CHAPTER XI
MR. BARTER TAKES A WALK
The event at the Rectory was expected every moment. The Rector, who practically never suffered, disliked the thought and sight of others’ suffering. Up to this day, indeed, there had been none to dislike, for in answer to inquiries his wife had always said “No, dear, no; I’m all right – really, it’s nothing.” And she had always said it smiling, even when her smiling lips were white. But this morning in trying to say it she had failed to smile. Her eyes had lost their hopelessly hopeful shining, and sharply between her teeth she said: “Send for Dr. Wilson, Hussell.”
The Rector kissed her, shutting his eyes, for he was afraid of her face with its lips drawn back, and its discoloured cheeks. In five minutes the groom was hastening to Cornmarket on the roan cob, and the Rector stood in his study, looking from one to another of his household gods, as though calling them to his assistance. At last he took down a bat and began oiling it. Sixteen years ago, when Husell was born, he had been overtaken by sounds that he had never to this day forgotten; they had clung to the nerves of his memory, and for no reward would he hear them again. They had never been uttered since, for like most wives, his wife was a heroine; but, used as he was to this event, the Rector had ever since suffered from panic. It was as though Providence, storing all the anxiety which he might have felt throughout, let him have it with a rush at the last moment. He put the bat back into its case, corked the oil-bottle, and again stood looking at his household gods. None came to his aid. And his thoughts were as they had nine times been before. ‘I ought not to go out. I ought to wait for Wilson. Suppose anything were to happen. Still, nurse is with her, and I can do nothing. Poor Rose – poor darling! It’s my duty to – What’s that? I’m better out of the way.’
Softly, without knowing that it was softly, he opened the door; softly, without knowing it was softly, he stepped to the hat-rack and took his black straw hat; softly, without knowing it was softly, he went out, and, unfaltering, hurried down the drive.
Three minutes later he appeared again, approaching the house faster than he had set forth.
He passed the hall door, ran up the stairs, and entered his wife’s room.
“Rose dear, Rose, can I do anything?”
Mrs. Barter put out her hand, a gleam of malice shot into her eyes. Through her set lips came a vague murmur, and the words:
“No, dear, nothing. Better go for your walk.”
Mr. Barter pressed his lips to her quivering hand, and backed from the room. Outside the door he struck at the air with his fist, and, running downstairs, was once more lost to sight. Faster and faster he walked, leaving the village behind, and among the country sights and sounds and scents – his nerves began to recover. He was able to think again of other things: of Cecil’s school report – far from satisfactory; of old Hermon in the village, whom he suspected of overdoing his bronchitis with an eye to port; of the return match with Coldingham, and his belief that their left-hand bowler only wanted “hitting”; of the new edition of hymn-books, and the slackness of the upper village in attending church – five households less honest and ductile than the rest, a foreign look about them, dark people, un-English. In thinking of these things he forgot what he wanted to forget; but hearing the sound of wheels, he entered a field as though to examine the crops until the vehicle had passed.
It was not Wilson, but it might have been, and at the next turning he unconsciously branched off the Cornmarket road.
It was noon when he came within sight of Coldingham, six miles from Worsted Skeynes. He would have enjoyed a glass of beer, but, unable to enter the public-house, he went into the churchyard instead. He sat down on a bench beneath a sycamore opposite the Winlow graves, for Coldingham was Lord Montrossor’s seat, and it was here that all the Winlows lay. Bees were busy above them in the branches, and Mr. Barter thought:
‘Beautiful site. We’ve nothing like this at Worsted Skeynes…’
But suddenly he found that he could not sit there and think. Suppose his wife were to die! It happened sometimes; the wife of John Tharp of Bletchingham had died in giving birth to her tenth child! His forehead was wet, and he wiped it. Casting an angry glance at the Winlow graves, he left the seat.
He went down by the further path, and came out on the green. A cricket-match was going on, and in spite of himself the Rector stopped. The Coldingham team were in the field. Mr. Barter watched. As he had thought, that left-hand bowler bowled a good pace, and “came in” from the off, but his length was poor, very poor! A determined batsman would soon knock him off! He moved into line with the wickets to see how much the fellow “came in,” and he grew so absorbed that he did not at first notice the Hon. Geoffrey Winlow in pads and a blue and green blazer, smoking a cigarette astride of a camp-stool.
