1
The Ballinger affair did not end with the demonstration in the Town
Hall. It had unforeseen and far-reaching consequences.
The first of these appeared in a letter which Mr. Waddington received
from Mr. Hitchin:
"DEAR SIR,--
"_Re_ my estimate for decoration and additional building to Mrs.
Levitt's house, I beg to inform you that recent circumstances have
rendered it impossible for me to take up the contract. I must therefore
request you to transfer your esteemed order to some other firm.
"Faithfully yours,
"THOMAS HITCHIN."
Mr. Hitchin expressed his attitude even more clearly to the foreman of
his works. "I'm not going to build bathrooms and boudoirs and bedrooms
for that--" the word he chose completed the alliteration. So that Mr.
Waddington was compelled to employ a Cheltenham builder whose estimate
exceeded Mr. Hitchin's estimate by thirty pounds.
And Mr. Hitchin's refusal was felt, even by people who resented his
estimates, to be a moral protest that did him credit. It impressed the
popular imagination. In the popular imagination Mrs. Levitt was now
inextricably mixed up with the Ballinger affair. Public sympathy was all
with Ballinger, turned out of his house and forced to take refuge with
his wife's father at Medlicott, forced to trudge two and a half miles
every day to his work and back again. The Rector and Major Markham of
Wyck Wold, meditating on the Ballinger affair as they walked back that
night from the Town Hall, pronounced it a mystery.
"It wasn't likely," Major Markham said, "that Ballinger, of his own
initiative, would leave a comfortable house in Sheep Street for a damp
cottage in Lower Wyck."
"Was it likely," the Rector said, "that Waddington would turn him out?"
He couldn't believe that old Waddington would do anything of the sort.
"Unless," Major Markham suggested, "he's been got at. Mrs. Levitt may
have got at him." He was a good sort, old Waddy, but he would be very
weak in the hands of a clever, unscrupulous woman.
The Rector said he thought there was no harm in Mrs. Levitt, and Major
Markham replied that he didn't like the look of her.
A vague scandal rose in Wyck-on-the-Hill. It went from mouth to mouth in
bar parlours and back shops; Major Markham transported it in his
motor-car from Wyck Wold to the Halls and Manors of Winchway and Chipping
Kingdon and Norton-in-Mark. It got an even firmer footing in the county
than in Wyck, with the consequence that one old lady withdrew her
subscription to the League, and that when Mr. Waddington started on his
campaign of rounding up the county the county refused to be rounded up.
And the big towns, Gloucester, Cheltenham and Cirencester, were
singularly apathetic. It was intimated to Mr. Waddington that if the
local authorities saw fit to take the matter up no doubt something would
be done, but the big towns were not anxious for a National League of
Liberty imposed on them from Wyck-on-the-Hill.
The League did not die of Mrs. Levitt all at once. Very soon after the
inaugural meeting the Committee sat at Lower Wyck Manor and appointed
Mr. Waddington president. It arranged a series of monthly meetings in
the Town Hall at which Mr. Waddington would speak ("That," said Fanny,
"will give you something to look forward to every month.") Thus, on
Saturday, the nineteenth of July, he would speak on "The Truth about
Bolshevism." It was also decided that the League could be made very
useful during by-elections in the county, if there ever were any, and
Mr. Waddington prepared in fancy a great speech which he could use for
electioneering purposes.
On July the nineteenth, seventeen people, counting Fanny and Barbara,
came to the meeting: Sir John Corbett (Lady Corbett was unfortunately
unable to attend), the Rector without his wife, Major Markham of Wyck
Wold, Mr. Bostock of Parson's Bank, Kimber and Partridge and Annie
Trinder from the Manor, the landlady of the White Hart, the butcher, the
grocer and the fishmonger with whom Mr. Waddington dealt, three farmers
who approved of his determination to keep down wages, and Mrs. Levitt.
When he sat down and drank water there was a feeble clapping led by Mrs.
