Читать книгу Jutland Cottage - Angela Margaret Thirkell - Страница 4

Table of Contents

We have at times been accused of putting so many people into our books that no one can remember who they are, in which stricture we entirely concur, as we often cannot remember who they are ourself (or selves). We have often been urged to provide some sort of genealogical chart of Barsetshire families, and several kind and gifted young admirers have even gone so far as to make a rough table of affinities; but, to tell the truth and shame him that shall be nameless, we have allowed matters to get so far out of hand that it is now almost impossible to reconcile the various discrepancies of dates and ages. For this we have no excuse and shall therefore offer two: the first that we find we get just as muddled about generations and relationships in real life as we do in Barsetshire; the second—in the words of The Water Babies—that it is all a fairy story and you must not believe a word of it even if it is true. Those who are at the grandmother stage will understand how completely addled one is apt to be by the generations. A generation is usually considered as thirty years, and if everyone had married and had children at thirty ever since Genesis things would be simple, though even then they would have to have had all their children simultaneously to keep the ranks abreast and seen to it that they all married simultaneously for ever and ever. But children are born with all kinds of intervals between them, and there have been well-authenticated cases in good families where, owing to a fruitful first marriage followed by a fruitful second marriage, children in their early teens have been seen pushing their uncles and aunts about in perambulators.

This brief apologia is only meant to discourage any reader who is kind or rash enough to begin tabulating families and dates, and to beg that kind and rash reader to accept a cloud-cuckooland that has grown in a way by itself. Anyone who has lived in this world knows how confusing it is, and sometimes all we can do is to snatch at some person or some event before the passing moment flies—just indeed as one does in real life. All of which is a prefabricated excuse for the difficulty we ourselves have been having of late with the Leslie family.

To go back to the days before the Second World War to end War, when Mr. Leslie and Lady Emily Leslie lived at Rushwater, is like a dream. There they had lived for the whole of their married life when we first knew them. Their eldest son had been killed in the 1914 war, and Martin, his young son, was living mostly in the house he would inherit. Their second, John, was a young childless widower. Their lovely daughter, Agnes, was happily married to Colonel Graham (as he was then), with her growing brood of handsome gifted children, while their youngest son David, rightly stigmatised by his father as bone-selfish, was pursuing his easy-going career of taking jobs and dropping them with facile charm. And in that summer a niece of Colonel Graham’s, one Mary Preston, had spent several months at Rushwater, and in her the young widower had found exactly the wife he wanted.

Curtains have fallen and risen upon changed scenes. Martin Leslie and his golden wife Sylvia now reigned at Rushwater and were filling their nurseries. David and his well-dressed well-bred wife and their young family were much in America or abroad. Agnes Graham, now Lady Graham, had married two daughters young and still had a third in hand, while her three sons were doing and promising well. Of John and Mary Leslie not very much has been seen, for they lived their quiet, comfortable, slightly dull and very happy life over Greshamsbury way where John had bought the Old Rectory, a good late Georgian house standing in its own grounds. A former incumbent, the Reverend Caleb Oriel, whose grandfather, an Anglo-Indian general, had left him a considerable fortune (popularly supposed to have been made by torturing Rajahs and Begums), had put the kitchen quarters and the stabling in excellent repair, and successive tenants had so cared for them that, apart from the fact that the first were too large for these over-taxed days and the second more or less useless owing to a total vacancy of hoofs, John Leslie was able to make the whole place very livable without much expense. Neither he nor his wife had much of what is called taste; but as their taste consisted in having handsome and comfortable furniture, whether old or new, we think they will do just as well as the people who have experimented in wallpapers with feathers or shells, tables made of not quite stainless tubular steel, chairs with no hind legs so that one cannot feel safe even if one is certain that one is, and so-called kitchen units with drawers too heavy to pull out with one hand when the other is covered with flour or sticky with cutting up the dogs’ meat, and with a gift for getting damp inside from condensation that amounts to genius.

In these very pleasant surroundings three sons had been growing up. As we have known them since they were at Southbridge School, we shall continue to call them Major, Minor and Minimus, though as a matter of fact they were called Henry (after John’s father), John (after their own father) and Clive (after a Preston uncle who was killed in the 1914 war). All three boys had been at Southbridge School, rather to the surprise of the county who said “Why not Eton?” though not aloud in John Leslie’s presence. Not that he would have minded in the least, but he was not a talker except with his wife and sons and his near relations and saw no reason to discuss his choice of school in public. We think it was partly a strong county feeling (for Southbridge School was, as a former grammar school, as old a foundation as Eton) and partly a kind of tribute to his father, who had for many years been a governor. Henry, or Major, had now gone to Oxford with an exhibition. Minor and Minimus were still at Southbridge; and Minor, who had climbed everything in the county, including the great tulip tree in the Palace grounds and the very nasty spire of the School Chapel, was now also considering Oxford with a view to the spire of St. Mary’s; while Minimus, who had no head at all for heights, was considering the Royal Air Force on the grounds that if that didn’t cure him of feeling giddy then nothing would, and also, we think, because his uncle, David Leslie, had been a temporary flier during the Second World War to end War. To the young Leslies Uncle David, in spite of being a not at all so young married man with an increasing and delightful family, and two paths of baldness from the temples which made an appreciable yearly progress towards the back of his head, remained a figure of romance—largely because he always arrived unexpectedly, usually by air, and never stayed more than a night at that.

At the moment when our chronicle begins to continue its well-meaning but eccentric (in the scientific sense) way, it was a nasty cold day in early February. But in the Old Rectory all was pretty comfortable owing to the excellent central heating which would heat pretty well anything and the supply of wood from the Gresham estate. Mr. and Mrs. John Leslie were having breakfast with the heat at full blast and a good fire and not feeling in the least too warm. Indeed a great many of us, owing to the years of fuel and food shortage, will be like Harry Gill and our teeth (though we have not earned our fate as he did) will chatter still; and not to be warm enough is a state which leads us to hope for hell unless we can be authoritatively assured that heaven has a good reserve of whatever fuel it uses, with the rider that if people like Aunt Cecily—who comes into the room in mid-winter merely to say “What a fug! I don’t know how you can bear it!” and open the windows wide—is in heaven too, we shall strike.

