Chapter VII: Part III: “arcadia--More or Less” (2)

Waiting for her at Parc Gooth was a letter from Miss Roberts--“Gums” of her schoolroom days, and now installed with Grace and Stanley Watson at “Merlin’s Isle” (late “The Kopje”)--to be governess to Honor Rose, aged eleven, and to Honor Rose’s three little sisters, Lucy Ann, Freda and Belphoebe, nine, seven and five years old respectively, their ages diminishing with as compact a fit as a nest of tables, one within the other. The letter was full of chirpy gossip, such as: “Lottie has been staying with us for a fortnight; she is such a good auntie to the little girls and so helpful; I think Lottie has a beautiful character.” And: “Your mother and Aunt Lavvy went up to London last Saturday to have tea with Hal in his new chambers. I think that quite soon we shall have some interesting news to tell you about that young man!”

She looked with bright bird-like eyes upon Ursula’s affairs, determined to find them very good: “How lovely for you, Ursula dear, to be living a peaceful rural life with your husband. I am sure it is healthy; after all, what could be more invigorating than Nature. We are all expecting cream and butter and eggs from you as soon as they begin to lay well. The society of the quaint rustics must make you long to write a book about them. Don’t be proud, dear, but go about among them and share their joys and sorrows as though you were one of themselves; teach them--tactfully, of course--all you can about hygiene and the first care of babies; and I am sure that in time you will learn to love these simple folk....”

Ursula’s smile held more irony than genuine merriment.

There would always be trustful, credulous people like Doug and herself, like Miss Roberts, like the late Frankie Davis and the Allingham-Joneses and Mr. Gregory Loftus and his daughters, who left the gritty evil of towns behind them, intending to nestle closer to Nature, in the uncomplicated country amongst those quaint rustics.... Those same rustics who, a few years later, watching the broken, penniless procession wending their way back again to the towns, might murmur perhaps, with kindly, if contemptuous affection: “One learns to love these simple folk....”

[X]

JUNE 24th ended their tenancy at Parc Gooth; and the problem of its disposal was still unsettled the day before the Barrisons moved their belongings into Grey Stone, preparatory to moving in themselves the following morning. They had spent a day at St. Pol buying furniture; and the motor-van duly arrived on the morning of the 23rd, and halted a quarter of a mile away from the cottage, which was as near as the highway touched. Doug had collected two serfs to help him carry the pieces from the van across the rough ground to the house; Henry Endellion, a burly, grizzled gardener-fisherman, with a perpetual smile puckering his good-tempered features; and Jo Percy Jeyne, fisherman-gardener, and sexton and water-carrier in his spare time, a solemn anxious little old man, gnarled with the years. The van-men unloaded at the cross-roads, but refused to do any carrying; and the rain striped heavily on the comically absorbed trio, Doug and Endellion and Jo Percy Jeyne, who, with sacking over their shoulders, and maintaining exactly the same pace and regular distance one from the other, strode and trudged and trotted in Indian file to and fro between the van and Grey Stone. Ursula and Mrs. Endellion--Harry’s wife--stood ready to receive the articles as they were brought in, and to direct their destination; but Doug’s briefly Napoleonic: “My cabin” occurred so often that Ursula gave up her mild attempt to divert the flow of all that was most useful and precious into the small ground-floor room behind the big living-room. After a couple of hours steady work, the empty van drove away, the last splashed and dripping chair was carried in; the rain stopped; and the stolid children from the cove who had been lurking all the morning among the bushes near the house, some hiding, some claiming bold-eyed their right to satisfy curiosity, now scampered back to St. Miniot to report to their mothers exactly what the Barrisons had bought at St. Pol, and how many rugs, mattresses, saucepans and teacups they possessed.

“Thank you, my men!” said Doug, dismissing his serfs in what Ursula termed his most hearty “leggings-and-landowner” voice. “Here’s something to drink my health in!”

