“It is,” he answered, returning her glare with interest. “I’m damned glad to hear it. If your morning has been spoiled, what d’you think you’ve done to mine?”
“I neither know nor care.” Jane gathered what tattered shreds of dignity she could find, drew them about her like a cloak, and sailed away, bare legs and ancient clothes forgotten.
Her rage was still red-hot when she came down to breakfast several hours later, and though she knew it was injudicious, she could not resist saying to Love:
“I wish father wouldn’t give permission to such impossible people to wander about the hill looking at birds!”
“I didn’t know he had. It doesn’t sound much like father,” said Love with lively interest. “He isn’t very strong on impossible people as a rule. What exactly do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Jane, cutting an apple in two with a vicious stroke as if decapitating her enemy, “that I went up the glen this morning early, and met this—this person, and he was abominably rude to me.”
“What was he like?”
“Oh, tall and lanky, grey tweeds and beady grey eyes to match and a horrid little bristly fair moustache. Vile from head to foot,” said Jane.
Love gazed at her for a startled moment, then began to laugh. “Oh, Lord, Janey! You’ve started putting your foot in it pretty early on your return,” she said. “It must have been Mr.—or Major, I don’t know which he calls himself now that he’s retired—the Unionist candidate, you know. I told you he’d bought Allander and he happens to be father’s newest pet. His ee-wee lamb, in fact.”
“Nonsense,” said Jane faintly. “It couldn’t be the same, Love. Why, I travelled with the Gilbert man yesterday, and he looked utterly different from this creature—”
“It’s the very same,” Love said, nodding her head emphatically. “You’ve done it this time, Janey.”
“Thank heaven the parents aren’t at home! I won’t have to meet him for a bit, and he’ll have forgotten what I look like. Besides, I was dressed untidily, and my nose was glittering this morning,” said Jane, trying to sound hopeful.
Love carefully poured cream over a plate of porridge. “It’s just too bad to disappoint you,” she said with elaborate unconcern. “But mother told me to have the old General and Miss Scott to luncheon to-day as usual, and just to brighten the party I invited Althea Johnston and Major—Mr.—Gilbert as well.”
Chapter Three
SUNDAY LUNCHEON
When Jane went into her room and saw laid out on the smooth bed a thin black wool dress, her best black hat, her brown squirrel coat, and on the floor below them a pair of black suède shoes, she knew that Gunn meant her to go to church and had told Mary, the under-tablemaid, to put suitable garments ready as a gentle hint. Gunn held very strong views on church-going, and expected every member of the family who happened to be at home to attend morning service in the Parish Church of Milton Riggend. Nothing gave her greater satisfaction than to have a full turn-out. She always contrived to be in the hall to see them start, brushing Sir Magnus’s hat, holding Lady Cranstoun’s coat, reminding the younger generation not to forget their ‘pennies for the plate’ while they were children, or handing gloves or umbrella to them after they grew up.
Jane groaned. “Church on my first morning! I simply will not go!” she muttered rebelliously, knowing full well that the force of suggestion exerted by Gunn’s dumb reminders of her duty would be too much for her in the end. “I wonder what Love will do?” The question was answered in person by Love, who at that moment burst into the room. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “I see that you’re to go too! I thought she might have let you off after a day in the train. The old serpent! But I’m not going!”
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course not. How can I, with people coming to lunch?”
“No doubt Gunn thinks she can look after everything. She has done it for a good many years. How do you suppose she managed all the time you were at school?” said Jane rather drily.
“I have to arrange the flowers,” said Love with dignity. Then, in an endearing spasm of unselfishness added: “Unless you’d rather do that, Janey? And I’ll go to church?”
“No, no. It’s your luncheon party,” Jane said quickly. “I’ll go. I can walk back with Miss Scott and the dear General. It makes me feel good to be seen with such a handsome man.”
“He is an old pet,” agreed Love, perching on the bed while Jane began to change, and chattering with great animation. “Do you believe Gunn would go to church herself every Sunday if she could, Janey? I don’t.”
“You think she really prefers to do it by proxy, as it were?” Jane asked, amused.
