Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
AN AUTUMN SOWING
BY
E. F. BENSON
LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND
Copyright
First Impression, November, 1917
Second ” November, 1917
Third ” October, 1919
CHAPTER I
Mr Keeling had expected an edifying half-hour when Dr Inglis gave out as
his text, ‘There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth,’ and as the
discourse proceeded, he felt that his anticipations were amply
justified. Based on this unshakable foundation, and buttressed by other
stalwart pronouncements, the doctrine of eternal damnation wore a very
safe and solid aspect. It was the justice of it that appealed to Mr
Keeling. Mankind had been warned in a perfectly unmistakable manner that
if they persisted in certain courses of action and in certain
inabilities to believe, they would be punished for ever and ever. That
was fair, that was reasonable: rules were made to be obeyed. If you were
truly sorry for having disobeyed them, a secondary principle, called
mercy, came to the succour of the repentant. But Dr Inglis did not say
so much about that. He was concerned with the inflexibility of his text.
It is said that a man’s conduct is coloured and inspired by his
religion, but it is equally true to say of another and more numerous
class that their religion is coloured and inspired by their conduct.
Certainly that was the case with Mr Keeling. His life did not so much
spring out of his religion, as his religion out of his life; and what he
felt every Sunday morning and evening in church was the fruit, the stern
honey distilled, so to speak, from the mental and moral integrity which
had pervaded him from Monday till Saturday inclusive. All the week the
bees collected that store of provender which was transmuted into the
frame of mind which was equivalent in him to religion. It did not in the
smallest degree enter into his week-day life: his week-day life secreted
it, and he found it very well expressed for him in the sermon of Dr
Inglis and the fiercer of King David’s psalms. The uprightness, honesty,
and industry which he demanded from himself he demanded also from
others; but it was not his religion that inspired those excellent
qualities. They inspired it.
Mr Keeling sat at one end of the varnished pitch-pine pew with his
children in a row between him and their mother at the other end. There
were large schedules of commandments on either side of the plain, bare
table (miscalled an altar), so that everybody could see what was
expected of him, while Dr Inglis told them what they could expect if
they were not very careful. Next his father sat John, who, from the
unfortunate accident of his being the youngest, went last into the pew,
while Mr Keeling stood like an angry shepherd in the aisle to herd his
family into the fold, just above which rose the pulpit where Dr Inglis
at this moment was speaking in a voice of icy conviction.
John’s position was thus a peculiarly depressing one, for his natural
instinct in those hours of tedium in church was to edge away as far as
possible from his father, but on the other side of him was his sister
Alice, who not only sang psalms and canticles and hymns with such
piercing resonance that John’s left ear sang and buzzed during the
prayers afterwards, but had marvellously angular knees and elbows, which
with a pious and unconscious air she pressed into John’s slim side if he
encroached on her due share of the pew. And when we consider that John
was just seventeen years old, an age when the young male animal has a
tendency to show symptoms of its growth and vigour by jerky, electric
movements known as ‘fidgets’ whenever it has to stop in one position for
more than a minute or two, it was reasonable that John should conclude
that his share of weeping and gnashing of teeth had begun already. But
church time did not last for ever and ever.... Beyond the angular Alice,
who was twenty-five, came Hugh, whose banns had been given out that day
for the first time, just before the sermon, and who was still feeling
rather hot and uncomfortable about it. He had hinted at breakfast that
perhaps he would not go to church that morning in consequence, but his
father had fixed him with so appalling a countenance that the hint
developed no further.
Alice’s banns had never been given out by anybody, and a physiognomist
might hazard the conjecture that they never would be, for she had in her
face, with its short-sighted eyes, high cheekbones, and mouth that
looked as if it had got unbuttoned, that indescribable air of
old-maidishness which fate sometimes imprints on the features of girls
still scarcely of marriageable age. They do not, as Alice did not, seem
to be of the types from which wives and mothers are developed. A
celibacy, tortured it may be, seems the fate inexplicably destined for
them by the irony of Nature who decreed that they should be women, and
they discharge their hearts in peevishness or in feverish activities.
Alice was inclined to the more amiable of these safety-valves, but she
could be peevish too.
