“Yes, but…”
“That’s grand. I’ll take the Connollies over there this morning. D’you know, this is the first piece of serious war work I’ve done so far?”
Normally, whenever the car left the garage there was a stampede of evacuees to the running boards crying, “Give us a ride.” This morning, however, seeing the three forbidding Connollies in the back seat, the other children fell back silently. They were not allowed by their mothers to play with the Connollies.
“Mister, why can’t I sit in front with you?”
“You’ve got to keep the other two in order.”
“They’ll be good.”
“That’s what you think.”
“They’ll be good if I tell them, Mister.”
“Then why aren’t they?”
“’Cos I tell ’em to be bad. In fun you know. Where are we going?”
“I’m finding a new home for you, Doris.”
“Away from you?”
“Far away from me.”
“Mister, listen. Micky ain’t bad really nor Marlene isn’t silly. Are you Marlene?”
“Not very silly,” said Marlene.
“She can be clean if she wants to be, if I tell her. See here, Mister, play fair. You let us stay with you and I’ll see the kids behave themselves.”
“And what about you, Doris?”
“I don’t have to behave. I’m not a kid. Is it on?”
“It is not.”
“You going to take us away?”
“You bet I am.”
“Then just you wait and see what we give them where we’re going.”
“I shan’t wait and see,” said Basil, “but I’ve no doubt I shall hear about it in good time.”
North Grappling was ten miles distant, a stone-built village of uneven stone tile roofs none of which was less than a century old. It lay off the main road in a fold of the hills; a stream ran through it following the line of its single street and crossing it under two old stone bridges. At the upper end of the street stood the church, which declared by its size and rich decoration that in the centuries since it was built, while the rest of the world was growing, North Grappling had shrunk; at the lower end, below the second bridge, stood Old Mill House. It was just such a home of ancient peace as a man might dream of who was forced to earn his living under a fiercer sky. Mr. Harkness had in fact dreamed of it, year in, year out, as he toiled in his office at Singapore, or reclined after work on the club verandah, surrounded by gross vegetation and rude colors. He bought it from his father’s legacy while on leave, when he was still a young man, meaning to retire there when the time came, and his years of waiting had been haunted by only one fear; that he would return to find the place “developed,” new red roofs among the grey and a tarmac road down the uneven street. But modernity spared North Grappling; he returned to find the place just as he had first come upon it, on a walking tour, late in the evening with the stones still warm from the afternoon sun and the scent of the gilly flowers sweet and fresh on the breeze.
This morning, half lost in snow, the stones, which in summer seemed grey, were a golden brown, and the pleached limes, which in their leaf hid the low front, now revealed the mullions and dripstones, the sun-dial above the long, centre window, and the stone hood of the door carved in the shape of a scallop shell. Basil stopped the car by the bridge.
“Jesus,” said Doris. “You aren’t going to leave us here.”
“Sit tight,” said Basil. “You’ll know soon enough.”
He threw a rug over the radiator of the car, opened the little iron gate and walked up the flagged path, grimly, a figure of doom. The low, winter sun cast his shadow before him, ominously, against the door which Mr. Harkness had had painted apple green. The gnarled trunk of a wisteria rose from beside the door-jamb and twisted its naked length between the lines of the windows. Basil glanced once over his shoulder to see that his young passengers were invisible and then put his hand to the iron bell. He heard it ring melodiously not far away, and presently the door was opened by a maid dressed in apple green, with an apron of sprigged muslin and a starched white cap that was in effect part Dutch, part conventual, and wholly ludicrous. This figure of fancy led Basil up a step, down a step and into a living room, where he was left long enough to observe the decorations. The floor was covered in coarse rush matting and in places by bright Balkan rugs. On the walls were Thornton’s flower prints (with the exception of his masterpiece, The Night-Blowing Cereus), samplers and old maps. The most prominent objects of furniture were a grand piano and a harp. There were also some tables and chairs of raw-looking beech. From an open hearth peat smoke billowed periodically into the room, causing Basil’s eyes to water. It was just such a room as Basil had imagined from the advertisement, and Mr. and Mrs. Harkness were just such a couple. Mrs. Harkness wore a hand-woven woollen garment, her eyes were large and poetic, her nose long and red with the frost, her hair nondescript in color and haphazard in arrangement. Her husband had done all that a man can, to disguise the effects of twenty years of club and bungalow life in the Far East. He had grown a little pointed beard; he wore a homespun suit of knickerbockers in the style of the pioneers of bicycling; he wore a cameo ring round his loose silk tie, yet there was something in his bearing which still suggested the dapper figure in white ducks who had stood his round of pink gins, evening after evening, to other dapper white figures, and had dined twice a year at Government House.
They entered from the garden door. Basil half expected Mr. Harkness to say “take a pew,” and clap his hands for the gin. Instead they stood looking at him with enquiry and some slight distaste.
“My name is Seal. I came about your advertisement in the Courier.”
