CHAPTER IX.AUNTSOPHYwas giving her first garden party of the season—to her second-best set. That meant a family gathering, with the Jeremy Crisps left out. Maria Furlonger drew the line at the Jeremy Crisps, and said she did her duty to them as a relative by buying groceries at their father’s shop.Edred was to go with Pamela. He was already a local favorite. He had all the qualities which commend themselves to country society. He could sing, play tennis, do conjuring tricks at the local entertainments.Jethro wasn’t going; men with a serious occupation were never even asked. Aunt Sophy collected her men painfully; a town failure or so, who happened to be trying poultry farming or fruit culture—having tried everything else of which he knew anything whatever; the curate; one or two old gentlemen who had retired from something or the other, one or two young ones who admired a particular girl.Pamela ran out to the barn before she started. Jethro was at the door, with a couple of half-bred retrievers at his heels and a trio of mongrel pups that he was training for sheep-dogs gamboling in the muck of the yard.The vast proportions of the barn—the biggest andoldest for many miles round—were a fitting background for Jethro with his muscular frame and fair, sun-seared face. He was so English, so brown, so spare. There was nothing of the student’s pallor and stoop about him—no irritating subtlety. There was no furrow in his face, no ridge of superfluous flesh, no mark of painful thought. It was all tough muscle. Pamela looked at him admiringly, her desire going out to strength and health and simplicity of life and motive. The clean shocks of yellow straw in the barn, the dirty, trodden straw in the yard, agreed well with his blue checked shirt and tan waistcoat; with his voluminous checked tie, made in the time-honored rustic fashion. His father had worn such ties andhisfather before him. What had been seemly in “Old Jethro” was seemly in “Young Jethro”; that was the spirit of Folly Corner. It was a blue check tie made out of half a silk handkerchief, cut cornerwise and deftly folded into proper shape by the iron. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his delicately textured upper arm. He had been helping his men with some necessary job—he was a master, by heredity, of all the intricate sublime art of agriculture. She said:“We are going now. I wish you could come too.”As she spoke, a loud angry hiss came from behind the house. It was like the threatening bubble of a pot that is boiling too fast.“Chalcraft is taking a starling’s nest,” Jethro said. “Tell Aunt Sophy I may be up after tea.”He turned into the barn, through the dim shadow of which she could see two men, Peter Hone and another. She turned to go back through the yard, placing the points of her shoes carefully on the ground so that she might not soil above the toe-cap. Edred was leaning over the white paling and watching her gingerly progress with amusement.“Beastly dirty place, isn’t it?” he said, sneering and glancing down at the trodden straw. “I say, what a jolly dance you could have in that great barn! Do you remember the dance I took you to at Westminster Town Hall?”She nodded, hardly glancing at his slim, foppish figure. He was tinsel compared to Jethro—Jethro with his muscular arms bared amid the golden straw of his barn. She saw poetry in the vast gray place, with its dusty, murky rafters; to Edred it only suggested a subscription dance and Westminster Town Hall. For the moment she preferred Jethro, with his white strong throat.They went down the road and through the wood, talking commonplaces. Edred had been nearly three months at Folly Corner, and one cannot for three months keep up the strain of a dramatic attitude. Pamela still had her moments of anguish, of struggle—but she no longer talked about those moments. She waited with turgid, stupid hopelessness for what the future might fling at her. She drifted; the matter had been taken completely out of her hands. She was—so she understood—to be married to Jethro directly the harvest was in: until theharvest was in, she allowed herself time to breathe. She was garnering up strength.The woods were in their fullest flush of beauty. The anemones were widely blown, with the quiet watchfulness which comes before death. The heavy heads of the blue-bells were voluptuous. Here and there one caught the deep yellow of the oxlip; snowy stitchwork was a delicate groundwork to every leaf and flower.No feet but their own disturbed the silence. Jethro was savage on the rights of property, and this was his land. No old woman might pick up sticks, no child gather wild-flowers in his preserves. They were small; he was fond of saying scornfully that he was a working farmer, not a rich yard-stick from London. He did not make pheasants the sole business of October, and what he shot he ate or gave away. The contents of his bag never went to market.He had the grasping spirit of the farmer who flourished in the early years of the century, in the roaring times before Parish Councils and educated, supercilious cockneys, keen on rights of way. He would, when the opportunity occurred, put a padlocked, five-barred gate across a little-used public path. He cunningly inclosed wayside waste, doing it gradually; grubbing the old hedge, bringing his newly planted, carefully clipped one to the edge of the road. He honestly believed that he was doing a good act; in his view, all waste land was wasted land, and he would have had the Government parcel out the commons to farmers for redemption.Edred kept his eyes on the ground and grumbled at