‘Nah! I’m only thankin’ God I ain’t my own landlord. Take that cheer. What’s she done?’
‘It hasn’t gone down enough for me to make sure.’
‘Them floodgates o’ yourn ‘ll be middlin’ far down the brook by now; an’ your rose-garden have gone after ’em. I saved my chickens, though. You’d better get Mus’ Sperrit to take the law o’ Lotten an’ ‘is fishpond.’
‘No, thanks. I’ve trouble enough without that.’
‘Hev ye?’ Mr Sidney grinned. ‘How did ye make out with those two women o’ mine last night? I lay they fought.’
‘You infernal old scoundrel!’ Midmore laughed.
‘I be – an’ then again I bain’t,’ was the placid answer. ‘But, Rhoda, she wouldn’t ha’ left me last night. Fire or flood, she wouldn’t.’
‘Why didn’t you ever marry her?’ Midmore asked.
‘Waste of good money. She was willin’ without.’
There was a step on the gritty mud below, and a voice humming. Midmore rose quickly saying: ‘Well, I suppose you’re all right now.’
‘I be. I ain’t a landlord, nor I ain’t young – nor anxious. Oh, Mus’ Midmore! Would it make any odds about her thirty pounds comin’ regular if I married her? Charlie said maybe ‘twould.’
‘Did he?’ Midmore turned at the door. ‘And what did Jimmy say about it?’
‘Jimmy?’ Mr Sidney chuckled as the joke took him. ‘Oh, he’s none o’ mine. He’s Charlie’s look-out.’
Midmore slammed the door and ran downstairs.
‘Well, this is a – sweet – mess,’ said Miss Sperrit in shortest skirts and heaviest riding-boots. ‘I had to come down and have a look at it. “The old mayor climbed the belfry tower.” Been up all night nursing your family?’
‘Nearly that! Isn’t it cheerful?’ He pointed through the door to the stairs with small twig-drift on the last three treads.
‘It’s a record, though,’ said she, and hummed to herself:
‘That flood strewed wrecks upon the grass,
That ebb swept out the flocks to sea.’
‘You’re always singing that, aren’t you?’ Midmore said suddenly as she passed into the parlour where slimy chairs had been stranded at all angles.
‘Am I? Now I come to think of it I believe I do. They say I always hum when I ride. Have you noticed it?’
‘Of course I have. I notice every –’
‘Oh,’ she went on hurriedly. ‘We had it for the village cantata last winter – “The Brides of Enderby”.’
‘No! “High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire”.’ For some reason Midmore spoke sharply.
‘Just like that.’ She pointed to the befouled walls. ‘I say… Let’s get this furniture a little straight… You know it too?’
‘Every word, since you sang it, of course.’
‘When?’
‘The first night I ever came down. You rode past the drawing-room window in the dark singing it – “And sweeter woman –”’
‘I thought the house was empty then. Your aunt always let us use that short cut. Ha-hadn’t we better get this out into the passage? It’ll all have to come out anyhow. You take the other side.’ They began to lift a heavyish table. Their words came jerkily between gasps and their faces were as white as – a newly washed and very hungry pig.
‘Look out!’ Midmore shouted. His legs were whirled from under him, as the table, grunting madly, careened and knocked the girl out of sight.
The wild boar of Asia could not have cut down a couple more scientifically, but this little pig lacked his ancestor’s nerve and fled shrieking over their bodies.
‘Are you hurt, darling?’ was Midmore’s first word, and ‘No – I’m only winded – dear,’ was Miss Sperrit’s, as he lifted her out of her corner, her hat over one eye and her right cheek a smear of mud.
They fed him a little later on some chicken-feed that they found in Sidney’s quiet barn, a pail of buttermilk out of the dairy, and a quantity of onions from a shelf in the back-kitchen.
‘Seed-onions, most likely,’ said Connie. ‘You’ll hear about this.’
‘What does it matter? They ought to have been gilded. We must buy him.’
‘And keep him as long as he lives,’ she agreed. ‘But I think I ought to go home now. You see, when I came out I didn’t expect… Did you?’
‘No! Yes… It had to come… But if anyone had told me an hour ago!… Sidney’s unspeakable parlour – and the mud on the carpet.’
