Читать книгу Enter Sir Robert - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 4

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As it is some time since we were at Hatch End, we will take this opportunity of reminding our Reader (the one who says our books are so nice because it doesn’t matter which you read or where you open it as they are all exactly the same—as indeed they are, with a difference) that it is a small village in the valley of the Rising, which here flows through water-meadows. Hatch House, since 1721 the seat of the Hallidays, local landowners or Squires, is a pleasant red-brick building sheltered by the downs at the back. In front of it is a lawn, bounded by a low red-brick wall with a stone coping and an eight foot drop on its riverward side to the old Barchester Road, beyond which lie the water-meadows and the Rising. The village of Hatch End, on the other side of the river, is reached by a narrow road, carried high on stone arches, spanning the water-meadows above the reach of floods, built by the sixth Earl of Pomfret at his own expense after the great flood of 1863 when the two banks of the river were completely cut off from one another for seven or eight miles and a jackass was found in a willow tree, unhurt, but extremely difficult to extricate. The valley is still mildly flooded from time to time, when carts have to splash axle-deep and cars either go round the long way by a bridge two miles lower down or, tempting the flood, expire with shrieks and hissings and have to be pulled out by any cart horse who happens to be at leisure; and as nearly all the cart horses are now tractors, forbidden to use the bridge because of their weight, the car has time to sit there with wet feet and repent its sins.

The village itself had been, up till the end of the war, the usual Barsetshire type, with one or two small gentry stone houses, some pleasant red-brick houses and a number of cottages with white-washed fronts (if anyone remembered to white-wash them), thatched roofs with bits of wire netting supposed to keep birds off and now mostly so covered with moss that the netting was invisible, and garden walls consisting largely of mud or clay, some of them still with a thatched top to prevent their total disintegredation (as Mr. Geo. Panter, licensee of the Mellings Arms put it), others hideously, though utilitarianly, with a corrugated iron cover like half a drain pipe split lengthways, if we make ourselves clear.

Owing to a totalitarian war in which many thousands of lives were lost and a generation sorely depleted, the population of England was larger than ever. Where it all came from, Hatch End did not know, nor do we. Perhaps some kind of explanation lies in the fact that far too many people, having tasted the sweets of freedom at our expense, preferred to go on doing so; also that the children of Dark Rosaleen (we allude to what we still call Ireland as no one knows quite how to pronounce the native name which is written in Cunic, or Ogham, or perhaps Runic characters on its stamps), found good wages under the Saxon oppressor well worth an exile from Erin; that our dusky brethren from Africa and the West Indies and elsewhere prefer our climate and our increasing bureaucratic tyranny to their own; that we are, in fact, what Imperial Rome was, and if the Orontes does not flow into the Tiber here, rivers from every less agreeable part of the world are flowing like anything into the Thames, the Forth, and even the Rising. Saxon and Norman and Dane are we, as Lord Tennyson writes, and a good deal besides: and as Mrs. Morland the popular writer of the Madame Koska thrillers said, after a visit to friends in Riverside, London, S.W.₃, it is disconcerting if you are coming back from a friend’s house after dark to meet two or three people with no faces, only white collars and the whites of their eyes; it made one think of Othello and wonder if they would strangle one, only of course he was really only brown, she understood. At which point her old friend George Knox, the still very successful writer of historical novels, said Laura’s foolishness was passing the foolishness of woman, and Mrs. Morland said, without heat, man he meant, and Mrs. Knox laughed at them both. But, having by-passed this divagation, what we meant to say, though the telling gives us no pleasure at all, is that as a result of the general overcrowding of our little island cheap houses were being built everywhere and nearly always on the best agricultural land. Hatch End had not escaped. A large suburb of depressed semi-detached houses had been begun on its outskirts and was rapidly growing, to house some of the overflow from Barchester. For with the growth of Mr. Adams’s works and Mr. Pilward’s brewery (including the by-products of brewing which we shall not particularise as we do not know what they are) and Mr. Macfadyen’s Agricultural Laboratory which had begun after the war in a modest way but was yearly becoming bigger and better, a large population of foreigners (by which Barsetshire merely meant people who lived outside the county) had come in and they had to be housed. West Barsetshire had fought manfully against a satellite town, but one cannot stem the tide of so-called progress. The only redeeming feature of this revolting new suburb was that it lay on the Barchester side, well away from the village and Sir Robert Graham’s estate, and did most of its shopping and all its cinema-going in Barchester.

Three or four miles above Hatch End is the still fairly unspoilt village of Little Misfit, past whose lower end the Rising takes its course. Here, just off the main road, lies Holdings, the ancestral property for at least two hundred years of well to do landowners called Graham, the present owner being Sir Robert Graham, K.C.M.G. and a good many other letters, who had been a professional soldier and served with high distinction in the last World War to End War; 1939-1945 nominally, but thanks to the more repulsive of those nations who took part in it, still going on, or being just about to blow up again in every part of the world, with the cordial cooperation of many unpleasant powers or dependent states, large and small, who felt that having avoided fighting themselves it would now be a good plan to throw their weight about and demand Self-Government, Self-Determination, Ambassadorial Status, large gifts of money and arms and complete freedom to be as nasty as they wished to everyone, while no nation—under pain of expulsion from a number of Leagues or Pacts known only by their initials though most people had not the faintest idea what words the initials represented—was to be allowed to defend its own frontier, protect its own nationals, or publish any newspaper article in any way depreciatory of its grasping ill-wishers. All of which was called the Free United Nations Kinship (whose initials, we may say, gave considerable pleasure to the large number of those who did not believe in it nor trust it).

But we must leave this golden dream of permanent war on earth and universal bad will to men, and return to Holdings whose owner, owing to his multifarious occupations, has never been in residence when we were about. For this his wife made full amends, keeping open house for friends and neighbours and such young people as were within easy distance. But not so many of these now, for all our dear young are in jobs, the better to be among their contemporaries. And very nice they are; hard-working and taking their fun when they get it and altogether, from their point of view, having a good time. And when they get married, if they do have their kitchen like the beach after a fine Whit Monday and are—to our eyes—sluttish and slatternly, they have quite delightful grandchildren for us who are turned out like princes and princesses when they go to each other’s parties, even if they are like Darkest London at home.