“Ah, Winlow, it’s your team against the village. Afraid I can’t stop to see you bat. I was just passing – matter I had to attend to – must get back!”
The real solemnity of his face excited Winlow’s curiosity.
“Can’t you stop and have lunch with us?”
“No, no; my wife – Must get back!”
Winlow murmured:
“Ah yes, of course.” His leisurely blue eyes, always in command of the situation, rested on the Rector’s heated face. “By the way,” he said, “I’m afraid George Pendyce is rather hard hit. Been obliged to sell his horse. I saw him at Epsom the week before last.”
The Rector brightened.
“I made certain he’d come to grief over that betting,” he said. “I’m very sorry – very sorry indeed.”
“They say,” went on Winlow, “that he dropped four thousand over the Thursday race.
“He was pretty well dipped before, I know. Poor old George! such an awfully good chap!”
“Ah,” repeated Mr. Barter, “I’m very sorry – very sorry indeed. Things were bad enough as it was.”
A ray of interest illumined the leisureliness of the Hon. Geoffrey’s eyes.
“You mean about Mrs. – H’m, yes?” he said. “People are talking; you can’t stop that. I’m so sorry for the poor Squire, and Mrs. Pendyce. I hope something’ll be done.”
The Rector frowned.
“I’ve done my best,” he said. “Well hit, sir! I’ve always said that anyone with a little pluck can knock off that lefthand man you think so much of. He ‘comes in’ a bit, but he bowls a shocking bad length. Here I am dawdling. I must get back!”
And once more that real solemnity came over Mr. Barter’s face.
“I suppose you’ll be playing for Coldingham against us on Thursday? Good-bye!”
Nodding in response to Winlow’s salute, he walked away.
He avoided the churchyard, and took a path across the fields. He was hungry and thirsty. In one of his sermons there occurred this passage: “We should habituate ourselves to hold our appetites in check. By constantly accustoming our selves to abstinence little abstinences in our daily life – we alone can attain to that true spirituality without which we cannot hope to know God.” And it was well known throughout his household and the village that the Rector’s temper was almost dangerously spiritual if anything detained him from his meals. For he was a man physiologically sane and healthy to the core, whose digestion and functions, strong, regular, and straightforward as the day, made calls upon him which would not be denied. After preaching that particular sermon, he frequently for a week or more denied himself a second glass of ale at lunch, or his after-dinner cigar, smoking a pipe instead. And he was perfectly honest in his belief that he attained a greater spirituality thereby, and perhaps indeed he did. But even if he did not, there was no one to notice this, for the majority of his flock accepted his spirituality as matter of course, and of the insignificant minority there were few who did not make allowance for the fact that he was their pastor by virtue of necessity, by virtue of a system which had placed him there almost mechanically, whether he would or no. Indeed, they respected him the more that he was their Rector, and could not be removed, and were glad that theirs was no common Vicar like that of Coldingham, dependent on the caprices of others. For, with the exception of two bad characters and one atheist, the whole village, Conservatives or Liberals (there were Liberals now that they were beginning to believe that the ballot was really secret), were believers in the hereditary system.
Insensibly the Rector directed himself towards Bletchingham, where there was a temperance house. At heart he loathed lemonade and gingerbeer in the middle of the day, both of which made his economy cold and uneasy, but he felt he could go nowhere else. And his spirits rose at the sight of Bletchingham spire.
‘Bread and cheese,’ he thought. ‘What’s better than bread and cheese? And they shall make me a cup of coffee.’
In that cup of coffee there was something symbolic and fitting to his mental state. It was agitated and thick, and impregnated with the peculiar flavour of country coffee. He swallowed but little, and resumed his march. At the first turning he passed the village school, whence issued a rhythmic but discordant hum, suggestive of some dull machine that had served its time. The Rector paused to listen. Leaning on the wall of the little play-yard, he tried to make out the words that, like a religious chant, were being intoned within. It sounded like, “Twice two’s four, twice four’s six, twice six’s eight,” and he passed on, thinking, ‘A fine thing; but if we don’t take care we shall go too far; we shall unfit them for their stations,’ and he frowned. Crossing a stile, he took a footpath. The air was full of the singing of larks, and the bees were pulling down the clover-stalks. At the bottom of the field was a little pond overhung with willows. On a bare strip of pasture, within thirty yards, in the full sun, an old horse was tethered to a peg. It stood with its face towards the pond, baring its yellow teeth, and stretching out its head, all bone and hollows, to the water which it could not reach. The Rector stopped. He did not know the horse personally, for it was three fields short of his parish, but he saw that the poor beast wanted water. He went up, and finding that the knot of the halter hurt his fingers, stooped down and wrenched at the peg. While he was thus straining and tugging, crimson in the face, the old horse stood still, gazing at him out of his bleary eyes. Mr. Barter sprang upright with a jerk, the peg in his hand, and the old horse started back.
