Читать книгу August Folly - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 4

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The little village of Worsted, some sixty miles west of London, is still, owing to the very defective railway system which hardly attempts to serve it, to a great extent unspoilt. To reach it you must change at Winter Overcotes where two railway lines cross. Alighting from the London train on the high level, you go down a dank flight of steps to the low level. Heavy luggage and merchandise are transferred from the high to the low level by being hurled or rolled down the steps. From time to time a package breaks loose, goes too far, and trundles over the edge of the platform on to the line, but there is usually a porter about to climb down and collect it. When your train comes backwards into the station, often assisted for the last few yards by a large grey horse and its friends and hangers-on, you may take your seat in a carriage which has never known the hand of change since it left the railway shops in 1887. If it is market day at Winter Overcotes your carriage will gradually fill with elderly women, carrying bags and baskets, who prefer the train to the more expensive motor-bus, children with season tickets coming back from school, and one or two old men who still wear a fringe of whisker. As your train pulls out on the single line which joins Winter Overcotes to Shearings, a small junction fifteen miles away, you are back in the late Victorian era. Up and down the single line, at rare and inconvenient intervals, run a few little trains, which can only pass one another when, at the stations, a second line emerges, only to flow back into the parent line a little further on. Engines and carriages are a striking relic of our earlier railways, and under their skimpy coats of paint may be read the names of long defunct systems.

The line meanders, in the way that makes an old railway so much more romantic than a new motor highway, among meadows, between hills, over level crossings. At Winter Underclose, Lambton and Fleece, the train stops to allow the passengers to extricate themselves and their baskets from its narrow doors. It then crosses the little river Woolram and enters a wide valley, the further end of which is apparently blocked by a hill. Just under the hill is Worsted, where you get out. The valley is not really impassable, for a few hundred yards beyond the station the train enters the famous Worsted tunnel, whose brutal and unsolved murders have been the pride of the district since 1892.

The line is staffed and controlled by three local dynasties; Margetts, Pattens and Polletts. If a Margett is station-master, you may be sure that there is a Patten in the goods yard, or on the platform. If a Patten is engine-driver, his fireman can hardly avoid being a Pollett. If there is a Pollett in the signal-box, there will be a Margett to open the gates of the level crossing and warn the signalman that the train is coming. All three families are deeply intermarried.

Mr. Patten is the station-master at Worsted. His head porter is Bert Margett, son of Mr. Margett the builder, and his nephew, Ed Pollett, whose father keeps the village shop, is in the lamp-room, and gives such extra help as zeal, unsupported by intellect, can afford. He also has a genius for handling cars.

The inconvenience of the hours of running is made up for by the kindness of the staff. They will hold up a train for any reasonable length of time if old Bill Patten, cousin of the station-master and father of the second gardener at the Manor House, is seen tottering towards the station half a mile away; or young Alf Margett, Bert’s younger brother, from the shop, has forgotten one of the parcels he should have brought on his handlebars, and has to go back to fetch it. Since no trains can proceed until their various drivers have exchanged uncouth tokens of metal, like pot-hooks and hangers, or gigantic nose and ear-rings to be bartered with savage tribes for diamonds and gold, there is no danger.

Most of the land hereabouts is owned by Mr. Palmer, whose property, bounded on the north by the Woolram, runs south nearly as far as Skeynes, the next station down the line. East and west are Penfold and Skeynes Agnes, where there is a fine Saxon church. Mr. Palmer is a J.P., an excellent landlord, and owner of a very fine herd of cows which supply Grade A milk, at prices fixed by the Milk Marketing Board. His wife, in virtue of her husband’s position and her own masterful personality, has taken the position of female Squire.

Of other gentry there are few in the immediate neighbourhood. Lady Bond at Staple Park does not count, because she and Mrs. Palmer have not for some time been on speaking terms. There are also the Tebbens, who live at Lamb’s Piece, near the wood above the railway. At the moment when our story opens, on a warm June morning last summer, Mrs. Tebben was in her drawing-room, reviewing a book on economics. Happening to raise her eyes to the window, she saw Mrs. Palmer opening the garden gate, so she went to warn her husband. Mr. Tebben was a Civil Servant during the week, from ten or eleven to six, or such later hour as his country might require, and carried an umbrella wet or fine; but in the evenings, and from Saturday to Monday, he gave himself entirely to the past, taking for his province the heroic age of Norway and Iceland, with excursions into the English Epic. During the War his knowledge of the Scandinavian tongues had been of great use to the censor’s department, from which he had emerged scatheless owing to his great presence of mind in deliberately forgetting to acknowledge the official communication offering him an inferior order of the Empire he had served. He was at this moment sitting in his very small, uncomfortable study, drafting a letter to a learned Society of which he was President, and did not wish to be disturbed.

