‘So far as I can understand, she has left me between four and five hundred a year. It all comes from Ther Land, as they call it down here. The unspeakable attorney, Sperrit, and a green-eyed daughter, who hums to herself as she tramps but is silent on all subjects except “huntin’”, insisted on taking me to see it. Ther Land is brown and green in alternate slabs like chocolate and pistachio cakes, speckled with occasional peasants who do not utter. In case it should not be wet enough there is a wet brook in the middle of it. Ther House is by the brook. I shall look into it later. If there should be any little memento of Jenny that you care for, let me know. Didn’t you tell me that mid-Victorian furniture is coming into the market again? Jenny’s old maid – it is called Rhoda Dolbie – tells me that Jenny promised it thirty pounds a year. The will does not. Hence, I suppose, the tears at the funeral. But that is close on ten per cent of the income. I fancy Jenny has destroyed all her private papers and records of her vie intime,3 if, indeed, life be possible in such a place. The Sperrit man told me that if I had means of my own I might come and live on Ther Land. I didn’t tell him how much I would pay not to! I cannot think it right that any human being should exercise mastery over others in the merciless fashion our tomfool social system permits; so, as it is all mine, I intend to sell it whenever the unholy Sperrit can find a purchaser.’
And he went to Mr Sperrit with the idea next day, just before returning to town.
‘Quite so,’ said the lawyer. ‘I see your point, of course. But the house itself is rather old-fashioned – hardly the type purchasers demand nowadays. There’s no park, of course, and the bulk of the land is let to a life-tenant, a Mr Sidney. As long as he pays his rent, he can’t be turned out, and even if he didn’t’ – Mr Sperrit’s face relaxed a shade – ‘you might have a difficulty.’
‘The property brings four hundred a year, I understand,’ said Midmore.
‘Well, hardly – ha-ardly. Deducting land and income tax, tithes, fire insurance, cost of collection and repairs of course, it returned two hundred and eighty-four pounds last year. The repairs are rather a large item – owing to the brook. I call it Liris – out of Horace,4 you know.’
Midmore looked at his watch impatiently.
‘I suppose you can find somebody to buy it?’ he repeated.
‘We will do our best, of course, if those are your instructions. Then, that is all except’ – here Midmore half rose, but Mr Sperrit’s little grey eyes held his large brown ones firmly – ‘except about Rhoda Dolbie, Mrs Werf’s maid. I may tell you that we did not draw up your aunt’s last will. She grew secretive towards the last – elderly people often do – and had it done in London. I expect her memory failed her, or she mislaid her notes. She used to put them in her spectacle-case… My motor only takes eight minutes to get to the station, Mr Midmore… but, as I was saying, whenever she made her will with us, Mrs Werf always left Rhoda thirty pounds per annum. Charlie, the wills!’ A clerk with a baldish head and a long nose dealt documents on to the table like cards, and breathed heavily behind Midmore. ‘It’s in no sense a legal obligation, of course,’ said Mr Sperrit. ‘Ah, that one is dated January the 11th, eighteen eighty-nine.’
Midmore looked at his watch again and found himself saying with no good grace: ‘Well, I suppose she’d better have it – for the present at any rate.’
He escaped with an uneasy feeling that two hundred and fifty-four pounds a year was not exactly four hundred, and that Charlie’s long nose annoyed him. Then he returned, first-class, to his own affairs.
Of the two, perhaps three, experiments in Social Relations which he had then in hand, one interested him acutely. It had run for some months and promised most variegated and interesting developments, on which he dwelt luxuriously all the way to town. When he reached his flat he was not well prepared for a twelve-page letter explaining, in the diction of the Immoderate Left which rubricates its I’s and illuminates its T’s, that the lady had realized greater attractions in another Soul. She re-stated, rather than pleaded, the gospel of the Immoderate Left as her justification, and ended in an impassioned demand for her right to express herself in and on her own life, through which, she pointed out, she could pass but once. She added that if, later, she should discover Midmore was ‘essentially complementary to her needs’, she would tell him so. That Midmore had himself written much the same sort of epistle – barring the hint of return – to a woman of whom his needs for self-expression had caused him to weary three years before, did not assist him in the least. He expressed himself to the gas-fire in terms essential but not complimentary. Then he reflected on the detached criticism of his best friends and her best friends, male and female, with whom he and she and others had talked so openly while their gay adventure was in flower. He recalled, too – this must have been about midnight – her analysis from every angle, remote and most intimate, of the mate to whom she had been adjudged under the base convention which is styled marriage. Later, at that bad hour when the cattle wake for a little, he remembered her in other aspects and went down into the hell appointed; desolate, desiring, with no God to call upon. About eleven o’clock next morning Eliphaz5 the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite called upon him ‘for they had made appointment together’ to see how he took it; but the janitor told them that Job had gone – into the country, he believed.
