The River Ashe, after a drowsy and meandering childhood, passed
peacefully among the sedges and marigolds of its water meadows, suddenly
and somewhat disconcertingly grows up and, without any period of
transition and adolescence, becomes, from being a mere girl of a
rivulet, a male and full-blooded estuary of the sea. At Coton, for
instance, the tips of the sculls of a sauntering pleasure-boat will
almost span its entire width, while, but a mile farther down, you will
see stone-laden barges and tall, red-winged sailing craft coming up with
the tide, and making fast to the grey wooden quay wall of Ashbridge,
rough with barnacles. For the reeds and meadow-sweet of its margin are
exchanged the brown and green growths of the sea, with their sharp,
acrid odour instead of the damp, fresh smell of meadow flowers, and at
low tide the podded bladders of brown weed and long strings of marine
macaroni, among which peevish crabs scuttle sideways, take the place
of the grass and spires of loosestrife; and over the water, instead of
singing larks, hang white companies of chiding seagulls. Here at high
tide extends a sheet of water large enough, when the wind blows up the
estuary, to breed waves that break in foam and spray against the barges,
while at the ebb acres of mud flats are disclosed on which the boats
lean slanting till the flood lifts them again and makes them strain at
the wheezing ropes that tie them to the quay.
A year before the flame of war went roaring through Europe in
unquenchable conflagration it would have seemed that nothing could
possibly rouse Ashbridge from its red-brick Georgian repose. There was
never a town so inimitably drowsy or so sternly uncompetitive. A hundred
years ago it must have presented almost precisely the same appearance as
it did in the summer of 1913, if we leave out of reckoning a few
dozen of modern upstart villas that line its outskirts, and the very
inconspicuous railway station that hides itself behind the warehouses
near the river’s bank. Most of the trains, too, quite ignore its
existence, and pass through it on their way to more rewarding
stopping-places, hardly recognising it even by a spurt of steam from
their whistles, and it is only if you travel by those that require
the most frequent pauses in their progress that you will be enabled to
alight at its thin and depopulated platform.
Just outside the station there perennially waits a low-roofed and
sanguine omnibus that under daily discouragement continues to hope that
in the long-delayed fulness of time somebody will want to be driven
somewhere. (This nobody ever does, since the distance to any house is so
small, and a porter follows with luggage on a barrow.) It carries on its
floor a quantity of fresh straw, in the manner of the stage coaches, in
which the problematic passenger, should he ever appear, will no doubt
bury his feet. On its side, just below the window that is not made to
open, it carries the legend that shows that it belongs to the Comber
Arms, a hostelry so self-effacing that it is discoverable only by the
sharpest-eyed of pilgrims. Narrow roadways, flanked by proportionately
narrower pavements, lie ribbon-like between huddled shops and
squarely-spacious Georgian houses; and an air of leisure and content,
amounting almost to stupefaction, is the moral atmosphere of the place.
On the outskirts of the town, crowning the gentle hills that lie to the
north and west, villas in acre plots, belonging to business men in the
county town some ten miles distant, “prick their Cockney ears” and are
strangely at variance with the sober gravity of the indigenous houses.
So, too, are the manners and customs of their owners, who go to
Stoneborough every morning to their work, and return by the train that
brings them home in time for dinner. They do other exotic and unsuitable
things also, like driving swiftly about in motors, in playing golf on
the other side of the river at Coton, and in having parties at each
other’s houses. But apart from them nobody ever seems to leave Ashbridge
(though a stroll to the station about the time that the evening train
arrives is a recognised diversion) or, in consequence, ever to come
back. Ashbridge, in fact, is self-contained, and desires neither to
meddle with others nor to be meddled with.
The estuary opposite the town is some quarter of a mile broad at high
tide, and in order to cross to the other side, where lie the woods and
park of Ashbridge House, it is necessary to shout and make staccato
prancings in order to attract the attention of the antique ferryman, who
is invariably at the other side of the river and generally asleep at the
bottom of his boat. If you are strong-lunged and can prance and shout
for a long time, he may eventually stagger to his feet, come across
for you and row you over. Otherwise you will stand but little chance of
arousing him from his slumbers, and you will stop where you are, unless
you choose to walk round by the bridge at Coton, a mile above.