‘Warning, Gilbert! Warning!’ cried Mrs. Tebben, putting her head in at the study door. ‘Louise Palmer!’

As her husband only stared at her with the expression of a mad and rather obstinate bull, startled from its dreams, she began to insert herself into the room. To open the door wider was impossible because of the furniture. The house at Worsted had been altogether Mrs. Tebben’s doing. Her husband would have preferred to live permanently in London, where his books would all have been under one roof, but Mrs. Tebben, feeling that her children, who were both at school in the country and liked London more than anything in the world, ought to have pure air for their holidays, had plotted and saved towards the purchase of a perpendicular field on the side of a hill near the village of Worsted. From her own earnings, for after taking a first at Oxford she had coached for many years, not letting marriage interfere, and had produced several useful and uninteresting textbooks on economics, she had bought the land and caused to be built Lamb’s Piece, a local name on which she had pounced with educated glee, but no provision had been made for a study. After two miserable years of trying to work in a corner of the drawing-room, distracted by his wife’s village activities, by his son’s rudeness during school holidays and, later, University Vacation, by the ebb and flow of domestic life, Mr. Tebben had insisted on a separate work-room.

Mrs. Tebben prided herself on being able to argue like a man, with logic and without rancour. This very mistaken point of view was based upon her early passion for a young don, Mr. Fanshawe of Paul’s, whose courtesy to his women pupils cleverly concealed his contempt and abhorrence, which passion had consumed her during her last year at college, or rather, during that portion of the year spent in residence. After taking her degree she had done some research, gone on a Norwegian cruise, met and married Mr. Tebben, and settled down to coaching and the rearing of a son and daughter. Mr. Fanshawe had determinedly ripened into an Oxford character, refusing to use any other than a small, flat, tin bath, and arguing with his women pupils with logic and without rancour; while for his intellectual equals he used every weapon fair and unfair, and nourished feuds which overflowed into every learned journal in Europe.

Mrs. Tebben had therefore replied to her husband’s plea for a study:

‘Your point of view is perfectly reasonable, Gilbert. You are the wage-earner, therefore it is only just that you should be comfortable. I will send for Margett, and we will see what we can do.’

‘Isn’t it more a job for an architect, Winifred?’ said Mr. Tebben. ‘Margett is only a builder, and look at the mess he made of Mrs. Palmer’s barn.’

‘That was quite different. Mrs. Palmer wanted to use the barn for Greek plays, so she had to have a fixed basin put in for the actors to wash before they changed into their ordinary clothes. Sandals do let the dirt in so frightfully. It is true that the basin did leak, but as there will be no fixed basin in your study, Margett could do it quite well.’

Mrs. Tebben, thus open-mindedly arguing, or rather, trampling kindly over her husband, had summoned Margett, the carpenter and builder. After a long conversation, only two plans were found possible. One was to put the study in the basement, which owing to the perpendicular nature of the land was really a ground floor, the other to take a piece off the dining-room. Mr. Tebben would have preferred the lower story, from which he could escape straight into the garden and away down the valley into the woods, if pressed by enemies, but Mrs. Tebben, who liked to have her household under her eye, decided to take a piece off the dining-room. The result was two rooms, both too small for human habitation. In the one the family took their meals, seated at a narrow table, the backs of their chairs grating against the walls, in the other Mr. Tebben had made a little hole for himself among his books, where he sat with an oil-stove in winter, and fried in the sun in summer. An ancestral bookcase, with which he refused to part, almost blocked the entrance. It was as high as the room, it stuck out so far that the door could never be more than half opened, its shelves were edged with faded, scalloped fringes of red leather, which, disintegrating, shed dust and leathery crumbs. Owing to the great depth of the shelves the books were double banked. Mr. Tebben always knew where a given book should be found, but could not always summon the energy to dig it out from the back row. Mrs. Tebben rarely knew where any book she wanted was placed, but was willing to remove all the front rows, lay them with ready cheerfulness on the floor, and when she had found what she wanted, put them back in their wrong places. Their son, Richard, now in his last year at Oxford, had a deep contempt for these and all his parents’ other ways, though, unlike Mr. Fanshawe of Paul’s, he did not attempt to conceal his contempt under a mask of courtesy, a social virtue which he condemned as hypocritical snobbery.