Now, with her three sons professional soldiers as their father had been, her two elder daughters happily married and only Edith at home, Lady Graham had for the first time in her life felt a little lonely. But being with all her appearance of elegant fragility remarkably strong, and though she seemed vague really very practical, she had taken on the organising of local branches of such worthy bodies as the Barsetshire Archaeological Society, the Friends of Barchester Cathedral, and the Friends of Beliers Priory, a monastic building whose remains consisted entirely of one end wall of a barn popularly supposed to have been a Refectory, or an Ambulatory, or a Scriptorium, and a chain of picturesque almost stagnant pools known as the Dipping Ponds, fed by a streamlet, tributary to the Woolram, where The Monks were supposed to have Kept Carp in The Olden Times. As there was no proof of this, nor of anything else, the Barsetshire Archaeological Society had organised an Outing in July, but owing to the weather it had to be abandoned, so that everyone’s opinion remained unchanged, as indeed it would have been in any case. There were also the less spectacular but really useful societies such as the St. John and Red Cross Hospital Libraries, the Friends of Barchester General Hospital, the Women’s Institutes and several smaller local bodies, for all of which her ladyship did good work, never promising to do anything she could not do well and lending her large beautiful room, known as the Saloon, for meetings; in all of which worthy works Edith helped her mother very efficiently and kindly. Also, being animal-minded as most Leslies were, Edith had, after the marriage of her sister Emmy, taken a practical interest in her father’s farm and was considered by Goble, the bailiff, as a young lady who did understand pigs. He wouldn’t say cows. Now Miss Emmy, she as married young Mr. Grantly, she knew a cow when she saw one and a bull; and ’tother one too, Goble was apt to add, with a fine lewd Saxon chuckle. But Miss Edith, he said—and far too often his friends at the Mellings Arms held—now there was a young lady as did know a silk purse from a sow’s ear and he wouldn’t be surprised if Holdings Blunderbore got the Barsetshire Agricultural’s Challenge Cup this year, the way his father, Holdings Goliath, did in ’47.

Whether Edith had other immortal longings in her we do not know, for she has grown in the years of peace from the child we knew to a young lady whom as yet we do not quite know. Not so fair nor so overpowering as her sister Emmy, Mrs. Tom Grantly; no dainty rogue in porcelain like her difficult sister Clarissa Belton; but with a mixture of Pomfret and Leslie which was very attractive. Could old Lord Pomfret, the seventh Earl and her great-uncle have seen his great-niece, he would have been grimly pleased to recognise in her the Foster strain, taken her riding about the place to be talked to by the old tenants and working people, appreciated her card-sense and liked her looks. Had her grandfather, Lady Emily Leslie’s husband, lived to see her grown-up, he would have found in her a charming friend with good manners to her elders, a sound grasp of the essentials of cow-breeding, a working knowledge of how a small farm is run and an unusual gift with pigs.

With love she was not particularly acquainted. In her salad and rather stout days, she had made eyes at most of her elder sisters’ and her brothers’ friends, but though at seven or eight she behaved like a finished coquette, her heart had not been affected then, or later. Two or three years ago, at the dance in the elegant Assembly Room of the Nabob’s Arms at Harefield she had flirted wildly, but always with married gentlemen who, though still fairly young, could at a pinch have been her father. That a daughter of hers, still under twenty, should not have been in love at least with a curate, or a film star, would have seemed unusual to Lady Graham, but though her ladyship had an uncommonly good world sense as a rule, she had little clue to her youngest daughter, part romping hoyden, part a sound pig-fancier, part a poetical improvisatoressa, if we may coin such a word. Perhaps there is a real one, but our Italian dictionary is downstairs. And also, to go back to what we were saying, a very affectionate and easy person to live with.

On this particular morning Lady Graham and Edith were in the village doing odds and ends of shopping which included fish. In spite of the march of civilisation Hatch End, unless it had the means and the time to go to Barchester, still had to depend for its fish on Vidler’s van which called at The Shop twice a week. Here regular customers could leave their orders on a Monday and Thursday, which orders Vidler would carry out on Tuesday and Friday, provided he had the right fish in his van. For, as he truly said, it stood to reason a man might know what kind of fish his customers wanted but a man couldn’t guess what kind fish would be in the market. But it all worked pretty well.

So they walked down to The Shop, where the proprietress, old Mrs. Hubback, cousin of the Hallidays’ faithful maid, had a large damp parcel wrapped in an insufficient amount of newspaper waiting for them.

“Good-morning, my lady,” said Mrs. Hubback. “It’s cod again, but I saw some lemon soles out of the corner of my eye and I said to Vidler, fridge or no fridge, I said, cod’s not the stuff for her ladyship. And if you don’t mind your business better, I said, her ladyship’s going to get her fish in Barchester.”

“How kind of you, Mrs. Hubback,” said her ladyship. “Did he believe you?”

“I couldn’t say, my lady,” said Mrs. Hubback, “but he looked a great fool, as he is and all them Vidlers are. A gypsy lot, that’s what they are and I ought to know seeing my auntie married one. Beat her proper he did.”

“How unfortunate,” said Lady Graham, assuming a sympathy she did not feel. And this, I may add, is what we all do now. A kind of blackmail in which no money passes but the blackmail is exacted to the utmost farthing’s worth by the amount of listening and sympathising we have to do with people whose time appears to be of no value to them and whose affairs are of no interest to us. To one’s maid (if one has one), to the milk, the bread, the butcher, the grocer, the fish; to everyone up and down the village street, or the shopping road in London. To the taxi driver we have overtipped, to the baker’s head assistant who expects one to ask after her old mother whenever one comes into the shop, to all of these and hundreds more we pay ceaseless toll. Perhaps it promotes human fellowship, but sometimes one would like to tie them all up in a row and gag them and do the talking oneself. Or, better still, just leave them there gagged and walk away.

“Black and blue she was, as the saying is,” Mrs. Hubback added, as she wrapped the fish parcel in a large and fairly clean newspaper. “Still it takes all sorts to make a world,” and as this remark, though very true, did not appear to have any particular bearing on the subject, Lady Graham managed to say “Good-morning” and go out.

“Now, what next?” said Lady Graham to her daughter. “I must see Mr. Choyce about a little service for darling Gran’s anniversary. I mean of the day she died. It seems so long ago. It is six years.”

“I’m so sorry, mother,” said Edith. “Gran was so darling and I remember that day because we were talking about how kind our American friends were, because they sent us food in the war and then when the war stopped they still sent it and I made a poem about it. But Gran was in the little drawing-room and didn’t hear it and then Martin came in to tell us. Darling Gran,” and her eyes misted a little. “When is the service to be?”

Lady Graham said on Thursday afternoon if it suited everyone, and only the family or any old friends who liked to come.

“I wish we could have had Mr. Bostock,” she said, “because darling Mamma is buried at Rushwater, but then it would be Martin’s business and he has so much to do. In any case our little service is only a sort of private one, because Gran died here, though she was buried at Rushwater. Just for all the people here who loved her. And it will please Mr. Choyce so much,” at which moment the vicar came past and stopped to speak to them.

“You are the very person I wanted to see,” said Lady Graham. “About darling Mamma’s funeral.”

Mr. Choyce, surprised by her ladyship’s way of putting it, wondered if there was some difficulty at Rushwater and Lady Emily Leslie would have to be exhumed and buried again and if so why and by whom.

