A Bachelor's Comedy

But after lunch Bill did remark to his sister —

“I say – I don’t want a stuffed owl for a brother-in-law.”

“That’s no worse,” retorted the goaded Elizabeth, “than having a live donkey for a brother.”

Then she retired to her room, and Bill went out with a grin to exercise the dogs.

There is a theory held by many wise people that if we were all happy we should all be good and clever; but facts at present do seem rather to dispute it. For instance, Andy was undoubtedly less happy than he had ever been in his life, though he was beginning to get hold of the meaning of life, and yet he was both better and cleverer than when he was happy.

His soul was learning, awkwardly and timidly, with many mishaps, to drive his body – and that is, of course, after all, the reason of human life; when we have learned that we are ready for the next thing.

His air of sane and jolly boyishness was just the same, but strength showed through it; you saw that he might grow into one of those sane and jolly men who keep the world from going mad, but you also saw that if anything went wrong with the driving-gear he would have a bad fall.

As he sat in his study window the sunlight filled the garden with that deep radiance peculiar to an English September afternoon, and he looked out with a glance more focused, and features sharper, than on that spring day when he saw it all in a glory of gold and green. After a while he straightened his shoulders, as if banishing some insistent thought, and drew the paper towards him.

His little articles were accepted more often now, and he wrote slowly, so that a good deal of his spare time was occupied in this way. But he was learning to follow the Holy Grail of all writers, which is to find the arresting and beautiful which hides in the obvious, and those who do that seek long and never come quite close; but there is a wonder in the far glimpse they catch sometimes which makes up for years of pilgrimage.

However, those only start on the quest to whom sorrow has wept and reality spoken, though a secret joy goes with them all the way which makes the dullest path a highway of adventure.

So Andy gave up trying to write of the infinities, and yet they began to shine, somehow, through the simple things he wrote about common life.

He worked on until Sam Petch came back from his tea and desired an audience, then he put down his pen and turned to the open door with some impatience.

“Well, what is it?”

“The Primitives has got our apples,” burst forth Sam, before he was well inside the room. “For six years we’ve had the pulpit done with ’em, and the Primitives has been and got the promise of them.”

“Well, let them,” said Andy. “I don’t mind. We can use something else.”

Sam struggled to be polite, because he was a polite man, but he could not keep it out of his voice that he thought Andy a fool.

“Use something else?” he repeated. “Can’t you see, sir, what a smack in the face it is for you and the Church? Strangers come from far and near to the harvest festival. Everybody in the parish has somebody to tea for it. As far as Millsby they come from, and last year I counted no less than four Bardswell people. And they’ll all say, ‘Where’s the apples?’ For nobody ever saw such red little apples anywhere. And folks’ll have to answer back, ‘Primitives has got ’em.’ It’s a slight on you, sir, that’s what it is.”

But Andy had not yet learned that this affair, in Gaythorpe, assumed the same proportions as the seizing of a burdensome protectorate by a rival nation, and was as hurtful to the pride of the vanquished.

“It’s very good of you to bother about it,” said Andy, “but I really don’t care a bit. What does it matter whether we have red flowers with the corn or red apples?”

“And after you giving that old f – ” – Sam checked himself – “body a whole ounce of your own tobacco only last week – it’s outrageous! But he has a niece stopping with him from Bardswell that’s a hot Primitive, and there you are!”

“Poor old chap, surely he has a right to do what he likes with his own apples – he can’t eat ’em, more’s the pity,” said Andy.

“He can!” retorted Sam. “Anybody can with a scoop made out of a mutton bone. But it’s the principle of the thing I hate.” He paused. “Then you won’t go to see him about it, sir?”

“Certainly not,” said Andy, returning to his work.

Sam closed the door and retreated thoughtfully down the passage.

The next morning – the day before the harvest festival – was one of those autumn mornings when the world seems full of a cool sparkle, and the sunshine is to summer sunshine as champagne a little iced is to some still, golden wine which you drink under heavy-leaved trees at a Spanish inn. There’s a quality in it that makes the dullest want to be a little jolly – and those who are jolly already, like young Sam Petch, feel a little drunk with the clear exhilaration of it. They are buoyantly ready for anything, and not to be beaten even by Fate or nieces who are hot Primitives safely in possession of a desired object.