the deep yellow ruts made in winter by timber wagons and horses’ hoofs. But Pamela forgot her dainty shoes, the edge of her new skirt, with the tiny frills. She looked ardently at every new beauty which slid before her eyes—bursting twigs, drifted blossom, dry, feathery fagots tied into bundles, little heaps of creamy wood chips; the hacked hedge-rows and banks, with the warm orange of the amputated tree-trunks.It was early June. The day was so hot and dry that when they reached Turle they could see from the road that even careful matrons like Aunt Sophy were sitting about the big sloping lawn without even a shawl. They made little groups—like modern pictures of the ladies in the “Decameron.”Nancy came running across the lawn, her heavy red-ringed croquet mallet in her hand. She had a loose flannel shirt and her cycling skirt with the big smoked pearl buttons at each hip.“A cycling skirt always makes a girl look coarse,” Edred murmured critically.Pamela gave him a pleased glance; she loved to hear him depreciate Nancy.“Oh! do come and play!” cried the girl, addressing herself pointedly to Edred. “We are making up a fresh set. Croquet is such fun.”Pamela, the thin stream of gall flowing from her heart, saw him return Nancy’s pleading, babyish glance tenderly. She turned away. She took Aunt Sophy’s effusive kiss without a word, only assuring her that she hadn’t a headache.Egbert Turle, who had left Cambridge and was walking the hospital, nodded with patronage from his post by the tennis-net. He came dutifully to Turle every week.Mrs. Clutton ran along the grass in her careless gown.“Come and sit under the elms with me,” she said.There were several ladies under the elms, in green wooden chairs with sloping backs. They had not come to play tennis or croquet; their sole aim was to talk scandal, snub people in the set a shade beneath their own, and drink astringent tea. They wore long skirts and elaborate light wraps, as distinguished from the athletic women a few paces off, who were running about and screaming to each other in the sun.The earnest topic of the moment turned out to be false hair. Mrs. McAlpine had confessed to an increasing thinness on the left temple. Her doctor told her that she used the right side of the brain too much—and darkly hinted that she must go up to Lechaux—a hairdresser recommended by the ladies’ paper—and get a front. Annie Jayne cried out in earnest horror:“Oh, don’t! My mother never wore false hair in her life. She took to caps when she was thirty-five. I shall take to caps myself in a year or two—they look matronly.”“But no one wears caps nowadays,” cried Mrs. Clutton tersely. “Women buy false hair instead of lace. If, since the creation, each woman had donejust as her mother did, fig-leaves would still be the height of fashion.”Mrs. McAlpine, who had the greatest contempt for the journalist’s wife—shewas a J. P.’s daughter and the widow of a Government official—broke out in her languidly genteel voice:“I was afraid I should have been prevented from coming, dear Mrs. Turle. One can’t possibly attend a garden-party in a coat and skirt”; she looked complacently at her embroidered bodice, “and my lost box only turned up last night.”The face of every lady immediately became solemnly sympathetic.“I told you all about it, didn’t I? I’d been visiting at Warne—taking my best things, of course. The things, you know”—she gave a quick glance of her narrow eyes at Mrs. Clutton—“that one takes with one on a visit at a house where they are—well, rather particular. Dear Laura entertains so largely at Warne.”One or two ladies on the edge of the second-best set looked at her with reverential alarm. Here was a person who visited on such positively equal terms at Warne, the biggest seat for miles round, that she called the hostess by her Christian name!“I was in despair.” She flattened out her hands. “My box lost! My diamond comb and pendant, my jeweled girdle, a miniature set with diamonds that was given to my great-uncle by the Duke of Wellington, my ivory-backed brushes and silver toilet set—all the small, necessary trifles that one takes on a visit.”“And you got them back?” asked a little lady breathlessly.She was a shabby Jayne. Sophy did not often ask her to a garden-party, and she was feverishly voluble and deprecating in turn. She had a home-made blouse, with a funny tucker, and very new black kid gloves, the perfect palms of which she constantly displayed.“I got it back,” Mrs. McAlpine said carelessly, giving the home-made blouse a look of amiable condescension. “But you may all imagine how I felt; one sets such store by one’s poor trifles.”A massive girl, with a white gown, threw down her mallet as a member of the opposition clicked her ball against the stick.“I can’t play any more; too slow,” she said. “I’ll tell somebody’s fortune instead.”“My dear”—the dowdy Jayne cousin looked alarmed—“do you think that it is in quite good taste?”She stopped with a jerk as Mrs. McAlpine said sweetly:“Palmistry is all the rage just now in the best houses. Prejudice of any sort is so very middle-class. We had a professional palmist at Lady Clara’s last week, when I ran up to Grosvenor Gardens for her reception. She implored me to come; we are such very old friends.”“Mother always thought it was best to ignore such things as fortune-telling, table-turning, scientific lectures, and anything unsettling,” AnnieJayne said simply. “I don’t think I’ll have mine told, Isabel.”Half a dozen hands were held out. The girl in white went round phlegmatically.She distributed journeys, legacies, surprises, and mishaps with equal calm. When it came to Mrs. Clutton’s turn she held out her pretty hand, a little coarsened by devotion to her neurotic fowls and her garden, with pretended nervousness. Isabel looked at it thoughtfully and murmured something about the lines not being very clear—a certain one, at least, confusing.