The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy

J >> John Galsworthy >> The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy


It was Stanley who answered: "That sort of agitation business is all very
well until it begins to affect your neighbors; then it's time it stopped.
You know the Mallorings who own all the land round Tod's. Well, they've
fallen foul of the Mallorings over what they call injustice to some
laborers. Questions of morality involved. I don't know all the details.
A man's got notice to quit over his deceased wife's sister; and some girl
or other in another cottage has kicked over--just ordinary country
incidents. What I want is that Tod should be made to see that his family
mustn't quarrel with his nearest neighbors in this way. We know the
Mallorings well, they're only seven miles from us at Becket. It doesn't
do; sooner or later it plays the devil all round. And the air's full of
agitation about the laborers and 'the Land,' and all the rest of it--only
wants a spark to make real trouble."

And having finished this oration, Stanley thrust his hands deep into his
pockets, and jingled the money that was there.

John said abruptly:

"Felix, you'd better go down."

Felix was sitting back, his eyes for once withdrawn from his brothers'
faces.

"Odd," he said, "really odd, that with a perfectly unique person like Tod
for a brother, we only see him once in a blue moon."

"It's because he IS so d--d unique."

Felix got up and gravely extended his hand to Stanley.

"By Jove," he said, "you've spoken truth." And to John he added: "Well,
I WILL go, and let you know the upshot."

When he had departed, the two elder brothers remained for some moments
silent, then Stanley said:

"Old Felix is a bit tryin'! With the fuss they make of him in the
papers, his head's swelled!"

John did not answer. One could not in so many words resent one's own
brother being made a fuss of, and if it had been for something real, such
as discovering the source of the Black River, conquering Bechuanaland,
curing Blue-mange, or being made a Bishop, he would have been the first
and most loyal in his appreciation; but for the sort of thing Felix made
up--Fiction, and critical, acid, destructive sort of stuff, pretending to
show John Freeland things that he hadn't seen before--as if Felix
could!--not at all the jolly old romance which one could read well enough
and enjoy till it sent you to sleep after a good day's work. No! that
Felix should be made a fuss of for such work as that really almost hurt
him. It was not quite decent, violating deep down one's sense of form,
one's sense of health, one's traditions. Though he would not have
admitted it, he secretly felt, too, that this fuss was dangerous to his
own point of view, which was, of course, to him the only real one. And
he merely said:

"Will you stay to dinner, Stan?"




CHAPTER III

If John had those sensations about Felix, so--when he was away from
John--had Felix about himself. He had never quite grown out of the
feeling that to make himself conspicuous in any way was bad form. In
common with his three brothers he had been through the mills of
gentility--those unique grinding machines of education only found in his
native land. Tod, to be sure, had been publicly sacked at the end of his
third term, for climbing on to the headmaster's roof and filling up two
of his chimneys with football pants, from which he had omitted to remove
his name. Felix still remembered the august scene--the horrid thrill of
it, the ominous sound of that: "Freeland minimus!" the ominous sight of
poor little Tod emerging from his obscurity near the roof of the Speech
Room, and descending all those steps. How very small and rosy he had
looked, his bright hair standing on end, and his little blue eyes staring
up very hard from under a troubled frown. And the august hand holding up
those sooty pants, and the august voice: "These appear to be yours,
Freeland minimus. Were you so good as to put them down my chimneys?"
And the little piping, "Yes, sir."

"May I ask why, Freeland minimus?"

"I don't know, sir."

"You must have had some reason, Freeland minimus?"

"It was the end of term, sir."

"Ah! You must not come back here, Freeland minimus. You are too
dangerous, to yourself, and others. Go to your place."

And poor little Tod ascending again all those steps, cheeks more terribly
rosy than ever, eyes bluer, from under a still more troubled frown;
little mouth hard set; and breathing so that you could hear him six forms
off. True, the new Head had been goaded by other outrages, the authors
of which had not omitted to remove their names; but the want of humor,
the amazing want of humor! As if it had not been a sign of first-rate
stuff in Tod! And to this day Felix remembered with delight the little
bubbling hiss that he himself had started, squelched at once, but
rippling out again along the rows like tiny scattered lines of fire when
a conflagration is suppressed. Expulsion had been the salvation of Tod!
Or--his damnation? Which? God would know, but Felix was not certain.
Having himself been fifteen years acquiring 'Mill' philosophy, and
another fifteen years getting rid of it, he had now begun to think that
after all there might be something in it. A philosophy that took
everything, including itself, at face value, and questioned nothing, was
sedative to nerves too highly strung by the continual examination of the
insides of oneself and others, with a view to their alteration. Tod, of
course, having been sent to Germany after his expulsion, as one naturally
would be, and then put to farming, had never properly acquired 'Mill'
manner, and never sloughed it off; and yet he was as sedative a man as
you could meet.