Anyway this was how Sam felt as he picked up Andy’s fallen apples which were only tame green and yellow, and he meditated, whistling, on the lovely red clusters which hung in a little garden at the other end of the village.

By and by out came Mrs. Jebb, ostensibly to fetch apples for a pudding, but really for conversation and fresh air, for she too felt the prickling stir of this lovely autumn morning.

Sam’s eyes lightened and grew younger than ever under his grizzled mop as he caught sight of her, and after a moment of that tense quietude in which men await a growing, fine idea, he slapped his thigh and muttered —

“I’ve got it!”

“Good morning, Sam,” said Mrs. Jebb, immensely condescending.

“Good morning, ’m,” said Sam, humbly respectful, with an ingenuous air of being grateful for such a lady’s notice; but his brain was working like a steam engine. How was he to begin?

Then Fate helped him, as she does, perversely, such people, while she leaves deserving objects like you and me severely alone.

“Mr. Deane says you may drive me into Bardswell this morning, if you will. Mrs. Dixon and the young ladies are coming to supper after the harvest festival to-morrow night, and there is no whisky in the house – Mrs. Dixon takes whisky for her gout – and we want various other little things.”

“How many bottles are you to get?”

“Er – two,” said Mrs. Jebb, whose dignified coldness intimated that it was no business of his.

Then Sam came a little nearer and spoke earnestly to Mrs. Jebb under the apple tree, and Mrs. Jebb appeared at first annoyed, then interested, then righteously indignant, finally in a state of fluttered adventurousness, for through this stirring, sparkling day she too was going forth to do something desperate for the sake of Romance, and it made her feel agitatedly splendid.

Really she was going to give Sam the second bottle of Andy’s whisky, presuming on the safe assumption that only one would be required and that he would forget all about the other. But it was a reckless and daring deed for one who had taken through life the motto of her pinafore days: “It is a sin to steal a pin, and much more so a greater thing.”

Her mother had worked that on a sampler and, incidentally, on Mrs. Jebb’s soul – as mothers did in the dark days before we all grew too clever to work samplers.

So no wonder that, having so given herself away to Sam, she should try to take a little back with a final —

“Then, Petch, you will be round punctually at half-past two.”

Or, that, when she did climb into the cart behind the frisky piebald, she should remark to her coachman —

“Mr. Jebb always maintained that the sign of success was the ability to take a cab without consideration, and for weeks together I never so much as crossed the street on foot. Now I consider this luxury. Other times, other manners.”

“It is so, Mrs. Jebb,” agreed Sam, with respectful heartiness, though he had no idea what she was driving at. “Gee-up, Tommy.”

The cart gave a slight lurch, and for a moment Mrs. Jebb clung to her hat, which was of the airy, summery kind which some women always wear forlornly on into autumn, just as they cling to felt in a burning June. It is not a question of money but of temperament. Then they passed a little garden where an apple tree with the reddest apples ever seen, deep crimson with ruby streaks on them, glowed like jewels in the sunshine.

“That’s them,” whispered Sam behind his hand, though there was not a soul in sight.

Mrs. Jebb averted her eyes and shivered slightly.

“Do you think it really would be taken as an indication by all the villages round that Mr. Deane was not getting on well with his parishioners?”

“I’m certain sure it would,” breathed Sam earnestly.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Jebb, drawing a long breath.

Sam glanced at her and hastened to change the subject from apples to women, with some instinctive sense of the connection.

“He doesn’t get a wife – Mr. Deane doesn’t. They say Miss Elizabeth Atterton give him the mitten. I don’t credit it. She seemed keen enough on him so long as he kept going to see her.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Mrs. Jebb coldly; then she closed her eyes as if the light affected them and conversed no more.

But under her calm exterior a great storm was going on, and above that storm echoed some words that her father had read aloud from David Copperfield, while they all sewed in the old, old days in a narrow street of the place where she was born. “The first fancy of an undisciplined heart” – that was how the quotation came back, not quite correctly, of course, to a brain like Mrs. Jebb’s, but near enough to make her feel another Agnes, and to dismiss Elizabeth to that sentimental paradise where foolish girls with light hair and creamy complexions belong.

