Susan Settles Down

by Molly Clavering

  After a deplorable luncheon, eaten alone, as Oliver had sent a message to say that he was too busy to come back, Susan sat down in the drawing-room to make out a list of the most urgently necessary improvements. The sun had retreated with an air of finality behind a bank of heavy doud, and a sharp shower of rain, beating smartly on the windows, added to her depression.

  “I shall cry in a minute,” she thought desperately, looking about the dismal room and remembering the pleasant little flat which she had left for it. “Perhaps a fire would help things a little. It’s bitterly cold in here.”

  The grate was furnished only with a small piece of newspaper, yellowed by age. Susan rang the bell. The summons remained unanswered for so long that at last she went out into the hall and called loudly. Still there was no reply, except for the defiant strains of a mouth-organ, played discordantly but with considerable verve, in the back premises. Advancing to the baize-covered door and throwing it open, Susan once again called for Bernice.

  The mouth-organ ceased abruptly, and Bernice, her face flushed with musical effort, came scuttling along the passage.

  “Didn’t you hear the bell?” asked Susan.

  She giggled. “Och, I thocht it wad juist be the baker, an’ I wisna heedin’ him!” she responded with a coquettish toss of her untidy head.

  “I shall be obliged if you will answer any bell that is rung at once,” Susan said; but the dignity of this reproof was spoiled by her wonder that the baker, or, indeed, any male, should have fallen a victim to Bernice’s rabbit-like charms, as her pleased simper seemed to declare. “Please bring sticks and paper and coals, and light the drawing-room fire,” said Susan, and retired to wait for her longed-for blaze.

  It was not to be. Bernice, wearing a somewhat chastened look, entered in a few minutes with the announcement: “Ma mither says the coals is near done, and onywey there canna be a fire lichtit ben in the droyn-room, for the chimley’s chockit wi’ sterlings’ nests.”

  (“I’ve sometimes wondered,” Susan wrote later to Charles Crawley, “how the principals in a Greek tragedy felt towards the messenger who is always popping in with tidings of fresh woe. Now I think I know. If the messenger wore the look of half-terrified delight in bad news which is plainly to be seen in Bernice’s protruding eyes, death, instant and painful, would have been his portion. In fact, I really believe that only the lack of a handy weapon prevented me from killing her on the drawing-room hearthrug!”)

  Controlling herself, she dismissed Bernice from the room in such a peremptory manner that the girl ran all the way to the kitchen, where her shrill tones could be heard proclaiming: “Eh, she’s awfu’ vexed. She’s lookin’ like murrder!”

  As she relieved her feelings by slamming the drawing-room door, Susan tried to find some comfort in the thought that the day had become so awful as to leave no further depths to be plumbed before nightfall. She brewed herself tea over her picnic spirit lamp, and, refreshed and a little heartened, shrouded herself in a rug and opened a book. Minutes passed, and drowsiness began to overtake her. The book had fallen from her hand, and she was in that pleasant borderland which immediately precedes sleep, when a succession of thrilling screams, increasing in volume as their utterer approached the door of her haven, roused her with horrid suddenness. She was springing from the sofa when the door burst open and the Messenger of Fate, capless, draggled apron-strings streaming like a comet’s tail, rushed in. Her mouth was opening to give vent to one final yell when Susan stopped her by demanding what was wrong.

  “Is it whit’s wrang?” screamed Bernice, her voice, hitherto muted to an indistinct pipe in her mistress’s presence, now given full freedom with ear-shattering results. “There’s ma mither in the kitchen, fechting drunk, an’ seekin’ ma bluid!”

  Susan knew a second’s fleeting sympathy with Mrs. Bald, and then the horror of the situation began to come home to her, sharpened by the ominous sounds of crashing crockery and hoarse bellowing from the kitchen.

  Bernice broke into loud hysterical sobbing. “The Commander’ll fin’ us baith deid when he wins hame!” she cried, weeping.

  “The Commander will do no such thing,” Susan retorted angrily. “Stop behaving like a fool, Bernice, and tell me, if you can, where your mother got anything to drink.”

  Hiccupping sobs made Bernice almost entirely incoherent, but Susan was at last able to elicit that Mrs. Bald, her appetite whetted by a bottle of cooking sherry, had drunk some methylated spirits, and had then demanded whisky. Bernice, who had seen where Oliver had put the key of the cupboard containing the whisky-bottle, had been forced to disclose its whereabouts at the point of the poker, Mrs. Bald’s favourite weapon.

