repose. There wasnever a town so inimitably drowsy or so sternly uncompetitive. A hundredyears ago it must have presented almost precisely the same appearance asit did in the summer of 1913, if we leave out of reckoning a fewdozen of modern upstart villas that line its outskirts, and the veryinconspicuous railway station that hides itself behind the warehousesnear the river's bank. Most of the trains, too, quite ignore itsexistence, and pass through it on their way to more rewardingstopping-places, hardly recognising it even by a spurt of steam fromtheir whistles, and it is only if you travel by those that requirethe most frequent pauses in their progress that you will be enabled toalight at its thin and depopulated platform.
Just outside the station there perennially waits a low-roofed andsanguine omnibus that under daily discouragement continues to hope thatin the long-delayed fulness of time somebody will want to be drivensomewhere. (This nobody ever does, since the distance to any house is sosmall, and a porter follows with luggage on a barrow.) It carries on itsfloor a quantity of fresh straw, in the manner of the stage coaches, inwhich the problematic passenger, should he ever appear, will no doubtbury his feet. On its side, just below the window that is not made toopen, it carries the legend that shows that it belongs to the ComberArms, a hostelry so self-effacing that it is discoverable only by thesharpest-eyed of pilgrims. Narrow roadways, flanked by proportionatelynarrower pavements, lie ribbon-like between huddled shops andsquarely-spacious Georgian houses; and an air of leisure and content,amounting almost to stupefaction, is the moral atmosphere of the place.
On the outskirts of the town, crowning the gentle hills that lie to thenorth and west, villas in acre plots, belonging to business men in thecounty town some ten miles distant, "prick their Cockney ears" and arestrangely at variance with the sober gravity of the indigenous houses.So, too, are the manners and customs of their owners, who go toStoneborough every morning to their work, and return by the train thatbrings them home in time for dinner. They do other exotic and unsuitablethings also, like driving swiftly about in motors, in playing golf onthe other side of the river at Coton, and in having parties at eachother's houses. But apart from them nobody ever seems to leave Ashbridge(though a stroll to the station about the time that the evening trainarrives is a recognised diversion) or, in consequence, ever to comeback. Ashbridge, in fact, is self-contained, and desires neither tomeddle with others nor to be meddled with.
The estuary opposite the town is some quarter of a mile broad at hightide, and in order to cross to the other side, where lie the woods andpark of Ashbridge House, it is necessary to shout and make staccatoprancings in order to attract the attention of the antique ferryman, whois invariably at the other side of the river and generally asleep at thebottom of his boat. If you are strong-lunged and can prance and shoutfor a long time, he may eventually stagger to his feet, come acrossfor you and row you over. Otherwise you will stand but little chance ofarousing him from his slumbers, and you will stop where you are, unlessyou choose to walk round by the bridge at Coton, a mile above.
Periodical attempts are made by the brisker inhabitants of Ashbridge,who do not understand its spirit, to substitute for this aged andineffectual Charon someone who is occasionally awake, but nothing everresults from these revolutionary moves, and the requests addressed tothe town council on the subject are never heard of again. "Old George"was ferryman there before any members of the town council were born, andhe seems to have established a right to go to sleep on the other side ofthe river which is now inalienable from him. Besides, asleep or awake,he is always perfectly sober, which, after all, is really one of thefirst requirements for a suitable ferryman. Even the representations ofLord Ashbridge himself who, when in residence, frequently has occasionto use the ferry when crossing from his house to the town, failed toproduce the smallest effect, and he was compelled to build a boathouseof his own on the farther bank, and be paddled across by himself orone of the servants. Often he rowed himself, for he used to be a fineoarsman, and it was good for the lounger on the quay to see the foamingprow of his vigorous progress and the dignity of physical toil.