“I’m perfectly certain of it,” Love said emphatically. “You know she always arranges with mother that the under-tablemaid goes every second Sunday, but catch her go and leave her satellite in charge, ever! That’s what makes my blood boil when she’s so keen to drive us there!”
“Well, I recommend you not to let it boil over,” said Jane. “Or she’ll do something awful. Do you remember the time father annoyed her in some way, and she served whisky instead of sherry? It was when people we hardly knew were dining for the first time, and they didn’t like to say anything, so they drank neat whisky with their soup. And when father tasted his and asked Gunn how she had come to make such a mistake, she muddled him up until he and mother and all the guests began to think it was his fault. If Maggie and I hadn’t seen the devilish glint in her eyes as she brought the sherry at last, we’d have been fooled with the rest of them!”
“Oh, I won’t say a word to her. After all. I’m not going to church. You’re the poor victim,” said Love. “Only I wish we could pension her off and get a nice tame butler.”
“Butlers, wild or tame, are more expensive pets to keep than Gunn,” Jane pointed out, as she pulled on her hat and adjusted it at an angle over her right eye.
“Well, it doesn’t matter terribly. I don’t intend that either of us will have to endure her tyranny much longer,” said Love, and as she seemed about to enlarge on her plans once more, Jane snatched up her gloves and fled, saying over her shoulder: “What about the flowers?”
Gunn was hovering in the hall, ostensibly straightening the telephone directories and engagement pad on the little table in a corner. She advanced at once with an umbrella.
“No, thank you, Gunn. It isn’t going to rain,” Jane said firmly, waving it away.
“Is Miss Love not going with ye, Miss Jane? It’ll be a poor turn-out for Craigrois this morning,” said Gunn discontentedly.
“Miss Love has several things to see to,” Jane replied. “And there will be more of us at church next Sunday. Mr. Stair may be coming on week-end leave.”
Gunn cheered visibly. “That’ll be better, Miss Jane,” she said with satisfaction. “I hope ye’ll have a profitable sermon.”
“I hope I don’t fall asleep in the middle of it,” was Jane’s answer to this pious wish, but she said it to herself. It would be a pity to shock poor old Gunn unnecessarily.
The single bell was ringing as she walked towards the church through the ugly village street. A few devout inhabitants in their Sunday clothes were moving sluggishly in the same direction, but by far the greater number, especially among the younger ones, lounged in doorways reading the papers while cigarettes drooped from their lower lips if they were men, standing felt-slippered and curling-pinned in overalls exchanging gossip if women. The ice-cream saloon which sold sweets and cigarettes was open, revealing the blue-chinned and oily-haired Italian owner lurking in its dingy background; wireless blared from houses on either side of the street, dogs scratched for fleas or hunted furtively in the gutter for scraps or smells, which must have yielded an abundant reward to their questing sensitive noses, a child screamed shrilly and was audibly slapped.
Jane looked up to the blue cloud-flecked sky in time to see a long symmetrical wedge of geese fly northward, to catch a hint of their wild music faint above the man-made noises
below. The hills stood solid and strong, frowning down at the village as if they could not understand why such ugliness should exist so close to them. Cloud shadows swept across their mighty flanks, lending a sudden beauty of changing colour to their unchanging strength.
‘Thank God, nothing can alter them but the end of the world!’ thought Jane.