  “Well,” said Susan, “you must go to—Reiverslaw, is it?—and tell Commander Parsons to come back here at once, and bring a policeman with him.”

  “Is it the polis?” echoed Bernice with a look half of pity, half of misplaced pride in her parent’s reputation. “Guid save us, the polis is as feared for ma mither as ony o’ them!”

  A ring at the bell caused an interruption, and Bernice, darting to the window, said, “It’s Wullie Blair wi’ the breid.”

  “Is he afraid of Mrs. Bald too?” asked Susan, her hopes rising at the thought of possible succour.

  “Ay, is he!” quoth Bernice.

  Susan’s heart sank, and certainly the appearance of the weedy shambling youth on the gravel outside, who held two loaves, innocent of wrapping, in his grimy hands, was not inspiring. Obviously he was no match for Mrs. Bald.

  “But he’ll gi’e me a lift tae Reiverslaw!” said Bernice with the first glimmering of intelligence her mistress had yet perceived in her. “I’ll awa’ oot an’ speir him!”

  She sped to the door, and Susan heard their conversation, punctuated by loud exclamations from the youth and neighing laughter from Bernice. The request evidently met with a favourable reply, for presently both darted round the side of the house and disappeared from view. In a few seconds from the back window, to which she had hurried, Susan saw the baker’s van, with Bernice seated on the box, her arm lovingly round her swain’s neck, lurch perilously off along the road, the horse between the shafts breaking into a stumbling gallop as roars from the kitchen told that their flight had not passed unnoticed by Mrs. Bald.

  They were scarcely out of sight before Susan began to regret most bitterly that she had not thrown pride to the winds and accompanied them. The prospect of bearding the cook in her den was far from alluring, and she had serious thoughts of locking herself into the drawing-room to await Oliver’s return in safety.

  There was a sudden lull in the noises from the kitchen, and an ominous silence began to settle down and brood over the whole house. Susan, who had plenty of courage, decided that Mrs. Bald was by this time reduced to a state of stupor; so, leaving the drawing-room, she went towards the kitchen passage to see for herself. It was getting dark in the house, though outside a queer grey half-light still prevailed. As Susan stood uncertainly in the passage with the swinging baize door between her and safety, she hesitated again. Perhaps, after all, discretion was really the better part, and it would only be foolish to interfere? It was the striking of a match in the kitchen that turned the scales. She could not leave a drunken old woman to set the house on fire without making some effort to prevent it.

  Mrs. Bald was trying with a palsied hand to light a lamp on the table. Several matches lay on the floor; one, still alight, was burning a hole in a rug. Susan stamped out its smouldering end, and striving to hide her disgust at the old woman’s appearance and the fumes of alcohol which filled the kitchen, said in a voice which succeeded in being both firm and conciliatory, “Let me do that for you, Mrs. Bald.”

  Rather to her surprise, for she had expected a violent refusal, Mrs. Bald gave up the matches and sank into a chair. By the time the lamp had yielded to Susan’s inexperienced fumbling and was properly lighted, stertorous breathing, broken from time to time by a pig-like snore, led her to hope that the cook had fallen
asleep. She tiptoed from the kitchen thankfully, but had not reached the door when Mrs. Bald roused herself to demand querulously:

  “Whaur’s Bairniss? Whaur’s ma wee lassie?”

  Susan found herself quite unequal to the task of telling Mrs. Bald that her daughter had gone to summon those who would remove her from Easter Hartrigg without delay; and while she hesitated there was a lamentable howl from the figure slumped in the chair.

  “Ye needna tell me. I ken whaur she is! She’s aff wi’ yon guid-for-naethin’ Wullie Blair! Ma bonnie wee Bairniss that micht ha’e mairret on the sanitary inspector frae Kaleford if he hadna’ catched the ’fluenzy an’ dee’d on her! Eh, ma wee lassie!” Then, with a sudden appalling change from maternal sorrow to ferocity: “Eh, wait you till I get ma haunds on her! I’ll sort her, so I wull!”

  Susan trembled for Bernice, but thought it probable that by the time she returned Mrs. Bald would be completely comatose.

