THE MORGANS OF ABERCORRAN HOUSE
In spite of old Ann and her kitchen fire I did not stay long in the
house that day. The removal which had left it deserted and silent had
made it also a little sordid: the family’s ways, for example, had not
agreed with the wall-paper, and they had been no enemies to spiders.
So I went out into the yard. There were no dogs; all had gone with the
Morgans to Abercorran. The only life was a single homeless blue pigeon
flying about in search of the home which had been sold. Ann said that
almost every one of the birds had returned in this way, and she called
the traveller into the kitchen to wait until its purchaser came in
search of it. She told me who he was, and much more about the sale,
which I forgot or never heard, because the sun shone very warmly into
the yard just then, and I could not help seeing them all again, Jack
and Roland, Lewis and Harry, and Jessie, and Philip, too, as he was at
sixteen, and the dogs,--Ladas the greyhound, Bully the bull-terrier,
Granfer the dachshund, Spot the fox-terrier, and pigeons here and there
among them, and some perched on roof and chimneys, some flying so high
that they were no bigger than larks--and Mr Morgan at the top of the
steps looking at it all and seeing that it was good. Often had I come
upon them in this pattern, not knowing at first whether to join this
group or that, the busy or the idle.
In those days Abercorran House stood at the end of a short, quiet
street which had only six houses in it, all on the right-hand side
going up, all roomy and respectable, monuments of Albert the Good’s
age, well covered with creepers, screened by a continuous line of
lime-trees and in most cases by laurel, lilac, and balsam in compact
shrubberies. Opposite the houses a high wall ran along until, at
Abercorran House, the street was cut short by an oak fence. Behind that
fence, and occupying as much ground as all the other houses and gardens
together, lay the Abercorran garden, the Wilderness, which was bounded
and given its triangular shape by a main road--now Harrington Road--and
a farm lane. Impenetrable hedges and unscaleable fences protected the
garden from the world.
I cannot say how it had come about that these three acres became
attached to the house which so well deserved them. From the outside
nobody would have suspected it. Abercorran House was in no practical
respect superior to its neighbours; presumably the land beyond the
fence was another property, or it would not have been allowed to cut
short the street. But so it was. You entered the carriage gate on
your right--there was no carriage--passed round the right side of the
house into the yard at the back, turned to the left across it and went
between the conservatory and the pigeon house out into the Wilderness.
The house was distinguished, to the casual eye, by the lack of coloured
or white curtains, the never-shut gate, the flourishing, untended lilac
hiding the front door and lower windows except in winter. But for me
it is hard to admit that Abercorran House had anything in common,
except building material, with the other five--The Elms, Orchard Lea,
Brockenhurst, and Candelent Gate, and I forget the other. The street
was called Candelent Street; God knows why, but there may be someone
who knows as much about Candelent Gate as I do of Abercorran House.
These houses showed signs of pride and affluence. Their woodwork
was frequently painted; the gravel was renewed; the knockers and
letter-boxes gleamed; their inhabitants were always either neat or
gaudy; even the servants were chosen half for their good looks, and
were therefore continually being changed. At the Elms lived several
people and a great Dane; at Orchard Lea a wire-haired terrier with a
silver collar; at Candelent Gate a sort of whippet; at the house whose
name I have forgotten, three pugs. These dogs all liked the Morgans’
house for one reason or another: men and dogs and food were always
to be found there. The dogs’ owners never got so far up the street
as that, though they sometimes sent to ask if Bunter the wire-haired
terrier, or Lofty the Dane, or Silvermoon the whippet, were there, or
to complain about one of some score of things which they disliked,
as, for example, the conduct of the dogs (especially Bully, who was
damned at first sight for his looks), the use of the hundred yards of
roadway as a running ground, Jessie’s entering the races in a costume
which enabled her to win, the noise of boys whistling at the pigeons,
the number of the pigeons, the visits of almost verminous-looking
strangers who had forgotten the name of the house and tried The Elms,
or Candelent Gate, or Orchard Lea, or Brockenhurst, before discovering
the Morgans. In return, Mr Morgan regretted the nature of things and
the incompatibility of temperaments, and he forbade racing in the
street; but as races were always an inspiration, they recurred. As for
Jessie’s clothes, his opinion was that his neighbours, being fools,
should look the other way or pull down their blinds. He did not see why
Godiva should complain of Peeping Tom, or Peeping Tom of Godiva. As for
the difficulty in remembering the name of the house, he saw no reason
for changing it; all his friends and his children’s friends could see
instantly that neither The Elms, nor Orchard Lea, nor Brockenhurst, nor
Candelent Gate, nor the other house, was his, and he could not think of
consulting those who were not his friends.
