Читать книгу Michael - E F Benson - Страница 5

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The River Ashe, after a drowsy and meandering childhood, passed peacefully among the sedges and marigolds of its water meadows, suddenly and somewhat disconcertingly grows up and, without any period of transition and adolescence, becomes, from being a mere girl of a rivulet, a male and full-blooded estuary of the sea. At Coton, for instance, the tips of the sculls of a sauntering pleasure-boat will almost span its entire width, while, but a mile farther down, you will see stone-laden barges and tall, red-winged sailing craft coming up with the tide, and making fast to the grey wooden quay wall of Ashbridge, rough with barnacles. For the reeds and meadow-sweet of its margin are exchanged the brown and green growths of the sea, with their sharp, acrid odour instead of the damp, fresh smell of meadow flowers, and at low tide the podded bladders of brown weed and long strings of marine macaroni, among which peevish crabs scuttle sideways, take the place of the grass and spires of loosestrife; and over the water, instead of singing larks, hang white companies of chiding seagulls. Here at high tide extends a sheet of water large enough, when the wind blows up the estuary, to breed waves that break in foam and spray against the barges, while at the ebb acres of mud flats are disclosed on which the boats lean slanting till the flood lifts them again and makes them strain at the wheezing ropes that tie them to the quay.

A year before the flame of war went roaring through Europe in unquenchable conflagration it would have seemed that nothing could possibly rouse Ashbridge from its red-brick Georgian repose. There was never a town so inimitably drowsy or so sternly uncompetitive. A hundred years ago it must have presented almost precisely the same appearance as it did in the summer of 1913, if we leave out of reckoning a few dozen of modern upstart villas that line its outskirts, and the very inconspicuous railway station that hides itself behind the warehouses near the river’s bank. Most of the trains, too, quite ignore its existence, and pass through it on their way to more rewarding stopping-places, hardly recognising it even by a spurt of steam from their whistles, and it is only if you travel by those that require the most frequent pauses in their progress that you will be enabled to alight at its thin and depopulated platform.

Just outside the station there perennially waits a low-roofed and sanguine omnibus that under daily discouragement continues to hope that in the long-delayed fulness of time somebody will want to be driven somewhere. (This nobody ever does, since the distance to any house is so small, and a porter follows with luggage on a barrow.) It carries on its floor a quantity of fresh straw, in the manner of the stage coaches, in which the problematic passenger, should he ever appear, will no doubt bury his feet. On its side, just below the window that is not made to open, it carries the legend that shows that it belongs to the Comber Arms, a hostelry so self-effacing that it is discoverable only by the sharpest-eyed of pilgrims. Narrow roadways, flanked by proportionately narrower pavements, lie ribbon-like between huddled shops and squarely-spacious Georgian houses; and an air of leisure and content, amounting almost to stupefaction, is the moral atmosphere of the place.

On the outskirts of the town, crowning the gentle hills that lie to the north and west, villas in acre plots, belonging to business men in the county town some ten miles distant, “prick their Cockney ears” and are strangely at variance with the sober gravity of the indigenous houses. So, too, are the manners and customs of their owners, who go to Stoneborough every morning to their work, and return by the train that brings them home in time for dinner. They do other exotic and unsuitable things also, like driving swiftly about in motors, in playing golf on the other side of the river at Coton, and in having parties at each other’s houses. But apart from them nobody ever seems to leave Ashbridge (though a stroll to the station about the time that the evening train arrives is a recognised diversion) or, in consequence, ever to come back. Ashbridge, in fact, is self-contained, and desires neither to meddle with others nor to be meddled with.

The estuary opposite the town is some quarter of a mile broad at high tide, and in order to cross to the other side, where lie the woods and park of Ashbridge House, it is necessary to shout and make staccato prancings in order to attract the attention of the antique ferryman, who is invariably at the other side of the river and generally asleep at the bottom of his boat. If you are strong-lunged and can prance and shout for a long time, he may eventually stagger to his feet, come across for you and row you over. Otherwise you will stand but little chance of arousing him from his slumbers, and you will stop where you are, unless you choose to walk round by the bridge at Coton, a mile above.

