Shabby Summer

by Warwick Deeping

  “Damned young pup!”

  He wanted to convince himself that he had told the fellow off, and done it properly, but the conviction was not here. Old Crabtree was no fool, far from it, and inwardly he was seething with the knowledge that young Ghent had had rather the best of it. That motionless and ironic figure had seemed to express the exasperating aloofness of a community that marshalled itself round secret standards and refused to flinch, though you shot your arrows of gold at it, and swaggered and shouted ever so stoutly. Infernal snobs! Even the damned hirelings were snobs, and looked towards Temple Manor and not towards bastard Gothic.

  From where he stood Roger Crabtree looked down upon Ghent’s nursery, a miserable twenty acres or so, and worth at most as a commercial venture two or three hundred pounds a year. It had become, in a sense, Roger Crabtree’s Naboth’s Vineyard, just because he had been baulked by it and its owner. He had come to consider it as inevitably and rightly his, not only because it would round off his property and cease from thrusting itself like a hostile salient into his estate. Beyond the river Temple Manor was inviolable, serenely mysterious amid its beechwoods, and as old Crabtree swung round it confronted him like some maiden fortress that would surrender to no siege. Lady Vandeleur—bah! A woman who had been christened Melissa, and looked it. A damned cool customer that old woman! A pillar of salt that could both walk and talk. How Temple Towers had waited for Temple Manor to leave those pieces of pasteboard on the Crabtree salver. And it had not happened. Damned, stuck up old bitch, for Temple Towers spoke and thought coarsely, save on certain occasions when it took the stage. Roger Crabtree, glowering at the house across the river, and stepping back, made contact with one of the Chile pines. A razor-edged leaf cut his cheek, and the old man flared like a truculent child. He struck savagely at the tree with his stick, but the offending bough merely swung to and fro with rigid unconcern. After all, it was his tree. It could give and take.

  Crabtree dabbed his cheek with his green handkerchief, and found a spot of blood on it. The assault tickled him somehow, and he grinned. That was the sort of tree to own. Rather like himself, what! “No nonsense. I’ll show you.” Yes, he was showing the world what manner of man he was. Temple Manor might flout him, but he had got a foot in Farley village; he owned a dozen or so cottages there. Badgers Farm and Millbourne Farm were his. Even Mrs. Prance of The Blue Lagoon was responsible to him for a mortgage. As for that pup Ghent, ruddy young Bolshie, he had him and his nursery shut in and surrounded on every side save on that of the river. He would find ways and means to deal with the fellow.

  Voices, laughter, the trumpeting of motor-horns, a flurry of stones down by the red lodge. Old Crabtree had almost reached the vast, gravelly space in which Temple Towers stood like a complicated piece of iced confectionery, when the sound of the uproar reached him. He faced about to see his daughter’s blue-grey car coming at speed up the drive. A young thing with a raincoat over a green bathing-dress was leaning out of the near window, and waving a towel mockingly at the pursuers. Five more cars were following his daughter’s. In passing, the young thing at the window waved her towel at Mr. Crabtree.

  The old man grinned at her, and waved his stick. The six cars swung up and parked themselves on the gravelled space. Men and girls spilled out of them, noisy and jocund. Damage to gravel might be one thing, but it was not damage to pride. Six cars, a crowd of smart young things, bare legs and arms, colour, noise, that was life and a salute to life, as Crabtree understood it. His daughter was waving a towel and mocking a sallow young man with side-whiskers who had pursued her up the drive in a red sport’s model.

  “Oy, what about it? I said you couldn’t pass me.”

  The sallow young man, his name was Danglish, Rudolph Danglish, saw the father beyond the daughter, and walked across the gravel to salute the Squire. He addressed him as Squire, and Mr. Crabtree was pleased. He could show another face and a bustling geniality when the show was his, and he felt like owning Boulters Lock on a Sunday, or the Drury Lane stage when a full chorus was in action. Hadn’t he the money? Besides, young Danglish was not only a man about town but a fellow with brains and very active in the City.

  “Your daughter’s hot stuff, Squire.”

  “Been racing, what?”

