‘How many more?’ asked Guy. Mr Elcott seemed the kind of chap you could unbend with.
‘Dozens, my lad. I haven’t begun yet. Another of your jobs is addressing envelopes. And, of course, you have to keep the stamps and account for them. And enter up all outgoing letters in a book. Sounds a lot, but it’s wonderful what you can get used to. Your chief trial will be dear Mr Liverish. He’s always hot on the junior.’
‘Mr Deverill, do you mean?’
‘As you please,’ said Elcott. ‘He’s got several names, but there’s only one of him, thank the Lord.’
‘Is he always like that?’ Guy asked.
‘Like what?’
‘Well …’ Guy hesitated. The word balmy presented itself but seemed a little too free. ‘He seemed a bit strict, I thought.’
‘Strict?’ said Elcott. ‘Strict isn’t in it. You don’t know old Liverish yet. He’s straight from the Loony Bin.’
Book Two Spring Fevers
§ 1
The curtain rises on a new scene; for Felix in his young twenties found himself at Stanton Wold, a broad undulating valley on the south-western border of his native shire and some seventy or eighty miles from Upmarden. Stanton, a Georgian house standing amid terraced lawns and tree-shaded walks, with a high-walled orchard at one extremity and a paddock for pony-riding at the other, combined comeliness and good sense in equal proportions. In the shelter of its urbane dignity dwelt Daniel Williams, his son Tom, his new young wife and her children, his assistant master Felix Elderbrook, sundry domestic servants, and some thirty-five boys of varying ages. Two unresolved questions were in the habit of drifting in and out of Felix’s mind. About the one, Mr Williams’s peremptory resignation from the headmastership of St Swithins, he confessed himself curious; but from the other he averted his eyes, for to ask why Faith had consented to marry Dan Williams would have been to explore a region distasteful to him.
This morning had a special colour and quality. It was the first day of the Easter vacation. The clearing-up, the calculation of marks, the helping to pack, the farewells, the triumphant dispatch of the boys to their several homes, all those things belonged to yesterday. Today was blessedly empty. Presently there would be the reports to think about; but not today, for it was a tradition at Stanton House that this first day after the end-of-term frenzy should be a day of relaxation, a feast of indolence, for all who chose to make it so. Among such were Tom Williams certainly, and Felix scarcely less so. The headmaster, an incorrigibly early riser, was already re-immersed in his history of heresy, at which lifelong pedestrian enterprise, as the day wore on, he would be frequently interrupted, and to his great satisfaction, by one or the other of his infant daughters, the delight of his late middle age. Mrs Williams, in the intervals of pursuing and admiring those same daughters, would as usual spend the day supervising or conferring with her domestic staff; but at this moment she was pouring out coffee for the two young men. She too was agreeably conscious that term was over.
‘Make a good breakfast, boys,’ she said. ‘I expect you’re worn out after yesterday.’
Tom and Felix could not claim to be worn out; but Felix at any rate was ready to savour and enjoy the quietness of a house no longer infested with boys, and Tom took everything as it came. Felix liked the boys, or most of them; there was not one he actively disliked; but this very liking levied an undue tax on his sympathy. He was in some danger, through good nature and inexperience, of taking their individual concerns too much to heart. Tom Williams was in no such danger: he rode life with a looser rein. He was a big, ruddy, redheaded fellow, with no particular talent for teaching and no wish to teach, unless games were in question, and even then, not unnaturally, he preferred doing to discoursing. He owed his place at Stanton first to being his father’s son, the only one available now that his brother Stephen had gone to a job in London, and second to his having rowed in the University Eight, in return for which service Alma Mater had conferred on him, with some misgiving, a pass degree. His qualifications looked well enough in the prospectus of this highly selective little academy, which, as its Principal would have you know, combined the best ingredients of the great Public School tradition with the educational virtues of private and individual tuition. Boys were received at the age of ten or upwards, but in no case after fourteen, and it was expected that they would stay till the end of their seventeenth year and proceed, by way of scholarship or otherwise, to one or another of the older universities. The whole enterprise was carried through with something of the ease and grace and leisurely precision which the house and its setting inevitably suggested to a discerning eye; and the fees were not inconsiderable.
