Long Summer Day (A Horseman Riding By)

by R. F Delderfield

  Rudd brought a flustered Mary Willoughby over to shake hands but instead of doing so she dropped a swift curtsy, so that Paul was struck by the tug of feudalism among the Lovell tenantry.

  ‘I heard the children singing,’ he said, for something to say and Mary Willoughby replied, eagerly, ‘Will you have them sing for you here, Sir? I’m sure they’d like to, wouldn’t you, my dears?’ and the children chanted ‘Yes, Miss Willoughby,’ opening and closing their mouths like two rows of puppets, then fixing their eyes on their teacher who picked up a tuning fork, tapped it on the desk and said, ‘Softly then! Watch the baton! One chorus of “The British Grenadiers”, because Mr Rudd tells me Mr Craddock is just home from the wars!’

  The children, one and all, received this news with respect, their eyes leaving the tuning fork and returning to Paul. They sang in shrill, clear voices, the boys grinning, the girls repressing giggles, and when they had finished Paul said, hoarsely, ‘Thank you, that was splendid! Er—how many are there here, Miss Willoughby?’ and Mary said there were fourteen today because two of the older boys were out helping with the harvest and little Hazel Potter was playing truant again.

  Paul, on impulse, pulled out a handful of loose change, saying that everyone present was to have a reward for singing so well but before the squeal of delight had died away a bullet-headed little boy in the rear row shot up his hand and demanded, ‘Sir, sir! Did you kill ole Kruger?’, a question that made even the demure Mary Willoughby laugh.

  ‘No,’ said Paul, ‘nobody killed Kruger, because he got away before anyone could catch him!’, but his questioner was not satisfied with this and saw Paul’s presence as a means of beguiling a tedious hour’s instruction. He followed up with, ‘Did all the Boers run away, please, sir?’, and Paul glanced at Rudd, hoping for some inspiration but getting none said, deliberately, ‘The Boers didn’t run away at all. They were very brave. After all, they were farmers fighting for their country, just as we would!’ This simple statement was received with a shocked ‘Cooo!’, and Paul again glanced at Rudd who was now studying a knothole on the schoolroom floor. Feeling miserably embarrassed he got up and tried to smile. ‘I’m sure Miss Willoughby won’t want me to stay and interrupt your lessons any longer,’ he said, ‘so Mr Rudd and I will have to say goodbye, because we have to ride over and see all the other farms.’

  When they were clear of the farm, and riding along the ridge parallel with the woods Paul said, ‘Did I do wrong to tell them the truth?’

  ‘If you’re only a visitor passing through it doesn’t matter a damn what you say,’ Rudd told him, ‘whereas if you become “New Squire”, as the Potters rather hope, you can say anything you like! After all, they’ll be tenants, and if a Tory doesn’t mince his words with them why should a Radical?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I am a Radical,’ Paul told him. ‘I never gave a thought to politics until I began to convalesce, and had nothing better to do than read the Parliamentary debates in the newspapers.’

  ‘Well,’ pursued Rudd, with one of his quizzical sidelong glances, ‘and what conclusions did you arrive at?’

  ‘I don’t know, one can’t help admiring that chap Lloyd George’s nerve defying the whole weight of public opinion about the war, and there were fellows out there who came around to agreeing with him, after they took part in chivvying the Boers from Hell to Hackney. It seemed to me, however, that once we were in it we had to choose going through with it or becoming the laughing stock of the world. Apart from that it now looks as if they’ll get a better deal from us than they would have got from anyone else. What would have happened to them if the Germans or French had been in our situation?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Rudd evasively, ‘that would be telling!’ and Paul thought: ‘Damn him, he gave so much away yesterday that he’ll be a clam from now on! However, I’d lay six to four that he’s pro-Lloyd George, if only because the Lovell family were Tories!’ And then he forgot politics, surrendering himself to the beauty of a long, easterly slope stretching from Willoughby’s boundary, across the Derwent holding to the cloudless sky over the county border.

  They met Willoughby on the ridge and introductions were exchanged. Rudd, glancing over the hedge, saw the evidence of Gregory’s excavations alongside the stream and at once remarked on it.

  ‘Derwent had no right to siphon off your water,’ he told the saintlike farmer. ‘You may need it badly later on, even if you don’t now.’

  ‘Why, God bless you; Mr Rudd,’ Willoughby said, ‘who am I to begrudge a neighbour water for his cattle in weather like this?’

