Susan Settles Down

by Molly Clavering

  “After all,” she said to Oliver that evening, “I believe I was really intended for a rural life. There’s something about this, with all its drawbacks, that town entirely lacked.”

  His face, which had grown browner and slightly less haggard in the two months since he had left London, brightened.

  “I’m glad you feel like that, Susan. I hoped you would,” he said. “It’s—I can’t explain it, exactly, but this is my own place. Our place. . . .”

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  The “long-lie-in” which his parishioners enjoyed on the Sabbath morning was denied to Mr. Cunningham and his family. After breakfast there were dishes to wash, beds to make, the hens to feed, and preparations for the midday dinner to be started, all before eleven o’clock, when the Sunday School was timed to begin.

  Peggy went through the usual routine in a frame of mind far from exemplary. The lovely clearness of the March morning had made her restless. For just one Sunday, she thought, she would like to stay away from church if she wished, as other girls of her acquaintance were free to do. She paused in her task of arranging a bowl of evergreens to be placed on the Communion table in the little chancel, to plan what she would do with this morning if it were her very own. A book beside the fire in the study, perhaps; or, far better on such a day, a tramp along the high ridge past Reiverslaw, wearing comfortable old clothes instead of her Sunday dress of deep-blue with its white collar. There would be yellowhammers flitting about the hedges, and pussy-willows, powdered with gold, in the sheltered hollows. . . . She shook herself free of useless wishes with a sigh, and carried the big jar of glossy rhododendron leaves and a few of the earlier daffodils into the church.

  But while she told her class of small children the story of Ruth, her thoughts persisted in straying from that Eastern cornfield and wandered away with her into the cold, crisp meadows outside. The decorous rows of well-scrubbed, apple-cheeked little girls and boys began to fidget. There was a sound of whispering, the toe of a stubby boot kicked against a pew, and Peggy saw her father glance in her direction with a faint reproving shake of his head. This would never do. She, the minister’s daughter, was supposed to be a shining example to the others. She pulled herself together, and for the remainder of the time devoted her attention to the class, to such good effect that there was a sigh of disappointment when it ended, and children and teachers were free to go out into the churchyard until the bell summoned them back for morning service.

  Ronald Graham, the organist, who came several miles on a bicycle to preside over the harmonium every Sunday, was waiting patiently at the Manse gate. He, and several of the Sabbath School teachers, were always taken in at this chilly season, and stayed with glasses of hot milk, plates of rich tea biscuits. Peggy made a vain attempt to appear deep in conversation with little Miss Webster, who taught the class senior to her own, but this did not deter Ronald Graham. He walked firmly on her other side, darting such bitter looks at Miss Webster that she seized on the first available opportunity of leaving Peggy to him.

  Then he said quickly, accusingly: “It seems an awfully long time since I saw you.”

  “Thursday evening, at the choir practice,” Peggy pointed out briskly. “That’s only about two days ago. Come in and have your hot milk. The bell will be ringing in a minute.”

  He snatched at her ungloved hand as they went into the dark hall, and Peggy, hating the feel of his hot yet clammy touch, pulled her fingers away. “Please don’t be so silly, Ronald,” she said. “And do be careful where you’re going—there! You’ve tripped over the step again! You always do.”

  In spite of the shining brass edge of the single step leading up into the inner hall of the Manse, Ronald Graham had not seen it, and stumbled, as he seldom failed to do, often as he entered this hospitable house.

  “What’s happening out there?” called the minister, glancing back from the open doorway of the dining-room. “Someone slipped?”

  “Only Ronald!” Peggy called back in clear, unkind tones.

  “Ronald? You’re always falling over that step, my boy,” said the minister, joining them to his daughter’s visible relief and the organist’s helpless rage. “We’ll need to have it removed, for we can’t risk anyone as valuable to us as you hurting yourself.” He laid a friendly hand on the young man’s shoulder, smiling at his own well-worn joke; but Ronald Graham’s answering smile was a wry one and summoned to his lips with an effort.

