AUNT SOPHY was giving her first garden party of the season--to her
second-best set. That meant a family gathering, with the Jeremy Crisps
left out. Maria Furlonger drew the line at the Jeremy Crisps, and said
she did her duty to them as a relative by buying groceries at their
father’s shop.
Edred was to go with Pamela. He was already a local favorite. He had
all the qualities which commend themselves to country society. He could
sing, play tennis, do conjuring tricks at the local entertainments.
Jethro wasn’t going; men with a serious occupation were never even
asked. Aunt Sophy collected her men painfully; a town failure or so,
who happened to be trying poultry farming or fruit culture--having
tried everything else of which he knew anything whatever; the curate;
one or two old gentlemen who had retired from something or the other,
one or two young ones who admired a particular girl.
Pamela ran out to the barn before she started. Jethro was at the door,
with a couple of half-bred retrievers at his heels and a trio of
mongrel pups that he was training for sheep-dogs gamboling in the muck
of the yard.
The vast proportions of the barn--the biggest and oldest for many
miles round--were a fitting background for Jethro with his muscular
frame and fair, sun-seared face. He was so English, so brown, so spare.
There was nothing of the student’s pallor and stoop about him--no
irritating subtlety. There was no furrow in his face, no ridge of
superfluous flesh, no mark of painful thought. It was all tough muscle.
Pamela looked at him admiringly, her desire going out to strength and
health and simplicity of life and motive. The clean shocks of yellow
straw in the barn, the dirty, trodden straw in the yard, agreed well
with his blue checked shirt and tan waistcoat; with his voluminous
checked tie, made in the time-honored rustic fashion. His father had
worn such ties and _his_ father before him. What had been seemly in
“Old Jethro” was seemly in “Young Jethro”; that was the spirit of Folly
Corner. It was a blue check tie made out of half a silk handkerchief,
cut cornerwise and deftly folded into proper shape by the iron. His
sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his delicately textured upper
arm. He had been helping his men with some necessary job--he was a
master, by heredity, of all the intricate sublime art of agriculture.
She said:
“We are going now. I wish you could come too.”
As she spoke, a loud angry hiss came from behind the house. It was like
the threatening bubble of a pot that is boiling too fast.
“Chalcraft is taking a starling’s nest,” Jethro said. “Tell Aunt Sophy
I may be up after tea.”
He turned into the barn, through the dim shadow of which she could see
two men, Peter Hone and another. She turned to go back through the
yard, placing the points of her shoes carefully on the ground so that
she might not soil above the toe-cap. Edred was leaning over the white
paling and watching her gingerly progress with amusement.
“Beastly dirty place, isn’t it?” he said, sneering and glancing down at
the trodden straw. “I say, what a jolly dance you could have in that
great barn! Do you remember the dance I took you to at Westminster Town
Hall?”
She nodded, hardly glancing at his slim, foppish figure. He was tinsel
compared to Jethro--Jethro with his muscular arms bared amid the golden
straw of his barn. She saw poetry in the vast gray place, with its
dusty, murky rafters; to Edred it only suggested a subscription dance
and Westminster Town Hall. For the moment she preferred Jethro, with
his white strong throat.
They went down the road and through the wood, talking commonplaces.
Edred had been nearly three months at Folly Corner, and one cannot for
three months keep up the strain of a dramatic attitude. Pamela still
had her moments of anguish, of struggle--but she no longer talked about
those moments. She waited with turgid, stupid hopelessness for what the
future might fling at her. She drifted; the matter had been taken
completely out of her hands. She was--so she understood--to be married
to Jethro directly the harvest was in: until the harvest was in, she
allowed herself time to breathe. She was garnering up strength.
The woods were in their fullest flush of beauty. The anemones were
widely blown, with the quiet watchfulness which comes before death. The
heavy heads of the blue-bells were voluptuous. Here and there one
caught the deep yellow of the oxlip; snowy stitchwork was a delicate
groundwork to every leaf and flower.
No feet but their own disturbed the silence. Jethro was savage on the
rights of property, and this was his land. No old woman might pick up
sticks, no child gather wild-flowers in his preserves. They were small;
he was fond of saying scornfully that he was a working farmer, not a
rich yard-stick from London. He did not make pheasants the sole
business of October, and what he shot he ate or gave away. The contents
of his bag never went to market.
