by H. E. Bates
‘Excuse me, sir, there’s someone to see you.’
‘Who?’ he said. ‘Who? I’m having dinner!’
‘Don’t shout at the child,’ his wife said.
‘I am not shouting,’ he said and knew that he was. He walked out of the open door into the garden, banging his glass on the table as he passed.
A figure was waiting at the small latch-gate by the summer-house and as it turned he said, loudly:
‘Medhurst. What do you want?’
‘I been to see Captain Fawcett, sir.’
‘I’m having my dinner. Why the hell have I to be dragged out to listen about Fawcett?’
‘Captain Fawcett says he spoke to you about this cottage seven or eight times, sir.’
‘I don’t recall it.’
‘Everybody knows you’re rather forgetful, sir, and I daresay you forgot it.’
‘Forgetful? Forgetful?’
‘You’re away a lot too, sir. You’re away and you don’t know what goes on.’
‘What does go on? Tell me.’
‘Well, sir,’ Medhurst said. ‘Well –’
‘Well what?’
‘There’s a lot said, sir. There’s a lot of feeling.’
‘For Christ’s sake about what?’
‘One thing and another,’ Medhurst said. ‘One thing and another.’
He felt his heart raging inside him at the thought of the accumulating evil pettiness about him, at the vague insinuations of disloyalty and dislocation. There was no doubt that here and there the damn bolsheviks were working their way in. It was not like the old days, when one had loyalty and trust and decency and continuity of service. Now there were always labour troubles, dissatisfaction, some feeling of unspecified unrest. He was about to say something about this when Medhurst said:
‘I don’t want to keep you from your dinner, sir. But I’d like to ask you something.’
‘What?’
‘Will you come and have a look at this hut to-morrow? I don’t think you’ve ever been down –’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come.’
‘Very well, sir. You come down.’ He opened the gate, went through it and stood the other side of it. ‘About six? I’ll be home from work and had a wash by then.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll be down.’
It was only when Medhurst was twenty or thirty yards down the road that he remembered that, after all, he could not go at that time. He remembered his delicious feeling of anticipation about the girl in the yellow scarf: and how, to-morrow, they were going to explore the house together.
Then as he got back to the house he heard the sound of a car being driven away. Harshly the gears clashed up the quiet road, and he knew that, all too soon, before he could speak again, his wife had gone. It was almost dark and he was alone now with the whisky, the scented garden and the big empty space of the park, all grass, beyond.
His wife’s name was Cordelia: and somehow he had never quite come round to that, either.
3
Every morning in spring and summer he was up by seven o’clock in order to make, sometimes in a jeep, sometimes a small dog-cart, a tour of the estate. It was wonderfully pleasant, often a tonic of exhilaration for him after a bad evening with Cordelia and the whisky, to drive into deep woodland roads, under high banks of primrose and bluebell and bracken, through plantations of birch and sweet-chestnut, in and about the little valley. There he had almost everything; on those four thousand acres there were endless variations. Hop-gardens on the south-west slopes, from which on fine days you could see the line of sea, flanked old and excellent cherry-orchards and tasselled plantations of hazel-nut. In copses about the park rhododendrons had been planted for game-cover and from under startling magenta fires of flower cock-pheasants would come serenely stalking, themselves on fire with flames of brilliant scarlet and green and blue. On the lake water-lilies, both yellow and white, grew in thousands and wild duck inhabited the small upper islands of sallow. Where the cherry-orchards finished their snowy blossoming there were many acres of pink apple and then, in high summer, the great fragrance of limes about the park. The largeness and width of it embraced everything, from prize cattle to a white peacock or two that still roamed about the old wild lawns behind the big house, among the rose-pink camellias he had forgotten.
It had not always been so large. At the time of his father’s death there had been not more than two thousand acres. They were the slump days. His father had been rather a mean but in many ways admirable landowner, conservative and human, liked and feared, of the old nineteenth-century school. Everything had been cautiously solid, thorough, unscientific perhaps, but profitable. Labour had been cheap; men were two a penny. Twelve gardeners, with a number of apprentice boys, had raised delicious things in the old walled gardens and hot-houses sheltered from cold winds by Atlantic cedars. Peaches and asparagus were always ready to perfection before their time; there were always amaryllis and gardenias and carnations and orchids for the house. A loveliness flourished, unhurried and quiet and prodigal, that had never come back and now never would.
His father could not have died, in a sense, at a better time. The slump was grim and stubborn; estates everywhere were breaking up. His father had been a man who believed in eating his apples only from the trees he had. Solid entrenchment, capital sagaciously invested, had built up an estate that was like a bastion, If times were bad you did not venture out beyond it; if they were good you still remained at home. That was what prudence and capital and sound sense and foresight gave as their reward: an antidote of comfort against evil days, another spread of butter for the good.
His father, in consequence, had never bought land. Expansion, like spraying fruit trees, was not in his philosophy. But after he had gone it was different. All about the edges of the estate were pieces of land, either other estates or little farms, that the slump had beaten into decay and that were ripe for selling. And so another fifty or a hundred acres were added here; a hop-garden or an orchard there; a number of useful little farms, many pieces of woodland and another mile of stream. Where other people were shedding land against the evil of the times, the slump and the threat of war, the son acquired it. And he went on acquiring it, cheaply, thoughtfully, and as it turned out wisely, until the beginning of the war.
