'Thank you, I will go to the post office,' said Pat. Her manner suggested that you got a superior brand of stamp there. She walked out. Rudge, as she looked upon it, seemed a more depressing place than ever. Sunshine flooded the High Street. Sunshine fell on the Carmody Arms, the Village Hall, the Plough and Chickens, the Bunch of Grapes, the Waggoner's Rest and the Jubilee Watering Trough. But there was no sunshine in the heart of Pat Wyvern.
III
And, curiously enough, at this very moment up at the Hall the same experience was happening to Mr Lester Carmody. Staring out of his study window, he gazed upon a world bathed in a golden glow: but his heart was cold and heavy. He had just had a visit from the Rev. Alistair Pond-Pond, and the Rev. Alistair had touched him for five shillings.
Many men in Mr Carmody's place would have considered that they had got off lightly. The vicar had come seeking subscriptions to the Church Organ Fund, the Mothers' Pleasant Sunday Evenings, the Distressed Cottagers' Aid Society, the Stipend of the Additional Curate and the Rudge Lads' Annual Summer Outing, and there had been moments of mad optimism when he had hoped for as much as a ten-pound note. The actual bag, as he totted it up while riding pensively away on his motor-bicycle, was the above-mentioned five shillings and a promise that the Squire's nephew Hugo and his friend Mr Fish should perform at the village concert next week.
And even so, Mr Carmody was looking on him as a robber. Five shillings gone – just like that!
Nor was this all that was poisoning a perfect summer day for Mr Carmody. There was in addition the soul-searing behaviour of Doctor Alexander Twist, of Healthward Ho.
When Doctor Twist had undertaken the contract of making a new Lester Carmody out of the old Lester Carmody, he had cannily stipulated for cash down in advance – this to cover a course of three weeks. But at the end of the second week Mr Carmody, learning from his nephew Hugo that an American millionaire was arriving at the Hall, had naturally felt compelled to forgo the final stages of the treatment and return home. Equally naturally, he had invited Doctor Twist to refund one third of the fee. This the eminent physician and physical culture expert had resolutely declined to do, and Mr Carmody, re-reading the man's letter, thought he had never set eyes upon a baser document.
The lot of the English landed proprietor, felt Mr Carmody, is not what it used to be in the good old times. When the first Carmody settled in Rudge he had found little to view with alarm. Those were the days when churls were churls, and a scurvy knave was quite content to work twelve hours a day, Saturdays included, in return for a little black bread and an occasional nod of approval from his overlord. But in this twentieth century England's peasantry has degenerated. Modern sons of the soil expect coddling. Their roofs leak, and you have to mend them, their walls fall down and you have to build them up; their lanes develop holes and you have to restore the surface, and all this runs into money. The way things were shaping, felt Mr Carmody, in a few years a landlord would be expected to pay for the repairs of his tenants' wireless sets.
He stood at the window and looked out on the sunlit garden. And as he did so there came into his range of vision the sturdy figure of his guest, Mr Molloy, and for the first time that morning Lester Carmody seemed to hear, beating faintly in the distance, the wings of the blue bird. In a world containing anybody as rich-looking as Thomas G. Molloy there was surely still hope.
Ronald Fish's prediction that Hugo's uncle would appreciate a visit from so solid a citizen of the United States as Mr Molloy had been fulfilled to the letter. Mr Carmody had welcomed his guest with open arms. The more rich men he could gather about him, the better he was pleased, for he was a man of vision, and had quite a number of schemes in his mind for which he was anxious to obtain financial support.
He decided to go and have a chat with Mr Molloy. On a morning like this, with all Nature smiling, an American millionaire might well feel just in the mood to put up a few hundred thousand dollars for something. For July had come in on golden wings, and the weather now was the kind of weather to make a poet sing, a lover love, and a Scotch business man subscribe largely to companies formed for the purpose of manufacturing diamonds out of coal-tar. On such a morning, felt Mr Carmody, anybody ought to be willing to put up any sum for anything.
IV
Nature continued to smile for about another three and a quarter minutes, and then, as far as Mr Carmody was concerned, the sun went out. With a genial heartiness which gashed him like a knife, the plutocratic Mr Molloy declined to invest even a portion of his millions in a new golf-course, a cinema de luxe to be established in Rudge High Street, or any of the four other schemes which his host presented to his notice.
