‘Difficult times at Corry,’ Mountjoy said. He was studying a map in order to work out the best disposition of a new system of snow screens. As such things must cost money, I took him to be referring to financial exigencies. I had lately ceased to take it for granted that a Glencorry of Glencorry must necessarily be opulent – even if, from time to time, he appeared to judge it perfectly feasible to set up with a standing army. In fact I was now suspecting that the wolves might not be too far from the door.
‘I am sure you manage everything very well, Mr Mountjoy,’ I said politely. With the exception of Uncle Rory himself, everybody at Corry was required to address the quite youthful factor in this way.
‘That’s as may be, Mr Duncan.’ Mountjoy himself was equally correct. I had still been ‘Master Duncan’ on my last visit; approaching undergraduatedom had promoted me. ‘But difficult times. A household of womenfolk, Mr Duncan, is a tricksy thing.’
This glimpse of the sweep of Mountjoy’s thought surprised me, as did an unguarded hint of animus in his voice. For a moment I felt I ought to disapprove, and then I reflected that here again was perhaps no more than reasonable promotion. The Glencorrys who were to inherit Corry lived in Canada. Nobody ever saw them, or much heard of them. Ninian and I were the only relations to visit the place regularly, and we tended to be thought of among my uncle’s people as the young lairds. It was, so to speak, a purely honorary position, since nobody was so ignorant as to suppose us in any direct line of inheritance. We enjoyed prestige, all the same. If Mountjoy judged me, in the light of this and of my established adulthood, a proper person with whom to hold confidential talk, it wasn’t for me to snub him too quickly.
‘The young ladies are restless,’ Mountjoy said. ‘And who’s to blame them? It’s a dull life for them, as you and I know. I wouldn’t care to blame her ladyship, I need hardly say.’
Whether my aunt had any title to this manner of address, I don’t know. I should suppose not. It didn’t appear, however, to be something my uncle had thought up when in his King Gorse vein; it was vaguely prescriptive among what might be called his retainers. How being a Somebody of that Ilk places one in point of titles of honour I have never found out. Perhaps it was left a muddle at the time when the Chiefs were deprived of their hereditary jurisdiction. At the moment, however, it was my job to back up my honoured hostess. King Duncan had done as much even for Lady Macbeth, although he can hardly have been unaware that she was a menacing woman.
‘I should call my aunt,’ I said, ‘an extremely conscientious person.’
‘You’re right there, Mr Duncan. But she has never quite taken to the way of life here, if you ask me. And not greatly to the folks around either. It doesn’t help the young mistresses – nor does some of the laird’s high thinking, right as he no doubt is about it.’
‘Probably not.’ Now I might really have shut up Mountjoy, had it not suddenly come to me that he was a genuinely worried man. This appeared in his idiom. He didn’t commonly employ the kind of modified folk-syntax he was now using, and there was something defensive in it. ‘It would certainly be better,’ I said, ‘if Anna and Ruth occasionally got away for a bit.’
‘It would that. The Glencorrys have imaginations, Mr Duncan. You have your own share, if I may say so, and I’m thinking it will take you some way yet.’
‘Oh, do you think so?’
‘That I do.’ Mountjoy must have possessed considerable acuteness to know that I should be flattered by this, although I suppose that my juvenile ambitions as a writer may somehow have got round to him. ‘But it’s a thing can lead more ways than one,’ he continued. ‘Hasn’t it led the laird to some uncommonly curious genealogy?’
‘I suppose it has.’ I was conscious that Mountjoy had here contrastingly chosen a manner of speech which deliberately touched in the mysteriousness of his hinterland. ‘But it’s perfectly harmless,’ I said firmly, ‘and entirely honourable as well.’
‘Of course it is.’ Mountjoy glanced at me in a kind of convention of approval. He might have been (although I didn’t quite believe it) in the enjoyment of the correct feudal attitudes, and reflecting that this was how a young Glencorry ought to speak up. His next words, however, were on an egalitarian note. ‘But it may be a hereditary liability that takes other people in other ways. Those girls, for example. They might get fancying I don’t know what.’
‘Mr Mountjoy, just what are you talking about?’