She spoke or nodded to almost everyone she saw. Though the village was strongly Socialist in its politics—Communist, some of the stauncher die-hard Conservatives said darkly—the Cranstouns were well known and respected in a dour unyielding way. Jane sometimes felt that she did not altogether blame them for their socialist sympathies. There was a good deal of hardship and unemployment in the place, since the tiny Turkey-red dye-works which had given work to the community, and had been indeed the reason for Milton Riggend’s existence, had had to close down, unable to struggle any longer against competition from Japan and the improved standard of living at home. It could not be easy to live on bread and margarine and tea, and not much of that, knowing that in all the big houses round, people who had never earned their living sat down to four ample meals every day. Of course they were unjust, these angry, hungry Socialists, where men like Sir Magnus, and women like his wife were concerned, men and women who worked far longer than Union hours for the good of their employees and poorer neighbours, on the County Council, on education boards, and committees without number. Nor had the Socialists any real idea of a landowner’s difficulties, the crippling death-duties, the constant expense of an estate that must always in these times of progress be a liability, the appearances that had to be kept up for the sake of morale if for nothing else. But there were others, those wealthy persons who had inherited no sense of responsibility along with their money, who took no thought for any but themselves. Against them, diatribes were justly thundered by the Labour member for the constituency—people like the Dawsons, Jane said to herself, as one of their sports cars, laden with young men and maidens obviously dressed for amusements other than church, flashed past, to a fanfare on a three-noted horn. Their parties reached a height of extravagance hitherto known to the neighbourhood only through the medium of the silver screen. The decent old country house which they had bought and transmogrified into a cross between a country club and a film-star’s Hollywood home, seemed to shrink back among its trees as if ashamed of the glass sun-lounge disfiguring its honest plain face, as if to apologize for the cocktail-bar decorated with surrealist portraits of its proud owners by an artist acquaintance, which now filled one end of the dining-room. Magnums of champagne were not sufficiently large or imposing for the Dawsons, they had jeroboams, and Jane still felt hot with shame for them when she remembered the one party to which she had gone there, during the winter of the slump where crackers costing five shillings each had been pulled in dozens by screaming people who might have been supposed to have reached years of discretion. She had never recovered from her distaste for that display of wanton luxury—cocktails, champagne, and those idiotic crackers in the house, while less than a mile away whole families sat huddled listening to the hungry howling of that wolf which is never very far from the doors of the poor. After the last general election, when a Labour member had been returned and every window in Milton Riggend had flaunted a triumphant red flag, Sir Magnus had said coldly that it had been Mrs. Dawson, canvassing in a sable coat and pearls for the Unionist candidate, who had lost them the seat, and Jane could not help feeling that for once her father had not been wide of the mark.
And now Donald Harrison, the member at whose name all true-blue Tories shuddered, had announced that he was retiring. There would be a by-election, contested for the Unionists by this Gilbert man, detestable creature. Jane wondered if he had a hope at all of getting in against the ardent and eloquent protégé of Harrison, who was so carefully nursing his chances, and decided that Peregrine Gilbert was quite disagreeable enough to enjoy a hard fight, and had plenty of self-assurance to withstand the savage heckling which would be his lot at every meeting.
She was at the church door, she put her half-crown among a mass of pennies and small silver in the broad pewter plate which stood on a pedestal where no one could possibly avoid its mute demand, exchanged a word or two with the elders who brooded over it like guardian angels in sober rusty black and abnormally high stiff collars, and mounted the stairs which rose left and right of the door, to the gallery. The Craigrois pew had been formerly in the ‘breist of the laft,’ facing the cast window across the length of the church; but when a pipe organ replaced the original harmonium, Sir Magnus’s father had given up his honoured position to it, and had been moved to the next best place, the pew at the north end, directly overlooking the pulpit, a monstrous erection of tortured carving and red velvet, with an ornate roof. Sitting there without enough knee-room, so that children’s shoes were apt to bump resoundingly against the solid oak front, and grown-ups had to turn discreetly a little to the side for comfort, the Cranstouns looked straight down on the bald head of Mr. Jamieson, the minister, as he stood beneath his squiggly canopy of shiny pitch-pine, his eyes tightly shut behind his spectacles, his hands clenched on the red velvet ledge of the pulpit, his ears crimsoning to its shade with earnestness as he prayed fervently, or poured out a stream of quotations in his sermons. Jane and Maggie, always unregenerate, frequently longed to drop something on to that bald patch, their fingers itched for catapult or bread-pellet. Baulked of this pleasure, they found solace in counting the number of times he said “Ah, my frrainds,” or “And now, Ooo Loarrd,” during the service.
