and I believe he beats his daughters sometimes.”

Mr. Holden, scenting the trail of old English customs, said he must look up old Bunce and wondered if he ever beat his wife. His mild student’s eyes gleamed through his spectacles as he uttered this wish and Mrs. Villars felt sorry for him as she said that it was Mrs. Bunce who was popularly supposed to beat her husband on Saturday nights, but seeing in Mr. Holden’s eye that he would shortly require a scold’s bridle and a ducking-stool at her hands or her imagination, she hurried on to say,

“Of course Miss Pemberton doesn’t write for money—”

“It wouldn’t be any good if she did,” said Mr. Holden, who had been for ten years in a publisher’s office before the Army engulfed him, “she couldn’t.”

Mrs. Villars had sometimes wondered about that herself, but loyalty to a Northbridge character had bidden her restrain her thoughts, so she went on, determined to say what she had started out to say.

“And having a spare room, she wanted to make a little money,” said Mrs. Villars, “so she used to have Mr. Downing for week-ends as a paying guest, because he was literary, and gradually he took to living there more and more—of course when I say ‘living,’ I don’t mean anything as indeed you would know if you had seen Miss Pemberton.”

“No, no, of course not,” said Mr. Holden.

“It is quite dreadful,” said Mrs. Villars, putting down her knitting (which was mittens for her younger son in the Royal Air Force), “the way some words behave so that you cannot use them. ‘Living’ has almost got out of control.”

Mr. Holden nearly said, “So has ‘sleeping’,” but checked himself, for he felt towards his hostess, who was at least fifteen years his senior and had a son who was a Professor in a provincial University as well as the Wing-Commander in the Air Force, a rather sacred respect. There is no accounting for these things.

“Some people won’t visit them,” said Mrs. Villars, “but I must say it is partly because Miss Pemberton has been rather snubbing. She doesn’t like people to come to the house when Mr. Downing is there, in case they ask him to lunch. Gregory,” she said as the Rector came in, “I was telling Mr. Holden about Punshion’s.”

“A fine piece of restoration,” said Mr. Villars, who had a passion for archaeology. “Barton did it about 1919, just in time. The Council had condemned it, but Lord Pomfret, the late Earl, wouldn’t hear of it coming down. Verena, did I give you half a crown to take care of this morning?”

“If you did, it is in my bag,” said Mrs. Villars, “on my writing table. I meant more about Miss Pemberton and Mr. Downing and the way they live together—at least I don’t exactly mean live, but you know what I mean.”

“I have it, I have it!” said the Rector, holding up a half-crown. “It is Mrs. Turner’s subscription to the British Legion and I thought I might spend it on stamps if I had it about me.”

“But you could have given another half-crown to the Legion, sir,” said Mr. Holden.

“I could,” said the Rector, “but it is the principle of the thing. So I entrusted it to Verena.”

“As a matter of fact I spent your half-crown at the chemist’s,” said Mrs. Villars, “so I don’t know whose this is.”

The Rector looked disappointed.

“Well, it is the thought behind the deed that matters,” he said, though not with complete conviction. “Yes, the matter of Miss Pemberton and Mr. Downing living together, not of course that I mean anything by the expression which has fallen so lamentably by the way, has made some difficulties socially. I have preached against judging one’s neighbour more than once, but I must say it appears to me incredible that a man of Downing’s fastidiousness—we were at College together and I knew him well—can live, can associate let us say, with a woman of such complete absence of charm, though doubtless highly cultivated, of such revolting exterior if the expression is not too strong, as Miss Pemberton.”

Mr. Holden said that he had always wanted to see a pig-faced lady, but didn’t want a World War to make his wish come true. But that, he added, was just like Providence. He then, as often, wished he had not spoken, for he feared the Rector might be hurt, but Mr. Villars confessed that he too had had doubts. He had long wished, though not in any complaining spirit, that there was a little more life in Northbridge. Now that the Rectory was full of officers he sometimes felt, he said, that if Europe was to be plunged into war to gratify his wish, he would have done better to be content with his lot. He then remarked that he had not added Mrs. Turner to the list of subscribers to the British Legion and went off to the study.

