Robin said his father, who was Rector of Hallbury, had a great aunt called Lily Dale, but he didn’t know much about her.
“But then your father is Dr. Dale!” said Lady Emily, enchanted to have an excuse for going into relationships. “I remember meeting him at the Deanery a long time ago with your mother, a lovely young creature. How is she?”
Robin said he was dreadfully sorry but she was dead, at which Lady Emily’s face became all compassion; but a long time ago, when he was quite a little boy, he added.
“Poor boy, poor boy,” said Lady Emily, laying her frail hand with its heavy jewelled rings on his knee. “And poor Dr. Dale. My second son—the one whose boys are at Southbridge—lost his first wife soon after they were married. She was the most enchanting person and we all adored her, but they had no children. John was in the most bitter distress, and if he had not met Mary Preston—her mother is the sister of Agnes’s husband and Mary is a darling and we all love her—I think he would have become a kind of hollow mask, though he was always most loving to me,” said Lady Emily, a veil coming over her bright falcon’s eyes as she thought of her child’s misery, though long since stilled and probably forgotten with his very nice wife and his children.
Robin did not know what to answer. He could not truthfully say ‘poor boy’ of himself, for he hardly remembered his mother, his boyhood and school days had been happy, and he and his father were excellent if not intimate friends. But all this was rather difficult to explain in one breath and he did not like to intrude his own deficiency in sorrow upon Lady Emily, to whom the old griefs were still young in her remembering of them. Luckily the pause was not too long before her ladyship, always wanting to know about people, asked Robin if his father had married again.
Robin said No; not but what, he added, he thought his father certainly would have if he had wanted to.
“You must bring him to see me one day,” said Lady Emily. “We could talk about old times and your lovely mother.”
“I’m afraid Papa wouldn’t be up to it,” said Robin. “He is over eighty—he married very late in life, but I think he and my mother were very happy—and very frail. But I will give him your kind message.”
Lady Emily then fell into a welter of plans for going over to Hallbury, and Robin had to explain that though his father was not in the least mad, he was very apt to forget or jumble names and dates and places, and was in fact distinctly woolly in the wits except for church matters, on which his mind remained perfectly clear, though his physical powers were failing.
Lady Emily’s sympathy was so prompt, so understanding, that Robin confided to her that everyone was wondering if his father would have to retire soon; how Robin hoped this would not come to pass, because he thought his father would die of a broken heart, quite apart from old age, if he were separated from his beloved St. Hall Friar’s Church; and that a horrid rumour had reached him through the Deanery that the Bishop was going to be difficult.
“The Bishop!” said Lady Emily. And then her ladyship expressed her opinion of that prelate with some vigour. “My dear Mr. Dale, it must not be. I shall tell Gillie to enquire into it at once, and he shall tell the Duke of Omnium to speak to the Archbishop“; for Lady Emily’s distant cousin young Giles Foster, who had succeeded to the Pomfret earldom after her brother’s death, had become a power in Barsetshire, not so much through his possessions as by his hard work in the county and his utter reliability in any matter into which he entered.
“Bishop Joram, I think you know him, who was vicar of Rushwater for a time during the war,” said Robin, “is extremely kind about coming over from Barchester to help, and Papa likes him. So I hope everything will be all right. But thank you very much, Lady Emily, for your kindness. I don’t know how to thank you properly.”
“And you lost a foot at Anzio, so little Anne Fielding told me,” said Lady Emily. “And there is Martin with that leg of his though he never complains, and I sometimes think of my eldest son. He was killed at Arras. He was Martin’s father, you know. The Flowers of the Forest.”
There was a silence while Lady Emily looked far back into the past and Robin thought of the Leslie boys and all his other pupils, and wondered at what age another war would catch them with its blind, senseless fury. He saw no particular hope in the prospect.
“Before you go,” said Lady Emily, coming back to the present with a very practical air, “I should like to give you a copy of Papa’s translation of the poem by Ronsard. We will go to my room and find one. Will you give me your arm?”
