The Elderbrook Brothers (8 page)

He came to the infirmary, winningly eager to be friends, but
bringing that silence with him. ‘Did it hurt much?' he said. And: ‘When are you coming back, do you know?' He had a new story about Mr Lamble, who twelve months earlier had been Felix's form-master, and he gave an excited, exclamatory, giggling account of a recent hockey-match at which Mr Lamble had acted as referee. The two stories were inextricably mixed together in Jerry's narrative, though they seemed to have no connection except Mr Lamble himself. Both Mr Lamble and his friend Mr Plover were said to be at daggers drawn with the sarcastic Mr Fletton, the headmaster's second-in-command: a circumstance much to their credit in the general estimation. Mr Fletton had a fanatical dislike of smoking, and the other day (so Jerry's story ran) he had found Mr Lamble smoking his pipe in the masters' Common Room with a pile of exercise books in front of him which he was busy marking. ‘Working or smoking, which is it?' said Mr Fletton. ‘Both,' said Mr Lamble. ‘So you can do two things at once, can you, Lamble? What a talented young fellow you are!' ‘I can do better than that, dear Mr Fletton,' said Lamble. ‘I can do three things at once. I can work, I can smoke, and I can mind my own business.' On the face of it the story was an improbable one, but boys who had suffered much in their time from Mr Fletton's tongue were resolved to believe it. The hockey-match was tame by comparison. St Swithins played hockey as well as football and cricket, all games being in theory optional, though the moral obligation to play something was in practice irresistible. There was a school of thought which considered hockey a girlish pastime, but Jerry Cockle made this particular match sound like a massacre. ‘And would you believe it, Brooky, we've had a challenge from a Girls' High School. Imagine the cheek of them!'

And all this while the two boys were thinking, not of hockey, nor yet of Mr Lamble's brilliant retort, but of that strange uncomfortable moment in Longbarrow Wood last summer, when invisibly, without sign or sound, the delicate filament of their comradeship, drawn too tight, had snapped.

Mr Surrey's visit carried no such undertones. Long, fair, freckled, curly-headed, Arthur Surrey was the very newest and youngest of the masters and a prime favourite with the Head, who, in introducing him to the little boys he was to teach, had rather the air of Santa Claus presenting them with an exceptionally large and beautiful toy-rabbit to play with. ‘The son of my oldest friend,' he said superfluously; and stood smiling encouragement while Mr Surrey, plunging straight into his duties, set the whole class noisily chanting their multiplication tables. Frank and sunny was Mr Surrey's style, guileless and good-natured with no complicating humour or reserve in his character. He flung himself with a will into teaching the little boys, doing it (as the Scriptures enjoined) with all his might; but his secret ambition, which he confided to everyone, which he carolled from the housetops, which he sunned with his smiles and nourished with his heart's blood, was to be a missionary, to carry the light of Camden Town into darkest Africa. In addition to taking a form he taught games and exercised a brotherly supervision over the rough-and-tumble of the playground during break, saying at intervals ‘Now then, old chap! Not too rough with the little fellows!' or ‘Break away there, boys! It's a playground, not a battlefield.' Into almost every lesson Mr Surrey contrived to drag a mention of Dr Livingstone, or some other hero of what he was fond of calling the mission field, a phrase that encouraged the boys— though all but the smallest knew better—to picture all heathendom as a large green meadow vocal with hymn-singing blacks.

‘Well, Elderbrook old man, how are you feeling?'

‘Fine, sir.'

‘That's the style. Soon be out and about again. You've had a bit of a rough passage, I know.'

Though one could hardly help liking Mr Surrey, in spite of his being such an ass, Felix was embarrassed by the solemn gleam in his eye. He was afraid Mr Surrey was going to call him a brave fellow or something of that kind. To be applauded by Sister for being a good patient was pleasant enough, but Mr
Surrey's laudations were sometimes of a kind to make one squirm.

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Felix. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he realized, with regret, that perhaps they sounded ‘modest'.

‘Yes, a rough passage,' Mr Surrey insisted. ‘But you weren't afraid, were you? You knew who the Pilot was.'

‘Er … yes,' said Felix uncertainly. But his puzzled look betrayed him.

