ENGLAND, THEIR ENGLAND
CHAPTER XIII
The s.s. Wilno bucketed laboriously into Hull on the morning of the last day of the year, and Donald reached London that evening. He found a few letters waiting for him, among them one from Sir Henry Wootton's brother-in-law, Mr. Fielding, whom he had met at Geneva, inviting him to spend a few days with him at his country cottage in Buckinghamshire. "It won't be a party," wrote Mr. Fielding, "but just ourselves. I hope you won't find it too dull." There was also a book about the Lepidoptera of the Shan States to be reviewed for Mr. Hodge. Donald immediately wrote an acceptance to Mr. Fielding, and then settled down to the insects. At 10.30 he had mastered the chapters about the flying scorpions (discovered in 1925 by a young Harvard lepidopterist, who had fled to the wilds of Upper Burma in order to try to forget the passionate love which he bore for Miss Norma Talmadge, and officially named by him in a moment of bitter and unchivalrous irony, so rare in Harvard men, Scorpio Normatalmadgensis) and he laid the book down, put on his hat and coat, and set out for St. Paul's Cathedral. Almost all his life he had known that on New Year's Eve, St. Paul's Cathedral is, as the evening papers and the penny 1 dailies so wittily describe it, year after year, the Scotchman's Mecca, and he was determined, now that he had the opportunity, to perform this pilgrimage. At 11.15 he had got as far as the Church of St. Martin Ludgate, half-way up from Ludgate Circus to St. Paul's, and there he stuck, wedged in on all sides by solid masses of Englishmen. On all sides rose hearty English laughter, and the accents of those who "were born within sound of Bowe Bells and eat buttered tostes," as the old chronicle says, and of those who had come up from Somerset, and of those whose homes had once been in Wiltshire and Yorkshire and Devonshire and Lancashire—especially Lancashire. Donald even thought he could detect once or twice a Middlesex accent amid all the chatter. All around him echoed the words "haggis" and "Lauder" and "whusky" and "hoots" and "baw-bee," the traditional patter of the English music-hall, with its strange words and its mysterious pronunciations, and, above it all, there was a steady drone like the hum of a great dynamo, or the fabled recitation of Browning in Boston drawing-rooms, or the murmur of distant waterfalls, the steady drone of many voices saying, "Do you know the one about the Aberdonian and the Jew?"
Donald went home.
Two days later he was at Marylebone Station, quietest and most dignified of stations, where the porters go on tiptoe, where the barrows are rubber-tyred and the trains sidle mysteriously in and out with only the faintest of toots upon their whistles so as not 2 to disturb the signalmen, and there he bought a ticket to Aylesbury from a man who whispered that the cost was nine-and-six, and that a train would probably start from Number 5 platform as soon as the engine-driver had come back from the pictures, and the guard had been to see his old mother in Baker Street.
Sure enough a train marked Aylesbury was standing at Number 5 platform. According to the timetable it was due to start in ten minutes, but the platform was deserted and there were no passengers in the carriages. The station was silent. The newspaper boy was asleep. A horse, waiting all harnessed beside a loaded van, lay down and yawned. The dust filtered slowly down through the winter sunbeams, gradually obliterating a label upon a wooden crate which said "Urgent. Perishable."
Donald took a seat in a third-class smoker and waited. An engine-driver came stealthily up the platform. A stoker, walking like a cat, followed him. After a few minutes a guard appeared at the door of the carriage and seemed rather surprised at seeing Donald.
"Do you wish to travel, sir?" he asked gently, and when Donald had said that he was desirous of going as far as Aylesbury, the guard touched his hat and said in a most respectful manner, "If you wish it, sir." He reminded Donald of the immortal butler, Jeeves. Donald fancied, but he was not quite sure, that he heard the guard whisper to the engine-driver, "I think we might make a start now, Gerald," and he rather thinks the engine-driver replied in the same undertone, "Just as you wish, Horace." 2
Anyway, a moment or two later the train slipped out of the station and gathered speed in the direction of Aylesbury.