As with all England and indeed with a large part of the world (except those whose breakfast-time is much earlier or later owing to geography), the chief, the governing, obsessing thought of every day was: “How is the King?” A monarch, selfless, dedicated to his people’s service, taking the heavy burden of kingship which had come to him by default, had been desperately ill. If the prayers of an Empire, spoken or unspoken, formulated or only emotionally felt, could save a life, that life was saved a million million times; but the answer to prayer as we would have it is not always given by one whose mysterious ways are not to be foreseen by us. At least the bulletins of His Majesty’s health had been more reassuring of late and he was now in his country home, the Norfolk squire, shooting and walking among his own people.

“I think it is so nice for His Majesty that he lives in Norfolk,” said Mrs. Leslie to her husband. “It feels so safe.”

Her husband said, “Why safe, or any rate why safer than anywhere else?”

“Because,” said his wife, “of Liverpool Street.”

John Leslie put down his cup with almost a bang.

“And what on earth has Liverpool Street to do with it?” he asked.

His wife, whom many years of happy married life had not entirely accustomed to the general denseness of husbands, smiled in a gently superior way.

“If,” she said accusingly, “you think, John, you will see that Liverpool Street was simply built to keep people out of East Anglia.”

Her husband said that might be, but it was the only way of getting there.

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Leslie, “so one has to use it. But just think of it, John. To begin with, it’s all in the wrong place. I mean it isn’t where you think it is.”

Her husband said it rather depended where you did think it was, to which his wife replied that it was always farther round the corner than you thought. John Leslie said it depended where you thought the corner was.

“I don’t,” said Mrs. Leslie. “But it always is. And it is so dark and banging and so many platforms and so many trains going to places one doesn’t know that used to be country. And London goes on for ever and ever. Besides, they have stopped that nice little real country line that goes from Bishop Stortford to Braintree and turned it into a motor bus. And the dirt! I’ve got to go to Barchester this morning. Are you coming?”

Mr. Leslie said he had to go and see Francis Brandon on business and would like to accompany his wife, and they might have lunch at the County Club, and he thought they ought to ask the Brandons to dinner as Francis had been really very useful to him about some investments and his wife was so charming. Mary Leslie, to whom her husband’s will (and a very kind and just one, we must say) had been law almost from the day she had first seen him, agreed to this and went away to see the cook for, thanks to good county roots, they always had a staff of sorts, and so long as good-will reigned in the kitchen its employers were willing to meet it more than halfway, so that what with tradesmen and an old gardener and the odd man (who was also in the proud position of being the village idiot and could take an egg from under a hen without ruffling her feathers or her susceptibilities and could charm warts) and the postman and the old keeper from Greshamsbury Park and anyone else who happened to be about, the yard outside the back was, as John Leslie’s brother David had so truly remarked, not unlike “Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time.” And if there are readers who do not know this picture, or rather the engraving of it, usually framed in a peculiarly hideous light-brown wood of concave shape lengthways (if we make ourselves clear, as we almost despair of doing), we can, like Miss Fanny Squeers, only pity their ignorance and despise them.

So the Leslies went about their various businesses and then drove into Barchester and left their car in the Close. This was strictly illegal, but the Chancellor of the Diocese, Sir Robert Fielding, had a good many visitors on ecclesiastical business; and as John Leslie was a churchwarden and had known the Fieldings all his life, he was considered as privileged and acted accordingly. The Close was almost empty of people. The Leslies walked round to the stone archway and out into the town. As they had to pass the White Hart, John said he wanted to have a word with Burden, the old head waiter. The hall was empty. John looked through the glass door of the dining-room and, seeing Burden there, went in. The old waiter was arranging glass and silver (so-called) on a table. John knew he was rather deaf and did not wish to startle him, so he went round to the other side of the table. The old man looked up with a face so altered, so stricken, that John was alarmed.

“What’s wrong, Burden?” he said very gently.

“Haven’t you heard, sir?” said Burden.

“What?” said John Leslie. “Nothing wrong, I hope, Burden?”

“His Majesty, sir,” said Burden. “It was on the wireless, just a moment ago. I didn’t know what to do, sir, so I came in the dining-room. These forks want cleaning. He’s gone, sir, God bless him,” and the old waiter applied himself again to rearranging the silver and cutlery, but his hands trembled and it was obvious that he didn’t know what he was doing.

“Do you mean the King is dead?” said John Leslie, quickly assuming, as we all do, a kind of mask or shield of incredulity against news of disaster.

“In his sleep, sir, like a baby,” said Burden, and even in the shock and grief of that moment John could not help reflecting how inapposite the comparison was, for babies—we are thankful to say—are far more apt to wake and yell than to slip from a night’s sleep to a lasting sleep.

“Are you sure?” said John, uneasily hoping that it was all a bad dream, willing to snatch unreasonably at any respite from what was ineluctably before him—and before the whole Empire.

The old man nodded his head, blew his nose on a large red-spotted handkerchief and went on with his work, but he did not see very well and dropped a fork.

“Here you are,” said John, picking it up and giving it to him. “Bear up, Burden. It’s a blow for us all,” which words he felt, as indeed they were, to be singularly unhelpful. But the old waiter, with the wide philosophy of the uneducated, said Mr. Leslie was right, and if a man—he meant a King—died in his duty, that was all a man could do.

“Well, you have done your duty for a great many years, Burden,” said John, obeying the instinctive reaction of the governing classes (for so they remain by faith, charity and tradition) to come to the help of a dependant. “Cheer up. We must think of the Queen, not of ourselves.”

“Which Queen, sir?” said Burden. “There’s three Queens now, sir.”

“Lord! So there are!” said John Leslie. “I was thinking of His Majesty’s own Queen, Burden—Queen Elizabeth.” And then he realised that already there was a new Queen Elizabeth, her father’s successor, and everything was too difficult. He gave the old man a friendly but carefully gentle slap on the shoulder as a mark of good-will and left him to his knives and forks.

In the hall he found his wife pretending to read an illustrated paper upside down.

“John!” she said. “Have you heard?”

“Burden told me,” said John Leslie. “God bless him—and us all, for that matter. Let’s get what we have to do done and have lunch and go home.” So they went first to the bank, where already everyone was hushed and the noise of coins being shovelled into brass scoops felt like sacrilege. John’s business with the manager took some little time. When he had finished his talk he collected his wife.

“I’ll go to Brandon’s office now,” he said. “Will you come?” But Mary said there was some household shopping that she ought to do and she would wait for him at the club when she had finished, so he went away and Mary went up towards the High Street.