  Peggy thankfully busied herself with handing round the plate of biscuits. She was glad to have escaped fairly easily from Ronald, who openly showed a liking for her which she by no means returned. Everything about him offended and irritated her: his clumsiness, his sullen temper alternating with bursts of much-too-noisy gaiety; the ill-breeding which an expensive education failed to disguise at times, and the fact that he traded on his standing as organist to pester her with his unwanted attentions. “Just because he’s the only young man I ever meet,” she thought resentfully, “he needn’t behave as though I ought to be thanking heaven fasting for him. His horrible red hands, like bits of raw beef. Ugh!”

  Catching his eye across the room, she gave him a cold look. However necessary Ronald Graham might be to her father, for he had trained the village choir to something approaching excellence, and loved his work, she refused to be more than polite to him—and not always even that, as she admitted to herself truthfully. . . .

  The bell began to ring; Mr. Cunningham and the organist set off to the church, followed more slowly by Peggy and her mother, the latter still deep in talk with the Sunday School teachers.

  The Manse pew was at the back of one of the transepts, under the northern window, and commanded very restricted view of the church. Across an empty floor-space the choir occupied the first three rows of the south transept, and Peggy found that one of her reasons for liking to be among the young men and maidens who led the singing was that she could see more of the church. True, Ronald Graham’s hateful, sleek head was close in front of her; she could not escape the constant sight of his profile as he sat at the harmonium at right angles to the choir; but by glancing discreetly sideways she managed to have a very fair idea of who were present. This morning, as usual, she watched them filing soberly in. Farmers with their wives, ploughmen and hinds with their families, the village, people; the three Miss Pringles, the most notable gossips in the neighbourhood; old Lady Brakespear, erect and eagle-eyed for all her eighty-four years, who only emerged from her nun-like seclusion to attend church; a sprinkling of “county” from the big houses. The Reiverslaw pew was empty, and Peggy missed Jed Armstrong when he was not there to give her a covert smile as he took his place. Suddenly her eyes opened wide: two persons were being shown into the Easter Hartrigg pew by Robert Elder, the beadle. The man, limping slightly, and wearing the church-going expression of devout misery common to normal men, was Commander Parsons. The tall woman in tawny tweeds, who carried her head high, and whose glance seemed to sweep the whole church in a second, must be his sister. She smiled at him as they sat down, and Peggy thought with young enthusiasm, “I like her! Oh, I do hope she’ll like me!”

  Then Robert Elder, the long tails of his Sunday black coat flapping down to his calves, carried the big Bible up into the pulpit, and while the harmonium began a wheezy voluntary, retired, only to make a second appearance, ushering in the minister from the vestry, in his black gown and snowy bands.

  “Let us prepare to worship God by singing to His praise part of the forty-sixth psalm. Psalm forty-six, verses one to five. ‘God is our refuge and our strength.’ The tune is Stroudwater, number one hundred and twenty-eight. . . .”

  Peggy, singing with the unselfconsciousness of a thrush, still looked from time to time towards Miss Parsons. There was something about her—not beauty, for she was not beautiful—that made you look, and look again. “She’s like a person out of a book,” thought Peggy, unable to describe Susan’s curious appeal even to herself.

  After church, standing shyl
y behind her mother while Oliver Parsons made introductions, Peggy was at last able to see her at close quarters. Very tall, with an out-of-date stateliness which seemed natural to her, Susan Parsons yet had a gracefulness that made every movement lovely to watch. Her hazel eyes, shining below black brows like her brother’s, could flash with sudden gaiety and humour, yet seemed more often to contradict than to agree with the curves of her mouth with its deeply indented corners. A dimple which made its brief appearance when she smiled, and dark curling hair, lent an air of youthfulness to her face. “Susan belongs to the court of Charles I. She is out of place in this century,” a discerning acquaintance once said of her, and Peggy recognized this, though she could not put a name to it.