“Don’t say anything dreadful. Don’t tell me I’m going to be hanged; I’ve always had a foreboding that I shall be; and Tim—my husband, you know—used to say in his most savagely dyspeptic moments that I certainly deserved the fate.”Isabel dropped the roughened hand suddenly.“I can’t make out your fortune,” she said coldly. “There is no one else, is there? Yours is settled, Pamela. I’ll go and have a game of tennis, if Egbert will join—croquet’s duffing.”She moved away in her statuesque fashion, her white skirt bellowing out in the May breeze. There was a sudden coldness and constraint. Even diplomatic Mrs. Turle looked vexed.Mrs. Clutton made a mouth at Pamela, and said:“Shall we go and have a look at Nancy’s flowers in the walled garden?”They skirted the shrubbery, with its clumps of yellow berberis and laurustinus gone shabby. Therewas a swing between the double-flowered cherry trees; Nancy still used it—on rare occasions when she read fiction. Usually she was honestly intent on improving her mind. A thick volume lay face downward on the seat. Mrs. Clutton picked it up, read the title, and dropped the book with a gesture of distaste.“Nancy shouldn’t be allowed to read that woman’s stories.”“She is very popular.”“She ought to lecture—‘for men only.’ However, Nancy won’t hurt; she won’t understand—half. She is a little more than shallow; all surface, like a dish—not even a well-dish. Nancy and Isabel Crisp—you know Isabel is staying here now that Egbert is down from the hospital—will read the same book. One reads a bit, puts in a marker; the other takes up the book, reads on from the marker, then puts it in where she leaves off. That’s how they get through. I’m fond of Nancy—she’s so picturesquely idiotic. Of course, she will marry your brother?”Pamela dropped the almond-scented stalk of plum-colored wallflower which she had pulled and was sticking in her belt.“I—I don’t know. Oh, no! I wouldn’t let him marry Nancy.”Mrs. Clutton looked at her suspiciously.She said meaningly, “There is one man in the world for you—Jethro Jayne. A woman has only to concern herself about her husband. Of course your brother will be cruel to Nancy in his own particularfashion. Some kick with their feet, some lash with their tongues—I prefer the former; they kiss a bruise, but no man’s lips can reach a woman’s heart. After all, he’ll make a better husband than that prig, Egbert Turle;he’sgoing to marry Isabel Crisp. He’s insufferable. He would divide the animal kingdom into four groups: the lower animals, hospital cases, human beings, and ’Varsity men. He talks of nothing but dissecting-rooms. He alludes constantly to the ‘laity.’”Mrs. McAlpine’s genteel voice filtered through the shrubs.“I knew the dear Duchess very well—in her maiden days. We visited at the same house in the Midlands.”“That humbug! Her motto is ‘Who’s who?’ I don’t believe that she ever got farther than the housekeeper’s room at Warne. Some day, when I’ve bought enough oak and china, I’ll devote a little time to unmasking her. Tea will be served in half an hour. There’s dear Mrs. Turle going weightily toward the house to coach her three maids how to set cups.”“Gainah is like that—or was before I deposed her. Cook did nothing but wash dishes.”“You may sort women into two classes: those who can’t touch a chicken unless they’ve cleaned it themselves, and those who, if they are obliged to clean it, can’t eat it. Do come with me to Mrs. Hone’s—this way; through the gate, across the field, and into the Liddleshorn road. She has a Chippendale teatray which she has half promisedto sell. We shall have plenty of time before tea.”They went across the field, black-horned cattle following them curiously. Occasional cottages sparsely dotted the straight road leading to Liddleshorn. Two new ones, with vivid roofs of smooth tiles running up in conical shape to a chimney like an exaggerated pimple, had a blue metal plate lettered with white between the narrow doors.“You are pretty safe in saying that every singularly ugly cottage is tenanted by the county police. Mrs. Hone lives at this next one with the bush of Jew’s mallow.”They went in single file up the narrow flag path. Sheets of white candytuft crept coldly along the edge of the borders from the wooden gate to the door. In the little patch of kitchen garden row after row of cabbage with a blue bloom looked to Pamela like a generously flung out art carpet. The man at the best shop in Liddleshorn had shown her one just that shade. Straight ahead, across the railway bridge, a train shot past, the tails of smoke like drifting opal under the bright sun.Mrs. Hone was hobbling about her garden.“Poor old dear! She looks like a camel whose hump has slipped. Now, you must say nothing, look nothing—or you’ll spoil my bargain. Good-afternoon, Mrs. Hone. How’s the rheumatism?”The sweet wrinkled face lifted and a thin voice said shrilly:“It aint what you call rheumatism, ma’am; it’s paralism, that’s what I tells Dr. Frith.”“You’re busy in your garden. I’ve been working very hard in mine. Your broad beans are in blossom. And you’ve planted out your French marigolds already.”“Aye. But I doubt the frost ’ull nip ’em.”She laughed; the pretty, brainless cackle of a very old woman—the light laugh something like a child’s and yet with the knell of decay in it.