Abercorran House was honoured by four martins’ nests under the eaves,
placed at such regular intervals that they appeared to be corbels for
supporting the roof. Not one of the other houses in the street had a
martin’s nest. But the distinguishing feature of the Morgans’ house
was that you could see at a glance that it was the Morgans’. The
front garden was merely a way round to the yard and the Wilderness.
Altogether the front of the house, facing east, must have looked to a
stranger uninhabited. Everything was done on the other side, or in the
yard. Bounded on the east by the house, on the north or Brockenhurst
side by a high wall (built by Mr Brockenhurst, as we called him), and
on the west or lane side by a split oak fence, but separated from the
Wilderness and the south only by the conservatory and the pigeon-house
and some low railings, the yard of Abercorran House was a reservoir
of sun. The high south wall was occupied, not by fruit trees, but
by cascades of ivy and by men and boys standing or sitting in the
sun, talking, watching the jackdaws coming and going in the elms of
the Wilderness, and also by dogs gnawing bones or sleeping. There
was no cultivated garden, but several of the corners had always some
blossoms of wall-flower, sweet-rocket, or snapdragon, that looked after
themselves: in the pocket between the fence and the pigeon house half
a dozen sunflowers invariably found a way of growing eight feet high
and expanding enormous blossoms, every one of them fit to be copied and
stuck up for a sign outside the “Sun” inn.
Nobody could mistake Abercorran House; but in case anybody did, Mr
Morgan had a brass plate with “T. Ll. Morgan” on it at the foot of
his front steps, in a position where to see it from the road was
impossible. This plate was always bright: the only time when I saw
it dim was when Ann was alone in the deserted house. A succession of
active, dirty, little maids employed in the house agreed upon this
one point, that the name-plate must be polished until it reflected
their cheeks as they reflected its never-understood glory. No
vainglorious initial letters followed the name, nor any descriptive
word. The maids--Lizz, Kate, Ellen, Polly, Hannah, Victoria, and the
rest--probably knew no more than I ever did why the name was there.
For it was perfectly clear that Mr Morgan never did or wished to do
anything. The name might just as well have been that of some famous man
born there a hundred years before: in any case it had nothing to do
with that expression the house had of frankness, mystery, untidiness,
ease, and something like rusticity. In the yard behind, the bull
terrier stood for frankness, the greyhound for rusticity, the cats for
mystery, and most things for untidiness, and all for ease.
Indoors it was a dark house. Windows were numerous, but it was
undoubtedly dark. This was in part due to comparison with the outer
air, where people lived as much as possible, and especially with the
sunlit yard. The house had, however, a dark spirit, aided by the folds
of heavy curtains, the massive, old, blackened furniture, and the
wall-paper of some years before. You wandered as you pleased about it,
alone or with Philip, Lewis, or Harry. Most of the rooms were bedrooms,
but not conspicuous as such when strewn with cases of butterflies,
birds’ eggs and nests, stuffed animals, cages containing foreign birds,
several blackbirds, a nest of young thrushes, an adder and some ringed
snakes and lizards, a hedgehog, white and piebald rats and mice,
fishing-rods and tackle, pistols and guns and toy cannon, tools and
half-made articles of many kinds, model steam-engines, a model of the
“Victory” and a painting of the “Owen Glendower” under a flock of sail,
boxing gloves, foils, odds and ends of wood and metal, curiosities from
tree and stone, everything that can be accumulated by curious and
unruly minds; and then also the owners themselves and their friends,
plotting, arguing, examining their property, tending the living animals
or skinning the dead, boxing, fencing, firing cannon, and going to and
fro.
The kitchen, the Library, and Mrs Morgan’s room were silent rooms. In
the kitchen Ann ruled. It smelt of an old Bible and new cakes: its
sole sound was Ann’s voice singing in Welsh, which was often stopped
abruptly by her duties coming to a head, or by something outside--as
when she heard Lewis overtaxing Granfer in teaching it a trick and
flitted out, saying: “Don’t use the dog like that. Anyone might think
he had no human feelings.” She must have been, in a sense, young in
those days, but was unlike any other young woman I have seen, and it
never occurred to me then to think of her as one; nor, as certainly,
did it seem possible that she would grow old--and she has not grown
old. When she left her kitchen it was seldom to go out. Except to do
the household shopping, and that was always after dark, she never went
beyond the yard. She did not like being laughed at for her looks and
accent, and she disliked London so much as to keep out the London air,
as far as possible, with closed windows.
