The Complete Stories (23 page)

  After the first moment of shock, Mr. Metcalfe rallied for action, hesitated for a moment whether or not to plunge down the hill and challenge the enemy on his own ground, and decided against it; this was the moment to act with circumspection. He must consult Lady Peabury.

  It was three-quarters of a mile to the house; the lane ran past the gate which gave access to Westmacott's field; a crazily-hung elm gate and deep cow-trodden mud, soon in Mr. Metcalfe's imagination, to give place to golden privet and red gravel. Mr. Metcalfe could see the heads of the intruders bobbing beyond the hedge; they bore urban, purposeful black hats. He drove on, miserably.

  Lady Peabury was in the morning room reading a novel; early training gave a guilty spice to this recreation, for she had been brought up to believe that to read a novel before luncheon was one of the gravest sins it was possible for a gentlewoman to commit. She slipped the book under a cushion and rose to greet Mr. Metcalfe.

  "I was just getting ready to go out," she explained.

  Mr. Metcalfe had no time for politenesses.

  "Lady Peabury," he began at once, "I have very terrible news."

  "Oh dear! Is poor Mr. Cruttwell having trouble with the Wolf Cub account again?"

  "No; at least, he is; there's another fourpence gone astray; on the credit side this time, which makes it more worrying. But that isn't what I came about. It is something that threatens our whole lives. They are going to build in Westmacott's field." Briefly, but with emotion, he told Lady Peabury what he had seen.

  She listened gravely. When he had finished there was silence in the morning room; six little clocks ticked among the chintzes and the potted azaleas. At last Lady Peabury spoke:

  "Westmacott has behaved very badly," she said.

  "I suppose you can't blame him."

  "I do blame him, Mr. Metcalfe, very severely. I can't understand it at all. He always seemed a very decent man..... I was thinking of making Mrs. Westmacott secretary of the Women's Institute. He had no right to do a thing like that without consulting us. Why, I look right on to that field from my bedroom windows. I could never understand why you didn't buy the field yourself."

  It was let for £3 18s.; they had asked £170 for it; there was tithe and property tax on top of that. Lady Peabury knew this.

  "Any of us could have bought it at the time of sale," said Mr. Metcalfe rather sharply.

  "It always went with your house."

  In another minute, Mr. Metcalfe felt, she would be telling him that he had behaved very badly; that he had always seemed a very decent man.

  She was, in fact, thinking on just those lines at the moment. "I daresay it's not too late even now for you to make an offer," she said.

  "We are all equally threatened," said Mr. Metcalfe. "I think we ought to act together. Hodge won't be any too pleased when he hears the news."

  Colonel Hodge had heard, and he was none too pleased. He was waiting at the Hall when Mr. Metcalfe got back.

  "Do you know what that scoundrel Westmacott has done?"

  "Yes," said Mr. Metcalfe rather wearily, "I know." The interview with Lady Peabury had not gone off quite as he had hoped. She had shown no enthusiasm for common action.

  "Sold his field to a lot of jerry builders."

  "Yes, I know."

  "Funny, I always thought it was your field."

  "No," said Mr. Metcalfe, "never."

  "It always used to go with this house."

  "Yes, I know, but I didn't happen to want it."

  "Well, it's put us all in a pretty nasty fix, I must say. D'you suppose they'd sell it back to you now?"

  "I don't know that I want to buy it. Why, they'll probably want a building-land price—seventy or eighty pounds an acre."

  "More, I daresay. But, good heavens man, you wouldn't let that stop you. Think how it would depreciate your property having a whole town of bungalows right under your windows."

  "Come, come, Hodge. We've no reason to suppose that it will be bungalows."

  "Well, villas then. You surely aren't sticking up for the fellows?"

  "Certainly not. We shall all suffer very much from any development there. My belief is that it can be stopped by law; there's the Society for the Protection of Rural England. We could interest them in it. The County Council could be approached. We could write letters to the papers and petition the Office of Works. The great thing is that we must all stand together over this."

  "Fat lot of change we shall get out of that. Think of the building that's gone on over at Metbury."

  Mr. Metcalfe thought, and shuddered.

  "I should say that this was one of the times when money talked loudest. Have you tried Lady Peabury?"

