There was nothing for it but to say it didn’t matter, and the young Hallidays were turning away disconsolately when Mr. Geo. Panter, turning his back upon the other visitors, favoured them with a wink and the information that Lord Pomfret’s keeper had left a couple of rabbits with him for Mrs. Halliday and if they could manage them it would save sending the barman up. The barman, who was a young lady in a pullover and a kind of naval trousers highly unbecoming to the female form, looked at George and said it wasn’t everyone she’d put herself out for, but if it was to oblige Mr. Halliday, or was it Captain, she didn’t mind if she did run up on her bike. George chivalrously said he would hate her to do it and she must have one with him when Pilward’s stuff came in, and where were the rabbits.
Mr. George Panter silently led the way to the stables and from a corner produced two rabbits looking very dead. From another corner he produced four quart bottles of beer, wrapped a dirty piece of sacking round them and put beer and rabbits into a large plaited fish basket, remarking that he would chalk it up. George took the basket, handed half-a-crown to Mr. Geo. Panter with the request that he would have one on him when Pilward sent, collected his sister and went away, while Mr. Geo. Panter returned to the bar.
The return of the young Hallidays was not altogether a success, for according to Hubback, who received her washing with no gratitude at all, cook was in a fine state about her fish and three telephone messages had been received, about whose senders Hubback could remember nothing except that one of them was a name something like Bantam.
“Oh Lord!” said George as he and Sylvia wandered out into the garden again to kill time before lunch. “Coming home is all right, but it does get one down.”
Sylvia agreed, pointing out at the same time that they had had parsnip wine, got some beer that someone else probably wanted, and had seen Lady Graham, which was always nice. Also that they were going to tea at the Deanery which might be fun.
George, possessed by melancholy and a nostalgia for Lady Graham, said it mightn’t. What he wanted, he said, was lots of drink, a radio gramophone with a lot of good new dance records, and six dozen ravishing starry-eyed blondes and brunettes all in love with him at once and beautifully dressed in expensive clothes. And a very powerful car painted bright red, he added. Also to make his Colonel clean his, George’s, leather and brass and webbing and then make him do it all over again.
Sylvia admired his despondency and his nostalgia and would have liked to say what she wanted. But what she wanted, which was either to be an explorer in hot countries, or to have four very nice children and a husband who was rather rich and liked dancing, seemed to her too dull for George. So she only made sympathetic noises. Then George remembered that he wanted two screws, so they went over to the carpenter’s shop where Caxton was reading the Barsetshire Free Press till it was time to finish his lunch hour. He was a spare elderly man who had worked, as he far too often said, being a man of few words and those far too often repeated, father and son for Hatch House this many a year. As his father had been one of Lord Pomfret’s gamekeepers and he was himself childless, this description was generally held to be a figure of speech, and had indeed been invented by the carpenter for the express purpose of luring halfcrowns from visitors to Hatch House or tourists at the Mellings Arms. The further to impress his hereditary carpentership upon a credulous world, he affected a kind of square paper hat, like a strawberry punnet upside down, in the almost vanished tradition of the craft. The hat, by a not unnatural confusion of ideas, had led the young Hallidays in their nursery years to call him Mr. Chips, but this name they now kept for their private use, as most of the Brave New World belonged to a generation that had never seen or heard of Happy Families, and in any case only associated the name with a film, if indeed they associated it with anything at all.
Caxton folded the Barsetshire Free Press neatly, put his large plane on it as a kind of paperweight, and shook hands warmly with Master George.
“But you haven’t grown, Master George, not a quarter of an inch,” he said reproachfully. “There’s the mark I made on the door, last time I measured you. No, not a quarter of an inch, nor an eighth.”
“Oh, I say, Caxton,” said George, standing up manfully for himself, “you can’t expect me to grow any more. After all I’m twenty-four.”
Caxton said that made no odds. His own cousin Fred, over at Nutfield, grew half an inch at twenty-four when he had the fever so bad; and he had lost all his hair and wouldn’t wear a wig. No, Master George hadn’t grown so much as a sixteenth of an inch, as there was the mark on the door to prove.