“When I plants out they little seedlin’s I thinks o’ my children—all planted out; some in London, some on the hill. Some livin’ to blossom, some nipped by the frost. I’ve had thirteen, bless you! You’ll step inside?”They went into the tiny living room, the strangely twisted mistress painfully leading the way. At a round table an old man sat at tea—bread, lettuce that had bolted, a handful of spring onions. The mahogany tray that Mrs. Clutton coveted was on a ledge beside the low-burning fire. The old wife stepped up to her husband and shook him none too gently by the shoulder, dropping her head at the same time, and shouting:“Get up and let the ladies come to the fire.”To them she added apologetically:“He’s very old. I’m only seventy-eight, but he’s pretty nigh eighty. Deaf, too. I can’t make him hear—not when I wants him to do anything. I very offen say to him, ‘You don’t want to hear; you don’t want to hear, that’s what it is,’ I says.”He turned round savagely at the touch of her hand on his shoulder and looked at the two women in light gowns on the threshold.“What are you doing?” he demanded gruffly. “Damn it all, I means to have my tea.”“He’s been one of those who lash and kick, too—the brute. And she such a sweet old fragrant thing! Never mind, Mrs. Hone; don’t you trouble to move, Mr. Hone; we should be sorry to disturb your tea.”Mrs. Clutton squeezed round the other side of the table and took the tray in her hands. It was oval, cut out of the solid wood, and daintily inlaid with box.“You’d sell this, Mrs. Hone?”“The lady wants to know if we’ll sell the tray.”“What’s she goin’ to give we for it?” he demanded sharply.“Ten shillings!” screamed Mrs. Clutton.“No, no! We couldn’t let it go for that. I thought fifteen.”“Too much.” She put the tray back on the ledge.He stuffed the last hunk of bread into his fierce old mouth, and spluttered out:“Will you give twelve-and-six?”“Well—yes. Is that settled?”“You must settle with missus. I’m only a lodger.”His eyes glittered at the half-sovereign she took from her purse and laid in Mrs. Hone’s hand.“Yes, he’s only a lodger, as I often tells him when he’s tiresome. It’s my house. I was borned here—my brother left it me; he says, ‘You was borned here and you shall die here.’ My father built itand my brother added on this front room. His wife wanted to pull the old place down and put up a new; but he says, ‘No; what the father’s hands had put up the son’s should never pull down.’”She kept laughing feebly and looking at them, from one to the other, with her dim eyes, deep in the web of seventy-eight years.“It’s my cottage, and that’s why they won’t give me parish relief. It’s very hard. I ses to ’em, ‘I can’t fill my poor empty belly with bricks and mortar. An’ I am so fond of a bit of meat.’”She was like a small child begging for sweets.“Haven’t you any daughter to come in and look after you?”“No. My daughter died fifty-five year ago. She was a pretty little gal. He’s my second husband, you know.” She nodded her head toward the deaf man, who, mollified by the gold, was munching vegetables like an amiable donkey. “My first husband died. He was coachman at Warne. When the new one come I was told to turn out of my nice cottage. So I married him. I couldn’t leave my nice cottage, could I, my dears? I was a silly gal and got married agen. I married the new coachman. That was before my brother died and left me this. If I’d known he was going to die and leave me this cottage when I was borned, I wouldn’t ha’ been a silly gal and got married agen. He was a dwarf, my brother. You come agen some day, and I’ll show you his trousers. I’ll show you my husband’s trousers, too. I got four shillin’s prize at the show last year for the best patch put on her husband’strousers by an old woman over sixty. And I’m seventy-eight—there’s a difference! There did ought to be another class for them over seventy. I can use my needle. Mother always taught us to use our needles. The gals nowadays can’t put a shirt together.”“Tea will be ready at Turle,” whispered Pamela.“Yes. We must go. Good-by, Mrs. Hone; good-day, Mr. Hone. I’ll take the tray under my arm. Oh, don’t you bother about paper.”They went down the uneven path with the stiff lines of snowy flowers.“Poor old soul!” said Pamela, when they reached the road.“Did she take you in with what she so eloquently calls her ‘poor, empty belly’? I left off being sentimental long ago. Mrs. Hone has a fat account in the post-office savings bank. I know that for a fact.”“Shall we hurry a little? I hate to keep Aunt Sophy waiting, or to vex her. She didn’t like your remark about being hanged.”“Of course she didn’t. Wasn’t it fun to see them petrify? No doubt they’ve been discussing me; saying what bad taste it was to set up a gallows-tree at a garden party. I give them endless topics for conversation. They don’t believe me even when I do tell the truth. There was a comic song Tim used to sing, ‘The only time I told the truth she said I was a liar.’ That is just my position. I tell the unvarnished truth: that my husband is a journalist traveling in search of sensation. Theydon’t believe me. If he were doing time at Portland and I said he was stalking big game, my social popularity would rival Mrs. McAlpine’s. Here’s your brother Edred coming across the meadow to look for us. He’s a very handsome man; not a bit like you. He reminds me of some splendid snake. Do you understand? As his sister, you won’t. You’ll only be shocked; there is a strong streak of the local prudery and orthodoxy about you, Pamela. I could go to destruction with a man of that type—hating him and myself all the time.”
