Peace Breaks Out Read online

  “Since you enquire, sir,” began Mr. Scatcherd, which beginning annoyed him very much, for although he knew that his position as an artist made him the equal of any man, his early training in his father’s old-established grocery business had implanted in him the habit of addressing everyone as a respected customer. “Since you do enquire, Mr. Leslie,” he continued, though slightly uncomfortable about the whole thing, “I am just roughing in an idea. Ideas come to we artists and we must catch them ere they fly.”

  David said that was a jolly good idea and might he look.

  “Only an idea, as I may say,” said Mr. Scatcherd, holding his drawing-book at arm’s length and squinting at it with his head on one side. “But still—an idea.”

  David without much interest looked at the drawing. As it bore a paralytic likeness to a three-story building with the words THE MELLING ARMS below the first floor windows, he felt safe in guessing that it was a portrait of the village inn, and loudly admired it.

  “Just an idea,” said Mr. Scatcherd, with the air of bringing out a striking and original thought. “And by the way, Mr. Leslie, could you mention to her ladyship that the views she was good enough to order are practically completed and I shall have the pleasure of delivering them well in time for the Sale.”

  “I didn’t know my mamma was an art-patron,” said David.

  “It is Lady Graham to whom I relude,” said Mr. Scatcherd.

  “So sorry. I thought you meant mamma,” said David. “One never knows what she will do next. But if she wanted a picture she’d probably paint it herself with one of the children’s paint-boxes on the dining-room tablecloth.”

  Mr. Scatcherd did not at once reply, for he was slightly at a loss. In common with a good many other people he felt that to say Lady Emily savoured of over-familiarity, though he knew that to say Lady Leslie would be socially incorrect. He also knew that an artist was the equal of kings and princes, though unfortunately there were no emperors to pick up one’s paint-brush, unless it were the Emperor of Abyssinia who was however in the sad position of not being a member of the Church of England and therefore not a real Emperor; but in spite of this knowledge his early upbringing had made him speak of Lady Graham as her ladyship and now there was a muddle.

  “Well,” said David, already bored, “I must be going. I’ll tell my sister about the pictures. You must get a lot of work done now the days are so long.”

  “Ah, well you may say so, Mr. Leslie,” said Mr. Scatcherd, gratified by this tribute to his gift. “But though the days are long, ars is longer.”

  With which application of an old tag he resumed his work and David passed on. For twopence he would have gone back to Holdings, taken out his car, driven up to London and found some friends to talk shop with. But duty bade him stay out his visit to Holdings with his mother and sister to whom he was genuinely devoted in his own fashion, and some rather bitter though perfunctory self-examination told him that he would be just as bored in London with his R.A.F. friends. There was no twopence that anyone could offer him which seemed worth the taking.

  “And a nice state of things for a young man of thirty-seven who is probably going a bit bald on the top, though thank heaven very few of the girls are tall enough to see it,” he remarked to himself, and turned aimlessly to the right onto the long bridge over the water-meadows. When he got as far as the river he leaned his arms on the stone parapet and contemplated suicide. But the Rising was shallow under the bridge, with a gravelly bottom, and the prospects were not good. Just then a pleasant trit-trot struck his ear. He turned and saw a pony-cart coming down the road at a brisk pace, containing Mrs. Halliday and two young women. Mrs. Halliday pulled the pony up and called to David.

  “I haven’t seen you this leave, David,” she said. “Keep still, Brisket. Come back to tea with us.”

  David, with a charming air of attention, rapidly considered the rival chances of being bored at Hatch House or Holdings. Why not Hatch House? The girls looked personable.

  “Sylvia is on leave,” said Mrs. Halliday. “Will you keep quiet, Brisket. And we’ve got Anne for the week-end. Jump in.”

  “I’ll walk up,” said David, not relishing the thought of sitting among so many legs and a good many miscellaneous parcels and pieces of luggage.

  “Right,” said Mrs. Halliday. “Get on, Brisket.”

  The pony trotted off and David followed. By the time he got to Hatch House Brisket was unharnessed and his passengers were in the drawing-room.