She pictured Andy turning for consolation to a more mature affection such as an experienced woman could give, and she was walking down the church aisle in pale-grey on his arm when Sam drew up with a jerk at the grocer’s shop, and she was obliged to come back from all that and order food. No wonder she forgot the sardines and the gelatine! Ordinary groceries, of course, were purchased in Gaythorpe, but these were to have been part of the supper next night. However, even when Mrs. Jebb remembered them on the way home, she still was in an exalted state of mind which made her feel vaguely that where love was, all was, and that a sardine more or less mattered nothing.

She was rather rudely shaken out of this blissful state by Andy’s reception of the news.

“But sardines on toast were to have been the only hot dish,” he said, “and you can’t get decent ones in Gaythorpe. Why didn’t you make a proper list, Mrs. Jebb? You know you have no memory.”

“Is it likely I should have a good memory after all I’ve gone through?” she asked.

So Andy felt rather ashamed of himself, while knowing he had no reason to be, and that a man who orders sardines ought to get them.

After tea young Sam Petch watched the little cottage with its one apple tree now black against the end of the sunset until the niece, who was a hot Primitive, had departed to an evening class at the chapel. He held a bottle concealed beneath his coat, and every now and then he laid its cool side affectionately against his face, while he sniffed at the leaden cap which jealously retained the fragrance locked within. Once he muttered something to himself and began to ease the cap, but with a terrific effort he desisted and put the bottle resolutely farther away from his thirsty mouth.

At last the hot Primitive went out, looking very cool and self-reliant in neat blue serge, and Sam knocked at the cottage door just as dusk was hiding the quiet fields beyond the village.

He remained within for half an hour, while voices rose and fell, and there were emotional silences of indecision; then he opened the door and stood cautiously within, holding a basket in one hand and a small ladder in the other, while he looked back for a last word —

“She’ll be that mad,” urged an old man’s voice from the dark interior.

“But you know what to say,” responded Sam, curbing his impatience. “Say you’ve always given the apples to the Church, and when I came for ’em you couldn’t refuse me. That’s true enough.”

A match was struck, a faint and pleasant clinking which made Sam’s mouth water came through the quiet air, but he walked away into the dewy garden with his ladder and basket. And as he stood between the cool green world and the reposeful sky, where faint stars began to glimmer through the dusk, the poet that hides in almost every man was stirred a little. He laid the apples in the basket with the same charmed sense of adventure that children know when they hear of the cave of Aladdin and that spirit first awakes which drives them forth later into the far places of the earth, whence they bring nothing back but a secret memory. Young Sam Petch, with his breeches tied with string, and his grizzled hair, was gathering, in that moment, the enchanted, forbidden fruit of every fable since the world began. The greatest can do no more – a schoolboy in a wood can do no less – real adventure is so splendidly democratic.

At last the apples were all gathered, and the misty twilight had cleared into the soft radiance of a starlit night.

“Here’s your ladder,” said Sam, tapping very cautiously at the cottage door – not that there was any one to hear save a belated crow, but the spirit of adventure is always unconsciously dramatic.

The old man popped out his head into the starlight – he, too, felt somehow stirred and jolly.

“Got ’em?” he whispered.

“Yes, every one,” whispered Sam back.

For men can always go on being boys playing at robbers – that’s why they never grow so old as women.

“Put the ladder back in just the same place,” chuckled the old man under his breath. “I don’t want her to find out till to-morrow morning.”

“Why, you’re not frightened?” said Sam. “Frightened of a niece?”

“No, no – course not.” Pause. “You’re not frightened of anything with a drop of something warm inside you.” Pause again and a conclusion of intense bitterness. “Barley water! She keeps me on barley water!”

“Well, I know if I’d let myself be frightened by any w – ”

Faint footsteps in the lane – rapid dispersal – and when the hot Primitive reached the cottage all was in darkness and nothing seemed alive but a smell of whisky.

“Uncle!” called the hot Primitive. “Come down!”

But he had armed himself.

“Can’t, my dear. Got my trousers off.” And he repeated the formula about the apples.

“It’s Sam Petch, then. I might have known,” cried the indignant niece. “He’s an evil liver and wants to drag you down to his level.”

“His liver’s all right – it’s mine that won’t work nowadays,” answered the old man at random, for he was trying his door to see if the lock really held; then when he found it did, he called more valiantly, “Good-night. Sleep well, my dear.”