Periodical attempts are made by the brisker inhabitants of Ashbridge, who do not understand its spirit, to substitute for this aged and ineffectual Charon someone who is occasionally awake, but nothing ever results from these revolutionary moves, and the requests addressed to the town council on the subject are never heard of again. “Old George” was ferryman there before any members of the town council were born, and he seems to have established a right to go to sleep on the other side of the river which is now inalienable from him. Besides, asleep or awake, he is always perfectly sober, which, after all, is really one of the first requirements for a suitable ferryman. Even the representations of Lord Ashbridge himself who, when in residence, frequently has occasion to use the ferry when crossing from his house to the town, failed to produce the smallest effect, and he was compelled to build a boathouse of his own on the farther bank, and be paddled across by himself or one of the servants. Often he rowed himself, for he used to be a fine oarsman, and it was good for the lounger on the quay to see the foaming prow of his vigorous progress and the dignity of physical toil.

In all other respects, except in this case of “Old George,” Lord Ashbridge’s wishes were law to the local authorities, for in this tranquil East-coast district the spirit of the feudal system with a beneficent lord and contented tenants strongly survived. It had triumphed even over such modern innovations as railroads, for Lord Ashbridge had the undoubted right to stop any train he pleased by signal at Ashbridge station. This he certainly enjoyed doing; it fed his sense of the fitness of things to progress along the platform with his genial, important tiptoe walk, and elbows squarely stuck out, to the carriage that was at once reserved for him, to touch the brim of his grey top-hat (if travelling up to town) to the obsequious guard, and to observe the heads of passengers who wondered why their express was arrested, thrust out of carriage windows to look at him. A livened footman, as well as a valet, followed him, bearing a coat and a rug and a morning or evening paper and a dispatch-box with a large gilt coronet on it, and bestowed these solaces to a railway journey on the empty seats near him. And not only his sense of fitness was hereby fed, but that also of the station-master and the solitary porter and the newsboy, and such inhabitants of Ashbridge as happened to have strolled on to the platform. For he was THEIR Earl of Ashbridge, kind, courteous and dominant, a local king; it was all very pleasant.

But this arrest of express trains was a strictly personal privilege; when Lady Ashbridge or Michael travelled they always went in the slow train to Stoneborough, changed there and abided their time on the platform like ordinary mortals. Though he could undoubtedly have extended his rights to the stopping of a train for his wife or son, he wisely reserved this for himself, lest it should lose prestige. There was sufficient glory already (to probe his mind to the bottom) for Lady Ashbridge in being his wife; it was sufficient also for Michael that he was his son.

It may be inferred that there was a touch of pomposity about this admirable gentleman, who was so excellent a landlord and so hard working a member of the British aristocracy. But pomposity would be far too superficial a word to apply to him; it would not adequately connote his deep-abiding and essential conviction that on one of the days of Creation (that, probably, on which the decree was made that there should be Light) there leaped into being the great landowners of England.

But Lord Ashbridge, though himself a peer, by no means accepted the peerage en bloc as representing the English aristocracy; to be, in his phrase, “one of us” implied that you belonged to certain well-ascertained families where brewers and distinguished soldiers had no place, unless it was theirs already. He was ready to pay all reasonable homage to those who were distinguished by their abilities, their riches, their exalted positions in Church and State, but his homage to such was transfused with a courteous condescension, and he only treated as his equals and really revered those who belonged to the families that were “one of us.”

His wife, of course, was “one of us,” since he would never have permitted himself to be allied to a woman who was not, though for beauty and wisdom she might have been Aphrodite and Athene rolled compactly into one peerless identity. As a matter of fact, Lady Ashbridge had not the faintest resemblance to either of these effulgent goddesses. In person she resembled a camel, long and lean, with a drooping mouth and tired, patient eyes, while in mind she was stunned. No idea other than an obvious one ever had birth behind her high, smooth forehead, and she habitually brought conversation to a close by the dry enunciation of something indubitably true, which had no direct relation to the point under discussion. But she had faint, ineradicable prejudices, and instincts not quite dormant. There was a large quantity of mild affection in her nature, the quality of which may be illustrated by the fact that when her father died she cried a little every day after breakfast for about six weeks. Then she did not cry any more. It was impossible not to like what there was of her, but there was really very little to like, for she belonged heart and soul to the generation and the breeding among which it is enough for a woman to be a lady, and visit the keeper’s wife when she has a baby.

