were still among the woods; and the house—she knew—stood beyond the
woods, at the brow of the hill. Yet Patricia saw it, clear and perfect
in the eye of her mind—a long low red-roofed home, with square windows
opening out from walls of mellow brick-work, criss-crossed with
weather-beaten oak, onto terraced garden. Below the garden pastures
sloped to dark-green tree-clumps; and beyond the tree-clumps, shining
silver in the gaps between, wound the river. . . .
The road forked. Instinctively Patricia swung the car left-handed. Trees
closed in above them; macadam under their wheels narrowed to a
turf-edged track.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” asked Francis.
“Certain,” she answered; and drove on, between the serried
tree-trunks,—beech and larch and alder, slim pillars of brown,
gray-green and silver about their path.
“Look,” said Patricia, “the woods end.”
She spoke very quietly, pointing to the door of blue which widened as
they climbed to it, letting them out from the trees. The car dropped a
hundred yards between the warm coral-and-ivory of hawthorn hedgerows;
seemed to stop of its own accord at a quaint red-walled brown-gabled
house whose lower windows were almost level with the Crossley’s wheels.
“This isn’t the place,” thought Patricia. Yet somehow the peaked and
ivied gable with its one leaded window looked familiar—familiar as the
road they had climbed through the woods. Just under the window,
half-hidden by the ivy, was an old sign-board: “T. Tebbits. Builder &
Contractor,” read Patricia. But Francis, sharper-eyed, had seen the
other sign which peered over the garden-hedge—a plain square of oak,
newly painted with the words:—
“TWO GOOD HOUSES TO LET.”
“I say, Pat,” he said, pointing to it, “why not try here? . . .”
There came out of the house a hatless man with weather-beaten face,
clean-shaven except for the fringe of hair under his chin, bushy of
eyebrows, dressed collarless in a rusty black cardigan jacket and
corduroy-trousers. He had hard blue eyes, hairy ears, thin lips; might
have been any age from fifty-five to eighty.
“Might you be wanting anything?” he asked.
“Are you Mr. Tebbits?” Patricia smiled down at him.
“That’s my name, missis.”
“We came about the houses,” went on Patricia, indicating the
notice-board.
“Be you from the agents?” asked Mr. Tebbits suspiciously.
“No. We were just passing, and we thought. . . .”
“Well, that’s a good thing.” The old man smiled grimly. “Because I won’t
have no more agents. They be all robbers, it seems to me. Now what sort
of a house was you looking for, missis? I asks because it’s no good a
wasting your time if you wants the sort of house I hasn’t got. There be
two of ’em, one’s a bit cottage-like and t’other’s bigger. But they
bain’t neither of ’em what you’d call big.”
“Are they a long way away?” interrupted Patricia.
“Well, missis, one is middling far and t’other’s quite close.
Sunflowers—that’s the name of the bigger one and a silly name it be, to
my way of thinking, because there bain’t never a sunflower near
it—her’s just up the road. T’other. . . .”
“Could we go and see it, do you think?” Patricia interrupted again.
“Aye. If you’ll bide a minute, I’ll just go and get my cap.” He
disappeared into the house; re-appeared.
“Now if you’ll drive on slowly, missis, I’ll follow you. ’Tis the first
house you comes to on the left hand side of the road. ’Bout a hundred
and fifty yards down, two hundred mebbe.”
Mr. Tebbits declined a lift, and they motored on without him; rounded a
bend in the hedge-rows; and saw in front of them, half hidden by
greenery, low red roofs that curled up to high red chimney-stacks and
down to square windows, set in walls of mellow brick-work criss-crossed
with the gray of weather-beaten oak.
Patricia’s heart gave a great leap: for this was the very home she had
imagined as they came through the woods!
They drew up at a wooden gate, painted dull green, supported by low
pillars of old brick-work between the hawthorn hedges; saw, peering
through it, a small gravel-drive, a huge walnut tree just in leaf, and a
long low house, door in centre, double-floored under projecting eaves.
“Francis,” cried Patricia, “this is _it_.”
He looked at her; saw a woman transformed. Her cheeks glowed; her lips
were half-parted; her slumbrous eyes danced and kindled.
“My dear Pat . . .” he began.
“Don’t tell me I haven’t seen it yet, Francis. Don’t tell me it won’t
do; that the drains will be all wrong; that it’s a hundred miles from
anywhere. Because I don’t care. This is going to be my home—mine and
Peter’s. . . .”
Mr. Tebbits found them by the gate.