  “Eh, dearie, dearie me!” moaned the stricken parent. “I’m feelin’ that badly. I doot whit I need’s a wee drap whusky!”

  “A cup of tea will do you all the good in the world,” Susan said firmly, and turned to move the kettle farther on to the fire. When she looked round, it was to see Mrs. Bald withdrawing a bottle, with stealthy cunning, from a little cupboard below the sink.

  “Mrs. Bald,” she cried, “you must give me that—that bottle at once! If you drink any more out of it you’ll be ill.” Without allowing herself time to hesitate, she advanced and, before Mrs. Bald’s bemused brain could gather her intention, snatched the bottle, now only one-third full, and poured the remaining contents down the sink. Then, indeed, Susan shrank back, appalled at the consequences of her action, for the gibbering creature mouthing incoherent curses and threats who came wavering towards her seemed barely human.

  “Mrs. Bald—” she began bravely, to be cut short by a tea-cup which, fortunately wide of the mark, flew past her and was shattered against the wall at her back. Several plates followed, and Susan wished with all her heart that Mrs. Bald were not between her and the door. It was when the cook seized the lamp that her nerve gave way, and she uttered a cry of horror.

  Then a good many things seemed to happen at once. There were screams easily recognizable as Bernice’s in the hall, quick, heavy footsteps along the passage, and a man burst into the kitchen. Without an instant’s pause he tore the smoking lamp from Mrs. Bald and, holding it out of her reach, pushed her down into a chair.

  “Take the lamp, can’t you?” he roared.

  Susan threw down the whisky-bottle to which, as a drowning man to his straw, she had been clinging convulsively, and did as she was told with a shaking hand. Still holding the overflowing bulk of Mrs. Bald down easily, the rescuer, whom Susan now realized was her unwanted caller of the morning, said: “It’s all right. Your brother will be here in a minute, and we’ll put her inside the baker’s van and send her home to Kaleford.”

  The white, scared faces of Bernice and the baker’s boy were now to be seen peering round the door, and shortly afterwards Oliver limped in. Within a few minutes the shelves, empty of loaves now, had been taken from the van by Bernice and her young man in loving co-operation, and the portly figure of Mrs. Bald was inserted in their place as a tigress in its cage, by Oliver and the gigantic Mr. Armstrong. The door was slammed on her bellowing, the baker’s boy and the housemaid mounted the box once more, and the weary horse with its roaring freight plunged off into the darkness.

  Oliver mopped his brow. “What a day!” he said. He put an arm about his sister’s still trembling form. “Sure you’re all right, old lady? What a day!”

  Susan, with a shaky laugh, confessed to feeling rather the worse for wear; but her recovery was speeded by her sudden spurt of anger, for Mr. Armstrong, with a reproachful glance at her, merely remarked: “It’s a pity you were so hasty with that good whisky. We could have done with some of it ourselves.”

  4

  As though the mere presence of Mrs. Bald and her daughter had cast a blight over the place which vanished with their departure, the major discomforts of Easter Hartrigg seemed to have melted away on the following morning. If Susan still felt indignant with Mr. Armstrong for his callousness, she had to admit that he had been as good as his word, for he had promised help and duly sent it in the form of the grieve’s wife from Reiverslaw.

  This gaunt, grim but capable woman had served Oliver and his sister with an excellent breakfast, and Susan, going to thank her, found her giving the kitchen what she called a “redd up.” The tank, so far from being empty, was overflowing, the coal-cellar in like case, and the grieve’s wife darkly uttered her opinion of Mrs. Bald as she scrubbed the table.

  “Bane-idle, baith the twa o’ them, like a’ the Irish,” she said, her words keeping time to violent movements of her bony arms. “They’re no’ Kaleford fowk, ye ken. It wad be tae spare hersel’ the trouble, mem, o’ heatin’ watter or cairryin’ coal that she tellt ye a pack o’ lees. This kitchen’s no’ fit for pigs’ meat tae be mixed in, let alane cookin’ for gentry! But I’ll sort it. Awa’ you ootbye an’ tak’ a bit daunder tae yersel’, it’ll dae ye guid, and ye’ll no’ ken the place or ye come back.”

