“I know,” said Anne, sympathetically. “His very being is racked and beads of perspiration stand out upon his forehead and his nails are driven deeply into the flesh of his clenched hands.”
“Good God, my girl,” said David, suddenly realising that the Fielding girl was no fool, “you and I are the most perfect products of dear old Bunny. But if I were really a strong silent man I would also groan aloud.”
And at this they both began to laugh and Anne knew that she was now grown-up, which fact emboldened her to tell Lady Emily how much she liked the scent of sweetbriar. This led to a conversation on gardening and Lady Emily said Anne must come to Holdings for a week-end and have a really long talk, and Anne, such is the effect of being grown-up, said she would love to come, which was perhaps one of the most dashing things she had yet said, and gave Robin, who overheard her, great pleasure.
Martin, watchful of his visitors’ comfort, now began to urge his grandmother towards the house, for Agnes and the car would be waiting, but Lady Emily, more tired than her spirit would admit, leaned heavily on her stick and walked very slowly.
“You take Gran to the seat,” said Martin to his uncle David, “and I’ll go back to the house and bring the car,” for there was a little private driving road to the church, although it was seldom used now except by pedestrians. And he ran, always with his slight limp, in the direction of the house.
Outside the churchyard, against the low wall, there was a wooden seat, put there by Lady Emily’s husband for the use of his tenants, and towards this David steered his grandmother. One end of it was already occupied by a deliberately picturesque though rather démodé figure in whom Anne at once recognised Mr. Scatcherd.
“Who is that scarecrow?” said Robin.
“He isn’t really a scarecrow,” said Anne. “He is an artist who lives in Hatch End. I saw him this morning after church drawing the Mellings Arms, but I don’t think he draws very well.”
“Let’s look,” said Robin.
He and Anne went back into the churchyard and leaning on the low wall were able to study from behind the artist at work. Mr. Scatcherd, stimulated by the sight of Lady Emily whose appearance was of course very familiar to him at Hatch End though he had never been privileged to meet her, at once became so violently an artist that no one could have failed to recognise him. He cocked his head first to one side then the other, screwed up his eyes for a distant view, unscrewed them for the middle distance, put on a pair of spectacles to examine his work, pushed them up onto his forehead and held his drawing block at arm’s length the better to judge it, took measurements of the view with a pencil held now vertically, now horizontally; and altogether felt he was making a good effect. His only regret was that he had not brought the battered straw hat and the painter’s blouse in which (so he felt) he was Barbizon incarnate; but Hettie had burnt the hat, calling it a nasty mucky old thing only fit for the gypsies, and laid violent hands upon the blouse to make herself a couple of aprons, saying she couldn’t be expected to keep herself nice if she didn’t and where did uncle think she was going to get the kewpons from for aprons she’d like to know.
“David,” said Lady Emily, after seating herself with a vast arranging of scarves and the total though temporary disappearance of her stick among the folds of her cloak, “what is he doing. Is he the district surveyor?”
“Lord no, mamma,” said David, lowering his voice in the vain hope that his beloved mother would follow suit. “He’s that artist at Hatch End that Agnes gets things from sometimes.”
“An artist,” said Lady Emily, much interested. “But he doesn’t look like one.”
“I should say he looked far too like one,” said David. “What ought he to look like mamma?”
“I don’t know,” said Lady Emily with an air of great candour. “But all the artists I knew were very nice and came to dinner. Papa used to have people like Lord Leighton and Sir John Millais to the Towers when I was a girl and Mr. Sargent dined with your father and me several times when we had the Rutland Gate house. I wonder if he dines out. I will ask Agnes to invite him.”
“No mamma darling,” said David. “Merry wouldn’t like it.”
“Well, I shall go and see,” said Lady Emily, hitching herself majestically along the seat.
At the same moment Martin returned with the car.
“Come along, mamma,” said David.
“I have only just discovered,” said Lady Emily, who had by now sat herself along to Mr. Scatcherd’s end of the bench, “that you are an artist. My mother painted quite delightfully in water-colours and did some charming pictures of the Alhambra. You must have seen them at the Towers when you were calling.”