“Because, Thursday is her anniversary,” Lady Graham went on, not noticing Mr. Choyce’s agitation. “I mean the day she died, not her birthday. Though of course we have to believe that it is all much the same thing, haven’t we? I mean when one is dead it probably feels like being born again, only as one doesn’t remember being born it would be a little difficult to get it right the first time,” by which religious-philosophical thesis Mr. Choyce was considerably exercised and wondered what on earth her ladyship meant; though he admired, nay adored her too much to say so.

“So I thought if we could have a little service of Remembrance for her, with some prayers and something out of the Bible,” her ladyship went on, “darling Mamma would like it so much, and after all if one is in heaven I cannot think that it matters much if the service is at Rushwater or Hatch End. They must look exactly alike from there.”

Mr. Choyce, an old friend of Mr. Halliday’s, a gentleman, extremely kind-hearted, and a Christian in the best and happiest sense of the word, was overcome with compassion for Lady Graham who bore her sorrow so angelically and said he would feel it a privilege to do anything for Lady Graham.

“Oh, but it’s not for me,” said Lady Graham, “it’s for my mother,” at which words poor Mr. Choyce fell into a kind of religious melancholia at the thought of having made such a floater (for his slang was a little out of date) and perhaps wounded the tender heart of a woman mourning a beloved mother.

“If you are not busy, Mr. Choyce, do let us go into the church for a moment,” said Lady Graham, “and then I can show you everything,” which made the vicar even more nervous, but he remembered that he was not only a clerk in Holy Orders but quite as old as Lady Graham, if not older, and braced himself to accompany her ladyship.

“We have had some quite dreadful men here,” said Lady Graham.

“Not the gang that broke into Lord Aberfordbury’s house and stole all the whiskey!” said Mr. Choyce, alarmed for Lady Graham’s safety.

“I meant in the church,” said Lady Graham in a religious voice.

The vicar said he always kept the church plate, not that there was much of it, in the locked cupboard under the organ to put thieves off the scent, and had fixed an alarm which was connected with the vicarage, so that if it went off he could get his gun and go straight down to the vestry.

“How very clever of you,” said Lady Graham admiringly. “You must let me see it,” at which the vicar’s heart beat quite uncontrollably for a few seconds. “But I wasn’t talking about burglars, Mr. Choyce. I meant we had some dreadful vicars. Long before you came of course. When my husband was a boy there was a vicar who used to pray by name for everyone he didn’t like. And there was another one who shot a fox in the churchyard.”

Mr. Choyce, not quite certain whether the sin lay in shooting the fox or doing it in the churchyard, said If we had no sins we deceived ourselves and then wondered if that was what he meant.

“And the man who stole socks,” said Lady Graham. “You could trust him with the collection or anything, but if he saw socks on a line he always took them. He did not stay long and I believe he was sent to a nudist colony, because they had nothing on that he could steal. So I think just a few prayers and something out of the Bible. Her children do rise up and call her blessed, Mr. Choyce. Shall I come back to the Vicarage with you and we could choose something?”

Torn between his respectful adoration for Lady Graham and his uncertainty as to what she might say next, Mr. Choyce took her ladyship and her daughter through the side gate, along the short and depressing drive overshadowed and encroached on by evergreens, across the lawn where a gigantic monkey-puzzle blocked the light from at least three windows, and so through the encaustic tiled little hall (or lobby, horrid word) into his study, which was so exactly like a study that words are not needed. If we say that there were coloured Arundel prints on the wall, framed in what is known as an Oxford frame (and is so hideous that we feel the name must have been given to it at The Other Place) and a hockey stick over the mantelpiece, we shall have said quite enough. Edith, who knew by experience that when her mother had decided on a course it was impossible to stop her, unless by physical force, sat in a comfortable chair and read a back number of the Guardian, that excellent church weekly with its equally good secular side now, to the dishonour of the reading public and more especially the active churchgoers among it, dead for want of support, leaving not a wrack behind.

“Only something very simple,” said Lady Graham, “because darling Mamma could not bear a long service on account of her arthritis. And perhaps you would let my husband read something out of the Bible if he is down here. If not we might ask George Halliday because his father was a churchwarden and feels so out of it now he is an invalid. Only we must be careful about the Bible reading because you never know what you will find. Perhaps just the words about her children rising up and calling her blessed.”

“Proverbs, chapter thirty-one, verse twenty-eight,” said Mr. Choyce.

“How did you know that?” said Lady Graham, with frank admiration.

“It is part of my job,” said Mr. Choyce. “And I would like to remember verse twenty-nine as well: ‘Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all,’ ” and then he wondered if Lady Graham would say, “Unhand me villain” and have him excommunicated.

“How true,” said Lady Graham, her lovely eyes a little misty. “She did excel everyone. Thank you, Mr. Choyce,” at which Edith, who had listened with composed interest, suddenly realised for the first time that her mother was not only her mother, to love, to be loved by, to laugh at sometimes though always affectionately, but that real grown-up people found a rare and precious quality in her. Which discovery was very good for the rather spoilt youngest child and though the immediate impression passed, it will leave some mark in her and strengthen her affection.

“And now, as we are here,” said Lady Graham to the Vicar, “will you be kind enough to show Edith and me your burglar alarm?”

Mr. Choyce was more than willing. Edith suggested that she should go back to the church and try to open the safe and see what happened. Mr. Choyce took the key off his chain and gave it to her. When a minute or so had passed a bell began to ring stridently and violently.

“There!” said Mr. Choyce, with unfeigned pride. “The bell is hidden behind those two volumes of Paley’s Evidences. They are dummies of course. And once it has started the burglar can’t stop it,” and he pressed a knob on the shelf where the books stood. The bell stopped. Lady Graham could not contain her admiration of his ingenuity.

“I’m so glad you like it,” said Mr. Choyce. “I invented it, and my only disappointment is that no one has used it. I mean professionally. If it rang in the night I should of course ring up the police at once and not do anything till they come. I make gadgets like this when I have any spare time. I have another one that may interest you. You know I have a fine tabby cat who is kind enough to like living here?”

Lady Graham said she had seen it and admired it.

“Well, he is a good mouser and often out at night,” said Mr. Choyce, “and I used to get rather worried about him. So I gave my mind to it. You see the big chair by the fireplace where I usually sit at night? Well, my cat has a basket in the kitchen where he sleeps. I made a little door for him in the kitchen wall just by his basket and he opens it by pushing his head against it and it shuts behind him with a spring. And the spring releases a catch—but if you will wait here for a moment by the bookcase I will show you.”

He left the room. In a couple of minutes Lady Graham heard a click and a small flap fell down from the wall, disclosing a photograph of a cat curled up in its basket.

“There!” said Mr. Choyce coming back with Edith in triumph. “Then I know pussy is safely in bed.”

Lady Graham and Edith were loud in their applause of his ingenuity, but this was not all, for there was a burglar-alarm which played Home Sweet Home on a chime of tubular bells if anyone tried to force a ground-floor window and several other inventions no less ingenious.

