by Dion Fortune
“Come inside and sit down,” said the man.
Now he, like old Jelkes, had been put off at first sight by Hugh's voice and bearing, which were those of his caste, but he in his turn had quickly sensed the simple humanity that underlay the veneer that his environment had plastered on to Hugh, and metaphorically speaking, clasped hands with the man underneath. He ushered him into the lamp-lit, smoke-clouded, low-ceilinged snuggery.
“'Ave one with me?” he said, taking up a stone jug that stood on the table amid the remains of a meal.
“I don't mind if I do:' said Hugh, “I've had no lunch.”
That was the way straight to the heart of the bluejerseyed individualist confronting him. Had Hugh accepted fulsomely it would have been only one degree better than declining; but to admit that he was glad of the beer—well, that was man to man.
“'Ave a bite of supper?” said the seaman.
“No, I won't do that,” said Hugh. “I've got some people waiting for me, and I want to get some supper for them too; that's what I want to see Mrs Pascoe about.”
“She'll be back in two tweaks, or if she isn't, I'll fetch 'er. Where are your folk, Mister?”
“Up at Monks Farm.”
“Cor, so you're Mr Paston? Ma wasn't expecting you back till Monday.”
“I wasn't expecting myself back either, but here I am, and two people with me, one of them just been ill. And there's the place up there, all in darkness and nothing in it, and I want to get Mrs Pascoe to lend me a hand.”
“We'll lend yer a 'and all right, Mister. What'll yer want?”
“I haven't a notion. That's what I want to ask your mother, she'll know.”
“You bet she will,” said Mr Pascoe junior, winking, “and I'll get it up from the cellar!”
A bumping in the passage announced the return of Mrs Pascoe, her arms full of parcels, having evidently been to call on Mr Huggins. Hugh explained his predicament. He had an old gentleman and a young lady, his niece, Hugh added hastily, up at the farm, and the young lady was only just out of bed, having been ill.
Mrs Pascoe was horrified, and not without reason. The poor young lady! She'd get her death. What things men were! She flew round like a hen in a cornbin. Hugh was immensely amused to see what was her notion of the primary necessities of life. A case of bottled beer, two bottles of port and a bottle of whisky made their way into the car almost of their own volition. Then at his suggestion, she got in too. Without waiting for any suggestion her nautical offspring added himself to the party, and they set off in the Rolls-Royce for Mr Huggins.
The amazement of that gentleman when he saw them beggars description. A heavy swell developed itself in his waistcoat, and it surged about like a captive balloon. They formed a human chain, with Mr Huggins and Mrs Pascoe at the business end and himself and Bill as mindless links in outer darkness beside the car, and it seemed as if the entire contents of the shop were being passed out to them. In fact, it was only Bill's scientific stowage that enabled the Rolls to hold the stuff. Hugh expected momentarily to see the kittens coming out from hand to hand. Finally Mrs Pascoe came out and climbed in among the dunnage with a ham in her arms. Bill got in beside Hugh, and off they went. Hugh thought of the kind of cargoes that the Rolls was accustomed to carry, and wondered, if cars have souls, how it felt. Anyway, it was no stranger to alcohol. It was a Mad Hatter's Tea party, and he thought he might consider himself lucky if nobody stuffed him in the tea-pot.
Firelight shone out of the farm windows so brightly that Hugh wondered whether it had caught alight. But no, Jelkes had merely done as instructed, and stoked efficiently. A furnace roared up the chimney, throwing more light than the lamp.
Introductions were effected, and everybody seemed to know everybody else at once. Bill and Hugh winked at each other, and got out the bottled beer; but Mrs Pascoe suddenly spotted them and turned on them both impartially. Hugh, however, skilfully saved the situation by suggesting that Miss Wilton needed a small port; this roused Mrs Pascoe's professional instincts, they had one all round, and life took on a more normal hue. Jelkes and Bill went upstairs to get the beds put together, and Mrs Pascoe disappeared into the kitchen.
Mona, her toes on the hearth, looked much more like herself than she had done since things began to go wrong with her and her papers stopped payment. It was impossible to think shudderingly of Hugh after one had seen him caught out over the bottled beer. He drew a chair up to the hearth beside her, and dropped into it.