To which Endellion and Jo Percy Jeyne, to remain strictly in character, ought to have responded with: “Three cheers fur t’squoire!” and danced off left and right, to the ivied inn. Reality, however, prompted them to remain, and separately and argumentatively point out that five shillings was not enough pay for a full morning’s heavy work....

“I’m enjoying this,” Doug remarked, sitting on a packing-case and biting at a cold pasty Mrs. Endellion had brought him. “Aren’t you, Teddy?”

“No. Not a bit. I feel like somebody in _Funny Chips_.... Presently you’ll try and hang a picture up, and hit your thumb.”

“Why, my dear old kid, I once chopped half a finger off, rigging up a store-hut in a blizzard!” Doug laughed boisterously at the recollection.

“I’m sure you did.... I’ve got a sort of creepy suspicion that the Abbotts are going to turn up at Parc Gooth for the night.”

“What if they do? Abbott’s a plausible old rogue--simply dripping with humbug. I like him awfully.”

“Do you think he had a right to sell his lease to Wenn? Or ought we to have let the Allingham-Joneses look over the place?--but then there was Miss Gregson’s telegram....” Ursula’s eyes brooded in deep shadow. “And Wright said.... Oh, I hate it all!”

“Nothing to do with us. Why should you hate it? Women----”

“Doug, a woman is _never_ just women----”

“----always get cross, moving,” finished Doug, who, never cross or snappish or irritable himself, presented a surface like the wrong sort of matchbox on which these special qualities would not effectively strike. “Come on, Teddy, be a sport, and help me with my cabin,” he concluded, at his last mouthful of pasty. He leaped to his feet, and jumped over an oak chest and part of a dresser, which happened to be blocking his way.

By tea-time, his cabin was in beautiful order and ready for occupation.

“Do you think we might spare a few minutes now for the other rooms?” Ursula suggested petulantly.

But Doug was occupied in lining the drawers of his desk with paper; he announced, absently, that the job would take him some time, and after that, of course, he must give his tools a rub up before stowing them away in the oak chest which he was going to bring down from their bedroom after all....

“Yes,” said Ursula. “I’m going home.”

He nodded, absorbed, breathing very hard; his hair was tousled and his bare knees dirty and bruised. Ursula told Mrs. Endellion to rouse him in a couple of hours, to lock up; and went.

[XI]

A SEA fog had crept up after the sting of hot sunshine which followed the rain, and stifled it. When Ursula had walked a few paces from Grey Stone, the solid world was melted to clammy vapour. The siren at Polpinnock Head was emitting at regular intervals a sound comparable to that of a wolf in Northern Canada who, after four months’ winter starvation, smells faintly his first caribou, and then discovers he has a stiff leg. Ursula slipped along, huddling her mind against the wraiths of dreariness and fear. The invisible sea fell back from the rocks below with a sulky gurgle and suck.

Nearing the village, she heard occasional steps around her, and once or twice a foolish laugh ... and all the while, like a forlorn child, she was repeating to herself, “I want to run away--oh, I _do_ want to run away,” till the very rhythm of the phrase soothed her.

Parc Gooth seemed full of angry people. The Abbotts’ jingle stood outside; and within, the Abbotts were backing the claims of a melancholy veteran with a long beard and an American accent, against Tody, whose mysterious other Todys were rapidly multiplying in his speech. The Allingham-Joneses had penetrated to upstairs, and were critically investigating the bedrooms. And two telegrams addressed to Barrison, and signed Lacey, announced that Major Allingham-Jones was by signed agreement the next in succession at Parc Gooth, after June 24th. Bewildered by the sudden clamour and rivalry, on top of her silent walk from Grey Stone, Ursula went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Tody respectfully murmured: “I can’t get tea till Mr. Wenn comes out o’ the pantry, please madam, if you don’t mind!”

“Are they here yet?” stammered Wenn in answer to Ursula’s mocking inquiries.