The adult severity I managed to import into this question pleased me. It seemed to please Mountjoy too. He wasn’t going to be rebuked but was quite ready to be challenged – which was the more interesting because challenge was precisely what I’d sometimes felt his intent but fleeting glance to shy away from. It struck me again what a good-looking young man he was. Stripped to bathe in the Corry, as I had once seen him, he was good-looking all over. He must, I thought sagely, be extremely attractive to women. Already there were bound to have been plenty of women in his life, and I wondered why he wasn’t married. Perhaps he had decided against ‘settling down’, and still went in for a succession of mistresses. But just how that could be squared with holding down the job of factor on such a pervasively depopulated estate as Glencorry wasn’t at all clear.
‘Well, Mr Duncan, I’m saying in the first place that those young women haven’t enough to bite on. I believe we’re agreed as to that. But I’m also saying that, supposing anything out of the way happened, we might have to think twice about what to make of it.’ Mountjoy paused on this, but I remained silent. I judged his remarks to be unsatisfactory, and felt them to be occasioned by some irrational alarm which I couldn’t at all get hold of.
‘And not believe the first thing we were told,’ Mountjoy said.
I continued silent, still aware of something I lacked the experience to interpret, and displeased that it was my cousins who were being held to lurk in the background of it. Perhaps the explanation was simply that Mountjoy’s social indeterminateness didn’t go all that deep, and was in fact clearing itself up. He was essentially a servant – which is, of course, something a factor needn’t necessarily be. He was subject to the alarms of a dependent who may be turfed out at any time, and whose instinct is to safeguard his own position when there is a hazard of somebody else making off with the spoons. In his present case, the spoons were represented by one of my cousins, or conceivably by both of them. It was as simple as that, and this enigmatical conversation was for the record.
Even so, I was getting angry. I’d like to think that – bringing, as it were, the young laird’s boots into play – I’d at least have kicked something more explicit out of the man if there hadn’t at this moment come a diversion. It was Mountjoy who spotted it. He was a quick-witted person.
His business room (Uncle Rory had one of his own elsewhere) was perched over an archway at the back of the house which led to a detached line of disused stables. There still hung about it a smell of leather and embrocation and saddle soap, although there was no longer a horse between it and the horizon. It was hung with estate maps, and with obsolete calendars and almanacs which appeared to be the offerings of hopeful agricultural merchants long gone out of business. On a shelf put up for the purpose there was ranged a line of tarnished silver cups, and of silver medals embossed with improbably rectangular cattle, trophies which had lost interest for my uncle since his antiquarian pursuits had taken charge, but which he judged it proper that Mountjoy should be permitted to display. The room was in fact a monument to a Corry no longer viable. Its elevated situation offered, through cobwebby windows, a considerable vista of heather – one sullen power, as Dr Johnson had remarked, of useless vegetation.
‘There’s Colonel Morrison,’ Mountjoy said, ‘coming over the brae.’
Colonel Morrison was my uncle’s chief – indeed almost his sole – crony. He lived in a somewhat solitary situation in the next glen, and dropped in from time to time – with the aim, I used to think, of recruiting himself on malt whisky for the return journey. Not
, indeed, that one could imagine Colonel Morrison affected by liquor. He was that kind of middle-aged bachelor who keeps his figure and his form, and is never visible except in the clipped, brushed and braced condition which calls forth the term ‘spruce’ and stops just short of the conception of the elegant. Like my uncle and aunt, he was unfailingly courteous, but differed from them in seeming to regard gaiety as a social duty as well.
Mountjoy’s eyesight was good; he had detected the approaching colonel a quarter of a mile away. The colonel of course had no means of knowing himself to be observed, and there was no need to take any immediate step to welcome him. But my young nature was suggestible; when at Corry Hall the Glencorry connection commonly had its way with me; I felt I must step out to meet our visitor. Moreover, I’d had enough of Mountjoy for the moment, or at least I felt a need to think him over before advancing our peculiar conversation further. So I said good-morning to him and set out. I had a further motive in the fact that a stroll with Colonel Morrison was never likely to be boring. The oddest thing about him was his possession of a considerable amount of reading. I supposed his premature leaving the army to have been due to some physical disability the existence of which was accompanied by no outward sign. Intellectual restlessness might also have been a factor. Possibly some family tradition had tumbled him into what he had come to feel the wrong career. He never went about without a pair of field-glasses slung over his shoulder. There was something symbolic or emblematical about them: they signalled a man always wanting to get things a little clearer than they were. Perhaps he felt one could never be certain there was no threat on the horizon – a wariness proper in a military man. He lived with a housekeeper and a couple of menservants in a snug but reclusive way.