‘Oh, I say! Is my cheek clean now?’
‘Not quite. Lend me your hanky again a minute, darling… What a purler you came!’
‘You can’t talk. Remember when your chin hit that table and you said “blast”! I was just going to laugh.’
‘You didn’t laugh when I picked you up. You were going “oo-oo-oo” like a little owl.’
‘My dear child –’
‘Say that again!’
‘My dear child. (Do you really like it? I keep it for my best friends.) My dee-ar child, I thought I was going to be sick there and then. He knocked every ounce of wind out of me – the angel! But I must really go.’
They set off together, very careful not to join hands or take arms.
‘Not across the fields,’ said Midmore at the stile. ‘Come round by – by your own place.’
She flushed indignantly.
‘It will be yours in a little time,’ he went on, shaken with his own audacity.
‘Not so much of your little times, if you please!’ She shied like a colt across the road; then instantly, like a colt, her eyes lit with new curiosity as she came in sight of the drive-gates.
‘And not quite so much of your airs and graces, Madam,’ Midmore returned, ‘or I won’t let you use our drive as a short cut any more.’
‘Oh, I’ll be good. I’ll be good.’ Her voice changed suddenly. ‘I swear I’ll try to be good, dear. I’m not much of a thing at the best. What made you…’
‘I’m worse – worse! Miles and oceans worse. But what does it matter now?’
They halted beside the gate-pillars.
‘I see!’ she said, looking up the sodden carriage sweep to the front door porch where Rhoda was slapping a wet mat to and fro. ‘I see… Now, I really must go home. No! Don’t you come. I must speak to Mother first all by myself.’
He watched her up the hill till she was out of sight.
Mary Postgate1
Of Miss Mary Postgate, Lady McCausland wrote that she was ‘thoroughly conscientious, tidy, companionable, and ladylike. I am very sorry to part with her, and shall always be interested in her welfare.’
Miss Fowler engaged her on this recommendation, and to her surprise, for she had had experience of companions, found that it was true. Miss Fowler was nearer sixty than fifty at the time, but though she needed care she did not exhaust her attendant’s vitality. On the contrary, she gave out, stimulatingly and with reminiscences. Her father had been a minor Court official in the days when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had just set its seal on Civilization made perfect. Some of Miss Fowler’s tales, none the less, were not always for the young. Mary was not young, and though her speech was as colourless as her eyes or her hair, she was never shocked. She listened unflinchingly to every one; said at the end, ‘How interesting!’ or ‘How shocking!’ as the case might be, and never again referred to it, for she prided herself on a trained mind, which ‘did not dwell on these things’. She was, too, a treasure at domestic accounts, for which the village tradesmen, with their weekly books, loved her not. Otherwise she had no enemies; provoked no jealousy even among the plainest; neither gossip nor slander had ever been traced to her; she supplied the odd place at the Rector’s or the Doctor’s table at half an hour’s notice; she was a sort of public aunt to very many small children of the village street, whose parents, while accepting everything, would have been swift to resent what they called ‘patronage’; she served on the Village Nursing Committee as Miss Fowler’s nominee when Miss Fowler
was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and came out of six months’ fortnightly meetings equally respected by all the cliques.
And when Fate threw Miss Fowler’s nephew, an unlovely orphan of eleven, on Miss Fowler’s hands, Mary Postgate stood to her share of the business of education as practised in private and public schools. She checked printed clothes-lists, and unitemized bills of extras; wrote to Head and House masters, matrons, nurses and doctors, and grieved or rejoiced over half-term reports. Young Wyndham Fowler repaid her in his holidays by calling her ‘Gatepost’, ‘Postey’, or ‘Packthread’, by thumping her between her narrow shoulders, or by chasing her bleating, round the garden, her large mouth open, her large nose high in air, at a stiff-necked shamble very like a camel’s. Later on he filled the house with clamour, argument, and harangues as to his personal needs, likes and dislikes, and the limitations of ‘you women’, reducing Mary to tears of physical fatigue, or, when he chose to be humorous, of helpless laughter. At crises, which multiplied as he grew older, she was his ambassadress and his interpretress to Miss Fowler, who had no large sympathy with the young; a vote in his interest at the councils on his future; his sewing-woman, strictly accountable for mislaid boots and garments; always his butt and his slave.
