Yeovil got out of the train at a small, clean, wayside station, and
rapidly formed the conclusion that neatness, abundant leisure, and a
devotion to the cultivation of wallflowers and wyandottes were the
prevailing influences of the station-master's life. The train slid away
into the hazy distance of trees and meadows, and left the traveller
standing in a world that seemed to be made up in equal parts of rock
garden, chicken coops, and whiskey advertisements. The station-master,
who appeared also to act as emergency porter, took Yeovil's ticket with
the gesture of a kind-hearted person brushing away a troublesome wasp,
and returned to a study of the Poultry Chronicle, which was giving its
readers sage counsel concerning the ailments of belated July chickens.
Yeovil called to mind the station-master of a tiny railway town in
Siberia, who had held him in long and rather intelligent converse on the
poetical merits and demerits of Shelley, and he wondered what the result
would be if he were to engage the English official in a discussion on
Lermontoff--or for the matter of that, on Shelley. The temptation to
experiment was, however, removed by the arrival of a young groom, with
brown eyes and a friendly smile, who hurried into the station and took
Yeovil once more into a world where he was of fleeting importance.
In the roadway outside was a four-wheeled dogcart with a pair of the
famous Torywood blue roans. It was an agreeable variation in modern
locomotion to be met at a station with high-class horseflesh instead of
the ubiquitous motor, and the landscape was not of such a nature that one
wished to be whirled through it in a cloud of dust. After a quick spin
of some ten or fifteen minutes through twisting hedge-girt country roads,
the roans turned in at a wide gateway, and went with dancing, rhythmic
step along the park drive. The screen of oak-crowned upland suddenly
fell away and a grey sharp-cornered building came into view in a setting
of low growing beeches and dark pines. Torywood was not a stately,
reposeful-looking house; it lay amid the sleepy landscape like a couched
watchdog with pricked ears and wakeful eyes. Built somewhere about the
last years of Dutch William's reign, it had been a centre, ever since,
for the political life of the countryside; a storm centre of discontent
or a rallying ground for the well affected, as the circumstances of the
day might entail. On the stone-flagged terrace in front of the house,
with its quaint leaden figures of Diana pursuing a hound-pressed stag,
successive squires and lords of Torywood had walked to and fro with their
friends, watching the thunderclouds on the political horizon or the
shifting shadows on the sundial of political favour, tapping the
political barometer for indications of change, working out a party
campaign or arranging for the support of some national movement. To and
fro they had gone in their respective generations, men with the passion
for statecraft and political combat strong in their veins, and many oft-
recurring names had echoed under those wakeful-looking casements, names
spoken in anger or exultation, or murmured in fear and anxiety:
Bolingbroke, Charles Edward, Walpole, the Farmer King, Bonaparte, Pitt,
Wellington, Peel, Gladstone--echo and Time might have graven those names
on the stone flags and grey walls. And now one tired old woman walked
there, with names on her lips that she never uttered.
A friendly riot of fox terriers and spaniels greeted the carriage,
leaping and rolling and yelping in an exuberance of sociability, as
though horses and coachman and groom were comrades who had been absent
for long months instead of half an hour. An indiscriminately
affectionate puppy lay flat and whimpering at Yeovil's feet, sending up
little showers of gravel with its wildly thumping tail, while two of the
terriers raced each other madly across lawn and shrubbery, as though to
show the blue roans what speed really was. The laughing-eyed young groom
disentangled the puppy from between Yeovil's legs, and then he was
ushered into the grey silence of the entrance hall, leaving sunlight and
noise and the stir of life behind him.
"Her ladyship will see you in her writing room," he was told, and he
followed a servant along the dark passages to the well-remembered room.
There was something tragic in the sudden contrast between the vigour and
youth and pride of life that Yeovil had seen crystallised in those
dancing, high-stepping horses, scampering dogs, and alert, clean-limbed
young men-servants, and the age-frail woman who came forward to meet him.