Periodical attempts are made by the brisker inhabitants of Ashbridge,
who do not understand its spirit, to substitute for this aged and
ineffectual Charon someone who is occasionally awake, but nothing ever
results from these revolutionary moves, and the requests addressed to
the town council on the subject are never heard of again. “Old George”
was ferryman there before any members of the town council were born, and
he seems to have established a right to go to sleep on the other side of
the river which is now inalienable from him. Besides, asleep or awake,
he is always perfectly sober, which, after all, is really one of the
first requirements for a suitable ferryman. Even the representations of
Lord Ashbridge himself who, when in residence, frequently has occasion
to use the ferry when crossing from his house to the town, failed to
produce the smallest effect, and he was compelled to build a boathouse
of his own on the farther bank, and be paddled across by himself or
one of the servants. Often he rowed himself, for he used to be a fine
oarsman, and it was good for the lounger on the quay to see the foaming
prow of his vigorous progress and the dignity of physical toil.
In all other respects, except in this case of “Old George,” Lord
Ashbridge’s wishes were law to the local authorities, for in this
tranquil East-coast district the spirit of the feudal system with
a beneficent lord and contented tenants strongly survived. It had
triumphed even over such modern innovations as railroads, for Lord
Ashbridge had the undoubted right to stop any train he pleased by signal
at Ashbridge station. This he certainly enjoyed doing; it fed his sense
of the fitness of things to progress along the platform with his genial,
important tiptoe walk, and elbows squarely stuck out, to the carriage
that was at once reserved for him, to touch the brim of his grey top-hat
(if travelling up to town) to the obsequious guard, and to observe the
heads of passengers who wondered why their express was arrested, thrust
out of carriage windows to look at him. A livened footman, as well as a
valet, followed him, bearing a coat and a rug and a morning or evening
paper and a dispatch-box with a large gilt coronet on it, and bestowed
these solaces to a railway journey on the empty seats near him. And
not only his sense of fitness was hereby fed, but that also of the
station-master and the solitary porter and the newsboy, and such
inhabitants of Ashbridge as happened to have strolled on to the
platform. For he was THEIR Earl of Ashbridge, kind, courteous and
dominant, a local king; it was all very pleasant.
But this arrest of express trains was a strictly personal privilege;
when Lady Ashbridge or Michael travelled they always went in the slow
train to Stoneborough, changed there and abided their time on the
platform like ordinary mortals. Though he could undoubtedly have
extended his rights to the stopping of a train for his wife or son, he
wisely reserved this for himself, lest it should lose prestige. There
was sufficient glory already (to probe his mind to the bottom) for Lady
Ashbridge in being his wife; it was sufficient also for Michael that he
was his son.
It may be inferred that there was a touch of pomposity about this
admirable gentleman, who was so excellent a landlord and so hard working
a member of the British aristocracy. But pomposity would be far too
superficial a word to apply to him; it would not adequately connote
his deep-abiding and essential conviction that on one of the days of
Creation (that, probably, on which the decree was made that there should
be Light) there leaped into being the great landowners of England.
But Lord Ashbridge, though himself a peer, by no means accepted the
peerage en bloc as representing the English aristocracy; to be, in
his phrase, “one of us” implied that you belonged to certain
well-ascertained families where brewers and distinguished soldiers
had no place, unless it was theirs already. He was ready to pay all
reasonable homage to those who were distinguished by their abilities,
their riches, their exalted positions in Church and State, but his
homage to such was transfused with a courteous condescension, and he
only treated as his equals and really revered those who belonged to the
families that were “one of us.”
His wife, of course, was “one of us,” since he would never have
permitted himself to be allied to a woman who was not, though for beauty
and wisdom she might have been Aphrodite and Athene rolled compactly
into one peerless identity. As a matter of fact, Lady Ashbridge had
not the faintest resemblance to either of these effulgent goddesses. In
person she resembled a camel, long and lean, with a drooping mouth and
tired, patient eyes, while in mind she was stunned. No idea other than
an obvious one ever had birth behind her high, smooth forehead, and she
habitually brought conversation to a close by the dry enunciation of
something indubitably true, which had no direct relation to the point
under discussion. But she had faint, ineradicable prejudices, and
instincts not quite dormant. There was a large quantity of mild
affection in her nature, the quality of which may be illustrated by
the fact that when her father died she cried a little every day after
breakfast for about six weeks. Then she did not cry any more. It was
impossible not to like what there was of her, but there was really very
little to like, for she belonged heart and soul to the generation and
the breeding among which it is enough for a woman to be a lady, and
visit the keeper’s wife when she has a baby.
But though there was so little of her, the balance was made up for
by the fact that there was so much of her husband. His large, rather
flamboyant person, his big white face and curling brown beard, his loud
voice and his falsetto laugh, his absolutely certain opinions, above all
the fervency of his consciousness of being Lord Ashbridge and all which
that implied, completely filled any place he happened to be in, so
that a room empty except for him gave the impression of being almost
uncomfortably crowded. This keen consciousness of his identity was
naturally sufficient to make him very good humoured, since he was
himself a fine example of the type that he admired most. Probably only
two persons in the world had the power of causing him annoyance, but
both of these, by an irony of fate that it seemed scarcely possible to
consider accidental, were closely connected with him, for one was his
sister, the other his only son.