AUNTSOPHYwas giving her first garden party of the season—to her second-best set. That meant a family gathering, with the Jeremy Crisps left out. Maria Furlonger drew the line at the Jeremy Crisps, and said she did her duty to them as a relative by buying groceries at their father’s shop.
Edred was to go with Pamela. He was already a local favorite. He had all the qualities which commend themselves to country society. He could sing, play tennis, do conjuring tricks at the local entertainments.
Jethro wasn’t going; men with a serious occupation were never even asked. Aunt Sophy collected her men painfully; a town failure or so, who happened to be trying poultry farming or fruit culture—having tried everything else of which he knew anything whatever; the curate; one or two old gentlemen who had retired from something or the other, one or two young ones who admired a particular girl.
Pamela ran out to the barn before she started. Jethro was at the door, with a couple of half-bred retrievers at his heels and a trio of mongrel pups that he was training for sheep-dogs gamboling in the muck of the yard.
The vast proportions of the barn—the biggest andoldest for many miles round—were a fitting background for Jethro with his muscular frame and fair, sun-seared face. He was so English, so brown, so spare. There was nothing of the student’s pallor and stoop about him—no irritating subtlety. There was no furrow in his face, no ridge of superfluous flesh, no mark of painful thought. It was all tough muscle. Pamela looked at him admiringly, her desire going out to strength and health and simplicity of life and motive. The clean shocks of yellow straw in the barn, the dirty, trodden straw in the yard, agreed well with his blue checked shirt and tan waistcoat; with his voluminous checked tie, made in the time-honored rustic fashion. His father had worn such ties andhisfather before him. What had been seemly in “Old Jethro” was seemly in “Young Jethro”; that was the spirit of Folly Corner. It was a blue check tie made out of half a silk handkerchief, cut cornerwise and deftly folded into proper shape by the iron. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his delicately textured upper arm. He had been helping his men with some necessary job—he was a master, by heredity, of all the intricate sublime art of agriculture. She said:
“We are going now. I wish you could come too.”
As she spoke, a loud angry hiss came from behind the house. It was like the threatening bubble of a pot that is boiling too fast.
“Chalcraft is taking a starling’s nest,” Jethro said. “Tell Aunt Sophy I may be up after tea.”
He turned into the barn, through the dim shadow of which she could see two men, Peter Hone and another. She turned to go back through the yard, placing the points of her shoes carefully on the ground so that she might not soil above the toe-cap. Edred was leaning over the white paling and watching her gingerly progress with amusement.
“Beastly dirty place, isn’t it?” he said, sneering and glancing down at the trodden straw. “I say, what a jolly dance you could have in that great barn! Do you remember the dance I took you to at Westminster Town Hall?”
She nodded, hardly glancing at his slim, foppish figure. He was tinsel compared to Jethro—Jethro with his muscular arms bared amid the golden straw of his barn. She saw poetry in the vast gray place, with its dusty, murky rafters; to Edred it only suggested a subscription dance and Westminster Town Hall. For the moment she preferred Jethro, with his white strong throat.
They went down the road and through the wood, talking commonplaces. Edred had been nearly three months at Folly Corner, and one cannot for three months keep up the strain of a dramatic attitude. Pamela still had her moments of anguish, of struggle—but she no longer talked about those moments. She waited with turgid, stupid hopelessness for what the future might fling at her. She drifted; the matter had been taken completely out of her hands. She was—so she understood—to be married to Jethro directly the harvest was in: until theharvest was in, she allowed herself time to breathe. She was garnering up strength.
The woods were in their fullest flush of beauty. The anemones were widely blown, with the quiet watchfulness which comes before death. The heavy heads of the blue-bells were voluptuous. Here and there one caught the deep yellow of the oxlip; snowy stitchwork was a delicate groundwork to every leaf and flower.
No feet but their own disturbed the silence. Jethro was savage on the rights of property, and this was his land. No old woman might pick up sticks, no child gather wild-flowers in his preserves. They were small; he was fond of saying scornfully that he was a working farmer, not a rich yard-stick from London. He did not make pheasants the sole business of October, and what he shot he ate or gave away. The contents of his bag never went to market.
He had the grasping spirit of the farmer who flourished in the early years of the century, in the roaring times before Parish Councils and educated, supercilious cockneys, keen on rights of way. He would, when the opportunity occurred, put a padlocked, five-barred gate across a little-used public path. He cunningly inclosed wayside waste, doing it gradually; grubbing the old hedge, bringing his newly planted, carefully clipped one to the edge of the road. He honestly believed that he was doing a good act; in his view, all waste land was wasted land, and he would have had the Government parcel out the commons to farmers for redemption.
Edred kept his eyes on the ground and grumbled at the deep yellow ruts made in winter by timber wagons and horses’ hoofs. But Pamela forgot her dainty shoes, the edge of her new skirt, with the tiny frills. She looked ardently at every new beauty which slid before her eyes—bursting twigs, drifted blossom, dry, feathery fagots tied into bundles, little heaps of creamy wood chips; the hacked hedge-rows and banks, with the warm orange of the amputated tree-trunks.