As a landowner, a farmer, though young, he did not go to the war. It was after all not necessary; a modern army did not merely fight on its stomach; at least six, and later ten or more persons were needed to keep a single soldier in the field or a pilot in the sky. Not everybody was needed for fighting. So he had stayed at home, in the country, raising food that everyone needed, putting the plough firmly back into soil that had never seen a share for centuries, unlocking richness.
About that time too he had closed the house in the park. He had never liked that dog-eat-dog existence, with servants feeding on servants, butlers lording it over underlings, pocketing the perquisites of the pantry, and he had never really cared for hot-house flowers. Orchids and gardenias and poinsettias, all so un-English and precious and unreal, were symbols of a world he found he could give up without a flicker of regret. Soil and grass, things of depth and substance and reality, replaced them; and gradually he had brought to them, to grass especially, a scientific interest that was more than a theoretical passion. It became a creed.
As he drove in the jeep through the park on the following evening he decided to make a detour to the south side, to where, on a two-acre strip, he conducted trials on thirty or forty kinds of grass and clover variations. Soils deficient in nitrates, in limes, in potash, or whatever it was, were marked off in oblongs, to be given their trials of grass in endless permutations.
He stayed for a short time looking with pleasure and pride at the patterns of delicate and brightening green. It had been another beautiful day; there was a warm trembling everywhere of rising grass and leaf and flower. Flies were dancing and you could feel in the air, in the blackbird throatiness, the cuckoo mockery,
the whole deepening pulse of summer.
Then as he drove the jeep back across the park, already quite dry and hard from the heat of sun and yellow now in brilliant varnished stretches of buttercups, he saw a man in shirtsleeves working out on the grass. He remembered then his plan of soil-testing the entire estate. That gigantic task, to be recorded in time on a great coloured map that would hang in a special section of the estate office, was something he supposed not one farm in a thousand, in England at any rate, had ever done. In America of course they did this sort of thing; America was soil-plotted. They were ahead of us there.
He stopped the jeep and walked across to talk to the man who, with an implement like a large auger, was making trial borings into turf.
‘Hullo, Pritchard,’ he said. ‘How does it go?’
‘Good evening, sir.’ The man, quite young, in his shirtsleeves, was sweating heavily. ‘Warm. See that?’ He held up the auger, with its spiral of pale brown soil, crumbling away hairy rooted earth with his fingers. ‘Dry. As if there’d never been any rain. Ever.’
‘Extraordinary.’ The dry rainless spiral of earth crumbled like dusty brown cake, sprinkling the tall buttercups. ‘How is it here? What have you got?’
‘Sandgate beds. Not too good. You’ve got signs of spring water at twenty-two inches nearly everywhere. I’ll let you see.’
Pritchard screwed the auger down into earth, and then with a swift jerk wrenched it up again.
‘See the little rusty patches? like veins?’ He thumbed away iron-coloured crumbs of soil. ‘That’s your water.’
‘Bad?’
‘Typical. Water everywhere.’
Fitzgerald knew that it meant more drainage schemes. They were very expensive; but he knew too that they had to be done and that he would come to them gradually too, all in good time.
‘I’m glad you’re having this done, sir.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘It seems amazing when you come to think of it that we walk about on land and haven’t the slightest idea what goes on underneath it.’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean for example the water, You’d say the land here was bone dry. Never a drop of moisture in it. Yet there it is – water everywhere, all the way down water seeping through.’
‘It’s a revelation,’ he said.
Presently he said good-bye and got into the jeep and drove up through the buttercups to the house. It was striking six when he parked the jeep by the blackened and ruined army huts. A soft yellow bloom of buttercups had been beaten up and lay softly on the wheel-hubs, and by the army ruins crowds of white nettles were in flower.
Down the avenue he could not see the girl.
A curious feeling of disappointment suddenly gnawed at him as he stood there waiting. He had thought of the whole affair, the previous day, as something deliciously casual, almost offhand. He had not even wanted her, as he often wanted other women, out of loneliness, or in pleasure-spite against Cordelia, who would neither go nor let him go.
But now, as he walked up and down by the ruins and the nettles, he hated the idea that, after all, the girl was not coming: that she was going to let him down. It was not simply that he was used to people doing the things he wanted. It was something else; it was something not expected, an annoyingly elusive development he could not define.
Then suddenly he heard her call. He turned and, in a startling moment of surprise and pleasure and irritation, saw her coming from behind the big cedars at the side of the house. His irritation arose from the fact that she was once again wearing the same yellow scarf: this time tied over her head.
Even that irritation melted as he watched the long slender legs swinging through the grass. To-day he was not wearing his hat and he simply lifted his hand to greet her. She waved her hand too and he saw that she carried in it a spray or two of rose-pink flowers.
‘Camellias,’ she said. ‘I found the trees.’