Levitt, Sir John and the Rector. On August the sixteenth, the audience
had shrunk to Mrs. Levitt, Kimber and Partridge, the butcher, one of the
three farmers, and a visitor staying at the White Hart. Mr. Waddington
spoke on "What the League Can Do." Owing to a sudden unforeseen shortage
in his ideas he was obliged to fall back on his electioneering speech
and show how useful the League would be if at any time there were a
by-election in the county. The pop-popping of Mrs. Levitt's hands burst
into a silent space. Nobody, not even Kimber or Partridge, was going to
follow Mrs. Levitt's lead.
"You'll have to give it up," Fanny said. "Next time there won't be
anybody but Mrs. Levitt." And with the vision before him of all those
foolish, empty benches and Mrs. Levitt, pop-popping, dear brave woman,
all by herself, Mr. Waddington admitted that he would have to give it
up. Not that he owned himself beaten; not that he gave up his opinion of
the League.
"It's a bit too big for 'em," he said. "They can't grasp it. Sleepy
minds. You can't rouse 'em if they won't be roused."
He emerged from his defeat with an unbroken sense of intellectual
superiority.
2
Thus the League languished and died out; and Mr. Waddington, in the
absence of this field for personal activity, languished too. In spite of
his intellectual superiority, perhaps because of it, he languished till
Barbara pointed out to him that the situation had its advantages. At
last he could go on with his book.
"If you can only start him on it and keep him at it," Fanny said, "I'll
bless you for ever."
But it was not easy either to start him or to keep him at it. To begin
with, as Ralph had warned her, the work itself, _Ramblings Through the
Cotswolds_, was in an appalling mess, and Mr. Waddington seemed to have
exhausted his original impetus in getting it into that mess. He had set
out on his ramblings without any settled plan. "A rambler," he said,
"shouldn't have a settled plan." So that you would find Mr. Waddington,
starting from Wyck-on-the-Hill and arriving at Lechford in the Thames
valley, turning up in the valley of the Windlode or the Speed. You would
find him on page twenty-seven drinking ale at the Lygon Arms in Chipping
Kingdon, and on page twenty-eight looking down on the Evesham plain from
the heights south of Cheltenham. He would turn from this prospect and,
without traversing any intermediate ground, be back again, where you
least expected him, in his Manor under Wyck-on-the-Hill. For though he
had no fixed plan, he had a fixed idea, and however far he rambled he
returned invariably to Wyck. To Mr. Waddington Wyck-on-the-Hill was the
one stable, the one certain spot on the earth's surface, and this led to
his treating the map of Gloucestershire entirely with reference to
Wyck-on-the-Hill, so that all his ramblings were complicated by the
necessity laid on him of starting from and getting back to it.
So much Barbara made out after she had copied the first forty pages,
making the first clearing in Mr. Waddington's jungle. The clearings,
she explained to Ralph, broke your heart. It wasn't till you'd got the
thing all clean and tidy that you realized the deep spiritual confusion
that lay behind it.
After that fortieth page the Ramblings piled and mixed themselves in
three interpenetrating layers. First there was the original layer of
Waddington, then a layer of Ralph superimposed on Waddington and
striking down into him; then a top layer of Waddington, striking down
into Ralph. First, the primeval chaos of Waddington; then Ralph's spirit
moving over it and bringing in light and order; then Waddington again,
invading it and beating it all back to darkness and confusion. From the
moment Ralph came into it the progress of the book was a struggle
between these two principles, and Waddington could never let Ralph be,
so determined was he to stamp the book with his own personality.
"After all," Ralph said, "it _is_ his book."
"If he could only get away from Wyck, so that you could see where the
other places _are_," she moaned.
"He can't get away from it because he can't get away from himself. His
mind is egocentric and his ego lives in Wyck."
Barbara had had to ask Ralph to help her. They were in the library
together now, working on the Ramblings during one of Mr. Waddington's
periodical flights to London.
"He thinks he's rambling round the country but he's really rambling
round and round himself. All the time he's thinking about nothing but
his blessed self."