The grounds of their potentiality in this respect can be easily
stated. Barbara Comber, his sister (and so “one of us”), had married an
extremely wealthy American, who, in Lord Ashbridge’s view, could not be
considered one of anybody at all; in other words, his imagination failed
to picture a whole class of people who resembled Anthony Jerome. He had
hoped when his sister announced her intention of taking this deplorable
step that his future brother-in-law would at any rate prove to be a
snob--he had a vague notion that all Americans were snobs--and that thus
Mr. Jerome would have the saving grace to admire and toady him. But Mr.
Jerome showed no signs of doing anything of the sort; he treated him
with an austere and distant politeness that Lord Ashbridge could
not construe as being founded on admiration and a sense of his own
inferiority, for it was so clearly founded on dislike. That, however,
did not annoy Lord Ashbridge, for it was easy to suppose that poor Mr.
Jerome knew no better. But Barbara annoyed him, for not only had she
shown herself a renegade in marrying a man who was not “one of us,” but
with all the advantages she had enjoyed since birth of knowing what
“we” were, she gloried in her new relations, saying, without any proper
reticence about the matter, that they were Real People, whose character
and wits vastly transcended anything that Combers had to show.
Michael was an even more vexatious case, and in moments of depression
his father thought that he would really turn in his grave at the dismal
idea of Michael having stepped into his honourable shoes. Physically he
was utterly unlike a Comber, and his mind, his general attitude
towards life seemed to have diverged even farther from that healthy and
unreflective pattern. Only this morning his father had received a letter
from him that summed Michael up, that fulfilled all the doubts and fears
that had hung about him; for after three years in the Guards he had,
without consultation with anybody, resigned his commission on the
inexplicable grounds that he wanted to do something with his life. To
begin with that was rankly heretical; if you were a Comber there was no
need to do anything with your life; life did everything for you. . . .
And what this un-Comberish young man wanted to do with his life was to
be a musician. That musicians, artists, actors, had a right to exist
Lord Ashbridge did not question. They were no doubt (or might be)
very excellent people in their way, and as a matter of fact he often
recognised their existence by going to the opera, to the private view
of the Academy, or to the play, and he took a very considerable pride of
proprietorship in his own admirable collection of family portraits. But
then those were pictures of Combers; Reynolds and Romney and the rest of
them had enjoyed the privilege of perpetuating on their canvases these
big, fine men and charming women. But that a Comber--and that one
positively the next Lord Ashbridge--should intend to devote his energies
to an artistic calling, and allude to that scheme as doing something
with his life, was a thing as unthinkable as if the butler had developed
a fixed idea that he was “one of us.”
The blow was a recent one; Michael’s letter had only reached his father
this morning, and at the present moment Lord Ashbridge was attempting
over a cup of tea on the long south terrace overlooking the estuary to
convey--not very successfully--to his wife something of his feelings
on the subject. She, according to her custom, was drinking a little hot
water herself, and providing her Chinese pug with a mixture of cream
and crumbled rusks. Though the dog was of undoubtedly high lineage, Lord
Ashbridge rather detested her.
“A musical career!” he exclaimed, referring to Michael’s letter. “What
sort of a career for a Comber is a musical career? I shall tell Michael
pretty roundly when he arrives this evening what I think of it all. We
shall have Francis next saying that he wants to resign, too, and become
a dentist.”
Lady Ashbridge considered this for a moment in her stunned mind.
“Dear me, Robert, I hope not,” she said. “I do not think it the least
likely that Francis would do anything of the kind. Look, Petsy is
better; she has drunk her cream and rusks quite up. I think it was only
the heat.”
He gave a little good-humoured giggle of falsetto laughter.
“I wish, Marion,” he said, “that you could manage to take your mind off
your dog for a moment and attend to me. And I must really ask you not to
give your Petsy any more cream, or she will certainly be sick.”
Lady Ashbridge gave a little sigh.
“All gone, Petsy,” she said.
“I am glad it has all gone,” said he, “and we will hope it won’t return.
But about Michael now!”
Lady Ashbridge pulled herself together.
“Yes, poor Michael!” she said. “He is coming to-night, is he not? But
just now you were speaking of Francis, and the fear of his wanting to be
a dentist!”
“Well, I am now speaking of Michael’s wanting to be a musician. Of
course that is utterly out of the question. If, as he says, he has sent
in his resignation, he will just have to beg them to cancel it. Michael
seems not to have the slightest idea of the duties which his birth and
position entail on him. Unfitted for the life he now leads . . . waste
of time. . . . Instead he proposes to go to Baireuth in August, and then
to settle down in London to study!”
