Cheerfulness Breaks In Page 15

  The Admiral said there was of course only one way of looking at it, and the whole of the naval contingent supported him.

  ‘Kneeling? Nonsense, Vicar,’ said Miss Hampton. ‘If my father were alive he would write to the Times about it to-morrow.’

  Miss Bent said in a congregation composed chiefly of women, she did not include, she said, Hampton and herself in this statement, there was a natural tendency to kneel, which could be explained psychologically in Catholic countries as a Mother Complex, but in Protestant countries was less easy to analyse, as the female element in the act of worship was less pronounced. The Vicar who was terrified of Miss Bent and Miss Hampton, though deeply grateful for their generosity and kindness in the parish, got up and said his wife would be expecting him.

  ‘I cannot see that it is of vital importance,’ said Mrs. Warbury, ‘but then Oscar and I are not Church of England.’

  ‘Are you Catholic?’ said Mrs. Morland with deep interest. ‘I have quite a lot of friends who are Catholics and they are really very nice and we never mention anything unpleasant and get on very well.’

  ‘Oh, dear no,’ said Mrs. Warbury, showing no interest in Mrs. Morland’s apologia for the Catholic faith, ‘Oscar and I go much deeper. We are British Israelites.’

  If any of the eight other people now present, all of whom disliked the Warburys more and more, had tried to express politely what they thought of them, they could not have hit upon a better description. Tubby choked into his drink and tried to pretend he was only drinking. Mrs. Birkett said it was very late and they must be going as she had forgotten to bring a torch and there was no moon. Bill at once offered his torch, which Mrs. Birkett gratefully accepted, saying that she would send it back that evening by the odd man when he went home.

  ‘By the way,’ she added, ‘you were talking about an ocarina. I have one if you’d care to have it. It belongs to my daughter who is in Las Palombas with her husband and I know she won’t want it.’

  ‘I say, that’s awfully jolly of you,’ said Bill. ‘Funny thing, I know a chap in Las Palombas called Fairweather. I wonder if your daughter knows him. His wife is a peach. I saw her at the Barchester Palais de Danse with Fairweather last time I was on leave.’

  Mrs. Birkett’s intense pleasure at hearing Rose so described may be imagined, as may the joy of Bill (whose name and rank are for ever unknown) on hearing that Mrs. Birkett who had been sent from heaven to give him an ocarina was also the mother of the peach. All the guests then left in a lump, much hampered by the Admiral’s light-lock.

  ‘We have our car,’ said Mrs. Warbury, flashing a very large torch full on to a kind of super Daimler-Rolls about ten yards long, and describing circles of light in the air all round it to show off its magnificence.

  ‘Put out that torch, Mrs. Warbury,’ said the Admiral in his precise voice.

  ‘I am really not so conceited,’ said Mrs. Warbury, extinguishing the light however, ‘as to think that hostile aircraft is looking for little me. Does anyone want a lift? Oscar has heaps of petrol. He has been storing it ever since Munich, but not a word to the police.’

  There was a dead silence, for everyone present would have walked home with bare and bleeding feet, or on stilts, sooner than accept Mrs. Warbury’s offer. So Mr. Warbury got into the driver’s seat, lit his cigar with a petrol lighter that illuminated half the village, and drove fatly away.

  ‘High time Bent and I were at the Red Lion,’ said Miss Hampton. ‘Let me come and see you some day, Mrs. Birkett.’

  Mrs. Birkett said she would love it and Miss Hampton walked off with Miss Bent into the darkness.

  Mrs. Morland and Mrs. Birkett walked home in silence, turning on the torch as little as possible because of not using up the batteries, though as Mrs. Morland very truly said batteries seemed to run down just as much when you didn’t use them as when you did use them, to which Mrs. Birkett replied that the mysterious thing about electric irons was that they went on getting hotter after you had turned them off.