He had the grasping spirit of the farmer who flourished in the early
years of the century, in the roaring times before Parish Councils and
educated, supercilious cockneys, keen on rights of way. He would, when
the opportunity occurred, put a padlocked, five-barred gate across a
little-used public path. He cunningly inclosed wayside waste, doing it
gradually; grubbing the old hedge, bringing his newly planted,
carefully clipped one to the edge of the road. He honestly believed
that he was doing a good act; in his view, all waste land was wasted
land, and he would have had the Government parcel out the commons to
farmers for redemption.
Edred kept his eyes on the ground and grumbled at the deep yellow ruts
made in winter by timber wagons and horses’ hoofs. But Pamela forgot
her dainty shoes, the edge of her new skirt, with the tiny frills. She
looked ardently at every new beauty which slid before her
eyes--bursting twigs, drifted blossom, dry, feathery fagots tied into
bundles, little heaps of creamy wood chips; the hacked hedge-rows and
banks, with the warm orange of the amputated tree-trunks.
It was early June. The day was so hot and dry that when they reached
Turle they could see from the road that even careful matrons like Aunt
Sophy were sitting about the big sloping lawn without even a shawl.
They made little groups--like modern pictures of the ladies in the
“Decameron.”
Nancy came running across the lawn, her heavy red-ringed croquet mallet
in her hand. She had a loose flannel shirt and her cycling skirt with
the big smoked pearl buttons at each hip.
“A cycling skirt always makes a girl look coarse,” Edred murmured
critically.
Pamela gave him a pleased glance; she loved to hear him depreciate
Nancy.
“Oh! do come and play!” cried the girl, addressing herself pointedly to
Edred. “We are making up a fresh set. Croquet is such fun.”
Pamela, the thin stream of gall flowing from her heart, saw him return
Nancy’s pleading, babyish glance tenderly. She turned away. She took
Aunt Sophy’s effusive kiss without a word, only assuring her that she
hadn’t a headache.
Egbert Turle, who had left Cambridge and was walking the hospital,
nodded with patronage from his post by the tennis-net. He came
dutifully to Turle every week.
Mrs. Clutton ran along the grass in her careless gown.
“Come and sit under the elms with me,” she said.
There were several ladies under the elms, in green wooden chairs with
sloping backs. They had not come to play tennis or croquet; their sole
aim was to talk scandal, snub people in the set a shade beneath their
own, and drink astringent tea. They wore long skirts and elaborate
light wraps, as distinguished from the athletic women a few paces off,
who were running about and screaming to each other in the sun.
The earnest topic of the moment turned out to be false hair. Mrs.
McAlpine had confessed to an increasing thinness on the left temple.
Her doctor told her that she used the right side of the brain too
much--and darkly hinted that she must go up to Lechaux--a hairdresser
recommended by the ladies’ paper--and get a front. Annie Jayne cried
out in earnest horror:
“Oh, don’t! My mother never wore false hair in her life. She took to
caps when she was thirty-five. I shall take to caps myself in a year or
two--they look matronly.”
“But no one wears caps nowadays,” cried Mrs. Clutton tersely. “Women
buy false hair instead of lace. If, since the creation, each woman had
done just as her mother did, fig-leaves would still be the height of
fashion.”
Mrs. McAlpine, who had the greatest contempt for the journalist’s
wife--_she_ was a J. P.’s daughter and the widow of a Government
official--broke out in her languidly genteel voice:
“I was afraid I should have been prevented from coming, dear Mrs.
Turle. One can’t possibly attend a garden-party in a coat and skirt”;
she looked complacently at her embroidered bodice, “and my lost box
only turned up last night.”
The face of every lady immediately became solemnly sympathetic.
“I told you all about it, didn’t I? I’d been visiting at Warne--taking
my best things, of course. The things, you know”--she gave a quick
glance of her narrow eyes at Mrs. Clutton--“that one takes with one on
a visit at a house where they are--well, rather particular. Dear Laura
entertains so largely at Warne.”
One or two ladies on the edge of the second-best set looked at her with
reverential alarm. Here was a person who visited on such positively
equal terms at Warne, the biggest seat for miles round, that she called
the hostess by her Christian name!
