‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery,’ said Mr Purefoy. He read the service quickly now, and when the wet soil fell upon the coffin, when earth, ashes, and dust were committed to their like, Arthur Gander was seized by a curious notion that mud also should be mentioned, and for the next few minutes heard nothing of prayer or collect, being intent on a debate between the rival qualities of dust, that sterile pricking in the eyes, and mud, the gravid floor of crops, and was very perplexed that the former should be preferred for ritual remark. He was roused from this unprofitable logomachy by the loud command, ‘Firing party, present arms!’
The firing party hoisted their rifles into the required position. ‘Salope arms!’ said the sergeant. They transferred their rifles to their left shoulders. The preparatory order ‘Volleys!’ was succeeded by the injunction to load. They stuffed blank cartridges into the breech, thrust in the bolt, and, pointing their rifles to the sky, waited for the word to fire. Sergeant Pilcher hesitated: he looked anxiously to see if all were ready: and in that surplus second Stephen Sorley, harshly and abruptly, coughed. To Private Ling, eager as ever to be smart, the crackling noise seemed very like a military command, and he pressed his trigger. Privates Butt, Jenkins, Gotobed, Blair, and Hopkins followed suit, and the result, most inappropriate for a funeral, was a feu de joie.
‘Wait for it, you bloody fools!’ cried Sergeant Pilcher, and wished for one agonizing moment that he had at his command language equal to the daedal invective of a pre-War N.C.O. But the next two volleys were fired in gratifying unison, his anger evaporated, and he listened with composure to Bugler Bliss’s attempt to sound the Last Post. Bugler Bliss’s tongue was imperfectly taught, and that poignant call, that may summon the heart to a loneliness like the outer stars’, brayed with his breath like a tinker’s moke.
Major Gander’s life had not been happy, and the ceremonies attendant on his death were correspondingly mismanaged.
Chapter 2
Sergeant Pilcher, walking with a young woman past Rumneys in the late afternoon, when the weather had moderated, stopped to admire its handsome front, and remarked with envy and awe in his voice: ‘To think it’s all made of toffee!’
His observation, well contrived to arouse interest, was however inaccurate: Rumneys had not been built of toffee, but bought with toffee. Jonathan Gander, who had died in 1904 worth £84,000, had been a man of great business ability and the fortunate owner of a sweet tooth: but a sweet tooth of discrimination, of delicate appraisal, a tooth as sensitive to the various flavours of butterscotch and fondants as the palate of a wine-taster is to the exquisite difference between the growth of contiguous vineyards on the Slope of Gold. This refinement of taste he had inherited from his mother, who, being left a widow in the days when Lammiter was little more than a village, had turned to good account a nice hand for butter toffee and what were known as Grandmama’s Bonbons. Filling the kitchen of her cottage with sweet odours, she had made enough money to pay for the schooling of her family, and before she died she had been repaid by seeing most of them settle down as respectable tradesmen. But Jonathan, the tallest, the strongest, and by far the most independent of her brood, had excited the derision of the neighbours and astonished his mother by refusing to work anywhere except in the kitchen. There, among a host of lesser confections, he had invented that most satisfying of all sweetmeats, Gander’s Nutcream Toffee. But in him the artist was allied to the business man: quite early in his career, for instance, he found that barley-sugar acquired a quicker consistency and a greater bulk by the addition of a little flour, and this discovery revolutionized his production of Grandmama’s Bonbons. Art and acumen continued hand in hand throughout his career, and in forty years the copper pot in the kitchen had grown into a factory whose products were known throughout the kingdom. Gander’s Nutcream Toffee became as integral a part of English childhood as Mother Goose and Robinson Crusoe, and Jonathan himself continued to eat it till the day of his death. He neither drank nor smoked, seeing tobacco and wine as mortal enemies to toffee, and he firmly believed that the surest way to good health was an inordinate consumption of sugar.