'No, sir,' said Mr Molloy, 'I'm mighty sorry I can't meet you in any way, but the fact is I'm all fixed up in Oil. Oil's my dish. I began in Oil and I'll end in Oil. I wouldn't be happy outside of Oil.'
'Oh?' said Mr Carmody, regarding this Human Sardine with as little open hostility and dislike as he could manage on the spur of the moment.
'Yes, sir,' proceeded Mr Molloy, still in lyrical vein, 'I put my first thousand into Oil and I'll put my last thousand into Oil. Oil's been a good friend to me. There's money in Oil.'
'There is money,' urged Mr Carmody, 'in a cinema in Rudge High Street.'
'Not the money there is in Oil.'
'You are a stranger in England,' went on Mr Carmody patiently, 'so you have no doubt got a mistaken idea of the potentialities of a place like Rudge. Rudge, you must remember, is a centre. Small though it is, never forget that it lies just off the main road in the heart of a prosperous county. Worcester is only seven miles away, Birmingham only eighteen. People would come in their motors . . .'
'I'm not stopping them,' said Mr Molloy generously. 'All I'm saying is that my money stays in little old Oil.'
'Or take Golf,' said Mr Carmody, side-stepping and attacking from another angle. 'The only good golf-course in Worcestershire at present is at Stourbridge. Worcestershire needs more golf-courses. You know how popular Golf is nowadays.'
'Not so popular as Oil. Oil,' said Mr Molloy, with the air of one making an epigram, 'is Oil.'
Mr Carmody stopped himself just in time from saying what he thought of Oil. To relieve his feelings he ground his heel into the soft gravel of the path, and had but one regret, that Mr Molloy's most sensitive toe was not under it. Half-turning in the process of making this bitter gesture, he perceived that Providence, since the days of Job always curious to know just how much a good man can bear, had sent Ronald Overbury Fish to add to his troubles. Young Mr Fish was sauntering up behind his customary eleven inches of cigarette-holder, his pink face wearing that expression of good-natured superiority which, ever since their first meeting, had afflicted Mr Carmody sorely.
From the list of Mr Carmody's troubles, recently tabulated, Ronnie Fish was inadvertently omitted. Although to Lady Julia Fish, his mother, this young gentleman, no doubt, was all the world, Lester Carmody had found him nothing but a pain in the neck. Apart from the hideous expense of entertaining a man who took twice of nearly everything and helped himself unblushingly to more port, he chafed beneath his guest's curiously patronizing manner. He objected to being treated as a junior – and, what was more, as a half-witted junior – by solemn young men with pink faces.
'What's the argument?' asked Ronnie Fish, anchoring self and cigarette-holder at Mr Carmody's side.
Mr Molloy smiled genially.
'No argument, brother,' he replied with that bluff heartiness which Lester Carmody had come to dislike so much. 'I was merely telling our good friend and host here that the best investment under the broad blue canopy of God's sky is Oil.'
'Quite right,' said Ronnie Fish. 'He's perfectly correct, my dear Carmody.'
'Our good host was trying to interest me in golf-courses.'
'Don't touch 'em,' said Mr Fish.
'I won't,' said Mr Molloy. 'Give me Oil. Oil's oil. First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of its countrymen, that's what Oil is. The Univer
sal Fuel of the Future.'
'Absolutely,' said Ronnie Fish. 'What did Gladstone say in '88? You can fuel some of the people all the time, and you can fuel all the people some of the time, but you can't fuel all the people all the time. He was forgetting about Oil. Probably he meant coal.'
'Coal?' Mr Molloy laughed satirically. You could see he despised the stuff. 'Don't talk to me about Coal.'
This was another disappointment for Mr Carmody. Cinemas de luxe and golf-courses having failed, Coal was just what he had been intending to talk about. He suspected its presence beneath the turf of the park, and would have been glad to verify his suspicions with the aid of someone else's capital.
