"Yes, it's rather decent," Edred allowed. "We've got a swannery at the
back of our garden, and that's rather decent too. They get awfully waxy
sometimes. The swans, I mean," he supplemented. And in such
surroundings, Jasmine felt, even swans had no business to lose their
tempers.
The Deanery itself was externally the gravest and most impressive of the
many grave and impressive houses round the Close. Beheld thus it
presented such an imperturbable perfection of appearance that before he
knocked upon its door or rang its bright brass bell, the most
self-satisfied visitor would always accord it the respect of a momentary
pause. But when the door was opened--and it was opened by a butler with
all the outward and visible signs of what a decanal butler ought to
be--that air of prosperous comfort, of dignity and solid charm,
vanished. It was not that the entrance-hall was ill-equipped. Everything
was there that one could have expected to find in a Dean's hall; but
everything had an indescribably battered look, the irreverent mark that
an invading army passing through Silchester might have left upon the
Deanery, had some of the soldiers been billeted there. It was haunted by
a sense of everything's having served some other purpose from that for
which it was originally intended, and the farther one penetrated into
the house the more evident were the ravages of whatever ruinous
influence had been at work. Even Jasmine with her slight experience of
English houses was taken aback by the contradiction between the exterior
and the interior of the Deanery. She was used to entering Italian
palaces and finding interiors as bare and comfortless as a barrack; but
in them the discomfort and bareness had always been due to the
inadequate means of their owners. It was certainly not poverty that
caused the contradiction at the Deanery. The solution of the puzzle
burst upon her when with a simultaneous onrush her cousins, each
shouting at the top of his voice 'Bags I telling the mater Jasmine is
here,' stormed the staircase like troops. The butler, listening to their
yells dying away along the landing above, paused for a moment from the
gracious pomp of his ministrations and observed to Jasmine: "Very
high-spirited young gentlemen."
"But is the pony quite safe?" she asked, looking back to where the
governess-cart with her trunk still inside was waiting driverless
outside the door.
"Yes, miss, she's not a very high-spirited animal, and she's usually
very quiet after the young gentlemen have driven her."
Again the yells resounded, this time with increasing volume as the three
boys drew nearer, leaping, sliding, rolling, and cannoning down the
staircase abreast. Jasmine received a thump from Edred, who was the
first to reach her, a thump that was evidently the sign of victory,
because the other two immediately resigned her to his escort for the
necessary presentation to her aunt, while they went out to attend to the
pony.
Aunt Ellen's room had escaped the pillaged appearance which upstairs at
the Deanery was even more conspicuous than below; it was crowded with
religious pictures in religious Oxford frames, religious Gothic
furniture, and religious books. Apart from the fruit of her own
religious tastes, Aunt Ellen had directly inherited from the Bishop of
Clapham his religious equipment (accoutrements would be too highly
coloured a word for the relics of that broad-minded prelate); and
perhaps because she was fond of her episcopal father she had hesitated
to sacrifice his memory, together with her husband and the rest of the
household, upon the common altar of those six household gods, her sons.
At any rate, when she carefully explained to her niece that the room was
a sanctuary not so much for her own use as for old time's sake, Jasmine
accepted its survival as due to some sentimental reason. But if Aunt
Ellen's room had escaped, Aunt Ellen herself had certainly not. The
weather-beaten gauntness of Uncle Eneas and Uncle Hector was in Aunt
Ellen much exaggerated, although an aquiline nose preserved her from
being what she otherwise certainly would have been, a grotesque of
English womanhood, or rather, what English people would like to consider
a grotesque of English womanhood; Jasmine, however, with many years'
experience of English tourists landing at Sirene after a rough voyage
across the Bay of Naples, considered Aunt Ellen to be typically English.
She had acquired that masculine look which falls to so many women who
have produced a number of sons. When Jasmine knew her better she found
that her religious views and emotions resembled the religious views and
emotions that are so widely spread among men of action, such as sea
captains and Indian colonels. Her ignorance of anything except the
gentlemanly religion of the professional classes was unlimited; her
prejudice was unbounded. Jasmine soon discovered that the main reason
why she had not been invited to the Deanery before was her aunt's fear
of introducing a papist into the household. It was this, apparently,
that weighed much more with her than the accounts she had received from
Lady Grant of their niece's behaviour. True, she informed Jasmine that
she had been anxious to correct the looseness of her moral tone. But how
could she compete with priest-craft? She actually asked her niece this!