  Rudd said, ‘Well, it’s your concern I suppose, but I doubt if he’d do the same for you!’, and they rode on down the slope and through the fir copse that shaded the freshly whitewashed buildings of the Derwent farm, Rudd saying that Paul was not to expect forelock-pulling from Derwent, who was anxious to become a freeholder and probably had the means to purchase his land if a new owner was willing to sell it.

  ‘He’s a cagey fellow, with a poor wisp of a second wife,’ he told Craddock. ‘Frankly, I’ve never liked him much but both he and his son Hugh are first-class farmers, and the two daughters are the leading lights of the local hunt. One’s a very fetching girl but the other looks like a horse. They’ll all be civil to you when I tell him why you’re here, but don’t be fooled by the Derwents. They’re like the Codsalls; money and land are the only things they care about and after that, Independence Day!’

  Paul’s reception at High Coombe was much as Rudd had predicted, both father and children making a show of hospitality and the faded Mrs Derwent bringing out glasses of sherry and some appetising little pikelets on a large silver tray.

  The house was well furnished, the stock in good condition and the farm buildings in repair. Paul was particularly impressed by the spotlessly clean stables where Rose, the daughter with a face like a horse, showed him a magnificent four-year-old gelding she intended hunting next season. Rose cared for nothing but horses but her sister Claire showed great solicitude when Rudd told her that Paul had been wounded in action. She was extraordinarily pretty, Craddock decided, with gold hair piled high on a small head, dark blue eyes and an undeniably kissable mouth. She pretended to scold Rudd for encouraging a convalescent man with a leg wound to undertake such a long ride on a hot day, and when she took Paul’s glass to refill it her long fingers caressed his but in the nicest possible way. Craddock, somewhat to his surprise, found he was able to relax at High Coombe, notwithstanding Derwent’s dourness. The yard and enclosures were pleasant places in which to linger after the seediness of the Potter farm, and there were no children to embarrass him with leading questions about Kruger and the war. They resisted an invitation to stay for lunch, however, and pressed on under a blazing midday sun, breasting the northern spur of the ridge and entering the blessed coolness of Shallowford Woods.

  Craddock at once decided that this was the most enchanting part of the estate, a great belt of old timber rising from a jungle of undergrowth that covered the entire south-eastern section of the estate, two miles across and about a mile deep, with a dip in the middle filled by a shallow mere. He had not noticed the lake on the map Rudd had shown him before they set out and thus came upon it by surprise, an oval of reed-fringed water enclosed by oaks and beeches, some of which must have been centuries old. Waterlilies floated here and a tiny islet, half-way across, was the haunt of wild duck and moorhen, who took to the reeds as soon as the horses emerged from the trees. Paul saw that there was a building of mock oriental design on the islet and Rudd told him it was known as ‘The Pagoda’ and had been built, half a century ago, by Amyas Lovell, father of the late baronet. Amyas, Rudd said, had been wounded in the head campaigning in Lower Burma and had been very eccentric towards the end of his life. The pagoda was supposed to be a miniature replica of a temple in Mandalay, and the old soldier had been in the habit of punting himself across the lake and painting atrocious water-colours from th
e pagoda steps.

  They rode on through the murmurous woods, Rudd making estimates of the value of the timber, Paul telling himself that if ever he owned Shallowford he would prefer to sell Derwent his farm rather than fell any of the trees. Some of the beeches rose to a height of over a hundred feet and on the western edge of the wood, where they towered above younger trees, they had been planted according to plan for they were evenly spaced along the rides.

  They emerged into glaring sunshine again east of the steeper and far less dense Hermitage Wood that rose behind the house. Paul could now see the back view of the manor lying in the little valley as they crossed rough ground heading for Hermitage Farm, which lay in open country between the curve of the Sorrel and the main road they had crossed the previous afternoon.

  ‘You’ll like Arthur and young Henry Pitts,’ Rudd told Paul, ‘they’re a genial, hardworking pair and I don’t ever recall having had a dispute with them all the twenty years I’ve been here. Although Arthur is no more than my age his father and grandfather farmed here before him and his father, Old Gaffer Pitts, is still living, although he’s got Parkinson’s disease, poor old chap, and now sits mumbling in the chimney corner. He can remember the harvest failures of the ’forties, and riots over the Corn Laws away in Whinmouth and Paxtonbury. He was in the militia at the time and broke heads on behalf of the Lovells, but his son and grandson are very easy-going and we’ll stop off there for a bite of lunch, it you’ve room for it after all those pikelets Claire Derwent pressed on you. That girl is about desperate for a husband, Mr Craddock! I daresay you noticed she made a dead set at you. What did you think of her? More fetching than the little dark ghost you disturbed in the nursery last night?’

