Wyndham, John (16 page)

There was little likelihood of anyone missing the Manor.
Beyond the few cottages which constituted the village of Tynsham the high wall
of an estate ran beside the road. We followed it until we came to massive
wrought-iron gates. Behind them stood a young woman on whose face the sober
seriousness of responsibility had suppressed all human expression. She was
equipped with a shotgun which she clasped in inappropriate places. I signaled
to Coker to stop, and called to her as I drew up. Her mouth moved, but not a
word penetrated the clatter of the engine. I switched off.

“This is Tynsham Manor?” I asked.

She was not giving that, or anything else, away. “Where are
you from? And how many of you?” she countered.

I could have wished that she did not fiddle about with her
gun in just the way she did. Briefly, and keeping an eye on her uneasy fingers,
I explained who we were, why we came, roughly what we carried, and guaranteed
that there were no more of us hidden in the trucks. I doubted whether she was
taking it in. Her eyes were fixed on mine with a mournfully speculative
expression more common in bloodhounds, but not reassuring even there. My words
did little to disperse that random suspicion which makes the highly
conscientious so wearing. As she emerged to glance into the backs of the
trucks, and verify my statements, I hoped for her sake that she would not
chance to encounter a party of whom her suspicions were justified. Admission
that she was satisfied would have weakened her role of reliability, but she did
eventually consent, still with reserve, to allow us in.

“Take the right fork,” she called up to me as I passed, and
turned back at once to attend to the security of the gates. Beyond a short avenue
of elms lay a park landscaped in the manner of the late eighteenth century, and
dotted with trees which had had space to expand into full magnificence. The
house, when it came into view, was not a stately home in the architectural
sense, but there was a lot of it. It rambled over a considerable ground area
and through a variety of building styles, as though none of its previous owners
had been able to resist the temptation to leave his personal mark upon it.
Each, while respecting the work of his forefathers, had apparently felt it
incumbent upon him to express the spirit of his own age. A confident disregard
of previous levels had resulted in a sturdy waywardness. It was inescapably a
funny house, yet friendly and reliable-looking.

The right fork led us to a wide courtyard where several
trucks stood already. Coach houses and stables extended around it, seemingly
over several acres. Coker drew up alongside me, and we climbed down. There was
no one in sight.

We made our way through the open rear door of the main
building and down a long corridor. At the end of it was a kitchen of baronial
capacity where the warmth and smell of cooking lingered. From beyond a door on
the far side came a murmur of voices and a clatter of plates, but we had to
negotiate a further dark passage and another door before we reached them.

The place we entered had, I imagine, been the servants’ hall
in the days when staffs were large enough for the term to be no misnomer. It
was spacious enough to hold a hundred or more at tables without crowding. The
present occupants, seated on benches at two long trestles, I guessed to between
fifty and sixty, and it was clear at a glance that they were blind. While they
sat patiently a few sighted persons were very busy. Over at a side table three
girls were industriously caning chickens. I went up to one of them.

“we’ve just come,” I said. “What do we do?”

She paused, still clutching her fork, and pushed back a lock
of hair with the crook of her wrist.

“It’ll help if one of you takes charge of the veg and the
other helps with the plates,” she said.

I took command of two large tubs of potato and cabbage. In
the intervals of doling them out I looked over the occupants of the halls.
Josella was not among them—nor could I see any of the more notable characters
among the group that had put forward its proposals at the University Building—
though I fancied I had seen the faces of some of the women before.

The proportion of men was far higher than in the former
group, and they were curiously assorted. A few of them might have been
Londoners, or at least town dwellers, but the majority wore a countryman’s
working clothes. An exception to either kind was a middle-aged clergyman, but
what every one of the men had in common was blindness.

The women were more diversified. Some were in town clothes
quite unsuited to their surroundings; others were probably local. Among the
latter only one girl was sighted, but the former group comprised half a dozen or
so who could see and a number who, though blind, were not clumsy.

Coker, too, had been taking stock of the place.

“Rum sort of setup, this,” he remarked sotto voce to me.
“Have you seen her yet?”

I shook my head, desolately aware that I had pinned more on
the expectation of finding Josella there than I had admitted to myself.

“Funny thing,” he went on, “there’s practically none of the
lot I took along with you—except that girl that’s carrying, up at the end
there.”

“Has she recognized you?” I asked.

“I think so. I got a sort of dirty look from her.”

When the carrying and serving had been completed we took our
own plates and found places at the table. There was nothing to complain of in
the cooking or the food, and living out of cold cans for a week sharpens the
appreciation, anyway. At the end of the meal there was a knocking on the table.
The clergyman rose; he waited for silence before he spoke:

“My friends, it is fitting that at the end of another day we
should renew our thanks to God for His great mercy in preserving us in the
midst of such disaster. I will ask you all to pray that He may look with
compassion upon those who still wander alone in darkness, and that it may
please Him to guide their feet hither that we may succor them. Let us all
beseech Him that we may survive the trials and tribulations that lie ahead in
order that in His time and with His aid we may succeed in playing our part in
the rebuilding of a better world to His greater glory.”

He bowed his head.

“Almighty and most merciful God ..

After the “Amen” he led a hymn. When that was finished the
gathering sorted itself out into parties, each keeping touch with his neighbor,
and four of the sighted girls led them out.

I lit a cigarette. Coker took one from me absent-mindedly,
without making any comment. A girl came across to us.

“Will you help to clear up?” she asked. “Miss Durrant will
be back soon, I expect.”

“Miss Durrant?” I repeated.

“She does the organizing,” she explained. “You’ll be able to
fix things up with her.”