David, who realised that his highly maddening mother was under the impression that Mr. Scatcherd frequented the houses of the aristocracy and landed gentry rather as Sir Peter Paul Rubens might have done, looked up at Robin and Anne with an expression of such resigned despair as made them both laugh, though in a very sympathetic way.
“It is very good of your ladyship to say so,” said Mr. Scatcherd, much gratified by this speech, “and I called pretty often on my brother’s account when his late lordship was alive, but I didn’t see the masterpieces to which you refer.”
“They were in the yellow morning-room, in gilded frames with buff mounts,” said Lady Emily.
“And very nice, your ladyship, for water-colours,” said Mr. Scatcherd, “but for black and white which is my medium, take it from me, you can’t beat a big white mount with the drawing rather higher than lower if you take my meaning and a nice plain black binding. You can sell them three times as well if you have an artistic frame. Now take for example this little sketch, only an idea your ladyship, but what is Art if you don’t have ideas: you’ve no idea the way a nice mount and a black border will improve it. The mounts of course are the difficulty now, but my brother keeps all the best cardboard boxes for me.”
“Now cardboard boxes are exactly what I need,” said Lady Emily. “You must come to lunch and bring me some.”
“I don’t think my niece Hettie would like me to, your ladyship,” said Mr. Scatcherd, “but my brother does send to Holdings on Tuesdays and I’m sure will be only too willing to oblige, especially such an old customer as Lady Graham, though when I say old no offence is meant being only a trade term as you might say.”
At this point David hustled his mother into the car as dutifully as possible and collected Robin and Anne, by now in a fine fit of giggles, and Martin drove them back to Rushwater where the rest of the party were waiting. Robin collected Leslie major and minor and said good-bye to Martin, who asked him to come again. He then said good-bye to Anne and asked if she had had a happy day.
“Yes, thank you,” said Anne. “I loved it, Oh, and Robin, Miss Bunting was David’s governess. I think he’s very nice don’t you?”
Robin said he did, gave Anne a fatherly pat on the shoulder and went off to the station with his charges.
By degrees the car was re-packed. Emmy, who had taken a violent fancy to Sylvia because she had shown such sympathy about Romany Rushwater’s leg, begged her to come again as soon as she could. Martin asked everyone to come again. David waved his hand and started the car.
“Oh David, stop,” said his mother. “I mean really stop not standing still with the engine running, because I want you to hear what I say. What about Mr. Scatcherd?”
David, who was rarely impatient with his mother, much as she deserved it, stopped the car and asked what about him.
“How is he to get back?” asked Lady Emily.
Agnes placidly asked who her mother meant.
“He was making a drawing outside the church,” said Lady Emily, “and I told him about mamma’s water-colours at the Towers and he said his brother would bring me some of that nice stiff cardboard I always want, and I suddenly wondered if we could take him back and then you could arrange a day for him to come to lunch, Agnes.”
“Listen, mamma,” said David, almost irrita
ted. “We are already loaded above the Plimsoll line and Mr. Scatcherd’s brother is Scatcherd the grocer at Northbridge.”
Lady Emily said grocers could be very nice people and one could always manage an extra at lunch.
“I will speak to Robert about it, mamma,” said Agnes, “but I don’t think he would like Mr. Scatcherd.”
“Heaven bless you—and Robert too—for those words, my love,” said David, and drove off. As they passed the little turning that led to the church, Mr. Scatcherd emerged from it on his bicycle, his sketching materials strapped on the carrier, his thin stockinged legs working up and down while his cape billowed about him.
“There, mamma, you see heaven helps those who help themselves,” said David piously over his shoulder.
The journey back to Holdings did not take long, and Lady Emily, more tired than she cared to admit, did not raise the question of calling at Pomfret Towers, or going to inspect the servants’ bedrooms at Lady Fielding’s house. David offered to drive the Hallidays and Anne back to Hatch House, but they preferred to walk.