At the beginning of the war Mr. and Mrs. Villars, looking at the Rectory with its ten bedrooms not counting the servants’ and the large old-fashioned kitchen quarters, felt that their duty was to take in evacuee children. As soon as Mrs. Villars mentioned this all the servants gave notice, but even while Mrs. Villars was determinedly not taking it, they were asked to have part of the office staff of the Barsetshire Regiment. Workmen were sent down and the big laundry and servants’ hall converted into offices, five of the bedrooms were taken over, central heating and fixed basins were installed, and Colonel Passmore with his staff came into residence. Batmen cheered the kitchen and cleaned all boots and shoes impartially till they shone, the servants in a fit of patriotism withdrew their notice, and Mrs. Villars found herself at the head of a very large and quite pleasant family. Unless we count Colonel Passmore, who was what he himself described as a leftover from the last war, only one of the officers was a professional soldier, and Mrs. Villars more than once felt that she and her husband were back at the boys’ preparatory school where he had been Headmaster for some years before coming to Northbridge in the summer of the previous year. Of the officers who had kaleidoscopically come and gone during the past year, Mr. Holden was the nicest and the Villarses hoped he would be allowed to stay. He had arrived a month or so before our story begins and three days later the Rector discovered that his new guest was cousin of one of his former assistant masters. Upon this Mr. Holden had been made free of Mrs. Villars’s sitting-room (for the drawing-room had been given up to the officers’ use) and it had quickly become his habit to drop in at odd times during the day. In spite of a rather social life in London where the head of his publishing firm, Adrian Coates, believed in cultivating personal contacts with everyone who was an author, possible or impossible, actual or potential, he had felt no more than a very passing fancy for any girl or woman. Now, quite suddenly, he saw in Mrs. Villars someone who (as he fondly thought) understood him and whom (he quite blitheringly thought) he could understand. That her husband was so nice and that the couple so obviously got on very well was perhaps disconcerting to his romantic feelings, but although Mrs. Villars never raised large eyes brimming with tears to his, or with a tragic gesture bared her arm to the shoulder to show him the livid mark of a man’s cruel grip, he managed to feel quite happily sentimental about her. Mrs. Villars felt nothing about it at all, looking upon her lodger as a kind of assistant master and being a good deal occupied with her own business, running her large household, and thinking about her sons. But the impulse to give pleasure was always strong in her, so she said to Mr. Holden:

“If you are free after tea would you care to walk down to Punshions? I want to ask Miss Pemberton about Effie Bunce who has quite given up coming to the Girl Guides, which is a pity. As it is Wednesday I don’t think Mr. Downing will be there, so we shall be able to get in. When he is in residence it is rather difficult.”

Mr. Holden said he would be delighted, so after tea he and his hostess left the Rectory. There was a short cut by the back way to Punshions, which was about halfway down the High Street, but Mrs. Villars loved the noble curve so much that even at the risk of meeting far too many friends she preferred to take the longer route.

It was a mild sunny afternoon in early autumn and being Early Closing Day there were not many people about. Mrs. Villars inwardly congratulated herself, but too soon, for as they passed The Hollies, a pleasant stone Georgian house standing back a little from the street, out burst Mrs. Turner with her two nieces who lived with her.

Mrs. Turner, who was the very same who had given the Rector half a crown for the British Legion, had been so long a widow that she had quite lost the attributes of widowhood. Some bold spirits indeed went so far as to say that she had never been married at all and had merely taken the honorary status of Mrs., but this was not true, for she still quietly cherished the memory of the late Mr. Turner who had been an unmitigated cad and waster till death with kindly care removed him after a year of married life. By great good luck he had not yet been able to spend all his own or his wife’s money, so Mrs. Turner found herself quite comfortably off and after a few years of travel, which rather bored her, came to anchor at The Hollies and adopted two nieces whose parents had died of influenza. From The Hollies she radiated ceaseless and benevolent activity, loyally supported by the nieces who showed no signs at all of getting married. So she had hailed with joy the arrival of officers at the Vicarage and made her house into a kind of club where they could play billiards, at which game she herself was no mean performer, turn on the radio-gramophone, thump the piano to their hearts’ content, or read the many illustrated papers which she took in, for where papers and magazines were concerned The Hollies was, as Mr. Holden said, as good as a dentist’s waiting-room with none of the disadvantages.

Mrs. Turner greeted Mrs. Villars and Mr. Holden warmly and said she and the girls would walk along with them, as they were going to see Miss Pemberton about some apples. On learning that the Rectory party were also going to Punshions she said wonders would never cease.

