The New Collected Short Stories (9 page)

‘Is Jack mad?’ asked Mrs Worters.

But Miss Beaumont had caught the allusions – which were quite ingenious I must admit. ‘And Croesus?’ she inquired. ‘What was it one turned into to get away from Croesus?’

I hastened to tidy up her mythology. ‘Midas, Miss Beaumont, not Croesus. And he turns you – you don’t turn yourself: he turns you into gold.’

‘There’s no dodging Midas,’ said Ford.

‘Surely——’ said Miss Beaumont. She had been learning Latin not quite a fortnight, but she would have corrected the Regius Professor.

He began to tease her. ‘Oh, there’s no dodging Midas! He just comes, he touches you, and you pay him several thousand per cent. at once. You’re gold – a young golden lady – if he touches you.’

‘I won’t be touched!’ she cried, relapsing into her habitual frivolity.

‘Oh, but he’ll touch you.’

‘He sha’n’t!’

‘He will.’

‘He sha’n’t!’

‘He will.’

Miss Beaumont took up her Virgil and smacked Ford over the head with it.

‘Evelyn! Evelyn!’ said Mrs Worters. ‘Now you are forgetting yourself. And you also forget my question. What good has Latin done you?’

‘Mr Ford – what good has Latin done you?’

‘Mr Inskip – what good has Latin done us?’

So I was let in for the classical controversy. The arguments for the study of Latin are perfectly sound, but they are difficult to remember, and the afternoon sun was hot, and I needed my tea. But I had to justify my existence as a coach, so I took off my eye-glasses and breathed on them and said, ‘My dear Ford, what a question!’

‘It’s all right for Jack,’ said Mrs Worters. ‘Jack has to pass his entrance examination. But what’s the good of it for Evelyn? None at all.’

‘No, Mrs Worters,’ I persisted, pointing my eye-glasses at her. ‘I cannot agree. Miss Beaumont is – in a sense – new to our civilization. She is entering it, and Latin is one of the subjects in her entrance examination also. No one can grasp modern life without some knowledge of its origins.’

‘But why should she grasp modern life?’ said the tiresome woman.

‘Well, there you are!’ I retorted, and shut up my eye-glasses with a snap.

‘Mr Inskip, I am not there. Kindly tell me what’s the good of it all. Oh, I’ve been through it myself: Jupiter, Venus, Juno, I know the lot of them. And many of the stories not at all proper.’

‘Classical education,’ I said drily, ‘is not entirely confined to classical mythology. Though even the mythology has its value. Dreams if you like, but there is value in dreams.’

‘I too have dreams,’ said Mrs Worters, ‘but I am not so foolish as to mention them afterwards.’

Mercifully we were interrupted. A rich virile voice close behind us said, ‘Cherish your dreams!’ We had been joined by our host, Harcourt Worters – Mrs Worters’ son, Miss Beaumont’s
fiancé
, Ford’s guardian, my employer: I must speak of him as Mr Worters.

‘Let us cherish our dreams!’ he repeated. ‘All day I’ve been fighting, haggling, bargaining. And to come out on to this lawn and see you all learning Latin, so happy, so passionless, so Arcadian——’

He did not finish the sentence, but sank into the chair next to Miss Beaumont, and possessed himself of her hand. As he did so she sang: ‘Áh yoù sílly àss góds lìve in woóds!’

‘What have we here?’ said Mr Worters with a slight frown.

With the other hand she pointed to me.

‘Virgil——’ I stammered. ‘Colloquial translation——’

‘Oh, I see; a colloquial translation of poetry.’ Then his smile returned. ‘Perhaps if gods live in woods, that is why woods are so dear. I have just bought Other Kingdom Copse!’

Loud exclamations of joy. Indeed, the beeches in that copse are as fine as any in Hertfordshire. Moreover, it, and the meadow by which it is approached, have always made an ugly notch in the rounded contours of the Worters estate. So we were all very glad that Mr Worters had purchased Other Kingdom. Only Ford kept silent, stroking his head where the Virgil had hit it, and smiling a little to himself as he did so.

‘Judging from the price I paid, I should say there was a god in every tree. But price, this time, was no object.’ He glanced at Miss Beaumont. ‘You admire beeches, Evelyn, do you not?’

‘I forget always which they are. Like this?’

She flung her arms up above her head, close together, so that she looked like a slender column. Then her body swayed and her delicate green dress quivered over it with the suggestion of countless leaves.

‘My dear child!’ exclaimed her lover.

