The Elderbrook Brothers (31 page)

‘Can't be helped,' he said, after a comfortable silence.

‘Like iron it
is
, said Patchett, reading his thoughts, ‘and that's a true word. Down Morton's place they tried ploughing the Long Severals last week, he says. Jack Rounce tell me, him as works along there. Shares wouldn't take it at all, he says. Couldn't get their teeth in it. Just threw up great gobbets, he says, hard as stone. And a fine powdery dust throwing up, he says, fit to choke you.'

‘For all that,' said Matthew, with a touch of grimness, ‘I mean to plough the bean-stubble this week, even if I have to get ‘em to bring a steam plough to it.'

‘Nay, you'd never have one of them here, Muster Elderbrook. By the time you get un going, look, we'll have rainfall.'

‘Wish we could, Walter. I shouldn't complain.'

‘Come to think, I ain't seen steam ploughs hereabouts for a pretty long time. Reckon they was more trouble than worth.'

‘We had one come here once on a time,' said Matthew, ‘in my father's day. But never again. They do the job all right, but they want room, and it adds up to a lot of money on a small acreage.'

Patchett grunted contentedly, and moved off to the job in hand, leaving Matthew to his thoughts. That very night there was a sprinkling of rain, but no more. Not enough to notice, and not enough to make any difference, thought Matthew; but next morning he got Edgcombe on to ploughing the bean-stubble, as he had said. He himself was in at the start, to lend a hand with the horses. He was curious and anxious to see if the job could be done. He argued that Morton's Long Severals, on account of its situation and slope, was a dry stretch at the best of times, and that he himself might have better luck on low-lying ground. He decided that three
horses would not be one too many, and Dick Edgcombe agreed with him. Dick was quite his old self again, in spite of all that the army had done to him. He had got over his hankering for a town job and was settled again into his old way of life. Seeing his easy country gait, his taciturn good temper, his patient handling of the horses, Matthew recalled with astonishment a day in the middle of the war when Dick, home on leave, called to pay his respects: a different person from the old Dick, a person very conscious both of himself and of his uniform. All that was past, and Dick, in his silent deliberate fashion, seemed as keen to plough the bean-stubble, for the sowing of winter oats, as Matthew was to have it done.

Molly was the leader, a big black mare, tried and trusted. Matthew put a hand on her head, while Dick took a hold on the plough handles.

‘Do your best, old girl,' said Matthew. ‘Off we go then!'

There were several abortive beginnings. It was impossible at first to make any depth. The shares dragged lightly over the ground, merely scratching the surface. So they stopped, and made a new start. Not much better, but a little. They managed one length with tolerable success, but at the turn their troubles started again. The horses were already in a sweat.

‘Let
me
have a go,' said Matthew, changing places with Dick. ‘Kimmup, Molly!' Bringing the team round in a ragged arc, they were off again, on the return journey. ‘We're managing, Dick!' shouted Matthew cheerfully. ‘We're pulling it off, boy!' he cried, quite in his father's manner. And at the end of the furrow master and man exchanged triumphant grins, as they paused for the turn. ‘It's like trying to plough up Market Square,' said Matthew.

‘Ah,' said Dick. ‘If they want any more cobbles, we can tell ‘em where to come.'

At the next pause, to rest the horses, both men noticed that there was someone watching them from the shadow of the hedge. Neither had seen the stranger come into the field.

‘Looks like the fellow that calls himself Caidster,' Dick Edgcome remarked incuriously.

‘Isn't it his right name then?' asked Matthew.

‘Never know, with his sort. Here today and gone tomorrow, with whatever they can pick up.'

Knowing himself observed, Caidster came strolling across to where they stood discussing him.

‘Back again, Mr Elderbrook. Bad penny, eh?'

There was more than a hint of insolence in the way he took his welcome for granted. A moment earlier Matthew had been wondering why everyone conspired to give this stray dog a bad name, but now he felt differently. Stray he was, seemingly, a creature without roots or responsibilities. There was a down-at-heel look about him, for all his jaunty air.

‘Well?' said Matthew. ‘What do you want here?'

He spoke with unaccustomed roughness; but the question was a natural one, and he was surprised, even startled, to see a sudden glint of malice in the greeny grinning eyes that stared so boldly into his.

‘I'd like a job, master.'

