Читать книгу This Little World - Francis Brett Young - Страница 5

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On the morning of the squire’s funeral, the rain ceased at dawn. The water-washed air was so limpid that far hills could be seen; trees and hedgerows showed swelling bud; there was a touch of spring in the air, and each puddle reflected blue sky. This sudden change in the weather was a blessing for everybody, but particularly for Miss Loach, to whom, although she could take no active part in the ceremony, a funeral—and such a funeral—was meat and drink.

Miss Loach had been established in Chaddesbourne for more than thirty years in the midst of that nucleus of Georgian brick, contemporary with the Hall, which marked the cross-roads. Her house was by far the primmest of these prim dwellings, having two tiers of bay-windows projecting into the street on either side of a door surmounted by a fanlight and painted bright green. It was, in effect, a minute town-house that had been dropped complete into the heart of a village, and its air of urban formality was enhanced by the polished brass of the knocker, the letter-box, the door-handle and the two bell-pulls (one marked “Service”) and by the whiteness of the scrubbed steps descending to the pavement.

If the outside belonged to an earlier age, the contents of the house, its mistress included, were definitely Victorian. The drawing-room, which lay on the left of the doorway as one entered and was thawed into life once a week after middle-day dinner on Sundays, was a perfect example of the period of blue china, peacocks’ feathers, clasped photograph-albums and milking-stools. On a mantelpiece draped with a tasselled canopy of maroon chenille, stood an oblong mirror with a rounded top, of the kind through which Alice climbed into the looking-glass world. The mirror, in fact, provided the puzzled observer with a key to the nature of its owner; for, when once the resemblance was grasped, one became aware that Miss Loach herself was the spit and image of the Red Queen. Like that lady, Miss Loach was spare, with the most waspish of waists and the boniest of black satin bodices above an ample black cloth skirt; like her she possessed a bony, angular face, a prominent mouth, alternately grim and pugnacious, narrow eyes, and thin hair, preternaturally dark, secured, in a padded bun, by a black silk net of coarse texture; like her Miss Loach was a tyrant and subject to fainting-fits. The only feature in which Miss Loach did not resemble her looking-glass prototype was the queen’s remarkable mobility; for Miss Loach was an invalid—the villagers called her a bed-lier—and had rarely, in the last thirty years of her domicile at Chaddesbourne, emerged from her canopied mahogany four-poster in the room above the drawing-room.

This is not to suggest that Miss Loach, at any hour of the day, failed to keep herself informed of what happened in the village, whose minutest activities were the object of her interest and censure. On the contrary, she was as sensitive as a seismograph. No woman stood gossiping, no man entered the tap-room opposite or the doctor’s surgery next door, no schoolboy shouted and no dog barked in the street without the occurrence being reported to her in detail and its cause and significance discussed by her handmaiden and slave, Jane Trost, a less desiccated spinster with the eager bleached look of a ferret, who kept watch, from behind the lace curtains of the window, for that precise purpose. In the easy pre-war days, when dividends were more generous and taxes lower, Miss Loach’s researches had been spread wider afield by means of a one-horse victoria, in which, on fine afternoons, she had taken the air; but since her groom, whom she had heroically sacrificed on the altar of economy and patriotism, had failed to return from Flanders and her income simultaneously declined, her excursions were now limited to the meaner radius of a bath-chair pushed by her maid and steered by herself in a leisurely progress from the Church to the Hall gates and back again.

On the morning of Mr. Ombersley’s funeral, for the first time in thirty years, Miss Loach rose from her breakfast-tray of tea and dry toast and two kinds of medicine, and established herself in good time for the show, well propped-up with pillows and enveloped in a black Shetland shawl, within the bow of the drawing-room window. From this point she enjoyed a wide-angle distant view of the whole village street, from the entrance of the Hall-drive to the vicarage and the Church’s lych-gate, and a point-blank scrutiny of the buildings immediately opposite: the post-office, the school, the policeman’s house, the forge and the inn.

At the moment when Miss Loach took her station, with Jane Trost at her elbow, the street showed no signs of rising to the occasion, apart from the lowered blinds in Mrs. Webb’s shop and the policeman’s house. Outside the forge a tired plough-horse stood tethered with drooping head; in its black interior she could see the pulsating glow of Joe Atkins’s gleed and hear the irreverent tinkle of hammer on anvil. From the open windows of the school-house there issued a vaguer sound, resembling the rustling chatter of starlings in autumn reed-beds. At the door of the “Ombersley Arms” (whose blinds were not lowered), the maid-of-all-work, who came from “away,” was down on her knees scrubbing steps. Mr. Hadley, the landlord, came and opened the door to gaze at her. He was smoking a cigarette—in the middle of the morning, Miss Loach observed disapprovingly—but, in any case, Miss Loach disapproved of Ted Hadley. Though she liked a biscuit and a sip of port wine in the middle of the morning, to keep up one’s strength, and half a glass of Australian Burgundy at dinner to make blood, she considered the drinking of beer by the poor, on an empty stomach, a social evil, and the “Ombersley Arms” a plague-spot. She had often verbally complained to Dr. Selby, and once in a carefully-worded letter to old Mr. Ombersley, who was chairman of the licensing magistrates, about the language which reached her ears in bed from over the road at closing-time; but the doctor, less sympathetic than usual, had said something about “banishing poetry from the lives of the labouring classes,” and the squire (of course he was growing old) had not even answered.