“And now I think we have arranged everything,” said Lady Graham, who always knew the exact moment at which she would be bored and if possible anticipated it. “The service on Thursday, which is early closing so that the village can come if it likes. Just very simple as darling Mamma would have liked it. And one thing I want to ask you particularly, Mr. Choyce.”

Mr. Choyce said, rather nervously, for much as he admired Lady Graham he never knew where her ladyship might break out next, that he would be delighted if he could be of help.

“It is only,” said Lady Graham, looking at him with what he felt to be the pure friendship of an attractive and gifted woman though it really expressed nothing at all, “that bit of the carpet in the aisle where the hole is. I am always afraid someone may trip up on it. I am sure old Caxton, Mr. Halliday’s carpenter could mend it. He can do anything. Could you ask him? It is no use asking the Women’s Institute because they are all making jam. Or I could ask Caxton for you. After all he is the organist.”

At this moment Mr. Choyce felt a sudden drop in the thermometer of his respectful adoration of Lady Graham. Her ladyship’s interest in the church had moved him considerably. Her appreciation of his various cat and burglar gadgets had almost puffed him up with unseemly pride. But somehow the question of the carpet in the aisle—his aisle if it came to that so long as he was vicar—didn’t please him. And, though he knew it was done in kindness, her suggestion that she should approach Caxton about the carpet—one could tolerate much from a beautiful and charming woman, but there were chords in the human mind and then somehow the remembrance of Mr. Guppy in Bleak House and the great writer whom we have read from our earliest years and hope to read till our last days, made him feel charitably disposed to everyone.

“I know exactly what you feel,” said Lady Graham, whose flashes of insight often surprised her friends. “I am a meddling old woman. Oh indeed I am,” she repeated, laying her hand on the sleeve of Mr. Choyce’s rather horrid grey alpaca jacket which he only wore to save his priestly blacks, for clothes are a heavy charge upon a clergyman, even if he has, as Mr. Choyce had, a small private income. “Of course as Caxton plays the organ he comes under your jurisdiction,” and her ladyship looked at the Vicar with a learned expression.

Mr. Choyce’s slight resentment melted like lard in a frying pan. Here was Lady Graham trying to help the church, and who was he to disapprove of her kindness? Did he not owe the living to his friend Halliday, who had rescued him from a Liverpool parish where practically all his parishioners were Dissenters or total abstainers from any form of religion. And what would Halliday think—poor fellow, never in good health now—if he knew that the incumbent of his choice had let the side down. With which very mixed thoughts he came to—so quickly do our strange minds travel—before any pause was noticeable to Lady Graham, and said the suggestion was an excellent one and it would be more than kind of her to suggest it; at which point the word tautology somehow floated into his mind and he wished he had never taken orders.

“Then that is all settled,” said Lady Graham, by which we think her ladyship meant that she had settled everything as she wished it. “Good-bye, Mr. Choyce, and thank you so much. I always feel better for seeing you,” with which words her ladyship, quite unconsciously, lifted her still lovely eyes to Mr. Choyce like a repentant Magdalen, thus upsetting him considerably, pressed his hand and went away with her daughter.

It was a principle with Lady Graham—though we doubt whether she would have recognised it as such—never to put off till tomorrow anything that it would be more convenient to do today. Today was Tuesday. Thursday was the day for the little Memorial Service, which meant that if the hole in the carpet was to be mended it must be done soon. It would have been easy to ring up Mrs. Halliday and ask if Caxton, the estate carpenter, could come down, but to Lady Graham it seemed more friendly to go over and see for herself how Mr. Halliday was and so draw to a point. In this we think she was quite unconsciously imitating her delightful and maddening mother, Lady Emily Leslie, whose intromissions (as the old agent at Rushwater, Mr. Macpherson, used to call them) were famous in the family and indeed in her whole circle of friends, for Lady Emily so long as she had the strength to get about enjoyed nothing more than paying unexpected visits to her relations and friends with the express purpose of interfering with whatever work or play they had on hand. Accordingly Lady Graham rang up Mrs. Halliday, saying nothing about Caxton, and asked if she would find her at home. Mrs. Halliday said she would certainly be in and it would do Leonard so much good to see an old friend as he got about very little now, and would she bring Edith whom her husband was very fond of. So about four o’clock of a nasty, cold, grey, windy summer day Edith drove her mother down to Hatch End, whence Lady Graham proposed to walk across the river while Edith went to the Friends of Barchester General Hospital sewing party to cut out nightgowns, and would follow her mother later.

It was usually thought by those who did not know Lady Graham well that she probably could not walk, so helpless and elegant did she look, but they deceived themselves, for her apparent helplessness and frailty meant nothing at all. In her youth many a dancing partner had figuratively had his shoes danced to pieces by her soft energy; strong men had, on the moors in Scotland, wilted while she remained cool and fresh. Even Mr. Wickham the Noel Mertons’ agent, as tough a customer as any in Barsetshire, had to admit that Lady Graham could give him points when it came to an endurance test. No one, he said, without pride and as one stating a simple fact, could give him points when it came to punishing the rum, or downing the beer, but he would back Lady Graham against any of his acquaintance for general toughness. He was not going to forget in a hurry, he said, that weekend at The Towers one New Year’s Eve in old Lord Pomfret’s time when Mrs. Graham, as she was then, had walked to the meet, followed the hounds, attended the later stages of a point to point on foot, taken part in a paper chase with a trail all over the Towers from the nurseries on the top floor to the boot-room at the extremity of the kitchen wing, danced all evening, attended a watch-night service in the chapel of the Towers and been out with the guns next morning. And all the time with not a hair out of order, nor a feather out of place, he added, as he drank her health in absentia.

Perhaps Mr. Wickham exaggerated. In fact we are sure he did, but the fact remains that under Lady Graham’s appealing and apparently helpless exterior the blood of Fosters and Leslies was strong and she had transmitted it to her own children. She left Edith and the car at the working party and walked down the village street, and so to the right along the causeway that led, gradually rising, to the bridge. It was a pleasant afternoon so far as this summer allowed. That is to say it was not raining though it obviously would before long; the wind though very boisterous was blowing across the water-meadows which was much better than when it came raging and whistling down the valley, driving the rushes and the reeds almost horizontal, making foot-passengers stagger and grab at their hats. At the further end of the bridge the well-known Hatch End artist, Mr. Scatcherd, was seated on a camp stool, his feet on a bit of linoleum, busily making one of his well-known Sketches of the Rising Valley, which sold very well in Hatch End and even in Barchester during the summer season. Anyone who saw him would have known at once that he was an artist, for no one else would have been wearing a Norfolk jacket with a belt, knickerbockers buttoning below the knee and a deerstalker hat with several unconvincing flies stuck in it; nor would anyone today, we think, have a drooping walrus moustache. Those lucky enough to have known the palmy days of the Strand Magazine and Sydney Paget’s illustrations to Sherlock Holmes in each monthly number, would have been overcome by nostalgia on seeing Mr. Scatcherd; of which we think he was quite aware, as he took the position of Artist very seriously, dressing the part as it had been played in his extreme youth and even boasting about the week he had once spent in nervous sin at a cheap hotel in Boulogne. Unfortunately no one believed this story, though it was quite true.