“You been wounded, mister?” he asked, looking at the sticks Francis
carried.
“Yes,” admitted Francis.
“Ah. At the war, I expect. This be a mighty bad war. I’ve got five sons
there myself. All in the Ox and Bucks they be. Two’s Corporals. Charlie,
he couldn’t go; nor Harry neither.” He turned to Patricia. “This be
Sunflowers, missis. Likely you’d care to go in.”
He swung open the gate; held it while Francis hobbled through. “The
paddick goes with the house,” explained Tebbits, “but if you wasn’t
thinking ’bout keeping stock, I’d be just as glad to have it for my
cows.”
Patricia looked dumbly over the knee-deep green to the sun-lit
tree-fringe beyond. The house, _her house_, stood in a semi-circle of
woodland; the green trees folded it lovingly. What did she care about
keeping stock?
Mr. Tebbits drew a vast key from his trouser-pocket; opened the
front-door.
“This be what we calls the hall,” he began, “the kitchens be along the
passage. . . .”
Mr. Tebbits talked, as the British peasant talks, interminably
repetitive, all the time they were inspecting “Sunflowers.” But Patricia
hardly heard him. Already in her mind she had taken the place; was
settling herself and her family into it.
This hall now, with its deep fireplace, its windows either side the
door, (which would need heavy brown-velvet curtains), must be the
drawing-room. The dining-room, leading out of the drawing-room, would be
small, still. . . . And the tiny “study” must be Peter’s. “Kitchen-range
good,” thought Patricia. “Hope it doesn’t burn too much coal. . . .”
She passed up the balustered stair-case, Tebbits clumping at her heels;
found square bed-rooms, opening onto greenery, a good modern
bath-room—(“wonder of wonders,” thought Patricia)—and, best of all, at
the end of the corridor, running full-length of the north side, a long
apartment which would be ideal for the children. . . .
Of course, she had fallen in love with the place; meant to have it at
all costs. Yet even Francis, who had as yet very little sense of home,
admitted to himself, as he waited in the bare hall, the excellence of
Sunflowers. It was a strange combination of solid pre-Georgian brickwork
without; of old wood and modern plaster within.
Mr. Tebbits’ grandfather had converted it originally, from the shell of
a three-hundred-year-old tithe barn; running his floor-boards over beams
of oak; letting in the heavy fan-lighted front door, the deep
window-sashes; throwing out the red-tiled square-beamed kitchen. Mr.
Tebbits’ father had unroofed the kitchen, carefully, preserving _his_
father’s tilework, added the long room above. Then the grandson of the
original builder, dissatisfied with the narrow entrance corridor, had
broken it down, joined it to the parlour. Till finally _his_ son
Charlie—(“he be a bit new-fangled be Charlie”)—had seized the
opportunity presented when the new Company ran its mains over the hill,
to modernize the water-supply, to construct a bath-room. (“An’ a good
job they boys made of it, missis. These pipes, they _be_ pipes.”)
It was while replastering and “making all good with Parian” that the
idea of a “garrige” had come to Charlie Tebbits: and a “garrige” he and
his brothers forthwith constructed, using (as their great-grandfather
had used his tithe-barn) the shell of an old ramshackle stable, now
concrete-floored and water-tight. But the “modern” stabling constructed
by _their_ father, the “boys” had not touched, except for the throwing
of two stalls into a loose-box—just “case any one might be wanting it.”
Altogether, an amazing find. And amazing the fore-knowledge of this
detail and that which overcame Patricia as she passed from room to room.
But most amazing of all the certainty with which she flung open the
Eastward window half-way up the staircase; looked out onto the gravel
terrace, and the slopes of green pasturage dotted with dark tree-clumps
through which, molten in the drooping sun, flashed far glimpses of the
river Thames.
“That be Arlsfield village, missis,” explained Tebbits, pointing a
two-mile-distant cluster of buildings above which the smoke spired
lazily. “You can’t see the Hall from here. Them big chestnuts do hide
it. Too close to the Hall, they be: and often I’ve told the old Colonel
so myself. But he’s that set on his trees. . . .”
“What’s the name of the Hall?” interrupted Pat.
“Arlsfield Hall, mum.”
And, for the second time, the name sounded familiar. Indeed in all that
smiling prospect—jade fields of young wheat, emerald of pasture, trees
and village and far-away river—only one feature puzzled Patricia. The
oily magnolia-leaves at window-sill, she seemed to know; and the ochre
gravel below, and every detail of the sloping country beyond them. But
the slip of orchard, foaming in wave on wave of wave-green grass and
snow-white blossom between her terrace and the country-side, her strange
inward memories could not recall.