“Quite a lot of people are here. Can I send anybody to interview you? The bearded gentleman, for instance----”

“That’s Mr. Van Lou, what I’m letting this place to,” Wenn explained truculently. “No”--with a cautious drop in his tone--“it’s Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian that I don’t want to see. They were up tu Wright’s at noon--tes all over the village that they’m back again. And I don’t like ’em, Mrs. Barrison.”

Ursula shrugged her shoulders. Then, as her ear caught an unfamiliar note in the added hubbub in the hall, she suggested mischievously: “Come out and tell them so. Here they are, back in their old home....”

Wenn shrank limply against the wall. His knees gave. “It’s none o’ my business, letting this house. You’ll tell them so, Mrs. Barrison? If Abbott sells his lease to me, then Abbott’s my landlord, and there’s no need for me to talk to any one else about it. I’m best where I am, minding my own business without interfering....”

“You’re a blustering coward without even the courage of your own villainies,” Ursula sweetly informed him, losing in that one minute all dread of Wenn as a sinister personage. “If any one asks me, I shall say you’re hiding in the pantry.” And she left him.

In the hall, a broad-shouldered woman with cropped grey hair and sturdy features was abusing Mrs. Abbott, whose frequent titters were eerily at variance with her wizened miserable expression. A supple, olive-skinned man lounged gracefully against the balustrade beside them. His vague sweet smile embraced all humanity.

“How do you do, Mrs----” Ursula stopped short, for though she had constantly heard the pair referred to, like a performing troupe, as “Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian,” she had no idea of Miss Gregson’s married name.

“How do you do. You, of course, are Mrs. Barrison. Whose house is this?”

“Mine.” Miss Gregson triumphantly answered her own question before Ursula or Mrs. Abbott had time to offer an opinion.

“Most kindly,” interposed Mr. Abbott, “we took it off your hands on a seven years’ lease, when--ah--an unpopular marriage decided you to quit the neighbourhood.”

The Eye-talian beamed.

“I didn’t decide. We were kicked out,” Miss Gregson said bluntly. “I’ve not had any rent from you yet--that’s my trouble.”

“And _I_ have not had any rent from the Laceys, to whom I sub-let it for three years, because, owing to alien interference, they sent the rent straight to you, to whom it was not due ... I’m mentioning no names,” finished Mrs. Abbott with a sardonic salute to the absent Mr. Wright.

“And pray, to whom did _you_ pay the rent?” the Oliver-Cromwellian lady demanded of Ursula, who bowed her small gold head reverently and replied: “To God ...” and then ran with swift step upstairs, pursued by Abbott’s fat chuckle. She found Major Allingham-Jones minutely interested in the furnishings of her bedroom.

“Are those duns downstairs?” he snapped inquisitively. “D’you owe ’em money? Can’t you get rid of ’em? Who’s the fat fellow? Who’s the Dago draped over the balustrade? Who’s----”

“They are all, more or less, landlords of this house. Perhaps, if you still feel inclined to rent it, you’d do well to consult some of them.”

“But--bless me--my dear young woman--I _have_ rented it. Came to an agreement with Lacey about it, by post, only yesterday. He said he’d wire you. I say, where does your husband keep his clothes, if you stuff up all this chest of drawers with yours? And why his brushes on top? But before you tell me, I’ll just come downstairs and turn these impostors out.”

“Do.” Ursula led the way. Mrs. Allingham-Jones drifted out of Tody’s bedroom, and joined them.

The tide of battle seemed to have rolled out on to the front lawn, where, dim legendary figures swirled about with fog, Tody argued with the American:

“I’m going to live right here, and I’m going to be buried right _here_,” the American stated firmly, indicating his future grave by driving his stick into a portion of the sod directly blocking the entrance to Parc Gooth. And he walked away towards the vegetable garden; Tody, black with grievances, at his heels; Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian, the Abbotts, and Ursula with Major and Mrs. Allingham-Jones, following Tody.