"Oh, come, he thought a lot about his old League."
"No, the League was only an extension of his ego."
"That must have been what Fanny meant. We were looking at his portrait
and I said I wondered what he was thinking about, and she said she used
to wonder and now she knew. Of course, it's Himself. That's what makes
him look so absurdly solemn."
"Yes, but think of it. Think. That man hasn't ever cared about anything
or anybody but himself."
"Oh--he cares about Fanny."
"No. No, he doesn't. He cares about his wife. A very different thing."
"Well--he cares about his old mother. He really cares."
"Yes, and you know why? It's only because she makes him feel young. He
hates Horry because he can't feel young when he's there."
"Why, oh why, did that angel Fanny marry him?"
"Because she isn't an angel. She's a mortal woman and she wanted a
husband and children."
"Wasn't there anybody else?"
"I believe not--available. The man she ought to have married was
married already."
"Did my mother marry him?"
"Yes. And _my_ mother married the next best one.... It was as plain and
simple as all that. And you see, the plainer and simpler it was, the
more she realized why she was marrying Horatio, the more she idealized
him. It wanted camouflage."
"I see."
"Then you must remember her people were badly off and he helped them. He
was always doing things for them. He managed all Fanny's affairs for her
before he married her."
"Then--he does kind things."
"Lots. When he wants to get something. He wanted to get Fanny....
Besides, he does them to get power, to get a hold on you. It's really
for himself all the time. It gives him a certain simplicity and purity.
He isn't a snob. He doesn't think about his money or his property, or
his ancestors--he's got heaps--quite good ones. They don't matter.
Nothing matters but himself."
"How about his book? Doesn't that matter?"
"It does and yet again it doesn't. He pretends he's only doing it to
amuse himself, but it's really a projection of his ego into the
Cotswolds. On the other hand, he'd hate it if you took him for a
writing man when he's Horatio Bysshe Waddington. That's how he's got it
into such a mess, because he can't get away from himself and his Manor."
"Proud of his Manor, anyhow."
"Oh, yes. Not, mind you, because it's perfect Tudor of the sixteenth
century, _nor_ because the Earl of Warwick gave it to his
great-grandfather's great-great-grandfather, but because it's his Manor.
Horatio Bysshe Waddington's Manor. Of course, it's got to be what it is
because any other sort of Manor wouldn't be good enough for Bysshe."
"It's an extension of his ego, too?"
"Yes. Horatio's ego spreading itself in wings and bursting into
ball-topped gables and overflowing into a lovely garden and a park.
There isn't a tree, there isn't a flower that hasn't got bits of Horatio
in it."
"If I thought that I should never want to see roses and larkspurs
again."
"It only happens in Horatio's mind. But it does happen."
So, between them, bit by bit, they made him out.
And they made out the book. Here and there, on separate slips, were
great outlying tracts of light, contributed by Ralph, to be inserted,
and sketches of dark, undeveloped stuff, sprung from Waddington, to be
inserted too. Neither Ralph nor Barbara could make them fit. The only
thing was to copy it out clear as it stood and arrange it afterwards.
And presently it appeared that two pages were missing.
One evening, the evening of Mr. Waddington's return, looking for the
lost pages, Barbara made her great discovery: a sheaf of manuscript, a
hundred and twenty pages in Ralph's handwriting, hidden away at the back
of the bureau, crumpled as if an inimical hand had thrust it out of
sight. She took it up to bed and read it there.
A hundred and twenty pages of pure Ralph without any taint of
Waddington. It seemed to be part of Mr. Waddington's book, and yet no
part of it, for it was inconceivable that it should belong to anything
but itself. Ralph didn't ramble; he went straight for the things he had
seen. He saw the Cotswolds round Wyck-on-the-Hill, he made you see them,
as they were: the high curves of the hills, multiplied, thrown off, one
after another; the squares and oblongs and vandykes and spread fans of
the fields; and their many colours; grass green of the pastures, emerald
green of the young wheat, white green of the barley; shining, metallic
green of the turnips; the pink, the brown, the purple fallows, the sharp
canary yellow of the charlock. And the trees, the long processions of
trees by the great grass-bordered roads; trees furring the flanks and
groins of the parted hills, dark combs topping their edges.
