For me, at least, it marked an epoch in my uncle’s career when I learnt
one day that he had “shopped” Lady Grove. I realised a fresh, wide,
unpreluded step. He took me by surprise with the sudden change of scale
from such portable possessions as jewels and motor-cars to a stretch of
countryside. The transaction was Napoleonic; he was told of the place;
he said “snap”; there were no preliminary desirings or searchings. Then
he came home and said what he had done. Even my aunt was for a day or
so measurably awestricken by this exploit in purchase, and we both went
down with him to see the house in a mood near consternation. It struck
us then as a very lordly place indeed. I remember the three of us
standing on the terrace that looked westward, surveying the
sky-reflecting windows of the house, and a feeling of unwarrantable
intrusion comes back to me.
Lady Grove, you know, is a very beautiful house indeed, a still and
gracious place, whose age-long seclusion was only effectively broken
with the toot of the coming of the motor-car. An old Catholic family
had died out in it, century by century, and was now altogether dead.
Portions of the fabric are thirteenth century, and its last
architectural revision was Tudor; within, it is for the most part dark
and chilly, save for two or three favoured rooms and its tall-windowed,
oak-galleried hall. Its terrace is its noblest feature; a very wide,
broad lawn it is, bordered by a low stone battlement, and there is a
great cedar in one corner under whose level branches one looks out
across the blue distances of the Weald, blue distances that are made
extraordinarily Italian in quality by virtue of the dark masses of that
single tree. It is a very high terrace; southward one looks down upon
the tops of wayfaring trees and spruces, and westward on a steep slope
of beechwood, through which the road comes. One turns back to the still
old house, and sees a grey and lichenous façade with a very finely
arched entrance. It was warmed by the afternoon light and touched with
the colour of a few neglected roses and a pyracanthus. It seemed to me
that the most modern owner conceivable in this serene fine place was
some bearded scholarly man in a black cassock, gentle-voiced and
white-handed, or some very soft-robed, grey gentlewoman. And there was
my uncle holding his goggles in a sealskin glove, wiping the glass with
a pocket-handkerchief, and asking my aunt if Lady Grove wasn’t a “Bit
of all Right.”
My aunt made him no answer.
“The man who built this,” I speculated, “wore armour and carried a
sword.”
“There’s some of it inside still,” said my uncle.
We went inside. An old woman with very white hair was in charge of the
place and cringed rather obviously to the new master. She evidently
found him a very strange and frightful apparition indeed, and was
dreadfully afraid of him. But if the surviving present bowed down to
us, the past did not. We stood up to the dark, long portraits of the
extinguished race—one was a Holbein—and looked them in their sidelong
eyes. They looked back at us. We all, I know, felt the enigmatical
quality in them. Even my uncle was momentarily embarrassed, I think, by
that invincibly self-complacent expression. It was just as though,
after all, he had _not_ bought them up and replaced them altogether; as
though that, secretly, they knew better and could smile at him.
The spirit of the place was akin to Bladesover, but touched with
something older and remoter. That armour that stood about had once
served in tilt-yards, if indeed it had not served in battle, and this
family had sent its blood and treasure, time after time, upon the most
romantic quest in history, to Palestine. Dreams, loyalties, place and
honour, how utterly had it all evaporated, leaving, at last, the final
expression of its spirit, these quaint painted smiles, these smiles of
triumphant completion! It had evaporated, indeed, long before the
ultimate Durgan had died, and in his old age he had cumbered the place
with Early Victorian cushions and carpets and tapestry table-cloths and
invalid appliances of a type even more extinct, it seemed to us, than
the crusades.... Yes, it was different from Bladesover.
“Bit stuffy, George,” said my uncle. “They hadn’t much idea of
ventilation when this was built.”
One of the panelled rooms was half-filled with presses and a
four-poster bed. “Might be the ghost room,” said my uncle; but it did
not seem to me that so retiring a family as the Durgans, so old and
completely exhausted a family as the Durgans, was likely to haunt
anybody. What living thing now had any concern with their honour and
judgments and good and evil deeds? Ghosts and witchcraft were a later
innovation—that fashion came from Scotland with the Stuarts.
Afterwards, prying for epitaphs, we found a marble crusader with a
broken nose, under a battered canopy of fretted stone, outside the
restricted limits of the present Duffield church, and half buried in
nettles. “Ichabod,” said my uncle. “Eh? We shall be like that, Susan,
some day.... I’m going to clean him up a bit and put a railing to keep
off the children.”
“Old saved at the eleventh hour,” said my aunt, quoting one of the less
successful advertisements of Tono-Bungay.
But I don’t think my uncle heard her.
