Peace Breaks Out Page 2

  “As you are going down to the village, Miss Sylvia,” said Hubback, “you can look in at Mother’s and see if there’s any biscuits come. And there’s some other things ought to have come in by now and if Vidler’s boy has been over from Northbridge she’ll be able to let you have a bit of fish. Here’s the basket and a nice bit of paper to wrap the fish in.”

  So saying she thrust into Sylvia’s unwilling hand a recent number of the Sunday Express, with a good deal of dirt and grease on it.

  “Oughtn’t I to have a cleaner bit for the fish?” said Sylvia.

  “Not for Vidler’s fish,” said Hubback scornfully. “If you was to see the back of Vidler’s shop, Miss Sylvia, you’d never touch another piece. You wouldn’t credit there was so many flies in the world, and all the year round too. And don’t forget the beer, Master George. They can’t send now at the Arms, so what you want you’ll have to carry. There’s plenty of room in the basket.”

  Without waiting for her young master and mistress’s protests, she went back to the kitchen, giving the door that led to the servants’ quarters a hearty slam. But this was taken by the young Hallidays in the spirit in which it was meant; namely, not as a display of temper, but as the only method of making the door shut. Hardly had the noise of the slam stopped resounding through the hall and up the stairs when Hubback opened it again.

  “If I’ve told that Caxton once I’ve told him a dozen times,” she said vengefully, “that what this door needs is a good looking at. If you see him anywhere about you can tell him so.”

  She withdrew and ostentatiously closed the door quietly. It at once sprang open again.

  “Don’t say I didn’t say so,” said Hubback, poking her face through the opening; and slammed the door again till the house reeled.

  “Better get out now,” said Sylvia, “or she’ll send us to find Caxton in the workshop and he’ll keep us for hours. Come on.”

  They shut the front door behind them, for the Spring day was grey and cold. Before them lay the velvet-soft lawn with its two great cedars. Beyond the cedars was the low red brick wall with its stone coping and its stone urns at regular intervals, and an eight foot drop on its far side to the old Barchester Road. In all the Springs the young Hallidays could remember, before the German Chancellor had changed the face of the whole world with evil intent, the water meadows in late spring, richly green from the winter flooding, with promise of yellow iris, forget-me-not, and the scent of wild mint crushed as one walked, with dog-roses and meadow-sweet to come, had been part of one’s life at Hatch End. To-day, when a war against the powers of darkness was well into its sixth year, when the older people were living valiantly with tiredness and even hopelessness as their constant companions, when even the young were wondering if anything really mattered or if one might as well gamble away all one had, a chill spring wind was battering the reeds along the water channels and turning the leaves of the aspens till everything looked as grey as steel, and even the waters were wrinkled with cold, while depressed cows stood with their patient backs to the blast and chewed without enthusiasm.

  “Filthy it all looks,” said George Halliday.

  “Perfectly foul,” said Sylvia Halliday. “Come on. If we get Hubback’s fish in time, we might go up to Bolder’s Knob before lunch.”

  George knew that a visit to the village made anything else, especially a two mile walk each way, or two and a half if you kept to Gundric’s Fossway and didn’t cut up by the chalk quarry, quite out of the question. And he knew that his sister knew this as well as he did and was only playing the game, by now so threadbare and boring, of making the best of things, or looking on the bright side of them; though no side seemed to him brighter or better than any other side, all being pretty dull and depressing. But it was no good talking about these things, so he and Sylvia went down the sloping drive to the road. At the gate they paused, a habit formed in their childhood when to go out onto the road without looking might mean sudden death, not only in the imagination of their nurses, but in the sad fact of the nursery dog who rushed joyfully down the drive and straight under a motor coach of the Southbridge United Viator Passenger Coy., which should never have been allowed to use the narrow Old Road with its sudden ups and downs, its twists and turns. But for a long time no motor coaches had come along the Old Road, no tradesmen’s vans came out from Barchester. An occasional convoy that had lost its way in Barsetshire lanes, or coming over the downs, would bump and rattle past in the early hours of the morning, or a car marked Red Cross, W.V.S. or Doctor would pass the gates, but for the most part the road was deserted except for bicycles, and even they avoided it if possible, for there were some hills, notably the hill with the sudden turn in it going down from Hatch House Farm to Nether Hatch, which not even bad little boys could force a bicycle up, let them stand first on one pedal and then on the other as they would. Jimmy Panter, an extremely bad little boy, grandson of Mrs. Hubback at The Shop, had several times ridden down it, but only by keeping both hobnailed feet firmly on the tyre of the front wheel (whose mudguard he had long ago broken and lost) so ripping the tyre to pieces and getting a good thrashing from his father, Mr. Halliday’s carter Panter, who had lost an arm in Ypres salient beside his master, but could handle horses as well as any man in the neighbourhood.