“I don't know that I can do anything more useful,” he said, “than entertain you. How are you feeling these days?”
She told him.
“It's going to be a great lark here,” he said. “I'm having the time of my life.” He had completely forgotten his hours of black depression, when his only friend was Ambrosius. “I say, Mona, you haven't got to hurry back, have you?”
“I haven't got to, but I expect Uncle Jelkes will have to.”
Hugh fell silent. Dare he risk it? Supposing she resented the suggestion, would it finish the friendship?
“You know Mrs Macintosh has let me down?” he said at length.
“Yes, so she told us. I think she was right, you know. It wouldn't have worked. You want to break right away from everything connected with your old life.”
“Yes, that's my instinct. I don't know why I swerved from it. You see, I thought it would be so awfully handy if you could put up at the farm while you were working on it, and I didn't suppose I could get you to unless I could offer you Mrs Macintosh, or someone like her. Look here, supposing I get you this prize skivvy of Mrs Pascoe's, will you stop on after Uncle Jelkes goes home?!t would save no end of bother and fuss if you would.”
Mona thought for a minute. “I don't see why I shouldn't,” she said at length. Her Bohemian soul cared nothing for the unconventionality of the situation.
There had been a momentary flutter of fear at the thought of coping with Ambrosius single-handed after Jelkes had left, but she steeled her heart. After all, what prospects had she beyond her job with Hugh? She must try and separate the employer from the human being in her mind. But that, unfortunately, had been her difficulty all along, for nothing would induce Hugh to separate the human being from the employee. Mona put the problem aside. She was too tired to cope with it at the moment. This was her first outing since her illness, and it had been a pretty strenuous one.
Hugh, a thoroughly impractical person, achieved organisation when left to his own devices by a curious kind of unconscious cunning. He picked some person he liked, whom he felt would have the requisite knowledge, and threw himself on their mercy; and as Hugh had the same kind of flair for character as is reputed to be possessed by dogs and little children, his method succeeded. His female relations, all ofwhom were managing, designing women, were exasperated to fury by this manceuvre of Hugh's; Cassandra-like, they prognosticated woe the moment Hugh was off his lead; but instead he always turned up smiling, propped up by some kind-hearted, competent person, who took a delight in being a mother or brother to him as the case might be. It was enough to annoy any female relation.
Mrs Pascoe had taken Hugh so thoroughly in tow that he hardly realised he was in motion. A domestic organisation grew from the ground, as it were, almost without his knowledge. She got him and his visitors fed, and their beds aired, and metaphorically, (in fact, literally, in the case of Mona, tucked them into them without his quite realising what was happening. Then she and her offspring thoughtfully took the tarpaulin off Mr Pinker's circular saw and tucked the Rolls-Royce up in it, and trudged back the long mile to the village, and so to bed.
Mona was the first to awake next morning, Hugh and Mr Jelkes being constitutionally late risers. She looked out of her window and saw the first young green on the birches, and the first sunlight over the firs, and as soon as might be she was out of doors. Living in London so long, she had hardly realised what the spring and the morning could mean to her. Some polyanthuses, velvetbrown and wine-purple, had joined the daffodils in the coarse g
rass at the foot of the old wall, and Mona, made sensitive by her illness, stood and looked at them. Dew sparkled on every grey blade of the dry winter grass, the heavy dew left behind by late frosts, and the little velvety faces of the polyanthuses looked up through it unharmed. The sky was the pale blue of early spring and early morning; a little mare's tail of clouds to the south showed the way of the wind, which came in soft breaths, blowing away the chill of the dawn. Dark gorse with yellow bloom dotted the unthrifty pasture, silver birches rising among it made a fine lace of twigs against the sky, shot through as the light caught them with a faint haze of new green. The dark firs stood against the skyline as they had stood the year through, unchanging. Against the winter grey of the pasture broad stretches of bracken lay tawny; unfenced, the field stretched away and dropped into a wood with the fall of the ground. The sylvan Pan held his own here, and gave no inch to Ceres. It was a sight to break the heart of a landlord, but Mona gave God thanks for it.