“I was in despair.” She flattened out her hands. “My box lost! My
diamond comb and pendant, my jeweled girdle, a miniature set with
diamonds that was given to my great-uncle by the Duke of Wellington, my
ivory-backed brushes and silver toilet set--all the small, necessary
trifles that one takes on a visit.”
“And you got them back?” asked a little lady breathlessly.
She was a shabby Jayne. Sophy did not often ask her to a garden-party,
and she was feverishly voluble and deprecating in turn. She had a
home-made blouse, with a funny tucker, and very new black kid gloves,
the perfect palms of which she constantly displayed.
“I got it back,” Mrs. McAlpine said carelessly, giving the home-made
blouse a look of amiable condescension. “But you may all imagine how I
felt; one sets such store by one’s poor trifles.”
A massive girl, with a white gown, threw down her mallet as a member of
the opposition clicked her ball against the stick.
“I can’t play any more; too slow,” she said. “I’ll tell somebody’s
fortune instead.”
“My dear”--the dowdy Jayne cousin looked alarmed--“do you think that it
is in quite good taste?”
She stopped with a jerk as Mrs. McAlpine said sweetly:
“Palmistry is all the rage just now in the best houses. Prejudice of
any sort is so very middle-class. We had a professional palmist at Lady
Clara’s last week, when I ran up to Grosvenor Gardens for her
reception. She implored me to come; we are such very old friends.”
“Mother always thought it was best to ignore such things as
fortune-telling, table-turning, scientific lectures, and anything
unsettling,” Annie Jayne said simply. “I don’t think I’ll have mine
told, Isabel.”
Half a dozen hands were held out. The girl in white went round
phlegmatically.
She distributed journeys, legacies, surprises, and mishaps with equal
calm. When it came to Mrs. Clutton’s turn she held out her pretty hand,
a little coarsened by devotion to her neurotic fowls and her garden,
with pretended nervousness. Isabel looked at it thoughtfully and
murmured something about the lines not being very clear--a certain one,
at least, confusing.
“Don’t say anything dreadful. Don’t tell me I’m going to be hanged;
I’ve always had a foreboding that I shall be; and Tim--my husband, you
know--used to say in his most savagely dyspeptic moments that I
certainly deserved the fate.”
Isabel dropped the roughened hand suddenly.
“I can’t make out your fortune,” she said coldly. “There is no one
else, is there? Yours is settled, Pamela. I’ll go and have a game of
tennis, if Egbert will join--croquet’s duffing.”
She moved away in her statuesque fashion, her white skirt bellowing out
in the May breeze. There was a sudden coldness and constraint. Even
diplomatic Mrs. Turle looked vexed.
Mrs. Clutton made a mouth at Pamela, and said:
“Shall we go and have a look at Nancy’s flowers in the walled garden?”
They skirted the shrubbery, with its clumps of yellow berberis and
laurustinus gone shabby. There was a swing between the double-flowered
cherry trees; Nancy still used it--on rare occasions when she read
fiction. Usually she was honestly intent on improving her mind. A thick
volume lay face downward on the seat. Mrs. Clutton picked it up, read
the title, and dropped the book with a gesture of distaste.
“Nancy shouldn’t be allowed to read that woman’s stories.”
“She is very popular.”
“She ought to lecture--‘for men only.’ However, Nancy won’t hurt; she
won’t understand--half. She is a little more than shallow; all surface,
like a dish--not even a well-dish. Nancy and Isabel Crisp--you know
Isabel is staying here now that Egbert is down from the hospital--will
read the same book. One reads a bit, puts in a marker; the other takes
up the book, reads on from the marker, then puts it in where she leaves
off. That’s how they get through. I’m fond of Nancy--she’s so
picturesquely idiotic. Of course, she will marry your brother?”
Pamela dropped the almond-scented stalk of plum-colored wallflower
which she had pulled and was sticking in her belt.
“I--I don’t know. Oh, no! I wouldn’t let him marry Nancy.”
Mrs. Clutton looked at her suspiciously.
She said meaningly, “There is one man in the world for you--Jethro
Jayne. A woman has only to concern herself about her husband. Of course
your brother will be cruel to Nancy in his own particular fashion.