He had married twice. His first wife had borne him six children, of whom two had predeceased him. Hilary Gander was the sole issue of his second marriage.
The Major, his third son, had died a bachelor. A romantic attachment to a young lady called Evelyn Sotheby had ended, disastrously for him, during the siege of Ladysmith. While the Major – he was a Captain then – was shut up in that unfortunate town, Miss Sotheby married a man called Hubble, whose father, known in Lammiter as Hubble-Bubble, was a wealthy manufacturer of aerated waters. Now the Major had loved Evelyn Sotheby for ten years and never told his love. He was a shy man, to whom words came reluctantly, and Evelyn was a child of sixteen when he first saw her and knew, at that moment, that no other woman in the world had any meaning for him. His regiment was ordered to India and he went with it, hoping to find in the years of their separation words to woo her when he returned. He carried her photograph with him through the Tirah campaign of 1897, and he had another in his pocket – for the first had faded – when the Boers invested Ladysmith. The South African War interrupted his courtship for the second time. He had come home from India, a soldier proved in battle and toughened by service in the northern passes, and for three months he danced attendance on Miss Sotheby, and his love for her grew day by day, and he never said a word to hint of its existence. He waited for a miracle to make his heart speak for him, for a tongue of Pentecostal flame; but the Boers spoke first, and the Major went to war again. In the troopship he swore to himself that the first words he would utter on returning to Lammiter – if he lived to return – would be: ‘Evelyn, I love you. Will you marry me?’ But young Mr Hubble stayed at home, and when Lady smith was relieved the first news that the Major read was an intimation of Evelyn’s marriage.
This seemed to him the blackest treachery, and for a couple of years his prevailing mood was bitter pessimism. As soon as the war was over he resigned his commission and went to shoot lions in Uganda. This salutary exercise restored his morale, and when he heard that his two elder brothers had both died within six months – Edward of pleurisy, Alexander in a motor – car accident, for motor-cars were just beginning to go fast enough to be dangerous – he returned to Lammiter and entered the family business. He soon revealed so sound an understanding of its problems, so remarkable an ability for negotiation, that when old Jonathan died of diabetes, eighteen months later, Gander’s Nutcream Toffee had increased its sales by ten per cent, and several new chocolate varieties of Grandmama’s Bonbons were already on the market.
The Major’s energetic application to business was undoubtedly influenced by the desire, sometimes hardly conscious, to make a larger fortune than the Hubble-Bubbles’. Young Hubble and his wife had gone to live in London: he had bought a new factory site in Woolwich: ‘He can fill his lemonade bottles from the Thames, he won’t need to flavour them now,’ said the Major bitterly, and resolved to show Hubble-Bubble, and Mrs Hubble-Bubble too, that Lammiter toffee was a better proposition than London lemonade. The business of selling sweets became a romantic quest, and he pursued profits as though they were the path to virtue, leading an ascetic life and reading Malory for recreation.
From this monopoly of his interest he was rescued by the Great War. Leaving his manager to look after the business, he immediately offered his services in the national cause and was rewarded for zeal by a succession of the dullest duties imaginable. He guarded waterworks, he did garrison duty in Ireland, he conducted drafts across the Channel, he suffered heat, boredom, and flies in Salonika, and the conclusion of hostilities found him as Officer in Charge of Embarkations in Bombay. But his return to uniform filled him with enthusiasm for military service that even these elaborate variations in monotony could not kill, and when the war was over he devoted himself with such zeal to the affairs of the Brackenshire Territorial Army Association that he soon b
ecame its President.
The toffee business had suffered losses during the war, and the Major was no longer interested in it. He effected some perfunctory reforms, however, and in the boom that energized the first years of peace it again showed handsome profits. But in 1921, with the consent of old Jonathan Gander’s remaining descendants, he sold it outright to the mammoth corporation of American Candy, Inc., for £120,000. For many years he had held a controlling interest in the business – it had been a private company – and he was now able to retire with a handsome fortune. Having abundant leisure he added Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, the Lammiter Children’s Hospital, and a couple of orphanages to his Territorial hobby, and among such a crowd succeeded in losing the greater part of his bachelor loneliness. For in his latter years he became a prey to the fear of loneliness, and his once romantic temperament was progressively infused with sentimentality. He was delighted when the Girl Guides and the Orphans nicknamed him Uncle John.