But though there was so little of her, the balance was made up for by the fact that there was so much of her husband. His large, rather flamboyant person, his big white face and curling brown beard, his loud voice and his falsetto laugh, his absolutely certain opinions, above all the fervency of his consciousness of being Lord Ashbridge and all which that implied, completely filled any place he happened to be in, so that a room empty except for him gave the impression of being almost uncomfortably crowded. This keen consciousness of his identity was naturally sufficient to make him very good humoured, since he was himself a fine example of the type that he admired most. Probably only two persons in the world had the power of causing him annoyance, but both of these, by an irony of fate that it seemed scarcely possible to consider accidental, were closely connected with him, for one was his sister, the other his only son.

The grounds of their potentiality in this respect can be easily stated. Barbara Comber, his sister (and so “one of us”), had married an extremely wealthy American, who, in Lord Ashbridge’s view, could not be considered one of anybody at all; in other words, his imagination failed to picture a whole class of people who resembled Anthony Jerome. He had hoped when his sister announced her intention of taking this deplorable step that his future brother-in-law would at any rate prove to be a snob—he had a vague notion that all Americans were snobs—and that thus Mr. Jerome would have the saving grace to admire and toady him. But Mr. Jerome showed no signs of doing anything of the sort; he treated him with an austere and distant politeness that Lord Ashbridge could not construe as being founded on admiration and a sense of his own inferiority, for it was so clearly founded on dislike. That, however, did not annoy Lord Ashbridge, for it was easy to suppose that poor Mr. Jerome knew no better. But Barbara annoyed him, for not only had she shown herself a renegade in marrying a man who was not “one of us,” but with all the advantages she had enjoyed since birth of knowing what “we” were, she gloried in her new relations, saying, without any proper reticence about the matter, that they were Real People, whose character and wits vastly transcended anything that Combers had to show.

Michael was an even more vexatious case, and in moments of depression his father thought that he would really turn in his grave at the dismal idea of Michael having stepped into his honourable shoes. Physically he was utterly unlike a Comber, and his mind, his general attitude towards life seemed to have diverged even farther from that healthy and unreflective pattern. Only this morning his father had received a letter from him that summed Michael up, that fulfilled all the doubts and fears that had hung about him; for after three years in the Guards he had, without consultation with anybody, resigned his commission on the inexplicable grounds that he wanted to do something with his life. To begin with that was rankly heretical; if you were a Comber there was no need to do anything with your life; life did everything for you. … And what this un-Comberish young man wanted to do with his life was to be a musician. That musicians, artists, actors, had a right to exist Lord Ashbridge did not question. They were no doubt (or might be) very excellent people in their way, and as a matter of fact he often recognised their existence by going to the opera, to the private view of the Academy, or to the play, and he took a very considerable pride of proprietorship in his own admirable collection of family portraits. But then those were pictures of Combers; Reynolds and Romney and the rest of them had enjoyed the privilege of perpetuating on their canvases these big, fine men and charming women. But that a Comber—and that one positively the next Lord Ashbridge—should intend to devote his energies to an artistic calling, and allude to that scheme as doing something with his life, was a thing as unthinkable as if the butler had developed a fixed idea that he was “one of us.”

The blow was a recent one; Michael’s letter had only reached his father this morning, and at the present moment Lord Ashbridge was attempting over a cup of tea on the long south terrace overlooking the estuary to convey—not very successfully—to his wife something of his feelings on the subject. She, according to her custom, was drinking a little hot water herself, and providing her Chinese pug with a mixture of cream and crumbled rusks. Though the dog was of undoubtedly high lineage, Lord Ashbridge rather detested her.

“A musical career!” he exclaimed, referring to Michael’s letter. “What sort of a career for a Comber is a musical career? I shall tell Michael pretty roundly when he arrives this evening what I think of it all. We shall have Francis next saying that he wants to resign, too, and become a dentist.”

