WHAT WILL ROLAND DO?
Roland and Jack were too much my seniors, and yet still too young, to
take notice of me. But I could admire them from afar for their gifts
and opportunities, their good looks, their bodily prowess, liberty,
and apparent lack of all care. Their activities were mostly away from
home, and rumours, probably, were incomplete. Roland ran and jumped at
sports, rode a horse, sometimes into the yard, sometimes out to where
the fox was hunted (a little beyond _our_ range)--bicycled hither
and thither--possessed a gun and used it, doubtless in a magnificent
manner--dressed as he should be dressed--was more than once in trouble
of some kind, I think in debt, and had once been observed by me in
London walking with a dark lady of his own splendid breed, whom I
never heard anything of, or saw again. What I first knew of Roland
was--shortly after I began to frequent Abercorran House--a voice
singing mightily in the bathroom:
“Foul fall the hand that bends the steel
Around the courser’s thundering heel,
That e’er shall print a sable wound
On fair Glamorgan’s velvet ground.”
Never afterwards did he do anything that fell short of the name Roland,
to which the noble war-song, at that moment, fixed its character for
ever. Jack and he had been to a famous school until they were sixteen,
and did no good there. Indoors they learnt very little more than a
manner extremely well suited to hours of idleness. Out of doors they
excelled at the more selfish sports, at athletics, boxing, sculling,
shooting. So they had come home and, as Mr Morgan had nothing to
suggest, they had done what suggested itself.
You could see Mr Morgan thinking as he watched the two, undecided
whether it was best to think with or without the cigar, which he
might remove for a few seconds, perhaps without advantage, for it
was replaced with evident satisfaction. But he was thinking as he
stood there, pale, rigid, and abstracted. Then perhaps Roland would
do or say something accompanied by a characteristic free, bold, easy
gesture, turning on his heel; and the father gave up thinking, to laugh
heartily, and as likely as not step forward to enter the conversation,
or ask Roland about the dogs, or what he had been doing in the past
week. “Had a good time? ... suits you?... Ha, ha, ... Well, this will
never do, I must be going. Good-bye, good-bye. Don’t forget to look in
and see how mother is.”
He had only gone upstairs to the Library to open one of the new reviews
which, except where they caught the sunshine, remained so new. He and
his two elder sons always parted with a laugh. Either he manœuvred for
it, or as soon as the good laugh arrived he slipped away lest worse
might befall. He saw clearly enough that “they had no more place in
London than Bengal tigers,” as he said one day to Mr Stodham: “They
ought to have been in the cavalry. But they aren’t--curse it--what is
to be done? Why could I not breed clerks?” The immediate thing to be
done was to light the suspended cigar. It was lucky if the weather just
at that time took a fine turn; if Harry and Lewis, for a wonder, were
persuaded to spend all day and every day at school; if Mrs Morgan was
away in Wales; if Jessie’s voice was perfect, singing
“The cuckoo is a merry bird ...”
I recall such a time. The wall-flower had turned out to be just the
mixture of blood colour and lemon that Mr Morgan liked best. The
water-lilies were out on the pond. The pigeons lay all along under
the roof ridge, too idle to coo except by mistake or in a dream. Jack
and Roland were working hard at some machinery in the yard. The right
horse, it seems, had won the Derby.
On the evenings in such a season Philip and I had to bring to light the
fishing-tackle, bind hooks on gut and gimp, varnish the binding, mix
new varnish, fit the rods together, practise casting in the Wilderness,
with a view to our next visit, which would be in August, to my aunt
Rachel’s at Lydiard Constantine. There would be no eggs to be found so
late, except a few woodpigeons’, linnets’, and swallows’, but these
late finds in the intervals of fishing--when it was too hot, for
example--had a special charm. The nuts would be ripe before we left....
On these evenings we saw only the fishing things, the Wilderness, and
Lydiard Constantine.
This weather was but a temporary cure for Mr Morgan’s curiosity as to
what Jack and Roland were to do. You could tell that he was glad to
see Roland’s face again, home from Canada with some wolf skins after a
six months’ absence; but it was not enough. The fellow had been in an
office once for a much shorter period. The one thing to draw him early
from bed was hunting. Well, but he was a fine fellow. How should all
the good in him be employed? It could not be left to the gods; and yet
assuredly the gods would have their way.