“Our advertisement. Ah yes,” said Mr. Harkness vaguely. “It was just an idea we had. We felt a little ashamed here, with so much space and beauty; the place is a little large for our requirements these days. We did think that perhaps if we heard of a few people like ourselves—the same simple tastes—we might, er, join forces as it were during the present difficult times. As a matter of fact we have one newcomer with us already. I don’t think we really want to take anyone else, do we Agnes?”
“It was just an idle thought,” said Mrs. Harkness. “A green thought in a green place.”
“This is not a Guest House, you know. We take in paying guests. Quite a different thing.”
Basil understood their difficulties with a keenness of perception that was rare to him. “It’s not for myself that I was enquiring,” he said.
“Ah, that’s different. I daresay we might take in one or two more if they were, if they were really…”
Mrs. Harkness helped him out. “If we were sure they were the kind of people who would be happy here.”
“Exactly. It is essentially a happy house.”
It was like his housemaster at school. “We are essentially a keen House, Seal. We may not win many cups but at least we try.”
“I can see it is,” he said gallantly.
“I expect you’d like to look round. It looks quite a little place from the road, but is surprisingly large, really, when you come to count up the rooms.”
A hundred years ago the pastures round North Grappling had all been corn-growing land and the mill had served a wide area. Long before the Harknesses’ time it had fallen into disuse and, in the ’eighties, had been turned into a dwelling house by a disciple of William Morris. The stream had been diverted, the old mill pool drained and leveled and made into a sunken garden. The rooms that had held the grindstones and machinery, and the long lofts where the grain had been stored, had been tactfully floored and plastered and partitioned. Mrs. Harkness pointed out all the features with maternal pride.
“Are your friends who were thinking of coming here artistic people?”
“No, I don’t think you could call them that.”
“They don’t write?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I’ve always thought thi
s would be an ideal place for someone who wanted to write. May I ask, what are your friends?”
“Well, I suppose you might call them evacuees.”
Mr. and Mrs. Harkness laughed pleasantly at the little joke. “Townsfolk in search of sanctuary, eh?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, they will find it here, eh, Agnes?”
They were back in the living room. Mrs. Harkness laid her hand on the gilded neck of the harp and looked out across the sunken garden with a dreamy look in her large grey eyes. Thus she had looked out across the Malaya golf course, dreaming of home.
“I like to think of this beautiful old house still being of use in the world. After all it was built for use. Hundreds of years ago it gave bread to the people. Then with the change of the times it was left forlorn and derelict. Then it became a home, but it was still out of the world, shut off from the life of the people. And now at last it comes into its own again. Fulfilling a need. You may think me fanciful,” she said, remote and whimsical, “but in the last few weeks I feel sometimes I can see the old house smiling to itself and hear the old timbers whispering, ‘They thought we were no use. They thought we were old stick-in-the-muds. But they can’t get on without us, all these busy go-ahead people. They come back to us when they’re in trouble.’ ”
“Agnes was always a poet,” said Mr. Harkness. “I have had to be the practical housewife. You saw our terms in the advertisement?”
“Yes.”
“They may have seemed to you a little heavy, but you must understand that our guests live exactly as we do ourselves. We live simply but we like our comfort. Fires,” he said, backing slightly from the belch of aromatic smoke which issued into the room as he spoke, “the garden,” he said, indicating the frozen and buried enclosure outside the windows. “In the summer we take our meals under the old mulberry tree. Music. Every week we have chamber music. There are certain imponderabilia at the Old Mill which, to be crude, have their market value. I don’t think,” he said coyly, “I don’t think that in the circumstances”—and the circumstances Basil felt sure were meant to include a good fat slice of Mrs. Harkness’s poetic imagination—“six guineas is too much to ask.”
The moment for which Basil had been waiting was come. This was the time for the grenade he had been nursing ever since he opened the little, wrought-iron gate and put his hand to the wrought-iron bell-pull. “We pay eight shillings and sixpence a week,” he said. That was the safety pin; the lever flew up, the spring struck home; within the serrated metal shell the primer spat and, invisibly, flame crept up the finger’s-length of fuse. Count seven slowly, then throw. One, two, three, four…
“Eight shillings and sixpence?” said Mr. Harkness. “I’m afraid there’s been some misunderstanding.”
Five, six, seven. Here it comes. Bang! “Perhaps I should have told you at once. I am the billeting officer. I’ve three children for you in the car outside.”
It was magnificent. It was war. Basil was something of a specialist in shocks. He could not recall a better.
After the first tremendous silence there were three stages of Harkness reaction; the indignant appeal to reason and justice, then the humble appeal to mercy, then the frigid and dignified acceptance of the inevitable.
First:
“I shall telephone to Mrs. Sothill… I shall go and see the County authorities… I shall write to the Board of Education and the Lord Lieutenant. This is perfectly ridiculous; there must be a hundred cottagers who would be glad to take these children in.”
“Not these children,” said Basil. “Besides, you know, this is a war for democracy. It looks awfully bad if the rich seem to be shirking their responsibilities.”
“Rich. It’s only because we find it so hard to make both ends meet that we take paying guests at all.”
