HAMER’S HUT
Dandy Shaw looked round the Watters drawing-room with a little twist
of the lips. She was perched on a high oak stool, with her feet on the
rungs, and through the Chippendale mirror opposite she could see both
her own figure and its setting. It was afternoon, and under the looped
yellow silk blinds the sun pattered on dark wood and faint brocades, a
carpet hushed as moss, elusive little water-colours, china ephemeral
as frost-breath, books with the colouring of rare gems. There were no
photographs in the room, and there was no silver, no flotsam and jetsam
of Christmas and birthday offerings, but there were flowers everywhere,
not massed with heavy ballroom effects, nor set at conventional
intervals like a well-drilled regiment, but leading the eye on with
unexpected thrills of pleasure from one delicate single shade to
another, like tiny semitones in a fairy scale. From without, where the
river crept beneath the dark splendour of turned beeches edging the
terrace, the long, low, gray-faced house with its plain windows looked
almost asleep, but there was a very active brain at work within.
Dandy--otherwise Anne--had no need to fear her image in the mirror, but
she frowned at it, nevertheless. Even the image seemed joyously alive,
with soft, bright hair, and blue eyes full of candid goodwill; and
nothing about it clashed at first sight with its surroundings, yet she
glanced from it to the old walls with amused yet abashed and apologetic
resentment. For the first time in her life, Dandy Shaw was discovering
that there are things which mean more than people.
From the still house and the simple, beautiful room her thoughts
went back to Halsted, her late home on the outskirts of a Lancashire
town--to the overwhelming magnificence of its _ménage_, the long, rich
meals, the endless contrivances for comfort, the stream of guests, the
intricate programmes of amusement. She saw the big, red pile, with the
shining cars slurring up its drive, the long lines of hothouses, the
priceless roses, the precious orchids flung into elaborate schemes
of colour. It was all rich and splendid and inviting, luxurious and
perfectly organised; but Watters cared for none of these things.
It was pale and gray and plain and cool and utterly aloof. It did not
care a toss whether you looked at it or not, so of course you always
did, leaning over the humped bridge, and wondering what ghosts moved in
the darkened rooms and met by moonlight on the terrace. If you tried
to bring a car up its twisting, cross-grained drive, the odds were you
would find yourself in the river or a clump of clipped yews as old as
Ernuin the Priest. And the roses at Watters would have died of sheer
disgust in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a rose-show marquee. They
grew and scrambled and climbed in their own strong-willed fashion,
clothing cold stone with hearts of deep orange, flinging arches of
tender pink or glowing crimson against opal skies, or lifting single,
dewy heads like pale lamps in the hushed garden after sunset. And at
any but simple food it looked rigidly askance, loftily permitting the
butcher to drop his beef and mutton, and condescending to game, as a
country house of standing, but shutting shocked eyelids upon French
ménus and foreign cheeses. Anything _bisqué_ or _braisé_ or _soufflé_
or _au gratin_ scarcely dared trust itself near the stove, and a pot of
_foie-gras_ had positively to be smuggled.
It was a curious impulse that had driven the Lancashire tradesman from
the home of his own creating to one with which he had apparently
nothing in common. Less than a year ago, Dandy had found him on the
Halsted drive, with his hands in his pockets and his hat on the back of
his head, surveying the symbol of wealth with a puzzled frown.
“There’s something wrong, Dandy Anne!” he broke out, as she slid a hand
through his arm. “It’s strong and it’s good, and it’s warm and it’s
cool, and comfortable and convenient and clean, but it isn’t anything
else. It doesn’t make you think of the past and the future. It doesn’t
make you want to throw up your hat one minute and dry your eyes on your
coat-sleeve the next. It’ll never have any troubles or joys bigger than
an insurance-card or a mayoral invitation. It’s smug--that’s what it
is! It doesn’t feel--it _can’t_, and so it can’t make you feel, either.
When a man’s getting on in years, he wants the sort of house that can
show him how to grow old kindly. This red elephant would be smug and
smiling while I was tottering into the grave. Let’s go and find a hut,
Dandy Anne, where I can grow old gently.”
And Watters, for some reason known only to himself, had seemed to him
just that “hut.” He had had it decorated by an artist, who, recognising
the individuality of the place, seemed to have listened in secret
to its whispered wants; and when it was finished, Hamer Shaw strode
happily up and down it, a burly, incongruous figure with its hat on the
back of its head, satisfied to the very marrow, and growing younger
every day. He had opened his eyes in a Westmorland cottage, and though
he had left it so speedily that it was scarcely worth mention, some
power, biding its time, had called him back, to his passionate content.
Mrs. Shaw was of the type that belongs nowhere but to the absorbing
house-world of the moment, and she had borne the transplanting
cheerfully enough, if not with her husband’s bubbling ecstasy. But to
Dandy it was almost as terrific an experience as a total change of
planet.