On seeing Lady Graham, Mr. Scatcherd unwrapped his legs from a shepherd’s plaid shawl, got up and bowed.

“Oh, don’t get up, Mr. Scatcherd,” said Lady Graham.

Mr. Scatcherd said gallantly that he always rose for the ladies.

“So did an uncle of my father’s,” said Lady Graham. “He had a false leg and he always had to click it into position before he could stand. And before he could sit,” she added. “How is your niece, Mr. Scatcherd?”

The artist, who thought but poorly of his maiden niece who kept house for him, took any money he earned, made him a weekly allowance from it, and fed him, said she was much the same. To avoid any further discussion of this painful subject he tilted his camp stool, threw his head back, stretched out his right arm and did what looked like a kind of amateur surveying by means of a pencil held between two fingers and a thumb.

“Michael Angelo would have seen nothing in this,” said Mr. Scatcherd, indicating the whole circle of river, valley and downs.

Lady Graham said he might have seen it, but of course he wouldn’t be able to explain it, as he was an Italian; hoping, in a rather cowardly way, thus to placate the artist.

“AH,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “That is just where your ladyship hits the crux. All them Italians,” said Mr. Scatcherd, dropping to the level of everyday’s most common speech, “they may be well enough, but do they get the idea behind?” to which Lady Graham replied, with great truth, that she had not the faintest idea.

“Well, let me put it clearer to your ladyship,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “They had a good general idear of painting. Charosskoorer and the rest,” by which Lady Graham dimly apprehended him to be thinking of chiaroscuro. “Ah! but had they the Mental Conception? It’s not so much what I put onto the paper as the mental conception of what I am driving at.”

Lady Graham rather basely said that foreigners were different.

“Your ladyship has driven the nail home!” said Mr. Scatcherd. “They are different and they KNOW it. That is where we differ from them. We are NOT different.”

Lady Graham said How true and asked after his brother, who was Mr. Scatcherd at Northbridge, the present proprietor of Scatcherds’ Stores, Est: 1824, and had bought for his ne’er-do-weel brother (for anyone who prefers messing about with paints to a well established business must be a ne’er-do-weel or a fool and Mr. Scatcherd had quite good premises for his conclusion) a small uncomfortable house called Rokeby and had sent his eldest daughter Hettie, who had the worst temper in Northbridge, to keep house for her uncle.

There was a chill silence and then Mr. Scatcherd said his brother went his way and so did he, leastways he went his own way if Lady Graham saw what he meant. But it was cold and blustery on the bridge, so Lady Graham said she must be going on.

“If your ladyship would like to look in at Rokeby on your way back,” said Mr. Scatcherd, “I have something that would interest you. Something out of the Dear, Dead Days beyond Recall.”

Lady Graham did not answer for a moment. The song which began with those words, a song called Just a Song at Twilight, had been one of the joys of her nursery days, sung to her when she was a very little girl by the Nanny of the time on winter evenings after tea, sitting before a comfortable coal fire on a hassock while she worked at her first piece of needlework; a piece of canvas about eight inches square with the outline of a kettle drawn on it. Nanny had embroidered the kettle in purple wool as it was rather difficult for a little girl of five and little Agnes had filled in the background with red wool. Nanny had then backed the canvas with a material called mysteriously Domett, though not, we presume, after the original of Browning’s Waring, and over that a piece of blue Chinese silk, left over from one of Lady Emily Leslie’s gowns (as we called them then). On this Agnes, with small unaccustomed hands, had embroidered in large sprawling letters the words TO DARLING MOTHER WITH LOVE FROM ANGES; which work had taken her quite a week and Lady Emily, deeply touched by the tribute, had not allowed Nanny to correct the spelling.

“If I have time, I should like to look in, Mr. Scatcherd,” she said, and went on her way.

In the drawing-room at Hatch House there was a roaring fire, eminently suitable for a late summer afternoon, and Mr. Halliday was sitting beside it doing the Times Cross-Word Puzzle.

“Now please don’t get up, Mr. Halliday,” said Agnes, coming with swift elegance across the room to him. “How deliciously warm you are here. Mr. Scatcherd stopped me on the bridge and the wind was bitter.” And as she talked one part of her mind was appraising her host, a kindly neighbour ever since she had come as a bride to Holdings, a newcomer in a strange land. For in Barsetshire, in spite of motors and telephones, one still is apt to regard anyone from a neighbouring town or village as a foreigner till he has proved himself or in this case herself. That was now thirty years ago. How time went—and where did it go?

“Is that impostor still at it?” said Mr. Halliday, amused, and then Lady Graham went on to tell him various bits of local gossip which he enjoyed. His wife, seeing her husband happily engaged, smiled to her guest and went away, saying she would be there as soon as tea came in. Lady Graham was not shocked by her host’s appearance, for her mind, eminently reasonable under her apparent vagueness or even foolishness, was the mind of a country dweller and, even to those who live on the land rather than by it, the cycles of birth and life and death often come more easily than they do to the town-dweller. She had seen her father gradually decaying till his death early in the war. She had watched her brilliant, exasperating, adored mother travelling down that slope till she too crossed that river, and had felt deep sorrow for that parting; but no bitterness, hardly even a regret, for when the appointed time has come we have to go and the willingness is all. Leonard Halliday had done his duty as well as most of us do, indeed better, and now he too must go through the door.

Mr. Halliday liked to hear any village gossip, so Lady Graham told him how she was planning a little service of remembrance for Lady Emily and made him laugh by her account of the Vicar’s mechanical contraptions.

“Choyce is a good fellow,” he said. “I knew him when we were at school. He was younger than I was then, now he feels the same age. All time gets very close together as you get older, Lady Graham.”

“I know,” said she. “At least I am beginning to know. And when darling Mamma died, at Holdings, she had slipped into the past. Martin was there and she thought he was his father who was killed in the first war. Martin was only two then and now he is a married man with a family. And all our children are getting married. It is most confusing.”

“But we are confused here,” said Mr. Halliday. “More and more so. Tell me how Sylvia looked. She comes as often as she can, bless her, but Rushwater doesn’t let go very easily,” and Lady Graham said that whenever she went over to Rushwater it was like a dream of old times and sometimes she felt that she was her mother and sometimes that she was still a little girl in the nursery, being teased by her elder brothers.

“And we did all so enjoy having George there,” she said, “What a very nice boy he is. And that,” she added with a smile of mischief very like her mother’s, “just shows you how old we get. Here am I calling George a boy, and he is a very nice grown-up man.”