Lady Ashbridge recollected the almanac.
“That will be in September, then,” she said. “I do not think I was ever
in London in September. I did not know that anybody was.”
“The point, my dear, is not how or where you have been accustomed to
spend your Septembers,” said her husband. “What we are talking about
is--”
“Yes, dear, I know quite well what we are talking about,” said she. “We
are talking about Michael not studying music all September.”
Lord Ashbridge got up and began walking across the terrace opposite the
tea-table with his elbows stuck out and his feet lifted rather high.
“Michael doesn’t seem to realise that he is not Tom or Dick or Harry,”
said he. “Music, indeed! I’m musical myself; all we Combers are musical.
But Michael is my only son, and it really distresses me to see how
little sense he has of his responsibilities. Amusements are all very
well; it is not that I want to cut him off his amusements, but when it
comes to a career--”
Lady Ashbridge was surreptitiously engaged in pouring out a little more
cream for Petsy, and her husband, turning rather sooner than she had
expected, caught her in the act.
“Do not give Petsy any more cream,” he said, with some asperity; “I
absolutely forbid it.”
Lady Ashbridge quite composedly replaced the cream-jug.
“Poor Petsy!” she observed.
“I ask you to attend to me, Marion,” he said.
“But I am attending to you very well, Robert,” said she, “and I
understand you perfectly. You do not want Michael to be a musician in
September and wear long hair and perhaps play at concerts. I am sure
I quite agree with you, for such a thing would be as unheard of in my
family as in yours. But how do you propose to stop it?”
“I shall use my authority,” he said, stepping a little higher.
“Yes, dear, I am sure you will. But what will happen if Michael doesn’t
pay any attention to your authority? You will be worse off than ever.
Poor Michael is very obedient when he is told to do anything he intends
to do, but when he doesn’t agree it is difficult to do anything with
him. And, you see, he is quite independent of you with my mother having
left him so much money. Poor mamma!”
Lord Ashbridge felt strongly about this.
“It was a most extraordinary disposition of her property for your mother
to make,” he observed. “It has given Michael an independence which I
much deplore. And she did it in direct opposition to my wishes.”
This touched on one of the questions about which Lady Ashbridge had her
convictions. She had a mild but unalterable opinion that when anybody
died, all that they had previously done became absolutely flawless and
laudable.
“Mamma did as she thought right with her property,” she said, “and it
is not for us to question it. She was conscientiousness itself. You will
have to excuse my listening to any criticism you may feel inclined to
make about her, Robert.”
“Certainly, my dear. I only want you to listen to me about Michael. You
agree with me on the impossibility of his adopting a musical career. I
cannot, at present, think so ill of Michael as to suppose that he will
defy our joint authority.”
“Michael has a great will of his own,” she remarked. “He gets that from
you, Robert, though he gets his money from his grandmother.”
The futility of further discussion with his wife began to dawn on Lord
Ashbridge, as it dawned on everybody who had the privilege of conversing
with her. Her mind was a blind alley that led nowhere; it was clear that
she had no idea to contribute to the subject except slightly pessimistic
forebodings with which, unfortunately, he found himself secretly
disposed to agree. He had always felt that Michael was an uncomfortable
sort of boy; in other words, that he had the inconvenient habit of
thinking things out for himself, instead of blindly accepting the
conclusions of other people.
Much as Lord Ashbridge valued the sturdy independence of character which
he himself enjoyed displaying, he appreciated it rather less highly when
it was manifested by people who were not sensible enough to agree
with him. He looked forward to Michael’s arrival that evening with the
feeling that there was a rebellious standard hoisted against the calm
blue of the evening sky, and remembering the advent of his sister he
wondered whether she would not join the insurgent. Barbara Jerome, as
has been remarked, often annoyed her brother; she also genially laughed
at him; but Lord Ashbridge, partly from affection, partly from a
loyal family sense of clanship, always expected his sister to spend
a fortnight with him in August, and would have been much hurt had she
refused to do so. Her husband, however, so far from spending a fortnight
with his brother-in-law, never spent a minute in his presence if it
could possibly be avoided, an arrangement which everybody concerned
considered to be wise, and in the interests of cordiality.
“And Barbara comes this evening as well as Michael, does she not?” he
said. “I hope she will not take Michael’s part in his absurd scheme.”
“I have given Barbara the blue room,” said Lady Ashbridge, after a
little thought. “I am afraid she may bring her great dog with her. I
hope he will not quarrel with Petsy. Petsy does not like other dogs.”