As a practical protest she had rung for Jane Trost and told her to open the window and bring it down with a bang; but even that, pointed as it was, had failed to stop them. If one wanted an example of what beer-drinking led to—as she remarked to her maid—one had only to consider Ted Hadley himself, standing there, with a cigarette on his lip, in the tap-room doorway: such a fresh-faced, respectable young fellow before he went to the war and got invalided, somehow or other, from Egypt—and look at him now, with his purple complexion (she didn’t believe it was heart) and his figure all gone to seed, and that barmaid-looking wife (if she was his wife) with the peroxide hair whom he’d picked up in London. It was typical of the man’s unseemly attitude towards life, his lack of decency in everything that mattered, that he probably had no intention of lowering the blinds in his front windows. “I never, never interfere in other people’s private business,” Miss Loach affirmed, “but Respect for the Dead is another matter entirely. Please step over the road, Jane, and ask Mr. Hadley, with my compliments, if he’ll do me the favour of kindly pulling them down. Ah, here comes the Vicar....”

Mr. Winter emerged from the laurels of the vicarage drive, a tall figure clad in black cassock and biretta. When she saw the biretta Miss Loach’s grim mouth hardened. Her late father, on such an occasion, would have worn the damaged mortar-board which he preserved to the end (Miss Loach had it still), as a relic of his association with Keble College; and she frowned on the biretta, not only because she found it new-fangled, but also because it suggested doctrinal flirtations with the Scarlet Woman, the Whore of Babylon. Her father, in fact, escaping the seductions of the Oxford Movement, had always mounted the pulpit in black, and drawn the line at a surpliced choir. Miss Loach, without being so rigid as that, was a strong Evangelical. Though she knew they existed, she was glad that she had never set eyes on the candles and vestments (the “thin edge of the wedge,” she called them) which had crept into Chaddesbourne since Mr. Winter’s institution. When he first came to the parish she had sent for Mr. Winter and catechized him and feared the worst; but the worst, in his case, had been tempered later by the fact that, however misguided he might be, he was deeply interested in his cure and a real hard worker. He didn’t, like the vicar who preceded him, resent being sent for at inconvenient moments, or regard reading the Office for the Visitation of the Sick and the administration of the Sacrament as a bore; he was patient and kindly and—unlike so many modern clergymen!—a gentleman-born; and if his lean ugly features wore, at times, a quizzical look, if his fine violet eyes (so luminous in that swarthy face) showed occasionally at the corners a crinkling that, in anyone but a cleric, might have denoted amusement, he was always ready to discuss serious questions—such as the Morals of the Village—with gravity. As for the vestments and the candles, which were only lit four times a year: his attitude towards these had an odd, inappropriate resemblance to that of Dr. Selby on the subject of beer-drinking. He had actually made use of the same word—Poetry!—though what poetry had to do with religion, which was surely a serious matter, any more than with the life of the Labouring Classes, Miss Loach couldn’t imagine. Still, Earnestness, after all, was the thing that counted; and however much humour (or poetry) got the better of him at times, in matters affecting the root principles of Christianity, such as his dislike of Dissenters and Socialists and the Marriage of Divorced Persons and Deceased Wives’ Sisters, Mr. Winter was earnest to a degree.

Mr. Winter’s black figure swerved into the lych-gate and Jane Trost returned, out of breath, to Miss Loach’s elbow.

“Well, what did the fellow say?” Miss Loach demanded.

Ted Hadley had actually said: “Tell the old cat to mind her own business,” but Jane Trost, being tactful, translated his answer freely.

“He said—‘Thank you kindly, ma’am, for reminding him’ ”—and Miss Loach smiled and preened herself at the thought that, through her timely watchfulness, the proprieties had been preserved.

But by this time the empty street had begun to exhibit a certain liveliness. The horse which had just been shod emerged from the forge and rejoined his tired team-mate. Joe Atkins, the blacksmith, appeared in the doorway in his leather apron. He wiped his hands on his trouser-seat and looked at his watch, then closed the wide door of the forge. From the direction of the Hall a group of old women laboriously approached the cross-roads; they were dressed in black, with old-fashioned jet-spangled bonnets, and picked their way between puddles, lifting their skirts. They all knew Miss Loach, and looked up at her shaded window to see if she was there; they nudged one another and whispered, but were far too shy to salute her. From the opposite end of the street a farmer’s dog-cart drove up. Its wheels were spattered with mud and the cob’s fetlocks soaked. It was driven by a tall, red-faced man of fifty in a flat-topped felt hat; a woman with a pale, anxious, patient face, sat beside him. As they reached the inn yard a lumbering youth with a florid face jumped down from the hinder-seat and held the cob’s head while the driver dismounted. The led horse and trap disappeared into the yard. The tall man entered the inn. Miss Loach shook her head in disapproval and glanced significantly at her maid. “Poor, poor Mrs. Cookson ... poor woman!” she said. “Such a fine man, too.”

“They say he’s all right except on market days, ma’am,” said Jane Trost in extenuation.