  “Good Lord!” said David. “When you said Sylvia I must have been mad. I didn’t see who it was. I was looking at the minnows and rather envying them. How long is it since I saw you, Sylvia?”

  “The whole of the war, I think,” said Sylvia.

  David looked at her and approved. The rather staid uninteresting schoolgirl he remembered had become a very good-looking young woman, tall, with easy movements, good legs, he noticed, shining fair hair and a very attractive face. A relief, if only temporary, from boredom.

  “And do you know Anne Fielding,” said Mrs. Halliday. “She is here for the weekend and you are taking them all over to Rushwater to-morrow, aren’t you? George will be in for tea. He is on leave too, so lucky. And I hope my husband will be back soon. He went over to Pomfret Towers about a tractor.”

  And even as she spoke George came in from helping Caxton with the two-handed saw down at the wood-pile, and Mr. Halliday was seen riding past the windows and shortly came in by the back way. And in the middle of a family hubbub and an exchanging of news, Miss Anne Fielding felt a little out of it. So she sat in the window seat and looked at last week but one’s Country Life passed on from Holdings via the Vicarage by courtesy of the bread every Tuesday. The first time she had seen David Leslie was in the dark; at least it was almost dark in the Deanery hall with all that panelling and the fanlight blacked out. Now she could see him much better. People weren’t usually like what you thought they were like. She had not imagined David Leslie like that; but already she had forgotten what her imagining of him had been. When she saw him standing on the bridge she had no idea that it was David Leslie. She had thought he would look older, or perhaps younger, at any rate quite different. It was all rather confusing. But if she went on reading Country Life she would be safe and no one would talk to her. Then Hubback brought tea in with the air of a British captive princess walking in a Roman triumph and she had to join the party.

  It was all rather noisy and overpowering to Anne until Mr. Halliday, who had very strong ideas about the duties of a landowner abroad and a host at home, saw that the Fielding child looked shy and rather out of it. So he brought his cup of tea to the little sofa where she was sitting and told her about his visit to Pomfret Towers and how he hoped to get a tractor over sometime; and Anne, who was a very good audience, listened in a flattering way and repeated something she had heard Sir Edmund Pridham say about a tractor at Brandon Abbey. Upon this Mr. Halliday at once classified her in his mind as a nice, sensible little thing and his opinion of her rose yet further when he discovered that she held very sound views on the cultivation of sweet peas.

  “Daddy is very fond of gardening,” said Anne. “And when I wasn’t well and stopped going to school and had a governess at Hallbury, daddy used to garden every week-end and I helped him. If anyone tied the sweet peas up the wrong way he was simply furious.”

  “His sweet peas have beaten mine at every Barchester Flower Show,” said Mr. Halliday sadly. “We haven’t the soil here—nor the labour.”

  Then they fell to talking about soils and aspects, and Mrs. Halliday, sitting back behind the tea-tray watching her party, was pleased that the little Fielding girl was making herself agreeable to Leonard, who didn’t have many people to talk to now except on his endless committees. An attractive child, but in a quiet way, not to be compared with her tall beautiful Viking Sylvia; or whatever the female of Viking was. And then a louder noise from the other side of the table roused her from her reflections.

  The noise
was David and Sylvia who had just made the discovery that they were both non-flying members of the Air Force and had many common acquaintances such as Piggy Hopgood and Tommy Bell and old Chumps Macdougal.

  “I ought to have guessed at once,” said David, “when I saw you towering over the pony-cart like the Winged Victory only with a better attempt at a head. But I simply thought you were a girl.”

  “Well, I might have known you,” said Sylvia, “only I wasn’t thinking about you, and you know the way you don’t expect to see people unless you do.”

  David said he fully appreciated the fine nuances implied by her remark, though that, he said, was more due to his own unusual intuitive powers than to her way of putting it. And then George and David discovered that they had both been at the same aerodrome in 1942.

  “Our lot were at the sham aerodrome,” said George. “The idea was that the Germans would bomb the fake one and kill us, while you chaps went on having hot baths and double rations of everything. Lord! how we hated you.”

