The Way Home (7 page)
Authors: Henry Handel Richardson
It was while he still lingered, ruminating these things, that he saw advertised for sale a practice on the south coast of England, in a locality which was described as lovely, sheltered, salubrious. Something in the wording of the paragraph took his fancy and he wrote for particulars. The reply was so favourable that, instead of either travelling to Glasgow or going back to Leicester, he set out by way of Bristol for the south. To see the place was straightway to lose his heart to it; here, for once was a dream come true. The advertiser turned out to be as young as Brocklebank had been old -- a practitioner of but a year's standing. But to the hardy old surgeon as a reed to an oak. For even the soft air of this sheltered nook had not been mild enough for a congenital throat-weakness; and the young man was hieing him to the Cape, where he proposed to settle. Such was his eagerness to be gone that he came a considerable way to meet Mahony in the matter of price. -- And now letters passed and telegrams flew between husband and wife; till, even the electric wire proving too circumstantial for Richard's impatience, Mary was bidden to pack her bag and join him there. She came, and was herself charmed with the spot -- as, indeed, how could she help being, cried Richard, who was as elated as a child. You might search England through, and not find its equal.
The chief difficulty was to get a house. Young Philips, as a bachelor, had lived in furnished apartments; which of course was impossible for them. But it was literally a case of Hobson's choice. For most people owned their houses -- had been born and would die in them like their fathers before them -- and in all the place only two were vacant. One was of a type that disfigures many a seaside town: a high, gloomy house -- in a terrace of three -- standing right on the pavement of a side street. With no garden of its own, it was darkened by the foliage of the big trees in the gardens opposite. Still worse, it turned its back on the sea. A lawyer had lived there; the ground-floor windows bore the hated shades. His widow, planning to move from the neighbourhood, was willing to let the house on lease. But Mahony took a furious dislike to it; and even Mary thought it dull, and rather large for the two of them. The second, much smaller and older -- some hundred and fifty years, said report -- was, on the other hand, bright and cheerful, and had a charming old-world garden and a magnificent view across the Bay. But it was for sale. Nor was the position it occupied so suitable as that of the lawyer's: it stood above the town, half-way up a steep hill. Still, distances were surely negligible, argued Mahony, in so small a place; and whoever really needed a doctor would summon him, whether it meant fifty yards further or no.
None the less the decision cost him his sleep of a night. Mary was all in favour of the one to be rented: his inclinations leaned to the other. He walked past this a dozen times a day, and went over it so often that the agent suggested him keeping the keys until he had made up his mind. It was ridiculous, he told himself, to think of buying a house before he had sampled the practice; yet seldom had he been so torn. And once again Mary, pitying his distraction, came to the rescue and said, well, after all, perhaps he should just buy and be done with it. For she saw what would happen if he didn't: he would never cease to bemoan his loss, and to find fault with the house he was in. Better for his peace of mind that he should take the monetary risk -- and though this meant using up the last remainder of their available ready money. But there was also another unspoken thought at the back of Mary's mind. The knowledge that he had thus involved himself might help him to sit firm, if -- and with a person like Richard the contingency had to be allowed for -- if he afterwards tired of the place.
So he bought; and not for a second had he regretted it -- any more than he regretted having pitched his tent in this loveliest of spots. On the contrary he counted himself a remarkably lucky man.
* * * * *
And thus to Buddlecombe.
At first, though, even she had to admit there was nothing to complain of.
For if Mahony here felt himself restored to his own level professionally, on the social side -- which was important, too -- things also promised to run smoothly. Of course, English people were notoriously slow to take you to their hearts; and, even after they had found out all about you, would still go walking round you looking you up and down. Once, however, these sticklers were sure with whom they had to deal, they made rich amends. And so Mary had numerous callers of the right kind; and invitations followed the calls. The vicar's wife took her up -- a due appearance at church having been made, and a pew hired -- and she joined a circle that sat twice a week to sew for the heathen. Further, she was asked to help in visiting and distributing tracts among the lower orders; in getting up a Penny Reading to raise funds for the promulgation of the Gospel; to take a table at the annual Sunday School Feast: was, in short, made free of all the artless diversions of the parish.