“You have only to look at his face, Jane,” Miss Loach replied, “to see that he’s not what he was. George Cookson is going downhill and so is the farm, in spite of all the money he made in the war. It’s a sad pity to have to say that of a man in the prime of life, a good-natured man, who’s a Churchwarden and a staunch Conservative. But there it is,”—Miss Loach folded her mittened hands in resignation—“there it is and, however unpleasant it may be, the truth must be spoken.”

“They say that young Jim and he don’t hit it off any too well, and I can’t say I blame the young man. Mr. Cookson is a regular tyrant by all accounts. The boy don’t dare open his mouth when his father has taken a drop.”

“That is all very well,” said Miss Loach sententiously. “Jim Cookson’s place is beside his mother, poor soul. If it were only the drink it would be bad enough; but there are other things too, unfortunately. ...”

She paused, with pursed lips. Whatever the “other things” were—and Jane Trost’s goggled eyes were already gloating—Miss Loach made it quite clear that no further definition should soil her virginal lips. There were limits to the intimacy permissible between mistress and maid, and this subject exceeded them. In any case it must have been closed; for, at that very moment, a new cause for indignation had arisen. It was eleven o’clock, the hour of the morning break, and the subdued starling chatter of the school-house had risen to a clamour as the children, released, stampeded, shouting and scrambling, into the asphalt playground. They screamed round in dizzy circles, crossing and re-crossing, like gulls fighting for offal, the ruder and stronger establishing themselves along the stone parapet which bordered the road.

“Disgraceful, abominable, monstrous!” Miss Loach’s vocabulary gave out. “The idea of letting them behave so uproariously on such an occasion! I shall write to Mr. Winter and ask him to complain to the authorities about this exhibition. Not a shadow of discipline, and the girls as bad as the boys! Though, indeed, what can one expect with that dreadful young man? In the old days....”

Miss Loach’s mind went back to the time when her father had been Vicar, and the Church School not merely a Church School in name; remembering how he used to “pop in” when he happened to be passing by at the time of the Scripture lesson and pat the children’s heads and question them on the order of the Kings of Judah and Israel or parts of the Catechism, explaining how every true Christian was bound to submit himself to his Spiritual Masters and Pastors and believe all the Bible literally, and how the stiff-necked and uncircumcised would assuredly be cast into a lake of fire—besides other vital points of behaviour in daily life (quite forgotten nowadays), such as not throwing stones or shouting, and doffing your hat or curtsying when you saw a lady or a gentleman.

In that golden age, of course, before that iniquitous, blasphemous Education Act (for which she would never, never forgive the Liberals—but what could you expect?) school-teachers were chosen by clergymen, with a proper regard to their characters and religious beliefs. Now, Miss Loach lamented, any young man or woman who had scraped enough book-learning to pass through a training-college was licensed to put wrong ideas into children’s heads. If you wanted an example you had only to look at that dreadful young man, Mr. Jones, standing there, caring about nothing but his salary, while the children ran riot and squealed and hung over the wall. Miss Loach hated his black Welsh hair waving in the wind and his savage white face. If he wasn’t an atheist and a socialist (and she’d heard rumours of both) he certainly looked the parts. When she had tackled Mr. Winter on the subject, he had merely puckered his eyes in the odd way he had and told her that Morgan Jones was “an interesting fellow”—as if being interesting had anything whatever to do with becoming a school-teacher whose influence could blight the beliefs of innocent children!

“There’s a fire in that young man, Miss Loach,” Mr. Winter had said, “a smoky fire, which may produce something particularly fine, or particularly unpleasant.” Miss Loach could guess which. “If I had my way ...” her soul cried. But the vehemence engendered by imagining just what she would do if she had it was so great that her head went swimmy all of a sudden; she felt faint, and in urgent need of her glass of port and her biscuit, which Jane Trost, in the excitement of the morning’s events, had forgotten to bring her. At that moment, indeed—almost as if her mute protests had come to him telepathically—Mr. Jones emerged from his pallid and sinister meditations. He tossed his black head and shouted an order, at which his pupils trotted obediently back into school; and the tenor-bell in the church-tower began to toll.