“Planted they trees ’bout twenty-five years ago. Good trees they be,
too. Blenheims mostly,” said Tebbits. . . .
It was long after five when Patricia finished her inspection. “Likely,
you’d care for a dish of tea, missis,” invited the old man: and to tea
in Mr. Tebbits’ kitchen the three went.
Miss Tebbits—she was sixty and the old man’s daughter all over, from
thin lips to the hair in her ears,—served them their “dish of tea” in
china which had no right to exist outside a museum; brought home-made
cake, home-made bread, a great dish of saffron butter: and while the
daughter served, her father talked.
“He didn’t believe in leases,” he told Patricia. “If so be she wanted
the house, all she had to do was to say so. He’d always got his sixty
pounds a year for it: ’cept when people didn’t keep stock. Then he took
fifty-five. ’Twas a bit dear like, but his son Charlie wouldn’t have him
take less. . . .” And here the old man explained how Charlie had moved
the building business to Arlsfield, leaving him and Harry with the farm.
“I be a bit old for the building, missis. Turned eighty-five. But
Charlie, he’ll do all the papering and the painting for you. We don’t
let any one ’cept ourselves touch our houses. . . .”
Tea over, he stood cap-in-hand to bid them good-bye.
“We’ll be down again tomorrow, Mr. Tebbits,” smiled Patricia, engine
throbbing under her finger on the throttle-lever.
“Very good, missis. I’ll have Charlie come up here to meet you. Likely,
if you take the house, there’ll be one or two things to talk over.”
§ 5
They came not only next day but the day after, and the day after that.
Charlie, a huge hairy man, only one degree less obstinate than his
father, consented after some persuasion to an agreement being drawn up
by a Henley lawyer; promised Patricia that she should be “in” by the end
of June; proposed ribbed papers, whites and creams and pale lemons for
the walls, brown paint for this room, cream for that; suggested
diffidently that if by any chance she were short of furniture, he could
easily make “chairs and tables and sideboards and such like”—in proof
of which he took her to his own thatched-roofed cottage, and showed her
specimens of his work, fine solid stuff, chiselled simply and lovingly
from the seasoned oaks and walnuts of which his timber-yard still held
store. For Charlie Tebbits was craftsman by heritage.
But the village, apart from Charlie’s cottage and workshops, proved
disappointing: most of the old cottages had been crowded out by
jerry-built atrocities; a tin-roofed chapel, a pseudo-artistic public
house, a “Recreation Room” (also of tin, but painted red), and a
peculiarly offensive stucco school-house, betrayed all too clearly the
trail of the urban serpent.
“Never mind, Pat,” consoled Francis. “You can hardly see it from
Sunflowers.”
Church and vicarage stood, (as if fearing contamination, they had
withdrawn themselves from these evidences of humanity), a full mile away
on the road to Arlsfield Hall—a fine Georgian house, ring-fenced, among
green vistas of parklands and woods much in need of the axe.
It was while circling Arlsfield Hall that Francis and Patricia found Mr.
Tebbits’ second “house”—a straggling cottage, brown-roofed and
mellow-walled. The cottage lay in a hollow of the road. Woods crept down
to it from the west; eastwards, corn fields swelled to a fringe of
spruce trees. South of it, lay the park of Arlsfield Hall; and north, a
mile by the trodden short-cut across the pasture, Tebbits Farm and
“Sunflowers.”
Exploring they found undulating corridors, quaint octagonal rooms,
panelled in age-dark oak, and—at the top of a broad shallow stair-case,
up which Francis scarcely needed Patricia’s arm—an enormous apartment,
looking through huge windows clean across the park to sunlit hills.
“Lord, Pat,” exclaimed Francis, “a man could write here.”
He looked about the room, measuring with one of his sticks, the
window-seat, the distance from window-seat to fireplace, the recesses on
either side of the fireplace; pointing out where the desk should stand,
where the bookcases. . . . And in that moment—though it took two more
visits, the first accompanied by Charlie Tebbits, the second by Prout,
before Francis eventually made up his mind—Patricia knew that she would
not be neighbourless at Sunflowers. . . .
§ 6
The night after he had signed the agreement for Glen Cottage, Francis
dined at Harley Street.