In all other respects, except in this case of "Old George," LordAshbridge's wishes were law to the local authorities, for in thistranquil East-coast district the spirit of the feudal system witha beneficent lord and contented tenants strongly survived. It hadtriumphed even over such modern innovations as railroads, for LordAshbridge had the undoubted right to stop any train he pleased by signalat Ashbridge station. This he certainly enjoyed doing; it fed his senseof the fitness of things to progress along the platform with his genial,important tiptoe walk, and elbows squarely stuck out, to the carriagethat was at once reserved for him, to touch the brim of his grey top-hat(if travelling up to town) to the obsequious guard, and to observe theheads of passengers who wondered why their express was arrested, thrustout of carriage windows to look at him. A livened footman, as well as avalet, followed him, bearing a coat and a rug and a morning or eveningpaper and a dispatch-box with a large gilt coronet on it, and bestowedthese solaces to a railway journey on the empty seats near him. Andnot only his sense of fitness was hereby fed, but that also of thestation-master and the solitary porter and the newsboy, and suchinhabitants of Ashbridge as happened to have strolled on to theplatform. For he was THEIR Earl of Ashbridge, kind, courteous anddominant, a local king; it was all very pleasant.
But this arrest of express trains was a strictly personal privilege;when Lady Ashbridge or Michael travelled they always went in the slowtrain to Stoneborough, changed there and abided their time on theplatform like ordinary mortals. Though he could undoubtedly haveextended his rights to the stopping of a train for his wife or son, hewisely reserved this for himself, lest it should lose prestige. Therewas sufficient glory already (to probe his mind to the bottom) for LadyAshbridge in being his wife; it was sufficient also for Michael that hewas his son.
It may be inferred that there was a touch of pomposity about thisadmirable gentleman, who was so excellent a landlord and so hard workinga member of the British aristocracy. But pomposity would be far toosuperficial a word to apply to him; it would not adequately connotehis deep-abiding and essential conviction that on one of the days ofCreation (that, probably, on which the decree was made that there shouldbe Light) there leaped into being the great landowners of England.
But Lord Ashbridge, though himself a peer, by no means accepted thepeerage en bloc as representing the English aristocracy; to be, inhis phrase, "one of us" implied that you belonged to certainwell-ascertained families where brewers and distinguished soldiershad no place, unless it was theirs already. He was ready to pay allreasonable homage to those who were distinguished by their abilities,their riches, their exalted positions in Church and State, but hishomage to such was transfused with a courteous condescension, and heonly treated as his equals and really revered those who belonged to thefamilies that were "one of us."
His wife, of course, was "one of us," since he would never havepermitted himself to be allied to a woman who was not, though for beautyand wisdom she might have been Aphrodite and Athene rolled compactlyinto one peerless identity. As a matter of fact, Lady Ashbridge hadnot the faintest resemblance to either of these effulgent goddesses. Inperson she resembled a camel, long and lean, with a drooping mouth andtired, patient eyes, while in mind she was stunned. No idea other thanan obvious one ever had birth behind her high, smooth forehead, and shehabitually brought conversation to a close by the dry enunciation ofsomething indubitably true, which had no direct relation to the pointunder discussion. But she had faint, ineradicable prejudices, andinstincts not quite dormant. There was a large quantity of mildaffection in her nature, the quality of which may be illustrated bythe fact that when her father died she cried a little every day afterbreakfast for about six weeks. Then she did not cry any more. It wasimpossible not to like what there was of her, but there was really verylittle to like, for she belonged heart and soul to the generation andthe breeding among which it is enough for a woman to be a lady, andvisit the keeper
's wife when she has a baby.
But though there was so little of her, the balance was made up forby the fact that there was so much of her husband. His large, ratherflamboyant person, his big white face and curling brown beard, his loudvoice and his falsetto laugh, his absolutely certain opinions, above allthe fervency of his consciousness of being Lord Ashbridge and all whichthat implied, completely filled any place he happened to be in, sothat a room empty except for him gave the impression of being almostuncomfortably crowded. This keen consciousness of his identity wasnaturally sufficient to make him very good humoured, since he washimself a fine example of the type that he admired most. Probably onlytwo persons in the world had the power of causing him annoyance, butboth of these, by an irony of fate that it seemed scarcely possible toconsider accidental, were closely connected with him, for one was hissister, the other his only son.