He was sixty-three when he died, and his death was due to heart-failure after shooting for the Officers’ Cup at the Brackens’ Rifle Meeting.
He had spent a lot of money on these organizations, but his wealth was so ample that everyone realized a fortune must still remain to be divided among his nephews and nieces. To estimate its extent had for years been a favourite amusement of the people of Lammiter, and extravagant opinions had frequently been hazarded. Poor and simple people, as well as charitable associations all over the country, regarded him as a millionaire; and even the sophisticated, who scornfully pooh-poohed such rumours, would often say, ‘Take my word for it, he won’t cut up for a penny less than £150,000.’ But speculation now had changed its front: the aggregate of his fortune was no longer of much interest compared with the manner of its distribution. The Major was survived by his half-sister Hilary, by two nieces, and by two nephews, or three if one counted George, who drank, and who was now living obscurely in India or the United States: opinion, though unanimous about his evil nature, differed as to his whereabouts.
It was generally agreed that Rumneys would be left to Hilary, who for many years had kept house for the Major; and well-informed opinion expected that she would also inherit the greater part of his whole estate. There were others who tipped Arthur Gander as the heir: he had lost most of the money left him by his father, he had a wife and child, he needed help: and many well-disposed people hoped he would get it. The Brackenshire Ladies’ Golf Club, on the other hand, nursed an uneasy fear that Jane Sutton would be the lucky one; it must not be thought, however, that she was unpopular in the Club: many of the members were sincerely fond of her: but altruism has its limitations, and to see a woman, who can already give you half a stroke and beat you, inherit £150,000, is not the sort of thing to make a female golfer happy. Another school of thought expected that Katherine Clements would be the winner: these, for the most part, were spinsters and neglected wives: they darkly said, ‘A woman like that can twist any man round her little finger’, economically declaring, by this judgement, their contempt for men and their dislike of Katherine in one breath. The last of the known claimants for the Major’s fortune, Stephen Sorley, was favoured only by Wilfrid Follison, his devoted friend, and by Mrs Barlow, their faithful housekeeper.
Happy were those whose curiosity was academic only, who could speculate upon the incidence of wealth without hope of their own gain or fear of their own disappointment. The state of mind of the possible heirs was far from pleasant. Hilary alone was comparatively calm, and even she was aware of a feeling like indigestion, of a certain discomfort in the chest, of a tendency to yawn, as though she were crossing the Channel in rough weather. Arthur, who for several days had been inventing variations on the theme of a beneficent squiredom – he being the squire – had just been made miserable by a whisper from Jane: ‘Have you bought Lammiter Priory yet?’ Arthur fully intended to do this if his share of the booty were sufficient, and to be surprised in his secret ambition was painfully embarrassing. He was offended, too, by open discussion of the pecuniary significance of his uncle’s will: he himself was prepared to regard it as a covenant rather than a testament, as an ark to be conveyed into his care – he the chosen Levite.
‘I have more respect for Uncle John than to try and anticipate his last wishes,’ he answered stiffly.
Jane whistled and felt unhappy. Arthur’s self-righteousness suggested that he knew more than he cared to admit, and an awful fear assailed her that she might be left out in the cold. Her vision of girdling the globe with birdies and her unerring mashie faded like a fire in the sun: she had already planned her tour of the world’s golf-courses, from St Andrews to Del Monte in California, and now that godlike progress dwindled to hacking her way for evermore down the familiar fairways of Lammiter Heath. Arthur would get the money and she would be left as poor as ever. Her enormous muscles felt limp and tired, and a bitter taste came into her mouth.