Some kick with their feet, some lash with their tongues--I prefer the
former; they kiss a bruise, but no man’s lips can reach a woman’s
heart. After all, he’ll make a better husband than that prig, Egbert
Turle; _he’s_ going to marry Isabel Crisp. He’s insufferable. He would
divide the animal kingdom into four groups: the lower animals, hospital
cases, human beings, and ’Varsity men. He talks of nothing but
dissecting-rooms. He alludes constantly to the ‘laity.’”
Mrs. McAlpine’s genteel voice filtered through the shrubs.
“I knew the dear Duchess very well--in her maiden days. We visited at
the same house in the Midlands.”
“That humbug! Her motto is ‘Who’s who?’ I don’t believe that she ever
got farther than the housekeeper’s room at Warne. Some day, when I’ve
bought enough oak and china, I’ll devote a little time to unmasking
her. Tea will be served in half an hour. There’s dear Mrs. Turle going
weightily toward the house to coach her three maids how to set cups.”
“Gainah is like that--or was before I deposed her. Cook did nothing but
wash dishes.”
“You may sort women into two classes: those who can’t touch a chicken
unless they’ve cleaned it themselves, and those who, if they are
obliged to clean it, can’t eat it. Do come with me to Mrs. Hone’s--this
way; through the gate, across the field, and into the Liddleshorn road.
She has a Chippendale teatray which she has half promised to sell. We
shall have plenty of time before tea.”
They went across the field, black-horned cattle following them
curiously. Occasional cottages sparsely dotted the straight road
leading to Liddleshorn. Two new ones, with vivid roofs of smooth tiles
running up in conical shape to a chimney like an exaggerated pimple,
had a blue metal plate lettered with white between the narrow doors.
“You are pretty safe in saying that every singularly ugly cottage is
tenanted by the county police. Mrs. Hone lives at this next one with
the bush of Jew’s mallow.”
They went in single file up the narrow flag path. Sheets of white
candytuft crept coldly along the edge of the borders from the wooden
gate to the door. In the little patch of kitchen garden row after row
of cabbage with a blue bloom looked to Pamela like a generously flung
out art carpet. The man at the best shop in Liddleshorn had shown her
one just that shade. Straight ahead, across the railway bridge, a train
shot past, the tails of smoke like drifting opal under the bright sun.
Mrs. Hone was hobbling about her garden.
“Poor old dear! She looks like a camel whose hump has slipped. Now, you
must say nothing, look nothing--or you’ll spoil my bargain.
Good-afternoon, Mrs. Hone. How’s the rheumatism?”
The sweet wrinkled face lifted and a thin voice said shrilly:
“It aint what you call rheumatism, ma’am; it’s paralism, that’s what I
tells Dr. Frith.”
“You’re busy in your garden. I’ve been working very hard in mine. Your
broad beans are in blossom. And you’ve planted out your French
marigolds already.”
“Aye. But I doubt the frost ’ull nip ’em.”
She laughed; the pretty, brainless cackle of a very old woman--the
light laugh something like a child’s and yet with the knell of decay in
it.
“When I plants out they little seedlin’s I thinks o’ my children--all
planted out; some in London, some on the hill. Some livin’ to blossom,
some nipped by the frost. I’ve had thirteen, bless you! You’ll step
inside?”
They went into the tiny living room, the strangely twisted mistress
painfully leading the way. At a round table an old man sat at
tea--bread, lettuce that had bolted, a handful of spring onions. The
mahogany tray that Mrs. Clutton coveted was on a ledge beside the
low-burning fire. The old wife stepped up to her husband and shook him
none too gently by the shoulder, dropping her head at the same time,
and shouting:
“Get up and let the ladies come to the fire.”
To them she added apologetically:
“He’s very old. I’m only seventy-eight, but he’s pretty nigh eighty.
Deaf, too. I can’t make him hear--not when I wants him to do anything.
I very offen say to him, ‘You don’t want to hear; you don’t want to
hear, that’s what it is,’ I says.”
He turned round savagely at the touch of her hand on his shoulder and
looked at the two women in light gowns on the threshold.
“What are you doing?” he demanded gruffly. “Damn it all, I means to
have my tea.”
“He’s been one of those who lash and kick, too--the brute. And she such
a sweet old fragrant thing! Never mind, Mrs. Hone; don’t you trouble to
move, Mr. Hone; we should be sorry to disturb your tea.”