The day had been very hot, and Lord Ashbridge, not having taken any
exercise, went off to have a round of golf with the professional of the
links that lay not half a mile from the house. He considered exercise
an essential part of the true Englishman’s daily curriculum, and as
necessary a contribution to the traditional mode of life which made them
all what they were--or should be--as a bath in the morning or attendance
at church on Sunday. He did not care so much about playing golf with
a casual friend, because the casual friend, as a rule, casually beat
him--thus putting him in an un-English position--and preferred a game
with this first-class professional whose duty it was--in complete
violation of his capacities--to play just badly enough to be beaten
towards the end of the round after an exciting match. It required a
good deal of cleverness and self-control to accomplish this, for Lord
Ashbridge was a notably puerile performer, but he generally managed it
with tact and success, by dint of missing absurdly easy putts, and (here
his skill came in) by pulling and slicing his ball into far-distant
bunkers. Throughout the game it was his business to keep up a running
fire of admiring ejaculations such as “Well driven, my lord,” or “A
fine putt, my lord. Ah! dear me, I wish I could putt like that,” though
occasionally his chorus of praise betrayed him into error, and from
habit he found himself saying: “Good shot, my lord,” when my lord had
just made an egregious mess of things. But on the whole he devised so
pleasantly sycophantic an atmosphere as to procure a substantial tip for
himself, and to make Lord Ashbridge conscious of being a very superior
performer. Whether at the bottom of his heart he knew he could not play
at all, he probably did not inquire; the result of his matches and his
opponent’s skilfully-showered praise was sufficient for him. So now he
left the discouraging companionship of his wife and Petsy and walked
swingingly across the garden and the park to the links, there to seek
in Macpherson’s applause the self-confidence that would enable him to
encounter his republican sister and his musical son with an unyielding
front.
His spirits mounted rapidly as he went. It pleased him to go jauntily
across the lawn and reflect that all this smooth turf was his, to look
at the wealth of well-tended flowers in his garden and know that all
this polychromatic loveliness was bred in Lord Ashbridge’s borders (and
was graciously thrown open to the gaze of the admiring public on Sunday
afternoon, when they were begged to keep off the grass), and that Lord
Ashbridge was himself. He liked reminding himself that the towering elms
drew their leafy verdure from Lord Ashbridge’s soil; that the rows of
hen-coops in the park, populous and cheeping with infant pheasants,
belonged to the same fortunate gentleman who in November would so
unerringly shoot them down as they rocketted swiftly over the highest
of his tree-tops; that to him also appertained the long-fronted Jacobean
house which stood so commandingly upon the hill-top, and glowed with
all the mellowness of its three-hundred-years-old bricks. And his
satisfaction was not wholly fatuous nor entirely personal; all these
spacious dignities were insignia (temporarily conferred on him, like
some order, and permanently conferred on his family) of the splendid
political constitution under which England had made herself mistress
of an empire and the seas that guarded it. Probably he would have been
proud of belonging to that even if he had not been “one of us”; as it
was, the high position which he occupied in it caused that pride to be
slightly mixed with the pride that was concerned with the notion of the
Empire belonging to him and his peers.
But though he was the most profound of Tories, he would truthfully have
professed (as indeed he practised in the management of his estates) the
most Liberal opinions as to schemes for the amelioration of the lower
classes. Only, just as the music he was good enough to listen to had to
be played for him, so the tenants and farmers had to be his dependents.
He looked after them very well indeed, conceiving this to be the
prime duty of a great landlord, but his interest in them was really
proprietary. It was of his bounty, and of his complete knowledge of
what his duties as “one of us” were, that he did so, and any legislation
which compelled him to part with one pennyworth of his property for the
sake of others less fortunate he resisted to the best of his ability as
a theft of what was his. The country, in fact, if it went to the dogs
(and certain recent legislation distinctly seemed to point kennelwards),
would go to the dogs because ignorant politicians, who were most
emphatically not “of us,” forced him and others like him to recognise
the rights of dependents instead of trusting to their instinctive
fitness to dispense benefits not as rights but as acts of grace. If
England trusted to her aristocracy (to put the matter in a nutshell) all
would be well with her in the future even as it had been in the past,
but any attempt to curtail their splendours must inevitably detract
from the prestige and magnificence of the Empire. . . . And he responded
suitably to the obsequious salute of the professional, and remembered
that the entire golf links were his property, and that the Club paid a
merely nominal rental to him, just the tribute money of a penny which
was due to Caesar.
For the next hour or two after her husband had left her, Lady Ashbridge
occupied herself in the thoroughly lady-like pursuit of doing nothing
whatever; she just existed in her comfortable chair, since Barbara
might come any moment, and she would have to entertain her, which she
frequently did unawares. But as Barbara continued not to come, she took
up her perennial piece of needlework, feeling rather busy and pressed,
and had hardly done so when her sister-in-law arrived.