“I can’t have fever on the spot to oblige,” said George, “but I’ll tell you what I can do. I’ll take my shoes off and you can measure me.”
As this was exactly what Caxton was itching to do and George well knew it, the offer was after a little proper reluctance accepted. George, leaning against the bench, began to force the shoe off one foot by pushing the heel down with the other foot.
“That’s not the way, Master George,” said Caxton, his neat and accurate soul disturbed by so unworkmanlike a method. “You’ll ruin those shoes; hand-made, too. Unlace them first, Master George, and ease them a bit.”
George, realising that in a moment Caxton would be capable of putting his leg in the large vice and taking his shoe off with a chisel and mallet, with a T-square and a gouge in reserve, sat down meekly on a stool, unlaced his shoes, took them off and put them neatly side by side.
“That’s better, Master George,” said Caxton approvingly, “And now your socks.”
“Oh Lord! not my socks,” said George, drawing his feet under the stool.
“You can’t tell with wool, Master George,” said Caxton. “The way the wash felts up the things now, it might make a difference of an eighth easy.”
“Out of these socks I will not go,” said George. “It was one of the worst shocks in my life when I looked at my own feet when I was about fourteen and realised that they were getting grown up.”
“It’s a pity,” said Caxton. “Spoiling a good job, Master George, that’s what it is. Miss Sylvia wouldn’t mind.”
Sylvia said she was very sorry, but she did mind, frightfully, and simply couldn’t bear people’s bare feet unless one was bathing and even then they mostly looked perfectly ghastly.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I can do,” said George. “I’ll give you one of my socks to-morrow and you can measure how thick it is and subtract it. And now let’s see.”
He walked over to the shop door where on one of the jambs were recorded the heights of himself and his sister at various ages in indelible pencil. He stood with his back against the jamb, heels well pressed against the wood, head erect.
“Time was,” said Caxton with melancholy pride, “that I laid the ruler on your head as easy as anything, Master George. It’s a job for a ladder now.”
He dragged a wooden box to the door, mounted it, and after giving George a number of meticulous instructions as to the way he must hold himself, keeping a ruler flat on his head the while, finally professed himself satisfied, made a pencil mark and got down.
“You can move now, Master George,” he said.
“I can’t,” said George, “I’ve got stiff all over, catalepsy or something. Oh Lord! I’ll never be able to bend my knees again. Help!”
Sylvia kindly assisted her brother to recover from his rigor and he put his shoes on again, while Caxton used his steel measure.
“I’ve lost my eye,” said Caxton. “Six foot and three-eighths it was November three years ago. Now it’s fair six foot and half an inch. I wouldn’t have thought it of myself.”
So downcast was he that George and Sylvia had to do their utmost to restore his self-confidence. George insisted that the socks had done it, while Sylvia pointed out that his thick and rather wavy hair needed cutting badly. But as Caxton took a perverse pleasure in refusing comfort, they gave it up. The sound of the stable clock striking one reached them.
“I s
ay, we must go,” said George, “or Hubback will be put out. Oh, by the way, Caxton, she asked me to remind you about easing the service door in the hall.”
“You tell her All in good time, Master George,” said Caxton, coming out of his despondency. “Miss Hubback knows that there’s a time for everything and everything at its time and when the time for that door does come, come it will. If she didn’t use her foot to it all the time for which there’s no excuse seeing the service slab with hinges I put up for her so she could put her trays down and use her hands, that door wouldn’t need easing.”
As the feud between the carpenter and Hubback was of long standing, Sylvia tweaked George’s sleeve to intimate that he had better leave well alone, so they went back to the house.
“Lord! I never asked Caxton for those screws,” said George.