The railway which begins, or ends, according to the way in which you look at it, from or at Marylebone, used to be called the Great Central Railway, but is now merged with lots of other railways into one large concern called the London, Midland and South Coast or some such name. The reason for the merger was that dividends might be raised, or lowered, or something. Anyway, the line used to be called the Great Central and it is like no other of the north-bound lines. For it runs through lovely, magical rural England. It goes to places that you have never heard of before, but when you have heard of them you want to live in them—Great Missenden and Wendover and High Wycombe and Princes Risborough and Quainton Road, and Akeman Street and Blackthorn. It goes to places that do not need a railway, that never use a railway, that probably do not yet know that they have got a railway. It goes to way-side halts where the only passengers are milk-churns. It visits lonely platforms where the only tickets are bought by geese and ducks. It stops in the middle of buttercup meadows to pick up eggs and flowers. It glides past the great pile of willow branches that are maturing to make England's cricket-bats. It is a dreamer among railways, a poet, kindly and absurd and lovely.
You can sit at your carriage window in a Great Central train and gallop your horse from Amersham to Aylesbury without a check for a factory or a detour for a field of corn or a break for a slum. Pasture and hedge, and pasture and hedge, and pasture and hedge, mile after mile after mile, grey-green and brown and russet, and silver where the little rivers tangle themselves among reeds and trodden watering-pools.
There are no mountains or ravines or noisy tunnels or dizzy viaducts. The Great Central is like that old stream of Asia Minor. It meanders and meanders until at last it reaches, loveliest of English names, the Vale of Aylesbury.
Mr. Fielding was waiting on the platform. He was a man of about sixty—broad-shouldered, pink-cheeked, white-moustached, who looked as if he spent a good deal of time in the open air and not very much time in the study.
He had an ancient Ford car outside, loaded up with baskets and parcels and paper-bags. "Been marketing," he explained. "It's a fixed rule of the house that anyone who takes a car into Aylesbury has to do the shopping for everyone, though who the deuce fixed the rule I'm blest if I know. It's all very nice for the women, but a fine fool I look matching ribbons." It was probably thirty years since anyone had asked Mr. Fielding to match a ribbon, but it was his stock phrase to cover any feminine commission.
A three-mile clatter in the veteran car—"I never can get the new car," explained Mr. Fielding. "I never have been able to get our new cars. That's why I have to hang on to one that my daughters say they wouldn't be seen dead in"—brought them to "The Golden Hind," which was the name of Mr. Fielding's house. It was a long, low building of pale-red brick and unstained timber-beams and ivy and queer-shaped windows with badly-fitting frames, and an ancient iron-studded door of oak that was almost white, and dark-red tiles and lichen and moss and stone-crop. A flagged path led up to the door, and on each side of the path were acres of lawns in their rough, worm-casty, twiggy, shaggy winter coats. Through the deepening twilight Donald could see a pale-red brick wall beyond the lawns and the tops of greenhouses peering over it, and beyond that again a cluster of ancient barns and the twisted curl-papers of a monster haystack. A jumble of terrier dogs hurled themselves out of an open window at the sound of the Ford, and lights sprang up in the windows and over the front door. The clock on a square, flinty, Saxon church-tower struck six. From a little further down the road came the clinkety-clink of hammer upon anvil and the jingling sound of harness as the horse that was being shod, by the light of a torch, shifted its feet restlessly. In the distance a dog barked and an owl cried out suddenly from a wood of willow-trees. Sappho's evening star, which brings home everything that the bright dawn has scattered—the sheep, the goat, and the little child to its mother—shone in a frosty sky and the moving moon was softly going up.
"Mind your head in the house," said Mr. Fielding, smacking the dogs affectionately. "It's a perfect death-trap. One of these days I'm going to pull it down and build a labour-saving affair, all made of concrete and ebony."
Donald stooped as he went in, but not far enough, and hit his head a shattering blow almost at once upon an oak beam. It was very painful, but at least it broke the ice as well as the skin, and by the time that Mrs. Fielding had finished fussing round with iodine and bandages and lint, and Mary Willock, the married daughter, and Winifred, the unmarried daughter, had fetched neat little leather satchels which contained everything that was necessary for the emergency treatment of dogs, cows, goats, and horses, and George Willock, the son-in-law, had uncorked with dazzling rapidity a bottle of Napoleon brandy, and Mr. Fielding himself had weighed in with a decanter of Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry, and the jumble of terriers had licked his face and hands and fought a brisk skirmish across his chest, Donald felt that he had been an intimate friend of the family for years.