She was preceded by an enormous stag-hound, who, having been shut up in
her motor all the way from London, bounded delightedly, with the sense
of young limbs released, on to the terrace, and made wild leaps in
a circle round the horrified Petsy, who had just received a second
saucerful of cream. Once he dashed in close, and with a single lick of
his tongue swept the saucer dry of nutriment, and with hoarse barkings
proceeded again to dance corybantically about, while Lady Ashbridge
with faint cries of dismay waved her embroidery at him. Then, seeing
his mistress coming out of the French window from the drawing-room, he
bounded calf-like towards her, and Petsy, nearly sick with cream and
horror, was gathered to Lady Ashbridge’s bosom.
“My dear Barbara,” she said, “how upsetting your dog is! Poor Petsy’s
heart is beating terribly; she does not like dogs. But I am very pleased
to see you, and I have given you the blue room.”
It was clearly suitable that Barbara Jerome should have a large dog,
for both in mind and body she was on the large scale herself. She had a
pleasant, high-coloured face, was very tall, enormously stout, and moved
with great briskness and vigour. She had something to say on any subject
that came on the board; and, what was less usual in these days of
universal knowledge, there was invariably some point in what she said.
She had, in the ordinary sense of the word, no manners at all,
but essentially made up for this lack by her sincere and humourous
kindliness. She saw with acute vividness the ludicrous side of
everybody, herself included, and to her mind the arch-humourist of
all was her brother, whom she was quite unable to take seriously. She
dressed as if she had looted a milliner’s shop and had put on in a great
hurry anything that came to hand. She towered over her sister-in-law as
she kissed her, and Petsy, safe in her citadel, barked shrilly.
“My dear, which is the blue room?” she said. “I hope it is big enough
for Og and me. Yes, that is Og, which is short for dog. He takes two
mutton-chops for dinner, and a little something during the night if he
feels disposed, because he is still growing. Tony drove down with me,
and is in the car now. He would not come in for fear of seeing Robert,
so I ventured to tell them to take him a cup of tea there, which he will
drink with the blinds down, and then drive back to town again. He has
been made American ambassador, by the way, and will go in to dinner
before Robert. My dear, I can think of few things which Robert is less
fitted to bear than that. However, we all have our crosses, even those
of us who have our coronets also.”
Lady Ashbridge’s hospitable instincts asserted themselves. “But your
husband must come in,” she said. “I will go and tell him. And Robert has
gone to play golf.”
Barbara laughed.
“I am quite sure Tony won’t come in,” she said. “I promised him he
shouldn’t, and he only drove down with me on the express stipulation
that no risks were to be run about his seeing Robert. We must take no
chances, so let him have his tea quietly in the motor and then drive
away again. And who else is there? Anybody? Michael?”
“Michael comes this evening.”
“I am glad; I am particularly fond of Michael. Also he will play to us
after dinner, and though I don’t know one note from another, it will
relieve me of sitting in a stately circle watching Robert cheat at
patience. I always find the evenings here rather trying; they remind me
of being in church. I feel as if I were part of a corporate body, which
leads to misplaced decorum. Ah! there is the sound of Tony’s retreating
motor; his strategic movement has come off. And now give me some news,
if you can get in a word. Dear me, there is Robert coming back across
the lawn. What a mercy that Tony did not leave the motor. Robert always
walks as if he was dancing a minuet. Look, there is Og imitating him! Or
is he stalking him, thinking he is an enemy. Og, come here!”
She whistled shrilly on her fingers, and rose to greet her brother, whom
Og was still menacing, as he advanced towards her with staccato steps.
Barbara, however, got between Og and his prey, and threw her parasol at
him.
“My dear, how are you?” she said. “And how did the golf go? And did you
beat the professional?”
He suspected flippancy here, and became markedly dignified.
“An excellent match,” he said, “and Macpherson tells me I played a very
sound game. I am delighted to see you, Barbara. And did Michael come
down with you?”
“No. I drove from town. It saves time, but not expense, with your awful
trains.”
“And you are well, and Mr. Jerome?” he asked. He always called his
brother-in-law Mr. Jerome, to indicate the gulf between them. Barbara
gave a little spurt of laughter.
“Yes, his excellency is quite well,” she said. “You must call him
excellency now, my dear.”
“Indeed! That is a great step.”
