A Fish Dinner in Memison

III

A MATCH AND SOME LOOKERS ON

‘TIME, you know, is a curious business’, said Lord Anmering, tilting his head forward a little to let the brim of his panama hat shade his eyes; for it was teatime, and the afternoon sun, from beyond the cricket field below, blazed out of cloudless blue full in their faces. ‘Love of money, we’re told – root of all evil. Gad! I think otherwise. I think Time strikes deeper.’

Lady Southmere replenished the vacuum with one of the more long-drawn, contemplative, and non-committal varieties of the inimitable transatlantic ‘Aha’.

‘Look at Mary,’ he said. ‘Look at me. If I wasn’t her father: wasn’t thirty-two years her senior. Wouldn’t I know what to do with her?’

‘Well, I dare say you would.’

‘Easy enough when they’re not your own,’ he said, as they walked on slowly, coming to a halt at the top of two flights of shallow steps that led down to the field from the gardens. ‘But when they are – By Jove, that’s the style!’ The ball, from a magnificent forward drive, sailed clean over the far fence, amid shouts of applause, for six. ‘If you let your boy go and smash my melon-houses, knocking the bowling about like that, I’ll tell you, I’ll have no more to do with him. We mustn’t forget,’ he said, lower again: ‘she’s very young. Never force the pace.’

‘O but don’t I just agree? And the very dearest, sweetest—’

‘You know her, well as I do. No, you don’t, though. Look there,’ putting up his eye-glass to examine the telegraph board: ‘Eighty. Eighty: a hundred and sixty-three: that’s eighty-four to win. Not so bad, with only three wickets down. It’s that boy of yours is doing it: wonderful steady play: nice style too: like to see him make his century. You know our two best bats, Chedisford and that young Macnaghten, didn’t add up to double figures between ’em: Hugh’s got his work cut out for him. Look at that! Pretty warm bowling. A strong team old Playter’s brought us over this time from Hyrnbastwick: Jove, I’d like to give ’em a whacking for a change. Well, Hugh and Jim seem settled to it. Would you like to come down over there: get a bit of shade?’

‘I would like to do anything anybody tells me to. This is just too perfect.’ She turned, before coming down the steps, to look back for a minute to the great west front of Anmering Blunds, where it ranged beyond green lawns and flower-beds and trim deep-hued hedges of clipped box and barberry and yew: long rows of mullioned windows taking the sun, whose beams seemed to have fired the very substance of the ancient brickwork to some cool-burning airy essence of gold. This wing, by Inigo Jones, was the newest part, masking from this side the original flint-built house that had been old Sir Robert Scarnside’s whom Henry VIII made first Earl of Anmering. Round to the right, in the home park, stood up, square and grey, Anmering church tower. A sheltering wood of oak, ash, beech and sycamore was a screen for hall and church and garden against the east; and all the midsummer leafage of these trees seemed, at this hour, impregnate with that golden light. Northwards, all lay open, the ground falling sharply to the creek, salt marshes and sand-dunes and thence-away, to the North Pole, the sea. Southwards and landwards, park and wood and meadow and arable rose gently to the heaths and commons: Bestarton, Sprowswood, Toftrising. Lady Southmere, waiting on the silence a minute, might hear as under-tones to the voices of the cricket field (of players and lookers on, click of wood against leather as the batsman played) the faint far-off rumour of tide-washed shingle, and, from trees, the woodpigeon’s rustic, slumbrous, suddenly started and suddenly checked, discourse: Two coos, tak’ two coos, Taffy, tak’ two coos, Taffy tak— From golden rose to larkspur a swallowtail butterfly fluttered in the heat. ‘Just too perfect for words,’ she said, turning at last.

They came down the steps and began walking, first north, and so round by the top end of the cricket field towards the tents. ‘I’ll make a clean breast of it,’ she said: ‘twenty-six years now I have been English and lived in the Shires; and yet, Blunds in summer, well, it gets me here: sends me downright home-sick.’ Just as, underneath all immediate sounds or voices, those distant sea-sounds were there for the listening, so in Lady Southmere’s speech there survived some pleasant native intonations of the southern States.

‘Home-sick?’ said Lord Anmering. ‘Virginia?’

‘No, no, no: just for Norfolk. Aren’t I English? And isn’t your Norfolk pure England as England ought to be?’

‘Better get Southmere to do an exchange: give me the place in Leicestershire and you take Blunds.’

‘Well and would you consent to that? Can you break the entail?’

‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘there are many things I would do for you—’

‘But hardly that?’

‘I’m afraid, not that.’

‘O isn’t that just too bad!’ she said, as Jim Scarnside, playing forward to a yorker, was bowled middle stump.