It was early June. The day was so hot and dry that when they reached Turle they could see from the road that even careful matrons like Aunt Sophy were sitting about the big sloping lawn without even a shawl. They made little groups—like modern pictures of the ladies in the “Decameron.”
Nancy came running across the lawn, her heavy red-ringed croquet mallet in her hand. She had a loose flannel shirt and her cycling skirt with the big smoked pearl buttons at each hip.
“A cycling skirt always makes a girl look coarse,” Edred murmured critically.
Pamela gave him a pleased glance; she loved to hear him depreciate Nancy.
“Oh! do come and play!” cried the girl, addressing herself pointedly to Edred. “We are making up a fresh set. Croquet is such fun.”
Pamela, the thin stream of gall flowing from her heart, saw him return Nancy’s pleading, babyish glance tenderly. She turned away. She took Aunt Sophy’s effusive kiss without a word, only assuring her that she hadn’t a headache.
Egbert Turle, who had left Cambridge and was walking the hospital, nodded with patronage from his post by the tennis-net. He came dutifully to Turle every week.
Mrs. Clutton ran along the grass in her careless gown.
“Come and sit under the elms with me,” she said.
There were several ladies under the elms, in green wooden chairs with sloping backs. They had not come to play tennis or croquet; their sole aim was to talk scandal, snub people in the set a shade beneath their own, and drink astringent tea. They wore long skirts and elaborate light wraps, as distinguished from the athletic women a few paces off, who were running about and screaming to each other in the sun.
The earnest topic of the moment turned out to be false hair. Mrs. McAlpine had confessed to an increasing thinness on the left temple. Her doctor told her that she used the right side of the brain too much—and darkly hinted that she must go up to Lechaux—a hairdresser recommended by the ladies’ paper—and get a front. Annie Jayne cried out in earnest horror:
“Oh, don’t! My mother never wore false hair in her life. She took to caps when she was thirty-five. I shall take to caps myself in a year or two—they look matronly.”
“But no one wears caps nowadays,” cried Mrs. Clutton tersely. “Women buy false hair instead of lace. If, since the creation, each woman had donejust as her mother did, fig-leaves would still be the height of fashion.”
Mrs. McAlpine, who had the greatest contempt for the journalist’s wife—shewas a J. P.’s daughter and the widow of a Government official—broke out in her languidly genteel voice:
“I was afraid I should have been prevented from coming, dear Mrs. Turle. One can’t possibly attend a garden-party in a coat and skirt”; she looked complacently at her embroidered bodice, “and my lost box only turned up last night.”
The face of every lady immediately became solemnly sympathetic.
“I told you all about it, didn’t I? I’d been visiting at Warne—taking my best things, of course. The things, you know”—she gave a quick glance of her narrow eyes at Mrs. Clutton—“that one takes with one on a visit at a house where they are—well, rather particular. Dear Laura entertains so largely at Warne.”
One or two ladies on the edge of the second-best set looked at her with reverential alarm. Here was a person who visited on such positively equal terms at Warne, the biggest seat for miles round, that she called the hostess by her Christian name!
“I was in despair.” She flattened out her hands. “My box lost! My diamond comb and pendant, my jeweled girdle, a miniature set with diamonds that was given to my great-uncle by the Duke of Wellington, my ivory-backed brushes and silver toilet set—all the small, necessary trifles that one takes on a visit.”
“And you got them back?” asked a little lady breathlessly.
She was a shabby Jayne. Sophy did not often ask her to a garden-party, and she was feverishly voluble and deprecating in turn. She had a home-made blouse, with a funny tucker, and very new black kid gloves, the perfect palms of which she constantly displayed.
“I got it back,” Mrs. McAlpine said carelessly, giving the home-made blouse a look of amiable condescension. “But you may all imagine how I felt; one sets such store by one’s poor trifles.”
A massive girl, with a white gown, threw down her mallet as a member of the opposition clicked her ball against the stick.
“I can’t play any more; too slow,” she said. “I’ll tell somebody’s fortune instead.”
“My dear”—the dowdy Jayne cousin looked alarmed—“do you think that it is in quite good taste?”
She stopped with a jerk as Mrs. McAlpine said sweetly:
“Palmistry is all the rage just now in the best houses. Prejudice of any sort is so very middle-class. We had a professional palmist at Lady Clara’s last week, when I ran up to Grosvenor Gardens for her reception. She implored me to come; we are such very old friends.”
“Mother always thought it was best to ignore such things as fortune-telling, table-turning, scientific lectures, and anything unsettling,” AnnieJayne said simply. “I don’t think I’ll have mine told, Isabel.”
Half a dozen hands were held out. The girl in white went round phlegmatically.
She distributed journeys, legacies, surprises, and mishaps with equal calm. When it came to Mrs. Clutton’s turn she held out her pretty hand, a little coarsened by devotion to her neurotic fowls and her garden, with pretended nervousness. Isabel looked at it thoughtfully and murmured something about the lines not being very clear—a certain one, at least, confusing.
“Don’t say anything dreadful. Don’t tell me I’m going to be hanged; I’ve always had a foreboding that I shall be; and Tim—my husband, you know—used to say in his most savagely dyspeptic moments that I certainly deserved the fate.”