“Besides this is a most unsuitable place for children. They might fall into the stream and be drowned. There’s no school within four miles…”
Secondly:
“We’re not as young as we were. After living so long in the East the English winter is very difficult. Any additional burden…”
“Mr. Seal, you’ve seen for yourself this lovely old house and the kind of life we live here. Don’t you feel that there is something different here, something precious that could so easily be killed?”
“It’s just this kind of influence these children need,” said Basil cheerfully. “They’re rather short on culture at the moment.”
Thirdly:
A hostility as cold as the winter hillside above the village. Basil led the Connollies up the flagged path, through the apple-green door, into the passage which smelled of peat smoke and pot-pourri. “I’m afraid they haven’t any luggage,” he said. “This is Doris, this is Micky, and that—that is little Marlene. I expect after a day or two you’ll wonder how you ever got on without them. We meet that over and over again in our work; people who are a little shy of children to begin with, and soon want to adopt them permanently. Good-bye kids, have a good time. Good-bye, Mrs. Harkness. We shall drop in from time to time just to see that everything is all right.”
And Basil drove back through the naked lanes with a deep interior warmth which defied the gathering blizzard.
That night there was an enormous fall of snow, telephone wires were down, the lane to North Grappling became impassable, and for eight days the Old Mill was cut off physically, as for so long it had been cut in spirit, from all contact with the modern world.
IV
Barbara and Basil sat in the orangery after luncheon. The smoke from Basil’s cigar hung on the humid air, a blue line of cloud, motionless, breast high between the paved floor and the exotic foliage overhead. He was reading aloud to his sister.
“So much for the supply services,” he said, laying down the last sheet of manuscript. The book had prospered during the past week.
Barbara awoke, so gently that she might never have been asleep. “Very good,” she said. “First class.”
“It ought to wake them up,” said Basil.
“It ought,” said Barbara, on whom the work had so different an effect. Then she added irrelevantly, “I hear they’ve dug the way through to North Grappling this morning.”
“There was providence in that fall of snow. It’s let the Connollies and the Harknesses get properly to grips. Otherwise, I feel, one or other side might have despaired.”
“I daresay we shall hear something of the Harknesses shortly.”
And immediately, as though they were on the stage, Benson came to the door and announced that Mr. Harkness was in the little parlor.
“I must see him,” said Barbara.
“Certainly not,” said Basil. “This is my war effort,” and followed Benson into the house.
He had expected some change in Mr. Harkness but not so marked a change as he now saw. The man was barely recognizable. It was as though the crust of tropical respectability that had survived below the home-spun and tie-ring surface had been crushed to powder; the man was abject. The clothes were the same. It must be imagination which gave that trim beard a raffish look, imagination fired by the haunted look in the man’s eyes.
Basil on his travels had once visited a prison in Transjordan where an ingenious system of punishment had been devised. The institution served the double purpose of penitentiary and lunatic asylum. One of the madmen was a tough old Arab of peculiar ferocity who could be subdued by one thing only—the steady gaze of the human eye. Bat an eyelid, and he was at you. Refractory convicts were taken to this man’s cell and shut in with him for periods of anything up to forty-eight hours according to the gravity of their offences. Day and night the madman lurked in his corner with his eyes fixed, fascinated, on those of the delinquent. The heat of midday was his best opportunity; then even the wariest convict sometimes allowed his weary eyelids to droop and in that moment he was across the floor, tooth and nail, in a savage attack. Basil had seen a gigantic felon led out after a two days’ session. There was something in Mr. H
arkness’ eyes that brought the scene back vividly to him.
“I am afraid my sister’s away,” said Basil.
Whatever hope had ever been in Mr. Harkness’ breast died when he saw his old enemy. “You are Mrs. Sothill’s brother?”
“Yes; we are thought rather alike. I’m helping her here now that my brother-in-law’s away. Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” he said brokenly. “No. It doesn’t matter. I’d hoped to see Mrs. Sothill. When will she be back?”
“You can never tell,” said Basil. “Most irresponsible in some ways. Goes off for months at a time. But this time she has me to watch out for her. Was it about your evacuees you wanted to see her? She was very glad to hear they had been happily settled. It meant she could go away with a clear conscience. That particular family had been something of an anxiety, if you understand me.”
Mr. Harkness sat down uninvited. He sat on a gilt chair in that bright little room, like a figure of death. He seemed disposed neither to speak nor move.
“Mrs. Harkness well?” said Basil affably.
“Prostrate.”
“And your paying guest?”
“She left this morning—as soon as the road was cleared. Our two maids went with her.”
“I hope Doris is making herself useful about the house.”
At the mention of that name Mr. Harkness broke. He came clean. “Mr. Seal, I can’t stand it. We neither of us can. We’ve come to the end. You must take those children away.”
“You surely wouldn’t suggest sending them back to Birmingham to be bombed?”
This was an argument which Barbara often employed with good effect. As soon as Basil spoke he realized it was a false step. Suffering had purged Mr. Harkness of all hypocrisy. For the first time something like a smile twisted his lips.
“There is nothing would delight me more,” he said.
“Tut, tut. You do yourself an injustice. Anyway it is against the law. I should like to help you. What can you suggest?”