  Now she was being introduced. “My daughter Peggy, Miss Parsons.” And with a shyness which she hated, but was unable to overcome, she murmured, “How d’you do?” Conscious of Oliver’s dark gaze, she coloured hotly and, looking up, saw that Ronald Graham, who stood apart waiting to go over to the Manse for dinner, was watching her. Anger and a hint of fear brought more colour to her cheeks, for she knew that after the meal, when Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham had disappeared to rest for an hour, she would be taken to task by Ronald. It was none of his business, of course, but that would not stop him, and the thought of this unpleasant tête-à-tête filled her with dismay.

  Susan’s voice, inviting her to walk up to Easter Hartrigg and have luncheon with them, sounded like that of a rescuing angel.

  “Oh, Mother, may I? I’m not wanted for anything, am I?”

  Mrs. Cunningham hesitated. Sunday was a day to be spent between church and home; then she saw Peggy’s imploring look, remembered how young she was, and nodded with a smile.

  “You’ll not forget, though, Peggy, that this is a Newtown night,” said her father.

  “No, no, Father. I won’t forget,” said Peggy joyfully.

  Susan asked with interest, “What is a ‘Newtown night,’ Mr. Cunningham? I’m strange to the country, so please enlighten me.”

  The minister explained, with additions thrown in by Mrs. Cunningham, that on alternate Sundays he held an evening service at Newtown-of-Muirfoot, a few scattered cottages about two miles away, where a handful of the faithful gathered in a draughty tin hall to hear him preach. It was too much for his wife to trudge there and back in all weathers, so Peggy represented her.

  “I see,” said Susan. “Then may she stay to tea, and we’ll see that she leaves in good time for the service.”

  “Who’s the surly-looking bloke lurking among the tombstones?” asked Oliver as the three walked up the village.

  Peggy gasped, but recovered herself. “He’s our organist,” she said. “Didn’t you see him in church?”

  “All I could see was that his hair had been mastered by Anzora, same like the advertisements,” said Oliver. “So that’s the organist, is it?”

  “Yes. His father is Graham’s Cough Mixture. A Cure in Every Dose,” said Peggy. “He’s—” she broke off, biting her lip.

  “He’s what?” Oliver asked, heedless of Susan’s frown.

  But Peggy had her temper in hand again. “He’s a very good organist,” she said demurely. “I’m sure I don’t know what we’d do without him.”

  They turned into a grassy track, a short cut which led up out of the hollow to the Hartrigg ridge. High hawthorn hedges sheltered them from the piercing wind which sang through the bare, gnarled branches, black against a sky of keen blue. The distant woods were misty with an exquisite umber bloom, like nothing so much as the bloom on a grape, fields showed bright-green where young grass was springing, or dark-red of ploughland gleamed in the sun.

  It was a stiff climb, but Oliver Parsons, in spite of his lame leg, went up it at a great pace, forcing himself on as if it gave him a queer pleasure to struggle against his disability. Peggy saw that his sister cast him a frequent anxious look without appearing to do so. She said nothing until they had covered half the ascent, and then begged for a halt. “Or at least, my dear, have mercy on us,” she said. “I don’t know about Miss Cunningham, but this pace is killing me.” He glanced from her to Peggy suspiciously, but they were obviously tired and out of breath, and he slackened speed.

  “That’s better,” said Susan contentedly. Peggy knew that her small sigh of relief was for her brother, not herself.

  “How well she manages him,” thought the younger girl, whose own impulse had been to beg him to spare himself. “And how he hates to limp, poor man!”

  She looked at Oliver quickly, almost guiltily, in case he should catch her in the act. Instinctively she knew that he would resent pity most bitterly. But she understood now why he gave a petulant flick at his offending leg with the gloves he carried, why he drove himself as cruelly as if he spurred a done horse, why his cheeks were hollow and his eyes angry.

  When, at the top of the hill, he turned to speak to her, the shadows had gone and he sounded cheerful, almost gay. It might have been a different person, Peggy thought wonderingly, as she tried to make amusing answer to his sallies.

  An enormous black dog met them on the threshold of Easter Hartrigg, and nearly knocked them down in the exuberance of his welcome to Susan.