  Paul smiled but said nothing, determined to give the agent no opening in this particular field but as they urged their horses into a trot at the top of Hermitage he reflected that the Sorrel Valley seemed very well endowed with pretty girls, for he had encountered six in a single morning’s ride and any one of them would have stood out in a crowd among the overdressed young women he had noticed in London. Musing on them as they jogged down the track he made comparisons, measuring the aloof appeal of Grace Lovell with the pink and white prettiness of Claire Derwent and the shy charms of the Willoughby girl, now courted by young Will Codsall. He recalled also the frankly sensual appeal of the three Potter girls and it came into his mind that they had the generous proportions of the Hottentot prostitute from whom he had fled in Capetown but looked infinitely more wholesome. Then he was required to face yet another series of introductions, this time to Arthur Pitts and his wife Martha, their son Henry, and Pitts’ old father, The Gaffer. He took to this family at once, for there was a lack of ceremony about Hermitage that had been absent elsewhere, or perhaps it only appeared so, because Rudd was on more friendly terms with the Pitts than with the other tenants and he and Arthur began talking of the drought and the harvest, while Paul was faced with vast helpings of ham and tongue and mountains of green salad, served with a stone jug of potent, home-brewed cider.

  Henry, Arthur’s son, a thick-set young man with a pallor at odds with a farmer who had been out in a heatwave for a month, was exceptionally welcoming and solemnly wished Paul well if he did in fact buy, reinforcing Rudd’s hints that ‘the place would require a praper ole shower o’ money’ if it was to be put on a profitable basis. Martha, Arthur’s busy little wife, had a brogue as broad or broader than Tamer Potter’s and Paul had some difficulty in catching the drift of her conversation, spiced as it was with so many strange words, like ‘thicky’ and ‘giddon’ which he interpreted as ‘that’ and ‘go along with you’, whereas all animals, male and female, were referred to as ‘’Er’. She expressed her deep thankfulness that ‘they ole Boers were now parcelled up an’ vinished with’, and that no more young men would be required to ‘get theirselves shot to tatters’, pointing out that if a man had a mind to die from gunshot wounds he might, with more profit, ‘stand the blind side of thicky hedge, when us iz rabbiting!’ Her husband, Arthur, who happened to overhear this remark, said, ‘Dornee talk so daft, mother! You get a blamed sight more pay chasin’ they Boers than us gets for the rabbits us knocks over hereabouts!’ One way and another Paul delighted in their cheerful company and was sorry when Rudd said they must press on to Four Winds to meet the Codsalls; his failure to do so that same day would surely stir up jealousy in the Valley.

  ‘Well youm right there,’ confirmed Martha, ‘but dornee let that Arabella Codsall give herself airs and you can depend on it she’ll try, seeing as she can’t never forget her father left her the best-dowered daughter in the Valley.’

  Rudd, laughing, said he would mind her advice and off they went again, Paul making light of the growing stiffness in his knee, which pained him somewhat when he swung his leg over the grey.

  ‘I think they’re delightful people,’ he told Rudd, when they were trotting down to the river road and Rudd said he had planned the tour this way because it had a natural rhythm, all the way from sleazy rascality in the Potters’ Dell, to the farcical pretentiousness of Arabella Codsall, ‘the best-dowered woman in the Valley.’

  ‘Four Winds is the largest farm in the area,’ he told Paul as they went along, explaining that it had been stocked on Arabella’s money, nearly two thousand left by her father, a Paxtonbury draper. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘Martin paid dearly for his stake, for Arabella never lets him forget that she married beneath her and considers herself a cut above any other farmer’s wife in the Valley. Martin is a harmless sort of chap but of less account at Four Winds than Derwent’s wife is at High Coombe. At least Mrs Derwent can handle a knife and fork how she likes and that’s more than Martin can when there’s company. She’s a tiresome, garrulous, over-weening bitch is Arabella, for she not only nags her husband from morning to night but discriminates between the boys. Will, the elder, is an amiable blockhead, who would make a good enough farmer if he was left to himself, but he isn’t, and his mother makes a pet of Sydney, her younger son, who she is determined to make into a gentleman. How the hell she’ll do that with Codsall blood and bone I can’t imagine, for the Codsalls have been farming there for a century and Codsall’s father, old Jeremiah, died in the infirmary after falling in the Sorrel dead drunk on New Year’s night. However, we’d best call and round off the day by taking a quick look at the village itself. You can see the Home Farm any time, tomorrow if you like, if you don’t want to hang about the sale.’

