Plashers Mead Part 1

Plashers Mead.

by Compton Mackenzie.

AUTUMN

SEPTEMBER

The slow train puffed away into the unadventurous country; and the bees buzzing round the wine-dark dahlias along the platform were once again audible. The last farewell that Guy Hazlewood flung over his shoulder to a parting friend was more casual than it would have been had he not at the same moment been turning to ask the solitary porter how many cases of books awaited his disposition. They were very heavy, it seemed; and the porter, as he led the way towards the small and obscure purgatory through which every package for s.h.i.+pcot must pa.s.s, declared he was surprised to hear these cases contained merely books. He would not go so far as to suggest that hitherto he had never faced the existence of books in such quant.i.ty, for the admission might have impugned official omniscience; yet there was in his att.i.tude just as much incredulity mingled with disdain of useless learning as would preserve his dignity without jeopardizing the financial compliment his services were owed.

"Ah, well," he decided, as if he were trying to smooth over Guy's embarra.s.sment at the sight of these large packing-cases in the parcel-office. "You'll want something as'll keep you busy this winter--for you'll be the gentleman who've come to live down Wychford way?"

Guy nodded.

"And Wychford is mortal dead in winter. Time walks very lame there, as they say. And all these books, I suppose, were better to come along of the 'bus to-night?"

Guy looked doubtful. It was seeming a pity to waste this afternoon without unpacking a single case. "The trap...." he began.

But the porter interrupted him firmly; he did not think Mr. G.o.dbold would relish the notion of one of these packing-cases in his new trap.

"I could give you a hand...." Guy began again.

The porter stiffened himself against the slight upon his strength.

"It's not the heffort," he a.s.serted. "Heffort is what I must look for every day of my life. It's Mr. G.o.dbold's trap."

The discussion was given another turn by the entrance of Mr. G.o.dbold himself. He was not at all concerned for his trap, and indeed by an a.s.severated indifference to its welfare he conveyed the impression that, new though it were, it was so much firewood, if the gentleman wanted firewood. No, the trap did not matter, but what about Mr. Hazlewood's knees?

"Ah, there you are," said the porter, and he and Mr. G.o.dbold both stood dumb in the presence of the finally insuperable.

"I suppose it must be the 'bus," said Guy. On such a sleepy afternoon he could argue no longer. The books must be unpacked to-morrow; and the word lulled like an opiate the faint irritation of his disappointment.

The porter's reiterated altruism was rewarded with a fee so absurdly in excess of anything he had done, that he began to speak of a possibility if, after all, the smallest case might not be squeezed ... but Mr.

G.o.dbold flicked the pony, and the trap rattled up the station road at a pace quite out of accord with the warmth of the afternoon. Presently he turned to his fare:

"Mrs. G.o.dbold said to me only this morning, she said, 'You ought to have had a luggage-flap behind and that I shall always say,' And she was right. Women is often right, what's more," the husband postulated.

Guy nodded absently; he was thinking about the books.

"Very often right," Mr. G.o.dbold murmured.

Still Guy paid no attention.

"Very often," he repeated, but as Guy would neither contradict nor agree with him, Mr. G.o.dbold relapsed into meditation upon the justice of his observation. The pony had settled down to his wonted pace and jogged on through the golden haze of fine September weather. Soon the village of s.h.i.+pcot was left behind, and before them lay the long road winding upward over the wold to Wychford. Guy thought of the friend who had left him that afternoon and wished that Michael Fane were still with him to enjoy this illimitable sweep of country. He had been the very person to share in the excitement of arranging a new house. Guy could not remember that he had ever made a suggestion for which he had not been asked; nor could he call to mind a single occasion when his appreciation had failed. And now to-night, when for the first time he was going to sleep in his own house, his friend was gone. There had been no hint of departure during the six weeks of preparation they had spent together at the Stag Inn, and it was really perverse of Michael to rush back to London now. Guy jumped down from the trap, which was climbing the hill very slowly, and stretched his long legs. He was rather bored by his loneliness, but as soon as he had stated so much to himself, he was shocked at the disloyalty to his ambition. After all, he rea.s.sured himself, he was not going back to a dull inn-parlor; to-night he was going to sleep in an hermitage for the right to enjoy the seclusion of which he had been compelled to fight very hard. It was weak to imagine he was lonely already, and to fortify himself against this mood he pulled out of his pocket his father's last letter and read it again while he walked up the hill behind the trap.

FOX HALL, GALTON, HANTS, _September 10th_.

