Part 11

When she went upstairs, he turned over the pages of _Country Life_. Holme Ottery was not the only house for sale, as well he knew. Page after page was filled with the usual announcements of “Noble Estates,” “Fine Old Country Mansions,” “Historic Residences.” Some of them belonged to people he knew, as he had seen many times before.

He remembered other words spoken by Lord Ottery. “Our day is done,” he’d said. “The War and its costs have finished us.”

These advertisements were only one more proof of the change that was happening in England, where the Old Order was gassing, giving place to—what?

It was no new revelation to him. He’d seen the boards up outside many old houses. Some of his own friends had abandoned their old places and come to live in the Albany, Belgravia, Knightsbridge, the Kensingtons, and other districts not immensely far from Mayfair, but outside its former sanctuary, now delivered over to the New Rich. They were not distressingly poor. They were carrying on rather well! But they’d lost the family roof-trees, the quiet parklands, something of their state in England. Profiteers, American millionaires, Jews, were taking over some of the old houses, though many remained unsold. . . . This news about Holme Ottery for sale brought sharply home to Bertram that silent, social, bloodless revolution which was happening in England. Well, it didn’t matter very much to him. It mattered very much to Joyce.

She was silent going down in the train to Sussex, and seemed to have a chill. He wrapped his overcoat about her in the corner of the first-class carriage where she sat smoking cigarettes through a long amber tube. She wore her country clothes of rough tweed, and looked, he thought, “patrician” to her polished finger-tips. But amazingly young, and child-like, in a white Tam-o’-shanter, with a gleam of gold where her bobbed hair curled above her neck. He would have liked to kiss her neck, so delicate and white, so inviting, as she bent her head over the morning paper. He sat close to her for a while, and put his arm about her waist, which she suffered impatiently, until she asked him to give her elbow room and not to get into one of his “soppy moods.”

That sent him to the other side of the carriage, moodily, and he sat staring out of the train at the passing meadows, all silver and gold and green, on this day of Eastertide. The sunlight of an April sky chased across the thatched roofs of little old cottages, touched their tall twisted chimneys, gleamed on church spires, chased the shadows in feathery woods. Little old England! So snug, and ancient, and sheltered, and peaceful. He’d only learnt to love England properly when he was out of it, fighting for it,—with only a thin chance of getting back to it. Ireland was his father’s country, his own birthplace. England was his mother’s land, and it was England, not Ireland to which his soul gave allegiance.

Lying in the earth of France, he had thought back to England, yearned for it. Not only and always for London, its mighty heart, which he’d loved, but for the smell of fields like this, for the sight again—once again—of an old village like one of those, with a square church tower, and walled gardens, and orchards white, as now, with blossom. He had tried to get something of that into his book—the inarticulate, half-conscious love of England which had come to country boys, Cockneys, young louts in khaki, so that some instinct in them, some strain of blood, some heritage of spirit, had steeled them to stand fast in the dirty ditches of death, whatever their fear.

Perhaps in a few days the safety of England would be threatened again by social conflict. As the train crawled slowly through Robertsbridge, he saw the newspaper placards, “Strike Certain. Notices Issued.” Bad, that. Perhaps the railways might close down. They’d have to motor back from Holme Ottery. Christy had just got away in time. He wondered if his article on “The Mind of the Men” would attract any kind of notice. It might do some good. He’d been fair to the men, tried to make people understand their point of view, their reasonable claim for a living wage.

Joyce spoke for the first time from her corner.

“I’m going to give father hell. He ought to have consulted me.”

Bertram suggested that perhaps his father-in-law had wanted to save her from the worry of it, while she was unwell.

“Nonsense!” she said, impatiently. “It was just cowardice. He hadn’t the pluck to tell me.”

Probably Joyce was right. So Bertram thought when they met Lord Ottery, beyond the lodge gates, strolling towards them, with a little white dog at his heels. He’d come to meet his daughter in answer to a telegram she had sent from Victoria station.

“Well, Joyce!” he said, holding out his hairy cheek for her to kiss. “Glad to see you looking so strong again.”

