Then his eyes shifted. In a corner of the room stood the collection of his fishing-rods. Their solid butts were set in a cracked Ming vase like arrows in a quiver; but he felt now as if their wispy twitching ends were tingling, like antennae—his antennae. Above them the mounted otters’-masks on the peeling walls grinned. The tiny wisp of steam from the ever-simmering kettle on the round coke-stove seemed to be actively inviting the brown teapot that stood on the shelf above —the loaf, and the knife, and the pot of jam. In short, these guns and rods of his, and even the furniture, the kettle and the loaf had suddenly become living tentacles of “him.” It was as if he and this long-loved gunroom were now one living continuous flesh. It was as if for the time being “he” was no longer cooped up entirely within his own skin: he had expanded, and these four walls had become now his final envelope. Only outside these walls did the hostile, alien “world” begin.
All this passed in a matter of seconds: then mentally Augustine shook himself, aware that his state was more than a little abnormal and reminded at the same time of that dead mite of alien world he had brought in here and carried on his shoulder still.
An old lancet window suggested this had been a domestic chapel once; all the same, not even for a moment could he put her down in here.
In the middle of the room a round oak table stood nowadays; but under the morning’s crumbs, under the oilstains where for years guns had been cleaned on it and under the bloodstains where game had been rested on it there were still discernible faded inkstains and blurred inscriptions and knife-cuts from its earlier days in the schoolroom. As Augustine moved towards it to lay the guns down his own initials, “A.L.P.-H.,” suddenly leapt out at him from the dark wood, pricked there with his compass-points and colored (he recalled) one drowsy morning in the schoolroom long ago—in imitation of Henry, his godlike elder cousin. For though this house had not been actually his childhood home, much of Augustine’s childhood had in fact been spent here: from his earliest age his two old great-uncles used to invite him on prolonged visits, as company for Henry chiefly ... ah, now Henry’s “H.P.-H.” had leaped out of the smudges too (ten times more elegantly tattooed than his, of course).
That little Purdey 20-bore behind the glass (momentarily it stood out from the background of its fellows as the figure in a painted portrait does) had been Henry’s first gun. When Henry quite grew out of it, it had descended to teach Augustine too to shoot. That of course was before 1914: in the halcyon days before the war when the two old men were still living and Henry was the heir.
Augustine, still humping the little body, moved towards the telephone bracketed to the wall behind the door. This was a peculiar apparatus, evidently built to order. It had two hinged ear-pieces, installed one on each side in case one ear or the other should be deaf; and it was ancient enough to have a handle to wind. Augustine wound the handle and asked for the police, addressing the instrument in the toneless but very articulate manner habitual to someone a solitary by his own act and choice who prefers to use his voice as seldom and as briefly as he can.
Then the machine answered him. The upshot was that the sergeant would come out this evening on his bicycle to view, but doubted he could get an ambulance to fetch it till the morning. For tonight it must just stay where it was.
When at last (in a remote and half-darkened formal place of elegance, a room he never used) Augustine did lift the morsel off his shoulder, he found that it had stiffened. This had ceased to be “child” at all: it was total cadaver now. It had taken into its soft contours the exact mold of the shoulder over which it had been doubled and it had set like that—into a matrix of him. If (which God forbid) he had put it on again it would have fitted.
Augustine was absolutely alone with it in all this huge, empty house. He left it dumped there on the big dust-sheeted drawing-room sofa and hurried across the silent stone hall to wash his creeping hands.
3
For a while, cleaning the two guns and toweling the dog took all Augustine’s attention; but then he was at a loss till the sergeant should come. He craved for and gulped a spoonful of sugar but otherwise could not eat because he had become aware of his hands again: they felt large, and as if he had not washed them enough. Indeed he was loth to taint with them even the pages of a book.
In this dilemma he wandered from the gunroom almost without knowing it into the billiardroom. This smelt of old carpeting and perished leather; it was a place he seldom went these days, but unlike most of the rest of the house it was unshuttered and now there was still enough of the failing daylight in here to see by.