‘Louise!’ cried Mrs. Tebben again, getting herself through the door and shutting it behind her. ‘Her van will be upon us, before the bridge goes down!’

‘Her van?’ asked Mr. Tebben, justifiably puzzled. ‘Oh, I thought you meant she was bringing the milk-lorry down the garden. Well, I can’t see her. I’m busy. I’m writing to Fanshawe. The letter ought to have been sent a week ago. Can’t you stop her?’

‘You’ll have to see her sooner or later,’ said his wife, ‘if it’s about her Greek play. You know she wants you to do Theseus, and she said she would take no denial.’

‘I certainly won’t be Theseus,’ said Mr. Tebben. ‘I won’t wear sandals and catch cold and wash my feet in that leaky basin of Margett’s. I have never acted in one of her plays yet, and I never will. Besides, what does the woman know about Greek plays? Let Richard do Theseus when he comes down, or Margett, or Mrs. Palmer’s nephew that she’s always talking about. I will not make a fool of myself. You really must tell her I am busy, Winifred.’

‘So be it,’ said Mrs. Tebben. But it was not, for Mrs. Palmer, who had annoyingly come round by the garden, in at the drawing-room window, and so through the hall, now intruded herself. Those who did not admire Mrs. Palmer both disliked and feared her hectoring methods, but she was entirely indifferent to moral temperatures. Her husband avoided her activities as much as possible, and was very fond of her, having that affectionate reverence for his wife which is one of the advantages, from the female point of view, of the childless marriage. It is so much more difficult for a husband to cherish and revere the mother of several healthy children who take possession of her time and devotion.

Mr. Palmer’s only and much younger sister, Rachel, had married Frank Dean, the head of a large engineering firm. The Deans had lived abroad a good deal, on account of Mr. Dean’s work, and their large family had made the Manor House a kind of head-quarters. Of late they had not been down so often, and were not well known to the Tebbens. The nephew that, according to Mr. Tebben, Mrs. Palmer was always talking about, was Laurence Dean, the eldest son. He had been for some years in his father’s firm and was eventually to inherit most of Mr. Palmer’s property. His aunt Louise was devoted in her high-handed way to him and his brothers and sisters, and made as much fuss over them as if she were the hen that had hatched someone else’s eggs.

‘News! News!’ cried Mrs. Palmer, waving a letter at the Tebbens. ‘I had to come round and tell you, Winifred, and as I met your Mrs. Phipps at the shop, I knew there would be no one here to answer the bell, so I came creeping round by the drawing-room. I shall just tell you about it and run away, for the great man must not be disturbed.’

Mr. Tebben, who detested being called a great man, got up, but was unable to offer his caller a seat, as he had the only chair in the little room, and Mrs. Palmer could not have squeezed her stout, imposing person behind the table. Luckily Mrs. Tebben, who in some ways had never developed spiritually since the days of cocoa-parties in a bed-sitting room at college, remembered refreshments, and said to Mrs. Palmer:

‘You must have a cup of tea. Mrs. Phipps will be back in a moment, and the kettle is just on the boil. We always have tea in the morning. Come into the drawing-room and Gilbert will join us.’

Rather suspiciously Mrs. Palmer allowed herself to be led into the drawing-room, where sofas and chairs heaped with papers showed that Mrs. Tebben had been working. It was a pleasant side of Mrs. Tebben’s character that although her own books were described, by those who read them, as important, she was entirely modest about what she had done, and never dreamt of demanding elbow-room or solitude for herself, although she accepted their necessity for her husband. There were more bookcases, photographs of places in Norway and Iceland that they had visited before children put such an expense out of the question, and in a corner a small upright piano, celebrated for having belonged to Mr. Tebben’s mother, but possessing no other merit. Mrs. Tebben, clearing an armful of papers and a huge tabby cat off the sofa, invited her visitor to sit down.

‘It is about the Deans,’ said Mrs. Palmer. ‘I have had a letter from Rachel. She and Frank and five, or is it six, of their children, are coming to the Dower House for the summer.’