DEAR GUY,--I agree with some of what you say, but I disagree with a good deal more, and I am entirely opposed to your method of procedure, which is to put it very mildly rather casual. Your degree was not so good as it ought to have been, but I did not reproach you, because in the Consular Service you had chosen a career which did not call specially for a first. At the same time you could, if you had worked, have got a first quite easily. Your six months with the Macedonian Relief people seems to have knocked all your consular ambitions on the head rather too easily, I confess, to make me feel very happy about your future. And now without consulting me you take a house in the country for the purpose of writing poetry! You imply in answer to my remonstrances that I am unable to appreciate the "necessity" for your step. That may be, but I cannot help asking where you would be now if I at your age, instead of helping my father with his school, had gone off to Oxfords.h.i.+re to write poetry. Perhaps I had ambitions to make a name for myself with the pen. If I had, I quenched them in order to devote myself to what I considered my duty. I do not reproach you for refusing to carry on the school at Fox Hall. Your dear mother's last request was that I should not urge you to be a schoolmaster, unless you were drawn to the vocation. Her wishes I have respected, and I repeat that I am not hurt at your refusal.

At the same time I cannot encourage what can only be described as this whim of yours to bury yourself in a remote village where, having saddled yourself with the responsibilities of a house, you announce your intention of living by poetry! I am the last person to underestimate the value of poetry, but as a livelihood it seems to me as little to be relied upon as the weather. However, you are of age. You have 150 a year of your own. You are with the exercise of the strictest economy independent. And this brings me to the point of your last letter in which you ask me to supplement your own income with an allowance of 150 a year from me. This inclination to depend upon your father is not what I conceive to be the artist's spirit of independence. This overdrawing upon your achievement fills me with dismay for the future. However, since I do not wish you to begin hampered by debt and as you a.s.sure me that you have spent all your own money on this idiotic house, I will give you 150, to be paid in quarterly instalments of 37 10_s_, as from the 21st of this month for one year. Furthermore, at the end of next year if you find that poetry is less profitable than even you expect, I will offer you a place at Fox Hall, thereby securing for you the certainty of a life moderately free from financial worries. After all, even a schoolmaster has some spare time, and I dare say our greatest poets did much of their best work in their spare time. The idea of writing poetry all day and every day appeals to me as enervating and ostentatious.

Your affectionate father, JOHN HAZLEWOOD.

Guy stood still when he had finished the letter, and execrated mutely the d.a.m.nable dependence that compelled him to accept gratefully and humbly this gift of 150. Yet with no money of his own coming in till December, with actually a housekeeper on her way from Cardiff and his house already furnished, he must accept the offer. In a year's time he would have proved the reasonableness of his request; and he began to compose a scene between them, in which his father would almost on bended knees beg him to accept an allowance of 300 a year in consideration of the magnificent proof he had afforded to the world of being in the direct line of English poets.

"And I mustn't forget to send him a sonnet on his birthday," said Guy to himself.

This notion restored his dignity, and he hurried on to overtake the trap which was waiting on the brow of the hill.

"You were saying something about women being right," he reminded Mr.

G.o.dbold, as he sat down again beside him. "Has it ever struck you that fathers are nearly always wrong?"

"That wouldn't do for me at all," said Mr. G.o.dbold, shaking his head.

"You see I'm the father of nine, and if I wasn't always right, sir, I shouldn't be no better than a bull in a china-shop where I live. I've _got_ to be right, Mr. Hazlewood."

"I suppose that's what the Pope felt," Guy murmured.

"Now do you reckon this here Pope they speak of really exists in a manner of speaking?" Mr. G.o.dbold asked, as the trap bowled along the level stretch of upland road. "You know there's some of these narrow-minded mortals at Wychford as will have it that Mr. Grey, our parson, is in with the Pope, and I said to one or two of them the other night while we were arguing in the post-office, I said, 'Have any of you wise men of Gotham ever seen this Pope as you're so knowing about?'"

"And had they?" asked Guy, encouragingly.

"Not one of them," said Mr. G.o.dbold. "And I thought to myself as I was walking up home, I thought now what if there wasn't no such thing as a Pope any more than there's women with fish-tails and all this rubbish you read of in books. If you ask my opinion of books, Mr. Hazlewood, I tell you that I think books is as bad for some people as wireworms is for carnations. They seem to regular eat into them."

Guy laughed. Misgivings about the wisdom of his choice vanished, and he was being conscious of a very intimate pleasure in thus driving back to Wychford from the station. The country tossed for miles to right and left in great stretches of pasturage, and when Mr. G.o.dbold pulled up for a moment to look at a trace, the air, brilliantly dusted with autumnal gold, seemed to endow him with the richness of its silence; along the spa.r.s.e hedgerow chicory flowers burned with the pale intense blue of the September sky above, and Guy felt like them, wors.h.i.+pful of the cloudless scene. The road ran along the upland for half a mile before it dipped suddenly down into the valley of the Greenrush, from which the spire of Wychford church came delicately up into the air, like a coil of smoke ascending from the opalescent corona that hung over the small town cl.u.s.tered against the farther hillside. Down in that valley close to the church was Plashers Mead, and Guy watched eagerly for the first sight of his long, low house. Already the sparkle of the more distant curves of the Greenrush was visible; but Plashers Mead was still hidden by the slope of the bank. Presently this broke away to a ragged hedge, and the house displayed itself as much an integral part of the landscape as an outcrop of stone.