“Ackcherly,” said her niece Betty, “I’m only going as far as the chemist.”

“Early closing,” said the other niece.

“Good Lord! it happens about twelve times a week,” said Betty. “Then I’d better come with you, Auntie.”

“You young people go on ahead, then,” said Mrs. Turner, such being her simple methods, “and I’ll walk with Mrs. Villars. And don’t forget the basket, girls.”

As this would have happened in any case, they all proceeded down the street, Betty and the other niece walking one on each side of Mr. Holden rather as if he were Eugene Aram, though less because they looked upon him as their prey than because they loyally shared every treat that came their way, from an unattached man to two-pennyworth of sweets. Mrs. Villars inquired after the Communal Kitchen which Mrs. Turner had started at the beginning of the war and had run herself with the help of her nieces and other voluntary workers ever since.

“We are doing nicely,” said Mrs. Turner. “Quite a lot of vegetables have come in this week and Miss Pemberton has promised some apples which is what I’m going to see her about. Lord Pomfret sent us down some venison from Scotland but unfortunately the name leaked out, and the children wouldn’t eat it.”

“So what did you do?” asked Mrs. Villars.

“Gave them fish pie next day which they detest,” said Mrs. Turner, “and the day after we minced up the venison and called it shepherd’s pie and they all wanted second helpings.”

“Ernie Wheeler was sick afterwards,” shouted Betty, who always preferred other people’s conversations to her own, over her shoulder.

“Only because he had cocoa and sardines for breakfast,” shouted Mrs. Turner. “His hostess, Mrs. Gibbs,” she added in a gentler voice for Mrs. Villars’s benefit, “Gibbs’s wife, you know, is so kind, but all her children died young and she really has no idea of how to feed little boys.”

“Perhaps that’s why,” said Mrs. Villars elliptically.

Mrs. Turner said she expected she was right and the cortège continued its way.

As they approached the front door of Miss Pemberton’s cottage Mrs. Villars felt a peculiar sinking of the heart, for innocent as she was of any attempt, or of the slightest wish, to rape Mr. Downing from Miss Pemberton’s mature care, she felt it in her bones that she lay under suspicion, as indeed did every other woman in Northbridge of suitable social standing, of wishing to destroy that lady’s extra-matrimonial peace. True it was a Wednesday, and Mr. Downing was always in town during the middle of the week, but one never knew where one might offend. The first time she had visited Miss Pemberton, and that by special invitation, she had inquired how Mr. Downing’s new anthology, a collection of twelfth-century Provençal lyrics, was getting on; and though Miss Pemberton could talk of little else at the time she appeared to resent the introduction of the subject by her visitor so deeply that Mrs. Villars blushed inside herself whenever she thought of the episode, as if she had been guilty of some gross indelicacy rather than a polite inquiry about something that did not really interest her in the least. For who, as she said to her husband the same evening, can be interested in things that say

“Ay! lez moult en fiez donnouro genti”

or words to that effect. To which her husband had replied that he supposed Mr. Downing was, and she had kissed the top of his head.

“It’s all very well,” said Mrs. Turner in her loud cheerful voice, as if answering Mrs. Villars’s thoughts, “but if I didn’t want those apples, I wouldn’t have come. I’ve got nothing to say to a highbrow like Mr. Downing, but she looks at me as if I were Venus and Adonis.”

Upon this she pressed the bell with an unswerving finger, remarking that Effie Bunce was always out at the back. The bell rang for what Mrs. Villars nervously felt to be at least five minutes. Miss Pemberton’s face appeared at a window, looked dispassionately at them and disappeared. Mrs. Turner, slightly dashed, took her finger off the bell and Effie Bunce came round the corner of the house with an armful of tea-cloths.

“I was just taking the clorths off the line,” she said, “and I thought it must be the bell.”

She then retreated, and in a few seconds the front door was opened.

“Well, Effie, how is your father’s rheumatism?” said Mrs. Turner.

Effie giggled.

“Him and mother had a good old dust-up on Saturday night,” said the undutiful daughter, “and the radio going on and all. Ruby and me we laughed fit to die.”

“Ruby is Effie’s sister,” Mrs. Turner explained, with a faint air of pride in her knowledge. “Is Miss Pemberton in, Effie? I’ve come about the apples.”