“He is a good boy,” said Mr. Halliday. “I think he would have liked to make the army his profession after the war, but he came back to Hatch End and took on the place bit by bit. We had our differences. There was one real row when George wanted to put a bit of that land up towards Gundric’s Fossway under wheat and I told him he knew nothing and he went straight out of the house. But he came back next day and said he had been over to see Mr. Gresham in East Barsetshire who has farmed all his life and his father’s before him, and Mr. Gresham told him he was a young fool and the land was too poor for wheat, but with some good fertiliser it would be all right for other crops. So it was. And I learnt my lesson and didn’t try to teach George to suck eggs. Well, well.”

“And George listened to you after that?” said Lady Graham.

“He listened to me and I listened to him and we worked together and the property is doing very well—as well as the times will allow,” said Mr. Halliday, with the proper farmer’s grumble which is sometimes, perhaps, some dim atavistic yearning to propitiate the gods of blight and mildew and the bots and the strangles and all such pastoral joys. But the modern farmers, not having the old helpers, Furrina, Robigus and the other lost deities to worship or to propitiate, have substituted chemical products, and perhaps do as well; or worse, or better. But no deity has been found to give the farmer the weather he wants, so perhaps a supreme deity is really doing his best and better than we know, though our human frames feel heat and damp and cold more (we think) than do the corn and the animals; which is manifestly unfair.

As Mr. Halliday finished speaking there was a knock at the door.

“That’s Caxton,” he said. “It looks as if Ellie were out, or he wouldn’t dare to come into the house unless it were the estate room, but I don’t get there much now. Come in!” and in came the old estate carpenter. Caxton was a spare elderly man who had worked, as he often said, being a man of few words and those far too often repeated, father and son at Hatch House this many a year, though as his father had been a gamekeeper on the Pomfret estate and he was unmarried and as far as he knew childless, this description can only be considered as a figure of speech specially invented to lure half-crowns from visitors to Hatch House or tourists at the Mellings Arms. The further to impress his hereditary carpentership upon a credulous world, he still wore when working a kind of square paper hat, rather like a strawberry punnet upside down, as we remember it on Mr. Chips the Carpenter when we played Happy Families in the nursery. The game, we believe, still exists, but alas! the pictures on the cards have been brought up to date by—we think—the same artist who does the odious illustrations for those revolting little Kiddy-Books about Hobo-Gobo and the Fairy Joybell. Undoubtedly we are seeing the end of a civilisation.

Caxton, who we think had deliberately chosen this moment because he had seen Mrs. Halliday on her knees weeding a flower-bed, came in, touched his paper hat to Lady Graham and said nothing.

“Shut the door and come in, Caxton,” said Mr. Halliday. “Lady Graham has come to see me,” which Caxton knew perfectly well and indeed it was the reason of his visit. And if he did not pull his forelock, it was because he did not wish to remove the paper hat, insignia of his craft (and here we may say that we believe insigne would be more correct as being the singular, but as the plural has become Modern English Usage, it might be pedantic and would undoubtedly be showing off).

“Well, Caxton, what is it?” said Mr. Halliday, who knew that only a matter of life and death, or to put it less vaguely something connected with his work, would bring the carpenter into the drawing-room.

“Well, sir, it’s this-a-way,” Caxton began, which is barely credible except that Lady Graham was witness to it and as her ladyship was very truthful and certainly would not have exerted herself to invent a lie it must have been so. “I was thinking, sir, when I was mending that fence on the other side of the pig-yard that we did ought to have a bit of a drain on the far side. She’ll never drain that old yard won’t unless we lend a hand. Give her a hand, I say, and she’ll do nicely.”

“I can’t do much about it, Caxton,” said Mr. Halliday good-humouredly. “Here I am, being a nuisance to everyone. You ask Master George.”

“That’s just it, sir,” said Caxton. “Master George is willing and he’s a rare one with the farm, but drains are drains.”

“Well, what do you want?” said Mr. Halliday, with perfect good-temper, but Agnes saw him growing tired under her eyes.

“Now Mr. Goble, over at Holdings, he’s got some good drains,” said Caxton, addressing an invisible audience above one of the long windows. “Good quality drain-pipes, he has. Last a century those will.”

“Good lord, Caxton!” said Mr. Halliday, roused in a way that Lady Graham felt could not be good for him. “Do you expect me to ask Sir Robert for his drain-pipes?”

“Oh no, sir,” said Caxton, shocked. “Only seeing as her ladyship was here I thought now’s the time to mention it,” at which words Agnes really felt that Mr. Halliday might be disturbed beyond reason by his carpenter’s diplomacy.

“Now, please Mr. Halliday, may I ask for something too?” she said. “You know we are having a little memorial service for darling Mamma on Thursday and there are some nasty holes in that horrid bit of red carpet in the aisle and if anyone tripped over them it would be really quite awkward. If Caxton could come over to Holdings on Thursday morning and see Goble about the drains, he could mend the carpet on his way back,” said her ladyship, rather as though the church aisle were the direct road from Holdings to Hatch House. “You will only need,” she went on, addressing the carpenter, “one of those things sailors use on their hands instead of a thimble because if you try to get a carpet-needle through that carpet you can’t.”

Caxton, whose face had at first darkened, now resumed his normal tone. There was, he remarked, something in what her ladyship said and he wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t got a bit of that old carpet in his shop. And a carpet-needle too, he added. Many was the carpet, he continued, as he’d mended at Hatch House since he come there he couldn’t say how many year ago. Mr. Halliday who, as Lady Graham did not fail to observe, was looking much more himself since the conversation took this friendly turn, said it must be a matter of forty years or more.

“Forty year, sir? Nearer forty-three,” said Caxton indignantly. “Mrs. Fothergill was in the kitchen when first I come here, sir, scullery-maid she was then, and she’ll tell you. She’s not the woman she was,” he concluded with the relish we all feel for the decay of our co-evals, knowing that we ourselves look far younger and are probably immortal.

“Well, that’s all right and never mind about Mrs. Fothergill,” said Mr. Halliday who, as Lady Graham did not fail to notice, was now looking more tired every moment.

“I don’t mind about her, sir, no more than I don’t about Miss Hubback neither,” said Caxton, but at a most unfortunate moment, for Hubback who was bringing tea in heard him and managed to exude such an aura of resentment, scorn and determination to have it out with him later, as made Mr. Halliday sink back in his chair.

Lady Graham, despite her helpless appearance, had a great deal of courage and at once came to the rescue.

“Thank you, Caxton, that will do,” she said. “I will tell Goble you are coming over tomorrow and he will look after you. And don’t forget to bring that piece of carpet and a proper needle and thread and something to push the needle through with. I want the church to look really nice for the service. You remember my mother, Caxton; Lady Emily Leslie. I am having a little service on the anniversary of her death and it would be so uncomfortable if anyone fell over the carpet” and though her ladyship did not say in so many words, “and you can go now,” the carpenter made a kind of bow and went away.