Emerging from the Tube station at Hampstead, he moved toward home under a
sky stranger than one might see in a whole year of evenings. Between the
pine-trees on the ridge it was opaque and colored like pinkish stone, and
all around violent purple with flames of the young green, and white
spring blossom lit against it. Spring had been dull and unimaginative so
far, but this evening it was all fire and gathered torrents; Felix
wondered at the waiting passion of that sky.

He reached home just as those torrents began to fall.

The old house, beyond the Spaniard's Road, save for mice and a faint
underlying savor of wood-rot in two rooms, well satisfied the aesthetic
sense. Felix often stood in his hall, study, bedroom, and other
apartments, admiring the rich and simple glow of them--admiring the
rarity and look of studied negligence about the stuffs, the flowers, the
books, the furniture, the china; and then quite suddenly the feeling
would sweep over him: "By George, do I really own all this, when my ideal
is 'bread and water, and on feast days a little bit of cheese'?" True,
he was not to blame for the niceness of his things--Flora did it; but
still--there they were, a little hard to swallow for an epicurean. It
might, of course, have been worse, for if Flora had a passion for
collecting, it was a very chaste one, and though what she collected cost
no little money, it always looked as if it had been inherited, and--as
everybody knows--what has been inherited must be put up with, whether it
be a coronet or a cruet-stand.

To collect old things, and write poetry! It was a career; one would not
have one's wife otherwise. She might, for instance, have been like
Stanley's wife, Clara, whose career was wealth and station; or John's
wife, Anne, whose career had been cut short; or even Tod's wife,
Kirsteen, whose career was revolution. No--a wife who had two, and only
two children, and treated them with affectionate surprise, who was never
out of temper, never in a hurry, knew the points of a book or play, could
cut your hair at a pinch; whose hand was dry, figure still good, verse
tolerable, and--above all--who wished for no better fate than Fate had
given her--was a wife not to be sneezed at. And Felix never had. He
had depicted so many sneezing wives and husbands in his books, and knew
the value of a happy marriage better perhaps than any one in England. He
had laid marriage low a dozen times, wrecked it on all sorts of rocks,
and had the greater veneration for his own, which had begun early,
manifested every symptom of ending late, and in the meantime walked down
the years holding hands fast, and by no means forgetting to touch lips.

Hanging up the gray top hat, he went in search of her. He found her in
his dressing-room, surrounded by a number of little bottles, which she
was examining vaguely, and putting one by one into an 'inherited'
waste-paper basket. Having watched her for a little while with a certain
pleasure, he said:

"Yes, my dear?"

Noticing his presence, and continuing to put bottles into the basket, she
answered:

"I thought I must--they're what dear Mother's given us."

There they lay--little bottles filled with white and brown fluids, white
and blue and brown powders; green and brown and yellow ointments; black
lozenges; buff plasters; blue and pink and purple pills. All beautifully
labelled and corked.

And he said in a rather faltering voice:

"Bless her! How she does give her things away! Haven't we used ANY?"

"Not one. And they have to be cleared away before they're stale, for
fear we might take one by mistake."

"Poor Mother!"

"My dear, she's found something newer than them all by now."

Felix sighed.

"The nomadic spirit. I have it, too!"

And a sudden vision came to him of his mother's carved ivory face, kept
free of wrinkles by sheer will-power, its firm chin, slightly aquiline
nose, and measured brows; its eyes that saw everything so quickly, so
fastidiously, its compressed mouth that smiled sweetly, with a resolute
but pathetic acceptation. Of the piece of fine lace, sometimes black,
sometimes white, over her gray hair. Of her hands, so thin now, always
moving a little, as if all the composure and care not to offend any eye
by allowing Time to ravage her face, were avenging themselves in that
constant movement. Of her figure, that was short but did not seem so,
still quick-moving, still alert, and always dressed in black or gray. A
vision of that exact, fastidious, wandering spirit called Frances
Fleeming Freeland--that spirit strangely compounded of domination and
humility, of acceptation and cynicism; precise and actual to the point of
desert dryness; generous to a point that caused her family to despair;
and always, beyond all things, brave.