For an answer Effie gave a violent knock on the sitting-room door, threw it open without waiting for an answer, and went back to the tea-cloths, leaving the callers stranded high and dry. Mrs. Turner, who in the cause of charity knew no fear, walked in followed by her party the more sensitive of whom—we allude to Mrs. Villars and Mr. Holden—wished they had never come, for sitting on opposite sides of the fire, a well-spread tea-table between them, were Miss Pemberton and a spare, grey-haired, intelligent looking man of about fifty-five.

Miss Pemberton rose, for no other word can express her action. Mr. Holden saw what was apparently an elderly man with a powerful and slightly unpleasant face, dressed in brown sacking with short grey hair and an amber necklace, but his friends, who were used to this phenomenon, saw that Miss Pemberton would not forgive them lightly for having come to call on a day when by all rights Mr. Downing should have been in town. Mrs. Villars, pulling herself together and reminding herself that she was the Rector’s wife, came forward, said How do you do to her hostess and introduced Mr. Holden.

“Mr. Downing,” said Miss Pemberton, “and I always have high tea. It saves supper.”

With which explanation she reseated herself. Taking this as a royal permission to make themselves at home, the visitors also sat down. Mr. Holden took the precaution to get as near Mr. Downing as possible, feeling that a fellow-man, however Pemberton-pecked, would be a little protection.

“My name is Holden,” he said. “I’m with Adrian Coates, and we were much honoured by being allowed to publish your little life of Reynault Camargou.”

“I’m afraid it didn’t sell very well,” said Mr. Downing in a singularly pleasant voice, “but when an author pays for his own books I suppose publishers don’t mind.”

“We would always prefer a selling success of course,” said Mr. Holden, “but it would have been almost an honour to lose on your book. I hear you are doing a Provençal Anthology. I do hope you will include something of Camargou’s. I was fascinated by the little poem you quoted that begins—

“ ‘En doubx ebaz m’oun dueilliez paréiou ...’ ”

“Would you say it again?” said Mr. Downing.

Mr. Holden did.

“Ah,” said Mr. Downing, “you follow Bompard’s phonetics. There is much to be said for his theory, but I think, though I would not insist, that the Vicomte de Mas-Cagnou got nearer the root of the thing. According to him the spoken verse would run roughly thus:

“ ‘En doubx ebaz m’oun dueilliez paréiou ...’ ”

“Yes ... yes ... I see what you mean,” said Mr. Holden, which was a lie, but he had acquired under his head’s capable instruction a fine technique of surface knowledge about any book the firm published. “I have never really read Mas-Cagnou, but the main trend of his ideas is familiar to me. If you could make one or two points clear—”

Mr. Downing required no further invitation and the air became melodious with the sound of verses which their makers would certainly never have recognized, whatever the pronunciation.

Miss Pemberton, casting on Mr. Downing an eye that augured ill for his peace when the visitors should have gone, munched her high tea and listened to Mrs. Turner’s reminder about the promised apples. When Mrs. Turner had finished, Miss Pemberton, slightly deepening her voice, said:

“Harold!”

Mr. Downing started, made an apologetic gesture to Mr. Holden, and turned to his Egeria.

“Yes, Ianthe,” he said.

“Did you put those apples in the garage?” said Miss Pemberton.

Mr. Downing said he had.

“Mr. Downing,” said Miss Pemberton, who never spoke of her lodger by his Christian name, “has put the apples in the garage.”

“Well, the girls have brought their baskets, so we can take them away if that suits you,” said Mrs. Turner. “It is so kind of you.”

As Miss Pemberton made no answer beyond pouring herself out another cup of tea, Mrs. Villars threw herself into the breach and inquired if Miss Pemberton’s monograph on the altar-pieces of Giacopone Giacopini, detto Il Giacopinaccio, was getting on.

“There are only two of them, and they haven’t been seen since 1474,” said Miss Pemberton, her face of a depraved elderly cardinal suddenly lighting to a rather fine eagerness, “and of course Italy is difficult now. But Lord Pomfret has let me look through some of the papers of the Italian branch of his house and I was able to do a most interesting little piece of research, indirectly bearing on my subject.”

“Do tell me,” said Mrs. Villars, while Betty and the other niece exchanged glances of despair.