"Tasty little place," commented Mr. G.o.dbold while the trap jolted cautiously down the last twist of the hilly road. "But I reckon old Burrows was glad to let it. You're young, though, and I dare say you won't mind being flooded out in winter. Two years ago Burrows's son's wife's nephew was floating paper boats in the front hall. But you're young, and I dare say you'll enjoy it."

The pony swept round the corner and pulled up with a jerk at the wooden gateway in the gray wall overhung by lime-trees that concealed from the highroad the moist fields and garden of Plashers Mead.

"I'm sleeping here to-night, you know, for the first time," said Guy. He had tried all the way back not to make this announcement, but the sight of his own gateway destroyed his reserve.

"Well, you'll have a fine night, that's one good job," Mr. G.o.dbold predicted.

"And the moon only just past the full," said Guy.

"That's right," Mr. G.o.dbold agreed; and the tenant pa.s.sed through the gateway into the garden, where every path had its own melody of running water. He examined with proprietary solicitude the espaliers of apple-trees, and admired for the twentieth time the pledge they offered by their fantastic forms of his garden's antiquity. He pinched several pippins that seemed ripe, but they were still hard; and he could find nothing over which to exert his lords.h.i.+p until he saw by the edge of the path a piece of groundsel. Having solemnly exterminated the weed, Guy felt that the garden must henceforth recognize him as master, and he walked on through a ma.s.s of dropsical cabbages and early kale until he came face to face with the house, the sudden view of which like this never failed to give him a peculiar pleasure. The tangled garden, long and narrow, was bounded on the right, as one entered, by the Greenrush, over which hung a thicket of yews that completely shut out the first straggling houses of Wychford. On the left the ma.s.sed espaliers ended abruptly in a large water-meadow reaching to the foot of the hill along which the highroad climbed in a slow diagonal. By the corner of the house the garden had narrowed to the apex of a thin triangle, so that the windows looked out over the water-meadow and, beyond, up the wide valley of the Greenrush to where the mighty western sky rested on rounded hills. At this apex the Greenrush flung a tributary stream to wash the back of the house and one side of the orchard, whence it wound in extravagant curves towards the easterly valley. The main branch, d.a.m.ned up to form a deep and sluggish mill-stream, flowed straight on, dividing Guy's domain from the churchyard. At the end of the orchard on this side was a lock-gate through which a certain amount of water continuously escaped from the mill-stream, enough, indeed, to make the orchard an island, as it trickled in diamonded shallows to reinforce the idle tributary. Somewhere in the farther depths of the eastern valley all vagrant waters were united, and somewhere still more remote they came to a confluence with their father the Thames.

Guy sat upon the parapet of the well under the shade of a sycamore-tree and regarded with admiration and satisfaction the exterior of his house.

He looked at the semicircular porch of stone over the front door and venerated the supporting cherubs who with puffed-out cheeks had blown defiance at wind and rain since the days of Elizabeth. He counted the nine windows, five above and four below, populating with the shapes of many friends the rooms they lightened. He looked at the steep roof of gray-stone tiles rich with the warm golden green of mossy patterns. He looked at the four pear-trees against the walls of the house barren now for many years. He looked at himself in silhouette against the silver sky of the well-water; and then he went indoors.