A hand through her arm made her jump nearly out of her skin, and she turned round to see Hugh looking down on her from his ungainly height. He smiled, and gave her arm a squeeze. “Lovely, isn't it?” he said.
“Very lovely,” said Mona, and they stood together silently.
“Everyone talks about a garden round here, Mona, but there isn't going to be any garden. This is good enough for me.”
“There ought to be some old-fashioned, cottagy flowers in the garth,” said Mona.
“What's a garth?” asked Hugh.
“The ground inside the cloisters, the present farmyard.”
“So you'd like to make a garden, would you, Mona? All right, you shall.”
A clop-clop on the drive attracted their attention, and they saw Mr Pinker arriving in an old-fashioned gig with a most extraordinary load on board, which included Mrs Pascoe, Bill Pascoe, the foreman, a boy, a quantity of planks, and in Mrs Pascoe's motherly arms a steaming glue-pot. Bill was nursing a milk-can as if it were his first-born. The Green Man could go to hell with all its clientele; once more was exemplified the truth to human nature of the parable of the ninety and nine sheep safe in fold that weighed as naught against the one forlorn stray. Technically, Hugh Paston was not a ewe-lamb, but he was the next best thing—a male who would allow himself to be managed.
Jelkes, who had left his dressing-gown behind out of politeness, ambled down in his Inverness cape and lent a touch of picturesqueness to the assemblage. Mona, whose neutral-tinted clothes seemed so drab in London, looked here as if she had risen from the grey winter pasture like Aphrodite from the foam of the sea, so perfectly did she match her surroundings.
They set the door of the living-room wide open and carried the table into the patch of sunshine that came streaming in. Mona picked some of the polyanthus and set them in a rough little earthenware jar she found on a shelf in the scullery, and placed them on the table among the gay cottage crockery, and a bee came bumbling in and got the honey from them. Hugh suddenly realised that there was a kind of happiness that had almost the quality of inebriation.
It was a great joy to them both to show Jelkes all there was to see of the interesting old buildings. Jelkes, for his part, was amused to observe that Mona was quite as possessive as Hugh in her attitude towards them.
Mona had not seen them since the general clearance of partitions and other impedimenta had taken place, and she was now able for the first time to appreciate the possibilities of the two beautiful big rooms with their fanarching and fine fire-places. Ambrosius had evidently been a gentleman of taste who had done himself wellwithin the limits of ecclesiastical architectural conventions.
Jelkes looked at the chapel, but said no word: but it was obvious that, like the parrot that was a poor talker, he thought a lot.
Returned to the dwelling-house, they were confronted by Mrs Pascoe, who had rallied all her forces with a view to planting upon them the prize skivvy, whom she was determined they should have. It appeared that there were wheels within wheels in this matter, and it gradually transpired that Miss Pumfrey was in the habit of running her establishment with the help of girls from ‘Homes'. Now the chief thing about a Home is that it is not a home in the usually accepted sense of the word. And girls from Homes bear very little resemblance to home-reared stock when they first issue forth into the world from their cloistral retreat. They resemble, in fact, the old-fashioned ideal of what a servant should be, and this was the kind that Miss Pumfrey liked to get hold of. In varying periods oftime, however, these unhappy fledglings became full-fledged, realised how they were being imposed upon, and gave in their notice. Consequently they had to be replaced. Miss Pumfrey, therefore, ran her establishment with a steady succession of ignorant orphans, which the village took a malicious delight in educating in the ways of the world, for Miss Pumfrey was not popular.
The latest orphan, however, had stuck. She had been with Miss Pumfrey over a year, and in all this time she had never been out alone, but always in the company of either the elderly parlour-maid or Miss Pumfrey herself. It then happened, and it is difficult, on the surface, to see the connection between the two matters, that Mrs Pascoe applied for an extension of hours on the occasion of the Xmas Eve share-out of the slate-club; the matter had come to Miss Pumfrey's ears; Miss Pumfrey had spoken to one of the magistrates, who had been a friend of her father's, and the application was refused. Mrs Pascoe wanted to get Miss Pumfrey's perfect orphan another job.
Of course Mrs Pascoe did not put it as bluntly as all that, according to her, the girl was a deserving girl, being imposed upon, who wanted to better herself, but information leaked and percolated in the course of her loquaciousness. After she had withdrawn, the three of them looked at each other.