Isabel dropped the roughened hand suddenly.
“I can’t make out your fortune,” she said coldly. “There is no one else, is there? Yours is settled, Pamela. I’ll go and have a game of tennis, if Egbert will join—croquet’s duffing.”
She moved away in her statuesque fashion, her white skirt bellowing out in the May breeze. There was a sudden coldness and constraint. Even diplomatic Mrs. Turle looked vexed.
Mrs. Clutton made a mouth at Pamela, and said:
“Shall we go and have a look at Nancy’s flowers in the walled garden?”
They skirted the shrubbery, with its clumps of yellow berberis and laurustinus gone shabby. Therewas a swing between the double-flowered cherry trees; Nancy still used it—on rare occasions when she read fiction. Usually she was honestly intent on improving her mind. A thick volume lay face downward on the seat. Mrs. Clutton picked it up, read the title, and dropped the book with a gesture of distaste.
“Nancy shouldn’t be allowed to read that woman’s stories.”
“She is very popular.”
“She ought to lecture—‘for men only.’ However, Nancy won’t hurt; she won’t understand—half. She is a little more than shallow; all surface, like a dish—not even a well-dish. Nancy and Isabel Crisp—you know Isabel is staying here now that Egbert is down from the hospital—will read the same book. One reads a bit, puts in a marker; the other takes up the book, reads on from the marker, then puts it in where she leaves off. That’s how they get through. I’m fond of Nancy—she’s so picturesquely idiotic. Of course, she will marry your brother?”
Pamela dropped the almond-scented stalk of plum-colored wallflower which she had pulled and was sticking in her belt.
“I—I don’t know. Oh, no! I wouldn’t let him marry Nancy.”
Mrs. Clutton looked at her suspiciously.
She said meaningly, “There is one man in the world for you—Jethro Jayne. A woman has only to concern herself about her husband. Of course your brother will be cruel to Nancy in his own particularfashion. Some kick with their feet, some lash with their tongues—I prefer the former; they kiss a bruise, but no man’s lips can reach a woman’s heart. After all, he’ll make a better husband than that prig, Egbert Turle;he’sgoing to marry Isabel Crisp. He’s insufferable. He would divide the animal kingdom into four groups: the lower animals, hospital cases, human beings, and ’Varsity men. He talks of nothing but dissecting-rooms. He alludes constantly to the ‘laity.’”
Mrs. McAlpine’s genteel voice filtered through the shrubs.
“I knew the dear Duchess very well—in her maiden days. We visited at the same house in the Midlands.”
“That humbug! Her motto is ‘Who’s who?’ I don’t believe that she ever got farther than the housekeeper’s room at Warne. Some day, when I’ve bought enough oak and china, I’ll devote a little time to unmasking her. Tea will be served in half an hour. There’s dear Mrs. Turle going weightily toward the house to coach her three maids how to set cups.”
“Gainah is like that—or was before I deposed her. Cook did nothing but wash dishes.”
“You may sort women into two classes: those who can’t touch a chicken unless they’ve cleaned it themselves, and those who, if they are obliged to clean it, can’t eat it. Do come with me to Mrs. Hone’s—this way; through the gate, across the field, and into the Liddleshorn road. She has a Chippendale teatray which she has half promisedto sell. We shall have plenty of time before tea.”
They went across the field, black-horned cattle following them curiously. Occasional cottages sparsely dotted the straight road leading to Liddleshorn. Two new ones, with vivid roofs of smooth tiles running up in conical shape to a chimney like an exaggerated pimple, had a blue metal plate lettered with white between the narrow doors.
“You are pretty safe in saying that every singularly ugly cottage is tenanted by the county police. Mrs. Hone lives at this next one with the bush of Jew’s mallow.”
They went in single file up the narrow flag path. Sheets of white candytuft crept coldly along the edge of the borders from the wooden gate to the door. In the little patch of kitchen garden row after row of cabbage with a blue bloom looked to Pamela like a generously flung out art carpet. The man at the best shop in Liddleshorn had shown her one just that shade. Straight ahead, across the railway bridge, a train shot past, the tails of smoke like drifting opal under the bright sun.
Mrs. Hone was hobbling about her garden.
“Poor old dear! She looks like a camel whose hump has slipped. Now, you must say nothing, look nothing—or you’ll spoil my bargain. Good-afternoon, Mrs. Hone. How’s the rheumatism?”
The sweet wrinkled face lifted and a thin voice said shrilly:
“It aint what you call rheumatism, ma’am; it’s paralism, that’s what I tells Dr. Frith.”
“You’re busy in your garden. I’ve been working very hard in mine. Your broad beans are in blossom. And you’ve planted out your French marigolds already.”
“Aye. But I doubt the frost ’ull nip ’em.”
She laughed; the pretty, brainless cackle of a very old woman—the light laugh something like a child’s and yet with the knell of decay in it.
“When I plants out they little seedlin’s I thinks o’ my children—all planted out; some in London, some on the hill. Some livin’ to blossom, some nipped by the frost. I’ve had thirteen, bless you! You’ll step inside?”