Bred in Lancashire, educated in London, finished abroad, she had no
single tie with her new life and surroundings. She had been perfectly
happy at Halsted, liking the constant excitement, the flow of money,
the crowd of guests. She had understood everybody, and they had
understood her. She had been an excellent hostess, and a very charming
uncrowned queen, with not only Halsted, but all her circle at her feet.
She had lived quickly and strongly, a little noisily, perhaps, but
very vividly; and now, at the age of twenty-four, she was flung out
of the rush into still water. Cessation may prove as distracting as
revolution, and after five months she was even yet eminently perplexed.
She had put no stone in the way of her father’s sudden desire,
cheerfully resigning the old life for the new, for she was a happy
creature with an interest in the world at large that would have stood
the shock of almost any change. But this had proved so puzzling and
disconcerting,--yielded so many emotions of an unexpected nature! Not
only was she no longer a queen; she was scarcely an individual. With
her somewhat exceptional powers of clear vision she soon discovered
that. She was “the new girl from somewhere awful--I forget where;
daughter of the new people at Watters--I forget who; new-rich dealers
in something--I forget what.”
The word “new” followed her about like a witch’s curse. At Halsted
it had been the last touch of praise for everything. If you made a
purchase, you called everybody in the house to see it, whether it was
a diamond necklace or the tiling in the bathroom. But in Gilthrotin
nothing new was tolerated but necessaries like bread and butter;
diamonds were nothing accounted of unless they had glittered first on
a family neck in a family portrait; and when progress and the plumber
forced you to a hot-water system or incandescents, you were always
glad that your great-grandfather had not lived to see it. Under her
cruel consciousness of “newness” Dandy was oppressed even to the earth.
She frowned at the picture in the glass, much as Hamer had frowned at
soulless Halsted.
Few people had called, as yet, except the neighbouring clergy,
together with countless daughters of the horse-leech, cased in
subscription-lists. More daughters had written. Indeed, begging letters
dropped like hail. Hamer contributed to the first twenty-five, and then
sat down to think about the rest. The county came slowly, however; in
driblets, so to speak. Things would alter in time, of course, for even
in the conservative country Hamer Shaw’s money would make its way, as
well as--later--Hamer Shaw’s sterling worth and fine business capacity.
And his daughter would be taken up, when it was discovered that she
hadn’t actually worked in a mill and worn clogs, but was merely a
charming and well-educated member of human society. But she would never
be a queen again, even then. She would never be even one of the elect.
She would always be “new.” In a ripe old age she would have progressed
no further than “rather new.” She would always be an outsider at
Watters in Gilthrotin.
To do her justice, though she sent a sigh after her lost crown, that
was not the cause of her dissatisfaction. For the first time in her
smooth career she was arrested, called to halt by something that
thrilled almost to pain. For the first time, too, she saw herself no
longer the pivot of her world, an outstanding figure on an obliging
background of earth, but a mere unnecessary pigmy on its surface. She
found the country cruel and very lonely, full of shut secrets, fearful,
yet unquestionably alluring. In this new atmosphere, where the true
Romance still brushed by on velvet wings, her unfledged soul shrank a
little, and as yet was lost. The name of it in books had stirred her
to a vague desire; the reality of it, keen as a sword, rich as purple
curtains before God, made her afraid.
The house affected her in the same way. Its tranquillity, its dignity,
its rapt air of hiding secrets mystic as the Grail, impressed her as
the attributes of a living thing, with a mind and being larger than
her own. Its susceptibility, too, amazed her. Halsted, for instance,
had cared nothing for weather. When the sun burned, you drew the
blinds, and, within, the luxury grew cool and fragrant; and when storm
held sway without, again the blinds were drawn, shutting you into soft
comfort, where electric light, silver, and china, laughter and the
click of balls or the slur of dancing feet, struck always the same
note of lapped pleasure. But, at Watters, when the sun shone, the old
house stirred dreamily and smiled, and half-forgotten pictured faces
looked alive from the dim walls, and threads of hot gold ran molten
along the dark floors. There was no need to curtain the sun; the place
needed it, and turned its old bones gratefully under its touch. And on
days of stress the house shared it with the day; you could not shut
the storm from Watters. The wind was in the house itself, lifting the
rugs, whistling up the stair, crying like a lost soul in the eaves.
The hurrying sky was mirrored in the glass of the panelling, and the
beating rain filled the stone eyes with streaming tears. Outside, the
full river swung above its banks, and the lost wail of sheep on the
mist-hung fell rode on the tortured air.
But the silence was worse than anything, she found,--the real silence
that is full of notes but never a note that jars. When she woke
in the morning, it took her by the throat. No jangling of trams,
mill-whistles, and trains; only, at times, faint music from the farm
across the way, and the slow, sleepy call of church-bells. She could
not lie, as she learned to do in later days, staring with quiet eyes
at the sky, wrapped in a happy stillness more soothing than sleep. It
often woke her in the night--that full silence.