‘Jesus, who else?' said Mr Surrey. ‘Our Saviour and our Friend in Need. We can always take our troubles to Him. Always. That's the good news I'm hoping to carry with me across the ocean, Elderbrook, some day, when God wills. I am with you always, that's what He said. And He meant it, just like that. It's quite simple, the old simple gospel. No long words. Nothing mysterious. Just honest, healthy religion, and English, through and through, like cricket and footer. We know the rules and we must play the game. You know why. You don't need me to tell you,' said Mr Surrey, resolved to do just that. ‘It's because we've got such a grand Captain, eh?' He gave his audience an intent earnest look, then suddenly grinned, and seemed to shake himself, saying heartily: ‘Well, well! No more preaching!' He rose to his feet and shook hands. ‘Buck up and get strong again, old chap. We all miss our Elderbrook.'

Upmarden did not greatly concern itself with what went on outside Mercestershire. Why should it? Within those broad confines (or narrow, if you chose to think them so) the whole human drama of love and birth and death had ample scope; and no matter how far you travelled, no matter in what distant hemispheres of the mind you searched, you would get no deeper knowledge of reality than your own lives or the lives of your
nearest neighbours could give you. National and imperial affairs scarcely touched these private lives. That the Queen was immured in Balmoral or Windsor, nursing her years-old grief, was a fixed fact, like the sun in heaven; but unlike that luminary it did not affect the cycle of the seasons, or the price of cattle, or the leap of young blood in springtime. It was wonderful, if you stopped to think of it, that in that small, stubborn, unimaginative personage the might and majesty of a great Empire was symbolized; but so it had always been within the memory of all but the very oldest, and that it would not be so for ever was beyond normal imagining. The year of the Diamond Jubilee was made memorable, for at least one of the Elderbrooks, not by solemn thoughts of the Queen's majesty but by the gift of a satchel from Aunt Dolly. It was a thing of beauty and Guy fell in love with it instantly. Its shape and colour, and especially its smell, enchanted him. Yet he was uneasily conscious of being already too big to carry a satchel and was shy of exhibiting it among schoolmates who, like himself, had never felt the need for such an aid to the acquisition of learning; moreover he would very soon, he hoped, be leaving them. But it gave him a profound secret satisfaction to have it hanging from, a nail in the wall at his bed-head, in the room which he still shared with Matthew. There he left it, and there it served the purpose of a shelf for the books Mr Cowlin lent him. In the early days of its possession it was the first thing he looked for on waking.

In the world beyond Mercestershire astonishing things happened, but with rare exceptions they made no great impression on the Elderb rooks and their neighbours. They were remote and scarcely real, little more than a confused rambling serial story brought into the house every day in the form of the
Mercester Chronicle
. The death of the aged Mr. Gladstone provoked Joe to an unwonted outburst of moralizing, for Mr Gladstone was a great hero of his; the rush to the Klon-dyke goldfields, the year before, had provided Guy and Felix with a new game in the summer holidays, a successor to the
shipwrecks and explorings of earlier years; young Felix, who at the time had a fancy for following in the footsteps of Irving, received a personal shock when he read how a popular actor of melodrama had been stabbed to death by a demented stranger at the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre: for days he could think of little else, and for a long time the incident retained for him a curious vividness, as though it were happening to himself. But the larger, the world events made less mark at Up-marden than, for example, the compulsory muzzling of old Rover the sheepdog, in the interests of a government campaign against rabies: a matter, this, for indignation, Rover being one of the most amiable and harmless of his kind. And for the children that too was of small account compared with the brief annual excitement of the Boat Race. Each year, with dramatic suddenness, came a day when every child in the neighbourhood was asking every other child: ‘Are you Oxford or Cambridge?' And everyone ‘was Oxford', because Oxford always won: everyone except, for the same reason, Guy. Guy, a perverse supporter of the traditionally losing side, had at last his reward; but the victory of Cambridge came too late for him to flaunt it among his neighbours, for by then he was translated to another sphere.