'You listen to this bird, Carmody,' said Mr Fish, patting his host on the back. 'He's talking sense. Oil's the stuff. Dig some of the savings out of the old sock, my dear Carmody, and wade in. You'll never regret it.'
And, having delivered himself of this advice with a fatherly kindliness which sent his host's temperature up several degrees, Ronnie Fish strolled on.
Mr Molloy watched him disappear with benevolent approval. He said to Mr Carmody that that young man had his head screwed on the right way, and seemed not to notice a certain lack of responsive enthusiasm on the other's part. Ronnie Fish's head was not one of Mr Carmody's favourite subjects at the moment.
'Yes, sir,' said Mr Molloy, resuming. 'Any man that goes into Oil is going into a good thing. Oil's all right. You don't see John D. Rockefeller running round asking for hand-outs from his friends, do you? No, sir! John's got his modest little competence, same as me, and he got it, like I did, out of Oil. Say, listen, Mr Carmody, it isn't often I give up any of my holdings, but you've been mighty nice to me, inviting me to your home and all, and I'd like to do something for you in return. What do you say to a good, solid block of Silver River stock at just the price it cost me? And let me tell you I'm offering you something that half the big men on our side would give their eye-teeth for. Only a couple of days before I sailed I was in Charley Schwab's office, and he said to me "Tom," said Charley, "right up till now I've stuck to Steel and I've done well. Understand," he said, "I'm not knocking Steel. But Oil's the stuff, and if you want to part with any of that Silver River of yours, Tom," he said, "pass it across this desk and write your own ticket." That'll show you.'
There is no anguish like the anguish of the man who is trying to extract cash from a fellow-human being and suddenly finds the fellow-human being trying to extract it from him. Mr Carmody laughed a bitter laugh.
'Do you imagine,' he said, 'that I have money to spare for speculative investments?'
'Speculative?' Mr Molloy seemed to suspect his ears of playing tricks. 'Silver River spec. . . .'
'By the time I've finished paying the bills for the expenses of this infernal estate I consider myself lucky if I've got a few hundred that I can call my own.'
There was a pause.
'Is that so?' said Mr Molloy in a thin voice.
Strictly speaking, it was not. Before succeeding to his present position as head of the family and squire of Rudge Hall, Lester Carmody had contrived to put away in gilt-edged securities a very nice sum indeed, the fruit of his labours in the world of business. But it was his whim to regard himself as a struggling pauper.
'But all this . . .' Mr Molloy indicated with a wave of his hand the smiling gardens, the rolling park and the opulent-looking trees reflected in the waters of the moat. 'Surely this means a barrel of money?'
'Everything that comes in goes out again in expenses. There's no end to my expenses. Farmers in England today sit up at night trying to think of new claims they can make against a landlord.'
There was another pause.
'That's bad,' said Mr Molloy thoughtfully. 'Yes, sir, that's bad.'
His commiseration was not all for Mr Carmody. In fact, very little of it was. Most of it was reserved for himself. It began to look, he realized, as though in coming to this stately home of England he had been simply wasting valuable time. It was not as if he enjoyed staying at country-houses in a purely aesthetic spirit. On the contrary, a place like Rudge Hall afflicted his town-bred nerves. Being in it seemed to him like living in the first act set of an old-fashioned comic opera. He always felt that at any moment a band of villagers and retainers might dance out and start a drinking-chorus.
'Yes, sir,' said Mr Molloy, 'that must grind you a good deal.'
'What must?'
It was not Mr Carmody who had spoken, but his guest's attractive young wife, who, having returned from the village, had come up from the direction of the rose-garden. From afar she had observed her husband spreading his hands in broad, persuasive gestures, and from her knowledge of him had gathered that he had embarked on one of those high-pressure sales-talks of his which did so much to keep the wolf from the door. Then she had seen a shadow fall athwart his fine face: and, scenting a hitch in the negotiations, had hurried up to lend wifely assistance.
'What must grind him?' she asked.
Mr Molloy kept nothing from his bride.
'I was offering our host here a block of those Silver River shares. . . .'
'Oh, you aren't going to sell Silver Rivers!' cried Mrs Molloy in pretty concern. 'Why, you've always told me they're the biggest thing you've got.'
'So they are. But. . . .'