He was obviously ill at ease. He pretended not to be aware that Joyce had failed to kiss him, and that her answer of “Well, father!” to his “Well, Joyce,” was decidedly hostile and challenging.

“Your Mother’s not very bobbish this morning,” he said. “Sick headache, or something of the sort.”

“I’m not surprised,” answered Joyce, with a little sarcastic laugh which plainly suggested that Lord Ottery was the cause of her mother’s ill-health. She walked with a long, swinging stride up the avenue of elms which led towards the old house, so that her father lagged a little behind her.

He remarked that the crops were coming along well, in spite of the dry weather. He also expressed annoyance because the villagers had been breaking down some of the fences on the south side of the park.

“The spirit of Bolshevism,” he said. “All those young fellows back from the war are socialists and lawbreakers. I can’t understand it. They weren’t like that after the South African War.”

Joyce continued walking in silence. Bertram, stealing a glance at her, saw that there was a bright spot of colour on each cheek—danger signals. It was when she reached the lawns outside the house, and saw its old grey walls and mullion windows close to the terrace, and the sloping banks with their clipped hedges, that she turned on her father and revealed her anger and her anguish.

“Father! I can’t believe it’s true! You couldn’t bring yourself to do it!”

“Do what, my dear?”

Lord Ottery put on his vacant look, and opened his mouth a little, like a stupid rustic.

“Put the house up for sale!”

“Oh, the house! Oh, Lord! Who told you that? _Have_ they put it up for sale? I’ve seen nothing about it in the Press.”

Joyce clutched her father’s arm, and shook him a little.

“Father! Tell me the truth. You’re not going to sell Holme Ottery?”

“Sell it, my dear? Who would buy it? It’s most unlikely that any one in the world would buy it. It costs a fearful lot of money to keep up. Look at it now—going to rack and ruin. A white elephant, Joyce. What with income tax, land tax, death duties, price of labour—”

“Have you put it up for sale?”

Joyce stamped her foot, and her blue eyes looked piercingly into her father’s grey ones. His were less courageous. He looked sheepishly at Bertram, of whose presence he had previously taken no notice at all.

“My dear Joyce,” he said, “I wish you wouldn’t be so imperious! I’m an old man now. I’m getting devilish hard-pressed in my old age, and I have the right to a little domestic peace.”

“Father, have you put it up for sale?”

He hesitated, shifted a little from one foot to the other, and poked up a stone in the path with his thick cudgel.

“Well, my dear, I suggested to those damn fellows, Huxted and Wells, that they might get an offer some time.”

It was the confession that Holme Ottery had been put up for sale. Joyce accepted it as such.

“It’s a treachery!” she cried; “a treachery to Alban and all of us. We won’t allow it. We ought to starve rather than let the house go. All our history is there. It’s what we mean and are. Without that we’re nothing.”

“It will be a great sacrifice, my dear,” said the tenth Earl of Ottery. He, too, looked up at the old house which his forefathers had built, in which they had lived and died and played their part in English history. There was a little mist before his eyes.

“A great sacrifice!” he said in a broken way.

“I’ll talk to Mother about this!” said Joyce, savagely.

Lord Ottery smiled at her, and patted her hand.

“Yes, go and talk it out with your Mother. She’s in her room reading _The Times_.”

Joyce ran up the terrace steps, without waiting for Bertram, and the two men watched her slim, boyish figure disappear through the doorway of the west turret.

“Women like talking,” said Ottery. “It doesn’t alter things, though. Talking never did.”

He thrust his fingers through his red beard, and then put his hand through Bertram’s arm, leaning on him a little heavily. It was the first time he had ever done so, and Bertram thought it was a sign of weakness.

“No amount of talk will bring back England to its old state,” said Lord Ottery, gravely. “Only hard work and good will, and honest government, and wise leadership, can help towards that. The war has robbed us of our old prosperity. We’re going to be poor. We must steel ourselves to poverty.”

He whistled to his little white dog.

“Hi, Clincher!”

Then he asked Bertram whether he was an authority on the Black Death. He found that subject wonderfully interesting. It threw a great deal of light on the wage-system in the Middle Ages.