  Dinner was rather quiet except for Geraldine, who was now on day duty at Barchester Hospital and so able to entertain her parents and their guest in the evening by telling them what Matron said and drawing very trenchant comparisons between that lady and Miss Pettinger. While she talked the grown-ups were able to enjoy the good food and try not to listen. Mr. Birkett was deep in his report for the School Governors which had to be presented next week and the ladies were still ruminating on the events of the afternoon. Mrs. Birkett and Mrs. Morland were still partially stunned by all they had gone through since tea-time, and it was not till Geraldine was brought to a stop by a very good coffee pudding that they began to revive. Mrs. Morland, as a successful author, was experiencing the hopeless feeling which besets writers when life gets the better of them with one hand tied behind its back. She felt that she might have invented the Admiral and Mrs. Phelps, who were the novelist’s dream of what retired Admirals and their wives should be, and might even have managed the Warburys, though British Israelitism was, she freely admitted, quite beyond her. But at Maria Cottage she had been shaken from her bearings in a way she would have thought impossible. Mr. Bissell she had met, liked and could more or less deal with, but Mrs. Bissell had left her perfectly addled. If Mrs. Bissell had been, as she described herself, a mere home bird, or on the other hand an ordinary sample of a teacher, she could have coped with it. But she burst out in such unexpected places. Her obvious though unspoken devotion to Mr. Bissell, her firm yet tender treatment of the dreadful Edna, her terrifying and businesslike grasp of Income Tax, Psychology, the question of the married teacher, the case of Miss Hampton and Miss Bent; all these filled Mrs. Morland’s humble mind with slightly envious admiration. She felt perfectly certain that as soon as the door of Maria Cottage had closed behind them Mrs. Bissell had first tabulated them all neatly in her own mind and then forgotten all about them till next time. That Mrs. Bissell thought poorly of her she had no doubt and did not in the least resent it, for before real goodness, and that absolutely shone from Mrs. Bissell, she was silent and abashed. Then, thinking of little Edna, the happy thought swept over her that she had four sons, and thus was infinitely superior to anyone who had no children, not to speak of those that had only daughters. For this feeling she occasionally blamed herself, but it was rooted somewhere in her very deeply. People might know psychology till they were black in the face, thought Mrs. Morland, and be able to take in a business-like spirit all the sinister implications of Adelina Cottage which would never have occurred to her at all. But although such people existed they had not got four sons. And Mrs. Morland’s mind began to sketch out a scene for her next story in which Madame Koska should engage two ladies like Miss Hampton and Miss Bent to be mannequins for her tailored costumes and dinner-jacket suits (with skirt), how the Gestapo agent should try his wiles on one of them while planning to abduct the heroine, and the whole should be brought to confusion by a customer, no longer young, not remarkably good-looking yet distinguished, who could only afford one good costume a year, but who had a woman’s intuition and the heart of a lion, all because she had four sons.

  ‘What is it, Laura?’ said Mr. Birkett, looking up from his savoury as he heard a slight noise.

  ‘I was only thinking about a book,’ said Mrs. Morland gulping, for the thought of the middle-aged customer (herself in fact) had been too much for her. ‘Do you think, Bill,’ she added with one of her snipe-flights, ‘that I ought to be doing propaganda?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Mr. Birkett. ‘You haven’t the faintest qualifications, my dear Laura. Go on amusing us for God’s sake with your books, and saving my life by being my secretary.’

  ‘Fritz Warbury is bringing out a book with the Anti-Imperial Book Club,’ said Geraldine, who was now at a loose end owing to not liking cheese canapés. ‘It’s called The Lion Turns Tail. It’s all about how rotten the Government are.’

  Her parents said nothing, knowing well that their approval or disapproval of this remark woul
d meet with equal disfavour from their daughter.

  ‘I told him I thought it was an awfully silly name,’ said Geraldine dispassionately, ‘and he’s going to take me over the Film Studios.’

  ‘But where did you meet him?’ said Mrs. Birkett, breaking the most sacred rule of a parent’s conduct, which is never to ask anything about anything where her children are concerned.

  But Geraldine was in a favourable mood, so instead of glaring at her mother, or losing her temper, she said ‘Oh, places; I must go and telephone,’ and left the room.