CHAPTER 2
IT was well known in the Close and the County that Mrs. Crawley’s tea-parties at the Deanery were not so much for the pleasure of herself and her friends, whom she would have preferred to see in a quieter way, as to express to the world of Barsetshire her opinion of the Palace, where the fine tradition of stinginess and inhospitality inaugurated by Bishop Proudie’s wife still held sway, to the fury and scorn of all well-thinking people. Mrs. Crawley, eighth child of a country vicarage herself and with a large family of children and grandchildren, had carried on the subterranean feud between Palace and Deanery with tact and energy for a number of years. With remarkable self-restraint she never brandished her family before the Bishop and his wife with their one depressing son who worked in what his parents called the Mission Field, though it was an office in Westminster, and at her yearly dinner for the Palace the best of the County and the Close were always invited. Never, except to such intimate friends as Mrs. Morland the novelist, or Lord and Lady Pomfret, did the Dean’s wife let herself go on the dinner given once a year by the Palace to the Deanery, but her silence was extremely eloquent and left no doubt in the minds of the anti-Palace party about the meagre amount of food and the very poor quality of wine supplied on these occasions. Only once had she been known to speak a little of her mind when after a particularly dull and penitential evening at the Palace during the war she had remarked to old Canon Thorne who needed shouting at though even then he neither heard nor understood, that the silver and mahogany wine cooler in the Palace dining-room was a very fine piece of eighteenth century work.
“And the Bishop said to me,” said Mrs. Crawley with loud and meticulous articulation, “that his predecessor used to have it full of wine for dinner-parties, but he and his wife thought ferns more suitable to a Christian’s dining-room.”
When it had been sufficiently explained to Canon Thorne that no one was talking about the Bishopric of Ferns, his indignation at this profanation of a wine-cooler, and one with exquisite classical handles and lions’ feet, knew no bounds, and the whole company assembled had shivered with contempt.
This story had of course a wide circulation, and though it was not a particularly good one was received as a kind of Shibboleth by Close and County and it has become a point of honour with both to re-tell it in and out of season. On this particular afternoon Octavia Needham, youngest and dullest daughter of the Deanery on a visit to her parents with her little boy, was telling the story to an old friend of the family, David Leslie, who as we know was staying with his sister Lady Graham at Holdings.
“Even my sister Agnes, who would make excuses for Caligula,” said David Leslie, “would be shocked by that story. The Bishop is the sort of person who would cut the General Confession and the Creed out of the service and say it was because there was Er War on. If we aren’t careful he will cut them out before long because there’s Er Peace on.”
Octavia, who was as dull as she was competent, said wouldn’t that be rather dreadful. David said it would and lost interest in her, but Octavia, seeing her friend Mrs. Noel Morton across the large drawing-room, had at once lost interest in David, who detached himself and drifted away to say how do you do to his hostess, whom he had not yet been able to reach.
“Octavia has been telling me about the wine-cooler,” said David, shaking hands.
“It is a very handsome piece of furniture,” said Mrs. Crawley with an air of complete candour, and they both laughed. “But do you know the really shocking thing the Bishop has done?”
David said he didn’t owing to having been abroad a good deal, but if it was simony or heresy, he would be happy to become a Common Informer, a person he had always wished to be, and tell the Court of Arches or any other competent body.
“He has arranged,” said Mrs. Crawley, sinking her voice and drawing David slightly apart from the crowd, “to broadcast on three successive Fridays.”
“Good God, I beg your pardon,” said David, “though speaking as one who was long ago and for a very short time a hanger-on of the Wireless Boys in the good old days of Savoy Hill, I should say they had done the arranging and not his Lordship.”
“I daresay they did,” said Mrs. Crawley, “for I don’t think even the Bishop’s wife could approve the subject.”
“What is it?” said David. “Or is it one of those subjects that we all talk about without having the faintest idea of its sinister implications.”
“It is ‘Our Duty’—oh, how do you do, Lady Fielding, and Anne dear. You do know David Leslie, don’t you?”
Lady Fielding said a few polite words and passed on with her daughter.
“Ought I to know her?” said David. “I’m a bit rusty about the social world.”
“Her husband is our Chancellor,” said Mrs. Crawley. “Charming people.”