At the end of the row, large, inane, and comfortable, came Mrs Keeling,
listening without appreciation, dissent, or emotion of any kind to this
uncompromising view of the future of miserable sinners, for that was not
the sort of thing that affected her in the slightest degree, since it
concerned not this world but the next. Though she quite believed in the
next world, she did not take the smallest interest in it: she regarded
it just about as the ordinary citizen of a country town regards
Australia. Very likely Dr Inglis was right about it, and we should all
know in time. She had pale eyebrows, rather prominent gray eyes, and
hair from which the original yellow was fast fading. Her general
appearance was of a woman who, thirty years ago, had probably been
exceedingly pretty in an absolutely meaningless manner. This, indeed,
had been the case, as certain photographs (fast fading too) scattered
about her ‘boudoir’ sufficiently proved. It was reasonable to suppose
that her marriage with so obviously dominant a man as Thomas Keeling
should have sucked all colour, mental and physical, out of her, but in
the process she had developed a certain protective strength of her own,
an inertia of dead weight. She did not make up her mind on many topics,
but when she did she sank deeply down like a stone, and a great deal of
grappling and effort was required to move her. She did not argue, she
did not struggle, she just remained. Her power of remaining, indeed, was
so remarkable that it was possible that there might be something alive,
some power of limpet-like suction that gave her force: on the other
hand, it was possible that this sticking was mere brute weight,
undirected by any human will. She stopped where she was, obeying habits
of heavy bodies, and it required a great deal of strength to shift her.
Even her husband, that notable remover of all obstacles that stood in
his way, seldom attempted to do so when he was convinced she meant to
abide. In the course of years he had tugged her, or perhaps she had
really gone of her own accord, to the sort of place where he wished her
to be, somewhere between an easy-chair in the awful drawing-room which
she had lately furnished, and the kitchen. In other words, she gave him
an extremely comfortable home, and took her place there as hostess. But
if he wanted more than that, she was, as he had found out, a millstone
round his neck. In common with many women of her type, she had a
practically inexhaustible flow of words to her mouth which seemed a
disintegration rather than an expression of the fabric of her faculties;
but every now and then among this debris there occurred an idea,
disconnected from all else, and floating down on its own account, which
seemed to suggest that Emmeline had a mind after all, though you would
never have thought it. But an idea did appear now and again, a bright,
solid, sensible idea, lying there like a jewel in a gutter. She had
tastes, too, a marked liking for sweet things, for quantities of cream
in her tea, for bright colours, for what we may call Mendelssohnic music
and for plush-like decorations. She had a good deal of geniality which,
so to speak, led nowhere, and a complete absence of physical cowardice,
which might be due to a want of imagination.
Apart from the strenuous matter of Dr Inglis’s discourse, a circumstance
that added interest to it was the fact that this was the last Sunday on
which he would officiate at St Thomas’s, Bracebridge, and he had already
been the recipient of a silver tea-set, deeply chased with scrolls and
vegetables, subscribed for by his parishioners and bought at Mr
Keeling’s stores, and a framed address in primary colours. He had been
appointed to a canonry of the Cathedral that stood in the centre of the
cup-shaped hollow on the sides of which Bracebridge so picturesquely
clustered, and his successor, a youngish man, with a short, pale beard,
now curiously coloured with the light that came through a stained glass
window opposite, had read the lessons and the litany.
Mr Silverdale, indeed, in spite of the special interest of Dr Inglis’s
discourse, was engrossing a good deal of Alice Keeling’s attention, and
her imagination was very busy. He had spent an assiduous week in calling
on his parishioners, but she had not been at home when he paid his visit
to her mother, who had formed no ideas about him, and Alice was now
looking forward with a good deal of excitement to to-night, when he was
going to take supper with them, after evening service, as her mother had
expressed it in her note, or after evensong, as he had expressed it in
his answer.
His conduct and appearance during the service had aroused her interest,
for he wore a richly coloured stole and a very short surplice, had
bowed in the direction of the east window as he walked up the chancel,
and had made a very deep obeisance somewhere in the middle of the Creed,
when everybody else stood upright. Somehow there was a different
atmosphere about him from that which surrounded the grim and austere Dr
Inglis, something in the pale face and in a rapt expression which she
easily read into his eyes, that made her mentally call him priest-like
rather than clergyman-like. Like most young women in whom the destiny of
old-maid is unrolling itself, Alice had a strong potentiality for
furtive romance, and while the pains of hell were being enunciated to
her inattentive ears, her short-sighted eyes were fixed on Mr
Silverdale, and she began to think of Lord Tennyson’s poem of Galahad
who was unmarried too.... She was so far lost in this that the rustle of
the uprising congregation at the end of the sermon, reached her
belatedly, and she rose in a considerable hurry, filling up the gap in
this tall barrier of Keelings. She and her mother were not less than
five feet ten in height, John’s inches had already outsoared them both,
while her father and Hugh, each a full six feet of solid stuff,
completed the substantial row. By one of Nature’s unkindest plans the
sons were handsome, the daughter plain, but all had the self-reliant
quality of size about them. A hymn followed, while the offertory, which
Mr Keeling helped to collect in serge-lined open mahogany plates, was in
progress, and the blessing, pronounced by Mr Silverdale, who made an
odd movement in the air with his right hand, brought the service to a
close.
