Unknown (7 page)

“Have to get home, Crow. The wife expects me, you know, and it's quite a walk. If I stayed to tea with all you good folk I shouldn't be at Methwold till after dark.”

Philip had the wit to see that Tilly's tactless outburst had really upset the worthy man. What wild creatures women are! He followed the lawyer out into the conservatory which was fragrant with heliotrope and lemon verbena. “You must forgive Mrs. Crow, Didlington,” he said quietly. And then, as the man only nodded with a faint shrug of his shoulders, “The great point you've made clear,” he went on, “is that the family has no case against this fellow? We should have no chance—eh?—not the ghost of a chance—of upsetting tins will?”

Mr. Didlington gravely bowed and buttoning his overcoat with his free hand pensively picked a leaf from the lemon verbena with the one that held his stick.

“Not the ghost of a chance, eh?” repeated Philip.

The man straightened and looked him in the face.

“I am acting,” he said, “for all parties concerned.” He paused, and resumed with real dignity. “My position as executor is a difficult one. Mr. Geard recognises its difficulty. His departure for Glastonbury proves that he does so. I hope that there may arise no occasion for the introduction of further advice and Mr. Geard hopes so too.”

“I warrant he does,” thought Philip. But he only said: “I confess to be startled, Didlington. You must have expected us to be startled.”

The lawyer continued crumpling up between his fingers the lemon verbena leaf. “Mr. Geard has been your grandfather's valet,” he said, “his secretary, his confidant, and, I might say, if you'll permit the word, his friend, for the last ten years. No opinion you called in would advise you to contest the will.”

Philip Crow bent down and smelt a heliotrope. “Won't you change your mind, Didlington, after all, and let my good wife give you a cup of tea? She was over-excited just now. It was a surprise, you know; and ladies always take things hard. I expect if Mr. Geard wasn't ., . • hadn't been . . . well-known to us in Glastonbury as a rather trying local preacher, she wouldn't have felt------”

The lawyer shook his head. “In case there arose,” he said, “in the mind of any of your family, a wish for further advice, I would like to point out that the late Canon's doctor, a good friend of mine, feels as I do, that your grandfather's mind was never clearer than during the time he made this will. No reputable firm would take up this case, Sir, on the grounds of undue influence. Everybody knows—if you'll allow me to be quite frank—that his family left the late Canon very much alone; and it is natural enough that under these circumstances------”

“Well—well—I'm afraid I must be getting back to my guests,” interrupted Philip coldly. “I wish you a pleasant walk home, Mr. Didlington.” He opened the door of the conservatory and bowed the man out.

No sooner had he entered the dining-room than Tilly Crow, peering at him round the great copper urn which stood on the table in front of her, with a little blue flame burning below it, cried out to him in a tearful, plaintive voice. “It was our own doing, Philip. That's what hurts me most. Oh, why, why did we ever let that man go to him?”

“What kind of a man is he, this lucky wretch?” Percy Spear enquired, as the head of the family sat down at the end of the table.

“He was an open-air preacher who lived in Glastonbury, Perse,” Philip explained. “He was always out of luck and had a wife and two children. He was a nuisance to the whole town; and when your grandfather wanted a lay-reader, or someone who'd combine the duties of a valet and a curate, we packed him off to him. No one would have dreamed of this being the result.”

“Perhaps he isn't a bad sort of chap after all,” remarked Dave Spear. “Did you ever see him, Mary?”

Mary shook her head.

“I suppose,” said John in a low voice, as if speaking rather to himself than to anyone in particular, “there is no way he could be persuaded to give up some of it?”

Philip gave him a swift glance of infinite disgust. “One doesn't do that sort of thing in England, Mr. Crow,” he said, “not, at any rate, people in our position.”

“A will is a funny thing,” said Dave Spear meditatively. “A dead man arbitrarily gives to some living person the power that he has robbed the community of! The mere existence of a thing like a will is enough to prove the unnaturalness of private property.”

Aunt Elizabeth looked anxiously at Philip. “Don't start a discussion of politics now, I beg you, Dave Spear,” she said.

“My quarrel with Spear,” interjected Philip in a low voice, “is not confined to politics.”