Lady Ashbridge considered this for a moment in her stunned mind.

“Dear me, Robert, I hope not,” she said. “I do not think it the least likely that Francis would do anything of the kind. Look, Petsy is better; she has drunk her cream and rusks quite up. I think it was only the heat.”

He gave a little good-humoured giggle of falsetto laughter.

“I wish, Marion,” he said, “that you could manage to take your mind off your dog for a moment and attend to me. And I must really ask you not to give your Petsy any more cream, or she will certainly be sick.”

Lady Ashbridge gave a little sigh.

“All gone, Petsy,” she said.

“I am glad it has all gone,” said he, “and we will hope it won’t return. But about Michael now!”

Lady Ashbridge pulled herself together.

“Yes, poor Michael!” she said. “He is coming to-night, is he not? But just now you were speaking of Francis, and the fear of his wanting to be a dentist!”

“Well, I am now speaking of Michael’s wanting to be a musician. Of course that is utterly out of the question. If, as he says, he has sent in his resignation, he will just have to beg them to cancel it. Michael seems not to have the slightest idea of the duties which his birth and position entail on him. Unfitted for the life he now leads … waste of time. … Instead he proposes to go to Baireuth in August, and then to settle down in London to study!”

Lady Ashbridge recollected the almanac.

“That will be in September, then,” she said. “I do not think I was ever in London in September. I did not know that anybody was.”

“The point, my dear, is not how or where you have been accustomed to spend your Septembers,” said her husband. “What we are talking about is—”

“Yes, dear, I know quite well what we are talking about,” said she. “We are talking about Michael not studying music all September.”

Lord Ashbridge got up and began walking across the terrace opposite the tea-table with his elbows stuck out and his feet lifted rather high.

“Michael doesn’t seem to realise that he is not Tom or Dick or Harry,” said he. “Music, indeed! I’m musical myself; all we Combers are musical. But Michael is my only son, and it really distresses me to see how little sense he has of his responsibilities. Amusements are all very well; it is not that I want to cut him off his amusements, but when it comes to a career—”

Lady Ashbridge was surreptitiously engaged in pouring out a little more cream for Petsy, and her husband, turning rather sooner than she had expected, caught her in the act.

“Do not give Petsy any more cream,” he said, with some asperity; “I absolutely forbid it.”

Lady Ashbridge quite composedly replaced the cream-jug.

“Poor Petsy!” she observed.

“I ask you to attend to me, Marion,” he said.

“But I am attending to you very well, Robert,” said she, “and I understand you perfectly. You do not want Michael to be a musician in September and wear long hair and perhaps play at concerts. I am sure I quite agree with you, for such a thing would be as unheard of in my family as in yours. But how do you propose to stop it?”

“I shall use my authority,” he said, stepping a little higher.

“Yes, dear, I am sure you will. But what will happen if Michael doesn’t pay any attention to your authority? You will be worse off than ever. Poor Michael is very obedient when he is told to do anything he intends to do, but when he doesn’t agree it is difficult to do anything with him. And, you see, he is quite independent of you with my mother having left him so much money. Poor mamma!”

Lord Ashbridge felt strongly about this.

“It was a most extraordinary disposition of her property for your mother to make,” he observed. “It has given Michael an independence which I much deplore. And she did it in direct opposition to my wishes.”

This touched on one of the questions about which Lady Ashbridge had her convictions. She had a mild but unalterable opinion that when anybody died, all that they had previously done became absolutely flawless and laudable.

“Mamma did as she thought right with her property,” she said, “and it is not for us to question it. She was conscientiousness itself. You will have to excuse my listening to any criticism you may feel inclined to make about her, Robert.”

“Certainly, my dear. I only want you to listen to me about Michael. You agree with me on the impossibility of his adopting a musical career. I cannot, at present, think so ill of Michael as to suppose that he will defy our joint authority.”

“Michael has a great will of his own,” she remarked. “He gets that from you, Robert, though he gets his money from his grandmother.”