Arthur Winter heard it, standing alone in the vestry and waiting. He could hear not only the boom of the passing bell, but the rasp of the rope that the sexton pulled and the rhythmical creak of the mounting. The tenor bell had a rich and melancholy tone. It reminded him how, on the day when he first came to Chaddesbourne, only a few months ago, he had climbed alone up the dark spiral steps that pierced the solid stone of the tower like a corkscrew, and gazed through the belfry louvres at the village whose souls had just been entrusted to his keeping. The tenor bell was more modern than the rest of the peal. He had read its inscription, in chaste eighteenth-century lettering:—Consider man when you hear me, that I ere long may ring for thee. Richard Sanders cast all we. 1719. The naïve doggerel came back to him now, beating into his brain with its rhythm, like the creak of the mounting, filling his mind with monitory import, yet not perturbing it, for he was a Christian, and the idea of death, if it awed him, evoked no terror. Rather, brooding on that day when he had stood in the belfry gazing down on the village, touched and humble and full of high hopes, he became aware of the spiritual loneliness which, strive how he would, was the lot of a country parson living alone in a gaunt imitation-Gothic vicarage besieged by laurels—of how, the age of passionate faith having waned (and it was worse since the war), a man like himself was condemned to lose his fine edge and accumulate rust. Even in Chaddesbourne, tiny as it was, there was plenty of scope for his energy. He loved his people. Heaven knew he had reason to love them, for no day passed by in which he didn’t find himself touched by some shining proof of their goodness and fortitude. They liked him as well, he humbly believed; on the surface they showed respect for him (or his cloth); and yet something—perhaps it was nothing but that respect—seemed always, somehow, to get between him and them; which, since he, by his office, was their means of approach to the throne of grace, seemed disastrous. Men and women alike could never forget that he was a parson; instinctively, when he approached them (they rarely approached him, alas) they assumed a protective colouring not only of speech, but also, he suspected, of thought, which, because it was assumed, made them incapable of religious communion as he understood it. He had blamed the war; one blamed the war for everything; yet in the war, in the trenches and dugouts, he had often, gratefully, beheld—or believed he beheld—the bare souls of men; he had been able to discover their doubts and agonies and exaltations, to share and occasionally, by the grace of God, to help. Those burning, ecstatic moments had passed, it seemed, irrevocably. Only one naked human soul had he glimpsed since he came to Chaddesbourne, on the day when he had quoted Swinburne to Jones, the school-teacher, and the impact of that white-hot soul had made him uncomfortable. It was alien, suspicious, perhaps even hostile. He had invited Jones to drop in some evening and smoke a pipe with him. Jones had thanked him, effusively, he thought, but hadn’t come. He was no longer, he felt, a fellow man, a comrade in arms, cold, mud-soaked, spattered with blood, but a gentleman leading a soft, sheltered life in a grey coat and clerical collar, who got up in the pulpit on Sundays and begged people who came there, because it was the right thing to do or because they liked singing hymns, to share in the Holy Sacraments, as, indeed, a few of them did.

In the war he had known the spirit of religion without its forms; now he felt himself throttled by the forms without a vestige of spirit. And what could he do about it? Of course he could pray. He knelt down on the vestry floor and prayed simply, fervently, humbly, for guidance, till, suddenly, the heat of his aspiration having waned, he became aware of a sound detached from the measured creak and clang of the bell, a brittle, fluttering sound like that of a dead leaf come to life; and, looking up to the bleared diamond panes through which sunlight blinked obliquely, he perceived the source of the sound, a small tortoise-shell butterfly which the sudden warmth of March sun had relaxed from its hibernation. It fluttered and clung to the leading with weak-clawed feet, and Mr. Winter saw in this solitary sharer of his loneliness the ancient and appropriate symbol of the soul, winged Psyche warmed into vague immortality—which brought his thoughts back to old Mr. Ombersley (by this time, surely, the cortège must have left the Hall?), and reminded him that this transitory life was, perhaps, after all, a dream, and the life to come the only reality. So he rose from his knees and began to put on his surplice.

The tenor bell tolled on. In that gusty air, to which the shrill blue of March gave a crystalline quality, rooks were busy building their nests in wind-tossed trivets. The quivering vibration of the bell broke in on their cawing and, because it was unusual, aroused the birds’ apprehension. They sat perched on the swaying twigs, an alert, black-coated congregation, and solemnly contemplated the odd phenomenon, till, deciding that it boded no good, they began to slip away—first a single bird, then small groups of three or four, till, the impulse having accumulated strength, the whole rookery straggled across the sky like a tattered black pennant, in flight for their second citadel in the elms that shadowed the Hall.

Here too, it appeared, some questionable activities were afoot. In front of the portico a two-horse wagon waited, and the drive was scattered with black human shapes that stood talking in groups and looked suspiciously like a shooting party; so the foremost rooks, which were already swooping to alight, changed their minds and swerved and soared steeply into the cold upper air, where an eddy of sudden wind caught them and blew them this way and that, like fragments of charred straw whirled in the draught of a bonfire. The figures on the drive were disturbed by their cawing; a dozen turned pale faces skyward. Roberts, the keeper, spat on the gravel and said to his neighbour:

“Just you hearken to them damned birds, John; there’s a sight too many on ’em. Last year was the first the old squire didn’t shoot the young ’uns. That showed he was failing, now that you come to think on it. I don’t mind a rook-pie myself.” And John Sheppy answered: “Ay, they be squawking up there just as if they knowed all about it, and I reckon they do, Harry. They say them rooks be uncommon knowledgeable birds....”

Helen Ombersley, who was waiting with Catherine and Jack in the cold drawing-room for the procession to start, saw the men on the drive staring upward and heard the rooks’ clamour, and the sound spread over her rigid features a soft relaxation, reminding her of the rooks that built in the elms round Stoke Priory when she was a child, and filled all her girlhood with their monotonous cawing.

“I’m glad there’s a rookery here,” she thought. “No Worcestershire house would feel right without its rookery. I do hope Miles won’t shoot them too heavily; they might go away. And there ought to be lambs in the park,” she thought, “but perhaps it’s too early for them.”

Then her eyes, which had been dreamy and remote, became aware of Catherine, who, exploring the unfamiliar room like a strange kitten just let out of a basket, was cautiously lifting the dust-sheet which, like a pall, enveloped the grand piano.