Her religious apprehensions were only overcome by the menace of waking
up one morning to find Jasmine the sole heiress of Uncle Matthew's
fortune, which, as she wrote to her sister-in-law, without presuming to
impugn the disposition of God, would be entirely unjust. It was not that
she dreaded a direct competition with her own boys, because, proud
though she was of them and of herself for having produced them, she
never deceived herself into supposing that a personal encounter between
them and their uncle would be anything but fatal, not merely to their
chances of ultimate wealth, but also to her own. On her own chances she
did build. She could not believe that her uncle (painfully without
belief in a future state as he was) would ignore the rights of a niece
married to the Dean of Silchester. After all, a Dean was something more
than a religious figure; he was a worldly figure. Aunt Ellen was sharply
aware of the might of a Dean, because that might was mainly exercised by
her, the Dean himself by now taking not the least interest in anything
except the history of England before the Conquest. Jasmine had derived
an entirely false impression of her aunt from her letters, which, filled
as they were with religious sentimentality, suggested that Aunt Ellen
was softer than the rest of the family, that perhaps she was even like
her own beloved father. She found, however, that except where her sons
were concerned Aunt Ellen was hard, fierce, martial, and domineering.
All her affection she had kept for her sons, all her duty for God.
Jasmine was not so much discouraged as she might have been by her aunt's
personality, because she found at any rate her three youngest cousins a
great improvement on Lettice and Pamela, and if the three eldest ones
turned out to be only half as amusing, she felt that she should not
dislike her visit to the Deanery. Besides, she had the satisfaction of
knowing that this was quite definitely only a visit, and that there was
no proposal pending to attach her permanently to the household as a poor
relation.
Jasmine did not discover all this about her aunt at their first meeting;
the conversation then was crammed with the commonplace of family news;
and how Aunt Ellen would have resented the notion that any news about
the Grants could be described as commonplace! She might have gone on
talking until tea-time if Edred's continuous kicking of the leg of her
father's favourite table had not suggested a diversion in the form of
Jasmine's long-delayed introduction to the Dean. She had hesitated to
interfere directly with her son's harmless if rather irritating little
pleasure; but the varnish was beginning to show signs of Edred's boots,
and she announced that, although Uncle Arnold was working, he would no
doubt in the circumstances forgive them for disturbing him.
Jasmine smiled pleasantly at the implied compliment, not realizing that
the circumstances were the table's, not hers.
"I say, need I go?" asked Edred. He dreaded these visits to the study,
because they sometimes ended in his being detained to copy out notes for
his father.
"No, dear, you need not go."
Edred dashed off with a whoop of delight, turning round in the doorway
to shout to Jasmine that he would be in the garden with Why and Ethel
should she wish presently to be shown the swans.
"Poor boy," sighed Aunt Ellen when he was gone, and upon Jasmine's
asking what was the matter with him, she told her that he had just
failed for Osborne.
"It's such a blow to him," she murmured in a plaintive voice that was
ridiculously out of keeping with her rockbound appearance. "If he had
passed, he had made up his mind to become an admiral, and now I suppose
we must send him back to school in September. Poor little boy, he's
quite heartbroken. I've had to be very gentle with him lately."
Jasmine supposed it might be tactless to observe that Edred showed no
signs of heartbreak, and instead of commenting she enquired
sympathetically what Ethelred was going to do.
"Ah, poor Ethelred's a great problem. He wants to be an engineer, and
really he is very clever with his fingers; but his father is quite
opposed to anything in the nature of technical education until he's had
an ordinary education. I think myself it is a pity, but Uncle Arnold is
quite firm on that point. Ethelred was at Mr. Arkwright's school until
Easter, but the school doctor wrote and told us that he thought the air
on the east coast was too bracing for him. In fact, he insisted on his
leaving for the dear boy's own sake."
"And Edwy?"