And when he decided to become a solicitor, and had entered an office in London; when his greeting had changed from ‘Hullo, Postey, you old beast,’ to ‘Mornin’, Packthread,’ there came a war which, unlike all wars that Mary could remember, did not stay decently outside England and in the newspapers, but intruded on the lives of people whom she knew. As she said to Miss Fowler, it was ‘most vexatious’. It took the Rector’s son who was going into business with his elder brother; it took the Colonel’s nephew on the eve of fruit-farming in Canada; it took Mrs Grant’s son who, his mother said, was devoted to the ministry; and, very early indeed, it took Wynn Fowler, who announced on a postcard that he had joined the Flying Corps and wanted a cardigan waistcoat.
‘He must go, and he must have the waistcoat,’ said Miss Fowler. So Mary got the proper-sized needles and wool, while Miss Fowler told the men of her establishment – two gardeners and an odd man, aged sixty – that those who could join the Army had better do so. The gardeners left. Cheape, the odd man, stayed on, and was promoted to the gardener’s cottage. The cook, scorning to be limited in luxuries, also left, after a spirited scene with Miss Fowler, and took the housemaid with her. Miss Fowler gazetted Nellie, Cheape’s seventeen-year-old daughter, to the vacant post; Mrs Cheape to the rank of cook, with occasional cleaning bouts; and the reduced establishment moved forward smoothly.
Wynn demanded an increase in his allowance. Miss Fowler, who always looked facts in the face, said, ‘He must have it. The chances are he won’t live long to draw it, and if three hundred makes him happy – ‘
Wynn was grateful, and came over, in his tight-buttoned uniform, to say so. His training centre was not thirty miles away, and his talk was so technical that it had to be explained by charts of the various types of machines. He gave Mary such a chart.
‘And you’d better study it, Postey,’ he said. ‘You’ll be seeing a lot of ’em soon.’ So Mary studied the chart, but when Wynn next arrived to swell and exalt himself before his womenfolk, she failed badly in cross-examination, and he rated her as in the old days.
‘You look more or less like a human being,’ he said in his new Service voice. ‘You must have had a brain at some time in your past. What have you done with it? Where d’you keep it? A sheep would know more than you do, Postey. You’re lamentable. You are less use than an empty tin can, you dowey old cassowary.’
‘I suppose that’s how your superior officer talks to you? said Miss Fowler from her chair.
‘But Postey doesn’t mind,’ Wynn replied. ‘Do you, Packthread?’
‘Why? Was Wynn saying anything? I shall get this right next time you come,’ she muttered, and knitted her pale brows again over the diagrams of Taubes, Farmans, and Zeppelins.
In a few weeks the mere land and sea battles which she read to Miss Fowler after breakfast passed her like idle breath. Her heart and her interest were high in the air with Wynn, who had finished ‘rolling’ (whatever that might be) and had gone on from a ‘taxi’ to a machine more or less his own. One morning it circled over their very chimneys, alighted on Vegg’s Heath, almost outside the garden gate, and Wynn came in, blue with cold, shouting for food. He and she drew Miss Fowler’s bath-chair, as they had often done, along the Heath foot-path to look at the biplane. Mary observed that ‘it smelt very badly’.
‘Postey, I believe you think with your nose,’ said Wynn. ‘I know you don’t with your mind. Now, what type’s that?’
‘I’ll go and get the chart,’ said Mary.
‘You’re hopeless! You haven’t the mental capacity of a white mouse,’ he cried, and explained the dials and the sockets for bomb-dropping till it was time to mount and ride the wet clouds once more.
‘Ah!’ said Mary, as the stinking thing flared upward. ‘Wait till our Flying Corps gets to work! Wynn says it’s much safer than in the trenches.’
‘I wonder,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘Tell Cheape to come and tow me home again.’
‘It’s all downhill. I can do it,’ said Mary, ‘if you put the brake on.’ She laid her lean self against the pushing-bar and home they trundled.