In addition to this, the month was April; and the thousand and one beauties of an exceptionally fine spring unrolled before their eyes. Declared Mahony: to be present at this budding and bursting, this sprouting and flowering, more than made up for the disappointments he had suffered since landing in England. What a feast of tender green, of changing colours, was here spread for eyes sore with the harshness and aridity of the Australian landscape, the eternal grey-green of its skimpy foliage! When he first arrived, every sheltered slope and sunny bank was yellow with primroses; the lesser celandine bedecked the meadow-grass, violets were mauve and purple in the hedgerows; and no sooner did these show signs of fading than the ground became blue with myriads of bells, which, taken in the mass, looked like patches of sky dropped to earth. And the blue in its turn yielded to the ruby-pink of the red campion. Against a background of starry blackthorn blazed the golden gorse. The cliffs were covered with the comical little striped brown pokers of the horsetails, which soon branched out into bristly brooms; and piercing the rust-red carpet of last year's growth, up sprang the straight nimble spears of the bracken. In the high hedges the ruddy cane of the willows was smothered by the succulent green tips of hawthorn and bramble; and on the rolling countryside that belle of trees, the larch, stood out among the copperish buds of the beeches and the first tightly folded leaves of the chestnuts, with a pale green feathery loveliness all its own.
But with the onset of summer, when gardeners were busy netting strawberry-beds and currant-bushes against the greedy thrush; and the blackbird, his wooing done, was omitting the topnotes at the end of his call: by this time, in spite of Mahony's liking for the moderate but sympathetic practice, sly doubts had begun to invade him whether things were really at bottom as satisfactory as they seemed, or whether both in his professional and their twofold social life, there was not a fly in the ointment. In his own case, the suspicion soon deepened to a certainty. -- Robinson was that fly.
Of the person who bore his name he had naturally heard nothing at the time of buying. Only by degrees did Robinson come within his ken. A surgeon some years his junior, the fellow had originally, it now turned out, held the whole practice of the place for miles round in his hands. Then, three years previously, he had married a rich widow -- report credited her with eight to ten thousand a year -- bought a fine property and retired. Since then -- again according to rumour -- he had spent more time than was fitting in the company of the bottle. However that might be, his former wide professional connection, his wife's money and social standing, combined to make him persona grata in all the best houses; while among the townspeople and villagers, slow of wit and opposed to change as only English country-people could be, the memory, or rather the habit of him, had persisted, to the tribulation no doubt of his successors. For there came moments when Mahony mistrusted the throat-weakness alleged by young Philips; or at least wondered whether this was his sole reason for quitting so promising a place after a bare year's trial. And who had preceded Philips? At first what he, Mahony, had to meet was no more than a casual mention of Robinson's name. "Mr. Robinson said this, or would have done that"; and, at the outset, he had been simple enough to believe it a slip of the tongue for Philips. He soon learned better. A question put, a scrap of gossip retailed by Mary, taught him that Robinson was still a power in the place. For yet a while, however, he ascribed what was going on to hard-dying custom, which might be overcome. The first time he scented actual danger was when one of two spinsters he was attending complained of her sister's slow progress, and said she would ask Mr. Robinson to look in, he understanding their constitutions better than any one else.
"If you do that, my good woman, you see no more of me!" was Mahony's quick retort. And so he lost a patient.
Thereafter on his rounds he himself began to catch glimpses of the bottle-nosed surgeon -- sitting perched in a high gig beside a groom in livery; altogether a very smart turn-out -- and this went on until it positively looked as if the fellow intended taking up practice again . . . filching it back from under his very nose. A pretty thing that would be to happen, now he had staked his all on it! A shabby trick and no mistake! -- one, too, that ran counter to every known rule of medical etiquette.
The mischief was -- with a brain like his -- let the door open to one such suspicion, and straightway a dozen others seized the chance of inserting themselves. He next fell to questioning the apparent ease with which Mary and he had entered the polite society of the town. For, the longer he lived there, the more plainly he saw just what a wasps' nest of caste and prejudice they had fallen into. Social life in Buddlecombe was the most complicated affair under the sun: was divided into innumerable grades; made up of a series of cliques, rising one above the other and fitting as exactly as a set of Japanese boxes. No such simple matter, and that was a fact, for a pair of newcomers to find themselves to rights in it. But they in their ignorance had pranced boldly in, where those who knew better, walked warily and with discretion. The vicar's wife had taken Mary up: yes; but by now Mahony had come to see that she would be equally attentive to any one who might prove useful in helping to run the parish, or in slaving for foreign missions. And he began to doubt whether, often as Mary went to the vicarage, she was invited to the really select parties there given. She had never, for instance, met the Blakeneys of "The Towers," people he knew to be hand-in-glove with the vicaress. Mary either did not notice or, noticing, heed such trivial details she just laughed and said: "Rubbish!" or "You are fanciful, Richard!" -- but he most emphatically did, and thanked you for being put off with the second best. And besides her insensitiveness to slights, she was hopelessly obtuse when it came to observing the invisible but cast-iron barriers with which the various cliques hedged themselves round, to keep those a step lower in the scale from coming too near.