‘Would you like some more eggs and bacon, Tom? Cook’ll do you some in no time.’
If Faith had a fault, which Felix would scarcely admit, it was her slight excess of sympathy, her over-eagerness to be of service. There could be no doubt that she was a good wife, and a happy, if anxious, mother. She was still in her early thirties, and the ordeal of motherhood had left her figure still slim and youthful; but her sense of responsibility, her gentle unhumorous conscientiousness, made her seem older than her years and not ill-matched, in point of age, with Dan Williams. She was several inches taller than her short, sturdy, broad-girthed husband; but this disparity too she was in process of correcting, for she had already a slight habitual stoop.
Tom, idly occupied with yesterday’s newspaper (today’s would not arrive till the afternoon), glanced across at her with half a grin.
‘No, thanks, Mrs Williams.’ It amused him to tease her by calling her that, now and again. ‘My inner man is appeased.’
‘What are you going to do with yourselves today?’ Faith asked.
‘I shall ride,’ said Tom, yawning. ‘Over the hills and far away,’ he added, smothering the yawn with a lean brawny hand. ‘And I shall take Felix with me.’
‘No, you won’t,’ said Felix.
‘There’s gratitude for you!’ Tom said. ‘Well, what’s your programme, my dear step-uncle?’
‘Me? Oh … I shall drift around.’ It was a favourite formula with him.
‘Will you be going to see the Meldreths?’ Faith asked him.
‘Perhaps,’ said Felix. ‘Who knows? How are my nieces this morning, Fay?’
It was a well-timed question, as he knew. Felix suspected Faith of thinking that if it was children’s company he wanted there was no need to cross the road for it, since no little girls could be more enchanting than five-year-old Mifanwy and her baby-sister Claribel. Felix agreed with this judgment, so far as it went: he enjoyed the little Williamses’ company and they his: yet he knew it to be probable that sooner or later, and perhaps before the morning was out, his feet would carry him, almost unbidden, to the house where for some reason undefined he was most at home. Why, he did not know. It was one of the many things he did not know. He did not know how he proposed to spend the Easter vacation, and he did not know what he wanted to do with his life as a whole, except just live it. Perhaps that was enough: perhaps it would be meddlesome to inquire too deeply into the future or to make plans far ahead. But he could not quite rest in that conclusion. There were moments of disquiet in which he was conscious, with a pang that was almost fear, of a deep discontent with himself and his aimless existence. Why am I here, and what does it mean? Here and now, at this point of time and no other, this I in this local and perishable body: why and to what end? These were hardly the kind of questions to trouble a vigorous young man on a bright March morning, and indeed they did not so much trouble Felix as lurk in the background of his mind and call attention to themselves at intervals: they were like the letters a man will put aside, not knowing quite how to answer them, and half-hoping, against reason, that they will somehow, some day, ‘answer themselves’.
The scene of this belated breakfast was the room known as the morning room, and at this moment the morning filled it, entering by the large low south-east window beyond which, coming right up to the wall of the house,
lay a smooth stretch of lawn whose greenness had been renewing itself for more than a hundred years. The lawn was enclosed on two sides by a beech hedge, still rusty with last year’s leaves, and a pair of thrushes, coming from the direction of a group of young chestnut trees at the far end, alighted at intervals on the grass, to find provender, to flutter their wings in the shallow stone bird-bath, or merely to stand, in a miracle of stillness, listening and looking. They at least, thought Felix watching them, had no lack of purpose; nor did they ask that life should have a ‘meaning’.
‘Well, I mustn’t sit here gossiping,’ said Faith, after a prolonged and comfortable silence, ‘or you won’t get any luncheon.’
‘How’s that?’ said Felix blandly. ‘Has Cook been gathered to her fathers? It must have been very sudden.’