  ‘And I know what will happen,’ said Mrs. Birkett despairingly to Mrs. Morland as the door slammed; not we must say in justice to Geraldine with the slam of passion, but the slam of finding it less trouble to slam a door than to shut it quietly, ‘Geraldine will want to ask all the Warburys here.’

  ‘Well, I must go and get on with that report,’ said Mr. Birkett. ‘Why can’t Geraldine shut the door without slamming it? Everard is coming over to go through it with me. We shall be late, so don’t sit up.’

  ‘Oh, Bill, one thing before you go,’ said Mrs. Morland. ‘Who was it that had a casket with nothing but hope at the bottom of it? Not Prometheus, but you know whom I mean.’

  ‘I suppose you mean Pandora,’ said Mr. Birkett. ‘Why?’

  ‘I only wanted to be sure,’ said Mrs. Morland meekly.

  CHAPTER IX

  SHERRY AT THE BIRKETTS’

  THE most beautiful autumn that anyone could remember now spread its mantle over Barsetshire and the rest of England. The evacuated children, who were by now all dressed by the hand of charity in coloured woollen frocks arted up at the neck, and coloured woollen coats of no particular shape or cut, not to speak of nightgowns and dressing-gowns and underclothes, looked fatter and pinker every day. Owing to the vigorous efforts of volunteer workers there was now not a lice-infested head among them, except when one of them was taken back to London by its parents for a week, cried all the time, and was returned to start the whole thing all over again. The primitive Wessex speech of the country children was being rapidly overlaid with a fine veneer of Cockney. As far as bad words went neither side had the advantage and the grosser names of Barsetshire were bartered against the more up-to-date obscenities of the evacuated areas. In writing, however, the London children had a distinct advantage. Maturing more early than the children of the soil, quicker if shallower witted, more bad language was written on the walls of Southbridge owing to their efforts in ten weeks than had been seen since Roman soldiers inscribed facetiæ on the clay tiles of the Roman villa whose foundations had lately been excavated near Northbridge.

  Various voluntary committees had by now got well into their stride. Mrs. and Miss Phelps had collected money for a cottage hospital for the London children, forced a very rich friend to let them use an empty house, furnished it by borrowing from all their not so rich friends and bullied all the girls in the neighbourhood into nursing and cooking in shifts under a professional matron; while the Admiral, who never knew when he was beaten, had so badgered the Ministry concerned both by letter and through every influential friend he possessed that the necessary permits were obtained in less than a month. Upon this all the working parties had fallen to again with zeal and provided a supply of pyjamas guaranteed not to fit any age of child, red monkey jackets, and knitted coverlets that would have kept Florence Nightingale quiet for months.

  Another committee, also headed by Mrs. and Miss Phelps, had descended upon the Women’s Institute and commandeered its hall as a canteen for London parents when they came down on Sundays to see their offspring. Some of the committee had wished to supply free cups of tea, but Mrs. Phelps was adamant, and Miss Hampton, who was a liberal subscriber to all Mrs. Phelps’s activities, came to the meeting in her fiercest tailor-made and putting a monocle into her right eye had looked them all up and down, saying that as the parents, as far as she could see, need never spend another penny on their children’s clothes and general welfare as long as they left them in the country, they could afford to pay for cups of tea and buns.

  ‘I do think,’ said Mrs. Warbury, who had somehow got on to the Committee, ‘that the State ought to do everything for those poor women. In Germany, the State has a far better conception of its duties where children are concerned.’

  To which Miss Hampton had replied that if it came to that Russia had a better conception still and they were both wrong. And Mrs. Phelps had said: Were they all agreed then that the canteen was to be self-supporting, would all those in favour signify it in the usual way by holding up their hands, thank you, yes; so quickly that Mrs. Warbury put up her hand without meaning to and was so flurried that she gave half a crown towards the initial expenses before she knew where she was.

  Admiral Phelps carried a gas-mask everywhere as an example and worked himself to the bone collecting volunteer casualties for his A.R.P. practice. In the evenings, now beginning far too early, he would patrol the village for illegal lights and twice had the pleasure of knocking up the Warburys and making them turn out the light in their garage.