I do not remember ever to have seen Ann talking to her mistress, and
no doubt she did without her. Mrs Morgan was not to be seen about the
house, and her room was perfectly respected. She sat at the window
looking on to the yard and watched the boys as she sewed, or read, or
pretended to read. Sometimes Jessie sat with her, and then I have seen
her smiling. She had large eyes of a gloomy lustre which looked as if
they had worn their hollows in the gaunt face by much gazing and still
more musing. The boys were silent for a moment as they went past her
door. I do not know when she went out, if she ever did, but I never
saw her even in the yard. Nor did I see her with Mr Morgan, and it
was known that he was never in her sitting-room. She seemed to live
uncomplaining under a weight of gloom, looking out from under it upon
her strong sons and their busy indolence, with admiration and also a
certain dread.
Jessie was the favourite child of father and mother, but I used to
think that it was to avoid her father that she was so often in her
mother’s room. Why else should such a child of light and liberty
stay in that quietness and dark silence which breathed out darkness
over the house? Outside that room she was her brothers’ equal in
boldness, merriment and even in strength. Yet it once struck me with
some horror, as she sat up at the window, that she was like her
mother--too much like her--the dark eyes large, the cheeks not any too
plump, the expression sobered either by some fear of her own or by the
conversation; it struck me that she might some day by unimaginable
steps reach that aspect of soft endurance and tranquilly expectant
fear. At fifteen, when I best remember her, she was a tall girl with
a very grave face when alone, which could break out with astonishing
ease into great smiles of greeting and then laughter of the whole soul
and body as she was lured to one group or another in the yard. She
mixed so roughly and carelessly with every one that, at first, I, who
had false picture-book notions of beauty and looked for it to have
something proud and ceremonious in itself and its reception, did not
see how beautiful she was. She took no care of her dress, and this
made all the more noticeable the radiant sweetness of her complexion.
But I recognised her beauty before long. One Saturday night she was
shopping with Ann, and I met her suddenly face to face amidst a pale
crowd all spattered with acute light and shadow from the shops. I did
not know who it was, though I knew Ann. She was so extraordinary that
I stared hard at her as people do at a foreigner, or a picture, or
an animal, not expecting a look in answer. Others also were staring,
some of the women were laughing. There could be no greater testimony
to beauty than this laughter of the vulgar. The vulgar always laugh
at beauty; that they did so is my only reason for calling these women
by that hateful name. Jessie did not heed them. Then she caught sight
of me, and her face lightened and blossomed with smiles. I shall not
forget it, and how I blushed to be so saluted in that vile street.
There was another reason why I should remember. Some of the big boys
and young men--boys just leaving the Grammar School or in their first
year at an office--winked at her as they passed; and one of them, a
white-faced youth with a cigarette, not only winked but grinned as if
he were certain of conquest. Jessie’s face recovered its grave look,
she gave Ann her basket, and at the fullness of his leer she struck him
in the mouth with all her force, splashing her small hand and his face
with blood. I trembled and winced with admiration. Jessie burst into
tears. The crowd was quiet and excited. Everybody seemed to be looking
for somebody else to do they could not tell what. The crush increased.
I saw Ann wiping Jessie’s hand. They were saved by a big red-faced
working woman, who had a little husband alongside of her. She pushed
very slowly but with great determination through the crowd, using her
husband rather as an addition to her weight than as a brother in arms,
until she came to the cluster of moody youths. Between us and them she
stood, and hammering in her words with a projecting chin, told them
to “Get home, you chalk-faced quill-drivers, and tell your mothers
to suckle you again on milk instead of water. Then you can ask leave
to look at girls, but not the likes of this beautiful dear, not you.
Get home....” They laughed awkwardly and with affected scorn as they
turned away from that face on fire; and it was laughing thus that they
realised that they were blocking the traffic, and therefore dispersed
muttering a sort of threats, the woman keeping up her attack until it
could not be hoped that they heard her. As we hurried home we were
hooted by similar boys and by some of the young women who matched them.