Billiardrooms are never small. In childhood this one used to seem to Augustine as interminable as the vaults of heaven: it had always been a room of wonder, moreover, for what might not happen in a room where a rhinoceros—lurking in an Africa that must have been just behind the plaster—had thrust head and horn clean through the wall? (Often as a small thing he had peeped in fearfully before breakfast to find if during the night that rhinoceros in his wooden collar had inched any further through.)
This had been a man’s room, which no woman except housemaids ever entered. So, traditionally, it had given asylum to everything in the house no woman of taste or delicacy could stand; and Augustine himself had altered nothing. The paint was a sour chocolate brown. The chairs and settees were uniformly covered in leather. This faded purple leather covered even the top of a kind of stool made from a huge elephant’s-trotter (Great-uncle William had ridden the beast in battle or shot it in the chase, Augustine could never remember which).
In a tall china-cabinet here there were some lovely pieces of porcelain—Sèvres, Wedgwood, Dresden, Worcester—and other exquisite objects too: a large conch in silver-gilt, engraved with the royal arms of the Wittelsbachs and held out invitingly by a nymph: again, a delicate tureen-like receptacle in Pacific tortoiseshell which had stood (so the printed card stated) in the cabin of Captain Cook. You wondered, perhaps, to see such beauties banished here—till you realized that this was Uncle William’s unique collection of rare spittoons.
But there was even worse here than leather and brown paint and china of equivocal uses. The engravings on the walls for instance: if you looked at them closely and with not too innocent an eye you found they tended to be coarse—or even French.
Those two good old Tory bachelors, those noble Victorian figures—Great-uncle Arthur! Great-uncle William! Indeed what a powder-magazine of schoolboy naughtiness it had pleased them to sit on, in here! Hardly anything in this room was quite what it seemed at first sight. That ribbed-glass picture looked at first just an innocent rustic scene, but as you walked past you saw from the tail of your eye the billy-goat going incessantly in and out, in and out. Again, the top of that elephant-foot stool was hinged, and lifted. Absently, Augustine lifted it now: it housed a commode of course, and there was a dead spider in it; but until this very moment he had never noticed that under the spider and the dust you could just descry, printed in green under the glaze on the bottom of the china pot, the famous—the execrated face of Gladstone.
That had been typical of the fanatical way those two Tory old children felt about Liberals. Their treatment of Augustine’s own father was a case in point. Though a Conservative himself he had married the daughter of a house traditionally Whig and for this he had never been forgiven, never asked here again. Thus Augustine’s own childhood visits here had always been paid either alone or with a nurse. As if the taint was one clinging to the female line, even his elder sister Mary had never once been asked here to Newton Llantony (in fairness for this deprivation, Mary had been sent alone to spend one whole summer holidays in Germany, where they had cousins. That must have been 1913: she was to have gone again, only next year the Kaiser invaded Belgium and the war came).
In addition to improper pictures, many of the lesser family portraits were hung here in this billiardroom—“lesser” in the sense that either the sitter or the painter was better forgotten: black sheep and frail ladies; and the p
seudo-Lely, the Academy rejects. But as soon as Augustine’s father had married a Liberal, even the lovely drawing Rossetti had done of him as an infant angel with a tabor could no longer be hung anywhere at all at Newton Llantony—not even in here! Augustine had lately found this drawing hidden away upstairs in his grandmother’s bedroom drawer: whereas Henry’s portrait, posthumously painted by a limited company from photographs—that vast act of worship in oil-paint hung over the fireplace in the largest drawing-room.
Henry even while he lived had been the apple of every eye. The uncles had built him his own squash-court: when he was killed at Ypres in permanent mourning for him the court was not played in any more: it became where the larger stuffed animals were housed, including a giraffe.