  “Don’t blame me,” said David. “I was only a parasite. I haven’t the faintest idea how to fly. I got flown about on jobs like a kind of superior typist. Well, thank God it can’t go on much longer now.”

  A rash statement to make, though millions of people were thinking much the same thing. A loud and ignorant discussion followed on the alarming probability of peace breaking out and how ghastly it would be, just as we had got really used to the war.

  “The only way of really finding out when peace is coming,” said Sylvia, “is to have a talk with the baker. He is Hubback’s uncle and if he sees peace coming he’ll make extra bread the day before and shut up the shop.”

  “But how will he know?” said David.

  “He just does,” said George. “He’s the sort of person that knows when Easter will be. A man who knows that knows anything.”

  “If only peace meant being demobbed,” said Sylvia. “And anyway what’s the good of saying peace with all those ghastly Japs about.”

  “And what will we do with peace when it does break out?” said George. “I mean, as long as the war’s on you know where you are. I might get my majority with luck in a few months, but of course peace would come and muck it all up.”

  “I shall simply turn into a gilded butterfly of uncertain age,” said David gloomily. “I sometimes think I’d better go to South America. I’ve got some land there and some of the Rushwater bulls that went out before the war. I might raise prize cattle and wed a savage woman and she should bear my dusky race, and the fatter she got the more diamond necklaces I’d give her. My nephew Martin is going to get the Rushwater herd going again and Agnes’s eldest girl wants to join him. It’s all a black look-out.”

  So quiet did the three young people become as they reflected upon the dangers and horrors of peace that Anne was suddenly startled to hear her own voice talking to Mr. Halliday about politics, though the politics went no deeper than the information that when there was the next General Election Daddy was going to stand for Barchester.

  There was no need for her to add that her father was standing as a Conservative, for that was the only thing the people one knew did stand for, unless it was a few queer ones like Lord Bond who was a Liberal and anyway being a peer merely sat, or that very trying boy of Hermione Rivers’s who was an artist and called himself Common Wealth.

  “Silly name anyway,” said Mr. Halliday. “Why stop to take breath in the middle? There’s one point about those fellows though. They seem to manage to shove their properties off onto the National Trust and go on living there just the same. It’s worth considering with Taxes what they are.”

  “Nonsense, Leonard,” said his wife. “You know you’d hate to have people walking past the house all the time or having a Youth Hostel in half of it.”

  George said that the National Trust would jump at Bolder’s Knob and that bit of Gundric’s Fossway, but as far as he was concerned he would have man-traps and spring guns if he saw a Youth Hostel anywhere. The younger members, to whom David seemed to belong though considerably older than the others, then made plans for nationalising all the houses of the people they didn’t like, and Anne, emboldened by her talk with Mr. Halliday, said she would turn the Palace into an almshouse for old clergymen and their wives and make the Bishop clean the boots and knives in his apron and the Bishop’s wife and Miss Pettinger could be scullery maids. This suggestion went down very well and George felt a certain respect for a girl who could think of such sensible things.

  “What would be so awful for them,” said Anne, “would be that they would be eating all the time, because scullery maids are always having cups of nice tea and elevenses all day long. And as they are rather conceited about how little they eat and it doesn’t matter if it is nicely cooked or not, it would be a great mortification.”

  Finding that everyone was listening to her, she suddenly went pink and became shy again.

  “If you don’t mind,” said David, addressing her directly for the first time, “I’ll have the Bishop and Bishopess at Pomfret Towers. Sally can never get decent servants and a Bishop wouldn’t look bad as a butler. His wife could be under-nurse. Their Nannie would knock the spirit out of any helper in a fortnight.”

  Then David, restless again, said he must be going, but Sylvia said he must come up to Bolder’s Knob first, because Anne hadn’t seen it.

  David, scenting boredom, said he ought to be getting back to Holdings.

  “Don’t be silly, David,” said Sylvia, her eyes almost on a level with David’s as she faced him. “Come on.”

  Slightly awed by this handsome and probably muscular young Amazon, David said he had so often heard Bolder’s Knob discussed at Holdings that he had made a vow never to go there. If however his presence, as he gathered from Sylvia’s very illogical remarks, was somehow necessary to enable Miss Fielding to see that historic landmark, far be it from him to be a spoilsport.

