Читать книгу This England - Edgar Wallace - Страница 3
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Reproduced from The Evening Post (New Zealand), January 29, 1927
I STOPPED my car before the gates to admire the little house. It is one of those picturesque old places that are all angles and gables. And there are high poplars and beautifully trimmed hoi hedges and a velvety little lawn as smooth as a billiard table.
In summertime there are flowers, gold and scarlet and blue, in the wide beds fringing the lawn—now one must be content with the green symmetry of box and laurel and the patch of deep red which marks Molly's chrysanthemums. Behind the house is a very serious vegetable garden and a field where chickens stalk. And an orchard—about two acres in all.
Such a house and grounds as you might buy for some twenty-five hundred or three thousand pounds. Perhaps cheaper, for it lies away from railways and is off the main road. Town folk would call it lonely, though it is entitled to describe itself as being on the fringe of the London area.
Somebody lives here (you would say if you did not know) with a comfortable income. A snug place—the tiny week-end home of some stockbroker who does not want the bother and expense of the upkeep of a more pretentious demesne.
There was no need to ask the owner of the cottage that nearly faces the oaken gates, because I am in the fullest possession of all the necessary facts.
"Mrs. F— lives there. Oh, yes, she's lived there for years. She's a lady... I don't know anything about other people's business, mister."
This latter in a manner that is both suspicious and resentful. If Mrs. F— were immensely rich, our cottager would advertise her splendours; reticence he would not know. Mrs. F— isn't rich. She's immensely poor.
Molly, who met me halfway across the lawn, put the matter in a phrase. "We are 'The-Crashed,'" said Molly definitely, "and we try not to be Poor Brave Things—Poor Brave Things get on Mummie's nerves. Mrs. G— is a poor brave thing, and writes to the newspapers about it—well perhaps she doesn't exactly write to the newspapers, but she sort of gets her name in as the officer's widow who is beginning all over again to build her war-shattered fortune by designing furniture."
Molly is fourteen, and at Cheltenham. The bare fact of the "crash" and its cause are recorded, on one of the many memorials that one passes at crossroads on the way to the races.
To the Glory of God
and the Memory of
the following Officers,
Non-Commissioned Officers
and Men of the
Royal Blankshire Regiment,
who fell in the Great War.
Molly's father got his majority in June, 1914—I forget to what, pension his widow, is entitled under the Royal Warrant. He left a small house in Berkshire that needed a lot of repairs, an old car that he had bought secondhand, a couple of hunters, a lot of odd dogs, and four children—three girls and a boy.
Oh, yes, and (as Molly reminds me) four hundred shares in Somethingfontein Deeps.
He, was killed early in the war, before he had time to save money, and everybody was terribly sympathetic, especially about Molly, "who was three, or some ridiculous age.
Molly's mother had some well-off relations—not rich, but people who kept two or three gardeners and had a flat in town. So there was a family council, and everybody agreed that the small house in the country should be sold, and Molly's mother should take an even smaller house. Family councils of this kind always advise selling the house and getting something smaller. Happily, nobody wanted to buy the little mansion unless big repairs were effected, and electric light put in and parquet flooring and running water in every room, and all that sort of thing. Molly's mother worked it all out,on a piece of paper when the children were in bed, and discovered that the repairs would cost a little more than the house would fetch, in the open market. So she elected to stay on. She had one maid, who refused to leave her, and a gardener so deaf that he couldn't be told that his services were dispensed with.
Molly's mother had two hundred a year to live on and four children to educate.
"Mother decided to breed rabbits, which are notoriously prolific," said Molly. "It was the only poor brave thing she did. But she got terribly self- conscious about them, and confined herself to chickens—which are natural. Anybody can keep chickens without it getting into-the papers. She did try hard to write love stories, but she said they made her sick. I read one the other day, and it made me sick, too. Mrs. Griffel, who has the cottage down the road, was another war widow. Lord L—, who owns most of the land round here, gave her the cottage, and she has two tons of coal and all sorts of things. Nobody gave us anything, because, we were supposed to be gentry. I asked Mummie if she would have taken two tons of coal, and Mummie said, 'Like a shot!' But nobody offered, and we had one fire going besides the kitchen for years. It was terribly cold in the winters."
Education was an important matter. Tom had to go to Rugby, because Molly's father went to Rugby. The well-off relations helped, though their prosperity was diminishing with the years. The richest and most generous was a shareholder in certain coal mines, and dividends began to flutter like a bad pulse.
There was no question of "keeping up appearances." Molly's mother didn't care tuppence who knew of her poverty. She used to journey on a push bike every Saturday to Reading to buy in the cheapest market. And this small, sharp-featured lady was a terrible bargainer. She is not pretty—wholesome, but hot pretty. She cast no sad, appealing glance at susceptible butchers; she quoted glibly wholesale prices, and grew acrid when frozen mutton was offered in the guise of Southdown.
There was some help for Tom at Rugby—either an inadequate Government grant or a scholarship. One of the girls had only a year to stay at school when the crash came. Molly's elder sister began her education at a moment when coal mines were paying concerns—Molly was unfortunate in beginning her first term at Cheltenham under the cloud of an industrial crisis.
The two hundred a year has remained two hundred, but Molly's mother has performed miracles. Tom is at Woolwich, and Molly is at Cheltenham. God knows how she balances her budget, and what fierce and urgent appeals to the well-to-do relatives are slipped into the letter-box at the end of the lane. She does what cannot be done—adds two and two and makes it six.
I suspect Molly knows—she is so insistent upon that one point they are not Poor Brave Things.
"Getting married is going to be the bother." Molly was terribly, serious. "We're all so devilishly plain" (she uses this kind of language occasionally) "and unfortunately none of us is romantic—I mean we don't want be nurses or go on the stage or do anything eccentric. The great point is, as Mummie says, we must get used to the idea that we're the crashed generation, and we've got to sit tight and wipe ourselves out and work for the next. And Mummie says that there are hundreds and thousands of us, and we're jolly lucky to have a house and not live in lodgings, Tom thought he ought not to go into the Army because of the awful expense, but that's all rot. Mummie says that ashes without a Phoenix are just dirt."
Molly's mother is only one of the crashed, as she says. But for Molly, who is rather loquacious, you might never hear of them, because they are most awfully scared of attracting attention, or qualifying for admission to the Society of Poor Brave Things. Up and down the land, in out-of-the-way villages, in obscure lodgings, in very populous suburbs, the regimental ladies who crashed are keeping step with Molly's mother.