  Without further words George and his sister walked a hundred yards or so to where a narrow road, carried high on stone arches, spanned the water meadows above the reach of any floods. The older wooden bridge which had been there since time immemorial (or in other words since 1721, the year in which Hatch House was built by one of Mr. Halliday’s ancestors, Wm. Halliday, Gent., who had a passion for building and had married a young lady of property), was carried away in the great flood of 1863 when the waters of the Rising got entirely out of hand and the two sides of the river were completely cut off from one another for seven or eight miles, and a jackass was found in a willow tree, unhurt, but extremely difficult to extricate. The New Bridge, as it is still called, was built by the sixth Earl of Pomfret at his own expense; the seventh earl, as we have before mentioned, had the water channels, sluices and hatches put into proper order, and no modern child has ever had the pleasure of seeing a proper flood, though after heavy snowfall or rainfall with the wind blowing upstream the water sometimes laps right over the road at Hatch End and into any cottages that are below road level.

  As George and Sylvia walked across the bridge, feeling cross, and also annoyed with themselves for being cross, their attention was agreeably distracted by the sight of Mr. Scatcherd, sitting on a camp stool like a real artist in the shelter of one of the arches, his feet on a bit of linoleum, industriously sketching. Moved by a common impulse they stopped, leaned their elbows on the parapet, and entered upon the countryman’s eternal job of looking at other people working.

  Mr. Middleton of Laverings, who being an architect was supposed by such of the county as ever thought about art to be an authority on it, had once said that Mr. Scatcherd was a museum piece and ought to be preserved in a glass case in the Barchester Museum as a type of Late Nineteenth Century Artist. To his contemporaries this was quite clear. To George and Sylvia it would have meant very little, as indeed it would to most of their contemporaries, had they not been brought up in a home which possessed a complete set of Punch. This series showed with most other complete sets the peculiarity of having several volumes missing, but the years between 1870 and 1896 were in perfect condition and from them the young Hallidays had been able to reconstruct a good deal of England’s Lost Civilisation.

  Mr. Scatcherd was indeed a remarkable relic of the past, or of a conglomeration of pasts. His Norfolk jacket with belt, his knickerbockers buttoning below the knee, his deerstalker hat with several flies stuck in it, would alone have been enough to mark him as different from other men. When to these we add a silken scarf passed through a kind of flat ring, in itself a monument of antiquity, a drooping walrus moustache, and in bad weather a heavy tweed Inverness cape, or, hardly expecting to be
believed, mention the green veil with which he swathed his battered Panama in the summer against midges, it will at once be realised that Hatch End was highly privileged. And Hatch End was worthy of its privileges. Real R.A.’s had come over to Hatch End from one or other of the big houses, and setting up an easel had roughed in an oil sketch later to be expanded to thirty square feet of canvas called “The Rising Valley from Hatch End.” Artists of more promise than fame had made oil sketches apparently through sepia-coloured glasses and shown them at the Set of Five exhibition held in a room off Tottenham Court Road, as “The Rising Valley at Hatch End.” Other artists of a good deal more fame than promise had done pen and ink sketches with a livid wash of black and yellow called “Hatch End: Rising Valley.” Julian Rivers, who had been unwillingly absorbed by the Army, and been rescued from it as being an artist of National Importance by people who ought to have known better, had made a picture of Hatch End and the river valley from old Tube tickets and some blotting-paper from the Red Tape and Sealing Wax Office given to him by Geoffrey Harvey and called it derisively “What we are fighting for.” But as no one except his mother and a girl in trousers who thought she was in love with him came to the exhibition, the derision was quite wasted.

