Part 23 (1/2)
”Thanks awfully!”
”Now let's walk in the garden.”
It was a perfect midsummer evening. Away to the west the sky was still red with the sunset and higher up above them the changing hues of opal merged into a l.u.s.trous blue which again was turned to steel in the summit of the vault. To the east shapely stems of firs rose to a black bulk of branches, spread out against the sky like tails of giant peac.o.c.ks. And behind them was the splendid body of the moor with its great bosom of heather towering into nipples of stone. The night, which had stolen away colour and left only light and shade, had given strength and meaning to every line and curve and silhouette. They walked over soft, clinging gra.s.s to a paddock dotted with hen-coops, where the tiny pheasants were wont to squeak and scuttle. The black line of a distant bank twinkled with the tails of startled rabbits and an owl clattered heavily through leafy boughs. Then followed a silence, vivid and unforgettable, but soon to be broken by the shrill note of a bat that came and went with magic swerve and speed.
”Well,” said John Berrisford, after lighting a fresh cigar, ”isn't this rather convincing?”
”About the country, you mean?”
”Yes. On such a night do you thirst for Paris and cafe chatter with a drink-sodden Futurist?”
”It's too clear,” answered Martin, looking round. ”Perhaps to-morrow night it will be pouring, and then even you may have a hankering after the roar of traffic and the fine smell of a city.”
”My dear Martin, you're impossible. You can't have everything your own way. If you intend to wors.h.i.+p at one shrine you've got to keep it up for a bit and give the deity a chance of getting hold of you.”
”And what if you don't believe in wors.h.i.+pping deities?”
”Then you'll be very unhappy.”
”But you don't wors.h.i.+p and you profess to be happy?”
”Don't I wors.h.i.+p?”
”It's the first I've heard of it.”
”How do you suppose I would be here now if I didn't wors.h.i.+p the place?
I'm a positive mystic.”
”And the mystery?”
”The blessed mystery of Ham and Eggs.”
”It sounds very fleshly. Tell me about it.”
”Fleshly! It's the most spiritual thing on earth: in fact it's the cardinal point in the country gentleman's faith. But I'd better explain it all from the beginning. Just after I'd left Oxford your grandfather died and left me this estate. I was young and rebellious, as every young man should be, and I can tell you I didn't enjoy the prospect of settling down as a squire. Like Herrick, I preferred London to 'that dull Devons.h.i.+re.' I wanted to hang about town, to join the devotees of Morris, to be a genius, a writer of brilliant plays and beautiful books, to be a lover of woman and to have breakfast after lunch. So I let this place to a tenant and fooled round.”
”But I don't want to fool round. I want reasonable work.”
”That's what they all say. It's what I said. But I never did any work.”
”And you liked it?”
”On the whole, yes--until at last I went down to stay with a friend at a gorgeous place in the Cotswolds. There was a great grey manor-house, Jacobean and very good about the windows. My host gave me ham and eggs for breakfast: I had been used to omelettes and white wine. After breakfast--G.o.d, how I remember it--he took me across his wide, smooth lawns to talk to the keeper. We shot all day--I hadn't forgotten how to bowl over a pheasant--and then we dined and drank port and smoked cigars. Suddenly it all flashed across me, the fitness of things, the rich joy of escaping from chattering artists and cranks and reformers and all the crowds who had Done Something: I understood about pomp and circ.u.mstance. As I ate my ham and eggs next morning I became an initiate into their perfect mystery. (The eggs, I may say, must be fried, not poached.) The ham was a hill red with autumn and the eggs houses of gold in pure gardens of white. Then I swore to go back home and kick out the cotton king who used to come here for three weeks in the year. I would set up a new temple to the G.o.ddess and, wors.h.i.+p her with all due rites. So I married my host's daughter, who was sound about ham and eggs and never played with fruit at breakfast-time, and here I am. I've stuck to it, for, as I said, you can't wors.h.i.+p for a week and then go away: that isn't fair on the mystery. You've got to let things soak in. I've let the spirit of Ham and Eggs soak into me and I'm not tempted now to get it out again.”
”And you didn't repent at the beginning?”
”Never permanently. I'm not idle. I'm a J.P., a soundly democratic J.P., to the disgust of the Colonels. I work on a host of committees and I direct two highly disreputable companies. Just because I like to live here in the country and be an acolyte for the G.o.ddess, there's no reason why I shouldn't do a lot besides. You can believe that I'm a much better squire than the rest of them. Of course I'm well aware that there oughtn't to be squires and that the whole thing is wrong.
But equally plainly there are squires, and squiredom has its point, of which I may as well make the most. So I've played the part properly.
To begin with, I put my farms on a business basis, gave a reasonable minimum, and became unpopular with my neighbours because I made them pay. If the State demands my abolition, I'll go like a shot, but I don't intend to let some magnate from Mincing Lane, who never eats ham, come and buy the place, redecorate the house--as he'd call it--buy some ancestors at Christie's and arrange an aerodrome. You young men think that because you like one sort of pleasure you've got to drop the others. It's all rubbish. I'll read any literature you want and talk you silly, but only after ham and eggs for breakfast and port wine for dinner. To h.e.l.l with lunch!”