The futility of further discussion with his wife began to dawn on Lord Ashbridge, as it dawned on everybody who had the privilege of conversing with her. Her mind was a blind alley that led nowhere; it was clear that she had no idea to contribute to the subject except slightly pessimistic forebodings with which, unfortunately, he found himself secretly disposed to agree. He had always felt that Michael was an uncomfortable sort of boy; in other words, that he had the inconvenient habit of thinking things out for himself, instead of blindly accepting the conclusions of other people.

Much as Lord Ashbridge valued the sturdy independence of character which he himself enjoyed displaying, he appreciated it rather less highly when it was manifested by people who were not sensible enough to agree with him. He looked forward to Michael’s arrival that evening with the feeling that there was a rebellious standard hoisted against the calm blue of the evening sky, and remembering the advent of his sister he wondered whether she would not join the insurgent. Barbara Jerome, as has been remarked, often annoyed her brother; she also genially laughed at him; but Lord Ashbridge, partly from affection, partly from a loyal family sense of clanship, always expected his sister to spend a fortnight with him in August, and would have been much hurt had she refused to do so. Her husband, however, so far from spending a fortnight with his brother-in-law, never spent a minute in his presence if it could possibly be avoided, an arrangement which everybody concerned considered to be wise, and in the interests of cordiality.

“And Barbara comes this evening as well as Michael, does she not?” he said. “I hope she will not take Michael’s part in his absurd scheme.”

“I have given Barbara the blue room,” said Lady Ashbridge, after a little thought. “I am afraid she may bring her great dog with her. I hope he will not quarrel with Petsy. Petsy does not like other dogs.”

The day had been very hot, and Lord Ashbridge, not having taken any exercise, went off to have a round of golf with the professional of the links that lay not half a mile from the house. He considered exercise an essential part of the true Englishman’s daily curriculum, and as necessary a contribution to the traditional mode of life which made them all what they were—or should be—as a bath in the morning or attendance at church on Sunday. He did not care so much about playing golf with a casual friend, because the casual friend, as a rule, casually beat him—thus putting him in an un-English position—and preferred a game with this first-class professional whose duty it was—in complete violation of his capacities—to play just badly enough to be beaten towards the end of the round after an exciting match. It required a good deal of cleverness and self-control to accomplish this, for Lord Ashbridge was a notably puerile performer, but he generally managed it with tact and success, by dint of missing absurdly easy putts, and (here his skill came in) by pulling and slicing his ball into far-distant bunkers. Throughout the game it was his business to keep up a running fire of admiring ejaculations such as “Well driven, my lord,” or “A fine putt, my lord. Ah! dear me, I wish I could putt like that,” though occasionally his chorus of praise betrayed him into error, and from habit he found himself saying: “Good shot, my lord,” when my lord had just made an egregious mess of things. But on the whole he devised so pleasantly sycophantic an atmosphere as to procure a substantial tip for himself, and to make Lord Ashbridge conscious of being a very superior performer. Whether at the bottom of his heart he knew he could not play at all, he probably did not inquire; the result of his matches and his opponent’s skilfully-showered praise was sufficient for him. So now he left the discouraging companionship of his wife and Petsy and walked swingingly across the garden and the park to the links, there to seek in Macpherson’s applause the self-confidence that would enable him to encounter his republican sister and his musical son with an unyielding front.

His spirits mounted rapidly as he went. It pleased him to go jauntily across the lawn and reflect that all this smooth turf was his, to look at the wealth of well-tended flowers in his garden and know that all this polychromatic loveliness was bred in Lord Ashbridge’s borders (and was graciously thrown open to the gaze of the admiring public on Sunday afternoon, when they were begged to keep off the grass), and that Lord Ashbridge was himself. He liked reminding himself that the towering elms drew their leafy verdure from Lord Ashbridge’s soil; that the rows of hen-coops in the park, populous and cheeping with infant pheasants, belonged to the same fortunate gentleman who in November would so unerringly shoot them down as they rocketted swiftly over the highest of his tree-tops; that to him also appertained the long-fronted Jacobean house which stood so commandingly upon the hill-top, and glowed with all the mellowness of its three-hundred-years-old bricks. And his satisfaction was not wholly fatuous nor entirely personal; all these spacious dignities were insignia (temporarily conferred on him, like some order, and permanently conferred on his family) of the splendid political constitution under which England had made herself mistress of an empire and the seas that guarded it. Probably he would have been proud of belonging to that even if he had not been “one of us”; as it was, the high position which he occupied in it caused that pride to be slightly mixed with the pride that was concerned with the notion of the Empire belonging to him and his peers.