Eleanor, Dowager Lady Greymarten, had for more than half a century been
the ruling spirit at Torywood. The affairs of the county had not
sufficed for her untiring activities of mind and body; in the wider field
of national and Imperial service she had worked and schemed and fought
with an energy and a far-sightedness that came probably from the blend of
caution and bold restlessness in her Scottish blood. For many educated
minds the arena of politics and public life is a weariness of dust and
disgust, to others it is a fascinating study, to be watched from the
comfortable seat of a spectator. To her it was a home. In her town
house or down at Torywood, with her writing-pad on her knee and the
telephone at her elbow, or in personal counsel with some trusted
colleague or persuasive argument with a halting adherent or
half-convinced opponent, she had laboured on behalf of the poor and the
ill-equipped, had fought for her idea of the Right, and above all, for
the safety and sanity of her Fatherland. Spadework when necessary and
leadership when called for, came alike within the scope of her
activities, and not least of her achievements, though perhaps she hardly
realised it, was the force of her example, a lone, indomitable fighter
calling to the half-caring and the half-discouraged, to the laggard and
the slow-moving.
And now she came across the room with "the tired step of a tired king,"
and that look which the French so expressively called l'air defait. The
charm which Heaven bestows on old ladies, reserving its highest gift to
the end, had always seemed in her case to be lost sight of in the dignity
and interest of a great dame who was still in the full prime of her
fighting and ruling powers. Now, in Yeovil's eyes, she had suddenly come
to be very old, stricken with the forlorn languor of one who knows that
death will be weary to wait for. She had spared herself nothing in the
long labour, the ceaseless building, the watch and ward, and in one short
autumn week she had seen the overthrow of all that she had built, the
falling asunder of the world in which she had laboured. Her life's end
was like a harvest home when blight and storm have laid waste the fruit
of long toil and unsparing outlay. Victory had been her goal, the death
or victory of old heroic challenge, for she had always dreamed to die
fighting to the last; death or victory--and the gods had given her
neither, only the bitterness of a defeat that could not be measured in
words, and the weariness of a life that had outlived happiness or hope.
Such was Eleanor, Dowager Lady Greymarten, a shadow amid the young red-
blooded life at Torywood, but a shadow that was too real to die, a shadow
that was stronger than the substance that surrounded it.
Yeovil talked long and hurriedly of his late travels, of the vast
Siberian forests and rivers, the desolate tundras, the lakes and marshes
where the wild swans rear their broods, the flower carpet of the summer
fields and the winter ice-mantle of Russia's northern sea. He talked as
a man talks who avoids the subject that is uppermost in his mind, and in
the mind of his hearer, as one who looks away from a wound or deformity
that is too cruel to be taken notice of.
Tea was served in a long oak-panelled gallery, where generations of
Mustelfords had romped and played as children, and remained yet in
effigy, in a collection of more or less faithful portraits. After tea
Yeovil was taken by his hostess to the aviaries, which constituted the
sole claim which Torywood possessed to being considered a show place. The
third Earl of Greymarten had collected rare and interesting birds,
somewhere about the time when Gilbert White was penning the last of his
deathless letters, and his successors in the title had perpetuated the
hobby. Little lawns and ponds and shrubberies were partitioned off for
the various ground-loving species, and higher cages with interlacing
perches and rockwork shelves accommodated the birds whose natural
expression of movement was on the wing. Quails and francolins scurried
about under low-growing shrubs, peacock-pheasants strutted and sunned
themselves, pugnacious ruffs engaged in perfunctory battles, from force
of habit now that the rivalry of the mating season was over; choughs,
ravens, and loud-throated gulls occupied sections of a vast rockery, and
bright-hued Chinese pond-herons and delicately stepping egrets waded
among the waterlilies of a marble-terraced tank. One or two dusky shapes
seen dimly in the recesses of a large cage built round a hollow tree
would be lively owls when evening came on.
In the course of his many wanderings Yeovil had himself contributed three
or four inhabitants to this little feathered town, and he went round the
enclosures, renewing old acquaintances and examining new additions.
"The falcon cage is empty," said Lady Greymarten, pointing to a large
wired dome that towered high above the other enclosures, "I let the
lanner fly free one day. The other birds may be reconciled to their
comfortable quarters and abundant food and absence of dangers, but I
don't think all those things could make up to a falcon for the wild range
of cliff and desert. When one has lost one's own liberty one feels a
quicker sympathy for other caged things, I suppose."
There was silence for a moment, and then the Dowager went on, in a
wistful, passionate voice:
"I am an old woman now, Murrey, I must die in my cage. I haven't the
strength to fight. Age is a very real and very cruel thing, though we
may shut our eyes to it and pretend it is not there. I thought at one
time that I should never really know what it meant, what it brought to
one. I thought of it as a messenger that one could keep waiting out in
the yard till the very last moment. I know now what it means. . . . But
you, Murrey, you are young, you can fight. Are you going to be a
fighter, or the very humble servant of the fait accompli?"