As soon as the wound had been dressed and everyone had celebrated the recovery of the patient in Mr. Harvey's amazing sherry, Mrs. Fielding shoo-ed them all off to get ready for dinner. Dinner was at 7.15, and no one was to dress. Donald crept up to his room amid a jungle of grey oak beams and crept down again at 7.10. His host was already down. Donald asked him if there was any story attached to the naming of the house after Drake's ship.
"Not much of a story," said Mr. Fielding. "The records show that in 1550 the house was an inn, but no one knows what it was called in those days. All that is known is that it changed its name to celebrate Drake's voyage round the world. When I bought it —thirty years ago—it was a tumble-down farmhouse with water running in through the roof, and it was called Holt's. I got the story out of the parish records, and changed its name back to 'The Golden Hind.' There's a curious thing about that changing, too. About six months after I'd told everyone—the Post Office and the inn-keeper and the local gossips and so on—about the change, an old man came to see me. He was very, very old. The local people said he was well over a hundred, but there were no records about him. He said he was glad I'd gone back to the old name. I asked him how he knew anything about the old name and he said he didn't, but that his grandfather had told him that the Admiral was a great man. I asked him what Admiral he meant, and he said he couldn't remember, and he wasn't even sure that his grandfather had ever told him, and he wouldn't take his oath that his grandfather had ever known, but anyway the Admiral was a great man. You see, Cameron, it's an old country. Incredibly old. And there aren't many changes. Families go on and on and on. Sometimes a boy goes off to be a soldier, and sometimes a girl goes off to be a parlour-maid, but ninety per cent of them stick to the soil. And have stuck to the soil for centuries. There's a village near here—Eynesbury St. Clement—a matter of five or six hundred souls all told. Well, a fellow from London came down last year and ferreted around in the parish records and so on, and he found a list of the bowmen that went from Eynesbury St. Clement to Agincourt. There were the names of twenty-four bowmen, and eighteen of their names are on the 2 Eynesbury St. Clement war memorial for the Great War."
Dinner was served punctually at 7.15, and there was no delay between the soup and the roast chicken or between the roast chicken and the baked apples, for Mr. Fielding had to take the chair at a Committee of the local Boy Scouts at 8 o'clock, and Winifred was meeting the vicar at 8.15 to discuss a prospective jumble sale, and at 9 o'clock both Mr. and Mrs. Fielding were due at the Annual General Meeting of the Lawn Tennis Club. And as Mrs. Fielding, who was President of the Lawn Tennis Club, had to retire to prepare her presidential address, and as the married daughter and her husband seized the first opportunity after dinner to rush out to the stables to a horse that had colic, Donald was left with an hour or two upon his hands. He spent it in the best possible way. He strolled across in the starlight to the Crooked Billet, sometimes called the Mary Wells, for no known reason, and sometimes the Donkey, for no known reason, asked for a pint of bitter, which was handed to him in an early-Victorian pewter mug, and sat down in a corner of the bar-parlour. It was a small bar-parlour and the low ceiling was a tangled mass of oak beams. The fire-place stretched almost across one side of the room and the flickering oil-lamp threw queer shadows into its cavernous depths. A jumble of ancient iron cooking appliances—spits, pots, chains, saw-toothed racks, cauldrons—lay in one corner. A bench with a high back, polished by the corduroys of centuries into a shiny pale yellow, jutted out from the wall in a semicircle so that the man at one end would 2 have his back against the wall, and the man at the other would be exactly opposite the centre of the fire-place. On the high, smoke-blackened mantel-shelf were wooden gun-rests and a row of Rochester ware jars, decorated with green and purple flowers and gilt bands, and labelled "Shrub," "Whisky," "Gin," "Oporto," "Cinnamon," "Peach," and "Lemon." There was a pock-marked dart-board in one corner, and on an old oak table a shove-ha'penny board and piece of chalk.
The room was full of the smoke of cheap tobacco.