The grounds of their potentiality in this respect can be easilystated. Barbara Comber, his sister (and so "one of us"), had married anextremely wealthy American, who, in Lord Ashbridge's view, could not beconsidered one of anybody at all; in other words, his imagination failedto picture a whole class of people who resembled Anthony Jerome. He hadhoped when his sister announced her intention of taking this deplorablestep that his future brother-in-law would at any rate prove to be asnob--he had a vague notion that all Americans were snobs--and that thusMr. Jerome would have the saving grace to admire and toady him. But Mr.Jerome showed no signs of doing anything of the sort; he treated himwith an austere and distant politeness that Lord Ashbridge couldnot construe as being founded on admiration and a sense of his owninferiority, for it was so clearly founded on dislike. That, however,did not annoy Lord Ashbridge, for it was easy to suppose that poor Mr.Jerome knew no better. But Barbara annoyed him, for not only had sheshown herself a renegade in marrying a man who was not "one of us," butwith all the advantages she had enjoyed since birth of knowing what"we" were, she gloried in her new relations, saying, without any properreticence about the matter, that they were Real People, whose characterand wits vastly transcended anything that Combers had to show.
Michael was an even more vexatious case, and in moments of depressionhis father thought that he would really turn in his grave at the dismalidea of Michael having stepped into his honourable shoes. Physically hewas utterly unlike a Comber, and his mind, his general attitudetowards life seemed to have diverged even farther from that healthy andunreflective pattern. Only this morning his father had received a letterfrom him that summed Michael up, that fulfilled all the doubts and fearsthat had hung about him; for after three years in the Guards he had,without consultation with anybody, resigned his commission on theinexplicable grounds that he wanted to do something with his life. Tobegin with that was rankly heretical; if you were a Comber there was noneed to do anything with your life; life did everything for you. . . .And what this un-Comberish young man wanted to do with his life was tobe a musician. That musicians, artists, actors, had a right to existLord Ashbridge did not question. They were no doubt (or might be)very excellent people in their way, and as a matter of fact he oftenrecognised their existence by going to the opera, to the private viewof the Academy, or to the play, and he took a very considerable pride ofproprietorship in his own admirable collection of family portraits. Butthen those were pictures of Combers; Reynolds and Romney and the rest ofthem had enjoyed the privilege of perpetuating on their canvases thesebig, fine men and charming women. But that a Comber--and that onepositively the next Lord Ashbridge--should intend to devote his energiesto an artistic calling, and allude to that scheme as doing somethingwith his life, was a thing as unthinkable as if the butler had developeda fixed idea that he was "one of us."
The blow was a recent one; Michael's letter had only reached his fatherthis morning, and at the present moment Lord Ashbridge was attemptingover a cup of tea on the long south terrace overlooking the estuary toconvey--not very successfully--to his wife something of his feelingson the subject. She, according to her custom, was drinking a little hotwater herself, and providing her Chinese pug with a mixture of creamand crumbled rusks. Though the dog was of undoubtedly high lineage, LordAshbridge rather detested her.
"A musical career!" he exclaimed, referring to Michael's letter. "Whatsort of a career for a Comber is a musical career? I shall tell Michaelpretty roundly when he arrives this evening what I think of it all. Weshall have Francis next saying that he wants to resign, too, and becomea dentist."
Lady Ashbridge considered this for a moment in her stunned mind.
"Dear me, Robert, I hope not," she said. "I do not think it the leastlikely that Francis would do anything of the kind. Look, Petsy isbetter; she has drunk her cream and rusks quite up. I think it was onlythe heat."
He gave a little good-humoured giggle of falsetto laughter.
"I wish, Marion," he said, "that you could manage to take your mind offyour dog for a moment and attend to me. And I must really ask you not togive your Petsy any more cream, or she will certainly be sick."
Lady Ashbridge gave a little sigh.