Ralph knew what he was doing. He went about with the farmers and farm
hands; he followed the ploughing and sowing and the reaping, the feeding
and milking of the cattle, the care of the ewes in labour and of the
young lambs. He went at night to the upland folds with the shepherds; he
could tell you about shepherds. He sat with the village women by their
firesides and listened to their talk; he could tell you about village
women. Mr. Waddington did not tell you about anything that mattered.
She took the manuscript to Ralph at the White Hart with a note to say
how she had found it. He came running out to walk home with her.
"Did you know it was there?" she said.
"No. I thought I'd lost it. You see what it is?"
"Part of your book."
"Horatio's book."
"But you wrote it."
"Yes. That's what he fired me out for. He got tired of the thing and
asked me to go on with it. He called it working up his material. I went
on with it like that, and he wouldn't have it. He said it was badly
written--jerky, short sentences--he'd have to re-write it. Well--I
wouldn't let him do that, and he wouldn't have it as it stood."
"But--it's beautiful--alive and real. What more does he want?"
"The stamp of his personality."
"Oh, he'd _stamp_ on it all right."
"I'm glad you like it."
"_Like_ it. Don't you?"
Ralph said he thought he'd liked it when he wrote it, but now he didn't
know.
"You'll know when you've finished it."
"I don't suppose I shall finish it," he said.
"But you must. You can't _not_ finish a thing like that."
"I own I'd like to. But I can't publish it."
"Why ever not?"
"Oh, it wouldn't be fair to poor old Waddy. After all, I wrote it for
him."
"What on earth does that matter? If he doesn't want it. Of course you'll
finish it, and of course you'll publish it."
"Well, but it's all Cotswold, you see. And _he's_ Cotswold. If it _is_
any good, you know, I shouldn't like to--to well, get in his way. It's
his game. At least he began it."
"It's a game two can play, writing Cotswold books."
"No. No. It isn't. And he got in first."
"Well, then, let him get in first. You can bring your book out after."
"And dish his?"
"No, let it have a run first. Perhaps it won't have any run."
"Perhaps mine won't."
"_Yours_. That heavenly book? And his tosh--Don't you see that you
_can't_ get in his way? If anybody reads him they won't be the same
people who read you."
"I hope not. All the same it would be rather beastly to cut him out; I
mean to come in and do it better, show how bad he is, how frightful. It
would rub it in, you know."
"Not with him. You couldn't."
"You don't know. Some brute might get up and hurt him with it."
"Oh, you _are_ tender to him."
"Well, you see, I did let him down when I left him. Besides, it isn't
altogether him. There's Fanny."
"Fanny? She'd love you to write your book."
"I know she'd think she would. But she wouldn't like it if it made
Horatio look a fool."
"But he's bound to look a fool in any case."
"True. I might give him a year, or two years."
"Well, then, _my_ work's cut out for me. I shall have to make Horatio go
on and finish quick, so as not to keep you waiting."
"He'll get sick of it. He'll make you go on with it."
"_Me?_"
"Practically, and quarrel with every word you write. Unless you can
write so like Horatio that he'll think he's done it himself. And then,
you know, he won't have a word of mine left in. You'll have to take me
out. And we're so mixed up together that I don't believe even he could
sort us. You see, in order to appease him, I got into the way of giving
my sentences a Waddingtonian twist. If only I could have kept it up--"
"I'll have to lick the thing into shape somehow."
"There's only one thing you'll have to do. You must make him steer a
proper course. This is to be _the_ Guide to the Cotswolds. You can't
have him sending people back to Lower Wyck Manor all the time. You'll
have to know all the places and all the ways."