‘No: that is a silver birch,’ said Ford. ‘Oh, of course. Like this, then.’ And she twitched up her skirts so that for a moment they spread out in great horizontal layers, like the layers of a beech.

We glanced at the house, but none of the servants were looking. So we laughed, and said she ought to go on the variety stage.

‘Ah, this is the kind I like!’ she cried, and practised the beech-tree again.

‘I thought so,’ said Mr Worters. ‘I thought so. Other Kingdom Copse is yours.’

‘Mine——?’ She had never had such a present in her life. She could not realize it.

‘The purchase will be drawn up in your name. You will sign the deed. Receive the wood, with my love. It is a second engagement ring.’

‘But is it – is it mine? Can I – do what I like there?’

‘You can,’ said Mr Worters, smiling.

She rushed at him and kissed him. She kissed Mrs Worters. She would have kissed myself and Ford if we had not extruded elbows. The joy of possession had turned her head.

‘It’s mine! I can walk there, work there, live there. A wood of my own! Mine for ever.’

‘Yours, at all events, for ninety-nine years.’

‘Ninety-nine years?’ I regret to say there was a tinge of disappointment in her voice.

‘My dear child! Do you expect to live longer?’

‘I suppose I can’t,’ she replied, and flushed a little. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Ninety-nine seems long enough to most people. I have got this house, and the very lawn you are standing on, on a lease of ninety-nine years. Yet I call them my own, and I think I am justified. Am I not?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Ninety-nine years is practically for ever. Isn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes. It must be.’

Ford possesses a most inflammatory notebook. Outside it is labelled ‘Private’, inside it is headed ‘Practically a book’. I saw him make an entry in it now, ‘Eternity: practically ninety-nine years.’

Mr Worters, as if speaking to himself, now observed: ‘My goodness! My goodness! How land has risen! Perfectly astounding.’

I saw that he was in need of a Boswell, so I said: ‘Has it, indeed?’

‘My dear Inskip. Guess what I could have got that wood for ten years ago! But I refused. Guess why.’

We could not guess why.

‘Because the transaction would not have been straight.’ A most becoming blush spread over his face as he uttered the noble word. ‘Not straight. Straight legally. But not morally straight. We were to force the hands of the man who owned it. I refused. The others – decent fellows in their way – told me I was squeamish. I said, “Yes. Perhaps I am. My name is plain Harcourt Worters – not a well-known name if you go outside the City and my own country, but a name which, where it is known, carries, I flatter myself, some weight. And I will not sign my name to this. That is all. Call me squeamish if you like. But I will not sign. It is just a fad of mine. Let us call it a fad.”’ He blushed again. Ford believes that his guardian blushes all over – that if you could strip him and make him talk nobly he would look like a boiled lobster. There is a picture of him in this condition in the notebook.

‘So the man who owned it then didn’t own it now?’ said Miss Beaumont, who had followed the narrative with some interest.

‘Oh, no!’ said Mr Worters.

‘Why no!’ said Mrs Worters absently, as she hunted in the grass for her knitting-needle. ‘Of course not. It belongs to the widow.’

‘Tea!’ cried her son, springing vivaciously to his feet. ‘I see tea and I want it. Come mother. Come along, Evelyn. I can tell you it’s no joke, a hard day in the battle of life. For life is practically a battle. To all intents and purposes a battle. Except for a few lucky fellows who can read books, and so avoid realities. But I——’

His voice died away as he escorted the two ladies over the smooth lawn and up the stone steps to the terrace, on which the footman was placing tables and little chairs and a silver kettle-stand. More ladies came out of the house. We could just hear their shouts of excitement as they also were told of the purchase of Other Kingdom.

I like Ford. The boy has the makings of a scholar and – though for some reason he objects to the word – of a gentleman. It amused me now to see his lip curl with the vague cynicism of youth. He cannot understand the footman and the solid silver kettle-stand. They make him cross. For he has dreams – not exactly spiritual dreams: Mr Worters is the man for those – but dreams of the tangible and the actual: robust dreams, which take him, not to heaven, but to another earth. There are no footmen in this other earth, and the kettle-stands I suppose, will not be made of silver, and I know that everything is to be itself, and not practically something else. But what this means, and, if it means anything, what the good of it is, I am not prepared to say. For though I have just said ‘there is value in dreams,’ I only said it to silence old Mrs Worters.

‘Go ahead, man! We can’t have tea till we’ve got through something.’