Katherine Clements, meanwhile, was foolishly confessing her hopes to Stephen Sorley. ‘Uncle John was terribly fond of me, I’m sure of that,’ she said earnestly. ‘And he knew how poor we are: it was only the other day that he said he simply couldn’t think how I always managed to dress so well, for Oliver of course, has practically nothing but his pay, and it costs a lot to live in a cavalry regiment, even an Indian one. I do think Uncle John must have left me something pretty decent: well, £20,000, perhaps: don’t you?’
‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘I shall be amazed if he has left you anything at all.’
He was already busy with plans to purchase a charming little Queen Anne house, five or six miles away, where he and Wilfrid could live, not in luxury, but in exquisite refinement. They could give up their sordid occupation of teaching illiterates, at ten guineas a time, to write articles for the popular magazines and newspapers: twenty lessons, by correspondence, and the illiterates were supposed to learn an easy and congenial method of supplementing their income by journalism and the minor pangs of literature! How inexpressibly debasing! But what else could a man do to keep body and soul together? How different would life be if he were only moderately wealthy! He would have a secretary, a chauffeur, and a buttoned page in the little Queen Anne house: he knew a delightful boy, two years his junior at Oxford, who would make an admirable secretary, and young Herbert Ling – he had looked really handsome at the funeral, except that his nose was rather red – was very knowledgeable about motor-cars. They would live a trim monastic life, safe from the noise and importunacy and assertiveness of women – though he would keep Mrs Barrow, of course – and Wilfrid would have the opportunity he wanted to paint water-colour pictures, and design Gothic ornaments for goldfish bowls, and play the piano, and talk. How endlessly, with what infinite pleasure and ceaseless wit, they would talk together! There were days when he wanted to do nothing but talk, to spin like a silkworm his whole being into shining threads of conversation. And as things were he had to listen to this dreary woman Katherine, who smelt of a perfume called Deep Night and talked interminably of her shrill need for money and of her oafish husband who was a soldier in India: a Lancer or some such prehistoric monster.
‘It might have made a world of difference if Oliver could have got home in time,’ she was saying. ‘He’s on his way now, you see: if he leaves the boat at Marseille, as he said he would, he’ll be home in a day or two. And he used to get on so well with Uncle John, they were both soldiers, you see, and he could easily have said something about the future, nothing about money, naturally, but just a reminder that if I had an independent income things would be much easier for him. Uncle John would have understood him perfectly, and I might have been saved all this worry. Not that I’m actually worrying, of course, for I know that Uncle John must have left me something: but if I only knew how much …’
It was at this moment that Sergeant Pilcher, pausing outside, his right arm snugly round a young woman’s waist, looked with envy and awe at Rumneys and remarked, ‘To. think it’s all made of toffee!’
No sooner had the ser
geant resumed his walk than a car entered the drive, and Mr Peabody, the late Major’s solicitor, got out and rang the bell. He apologized for his lateness: Lady Caroline Purefoy had called to discuss with him certain arrangements for the garden party, for which he was acting as honorary treasurer, and he had found it difficult, well, not to get rid of her, but to persuade her to expedite her business. Mr Peabody smiled: a few ingratiating wrinkles appeared on the smooth tight skin of his face, and vanished like errant ripples on a mill-dam: ‘But I expect you are anxious to hear the contents of the will,’ he said.
He was answered by a little symphony of deprecatory ejaculation, hoarse agreement, and Katherine Clements’ frank admission, ‘Oh, yes, Mr Peabody!’
‘It was the Major’s wish’, he continued, ‘that you should all be apprised of the disposition of his property at one and the same time, in order, as he himself said, that you might start at scratch. I regret that I have not yet been able to get into touch with Mr George Gander, but with his exception everyone is present who may expect to benefit by the terms of the will. I refer, of course, to the residuum of the estate, for there are certain legacies which are independent of the condition that governs its disposal. These minor legacies are as follows.’
Ripeness is All Page 2