“Tody has his duty to do towards the lady and gentleman, and if aught goes wrong wi’ things it’s Tody’s fault. Tody has nothing against the gentleman, nothing at all, he may be a very nice gentleman, but when Tody’s orders are to let the house to no one but under Mr. Lacey’s written orders, and the gentleman and lady arrive with the letter in their pockets, it isn’t that Tody favours the gentleman and lady any more than this gentleman, but fair’s fair and a promise a promise, leastways when Tody promises----”

“I’ve just taken a fancy to this place.” The American passed like a weary steamroller over Tody’s eloquence and crushed it. “And I’m tired of moving about; I’m going to stay here an’ live here and not shift away from here, and be buried right _here_ ... and again he selected a portion of ground and drove his stick among the lettuces. “Now,” glaring defiantly at the surrounding company, “if any one would care to see my bank-book, or my cheque-book, my letters of credit, and the first half-year’s rent, whatever you like to make it, _down_ in notes, why, I’ve got the lot on me right now.” It was easy to see what had fascinated Wenn in this prospective tenant. “Where’s the guy who’s let me this house? he came here with me, but I haven’t seen his face round, lately.”

“Mr. Wenn is hiding in the pantry,” said Ursula.

“Wenn!” Miss Gregson now became excited. “Wenn’s an old enemy of mine. How did he come to be letting my house?”

“Forgive me--mine,” contradicted Mr. Abbott, flushed but caressingly gentle. “For the next five and a half years, mine.”

Ursula rather admired the old outlaw playing his wits against the multitude. He was not unromantic, in spite of his dingy felt hat pushed to the back of his head, and his wary, mischievous eyes behind their round spectacles. Young dark-bearded captains may have sailed for the Spanish Main with the same spirit of contempt for safe conformity as the Abbotts clambered into their creaking precarious jingle. Thus musing, Ursula missed Miss Gregson’s answering speech, which was a pity, as it summed up in brisk sentences the whole of her past relations with the Abbotts, material and moral, including an account of what she had believed them to be, and what she had since discovered in their overwhelming disfavour.

Suddenly a young Endellion--the village swarmed with them--popped like a goblin from a hole in the fog, handed Ursula yet another telegram, and disappeared again. She read it aloud:

“Allingham-Jones has my authority to occupy Parc Gooth from tomorrow.

“LACEY.”

Silence ... and then a hubbub of mingled expostulation and jubilance broke out. Ursula darted away from conflict, into the house, into the pantry, and seized the cowering Wenn by the arm:

“You’ve got to come out and face it.”

“I--I--ted’n no business of mine.”

“Yes, it is. Your tenant is burying himself all over the garden. Come out.” He stood petrified, but she dragged him along with her....

Nobody in the garden. No human voice. The white mist was clotted densely where Tody and the Major, Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian, the Abbotts and the mournful American, had stood disputing in all languages, three minutes before. All gone. A spell might have broken loose from ancient Cornish magic, and, drifting that way, enchanted them into bramble-bushes. Only the siren at Polpinnock Head still hooted dolorously, and at the high bend of the invisible road, a ghostly jingle rattled on its way.

Wenn sighed with relief: “I’ll be getting along home,” he said, “these damp fogs, they gnaw into my bones.... We fixed that matter up all right, Mrs. Barrison--I like to be friends with everybody....” And he, too, departed.

[XII]

HALF an hour later, Doug returned from Grey Stone.