  “Just crashed up from Madame Prance’s. Afraid we scattered your gravel a bit, sir.”

  “You young things must have your game. No safety first, hey?”

  “Not your motto, Squire, what!”

  Old Crabtree winked at him, and began to bustle and take the stage. He was the impresario and he had his show. He waggled his stick and collected the crowd. Chairs on the terrace, for anybody and for everybody, and little drinks, and cigars if the lads would only smoke them. Mr. Rudolph Danglish might think him a vulgar old cad, but Mr. Danglish did not let such prejudices appear when a man had property and might be productive. Irene, snuggling up to her father, and having her arm cuddled, flicked her towel at young Danglish.

  “Come on, whoopee. Where’s Bounds?”

  Bounds was the Temple Towers butler, a silent and depressed little man who shuffled about the place and became more and more servile when he was shouted at.

  Mr. Crabtree went in to ring a bell and shout.

  “Hi, Bounds, drinks on the terrace.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Cocktails, and whisky. And bring cigars. The silver tray, mind you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where’s your mistress?”

  “I think she’s in the rose-garden, sir.”

  “Tell her there’s company. Tell her to change her frock, if she’s gardening.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  III

  Frost. Ghent, going to look at his azalea beds, saw all the brilliant blossom hanging limp and pulped in the deceitful April sunlight. There had been three nights of such frost, with a coldly malicious breeze blowing from the north-east, but the azaleas were not the only live things that had suffered from the vagaries of a temperamental spring. Young rhododendrons had had their young blooms frozen; wistaria had been cut back, the blossom browned on the flowering cherries. Succulent young shoots, fooled by the March sunshine, were looking flaccid and discoloured.

  In the Green Way Ghent met Bob Fanshaw. Bob might be a taciturn soul, but on occasions his language could be picturesque and forceful. Yes, this was one of those sanguinary years when the weather went mad, and played every sort of devilish trick on you. Evil spirits were abroad. The ruddy spring was bewitched. And, no doubt, in the old days, Fanshaw would have been able to point a damning finger at some poor old hag who had cast a spell upon the weather.

  “There ain’t no sense in it. A March like June, and an April like January. And dry at that,” and Bob spat to show his opinion of the weather.

  Peter was looking a little sad.

  “Well, we don’t grow fruit, Bob.”

  “Fruit! There won’t be a plum or a pear in the valley. And as for apples! Silly, I call it. What’s more, these bloody cold nights aren’t doing our young stuff any good.”

  “A pity we can’t put it all down to old Crabtree, Bob.”

  “Him! The old blighter. That’s what gets one, sir, these days. There ain’t anyone to curse.”

  “No God, Bob?”

  “Exactly. I’ve been on the land thirty years, and things just happen. It looks like spite, and of course it ain’t nothing of the kind. Things just happen without our being able to do a damn about it. Seen those big thuyas we moved last autumn?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they’re looking a bit dicky.”

  “They can’t be, Bob, as early as all this.”

  “I tell ’ee they are, sir. My meaning is that anything can happen in a year like this. Everything’s upside down. Them thuyas, if they were going sick, wouldn’t have shown it, in a decent God-abiding year, till June. Well, some of ’em are sick now.”

  Peter made himself smile.

  “Let’s go and have a look, Bob.”
/>   They went together to the five-acre plot south of the boundary hedge, where a group of Thuya Lobii stood, seven foot trees that had been moved the previous autumn. Ghent saw that Bob was right. Some of the trees had lost their green gloss, and were dry and brittle to the touch. Ghent let some of the foliage run through his fingers, and from the feel of it he knew that the trees were sick. The root-balls were drying out in this cold, windy, rainless year. His young face became very grave. He hated losing trees, and in this case the financial loss might be considerable, for these conifers were worth perhaps ten shillings apiece on a private order, and five or six shillings to the trade, and there were two hundred of them.

  “Yes, Bob, I’m afraid you’re right. They’ve been hoed, too.”

  “Been through them twice with the hoe, sir.”

  “Seems funny, doesn’t it, with the river so near, that trees should be short of water! Rather a joke against us.”