“Considering that Tony began as an office-boy. How richly rewarding you
are, my dear. And shan’t I make an odd ambassadress! I haven’t been to a
Court since the dark ages, when I went to those beloved States. We will
practise after dinner, dear, and you and Marion shall be the King and
Queen, and I will try to walk backwards without tumbling on my head. You
will like being the King, Robert. And then we will be ourselves again,
all except Og, who shall be Tony and shall go out of the room before
you.”
He gave his treble little giggle, for on the whole it answered better
not to be dignified with Barbara, whenever he could remember not to
be; and Lady Ashbridge, still nursing Petsy, threw a bombshell of the
obvious to explode the conversation.
“Og has two mutton-chops for his dinner,” she said, “and he is growing
still. Fancy!”
Lord Ashbridge took a refreshing glance at the broad stretch of country
that all belonged to him.
“I am rather glad to have this opportunity of talking to you, my dear
Barbara,” he said, “before Michael comes.”
“His train gets in half an hour before dinner” said Lady Ashbridge. “He
has to change at Stoneborough.”
“Quite so. I heard from Michael this morning, saying that he has
resigned his commission in the Guards, and is going to take up music
seriously.”
Barbara gave a delighted exclamation.
“But how perfectly splendid!” she said. “Fancy a Comber doing anything
original! Michael and I are the only Combers who ever have, since
Combers ‘arose from out the azure main’ in the year one. I married an
American; that’s something, though it’s not up to Michael!”
“That is not quite my view of it,” said he. “As for its being original,
it would be original enough if Marion eloped with a Patagonian.”
Lady Ashbridge let fall her embroidery at this monstrous suggestion.
“You are talking very wildly, Robert,” she said, in a pained voice.
“My dear, get on with your sacred carpet,” said he. “I am talking to
Barbara. I have already ascertained your--your lack of views on the
subject. I was saying, Barbara, that mere originality is not a merit.”
“No, you never said that,” remarked Lady Ashbridge.
“I should have if you had allowed me to. And as for your saying that he
has done it, Barbara, that is very wide of the mark, and I intend shall
continue to be so.”
“Dear great Bashaw, that is just what you said to me when I told you
I was going to marry his Excellency. But I did. And I think it is a
glorious move on Michael’s part. It requires brain to find out what you
like, and character to go and do it. Combers haven’t got brains as
a rule, you see. If they ever had any, they have degenerated into
conservative instincts.”
He again refreshed himself with the landscape. The roofs of Ashbridge
were visible in the clear sunset. . . . Ashbridge paid its rents with
remarkable regularity.
“That may or may not be so,” he said, forgetting for a moment the danger
of being dignified. “But Combers have position.”
Barbara controlled herself admirably. A slight tremor shook her, which
he did not notice.
“Yes, dear,” she said. “I allow that Combers have had for many
generations a sort of acquisitive cunning, for all we possess has
come to us by exceedingly prudent marriages. They have also--I am an
exception here--the gift of not saying very much, which certainly has an
impressive effect, even when it arises from not having very much to say.
They are sticky; they attract wealth, and they have the force called vis
inertiae, which means that they invest their money prudently. You should
hear Tony--well, perhaps you had better not hear Tony. But now here
is Michael showing that he has got tastes. Can you wonder that I’m
delighted? And not only has he got tastes, but he has the strength of
character to back them. Michael, in the Guards too! It was a perfect
farce, and he’s had the sense to see it. He hated his duties, and he
hated his diversions. Now Francis--”
“I am afraid Michael has always been a little jealous of Francis,”
remarked his father.
This roused Barbara; she spoke quite seriously:
“If you really think that, my dear,” she said, “you have the distinction
of being the worst possible judge of character that the world has ever
known. Michael might be jealous of anybody else, for the poor boy feels
his physical awkwardness most sensitively, but Francis is just the one
person he really worships. He would do anything in the world for him.”
The discussion with Barbara was being even more fruitless than that with
his wife, and Lord Ashbridge rose.
“All I can do, then, is to ask you not to back Michael up,” he said.
“My dear, he won’t need backing up. He’s a match for you by himself. But
if Michael, after thoroughly worsting you, asks me my opinion, I shall
certainly give it him. But he won’t ask my opinion first. He will strew
your limbs, Robert, over this delightful terrace.”
“Michael’s train is late,” said Lady Ashbridge, hearing the stable clock
strike. “He should have been here before this.”
Barbara had still a word to say, and disregarded this quencher.
“But don’t think, Robert,” she said, “that because Michael resists your
wishes and authority, he will be enjoying himself. He will hate doing
it, but that will not stop him.”
Lord Ashbridge was not a bully; he had merely a profound sense of his
own importance.
“We will see about resistance,” he said.
Barbara was not so successful on this occasion, and exploded loudly:
“You will, dear, indeed,” she said.
Michael meantime had been travelling down from London without perturbing
himself over the scene with his father which he knew lay before him.