  For the first time in their acquaintance Mr. Metcalfe detected a distinctly coarse strain in Colonel Hodge. "I have discussed it with her. She is naturally very much concerned."

  "That field has always been known as Lower Grumps," said the Colonel, reverting to his former and doubly offensive line of thought. "It's not really her chicken."

  "It is all our chickens," said Mr. Metcalfe, getting confused with the metaphor.

  "Well, I don't know what you expect me to do about it," said Colonel Hodge. "You know how I'm placed. It all comes of that parson preaching Bolshevism Sunday after Sunday."

  "We ought to get together and discuss it."

  "Oh, we'll discuss it all right. I don't suppose we shall discuss anything else for the next three months."

  No one in Much Malcock took the crisis harder than the Hornbeams. News of it reached them at midday by means of the village charwoman, who dropped in twice a week to despoil their larder. She told them with some pride, innocently assuming that all city gentlemen—as she continued to regard Mr. Hornbeam, in spite of his home-spuns and his beard—would welcome an addition to their numbers.

  Nervous gloom descended on the Old Mill. There was no explosion of wrath as there had been at the Manor; no moral condemnation as at the House; no call to action as had come from the Hall. Hopeless sorrow reigned unrelieved. Mrs. Hornbeam's pottery went to pieces. Mr. Hornbeam sat listless at the loom. It was their working hour; they sat at opposite ends of the raftered granary. Often, on other afternoons, they sang to one another catches and refrains of folk music as their busy fingers muddled with the clay and the shuttles. Today they sat in silence each, according to a Japanese mystical practice, attempting to drive the new peril into the World of Unbeing. It had worked well enough with Colonel Hodge and the Airedale, with the Abyssinian War, and with Mr. Hornbeam senior's yearly visit, but by sunset the new peril remained obstinately concrete.

  Mrs. Hornbeam set their simple meal of milk, raisins, and raw turnip; Mr. Hornbeam turned away from his elm platter. "There is no place for the Artist in the Modern World," he said. "We ask nothing of their brutish civilization except to be left alone, to be given one little corner of land, an inch or two of sky where we can live at peace and occupy ourselves with making seemly and beautiful things. You wouldn't think it was too much to ask. We give them the entire globe for their machines. But it is not enough. They have to hunt us out and harry us. They know that as long as there is one spot of loveliness and decency left it is a standing reproach to them."

  It was growing dark; Mrs. Hornbeam struck a flint and lit the rush lights. She wandered to the harp and plucked a few poignant notes. "Perhaps Mr. Metcalfe will stop it," she said.

  "That we should be dependent for the essentials of life upon a vulgarian like that....."

  It was in this mood that he received an invitation from Mr. Metcalfe to confer with his neighbours at Much Malcock House on the following afternoon.

  The choice of meeting place had been a delicate one, for Lady Peabury was loth to abdicate her position of general leadership or to appear as leader in this particular matter; on the other hand, it touched her too closely for her to be able to ignore it. Accordingly the invitations were issued by Mr. Metcalfe, who thereby accepted responsibility for the agenda, while the presence of the meeting in her morning room gave something of the atmosphere of a Cabinet meeting at the Palace.

  Opinion had hardened during the day and there was general agreement with Colonel Hodge's judgment: "Metcalfe has got us into this hole by not buying the field in the first place; it's up to him to get us out of it." Though nothing as uncompromising as this was said in front of Mr. Metcalfe, he could feel it in the air. He was the last to arrive. Lady Peabury's welcome to her guests had been lukewarm. "It is very kind of you to come. I really cannot think that it is necessary, but Mr. Metcalfe particularly wished it. I suppose he intends telling us what he is going to do." To Mr. Metcalfe she said, "We are full of curiosity."

  "Sorry to be late. I've had a day of it, I can tell you. Been to all the local offices, got on to all the Societies, and I may as well tell you at once, there's nothing doing from that end. We are not even scheduled as a rural area."

  "No," said Colonel Hodge, "I saw to that. Halves the potential value of one's property."

  "Schedules," moaned Mr. Hornbeam, "that is what we have become. We must be scheduled to lead a free life."

  "... And so," persisted Mr. Metcalfe, in his boardroom manner, "we are left to find the solution ourselves. Now this young man has no particular reason, I imagine, for preferring this district above any other in the country. The building has not yet begun; he has no commitments. I cannot help feeling that if he were tactfully approached and offered a reasonable profit on the transaction, he might be induced to re-sell."