“I expect it’s a horrible old thing,” Mrs. Ombersley thought, “and all out of tune, but that’s where her heart is. When we’re properly settled here she must go on with her music. Perhaps it won’t cost a terrible lot to have that piano put in order. Or we might exchange it for a good one,” she thought, “and pay something extra. It would be nice for her to have a good piano of her own and a big room for practising, after all the horrid little houses we’ve always been forced to live in. It’s a wonderful resource for a girl to be musical, and the child’s been starved of it quite long enough. When they see a piano,” she thought, “they simply have to touch it.” Having no music herself, Mrs. Ombersley regarded that art in a detached way, as if it were Sanscrit roots or Economics; but she hated to think of Catherine being deprived of anything. These two children who had grown up under the pressure of the war were entitled to every kind of compensation (even odd ones, like music) which life could afford them.

Colonel Ombersley suddenly, solemnly appeared in the doorway and said: “They’re ready now, Helen. I think we’d better be starting.”

“Poor Miles!” Mrs. Ombersley thought. “What a wretched time he’s been having! It’s making him look quite thin—unless it’s the black clothes. Soldiers always look odd out of uniform.” She said, brightly: “Yes, darling.”

Into the private bar of the “Ombersley Arms” the note of the bell came booming and buzzing like some enormous vagrant insect. “It’s the set of the wind that does it,” Ted Hadley explained as he fastened the window-catch to exclude it. “Sunday morning it’s the limit: you can’t hardly hear yourself speak. Have another, Mr. Cookson? Just one more. There’s time for a short one.”

Mr. Cookson smacked his lips. “I don’t mind if I do, Ted. There’s nothing like a tot of the craythur in the middle of the morning. But, mind you, this has got to be mine.”

Ted Hadley laughed as he took the kettle from the hob. “Yours be blowed,” he said. “The bar’s not open till midday. I’m a law-abiding publican: that’s what I am.” He sliced lemon, dropped in a lump of sugar, and passed the glass with a reasonably steady hand. “Well, here goes! Cheerio! Here’s crime—coupled with the name of sweethearts and wives!”

He winked as he drank. Mr. Cookson drank too, with a gulp; but his shrewd blue eyes, suffused with blood at the corners, showed a hint of uneasiness. “Look here, Ted,” he said. “That reminds me. I ought to be moving. My missus and Jim are waiting outside in the yard. I told her I wouldn’t stay more than a moment. She’ll be wondering what’s up.”

“Well, we’ll soon put that right, Mr. Cookson. Why didn’t you say so before?” Ted Hadley limped to the door (it was the gout getting into his wound that made him lame) and shouted: “Hi, Gladys. Just come here a moment. Come on ... get a move on! Don’t take a month over it!”

Mrs. Hadley—if indeed she was Mrs. Hadley—appeared: a much-bangled young woman, perhaps twenty-seven, who, to judge by the roots of her hair which showed above her straight bang, had been dark before reconditioning as a bar-parlour blonde. She had once, too, probably, been slim and hungrily vivacious; even now, the greed having been sated at the expense of her figure, the remains of vivacity showed itself, in the presence of a strange man, by an automatic quickening of the big, soft, stupid eyes, and a smile that displayed teeth too good to be true, on a face which, in colour and texture, resembled a large pink fondant. At the sight of the strapping figure and red face of Cookson her manner became kittenish.

“Well, well, Mr. Cookson,” she cried. “Why, you’re quite a stranger. We’d begun to think you’d forgotten us. Hadn’t we, Ted?”

Mr. Cookson smiled heavily; his eyes approved the lax full-bosomed body which they were expected to approve. But Ted Hadley was businesslike.

“Look here, kid,” he said. “Just pop out at the back and ask Mrs. Cookson to step in for a moment. Say I’d no idea she was there and I hope she’s not cold.” He turned to his guest: “And now what about just one wee drappie more, to settle the others?”

Mrs. Hadley fluttered out into the yard knock-kneed, all girlish innocence. She saw Mrs. Cookson sitting, a monument of patience, bolt-upright in the trap; her thin, drawn, sweet face; the hair dragged back under the old-fashioned hat. “My God, if that’s her do you wonder?” she thought. She also saw Jim, long-limbed and powerfully built like his father, with a big, red, shy face, and was so interested in him that she became more girlish and fluttering than ever.

“Good morning, Mrs. Cookson,” she said. “It is Mrs. Cookson, isn’t it? My hubby asked me to say he’s so sorry. He didn’t know you were out here. And please won’t you step inside for a moment?”

Mrs. Cookson smiled wanly. “Oh, thank you very much, Mrs. Hadley. I think we ought really to be going on to the church. I hate being late at a funeral. If you’d just be so kind as to tell my husband I’m ready ... and thank Mr. Hadley for his kind offer.”