“So ho, boy!” said the Rector, and angrily he muttered: “A shame to tie the poor beast up here in the sun. I should like to give his owner a bit of my mind!”
He led the animal towards the water. The old horse followed tranquilly enough, but as he had done nothing to deserve his misfortune, neither did he feel any gratitude towards his deliverer. He drank his fill, and fell to grazing. The Rector experienced a sense of disillusionment, and drove the peg again into the softer earth under the willows; then raising himself, he looked hard at the old horse.
The animal continued to graze. The Rector took out his handkerchief, wiped the perspiration from his brow, and frowned. He hated ingratitude in man or beast.
Suddenly he realised that he was very tired.
“It must be over by now,” he said to himself, and hastened on in the heat across the fields.
The Rectory door was open. Passing into the study, he sat down a moment to collect his thoughts. People were moving above; he heard a long moaning sound that filled his heart with terror.
He got up and rushed to the bell, but did not ring it, and ran upstairs instead. Outside his wife’s room he met his children’s old nurse. She was standing on the mat, with her hands to her ears, and the tears were rolling down her face.
“Oh, sir!” she said – “oh, sir!”
The Rector glared.
“Woman!” he cried – “woman!”
He covered his ears and rushed downstairs again. There was a lady in the hall. It was Mrs. Pendyce, and he ran to her, as a hurt child runs to its mother.
“My wife,” he said – “my poor wife! God knows what they’re doing to her up there, Mrs. Pendyce!” and he hid his face in his hands.
She, who had been a Totteridge, stood motionless; then, very gently putting her gloved hand on his thick arm, where the muscles stood out from the clenching of his hands, she said:
“Dear Mr. Barter, Dr. Wilson is so clever! Come into the drawing-room!”
The Rector, stumbling like a blind man, suffered himself to be led. He sat down on the sofa, and Mrs. Pendyce sat down beside him, her hand still on his arm; over her face passed little quivers, as though she were holding herself in. She repeated in her gentle voice:
“It will be all right – it will be all right. Come, come!”
In her concern and sympathy there was apparent, not aloofness, but a faint surprise that she should be sitting there stroking the Rector’s arm.
Mr. Barter took his hands from before his face.
“If she dies,” he said in a voice unlike his own, “I’ll not bear it.”
In answer to those words, forced from him by that which is deeper than habit, Mrs. Pendyce’s hand slipped from his arm and rested on the shiny chintz covering of the sofa, patterned with green and crimson. Her soul shrank from the violence in his voice.
“Wait here,” she said. “I will go up and see.”
To command was foreign to her nature, but Mr. Barter, with a look such as a little rueful boy might give, obeyed.
When she was gone he stood listening at the door for some sound – for any sound, even the sound of her dress – but there was none, for her petticoat was of lawn, and the Rector was alone with a silence that he could not bear. He began to pace the room in his thick boots, his hands clenched behind him, his forehead butting the air, his lips folded; thus a bull, penned for the first time, turns and turns, showing the whites of its full eyes.
His thoughts drove here and there, fearful, angered, without guidance; he did not pray. The words he had spoken so many times left him as though of malice. “We are all in the hands of God! – we are all in the hands of God!” Instead of them he could think of nothing but the old saying Mr. Paramor had used in the Squire’s dining-room, “There is moderation in all things,” and this with cruel irony kept humming in his ears. “Moderation in all things – moderation in all things!” and his wife lying there – his doing, and…
There was a sound. The Rector’s face, so brown and red, could not grow pale, but his great fists relaxed. Mrs. Pendyce was standing in the doorway with a peculiar half-pitiful, half-excited smile.