  “We’re on a bit of gravel here. All right in a decent season. But you know, sir.”

  “Yes, I know, Bob. Nothing to be done about it. We can’t hand-water a whole plantation.”

  “It’s all along with the damned dry February and March, and not a shower yet in April. The subsoil’s dried out.”

  Ghent found two letters on his breakfast table, and directly he glanced at them he had a feeling that both letters were carriers of trouble. Mr. Peter Ghent, Marplot, Farley, Loddon. Marplot? Had the old country folk been mordantly wise in their choice of names, and had this piece of ground held a hint of tragedy in the title that it bore? The old people had been cunning and observant in their christening of plants and places. Coldharbour, Burntheath, Clayhanger, Deadly Nightshade, Foxglove, Coltsfoot, Devil’sbit Scabious!

  Peter opened his letters, and one of them in particular left him feeling a little sore. Dr. Bacchus had sent in his account, though Peter did not know that Dr. Bacchus had a new assistant to whom had been delegated the task of going through the ledgers. The other letter was from a firm of seed and artificial manure merchants, enclosing an account that was overdue and a curt request for the debt to be settled.

  Peter finished his breakfast, lit a pipe, and pushed the two communications into a drawer of his oak bureau. How much had he in the bank? Oh, about fifty-three-odd pounds, money that was being cherished for the first claim Marplot made on him, the paying of wages. Four pounds a week. Then, there was Mrs. Maintenance and the housekeeping, and the extra men he had to engage during the lifting season. Very little money would be coming in until the autumn sales. Well, perhaps he could just manage. Once or twice before the manager of his Loddon bank had allowed him to overdraw.

  But that bill of Bacchus’s? He felt a little hurt about it, and sensitive as to its challenge. Nine pounds ten. Well, couldn’t he borrow the money, and from whom? Lady Vandeleur? Oh, quite impossible. John Lynwood? John was not quite down on the rocks like he was, and John understood the way the land held you in fee.

  * * *

  Since his old car was in dock, and the front tyre of his bike happened to be punctured, Ghent set out to walk to Chesters Farm. The evening was fair, provokingly so, and Peter paused on the bridge to watch the water tumbling over the weir, and Folly Island floating like a green-sailed ship in the evening sunlight. Yes, plenty of water in the river, and hardly a cloud in the sky, and the fruitful earth praying for rain. Was Bob Fanshaw’s prophecy likely to prove true, that anything might happen on a freak year such as this?

  Some fifty yards beyond the bridge two trackways left the main road, the one on the right going to Folly Farm, the other a black cinder road to Mrs. Prance’s Blue Lagoon. Ghent noticed that the white gate of Folly Farm hung open, and in the distance he could see the red rump of a pantechnicon parked beside the white garden fence. Folly Farm had been empty for a year, the gentleman who had been responsible for its “Jacobethan” renovations having suffered losses in speculative finance. Ghent had no particular interest in Folly Farm, nor did The Blue Lagoon promise to satisfy the restlessness of his particular temperament, for, if the youth in him sometimes suffered from divine discontent, it was not a mood that could be ministered to by chatterings and splashings.

  Chesters was the place for him, Chesters with its great fields and its crumbling fragments of Roman wall, and big John Lynwood with his quiet, stubborn yet gentle face, his country mind, and his feeling for the way life vexed you when your world was a world of live things. Chesters had courage, even in a drought; it endured; it confronted Nature’s whimsies with steady eyes and a jaw that did not quiver.

  Half-way between the Weir Bridge and Farley village a lane which was the ghost of a Roman road ran straight as a spear-shaft to Ebchester. The Roman town had stood on a little plateau, and its main road going towards Londinium had crossed the river above Folly Island and passed across what was now Peter’s nursery, and followed the upper course of Badger’s Lane. Some of the Chesters Farm fields lay outside the line of the old walls, the rest within the circuit, and every ploughing turned over fragments of potsherd, tile and brick, or the little chalk coloured or red tesserae of Romano-Celtic floors. He could see a strip of grey flint wall, and the roofs of the farm and its outbuildings half hidden by the young foliage of a group of beech trees. To the right and outside the wall rose what looked like a low green mound covered with a smother of old white-thorns which were in flower, Ebchester’s amphitheatre.