Of the three brothers, Matthew was the most diligent reader of the newspaper and the least likely to be much concerned by its news. He was the stay-at-home, and to read of things beyond his horizon had a sharper appeal for him not because he rebelled against his destiny but rather because he had embraced it. He was not, as Felix was, cast out into a strange world for two-thirds of the year; he did not, as Guy did, dream of escape into a vaguely triumphant future; he remained rooted in the tradition of his fathers. He was a farmer born and bred, and a gardener too: unusual combination. He had, as they said, green fingers. He had an uncanny sense of when it was best to do what, and a way with animals, and a feeling for weather that enabled him, nine times out of ten, to forestall its vagaries. Joe Elderbrook was in the habit of boasting to
neighbours that Matt was a better farmer than his dad. And the more Matthew read in the newspaper of the miseries and dangers endured by workers in some urban industries, such as lead poisoning in the manufacture of china, and phosphorus poisoning in the making of matches, subjects dragged into unwelcome prominence as the century neared its end, the more was he persuaded that if farming had not chosen him he would have chosen farming. It was an arduous but satisfying life. You did not get rich on it, but with care and contriving and hard work you paid your way, and at least you did not condemn your work-people to an early death, as these big manufacturers didn't mind doing: of if they did mind, Matthew argued, why did they raise such an outcry against proposals to eliminate the dangers?

But Matthew, too, had his discontents. He was not quite the lump of meek good-natured earth that a superficial observer might have taken him for. Joe was a zealot in farming, and like all zealots he had an aptitude for tyranny. He had married comparatively late and was now an old man. He had had precisely his own way for so many years that the mere notion of conceding another and a younger man's point of view affronted him. Whatever he might say of Matthew, in moments mellowed by drinking with his cronies, he never allowed this model son of his to forget who was master, and he was quick to resent in him anything that looked like independent action. Nor was he generous in the matter of pay. The boy had a good home, hadn't he? And if there was anything he wanted, a new suit of clothes, a horse of his own to ride, or even one of these newfangled freewheel bicycles, he had only to ask. So what could he want with a salary, like any hired labourer? ‘And when I'm gone,' he said, arguing the point with a tire-somely persistent Emily, ‘he'll have the whole place, my lass, and the best part of what goes with it.' It seemed to Joe that Matthew was a very lucky fellow; and Matthew, being patient, bore with him, refrained from crossing him, and kept his own counsel. He was fond of his father: the bond between them
was deep. Yet there were times when if he could he would have broken away and set up on his own account, somewhere else. As his father grew more and more difficult—tachety was the Mercestershire word for it—he began to long for a farm and family of his own. A family of sons. He wanted sons before he was fully conscious of wanting a wife. He wanted sons (he said to himself) if only to show how they should be treated to get the best out of them. And that would be very differently from the way his father treated him. Three sons he would have, and perhaps two daughters; and he oddly failed to notice that that was precisely the pattern of the family in which he himself was part.

Joe, in his ripe age, grew sententious. The enunciation of aged platitudes became a habit with him. If a difference of opinion arose about whether or not some new machine or method should be given a trial he would say: ‘What was good enough for my father ought to be good enough for my son.' In this he did himself scant justice; for in fact, though he did not remember it, he had often enough disputed with his own father, and improved on that father's ways whenever he had a chance. History, which is human nature writ large, was at its old trick. We live and do not learn.

Guy's Aunt Dolly—for Guy was her favourite—lived in an outlying suburb of Mercester, on the very edge of the country, whence, about once a year, she visited Upmarden. She was Joe's eldest sister and the widow of a Mercester jeweller known as ‘poor Morton' or ‘your Uncle Morton': a small, lean, leathery-faced old lady with bright birdlike eyes, nutcracker features, and a freedom of speech surpassing her brother's. She insisted not merely on coming, but on being invited in due form, by Emily, in a series of letters that began by hoping that dear Dolly would soon be able to spare time to ‘pay us
your long promised visit' and ended by assuring her that the day she suggested was more than convenient, it was perfect, that everybody was enchanted by the prospect of seeing her, and that the train would be punctually met by Joe or one of the boys. When this ceremony had achieved its purpose, and the guest been secured, Emily did not scruple to tell her, in her mild way, what she thought of it. ‘Why you always wait to be asked, Dolly, is a mystery and a wonder. Is Joe your brother or isn't he?' ‘Brother indeed, my dear,' said Aunt Dolly, ‘and a rare scamp he was,
I
can tell you. But he's only the man about the place here. You're the one that counts.' ‘Ah yes,' Emily would retort, with a double irony. ‘And you've only known me six-and-twenty years. Almost strangers we are.' Aunt Dolly took the banter in good part and admitted the justice of it, but it made no difference: the procedure had always to be followed, and in time the banter itself became a ritual part of it.