XXIV

Joyce spent the rest of the morning in her Mother’s room, and Bertram was left to amuse himself alone. It was not very amusing. He was aware of a sense of isolation, not for the first time, in this distinguished household. Lord Ottery, after some minutes of almost intimate conversation, and that episode of holding on to Bertram’s arm, became absent-minded, and then, as though dismissing a footman, gave Bertram to understand that he wished to be left alone in the library, while he pursued his studies on The Black Death.

Bertram strolled round the stables, where most of the stalls were empty, though Ottery still kept a few hacks, and Alban had his hunter, “Lightning.”

He passed a few words with the grooms, and found himself reminiscing on the war. One of them had been with “his lordship,” meaning Alban, Viscount Bellairs, in the Grenadier Guards, and had been hit on the same day of July ’16 in the attack on Morval and Lesbœufs. Afterwards, for the second time, at Fontaine Notre Dame, below Bourlon Wood, in November of ’17. Remembered the great Tank attack in November ’20? Lord, yes! Major Pollard was there with his machine guns? Fancy that! . . . Well, it seemed a long time ago, and like a dream.

“Care to go through it all again?” asked Bertram.

The two men laughed, appreciating some hidden joke, not to be put into words.

Something was said about the strike.

“Them Labour chaps ought to be mowed down by machine guns,” said one of the men. “Dirty tykes!”

He was amazed when Bertram said he thought they had some justice on their side. It struck him “all of a heap.” They were all bloody Bolsheviks, begging his pardon.

Bertram himself was astonished at this point of view of men who had fought in the War and were of the same class as those in the world of “labour” they denounced. As he sauntered away, after a few light remarks, he supposed they were survivals of English feudalism. Their outlook was limited to the horizon of this old house. They belonged to the Family. They were for the maintenance of the Old Order which paid their wages, gave them perquisites, belonged to their tradition of service. The War hadn’t changed their mentality much. Strange!

He strolled round to the lake, and found Alban sitting on the end of the punt, smoking a cigarette and reading the _Sporting Times_, with his back to the wind. He was in an old heather-green jacket and grey, moss-stained trousers, with a cap at the back of his head, and looked better like that, to Bertram’s yes, than in his town clothes, with white spats and all.

“Good morning!” said Bertram, with more geniality than he quite felt, not having much affection for his brother-in-law.

Alban glanced over the top of the _Sporting Times_, and allowed himself to show a faint surprise.

“Hullo! Come down with Joyce?”

Assured on this point, he became absorbed again in his pink paper.

Bertram waited a little while for the condescension of another remark. Not obtaining that favour, he strolled away again, cursing inwardly at the incivility of his brother-in-law.

“A damned cad!” he said to himself. “An insufferable snob!”

And yet, as he had to admit to his sense of fairness, there was no reason why Alban should have engaged in chatty conversation. He himself resented fellows who were always “yapping.” Alban wanted to read the _Sporting Times_. There was heaps of room in the park for Bertram.

“It’s the Irish strain in me,” thought Bertram. “I’m always suspecting uncivil treatment when none is meant. It’s the ‘persecution’ mania. I’ll have to check it.”

Yet, in spite of all these arguments, his moodiness was increased at the luncheon table because of the almost complete ignoring of his presence by Joyce and her family. Not a word was said about the sale of the house—servants being present—and there was some general gossip, mostly by Alban and Lady Ottery, of a social and political kind. The Prime Minister had gone to Chequers Court for Easter, with his usual gang. The War Office had drawn up a complete programme in case the strike led to any rioting. General Bellasis was organising a Home Defence Corps. All ex-officers would be asked to join.

“Doesn’t it seem unnecessary?” asked Bertram.

Alban looked at him coldly, as he might have stared at a junior subaltern of the Guards Mess, after an impertinent remark.

“Extremely necessary,” he answered.

Lord Ottery put in a remark.

“Bellasis is coming down for the week-end, he tells me. We shall hear all about it.”