Midmore’s relief when he found his story was not written across his aching temples for Mr Sperrit to read – the defeated lover, like the successful one, believes all earth privy to his soul – was put down by Mr Sperrit to quite different causes. He led him into a morning-room. The rest of the house seemed to be full of people, singing to a loud piano idiotic songs about cows, and the hall smelt of damp cloaks.
‘It’s our evening to take the winter cantata,’ Mr Sperrit explained. ‘It’s “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire”. I hoped you’d come back. There are scores of little things to settle. As for the house, of course, it stands ready for you at any time. I couldn’t get Rhoda out of it – nor could Charlie for that matter. She’s the sister, isn’t she, of the nurse who brought you down here when you were four, she says, to recover from measles?’
‘Is she? Was I?’ said Midmore through the bad tastes in his mouth. ‘D’you suppose I could stay there the night?’
Thirty joyous young voices shouted appeal to someone to leave their ‘pipes of parsley ‘ollow – ‘ollow – ‘ollow!’ Mr Sperrit had to raise his voice above the din.
‘Well, if I asked you to stay here, I should never hear the last of it from Rhoda. She’s a little cracked, of course, but the soul of devotion and capable of anything. Ne sit ancillae,6 you know.’
‘Thank you. Then I’ll go. I’ll walk.’ He stumbled out dazed and sick into the winter twilight, and sought the square house by the brook.
It was not a dignified entry, because when the door was unchained and Rhoda exclaimed, he took two valiant steps into the hall and then fainted – as men sometimes will after twenty-two hours of strong emotion and little food.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said when he could speak. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, his head on Rhoda’s lap.
‘Your ’ome is your castle, sir,’ was the reply in his hair. ‘I smelt it wasn’t drink. You lay on the sofa till I get your supper.’
She settled him in a drawing-room hung with yellow silk, heavy with the smell of dead leaves and oil lamp. Something murmured soothingly in the background and overcame the noises in his head. He thought he heard horses’ feet on wet gravel and a voice singing about ships and flocks and grass. It passed close to the shuttered bay-window.
‘But each will mourn his own, she saith,
And sweeter woman ne’er drew breath
Than my son’s wife, Elizabeth…
Cusha – cusha – cusha – calling.’
The hoofs broke into a canter as Rhoda entered with the tray. ‘And then I’ll put you to bed,’ she said. ‘Sidney’s coming in the morning.’ Midmore asked no questions.
He dragged his poor bruised soul to bed and would have pitied it all over again, but the food and warm sherry and water drugged him to instant sleep.
Rhoda’s voice wakened him, asking whether he would have ‘’ip, foot, or sitz’, which he understood were the baths of the establishment. ‘Suppose you try all three,’ she suggested. ‘They’re all yours, you know, sir.’
He would have renewed his sorrows with the daylight, but her words struck him pleasantly. Everything his eyes opened upon was his very own to keep for ever. The carved four-post Chippendale bed, obviously worth hundreds; the wavy walnut William and Mary chairs – he had seen worse ones labelled twenty guineas apiece; the oval medallion mirror; the delicate eighteenth-century wire fireguard; the heavy brocaded curtains were his – all his. So, too, a great garden full of birds that faced him when he shaved; a mulberry tree, a sun-dial, and a dull, steel-coloured brook that murmured level with the edge of a lawn a hundred yards away. Peculiarly and privately his own was the smell of sausages and coffee that he sniffed at the head of the wide square landing, all set round with mysterious doors and Bartolozzi7 prints. He spent two hours after breakfast in exploring his new possessions. His heart leaped up at such things as sewing-machines, a rubber-tyred bath-chair in a tiled passage, a malachite-headed Malacca cane, boxes and boxes of unopened stationery, seal-rings, bunches of keys, and at the bottom of a steel-net reticule a little leather purse with seven pounds ten shillings in gold and eleven shillings in silver.