By this time the cruel news had spread. It was only a very short time since she had been at the White Hart, watching from the window the ebb and flow of shoppers on the pavement. The pavements were still crowded, the shoppers ebbed and flowed, but with a difference. Under a common, a national impulse, there was hardly a woman but was already in some kind of black. Some had almost widow’s weeds. Some who probably had not a black suit had put a black coat over what they wore. Some strange black hats had been exhumed or rescued from the jumble-sale box. Some women had tied a bit of black chiffon or black veiling over their hair, for it is not everyone who has a black scarf to hand. Some had neither coat nor dress of black and had pinned a knot of black ribbon or material to their dress, as dark or light-blue favours are pinned on the day of the Boat Race. For the men a black band for the sleeve had in many cases been found at home, or bought, or possibly made in haste from an old sock.

Mary Leslie, unprepared for this morning’s woe, had a horrid feeling of guilt that she was not in deep mourning and was just going into Bostock and Plummer to buy at least a black scarf or a ribbon for token, when she ran into Mrs. Crawley, the wife of the Dean, who was already in a black coat and hat.

“Josiah is in the Cathedral,” said Mrs. Crawley without any preface. “Not exactly a service. A kind of anybody who likes coming in and praying for His Majesty. Will you come?”

“I should love to,” said Mary, “but I don’t feel properly dressed.”

“Come back to the Deanery,” said Mrs. Crawley, “and I’ll lend you something. Not that it really matters, but one feels safer somehow. Oh dear! There are so many people to be sorry for that one doesn’t know where to begin. Do you suppose royalty always have some black things just in case? My father always said every woman should have one black dress in her wardrobe because you never know,” to which Mary Leslie replied that it was all very well, but you weren’t always at home when people died and then you couldn’t get at your blacks; but luckily the Deanery was close at hand, so this problem could be neglected. Here a black scarf was found and Mary with Mrs. Crawley went across to the Cathedral.

In London when there is any national crisis the people crowd to Buckingham Palace. So in the crises of His Majesty’s illness had thousands of people waited night and day, in rain or shine, as if the fervent good wishes of his subjects could help him—as indeed they may have done. So now hundreds of people who never came to church except on Sunday, and often not that, had thronged to the great space enclosed by the white walls of the Cathedral, with cold winter light filling the clear windows. Silent black multitudes thronged the nave and the transepts. In the choir county dignitaries could be seen among the clergy. Lord Pomfret, tired and hard-working as ever; Sir Edmund Pridham looking twenty years older than his already considerable age; landowners and titles belonging to the county—all with the feeling that a father had left them, summoned by a power greater than thrones and dominions. The Dean said—not without difficulty—a few words about the late King. The oldest Canon, who was popularly and incorrectly supposed to have been present at Queen Victoria’s accession, also spoke, and was quite inaudible, though less from emotion than from lack of teeth and a rooted distrust of dentists which had made him refuse to have false ones. The brief service was over and the worshippers went about their ways, rather unwilling to speak.

Halfway across the Close Mrs. Crawley and Mrs. Leslie were overtaken by the Dean, who had brought Mrs. Morland, the well-known novelist, away from the Cathedral with him. That worthy creature had been crying, her face was most unbecomingly blotched, and so incapable was she of coherent speech that Mrs. Crawley took both her ladies to the Dean’s study and sent for tea.

“You will have tea too, Josiah?” she said to her husband. “And don’t be pompous about it,” she added in what was for her an unusually sharp voice. “We are all unhappy, but at least we can be simple.”

“I can’t,” said Mrs. Morland, pulling her hat a little more crooked as she spoke. “What is so awful is that all the time I’m putting what’s happening into words. I know I oughtn’t to, because one ought to be thinking of nothing but His Majesty, but I can’t help it. I suppose it’s because of having earned my living for so long by writing that I have to think aloud—only not really aloud, only aloud to myself inside myself. Oh dear, I can’t explain.”

But though no one of her hearers was a writer, unless we count the Dean’s sermons and his articles in the Spectator about his trip to Finland and other even duller ones in the Church Times, they all understood in part. For most of us, we think, tell ourselves stories about what we are doing and the way we are behaving, almost unconsciously, though not all of us—luckily get the thoughts patted and banged and pushed and humoured into words. The Dean, feeling we think that he perhaps ought to say something but didn’t know what to say, oozed out of the room. The three ladies all had another cup of tea and tried to talk normally.

“You know,” said Mrs. Crawley, “Rose Fairweather is down here with her children. Her husband is to be at the Admiralty for a few years. They are staying with her people at Winter Overcotes and want to find a house. You don’t know of one, do you, Mary? Somewhere over this side of Barchester? I forget how many children they have.”

A better antidote to true grief for a departed king could not have been imagined. Rose Fairweather, the incredibly beautiful and even more incredibly silly daughter of Mr. Birkett, the former Headmaster of Southbridge School, was always what is called news-value. Her husband, now Captain Fairweather, R.N., with every kind of medal and order and distinction, had risen steadily in his profession, not unaided by his wife whose devotion to him, whose lavish and undiscriminating affection for everyone combined with an exquisite ruthlessness in getting her own way, had been of considerable advantage to him. A woman whom every male from retired full Admiral to smallest midshipman worships at sight, who calls everyone darling and is known to adore her husband above everything and to renounce cheerfully a night-club or a world première (as they say) of Glamora Tudor and her male star of the moment on her husband’s account, whose broadcast affection for practically everything in trousers no gossip has been able to touch, may be an unusual wife for a naval captain; but a better wife in her own artless way than Rose Fairweather did not exist, and her husband was fully aware of it.

“I don’t know all of a sudden like that,” said Mary Leslie. “Yes, I do, though. It might do. I wonder.”

“Do tell me,” said Mrs. Crawley, adding a little unkindly, “then we could wonder, too.”

“I am so sorry,” said Mary Leslie. “I was just thinking. That house where the Umblebys used to live—just outside Greshamsbury Park. The people who live there are going abroad for two or three years—I really don’t know why—and I believe they want to let it. Shall I ask? It has quite a nice garden, and the bus stop is just down the village street. Where is Rose now?”

Mrs. Crawley said she was at Winter Overcotes with her parents, so Mary said she would telephone and now she really must go as John would be waiting for her at the club, and the party dispersed.