Bertram glanced at Joyce, and wondered whether she had suggested this visit. He detested Bellasis. Joyce seemed to be aware of his look, for she flushed, ever so slightly, though she did not meet his eyes. She had been crying again, he thought. Most unusual for Joyce. He felt very sorry for her. Sitting there at the old dining-table, under the portrait of Rupert Bellairs, fifth Earl, by Lely, it was impossible to believe that Holme Ottery was up for sale.

How like Joyce was to that fellow! He hadn’t noticed it before. Although Charles II’s favourite had a plump pink face, softened by long ringlets, he had the same kind of eyes and nose as Joyce’s, with the same glint of steel in the eyes. She sat next to her Mother, crumbling her bread and looking thoroughly “vexed.” He had seen her in such moods of late, at his own breakfast table, when she came down to breakfast.

Lady Ottery had given Bertram a wintery smile, and permitted him to kiss her cheek. He felt as though he had kissed one of the marble pillars in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

“A sharp frost last night,” she said, and as this statement didn’t call for much of an answer, she seemed to forget his presence, and engaged Alban in an argument on the subject of Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs, newly published, of which she disapproved strongly.

“An outrage!” was her opinion, and she also believed they would be used as propaganda by radicals who desired to destroy society, and delighted in all such revelations of corruption in high places.

“It seems to me an extremely witty, harmless, and entertaining book, Mother,” said Alban. “My only regret is that it contains such little scandal. Think of all the things she might have written!”

“If we must have scandals, let us keep them to ourselves, my dear,” said Lady Ottery, firmly. “In my young days we hushed up anything that might prejudice our position in the public mind.”

“Most dishonest!” said Alban lightly.

“What do you think, Ottery?” asked Bertram’s mother-in-law.

“Entirely as you do, my dear,” said Lord Ottery, somewhat vaguely, having been thinking, perhaps, of The Black Death.

Bertram expressed an opinion upon Mrs. Asquith’s portraits of “The Souls.” He thought it would be quoted centuries hence as a picture of English life in the ’eighties. His opinion did not seem to impress his wife’s family or Joyce. There was no reply to his remark, and Alban switched off the conversation to the character of his new terrier—a cunning little devil with a hell of a lot of pluck.

“Doing anything special this afternoon, Joyce?” asked Bertram, towards the end of this meal which had been a silent one for him.

“I’m talking business with Alban,” said Joyce, in a most determined voice, as though announcing an ultimatum to Alban himself.

He took it as such, and groaned a little.

“Certainly, old girl, much as I hate such palavers.”

Talking business with Alban. Not for Bertram to intervene. He had no right to “barge in” upon such discussions, though Joyce happened to be his wife. Well, he might do a slope down into the village, and buy an afternoon paper, or perhaps tramp over the Common, and watch the village boys starting the season’s cricket. Holme Ottery was not very sociable to-day to an outsider like himself.

That was what he did, and he recovered his sense of humour a little as he watched the game of cricket between the youngsters of Ottery. He even laughed aloud at the argumentative interruptions of the game, with wild and angry shouts of “How’s that?” “That ain’t fair!” . . . “Who’s umpire?” . . . “Umpire be blowed!” Youth didn’t change, in spite of social upheavals, the passing of the Old Order, houses to let, falling Empires, ruin in Europe, threatened strikes, any damn thing. Boyhood survived, with its laughter, its quarrels, its passionate excitement, its game of life. Survived, in spite of war’s massacre! Many of those kids must have lost fathers and brothers. The shadow of the War had been over their childhood. They’d seen women weeping at the news of death. But it had not spoilt the spirit of youth. They’d forgotten the shadow. Bertram wondered if any of them would live to see another Great War, would live to die, as fathers and brothers had died, in the same old battlefields, blown to bits, sliced by flying steel, gassed, plugged with machine-gun bullets. Not if he could do anything to save them. Not if his book had any luck.