The sneer in the word master did not escape Matthew, but though his dander was rising, as they said in these parts, he controlled himself and answered without heat. When Patchett called him master it was no more than an old country habit, a mode of civility implying no subservience but only such respect as any man may pay to another. But on the tongue of this ex-hireling who called himself Caidster it had a flavour both oily and satirical.

‘Nothing for you here,' said Matthew curtly. ‘I've all the help I need.'

The fellow's grin fixed itself on distance. ‘Mebbe so, master. But another pair of hands'll come in useful. I worked for you at harvest. Didn't I now?'

‘It's not harvest now,' said Matthew. ‘Come along, Dick.'

He put his hands on the plough again. Dick went to the head of the team.

‘You and me,' said Caidster softly, ‘we'll have a quiet talk sometime. See?'

Matthew gave him a sharp astonished look. ‘Be off with you, man!' he said. ‘I've told you there's nothing doing here. Kimmup, Molly! Good girl!'

FOR years now the three brothers had been virtually strangers. There was no shadow of ill feeling among them, but each in the mind of the others (for they scarcely ever met) was a more or less unknown character having a merely nominal connection with the brother they had grown up with. After the first scattering of the sons their mother had been the chief link between them; and at Emily's death it fell to young Nancy, so long as she remained at Upmarden, to sustain the maternal tradition by collecting and re-distributing the family news. Guy had been the least responsive to her efforts: ‘as soon get blood from a stone', she was in the habit of saying, and with a certain tiresome iteration. But Felix was not much better; nor perhaps would Matthew have been; for family letter-writing, after all, was a woman's job. Nancy nowadays had concerns of her own to occupy her. Her Fred had proved to be both ardent and industrious; his business prospered; and Nancy, making up for the years that the locust had eaten, was already the happy mother of four small children. The family dissolution was complete.

In a world remote from Matthew, whose existence he seldom had occasion to remember, and infinitely remote from Guy, with whom he seemed to have lost touch altogether, Felix was now engaged in another kind of warfare than that from which he had been recently released. The year of the Versailles Peace Conference found him in one of the dingier neighbourhoods of East London, living and working, preaching a little but listening more, among people whose squalor was their
native element. From Minsterbourne to Rattlebone Road was a long step; but in Hemner's view, which Felix fully shared, the journey was well worth making. Soap-and-water austerity combined with hard work and high thinking was one thing: this new discipline was quite another. He had travelled a long way indeed; the ‘darkest Africa' Arthur Surrey had desired for him could be scarcely further from Minsterbourne's placid industry than was this huddle of mean streets in which, for a while, he had pitched his tent. That, when he stopped to look, was how he saw himself, and how he saw his fellow-man: as a pilgrim, moving across the dim-lit stage of mortal life from darkness to darkness, from the darkness of non-being to that ultimate darkness which was none other, faith asserted, than eternal light, too intense for our seeing. The routine of his work was the christening, marrying, and burying of his parishioners, and visiting the sick and the dying: the last a frequent duty, for in this densely populated district illness was plentiful and death no stranger. He had seen death often enough before, and in more violent shape. Many an unknown warrior had confided to him the last pitiful desires of the heart; and many others, too far gone for speaking, had heard the diminishing sound of his voice praying ‘that at the last we may come to his eternal joy'. At such moments, as on all occasions of prayer, Felix did not attempt to improve on the traditional forms, nor study to astonish heaven with thoughts of his own. He was content to be an instrument, an echo, or at most a messenger, knowing moreover that to a believing heart, or one wishing to believe, the music of familiar words had more power of comfort than anything he could devise. And since at the last every man is a child, whether aloof in his forlornness or groping for a hand in the dark, even a nursery rhyme, Felix believed, would be of more avail than pious exhortation.

‘So they made a chaplain of you, did they?' said Dr Jakes. They were walking together down the dingy, moonlit street. ‘That was after you were wounded, of course. Anything
rather than let you go. I know ‘em, the brutes. And how did you fancy that?'

‘I didn't fancy it. I funked it. I tried to get out of it.'

‘And couldn't you, with that limp?'

‘I got that afterwards,' said Felix, ‘in a field dressing-station. Shell splinter.'

‘Does it hurt?'

‘Sometimes.'

The doctor nodded. The answer seemed to give him professional satisfaction. ‘I rather thought it did. They bungled the job, I suppose?'

‘Not at all. They saved my leg for me,' said Felix, smiling.

‘Devilish good of them,' said Dr Jakes.