“What is it confined to?” cried Persephone sharply. “Don't you begin teasing my Dave,” she went on, and as she spoke, she stretched out a long, delicious, young girl's arm across the table and taking Philip's hand in her own gave it a little playful scolding shake.

Philip caught her fingers and held them gravely, while he looked intently into her eyes. John saw the communist's rather rustic countenance wince sharply while this magnetic vibration passed between the cousins.

“What puzzles me about all your theories, Mr. Spear,” began John, speaking rather rapidly, “is that they contradict the deepest instinct in human nature. To possess—doesn't the whole world, for every one of us, turn upon this great pivot? Our philosophy, for instance, what is it but the act by which we possess the Cosmos? Our love? That surely is the quintessence of possession. And isn't this asceticism which you people practice, this giving up of everything except the 'bare essentials' as you call 'em, isn't it a sort of wet blanket thrown upon human nature, a sort of moral rebuke to the natural pleasures?”

“I think you will agree, Mr. Crow------” began Spear excitedly, but his wife broke in. “Let me put it to him, Dave!” she cried. “The point is this, Mr. Crow. We fully agree with you about the importance of a free fling of our whole nature towards happiness. But it's just this that the capitalistic system interferes with! You are confusing two things. You are confusing natural, instinctive happiness and the artificial social pride that we get from private property. Under a just and scientific arrangement of society such as they have achieved in Russia, our human values begin to change. People feel ashamed of having money. It becomes a disgrace, like the reputation of a thief, to have more than the essentials. But everyone has a right to the pleasures that bring happiness. Everyone has a right to------”

“She means,” interrupted her husband, raising his voice to a very vigorous pitch, “she means, Mr. Crow, that everyone who works honestly and doesn't live by exploiting others can have enough to enjoy their life on. The exploiting classes, of course,” here he nearly shouted, causing Tilly to give a quick glance at the door, afraid lest the servants should hear him, “must be starved out!”

The contrast was so great between, the rosy face of this fair-haired youth and the fanaticism of his tone that John stared at him in astonishment. Into the darkening twilight, past all those dim faces sitting round the table, the fierce words “must he starved out” twanged like a bow-string.

Philip Crow from the end of the table cast upon the young revolutionary very much the sort of glance that some Devereux of the Norman Conquest would have cast upon some Saxon Gurth who had dared to challenge him as his horse broke through the brushwood with a raised quarterstaff. “You could starve me out, my son, if you won over the army and the air-force, but I assure you you'll have one bloated capitalist you'll never starve out.”

“Philip means our friend Mr. Geard, I suppose,” murmured Aunt Elizabeth.

“I mean Nature!”

Persephone gave vent to a rather uncivil whistle. “Nature?” she mo'cked. “What are you talking about, Philip?”

“Don't you see, my good child,” he said quite gently, “that it's always been by the brains and the energy of exceptional individuals, fighting for their own hands, that the world has moved on? What you people are doing now is simply sharing out what has already been won. We have the future to think of; or, as I say, Nature has the future to think of.”

The blood rushed to the face of Dave Spear and a misty film gathered in front of his eyes, so that what he saw of the room and the people in the room was a swimming blur,

“I can't argue . . . with you , . .” he jerked out as if each word carried with it a streak of his heart's blood, “but I know that ... if the masses . . . the masses of workers . . . the real workers . . . got . . . got the machinery and the . * . the land and water . . into their hands . ? . a new spirit ... not known before in all the history ... of ... of ... of humanity conscious of its fate . . . would be stronger, greater, more . . . more . . . more god . . . more godlike than anything that your great selfish individuals have . . . have felt”

In his emotion the young man had lurched to his feet, and had seized with his fingers a half-cut loaf of bread which he began squeezing spasmodically. Aunt Elizabeth stretched forth her hand and removed this object; but not before that particular gesture in this darkening room, with the damp, green lawn and the sombre cedar outside, had caught John's attention as something symbolic. Long afterward John remembered that clumsy, bucolic figure leaning forward over the shadowy, unlit table and clutching that bread. With far more force than the slender Percy's eloquence those awkward, blurted words seemed to carry the seal of prophecy upon them. A green-coloured gust of rainy wind came rushing across that spacious garden, came swishing and swirling through the laurel-bushes, came moaning through the cedar-boughs.

“Just touch the bell, would you, Mary, so that they know we want the lamp?” broke in the voice of Tilly Crow.