This was quite characteristic of him; he had a singular command over his
imagination when he had made up his mind to anything, and never indulged
in the gratuitous pain of anticipation. Today he had an additional
bulwark against such self-inflicted worries, for he had spent his last
two hours in town at the vocal recital of a singer who a month before
had stirred the critics into rhapsody over her gift of lyric song.
Up till now he had had no opportunity of hearing her; and, with the
panegyrics that had been showered on her in his mind, he had gone with
the expectation of disappointment. But now, an hour afterwards, the
wheels of the train sang her songs, and in the inward ear he could
recapture, with the vividness of an hallucination, the timbre of
that wonderful voice and also the sweet harmonies of the pianist who
accompanied her.
The hall had been packed from end to end, and he had barely got to his
seat, the only one vacant in the whole room, when Miss Sylvia Falbe
appeared, followed at once by her accompanist, whose name occurred
nowhere on the programme. Two neighbours, however, who chatted shrilly
during the applause that greeted them, informed him that this was
Hermann, “dear Hermann; there is no one like him!” But it occurred to
Michael that the singer was like him, though she was fair and he dark.
But his perception of either of them visually was but vague; he had come
to hear and not to see. Neither she nor Hermann had any music with them,
and Hermann just glanced at the programme, which he put down on the top
of the piano, which, again unusually, was open. Then without pause they
began the set of German songs--Brahms, Schubert, Schumann--with which
the recital opened. And for one moment, before he lost himself in the
ecstasy of hearing, Michael found himself registering the fact that
Sylvia Falbe had one of the most charming faces he had ever seen. The
next he was swallowed up in melody.
She had the ease of the consummate artist, and each note, like the gates
of the New Jerusalem, was a pearl, round and smooth and luminous almost,
so that it was as if many-coloured light came from her lips. Nor was
that all; it seemed as if the accompaniment was made by the song itself,
coming into life with the freshness of the dawn of its creation; it was
impossible to believe that one mind directed the singer and another the
pianist, and if the voice was an example of art in excelsis, not less
exalted was the perfection of the player. Not for a moment through the
song did he take his eyes off her; he looked at her with an intensity of
gaze that seemed to be reading the emotion with which the lovely melody
filled her. For herself, she looked straight out over the hall, with
grey eyes half-closed, and mouth that in the pauses of her song was
large and full-lipped, generously curving, and face that seemed lit with
the light of the morning she sang of. She was the song; Michael thought
of her as just that, and the pianist who watched and understood her so
unerringly was the song, too. They had for him no identity of their own;
they were as remote from everyday life as the mind of Schumann which
they made so vivid. It was then that they existed.
The last song of the group she sang in English, for it was “Who is
Sylvia?” There was a buzz of smiles and whispers among the front row in
the pause before it, and regaining her own identity for a moment, she
smiled at a group of her friends among whom clearly it was a cliche
species of joke that she should ask who Sylvia was, and enumerate her
merits, when all the time she was Sylvia. Michael felt rather impatient
at this; she was not anybody just now but a singer. And then came the
divine inevitable simplicity of perfect words and the melody preordained
for them. The singer, as he knew, was German, but she had no trace of
foreign accent. It seemed to him that this was just one miracle the
more; she had become English because she was singing what Shakespeare
wrote.
The next group, consisting of modern French songs, appeared to Michael
utterly unworthy of the singer and the echoing piano. If you had it in
you to give reality to great and simple things, it was surely a waste
to concern yourself with these little morbid, melancholy manikins, these
marionettes. But his emotions being unoccupied he attended more to the
manner of the performance, and in especial to the marvellous technique,
not so much of the singer, but of the pianist who caused the rain to
fall and the waters reflect the toneless grey skies. He had never, even
when listening to the great masters, heard so flawless a comprehension
as this anonymous player, incidentally known as Hermann, exhibited. As
far as mere manipulation went, it was, as might perhaps be expected,
entirely effortless, but effortless no less was the understanding of the
music. It happened. . . . It was like that.
All of this so filled Michael’s mind as he travelled down that evening
to Ashbridge, that he scarcely remembered the errand on which he went,
and when it occurred to him it instantly sank out of sight again, lost
in the recollection of the music which he had heard to-day and which
belonged to the art that claimed the allegiance of his soul. The rattle
of the wheels was alchemised into song, and as with half-closed eyes he
listened to it, there swam across it now the full face of the singer,
now the profile of the pianist, that had stood out white and intent
against the dark panelling behind his head. He had gleaned one fact at
the box-office as he hurried out to catch his train: this Hermann was
the singer’s brother, a teacher of the piano in London, and apparently
highly thought of.