The conversation only faltered for a moment when the strange gentleman came in, for the courtesy of the country-side is universal and there is no inquisitiveness. The gentry, of course, are different, for they have little to do except to be inquisitive and to play lawn tennis, and, nowadays, to grapple unsuccessfully with the intricacies of contract bridge. But they are a separate race. As a rule they are only a single remove from one or other of the four great breeding-grounds of the English rural gentry—London's suburbs, Clyde's banks, Boston, and the torrid plains of Hindostan. And each little family group, living each in its eight-bedroomed or ten-bedroomed house, detached from other houses, detached indeed from everything in the world, has its own separate interests. They have no common bond except gossip and lawn tennis and bridge. The soil means nothing to them, nor the seasons and their fruits, nor the nesting of birds, nor the first green budding of elm-trees, nor the sound of the flight of swans. Their desires are thwarted. They have no escape from gentility, no 2 desperate romances, no love-making under the leaf-falling moon, nothing, nothing but bridge and lawn tennis, and lawn tennis and bridge, until Death parts them even from their cards and their racquets.
But it is different with those who live on the earth and for the earth. They have no interest in each other's petty lives. They do not discuss the village. They are concerned with vaster things than fashionable hats and informatory doubles. The tiller of the soil lives his life very close to Nature, and of all men he is the most natural.
So when Donald entered the bar-room of the Crooked Billet, he aroused only the slightest of attention for a moment or two, and in a minute he was almost forgotten, and was able to look round at his ease. There were ten men in the room and all were old. Seven of the ten had beards, and the others had clean-shaven chins and long side-whiskers. Most of them wore corduroys, but one was resplendent in a dark tweed suit and a very dirty dickey, unadorned by a tie. The cheeks of all of them were pink and the eyes of all of them were clear. They were talking about politics.
"Well," said one, who must have been well over eighty, and whose back was bowed with a life-time of digging and an old age of rheumatism, "when Lord Salisbury was in office I voted for Lord Salisbury, and when Mr. Gladstone was in office I voted for Mr. Gladstone, because there never was a ha'porth of difference between them that ever I could see."
"Ah! now, Lord Salisbury," said another, "there 2 was a man for you. I heard him speak once and I couldn't understand one word he said. Not one word. A fine gentleman, he was."
"I never rightly understood," said a third man who had a straw bag of carpentering tools between his feet and a violin tied on his back with a piece of black tape, "why Mr. Gladstone gave the licence to the grocers. Did a lot of harm to the houses, and didn't do any good to the Liberal Party."
"It didn't do any good to the Liberal Party," said a wizened little man with a cheerful face, "when the Earl Rosebery won the Derby when he was Prime Minister, but it did a deal of good to my pocket," and he winked several times and nodded his head knowingly.
A man who had been dozing in a corner suddenly woke up and lifted an ancient, wrinkled, pink-and-brown countenance to the company. His white beard shone bravely in the beam of the oil-lamp and he thrust it forward as he propped his chin upon a newly cut holly cudgel. "I remember," he said in a deep whisper which came as rather a shock to Donald, who from his experience of stage old men had expected a falsetto piping, "I remember the year when Mr. Harry Chaplin won the Derby and there isn't another of you young chaps that can say as much. I was working in his gardens and he gave me a shilling—gave us all a shilling, all of us working in his gardens and stables—and I knocked a hole in it and wore it on my watch-chain for five-and-thirty years, but I lost it afterwards. Mr. Harry Chaplin, that was."
The old man's head drooped and in a few moments he was asleep again.
"Ah! Mr. Chaplin," struck in another ancient, "there was a gentleman for you."
"Yes, he was a gentleman all right," said the man with the violin. "There aren't too many of them about nowadays."
"That's right," nodded the man who voted impartially for Lord Salisbury and Mr. Gladstone. "Why, I can remember the time when old Squire Rushbrooke was up at the Manor, and the Parson at that time, Stoke his name was—you remember Parson Stoke, Mr. Davis?"
"I remember Parson Stoke, Mr. Stillaway. Remember him clear."
"Well, Parson Stoke said to me once that in the writings about the parish there had been Rushbrookes at the Manor for hundreds and hundreds of years."
"I reckon it was the War put a stop to all that."
"Ay, the War put a stop to a great many things."
"I reckon," said the man with the violin, "that we could do with a bit more of Mr. Dickens in this country. A few more Sam Wellers. That's what we want."