‘Mr. Palmer’s sister and her husband?’ said Mrs. Tebben. ‘Gunnar, put your claws in!’

‘Yes. Fred is so delighted, and so am I, because they will all be able to help with my play. You know we are doing Hippolytus this summer. That is partly what I came to see you about.’

‘I must see about the tea,’ said Mrs. Tebben, getting up again. ‘I’ll send Gilbert to you, if you’ll excuse me for a moment. Gilbert! Gilbert!’ she shouted as she passed the study door, ‘Mrs. Palmer is alone in the drawing-room. Entertain her. I must see about some tea,’ and so disappeared into the kitchen.

Mr. Tebben unwillingly rose, went into the drawing-room, saved Mrs. Palmer from Gunnar, who was preparing to sharpen his claws on her skirt, sat down beside her, and said nothing.

‘We are doing Hippolytus this summer, you know,’ said Mrs. Palmer, for the second time. ‘We know that you are only free at week-ends, but we are very anxious to get you. Theseus cries out for you in the part.’

‘Greek isn’t my subject,’ said Mr. Tebben. ‘The Scandinavian languages are more in my line. Now, if you were doing something in the nature of a saga—but no, it wouldn’t do. No, I positively couldn’t act, even in a saga. Besides, I don’t think the village would understand Norse.’

‘But we aren’t acting sagas,’ said Mrs. Palmer, ‘it’s Euripides.’

‘Greek is much the same,’ said Mr. Tebben. ‘They wouldn’t understand Greek. No, I really don’t think they would.’

‘It isn’t Greek, it’s English—a translation.’

‘I don’t think they’d understand a translation either,’ said Mr. Tebben determinedly.

‘My nephew, Laurence Dean, that you have so often heard me talk about,’ said Mrs. Palmer, trying a fresh point of attack, ‘will be here for the summer. His parents, my sister-in-law and her husband, will be at the Dower House with some of their children, I mean Laurence to do Hippolytus. Now, if you did Theseus, we should at least feel that we had a nucleus.’

Mrs. Tebben now came in, with a three-legged cake-stand, followed by Mrs. Phipps, carrying a wavering brass tray of tea-things. When the tray had been balanced on an eight-legged folding stand, Mr. Tebben got up.

‘ “Two legs sat on three legs, milking four legs,” ’ he said meditatively. ‘Dear Mother Goose. Well, I must get back to my work. That letter to Fanshawe should have been written a week ago. Good-bye, Mrs. Palmer. Villagers understand nothing, so it really will not matter what you do.’

With which helpful remark he picked up the tabby cat, and going quickly back to his study resumed his letter to Mr. Fanshawe, whose society held outrageous views about the Elder Edda.

‘What a splendid Theseus he would make,’ said Mrs. Palmer, as her host went out.

‘Milk?’ said Mrs. Tebben. ‘I’m afraid you will never get Gilbert to do Theseus. In fact, I know he won’t. Gunnar! Gunnar! do you want some milk? Oh, Gilbert must have taken Gunnar into the study. You know he doesn’t like the Greeks. Gilbert, I mean. He says they were uncomfortable.’

‘Well, it can’t be helped,’ said Mrs. Palmer, taking a notebook out of her bag and crossing out an entry. ‘We shall have to find someone else. It isn’t a big cast. Theseus, Hippolytus, a huntsman, and a henchman are all the men. Margett will be the huntsman, and Patten, my second gardener, the henchman. I daresay Pollett, at the shop, will do Theseus if Mr. Tibben really can’t be persuaded. And then, about Hippolytus—’

‘Richard comes down to-day and might be able to help. He will be here all the summer, I hope. He has been doing Greats, so he would know the play. Not in English, of course, but then he knows the original, and could get the spirit,’ said Mrs. Tebben, going into the trance of adoration which any thought of Richard always induced.

‘Perhaps he would train the chorus for me, then,’ said Mrs. Palmer, with great presence of mind. ‘That is where real skill is required. I had thought of Laurence for Hippolytus. He has had a good deal of experience. He is in his father’s engineering firm, and they have an excellent amateur dramatic society.’

She did not add that, in her opinion, anyone whose ears stuck out as much as Richard’s was naturally disqualified for a part which did not demand a wig.

Mother, and aunt by marriage, each eager in the defence of her absent young, were silent for a moment, massing their forces for the next move. Mrs. Palmer, who had quicker wits than her friend, got in first.