“My cabin looks top-hole,” he began enthusiastically. “I say, who d’you think’s here? Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian. They’re in the bar-parlour of the ‘Dog and Pilchard,’ lapping up hot whisky as pally as anything with those Allingham-Jones people and a fellow with a long beard and an American twang. I dropped in for a drink on my way home from Grey Stone. This infernal fog--it’s like breathing damp wool--I expect they’ll all be rolling up here presently. I say, Teddy, you should see my cabin now----”

“We’ve got to get away from here,” said Ursula, speaking quietly, but with a steady taut unreason which was her form of hysteria. “I don’t care where we go or what we leave behind, but I’m not going to settle down. Things grow over us ... here. Parc Gooth--I’ve got Parc Gooth on the brain. Stuck there like a burr. Let’s go tonight, Doug--please.... Oh, _please_ let’s go tonight.”

“My dear old kid,” Doug began. Then: “You’re tired out. Moving’s the devil. I’m going to carry you upstairs and put you to bed! And if you want a good cry, you shall have it.” He advanced towards her, large and ruddy and cheerful, his arms outstretched. Ursula shrank.

“I’m not going to be put to bed, and I’m nowhere near a good cry. Don’t you understand, Doug, that we’re in danger--deadly danger. I’m not just being womanish. We were wrong to come here. At least, it was my fault--I was wrong. I’m owning it. We’re too young to live in the country where it’s peaceful ... where it isn’t peaceful, and only looks it. At first I thought everybody rather quaint and amusing, with their quaint, rigid little prejudices. But I’m frightened of them now; they’re not our _kind_ of people, down in the country. They’ll never grow like us, but we might grow like them ... we’d have to pretend to, to start with, because they’re here first, and they won’t budge in the way they think and behave. Can’t and won’t. But we’re too tolerant and broad-minded and we have such a sense of humour.... Oh, yes, we can afford to pretend and to adjust ourselves and to be flexible--it’s fatally easy. Doug, I’m just now more interested than in anything else in the world, to hear what Jeyne of the ‘Dog and Pilchard’ will probably tell his brother-in-law, Harry Endellion, about what Miss Gregson said to the Allingham-Joneses, and whether it was Wright who warned her to come down, and why and what he gets out of it. Doesn’t that prove to you it’s serious and that we _must_ go?”

Doug had one fixed conviction, and he brought it forth now:

“My dear old kid, you’ll feel different in the morning.”

“I know I will. More settled down. That’s just it--that’s just it--that’s why we’ve got to go now, while I’ve still got the desire, and before I begin to feel different....”

“Don’t be absurd, Teddy.” Her husband walked up and down the verandah with truculent strides. “Go? Run away? Give up Grey Stone and everything? When my cabin looks so jolly?”

Ursula was fighting hard ... and she saw that Doug had not even realized why and for what she was fighting. Subtlety prompted her to take a line which she knew would make a powerful appeal to him.

“You’re not the sort of man to be held down by furniture, Doug. Just because we moved into a house today--that’s no reason why we shouldn’t up stakes tomorrow. Furniture means comfort ... and deep down in our hearts we’re buccaneers!”

Doug wavered.... Had it not been for the memory of some jolly little contrivances he had that afternoon fixed up in his cabin--a hammock, for instance, ingeniously slung to a stout beam by cords, so that he could haul it up to the ceiling and out of the way when not in use--oh, and a ship’s bell, rusty but with a throat of sonorous silver, had it not been for these, he might have been tempted by the idea of behaving so like a buccaneer, a roystering, stouthearted, easy-come-and-easy-go sort of fellow, as to quit harbour the very day of anchoring. But that hammock--and the bell--it would be a shame not to use them. He had not told Ursula about them, meaning to surprise her. But now he poured out a full description: “... And the point is, Teddy, it’s a dinkum naval hammock--the genuine thing--canvas, you know. They’re not easy to get, but a chap I once knew in the merchant service had a brother who was ships-chandler on the quay at St. Pol ... I remembered, and slipped off there while you were bargaining for that gate-legged table. And he sold me the bell, too--a real beauty--about ten bobs’ worth of silver in it. Nothing much to look at, of course. You’ll see; I’m not going to have any clocks at all at Grey Stone, but sound the four bells and eight bells--dong--dong--dong--dong--‘All’s ... well!’”