Hubback, rather resentful at having been done out of a row, or scene, laid the tea-table in a grim silence which had no effect upon her employer or his guest but satisfied her amour propre. Then Mrs. Halliday came in with Edith, who had found her weeding and offered to help.

“Another cup for Miss Edith, please, Hubback,” she said.

“There’s only the four left of this service,” said Hubback with gloomy satisfaction.

“Then we’ll have to use the other service,” said Mrs. Halliday. “I think there are five cups and seven saucers left of it.”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say, madam,” said Hubback, seeing an opportunity for putting it in an unkind word about old Mrs. Fothergill the cook, who was feeling her age and her legs and was always having a nice cup of tea or a quiet lay down, but was faithful and honest and never went out, which meant that Mrs. Halliday could always leave her husband and go out herself without any need to worry. “Them cups and saucers are in the cupboard in Mrs. Fothergill’s room, madam.”

“Then that’s all right,” said Mrs. Halliday cheerfully. “Bring Mr. Halliday’s big cup and I’ll ring if we want more hot water.”

“You needn’t,” said the devoted old servant. “The kettle’s by the fire there,” and she left the room with mutterings that boded no good to Caxton, returning however with some more cups and saucers and plates and a large copper kettle of boiling water, which she put down on the open hearth, and with a last severe look at the party, implying that she hoped they were happy now, she left the room.

By a kind of tacit consent no allusion was made to this Scene from Domestic Life. Mr. Halliday began to revive under the influence of hot tea and listened with amusement to the ladies’ conversation which was largely parochial. Presently loud clumpings were heard outside, followed by a short silence and then by George Halliday in his farming clothes of old khaki shirt with a shabby tweed jacket, corduroy breeches, thick stockings and heavy boots; but he always came in by the back way and used first the door-scraper by the scullery door and then the well-worn mat.

“How do you do, Lady Graham,” said George. “Hullo, Edith, I’d have washed my hands again if I’d known you were here. I say, father—” and he sat down by his father and began to talk about a sow who, so he said, was so late with her litter that he thought she must have made a mistake and was really an elephant.

Lady Graham, distracted from her hostess by hearing these words, asked why an elephant.

“Don’t elephants take about two years or something to have an Elephant’s Child?” said George, which impressed all his hearers very much. His father questioned the veracity of this statement, but as he had no supporting evidence for his opinion, that part of the talk came to an end. The telephone rang. George went to it.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “I thought you were the people about the tractor. They promised to ring up about that missing part. Lady Graham’s here and Edith. Wait a minute and I’ll get mother. It’s Sylvia,” he said turning to the tea-table. “She wants to talk to you, mother,” so Mrs. Halliday took the telephone and George sat down to his tea again. Politeness made Lady Graham and Edith talk in lowered voices that they might not disturb Mrs. Halliday’s talk, but as it appeared to have no end they gradually rose to a normal tone. Then she hung up the receiver and came back.

“It was only about coming here for a few days,” she said, “so I told her about the service for Lady Emily and she said she would come over that morning so that she can go to it,” by which plan her ladyship seemed gratified. “She said would it matter if she came as she was.”

Lady Graham said it always seemed stupid to wear mourning in the country, though she did not know why, and she was certainly coming just as she was, a sentiment which made her audience feel vaguely religious.

George said she must be thinking of that hymn that begins “Just as I am without one plea” and at his prep. school they—

“Of course they did, darling,” said his mother firmly.

Lady Graham asked who did what.

“George is being very silly,” said his mother, who privately did not think so, but did not wish her son to lose caste before Lady Graham.

“I know exactly what you said,” said Lady Graham, her still lovely face alive with interest. “You said ‘without one flea.’ So did David and I, and Mademoiselle—or perhaps it was Fräulein—scolded us dreadfully. We were staying at The Towers then. I remember it because David dropped his three-penny piece for the collection down the hot air grating in the chapel. I was in love with the curate and I tried to fast in Lent but Nurse wouldn’t let me. She said young ladies didn’t do that sort of thing,” at which, we regret to say, George guffawed, at least to put it more elegantly he suddenly exploded into his tea-cup and apologised.

Lady Graham had not lived with an elderly invalid (if either of those words can be used about Lady Emily Leslie) in her house for several years for nothing. She saw that Mr. Halliday, though liking the party, was getting very tired and told Edith they must go home. While good-byes were being said Mrs. Halliday took Lady Graham to the far end of the room to show her a very good engraving which she had lately picked up in Barchester of Hatch House as it was in 1721, the year of its building by Wm. Halliday, Gent.

“I wonder, Lady Graham,” she said, “if Edith could come to us for a few days while Sylvia is here. I am rather tied in some ways” she went on, lowering her voice, “and it will be such pleasant company for Sylvia when George is down at the farm.”

Lady Graham said she was sure Edith would love it and called to her daughter to join her. Edith was delighted by the plan and thanked Mrs. Halliday very prettily. Then everyone said good-bye and the Graham ladies got into the Holdings car and drove away. As they crossed the bridge Lady Graham remembered her talk with Mr. Scatcherd earlier in the afternoon and the conditional promise she had made to him and asked her daughter to go to Rokeby.

Rokeby, Mr. Scatcherd’s house, stood on a little hillock at the far end of the village. It had been built by a Barchester contractor to house his old mother and it was his boast that the bricks were a bargain, as they doubtless were, but they could not have been uglier, being a purplish-red colour with flecks of black. The woodwork, which was of the fretsaw type, was chocolate relieved with coffee; the slate roof was at an abominable pitch and the box staircase which led to the upper floor was almost directly inside the front door, so that it was almost impossible to squeeze into the sitting room. On the front door-step lay a woven wire mat in which white marbles were embedded, originally forming the word ROKEBY. Owing to a heavy piece of furniture having been dropped on it when Mr. Scatcherd and his niece were moving in, and the loosened marbles having been extracted by the careful fingers of the Hatch End school children, this had during the war dwindled to POKFRY and since Peace had brought her blessings to this favoured Isle the children in the new suburb had so improved on this that the name now stood as IOKIPY. So has Babylon vanished, so Palmyra and the Cities of the Plain and Angkor Wat (whose name was doubtless far more like a real name before the dear little kiddies got to work on it).

Edith knocked at the door which was opened by Hettie, Mr. Scatcherd’s niece, a middle-aged woman on the wrong side of the middle who might have been not ill-looking if she had not cut her hair short with the kitchen scissors and refused to have false teeth, owing to some religious confusion about graven images.