It was by our captured crusader that the vicar found us. He came round
the corner at us briskly, a little out of breath. He had an air of
having been running after us since the first toot of our horn had
warned the village of our presence. He was an Oxford man, clean-shaven,
with a cadaverous complexion and a guardedly respectful manner, a
cultivated intonation, and a general air of accommodation to the new
order of things. These Oxford men are the Greeks of our plutocratic
empire. He was a Tory in spirit, and what one may call an adapted Tory
by stress of circumstances; that is to say, he was no longer a
legitimist; he was prepared for the substitution of new lords for old.
We were pill vendors he knew, and no doubt horribly vulgar in soul; but
then it might have been some polygamous Indian rajah, a great strain on
a good man’s tact, or some Jew with an inherited expression of
contempt. Anyhow, we were English, and neither Dissenters nor
Socialists, and he was cheerfully prepared to do what he could to make
gentlemen of both of us. He might have preferred Americans for some
reasons; they are not so obviously taken from one part of the social
system and dumped down in another, and they are more teachable; but in
this world we cannot always be choosers. So he was very bright and
pleasant with us, showed us the church, gossiped informingly about our
neighbours on the countryside—Tux, the banker; Lord Boom, the magazine
and newspaper proprietor; Lord Carnaby, that great sportsman, and old
Lady Osprey. And finally he took us by way of a village lane—three
children bobbed convulsively with eyes of terror for my uncle—through a
meticulous garden to a big, slovenly Vicarage with faded Victorian
furniture and a faded Victorian wife, who gave us tea and introduced us
to a confusing family dispersed among a lot of disintegrating basket
chairs upon the edge of a well-used tennis lawn.
These people interested me. They were a common type, no doubt, but they
were new to me. There were two lank sons who had been playing singles
at tennis, red-eared youths growing black moustaches, and dressed in
conscientiously untidy tweeds and unbuttoned and ungirt Norfolk
jackets. There were a number of ill-nourished-looking daughters,
sensible and economical in their costume, the younger still with long,
brown-stockinged legs, and the eldest present—there were, we
discovered, one or two hidden away—displaying a large gold cross and
other aggressive ecclesiastical symbols; there were two or three
fox-terriers, a retrieverish mongrel, and an old, bloody-eyed and very
evil-smelling St. Bernard. There was a jackdaw. There was, moreover, an
ambiguous, silent lady that my aunt subsequently decided must be a very
deaf paying guest. Two or three other people had concealed themselves
at our coming and left unfinished teas behind them. Rugs and cushions
lay among the chairs, and two of the latter were, I noted, covered with
Union Jacks.
The vicar introduced us sketchily, and the faded Victorian wife
regarded my aunt with a mixture of conventional scorn and abject
respect, and talked to her in a languid, persistent voice about people
in the neighbourhood whom my aunt could not possibly know.
My aunt received these personalia cheerfully, with her blue eyes
flitting from point to point, and coming back again and again to the
pinched faces of the daughters and the cross upon the eldest’s breast.
Encouraged by my aunt’s manner, the vicar’s wife grew patronising and
kindly, and made it evident that she could do much to bridge the social
gulf between ourselves and the people of family about us.
I had just snatches of that conversation. “Mrs. Merridew brought him
quite a lot of money. Her father, I believe, had been in the Spanish
wine trade—quite a lady though. And after that he fell off his horse
and cracked his brain pan and took to fishing and farming. I’m sure
you’ll like to know them. He’s _most_ amusing.... The daughter had a
disappointment and went to China as a missionary and got mixed up in a
massacre.”...
“The most beautiful silks and things she brought back, you’d hardly
believe!”
“Yes, they gave them to propitiate her. You see, they didn’t understand
the difference, and they thought that as they’d been massacring people,
_they’d_ be massacred. They didn’t understand the difference
Christianity makes.”...
“Seven bishops they’ve had in the family!”
“Married a Papist and was quite lost to them.”...
“He failed some dreadful examination and had to go into the
militia.”...
“So she bit his leg as hard as ever she could and he let go.”...
“Had four of his ribs amputated.”...
“Caught meningitis and was carried off in a week.”
“Had to have a large piece of silver tube let into his throat, and if
he wants to talk he puts his finger on it. It makes him so interesting,
I think. You feel he’s sincere somehow. A most charming man in every
way.”
“Preserved them both in spirits very luckily, and there they are in his
study, though of course he doesn’t show them to everybody.”
The silent lady, unperturbed by these apparently exciting topics,
scrutinised my aunt’s costume with a singular intensity, and was
visibly moved when she unbuttoned her dust cloak and flung it wide.
Meanwhile we men conversed, one of the more spirited daughters listened
brightly, and the youths lay on the grass at our feet. My uncle offered
them cigars, but they both declined,—out of bashfulness, it seemed to
me, whereas the vicar, I think, accepted out of tact. When we were not
looking at them directly, these young men would kick each other
furtively.
Under the influence of my uncle’s cigar, the vicar’s mind had soared
beyond the limits of the district. “This Socialism,” he said, “seems
making great headway.”