Without waiting for an assistance which Robin hardly knew how to give, so encompassed was her ladyship by the barricades round her chair, Lady Emily began to get up. As Robin told Anne afterwards it was rather like a game of spillikins, except that Lady Emily cheated and always played again after she had disturbed the pile. Three books slid gently to the floor, a glass of water with two paint brushes and a rose in it tilted with maddening slowness, though just so fast that Robin could not catch it in time, and fell into a basket of knitting, A reading lamp crashed to the ground and Robin, trying to get nearer his hostess, caught his foot in the flex and nearly fell into the fireplace.
“Oh dear, do be careful, Mr. Dale,” said Lady Emily, who had by now managed to stand up and was dropping shawls and scarves like icicles when the thaw begins. “You will hurt your foot.”
Without pausing to ask whether she meant his real foot or the pretence one, Robin picked up some of the impedimenta and followed her respectfully across the hall to her own sitting-room, which looked rather as if a dealer in old furniture and clothes had been trying to find the philosopher’s stone over a period of years.
“Merry tidies it every day,” said Lady Emily, “I cannot think how it gets so untidy. Now, I know Papa’s Ronsards are on the top shelf in the corner, because I put them there only last week. Will you look, Mr. Dale?”
Robin looked and said he was very sorry he couldn’t see them.
“You are perfectly right,” said Lady Emily. “They can’t be there for I distinctly remember having moved them to make room for something else. I know.”
She advanced triumphantly, leaning on her stick, to the large table, lifted a piece of old wine-coloured velvet and exposed a little pile of thin books. She took one, and saying to Robin that she would write his name in it, sat down at another part of the table where pens, pencils, paste, chalks, drawing-pins and coloured inks lay pell-mell.
“Green for Ronsard, I think,” said Lady Emily, taking up a pen and dipping it into an ink bottle. “Though why green,” she added with an air of great candour, “I really do not know.”
“Perhaps because of its verte nouveauté,” said Robin, a phrase suddenly rising to his memory.
Lady Emily flashed one of her most brilliant bewitching smiles upon him and in her flowing handwriting embellished with arabesques, wrote some words.
“We will let it dry,” she said. “It always looks nicer than if you blot it.”
Robin looked over his shoulder and read, ‘To Robin Dale this book written by his dear Father. Emily Leslie.’
“I think,” said Robin, though tentatively, for he was beginning to feel as most of Lady Emily’s friends did that with her all things were possible, “there is a kind of mistake, Lady Emily. It was Lord Pomfret who translated the poem, not my father. At least, I don’t think he did.”
“How foolish of me,” said Lady Emily. “I must have been thinking of your dear father, or of something quite different. I often do. I will alter it.”
Below the inscription she added the words, “Fool that I am. It was Papa that translated the poem.”
“There,” she said, handing it triumphantly to Robin. “Give your dear father my love and tell him that I have never forgotten your mother; that lovely creature. And now if you will ring the bell for Conque I shall go to my room.”
Robin rang. Conque came in her usual grudging way and took possession of her mistress’s loose property. Lady Emily said good-bye and Robin
went to see how the sale was getting on.
The sale was going pretty well. The neighbourhood had rallied loyally and a few friends had come from Barchester by train, really to see Lady Graham, though they bought nobly as well. But the friends further away mostly hadn’t any petrol to spare, or if they had, felt too tired to make the effort after dealing with the food problems roused by Peace. Lord Stoke, who never missed an opportunity of going anywhere, had driven over from Rising Castle in a dog-cart, bringing Mrs. Morland with him and an elderly groom on the back seat, which turn-out aroused a great deal of comment, most of it we regret to say of a disparaging nature, from the general public who thought a horse was funny.
“I wouldn’t have come over,” said Lord Stoke to Lady Graham, “if I hadn’t known you could put the horse up. When I was a young man you could drive all over England and put your trap or your horse up properly. Now, except for the Omnium Arms at Hallbury, I don’t know an hotel within miles that has even one loose-box. My rule is: go and see your friends that farm. They’ll be able to look after a horse. I told my man to take the dog-cart over to the farm. Well, well, you’ve a sale, haven’t you? Anything I can buy?”
Lady Graham, having waited patiently for her distinguished old friend to finish talking, for owing to his deafness it was useless to say anything till he had talked himself out, said at the top of her voice that she was so glad he had sent the dog-cart over to the farm and the bailiff would take great care of it and the horse and look after the groom. She then welcomed Mrs. Morland and begged them both to come and have tea in the drawing-room before they went.