* * * * *
According to custom, Mr Keeling, with his two sons, went for a brisk
walk, whatever the weather, before lunch, while Alice and her mother,
one of whose habits was to set as few feet to the ground as was humanly
possible without incurring the danger of striking root, got into the
victoria that waited for them at the church-door, on which the fat horse
was roused from his reverie and began heavily lolloping homewards. It
was not usual in Bracebridge to have a carriage out on Sunday, and Mrs
Keeling, surveying less fortunate pedestrians through her
tortoise-shell-handled glass, was Sunday by Sunday a little Lucretian on
the subject. The matter of the carriage also was a monument to her own
immovableness, for her husband, years ago, had done his utmost to induce
her to traverse the half mile on her own feet.
‘Ah, there is poor Mrs Etheridge,’ she said. ‘She will get very hot and
dusty before she reaches home. I would offer her a lift, but it would
make such a crush for us all. And there is poor Mr Moulton. How he
limps! I noticed that when he was handing the other offertory plate. He
has a long walk before him too, has he not? But we cannot drive
everybody home. It is pleasant driving to-day: the thin rug keeps off
the dust, and I want no other covering. It is neither too hot nor too
cold, just what I like. But it looks threatening over there. I should
not wonder if poor Mrs Etheridge got a drenching before she reaches her
little house. Her house is damp too: I have often noticed that, and to
get hot and wet and sit in a damp house is the very way to get
pneumonia. You are very silent, Alice.’
Alice assumed a slightly nippy look.
‘I was waiting till you had finished, Mamma!’ she permitted herself to
observe.
Here Mrs Keeling’s disintegration of mind showed itself. She had but a
moment before been critical of Alice’s silence.
‘Yes, dear, that is what I always tried to teach you,’ she said, ‘when
you were children; just as my mother taught me. I’m sure I told you all
every day not to talk with your mouths full or when anybody else is
talking. If we all talked together there would be a fine noise, to be
sure, and nobody a bit the wiser. I took a great deal of trouble about
your manners, and I’m sure it was not thrown away, for I consider you’ve
all got very good manners, even John, when he chooses. Talking of that’
(This phrase meant nothing in Mrs Keeling’s mouth), ‘I noticed Mr
Silverdale in church. He seemed to me to have a hungry kind of look. I
dare say his housekeeper is very careless about his meals, not having a
wife. I hope he will make a good meal this evening. Perhaps it would be
safer, dear, if you refused the salmon mayonnaise, as you are not so
very fond of it. Mrs Bellaway would have it that there was plenty, but
she has such a small appetite herself.’
‘I saw nothing hungry about his face,’ said Alice, with decision. ‘He
looked so rapt and far-away as if anything like food was the last
subject he would think about.’
‘Very likely, my dear; you are wonderful at reading character. All the
same the people who don’t give a thought to food are just those who do
go hungry, so we may both of us be right. Is that a spot of rain or a
fly? I felt something on the back of my glove.’
Alice put her clasped hands between her knees and squeezed them. She was
perfectly willing to go without her mayonnaise, but she could not bear
her mother should think Mr Silverdale looked hungry.
‘I thought his face was so like Jonah preaching at Nineveh in the
stained glass window,’ she said.
Mrs Keeling suddenly became coherently humorous. An idea (not much of
one, but still an idea) floated down the debris from her mind.
‘Well, he had had nothing to eat for three days,’ she remarked. ‘That
seems to show that I’m right.’