My uncle shook his head. “We’re too individualistic in this country for
that sort of nonsense,” he said “Everybody’s business is nobody’s
business. That’s where they go wrong.”
“They have some intelligent people in their ranks, I am told,” said the
vicar, “writers and so forth. Quite a distinguished playwright, my
eldest daughter was telling me—I forget his name.
“Milly, dear! Oh! she’s not here. Painters, too, they have. This
Socialist, it seems to me, is part of the Unrest of the Age.... But, as
you say, the spirit of the people is against it. In the country, at any
rate. The people down here are too sturdily independent in their small
way—and too sensible altogether.”...
“It’s a great thing for Duffield to have Lady Grove occupied again,” he
was saying when my wandering attention came back from some attractive
casualty in his wife’s discourse. “People have always looked up to the
house and considering all things, old Mr. Durgan really was
extraordinarily good—extraordinarily good. You intend to give us a good
deal of your time here, I hope.”
“I mean to do my duty by the Parish,” said my uncle.
“I’m sincerely glad to hear it—sincerely. We’ve missed—the house
influence. An English village isn’t complete—People get out of hand.
Life grows dull. The young people drift away to London.”
He enjoyed his cigar gingerly for a moment.
“We shall look to you to liven things up,” he said, poor man!
My uncle cocked his cigar and removed it from his mouth.
“What you think the place wants?” he asked.
He did not wait for an answer. “I been thinking while you been
talking—things one might do. Cricket—a good English game—sports. Build
the chaps a pavilion perhaps. Then every village ought to have a
miniature rifle range.”
“Ye-ees,” said the vicar. “Provided, of course, there isn’t a constant
popping.”...
“Manage _that_ all right,” said my uncle. “Thing’d be a sort of long
shed. Paint it red. British colour. Then there’s a Union Jack for the
church and the village school. Paint the school red, too, p’raps. Not
enough colour about now. Too grey. Then a maypole.”
“How far our people would take up that sort of thing—” began the vicar.
“I’m all for getting that good old English spirit back again,” said my
uncle. “Merrymakings. Lads and lasses dancing on the village green.
Harvest home. Fairings. Yule Log—all the rest of it.”
“How would old Sally Glue do for a May Queen?” asked one of the sons in
the slight pause that followed.
“Or Annie Glassbound?” said the other, with the huge virile guffaw of a
young man whose voice has only recently broken.
“Sally Glue is eighty-five,” explained the vicar, “and Annie Glassbound
is well—a young lady of extremely generous proportions. And not quite
right, you know. Not quite right—here.” He tapped his brow.
“Generous proportions!” said the eldest son, and the guffaws were
renewed.
“You see,” said the vicar, “all the brisker girls go into service in or
near London. The life of excitement attracts them. And no doubt the
higher wages have something to do with it. And the liberty to wear
finery. And generally—freedom from restraint. So that there might be a
little difficulty perhaps to find a May Queen here just at present who
was really young and er—pretty.... Of course I couldn’t think of any of
my girls—or anything of that sort.”
“We got to attract ’em back,” said my uncle. “That’s what I feel about
it. We got to Buck-Up the country. The English country is a going
concern still; just as the Established Church—if you’ll excuse me
saying it, is a going concern. Just as Oxford is—or Cambridge. Or any
of those old, fine old things. Only it wants fresh capital, fresh idees
and fresh methods. Light railways, f’rinstance—scientific use of
drainage. Wire fencing machinery—all that.”
The vicar’s face for one moment betrayed dismay. Perhaps he was
thinking of his country walks amids the hawthorns and honeysuckle.
“There’s great things,” said my uncle, “to be done on Mod’un lines with
Village Jam and Pickles—boiled in the country.”
It was the reverberation of this last sentence in my mind, I think,
that sharpened my sentimental sympathy as we went through the
straggling village street and across the trim green on our way back to
London. It seemed that afternoon the most tranquil and idyllic
collection of creeper-sheltered homes you can imagine; thatch still
lingered on a whitewashed cottage or two, pyracanthus, wall-flowers,
and daffodils abounded, and an unsystematic orchard or so was white
with blossom above and gay with bulbs below. I noted a row of straw
beehives, beehive-shaped, beehives of the type long since condemned as
inefficient by all progressive minds, and in the doctor’s acre of grass
a flock of two whole sheep was grazing,—no doubt he’d taken them on
account. Two men and one old woman made gestures of abject vassalage,
and my uncle replied with a lordly gesture of his great motoring
glove....
“England’s full of Bits like this,” said my uncle, leaning over the
front seat and looking back with great satisfaction. The black glare of
his goggles rested for a time on the receding turrets of Lady Grove
just peeping over the trees.
“I shall have a flagstaff, I think,” he considered. “Then one could
show when one is in residence. The villagers will like to know.”...