Lord Stoke, whose knowledge of the county was extensive and peculiar, made himself quite happy in his own way by giving the best-looking of the village helpers five pounds and telling her to buy some rubbish for him and take tickets in all the raffles, and then melted away towards the farm where he caught the bailiff and had a long and delightfully depressing talk about the future of agriculture in England. Mrs. Morland, seeing Anne Fielding, for whom she had taken a great liking, went and talked to her.
“Will you introduce me to Mrs. Morland, Anne?” said Miss Merriman.
“But don’t you know each other?” said Anne, surprised that two ladies, both inhabitants of Barsetshire, each so distinguished in her own way, should not be acquainted. “Oh Mrs. Morland, this is Miss Merriman.”
“Would you mind if I told you how very much I like your books?” said Miss Merriman, shaking hands with Mrs. Morland.
“Not really,” said Mrs. Morland, with her air of desperate candour. “I mean I am frightfully pleased, but it always seems to me so peculiar that the sort of people one knows should like one’s books, because they are really intelligent.”
“Do you mean the people or the books?” said Miss Merriman.
And then both the ladies laughed and got on very well, each respecting in the other something she could not possibly do herself.
“I have brought you, if you don’t mind,” said Mrs. Morland, scrabbling about in a large bag and extracting an untidy parcel, “three of my books for the sale. I wish I could have brought more, but my publisher Adrian Coates can’t get any more paper and I can’t get copies of my own old books. These are some I happened to have by me. I wish they were eggs or something useful.”
Miss Merriman thanked Mrs. Morland warmly and said if she would autograph them it would greatly enhance their value. Mrs. Morland, flattered and surprised, undid the parcel, put the books on a table where second-hand novels were being sold and pulling out a fountain pen signed them all.
“Thank you very much,” said Miss Merriman. “But they are too good for this stall. We will raffle them.”
Clarissa, who had been looking on, hoping to be allowed to shake hands with the creator of Madame Koska, in whose dressmaking establishment so many delightful crimes and conspiracies took place yearly, threw herself into the business of raffle tickets and with the help of Anne and the Infant School Teacher, who was very littery—at least that was how she described herself—had within a quarter of an hour sold two pounds fourteen shillings and sixpence worth of tickets, which gratified the well-known authoress very much.
“Because that,” she explained, “comes to more than they cost at a bookseller’s, so my publisher can’t say I am underselling him.”
Even Miss Merriman, who had kept the whole of the domestic accounts for Pomfret Towers and metaphorically cast her shoe over most financial problems, was staggered by Mrs. Morland’s statement, but decided to treat it as a proof of genius.
“It was Clarissa,” said Anne, presenting her friend.
Mrs. Morland shook Clarissa’s hand warmly and said she would send a copy of her next book, which kind action confirmed Clarissa in her wish to go to boarding school, as she would there be able to boast about it.
As most of the goods on the tables were now sold, Miss Merriman decided to announce the names of raffle winners before tea, at which news Mr. Scatcherd’s anxiety rose to fever point, for the fate of his masterpiece was in the balance.
Clarissa drew the tickets out of a horse’s nosebag, itself one of the articles being raffled, and read, “Mr. Scatcherd’s picture. Number Twenty-two.”
All those who had not lost their tickets looked anxiously through them.
“Well to GOODNESS,” said the exasperated voice of Hetty Scatcherd, “if it isn’t my number anyone might have told me not to be fool enough to take a ticket for anything of Uncle’s I’d be sure to get it oh good GRACIOUS now we’ve got to have it back on our hands as if there wasn’t enough of your rubbishy stuff about the house any way Uncle and what her ladyship will say after being so kind as to buy those things of yours for her sale I don’t know oh my GOODNESS!”
Lady Graham, who had been talking with the Hallidays and Martin about Sylvia’s wedding, which was to be at Hatch End, of course, came over to see what all the noise was about. Miss Merriman explained the unfortunate coincidence and Lady Graham said if Miss Scatcherd didn’t mind she would re-buy the picture for whatever it had fetched in the raffle and present it to the Infant School. On enquiry it was found that Hetty’s was the last ticket sold and that twenty-two sixpences were eleven shillings. This sum Lady Graham accordingly paid to Miss Merriman as Honorary Treasurer, the Infant School teacher said it would brighten up that dark place where the children left their coats nicely, and Mr. Scatcherd, pleased to think that his masterpiece would assist in forming the minds, if any, of future generations, though he would have preferred to see it hung in the National Gallery, was dragged back to Rokeby by his niece, who didn’t believe in spending money on tea when she could have it quietly at home.