But though he was the most profound of Tories, he would truthfully have professed (as indeed he practised in the management of his estates) the most Liberal opinions as to schemes for the amelioration of the lower classes. Only, just as the music he was good enough to listen to had to be played for him, so the tenants and farmers had to be his dependents. He looked after them very well indeed, conceiving this to be the prime duty of a great landlord, but his interest in them was really proprietary. It was of his bounty, and of his complete knowledge of what his duties as “one of us” were, that he did so, and any legislation which compelled him to part with one pennyworth of his property for the sake of others less fortunate he resisted to the best of his ability as a theft of what was his. The country, in fact, if it went to the dogs (and certain recent legislation distinctly seemed to point kennelwards), would go to the dogs because ignorant politicians, who were most emphatically not “of us,” forced him and others like him to recognise the rights of dependents instead of trusting to their instinctive fitness to dispense benefits not as rights but as acts of grace. If England trusted to her aristocracy (to put the matter in a nutshell) all would be well with her in the future even as it had been in the past, but any attempt to curtail their splendours must inevitably detract from the prestige and magnificence of the Empire. … And he responded suitably to the obsequious salute of the professional, and remembered that the entire golf links were his property, and that the Club paid a merely nominal rental to him, just the tribute money of a penny which was due to Caesar.

For the next hour or two after her husband had left her, Lady Ashbridge occupied herself in the thoroughly lady-like pursuit of doing nothing whatever; she just existed in her comfortable chair, since Barbara might come any moment, and she would have to entertain her, which she frequently did unawares. But as Barbara continued not to come, she took up her perennial piece of needlework, feeling rather busy and pressed, and had hardly done so when her sister-in-law arrived.

She was preceded by an enormous stag-hound, who, having been shut up in her motor all the way from London, bounded delightedly, with the sense of young limbs released, on to the terrace, and made wild leaps in a circle round the horrified Petsy, who had just received a second saucerful of cream. Once he dashed in close, and with a single lick of his tongue swept the saucer dry of nutriment, and with hoarse barkings proceeded again to dance corybantically about, while Lady Ashbridge with faint cries of dismay waved her embroidery at him. Then, seeing his mistress coming out of the French window from the drawing-room, he bounded calf-like towards her, and Petsy, nearly sick with cream and horror, was gathered to Lady Ashbridge’s bosom.

“My dear Barbara,” she said, “how upsetting your dog is! Poor Petsy’s heart is beating terribly; she does not like dogs. But I am very pleased to see you, and I have given you the blue room.”

It was clearly suitable that Barbara Jerome should have a large dog, for both in mind and body she was on the large scale herself. She had a pleasant, high-coloured face, was very tall, enormously stout, and moved with great briskness and vigour. She had something to say on any subject that came on the board; and, what was less usual in these days of universal knowledge, there was invariably some point in what she said. She had, in the ordinary sense of the word, no manners at all, but essentially made up for this lack by her sincere and humourous kindliness. She saw with acute vividness the ludicrous side of everybody, herself included, and to her mind the arch-humourist of all was her brother, whom she was quite unable to take seriously. She dressed as if she had looted a milliner’s shop and had put on in a great hurry anything that came to hand. She towered over her sister-in-law as she kissed her, and Petsy, safe in her citadel, barked shrilly.

“My dear, which is the blue room?” she said. “I hope it is big enough for Og and me. Yes, that is Og, which is short for dog. He takes two mutton-chops for dinner, and a little something during the night if he feels disposed, because he is still growing. Tony drove down with me, and is in the car now. He would not come in for fear of seeing Robert, so I ventured to tell them to take him a cup of tea there, which he will drink with the blinds down, and then drive back to town again. He has been made American ambassador, by the way, and will go in to dinner before Robert. My dear, I can think of few things which Robert is less fitted to bear than that. However, we all have our crosses, even those of us who have our coronets also.”