It was an hour later and almost dark when we heard that Miss
Durrant had returned. We found her in a small, study-like room lit only by the
light of two candles on the desk. I recognized her at once as the dark,
thin-lipped woman who had spoken for the opposition at the meeting. For the
moment all her attention was concentrated on Coker. Her expression was no more
amiable than upon the former occasion.

“I am told,” she said coldly, regarding Coker as though he
were some kind of silt, “I am told that you are the man who organized the raid
on the University Building?”

Coker agreed, and waited.

‘Then I may as well tell you, once and for all, that in our
community here we have no use for brutal methods, and no intention of
tolerating them.”

Coker smiled slightly. He answered her in his best
middle-class speech:

“It is a matter of viewpoint. Who is to judge who were the
more brutal? Those who saw an immediate responsibility, and stayed—or those who
saw a further responsibility, and cleared out?”

She continued to look hard at him. Her expression remained
unchanged, but she was evidently forming a different judgment of the type of
man she had to deal with. Neither his reply nor his manner had been quite what
she had expected. She shelved that aspect for a time and turned to me.

“Were you in that too?” she asked.

I explained my somewhat negative part in the affair and put
my own question:

“What happened to Michael Beadley, the Colonel, and the
rest?”

It was not well received.

“They have gone elsewhere,” she said sharply. “This is a
clean, decent community with standards—Christian standards

—and we intend to uphold them. We have no place here for
people of loose views. Decadence, immorality, and lack of faith were
responsible for mast of the world’s ills. It is the duty of those of us who
have been spared to see that we build a society where that does not happen
again. The cynical and the clever-clever will find they are not wanted here, no
matter what brilliant theories they may put forward to disguise their
licentiousness and their materialism. We are a Christian community, and we
intend to remain so.” She looked at me challengingly.

“So you split, did you?” I said. “Where did they go?”

She replied stonily;

“They moved on, and we stayed here. That is what matters.
So long as they keep their influence away from here, they may work out their
own damnation as they please. And since they choose to consider themselves
superior to both the laws of God and civilized custom, II have no doubt that
they will.”

She ended this declaration with a snap of the jaw which
suggested that I should be wasting my time
if
I tried to pursue the
question further, and turned back to Coker.

“What can you do?” she inquired.

“A number of things,” he said calmly. “I suggest that I make
myself generally useful until I see where I am needed most.”

She hesitated, a little taken aback. It had clearly been her
intention to make the decision and issue the instruction, but she changed her
mind.

“All right. Look round, and come and talk it over tomorrow
evening,” she said.

But Coker was not to be dismissed quite so easily. He wanted
particulars of the size of the estate, the number of persons at present in the
house, the proportion of sighted to blind, along with a number of other
matters, and he got them.

Before we left 12 put in a question about Josella. Miss Durrant
frowned.

“I seem to know that name. Now where— Oh, did she stand in
the Conservative interest in the last election?”

“I don’t think so. She—er—she did write a book once,” I
admitted.

“She—” she began. Then I saw recollection dawn. “Oh, oh,
that Well, really, Mr. Masen, I can scarcely think she would be the kind of
person to care
far
the kind of community we are building here.”

In the corridor outside Coker turned to me. There was just
enough of the twilight left for me to see his grin.

“A somewhat oppressive orthodoxy around these parts,” he
remarked. The grin disappeared as he added: “Rum type, you know. Pride and
prejudice. She’s wanting help. She knows she needs it badly, but nothing’s
going to make her admit it.”

He paused opposite an open door. It was almost too dark now
to make out anything in the room, but when we had passed it before there had
been enough light to reveal it as a men’s dormitory.

“I’m going in to have a word with these chaps. See you
later.”

I watched him stroll into the room and greet it collectively
with a cheerful “Worcher, mates! ‘Ow’s it goin7” and then made my own way back
to the dining hail.

The only light there came from three candles set close together
on one table. Beside them a girl peered exasperatedly at same mending.

“Hullo,” she said. “Awful, isn’t it? How on earth did they
manage to do anything after dark in the old days?”

“Not such old days, either,” I told her. “This is the future
as well as the past—provided there’s somebody to show us how to make candles.”

“I suppose so.” She raised her head and regarded me. “You Came from London today?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“It’s bad there now?”

“It’s
finished,” I said.

Of Josella, the girl could tell me nothing. Clearly she had
never heard the name before, and my attempts at description roused no
recollections.

While we were talking, the electric lights in the room suddenly
went on. The girl looked up at them with the awed expression of one receiving a
revelation. She blew out the candies, and as she went on with her mending she
looked up at the bulbs occasionally as if to make certain they were still
there.

A few minutes later Coker strolled in.

“That was you, I suppose?” I said, nodding at the lights.

“Yes,” he admitted. “They’ve got their own plant here. We
might as well use up the Las as let it evaporate.”

“Do you mean to say we could have had lights all the time
we’ve been here?” asked the girl.

“If you had just taken the trouble to start the engine,”
Coker said, looking at her. “II you wanted light, why didn’t you try to start
it?”

“I didn’t know it was there; besides, I don’t know anything
about engines or electricity.”

Coker continued to look at her, thoughtfully.

“So you just went on sitting in the dark,” he remarked. “And
how long do you think you are likely to survive if you just go on sitting in
the dark when things need doing?”

She was stung by his tone.

“it’s not my fault if I’m not any good at things like that.”

“I’ll differ there,” Coker told her. “It’s not only your
fault— it’s a self-created fault. Moreover, it’s an affectation to consider
yourself too spiritual to understand anything mechanical. It is a petty and a
very silly form of vanity. Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything,
but God gives him—and even her—brains to find out with. Failure to use them is
not a virtue to be praised; even in women it is a gap to be deplored.”