While she was in the Cathedral His Majesty had seemed less far away. While she was at the Deanery she had forgotten England’s loss, as we all so easily (and thankfully) forget even our own heavy troubles while we are with friends and talking. But no sooner had the hospitable Deanery doors closed behind her than the feeling of loss and an empty house came over her again, so heavily that she went across to the Cathedral and knelt—not alone—trying to find words for her feeling, though beyond “Please, please, God, make His Majesty happy” she could not think of anything to say, till she remembered His Majesty’s Queen-mother and his Queen-widow and his elder daughter suddenly called to her high responsibility. But even then she could not manage anything better than “Please, please,” without any definite prayer. So she gave it up and went on her way to the club—but not altogether uncomforted.

At the club Mary found her husband waiting downstairs, so they went straight to the dining-room where John had booked a table; most luckily, for the morning’s news had driven many people to seek among a crowd of friends or acquaintances, or even strangers, forgetfulness of the journey which the King had taken alone, though not, they felt, even if they could not put the feeling into words, unfriended or unguided—rather supported and accompanied by the Master who does not leave His good and faithful servants strangers in a strange land.

During the morning the tide of black had been rising, and there was a hush in the dining-room and a general feeling that somehow gin or whisky weren’t the thing, but a half bottle of red wine would not offend. For this we have no explanation. One came, like a shadow, into a back corner of our mind and was gone before it could materialise. But we think we should have felt the same, though why, we have not the faintest idea.

The Leslies exchanged news. Mary told John how she had been to the Cathedral and gone in to the Deanery. John said he had had a very satisfactory talk with Francis Brandon and gathered that there were quite definite hopes of a new baby, and Lady Cora Waring was going to be godmother.

“Four is a very nice number,” said Mary, not wistfully, for her three boys had filled her heart and life very comfortably, but as a mathematical fact, to which John replied that he quite agreed, but three was somehow a nicer number than four; adding rather sententiously a Latin tag about the gods liking odd numbers.

“Anyway,” said Mary rather conceitedly, “three is a prime number. I remember that from school. Why prime, I wonder?”

But John said it wasn’t worth wondering about and they might as well go home. Mary did say something about mourning, but John said—and very properly, we think—that mourning in the country simply looked silly, and so long as she didn’t put on a red dress with spangles and dance the Cachuca down Greshamsbury High Street she would be quite in order, with all of which she agreed—as indeed she always had agreed with what John Leslie said for nearly twenty years.

Those who know Barsetshire will remember that the old Greshamsbury consisted of one long straggling street about a mile in length, with a sharp turn in the middle, so that the two halves of the street were at right angles. Inside this angle was Greshamsbury House, where Greshams still lived, with its gardens and grounds. Within the last hundred years or so many changes had come of course. The village had grown considerably and not always for the better, pushing out towards the railway, where there was a quite large working-class suburb. Of the great wealth that had come into the family through the heiress Mary Thorne, who married young Frank Gresham, much had been lost or confiscated through deaths and taxation and a good deal of the large estate sold. The property had, since the end of the war, been made over to the National Trust. Trippers came in roaring motor coaches and cars through the great gates and up the lime avenues; they walked in the terraced gardens and were shown the principal rooms. But Greshams still lived there. The house had been divided of late years. The present owners, a quiet elderly couple whose family were mostly in London or abroad, lived in one part of the house. The big rooms were kept aired and dusted for the National Trust visitors, but not used. The smaller wing was let to cousins: Captain Francis Gresham, R.N., and his wife Jane, daughter of old Admiral Palliser, a connection of the Omniums, over Hallbury way. Several years as a prisoner of war in Japan had not done Captain Gresham any particular good, and to his great grief he had not been allowed much active service, but he was at the Admiralty during the week and came down for weekends. Their only son Frank, born some years before the war, was now at Southbridge School; and there were two little girls, born after their father’s release, but of them we do not know very much at present except that they were eminently kissable and quite fairly good.

With Captain and Mrs. Gresham the Leslies had become very friendly. There was a good deal of coming and going between Greshamsbury Park and the Old Rectory, and Frank Gresham was a devoted admirer of the Leslie boys, especially of Minor, whose Alpine feats on roofs and towers he tried to copy. Not always successfully and least so on the night when he had scaled the Headmaster’s House by what was known as the Everest route, including a nasty col between the built-out bit at the back and the main building, where he suddenly found himself looking in at the window of the nursery bathroom where Mrs. Carter’s nurse was giving her uppers and unders their special Saturday-night purification. Nurse had with great courage opened the window and asked which boy that was, but having only put in her uppers her articulation was not very clear, which made Frank have the giggles so much that he slid down the sloping roof, fell into the box hedge and so escaped to his House and to bed—but not unseen, for next morning Matron had reported him to his Housemaster, who said he had tried that way several times himself but couldn’t make it and Gresham could take a hundred lines and think himself lucky. After which Frank had boasted quite unbearably and Leslie Minor had taken the same route two nights later and seen Nurse putting her front hair into curlers, and Nurse had seen him and screamed, and the Headmaster had told his Housemaster that officially he ought to make a row, but if he would put the fear of God into Gresham and Leslie Minor he himself would overlook their behaviour. All of which was duly done, for though Everard Carter was universally liked he was also feared by evildoers, not one of whom had been known to get away with his evil doing.

At the moment, being February, all their young gentlemen were away at school, and the Leslies went back to a quiet home and about their various businesses and after tea walked down to the village.

Had the Frank Gresham who married the heiress Mary Thorne nearly a hundred years ago—and yet their story feels as new as though it were happening today—been walking down the village street in the February dusk he would not have noticed any very great change. Some of the smaller houses, hardly more than cottages, had been in the phrase of the Vicar’s wife at Mrs. Keith’s Working Party in the first year of the war “arted up.” Doors had become alarmingly flat and were bright blue, pink or yellow. Sash windows had pushed themselves out into badly shaped bows. Several thatched roofs had, through time and the decay of thatching as a profession, decayed and fallen to pieces and been replaced in some cases by wavy red tiles, in others by a flat roof with a parapet—not, as in Mrs. Gamp’s time, in case of fire but rather to conceal from a still fairly uncorrupted villagery that the highbrows were lying in exiguous bathing suits on Li-los (if that is how they are spelt) with a lot of tan cream on their faces, necks, arms, legs and practically everything that was theirs. The little inn had put a dancing-room in its little garden and a rather dashing counter in its little bar. But on the whole the village was not much spoilt and, being off the main road, did not get the great motor-coach traffic. There were two good houses which had on the whole kept a dignified appearance. One, already mentioned by Mary Leslie, had been lived in by the Umbleby’s, agents and lawyers to the estate, and the present tenants wanted to let it for a term of years which might suit the Fairweathers. The other and smaller house had, since the Old Rectory had been as it were secularised, mostly been lived in by the clergyman of the moment, about whom we hope to hear more.