The big stone-paved hall was very cool, and the sound of the stream at the back came babbling through lattices open to the light of a green world. Guy could not make up his mind whether the inside of the house smelled very dry or very damp, for there clung about it that odor peculiar to rustic age, which may be found equally in dry old barns and in damp potting-sheds. He wished he could furnish the hall worthily. At present it contained only a high-back chair, an alleged contemporary of Cromwell, which was doddering beside the hooded fireplace; a warming-pan; and an oak chest which remained a chest only so long as n.o.body either sat upon it or lifted the lid. There was also a grandfather-clock which had suffered an abrupt resurrection of four minutes' duration when it was recently lifted out of the furniture-van, but had now relapsed into the silence of years. Leading out of the hall was a small, empty room which had been dedicated to the possession of his friend Michael Fane; together they had planned to paper it with gold and paint the ceiling black. Michael, however, had still another year at Oxford, and the room with an obelisk of lining-paper standing upright on the bare floor was now a little desolate. On the other side of the hall was the dining-room, which Guy, by taxing his resources, had managed to furnish very successfully. It was a square room painted emerald-green above the white wainscot. Two inset cupboards were filled with gla.s.s and china: there were four Chippendale chairs and an oval Sheraton table, curtains of purple silk, some old English water-colors, and two candlesticks of Sheffield plate. Beyond the dining-room was the kitchen, the corridor to which was endowed with a swinging baize door considered by the landlord to be the finest feature of the house. The problem of equipping the kitchen had seemed insoluble until Guy heard of a sale in the neighborhood. He had bicycled over to this and bought the contents of the large kitchen at auction. The result was that the dresser encroached upon the table, that the table had one leg in the fender, and that a row of graduated dish-covers, the largest of which would have sheltered two turkeys, occupied whatever s.p.a.ce was left. All that remained of Guy's own money had been invested in his kitchen, and he accounted for the large size of everything by the fact of the auction's having been held in the open air, where everything had looked so much smaller. Now, as he contemplated dubiously the result, he wondered what Miss Peasey would say to it. She and the books would arrive together at half past nine to-night. He hoped his unknown housekeeper would not be irritated by these dish-covers, and as a precautionary measure he unhooked the largest, carried it up-stairs, and deposited it on the floor of an unfurnished bedroom. The staircase ran steep and straight up from the hall into a long corridor with more cas.e.m.e.nts opening on the orchard behind. The bedroom at one end was dedicated to the hope of Michael Fane's occupation and was always referred to in letters as his: "_By the way I put the largest dish-cover in your bedroom._" The next two bedrooms were also empty and belonged in spirit to the friends with whom Guy had lived during his last year at Oxford. The fourth was his own, very simply and spa.r.s.ely furnished in comparison with the bedroom up in the roof which was intended for Miss Peasey. The preparation of that for an elderly unmarried woman had involved a certain voluptuousness of rep and fumed oak and heavily decorated china, the fruit of the second-best bedroom in the house of the dish-covers. As Guy went up the crooked stairs and knocked his head on three successive beams, he hoped Miss Peasey would not be as disproportionately large as the kitchen dresser. Her handwriting had been spidery enough, and he pictured her hopefully as small and wizened. Miss Peasey's bower with the big dormer window surveying the tree-tops of the orchard was certainly a success, and Guy saw that Michael had with happy intuition of female aspiration hung on the wall opposite her bed a large steel-engraving of Dore's Martyrs, which had been included with two hammocks and a fis.h.i.+ng-rod in one of the odd lots lightly bid for at the auction. There did not seem anything else she could want; so, having killed a bluebottle with a tartan pincus.h.i.+on, he came down-stairs.

Guy had left his own room to the last, partly because he regretted so much the delay in the arrival of those books and partly because, however inadequately equipped was the rest of the house, this room was always the final justification of his tenancy. It was a larger room than any of the others, for the corridor did not cut off its share of the back. It possessed, in addition to the usual window looking out over the western side of the valley, a very large bay which hung right over the stream, with a view of the orchard, of the church steeple, of the water-meadows beyond, and of the wold rolling across the horizon. This morning Michael and he had pushed the furniture into place, had set in order the great wicker chairs and nailed against the wall the frames of green canvas.

The floor was covered with a sweet-smelling mat of Abingdon rushes; and the curtains of his old rooms in Balliol were hung in place, dim green curtains sown with golden fleurs-de-lys. The ivory image of an emaciated saint standing on the mantelshelf between candlesticks of old wrought iron was probably a Spanish Virgin, but Guy preferred to say she was Saint Rose of Lima because "_O Rose of Lima_" seemed a wonderful apostrophe to begin a poem. Nothing indeed remained for the room's perfection but to fill the new bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. Why had he not hired a cart in s.h.i.+pcot? They would have been here by now, and he would actually have been able to begin work to-night, setting thus a n.o.ble period to these last six weeks of preparation.

Guy dragged a chair into the bay window and, balancing his long legs on the sill, he made numerous calculations in which Miss Peasey's wages, the weekly bills for food, and the number of times he would have to go up to London were set against 150 a year. When he woke up, the lime-trees that bordered the highroad had flung their shadows half-way across the meadow, and the air was a fume of golden gnats against the dipping sun. Within ten minutes the sun vanished, and the mists began to rise. Guy, feeling rather chilly and ashamed of himself for falling asleep, rose hurriedly and went up into the town. He interviewed the driver of the omnibus and told him to look out for his books, and as an afterthought he mentioned the arrival of Miss Peasey. He wished now he had written and told his housekeeper to spend the night in Oxford; and he hoped she would not be prejudiced against Plashers Mead by a five-mile drive in a cold omnibus after her tiring journey from Cardiff.

He dawdled about the steep village street for a while, gossiping with tradesmen at their doors and watching the warmth fade out of the gray houses in the falling dusk. Then he went to eat his last meal in the Stag Inn.