The street down which they drove from church very soon ceased to be a
street in the sense of its being lined on each side by contiguous
houses, and became Alfred Road, and was bounded on each side by brick
and stucco villas. At first stood arm-in-arm, semi-detached, but
presently they took on an air of greater spaciousness and stood square
and singly, while the gardens that sandwiched them before and behind
were large enough to contain a grass-plot and six or seven laurels in
front, and a full-sized tennis-lawn and a small kitchen garden at the
back. But perhaps they scarcely warranted such names as ‘Chatsworth,’
‘Blenheim,’ ‘Balmoral,’ or ‘The Engadine,’ which appeared so prominently
on their painted gates. ‘Blenheim’ had once been Mrs Keeling’s home, and
her mother, a tiny, venomous old lady in a Bath-chair, lived and was
likely long to live there still, for she had admirable health, and the
keen, spiteful temper which gives its possessor so indignant and
absorbing an interest in life.
It was to a far narrower home than Blenheim that Emmeline had gone on
her marriage with Mr Keeling, and though the greater part of Alfred Road
had shaken their heads over her mating herself with a man so much below
her socially, her mother, wife, and now widow of a retired P. & O.
captain, had formed a juster estimate of her future son-in-law’s chin. A
silly, pretty girl like Emmeline, she thought, was very lucky to capture
a man who was going to make his way upwards so obviously as that
strapping young fellow with the square jaw. He was then but the
proprietor of the fishmonger’s shop at the end of the High Street, but
Mrs Goodford knew very well, without being told so by young Keeling
himself, that he was not of the sort which remain a small fishmonger.
Events had justified her insight, and it was to a much bigger house than
Mrs Goodford’s that her daughter was being driven on this Sunday
morning.
As the victoria pursued its leisurely way, the spaces between the
Blenheims and Chatsworths grew larger, the villas ceased to have but one
window on each side of the front door: they stood farther back from the
road, and were approached by small carriage drives culminating in what
was known as the ‘carriage sweep’ in front of the house, a gravelled
space where a carriage could turn completely round. Two gates led to the
carriage sweep, on one of which was painted ‘In,’ and on the other
‘Out,’ and the spaces surrounding the houses could justly be called
‘grounds’ since they embraced tennis lawns and kitchen gardens with
‘glass,’ and shrubberies with winding paths. Retired colonels must needs
have private money of their own in addition to their pensions to live so
spaciously, and Mr Keeling, even thus housed, was putting by very
considerable sums of money every year. Into one of those carriage
drives, advertised to passers-by as the entrance of ‘The Cedars’
(probably because there were three prosperous larch trees planted near
the ‘In’ gate), Mrs Keeling’s carriage turned, and after passing some
yards of shrubbery stopped before a wooden Gothic porch. Both ladies
appeared unconscious of having reached home till a small boy covered
with buttons came out of the house and removed the light carriage-rug
that covered their knees.
It was but a few months ago that Mr Keeling, taking advantage of a break
in the lease of his own house, and the undoubted bargain that he had
secured in this more spacious residence, had bought the freehold of ‘The
Cedars,’ and had given the furnishing and embellishment of it (naming
the total sum not to be exceeded) into the hands of his wife and the
head of the furnishing department in his stores. The Gothic porch,
already there, had suggested a ‘scheme’ to the artistic Mr Bowman, and
from it you walked into a large square hall of an amazing kind. On the
floor were red encaustic tiles with blue fleurs-de-lis, and the walls
and ceiling were covered with the most expensive and deeply-moulded
Lincrusta-Walton paper of Tudor design with alternate crowns and
portcullises. It was clearly inconvenient that visitors should be able
to look in through the window that opened on the ‘carriage-sweep’; so Mr
Bowman had arranged that it should not open at all, but be filled with
sham bottle-bottoms impervious to the eye. In front of it stood a large
pitch-pine table to hold the clothings and impedimenta of out-of-doors,
and on each side of it were chairs of Gothic design. The fireplace, also
new, had modern Dutch tiles in it, and a high battlemented mantel-shelf,
with turrets at the corners. For hats there was a mahogany hat-rack with
chamois-horns tipped with brass instead of pegs, and on the
Lincrusta-Walton walls were trophies of spears and battle-axes and
swords. Mr Bowman would have left the hall thus in classic severity, but
his partner in decoration here intervened, and insisted on its being
made more home-like. To secure this she added a second table on which
stood a small stuffed crocodile rampant holding in his outstretched
forelegs a copper tray for visitors’ calling cards. Mrs Keeling was very
much pleased with this, considering it so quaint, and when her friends
called, it often served as the header-board from which they leaped into
the sea of conversation. The grate of the fire-place, empty of fuel, in
this midsummer weather, was filled with multitudinous strips of
polychromatic paper with gilt threads among it, which streamed from some