“Good-night, uncle,” said the niece, but it did not seem to mean that; then she flung open the cottage door and the window where the geraniums flowered, and thought with pious resignation of the time when the apples would be inevitably hers.

Meanwhile, Sam tramped between wet, scented hedges underneath the stars with the big basket of apples on his arm, but he stopped still every now and then and muttered something that was obviously not in tune with the soft quiet of the September night. He put the apples in a safe place in the hayloft, and then went straight to Andy’s study door without the usual preliminaries.

“Come in,” said Andy.

He looked white and fagged as he sat over his papers, as if he were keeping some wearing thought at bay, which yet made the writing a great mental strain. It is not easy for a man to be in love, body and soul, at twenty-six, and yet to remain away and wait. And Andy had more to bear than mere waiting, for he began to be torn by those fears and agonies which seem trivial to other people but are more real and poignant to those most concerned than any of the tremendous things of life which can come afterwards.

“Well, Sam?” he said, seeing the man through a haze of ideas that he was forging amid the fire of his emotions, and only half aware of him. “What is it now?”

“I’ve got the apples. Old Bateson’s given me them.”

“Oh, all right,” said Andy, turning back to his work.

“There’s something else,” said Sam. “I told you I wouldn’t touch drink again without giving you notice. Well – this is notice. I’d have a glass of beer this night if I knew the devil was waiting to get me when I’d drunk the last drop.”

The mist of thought cleared out of Andy’s eyes and they became very kind and bright. He rang the bell without speaking, while Sam watched him uneasily. And when the little maid appeared he ordered her to bring in tea in ten minutes.

“I don’t want no – ” began Sam roughly, driven beside himself by the old enemy.

“Will you wait ten minutes for me?” asked Andy. “I won’t ask you to do more than that. I am going out.”

“I don’t – ” began Sam again.

“It’s all right, Sam,” said Andy.

There was a moment’s silence while the two men looked at each other, then Sam drew a long breath and said —

“Very well, I’ll wait.”

A moment after the time stated Andy rushed in breathless with two bottles under his arm, and almost upset the little maid, who was carrying the tea-tray.

“A tumbler, please,” he said, sitting down to the table. “Here, Sam, you have that chair.”

Sam sat gingerly on the edge of it, feeling suspicious that he was being ‘had,’ and yet scarcely thinking it of Parson Andy – but parsons were all alike, evidently, when you got deep enough down.

The door closed on the little maid again, the tumbler stood clean and shining on the table. Sam’s throat became dry as he stared morosely at it. Then there was a click, as of a beer-bottle being opened, the golden fluid ran ‘clop-clop-clop’ into the glass.

“Here, Sam,” said Andy, holding it out; and turning to the teapot, he poured himself out a cup of tea without looking at his visitor.

“Bit of cake?” he said, holding the plate. Then he glanced at Sam. “Why, you’re not drinking the beer?”

“Do you mean it, sir?” asked Sam.

“Of course I do. Here’s another bottle when you’ve finished that. I was glad of somebody to talk to.”

“My respects,” Sam said, gulping down the ale.

Then Andy poured out another bottle and brought forth tobacco, and as they smoked they talked together about everything on earth. Certain it is, that Andy had never been so amusing or so brilliant in his life, and sounds of laughter could be heard long after eleven in the apartment where Mrs. Jebb enjoyed her chaste repose, while the study was misty with tobacco-smoke.

Next morning, however, the little maid came out of the room aghast, with the two empty beer-bottles on her tray.

“Smoking and drinking till nearly twelve o’clock with Sam Petch! Why, even the public-house closes at eleven!” she exclaimed.

“Mr. Deane has a perfect right to do as he likes in his own house without giving rise to foolish remarks,” said Mrs. Jebb with her lips – but her heart was so little in it that Sophy felt emboldened to reply —

“It does seem queer, ’m.”

“When you get to my age, you will find that things are not always what they seem,” said Mrs. Jebb vaguely.

But she shook her head as she took up the bottles, and again as she secreted them with her own fair fingers in the dust-bin.

CHAPTER XVII

Frost came in the night and the next morning was fine and glorious; the aromatic scent of autumn mingled with that of a brushwood fire in Mrs. Simpson’s garden, and the smoke of it rose like incense to the god of harvest, straight up into a blue sky flecked with white clouds which were great brooding angels with their faces towards heaven.