  “Down, Tara, down!” she cried. And to Peggy: “This is the latest addition to the family. Poor boy, his people moved into town from the country, and as we had become country-dwellers ourselves, and he is obviously the wrong size for a small flat, they bequeathed him to us.”

  “He’s lovely,” said Peggy, laying a hand on the broad black head. “. . . Oh, and a cat too!”

  “Yes. This is MacDaisy, rat-catcher-in-chief to the house of Easter Hartrigg,” said Oliver, picking up the cat, black also, but adorned with four white socks and white whiskers of superb length.

  “MacDaisy?” said Peggy, wishing she did not always sound so surprised at the remarks of these pleasant English persons.

  Susan laughed. “Isn’t it absurd? But his mother’s name is Daisy, and Oliver insisted that a Scottish cat should have a ‘Mac’ about him. We got him from the grieve’s wife at Reiverslaw.”

  Luncheon was a delightful meal to Peggy. She did not mind the fact that the wallpaper was faded, and in one place hanging from the wall, or that a leg of her chair caught on a hole in the carpet and nearly capsized her into a bowl of daffodils on the table. Here she had found the congenial society for which she pined, and if her tongue said little, her blue eyes spoke eloquently, telling Susan all her pleasure.

  “A charming child,” said Susan after she had left them to walk to Newtown-of-Muirfoot. “There’s something so fresh and simple about her—”

  “What you mean,” growled Oliver, whose leg was paining him after his exertions, “is that she hangs on your words, my girl, as if you were a blooming oracle. Simple? Oh, yes; she’s simple, all right. So’s the village idiot. And of the two, I think he’s the more enlivening. You can keep her.”

  “Liver,” murmured Susan provokingly, “or spleen, because she likes me better than you, darling. I’ll have my nice little Peggy—at least she’s easy to look at—and you can enjoy your hulking Armstrong. Good night.”

  2

  “You ask me whether I am not bored to tears. My dear,” wrote Susan, “boredom and I are total strangers, and have been since I came here. You see, to be bored implies unlimited leisure, and of that I have little or none. When I shut my eyes and think back over the four months since I came, I can remember a period of ceaseless turmoil, a nightmare war waged against rats, damp, servants, local workmen, and the incursions of cattle on the wilderness which was once a garden, and which I have vowed will blossom again as the rose. Oliver poisoned the rats, and they avenged themselves hideously by returning to die under the floors. No sooner did we trace one leak to its source and stop it than another mysteriously took its place. A succession of domestics, their utter incompetence as incredible as the wages they demanded (and, perforce, got), has ruled in turn over the kitchen. Plumbers and strange artisans called in this country
‘slaters’ and ‘joiners’, have pervaded the house in muddy hobnailed boots, and sung, whistled, smoked, and bawled injunctions to one another as though miles instead of yards divided them. If the infinitely slow pursuit of their labours did not please us—miserably counting up the hours for which we’d have to pay them—at least the reigning staff were well entertained, to judge by the skirls of shrill merriment proceeding from the kitchen premises. As for the fences, hastily mended against invading bullocks which jump like stags or hunters, they are constantly requiring fresh repairs. There have been times, Charles, when only hysterical laughter has kept me from either sitting down to weep, or packing my belongings and fleeing to take shelter in an hotel; but of course I’ve weathered it, and the difference these months have made to Oliver is worth anything.”

  She laid down her pen and, setting both elbows on the bureau, rested her chin in her hands and stared out of the window. What she had said to Charles about the difficulties she had faced was quite true, but there had certainly been compensations. If confusion had held sway within the house, outside the slow days marched by in a painted procession of changeful beauty, the still nights throbbed with a myriad stars. Sunlight and cloud-shadow patched the long line of distant hills, and the singing of small birds made music. It was a kindly countryside in summer weather, of rich pasture and arable land, of deep old woods, of hills that melted roundly into the skyline and did not pierce it with jagged peaks. When, in a fury of revolt against the domestic cares with which she, an unwilling Martha, was cumbered, Susan rushed out of doors, or even thrust her head out of a wide-flung window, a deep peace instantly fell on her, and she returned soothed and refreshed.