fixed point up in the chimney, and suggested that a lady with a skirt
covered with ribbons had stuck in the chimney, her head and body being
invisible. By the fireplace Mrs Keeling had placed a painted wheelbarrow
with a gilt spade, containing fuchsias in pots, and among the trophies
of arms had inserted various Polynesian aprons of shells and leather
thongs brought back by her father from his voyages; these the outraged
Mr Bowman sarcastically allowed ‘added colour’ about which there was no
doubt whatever. Beyond this hall lay a farther inner one, out of which
ascended the main staircase furnished (here again could be traced Mr
Bowman’s chaste finger) with a grandfather’s clock, and reproductions of
cane-backed Jacobean chairs. From this opened a big drawing-room giving
on the lawn at the back, and communicating at one end with Mrs Keeling’s
‘boudoir.’ These rooms, as being more exclusively feminine, were
inspired in the matter of their decoration by Mrs Keeling’s unaided
taste; about them nothing need be said beyond the fact that it would
take any one a considerable time to ascertain whether they contained a
greater number of mirrors framed in plush and painted with lilies, or of
draped pictures standing at angles on easels. Saddlebag chairs, damask
curtains, Landseer prints, and a Brussels carpet were the chief
characteristics of the dining-room.
To the left of the Gothic and inner halls, a very large room had been
built out to the demolition of a laurel shrubbery. This was Mr Keeling’s
study, and when he gave his house over to the taste of his decorators,
he made the stipulation that they should not exercise their artistic
faculties therein, but leave it entirely to him. In fact, there had
been a short and violent scene of ejection when the card-holding
crocodile had appeared on a table there owing to the inadvertence of a
house-maid, for Mr Keeling had thrown it out of the window on to the
carriage sweep, and one of its hind legs had to be repaired. Here for
furniture he had a gray drugget on the floor, a couple of easy chairs,
half a dozen deal ones, an immense table and a step-ladder, while the
wall space was entirely taken up with book shelves. These were but as
yet half-filled, and stacks of books, some still in the parcels in which
they had arrived from dealers and publishers, stood on the floor. This
room with its books was Mr Keeling’s secret romance: all his life, even
from the days of the fish-shop, the collection of fine illustrated books
had been his hobby, his _hortus inclusus_, where lay his escape from the
eternal pursuit of money-making and from the tedium of domestic life.
There he indulged his undeveloped love of the romance of literature, and
the untutored joy with which design of line and colour inspired him. As
an apostle of thoroughness in business and everything else, his books
must be as well equipped as books could be: there must be fine bindings,
the best paper and printing, and above all there must be pictures. When
that was done you might say you had got a book. For rarity and antiquity
he cared nothing at all; a sumptuous edition of a book of nursery
rhymes was more desirable in his eyes than any Caxton. Here in his hard,
industrious, Puritan life, was Keeling’s secret garden, of which none of
his family held the key. Few at all entered the room, and into the
spirit of it none except perhaps the young man who was at the head of
the book department at Keeling’s stores. He had often been of use to the
proprietor in pointing out to him the publication of some new edition he
might wish to possess, and now and then, as on this particular Sunday
afternoon, he was invited to spend an hour at the house looking over Mr
Keeling’s latest purchases. He came, of course, by the back door, and
was conducted by the boy in buttons along the servants’ passage, for Mrs
Keeling would certainly not like to have the front door opened to him.
That would have been far from proper, and he might have put his hat on
one of the brass-tipped chamois horns. But there was no real danger of
that, for it had never occurred to Charles Propert to approach ‘The
Cedars’ by any but the tradesman’s entrance.
* * * * *
Mrs Keeling in the passionless and oyster-like conduct of her life very
seldom allowed any external circumstance to annoy her, and when she
found on her arrival home this morning a note beside the crocodile in
the hall saying that her mother proposed to come to lunch, it did not
interfere with the few minutes’ nap that she always allowed herself on
Sunday morning after the pomp and fatigue of public worship. But it was
a fact that her husband did not much care for his mother-in-law’s
presence at his table, for as Mrs Keeling said, they were apt to worry
each other, and consequently Mrs Goodford’s visits usually took place on
week-days when Mr Keeling was at the Stores. But it did not ever so
faintly enter her head to send round to say that she would not be at
home for lunch, because, in the first place, she did not care
sufficiently whether Mamma came or not, and in the second place, because
there was not the slightest chance of Mamma’s believing her. The most
she could do was to intercept any worrying by excessive geniality, and
as they all sat down she remarked, pausing before she began to cut the
roast beef,--
‘Well, I do call this a nice family party! All of us at home, and Mamma
too!’