“We all are,” said David. “But if I do not at once hear what the proud prelate is broadcasting about, my charm will desert me entirely.”
“‘Our Duty to a Penitent Foe ’,” said Mrs. Crawley, as if she were mentioning leprosy.
“My dear Mrs. Crawley,” said David, “while in His Majesty’s Royal Air Force, though alas too old to be a gallant dare-devil of the air, I learnt some new and very offensive words. But not one of them, I assure you, would express my feelings. What would Anselm have said, or Becket? Or, to put the matter on a wider oecumenical basis, what would Pope Hildebrand have said? His idea of treating Penitent Foes was to keep them standing at the back door dressed in a sheet without any boots on in a snow-storm for seventy-two hours, and that was only a beginning.”
“Still, you must admit that the Emperor Henry took the wind out of Hildebrand’s sails by repenting,” said Mrs. Crawley.
“Now, you are what I call a really well-educated woman,” said David admiringly. “How true that is. And all our Penitent Foes, blast them, will take the wind out of our sails nicely. When Peace breaks out, you mark my words.”
He then lost interest in Mrs. Crawley, who turned to her duties as hostess and welcomed the Halliday family; at least three-quarters of it, for Mr. Halliday had basely produced a committee meeting at die County Club.
“I am so sorry about my husband,” said Mrs. Halliday. “I believe it is a real engagement, but he certainly only remembered it because he is frightened of tea-parties. He is coming to fetch me and I intend to stay here till he comes.”
Then Mrs. Crawley said how nice to see George and Sylvia and how nice that they both had leave and wafted them on to the further end of the big drawing-room where a small crowd indicated the presence of Mrs. Brandon. But before they could penetrate the massed backs and elbows of their friends, they were detained by Lady Fielding, who wanted to talk to Mrs. Halliday about the W.V.S.
“This is Anne,” said Lady Fielding, who was accompanied by her daughter. “She is doing Domestic Economy at present. Now, Mrs. Halliday, there is this question of the Clothing Exchange. We have a perfect glut of very short pale-green sateen frocks and very short pale pink knickers all in quite horrid condition. They come from the evacuee children and none of the other members want them. The cottagers say they aren’t decent, and they are perfectly right. We shall have to d
o something about it and about the use of the gas ring at the depôt, because Mrs. Betts is being very unpleasant about it and it is her room after all, even if she does charge us a ridiculous rent for it. And Madame Tomkins has had a row with Mrs. Betts and I really can’t let Madame Tomkins go, for she is the only good dressmaker in Barchester and makes Anne’s things so cleverly. I do hope you are coming to the Committee meeting next week.”
The two ladies then fell into matters of high politics.
Meanwhile the young Hallidays were doing their best to make friends with Anne Fielding, and both feeling a little shy of their new acquaintance, which was for them a new experience. It was not that they had taken a dislike to Anne, for they both liked the look of her. It was not that she was stand-offish to them, for her manners, though less slap-dash than those of their friends, were charming without affectation. But they had an impression, though neither of them was equal to defining it, that she was much more grown-up than they were.
“I’m twenty-two,” said Sylvia, who believed in direct tactics, “and George is twenty-four.”
Anne Fielding said “Oh”; not at all snubbingly, in fact in a very kind and interested way, but made no further comment.
“How old are you?” said Sylvia desperately.
Anne said she was nearly nineteen.
“Then if we do get peace or anything, I suppose you won’t be called up,” said Sylvia.
“I’m afraid not,” said Anne, flushing slightly. “I did want to be an ambulance driver, but Dr. Ford says it would be out of the question, so I am doing cooking which I love and if only they didn’t make us learn economics too, which is all very silly, it would be perfect. I suppose you are a Wren,” she added, with an admiring glance at Sylvia’s good figure, fair wavy hair and cornflower blue eyes.
Sylvia realised that Anne was somehow paying her a high compliment and almost apologised as she said she was in the W.A.A.F.s and George was in the Barsetshire Regiment.
Peace Breaks Out Page 4