  He paused and turned right towards this mound, following a grass track between ditches full of chervil. The place had a particular fascination for him, for it seemed to smell of that strange, old other world before the Saxon terror.

  The amphitheatre was like a great green bowl, its banks lined with short sweet turf and shaded by the thorn trees. There had been two gateways, one on the east, and the other on the west, where the green vallum was broken. Its roof was the sky, grey or cloudless or filled with white cloud masses, and Ghent had spent many an hour here, lying on his back, reading or dreaming.

  It so happened that Peter did not enter the grassy hollow by one of the old gateways. He climbed the bank between two thorn trees, and suddenly stood still. For he was not alone here. Someone else had found this secret place, a girl whose face was strange to him.

  She was sitting on the southern bank and in the full evening sunlight, her knees drawn up, her elbows resting on them, and her chin cupped in her two hands. Her frock was a cheap, flowery thing that could be bought for seven and sixpence, but almost, to Ghent, it made it appear as though the green bank had broken into flower. She had very dark hair, a crisp, insurgent mop of it that shaded her forehead and clouded over ears and neck.

  She had not heard his footsteps in the grass and for perhaps ten seconds she sat there wholly unconscious of his presence, absorbed in a mood, or in her own thoughts, whatever they might be. Ghent stood very still, feeling half ashamed of watching her, and ready to slip down the green bank and away. Then, her hands fell and her head turned sharply. He was aware of eyes that looked black in a wide, pale face. She was startled and not pleased. He thought her rather plain at that first, full glance, her nose too broad, the black eyebrows somewhat heavy. Moreover, he got the impression that he had seen her before, but where or when he could not say.

  He felt challenged, an interloper who had broken in upon her aloofness. He smiled, and stepped back and down.

  “Sorry.”

  She saw him sink back and disappear below the bank’s green rim, and suddenly her face lost its unfriendliness. Her strong white teeth showed; her eyes lit up. His sensitive flinching from the confrontation had amused her. She gave her vigorous hair a shake, and glanced at the watch on her wrist. This was an unusual Adam who came and looked and fled.

  * * *

  Peter might know his flowers and be fooled by a face, but at the moment he was puzzled by one. He was walking towards the beech trees of Chesters, and seeing them, yet not seeing them, like green clouds upon which the evening sunlight glowed. Everything was very brilliant, the dormers and chim
neys of the house, its casements and old bricks, the white slats of the garden fence, two beds of Cottage tulips in the garden. Ghent stood in the red brick porch and put his hand to the brass knocker. There were oak seats in the porch, and he sat down on one of them, to wait and listen, with the evening landscape spread before him. No one answered the knock, and the house was very silent with a silence that suggested that it smiled and said: “Waste no time. I am empty.” Ghent got up and wandered through the garden into the farmyard. The sunlight was shining into the long, open shed with its oak posts and tiled roof in which carts and wagons and farm machinery lived, and a man was standing there, bending over a reaper, a spanner in one hand, the light playing upon his brown head and face and forearms.

  John Lynwood overhauling his reaper, though in this dry year the hay crop might not be worth the reaping, but that was John Lynwood all over. He was like some symbolical figure with a scythe, playing Time to the earth’s seasons, and Ghent, looking at that tawny head and those great strong hands, felt accused of cowardice. He had come to beg and now he knew that such a thing was impossible. Friendship failed when favours were asked for or granted. You could go to your banker, but not to your friend.

  “Hallo, Peter.”

  Lynwood had one of those slow, sure smiles.

  “Been knocking?”

  “I thought I might find you out here.”

  “Think I’m an incurable optimist?”

  “Not quite that.”

  “Well, one has to be on the land, you know, or one might go potty.”

  Ghent sat down on the shaft of a tumbril, and watched Lynwood’s big hands at work. Here was a man with the courage and endurance which alone could carry him through bad seasons.

  “Like to see to things yourself, John.”

  Lynwood straightened his back, and wiped his hands on some cotton-waste.