Everybody else did something. Aurelius earned a living, though his
hands proclaimed him one who was born neither to toil nor spin. Higgs,
too, did no one knew what, but something that kept him in tobacco and
bowler hats, in the times when he was not fishing in the Wilderness or
looking after his pigeons in the yard. For it so happened--and caused
nobody surprise--that all the pigeons at Abercorran House were his. Mr
Morgan looked with puzzled disapproval from Higgs to Roland and Jack,
and back again to Higgs. Higgs had arrived and stayed under their
shadow. It was a little mysterious, but so it was, and Mr Morgan could
not help seeing and wondering why the two should afflict themselves
with patronising one like fat Higgs. Once when Roland struck him, half
in play, he bellowed distractedly, not for pain but for pure rabid
terror. He went about whistling; for he had a little, hard mouth made
on purpose. I thought him cruel, because one day when he saw that,
owing to some misapprehension, I was expecting two young pigeons for
the price of one, he put the head of one into his mouth and closed his
teeth.... Whilst I was still silly with disgust and horror he gave
me the other bird. But he understood dogs. I have seen Roland listen
seriously while Higgs was giving an opinion on some matter concerning
Ladas, Bully, Spot, or Granfer; yet Roland was reputed to know all
about dogs, and almost all about bitches.
That did not console Mr Morgan. Wherever he looked he saw someone who
was perfectly content with Roland and everything else, just as they
were, at Abercorran House. Mr Stodham, for example, was all admiration,
with a little surprise. Aurelius, again, said that if such a family,
house, and backyard, had not existed, they would have to be invented,
as other things less pleasant and necessary had been. When rumours
were afloat that perhaps Mr Morgan would be compelled to give up the
house Aurelius exclaimed: “It is impossible, it is disgraceful. Let
the National Gallery go, let the British Museum go, but preserve the
Morgans and Abercorran House.” Mr Torrance, of course, agreed with
Aurelius. He wrote a poem about the house, but, said Aurelius, “It was
written with tears for ink, which is barbarous. He has not enough gall
to translate tears into good ink.” Higgs naturally favoured things as
they were, since the yard at Abercorran House was the best possible
place for his birds. As for me, I was too young, but Abercorran House
made London tolerable and often faultless.
Ann’s opinion was expressed in one word: “Wales.” She thought that
the family ought to go back to Wales, that all would be well there.
In fact, she regarded Abercorran House as only a halt, though she
admitted that there were unfriendly circumstances. The return to Wales
was for her the foundation or the coping stone always. She would not
have been greatly put out if there had been a public subscription or
grant from the Civil list to make Abercorran House and Mr Morgan,
Jessie, Ann herself, Jack, Roland, Philip, Harry, Lewis, Ladas, Bully,
Spot, Granfer, the pigeons, the yard, the Wilderness and the jackdaws,
the pond and the water-lilies, as far as possible immortal, and a
possession for ever, without interference from Board of Works, School
Board inspectors, Rate Collectors, surveyors of taxes, bailiffs and
recoverers of debts, moreover without any right on the part of the
public to touch this possession except by invitation, with explicit
approval by Roland and the rest. It should have been done. A branch of
the British Museum might have been especially created to protect this
stronghold, as doubtless it would have been protected had it included a
dolmen, tumulus, or British camp, or other relic of familiar type. As
it was not done, a bailiff did once share the kitchen with Ann, a short
man completely enveloped in what had been, at about the time of Albert
the Good, a fur-lined overcoat, and a silk hat suitable for a red
Indian. Most of his face was nose, and his eyes and nose both together
looked everlastingly over the edge of the turned-up coat-collar at the
ground. His hands must have been in his coat-pockets. I speak of his
appearance when he took the air; for I did not see him at Abercorran
House. There he may have produced his hands and removed his hat from
his head and lifted up his eyes from the ground--a thing impossible to
his nose. He may even have spoken--in a voice of ashes. But at least on
the day after his visit all was well at Abercorran House with man and
bird and beast. The jackdaws riding a south-west wind in the sun said
“Jack” over and over again, both singly and in volley. Only Higgs was
disturbed. He, it seems, knew the visitor, and from that day dated his
belief in the perishableness of mortal things, and a moderated opinion
of everything about the Morgans except the pigeon-house and Roland. Mr
Morgan perhaps did not, but everybody else soon forgot the bailiff. On
the day after his visit, nevertheless, Philip was still indignant. He
was telling me about the battle of Hastings. All I knew and had cared
to know was summed up in the four figures--1066. But Philip, armed with
a long-handled mallet, had constituted himself the English host on the
hill brow, battering the Normans downhill with yells of “Out, out,”
and “God Almighty,” and also “Out Jew.” For his enemy was William of
Normandy and the Jew bailiff in one. With growls of “Out, out” through
foaming set lips, he swung the mallet repeatedly, broke a Windsor chair
all to pieces, and made the past live again.