‘I,’ remarked Tom, ‘shall not be in to lunch.’
‘Thank you for condescending to tell me,’ said Faith tartly. She rose from the table, softening the asperity with a smile. ‘If you’ve both finished I’ll ring for Minnie to clear away.’
But I am not a thrush, said Felix. Old Matthew is, almost. I’m not contented, like Matthew. And I’m not ambitious, like Guy. What am I then? Perhaps (his thoughts ran on) perhaps if I’d done a bit better at Cambridge …
§ 2
That Felix should go to Cambridge was a matter of surprise to everyone in the family except Felix himself. Not that he had expected any such thing, or had given it till his last school year any serious thought; but his abrupt translation from Up-marden to St Swithins had made him almost immune to further surprises, and he could hardly be blamed, moreover, if it had suggested to him that he was marked down for some unusual destiny. For Joe, who had to find the money for it, it followed with a certain inevitability: it was part of that hastily conceived plan which Joe, imprisoned in his own defiant resolution, would not or could not modify. At St Swithins Felix had neither distinguished nor disgraced himself. He was up to the average in school knowledge, but no more, except in a few subjects that happened to interest him. He did not win a university scholarship, and there was nothing Joe could do about it except abandon his plan or pay the full fees. It was more than he could comfortably afford, but pay he did, and without reproaches. You could put it either that Joe was a good loser or that he would never admit himself beaten. Whichever it was, Emily for one was grateful to him for it.
Felix, though little or nothing was said, could not help knowing that he had failed to do what was expected of him. Even in what was not said there was the implication that he might have worked harder. This made him feel guilty, and a little resentful. It was Joe’s idea, not his, that he should have ‘letters after his name’. He would have been content, so he fancied, to stay with Matthew on the farm, or to follow some kindred country pursuit. He had never asked to be singled out and made much of. As for working harder, perhaps he would have done, had he known where he was making for. At home there had been some vague desultory talk of making a clergyman of him: Joe recurred, at intervals, to his notion that such a consummation would be, in some undefined way, peculiarly pleasing to Emily, who acquiesced in this conspiracy for her happiness, but without marked enthusiasm. Joe, with his habit of quick decision, was nettled by her mild insistence that it would be best to wait and see. Meanwhile, with other boys of his age Felix learnt his Catechism, was ‘prepared’ by Mr Williams, and in due time was confirmed as a member of the Anglican Communion. But he heard, as yet, no call. A phrase here and there, in the praying or the preaching, would sometimes echo in his heart with music and illumination; and the familiar Christian story, which had always been ‘true’ to him but never ‘real’, as true as a date in history and as little related to his own life, remained so still. Mr Williams in the pulpit, wearing a surplice instead of a Master’s gown, had his moments of inspiration and of eloquence; the prayers, in his reading of them, lost nothing of their verbal beauty; and in chapel, in the quietness of a summer’s evening, it was easy to believe that the light falling across the chancel floor, the glow of the stained glass, came from a world beyond the world. These things, in sum, were religion; it was something as easy to disregard as to accept; and Felix shied away from the idea that he should make it his special business and his means of livelihood. He shrank from the prospect of setting up to know and to teach those remote irrelevant mysteries. Indeed, he was not confident of being fitted to teach anything. But, if anything, he argued, let it be something more neutral and more definite: in short a ‘subject’. Even Mr Surrey’s evangelizing fervour, though he could not help liking Mr Surrey, had failed to attach him to the idea of becoming a preacher of the gospel; he therefore read Classics and English during his academic terms, graduating with second class honours. He might have done worse; he might have done better. If he had done better he might have become a University lecturer and in time a Fellow of his college. That would have pleased Joe mightily, but was it what he himself wanted? He did not know, until it was too late; and even then he was by no means sure. And, whatever he wished, wishing would not mend matters; for second class honours—though Joe was ingenuously impressed by the deceptive word honours—led nowhere, he ruefully reflected.