Flora dropped the last little bottle, and sitting on the edge of the bath
let her eyebrows rise. How pleasant was that impersonal humor which made
her superior to other wives!

"You--nomadic? How?"

"Mother travels unceasingly from place to place, person to person, thing
to thing. I travel unceasingly from motive to motive, mind to mind; my
native air is also desert air--hence the sterility of my work."

Flora rose, but her eyebrows descended.

"Your work," she said, "is not sterile."

"That, my dear," said Felix, "is prejudice." And perceiving that she was
going to kiss him, he waited without annoyance. For a woman of
forty-two, with two children and three books of poems--and not knowing
which had taken least out of her--with hazel-gray eyes, wavy eyebrows
darker than they should have been, a glint of red in her hair; wavy
figure and lips; quaint, half-humorous indolence, quaint, half-humorous
warmth--was she not as satisfactory a woman as a man could possibly have
married!

"I have got to go down and see Tod," he said. "I like that wife of his;
but she has no sense of humor. How much better principles are in theory
than in practice!"

Flora repeated softly, as if to herself:

"I'm glad I have none." She was at the window leaning out, and Felix
took his place beside her. The air was full of scent from wet leaves,
alive with the song of birds thanking the sky. Suddenly he felt her arm
round his ribs; either it or they--which, he could not at the moment
tell--seemed extraordinarily soft. . . .

Between Felix and his young daughter, Nedda, there existed the only kind
of love, except a mother's, which has much permanence--love based on
mutual admiration. Though why Nedda, with her starry innocence, should
admire him, Felix could never understand, not realizing that she read his
books, and even analyzed them for herself in the diary which she kept
religiously, writing it when she ought to have been asleep. He had
therefore no knowledge of the way his written thoughts stimulated the
ceaseless questioning that was always going on within her; the thirst to
know why this was and that was not. Why, for instance, her heart ached
so some days and felt light and eager other days? Why, when people wrote
and talked of God, they seemed to know what He was, and she never did?
Why people had to suffer; and the world be black to so many millions?
Why one could not love more than one man at a time? Why--a thousand
things? Felix's books supplied no answers to these questions, but they
were comforting; for her real need as yet was not for answers, but ever
for more questions, as a young bird's need is for opening its beak
without quite knowing what is coming out or going in. When she and her
father walked, or sat, or went to concerts together, their talk was
neither particularly intimate nor particularly voluble; they made to each
other no great confidences. Yet each was certain that the other was not
bored--a great thing; and they squeezed each other's little fingers a
good deal--very warming. Now with his son Alan, Felix had a continual
sensation of having to keep up to a mark and never succeeding--a feeling,
as in his favorite nightmare, of trying to pass an examination for which
he had neglected to prepare; of having to preserve, in fact, form proper
to the father of Alan Freeland. With Nedda he had a sense of refreshment;
the delight one has on a spring day, watching a clear stream, a bank of
flowers, birds flying. And Nedda with her father--what feeling had she?
To be with him was like a long stroking with a touch of tickle in it; to
read his books, a long tickle with a nice touch of stroking now and then
when one was not expecting it.

That night after dinner, when Alan had gone out and Flora into a dream,
she snuggled up alongside her father, got hold of his little finger, and
whispered:

"Come into the garden, Dad; I'll put on goloshes. It's an awfully nice
moon."

The moon indeed was palest gold behind the pines, so that its radiance
was a mere shower of pollen, just a brushing of white moth-down over the
reeds of their little dark pond, and the black blur of the flowering
currant bushes. And the young lime-trees, not yet in full leaf, quivered
ecstatically in that moon-witchery, still letting fall raindrops of the
past spring torrent, with soft hissing sounds. A real sense in the
garden, of God holding his breath in the presence of his own youth
swelling, growing, trembling toward perfection! Somewhere a bird--a
thrush, they thought--mixed in its little mind as to night and day, was
queerly chirruping. And Felix and his daughter went along the dark wet
paths, holding each other's arms, not talking much. For, in him, very
responsive to the moods of Nature, there was a flattered feeling, with
that young arm in his, of Spring having chosen to confide in him this
whispering, rustling hour. And in Nedda was so much of that night's
unutterable youth--no wonder she was silent! Then, somehow--neither
responsible--they stood motionless. How quiet it was, but for a distant
dog or two, and the stilly shivering-down of the water drops, and the far
vibration of the million-voiced city! How quiet and soft and fresh!
Then Nedda spoke:

"Dad, I do so want to know everything."