  Paul, elated at the prospect of riding down to the sea before the heat went out of the day, now addressed himself to the impossible task of sorting out the various families he had met so far but his memory boggled at so many Potters and Willoughbys and Derwents and Pitts, with here a husband who bullied his wife, and there a wife who nagged her husband, of the rivalries and jealousies and a bevy of pretty, chirrupy girls and their lumping great brothers, so that he gave it up as they clattered over the wooden bridge into Codsall territory and saw the sprawling cluster of buildings round the long, low farmhouse close to the western boundary.

  It was obvious that word of his presence had reached the fifth farm, for the four Codsalls awaited them in the yard, dressed in their Sunday broadcloth and Rudd, spotting Martin Codsall’s silk waistcoat from afar, let out a guffaw and shouted, ‘Codsall! You never tog yourself up for me when I come for the rent!’, a jest that Arabella Codsall, towering half-a-head above her husband, and holding little Sydney by the hand, ignored but bobbed an abbreviated curtsy in Paul’s direction, exclaiming, ‘Look now, Sydney! The gentleman’s in uniform, and an officer’s uniform, I declare! Welcome to Four Winds, Mr Craddock!’ Then, in a higher key that carried as far as the river—‘Will! Don’t stand gawping! Take the gentleman’s horse! Martin! What are you about? Show the visitors into the parlour this minute!’, and the Codsalls moved into action like a sullen detail surprised by a visiting staff-officer and watched by a zealous sergeant-major.

  III

  A
rabella Codsall, notwithstanding her comparative affluence, was almost certainly the most unhappy woman in the Valley and her discontent stemmed from her disgust of the poor material with which she was obliged to work. Under no circumstances could she have proved a success as a farmer’s wife. She had been born over a linen-draper’s shop and brought up within the tight circle of a cathedral city’s tradesmen’s community, so that she thought of farmers as hobbledehoys in a social bracket equivalent to that of roadsweepers, lamplighters and Irish navvies. For all that she had been glad to marry Martin Codsall some twenty years before when she was then twenty-eight and towered nearly six inches above most of the eligible tradesmen’s sons, in her native Paxtonbury. She had the additional handicap of looking rather like an indignant goose, with a large, curving nose, small startled eyes, sharply receding chin and a mouth that was always half-open, as though honking with fury. She had arrived at Four Winds with a supply of linen and one hair trunk but any chance she had of making the most of her situation was shattered by her father’s death and surprise legacy of nearly two thousand pounds. She had not expected anything like this amount for Alderman Blackett had been notoriously secretive concerning his savings. Moreover, there had originally been two other children and the Alderman, having made his will early, had not altered it when these two died in a scarlet-fever epidemic in the early ’nineties, so that the words ‘or surviving progency thereof’ trebled Arabella’s patrimony. She at once set about the task of hoisting the cumbersome Codsalls into a niche above that occupied by their neighbours, and only a peg or two below that of the Lovells, but it had been a wearisome, thankless task, for neither Martin nor her elder son Will seemed able or willing to exploit their opportunities. Arabella mistook the symbols and rituals of her linen-draper’s background for reliable handholds along the haul towards gentility, instituting at Four Winds such incongruous items as four o’clock tea sipped from thin china, linen napkins, a maid with a cap, and even a tablecloth at breakfast, novelties that bewildered Martin Codsall and ultimately converted both him and his son Will into farmyard fugitives, who stayed out of doors whenever possible. Yet she persisted; year after year she prodded and planned, and words of advice and admonition gushed from her goosey little mouth like a cataract, so that in order to survive her menfolk were driven to raise all kinds of defences against her nagging. Martin took refuge in a weak man’s obstinacy and a warren of bolt holes. Will adopted the characteristics of a deaf mute, so that at last Arabella was driven to direct most of her energy upon Sydney, the younger boy. Sydney was more pliant—or so it seemed—and his pliancy soon won for him the adoration of his mother. The moment Arabella had word of Craddock’s visit, and the possibility of his succeeding as Squire, Four Winds erupted. She dressed Sydney in his best, set the hired hands to scour the yard, instituted a spring-clean inside the house (where most of the work was done by a befrilled half-witted child, called Minnie), flushed Martin and Will from their hiding-places and ordered them to don their Sunday serge. Martin, mumbling that he had work to do, took his revenge by somewhat overdoing the transformation and appeared downstairs in a starched dickey when it was too late to go back and change his shirt. Son Will, his mind still searching for a permanent escape route from this hell upon earth, said nothing at all but eyed Craddock with interest when he rode into the yard, perhaps seeing in him some glimmer of hope for the future; for Will Codsall, madly in love with Elinor Willoughby and reduced to the status of an automaton, any change at Shallowford would be for the better.