  “It’s not Miss Fielding, it’s Anne,” said Sylvia. “Come on.”

  So the four younger people set off up Gundric’s Fossway, the chalk track that skirted Mr. Halliday’s property and mounted the downs to where the steep green hump, once probably dedicated to Baldur, but for many centuries known as Bolder’s Knob, rose abruptly. The last ten minutes were fairly stiff going. Sylvia forged ahead. David, just to show that he could do it if he liked, outstripped Sylvia and kindly offered her a hand from above for the final scramble.

  “How slow those two are,” said Sylvia looking down.

  Anne, not so violently robust as Sylvia, was mounting the track at a more sober pace. George, who had a very sacred feeling that by helping any woman (except his mother and sister, and his aunts and grandmother) he was somehow honouring Lady Graham, asked Anne if she felt tired.

  “Oh no, thank you,” said Anne. “It’s only that I can’t walk as fast as Sylvia. She has such long legs.”

  “Showing off,” said George briefly. “I say, are you sure you aren’t tired?”

  But Anne said, quite truthfully, that she was enjoying it, and in a few moments they had joined the others on the summit of the Knob. The cold wind had dropped and there was a promise of milder weather in the air. Round them lay Barsetshire, as lovely a county as any. To the north and east the downs encircled them; Humpback Ridge, the Great Hump, Fish Hill with its stone pines, the Plumstead water tower looking romantic at a distance. To the south and west the downs melted into river valleys, water-meadows, cornland and the low pasture lands. A group of pylons far away looked like minarets.

  “What a heavenly evening,” said Sylvia.

  “Just as you like,” said David, “but it’s really only four o’clock in the afternoon by real time. Or do I mean eight?” he added anxiously.

  There was a tense silence while everyone tried to think.

  “Listen!” said Anne suddenly.

  Borne up the Rising valley came four notes from a bell.

  “Good Lord!” said George. “I thought we had tea ages ago.” />
  “It’s all right,” said Anne. “That was the cathedral. They can’t alter the clock because it would burst, or at least Canon Thorne said it would and he knows more about the clock than anybody. The Bishop wanted to have it altered for Double Summer Time, but of course the Dean said he couldn’t possibly allow it, so it goes on telling the right time.

  “But it isn’t the right time,” said George indignantly. “It said four, and it’s six now. Oh! I see what you mean. It’s right by the right time. Well anyway when peace comes the Dean will be able to laugh at the Bishop.

  This seemed so funny to George and Sylvia and Anne that David felt he must laugh too. Then they all went down the Fossway again and through the garden where Mr. Halliday was hard at work in the potting shed. Anne asked rather timidly if she might help.

  “I really must go back now,” said David, fearing that he might be asked to pot something, or be set to a kind of stepmother’s task of sifting earth. “Lunch one o’clock to-morrow at Holdings. Good-bye, sir. Good-bye.”

  This last good-bye was addressed to Anne, whose Christian name he had not yet used, a fact which he noted to his own surprise.

  “Oh, good-bye, Mr. Leslie,” said Anne.

  “It’s not Mr. Leslie, it’s David,” said Sylvia. “Come on, David.”

  Anne hoped she had not been rude and smiled at David. Mr. Halliday, reverently disentangling some thin straggling fibres from a ball of mould, happened to look up and thought Fielding’s girl wasn’t at all bad-looking when you came to know her. David went off with the young Hallidays, said good-bye to Mrs. Halliday, and walked back by the other path which crossed the Rising where it flowed past the garden at Holdings. As he wrestled with the little iron gate, its bars bent, its hinges loose where many children had climbed and swung on it when nurse’s eye was off them, he thought with disapproval of his own behaviour. He had suddenly, for no reason at all, been gauche; a quality for which he had a special contempt. That Fielding girl seemed a shy creature, not really his kind, but she had somehow disturbed his self-possession. This thought pursued him at intervals during dinner, so he exerted himself to be particularly charming, just to show the thought that it was having no effect on him at all.