Not rousing even a smile, with its sublime immodesty, that aspiration
seemed to Felix infinitely touching. What less could youth want in the
very heart of Spring? And, watching her face put up to the night, her
parted lips, and the moon-gleam fingering her white throat, he answered:

"It'll all come soon enough, my pretty!"

To think that she must come to an end like the rest, having found out
almost nothing, having discovered just herself, and the particle of God
that was within her! But he could not, of course, say this.

"I want to FEEL. Can't I begin?"

How many millions of young creatures all the world over were sending up
that white prayer to climb and twine toward the stars, and--fall to earth
again! And nothing to be answered, but:

"Time enough, Nedda!"

"But, Dad, there are such heaps of things, such heaps of people, and
reasons, and--and life; and I know nothing. Dreams are the only times,
it seems to me, that one finds out anything."

"As for that, my child, I am exactly in your case. What's to be done for
us?"

She slid her hand through his arm again.

"Don't laugh at me!"

"Heaven forbid! I meant it. You're finding out much quicker than I.
It's all folk-music to you still; to me Strauss and the rest of the tired
stuff. The variations my mind spins--wouldn't I just swap them for the
tunes your mind is making?"

"I don't seem making tunes at all. I don't seem to have anything to make
them of. Take me down to see 'the Tods,' Dad!"

Why not? And yet--! Just as in this spring night Felix felt so much, so
very much, lying out there behind the still and moony dark, such
marvellous holding of breath and waiting sentiency, so behind this
innocent petition, he could not help the feeling of a lurking
fatefulness. That was absurd. And he said: "If you wish it, by all
means. You'll like your Uncle Tod; as to the others, I can't say, but
your aunt is an experience, and experiences are what you want, it seems."

Fervently, without speech, Nedda squeezed his arm.




CHAPTER IV

Stanley Freeland's country house, Becket, was almost a show place. It
stood in its park and pastures two miles from the little town of Transham
and the Morton Plough Works; close to the ancestral home of the Moretons,
his mother's family--that home burned down by Roundheads in the Civil
War. The site--certain vagaries in the ground--Mrs. Stanley had caused
to be walled round, and consecrated so to speak with a stone medallion on
which were engraved the aged Moreton arms--arrows and crescent moons in
proper juxtaposition. Peacocks, too--that bird 'parlant,' from the old
Moreton crest--were encouraged to dwell there and utter their cries, as
of passionate souls lost in too comfortable surroundings.

By one of those freaks of which Nature is so prodigal, Stanley--owner of
this native Moreton soil--least of all four Freeland brothers, had the
Moreton cast of mind and body. That was why he made so much more money
than the other three put together, and had been able, with the aid of
Clara's undoubted genius for rank and station, to restore a strain of
Moreton blood to its rightful position among the county families of
Worcestershire. Bluff and without sentiment, he himself set little store
by that, smiling up his sleeve--for he was both kindly and prudent--at
his wife who had been a Tomson. It was not in Stanley to appreciate the
peculiar flavor of the Moretons, that something which in spite of their
naivete and narrowness, had really been rather fine. To him, such
Moretons as were left were 'dry enough sticks, clean out of it.' They
were of a breed that was already gone, the simplest of all country
gentlemen, dating back to the Conquest, without one solitary conspicuous
ancestor, save the one who had been physician to a king and perished
without issue--marrying from generation to generation exactly their own
equals; living simple, pious, parochial lives; never in trade, never
making money, having a tradition and a practice of gentility more
punctilious than the so-called aristocracy; constitutionally paternal and
maternal to their dependents, constitutionally so convinced that those
dependents and all indeed who were not 'gentry,' were of different clay,
that they were entirely simple and entirely without arrogance, carrying
with them even now a sort of Early atmosphere of archery and home-made
cordials, lavender and love of clergy, together with frequent use of the
word 'nice,' a peculiar regularity of feature, and a complexion that was
rather parchmenty. High Church people and Tories, naturally, to a man
and woman, by sheer inbred absence of ideas, and sheer inbred conviction
that nothing else was nice; but withal very considerate of others, really
plucky in bearing their own ills; not greedy, and not wasteful.