And Ursula, defeated by the sheer stupefying force of little boys at their games, laid her head down on her arms and laughed and cried and cried; knowing well that now she would have to surrender and remain in Arcadia; knowing well that if you make your bed and do not want to lie on it, you need not; but if it be a double bed, and you have made it, and your partner will not stir, you must lie on it too. It was she, and not Doug, who had proposed their present sharp severance from Town and the Knapsack Club and all the other ties. And now they would never escape, never.... Nor again might she sufficiently want to escape.

“Teddy, Teddy darling, don’t cry. It’s only a mood--I’ve had ’em myself.... That damned hooter at Polpinnock! I’ll hot you up a toddy of rum and milk--a chap I knew at the Knapsack smuggled me through a demi-john of the real stuff from Jamaica. And honestly, you’ll feel different in the morning....”

[XIII]

AND in the morning Ursula did feel different. So different that she went up to Mr. Wright’s shop, on the pretext of buying matches and soap and a bucket; and there heard the secret history of the evening before. Mr. Wright’s beard was very knowing and triumphant over it all; and he was able to enlighten Ursula as to the mysterious vanishings after she had run into the house to fetch out Wenn from the pantry. Miss Gregson’s Eye-talian, it appeared, had coughed, and she, fearing for his Southern lungs exposed to the sea-mists, had hurried him to the “Dog and Pilchard” for a fiery drink; whereupon the American had invited the rest of the company likewise to come down into the warm bar-parlour, and there further to negotiate the matter of Parc Gooth over glasses of hot whisky. The Allingham-Joneses had accepted; but old Abbott and his wife, possibly realizing that--in melodramatic parlance--their game was up, had silently detached themselves from the others, and driven off in their jingle.... The voice of Tody, however, penetrated at intervals from the public bar, beyond the glass door, in disjointed confidences to Jeyne the landlord--“the lady and gentleman” occurred frequently in his narration, and “Tody” and Tody and Tody and Tody....

“And what’s the upshot?” Ursula asked. “Who’s going to have Parc Gooth?”

It was one of the glowing moments which made Mr. Wright’s drab life worth the living:

“I don’t think Major Allingham-Jones will live there, Mrs. Barrison,” mysteriously.

“The American, then? Wenn’s man?”

The grocer shook his head ... took down some boxes from the shelf and put them back again; opened the door which separated his parlour from the shop, and called to his daughter: “Alice, have you gone yet?... Oh, she has. Yes. Well, Mrs. Barrison, I’ll tell you this, knowing it’ll go no further, for the people here are so ignorant that they believe a man’s always pushing his own trade interests when he simply wants to befriend some one; and it would be awkward for me if my name was to be mixed up in this. Very awkward. I’m in a difficult position, you see, not being a native of the place. And they’re already saying it must have been somebody who wrote to Miss Gregson putting her on her guard. And though I remind them, carelessly, if you follow me, that the Vicar had her address as well as myself----”

George Sampson hobbled into the shop. Recognizing Ursula, he saluted her, his wistful, threadbare look holding no malice for her patronage of the rival stores. “Good day to ’ee, Mrs. Barrison. Fine weather after the fog. Wright, is it true what they’m sayin’ down tu Cove?--that Miss Gregson and her Eye-talian are comin’ back for good to live at Parc Gooth?”

“Oh!” Ursula cried in amazement.

Mr. Wright stood with rigidly guarded countenance, examining his stock of gingham aprons.

“I can’t help being sorry, in a way, that the American gentleman’s not going to live there,” Sampson went on. “Heaps o’ money ’e has, heaps; an’ he told me he was goin’ to divide his custom fair between you an’ me----”

But Wright still said nothing. All Miss Gregson’s custom went to him.

Ursula ought to have been up at Grey Stone by now, but she lingered on in the shop, absorbed, anxious to hear more....