Her tone was polite—she had been brought up in an old school of behaviour—but the heart within her went cold with bitterness and scorn. “So this,” she thought, “this is what he goes out at night to see, this is what he admires! Mrs. Hadley here, Mrs. Hadley there! though it wouldn’t matter so much—I’m past caring now, since the day he pushed me in the fire, even though he did cry afterwards and say it was an accident—it wouldn’t matter to me if she didn’t happen to live on licensed premises, where money just goes like water. No, you needn’t take all that trouble,” she thought, “to show me your wedding-ring. I can see it all right—the great vulgar thing. It’s your hands I’m looking at; you can always tell what a woman’s worth by her hands.” And she thought of her own sinewy red fingers chapped with cold and roughened by dairy work, and the wedding-ring, worn thin by marriage like herself, which she nervously slipped up and down inside her black-cotton gloves, till, suddenly, she became aware that this woman and Jim were looking at each other, and that Jim was blushing, and terror, combined with protective fury, overwhelmed her politeness.

“Don’t stand there gaping like that, Jim,” she said. “Come and help me down, and then tie up the horse while this lady gives dad my message. Thank your husband for me, Mrs. Hadley, and tell him I’m much obliged.” She turned her back. “Come along, hurry up, Jim.”

Mrs. Hadley sulkily returned to the bar and jerked her head backward. “She won’t come in,” she said, “and you’ve got to go out at once. If you don’t, I bet you’ll soon hear all about it, Mr. Cookson.” And she laughed derisively. “That’s a nice-looking boy. You can see who his father is.”

But Mr. Cookson was far too furious to grasp the compliment. He banged down his empty glass on the table and rose. His face had the dark morosity of an angry bull’s.

“I’ve got to go, have I? There, what did I tell you, Ted?”

But he went, all the same.

“I think I can see the wagon now, ma’am,” said Jane Trost excitedly. “It does seem funny, doesn’t it, for people in that position to have a walking funeral? You’d have thought they’d have had a motor-hearse.”

“Mr. Ombersley never countenanced motor-cars,” said Miss Loach severely, “and I think it was very fine of him. A walking funeral, though fatiguing, is reverent and dignified, and it’s no great way, after all, from the Hall to the churchyard. If you’ll raise that front blind a few inches, Jane, I shall be able to see much better, and none of the mourners, if they’re keeping their eyes down as they should, will notice the difference or consider it disrespectful. Ah, there goes Mr. Cookson at last, walking yards in front of his wife, poor creature. It looks as if they’ve been quarrelling. ...”

“Oh, and here come the children, ma’am!”

“Well, it’s to be hoped that young man will keep them in order this time.”

They marched out, the boys grinning sheepishly, the girls primly solemn, and stood by the playground wall in two rows. Morgan Jones, though he controlled these proceedings, resented them inwardly. This parade had been more or less ordered by Mr. Winter, whom he liked, but, because he was a parson, suspected of some masked designs on his soul. Morgan Jones, as he often assured himself, was the captain of his soul. He wasn’t, however, regrettably, the master of his fate, which lay at the mercy of the six school-managers who had appointed him—and Mr. Winter had all the other five in his waistcoat pocket. It was a scandalous thing, he thought, that young children should be paraded like this to witness the pomps of death. Mr. Ombersley was “our Chairman,” as Mr. Winter put it; but during his two years at Chaddesbourne Morgan Jones had never set eyes on him. That wasn’t the real reason of this exhibition. Not at all. It was just another barefaced attempt to prop up the out-of-date feudal tradition, though among the old people in this benighted backwater, the feudal tradition seemed strong enough to stand of itself—as witness the crooked black figures that now came hobbling out of their garden gates to join the procession down the whole length of the road. There could hardly, he thought, be a soul in the whole blessed village who hadn’t turned out that morning. There was none of that nonsense left, thank God, in Wales, where he came from....

“In Wales ...” he thought; and immediately his romantic face grew tender. Even now, as he lifted his eyes, he could see the humped line of Abberley, beyond Severn. If one climbed to the top of those hills sight could compass the whole cloudy splendour of the Radnor March and the line along which Saxon Offa had dug his dyke. “Land of our Fathers,” he thought, as the tune, sung by sweet Welsh voices, came into his head. Here, in Chaddesbourne, he told himself fiercely, the old feud persisted; the fair-haired louts mimicked his rising intonation and scorned him for being a Welshman! Wasn’t it a Welshman, a Welsh peasant like himself, who had won their war for them?

But by now the slow horses had dragged the wagon abreast of him. At the sight of the plain oak coffin and the thought of what it contained, his emotional heart, for all its gusty bitterness, grew grave. Death was moving at all times, even the death of a grim old man whom he had disliked, but had never seen. Morgan Jones’s mouth stiffened. This solemn thing must be faced. The wheels of the wagon creaked by in a mortal silence. He saw the set faces of the principal mourners, the new squire and his wife; hard faces, he thought, but, most enviably firm. There was something admirable though hateful in their aristocratic composure. Then, suddenly, before that envy had faded, his eyes beheld Catherine Ombersley, and he held his breath, for he was a poet, cruelly susceptible to woman’s beauty, and it wounded him to think that any loveliness should look so cold, so remote, so utterly unattainable, as that of this tall, rather angular girl with her proud, pale face and her unconscious distinction of movement. And because his mind was drenched with poetry he found himself thinking of “Maud”:

All that I saw (for her eyes were downcast, not to be seen),

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,

Dead perfection, no more....