“I shall be here off and on quite a lot,” said David to Sylvia. “We must get some more tennis.”
“And go for some good long walks,” said Sylvia. “If peace did break out I think I’ll get released pretty soon and anyway I’ll be at home for quite a lot of weekends. Have you ever been right along Gundric’s Fossway as far as Low Afton? It’s a ripping walk, and we could come back by the Great Hump: there’s a place where one crosses the Rising on stepping stones and if the waters are out it’s simply splendid. George and I both fell in last time we went there.”
David smiled at her with an inward determination not to go for any walk that involved falling into a river at least six miles from home, and turned to Anne.
“Do you think?” he said, “that your mamma would take it kindly if my mamma came and paid a call on her? My mamma will neither slumber nor sleep till she has seen the servants’ bedrooms at Number Seventeen. A peculiar passion, but she is like that.”
Anne said she thought her mother would like it very much, looked up with a mixture of shyness and confidence at David and said good-bye. She and the Hallidays then said good-bye to Lady Graham and Lady Emily, thanked them for a very happy afternoon and walked away down the village street. Here all was quiet, as most of the cottagers had had a bit of a clean-up and were sitting down to their tea. Outside the Mellings Arms a few hopeful elders were sitting on the bench waiting for the tap to open, in the very unsure and uncertain hope of there being some beer. In the door of The Shop, which was on the sunny side of the street, Mrs. Hubback was sitting in a wicker chair with a white apron on. The young people wished her good-evening as they passed.
“I’ve got something to say to you, Mr. George,” said Mrs. Hubback, managing to give an impression of curtseying while remaining stout and immobile in her chair.
The three young people came over and grouped themselves respectfully in front of her.
“You tell your mother, Mr. George,” said Mrs. Hubback, “to get all the bread she wants to-morrow.”
“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” said George. “Blast. Just as I thought of going up to town on Tuesday. Oh, well. Thank you Mrs. Hubback.”
Mrs. Hubback by remaining stout and immobile in her chair again conveyed the impression that she had bobbed a curtsey, and the three young people passed on.
Anne, less versed in the world than her friends, thought it kind of Mrs. Hubback to remind Mrs. Halliday to get some bread, but did not realise the dire implication behind those simple words, so she wondered why George and Sylvia had suddenly become so depressed, and fell silent in sympathy.
“Well, that’s torn it,” said Sylvia at last. “A few weeks more and I’d have got promotion and then I could have told that odious Philpott woman all I’ve wanted to tell her for the last two years. Oh, well.”
They continued to walk in gloomy silence, Anne feeling rather small and ignorant beside them. By the time they had crossed the river and were almost at the end of the long bridge over the water meadows, she could not bear her ignorance any longer.
“Why did that nice woman in the white apron tell you about the bread?” she asked timidly.
George and Sylvia looked at her with interest, as at a small wild animal which had somehow got into the house, and said with one voice, “Peace”; George adding bitterly in what he considered to be an American accent, “And how.”
“Do you mean PEACE?” said Anne.
“It was bound to break out some time,” said George gloomily, “and it’s high time we had some, but of course they had to choose just the most inconvenient moment. Still, I daresay it would be just as bad as any other time. Well, that means good-bye to my majority, I suppose.”
Anne was so staggered by this conversation that she did not like to ask any more questions and finished the walk in a state of considerable depression, which was not lessened by a sudden and, as she knew, totally unreasonable apprehension that if peace really happened she would not be able to get back to Barchester. This feeling she knew was extremely silly, but at the moment she would have given anything to be safely in the drawing-room at Number Seventeen with her father and mother. The thought of David Leslie was vaguely comforting, only just across the river at Holdings, but she was sensitive enough to realise that if anything very dreadful happened, his first duty would be to his own relations. What the dreadful happening might be she did not know, nor could she invent any specific catastrophe likely to occur, but a horrid sense of doom hung over her, not even dispelled by the sight of a large cold boiled fowl for supper.
