Years of Plenty Part 23

"Thanks awfully!"

"Now let's walk in the garden."

It was a perfect midsummer evening. Away to the west the sky was still red with the sunset and higher up above them the changing hues of opal merged into a l.u.s.trous blue which again was turned to steel in the summit of the vault. To the east shapely stems of firs rose to a black bulk of branches, spread out against the sky like tails of giant peac.o.c.ks. And behind them was the splendid body of the moor with its great bosom of heather towering into nipples of stone. The night, which had stolen away colour and left only light and shade, had given strength and meaning to every line and curve and silhouette. They walked over soft, clinging gra.s.s to a paddock dotted with hen-coops, where the tiny pheasants were wont to squeak and scuttle. The black line of a distant bank twinkled with the tails of startled rabbits and an owl clattered heavily through leafy boughs. Then followed a silence, vivid and unforgettable, but soon to be broken by the shrill note of a bat that came and went with magic swerve and speed.

"Well," said John Berrisford, after lighting a fresh cigar, "isn't this rather convincing?"

"About the country, you mean?"

"Yes. On such a night do you thirst for Paris and cafe chatter with a drink-sodden Futurist?"

"It's too clear," answered Martin, looking round. "Perhaps to-morrow night it will be pouring, and then even you may have a hankering after the roar of traffic and the fine smell of a city."

"My dear Martin, you're impossible. You can't have everything your own way. If you intend to wors.h.i.+p at one shrine you've got to keep it up for a bit and give the deity a chance of getting hold of you."

"And what if you don't believe in wors.h.i.+pping deities?"

"Then you'll be very unhappy."

"But you don't wors.h.i.+p and you profess to be happy?"

"Don't I wors.h.i.+p?"

"It's the first I've heard of it."

"How do you suppose I would be here now if I didn't wors.h.i.+p the place?

I'm a positive mystic."

"And the mystery?"

"The blessed mystery of Ham and Eggs."

"It sounds very fleshly. Tell me about it."

"Fleshly! It's the most spiritual thing on earth: in fact it's the cardinal point in the country gentleman's faith. But I'd better explain it all from the beginning. Just after I'd left Oxford your grandfather died and left me this estate. I was young and rebellious, as every young man should be, and I can tell you I didn't enjoy the prospect of settling down as a squire. Like Herrick, I preferred London to 'that dull Devons.h.i.+re.' I wanted to hang about town, to join the devotees of Morris, to be a genius, a writer of brilliant plays and beautiful books, to be a lover of woman and to have breakfast after lunch. So I let this place to a tenant and fooled round."

"But I don't want to fool round. I want reasonable work."

"That's what they all say. It's what I said. But I never did any work."

"And you liked it?"

"On the whole, yes--until at last I went down to stay with a friend at a gorgeous place in the Cotswolds. There was a great grey manor-house, Jacobean and very good about the windows. My host gave me ham and eggs for breakfast: I had been used to omelettes and white wine. After breakfast--G.o.d, how I remember it--he took me across his wide, smooth lawns to talk to the keeper. We shot all day--I hadn't forgotten how to bowl over a pheasant--and then we dined and drank port and smoked cigars. Suddenly it all flashed across me, the fitness of things, the rich joy of escaping from chattering artists and cranks and reformers and all the crowds who had Done Something: I understood about pomp and circ.u.mstance. As I ate my ham and eggs next morning I became an initiate into their perfect mystery. (The eggs, I may say, must be fried, not poached.) The ham was a hill red with autumn and the eggs houses of gold in pure gardens of white. Then I swore to go back home and kick out the cotton king who used to come here for three weeks in the year. I would set up a new temple to the G.o.ddess and, wors.h.i.+p her with all due rites. So I married my host's daughter, who was sound about ham and eggs and never played with fruit at breakfast-time, and here I am. I've stuck to it, for, as I said, you can't wors.h.i.+p for a week and then go away: that isn't fair on the mystery. You've got to let things soak in. I've let the spirit of Ham and Eggs soak into me and I'm not tempted now to get it out again."

"And you didn't repent at the beginning?"

"Never permanently. I'm not idle. I'm a J.P., a soundly democratic J.P., to the disgust of the Colonels. I work on a host of committees and I direct two highly disreputable companies. Just because I like to live here in the country and be an acolyte for the G.o.ddess, there's no reason why I shouldn't do a lot besides. You can believe that I'm a much better squire than the rest of them. Of course I'm well aware that there oughtn't to be squires and that the whole thing is wrong.

But equally plainly there are squires, and squiredom has its point, of which I may as well make the most. So I've played the part properly.