This did not quite seem to break the ice, and Mrs Goodford looked in
some contempt at her daughter with her eyes, little and red and wicked
like an elephant’s. Her face was so deeply wrinkled that her features
were almost invisible in the network, but what there was of them was
exceedingly sharp. She had taken off her bonnet, a sign that she meant
to stop all afternoon, and showed a head very sparsely covered with
white hair: at the back of it was fixed on a small bun of bright auburn,
which no doubt had been the colour of her hair some forty years ago.
This bun always fascinated John: it was impossible to conjecture how it
was attached to his grandmother’s head.
Mrs Goodford ate a slice of hot beef in dead silence, with a circular
mill-like motion of her chin. It disappeared before her daughter had
time to begin eating on her own account, which gave her an opportunity
for another attempt to thaw the glacial silence that presided over the
nice family party.
‘Well, and there’s Mamma finished her slice of beef already! What a
blessing a good appetite is, to be sure! You’ll let me give you another
slice, Mamma, won’t you?’
Mrs Goodford had pointedly taken a place next her daughter, which was as
far as she could get from Mr Keeling, and, still without speaking, she
advanced her plate up to the edge of the dish. Again she ate in silence,
and pushed her Yorkshire pudding to the extreme edge of her plate.
‘Nasty, mushy stuff,’ she observed. ‘I’d as soon eat a poultice.’
John, who had scarcely taken his eyes off the bun, putting his food into
his mouth by general sense of locality only, suddenly gave a hiccupy
kind of gasp. Mrs Goodford, exhilarated by beef, turned her
elephant-eyes on him.
‘I don’t quite catch what you said, John,’ she remarked. ‘Perhaps you
can tell me what the sermon was about this morning.’
‘Hell, Granny,’ said John cheerfully.
Mrs Goodford began to grow slightly more bellicose.
‘Your father would like that,’ she observed.
Hitherto Mr Keeling had devoted his mind to his own immediate concerns
which were those of eating. He had no wish to get worried with Mrs
Goodford, but it seemed that mere politeness required an answer to this.
‘I found it an excellent sermon,’ he said, with admirable neutrality; ‘I
only hope that Mr--Mr Silverdale will give us such good ones.’
Mrs Goodford scrutinised the faces of her grandchildren. Her eye fell on
Alice.
‘We must find a wife for him,’ she said. ‘I dare say we shall be able to
fit him out with a wife. He seems a polite sort of young man too. I
shouldn’t wonder if plenty of our Bracebridge young ladies would be
willing to become Mrs Silverside, or whatever the man’s name is.’
‘Dear me, Mamma!’ said Mrs Keeling, ‘you talk as if the gentleman was a
bit of beef.’
‘Mostly bones, as far as I could see,’ said Mrs Goodford, still not
taking her little eyes off Alice. ‘There wasn’t much beef on them.’
‘Well, I hope he’ll get a good meal this evening,’ said Mrs Keeling.
‘He’s taking his supper with us.’
‘Ah, I dare say he’ll find something he likes,’ said this dreadful old
lady, observing with malicious pleasure that Alice’s colour, as she
would have phrased it, ‘was mounting.’
A certain measure of relief came to poor Alice at this moment, for she
observed that everybody had finished the meat-course, and she and Hugh
(who had at present escaped the lash of his grandmother’s tongue) and
John hastily got up and began changing their elders’ plates, and
removing dishes. This was the custom of Sunday lunch at Mrs Keeling’s,
and a Sabbatarian design of saving the servants trouble lay at the back
of it. The detail of which it took no account was that it gave Hugh and
Alice and John three times as much trouble as it would have given the
servants, for they made endless collisions with each other as they went
round the table; two of them simultaneously tried to drag the roast beef
away in opposite directions, and the gravy spoon, tipped up by John’s
elbow, careered through the air with a comet-tail of congealed
meat-juice behind it. Ominous sounds of side-slip from heaped plates and
knives came from the dinner wagon, where the used china was piled, and
some five minutes of arduous work, filled with bumpings and crashings
and occasional spurts of suppressed laughter from John, who, like a true
wit, was delighted with his own swift and disconcerting reply to his
Granny, were needful to effect the changes required for the discussion
of plum tart and that strange form of refreshment known as ‘cold
shape.’ During these resonant minutes further conversation between the
elders was impossible, but Mrs Goodford was not wasting her time, but
saving up, storing her forces, reviewing her future topics.