He turned his chair away from the terrace, so that he could sit looking at the meadows and at the stream that runs through the meadows, and at the beech-trees of Other Kingdom that rise beyond the stream. Then, most gravely and admirably, he began to construe the Eclogues of Virgil.

II

Other Kingdom Copse is just like any other beech copse, and I am therefore spared the fatigue of describing it. And the stream in front of it, like many other streams, is not crossed by a bridge in the right place, and you must either walk round a mile or else you must paddle. Miss Beaumont suggested that we should paddle.

Mr Worters accepted the suggestion tumultuously. It only became evident gradually that he was not going to adopt it.

‘What fun! what fun! We will paddle to your kingdom. If only – if only it wasn’t for the tea-things.’

‘But you can carry the tea-things on your back.’

‘Why, yes! so I can. Or the servants could.’

‘Harcourt – no servants. This is my picnic, and my wood. I’m going to settle everything. I didn’t tell you: I’ve got all the food. I’ve been in the village with Mr Ford.’

‘In the village——’

‘Yes. We got biscuits and oranges and half a pound of tea. That’s all you’ll have. He carried them up. And he’ll carry them over the stream. I want you just to lend me some tea-things – not the best ones. I’ll take care of them. That’s all.’

‘Dear creature. . . .’

‘Evelyn,’ said Mrs Worters, ‘how much did you and Jack pay for that tea?’

‘For the half-pound, tenpence.’

Mrs Worters received the announcement in gloomy silence.

‘Mother!’ cried Mr Worters. ‘Why, I forgot! How could we go paddling with mother?’

‘Oh, but, Mrs Worters, we could carry you over.’

‘Thank you, dearest child. I am sure you could.’

‘Alas! alas! Evelyn. Mother is laughing at us. She would sooner die than be carried. And alas! there are my sisters, and Mrs Osgood: she has a cold, tiresome woman. No: we shall have to go round by the bridge.’

‘But some of us——’ began Ford. His guardian cut him short with a quick look.

So we went round – a procession of eight. Miss Beaumont led us. She was full of fun – at least so I thought at the time, but when I reviewed her speeches afterwards I could not find in them anything amusing. It was all this kind of thing: ‘Single file! Pretend you’re in church and don’t talk. Mr Ford, turn out your toes. Harcourt – at the bridge throw to the Naiad a pinch of tea. She has a headache. She has had a headache for nineteen hundred years.’ All that she said was quite stupid. I cannot think why I liked it at the time.

As we approached the copse she said, ‘Mr Inskip, sing, and we’ll sing after you: Áh yoù sílly àss góds lìve in woóds.’ I cleared my throat and gave out the abominable phrase, and we all chanted it as if it were a litany. There was something attractive about Miss Beaumont. I was not surprised that Harcourt had picked her out of ‘Ireland’ and had brought her home, without money, without connections, almost without antecedents, to be his bride. It was daring of him, but he knew himself to be a daring fellow. She brought him nothing; but that he could afford, he had so vast a surplus of spiritual and commercial goods. ‘In time,’ I heard him tell his mother, ‘in time Evelyn will repay me a thousandfold.’ Meanwhile there was something attractive about her. If it were my place to like people, I could have liked her very much.

‘Stop singing!’ she cried. We had entered the wood. ‘Welcome, all of you.’ We bowed. Ford, who had not been laughing, bowed down to the ground. ‘And now be seated. Mrs Worters – will you sit there – against that tree with a green trunk? It will show up your beautiful dress.’

‘Very well, dear, I will,’ said Mrs Worters.

‘Anna – there. Mr Inskip next to her. Then Ruth and Mrs Osgood. Oh, Harcourt – do sit a little forward, so that you’ll hide the house. I don’t want to see the house at all.’

‘I won’t!’ laughed her lover, ‘I want my back against a tree, too.’

‘Miss Beaumont,’ asked Ford, ‘Where shall I sit?’ He was standing at attention, like a soldier.

‘Oh, look at all these Worters!’ she cried, ‘and one little Ford in the middle of them!’ For she was at that state of civilization which appreciates a pun.

‘Shall I stand, Miss Beaumont? Shall I hide the house from you if I stand?’

‘Sit down, Jack, you baby!’ cried his guardian, breaking in with needless asperity. ‘Sit down!’

‘He may just as well stand if he will,’ said she. ‘Just pull back your soft hat, Mr Ford. Like a halo. Now you hide even the smoke from the chimneys. And it makes you look beautiful.’

‘Evelyn! Evelyn! You are too hard on the boy. You’ll tire him. He’s one of those bookworms. He’s not strong. Let him sit down.’