To begin with, I put my farms on a business basis, gave a reasonable minimum, and became unpopular with my neighbours because I made them pay. If the State demands my abolition, I'll go like a shot, but I don't intend to let some magnate from Mincing Lane, who never eats ham, come and buy the place, redecorate the house--as he'd call it--buy some ancestors at Christie's and arrange an aerodrome. You young men think that because you like one sort of pleasure you've got to drop the others. It's all rubbish. I'll read any literature you want and talk you silly, but only after ham and eggs for breakfast and port wine for dinner. To h.e.l.l with lunch!"

John Berrisford talked happily on and Martin was always pleased to listen.

"You're not converted?" said the elder man at last.

"Only on fine nights."

"Well you aren't fit for the mystery. Go away to your Latin Quarter and squalid digs and midnight settling of the universe."

So Martin went and found various members of his college living in contented poverty. It seemed to him that, at the rate at which they were existing, twenty-five pounds would keep him for a lifetime. Their nights were late but frugal and an ability to sleep saved the expense of _pet.i.t dejeuner_. They found where to obtain the n.o.blest dinner for one franc fifty and made the acquaintance of artists, male and female, who would expound the whole theory of life and its artistic expression if someone paid for their drinks: which Martin did, purposing to improve his French. The weather was dry without being too hot, and one Sunday they went to Versailles in search of amus.e.m.e.nt, which materialised, for Martin and Lawrence, in the shape of two delightful women who said they had lost their way in the woods and needed a guide.

Martin and Lawrence guided them with some skill to a house of refreshment, where the strangers became pleasantly intoxicated and very charming. They soon announced that they had lost their husbands as well as their way and were going to look for them at the station.

Thither they went, with Martin and Lawrence following discreetly at a distance. The husbands were found to be in other company and the wives made a scene on the platform; it all ended by Martin and Lawrence, themselves not frigidly sober, removing the other company to a cafe and comforting their insulted dignity. They had a strange evening, and Martin learned a lot more French.

Owing to one or two reckless evenings he found himself a pauper just when the others were setting off to see Pierre Loti's fishermen, Paimpol and Guingamp and the quaint religion of the West. Of necessity he returned to Devons.h.i.+re, fired with a determination to settle those texts which he had carried in vain to Paris.

He crossed by night and came down during the day. When he arrived, it was an evening of great beauty. Suddenly, as he was driven between banked hedges and silent woods of purest green, he came to view the mystery of Ham and Eggs as he had never viewed it before. He knew now how sick he was of Paris with its noise and penetrating smell of petrol, how tired of street cafes and superficial chattering about art.

It struck him that if a man isn't going to create something he may as well shut his mouth and leave off jabbering for a bit. Here there was at least silence. Paris had been kindly in its way, but its way was sordid. He had been left with an impression that the city lacked baths and the citizens a cleanly comprehension. To forego ham and eggs and then to eat vastly in the middle of the day! What insipidity it showed, despite their reputation for taste. And there through a gap in the woods he saw The Steading, solid and calm as ever. Solidity and calmness counted, he knew, and what had Paris to do with them?

That evening he walked again with his uncle in the paddock, drinking in the sweet air, amazed at the restfulness.

"I enjoyed myself all the time," he said. "It was splendid!"

"That was good. And did you learn anything?"

"Nothing much from our talking. But I think I understand about the mystery."

"I thought Paris might drive it home; it used to smell so in August.

Does it still?"

"In places." The scent of fir-trees came to him on the summer breeze.

"I do see really," he added, almost pleadingly.

"I'm glad for your own sake. It's as well to look at the future. You may have to go to India. That may mean the end of books and talking and ideas. But you'll get reasonable pay and occasional leave and then you won't feel like anything but shooting and fis.h.i.+ng. And perhaps when you're fifty or so you'll struggle back to this kind of existence.

I a.s.sure you there's something in it all. And once you've dropped your philosophy of this and art of that for thirty years they won't come back. Ham and Eggs will be your only deity. But it isn't merely carnal."

"I see that," Martin replied.

Somehow the future did not seem so ugly to Martin as he stood watching the young moon hanging lightly over the dark shoulder of the moor. It would be good to come back and wors.h.i.+p the G.o.ddess in Devons.h.i.+re.

"Thanks for the initiation," he said as they turned back to the house.

V

"The' being no fur' questions, much pleasure call on Mr Leigh for his paper on Industrialism and the Home." (_Mild applause._)

The members of the King's Essay Society were scattered about Martin's rooms, lounging in window-seats or strewn on the floor. The air was thick with smoke, the carpet invisible by reason of the mingled feet, tobacco, coffee-cups, books, and crystallised fruit. The Push were present in force, and Lawrence, larger than ever, lounged on the sofa and smoked a cigar with ungainly opulence.