“It’s all right – a boy. The poor dear has had a dreadful time!”
The Rector looked at her, but did not speak; then abruptly he brushed past her in the doorway, hurried into his study and locked the door. Then, and then only, he kneeled down, and remained there many minutes, thinking of nothing.
CHAPTER XII
THE SQUIRE MAKES UP HIS MIND
That same evening at nine o’clock, sitting over the last glass of a pint of port, Mr. Barter felt an irresistible longing for enjoyment, an impulse towards expansion and his fellow-men.
Taking his hat and buttoning his coat – for though the June evening was fine the easterly breeze was eager – he walked towards the village.
Like an emblem of that path to God of which he spoke on Sundays, the grey road between trim hedges threaded the shadow of the elm-trees where the rooks had long since gone to bed. A scent of wood-smoke clung in the air; the cottages appeared, the forge, the little shops facing the village green. Lights in the doors and windows deepened; a breeze, which hardly stirred the chestnut leaves, fled with a gentle rustling through the aspens. Houses and trees, houses and trees! Shelter through the past and through the days to come!
The Rector stopped the first man he saw.
“Fine weather for the hay, Aiken! How’s your wife doing – a girl? Ah, ha! You want some boys! You heard of our event at the Rectory? I’m thankful to say – ”
From man to man and house to house he soothed his thirst for fellowship, for the lost sense of dignity that should efface again the scar of suffering. And above him the chestnuts in their breathing stillness, the aspens with their tender rustling, seemed to watch and whisper: “Oh, little men! oh, little men!”
The moon, at the end of her first quarter, sailed out of the shadow of the churchyard – the same young moon that had sailed in her silver irony when the first Barter preached, the first Pendyce was Squire at Worsted Skeynes; the same young moon that, serene, ineffable, would come again when the last Barter slept, the last Pendyce was gone, and on their gravestones, through the amethystine air, let fall her gentle light.
The Rector thought:
‘I shall set Stedman to work on that corner. We must have more room; the stones there are a hundred and fifty years old if they’re a day. You can’t read a single word. They’d better be the first to go.’
He passed on along the paddock footway leading to the Squire’s.
Day was gone, and only the moonbeams lighted the tall grasses.
At the Hall the long French windows of the dining-room were open; the Squire was sitting there alone, brooding sadly above the remnants of the fruit he had been eating. Flanking him on either wall hung a silent company, the effigies of past Pendyces; and at the end, above the oak and silver of the sideboard, the portrait of his wife was looking at them under lifted brows, with her faint wonder.
He raised his head.
“Ah, Barter! How’s your wife?”
“Doing as well as can be expected.”
“Glad to hear that! A fine constitution – wonderful vitality. Port or claret?”
“Thanks; just a glass of port.”
“Very trying for your nerves. I know what it is. We’re different from the last generation; they thought nothing of it. When Charles was born my dear old father was out hunting all day. When my wife had George, it made me as nervous as a cat!”
The Squire stopped, then hurriedly added:
“But you’re so used to it.”
Mr. Barter frowned.
“I was passing Coldingham to-day,” he said. “I saw Winlow. He asked after you.”
“Ah! Winlow! His wife’s a very nice woman. They’ve only the one child, I think?”
The Rector winced.
“Winlow tells me,” he said abruptly, “that George has sold his horse.”
The Squire’s face changed. He glanced suspiciously at Mr. Barter, but the Rector was looking at his glass.
“Sold his horse! What’s the meaning of that? He told you why, I suppose?”
The Rector drank off his wine.
“I never ask for reasons,” he said, “where racing-men are concerned. It’s my belief they know no more what they’re about than so many dumb animals.”
“Ah! racing-men!” said Mr. Pendyce. “But George doesn’t bet.”
A gleam of humour shot into the Rector’s eyes. He pressed his lips together.
The Squire rose.
“Come now, Barter!” he said.
The Rector blushed. He hated tale-bearing – that is, of course, in the case of a man; the case of a woman was different – and just as, when he went to Bellew he had been careful not to give George away, so now he was still more on his guard.
“No, no, Pendyce.”
The Squire began to pace the room, and Mr. Barter felt something stir against his foot; the spaniel John emerging at the end, just where the moonlight shone, a symbol of all that was subservient to the Squire, gazed up at his master with tragic eyes. ‘Here, again,’ they seemed to say, ‘is something to disturb me!’
