There May Be Danger (4 page)

“How far away iss Llanhalo from Hastry, George? The Land-Army young lady that works for Gideon Atkins is a friend of this young lady here!”

“Oh, ah, about five-and-a-half mile, I shouldn't wonder. Yes, five or six mile, pretty near.”

Mr. Davis turned his head and looked at Kate with a sort of foxy humour.

“And how does the young lady like working for Gideon Atkins, Miss? Oh ah?”

He spoke with real curiosity, and Kate, glancing at his wife, saw that she was waiting, brightly intent behind her round child-like spectacles, for Kate's answer. Kate could not remember that Aminta had ever expressed any sentiments with regard to her employer. Aminta was not interested in human beings, only in cows and horses and other inarticulate animals. Mr. and Mrs. Davis, when she explained this, seemed both disappointed and sceptical.

“And how long's her been at Llanhalo, Missie?”

“Nearly a year.”

“Well, well her must be a stout girl! Does her get enough to eat, oh ah?” inquired Mr. Davis with jocularity. “Reckon that's why Atkins picked a land-girl, missus, her wouldn't eat as much as a man!”

“Llanhalo's a draughty old melancholy house, though Miss Atkins is for ever scrubbing her fingers away on the floors,” said Mrs. Davis, who seemed loth to believe that Kate had no second-hand titbits of gossip to pass on about Mr. Atkin's domestic life. “I wonder as that young lady likes to stay on there. No company, either. Gideon Atkins does not like visitors. There iss only the summer visitors from Llanfyn that comes to see the old Abbey ruins, and there iss not so many of them as there used to be, now that Gideon Atkins makes them pay sixpence each! Sixpence each they hass to pay, to go and look inside his farmyard at a lot of old stones!”

‘Ah, Gideon Atkins would ask sixpence admission to his own funeral,” remarked Mr. Davis, clucking to his horse as if to share the joke with it. “And there's plenty would pay it, whatever!”

“And he'll have ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted' written on his tomb-stone, too!” added Mrs. Davis with bright enjoyment.

Kate was certainly a little surprised that Aminta had made no comments on this individual. All Aminta had said about her employer was that he was a transplanted Yorkshire man. Yet Mr. Gideon Atkins was evidently a character of the countryside, and, to judge by this harping on his future obsequies, not a popular one.

They had descended the hill now, and were clopping quickly along a little road that led through the valley. Kate, who was tired, stiff, cold, hungry and getting wetter every minute around the wrists and ankles, longed for a lamp and a fire.

“It'll be black-out time soon now, I expect,” said Mrs. Davis. “Reckon them'll be very strict with the black-out in London, Missie?”

“Yes, very strict.”

“Them's pretty strict here. Oh, ah. Pretty strict them is.”

“And so they ought to be!” said his wife vigorously. “We have aeroplanes flying over here often at night. The Berminster water works is quite close the other side of Rhosbach, which is this hill ahead of you, Miss. Well, here is Hastry. And that is Howells the post, up the bank beyond the school.”

They were plodding uphill again, and had entered a pleasant little village that seemed to cling to the side of the great rain-hidden hill. The houses lay mostly to one side of the hillside road and looked across the little valley. Here and there along the street a lit window looked a welcome. One or two little slate-roofed cottages lay higher up the slope, like look-outs keeping a watch upon the valley for the whole village. They passed the humped church behind its great yew-trees, and the neat, but regrettably red-brick, elementary school; and a little farther up Mr. Davis drew rein before a row of cottages, the character of whose walls was hidden under many coats of whitewash, but whose pleasant wide-angled gables and stone roofs vouched for their antiquity. They lay above the road, with steep little front gardens still cheerful with set and drooping asters, marigolds and dahlias, and one of them, the end one, had a Post Office sign, and a little window filled with jars of sweets and faded cardboard packets of groceries.

“Here you be!” said Mr. Davis. “Us'll wait and see you in.”

“Mrs. Howells will give you a room, I am sure,” said Mrs. Davis, handing Kate's knapsack down to her. “But if Mrs. Howells cannot take you, you are welcome to Pentrewer for the night.”

“Oh, how kind of you!” said Kate gratefully, hoping all the same that she was not doomed to a further journey in the trap in the rain, which was now setting in with a bleak determination to soak everything thoroughly before the morning. “Thank you a thousand times for giving me a lift! I
should
have got wet if I'd walked!”