So much bitter fanaticism in those two old Tories: yet in practice so much actual kindness to many, including Augustine himself—the “Liberal Woman’s” child! The two things seemed hard to reconcile. Over the carved autumnal marbles of the empty fireplace there hung a huge presentation portrait of Uncle Arthur as Master, his otterhounds grouped around him; so Augustine fell to studying the face now, in the gloaming, in the hope of discovering its secret. But all it showed was that years of concentration on the animal had made the Master himself grow so like an otter it was a wonder his own hounds had not rent him, Actaeon-wise. And Uncle William? The only portrait of him here was a small lady-like watercolor in full uniform painted by an artistic color-sergeant at Hongkong. It showed the General’s eye large and liquid as a Reynolds cherub’s, the rounded cheek as innocent (there can have been no Liberals in Hongkong for Uncle William to look so much at peace).
The sky was darkening, but the mist seemed to have cleared now: through the tall uncurtained window what seemed like a single low star suddenly winked out, blurred only by the runnels on the glass.
Augustine raised the sash. That “star” must be the lamps in distant Flemton being lit (Flemton was a little mediaeval rock-citadel eight miles away guarding the river mouth: a kind of Welsh Mont-St.-Michel, or miniature Gibraltar). For a minute or two he stood watching, his solid height silhouetted against the window, what little daylight remained illumining his freckled, sensitive, sensible young face. But although his thoughts were distracted now, his features still wore the imprint of the shock he had had—like yesterday’s footprints still discernible on dewy grass.
4
Uncle Arthur the otter and Uncle William the faded general ... Augustine had been fond of both old men when he was a child, and he warmed to their memory now—but fond of them as objects rather than as people, for what grotesques they were! Too old even for billiards in the end, they had sat here day-in day-out winter and summer one each side of a roaring fire while dust settled on the cover of the ever-shrouded table. Uncle Arthur was stone deaf in the left ear, hard of hearing in the right: Uncle William stone deaf in the right ear, hard of hearing in the left (hence that peculiar custom-built telephone). Both used enormous ear-trumpets: Uncle William was nearly blind too, so used a powerful monocle as well.
Suddenly it struck Augustine with force: how was it so great a gulf divided his own from every previous generation, so that they seemed like different species?
The kind of Time called “History” ended at the Battle of Waterloo: after that, Time had gone into a long dark tunnel or chrysalis called the Victorian Age. It had come out into daylight again at the Present Day, but as something quite different: it was as impossible to imagine oneself born a Victorian or born in “History” as ... as born a puma.
But wherein did the difference demonstrably lie? For the moment he could not get beyond his starting-point that all previous generations had been objects, whereas his were people: that is, what mattered were their insides—what they thought, what they felt. Not their outsides at all: the natural face in the shaving-glass was not him, only the invisible mind and the erupting ego within it ranked as him. Whereas those ... those ancient objects his uncles and their generation were outsides only: hollow bundles of behaviorist gestures, of stylized reactions to stimuli like Pavlov’s dogs. Their only “reality” was the grotesques they looked, the grotesqueries they did.—Take Uncle William’s story of old Sir Rhydderch Prydderch, a neighbor said to have torn out his staircase at the age of seventy and thereafter swarmed up a rope every night to go to bed: had such a grotesque any reality except as an imagined spectacle halfway up a rope?
Or take the story of that disastrous fox-hunt (it had been Uncle Arthur speaking this time, sitting on Augustine’s little bed one evening and feeding him with bread-and-milk). Wolves, imported by a noble Polish exile to make his new Pembrokeshire home more homelike, were alleged to have crossed with the local foxes and brought forth monstrous hybrid young: hence, ultimately, Uncle Arthur’s bedtime story of those little terrified figures in Pink clinging in trees with a pack of huge red ravening foxes howling underneath (the story had been told with relish, for the Master of Otterhounds had despised fox-hunters “sitting dry-arse on their horses all day” almost as he had despised Liberals).