We were proud of Jessie in this attitude, which made her father call
her “Brynhild” or “Boadicea.” When she was with her mother she was
“Cordelia:” when she nursed a cat or fed the pigeons she was “Phyllis,”
by which I suppose he meant to express her gentleness. From that
Saturday night I admired everything about her, down to her bright
teeth, which were a little uneven, and thus gave a touch of country
homeliness to her beauty. Very few girls came to Abercorran House to
see Jessie, partly because she was impatient of very girlish girls,
partly because they could not get on with her brothers. And so, with
all her sweet temper--and violence that came like a tenth wave--she was
rather alone; just as her face dropped back to gravity so completely
after laughter, so I think she returned to solitude very easily after
her romps. Was it the shadow of London upon her, or of her mother’s
room? She went back to Wales too seldom, and as for other holidays, the
charming sophisticated home-counties were nothing to the Morgans, nor
the seaside resorts. Jessie should have had a purer air, where perhaps
she would never have sung the song beginning, “O the cuckoo, she’s a
pretty bird,” and ending with the chorus:
“Oh, the cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird, she singeth as she flies:
She bringeth good tidings, she telleth no lies.”
Sometimes she was willing to sing all three verses and repeat the first
to make a fourth and to please herself:
“Oh, the cuckoo, she’s a pretty bird, she singeth as she flies:
She bringeth good tidings, she telleth no lies:
She sucketh sweet flowers, for to keep her voice clear;
And the more she singeth cuckoo, the summer draweth near.”
When she came to those last two lines I looked at her very hard,
inspired by the thought that it was she had sucked dew out of the white
flowers of April, the cuckoo-flower, the stitchwort, the blackthorn,
and the first may, to make her voice clear and her lips sweet. While
she sang it once Mr Stodham--a clerk somewhere who had seen a naked
Dryad--bent his head a little to one side, perfectly motionless, the
eyes and lips puckered to a perfect attention, at once eager and
passive, so that I think the melody ran through all his nerves and his
veins, as I am sure he was inviting it to do. I heard him telling Mr
Morgan afterwards that he wanted to cry, but could not, it was not in
his family.
That was in Mr Morgan’s own room, the library, the largest room in the
house, where Mr Stodham had gone to escape the boys for a time. When
Mr Morgan was not at the top of the steps which led down to the yard,
smoking a cigar and watching the boys, the dogs, and the pigeons,
and looking round now and then to see if Jessie would come, he was
in the library sitting by the big fire with a cigar and a book. If
anyone entered he put the book on his knee, shifted the cigar to the
middle of his mouth, removed his spectacles, and looked at us without
a word. Then with a nod he replaced book, cigar, and spectacles, and
ignored us. We spoke in whispers or not at all as we coasted the high
book-shelves lining every part of each wall, except in one corner,
where there were several guns, an ivory-handled whip, and a pair of
skates. The books were on the whole grim and senatorial. We felt them
vaguely--the legal, the historical, and the classical tiers--to be our
accusers and judges. There were also many sporting books, many novels,
plays, poems, and romances of
“Old loves and wars for ladies done by many a lord.”
If we took some of these down they were not to be read in the library.
We laid one on our knees, opened a page, but glanced up more than once
the while at Mr Morgan, and then either replaced it or put it under an
arm and ran off with it on tiptoe. “Stay if you like, boys,” said Mr
Morgan as we reached the door; and immediately after, “Shut the door
quietly. Good-bye.”
At most gatherings and conversations Mr Morgan listened in silence,
except when appealed to for a fact or a decision, or when he
laughed--we often did not know why--and dropped his cigar, but caught
it in some confusion at his waist. He was a lean man of moderate height
and very upright, a hawk’s profile, a pointed brown beard, cheeks
weathered and worn, and the heaviest-lidded eyes possible without
deformity. He stood about with one hand in his coat pocket, the other
holding a newspaper or an opened book. The dogs loved him and leaped
up at him when he appeared, though he took small notice of them. When
we met him in the street he always had a slow horseman’s stride, was
wrapped in a long overcoat and deep in thought, and never saw us or
made any sign. At home, though he was a severe-looking man of grave
speech, he accepted the irregularities and alarums without a murmur,
often with a smile, sometimes, as I have said, with laughter, but
that was a little disconcerting. It was on questions of sport and
natural history that he was most often asked for a judgment, which he
always gave with an indifferent air and voice, yet in a very exact
and unquestionable manner. But they were the frankest family alive,
and there was nothing which the elder boys would not discuss in his
presence or refer to him--except in the matter of horse-racing. Jack
and Roland, the two eldest sons, betted; and so, as we all knew, did Mr
Morgan; but the father would not say one word about a horse or a race,
unless it was a classical or curious one belonging to the past.