It was obvious by this time that the family lunch was going to be rather
a stormy sort of passage, and Mrs Keeling had before this caught her
husband’s eye, and with dumb movements of her lips and querying eyebrows
had communicated ‘Champagne?’ to him, for it was known that when Mrs
Goodford was in a worrying mood, a glass of that agreeable beverage
often restored her to almost fatuous good humour. But her husband had
replied aloud, ‘Certainly not,’ and assumed his grimmest aspect. This
did not look well: as a rule he was content to suffer Mrs Goodford’s
most disagreeable humours in contemptuous silence. Now and then,
however, and his wife was afraid that this was one of those tempestuous
occasions, he was in no mind to lie prone under insults levelled at him
across his own table.
Mrs Goodford being helped first, poured the greater part of the cream
over her tart, and began on Hugh. Hugh would have been judged by a
sentimental school-girl to be much the best looking of all the Keelings,
for the resemblance between him and the wax types of manly beauty which
used to appear in the windows of hairdressers’ establishments was so
striking as to be almost uncanny. You wondered if there was a strain of
hairdresser blood in his ancestors. He had worked himself up from the
lowest offices in his father’s stores; he had been boy-messenger for the
delivery of parcels, he had sold behind the counters, he had been
through the accountant’s office, he had travelled on behalf of the
business, and knew the working of it all from A to Z. In course of time
he would become General Manager, and his father felt that in his capable
hands it was not likely that the business would deteriorate. He spoke
little, and usually paused before he spoke, and when he spoke he seldom
made a mistake. The brilliance of his appearance was backed by a solid
and sensible mind.
‘And they tell me you’re going to be married next, Hugh,’ said Mrs
Goodford.
Hugh considered this.
‘I don’t know what you mean by “next,” Grandmamma,’ he said. ‘But it is
quite true that I am going to be married.’
His mother again tried to introduce a little lightness into this sombre
opening.
‘Trust Hugh for not agreeing with anything he doesn’t understand,’ she
said.
Mrs Goodford took no notice whatever of this. It is likely that her
quick little eye had intercepted the telegraphic suggestion of
champagne, and that she was justly irritated at her son-in-law’s
rejection of it. She laid herself out to be more markedly disagreeable
than usual.
‘Well, all I can say is, that I hope your Miss Pemberton isn’t one of
those lively young ladies who are always laughing and joking, or you’ll
be fit to kill her with your serious airs. I should never have guessed
that you were going to be a bridegroom in a few weeks’ time.’
‘But you haven’t got to guess, Grandmamma,’ said Hugh. ‘You know
already.’
‘And I’m told she has a nice little fortune of her own,’ continued Mrs
Goodford. ‘Trust a Keeling for that. Ah, dear me, yes: there are some
that go up in the world and some that go down, and I never heard that
the Keelings were among those that go down.’
Hugh hardly thought about this at all before he answered. It was a
perfectly evident proposition.
‘I dare say not,’ he said, still non-committally.
‘Yes; and it was true before you were born or thought of,’ continued
this terrible old lady. ‘Your father didn’t marry so much beneath him
either. Ah, he was in a precious small way, he was, when he came
a-courting your mother.’
Mrs Goodford had now, so to speak, found her range. She had been like a
gun, that has made a few trial shots, dropping a shell now on Alice, now
on Hugh. But this last one went off right in the centre of the target.
She disliked her son-in-law with that peculiar animus which is the
privilege of those who are under a thousand obligations to the object of
their spite, for since nearly thirty years ago, when he had taken
Emmeline off her hands, till last Christmas, when he had given her a new
Bath-chair in addition to his usual present of a hundred pounds, Keeling
had treated her with consistent and contemptuous liberality. This
liberality, naturally, was not the offspring of any affection: the
dominant ingredient in it was pride. However Mrs Goodford might behave,
he was not to be disturbed from his sense of duty towards his
mother-in-law. Nor, at present, was he sufficiently provoked to make any
sort of retort, but merely told John to pass him the sugar.
Mrs Goodford finished her plum tart.