How wonderful was the fruit blossom this year! The little orchards round the Common were snowed under with white and pink petals. The April wind was laden with scent of apple-blossom, cherry-blossom, pear-blossom, and drenched with the stronger perfume of lilac, splendid in the cottage gardens. It stole into his senses like an opiate. Why worry? This beauty of England endured through the centuries, through civil strife, foreign wars, all kind of trouble, soon forgotten. Spring had come again, with its English loveliness, calling to his heart, putting its spell upon the senses. Romance and love should go hand in hand in little old villages like this. So they had gone hand in hand, a year ago, when he and Joyce had wandered through Ottery village, not caring because the village folk smiled to see their love, glad of their friendly, smiling glances. A year ago! They didn’t go hand in hand just now. Something had come between them, some coldness. Perhaps with the coming back of spring again, their love would come back. He would woo Joyce again, as a humble lover, as a passionate but patient lover. This very night he would sue for her kisses, as once she had kissed him with sweet lips. He would entice her down to the little wood beyond the lake where one night they’d stood listening to a nightingale, with their arms about each other, like children, like Adam and Eve, like any man and any woman in the spring-time of life, with pulses thrilling to the tune of love, freshly heard.

Sentiment! Romantic stuff! Well, why not?

XXV

He stood outside a quaint kind of shop on the edge of Ottery Common, and wondered if he could get an evening newspaper with late news from London.

It was an old thatched cottage converted into a shop by the simple plan of using the front garden as a show place for antique furniture, brass warming pans, old china on old tables, wooden toys—“made by Blinded Soldiers”—queer odds and ends from attics and lumber rooms—a violin without a bridge, silver spurs, a spinning wheel, a portrait of the Prince Consort by Winterhalter, an oak cradle.

In one of the cottage windows, with its little panes of knobby green glass, was the notice, “Tobacco, Eggs, and Ferrets.” In another window were the words, “London Papers; Lending Library; Home-made Jams.” A useful kind of shop! Anyhow, here was a chance of getting an evening paper.

Other people thought so too. A pretty girl, whom Bertram dimly remembered as one of Joyce’s friends—the Vicar’s daughter, perhaps,—rode up on a bicycle, left it against the garden wall, and stepping over the oak cradle, cried out in a merry voice:

“Papers in yet, Mr. Izzard?”

A voice from the cottage answered as cheerily:

“Not a damn one, Miss Heathcote!”

“Well, I’ll wait. I want the latest news about the strike. Is there going to be Civil War, do you think?”

The girl—it _was_ the Vicar’s daughter, as Bertram remembered—asked the question as lightly as she might have enquired about the chance of a shower. As lightly it was answered through the open doorway of the cottage.

“Not as far as I’m concerned. Having been a little hero once, I’ve turned Pacifist. No more naughty strife for me! Live and let live is my philosophy.”

“No good hedging like that!” said Miss Heathcote, who was sitting on an iron-bound chest, turning over some old engravings. “‘He who is not with me is against me.’ Our wicked Bolshevists will demand allegiance or hang you up to one of your own oak beams.”

“Oh, I’ll sacrifice to the false gods!” said the voice inside. “No martyr stuff for me. Thrice was I wounded in Flanders. . . . Peace! Peace!”

“Caitiff!” cried Miss Heathcote.

Bertram went into the shop, and said “Hullo, Izzard! What on earth are you doing here?”

He’d remembered in a flash—that name and that voice. Major Arthur Izzard, D.S.O., and a double bar to his M.C., the most reckless fellow he had ever met in a front line trench, and one of the most comical. They’d spent some merry and memorable evenings in old Amiens, down from the line, between one “show” and another. Izzard had been a great lad for the eggnogs in Charlie’s Bar, and proclaimed his passion for Marguérite in the restaurant of “La Cathédrale.” Now he seemed to be proprietor, serving-man, and shop-boy in this village storehouse.

When Bertram hailed him, he was sitting on the counter with his legs dangling, arranging some eggs in a basket. Deliberately he let one of the eggs fall and smash, as a sign of his astonishment and delight at seeing Bertram.

“Great Scott! My old college chum!” (This had no foundation in fact.) “My trusty comrade-in-arms! My fellow-consumer of cocktails behind the lines of Armageddon!”

He gripped Bertram’s hand, and pump-handled vigorously, and called in the Vicar’s daughter to be introduced to another “little hero.”

“What’s the game with this shop?” asked Bertram.