"Ah, poor Edwy! His heart is weak, and we can only hope that with care
he will become strong enough for the Army by the time he goes to
Sandhurst."
"Is his heart very weak?" Jasmine asked.
"Oh, very weak," her aunt replied, "and he has set it--his heart, I
mean--on being a soldier, and so he is working with Canon Bompas, one of
the minor canons. A great enthusiast of the Boy Scout movement. A
delightful man who was in the Army before he took Orders, and who, as he
often says jokingly, though of course quite reverently, still belongs to
the artillery. He is a bachelor, though of course," added Aunt Ellen,
"not from conviction. As you perhaps know, the Church of England is
opposed to celibacy of the clergy. Yes, poor Edwy! He had such a lovely
voice. I wish it hadn't broken just before you arrived."
It was hard to believe that Edwy's voice, which now alternated between
the high notes of a cockatoo and the low notes of a bear, had ever been
beautiful, and Jasmine was inclined to ascribe its alleged beauty to
maternal fondness.
"Edmund and Edgar won't be back from Marlborough until the end of the
month; but Edward is coming in a fortnight. He delighted us all by
winning a scholarship at Trinity. He's so happy at Cambridge, dear boy;
though I think everybody is happy at Cambridge, don't you?"
Jasmine agreed, though she really had no opinion on the subject.
"Well, come along," said her aunt, "and we'll go and find your uncle.
Quite a walk," she added, "for his study is at the far end of the top
storey. His library is downstairs, of course, but he found that it
didn't suit him for work, and though it's rather inconvenient having to
carry books backwards and forwards up and downstairs, we all realize how
important it is that he should be quiet, and nobody minds fetching any
book he wants."
This was said with so much meaning that Jasmine immediately visualized
herself carrying books up and down the Deanery stairs day in day out
through the whole of the summer.
"I told you about the difficulty he had with his typewriting, and how
anxious he was that Ethelred should learn, but the dear boy's mind was
so bent on mechanics that he was always taking the machine to pieces.
Very cleverly, I'm bound to say. But of course it occupied a good deal
of his time. So now he practises the piano again instead. People tell me
he's very musical."
While Aunt Ellen was talking, they were walking up and down short
irregular flights of stairs and along narrow corridors, the floors of
which were billowy with age, until at last they came to a corridor at
the head of which was a large placard marked SILENCE.
"The boys are not allowed along here," said their mother with a sigh, as
if by not being allowed along here they were being deprived of the main
pleasure of their existence.
"Uncle Arnold does not like us to knock," she explained when they came
to the door at the end of the corridor, on which was another label DO
NOT KNOCK. She opened the door, and Jasmine was aware of a long, low,
sunny room under a groined ceiling, the gabled windows of which were
shaded with lucent green. The floor was littered with docketed papers
and heaped high with books from which cardboard slips protruded. From
the fact that the windows looked out on the Close instead of on the
garden, Jasmine divined that the Cathedral Close was considerably
quieter than the Deanery garden. Seated at a large table at the far end
of the room was her uncle, or rather what she supposed to be her uncle,
for her first impression was that somebody had left a large ostrich egg
on the table.
"Jasmine," her aunt announced.
The ostrich egg remained motionless; but the scratching of a pen and the
slow regular movement of a very plump white hand across a double sheet
of foolscap indicated that the room contained human life. At the end of
a minute the egg lifted itself from the table, and Jasmine found herself
confronted by a very bright pair of eyes and offered that very plump
white hand. After meeting so many tall, gaunt relatives, it was a great
pleasure to meet one who was actually shorter than herself. It was not
merely that the Dean was shorter than herself which attracted her. He
was regarding her with an expression that, had she not been assured of
his entire attention's being concentrated upon Anglo-Saxon history, she
would have supposed to be friendly, even affectionate; at any rate it
was an unusually pleasant expression for a relative. It was probably
that first impression of the Dean's head as an ostrich egg which led her
to compare him to a bird; but the longer she looked at him--and she had
to look quite a long time because her uncle said nothing at all--the
more she thought he resembled a bird. His eyes were like a bird's,
small, bright, hard, and round; he put his head on one side like a bird;
and his thin legs, encased in gaiters beneath that distinct paunch,
completed the resemblance.