He hated that tranquil beauty, and all the more because her colouring—dull gold, clouded amber, lustreless honey—was of the quality which always had power to ravish his black heart and send him mad.

“You shall turn and look at me,” he thought, fiercely. “I will you to look at me ...”

But Catherine Ombersley, unscathed by his will, passed on with her downcast eyes, and Morgan Jones, nursing his hatred, expelled the unattainable image from his hot brain, replacing it by another of the same colour, neither cold nor contemptuous nor yet unattainable: the image of Elsie Cookson of The Moat, who had blushed when his eyes devoured her in church, and to whom, though no living soul suspected it, and she least of all, he had written so many pages of passionate verse, walking to and fro between the desks of snivelling schoolboys, or stretching out his hand in the darkness to find a pencil.

“Come along, you boys,” he said hoarsely. “Go back to your places.”

He stalked into the schoolroom importantly, sombre as Hamlet; the hushed children streamed in before him.

The rich moment for which Miss Loach had been waiting all morning arrived. She wished now that, while there was time, she had dared to raised the front blind just a trifle higher. In order not to miss anything she was forced to duck her head in an attitude that made her jutting face resemble the Red Queen’s more closely than ever. The passage of the wagon and the led horses did not excite her, though she noticed, with approval, the plainness of the coffin and the absence of what she called floral tributes, which was quite in keeping. The spectacle on which her keen narrow eyes were focused so eagerly was provided by the principal mourners, Miles Ombersley, his wife, and the two children, whom, because of the family quarrel (she had heard vaguely about that), she had never seen, and the excellent view she obtained of it made her face go red with mild satisfaction.

The Colonel, to begin with, looked everything that a soldier should be, though it would have been better, she thought, if he had appeared in uniform, with his medals and a band of black crape on the arm of his tunic as a mark of respect.

He was tall, very tall, and admirably erect, with a typical cavalryman’s figure, spare and sinewy. As he walked he gazed straight in front of him with the level, unwavering gaze of a man who is facing his duty; and the profile of his rather small head, which the close-cropped grizzled moustache scarcely modified, had, she saw, the authentic classic Ombersley features: sloping forehead, obstinate jaw, firm lips and predatory nose—the features, in short, of his father (who had disliked her) and of his bachelor uncle, the general, with whom she had played backgammon and mildly flirted in the decade before he was killed in the Boer War. The mere fact of this family resemblance filled Miss Loach with the sensation of vicarious pride which she felt when she heard the first notes of God Save the Queen (the King it was nowadays) and Rule, Britannia, or saw the aspiring stone of Worcester Cathedral or (long, long ago) the Round Tower of Windsor Castle, with the royal standard above it, or hounds pattering down the village street, with a huntsman in pink, or a bishop’s gaiters. Like each of these sights, the persistence of the family profile in Colonel Ombersley assured her that in spite of that firebrand Ramsay Macdonald and the recent railway strike (in spite, even, of Mr. Jones, and the State-aided corruption of youth) all was well with the heart of the Empire, and thus with the world. “Even as a subaltern,” she confessed, “he gave promise of favouring his papa.”

The demeanour of Mrs. Ombersley pleased Miss Loach equally. That lady, she proudly affirmed, was a genuine D’Abitot.

“You notice how tall she is? Nearly as tall as the Colonel! All the D’Abitots are tall. No doubt it’s the Norman blood. And the firm way she puts her feet down—just like a thoroughbred! Though why not?” Miss Loach asked rhetorically. “After all, her father was a viscount and her mother the daughter of a marquess, so what would you expect if not that? You notice the gel takes after her? The same straight nose, the same colouring, though to my mind she looks much too fragile. No doubt the poor child, quite naturally, feels the occasion distressing, though, of course, her deportment cannot compare with her mamma’s. She’s a graceful creature, but no gels of to-day are fit to carry a tiara. Some say it’s the modern dancing and engaging in manly sports; but, if you ask me, what their figures miss is a backboard to give shape to the shoulders and a dignified carriage to the spine. I’m told that she plays the pianoforte brilliantly. Possibly that accounts for her stooping. The boy carries himself better, although she’s actually taller than he is. That’s a pity. Tall men are so much more distinguished ...”

As she spoke, Jack Ombersley turned his eyes in the direction of the window, and Miss Loach’s jutting head was quickly drawn back, but her eyes perceived, with a shock of surprise, that, unlike Catherine, the boy hadn’t bred true. His face had neither his father’s ruggedness nor his mother’s repose. His colouring was sanguine and dark, and the sleek hair, growing to a point, gave the forehead an obstinate air. His mouth was full-lipped, with a certain sensuous beauty which, with the dark eyes—a little lazy and scornful—appeared to demand the background of a cavalier’s love-locks, a setting of lace and steel. He had the look, in short, of a cornet in Rupert’s cavalry stuffed into a stick-up collar and black tail-coat unworn since Eton, and altogether too small for him. His face, at that moment, was anything but funereal, because he was young and lusty and had lived through the war when, even for children, death was mere commonplace; because, as he turned his eyes, they had caught sight of Miss Loach’s face popping back from the window like a rabbit into its hole, and because all this forced solemnity cried out for comic relief; so that he actually smiled, and told himself that he mustn’t forget afterwards to tell Catherine what he’d seen. Catherine and he always understood each other, thank Heaven!