  Hatch End had watched all those gentlemen at work, and thought poorly of their efforts, partly because they did the job that quick it didn’t seem it could be any good like, partly because they did not sit for hours in or outside the Mellings Arms, slowly drinking what beer there was to be got and saying nothing, which everyone knows is the way to paint pictures, drive a cart, shoe a horse, or even mend a car. But Mr. Scatcherd, ah, there was a man as studied what he was doing. Slow and sure, that was the way Mr. Scatcherd worked, and you could see his pictures at The Shop any day. And it stood to reason, said Mrs. Hubback at The Shop, that if a gentleman hadn’t got Wellingtons, nasty things they were, too and drew the feet, the next best was to put an old bit of lino under his boots.

  “Good-morning, Mr. Scatcherd,” said Sylvia from the bridge.

  Mr. Scatcherd looked up and courteously removed his deerstalker.

  “Good-morning to you, Miss Sylvia,” he replied. “You see me wooing Nature as of old.”

  “George is on leave,” said Sylvia. “Can we come and look?”

  Without waiting for permission she climbed down from the bridge, followed by George, and went through the rushes to Mr. Scatcherd’s arch.

  “You will excuse me getting up, or rather not getting up, I am sure,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “Everything falls down if I do. This is merely an idea, a very rough idea as yet.”

  “It’s awfully nice,” said Sylvia, looking at his sketch-block, upon which she distinctly recognised the course of the Rising among a lot of criss-cross scratchings that were obviously reeds and bulrushes.

  “I am delighted that it gives you satisfaction,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “I always do my best to oblige. You notice of course the focal point of the trifling sketch.”

  Neither George nor Sylvia had noticed it, nor could they see anything which to them looked more focal than anything else, unless it were a bulrush which rose rather more proudly than its fellows. George said would Mr. Scatcherd explain exactly the idea that lay behind it, and Sylvia looked admiringly at him.

  “Now, that is an article that very few people realise the value of,” said Mr. Scatcherd, evidently gratified. “When I make up my mental accounts—you follow me in this?—” Sylvia and George said with one untruthful voice that they did—“ I put to the credit side those members of the public who understand what lies behind a sketch. For it is not so much what I put onto the paper, if you follow me, as the mental conception of what I am driving at. And here I think I have summed up Everything.”

  Sylvia said it was quite wonderful. George said it was much better than a lot of exhibitions he’d seen in London, and anyway he didn’t understand art much, and he thought they ought to be getting on as they had to fetch the fish and get some beer.

  “Vidler hasn’t been round yet,” said Mr. Scatcherd, shedding the artist and suddenly becoming extremely practical. “I see every single thing that passes on the road. And the Arms ran out of beer last night.”

  “Good Lord!” said George. “Are you sure?”

  “Fack,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “But there is another line I might suggest. If you and Miss Sylvia come up to Rokeby I’ll show you my latest sketches and my niece will give you some parsnip wine. She made it last year and it’s about ready to blow the jar up. You can see Vidler’s van from the house.”

  So depressed were George and Sylvia by the weather and the thought of his twenty-eight days’ leave, of which there were only twenty-six left to run, that they accepted with gratitude an offer which in better times they would have declined. Mr. Scatcherd packed his drawing materials into a black-japanned box, put the box, the piece of linoleum and the camp stool into a suit case and led the way along the trodden path, with flagstones at regular intervals, through the rushes, up to the road. Here they turned to the left and walked along the village street for about a quarter of a mile to where on a little hillock stood Rokeby, with a commanding view of the road along which they had come.