Mrs. Clutton squeezed round the other side of the table and took the
tray in her hands. It was oval, cut out of the solid wood, and daintily
inlaid with box.
“You’d sell this, Mrs. Hone?”
“The lady wants to know if we’ll sell the tray.”
“What’s she goin’ to give we for it?” he demanded sharply.
“Ten shillings!” screamed Mrs. Clutton.
“No, no! We couldn’t let it go for that. I thought fifteen.”
“Too much.” She put the tray back on the ledge.
He stuffed the last hunk of bread into his fierce old mouth, and
spluttered out:
“Will you give twelve-and-six?”
“Well--yes. Is that settled?”
“You must settle with missus. I’m only a lodger.”
His eyes glittered at the half-sovereign she took from her purse and
laid in Mrs. Hone’s hand.
“Yes, he’s only a lodger, as I often tells him when he’s tiresome. It’s
my house. I was borned here--my brother left it me; he says, ‘You was
borned here and you shall die here.’ My father built it and my brother
added on this front room. His wife wanted to pull the old place down
and put up a new; but he says, ‘No; what the father’s hands had put up
the son’s should never pull down.’”
She kept laughing feebly and looking at them, from one to the other,
with her dim eyes, deep in the web of seventy-eight years.
“It’s my cottage, and that’s why they won’t give me parish relief. It’s
very hard. I ses to ’em, ‘I can’t fill my poor empty belly with bricks
and mortar. An’ I am so fond of a bit of meat.’”
She was like a small child begging for sweets.
“Haven’t you any daughter to come in and look after you?”
“No. My daughter died fifty-five year ago. She was a pretty little gal.
He’s my second husband, you know.” She nodded her head toward the deaf
man, who, mollified by the gold, was munching vegetables like an
amiable donkey. “My first husband died. He was coachman at Warne. When
the new one come I was told to turn out of my nice cottage. So I
married him. I couldn’t leave my nice cottage, could I, my dears? I was
a silly gal and got married agen. I married the new coachman. That was
before my brother died and left me this. If I’d known he was going to
die and leave me this cottage when I was borned, I wouldn’t ha’ been a
silly gal and got married agen. He was a dwarf, my brother. You come
agen some day, and I’ll show you his trousers. I’ll show you my
husband’s trousers, too. I got four shillin’s prize at the show last
year for the best patch put on her husband’s trousers by an old woman
over sixty. And I’m seventy-eight--there’s a difference! There did
ought to be another class for them over seventy. I can use my needle.
Mother always taught us to use our needles. The gals nowadays can’t put
a shirt together.”
“Tea will be ready at Turle,” whispered Pamela.
“Yes. We must go. Good-by, Mrs. Hone; good-day, Mr. Hone. I’ll take the
tray under my arm. Oh, don’t you bother about paper.”
They went down the uneven path with the stiff lines of snowy flowers.
“Poor old soul!” said Pamela, when they reached the road.
“Did she take you in with what she so eloquently calls her ‘poor, empty
belly’? I left off being sentimental long ago. Mrs. Hone has a fat
account in the post-office savings bank. I know that for a fact.”
“Shall we hurry a little? I hate to keep Aunt Sophy waiting, or to vex
her. She didn’t like your remark about being hanged.”
“Of course she didn’t. Wasn’t it fun to see them petrify? No doubt
they’ve been discussing me; saying what bad taste it was to set up a
gallows-tree at a garden party. I give them endless topics for
conversation. They don’t believe me even when I do tell the truth.
There was a comic song Tim used to sing, ‘The only time I told the
truth she said I was a liar.’ That is just my position. I tell the
unvarnished truth: that my husband is a journalist traveling in search
of sensation. They don’t believe me. If he were doing time at Portland
and I said he was stalking big game, my social popularity would rival
Mrs. McAlpine’s. Here’s your brother Edred coming across the meadow to
look for us. He’s a very handsome man; not a bit like you. He reminds
me of some splendid snake. Do you understand? As his sister, you won’t.
You’ll only be shocked; there is a strong streak of the local prudery
and orthodoxy about you, Pamela. I could go to destruction with a man
of that type--hating him and myself all the time.”