‘I wish there were a part for you, Winifred,’ she said regretfully. ‘Your Lady Montagu was such a success the year we did Romeo and Juliet. I could hardly ask you to do the nurse in Hippolytus.’

There was no inflection of interrogation in her voice, but Mrs. Tebben chose to take it that there was.

‘Of course I’ll do the nurse,’ she said obligingly. ‘It’s a longer part than Lady Montagu, but I learnt those two lines very easily, and it will simply be a question of application. I shall give myself regular hours for study, as I used to in the old days. And what about you?’

Mrs. Palmer had been thinking very quickly.

‘I shall lead the chorus,’ she said, feeling that by so doing she could foil any attempt on Richard’s part to train the villagers in his own way. ‘And my niece Helen, Laurence’s sister, will do Artemis,’ she continued hurriedly, ‘she drives a racing car. That fat daughter of Mrs. Phipps’s, Doris, I mean, will have to do Aphrodite, because Mrs. Phipps is helping with the dresses. That only leaves Phaedra. Neither of Dr. Thomas’s girls from the Rectory can act without giggling, and I don’t want to ask Lady Bond, because we are at war about a fence. My sister-in-law, Laurence’s mother, would take the part, I am sure, and she looks wonderfully young for forty-eight, but she cannot ever remember her words. What shall we do?’

‘Margaret will be coming home next week,’ said Mrs. Tebben, suddenly remembering the daughter whom, in her worship for Richard, she often forgot. ‘She has been at Grenoble with a family. Not Greeks, but highly cultured people. I think she said something about having met Laurence there in one of her letters.’

Because her mother could only think of Richard, Margaret, who was two years younger, was often forgotten like that. Her father also let her existence slip from his mind at times, not because he adored Richard, whom indeed he vaguely found rather trying, but because his mind was usually on letters to Fanshawe and similar subjects. So she had been sent to Germany and then to France when she left school, and there might have remained for ever if her father, suddenly remembering her existence, had not demanded her return. Mrs. Tebben, arguing that as her husband was paying for the child’s education he had a perfect right to see her, had agreed, and now came her reward, for Margaret would be a useful pawn to play against Mrs. Palmer. As that lady had no alternative left, she was obliged to accept enthusiastically, only wishing that Margaret were rather more hideous than she remembered her, as so very pretty a person might attract Laurence, whom she destined for a good marriage.

‘Then that’s all settled,’ said Mrs. Palmer. ‘Tell Richard to come over and see me as soon as he gets back—he might dine with us to-night, after the Choral. And tell Margaret too, of course, as soon as she comes home. We can’t begin rehearsing too soon. And do you mind if I have Mrs. Phipps on Wednesday afternoons? She can do a lot of machining for me, and I know you are nearly always in town in the middle of the week. Say good-bye to the great man for me. I shall just slip out again as I came in.’

Mrs. Tebben watched her visitor go with mixed feelings. To have Richard refused for Hippolytus and Mrs. Phipps commandeered for Wednesdays was intolerable. On the other hand, she as Nurse and Richard as chorus master would have the play a good deal in their own hands, and certainly Richard would not have wanted to play Hippolytus to his sister, of whom he thought as poorly as he did of his parents. If Mrs. Palmer thought she could manage the chorus against Richard’s wishes, let her try. And Gilbert was safely out of it, which reminded her that he had not had any tea, so she poured out a cup and took it into the study.

‘I’m afraid it’s rather cold and stewed,’ she said, putting it down on the table.

Mr. Tebben was used to it in that state, for it was one of his wife’s economies to keep tea for hours, under a tea-cosy, or in the fender, rather than send for fresh supplies, so he pushed it kindly away and continued his work till lunch-time. Meals were no particular pleasure to him in his own home. What she ate was a matter of indifference to Mrs. Tebben, who prided herself on being a good housewife, so she had forced her family into a small service flat in London, and had Mrs. Phipps to cook in the country. Mrs. Phipps, a born cook only in the sense that she had brought up a large family chiefly on tinned foods, had a natural gift for making meat appear grey and serving all vegetables in that water which to throw away (so scientists tell us) is to lose the most nutritious part of their natural salts. To-day the meat, being cold boiled mutton, would have been grey in any case. The salad was from the garden. Mrs. Phipps had indeed held it under the tap, but not long enough, nor had she shaken away the water (not, in this case, recommended as nutritious by scientists), so that the lettuces lay in a gritty pool.