"Not finished yet, my dear?" his wife asked in the way in which one asks
an invalid if he should like to sit up for an hour or two while the sun
was shining.
"No, my dear, not quite," the Dean replied; and his voice had a trill at
the back of it like a bird's. "About six more volumes."
Mrs. Lightbody sighed. "The way he works! But don't forget, my dear,
that the Archdeacon is coming to dinner."
In some odd way Jasmine divined that the Dean thought 'Damn.' She felt
like somebody in a fairy tale who is granted the gift of understanding
the speech of animals and the tongues of birds. What he actually said
was: "Delightful! Don't open the '58 port. Foljambe has no palate."
He had put his head more than ever on one side by now, so that with one
eye he was able to read over what he had just been writing, looking at
the foolscap as a thrush contemplates a snail before he attacks it.
"I'm afraid that we--I mean that I've disturbed your work," Jasmine
murmured.
"Yes," agreed the Dean, and so rapidly did he sit down that his niece
was scarcely conscious of the movement until she saw the ostrich egg
lying on the table again.
"Now I must take Jasmine to her room," proceeded Aunt Ellen, and she
managed to convey in her tone that it was the Dean who had interrupted
her and not she the Dean. He did not reply vocally; but as his hand
travelled along the paper, a short white forefinger raised itself for a
moment in acknowledgement of her remark, and then quickly drooped down
to the penholder again.
Jasmine did not suppose that she had made any impression on her uncle,
and she felt rather sad about this, because she was sure that if he
would only give her an opportunity of being her natural self he would
find her sympathetic. She was surprised, therefore, when he and
Archdeacon Foljambe arrived in the drawing-room that evening after
dinner, to perceive her uncle making straight for herself, exactly like
a water wagtail with his funny little strut and funny little way of
putting his hands behind his coat and flirting his tail.
"Can you type?" he asked.
And the twinkle in his eyes seemed to endow his question with a
suggestion of daring naughtiness, so that when Jasmine told him that she
did type, she felt that she was admitting the presence of a lighter side
to her nature.
"Come up to my study to-morrow morning about half-past nine. I'll have a
chair cleared for you by then."
And thus it was that Jasmine found herself booked to help Uncle Arnold
every morning of the week. Yet in helping him she was not in the least
aware of being made use of; on the contrary the work had a delicious
flavour of impropriety. The machine itself was a good one, so good that
it had survived Ethelred's attempted dissection of it; and Uncle Arnold,
who when a difficult Anglo-Saxon problem required solution used to tap
upon the table with his fingers, did not seem to mind the noise the
typewriter made any more than a nuthatch on one branch might object to
the pecking of a yaffle at another. Jasmine, remembering that her aunt
had alluded in her first letter to the Dean's dislike of constantly
changing typists, asked him one day on their way down to lunch why he
had had so much trouble with his secretaries.
"One used a particularly vicious kind of scent. Another was continually
scratching at her garter. One used to breathe over my head when she came
across to give me what she had been doing. Another thought she knew how
to punctuate. And one who had studied history at Lady Margaret's quoted
Freeman against me! My clerical position forbade me to swear at them. My
brain in consequence became surcharged with blood. So I used to work
them to death, and when one of them who refused to be worked to death
and refused to give notice ... Jasmine! this must never go beyond you
and me...."
"No, Uncle Arnold," she promised eagerly. "But do tell me how you got
rid of her."
"I used to put drawing pins on her chair. Not a word to a soul! My wife
would suspect me of being a papist like yourself if she found out, and
the Bishop, who now thinks I'm mad, would then be sure of it. Never let
a bishop be sure of anything. He thrives on ambiguity."