‘Yes, some do go up in the world,’ she went on. ‘Who’d have thought
thirty years ago that T. Keeling of the fish-shop in the High Street was
going to be Mr Thomas Keeling of the Stores?’
A slight smile appeared on Keeling’s grim face. He could not resist
replying to this.
‘Who’d have thought it, do you ask?’ he said. ‘Why, I thought it; I knew
it all along, I may say.’
‘And they tell me you’re going to be Mayor of Bracebridge next year,’
said Mrs Goodford, delighted to have drawn him into conversation with
her. If only she could engage him in it she trusted herself to make him
lose his temper before many minutes were over.
‘Yes, they’ve told you right there,’ said he. ‘Or perhaps you’ve got
some fault to find with that, Mrs Goodford.’
Mrs Keeling looked round in a distressed and flurried manner, with her
feeble geniality showing like some pale moon behind clouds that were
growing rapidly thicker.
‘Yes, and me the Lady Mayoress,’ she said. ‘Why, I’m ever so nervous
even now in the thinking of all the grand parties I shall have to give.
And the hospital will be finished next year too, and what a to-do we
shall have over that. And what do you say now, Mamma, to having your cup
of coffee in my boudoir quietly with Alice and me, leaving the gentlemen
to have a cigarette.’
Mrs Goodford gave a thin little laugh like a bat’s squeak.
‘No, I’ll sit here a bit longer,’ she said, ‘and talk to the gentlemen
and the Lord Mayor of Bracebridge. Dear me, to think of all the changes
we see! And I shouldn’t wonder if there was more in store yet. I learned
when I was a girl that there was once a King of England who used to like
a bit of stale fish----’
Keeling suddenly pointed an awful forefinger at her.
‘Now, that’s enough!’ he said. ‘Never in my life have I sold a bit of
bad goods, fish, flesh, or fowl, or whatever you like to name, that I
wasn’t willing to take it back with humble apologies for its having left
my shop. Not one atom of bad stuff did any one buy of me if I knew it.
And any one who says different to that speaks a false-hood. If you’ve
got anything to answer me there, Mrs Goodford, let’s have it now and
have done with it.’
There was not a word in reply, and after having given her good space to
answer him, he spoke again.
‘So we’ll have no more talk of stale fish at my table,’ he said.
Mrs Keeling rose.
‘Well, then, I’m sure that’s all comfortably settled,’ she said, ‘and
pray, Mamma, and you, Thomas, don’t go worrying each other any more,
when we might be having such a pleasant family party, on Sunday
afternoon too. Come along with me, Mamma, and let’s have our coffee
served in my boudoir, and let’s all sit and cool after our lunch.’
This appeal was more successful. Something in the simple dignity of
Keeling’s reply had silenced her, and she was led away like a wicked
little elephant between her daughter and Alice. Not one word did Keeling
say till they had left the room, and then, though his usual allowance of
port on Sunday was one glass after lunch and two after dinner, he
helped himself again and pushed the bottle towards Hugh.
‘Join your mother, John,’ he said to his other son.
‘Oh, mayn’t I----’ began John, with an eye to cherries.
‘You may do as I bid you without more words,’ said his father.
For a few minutes he sat glowering and sipping.
‘That’s why some men take to drink,’ he observed. ‘They’re driven silly
by some ill-conditioned woman like your grandmother. Nag, nag, nag: it
was Alice first, then you, then me. Does she come to eat her dinner with
us on Sunday just to insult us all, do you think?’
Hugh considered this as he helped himself.
‘I think that’s part of her reason,’ he said. ‘She also wants to get a
good dinner for nothing.’
‘I expect that’s about it. She may call me a tradesman if she likes, who
has been a fishmonger, for that’s quite true. But she shan’t call me
such a rotten bad man of business as to send out stale goods. She
wouldn’t be getting her hundred pounds regular as clock-work at
Christmas time, if I had been that sort of a man.’
‘You answered her very properly, I thought,’ remarked Hugh.
‘Of course I did. I didn’t want to do it: never in my life have I wanted
to speak like that to any woman, let alone your mother’s mother, but
she gave me no option. Now I’m off to my books.’
He rose.
‘It would be rather a good thing if you went into my mother’s room and
had your cup of coffee there,’ Hugh said, ‘it would show you paid no
heed to her rude speeches.’
‘Maybe it would, but she might treat me to some more, and I’ve no
inclination for them. Stale fish, indeed!’