"I saw Mr. Dickens once," said another rheumatism-backed gaffer who had not spoken up to now. "A fine-looking gentleman with a fine big beard, same as Mr. Stillaway's, only bigger. He was a gentleman who liked a good laugh, he was."
"Ah!" said the man with the violin, "that's what the trouble is. People don't seem to laugh now like they used to. I don't know why it is."
The man in the dickey drained off his glass pint-mug and called for another pint of mild-and-bitter.
"Well, has anyone got their antirrhinums in yet?" he enquired, and he looked round with a gleam in his eye which said as clearly as possible that he had got his antirrhinums in that morning and that it was high time that the others did the same. It was equally clear from the shuffling feet and evasive replies that no one else had got their antirrhinums in yet.
There was a pause in the conversation, and Donald plucked up sufficient courage to ask his neighbour when the Hunt was likely to be meeting in the district.
"They meet at Tainton Green to-morrow, sir," replied the man politely. "That's a matter of two miles from here."
"More like two miles and a furlong, Mr. Young," said Mr. Stillaway.
"That's right, Mr. Stillaway," agreed Mr. Davis. "It's every bit of a furlong above the two miles."
"You're working in Tainton, Mr. Stovold," Mr. Young appealed to the violinist. "Would you say it's as much as a furlong above the two miles?"
"Well, I'm not sure that I wouldn't, Mr. Young," replied Mr. Stovold. "I reckon it is maybe a furlong all but a chain or two."
"That might be it," conceded Mr. Young; "a furlong all but a chain or two."
The ancient with the holly-stick woke up again. He seemed to have an uncanny power of hearing in his sleep, for he observed, "They'll find near Stacey's to-morrow over to Tainton. There's an outlier there. I saw him to-day, the old rascal." He laughed a sudden high laugh, and added, "I remember finding at Stacey's when I was second horseman to Mr. Selby. Two hours and forty minutes, she gave us, and I never saw a faster run. We killed her at Grendon Church."
"What year would that be, Mr. Darley?" enquired the man in the dickey.
Mr. Darley cogitated, and finally said:
"I can't rightly remember, but it was the year that Mr. Selby sent us all up to London to see the Great Exhibition. It was a long time ago."
"Would that be Mr. Selby from over Ludgershall way?" asked Mr. Stillaway. But Mr. Darley was asleep again.
"How old is he?" Donald asked, and several voices answered simultaneously, "He's ninety-eight come Martinmas, sir."
Donald asked them if there was likely to be a large muster at the meet, and Mr. Stovold, the violinist, shook his head sadly.
"You can't tell, sir. Not nowadays. You see, fox-hunting has changed since I was a young man."
"Ay, that it has," the others nodded agreement.
"When I was a young man in these parts," went on Mr. Stovold, "all the gentry knew each other and we knew all the gentry—their faces, I mean. And you could tell who was going to foxhunt each day as easy as anything. It was all homely-like, a sort of family as you might say. But now it's all ladies and gentlemen from London. They come down in their motor-cars, and they go back in their motor-cars, and they bring their horses in motor-cars, and it's all changed. They're strangers. When I was a nipper, working over at Mr. Binstead's——"
"I remember Mr. Binstead," interrupted old Mr. Davis. "He's dead these five-and-forty years."
"That's right, Mr. Davis. He died in the year of the great frost when young Sam Byles skated from Bovington's water-meadow at Aylesbury to the Bull at Launton for a wager. As I was saying, when I was a nipper over at Mr. Binstead's, if I opened a gate or found a gap, as like as not the gentleman would know me by name and say, 'Much obliged to you, Bill,' or 'Thank you, Stovold. Hope your mother's rheumatism is better.' But nowadays you're more likely to get a 'Hurry up, blast you' for your pains."
"That's it. That's what you're more likely to get now," said Mr. Young, and the others nodded and puffed away at their pipes.
Mr. Stovold went on.
"And there's another thing. They don't use the inns as they used to. Time was when this very house would serve beer, or maybe cherry-brandy, or sloe-gin to twenty or thirty fox-hunters in a single afternoon. But now it all comes down from London in great silver bottles that they carry in the back pocket of their breeches. And they get their breeches in London, instead of in Bicester as they used to do. And ladies and gentlemen come down in motor-cars to watch, and they keep on heading the fox and blocking up the lanes and frightening the horses. Mr. Davis, what would old Mr. Holford have said to a gentleman who headed the fox in a motor-car?"