Jane, slipping quietly into the front seat of the Craigrois pew, sighed as she realized that she had behind her not only the gardener and his wife and sons, the chauffeur’s daughter, and the head-forester’s family, but a full assembly of the home-farm people, singers of such lusty abandon that she always expected to be blown into the pulpit by the strength of their voices. She bowed her head over her gloved hands for a moment, conscious that she should be praying, but unable to forget the glimpse she had once had when turning her head during one of the more militant hymns, she had seen the suffused faces, the round open mouths vociferating
Lift HIGH His roy-yal ban-ner,
It must not suf-fer loss.
With a slight feeling of shame she reflected that the Patersons probably gained a great deal more from their attendance at church than she did, for their singing at least, however unmodulated, was wholehearted.
The organ began to play a voluntary, the choir filed in, conscious of their new Sunday hats, the Bible was carried up to the pulpit with due ceremonious gravity. Presently the service started, and Jane tried to give it her full attention. In spite of herself, her thoughts wandered away again. Now she was remembering that only a week before she had been with George and Kitty and John in one of the front rows of the Barracks Church at Chatham, hearing the strong full-throated men’s voices behind her rising like a wave to beat against the high arching roof, the minor sounds as the Commodore or C.-in-C. read the lesson, of an occasional cough, the soft shuffle of boots, the clink of medals. . . . There was something very impressive about it all, the beautiful liturgy shortened to fit into the Parade service, yet losing nothing of its beauty, the brief, straightforward sermon spoken without cant by a man to other men, the prayers in their noble simplicity. . . . “Be pleased to receive into thy Almighty and most gracious protection the persons of us thy servants, and the Fleet in which we serve . . . that we may be a safeguard unto our most gracious Sovereign Lord . . . and a security for such as pass on the seas upon their lawful occasions” and finally, the last verse of the hymn for those at sea, sung kneeling:
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoe’er they go . . .
The words had real meaning in those surroundings, could not be uttered but as a supplication when each wandering glance, wherever directed, fell on memorial tablets to dead and gone sailors, or the serious clean-shaven faces of other sailors all around . . . John would be
back in the ante-room by this time, where the Mess provided sherry for officers and their friends to refresh them after church. He would be fumbling in the tails of his frock-coat for his battered silver case, offering a cigarette and a light to Kitty, laughing as if he found life more entertaining than most people did. A pang of doubt shot through Jane’s heart, and she hoped that Kitty was not flirting with him in her usual fashion, so difficult for any man with blood in his veins to resist. Then she comforted herself, as Mr. Jamieson’s sermon rolled to an impassioned climax below her, by remembering that John had appeared to have no difficulty in withstanding Kitty’s more notable attractions and showing quite plainly where his preference lay.
‘Dear John!’ thought Jane as she rose for the last hymn. ‘I hope there will be a letter from him to-morrow. It will be lovely when he goes to Rosyth and I can see him again.’
Her eyes were brilliant with eager anticipation as she went down from the gallery to meet Miss Scott and her brother in the porch, and the General at once complimented her on her looks in his courtly manner as he shook her hand, bowing very slightly over it. They were a tall, slender couple, both in their sixties, handsome and absurdly alike even to the tiny suspicion of a swagger which lent such gallantry to their walk. About them was that air of good breeding as impossible to describe as it is easy to recognize, but while in the General it took the outward form of punctiliousness in small matters, it became in his sister a gay, rather ironic friendliness which never descended to familiarity. The young Cranstouns had adored them from babyhood, and Jane had announced her engagement to the General on her third birthday. Ever since then she had been his particular pet, though she wondered occasionally how it happened that Love had never cut her out, for the General’s shyness had always led him to prefer feminine society in its nursery or school-room stage. What she did not realize was that she was almost the only woman and certainly the only young one, of whom the General, in spite of his D.S.O., was not desperately afraid. With Jane, having known her since the days when he had wiped her nose with his own beautiful linen handkerchiefs, he was at ease, and it filled him with pride and delight to find that even after she grew up, grew pretty, and came out, he remained unfrightened by the manner and behaviour which so appalled him in the daughters of his other friends. So now he congratulated her on looking like an April day, told her that it gave him a new lease of life to know that she was back at Craigrois, and hoped that he was to have the pleasure of sitting beside her at luncheon that day.
Love Comes Home Page 5