‘Well, Gilbert, I have rescued you from Louise,’ said Mrs. Tebben. ‘I am sorry there are no potatoes, but Mrs. Phipps didn’t put them on in time, and knowing that you wanted to come with me and meet Richard at the station, I didn’t like to wait for them to be finished. We could have them in if you like and just eat the outside part that is cooked, and have the rest properly boiled and use them up with the salad to-night.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Mr. Tebben.

‘Some cold caper sauce? There was just this little bit left, and it seemed a pity not to use it. If you don’t want it, I will have it, so that it won’t be wasted.’

‘Are there any pickles?’ asked Mr. Tebben, though without hope.

‘Alas, no, my dear. A break-down in domestic arrangements. But the salad which is so good for you, is all our own.’

‘When I eat green stuff,’ said Mr. Tebben, chewing away at a well-grown lettuce, ‘I understand why cows have four stomachs. I am relieved to hear about Theseus. Nothing would have induced me to act, but I had no wish to argue with Mrs. Palmer. Greek plays! I have always felt that the Greeks were easily amused. A stone seat under a burning sun, with the bitter wind that so often accompanies it, four or five people in preposterous boots and masks, plays with whose plots everyone had been familiar from childhood, and there they would sit for days and weeks. Now, the Vikings—’

‘Excuse me, dear,’ said Mrs. Tebben, ‘but which will you have? Here I have tinned apricots. The dish on the left, I will not disguise from you, is the remains of yesterday’s rice pudding. I told Mrs. Phipps to warm it up, but I fear she has forgotten. At least it is neither hot nor cold. Will you have both? And please go on with what you were saying.’

‘I’ll wait for cheese,’ said Mr. Tebben. ‘The Vikings had more sense, so had the Icelanders. The very idea of an open-air theatre was abhorrent to them, if indeed they ever thought of it. Their national literature, stories of gods and heroes, was familiar to them, and they would have laughed, yes, laughed, at the idea of dramatising what was already in the highest degree dramatic. We find no traces of open-air theatres in Norway or Iceland. Practical people, they realised that an open-air parliament, for so, very roughly, one may describe the Thing, or All-Thing, was enough strain on anyone, without resorting to open-air entertainments. If they wanted to be entertained they sat at home, by a fire, and had their skald to recite to them.’

‘More like the wireless,’ said Mrs. Tebben, sympathetically. ‘Cheese, dear? We are just finishing up this hard bit before Richard comes, if you don’t mind.’

‘Wireless!’ said Mr. Tebben, taking the cheese resignedly. ‘That is a thing the Icelanders would never have tolerated, not for a moment. Being a highly cultivated people, their chief pleasure in the long northern evenings was talk and song among themselves, while the women worked. A kind of talk of which, with the pleasant difference that no women are present, our University Common Rooms are in some sense the only survival.’

‘I do so agree with you about open-air performances, dear. I can’t think why the coffee is so nasty again. Will you have some? Luckily Louise has the barn centrally heated now. Do you remember what time Richard’s train arrives?’

‘Two-ten. We have plenty of time to walk down the lane.’

‘But I am taking the donkey-cart for Richard’s luggage, Gilbert; so will you get Modestine for me while I just look round Richard’s room. The reading lamp by his bed is broken, and we seem to have run out of bulbs, so if you don’t mind I’ll put yours there till I can get a new one. I lent mine to the Choral Society and forgot to get it back.’

Mr. Tebben hated Modestine, who was an elderly man, but literature must be served, more than anyone he knew. Mrs. Tebben, always conscious that she must economise, for they were not well off and there were the children to be provided for, had decided that a car would be an extravagance and a donkey and cart would do very well to take them on little excursions and do their station work. There is no need to explain how wrong she was. Richard had firmly been ashamed of cart, donkey, and mother from the first moment that the plan was discussed, and refused to ride in, or be seen walking by, the little governess-cart which Modestine sometimes pushed backwards, sometimes caused to remain stationary across the village street, and occasionally ran away with down the main road. Nor would he catch nor harness Modestine, neither lead him to the forge to be shod. Margaret, kind creature, was always ready to do her best, but she had been away for a year. Therefore Mr. Tebben had been forced—for Mr. Phipps the gardener and odd-job man, who was also the sexton, was far too busy letting the vegetables run to seed—to be catcher, harnesser, and leader (when driving was of no avail), or rather puller of the hateful animal, chasing it in wet grass, pitting his strength unsuccessfully against a brute’s. Though Mr. Tebben had been a mountain climber in his younger days, his strength was as nothing against Modestine’s, nor could he find any satisfactory method of retaliation when Modestine trod on his feet with hard little hoofs. If a god had granted Mr. Tebben one wish, and one only, it would have been that Modestine should for a day have human feet, and he hoofs, that justice might be done. Mrs. Tebben was not a good walker, so whenever they dined out in the immediate neighbourhood, she was conveyed by Modestine, a hurricane lamp tied to the front of the governess-cart, her husband driving or leading, as Modestine dictated, Richard, if he were of the party, a hundred yards in front or behind.