‘You used to play with that when my sister brought you down here after your measles,’ said Rhoda as he slipped the money into his pocket. ‘Now, this was your pore dear auntie’s business-room.’ She opened a low door. ‘Oh, I forgot about Mr Sidney! There he is.’ An enormous old man with rheumy red eyes that blinked under downy white eyebrows sat in an Empire chair, his cap in his hands. Rhoda withdrew sniffing. The man looked Midmore over in silence, then jerked a thumb towards the door. ‘I reckon she told you who I be,’ he began. ‘I’m the only farmer you’ve got. Nothin’ goes off my place ’thout it walks on its own feet. What about my pig-pound?’
‘Well, what about it?’ said Midmore.
‘That’s just what I be come about. The County Councils are getting more particular. Did ye know there was swine fever at Pashell’s? There be. It’ll ’ave to be in brick.’
‘Yes,’ said Midmore politely.
‘I’ve bin at your aunt that was, plenty times about it. I don’t say she wasn’t a just woman, but she didn’t read the lease same way I did. I be used to bein’ put upon, but there’s no doing any longer ’thout that pig-pound.’
‘When would you like it?’ Midmore asked. It seemed the easiest road to take.
‘Any time or other suits me, I reckon. He ain’t thrivin’ where he is, an’ I paid eighteen shillin’ for him.’ He crossed his hands on his stick and gave no further sign of life.
‘Is that all?’ Midmore stammered.
‘All now – excep” – he glanced fretfully at the table beside him – ‘excep’ my usuals. Where’s that Rhoda?’
Midmore rang the bell. Rhoda came in with a bottle and a glass. The old man helped himself to four stiff fingers, rose in one piece, and stumped out. At the door he cried ferociously: ‘Don’t suppose it’s any odds to you whether I’m drowned or not, but them floodgates want a wheel and winch, they do. I be too old for liftin’ ’em with the bar – my time o’ life.’
‘Good riddance if ’e was drowned,’ said Rhoda. ‘But don’t you mind him. He’s only amusin’ himself. Your pore dear auntie used to give ’im ‘is usual – ’tisn’t the whisky you drink – an’ send ’im about ‘is business.’
‘I see. Now, is a pig-pound the same thing as a pig-sty?’
Rhoda nodded. ‘’E needs one, too, but ’e ain’t entitled to it. You look at ‘is lease – third drawer on the left in that Bombay cab’net – an’ next time ’e comes you ask ’im to read it. That’ll choke ’im off, because ’e can’t!’
There was nothing in Midmore’s past to teach him the message and significance of a hand-written lease of the late ‘eighties, but Rhoda interpreted.
‘It don’t mean anything reelly,’ was her cheerful conclusion, ‘excep’ you mustn’t get rid of him anyhow, an’ ’e can do what ’e likes always. Lucky for us ’e do farm; and if it wasn’t for ‘is woman – ‘
‘Oh, there’s a Mrs Sidney, is there?’
‘Lor, no! The Sidneys don’t marry. They keep. That’s his fourth since – to my knowledge. He was a takin’ man from the first.’
‘Any families?’
‘They’d be grown up by now if there was, wouldn’t they? But you can’t spend all your days considerin’ ‘is interests. That’s what gave your pore aunt ‘er indigestion. ’Ave you seen the gun-room?’
Midmore held strong views on the immorality of taking life for pleasure. But there was no denying that the late Colonel Werf’s seventy-guinea breechloaders were good at their filthy job. He loaded one, took it out and pointed – merely pointed – it at a cock-pheasant which rose out of a shrubbery behind the kitchen, and the flaming bird came down in a long slant on the lawn, stone dead. Rhoda from the scullery said it was a lovely shot, and told him lunch was ready.