“If you take that girl, you've made an enemy for life of Miss Pumfrey,” said Jelkes.
“Do you know,” said Mona, “I don't think I've ever met anyone I've disliked quite as much as Miss Pumfrey. I'd love to snitch her skivvy.”
“That's all right for you,” said jelkes, “but what about Hugh? He's got to live in the village after you're gone.”
There was a sudden, blank silence, as if everybody were taken completely aback, and Jelkes' eyebrows slowly rose higher and higher. Then everybody talked at once.
Mona went to tell Mrs Pascoe they would have the girl, and see what arrangements could be made for her transference, to learn that arrangements had already been made, and the girl was practically sitting on her box waiting to be fetched. Hugh began to sniff a rat, but he was so amused at the spite-fight between Mrs Pascoe and Miss Pumfrey that he declined to take sides with Jelkes in discouraging the scheme, and backed up Mrs Pascoe for all he was worth.
Finally it was arranged that he should run Mrs Pascoe back to the village, drive the Rolls into a thick wood by a track used by the village sewageer when he emptied Miss Pumfrey's cess-pool, and wait there the coming of the fugitive orphan. Huge, enormously amused with the whole affair, readily agreed to the tryst by the midden, and drove off with Mrs Pascoe in the Rolls forthwith.
Left alone, Jelkes cocked a sandy eyebrow at his ewelamb, and said:
“Well, Mona, what are you brewing?”
“I had been going to tell you, Uncle, only I haven't had the chance. Mr Paston was talking to me just before you came down, and he suggested that if I had this girl with me. I could stop on here after you had gone back. It would be far handier like that while I am getting the place ship-shape.”
Jelkes sat in thought for a few minutes.
“Well, Mona,” he said at length. “It's your funeral.”
“Are you against it, Uncle?”
“I don't know what to say. It's a bit of a puzzle. I don't see, what other alternative you've got. I suppose, providing you keep your head and handle things shrewdly, you'll be all right, but I can't say I'm happy about Ambrosius. You could have the hell of a mix-up with Ambrosius, whether he's Hugh, or spooks, or whatever it is, and the girl would be no protection to you. Look here, why don't you work up a job for Bill
here? He's been sounding me about it. It seems there's a lot of shipping laid up at the moment, and berths hard to come by. He'd be very useful as handy-man, gardener, and general roustabout. I'd be happy, at least, much happier, about you, if you had Bill around.”
“You do amuse me, Uncle, proposing a regular cut-throat like Bill as protection from Hugh, who's the mildest of souls.”
“Not so damn mild, Mona, don't you believe it. No man who goes in for the kind of games Hugh has gone in for—mountaineering, motor-racing, and risky cabaret—is altogether mild. And anyway, the milder Hugh is, the bigger handful Ambrosius will be.”
“It strikes me that one would obtain an awfully nice result if Hugh and Ambrosius were melted and mixed and divided into two equal halves.”
“That is exactly what wants doing, but how it is to be done is more than I know. We'll just sit tight for a fortnight and see how things pan out.”
“Then you'll stop here for a fortnight, Uncle? How are you going to manage it?”
“I'll hop up to the shop twice a week. It's mainly a postal trade. I'll manage all right. It's shoal water we're in, Mona, more than you realise. I don't blame Mrs Macintosh for bolting. I'd bolt myself if I could.”
“What are you scared of, Uncle?”
“I'm scared of two things, child. Ambrosius is either a previous incarnation of Hugh's or a split personality. For all practical purposes it doesn't matter which. Everything that's shut down in Hugh is in Ambrosius—unchecked. Hugh is pecking his way out of his shell, and as he comes out, Ambrosius is coming out too—with a rush, if I'm not very much mistaken; and the trouble is going to be while Ambrosius is in a transition state, and it's you who are going to get the brunt of the trouble. If you don't handle Ambrosius just right, there'll be the devil to pay.”
“If I don't—? What do you mean, Uncle?”
“I ceased to count in this transaction some time ago, Mona. I spotted that early on, and that's what's been worrying me. Mrs Macintosh spotted it too, in fact it was she who put me wise to it.