Mr. Tebben caught Modestine, who was in a tolerant mood, gave him the rest of the cheese, and put him into the cart. Mrs. Tebben, wearing a shapeless old raincoat, for the day though warm had been showery, and a battered garden hat, got into the cart. Her husband, under pretence of sparing Modestine, walked at her side along the green lane that led down the hill to the railway. As Modestine had a feeling about level crossings, Mrs. Tebben drew up by the line. The train was already signalled, and Bert Margett the porter, elder brother of young Alf, was in the act of shutting the gates.

‘Want to come through, mum?’ said Bert.

‘No thanks, Bert,’ said Mrs. Tebben. ‘I couldn’t get the donkey across. He doesn’t like the lines.’

‘I’ll take him over, mum,’ said Bert, going to Modestine’s head.

Modestine, recognising him as one of the class who were his proper masters, nimbled elegantly across without a murmur.

‘Goes nicely with old Bert, don’t you, Neddy?’ said Bert affectionately.

‘Here, Bert, get them gates shut; she’s coming,’ shouted the station-master, Mr. Patten, the uncle of Mrs. Palmer’s second gardener.

‘Okey-oke,’ shouted back Bert Margett. ‘I’ll come and take him across again, mum, when she’s gone,’ he added to Mrs. Tebben, and resumed his task of shutting the gates.

No sooner had he done so than tank engine 17062, driven by Sid Pollett, a cousin of Mr. Patten’s who lived further up the line, came noisily round the curve, having waited to do so till Mr. Pollett had received certain information from his fireman, a Margett, who had got out of the cab to reconnoitre, that Bert had shut the gates. For greater facility of communication with his cousin, the engine-driver drew up in front of the station-master’s office, so that the end coach with the luggage van remained forlorn beyond the platform, marooning passengers and luggage.

A young man put his head out of the end coach.

‘Hi! aren’t we going up to the platform?’ he shouted to Bert.

‘Don’t look like it, Mr. Richard,’ shouted Bert.

‘Hell!’ said Richard, climbing down onto the line. ‘I’ve got no end of stuff in the van.’

‘All right, Mr. Richard,’ said Bert, ‘I’ll see to it. Your father and mother and Neddy’s outside.’

‘Oh hell,’ said Richard, ‘they would bring that foul donkey. Look here, Bert, you’ll find three suit-cases and a packing-case of books that weighs about a ton in the van, and I’ve got a gramophone and a box of records and a lot of coats and things and my cricket bat in the carriage. And there’s a pair of boots somewhere about, and for the Lord’s sake be careful with those records. Hullo, father, I wish you’d get a car. You can get a perfectly decent one for about twenty-five quid.’

‘I don’t think your mother would like it,’ said Mr. Tebben, sadly wondering why the inner affection he felt for his son should always be changed to embarrassed dislike at the very moment of meeting. ‘She’s outside in the donkey cart. How are you?’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Richard, adding in a stage undertone, ‘Oh, my God!’ which was meant to show that he resented his mother’s appearance in the donkey-cart and his father’s unnecessary inquiry after his health and possibly his examination results, which would not be out for some weeks and were not his father’s business, and wished them to know it without the trouble of having to tell them.

In deep depression Mr. Tebben led the way silently through the booking office to the little station yard.

‘My dear boy,’ cried Mrs. Tebben, throwing her arms wide.

Richard recognised with disgust that she was wearing the raincoat which reminded him forcibly of the appearance of the wives of Heads of colleges at garden parties, and that her untidy bobbed hair was escaping in every direction from beneath a hat suitable for Guy Fawkes. That her face was irradiated with affection escaped his notice.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Richard. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to get out, mother. I’ve an awful lot of stuff.’