As the present occupiers of the larger house, nice uninteresting people called Green, were pleased at the idea of tenants who were known to the Leslies, it appeared that if the Fairweathers were equally willing there need be no difficulty, so Mary promised to put both parties into communications as soon as possible.

“By the way,” said John Leslie to his hostess as they were leaving, “have you heard that our new Rector is appointed? I don’t suppose you have. I only heard it at the club today. I’m glad it is settled. One got a little tired of having unknown locums to lunch on Sunday. Goodbye.”

“But you didn’t say who it was,” said Mrs. Green.

“No more I did,” said John, who was apt to confound people by never apologising unless he felt an apology was necessary. “It is Fewling, from Northbridge.”

“Oh, but isn’t he frightfully High?” said Mrs. Green, looking alarmed.

“High but moderate,” said John Leslie. “And an ex-naval man with a fine record in the ’fourteen war.”

“If you say so,” said Mrs. Green, looking at him with trusting eyes. “But not incense, I hope.”

“I’m not going to answer for anything,” said John Leslie. “I must say that the only time I went to St. Sycorax—Fewling was only priest in charge there, you know—it was a bit too incensed for my taste, but a lot of people liked it; and Villars—he is the Rector and a very sound churchman—said Fewling was an admirable coadjutor and got a lot of people to church that usually didn’t go. I shall keep an eye on him and have him in good training by the time you come back. The church has been pretty empty lately, hasn’t it?” And the Greens had to admit that they didn’t go very often themselves, rather weakening their case by saying the service was so dull.

John did not make any comment, but as he and Mary walked back to the Old Rectory he said he wondered what exactly—if anything—Mrs. Green meant. That the service—whether morning or evening—could in itself be dull to anyone was almost beyond his conception. And if, he said, Mrs. Green called it dull in one breath and grumbled about incense in the next he didn’t know what she wanted.

“I wonder,” he said, talking half aloud to himself and half to his wife, “if the church is still open. I should feel more loyal—and more comfortable if we could go in. When I was with Francis Brandon this morning it didn’t come into my head to go to the Cathedral. I am really ashamed of myself.” But his wife would not hear of any such state of mind in the husband of her young love and her continuing deep affection and they took their way by the side gate and the steep path to the church, which stood a little higher than the village.

Greshamsbury Church was of quite respectable age and had not suffered too much from zealous hands—partly because it was not old enough to have people uncovering considerably damaged wall paintings as they had at Pomfret Madrigal; partly because it had been lucky in its Rectors, who mostly kept the noiseless tenor of their way. The nice square pews to which the Reverend Caleb Oriel had taken such exception were, alas, gone, but otherwise, apart from the unfortunate Memorial Window for the 1914-1918 war, it was much as it had been within the memory of the oldest inhabitant—only we doubt whether his memory would have been much good, as he went to a very small Ebenezer chapel away by the allotments and took a senile pride in never having set foot in the parish church. There was not, we are glad to say, a Children’s Corner, and the banner of the Greshamsbury Mothers’ Union was in a nice dark place.

The side door at the top of the steep path was open. In the church a few lights were on. In the choir seats was a kneeling figure which got up at the sound of their voices, revealing itself as the stout form of the Rector designate.

“Good evening, Fewling,” said John Leslie. “I can’t be the first to welcome you, as you have already been welcomed. But Mary and I—you do know my wife, I think—are very glad you are coming and hope you will be very happy. I am your senior churchwarden, John Leslie.”

“Thank you so much,” said the new Rector, shaking hands almost painfully with the Leslies. “I know I shall be. It always takes a little time, you know, to settle down in a new ship, but under a good Captain all will be well,” and he looked towards the altar, beyond which the east window glimmered as the moon came through a cloud.

“If it isn’t a bother, will you come back to supper with us?” said Mary Leslie, and then wondered if she ought to have waited till they were outside the church. But the new Rector appeared to take it all as a matter of course and accepted at once, saying that he would be at their disposal as soon as he had taken his leave.

“I always say a prayer when I come in or go out of a church,” he said. “It seems more polite in someone else’s house. You will forgive the delay,” which indeed the Leslies had no difficulty in doing and knelt while he bade his silent farewell, and then they all walked through the frosty moonlit evening to the Old Rectory, where there were welcoming light and warmth.

Those who had known Father Fewling as priest-in-charge at St. Sycorax in Northbridge might have been surprised for a moment at their old pastor’s appearance. His rather monkish black dress had changed to an eminently respectable black suit. His rather ugly shoes (for those who said he wore sandals were not speaking the truth) were from a better maker and very clean. His collar, above the neat black vest, was shiningly white, and—if the expression can be applied to a figure which almost approximated to that of the unfortunate West India sugar-broker in the Bab Ballads—he had a general air of being a fine upstanding gentleman.

In the drawing-room, besides a good roaring wood fire, John Leslie mixed a generous amount of gin with an adequate amount of vermouth and handed a glass to his wife and a glass to the Rector designate. Then silence fell on the party, for when a King has literally died in the service of his people such words as “Well, here’s fun” or “All the best” do not appear appropriate. The new Rector was, however, in full charge of the situation.

“God bless our departed King,” he said, as if it were a prayer, and then added in a lighter voice, but still—or so the Leslies agreed afterwards—as if it were a prayer, “and may He bless our new Queen,” at which heartfelt words both the Leslies felt the pricking behind the eyes, which means that tears are not far away. The glasses were raised and the toast honoured in silence.

“Look here, Fewling,” said John Leslie, “there’s one thing I’d like to know. Do you still call yourself—I mean do you like us to call you—Father Fewling?”

“I wish you would call me Tubby,” said the Rector. “They all called me Tubby in the Navy and I’m used to it—and really it does suit me,” he added, looking not without complacence at his figure. “As for the Father—I have thought about that. I am always Father for people who like to use the name. I was Father to everyone at St. Sycorax. But if people here prefer to call me anything else I hope they will. There’s something else——” and then he paused.