  Rokeby itself had good foundations and a damp course, but otherwise there was little to be said in its favour. It had been built by a Barchester contractor to house his old mother and it was his boast that the bricks were a bargain. Which indeed they doubtless were, but a very uncompromising one, being of purplish-red colour with flecks of black, like a very nasty German sausage. Its proportions were bad, its slate roof at an abominable pitch, its chocolate coloured woodwork tastefully relieved with coffee-colour quite revolting, and the meanness of its interior a perfect triumph of what Mr. Middleton called Builder’s Joy. Its only redeeming feature, and that a feature which appealed more to romantic youth than to any possible tenant, was a couple of pretence windows on what hardly looked high enough to be the first floor, very small, with black panes and white woodwork, popularly supposed to mask a secret chamber with a corpse in it. In vain had the Barchester Society of Antiquaries, the S.P.A.B., the Georgian Society protested. In vain had the Dean gone to London and spoken to the editor of the Jupiter. In vain had Lord Stoke offered several times to buy the site (reputed on no grounds at all to be a British tumulus) and present it to the National Trust. The Barchester contractor, by name Stringer and of a foxy nature, said if all those societies and whatsisnames wanted that bit of ground, it stood to reason there was something up their sleeves and he was as good a man as another and so was his money and if Hatch End didn’t like Rokeby they could lump it.

  But judgment fell upon Mr. Stringer, for just as the house was finishing, he lost all his money owing to conceited and ill-advised speculation and had to go and live with his old mother, who never stopped letting him know what she thought of him and outlived him by three triumphant weeks. So the house was sold and Mr. Scatcherd at Northbridge, the present proprietor of Scatcherd’s Stores, Est: 1824, bought Rokeby cheap as an investment. And as he was a kindly man, he let his ne’er-do-well brother (for so he considered one who had been brought up to the grocery trade and abandoned it to draw a lot of silly stuff), Mr. Scatcherd the artist live there at a nominal rent, sending his eldest daughter Hettie to keep house for her uncle. If anyone thinks this last was an act of pure kindness, it was not, for Mr. Scatcherd the grocer’s eldest unmarried daughter though an excellent housekeeper had a very bad temper. But it all worked very well, for Mr. Scatcherd the artist, who had once spent a week in nervous sin in a cheap hotel at Boulogne, always countered his niece’s outburst by telling her how much worse the French Madams were, and so long as he got his meals regular women’s whims meant nothing to him. So Hettie got his meals regularly and blew off most of her steam in chapel, where she was reputed to have a powerful gift.

  Some of this interesting story was known to the young Hallidays, though like most young they took their elders of every station very much for granted and made no enquiries, shying
away from any uncomfortable situations as they arose. But they had never been inside Rokeby before and were rather excited.

  “One moment, Miss Halliday,” said Mr. Scatcherd, remembering just in time that he was an Artist, and as such entitled to meet the Squire’s daughter socially on equal terms, instead of merely saying Miss. “I will deal with the front door. If you and Mr. Halliday would just step back, off the doorstep—”

  Obediently the young Hallidays retreated onto a woven wire mat, in which white marbles forming the word POKFRY were embedded, the tail of the R and the bottom of the E and B having been shaken by the furniture men from Northbridge dropping a large wardrobe on them and the loosened marbles having been subsequently extracted by the careful fingers of the Hatch End school children. Mr. Scatcherd, under their fascinated gaze, took a large key from the pocket of his Norfolk jacket, blew into it, saying briefly “India-rubber; it’s a wonder how many crumbs it makes,” and unlocked the door. It was then that the Hallidays realised the wisdom of Mr. Scatcherd’s advice, for the door opened outwards, and would have knocked them down had they remained on the wire mat. Almost directly inside the front door a box staircase went up to the top storey, with an exiguous doorway on each side of it, just inside the house.

  “Parver as you see,” said Mr. Scatcherd, “but extremely apter. Mind the bottom step, Miss Halliday, and you’ll get into the best sitting-room nicely.”

  His guests, edging round the bottom step, inserted themselves into a sitting-room as cold and cheerless as every proper best sitting-room should be.

  “Hettie doesn’t like me to use this room except on Christmas Day,” said Mr. Scatcherd. “Come into the Studio.”