“A fine pair of idiots you two seem to have made of yourselves while
I’ve been away,” commented Heron Baynet, who had just returned from a
fortnight’s holiday, after listening for over an hour to the usual
chatter of people obsessed with new possessions. “Within six months,
you’ll both be yearning for London.”
“I wonder,” said Francis. “Certainly Arlsfield doesn’t possess a
picture-palace. . . .”
“Arlsfield,” interrupted the doctor, (as if by common consent, neither
had mentioned the name of that unhappy village), “Arlsfield!”
For a moment he sat perfectly still, staring at one of the electric
candle-sticks on the dinner-table: then he pulled note-book and pencil
out of his pocket; turned to Patricia; and said, in the level voice of
the consulting-room:—
“You mentioned a little while ago, Pat, that this house—what’s its name
again?—Sunflowers—thanks—seemed familiar to you. I want you to
describe to me, as accurately as you can, just in what way it seemed
familiar.”
“Why do you want to know, pater?”
“Never mind about that. Tell me just how you felt both before you came
to it and when you were in it. . . .”
Astonished, Patricia began her story, doing her utmost to recall each
fleeting sensation of that first afternoon.
“All except the orchard, I seemed to know perfectly,” she finished.
And her father, looking up from his note-book, said, “No. You couldn’t
be expected to know about that. As far as I can recollect, there wasn’t
one.”
Francis, instinctively setting a story, glanced first at the lined face
of the little consultant, then into the astonished eyes of his daughter.
“Explain please, pater,” commanded Patricia. “What was it? One of those
cases of pre-natal vision you’ve always wanted to confirm.”
“No such luck!” Her father closed the note-book, returned it to his
pocket. “Very interesting though. You _had_ seen the place before. When
you were two years old, your mother and I drove you there—probably
through the very road up which you and Francis motored. She wanted me to
buy a country practice. Sunflowers—I’d forgotten the name till Francis
mentioned Arlsfield—was a doctor’s house in those days. You ask old
Tebbits and see if I’m not right.”
“Curious thing the human brain,” he went on, “always taking
snap-shots—just like a camera. Stores its pictures away too, and keeps
them for when they’re wanted. We’re working on this ‘picture’ theory
now—for our shell-shock cases. If anything weakens the brain—a shock
for instance, or overwork—the pictures get mixed up: confused, we call
it. No one seems to know how soon the brain starts taking its snapshots:
some say the process starts prior to birth. I don’t believe that. . . .
Then there are imaginative pictures. You know the impression of reality
a good book makes on you, or a well-told story. . . .” He expanded the
theory, ending: “It was because I didn’t want you to make imaginative
pictures that I took my notes _before_ I told you the truth.”
“Well I’m glad there was no mystery,” smiled Pat. “I don’t want any
ghosts at Sunflowers.”
But Francis Gordon, whose writer’s brain could summon and set aside both
real and imaginative pictures at will, sat very silent, visioning in
pale gold against the dark panelling of his new home the head of a girl
in America—a girl whose last letter had concluded:
“Somehow or other I don’t think I shall ever get married.”
PART TWENTY-THREE
“BEER” BATTERY
§ 1
If this were a “war-book,” at least two chapters might here be devoted
to the months which the Fourth Southdown Brigade spent in and around
Neuve Eglise. But since we are only considering war as it affected the
fortunes of our Mr. Jameson, his wife Patricia, and a few other
individuals, the reader at this point—as once before, in the City of
Fear—is asked to use his or her imagination.
Suffices, that the war went on. In England, goaded by a strong Press,
vacillating politicians introduced their weakling Conscription Act with
a brave fanfare of trumpets; a few perverts developed a “conscience”
which did not prevent their eating food brought to them at the risk of
human life; the bulk of the nation, humping its pack with a shrug, were
much consoled by the official announcement of the Jutland Victory as a
defeat. In the firing-line, the Huns hammered vainly at Verdun, the
British and French prepared counter-attack on the Somme.
But Peter Jameson, Cigar Merchant, cared for none of these things. He
had reached that particular point in the soldier’s existence which is
only described by the French word “_cafard_” or its Anglo-Saxon
equivalent “fed-up.”
How much the mental, how much the physical contributed to this
“_cafard_” of our Mr. Jameson—are questions for the psychologist.
Remain the facts that he was bored, irritable, depressed—and more
intolerably efficient in the routine duties of his Adjutancy than ever.
Only two thoughts consoled: one personal, “I’ve made such a muck of
things at home that perhaps the front is the best place for me”: and the
other, “Besides, if anything _does_ happen—Pat and the kids will get
that insurance money.”