The field-glasses were trained on me now. Having identified me, Colonel Morrison gave a wave and quickened his pace – an amiable action which I reciprocated. Peewits were making a great to-do overhead. They might have been applauding the pleasing spectacle of an elderly man and a young one thus hastening cordially to a meeting.
‘Good-morning, Duncan,’ Colonel Morrison called out briskly, and he shook hands with me when I came up. ‘Well settled in again, I hope?’ He glanced at me rather – I thought – as at a recruit on parade, and then gave a temperately approving nod.
‘Yes, thank you, sir. But I’m feeling rather unsettled in a general way. Facing the unknown, you know.’
‘Ah, the Varsity.’ The colonel articulated this word as if aware of its archaic character, or of the continued propriety of its use only by a non-Varsity man. ‘I was delighted to hear you have decided to go to Oxford. A wise decision, Duncan. I congratulate you.’
‘Thank you very much. But it has been my father’s idea, really.’
‘Then your father’s a sensible man. And he might well be what he is – the finest painter we have, to my mind – without in the least being that? Colonel Morrison paused on this deft praise, rather as if to give me an opportunity to take note of it. ‘You didn’t, I suppose, have a shot at a scholarship while you were about it?’
‘Well, yes—I did.’ I paused in turn, perhaps suspecting that the colonel, in his dextrous pursuit of the agreeable, was feigning ignorance of something he had in fact heard about. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve fluked one.’
‘Admirable! But you are chargeable with self-consciousness, my dear lad, if you apply such a foolish expression to your achievement. Acknowledge your own abilities soberly as you go along, Duncan. It’s a good rule in life.’
We were now stepping out together, and I made no attempt to reply to the colonel’s last remark. He was fond of delivering himself of preceptual wisdom in this way, and had the knack of doing so with a marked lightness of air.
‘By jove, yes!’ he went on. ‘A scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge is a great thing. A baton in the knapsack, eh?’ Colonel Morrison put a hand on my shoulder – but lightly and diffidently – to steady himself across a minute beck. ‘Or like going straight to Staff College from your mother’s milk.’
‘My headmaster says it’s a first step to modest distinction or keen disappointment, and that only time will show which. He probably has the experienced professional view, sir.’
‘Not a bit of it. I declare him to be a dreary man. What do you propose to do with yourself afterwards?’
‘Aunt Charlotte thinks I ought to become a parson.’
‘Well, I’m blessed! A minister, eh?’
‘Not exactly that. She calls it taking Holy Orders. So I’d have to be turned into an episcopalian first. It gets you further, she says. You can become a bishop.’
‘Sad nonsense, Duncan.’ Colonel Morrison laughed softly; he enjoyed sharing with me a little cautious irony at my aunt’s expense. ‘But the dear lady is a Sassenach, after all. Come, now – what’s your own notion of the thing?’
‘I want to write plays.’
‘Excellent! Must be far more fun than novels. Think of all the stodgy padding Tolstoy and fellows like that have to put in. Money in the theatre, too. Take that entertaining old rascal Bernard Shaw. Made a fortune that way. No need at all for him to have gone on and married an heiress. Although a nice woman, mark you. Or take Willie Maugham. Not always wholly agreeable, perhaps, but as clever as paint. And with plays running in half the theatres of London. Buy himself a steam yacht any day.’
‘It wouldn’t be my idea to make masses of money out of plays.’
‘Of course not. Artist and all that, eh? But no harm in its coming along incidentally. Shakespeare, for example. Ended up with the best house in town.’