The Squire broke the silence.
“I’ve always counted on you, Barter; I count on you as I would on my own brother. Come, now, what’s this about George?”
‘After all,’ thought the Rector, ‘it’s his father!’ – “I know nothing but what they say,” he blurted forth; “they talk of his having lost a lot of money. I dare say it’s all nonsense. I never set much store by rumour. And if he’s sold the horse, well, so much the better. He won’t be tempted to gamble again.”
But Horace Pendyce made no answer. A single thought possessed his bewildered, angry mind:
‘My son a gambler! Worsted Skeynes in the hands of a gambler!’
The Rector rose.
“It’s all rumour. You shouldn’t pay any attention. I should hardly think he’s been such a fool. I only know that I must get back to my wife. Good-night.”
And, nodding but confused, Mr. Barter went away through the French window by which he had come.
The Squire stood motionless.
A gambler!
To him, whose existence was bound up in Worsted Skeynes, whose every thought had some direct or indirect connection with it, whose son was but the occupier of that place he must at last vacate, whose religion was ancestor-worship, whose dread was change, no word could be so terrible. A gambler!
It did not occur to him that his system was in any way responsible for George’s conduct. He had said to Mr. Paramor: “I never had a system; I’m no believer in systems.” He had brought him up simply as a gentleman. He would have preferred that George should go into the Army, but George had failed; he would have preferred that George should devote himself to the estate, marry, and have a son, instead of idling away his time in town, but George had failed; and so, beyond furthering his desire to join the Yeomanry, and getting him proposed for the Stoics’ Club, what was there he could have done to keep him out of mischief? And now he was a gambler!
Once a gambler always a gambler!
To his wife’s face, looking down from the wall, he said:
“He gets it from you!”
But for all answer the face stared gently.
Turning abruptly, he left the room, and the spaniel John, for whom he had been too quick, stood with his nose to the shut door, scenting for someone to come and open it.
Mr. Pendyce went to his study, took some papers from a locked drawer, and sat a long time looking at them. One was the draft of his will, another a list of the holdings at Worsted Skeynes, their acreage and rents, a third a fair copy of the settlement, re-settling the estate when he had married. It was at this piece of supreme irony that Mr. Pendyce looked longest. He did not read it, but he thought:
‘And I can’t cut it! Paramor says so! A gambler!’
That “crassness” common to all men in this strange world, and in the Squire intensified, was rather a process than a quality – obedience to an instinctive dread of what was foreign to himself, an instinctive fear of seeing another’s point of view, an instinctive belief in precedent. And it was closely allied to his most deep and moral quality – the power of making a decision. Those decisions might be “crass” and stupid, conduce to unnecessary suffering, have no relation to morality or reason; but he could make them, and he could stick to them. By virtue of this power he was where he was, had been for centuries, and hoped to be for centuries to come. It was in his blood. By this alone he kept at bay the destroying forces that Time brought against him, his order, his inheritance; by this alone he could continue to hand down that inheritance to his son. And at the document which did hand it down he looked with angry and resentful eyes.
Men who conceive great resolutions do not always bring them forth with the ease and silence which they themselves desire. Mr. Pendyce went to his bedroom determined to say no word of what he had resolved to do. His wife was asleep. The Squire’s entrance wakened her, but she remained motionless, with her eyes closed, and it was the sight of that immobility, when he himself was so disturbed, which drew from him the words:
“Did you know that George was a gambler?”
By the light of the candle in his silver candlestick her dark eyes seemed suddenly alive.
“He’s been betting; he’s sold his horse. He’d never have sold that horse unless he were pushed. For all I know, he may be posted at Tattersalls!”
The sheets shivered as though she who lay within them were struggling. Then came her voice, cool and gentle:
“All young men bet, Horace; you must know that!”
The Squire at the foot of the bed held up the candle; the movement had a sinister significance.
“Do you defend him?” it seemed to say. “Do you defy me?”
Gripping the bed-rail, he cried:
“I’ll have no gambler and profligate for my son! I’ll not risk the estate!”