When one man, meeting, said to another, ‘Fine morning!’ it was a Laus Dei that he meant, and the crimson beeches glowing upon the green country were lamps of festival.

And something of that splendour which has fired the souls of men like love and battle caught hold of Andy as he walked down the lane in the sunshine. “Oh, all ye works of the Lord – praise ye the Lord – bless Him and magnify Him for ever!” He knew how the man felt who wrote that, and was thrilled with that strange sense of nearness which men have when they sing a song together, the words swelling up; but it is not the words that move them so – it is the sense of having got a little nearer together in the immense loneliness of the Universe.

And some of this brief ecstasy was Andy’s as he walked towards Mrs. Simpson’s cottage in the sunshine.

At the turn he met Jimmy Simpson dragging a new-painted horse and cart but otherwise unattended, even by the faithful Sally. His golden curls shone in the morning sun, and he, too, seemed to come along in a sort of glory. When he reached Andy he said nothing, but looked from the piebald creature to the face high above him in breathless expectation.

“What a beauty! I never saw such a horse and cart in my life,” said Andy, who loved children enough to know what was expected of him.

The round face relaxed into smiles.

“It’s my birfday, Mith Elithabeth broughted it.”

“When?” demanded Andy, glancing eagerly up the lane. “Has she gone home?”

“Yeth,” said Jimmy. Then he corrected himself, for he only lisped now in moments of great excitement. “Yes. She went home d’reckly. She said her mummy wanted her.”

Andy bent down and touched the piebald back of the animal.

“He’s like Tommy, isn’t he?”

“Better’n Tommy,” said his owner sturdily. Then his eyes rounded more widely than ever, and he remarked —

“What a funny thing to kith a cart!”

The two young gentlemen eyed each other in the sunny lane, the one curious, the other shamefaced.

It was Andy who turned away.

“I say – let’s fill the cart with hay.” And he began to cut grass for the purpose with his penknife.

But the keen, fine morning took on its last glory because she had passed that way, while he, like a clod, had been eating bacon, and he kissed the unpleasant red paint of the cart-wheel because her fingers must have touched it. For the springtime of life breeds such follies – or what men call follies afterwards for fear of regretting them too much.

At last the game of hay-cutting came to an end, and Jimmy tramped back on his sturdy little legs, dragging his cart behind him, and as Andy watched him go safely round the turn, he looked back and shouted —

“Better’n Tommy.”

For Jimmy was a Briton of the old type.

But Andy went in with his thoughts full of Elizabeth, and he felt as we all do when we are young on a prickly sunny morning, that he must get what he wanted because he wanted it so much.

All day long while he helped to decorate the little bare church and was gay with the young ladies who assisted, and attentive to Mrs. Thorpe who brought sheaves of corn and piles of flowers and fruit over which she presided like a jolly goddess of plenty in the porch, he was thinking about Elizabeth. When Mrs. Thorpe said, “Do try one of these pears, they are so sweet,” he replied with decorum, but his heart throbbed ridiculously, “Sweet – sweet – how sweet my lady is!”

And when Rose Werrit asked if she should decorate the pulpit, and was so pleased that old Bateson had given them the red apples after all, because they were so bright and pretty – he said, “Yes, indeed – how good of you,” but even made a sort of song in his head about that – though, really, Elizabeth’s worst enemy could never have called her ‘bright.’

Then Mrs. Dixon and the Webster girls arrived about six o’clock, and the whole household went in to service excepting Phyllis, who felt at the last moment that she could not stand the heated church and preferred a quiet walk instead.

The last of the sunset was dying behind the unstained windows as the rough, country voices sang the harvest hymn, but the lamplight fell pleasantly enough upon grain and fruit and flowers, and as Andy stood there, though he did not know it, he was leading his people back to the mystic beginning of all worship. He joined hands with Brother Gulielmus, who as plain Will Ford had sung a song at many a harvest home – and farther back still, with all those who had ever felt the joy of harvest. Rooted in immemorial needs – crowned with a hope that cannot die – belonging to all men and to all creeds – no wonder the hymn of that festival floated out across the sleeping fields with a poignant joy, a desperate hopefulness, that made old Bateson at his cottage door remark —