“The family of Strelsa, into which Eustace Pomfret married after 1688,” said Miss Pemberton, “had an ancestor who owned the castle of Strelsa, not fifty miles from Giacopone’s reputed birthplace. I find that a certain Cosimo di Strelsa was exiled and heavily fined for seducing a nun who subsequently gave birth to a male child. The dates are about right and in the absence of any further evidence, corroborative or otherwise, I think we may take it that Giacopone was the fruit of this relationship. As for Bernardo’s suggestion that the nun—Violante by name—had already been seduced by the prior of a neighbouring monastery, that on prima facie grounds can be ruled out altogether. If you would care to see the notes I made I will gladly let you see them when they are typed, if they would interest you.”

Mrs. Villars, in her turn telling a lie, said she would love to see them, and got up.

“Mr. Downing,” said Miss Pemberton, “will show you where the apples are and I will come too.”

So Mr. Downing was torn from his Provençal dream and the whole party went to the garage where Betty and the other niece filled all the baskets.

“Thank you very much,” said Mrs. Turner as they took their leave. “It is such a help to our kitchen, and everyone is so kind.”

“Wish I could do more,” said Miss Pemberton with sudden gruffness. “Good-bye. Come again if you want apples. Harold!”

Mr. Downing, who was blissfully engaged again with Mr. Holden, jumped.

“Clear the tea-things away,” said Miss Pemberton, “and I will see them out.”

“Oh, good-bye then,” said Mr. Downing to Mr. Holden.

“Come up to the Rectory some time and have a talk,” said Mr. Holden.

Mr. Downing looked longingly at Mr. Holden, despairingly at his Egeria, mumbled something and disappeared.

Just as they were at the front door Mrs. Villars suddenly remembered what she had come for.

“Oh, Miss Pemberton,” she said, “I am so sorry to bother you, but could you speak to Effie about the Girl Guides. She never comes now and she used to be such a regular member.”

“Effie!” said Miss Pemberton.

Effie appeared with a damp tea-cloth in one hand and a spoon in the other.

“I was just drying my teaspoons and I thought you called,” she said.

“What is this about your not going to the Girl Guides?” said Miss Pemberton. “Were you christened?”

Effie said Yes, by the Reverend Danby at Southbridge, because she was born over at Grannie’s.

“Very well then. You know your duty,” said Miss Pemberton. “Render unto Caesar. If you don’t go to the Guides regularly I shall tell your Aunt.”

Effie dropped the teaspoon with a clang on the brick floor, picked it up and retired hurriedly to the kitchen.

“That’s all right,” said Miss Pemberton, who was fumbling in an embroidered bag. “And here’s something for the Guides, Mrs. Villars. Sorry it isn’t more.”

She thrust half a crown into Mrs. Villars’s hands and shut the front door.

“Miss Pemberton gave me half a crown for the Guides,” said Mrs. Villars to her husband after dinner. “I know she can hardly afford it. I do wish people could be as nice as they are good. Was there any news to-night?”

“I don’t know,” said the Rector, who hated the wireless, and with his wife’s full approval had lent their set to the officers billeted with them. “I did mean to ask Colonel Passmore if I could listen at six, but it was ten minutes past when I thought of it, so I put it off till nine and then it was suddenly nine-fifteen. I could ask if you like.”

“Never mind, darling,” said his wife. “It will be in The Times to-morrow. Oh, here is Mr. Holden. Was there any news?”

“Passmore says there was a bomb on Buckingham Palace,” said Mr. Holden. “Did you know, sir, that one of your hens had been killed? Major Spender’s dog got into the run and bit her head off. He asked me to say he’s most awfully sorry and he has thrashed the dog within an inch of its life.”

“I understand,” said the Rector, “that the best way to cure a dog is to hang the corpse of the victim round its neck, like the Ancient Mariner.”

“I’m sure Spender would be delighted,” said Mr. Holden, “but he couldn’t catch the brute till it had eaten most of the body too.”

Mrs. Villars inquired if he knew which hen it was and on hearing that it was the White Leghorn with the pale comb said she was a bad layer in any case.

“There is never any news,” said the Rector sadly. “Without being impious, I do wish something would happen. The war just goes on and on and on.”

“Well, you never know your luck,” said Mr. Holden. “Good night, Mrs. Villars. Good night, sir.”