Yet not quite nowhere. For it had led to his accepting Mr Williams’s invitation to join the staff at Stanton. And here he was, punctually doing his duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call him, and not so much wanting anything better as wishing he wanted it. He had much to be thankful for. His geographical situation was perfect. There was no fairer valley in all England than Stanton Wold, no comelier house—though there were grander ones—than Stanton. And the Meldreth family was only just round the corner.
§ 3
Mrs Meldreth had been married three times, and was now, but not for the third time, a widow. From her first husband, the father of her two daughters, she was divided not by death but by a process of law which provided her in retrospect with endless amusement. She never tired of telling the story of how, in order to provide the court with evidence of cruelty, she arranged with the erring husband that he should meet her in the garden, pick a quarrel with her, and strike her, with Essie Mullins for witness, and how that simple warmhearted domestic had flown to the rescue with a garden broom and chased him, helpless with laughter, back into the house. By means of this pantomime, which the law of that day required in addition to evidence of what Mrs Meldreth sweetly called misbehaviour, poor Richard was enabled to make an honest woman of his new lady-love. ‘And a pretty dance she led him, poor lamb!’ said Mrs Meldreth, dimpling indulgently. At the time she was perhaps more sorry to lose Richard than she would now admit; but any such regret had been quite obliterated by Henry, who had been (she said) a splendid father to the girls, and by Captain Meldreth, R.N., by whose death at the age of eighty-two she was but recently bereaved. With her snow-white hair and speedwell blue eyes she had the air of being at once older and younger than her fifty-odd years. She affected the manner of a benign motherly old lady, but her capacity for being amused was that of a child. Her daughters, different as they were from each other, in some indefinable fashion took after her, though the fair one, Florrie, had less humour, and the dark one, Kate, more reserve. Kate at eighteen gave promise, to a discerning eye, of a late-flowering beauty; and Florrie, two years younger, sanguine and freckled, was sighing and storming her way through a difficult stage in adolescence. Each of the three had her individual charm, and it was a miracle to Felix that their startling unlikeness from each other did not prevent their having something perceptibly in common: something more audible than visible, for it was a voice, he thought, that they shared; or if not a voice, a tone; or if not a tone, a cadence; or, at any rate, something. He was lightly in love not with any one of them, unless it were Mrs Meldreth herself, but with the trinity in unity that they were, and with the house that contained and expressed them. He was at home the moment he crossed the threshold, and indeed was in the habit of drifting in and out of the house as though it were his own, and with sca
rcely more ceremony on either side. Mrs Meldreth called him Felix, by virtue of her years; but to the girls, for no reason except that they were living in the first decade of the century, instead of in the twenties or thirties or forties, he was Mr Elderbrook. Even when young Florrie was throwing cushions at him, he was that.
In the late middle of the morning Felix drifted across to the Meldreths’, as he had known he would. He entered unannounced by the garden door that gave into the drawing-room and found Kate there, sitting at the piano, her fingers gliding reflectively, without conscious plan, over the keyboard.
She gave him a brief friendly glance. ‘Hullo, Mr Elder-brook.’
‘Hullo, Kate. Don’t stop playing.’
She didn’t. Nor did she pay him any further attention for the next half minute. He sat himself down and was at peace. He had come with no special purpose and to see no one in particular, and he found it pleasant to be so taken for granted.
Presently Kate remarked: ‘Mother’s about somewhere. In the kitchen, I expect.’
‘Are you practising?’ Felix asked.
‘Good gracious, no! You wouldn’t call this practising, would you?’
‘Not if you wouldn’t, dear Kate.’
‘Thank you, dear Mr Elderbrook.’ She made a small derisive face at him. ‘Practising is hard work. This is just playing about.’
She sat, hands in lap, idly regarding him. Though his mind was half elsewhere, wandering aimlessly in a no man’s land between sleep and purpose, his eyes took quiet pleasure in the shining darkness of the girl’s glance and the proud unconscious carriage of her head. So different in type from her sister Florrie.
The Elderbrook Brothers Page 9