She would not really have got much wetter, and she would certainly not have got so cold, reflected Kate, as she hurried quickly up the steps of the steep little garden so as not to keep her kind friends sitting in the rain: but she would have missed quite a lot of interesting and possibly fruitful information. The first thing she must do when she found herself alone, and when she was warm and dry again, must be to look at her Ordnance Survey map.

With cold wet fingers she knocked at the door, which was round the side of the cottage. Steps sounded on stone in a moment, and the door was opened by a fat middle-aged woman in an apron, with red cheeks, slightly tousled hair, rolled-up sleeves and the floury hands that tell of kitchen, stove and food. A door was open behind her, and from it came the smell of baking, and that most welcome of all sounds to the cold traveller, the swish and hiss of flames rushing up round logs in the grate. To Kate at that moment the thought of a kitchen was like the thought of Paradise. Her sense of adventure was ebbing low. She asked for nothing of the gods but to be allowed to go into a kitchen, and listen to that noise, and smell that smell.

A moment later she was waving farewell to her friends the Davises and following Mrs. Cornelius Howells into a kitchen, low-raftered, lamp-lit, close-curtained, with fantastic flames rushing up around great cleft logs thrust endwise in the grate, and a huge iron kettle swinging on a chimney crane. An enamel teapot stood on the hob, and a meal was laid on the square table. There was a gleam of oak furniture and a glitter of black-lead and polished brass. There was an old high-backed settle with a red cushion on it drawn up close to that fire. A side of bacon hung on the wall, and a ham swung from the ceiling. It was a cottage kitchen of the kind that the stage often tries, and always fails, to reproduce; the kitchen of the weary traveller's dreams.

A couple of hours later, Kate was sitting on that curved-backed settle in front of the fire, hot-faced and replete with a large meal of fried green bacon, potatoes, bread-and-butter, strong tea and hot cake, and fortified in her resolve to find Sidney Brentwood by the simple approbation with which Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Howells accepted her intention.

“We was real upset to think of Sidney's relations coming here, and yet when they didn't come, we was more upset,” said Mrs. Cornelius, who, in contrast to Mrs. Davis of Pentrewer, had a very gentle voice, soft and deliberate, yet full of colour, with the clear consonants and rising inflections that Kate had noticed in the Davises. She was a stout, black-haired woman of about fifty, with large rosy cheeks and a pleasant untidiness of person, in contrast with the glittering orderliness of her kitchen. Her husband, who sat upright in a wooden chair opposite Kate, was a little man, grey-bearded and wrinkled, with a shrewd eye and a clipped, jovial tone of voice that Kate found rather difficult to follow. He had come in, in his oilskin cape, shortly after Kate's arrival, from some remote outpost of the G.P.O. which he visited daily to sell stamps and receive letters and, incidentally news. Kate was just getting used to the almost shockingly human look of a hatless postman, when, having finished his tea, Mr. Howells retired into the bakehouse and came out in an old tweed jacket, with only the red pipings up the seams of his trousers to remind Kate that she was talking to a Government official.

“Well, you see, his father's in the Merchant Navy, and the great-aunt he lives with is a very old lady,” said Kate.

Mr. and Mrs. Howells exchanged a stolid, and yet, Kate, felt, subtly ironical glance.

“We had a letter from Miss Brentwood saying she couldn't leave her cats,” stated Mrs. Howells simply, folding up the cloth and putting it away in a drawer. “We was surprised about that, Cornelius and me.”

“Her's an old maid, I reckon,” said Cornelius tolerantly, “and they be mostly cankerish... So Davis Pentrewer drove you out from the station! He be a rough kind of man, I reckon!”

The tone, as well as the words, was disparaging, and Kate perceived that the Post Office looked down upon Pentrewer.

“Is Pentrewer a farm?” 

Mr. Howells exchanged a bright, humorous glance with Mrs. Howells.

“You could call it a farm, I reckon, if you could see the land for bracken,” he opined. “Them've got a bit of hill land there and a few ship. But them turns a hand to anything for a living, mostly.”

The contemplation of Mr. and Mrs. Davis and their manner of livelihood seemed to cause Mr. Howells some secret amusement, as though he knew more about them than it would be neighbourly to say.