"And I don't."
"No. But I do. Supposing I took you on my motor-bike? Would you awfully
mind sitting on the carrier?"
"Do you think," she said, "he'd let me go?"
"Fanny will."
"I _could_, I think. I work so hard in the mornings and evenings that
they've given me all the afternoons."
"We might go every afternoon while the weather holds out," he said. And
then: "I say, he _does_ bring us together."
That was how Barbara's happy life began.
3
He did bring them together.
In the terrible months that followed, while she struggled for order and
clarity against Mr. Waddington, who strove to reinstate himself in his
obscure confusion, Barbara was sustained by the thought that in working
for Mr. Waddington she was working for Ralph Bevan. The harder she
worked for him the harder she worked for Ralph. With all her cunning and
her little indomitable will she urged and drove him to get on and make
way for Ralph. Mr. Waddington interposed all sorts of irritating
obstructions and delays. He would sit for hours, brooding solemnly,
equally unable to finish and to abandon any paragraph he had once begun.
He had left the high roads and was rambling now in bye-ways of such
intricacy that he was unable to give any clear account of himself. When
Barbara had made a clean copy of it Mr. Waddington's part didn't always
make sense. The only bits that could stand by themselves were Ralph's
bits, and they were the bits that Mr. Waddington wouldn't let stand. The
very clearness of the copy was a light flaring on the hopeless mess it
was. Even Mr. Waddington could see it.
"Do you think," she said, "we've got it all down in the right order?"
She pointed.
"_What's_ that?" She could see his hands twitching with annoyance. His
loose cheeks hung shaking as he brooded.
"That's not as _I_, wrote it," he said at last. "That's Ralph Bevan. He
wasn't a bit of good to me. There's--there's no end to the harm he's
done. Conceited fellow, full of himself and his own ideas. Now I shall
have to go over every line he's written and write it again. I'd rather
write a dozen books myself than patch up another fellow's bad work....
We've got to overhaul the whole thing and take out whatever he's done."
"But you're so mixed up you can't always tell."
He looked at her. "You may be sure that if any passage is obscure or
confused or badly written it isn't mine. The one you've shown me, for
example."
Then Barbara had another of her ideas. Since they were so mixed up
together that Mr. Waddington couldn't tell which was which, and since he
wanted to give the impression that Ralph was responsible for all the bad
bits, and insisted on the complete elimination of Ralph, she had only
got to eliminate the bad bits and give such a Waddingtonian turn to the
good ones that he would be persuaded that he had written them himself.
The great thing was, he said, that the book should be written by
himself. And once fairly extricated from his own entanglements and set
going on a clear path, with Barbara to pull him out of all the awkward
places, Mr. Waddington rambled along through the Cotswolds at a smooth,
easy pace. Barbara had contrived to break him of his wasteful and
expensive habit of returning from everywhere to Wyck. All through August
he kept a steady course northeast, north, northwest; by September he had
turned due south; he would be beating up east again by October; November
would find him in the valleys; there was no reason why he shouldn't
finish in December and come out in March.
Mr. Waddington himself was surprised at the progress he had made.
"It shows," he said, "what we can do without Ralph Bevan."
And Barbara, seated on Ralph's carrier, explored the countryside and
mapped out Mr. Waddington's course for him.
"She's worth a dozen Ralph Bevins," he would say.
And he would go to the door with her and see her start.
"You mustn't let yourself be victimized by Ralph," he said. He glanced
at the carrier. "Do you think it's safe?"
"Quite safe. If it isn't it'll only be a bit more thrilling."
"Much better to come in the car with me."
But Barbara wouldn't go in the car with him. When he talked about it she
looked frightened and embarrassed.
Her fright and her embarrassment were delicious to Mr. Waddington. He
said to himself: "She doesn't think _that's_ safe, anyhow."
And as he watched her rushing away, swaying exquisitely over a series of
terrific explosions, he gave a little skip and a half turn, light and
youthful, in the porch of his Manor.