‘Now, be careful you aren’t heated and catch a chill,’ said overdressed Miss Fowler.
‘Nothing makes me perspire,’ said Mary. As she bumped the chair under the porch she straightened her long back. The exertion had given her a colour, and the wind had loosened a wisp of hair across her forehead. Miss Fowler glanced at her.
‘What do you ever think of, Mary?’ she demanded suddenly.
‘Oh, Wynn says he wants another three pairs of stockings – as thick as we can make them.’
‘Yes. But I mean the things that women think about. Here you are, more than forty–’
‘Forty-four,’ said truthful Mary.
‘Well?’
‘Well?’ Mary offered Miss Fowler her shoulder as usual.
‘And you’ve been with me ten years now.’
‘Let’s see,’ said Mary. ‘Wynn was eleven when he came. He’s twenty now, and I came two years before that. It must be eleven.’
‘Eleven! And you’ve never told me anything that matters in all that while. Looking back, it seems to me that I’ve done all the talking.’
‘I’m afraid I’m not much of a conversationalist. As Wynn says, I haven’t the mind. Let me take your hat.’
Miss Fowler, moving stiffly from the hip, stamped her rubber-tipped stick on the tiled hall floor. ‘Mary, aren’t you anything except a companion? Would you ever have been anything except a companion?’
Mary hung up the garden hat on its proper peg. ‘No,’ she said after consideration. ‘I don’t imagine I ever should. But I’ve no imagination, I’m afraid.’
She fetched Miss Fowler her eleven-o’clock glass of Contrexeville.2
That was the wet December when it rained six inches to the month, and the women went abroad as little as might be. Wynn’s flying chariot visited them several times, and for two mornings (he had warned her by postcard) Mary heard the thresh of his propellers at dawn. The second time she ran to the window, and stared at the whitening sky. A little blur passed overhead. She lifted her lean arms towards it.
That evening at six o’clock there came an announcement in an official envelope that Second Lieutenant W. Fowler had been killed during a trial flight. Death was instantaneous. She read it and carried it to Miss Fowler.
‘I never expected anything else,’ said Miss Fowler; ‘but I’m sorry it happened before he had done anything.’
The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself quite steady in the midst of it.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a great pity he didn’t die in action after he had killed somebody.’
‘He was killed instantly. That’s one comfort,’ Miss Fowler w
ent on.
‘But Wynn says the shock of a fall kills a man at once – whatever happens to the tanks,’ quoted Mary.
The room was coming to rest now. She heard Miss Fowler say impatiently, ‘But why can’t we cry, Mary?’ and herself replying, ‘There’s nothing to cry for. He has done his duty as much as Mrs Grant’s son did.’
‘And when he died, she came and cried all the morning,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘This only makes me feel tired – terribly tired. Will you help me to bed, please, Mary? – And I think I’d like the hot-water bottle.’
So Mary helped her and sat beside, talking of Wynn in his riotous youth.
‘I believe,’ said Miss Fowler suddenly, ‘that old people and young people slip from under a stroke like this. The middle-aged feel it most.’
‘I expect that’s true,’ said Mary, rising. ‘I’m going to put away the things in his room now. Shall we wear mourning?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘Except, of course, at the funeral. I can’t go. You will. I want you to arrange about his being buried here. What a blessing it didn’t happen at Salisbury!’
Everyone, from the Authorities of the Flying Corps to the Rector, was most kind and sympathetic. Mary found herself for the moment in a world where bodies were in the habit of being despatched by all sorts of conveyances to all sorts of places. And at the funeral two young men in buttoned-up uniforms stood beside the grave and spoke to her afterwards.
‘You’re Miss Postgate, aren’t you?’ said one. ‘Fowler told me about you. He was a good chap – a first-class fellow – a great loss.’
‘Great loss!’ growled his companion. ‘We’re all awfully sorry.’
‘How high did he fall from?’ Mary whispered.
‘Pretty nearly four thousand feet, I should think, didn’t he? You were up that day, Monkey?’
‘All of that,’ the other child replied. ‘My bar made three thousand, and I wasn’t as high as him by a lot.’
‘Then that’s all right,’ said Mary. ‘Thank you very much.’