“I suppose you know about the bread, mother,” said George when they were seated at the supper table. “Mrs. Hubback told us just now.”
His mother said she didn’t know, but was not surprised, for the stationmaster who had been up with a brown paper package that showed symptoms of going bad if it spent the whole weekend in the parcels office, had said he knew nothing nor did no one else, but if he was going anywhere on Tuesday he wouldn’t, a statement which in spite of, or perhaps because of its obscurity, had chilled her to the bone.
Mr. Halliday, by way of cheering everyone, said he had been talking to Roddy Wicklow, Lord Pomfret’s agent, on the telephone and Roddy had said he supposed we were for it now.
“Well, peace or no peace,” said George, “it’s given me the worst guilt complex I’ve had since I got some ink on the headmaster’s Bible by mistake at my prep. school.”
At any other time his family would have demanded an instant explanation of this peculiar mistake, but each appeared to be reflecting on his or her blackest sin.
“I suppose peace had to come,” said Mrs. Halliday, putting the case as she felt very fairly. “But one never thought it would.”
Mr. Halliday said people seemed to get on all right if war went on for a long time. There was the Seven Years War, he said; also the Thirty Years War.
George said, Come to that there was the Hundred Years War.
Sylvia said one couldn’t compare, George said Why not.
“Well, they were proper wars,” said Sylvia. “I mean there was a close season and people went into winter quarters.”
“Still,” said Anne, trying to find what excuses she could for the peace, “it will be nice for people not to have things dropped on their heads.”
“And people won’t be being killed,” said Mrs. Halliday, thinking of George.
George, who was very sensitive to what his mother was thinking, was partly touched, partly annoyed; the annoyance being partly with himself for feeling touched, though this is almost too fine a shade for our pen to express. So to show that he was neither touched nor annoyed he remarked that lots of fellows would be being killed by those foul Japs.
“Quite true,” said Mrs. Halliday, cheering up. “We can’t really call it a peace till the Japs are done with.”
“Then it isn’t really peace at all,” said Sylvia, also brightening visibly.
Anne
said she supposed it would be just as bad as if it were and did Mrs. Halliday think the trains would be running to-morrow, because her mother would worry dreadfully if she didn’t come home. Mrs. Halliday was most sympathetic and promised Anne that if there was any difficulty with trains she would drive her back to Barchester herself in the pony cart, after which Anne was able to eat quite a hearty meal of cold chicken, baked potatoes, cold (bottled) gooseberry pie and cream and did not stay awake all night worrying as she had meant to do.
The hideous suspicion of peace bursting upon a war-racked world had already arrived at Holdings via the cowman, who had told the cook with gloomy pleasure that if what they were saying at the Mellings Arms was true, there wouldn’t be no trains on Tuesday and he’d think himself lucky if Jimmy, the under cow-man, didn’t go mafficking off to Barchester on his bike and leave him to do all the milking himself, but if Jimmy did, he’d give him such a larruping that he wouldn’t he able to sit on a milking stool for a week. To which the cook replied that there was no need to be coarse and if anyone thought she was going to put herself out about peace she wasn’t, not with her two nephews and her cousin’s son-in-law out in Burma. After which she had spread the news through the servants’ hall at tea-time with embellishments of her own.
“They do say,” said cook, with no authority at all for this statement, “that they’re going to burn old Hitler like a Guy Fawkes in the Close.”
“I should peek my needle in his eye,” said Conque, Lady Emily’s French maid, whom a six years’ totalitarian war had driven to tea with the lower orders, “and speet him to his face.”
“Well, Miss Conk,” said cook, “it’s not English to do that. Poor old Hitler. I dessay he wishes he were somewhere else now. They say he’s a secret drinker.”
The servants’ hall then discussed the private life of the German Chancellor on very insufficient evidence till cook said sitting there talking wouldn’t get her supper ready and drove them all away.
Supper at Holdings was also cold chicken and baked potatoes, but the cold pie was bottled plums.
Peace Breaks Out Page 13