He spent the afternoon gun in one hand, a map in the other, beating the bounds of his lands. They lay altogether in a shallow, uninteresting valley, flanked with woods and bisected by a brook. Up stream was his own house; down stream, less than half a mile, a low red farm-house squatted in an old orchard, beside what looked like small lock-gates on the Thames. There was no doubt as to ownership. Mr Sidney saw him while yet far off, and bellowed at him about pig-pounds and floodgates. These last were two great sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook, which were prised up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip of iron, and when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the water. Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some conjuring trick. This, too, was his very own.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘How interesting! Now, what’s that bell for?’ he went on, pointing to an old ship’s bell in a rude belfry at the end of an outhouse. ‘Was that a chapel once?’ The red-eyed giant seemed to have difficulty in expressing himself for the moment and blinked savagely.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘My chapel. When you ’ear that bell ring you’ll ’ear something. Nobody but me ud put up with it – but I reckon it don’t make any odds to you.’ He slammed the gates down again, and the brook rose behind them with a suck and a grunt.
Midmore moved off, conscious that he might be safer with Rhoda to hold his conversational hand. As he passed the front of the farm-house a smooth fat woman, with neatly parted grey hair under a widow’s cap, curtsied to him deferentially through the window. By every teaching of the Immoderate Left she had a perfect right to express herself in any way she pleased, but the curtsey revolted him. And on his way home he was hailed from behind a hedge by a manifest idiot with no roof to his mouth, who hallooed and danced round him.
‘What did that beast want?’ he demanded of Rhoda at tea.
‘Jimmy? He only wanted to know if you ’ad any telegrams to send. ‘E’ll go anywhere so long as ’tisn’t across running water. That gives ’im ‘is seizures. Even talkin’ about it for fun like makes ’im shake.’
‘But why isn’t he where he can be properly looked after?’
‘What ’arm’s ’e doing? ‘E’s a love-child, but ‘is family can pay for ’im. If’e was locked up ‘e’d die all off at once, like a wild rabbit. Won’t you, please, look at the drive, sir?’
Midmore looked in the fading light. The neat gravel was pitted with large roundish holes, and there was a punch or two of the same sort on the lawn.
‘That’s the ‘unt comin–’ ’ome,’ Rhoda explained. ‘Your pore dear auntie always let ’em use our drive for a short cut after the Colonel died. The Colonel wouldn’t so much because he preserved;8 but your auntie was always an ‘orsewoman till ‘er sciatica.’
‘
Isn’t there someone who can rake it over or – or something?’ said Midmore vaguely.
‘Oh yes. You’ll never see it in the morning, but – you was out when they came ’ome an’ Mister Fisher – he’s the Master – told me to tell you with ‘is compliments that if you wasn’t preservin’ and cared to ‘old to the old understandin’, ‘is gravel-pit is at your service same as before. ’E thought, perhaps, you mightn’t know, and it ’ad slipped my mind to tell you. It’s good gravel, Mister Fisher’s, and it binds beautiful on the drive. We ’ave to draw it, o’ course, from the pit, but –’
Midmore looked at her helplessly.
‘Rhoda,’ said he, ‘what am I supposed to do?’
‘Oh, let ’em come through,’ she replied. ‘You never know. You may want to ‘unt yourself some day.’
That evening it rained and his misery returned on him, the worse for having been diverted. At last he was driven to paw over a few score books in a panelled room called the library, and realized with horror what the late Colonel Werf’s mind must have been in its prime. The volumes smelt of a dead world as strongly as they did of mildew. He opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He began at random and read a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down by the fire still reading. It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time – a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore’s own criticism), but he read on, fascinated, and behold, from the pages leaped, as it were, the brother to the red-eyed man of the brook, bellowing at a landlord (here Midmore realized that he was that very animal) for new barns; and another man who, like himself again, objected to hoof-marks on gravel. Outrageous as thought and conception were, the stuff seemed to have the rudiments of observation. He dug out other volumes by the same author, till Rhoda came in with a silver candlestick.