His home letters, of course, continued to depict the Brigade as a
permanent poker-school established some leagues behind the firing-line!
§ 2
Meanwhile, the inevitable wastages of warfare—commenced at Loos and
continued in the City of Fear—went on among that collection of
voluntary fighters known as the Fourth Southdown Brigade, Royal Field
Artillery. Now “re-organization” came to complete the process. “Billy”
Williams and his command were transferred _en bloc_ to the enlarged
Divisional Ammunition Column—still presided over by that same Colonel
Mallory who had dined with the Weasel on Christmas Eve, 1914: Bromley
and his eighteen-pounders were exchanged for a Howitzer battery: Doctor
Carson secured a specialist appointment at the Base—his place being
taken by Laurillard, a young and not too sympathetic student of St.
Bartholomew’s hospital: Horrocks the Veterinary officer took promotion,
Morency a leg-breaking fall from his horse, and Stanley Purves to an
impassioned flow of soldier poetry.
“Shan’t have a friend left at this rate,” thought our Mr. Jameson. And
then to crown disasters, the Weasel announced his own promotion to
Brigadier.
“Take you with me as A.D.C.,” he rasped as they wandered out, on that
last morning, to inspect the batteries.
“Thank you, Colonel.” The phrase rose easily to Peter’s lips; but the
tone of it was utterly non-committal.
They walked on.
“Well?” continued Stark.
“It’s very decent of you, Colonel, but—”
“Nice soft job, P.J.!”
“Too soft, Colonel.”
They looked each other in the eyes. Then the Weasel said: “You’re a
married man, P.J.” and Peter, stubbornly: “What difference does that
make, Colonel?”
“The pay’s better.”
“I didn’t join the army to make money, sir.”
“Damn you, P.J. Don’t ‘Sir’ me when we’re alone.” The rasp softened.
“Don’t make an ass of yourself, P.J., I know you’ve had a pretty thin
time, one way and another since you joined up. . . .”
“But at that,” as General Stark wrote his young wife some days later,
“he seemed to freeze up completely; and when Revelsworth came to take
over command—you’ll remember Revelsworth, darling, he used to be in the
old show at Hillsea—P.J. asked me, as a particular favour, to send him
to a battery. . . . He’s a dashed sight too good for ordinary
subaltern’s work; but of course I couldn’t tell him so. . . . Bit of the
fanatic about P.J. . . . Said he wanted to kill a Hun or two. . . . I
shouldn’t mention anything to that nice wife of his when you write her.”
Which will serve to explain why Lieutenant-Colonel Percival
Revelsworth’s orders bore the signature: “Stanley Purves, Lieutenant and
Adjutant, Fourth Southdown Bde., R.F.A.”
§ 3
“Beer” Battery welcomed Peter with cordiality if not with effusion. The
clean-shaven Sandiland ordered Quarter-master Sergeant (ex rough-rider)
Murgatroyd to “snaffle a tent next time he saw one lyin’ about.”
Pettigrew,—cheeks redder, eyes bluer, spirits higher, than even in
Shoreham days—twinkled a “Wait till we’ve put you through it, P.J.”
Charlie Straker held out a big hand, and stuttered: “T-thought you
w-wouldn’t stand being Adjutant much longer.” Lindsay, newly-arrived
junior member of the Mess—a raw-boned raw-voiced Aberdonian boy, with a
budding moustache, and a passion for what he termed “Obsairvation
Duties”—immediately offered to point out some “verra interesting
features of the ground”; but being informed by Straker that “P.J. knew
the ground a damn sight better than he did,” subsided into disciplinary
silence.
Peter himself, once he grew accustomed to the restricted viewpoint of a
battery-subaltern (who sees very little of war except his own particular
job), lost a little of his _cafard_ by the change of duties.
The open air life suited him, improved his temper. He felt further than
ever removed from the annoyances of business. His by-weekly letters to
Patricia, busy with the furnishing of Sunflowers, grew almost
sentimental.
On the whole, he liked his new work better than the old. It held more
excitement, less routine. During his first duty-spell alone at the “O.
Pip” on Hill 63, he spotted a party of three Huns laying telephone-wires
in the open; and managed to burst his shell exactly in their faces. The
thrill of it—a thrill only to be compared with tiger shooting from an
elephant howdah—kept Peter’s eye to his telescope for the rest of the
day. And his two spells “in the trenches,” though spent in great peace
at the sand-bagged Battalion Headquarters, also gave him a fresh
experience.