They went into the tiny living room, the strangely twisted mistress painfully leading the way. At a round table an old man sat at tea—bread, lettuce that had bolted, a handful of spring onions. The mahogany tray that Mrs. Clutton coveted was on a ledge beside the low-burning fire. The old wife stepped up to her husband and shook him none too gently by the shoulder, dropping her head at the same time, and shouting:
“Get up and let the ladies come to the fire.”
To them she added apologetically:
“He’s very old. I’m only seventy-eight, but he’s pretty nigh eighty. Deaf, too. I can’t make him hear—not when I wants him to do anything. I very offen say to him, ‘You don’t want to hear; you don’t want to hear, that’s what it is,’ I says.”
He turned round savagely at the touch of her hand on his shoulder and looked at the two women in light gowns on the threshold.
“What are you doing?” he demanded gruffly. “Damn it all, I means to have my tea.”
“He’s been one of those who lash and kick, too—the brute. And she such a sweet old fragrant thing! Never mind, Mrs. Hone; don’t you trouble to move, Mr. Hone; we should be sorry to disturb your tea.”
Mrs. Clutton squeezed round the other side of the table and took the tray in her hands. It was oval, cut out of the solid wood, and daintily inlaid with box.
“You’d sell this, Mrs. Hone?”
“The lady wants to know if we’ll sell the tray.”
“What’s she goin’ to give we for it?” he demanded sharply.
“Ten shillings!” screamed Mrs. Clutton.
“No, no! We couldn’t let it go for that. I thought fifteen.”
“Too much.” She put the tray back on the ledge.
He stuffed the last hunk of bread into his fierce old mouth, and spluttered out:
“Will you give twelve-and-six?”
“Well—yes. Is that settled?”
“You must settle with missus. I’m only a lodger.”
His eyes glittered at the half-sovereign she took from her purse and laid in Mrs. Hone’s hand.
“Yes, he’s only a lodger, as I often tells him when he’s tiresome. It’s my house. I was borned here—my brother left it me; he says, ‘You was borned here and you shall die here.’ My father built itand my brother added on this front room. His wife wanted to pull the old place down and put up a new; but he says, ‘No; what the father’s hands had put up the son’s should never pull down.’”
She kept laughing feebly and looking at them, from one to the other, with her dim eyes, deep in the web of seventy-eight years.
“It’s my cottage, and that’s why they won’t give me parish relief. It’s very hard. I ses to ’em, ‘I can’t fill my poor empty belly with bricks and mortar. An’ I am so fond of a bit of meat.’”
She was like a small child begging for sweets.
“Haven’t you any daughter to come in and look after you?”
“No. My daughter died fifty-five year ago. She was a pretty little gal. He’s my second husband, you know.” She nodded her head toward the deaf man, who, mollified by the gold, was munching vegetables like an amiable donkey. “My first husband died. He was coachman at Warne. When the new one come I was told to turn out of my nice cottage. So I married him. I couldn’t leave my nice cottage, could I, my dears? I was a silly gal and got married agen. I married the new coachman. That was before my brother died and left me this. If I’d known he was going to die and leave me this cottage when I was borned, I wouldn’t ha’ been a silly gal and got married agen. He was a dwarf, my brother. You come agen some day, and I’ll show you his trousers. I’ll show you my husband’s trousers, too. I got four shillin’s prize at the show last year for the best patch put on her husband’strousers by an old woman over sixty. And I’m seventy-eight—there’s a difference! There did ought to be another class for them over seventy. I can use my needle. Mother always taught us to use our needles. The gals nowadays can’t put a shirt together.”
“Tea will be ready at Turle,” whispered Pamela.
“Yes. We must go. Good-by, Mrs. Hone; good-day, Mr. Hone. I’ll take the tray under my arm. Oh, don’t you bother about paper.”
They went down the uneven path with the stiff lines of snowy flowers.
“Poor old soul!” said Pamela, when they reached the road.
“Did she take you in with what she so eloquently calls her ‘poor, empty belly’? I left off being sentimental long ago. Mrs. Hone has a fat account in the post-office savings bank. I know that for a fact.”
“Shall we hurry a little? I hate to keep Aunt Sophy waiting, or to vex her. She didn’t like your remark about being hanged.”
“Of course she didn’t. Wasn’t it fun to see them petrify? No doubt they’ve been discussing me; saying what bad taste it was to set up a gallows-tree at a garden party. I give them endless topics for conversation. They don’t believe me even when I do tell the truth. There was a comic song Tim used to sing, ‘The only time I told the truth she said I was a liar.’ That is just my position. I tell the unvarnished truth: that my husband is a journalist traveling in search of sensation. Theydon’t believe me. If he were doing time at Portland and I said he was stalking big game, my social popularity would rival Mrs. McAlpine’s. Here’s your brother Edred coming across the meadow to look for us. He’s a very handsome man; not a bit like you. He reminds me of some splendid snake. Do you understand? As his sister, you won’t. You’ll only be shocked; there is a strong streak of the local prudery and orthodoxy about you, Pamela. I could go to destruction with a man of that type—hating him and myself all the time.”