  Miss Hampton and Miss Bent who were very strong and did not know what it was to be tired, took an allotment and dug for victory in a way that compelled the admiration of the sexton, who as an amateur of spadework spent hours of his time watching them and was nearly late with old Mrs. Trouncer’s grave, which he had to finish at six in the morning owing to Miss Hampton’s kind offer to give him a hand with it. They also collaborated with Miss Phelps in looking after the goats, hens and rabbits who lived in the field behind Jutland Cottage. The hens were no particular trouble except that they had to be fed, watered and put to bed at such various inconvenient hours that Margot Phelps had almost to give up social life. The rabbits were more especially Miss Bent’s care, as she had a loom on which she was occasionally moved to weave pieces of gaily striped material that sagged violently at the knees and elbows if made up into coats and skirts, and had visions of spinning the rabbits’ fur and weaving it into even looser and more sagging material. The goats therefore fell into the hands of Miss Hampton who, adding a pair of very well made leggings to her tweed costume, so harassed those odious animals that their spirits were quite broken. Her strength was such that the strongest Billy was outmatched if he tried to pull in the wrong direction. Every time a Nanny trod on her feet while being milked, she gave her a resounding whack with a stick. Mrs. Phelps was at first inclined to question the humanity of these methods, but when Miss Hampton explained that goats had an unfair advantage owing to their hoofs being so small and precipitous that you couldn’t tread back, she saw the point.

  The real difficulty about the goats was what to do with their milk. The Phelps’s who had become acclimatised to goats at Malta didn’t mind the taste and in any case didn’t take milk with their tea, but everyone else expressed their just abhorrence of it in no measured terms, till there seemed to be nothing for it but to throw the milk away, thus, as Mrs. Phelps said almost in tears, playing directly into the enemy’s hands. But very luckily an immensely rich family who had taken a house outside Southbridge for the duration believed that goats’ milk was Life for their six young children, so Mrs. Phelps was able to sell it at a good price, and Miss Phelps delivered it once a day on her bicycle. It seemed probable to everyone that the milk would arrive churned to death, but the children throve on it just as if it were nice cows’ milk, so all was well.

  Southbridge School, with the Hosiers’ Boys, did not take a large part in the village life. It had always been a self-contained establishment and under present conditions everyone was too busy to look aside. Geraldine, as her father had predicted, made herself such a trouble to her parents over the Warburys that they almost wished they had Rose back again. Mr. Birkett said to his wife, for he dared not say it to his daughter, it was difficult enough to keep the school going at present, and make the older boys stick to their scholarship work, and arbitrate on the question of whether the window in the squash court had been broken by his boys or Biss
ell’s, and bear with that man Hopkins’s Communism, and take the Classical Sixth himself till he could get a really first-class man to replace Philip Winter, without having impossible outsiders in his house. Mrs. Birkett said to her husband, for she also did not like to say it to Geraldine, that she had never seen anyone she disliked so much as the Warburys and she was sure that the son was even worse, but if Geraldine could not ask her friends to her parents’ house where could she ask them.

  Geraldine, relying on a war of attrition, merely went on bothering her parents whenever she was not at the Hospital till they gave in, which they might just as well have done in the first place. The only stipulation Mrs. Birkett made was that the Warburys should be asked to sherry. She had for some time wished to have a party for the pleasure of seeing people, for what with the petrol rationing, and everyone being busy, and the black-out, she had rather lost touch with her friends of late. In a gathering of this kind she hoped the Warburys might be if not drowned at least so watered down as to be fairly harmless. Accordingly, choosing a day when there would be some moonlight after darkness had set in, though with the firm conviction that there would also be clouds and heavy rain, she sent out her invitations. In case Heaven should disapprove of people enjoying themselves during a period of mingled unhappiness, anxiety and boredom which, as far as she could see, it had done nothing whatsoever to prevent, she threw it a sop in the shape of some very hideous embroidery done by the Mixo-Lydian refugees who were housed about two miles from Southbridge. These embroideries she decided to put in the dining-room, so that people needn’t look at them unless they really wanted to.