'Oh, well,' said Dolly with a charming smile, 'seing it's Mr Carmody. I wouldn't mind Mr Carmody having them.'
'Nor would I,' said Mr Molloy sincerely. 'But he can't afford to buy.'
'What!'
'You tell her,' said Mr Molloy.
Mr Carmody told her. He was never averse from speaking of the unfortunate position in which the modern owner of English land found himself.
'Well, I don't get it,' said Dolly, shaking her head. 'You call yourself a poor man. How can you be poor, when that gallery place you showed us round yesterday is jam-full of pictures worth a fortune an inch and tapestries and all those gold coins?'
'Heirlooms.'
'How's that?'
'They're heirlooms,' said Mr Carmody bitterly.
He always felt bitter when he thought of the Rudge Hall heirlooms. He looked upon them as a mean joke played on him by a gang of sardonic ancestors.
To a man who, lacking both reverence for family traditions and appreciation of the beautiful in Art, comes into possession of an ancient house and its contents there must always be something painfully ironical about heirlooms. To such a man they are simply so much potential wealth which is being allowed to lie idle, doing no good to anybody. Mr Carmody had always had that feeling very strongly.
Unlike the majority of heirs, he had not been trained from boyhood to revere the home of his ancestors and to look forward to its possession as a sacred trust. He had been the second son of a second son, and his chance of ever succeeding to the property was at the outset so remote that he had seldom given it a thought. He had gone into business at an early age; and when, in middle life, a series of accidents made him squire of Rudge Hall, he had brought with him to the place a practical eye and the commercial outlook. The result was that when he walked in the picture-gallery and thought how much solid cash he could get for its contents if only he were given a free hand, the iron entered into Lester Carmody's soul. There was one Elizabethan salt-cellar, valued at about three thousand pounds, at which he could scarcely bear to look.
'They're heirlooms,' he said. 'I can't sell them.'
'How come? They're yours, aren't they?'
'No,' said Mr Carmody, 'they belong to the estate.'
On Mr Molloy, as he listened to his host's lengthy exposition of the laws governing heirlooms, there descended a deepening cloud of gloom. You couldn't, it appeared, dispose of the darned things without the consent of trustees; while even if the trustees gave their consent they collared the money and invested it on behalf of the estate. And Mr Molloy, though ordinarily a man of sanguine temperament, could not bring himself to believe that a bunch of trustees, most of them probably lawyers with tight lips an
d suspicious minds, would ever have the sporting spirit to take a flutter in Silver River Ordinaries.
'Hell!' said Mr Molloy with a good deal of feeling.
Dolly linked her arm in his with a pretty gesture of affectionate solicitude.
'Poor old Pop!' she said. 'He's all broken up about this.'
Mr Carmody regarded his guest sourly.
'What's he got to worry about?' he asked with a certain resentment.
'Why, Pop was sort of hoping he'd be able to buy all this stuff,' said Dolly. 'He was telling me only this morning that, if you felt like selling, he would write you out his cheque for whatever you wanted without thinking twice.'
V
Moodily scanning his wife's face during Mr Carmody's lecture on Heirloom Law, Mr Molloy had observed it suddenly light up in a manner which suggested that some pleasing thought was passing through her always agile brain: but, presented now in words, this thought left him decidedly cold. He could not see any sense in it.
'For the love of Pete . . . !'
His bride had promised to love, honour and obey Mr Molloy, but she had never said anything about taking any notice of him when he tried to butt in on her moments of inspiration. She ignored the interruption.
'You see,' she said, 'Pop collects old junk – I mean antiques and all like that. Over in America he's got a great big museum place full of stuff. He's going to present it to the nation when he hands in his dinner-pail. Aren't you, Pop?'
It became apparent to Mr Molloy that at the back of his wife's mind there floated some idea at which, handicapped by his masculine slowness of wit, he could not guess. It was plain to him, however, that she expected him to do his bit, so he did it.
'You betcher,' he said.
'How much would you say all that stuff in your museum was worth, Pop?'
Mr Molloy was still groping in outer darkness, but he persevered.
'Oo,' he said. 'Worth? Call it a million. . . . Two millions. . . . Three, maybe.'