"Not shake hands with that nice old Mr. Dandy just because he was once in trade? I never heard such a thing!" In Ballarat Mary had been used to feel flattered did her grocer -- rich, influential, a trustee of the church, a member of the Horticultural Society -- emerge from behind the counter specially to chat with her. "I think we should just make a beginning."
"Indeed and you'll put your foot in it with a vengeance, my dear, if you try anything of that kind here. . . when I'm still struggling to get a stand."
"Oh well, of course, if you look at it that way.... But all the same . . . when I think . . ." Her sentence tailed off into a speaking silence.
He understood. "Tempi passati, love! Nowadays, we must do as Rome does. -- Recollect, too, my dear, these things may seem trifling enough to you . . . and me. . . who have knocked about the world; but to people here they're the very A B C of good breeding -- have been sucked in with their mother's milk. We mustn't let ourselves appear ignoramuses of the first water."
"But I've got to be friendly with your patients, Richard, whoever they are."
"True. But even you must draw the line somewhere, you know."
"I'm afraid I don't; I'm not clever enough. It doesn't seem human either. For we're all the same flesh and blood."
Yes, for the countless niceties and distinctions of social etiquette, Mary had, as she confessed, little aptitude. It sometimes seemed that, if a mistake was possible, she made it.
The two chief houses in Buddlecombe, the "Hall" and the "Court," were closed when the Mahonys settled there, the families being respectively abroad and in residence in London. During their absence the temporary leader, who gave the sign and set the key, and to whom the vicar deferred with his treacliest smile, was the owner of "Toplands." This was a Mrs. Challoner, a widow with two sons, and a person of great wealth and importance -- "Toplands" was really the biggest and most up-to-date place in the neighbourhood, both Hall and Court being cramped by comparison and mouldy with age. But let the Trehernes or the Saxeby-Corbetts show so much as the tips of their noses, and this lady subsided with extraordinary swiftness, collapsed like a jack-in-the-box; for, though her husband's antecedents were irreproachable, there was, on her own side, some shadowy connection with "malt" which could never be forgotten or forgiven her; or at least "only by the grace of God. . . or of the Saxeby-Corbetts."
Mrs. Challoner was a member of the vicarage sewing-circle; and here she met Mary, to whom she seemed to take a liking; for she called, asked her to "Toplands," and, as a special mark of favour, drove her out in her carriage; Mahony being simultaneously summoned to attend the younger of the two sons, a delicate lad of seventeen. Thus, when, in Mary's opinion, the time had come to return the various invitations they had received, by herself sending out cards for a party, she felt justified in including Mrs. Challoner. And, sure enough, had in reply a graceful note of acceptance. So far good. But now it was that Mary let her hospitable impulses outride her discretion. At the vicarage she had made a further acquaintance, in the shape of a Mrs. Johnston-Perkes, a very charming lady who had been settled in Buddlecombe not much longer than they themselves. And having it from this person's own lips that she came of a good Oxfordshire family, besides meeting her where she did -- Mrs. Dandy, for example, was not made free of the sewing-club -- how was Mary to guess that the Johnston-Perkes were not "in the swim"? Nor could Richard have helped her. For the dark fact, unknown to either, was that in his day the husband's father had had some Connection with a publishing firm; and though Mr. Perkes himself had never soiled his hands thus, yet the business stigma -- pray, did not the issuing of books imply the abhorred counter? -- clung to him and his lady-wife and tracked them from place to place. What followed proved -- according to Mahony -- that, though good enough for God and His works -- witness the lady's presence at the vicarage! -- the Johnston-Perkes were not by any means good enough for the upper crust of Buddlecombe; and the consequence was, Mary's party was a failure. There was no open contretemps; Mrs. Challoner and her satellites behaved with perfect civility. But it was impossible, to Mahony's mind, to misread the crippling surprise writ big on these people's faces; and the atmosphere of the drawing-room remained icy -- would not thaw.