"All gone, Petsy," she said.
"I am glad it has all gone," said he, "and we will hope it won't return.But about Michael now!"
Lady Ashbridge pulled herself together.
"Yes, poor Michael!" she said. "He is coming to-night, is he not? Butjust now you were speaking of Francis, and the fear of his wanting to bea dentist!"
"Well, I am now speaking of Michael's wanting to be a musician. Ofcourse that is utterly out of the question. If, as he says, he has sentin his resignation, he will just have to beg them to cancel it. Michaelseems not to have the slightest idea of the duties which his birth andposition entail on him. Unfitted for the life he now leads . . . wasteof time. . . . Instead he proposes to go to Baireuth in August, and thento settle down in London to study!"
Lady Ashbridge recollected the almanac.
"That will be in September, then," she said. "I do not think I was everin London in September. I did not know that anybody was."
"The point, my dear, is not how or where you have been accustomed tospend your Septembers," said her husband. "What we are talking aboutis--"
"Yes, dear, I know quite well what we are talking about," said she. "Weare talking about Michael not studying music all September."
Lord Ashbridge got up and began walking across the terrace opposite thetea-table with his elbows stuck out and his feet lifted rather high.
"Michael doesn't seem to realise that he is not Tom or Dick or Harry,"said he. "Music, indeed! I'm musical myself; all we Combers are musical.But Michael is my only son, and it really distresses me to see howlittle sense he has of his responsibilities. Amusements are all verywell; it is not that I want to cut him off his amusements, but when itcomes to a career--"
Lady Ashbridge was surreptitiously engaged in pouring out a little morecream for Petsy, and her husband, turning rather sooner than she hadexpected, caught her in the act.
"Do not give Petsy any more cream," he said, with some asperity; "Iabsolutely forbid it."
Lady Ashbridge quite composedly replaced the cream-jug.
"Poor Petsy!" she observed.
"I ask you to attend to me, Marion," he said.
"But I am attending to you very well, Robert," said she, "and Iunderstand you perfectly. You do not want Michael to be a musician inSeptember and wear long hair and perhaps play at concerts. I am sureI quite agree with you, for such a thing would be as unheard of in myfamily as in yours. But how do you propose to stop it?"
"I shall use my authority," he said, stepping a little higher.
"Yes, dear, I am sure you will. But what will happen if Michael doesn'tpay any attention to your authority? You will be worse off than ever.Poor Michael is very obedient when he is told to do anything he intendsto do, but when he doesn't agree it is difficult to do anything withhim. And, you see, he is quite independent of you with my mother havingleft him so much money. Poor mamma!"
Lord Ashbridge felt strongly about this. r />
"It was a most extraordinary disposition of her property for your motherto make," he observed. "It has given Michael an independence which Imuch deplore. And she did it in direct opposition to my wishes."
This touched on one of the questions about which Lady Ashbridge had herconvictions. She had a mild but unalterable opinion that when anybodydied, all that they had previously done became absolutely flawless andlaudable.
"Mamma did as she thought right with her property," she said, "and itis not for us to question it. She was conscientiousness itself. You willhave to excuse my listening to any criticism you may feel inclined tomake about her, Robert."
"Certainly, my dear. I only want you to listen to me about Michael. Youagree with me on the impossibility of his adopting a musical career. Icannot, at present, think so ill of Michael as to suppose that he willdefy our joint authority."
"Michael has a great will of his own," she remarked. "He gets that fromyou, Robert, though he gets his money from his grandmother."
The futility of further discussion with his wife began to dawn on LordAshbridge, as it dawned on everybody who had the privilege of conversingwith her. Her mind was a blind alley that led nowhere; it was clear thatshe had no idea to contribute to the subject except slightly pessimisticforebodings with which, unfortunately, he found himself secretlydisposed to agree. He had always felt that Michael was an uncomfortablesort of boy; in other words, that he had the inconvenient habit ofthinking things out for himself, instead of blindly accepting theconclusions of other people.
Much as Lord