I almost expected to hear the colonel add something like, ‘I always used to enjoy dropping in at New Place when passing through Stratford.’ He found a naive pleasure, surprising in so urbane a man, in this particular region of name-dropping. It is conceivable, of course, that at some period of his life he had enjoyed a distinguished literary acquaintance, but he had never produced hard evidence of anything of the kind. Persons of military or political or social consequence, of whom he must have known a fair number, never entered his conversation.
‘I shan’t fail your first first-night, Duncan,’ he continued amiably. ‘Meanwhile, you can tell me about what’s going on in the theatre now. For I hope you’re making a substantial stay at Corry?’
‘Well, yes. Aunt Charlotte has invited me till the end of the month.’
‘Good. Good.’ As Colonel Morrison said this, he slowed his pace and came to a halt. The front door of the house was before us, and it would have been natural to mount the steps and enter. My companion, however, glanced around him. ‘We’ll just take a turn in the garden,’ he said. ‘Interested to see how Elizabeth of Glamis is getting on. Not having much success with Floribunda myself.’
I guessed that Elizabeth of Glamis must be a rose, although I don’t think we actually got round to spotting her. Colonel Morrison appeared preoccupied. I caught him glancing at me curiously and in a manner which didn’t strike me as at all his habit.
‘Glad you’re making a decent stay,’ he said. A lack of conviction in his tone surprised me. I knew he liked me, or at least liked any fresh and lively talk I could put up, so it could scarcely be that he felt me to be a nuisance about the district. ‘You’ve grown a bit since you were here last,’ he said, crisply but inconsequently. I supposed the remark to be true, but wasn’t sure whether it was gratifying. A young man, as distinct from a boy, likes to think that his inches are accomplished. ‘In fact,’ Colonel Morrison concluded, ‘you’ve become a distinctly attractive youth.’
My surprise increased. The colonel had his fondness for the agreeable, but to offer a personal remark like this on a note of flattery wasn’t at all his style. Nor had he sounded such a note. On the contrary, he had spoken with something like gloom.
‘What are the girls doing, these days?’ he asked casually.
‘I don’t really know. They’re a bit elusive, really. Ruth talks to me from time to time, but I never seem to get much out of Anna.’
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‘Humph.’
‘What do you mean – humph?’ I asked laughing. I knew that the colonel liked me to challenge him in this direct way. At the same time, my curiosity had quickened. I had an instinct that, for the second time within an hour, my cousins were going to turn up in an enigmatical context.
‘I have a notion, Duncan, that you were seeing rather more of Anna a year or two ago.’
I found that – very shockingly – my eyes were on Colonel Morrison’s field-glasses. The notion they conveyed sent the blood hotly to my face. It was of course inconceivable that the colonel should indulge the instinct of the voyeur, nor would the territory of his habitual perambulations have afforded him much scope if he had. But what those binoculars might on some specific occasion inadvertently have focused on was anybody’s guess. My circulation continued to behave badly.
‘Anna and I,’ I heard myself say firmly, ‘used to fool around a bit, as a matter of fact. But we were both younger then.’
‘Anna wasn’t all that younger. Duncan, I think she’s rather a tricky lass.’
Mountjoy’s word had been ‘tricksy’. The coincidence of these two phrases came on me with forceful effect.
‘Old friend, Duncan. Fond of your uncle and aunt. Interested in you for years.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Mind your Ps and Qs, if I were you. Verb. sap.—eh?’
I felt more than a moment’s interest in the colonel’s thus adopting the role of the gruff and embarrassed military man. I was reminded, too, of one or two previous occasions upon which he had spoken to me with some seriousness on the hazards attending the sexual side of our natures. He may have judged my father and uncle to be equally unlikely to do much in the way of timely warning, and it occurred to me that commanding officers might sometimes think it incumbent upon them to address their subalterns confidentially upon such topics. It had been undeniable that a certain morbidity had marked these admonishments; the danger to one’s health which attended – as the colonel expressed it – ‘going with a woman’ was prominent in his thought. But I had accepted his counsel in good part, not feeling that he was poking around or getting any illicit change out of his topic. And this present talk was essentially on different ground. Colonel Morrison must fear that my cousin Anna might at any minute set about seducing me in earnest, and that this wouldn’t be at all the thing.
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