PAGE 5
"My Son’s Wife"
by
‘I see,’ he said. ‘How interesting! Now, what’s that bell for?’ he went on, pointing to an old ship’s bell in a rude belfry at the end of an outhouse. ‘Was that a chapel once?’ The red-eyed giant seemed to have difficulty in expressing himself for the moment and blinked savagely.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘My chapel. When you ‘ear that bell ring you’ll ‘ear something. Nobody but me ‘ud put up with it–but I reckon it don’t make any odds to you.’ He slammed the gates down again, and the brook rose behind them with a suck and a grunt.
Midmore moved off, conscious that he might be safer with Rhoda to hold his conversational hand. As he passed the front of the farm-house a smooth fat woman, with neatly parted grey hair under a widow’s cap, curtsied to him deferentially through the window. By every teaching of the Immoderate Left she had a perfect right to express herself in any way she pleased, but the curtsey revolted him. And on his way home he was hailed from behind a hedge by a manifest idiot with no roof to his mouth, who hallooed and danced round him.
‘What did that beast want?’ he demanded of Rhoda at tea.
‘Jimmy? He only wanted to know if you ‘ad any telegrams to send. ‘E’ll go anywhere so long as ’tisn’t across running water. That gives ‘im ‘is seizures. Even talkin’ about it for fun like makes ‘im shake.’
‘But why isn’t he where he can be properly looked after?’
‘What ‘arm’s ‘e doing? E’s a love-child, but ‘is family can pay for ‘im. If ‘e was locked up ‘e’d die all off at once, like a wild rabbit. Won’t you, please, look at the drive, sir?’
Midmore looked in the fading light. The neat gravel was pitted with large roundish holes, and there was a punch or two of the same sort on the lawn.
‘That’s the ‘unt comin’ ‘ome,’ Rhoda explained. ‘Your pore dear auntie always let ’em use our drive for a short cut after the Colonel died. The Colonel wouldn’t so much because he preserved; but your auntie was always an ‘orsewoman till ‘er sciatica.’
‘Isn’t there some one who can rake it over or–or something?’ said Midmore vaguely.
‘Oh yes. You’ll never see it in the morning, but–you was out when they came ‘ome an’ Mister Fisher–he’s the Master–told me to tell you with ‘is compliments that if you wasn’t preservin’ and cared to ‘old to the old understanding’, is gravel-pit is at your service same as before. ‘E thought, perhaps, you mightn’t know, and it ‘ad slipped my mind to tell you. It’s good gravel, Mister Fisher’s, and it binds beautiful on the drive. We ‘ave to draw it, o’ course, from the pit, but–‘
Midmore looked at her helplessly.
‘Rhoda,’ said he, ‘what am I supposed to do?’
‘Oh, let ’em come through,’ she replied. ‘You never know. You may want to ‘unt yourself some day.’
That evening it rained and his misery returned on him, the worse for having been diverted. At last he was driven to paw over a few score books in a panelled room called the library, and realised with horror what the late Colonel Werf’s mind must have been in its prime. The volumes smelt of a dead world as strongly as they did of mildew. He opened and thrust them back, one after another, till crude coloured illustrations of men on horses held his eye. He began at random and read a little, moved into the drawing-room with the volume, and settled down by the fire still reading. It was a foul world into which he peeped for the first time–a heavy-eating, hard-drinking hell of horse-copers, swindlers, matchmaking mothers, economically dependent virgins selling themselves blushingly for cash and lands: Jews, tradesmen, and an ill-considered spawn of Dickens-and-horsedung characters (I give Midmore’s own criticism), but he read on, fascinated, and behold, from the pages leaped, as it were, the brother to the red-eyed man of the brook, bellowing at a landlord (here Midmore realised that he was that very animal) for new barns; and another man who, like himself again, objected to hoof-marks on gravel. Outrageous as thought and conception were, the stuff seemed to have the rudiments of observation. He dug out other volumes by the same author, till Rhoda came in with a silver candlestick.