Of Becket, as it now was, they would not have approved at all. By what
chance Edmund Moreton (Stanley's mother's grandfather), in the middle of
the eighteenth century, had suddenly diverged from family feeling and
ideals, and taken that 'not quite nice' resolution to make ploughs and
money, would never now be known. The fact remained, together with the
plough works. A man apparently of curious energy and character,
considering his origin, he had dropped the E from his name, and--though
he continued the family tradition so far as to marry a Fleeming of
Worcestershire, to be paternal to his workmen, to be known as Squire, and
to bring his children up in the older Moreton 'niceness'--he had yet
managed to make his ploughs quite celebrated, to found a little town, and
die still handsome and clean-shaved at the age of sixty-six. Of his four
sons, only two could be found sufficiently without the E to go on making
ploughs. Stanley's grandfather, Stuart Morton, indeed, had tried hard,
but in the end had reverted to the congenital instinct for being just a
Moreton. An extremely amiable man, he took to wandering with his family,
and died in France, leaving one daughter--Frances, Stanley's mother--and
three sons, one of whom, absorbed in horses, wandered to Australia and
was killed by falling from them; one of whom, a soldier, wandered to
India, and the embraces of a snake; and one of whom wandered into the
embraces of the Holy Roman Church.

The Morton Plough Works were dry and dwindling when Stanley's father,
seeking an opening for his son, put him and money into them. From that
moment they had never looked back, and now brought Stanley, the sole
proprietor, an income of full fifteen thousand pounds a year. He wanted
it. For Clara, his wife, had that energy of aspiration which before now
has raised women to positions of importance in the counties which are not
their own, and caused, incidentally, many acres to go out of cultivation.
Not one plough was used on the whole of Becket, not even a Morton
plough--these indeed were unsuitable to English soil and were all sent
abroad. It was the corner-stone of his success that Stanley had
completely seen through the talked-of revival of English agriculture, and
sedulously cultivated the foreign market. This was why the Becket
dining-room could contain without straining itself large quantities of
local magnates and celebrities from London, all deploring the condition
of 'the Land,' and discussing without end the regrettable position of the
agricultural laborer. Except for literary men and painters, present in
small quantities to leaven the lump, Becket was, in fact, a rallying
point for the advanced spirits of Land Reform--one of those places where
they were sure of being well done at week-ends, and of congenial and even
stimulating talk about the undoubted need for doing something, and the
designs which were being entertained upon 'the Land' by either party.
This very heart of English country that the old Moretons in their
paternal way had so religiously farmed, making out of its lush grass and
waving corn a simple and by no means selfish or ungenerous subsistence,
was now entirely lawns, park, coverts, and private golf course, together
with enough grass to support the kine which yielded that continual stream
of milk necessary to Clara's entertainments and children, all female,
save little Francis, and still of tender years. Of gardeners, keepers,
cow-men, chauffeurs, footmen, stablemen--full twenty were supported on
those fifteen hundred acres that formed the little Becket demesne. Of
agricultural laborers proper--that vexed individual so much in the air,
so reluctant to stay on 'the Land,' and so difficult to house when he was
there, there were fortunately none, so that it was possible for Stanley,
whose wife meant him to 'put up' for the Division, and his guests, who
were frequently in Parliament, to hold entirely unbiassed and impersonal
views upon the whole question so long as they were at Becket.

It was beautiful there, too, with the bright open fields hedged with
great elms, and that ever-rich serenity of its grass and trees. The
white house, timbered with dark beams in true Worcestershire fashion, and
added-to from time to time, had preserved, thanks to a fine architect, an
old-fashioned air of spacious presidency above its gardens and lawns. On
the long artificial lake, with innumerable rushy nooks and water-lilies
and coverture of leaves floating flat and bright in the sun, the
half-tame wild duck and shy water-hens had remote little worlds, and flew
and splashed when all Becket was abed, quite as if the human spirit, with
its monkey-tricks and its little divine flame, had not yet been born.