  "I am sure," said Lady Peabury, "we shall all owe a deep debt of gratitude to Mr. Metcalfe."

  "Very public spirited of you," said Colonel Hodge.

  "Profits, the cancer of the age ..."

  "I am perfectly willing," said Mr. Metcalfe, "to bear my share of the burden....." At the word "share" his hearers stiffened perceptibly. "My suggestion is that we make a common fund proportionate to our present land holdings. By a rough calculation I work that out as being in the ratio of one to Mr. Hornbeam, two to Colonel Hodge, two to myself, and five to our hostess here. The figures could be adjusted," he added as he noted that his suggestion was falling a little flat.

  "You can count me out," said Colonel Hodge. "Couldn't possibly run to it."

  "And me," said Mr. Hornbeam.

  Lady Peabury was left in, with a difficult hand to stake. Delicacy forbade recognition of the vital fact that Mr. Metcalfe was very much the richer—delicacy tempered with pride. The field must be saved, but there seemed no system of joint purchase by which she could honourably fail to bear the largest part. Duty called, clearly and unmistakably, to Mr. Metcalfe alone. She held her cards and passed the bidding. "Surely," she said, "as a businessman you must see a great many objections to joint ownership. Do you propose to partition the field, or are we all to share the rent, the tithe and the tax? It would be highly inconvenient. I doubt if it is even legal."

  "Certainly, certainly. I merely wished to assure you of my readiness to co-operate. The field, as such, is of no interest to me, I can assure you. I would willingly stand down."

  There was a threat, almost a lack of politeness in his tone. Colonel Hodge scented danger.

  "Wouldn't it be best," he said, "to find out first if this fellow is willing to re-sell? Then you can decide which of you keep it."

  "I am sure we shall be very interested to hear the results of Mr. Metcalfe's negotiations," said Lady Peabury.

  She should not have said that. She would gladly have recalled the words the moment after they were uttered. She had vaguely wanted to say something disagreeable, to punish Mr. Metcalfe for the discomfort in which she found herself. She had not meant to antagonize him, and this she had unmistakably done.

  Mr. Metcalfe left the House abruptly, almost precipitately, and all that evening he chafed. For fifteen years Mr. Metcalfe had been president of the British Chamber of Commerce. He had been greatly respected by the whole business community. No one could put anything across him, and he would not touch anything that was not aboveboard. Egyptian and Levantine merchants who tried to interest Metcalfe in shady business went away with a flea in the ear. It was no good trying to squeeze Metcalfe. That was his reputation in the Union Club, and here, at home, in his own village, an old woman had tried to catch him napping. There was a sudden change. He was no longer the public-spirited countryman; he was cards-on-the-table-brass-tacks-and-twenty-shillings-in-the-pound-treat-him-fair-or-mind-your-step Metcalfe, Metcalfe with his back up, fighting Metcalfe once again, Metcalfe who would cut off his nose any day to spite his face, sink any ship for a ha'p'orth of tar that was not legally due, Metcalfe the lion of the Rotarians.

  "She should not have said that," said Colonel Hodge, reporting the incident to his wife over their horrible dinner. "Metcalfe won't do anything now."

  "Why don't you go and talk to the man who's bought the field?" said Mrs. Hodge.

  "I might ... I think I will..... Tell you what, I'll go now."

  He went.

  He found the man without difficulty, since there was no other visitor staying at the Brakehurst Arms. An enquiry from the landlord elicited his name—Mr. Hargood-Hood. He was sitting alone in the parlour, sipping whisky and soda and working at The Times' crossword.

  The Colonel said, "Evening. My name is Hodge."

  "Yes?"

  "I daresay you know who I am."

  "I'm very sorry, I'm afraid ..."

  "I own the Manor. My garden backs on to Westmacott's field—the one you've bought."

  "Oh," said Mr. Hargood-Hood, "was he called Westmacott? I didn't know. I leave all these things to my lawyer. I simply told him to find me a suitable, secluded site for my work. He told me last week he had found one here. It seems very suitable. But he didn't tell me anyone's name."

  "You didn't pick this village for any particular reason?"