They all, except the ninety-eight-year-old, still asleep, laughed at this, and Mr. Davis slapped his corduroy leg and said, "God Almighty, I don't know what Mr. Holford wouldn't have said. He'd have fair killed him."
"Who was Mr. Holford?" asked Donald.
"When did Mr. Holford die, Mr. Stovold?" Mr. Davis passed on the question.
"Mr. Holford? It was the year before the war—not the war against the Germans. The war in Africa."
"That's right. The year after the old Queen had her processions and all."
Donald looked round the semicircle of wrinkled, wind-worn, ancient, glowing faces, and rather diffidently ventured on another question.
"Why is it," he said, "that some of the young men of the village don't come in here for a drink? Is there another inn in the village?"
"No sir," said Mr. Davis, smoothing his head with a hard thin hand. "They don't drink here nor anywhere else, the young chaps. They hardly drink at all."
"Why is that?" asked Donald.
Mr. Stovold, the violinist, seemed to be the readiest with his tongue, for it was he who answered.
"There's several reasons for it, sir. For one thing, there isn't the money about that there used to be; and then beer costs twice as much; and then there's picture-houses and sharrabangs and motor-bicycles with girls sitting on behind. And then in this village the Boy Scouts are very strong, and lots of the young chaps are Rovers and don't drink so as to be an example to the Scouts and the Cubs. And then, you see, there's no one between them and old chaps like us."
"All the rest were killed, you mean?"
"Most of them, sir. Forty-two were killed from this village and they'd be men of thirty-five and forty by now."
"Ah! That War didn't do any of us any good," said Mr. Stillaway. "Nothing's been the same since."
"Yes, and what did we gain by it?" asked Mr. Young.
"Nothing," said Mr. Davis.
Donald made a halting remark about Belgium and national honour and treaties, which the semicircle listened to attentively. Then Mr. Stillaway, the impartial voter, replied:
"But can you tell me, sir, what national honour does for me? I've worked on the land all my life, and the least I've ever earned is four-and-six a week and the most is twenty-nine shillings. It isn't a fortune, either of them. In 1914 a man comes down to the green here, and he makes a speech about just that very national honour that you've been talking about. Mind you, sir, in 1914 the nation and all its honour was giving me twenty-two shillings a week and I was working seventy-four hours a week for it. But I had to give three sons and eight grandsons to fight for the national honour. Eleven of them. And three were killed and two lost legs. And what good did that do to them or to me or Mr. Davis here, or Mr. Darley? Cost of living is higher. Beer is more expensive and so is tobacco. And my grandsons, the ones that weren't killed, can't get work. And all that for what you call national honour."
"That's right." "Mr. Stillaway's hit it." "That's as true as I'm sitting here," came as muttered applause.
Ancient Darley raised his venerable head once more.
"We fought on the wrong side," he whispered strongly. "Those Frenchies were never any use to us. My father saw the beacons on the downs of Sussex when Boney was on the other side. The Germans never did us any harm. It's all they Frenchies."
"Ah! That's right," echoed every antique voice in the parlour.
"My father saw the sails of Lord Nelson's ships many a time," whispered the ancient, "and old Boney sitting over there with his army like a squirrel with a nest of nuts. And my father said to me, and I say to you young chaps, 'What's the good of it all? What's the good of all these wars?'"
He broke off into an ancient laugh.
"I'm not a scholar, never was, and don't suppose now I ever will be. But one thing my father used to say, and he taught me to say it, was this: 'I am a true labourer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness, glad of other men's good, content with my own harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.' I don't know where he got it from. Maybe his father taught it to him. Or maybe it was Parson. War! What good is war to us?"
A voice, gently authoritative, came through the eddying smoke-clouds. "Time, gentlemen, please. If you please, gentlemen. Time. Ten o'clock. Act of Parliament, gentlemen, please."