“WELL, Uncle,” said Miss Scatcherd, addressing over her shoulder what was evidently Mr. Scatcherd in the background, “and a nice state I’m in for her ladyship and Miss Edith to see with the sitting-room floor still wet where I’ve been washing it and your room all anyhow and the fish not come you’d better take her ladyship into your studio though goodness knows there’s not a chair fit to sit on leaving all your paints and things about the way you do good GRACIOUS do you think I’ve got two pairs of hands like an octopus and your paints and rubbish all over the place and of course my washing has to be out on the line and goodness knows where I’m going to put it all damp come in your ladyship,” and she led Lady Graham and Edith through the little sitting-room into what had evidently once been a lean-to washhouse and was now, just as evidently, Mr. Scatcherd’s studio or atterleer, as he preferred to call it, though it bore an uncommonly close resemblance to Mr. Krook’s Rag and Bottle Warehouse near Lincoln’s Inn.

“Now,” said Mr. Scatcherd, moving an armful of paper and two broken picture frames and a bottle of Linseed Oil from two chairs to the floor, “if you ladies will take a seat, I will show you the Object we had words about earlier in the day. Not that I mean words in the sense some people might take it if you see my meaning, but our little conversation when your ladyship surprised me painting on the bridge.”

With her usual composure Lady Graham sat down upon the chair which seemed the safest and at least had its complement of legs, while Edith perched on an old leather trunk whose straps had rotted, whose lid had rusted from the hinges. Luckily it was full of dilapidated curtains which Mr. Scatcherd had bought at sales to use as properties and so made a quite safe and not too uncomfortable seat.

“Just one moment, your ladyship,” said Mr. Scatcherd, who was rummaging in another and even shabbier trunk. “Do you remember the Bring and Buy Sale at Holdings by your kind permission just when Peace broke out? Her ladyship Lady Emily Leslie was living with you then, my lady, but did not come to the Sale it being considered, so I understand, too exciting for her ladyship.”

“Dear Mamma,” said Lady Graham. “I remember it quite well, Mr. Scatcherd. My daughter, who is Mrs. Belton now, painted some bulrushes on a vase—I mean they were painted on the vase, so she painted them with some gold and silver paint to make it look more attractive. Lord Stoke won it in a raffle and Mrs. John Leslie’s elder boys broke it, so everyone was pleased.”

“But there was another Objy Dar which was not broken,” said Mr. Scatcherd in an imposing voice. “It was My Picture of the spire of Barchester Cathedral as seen from the bridge; the very bridge where your ladyship saw me today and—”

“—and I was fool enough to spend sixpence on tickets for the raffle seeing it was for a good cause, my lady,” said Mr. Scatcherd’s niece who had come back to see that her uncle did not disgrace himself in public, “and there it was, back on our hands as if there wasn’t enough of Uncle’s rubbishy stuff about the place without that.”

“How dreadful,” said Lady Graham, entirely unmoved by this story. “But I remember that I bought it back and gave it to that nice woman who taught at the Infant School and she said she would hang it in the dark corner where the children hung their coats to brighten it up.”

“And so she did, my lady, and of all the impertinence she put it up for a raffle when your ladyship was abroad. When I see that picture being raffled, my lady, my mind nearly deserted me. I couldn’t hardly hold a pencil, let alone a brush,” said Mr. Scatcherd, the just wrath of the artist boiling in him. “When I think of the Work that went into that sketch, my lady, I haven’t the words to put it into.”

“So what did uncle have to do,” said his niece, directing a look of scorn at Mr. Scatcherd, “but buy that picture back! Three and sixpence he gave for it and what teacher did with it I couldn’t say. Cheap lipstick at Sheepshanks or Gaiters if you ask me. But there’s plenty in the Bible for them as can read about those that paint their faces and—”

Lady Graham, realising that if not checked Miss Scatcherd would give them some fine, full-blooded Jacobean words about opening one’s feet to everyone who passed by and multiplying one’s whoredoms, said she must get back to Holdings but did so want to see the picture before she went.

“This,” said Mr. Scatcherd, dexterously producing the picture from a pile of odds and ends in a corner, “is the shayderve to which I was reluding to to your ladyship.”

Though his prepositions were overdone by excess of zeal his meaning was clear. He laid the drawing on the table, dusted it with an old silk muffler and stood back to observe its effect.

“That is very nice,” said Lady Graham placidly. “That’s the Rising, I can see quite well. And some bulrushes,” she added with a voice of admiration that would not have deceived any of her own family. “Do the bulrushes really grow as tall as that?” she added, pointing to the centre background of the picture. “I have never measured one,” at which words Edith nearly laughed.

“Ah, it takes a Lifetime to understand the Artist,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “If your ladyship were to look again now.”

Lady Graham looked again. So did Edith.

“I know,” said Edith. “It’s the spire of the cathedral. Only one can’t see it from the bridge,” she added rather smugly.

“That’s where Art comes in, miss,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “What the Eye doesn’t see the Imagination can imagine. Composition is the word. Look at Michael Angelo and all the Old Masters. They never sat on a bridge for hours at a time with a nasty east wind coming down the river. And why?”

This question was so obviously rhetorical that none of his audience tried to answer it. His niece said More fools they if they did and went into the back garden to collect the washing from the line.

“And well you may say Why,” Mr. Scatcherd continued, though no one had said it. “They had studied Composition, same as I did. Say an Old Master wanted to paint a landscape in his background, for landscape as landscape if you follow me was not in their line nor did they wish it to be. They took a bit here and a bit there same as I do. And they were Old Masters.”

“And I am sure you will be one some day, Mr. Scatcherd,” said Lady Graham getting up. “And if you will let me buy the drawing back it will be taken great care of.”

“If I LIVE,” said Mr. Scatcherd, “this little effort is what I shall live by.”

Miss Scatcherd, who had come in with a bundle of washing from the line, shoved her uncle’s pictures to one end of the table and began spreading and rolling the washing preparatory to ironing it.

“Eleven shillings’ worth of tickets were taken for that Thing of uncle’s at the raffle, your ladyship,” she said. “All in sixpences and one of them was mine. Born a fool, die a fool, as the saying is,” and she looked darkly at her uncle, though whether she was applying the word fool to him or to herself was not quite clear.

“Then suppose I give you eleven shillings, Mr. Scatcherd,” said Lady Graham, opening her bag and finding a ten shilling note and two sixpences which she laid on the table.

“All right, uncle, I’ll look after it for you,” said Miss Scatcherd, dexterously appropriating the money before her uncle could take it. “I’m sure uncle’s much obliged to you, my lady,” and she rolled up her bundle of linen, slapped it, put it at the far end of the table, opened a drawer, took out an old blanket with many marks of scorching on it and prepared to start work.

Lady Graham did not know fear. Partly because—apart from her husband’s absence during the war—she had never had real occasion to feel it, partly because in spite of her vagueness and the air of frailty that made people feel she must be protected she was extremely practical and saw no reason for being afraid until there was something to be afraid of. But at this moment, with Miss Scatcherd coming out of the kitchen with an iron which she spat upon to test its heat and set down on a small gridiron to cool, she felt she had seen enough of Rokeby and wafted herself and her daughter away.