Mrs. Pendyce raised herself, and for many seconds stared at her husband. Her heart beat furiously. It had come! What she had been expecting all these days had come! Her pale lips answered:
“What do you mean? I don’t understand you, Horace.”
Mr. Pendyce’s eyes searched here and there for what, he did not know.
“This has decided me,” he said. “I’ll have no half-measures. Until he can show me he’s done with that woman, until he can prove he’s given up this betting, until – until the heaven’s fallen, I’ll have no more to do with him!”
To Margery Pendyce, with all her senses quivering, that saying, “Until the heaven’s fallen,” was frightening beyond the rest. On the lips of her husband, those lips which had never spoken in metaphors, never swerved from the direct and commonplace, nor deserted the shibboleth of his order, such words had an evil and malignant sound.
He went on:
“I’ve brought him up as I was brought up myself. I never thought to have had a scamp for my son!”
Mrs. Pendyce’s heart stopped fluttering.
“How dare you, Horace!” she cried.
The Squire, letting go the bed-rail, paced to and fro. There was something savage in the sound of his footsteps through the utter silence.
“I’ve made up my mind,” he said. “The estate – ”
There broke from Mrs. Pendyce a torrent of words:
“You talk of the way you brought George up! You – you never understood him! You – you never did anything for him! He just grew up like you all grow up in this – ” But no word followed, for she did not know herself what was that against which her soul had blindly fluttered its wings. “You never loved him as I do! What do I care about the estate? I wish it were sold! D’you think I like living here? D’you think I’ve ever liked it? D’you think I’ve ever – ” But she did not finish that saying: D’you think I’ve ever loved you? “My boy a scamp! I’ve heard you laugh and shake your head and say a hundred times: ‘Young men will be young men!’ You think I don’t know how you’d all go on if you dared! You think I don’t know how you talk among yourselves! As for gambling, you’d gamble too, if you weren’t afraid! And now George is in trouble – ”
As suddenly as it had broken forth the torrent of her words dried up.
Mr. Pendyce had come back to the foot of the bed, and once more gripped the rail whereon the candle, still and bright, showed them each other’s faces, very changed from the faces that they knew. In the Squire’s lean brown throat, between the parted points of his stiff collar, a string seemed working. He stammered:
“You – you’re talking like a madwoman! My father would have cut me off, his father would have cut him off! By God! do you think I’ll stand quietly by and see it all played ducks and drakes with, and see that woman here, and see her son, a – a bastard, or as bad as a bastard, in my place? You don’t know me!”
The last words came through his teeth like the growl of a dog. Mrs. Pendyce made the crouching movement of one who gathers herself to spring.
“If you give him up, I shall go to him; I will never come back!”
The Squire’s grip on the rail relaxed; in the light of the candle, still and steady and bright – his jaw could be seen to fall. He snapped his teeth together, and turning abruptly, said:
“Don’t talk such rubbish!”
Then, taking the candle, he went into his dressing-room.
And at first his feelings were simple enough; he had merely that sore sensation, that sense of raw offence, as at some gross and violent breach of taste.
‘What madness,’ he thought, ‘gets into women! It would serve her right if I slept here!’
He looked around him. There was no place where he could sleep, not even a sofa, and taking up the candle, he moved towards the door. But a feeling of hesitation and forlornness rising, he knew not whence, made him pause irresolute before the window.
The young moon, riding low, shot her light upon his still, lean figure, and in that light it was strange to see how grey he looked – grey from head to foot, grey, and sad, and old, as though in summary of all the squires who in turn had looked upon that prospect frosted with young moonlight to the boundary of their lands. Out in the paddock he saw his old hunter Bob, with his head turned towards the house; and from the very bottom of his heart he sighed.
In answer to that sigh came a sound of something falling outside against the door. He opened it to see what might be there. The spaniel John, lying on a cushion of blue linen, with his head propped up against the wall, darkly turned his eyes.
‘I am here, master,’ he seemed to say; ‘it is late – I was about to go to sleep; it has done me good, however, to see you;’ and hiding his eyes from the light under a long black ear, he drew a stertorous breath. Mr. Pendyce shut-to the door. He had forgotten the existence of his dog. But, as though with the sight of that faithful creature he had regained belief in all that he was used to, in all that he was master of, in all that was – himself, he opened the bedroom door and took his place beside his wife.
And soon he was asleep.