Donald walked slowly and thoughtfully home under a clear cold sky. The Great Bear was pointing at the Pole Star and the Pleiades were a golden blur and Cassiopeia was twinkling and Orion was flaunting his old-fashioned military equipment. The black, gaunt hedges were like wrought-iron work against the starlight. Dogs barked in the distance and footfalls clinked in the village street. Another English day was over.
At The Golden Hind, Mr. and Mrs. Fielding were seated side by side at a desk, poring over a small, dog-eared note-book. The others had gone to bed. Mr. Fielding looked up and said, "Help yourself to whisky, Cameron. We'll be finished in a moment."
Donald poured himself out a drink and sat down by the blazing log-fire. His host and hostess went on with their work.
"If Mrs. Burchett can't pay her rent," said Mr. Fielding decisively, "we'll just have to go without it, that's all."
"She can't possibly pay, John. She's had rheumatism so badly all the winter that she's had to give up washing, and that means dropping fifteen shillings a week at least, and both her boys are out of work."
"All right. Strike off Mrs. Burchett. The next is Henry Davis. Henry's been out of work now twelve weeks——"
"And his wife's had twins."
"All right. Strike off Henry Davis. We can't worry him for rent just now. And the last is old Mrs. Mitchell, and she says will we take two shillings a week next month instead of four and six. What's the trouble there, Florence?"
"Young Mitchell's been in trouble again."
"Damn that young Mitchell!" exclaimed Mr. Fielding. "Whereabouts is it this time?"
"Down at Bristol, I hear," replied Mrs. Fielding. "A maid-servant, as usual. She got an order against him and he didn't pay, so now he's in Bristol prison."
"All right," said Mr. Fielding, "we'll put down Mrs. Mitchell for two shillings instead of four-and-six. I'd like to get that young blackguard up before me at Quarter Sessions; I'd make him jump. Is that all?"
"Mrs. Taylor's roof is leaking."
"I'll send up that carpenter fellow, Stovold, to-morrow."
"And a gate wants renewing at the lower paddock. I saw it this afternoon when I was out for a walk. And, John, do you think we could find a job for young Butter? His father was killed, you remember, and his mother has a pretty hard time of it."
"We're employing far more hands already than we ought to," grumbled Mr. Fielding.
"Yes, I know, dear. But Mrs. Butter does have such a hard time, and he's such a nice boy. I thought we might put him on to do a little trenching beyond the orchard for a new onion bed."
"All right, all right," said Mr. Fielding. Donald thought that his tone of grudging concession was very clumsily assumed and that secretly he was delighted at finding a reasonable excuse for employing young Butter.
"Well now, my dear, is that all?" he went on. "Mr. Cameron will think us very rude."
Mrs. Fielding smiled maternally at Donald and said:
"I am sure that Mr. Cameron will think nothing of the kind. There's only one thing more. The thatcher is coming up at 9 o'clock to-morrow morning about the end barn. It must be done soon or there'll be no roof left. Will you see him?"
"Oh yes, I'll see him," said Mr. Fielding enthusiastically. "He's promised to lend me a ferret for clearing out the rats at the stables. I expect he'll bring it along with him."
They both got up and came over to the fire.
"Well, Cameron," said Mr. Fielding. "We've been neglecting you scandalously."
"I've been enjoying myself enormously," replied Donald. "You see, I was a farmer myself once. But it was a different sort of farming to all this."
"You don't look like a farmer, Mr. Cameron," said Mrs. Fielding. Mrs. Fielding was a gentle, comely woman, with a voice like the purr of a cat, and large, soft, grey eyes.
"I've tried very hard to get rid of the traces."
"Why, didn't you like farming?" she asked in surprise. "We all adore living on the land."
"But what a different sort of land!" cried Donald. "Where I farmed, the soil was poor and the stones were plentiful. I grew oats and turnips and potatoes. Six months in the year the wind blew from the Arctic Circle straight into my front door. Everything was grey—a granite farmhouse, slate roofs, stone dykes, and grey skies, and in winter it was dark at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. But here—"—he threw his arms out—"here, what a difference! You've got colour here. Your houses are red, and you have hedges with flowers in them instead of stone dykes. You've got fruit blossom, and it's warm down here—and—and I somehow can't explain—you've been here such a long time. You're settled and cosy. I've been over in the Crooked Billet just now, listening to your old men talking. One of them had seen Dickens and one of them quoted Shakespeare—though he didn't know it was Shakespeare—and I felt—I don't quite know what I did feel—but I wouldn't have been a bit surprised if they'd told me all about their experiences at Crécy or Poitiers. I'd have believed them.... We haven't anything like that in Scotland."