Miss Loach saw that smile, and was profoundly shocked by its levity. This young man was handsome enough, she conceded, in a way; but it wasn’t the Ombersleys’ way, nor yet the D’Abitots’. This discovery, paradoxically, gave her almost as much satisfaction as the fact that the rest of the family had bred true to type, by confirming, simultaneously, her theory that “Blood will tell,” and her dark conviction that “Young People are not what they Used to Be.”

“You mark my words, Jane,” she said: “that boy is going to give trouble. When they told me he wasn’t going to Sandhurst after Eton, I knew that something was wrong.”

“He’s a very good-looking young gentleman, ma’am.”

“Good looks are not everything, Jane,” Miss Loach answered grimly. “Good looks are of minor importance compared with Distinction. If I wasn’t aware who he was, I should never have taken him for an Ombersley, and if I were in his mother’s shoes I should feel distinctly anxious. Poor, poor Mrs. Ombersley ...”

Miss Loach was not greatly interested in the remainder of the cortège. It trudged by, out of step, with an irregular scraping of hobnails on grit. The whole population of Chaddesbourne followed the coffin of this wayward old man, who, though they had not exactly loved him, had always been as much a part of their lives as the brook, or the church, or the hall, or the rooks that cawed in the elms. They were mostly old or middle-aged; for the war had bled Chaddesbourne white, and even before the war came, the power of North Bromwich and the black towns smoking eternally beyond the hills sucked the youth of the village out of the cottages and the fields to court richer adventure amid their sooty activity—as surely as death, and almost as irrevocably. Even the old looked reasonably healthy, thanks to pure air and meagre living, though dank marl and rain-sodden clothes had knotted their limbs and made them hobble. The young married men, lately home from the war, had a sturdy air, upstanding and frank, with wide Saxon eyes which accepted life as they found it; and the young married women, who had stolen shy, proud glances as they passed at their children standing in rows behind the schoolyard parapet, had something of the same stable quality in their looks: the same air of respect for themselves and the decencies of a life that was none too easy, so much less easy than when you were in service—what with children to rear and clothe and dark cottages to keep clean on a small weekly wage (thirty shillings, a labourer drew) with so many pence to put aside for the club and burial insurance, and always, in the background, the spectre of illness or unemployment or another baby. You never knew.... Yet their eyes were bright (if sometimes a little anxious); they were not ashamed of their hands, worn skinny and red with washing; and their plain, honest faces scrubbed shiny with common soap, looked happy and eager—a little excited, of course, by this free entertainment suddenly provided by death and the hurry of “cleaning-up” so early in the day—but, somehow, there seems to be no other word for it, good. Yes, “good” was the only word, Dr. Selby decided, as he stood behind the gauze screen of his surgery window and watched them passing. (He had driven his car axle-deep through the flood to an outlying case of pneumonia, and returned too late to take up his proper place in the procession.) There was hardly a man or a woman among them with whom he hadn’t been brought into contact more or less intimate during the last three years.

“Good, and brave,” he thought, remembering that even in the heaviest emergency, mental or physical, he had never known a Chaddesbourne villager “crack” or throw up the sponge. “That is mere insensitiveness,” some people might say; but he knew that it wasn’t. He had been in the war, and recognized fortitude when he saw it. “Good and brave, but not beautiful,” he thought—for, being a natural man, he was not indifferent to beauty in women. By his standards there wasn’t a single pretty girl in the parish except that soft minx of George Cookson’s at The Moat (poor George Cookson, going to seed pretty fast, by the look of him!) and his tight-lipped, admirable wife. Now that he came to think of it, the Cookson girl, in her colouring, resembled Catherine Ombersley; but “pretty” was not the word one could use for Catherine. Should he say “beautiful”? Perhaps.... He wasn’t quite sure. If beauty meant fineness of texture, as he supposed it did, then Mrs. Ombersley was actually more beautiful than her daughter....

The wagon had stopped in front of the lych-gate; the six bearers, who had walked on either side of it, were lifting the coffin; and the black cortège, its progress arrested, began to silt up behind. Now, seeing its population gathered together—from the Colonel and his family in front to the last hobbling grandfather in the rear—Dr. Selby conceived an entirely new vision of Chaddesbourne. It was no longer the village with which, returning from the war, he had instantly fallen in love and determined to end his days in, no longer a mere picturesque aggregation of sandstone and thatch and half-timber, no longer merely a negligible dot on the map, but a spiritual microcosm.

“This is England,” he thought: “the thing, the idea, which we fought for. And that’s why, though I don’t actually belong here, I love this place and these people. If I slip out now nobody will notice me....”

At that moment, indeed, all their eyes were turned towards the lych-gate where the gaunt, white-surpliced figure of Mr. Winter stood waiting. The bell ceased tolling. Its last note, unimpeded by following vibrations, hung quivering and died on the still air above a silence in which there could be heard the distant clamour of rooks, the heavy breathing of the bearers lifting their load, an uneasy bronchitic cough, and a metallic clink as one of the wagoner’s horses tossed his head. Mr. Winter lifted his hand to claim attention, and spoke in a strained, high voice: “I am the Resurrection and the Life ...”