The coming of the lamp changed the whole mental atmosphere of that group of people. It brought their minds back from the vibrations of the ideal to the agitations of the real. As the round orb of light was placed in the centre of the great table there entered the devastating reminder that forty thousand pounds' worth of power over the lives of men and women had passed from this comfortable room, from this secluded lawn, into some little shabby domicile at Glastonbury.

“How many children has this lucky person got, Philip?” enquired Mary in a low voice.

“Two,” was Philip's laconic answer,

“But didn't you say he was a nuisance?” persisted Mary Crow.

“Two great sprawling girls,” sneered Philip. “I suppose they'll buy Chalice House; or try and get the Bishop to sell them Abbey House and turn out Euphemia Drew.”

“Oh, I hope they will!” cried Mary.

“You hope they will?”

“I'm tired of Abbey House. Fd like the fun of seeing Miss Drew choose new wall-papers.”

“I'm afraid you'll never get that pleasure, Mary,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “ Themia was horn in the Abbey House and she'll die in the Abbey House.”

“It's all very well for you, Elizabeth,” piped up Tilly Crow in a voice like that of a melancholy meadow-pipit, “you've got your two hundred a year.”

“Yes, and I'm going to leave you in peace, too, Tilly, and live on my two hundred a year, i shall take one of those little workmen's cottages in Benedict Street that the town-council put up!” Philip turned upon her with good-humoured bluster. “You'll take nothing of the sort, Aunt,” he cried. “Why, those wretched socialistic cardboard toys don”t even keep the rain out."

“It's simply disgraceful of you, Philip,” threw in Persephone, “the way you do all you can to make the work of that town-council of yours so difficult.”

“By the way,” exclaimed Philip suddenly, disregarding her protest and speaking in a raised and carefully modulated voice, “where do you intend to sleep tonight, Cousin John?”

“Philip reads all our thoughts, you know,” murmured Aunt Elizabeth. “He thinks you've got an eye to that big sofa in the drawTing-room.”

“There won't be any sleeping on sofas in a house where I am!”5 cried Tilly Crow sharply. Her voice sounded so exactly like the miserable tweet-tweet of a bird soaked in a windy rain that John felt disarmed and sorry for her.

“Don't be afraid, Philip,” he said, “and don't you fret about the sofa, Cousin Tilly. I've got a room for two nights at the Inn.”

Persephone leaned over and whispered something in Philip's ear. It was impossible for John to hazard the least conjecture as to what she said; but a minute later Philip addressed him in a loud if not a very amiable tone.

“I shall be offended, Cousin John, and I'm sure your Cousin Tilly will be terribly hurt if you don't let us pay for your room while you're here. How long a holiday have you allowed yourself? How soon are you returning to Paris?”

“I ... I ... I haven't—on my soul I haven't thought about it yet,” muttered John Crow. “But thanks very much for the room at the Inn.” His voice suddenly became unnaturally loud. “Thanks very much, Cousin Philip. I shall be glad to stay two nights at the Inn at your expense. Shall I tell them to send the bill to you up here?”

John's tone, when his voice subsided, left everybody a little uncomfortable.

“Well,” Philip said, “well—yes. Yes, of course. Yes, I shall be here a few days more . . . perhaps. . , .” His voice sank down at that point in a polite but weary sigh. It was plain to them all that he felt no very strong attraction to the wanderer from across the channel His exact and precise thoughts, in fact, might be expressed thus: “This fellow never expected any legacy. He only came to see what he could get out of me. He's on his beam-ends. He's probably got consumption, diabetes and the pox. If I give him an inch hell take an ell. At alJ costs I mustn't let him come to Glastonbury.”

Miss Elizabeth turned round towards Tilly Crow now, and in a gentle, unassuming voice asked what time dinner would be.

“I do wish everybody would stop calling it dinner,” said Tilly, peevishly. “It'll be just a cold supper. There is so much over from lunch. I thought of it just for the family, you know, and I hoped Mr. Spear would not mind it being cold.” She glanced as she spoke, not at Dave, but at John. And it was John who lifted up his voice in answer. “Don't think of me, in your hospitality, Mrs. Crow, I be^. I shall be running up that bill—is it not so, Philip—that we spoke of at the Inn?”