Apart from her work with the Dean, Jasmine enjoyed herself immensely in
garden games with the three youngest boys. The Deanery garden was a
wonderful place, and to Jasmine it afforded a complete explanation of
the affection that English people had for England. She had been so
unhappy all this past year that she had come to think of Italy as having
the monopoly of earth's beauty. But this garden was as beautiful as
anything in Italy, this garden with wide green lawns, bird-haunted when
she looked out of her window in the lucid air of the morning,
bird-haunted when at dusk she would gaze at them from the candle-lit
dining-room. The shrubberies here were glossy and thick, not at all like
the shrubbery at Rouncivell Lodge. A high wall bright with snapdragon
bounded the garden on the side of the Cathedral, and beyond it loomed
the south transept and a grove of mighty elms. There was a lake in
which floated half a dozen swans that puffed themselves out with esteem
of their own white grace, while in the water they regarded those
mirrored images of themselves, the high-sailing clouds of summer, or
perhaps more proudly their own splendid ghosts. There was an enclosed
garden where fat vegetables were girdled with familiar flowers, blue and
yellow and red, an aromatic garden loud with bees. Finally there was an
ancient tower, the resort of owls and bats, which the Dean sometimes
spoke of restoring. But he never did; and the mouldering traceries, the
lattices long empty of glass, and the worm-eaten corbels of oak grey
with age went on decaying all that fine July. It would have been a pity
to restore the tower, Jasmine thought, and replace with sharp modern
edges that dim and immaterial building in its glade of larches. The dead
lower branches of the trees wove a mist for the paths, on the pallid
grass of which grew clusters of orange and vermilion toadstools; it
would be a pity to intrude on such a place with the tramp of restoring
workmen.
Jasmine's zest in the middle ages, her absorption in pre-Norman days,
her surrender to the essential England were at first faintly troubled by
having to attend mass at a little Catholic mission chapel built of
corrugated iron. But from being pestered by Aunt Ellen to compare the
facilities for worship in Silchester Cathedral with those in the church
of the Immaculate Conception, Bog Lane, she began to wonder if the
externals of history could effect as much as she had supposed. If the
Cathedral was spacious, the mind of Aunt Ellen was not; if the church of
the Immaculate Conception was tawdry ... but why make comparisons? She
had never noticed in Sirene how ugly sham flowers looked upon the altar;
when she made this discovery in Silchester, she was instantly ashamed
of herself; and when she looked again, it seemed as if the gilt daisies
in their tarnished vases were alive, as if they were nosegays gathered
in Italy. If the church of the Immaculate Conception, Bog Lane, was
hideous, what about the English church at Sirene? That was a poky enough
affair. But again, why make comparisons? There were rich relatives and
poor relations in churches just as much as in everything else.
Jasmine was fighting loyally against her inclination to criticize, when
one blazing day at the end of July the Dean proposed a visit to the
remains of Roman Silchester, at which his three sons expressed horror
and dismay.
"Why, what's the matter with Old Silchester?" she asked.
"Oh, it's a most stinking bore! A most frightful fag!" groaned Edred.
"Father makes us sweat ourselves to death digging in the sun," croaked
Edwy.
"And last time when I chivied a Holly Blue, or it may have been only a
Chalk Hill Blue, he cursed me like anything," lamented Ethelred.
The boys groaned again in unison.
"There's nothing to see."
"There's nothing to do."
"It's absolutely foul."
"Father jaws all the time about history, which I hate," said Edred. "I
say, can't you put him off taking us?"
But Jasmine declared that they were horribly unappreciative, and
declined to intervene.
"Well, anyway," said Ethelred hopefully, "Lord George Sanger's Circus is
coming the second week in August."
The thought of that sustained the boys to face a long summer's day among
the ruins of the ancient city.
In the end the day was delightful. The Dean preferred his niece as a
listener to his sons, and as Mrs. Lightbody had been unable to come, he
was not driven by her irritating crusade on behalf of the boys'
amusement to insisting upon their attention. The result was that they
vanished soon after lunch to hunt butterflies, while the Dean expounded
his theory of Old Silchester. Jasmine sat back enjoying the perfume of
hot grass, the murmurous air, the gentle fluting of a faint wind, while
the Dean proved conclusively that the Saxon invasion utterly swept away
every trace of Roman civilization in Britain. The Dean's shadow while he
wandered backward and forward among the scanty remains grew longer, and
beneath his exposition the Roman Empire, so far as its effect on England
was concerned, went down like the sun. Jasmine had been asleep, and she
woke up suddenly in the fresh airs of sunset. Half a mile away the boys
were coming back over the expanse of grey-green grass to display their
captures.