"You've got other things to be proud of," said Mrs. Fielding gently.
"Of course we have!" replied Donald patriotically. "Lots of them. But somehow all this down here makes Scotland seem rather disjointed."
"You were such blood-thirsty ruffians," said Mr. Fielding genially. "That was your trouble. Always scrapping. Look at our wars. We had that local affair at Sedgmoor, and the Cromwell stuff, and the Wars of the Roses, but that's about all in the last six hundred years, except when your Douglases came marauding over the Border. No wonder things have got settled down a bit."
"Yes, I suppose that's it, partly. But I think it's also that you're such a friendly race. It seems to me that you like things and people so much."
"Well, there isn't much point in quarrelling all the time, is there?"
"Of course there isn't much point," answered Donald; "there isn't any point. But people do it all the same. Especially on the west coast of Scotland. But down here it's different. I think the English have done lots of beastly things in the past—like Cromwell's sack of Drogheda, or the destruction of the Summer Palace in Pekin and the Old Fort at Delhi, or letting Marshal Ney be shot. But I think that every time it was just a fit of bad temper, and as soon as it was over they became as kind and as friendly as ever. I think the longest fit they've ever had was the way they treated Napoleon. But with the Scots, and the French, and lots of other races, there's far too much permanent bad temper."
"We're too busy money-making," said Mr. Fielding with a laugh. "Nation of shopkeepers, eh?"
"Oh no, no," exclaimed Donald earnestly, "that's a libel. You're the most unpractical race in the world."
"Oh, come, come, Mr. Cameron!" said Mrs. Fielding reproachfully. "You can't possibly defend that statement."
"Yes, Cameron," chimed in her husband, "that's going a bit too far. If there's one thing we are good at, it's money-making and business. I sometimes think we go a bit too far the other way and drive too hard bargains."
"I couldn't help overhearing," said Donald drily, "that you were preparing to drive some pretty hard bargains with your tenants just now."
Mr. Fielding became indignant.
"That's a different story altogether. It so happened that one or two of them have had a bit of hard luck lately, and one can't Shylock the poor devils. But when it comes to a business deal, I flatter myself I'm as good a man as my neighbours."
"Perhaps that's because they're all English," said Donald.
Mr. Fielding laughed delightedly.
"You mean that if you settled down here as a sort of Farfrae you'd soon turn me into a Mayor of Casterbridge."
"Talking about that," said Mrs. Fielding, knitting away with a fury that contrasted oddly with her gentle placidity of voice and manner, "what is that copy of Tess that is lying on the hall table? I don't think I've seen it before."
Mr. Fielding looked down and coughed, and then thumped his chest to call attention to the fact that the cough was physical, not nervous.
"It's a first edition, my dear," he said.
"I saw that it was a first edition," she replied. "Where did you find it? Upstairs somewhere?"
"No—er—as a matter of fact, I picked it up to-day. It's quite valuable."
"In Aylesbury?"
"Er—no. Not exactly. Er—here."
"John, the vicar has been at you again. How much did you give him?" Mrs. Fielding stopped knitting.
"Well, my dear, he's got seven children and a first edition is no use to him. He can get just as much fun out of a Tauchnitz."
"How much did you give him?" said Mrs. Fielding patiently.
"It's in perfect preservation," replied her lord and master.
"Three hundred pounds?"
Mr. Fielding sighed.
"As a matter of fact——" he began, but she gently interrupted him.
"If you want to conceal that sort of thing from me, John, you shouldn't use my cheque-book."
Mr. Fielding laughed, and then turned to Donald.
"I'm afraid I drove a pretty hard bargain with the poor old vicar, but after all, business is business."
"Considering that the market value of a Tess first edition probably isn't more than fifty pounds——"
"Oh, nonsense!" cried Mr. Fielding, jumping up. "It's a first-class investment. What does it matter anyway? One more drink and then bedtime—eh, chickabiddy. But as for saying that the English are bad business men, it's all rubbish! Say when, Cameron."