‘For a moment I thought you were not coming.’
‘I wanted to get here first. I wanted to see it in any case, whether you came or not.’
‘Did you think I wouldn’t come?’
She seemed to consider this question for a moment. Half smiling, dark eyes again like elongated buds above the shell-like rosettes, so pure and waxen, of the camellia flowers, she said:
‘No: I knew you’d come.’
Together, then, they began to walk up to the house.
‘Where did you find the camellias? It’s late for them.’
‘At the back,’ she said. ‘Don’t you know? You mean to say this is your house and yet –’
‘I always fancied they grew this side, on the wall.’
‘Curious man,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think they’re beautiful?’
He said yes, he thought they were beautiful. It had been many years since he had seen them or even since he had been into the house; and as he drew out his great bunch of keys and started to unlock the front door he said:
‘I warn you it’s an absolute shambles. There’s nothing to see.’
A moment or two later, as he pushed open the big white door, it was possible to see how true that was.
He stood inside the big hall-way with the girl, looking up at the stairs. They were elegant and wide and had once been white. Pictures had hung on the high walls. He remembered, as he looked at the dark unfaded rectangles left by them, that they had been very solid and sombrely ancestral. They had given tone. But now all pictures, all tone, and even half the stair balustrade had gone. An army had, in the army way, availed itself of several stair-rails, an odd window ledge, the shelves that had once held tea-services on either side of the fireplace. It had left blackening boot marks like dark repeated bruises all the way up the naked stairs.
‘You see,’ he said.
He half turned away as if to go out again.
‘What’s in here?’ she said.
‘It was the drawing-room,’ he said. Now it was marked ‘Company Commander: Keep out.’
Blinds with yellow silken tassels were drawn at the windows. By the side of the fireplace a few notices in typescript were still pinned, daily routine orders or things of that sort, and one or two sheets had fallen into the hearth, where showers of soot, pocked with rain, had covered them.
‘You see, it’s all gone,’ he said. ‘I told you.’
‘Upstairs,’ she said. ‘What’s up there?’
He knew that it could only be the same upstairs. Walking carefully, trying the bare blackened treads as he climbed, he led the way upstairs. A smell, dusty, sun-dried, greasily and stalely old, met him everywhere. No colour, even where the wallpaper of the main landing had once been a broad pattern of silver and chicory, remained now. Dust and time and the army locusts had eaten it away.
The effect of her walking into this, fresh and lovely, the spray of pink camellias in her hands, was startling to him as he turned and looked back down the stairs. Once more a leap of excitement, accompanied by the slightest wave of impatience, went through him as he watched her.
She looked up. What he felt was evidently clear in his face and she said:
‘Something wrong?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing wrong.’
It was useless, he thought, going through the whole business, quite pointless and silly, walking along empty dust-grey floors, from the derelict desert of one room to another. There was nothing to be got from it and his feeling of impatience grew. However much he wanted to kiss her he could not kiss her there among the ghost-ruins, on the broken stairs, in the sun-stale dustiness of a dead world.
He was glad when, on the second storey, they reached the far side of the house, where smaller rooms, one from a central balcony, looked out over what had once been the garden below. He had completely forgotten the geography of that floor, once the servants’ quarters, until suddenly she opened a door and cried out:
‘But there’s furniture in here. A bed and things –’
‘Odd,’ he said. ‘It can’t be. Good Lord!�
�
A single divan bed, with a bentwood chair, a kitchen table, and a little strip of carpet furnished the room that opened through French windows on to an iron-railed balcony. He stood for a moment in the doorway, puzzled by it all, and then he remembered.
Here, in blitz days, fire-watchers had brewed tea and kept a look out for the enemy and slept. From the little balcony they had been able to see all across the gardens, to the deserted hot-houses, and along the valley. He remembered it all: the ladder out on to the roof, the rows of fire-buckets, the shovels, the sand-bags, and the sand. Queer how one forgot these things. He had even had his own estate fire-engine, with seven or eight trained men and organized practices and a decent run of hose. It had been rather fun.
He opened the French windows. For some moments he stood half in and half out of the room, looking at the wilderness of cedars and nettle, lilac and thistle below. The room had a western aspect and now warm sun poured in, heavy with scent from many old sweet lilac trees.
Turning to explain about the room, its bed and its fire-watchers, he found the girl just behind him, looking across the valley. Once more the scarf roused in him a sharp sense of excited annoyance, and once more she caught the swift look of it in his face.
‘What is it –?’
‘Just the scarf,’ he said.
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘I hate it.’
He took the scarf between his fingers and began to untie it. She shook her dark hair free as he pulled the scarf away and threw it on to the little bed. A half-smile on her face parted her lips very slightly, as if she were going to say something, and her long body was pressed against him, close and supple, as he kissed her.
‘Did you bring me here to do that?’ she said.
‘You wanted to come here.’
‘Was I the only one?’ She smiled, holding her lips up to him a second time. He wanted to take her quickly, in a sudden rush of over-exquisite feeling, but she said softly: ‘Careful of the camellias. They’re too lovely to spoil. Let me put them on the bed.’