The gentry then went into the drawing-room, leaving the commons to have tea in the now almost denuded Saloon.
“Where is Lord Stoke?” said Lady Graham.
“With Emmy,” said Martin. “As soon as she heard he was here she went off to the farm to talk cows with him.”
Leslie major, who had bicycled from his home on the other side of Barchester with his brother, said he would go and find them and before long returned with the wanderers, who had been enjoying themselves vastly.
“Nice girl of yours,” said Lord Stoke to Lady Graham. “She’s got a head on her shoulders. We were talking a bit of business. I hear you are looking out for a good heifer in calf, Martin. Send Emmy over to see one or two I’ve got. And how are yours, eh? Emmy says you’ve called the new bull-calf Rushwater Churchill. Quite right too. If Churchill had been in, we’d never have had this peace.”
At this revolutionary remark most of the company stopped talking and stared.
“I know exactly what Lord Stoke means,” said Mrs. Morland, ramming her hat onto her head in a way which anyone who knew her would have recognised as a preparation for some of her most irresponsible and Sibylline utterances. “When this Government came into power—I will not say we put them into power,” said Mrs. Morland, “for I voted Conservative and so did everyone I know except a few people like that d
readful Major Hooper who thinks that what he thinks matters—I decided that as the People of England, though I really do not know what I mean by that nor does anyone else, wanted a Government like that and as it was His Majesty’s Government we ought to support it. So I did support it, except of course when I voted Conservative in the bye-election, but that was quite different because it was voting for one man, not for a whole Government; and I would be supporting it still, not that it has ever supported me,” said Mrs. Morland bitterly as she swept a bit of loose hair behind her ear, “until this dreadful Vay Jay Dee—I mean Vee Jee Day—well, you know what I mean. And when,” Mrs. Morland continued, putting her hat a little crooked and giving the impression of rising to her feet and being nine feet high, although she was sitting at the tea-table, “I saw the way They managed it; when Anne Knox started for London and got as far as Barchester and had to come back because the papers hadn’t come and they very rightly don’t listen to the wireless, though I daresay we shall all be compelled by law to listen to it soon, in which case I shall go and live with Lord Stoke because he is deaf; then I Lost Faith. Not that I ever had any,” said Mrs. Morland simply, “but I do want to be loyal and after all the Government is the governing power however you look at it. And people finding all the bread gone just because the Government thought it would show off instead of letting us know the day before, and then we could have stayed in bed an hour longer or something. So I stopped being loyal. I mean to the Government, not to the King, who makes me cry whenever I think of him,” at which loyal effusion most of her hearers felt they could easily cry too. “So,” said Mrs. Morland, reserving this thunderbolt for the last, “I joined the Women’s Section of the High Rising Branch of the Barsetshire Conservative Association, for I felt it was the very worst I could do. And now the Government can do what it likes.”
So strongly did this patriotic and defiant speech affect her audience that but for the powerful voices of Lord Stoke and Emmy they would all probably have joined the nearest Conservative Association at once, and Anne and Clarissa might have become members of a Youth Group. But the cow-keeping interest overbore all such secondary considerations, and Lord Stoke, Emmy, Martin and Sylvia bargained about the heifer at the tops of their voices, owing to his lordship’s deafness; which made Martin, who was not very good at shouting, think how lucky he was to have won a wife like Sylvia who was not only an angel and very kind and very beautiful, but could bellow down Lord Stoke on his own ground. And as he looked at Sylvia with adoration and gratitude, she suddenly looked at him with protection and adoration in her eyes, and Mrs. Halliday said to Lady Graham how very lovely Sylvia’s engagement ring was and how clever of Martin to find it, and they fell again into wedding talk while Mr. Halliday discussed “The Three Musketeers” with Leslie minor.
Peace Breaks Out Page 31