Felix laughed. ‘What a chap you are, doctor, for jumping to false conclusions! We were retreating, don't you see? And our casualties … had to lie about a bit and wait their turn.'

‘I know. Gangrene. Are we walking too fast for you? I don't want a Christian martyr on my hands.'

‘No, I'm all right. Where do they live?'

‘Plenty Street. Number 163. Waggish fellow who gave it that name. P'raps it was the damned scoundrel who put the houses up. Plenty Street! Plenty of rent, God blast his dirty soul! You don't mind my language, I hope?'

‘It's a shade too prayerful for me,' said Felix. ‘Otherwise all right. But I think your theology's pretty shaky.'

Dr Jakes took him by the arm. ‘We cross here. That's the road, by that lamp-post. Do you know, Elderbrook,' he said giving the arm a friendly squeeze, ‘you're the rummiest man of God I've ever struck.'

‘If it comes to that,' said Felix, ‘you're the rummiest man of medicine I've ever struck.'

Having crossed the road, they turned into Plenty Street; and Jakes, with one eye on the look-out for number 163, went on with the conversation. Talking was his favourite pursuit; he could never have too much of it; and since he was able to do
several other things at the same time it did not in the least hinder his being an excellent doctor. Moreover there was this to be said for him, that in the course of his day's and night's work he had a good deal of listening to do.

‘You've got your work cut out here, man of God. I fancy that's the one. They're all alike, and all hideous, but that's the one. As like as one louse to another. Ought to call ‘em hice, not houses. Not very funny. Is it religion they want? Maybe. But what they want first is better food, better housing, better sanitation. They want more money. They want champagne and oysters and three months in the south of France. Can you give them that? Not you. Nor can I. I can give them bottles of medicine and let them tell me their troubles. Some like it nasty, think it does 'em more good; others prefer it sweetish; but nasty or nice it must have a good rich colour. The only colour they get in their lives is the colour of my medicine, poor devils. And you, what do you give them?'

‘I?' said Felix. ‘Nothing. I merely try to show them … well, other colours. I can't, by myself, alter their world, any more than you can. I can only help them, a little, to endure it, by pointing to the sky.'

‘The sky? You can't see it here for chimney pots. And what's that mean anyhow? Bliss hereafter? The gospel of jam tomorrow?'

‘No,' said Felix, with a sudden urgent sincereity. ‘Not that at all. It means, for me, a light from beyond the world. The light of eternity breaking into time. Since you ask me,' he added apologetically.

With his hand on the knocker of number 163 Jakes looked at him for a moment without answering.

The door opened gingerly. A face peered out. ‘It's quite a good story,' said the doctor over his shoulder. ‘You stick to it. … I'm Dr Jakes,' he announced. ‘Are you Mrs Smith? I can't see you in the dark.'

A murmur of thankfulness greeted him. The woman turned to show him the way. He followed her, with Felix at his heels.
The rumour of Dr Jakes's presence preceded them up the narrow, uncarpeted, evil-smelling stairway. One could almost hear the beating of expectant hearts. Dr Jakes had come. Our Dr Jakes from round the corner. Everybody's friend. Dr Jakes who mucks in, same as us, when he might be riding in his kerridge with the dukes and duchesses. In the moment of crossing the threshold Felix had been hit in the face by another presence, a sour, stale, ammoniac stench, compounded of dankness and dirt and a variety of animal effluvia. But he was accustomed to that by now, and had not gone half-a-dozen paces up the stairs before he forgot it in his contemplation of this queer new friend of his, who already seemed an old friend. It was easy to get to know Dr Jakes, provided he liked you. And apparently he did like Felix, who from the first had been shrewd enough to see that being in with the doctor was his best passport to the confidence of his parishioners. Jakes had won his immense popularity, without plan or effort, by being himself, by making his home among the people he doctored instead of being, like his predecessor, an absentee doctor arriving two days a week from a supposedly luxurious house in the West End to put in a couple of hours' profitable slumming at the Rattlebone Road surgery. Dr Jakes's daily ‘surgery' was a crowded occasion, conducted with brisk patience and tart good humour, and combining, as Felix had seen for himself, the functions of health-shop and confessional. At sixpence a consultation, ninepence with medicine, and a shilling for an outside visit, the doctor declared he made a good thing out of it, and having a hearty hatred of philanthropy, in his view a stinking substitute for social justice, he tacitly invited you to infer that to make a good thing out of it was his prime motive.