They had had visitors, at first. Before they were fairly settled in the
place, a crowd of friends had descended on them, and Hamer Shaw would
sooner have shut his door to a Royal honour than an old acquaintance.
But the circle, so pleasant and suitable at Halsted, was altogether out
of the picture at Watters. The very house itself would have nothing
to say to the guests; indeed, it deliberately sulked at them with
grudging fires and lukewarm baths. It had other tricks, too--sudden
stairs down which they tumbled in the dark; rattling windows, creaking
boards and whistling key-holes for the hag-ridden hours of the
night; soot in spotless grates, burst pipes and skilfully situated
coal-buckets; while the outside world co-operated subtly, from the
early rooster to the midnight owl. These drawbacks had been unknown
at Halsted, and the guests asked each other dismally what could have
possessed old Hamer to quit his palace for a God-forsaken monument like
Watters. Their torpedo-nosed cars had a kind of abnormality in the
little village at the river’s edge. The Halsted habitués rent the night
with gramophones, and across the cool water flung the frenzied parlance
of snooker. They were Halstedites who had tangoed through a dream in
the lane. Dandy found herself shrinking from them unintentionally but
unmistakably. She was glad when they went; and yet, when they had gone,
she was sorry, for she felt her place to be with them. And the friends
bemoaned themselves as they motored home, saying sadly--“That’s the
end of _you_, Hamer, old man! In another year he’ll have forgotten
he ever knew us. It’s the country does it--the benighted, besotted,
be-swank-ridden country. Give him six months more, and he’ll be as
rooted an old tree-stump as any of them!”
It wasn’t anybody’s fault, Dandy realised that thankfully. The hosts
had been kind as usual, the guests hearty as ever, but the new
conditions had laughed the old friendships to scorn. It was very sad,
and it was also rather terrible, if you were once fully convinced that
a house, a senseless mixture of stone and mortar, had done it all on
its own!
Thus Dandy held review as she sat with her feet on the rungs of the
high stool. Later in the day, on a sudden impulse, she unburdened her
mind to her parents.
“It’s going to be a bit hard for me,” she said frankly, “so you must
not be disappointed if I’m a failure! I don’t match here, and I’ve
lost my old element, so at present I’m neither flesh, fowl, nor good
red herring. I’ll have to grow to this place, and that sort of thing
takes time. I don’t mean that I’m unhappy; it’s only that I don’t fit
in. _You’re_ all right, aren’t you, mummy? You touched ground over the
Bluecaster butcher with the Halsted smile. And father’s been all right
all along. It doesn’t seem fair that I should still be struggling in
deep water.”
Mrs. Shaw said--“6 tr., 3 lacets, 1 sp., 31 tr.--have you seen the new
stair-rods?--4 sl. sts. from third horizontal tr., turn!”
And Hamer took his pipe out of his mouth and added--“It’s great!” and
put it back again.
“Yes, it’s great.” Dandy laughed and sighed. “So great that I’m not
sure I’ll ever get round to the far side of it! It’s small and mean,
too--does _every_body keep a pet charity chained like a dog to nobble
new-comers? And those that don’t beg seem to be tied up in a pride as
big as a bath-towel--that nice, cross agent-person, for instance, who
looks rather like a high-class keeper, and nabobs you off his land
like a reigning duke. _He_’ll never want to be kind to us, I’m sure,
and we must have _some_body to pass the time of day with. Perhaps
the house will decide. It turned a cold enough shoulder on the poor
Halstedites; it owes us somebody in return. I hope it will send an
interesting selection soon, though it seems queer to have to let a
house choose your friends for you! I get on fairly well with the
villagers, though they’re not exactly flattering. ‘Very pleased to meet
you, miss, I’m sure! You mind me something surprising of her as was
last school-teacher but two!’ That was the ‘Jeanne’ frock, mother, that
Wiggie used to say looked like concrete moonshine, at Halsted. It looks
like the fairy queen in a ballet, _here_. Even my sporting clothes are
wrong--they sport too much. And I find I don’t know any of the things
that matter--when the grass begins to grow, and which weather is coming
up from the sea, and what to call it when it _has_ come. No, I don’t
fit in. Perhaps I’ll learn, after a while.”
Hamer Shaw said--“The land’ll teach you,” and leaned back and shut his
eyes. He could hear milk-pails on the flags at the Parsonage Farm.
“And love,” Mrs. Shaw added, very unexpectedly, “7 lacets, 7 tr., 9
ch., turn--don’t forget to look at the rods!”
“The land--and love.” Dandy said no more, knowing nothing of either.
On the fell opposite a floating wreath of mist was lifting delicately
upward like a lawn kerchief drawn from a sleeping face. “The land--and
love.” Great Masters. But the land, as yet, would have none of her, and
love might never look her way. She could win the one if she chose to
woo it; the other and greater must come unasked.
“Mais, cher dieu, de la tendre et divine épouvante,
Amour, que feraient-ils si vous ne veniez pas?”