As he spoke, Bert and his truck came clanking out of the station, followed by Ed Pollett, the occasional or sub-porter, carrying the gramophone and records.

‘But even if I get out, my dear boy,’ said Mrs. Tebben, preparing for a logical argument, ‘Modestine could not take all that luggage. We must make two journeys.’

‘Oh, don’t fuss like that, mother. The donkey can easily take my stuff. Do him good, the lazy brute.’

‘But, my dear boy, Modestine cannot possibly drag all those boxes up the lane. You seem to have a great many records. Willingly would I walk if that would help, but as things are I see nothing for it but that I should drive some of your luggage up to the house while you and your father walk, which I know daddy would love. You can then bring Modestine down again and fetch the rest of your things, and coming back you could just go round by the village and ask Mrs. Margett if the Choral have done with my reading lamp.’

For twopence, or to be more exact, for the price of a ticket back to London, Richard would have dashed over the level crossing, jumped into the up train, whose driver was at the moment exchanging tokens with Mr. Patten’s cousin in the cab of the down train, and gone back to town. But having only two shillings he had to content himself with replying, ‘Oh, anything anybody likes. All I can say is, it’s always exactly the same, the minute I get back. Fuss, fuss, fuss,’ and then feeling ashamed of himself.

‘Don’t you worry, mum,’ said Bert. ‘Ed’ll run Mr. Richard’s stuff up in Mr. Patten’s car as soon as he’s off duty, won’t you, Ed?’

Ed nodded. Richard strode off up the hill alone, angry and mortified because the irritation which his parents always produced in him had for the thousandth time got the upper hand. He had promised himself again and again this term that next time he would make allowances, treat them with tolerant kindness, and now, before he had even shaken hands with his father, or let himself be kissed by his mother, everything had gone wrong. It was quite impossible to apologise to one’s parents. They might be solemn about it and anyway it was not one’s own fault. If mother would go about in a donkey-cart, looking like that, when even the station-master had a car, and father would look at one as if he wanted one to be sympathetic, hang it, it was enough to put any fellow on edge, especially when he knew that he had slacked all this year and probably hadn’t done well in Greats. The next thing would be that they would begin to ask him what the exams were like, and mother would want to go through some of the papers with him. As if anyone with any sense didn’t know that a chap who had just come through the Schools would be gibbering with nerves till the results were out, and never want to hear of the beastly things again, and that having to stay with one’s parents made it worse than ever. If only one’s people would somehow have some more money, so that one could go abroad with other chaps instead of having to be cooped up with people who didn’t understand one and had probably never been young themselves at all.

He turned into the wood and there abandoned himself to the deep despair of a young man who knows he didn’t work enough in his last year, is even ruder and more intolerant to his parents than they deserve, and has let himself down before Bert and Ed.

Meanwhile Bert had put Richard’s small luggage into the cart, led Modestine across the line and renewed his promise that Ed should run Mr. Richard’s things up as soon as he could get off duty. Modestine took his own way up the lane, for neither his passenger nor his passenger’s husband had any heart to notice whether he plodded on or stopped to browse. Mrs. Tebben, much too hot in the raincoat, sat staring in front of her, while Mr. Tebben walked silently at her side. This time it was to have been different. Richard had had a hard year, they agreed, with Greats at the end of it, and each had secretly determined to do everything that might please him; placate was the word that each shrank from forming. And now, as always happened, the vacation was beginning with what was almost a scene, what would have been a scene if either of them had dared to answer back. Bitterly discouraged, yet unwilling to confess so early to defeat, they reached home in silence to find the house empty, Richard they knew not where, the last rankling thought in their mind being that the whole station had witnessed their disgrace.

But Bert and Ed, who were quite used to the Tebbens, gave no thought to these fine shades.

‘Plenty of stuff young Richard has,’ said Bert. ‘You need as many hands as a opticus to carry all them cases and all.’

‘That’s right,’ said Ed.

‘I come off duty six-thirty,’ continued Bert. ‘It’s the Choral to-night, up at the Manor House. I’ll get my tea first and a bit of a wash and then you get the car and I’ll come up with you, see?’

‘That’s right,’ said Ed.

‘Okey-doke,’ said Bert.