These particular grotesques were only hearsay, and perhaps even fabulous. But as well as his uncles there were plenty of other notable “outsides” Augustine had seen among his elders with his own eyes. There was Dr. Brinley, for instance: who was legendary, but living still. Dr. Brinley was an aged adored fox-hunting coroner never even half sober even when on a horse. Once Augustine as a schoolboy had pulled off his cap in the High Street at Penrys Cross out of respect for the dead; but it proved to be the coroner not the corpse they were carrying into Court.
Another notable grotesque here had been the late rector: parson not person, a mere clerical keeper of pigs that used to get loose during Service. From his pulpit he could see into his rectory garden, and Sunday after Sunday what he saw there made him falter and repeat himself and then suddenly explode into a cry of “Pigs!” that startled strangers no end. At that cry the rectory children (they had left the sty open deliberately of course) would rise and sidle out of their pew, bow to the altar before turning their backs on it, mince down the aisle with their muffs and prayer-books and Sunday hats ... and the moment they were through the church door burst into loud whoops as they scampered off.
The late bishop (who had a beard like old Kruger’s) came to luncheon here at Newton one day: it was 1916, and Henry was home on embarkation leave. The rector was there, but the reverend wits had now begun noticeably to fail and so Uncle Arthur asked the bishop himself to say Grace. The rector protested—etiquette was for him to say Grace, and he struggled to his feet. But after “For what we are about to receive ... the usual form of words must have escaped him, for he stumbled on ex tempore: “The plump chicken, the three excellent vegetables ...” Then he sat down, seething with indignation and muttering what sounded like “May the Lord in His mercy blast and braise us all!”
Next Sunday he announced from the pulpit a momentous discovery: Johns the Baptist and Evangelist were one and the same person! He was stuttering with excitement, but Augustine heard no more because Uncle William, startled at the news, dropped his eyeglass in his ear-trumpet and began fishing for it with a bunch of keys. Uncle Arthur in his senior corner of the family box-pew kept commenting “Damn’ young fool!” (he was unaware of the loudness of his own voice, of course) “Oh the silly damn’ fool!” then snatched the ear-trumpet from his brother’s hand and dislodged the eyeglass by putting the trumpet to his lips and blowing a blast like the horn of Roland.
As the scene came back to him now Augustine burst out laughing in the echoing, comfortable room those two old men had made: which should have been Henry’s: but which instead was his.
A breath of wind came through the opened window. In the dusk something white fluttered off the marble fireplace shelf where it had been propped and Augustine struck a match to look at it. It was an engraved and emblazoned invitation-card:
The High Steward and Worshipful Court
of
FLEMTON
Request
—and then his name, and so on.
At the sight of that card his conscience pricked him; for the annual Banquet was tonight and he had not even remembered to answer. His two old uncles, of course, had attended the High Steward’s Banquet yearly to the last; but wild horses could not drag Augustine to any function of that kind and surely the sooner people ceased even inviting him, the better! Bucolic banquets, flower-shows, the magistrate’s bench, audit-days, hunt balls—the young squire of Newton was absolutely determined not to get “involved”; and surely the neighborhood ought to be only too thankful—nobody wants a Heavy Squire these days! In 1923 it’s quite out of date. At the very least he wouldn’t be missed: there are plenty of noisome little creatures who like doing that sort of thing. Thus he could feel his lip curl a little in derision—though quite involuntarily—as he turned himself in the dusk to contemplate once more that low fixed star which was all the lights of distant ... of gregarious, festive Flemton.
For the moment he had clean forgotten what had just happened on the Marsh; and yet in his face that look of yesterday’s footmarks had still persisted even while he laughed.
5
Flemton, the object of Augustine’s mild involuntary derision ...
That long line of dunes dividing the seven-mile stretch of sea-marsh from the sea ended in a single precipitous peninsular outcrop of rock, and this was washed by the mouth of a small smelly tidal river which served as creek still for a few coasting smacks (though the trade was already dying). The tiny, unique self-governing township of Flemton was crowded right on top of this rock, the peeling yellow stucco of its Regency houses bulging out over its mediaeval walls like ice-cream from a cornet.