“Well, Fewling, it’s for you to say,” said John Leslie, amused by his Rector’s perplexity.

The new incumbent looked uncomfortable, yet at the same time rather proudly pleased. John Leslie refilled his glass.

“Put it down, Padre,” he said, “and take your time.”

Thus adjured, and in language familiar to him from his old naval service, the Rector did put it down in the naval or festive sense.

“I hope you won’t think I’m boasting,” he said, with a kind of subdued pride, “but I have been made an Honorary Canon of Barchester. So if you like to say Canon Fewling? Not but what I like the name Father, and I think my people at St. Sycorax liked it. But now I have a church of my own I feel perhaps Canon would be more suitable. Why I think it, I don’t know,” he added in a burst of confidence.

“My congratulations, Fewling,” said John Leslie, shaking his Rector’s hand warmly and emerging bruised from its clasp. “And I hope they’ll make you a Doctor of Divinity, too. It’s the first time I have felt happy since the news this morning.”

“I know,” said the Rector. “Faithful below he did his duty, And now he’s gone aloft. God bless him and his,” and their glasses met and the toast was again silently honoured.

“I saw him once,” said the Rector, when their glasses were again refilled and they had sat down by the leaping wood fire.

Mary Leslie asked if it was in the Navy.

“Oh no, in one of the big blitzes,” said the Rector. “I asked Villars if he would object to my going up for a night or two, though I daresay I’d have gone all the same.”

“I don’t think you would,” said Mary Leslie.

“Well, perhaps you are right,” said the Rector. “Captain’s orders come first. Anyway, I went up to see if I could help and, by Jove, I could. I rang up an old pal who had a church away down by the docks and went down for the night and, by Jove, we got it! The Hun bombers were having the time of their lives. Our fellows couldn’t do much but, by Jove, what they could do they did. Do you know what it made me think of?” he asked, turning to Mary.

Mary weakly said she couldn’t think.

“Tennyson,” said the Rector triumphantly.

John Leslie said, “Why?”

“Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came,

Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder and flame;

Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her shame;”

said, or rather thundered and chanted, the new Rector, suddenly showing a side of himself unsuspected by his hosts. “Not,” he added, returning to his normal voice, “that we could do much, though the A.A. chaps were doing their level best and so were our fighters—the one and the fifty-three. But that’s neither here nor there, and what I’m coming to is that next morning there was His Majesty—and her Majesty too—walking through the ruins. A lot of them were still burning, and all the little houses were gone, as far as the eye could see, and the roads were gone, and there was nothing but smoking ruins and heaps of brick and rubble and people holding a teapot or a pail—all they had left—and the women crying—quite quietly, and a lot of poor chaps on the ground with their toes turned up and a bit of cloth or something over their faces. And then along came Their Majesties and talked to us. And a middle-aged man who had been working like a demon with us all night—black from head to foot he was, and a nasty cut on his head—came up to His Majesty and said, ‘You’re a good King, sir.’ And His Majesty looked him in the eyes and he looked round at us all and said, ‘And you are a good people.’ God of battles, what a king! Sorry, Mrs. Leslie, I forgot where I was. I almost thought I was back in London—on that night.”

Emotion had by now reached a point at which anything must be an anticlimax, when most luckily dinner announced itself. The meal passed very pleasantly. The advantages of an honorary canonry were discussed and the Rector’s face beamed as he described the beauty of his stall in the Cathedral with its oak canopy and the stall-back and cushion beautifully embroidered in gros point by the ladies of the Society of the Friends of Barchester Cathedral, each with its own blazonings.

“And, do you know,” said the Rector, “I have the right—I mean any Honorary Canon has the right—to preach in the Cathedral once a year.”

Mary Leslie asked when he would best like to preach.

“I have often wondered the same thing myself,” said the Rector. “October the twenty-first would be a good day, especially if it would come on a Sunday, but it will be Tuesday this year. I looked it up. And one would have to wait five years for a Sunday.”

John Leslie said, “What about Leap Year?” which led to such countings on fingers and statements unsupported by any knowledge of the facts that everyone would have gone gently mad had not John Leslie suggested the Glorious First of June as an alternative.

“I did look that up too,” said the Rector mournfully. “Unfortunately, though I know I ought not to feel it so, the Bishop has chosen that day of all days to preach. Well, in God’s good time Trafalgar Day will come on a Sunday and then——” and he fell into a kind of muse, thinking of the Great Admiral and the Royal Navy and his new church and his stall in the Cathedral.

“You know, I sometimes feel like the Queen of Sheba,” he said. “The half was not told me. I mean I had often been in your church and admired it, but I did not know—no, I will ask you to guess what I found. And no one else knew it.”

There was a silence while his hosts wondered whether he had found the key (reported to weigh forty ounces) of the muniment chest, which key had been lost for fifteen years, but as nothing was in the chest nobody had bothered about it. Or perhaps a squinch, a word which John Leslie said made him feel dull at once and he always wondered if he really meant a squint.

“What was it?” said Mary Leslie, with a good hostess’s feeling that a silence must not last too long.

“You will never guess,” said the Rector, his large kind face beaming with pleasure. “I went up the tower and while I was looking over the edge, what do you think I saw?”

Mary, in despair at her husband’s cowardly silence, said she hoped the gutter had not gone anywhere again. Her husband, in mock despair at the folly of women, said gutters didn’t go—they stayed where they were.

“No, but seriously,” said the Rector. “A golden-crested mippet’s nest. Just where, if you lean over far enough, you can see that gargoyle with a devil sitting on a man’s head and pulling his ears. I thought I knew all about mippets. I have often been out with Wickham—the Noel Mertons’ agent, you know; he knows more about birds than anyone in the county except Mrs. Crofts at Southbridge—and he told me it was quite unknown for mippets to nest in lead gutters. And there it was, nest and mippet and all. A bit early in the year, but it’s the south side and well sheltered.”

The Leslies knew birds in a country way. They were not experts, but could tell a hawk from a hernshaw and they congratulated the new Rector warmly.

“There’s only one thing,” he said. “I would like to know if she has laid an egg yet, but I can’t very well climb over and see. I’ve got a pretty good head, but I’m too heavy now.”

He looked so dejected that Mary’s kind heart at once thought of some way to comfort him. Then, like a Spartan mother sending her son forth to battle, she suggested that John, better known to us as Minor, should on the occasion of the next school exeat go up and look.