"I shall never be the servant of the fait accompli," said Yeovil. "I
loathe it. As to fighting, one must first find out what weapon to use,
and how to use it effectively. One must watch and wait."
"One must not wait too long," said the old woman. "Time is on their
side, not ours. It is the young people we must fight for now, if they
are ever to fight for us. A new generation will spring up, a weaker
memory of old glories will survive, the eclat of the ruling race will
capture young imaginations. If I had your youth, Murrey, and your sex, I
would become a commercial traveller."
"A commercial traveller!" exclaimed Yeovil.
"Yes, one whose business took him up and down the country, into contact
with all classes, into homes and shops and inns and railway carriages.
And as I travelled I would work, work on the minds of every boy and girl
I came across, every young father and young mother too, every young
couple that were going to be man and wife. I would awaken or keep alive
in their memory the things that we have been, the grand, brave things
that some of our race have done, and I would stir up a longing, a
determination for the future that we must win back. I would be a counter-
agent to the agents of the fait accompli. In course of time the
Government would find out what I was doing, and I should be sent out of
the country, but I should have accomplished something, and others would
carry on the work. That is what I would do. Murrey, even if it is to be
a losing battle, fight it, fight it!"
Yeovil knew that the old lady was fighting her last battle, rallying the
discouraged, and spurring on the backward.
A footman came to announce that the carriage waited to take him back to
the station. His hostess walked with him through the hall, and came out
on to the stone-flagged terrace, the terrace from which a former Lady
Greymarten had watched the twinkling bonfires that told of Waterloo.
Yeovil said good-bye to her as she stood there, a wan, shrunken shadow,
yet with a greater strength and reality in her flickering life than those
parrot men and women that fluttered and chattered through London drawing-
rooms and theatre foyers.
As the carriage swung round a bend in the drive Yeovil looked back at
Torywood, a lone, grey building, couched like a watchdog with pricked
ears and wakeful eyes in the midst of the sleeping landscape. An old
pleading voice was still ringing in his ears:
Imperious and yet forlorn,
Came through the silence of the trees,
The echoes of a golden horn,
Calling to distances.
Somehow Yeovil knew that he would never hear that voice again, and he
knew, too, that he would hear it always, with its message, "Be a
fighter." And he knew now, with a shamefaced consciousness that sprang
suddenly into existence, that the summons would sound for him in vain.
The weary brain-torturing months of fever had left their trail behind, a
lassitude of spirit and a sluggishness of blood, a quenching of the
desire to roam and court adventure and hardship. In the hours of waking
and depression between the raging intervals of delirium he had
speculated, with a sort of detached, listless indifference, on the
chances of his getting back to life and strength and energy. The
prospect of filling a corner of some lonely Siberian graveyard or Finnish
cemetery had seemed near realisation at times, and for a man who was
already half dead the other half didn't particularly matter. But when he
had allowed himself to dwell on the more hopeful side of the case it had
always been a complete recovery that awaited him; the same Yeovil as of
yore, a little thinner and more lined about the eyes perhaps, would go
through life in the same way, alert, resolute, enterprising, ready to
start off at short notice for some desert or upland where the eagles were
circling and the wild-fowl were calling. He had not reckoned that Death,
evaded and held off by the doctors' skill, might exact a compromise, and
that only part of the man would go free to the West.
And now he began to realise how little of mental and physical energy he
could count on. His own country had never seemed in his eyes so comfort-
yielding and to-be-desired as it did now when it had passed into alien
keeping and become a prison land as much as a homeland. London with its
thin mockery of a Season, and its chattering horde of empty-hearted self-
seekers, held no attraction for him, but the spell of English country
life was weaving itself round him, now that the charm of the desert was
receding into a mist of memories. The waning of pleasant autumn days in
an English woodland, the whir of game birds in the clean harvested
fields, the grey moist mornings in the saddle, with the magical cry of
hounds coming up from some misty hollow, and then the delicious abandon
of physical weariness in bathroom and bedroom after a long run, and the
heavenly snatched hour of luxurious sleep, before stirring back to life
and hunger, the coming of the dinner hour and the jollity of a
well-chosen house-party.
That was the call which was competing with that other trumpet-call, and
Yeovil knew on which side his choice would incline.