  Cheered by this promise, Susan gladly took herself out of doors to look for the first time since her arrival at her brother’s inheritance. Shafts of March sunshine, slanting between the leafless branches of the trees which pressed too closely about the sides and back of the house, lighted the first daffodils to pale-yellow fire. A mating blackbird somewhere aloft had opened his orange bill and was pouring out a love-song more exquisite than any by which mortal maid was ever wooed. Susan walked slowly across the sweep of nobbly gravel to the verge of a sloping unkempt lawn and stood there, staring about her.

  The house, two-storied, square, stolid, its rough-cast walls stained by damp, was a little too low-lying, but a great improvement could be made by cutting down some of the trees, and she ruthlessly marked several future victims with a calculating eye. Once these were out of the way, a view of the rolling wooded country beyond would be cleared; and if Oliver demurred on the grounds that trees should not be felled for a view alone, she could point out more prosaic advantages.

  “It would be so much less damp without the trees,” she murmured aloud, “and think what splendid logs they’ll make for all sorts of things—”

  “What are you muttering about?” suddenly demanded Oliver, coming up behind her on the grass. “I see destruction in your eye, a sort of horrible spring-cleaning look. But if it’s anything that will cost a lot, you can think again.”

  Susan repeated her words. “We can use the logs on the sitting-room fire,” she urged. “And the house is dreadfully damp, Oliver.”

  “So we can. So it is.”

  “And we’d have such a lovely view—”

  “So we should.”

  “And I hope you are going to have them cut down,” she went on, a little daunted by this hearty agreement where she had expected to be overwhelmed by a flood of objections.

  “So I am,” he said. “Armstrong told me we ought to have ’em all down, and down they shall come.”

  “What? Not all?” cried Susan perversely, annoyed by this intrusion of what she was beginning to call to herself “the inevitable Armstrong.”

  “Every blessed one of them.”

  “Oh, no! Leave a few—for shade, you know—” she began weakly, and he broke into loud and derisive laughter.

  “Oliver,” said his sister, “you are a brute, and so is your great galumphing Mr. Armstrong.”

  He took her by the arm. “Never mind, old lady. Come and look at what used to be the garden. Lord knows what the last tenants did to pass the time, but I’ll take my oath it wasn’t gardening.”

  A garden run to waste, the hardier plants struggling valiantly but unavailingly against the encroaching weeds, is a melancholy sight, and as brother and sister went down the sloping pathless lawn towards the half-broken rustic trellis of spruce b
ranches which marked its upper boundary, they both fell silent.

  “Mercifully it’s not very large,” said Susan at last, when her eyes had taken in the desolation of overgrown paths, borders now rampant with nettles, beds where young weeds were springing up in gay green confidence.

  “It lies beautifully—southern exposure, sheltered on the east by that brick wall,” said Oliver more hopefully. “I believe it used to be a sight to see. It’s good soil, too, so Armstrong says—”

  “Blow Armstrong! And it’s a sight now. Do you suppose anything will ever make it look like a garden again?”

  “We’ll get it dug, anyhow. I don’t know the first thing about gardening, but the minister is an expert, and he’s offered to help.”

  “Very kind of him,” said Susan absently, for she was thinking of something else, and presently she voiced her thought. “How much of what we see belongs to you, Oliver?”

  On this, the only side of the house that was not shut in by trees, the ground fell away gently. Following the slope of the lawn came the garden, and below it again fields descended to a long, green hollow fringed with thorn bushes. Oliver nodded towards these and said: “There’s our march. Beyond the hawthorns is Armstrong’s place, Reiverslaw, and we have a couple of fields across the road behind the house.”

  “All that?” Susan was horrified.

  “All that? It’s a small property—”

  “Yes, but—my dear! It will have to be looked after. Ploughed or—or something,” said Susan helplessly. “And you know nothing about farming, any more than I do.”

  “I don’t have to,” he said. “Luckily, the land always seems to have been let separately from the house, and we get quite a decent rent for it, as land goes nowadays.”

  “Thank goodness!” sighed Susan.

  Relieved of her chief anxiety, she felt as she turned back to the house quite an affection for Easter Hartrigg. True, it was a house which, if not definitely ugly, was extremely plain; but it suited the surroundings in its simplicity, and there was not a hint of pretentious villadom about it. When she walked into the hall, reduced to cleanliness and order by the grieve’s wife, she was conscious of a pleasant sense of homecoming.