“Sidney Brentwood went over to see them one day, or so Mrs. Davis told me.”

“Boys get in all kinds of company,” said Mrs. Howells apologetically. “You can't stop them going where they likes. I wasn't too pleased when I heard as Sidney had stopped to tea along of Davis Pentrewer. But young people has to learn there's all sorts of folk in the world, hasn't they, and we can't keep them all the time tied to the right sort. I asked him not to go there again.”

Kate, puzzled by this social ostracism, protested:

“I thought Mr. and Mrs. Davis seemed rather nice people.”

“Well—I'm not saying they isn't, but—” Mrs. Howells looked at her husband, who helped her out.

“Reckon they've got too much gipsy blood in them for us kind of folk to take to, Missie. They be harmless folk in their way, I expect. But over Pentrewer way people mostly isn't as particular as us Hastry people. A tidy lot of them be a roughish sort, I reckon.”

“I see,” said Kate, still a little puzzled. Those who lived Pentrewer way, she must take it, then, including her kind Samaritans, were a lesser breed dwelling without the pale of civilised Hastry life. She was about to pigeon-hole the information under the heading of Distinctions (Social) when Mr. Howells added:

“They isn't as particular what they turns a hand to as us is, you sees, Miss. Not particular enough, us thinks.”

He seemed disinclined to say more on the subject, and Kate docketed his remarks temporarily under the label of Prejudice (Moral).

What she wondered, did Hastry village think of Gideon Atkins, whom even the Davises appeared to despise? But Gideon Atkins, it appeared when she mentioned his name, was a farmer in a biggish way, a warm man, and although Mr. Howells readily admitted that he was not popular in the district, he seemed to entertain a certain respect for him. 

“He be a bit close-fisted, Missie, that's how it be, and not only that, but he ben't a friendly man. He be not long from Yorkshire, and it
do seem
as if farmers round here can't get on with him and doesn't want to. But he be a goodish farmer, I reckon. People here is inclined to be jealous of strangers, unless they makes theirselves agreeable. Now, there's strangers at the Veault hasn't been there above six months and is more liked than Gideon Atkins after two years! But then they be free with their talk and their money, and he be tight with both, and that's the difference, I reckon!”

“The Veault!” exclaimed Kate. “I travelled in the train from Llanfyn with a children's nurse who said she was going to the Veault!”

“Ah, it's to be a home for London children, that's what they say. George Hufton the builder is working there, putting in plumbing enough for a hotel and baths I don't know how many!”

Mrs. Howells reckoned in an aside that they'd be needed, if the London children were like some that had come to Hastry village!

“They say it's an American lady is doing it,” continued Mr. Howells. “Her and her niece. There's to be room for forty children there, they says, with five nurses to them. Well the Veault's a big old rambling place, but 'twill be a puzzle to fit them in, I reckon! When you go to see your friend at Llanhalo, you can take a look at the Veault at the same time, Missie. It stands on the same bank, not above a quarter mile from Llanhalo, and that's six miles from Hastry, pretty near.”

“I wonder whether I can hire a bicycle,” said Kate, who had foolishly not anticipated these distances, nor a bus service that ran only twice a week.

Mrs. Howells said that she thought her daughter, who lived in the village, would be pleased to lend hers, as now that she had a baby to push about she didn't use a bicycle any more.

“You needs a bike to get about in this country,” she agreed.

“Sidney was for ever running around on his bike, poor boy. He was a real country kind of boy, not like some of them that's evacuated here and can't find anything to do with themselves. He was a real nice boy, and I can't bear to think what has happened to him! Our children is all grown up and married, it was like being young again to have him in the house!”

Tears sparkled in her kind eyes, and Mr. Howells, looking very grave said: “Ah, that was so, indeed!”

A little later, after a perilous walk down the garden path in the black-out and the rain, Kate was shown up the box-stairs to her bedroom. 

As Mrs. Howells put the candle down on the chest-of-drawers and made sure the window-curtain over the little window was fast, Kate looked about her. This had been Sidney Brentwood's room. His little collection of books was still on the mantelpiece. His football boots were still under the washstand. A photograph of his father in a frame of Woolworth tortoise-shell stood on the pillar-like commode behind the big, puffed bed.