“He would love it,” she said. “He always wanted to do the outside of the tower, but I was afraid. If you could perhaps lean over and give him your hand, Mr. Fewling——”

“Canon, not Mr.,” said her husband. “I don’t know much about clerical etiquette, but I think I am right, Fewling?”

“Quite right,” said the Rector. “I mean, I like it. But it would be very agreeable if someone called me Tubby.”

“If you will swear not to let Minor do anything dangerous, Tubby, I’ll call you anything you like,” said his hostess, to the new Rector’s great pleasure. “And when do you come and live here?”

The Rector said he had already looked at the Rectory and liked it. A respectable widow who had looked after him at Northbridge was willing to come as housekeeper and he wondered if she could get some help in the village. Mary Leslie said she would speak to her cook about it; and then talk gradually came back to the nation’s loss and there was a silence. But not a difficult silence. A communion of loyal and respectfully loving thoughts for a mother, a wife, and a daughter whose loss was the loss of England and English peoples in every quarter of the globe.

“It occurs to me,” said John Leslie, “that we may have seen the Last of the Kings.”

His wife asked him what he meant.

“Exactly what I say,” said John Leslie. “Where are the Kings of yesteryear? The Kings of France, Spain, Italy, Prussia, Hanover, Bavaria, Servia, Bulgaria, and, to be quite boring, Israel and Judah? I suppose Abyssinia thinks it has a King, but I wouldn’t stand for a King called Negus.”

“A very respectable English name though,” said Canon Fewling. “A Colonel who gave his name to a very respectable drink. But what about the Scandinavian bloc, Leslie?”

“Good well-meaning people,” said John, “but not much security of tenure and far too apt to be seen bicycling to Woolworth’s or whatever it is called up there. Holland has Queens, one must admit that, but Queens are not Kings be the other who he may. And as for Belgium——” and he paused.

“But, John,” said his wife, “they are all foreigners and have revolutions.”

“Which,” said Canon Fewling, “are child’s play compared with our revolution. I don’t want to be depressing, and I hope that God will see fit to guide our steps at home into the way of peace. We have a Queen now. But who can say whether we shall have a King?”

Mary said indignantly that there was Prince Charles, and if it came to that Princess Anne and probably more to follow.

“Yes, indeed,” said Canon Fewling. “But at the rate we are going who can be sure of a continued monarchy? God send such a thing may never happen to us as to become a republic——”

“If I may interrupt you,” said John Leslie, “it is more likely to be a Commonwealth with a King or Queen disguised as a Protector.”

“And if it is,” said Canon Fewling, “we come back to what you were saying, Leslie. A King of a Constitution. And they tried that in France and look at them now. No. Constitutions won’t work. A great many people don’t believe in the Divine Right of Kings now—then what happens?”

“Look here, Fewling, I’ll have to do the preaching myself. If they don’t believe in the Divine Right of Kings, why was everyone wearing in Barchester black and a lot of the women crying?” said John, rather basely changing his position.

“I think God had touched their hearts,” said Canon Fewling, but so simply that neither of his hearers felt uncomfortable. “Perhaps His Majesty’s death was a kind of sacrifice for us—for our manifold sins and wickedness. Kings have a duty, but they haven’t all done it. In the Royal Navy duty is duty. Nelson knew it. His Late Majesty was a naval man and he knew it too. And he did his duty and more than his duty. If,” said the Rector, “it is not asking too much of heaven, I should like to think of His Majesty being received by all our great Admirals. What a night it would be.”

“Rather like the Kipling poem about all the great men who welcome Jane Austen,” said Mary. “I cry every time I read it. I think I am crying now,” and indeed her eyes were misted and she had to bang them with her handkerchief.

“He knew,” said Canon Fewling, referring this time not to His Late Majesty but to a poet. “He knew almost too much. I have sometimes thought that after a hundred years or so he will be recognised as a prophet. If I were literary I should like to write something about his prophetic works. Now, there’s one called The City of Brass and it says word for word everything that has happened and is happening in England. But no one ever mentions it,” and the Leslies had to confess, to their eternal shame, that they had never come across it.

“Then there is something I really can do for you,” said the Rector, beaming at the thought of being useful. “I have got his collected poems, a great fat red book it is, and when I am settled and have unpacked my books may I bring it over and read it to you if it wouldn’t bore you? It really needs reading aloud—I don’t mean by me particularly—because half of it depends on the stresses and the cross-rhythms and the internal rhymes and assonances. No one has ever done anything like it.”

Mary Leslie said they had got a complete Kipling but she had never read the poem.

“If I got the book, would you read it to us, Tubby?” she said. “I’ll go and get it.”

So away she went, and the two men talked a little of parish affairs about which John Leslie as a landowning church-warden knew a good deal, till his wife came back with a fat red volume which she gave to Canon Fewling, open at a certain page.

He looked at it with great satisfaction and began to read in his pleasant, sonorous voice, beating out the rhythm and emphasising, just enough, what he had rightly called the stresses and the cross-rhythms and the internal rhymes and assonances, but before he had got very far a noise which had been growing in the hall burst into the room manifesting itself as Captain Fairweather, R.N., and his wife Rose.

“I say, Mrs. Leslie, we’re not too late to come in, are we?” said Rose Fairweather. “We were having dinner with the Carters at Southbridge and we thought we might just come and see you.”

Mary Leslie, too polite to show her disappointment at being interrupted, welcomed the Fairweathers and began to introduce Canon Fewling, who was to be their new Rector. But the words were still coming out of her mouth when Captain Fairweather, saying “Tubby!”, hit the reverend gentleman violently on the back. The rest of the company were then completely cold-shouldered while Canon Fewling and Captain Fairweather compared naval notes ranging over some twenty years. Captain Fairweather, it appeared, had been a midshipman in a ship where Canon Fewling was an officer before his retirement into the Church, and they made so much noise about the night the Old Man had kicked the cook’s cat out of his cabin where it had been clawing his best-loved leather-seated chair that the rest of the party were silent. His wife meanwhile made up her face, gazing the while at the company with the curious but fearless look of the savage who sees white men for the first time.

John Leslie, seeing no end to his naval occasion, fetched his whisky, kept for occasions of special merit, and put a glass into the hand of each disputant.

“Well, here’s to you, Tubby, and all the best,” said Captain Fairweather. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Leslie, but it was like old days to see this fellow again.”

Mary said, quite truly, that she was delighted to see old friends meeting and asked Rose if she would like some whisky, but Rose, for some reason known only to Providence, hardly ever touched alcohol, and partook of orange juice and soda water while Mary Leslie told her about the house that might be to let in the village and Rose said it sounded too shatteringly marvellous and she would go and see it next day.

“Mummy and Daddy sent their love to you,” said Rose to her hostess. “And I saw two of your boys at Southbridge. They had come to Sunday supper with the Carters. They were lambs. One of them can climb up outside houses like a cat burglar. I wanted him to show me, but it was all so shatteringly sad about the King that he didn’t. I mean, one does feel so awful, Mrs. Leslie, and I keep on hoping it isn’t true. And the other was quite shatteringly amusing and he told me about how he climbed up an edifice or a muniment or something and couldn’t get down till someone came and helped him. They are dears. What are their names?”

Mary Leslie, too wise in the ways of the young to be at all surprised by a beautiful young woman who didn’t know the name of two young men with whom she had spent an evening, said it was John, the second, who was a great climber, and the other was Clive and wanted to go into the Air Force. Rose said, “How frightfully shattering,” and, catching Canon Fewling’s eye, so distracted the naval part of it that he quite lost track of what Rose’s husband was saying to him.

“Sorry, Tubby,” said Captain Fairweather. “My wife has no manners. Never had. But a good heart and very nice children,” which of course made Mary Leslie enquire about the Fairweathers’ family and wonder again at their mother’s air of perpetual youth and come privately to the conclusion that to be very silly made life much easier—as it doubtless does.

“Oh, Father Fewling,” said Rose, “you’re coming to be the rector here, aren’t you? I simply adored your church at Northbridge with all those candles and the divine clothes and the choirboys singing, quite shattering. It will be too marvellous to have it here. You know John and I are looking for a house for two or three years and we may have that nice house just outside the gates of Greshamsbury Park. I shall come to church every Sunday, because I always do, and even the shatteringly early service.”

“Does anyone want the late news?” said Mary, feeling that Rose’s artless prattle had better be checked, and turned on the wireless. The same heart-breaking news was repeated and the world was told that the young Queen, flying back from Africa, would shortly be in her own land.

“What a burden for such a young Queen,” said John Leslie, and no one disagreed when Rose, whose lovely eyes were most becomingly full of tears, clutched her husband’s hand and said, “But the Queen has got her husband to help her, so she will be all right, won’t she, darling?”

Captain Fairweather, to whom His Royal Highness was not unknown in the Senior Service, said Her Majesty would be absolutely all right and told his wife to stop sniffing and dry her eyes, which she obediently did.

“By the way,” said Captain Fairweather, “the Francis Greshams live round here, don’t they? I saw a good deal of him in the bad days out east, before the Japs got him. Good fellow.”

Mary, delighted at the prospect of helping old friends to meet, said, Yes, indeed, the Greshams were living in part of Greshamsbury Park, the big house of the neighbourhood, and as soon as the Fairweathers were settled in The Laurels, which was the dull name of the house which the nice dull Greens were letting to them she would ask them all to meet, and if it weren’t so late she would ring them up and ask them to come over. Then Captain Fairweather said he must take his wife home and they would look forward to seeing the Leslies again very soon and so went away. As the last news had been at eleven-fifteen on that night it was close on midnight and Cannon Fewling also took his leave, thanking his hosts warmly for their hospitality.

“I’ll run you over to Northbridge, Fewling,” said John Leslie. “The last bus went at nine-fifteen.”

Canon Fewling looked confused.

“I don’t want to seem proud,” he said, rather in John Gilpin’s spirit, “but I have a car. I left it in that little lane by the church unless anyone has stolen it. You never know.”

So horrified was John Leslie at this thought that he insisted on walking up to the lane with his guest to assure himself that the honour of Greshamsbury was intact. All was well. A car was standing in the little lane and though it was not a particularly large one John could see that it was of the best and newest make.

“That’s a very nice car you’ve got, Fewling,” he said.

“It is,” said Canon Fewling. “I think I did well.”

“ ‘All my own invention’,” said John Leslie, at which Canon Fewling laughed and John thought even more highly of the new Rector.

“You see, though it’s not my own fault,” Canon Fewling continued, “I’m pretty well off now. An old uncle and aunt died last year and left me quite a nice sum of money, even when the death duties were paid. I did think perhaps I oughtn’t to take it, but I had a talk with Villars—the Rector at Northbridge, you know—and he said I would be a fool if I didn’t. He was really very kind and I felt quite humble.”

John Leslie, amused and interested by these midnight confidences, asked, “Why humble?”

“Well, you see,” said Canon Fewling, “I can help such a lot of people. Sometimes at St. Sycorax I used to wish I could sell myself as a slave to get money for my old and poor friends, but now I am, as it were, the steward in charge of this money and can really help people who need it. It is rather self-indulgent, I fear, but it gives me such pleasure that I hope it is all right. And one real piece of self-indulgence is the car. I had never had one, and bicycling does take a long time when people are ill and want you in the night to comfort them. So I took very good advice with an old friend, Wickham, the Mertons’ agent over near Northbridge, who knows all about birds, and he said I would be a fool if I didn’t buy the best as it paid in the end and I could give so many people lifts in it, or get to them quickly if they needed me in the night. She’s not bad, is she? Do you think I did rightly?”

John Leslie was able to say with all his heart that the new Rector had done a most sensible thing and although it was late and very cold, he allowed his new friend to point out the many beauties and qualities of the car. Then, after a farewell grip which left his host gasping, Canon Fewling got into the car and, handling her with great skill, backed her, turned her and drove away through the village. John Leslie walked back, thinking of the Rector as the master of a man-of-war, taking his craft with all her sails spread and a favouring gale through grey seas, an eye open for enemy ships, for rocks, for reefs, for signs of storm; confident in strength and knowledge and not unmindful of the Giver of those gifts.

“What a nice evening,” said his wife, already halfway upstairs.

John said indeed it was and he thought they were very lucky in their new Rector and how lovely Rose Fairweather was, to which she agreed. And we think that this was partly because, in a quite different way, she was herself a woman of quietly handsome and distinguished looks. For, whatever people may say, most good-looking women whole-heartedly admire beauty in their own sex.