Fifty or sixty people, may be, watched the game from this western side where the tents were and garden chairs and benches, all in a cool shade of beech and chestnut and lime and sycamore that began to throw shadows far out upon the cricket field: a pleasant summer scene as any could wish, of mingled sound and silence, stir and repose: white hats and white flannels and coloured caps and blazers contrasting here and there with more formal or darker clothes: a gaiety of muslin frocks, coloured silks, gauzes and ribbons, silken parasols and picture hats: the young, the old, the middle-aged: girls, boys, men, women: some being of the house-party; some, the belongings of the eleven that had driven over with Colonel Playter from Hyrnbastwick; some, neighbours and acquaintance from the countryside: wives, friends, parents, sisters, cousins, aunts. Among these their host, with Lady Southmere, now threaded his way, having for each, as he passed, the just greeting, were it word, smile, formal salutation or private joke: the Playter girls, Norah and Sybil, fresh from school: old Lady Dilstead, Sir Oliver’s mother, and his sister Lucy (engaged to Nigel Howard): young Mrs Margesson, a niece of Lord Anmering’s by marriage: Romer, the bursar of Trinity: Limpenfield of All Souls’: General Macnaghten and his wife and son: Trowsley of the Life Guards: Tom and Fanny Chedisford: Mr and Mrs Dagworth from Semmering: Sir Roderick Bailey, the Admiral, whose unpredictable son Jack had made top score (fifty) for the visiting eleven that morning: the Rector and his wife: the Denmore-Benthams: Mr and Mrs Everard Scarnside (Jim’s parents) and Princess Mitzmesczinsky (his sister): the Bremmerdales from Taverford: the Sterramores from Burnham Overy: Janet Rustham and her two little boys: Captain Feveringhay; and dozens besides.

‘Sorry, uncle,’ said Jim Scarnside, as their paths met: he on his way to the pavilion. ‘Ingloriously out for three.’

‘I was always told,’ Lady Southmere said, ‘you ought to block a yorker.’

‘My dear Lady Southmere, don’t I know it? But (I know you won’t believe this), it was all your fault.’

‘That’s very very interesting.’

‘It was.’

‘And please, why?’

‘Well. Just as that chap Howard was walking back the way he does to get properly wound up for one of those charging-buffalo runs that terrify the life out of a poor little batsman like me—’

‘Poor little six foot two!’ she said.

‘Just at that instant, there, on the horizon, your black and white parasol! And I remembered: Heavens! Didn’t Mary make me promise that Lady Southmere should have the first brew of strawberries and cream, because they’re so much the best? and isn’t it long past tea-time, and here she comes, so late, and they’ll all be gone? So there: and Nigel Howard sends down his beastly yorker. Is it fair? Really, Uncle Robert, you ought not to allow ladies to look on at serious cricket like ours. All very well at Lord’s and places like that; but here, it’s too much of a distraction.’

‘But dreadfully awkward,’ said she, laughing up at him, ‘not to have us to put the blame on? Jim!’ she called after him as they parted: he turned. ‘It was real noble and kind of you to think about the strawberries.’

‘I’m off to rescue them.’ And, using his bat like a walking-stick, he disappeared with long galloping strides in the direction of the tea-tent.

St John, next man in, was out first ball. This made an excitement, in expectation that Howard should do the hat-trick; but Denmore-Bentham, who followed, batted with extreme circumspection and entire success (in keeping his wicket up, though not indeed in scoring).

‘Who’s this young fellow that’s been putting up all the runs? Radford? Bradford? I couldn’t catch the name?’ said an old gentleman with white whiskers, white waistcoat, and that guinea-gold complexion that comes of long living east of Suez. His wife answered: ‘Lord Glanford, Lord Southmere’s son. They’re staying here at the house, I think. And that’s his sister: the pretty girl in pink, with brown hair, talking now to Lady Mary.’

His glance, following where hers gave him the direction, suddenly came to rest; but not upon Lady Rosamund Kirstead. For Mary, chancing at that instant to rise and, in her going, look back with some laughing rejoinder to her friends, stood, for that instant, singled; as if, sudden in a vista between trees, a white sail drawing to the wind should lean, pause, and so righting itself pass on its airy way. A most strange and singular look there was, for any perceiving eye to have read, in the eyes of that old colonial governor: as though, through these ordinary haphazard eyes, generations of men crowded to look forth as from a window.

Glanford, with a new partner, seemed to settle down now to win the match by cautious steady play, never taking a risk, never giving a chance. When, after a solid half hour of this, a hundred at last went up on the board, the more cavalierly minded among the onlookers began to give rein to their feelings. ‘Darling Anne,’ Fanny Chedisford said, arm in arm with Lady Bremmerdale, ‘I simply can’t stick it any longer: poke, poke, poke: as soon look on at a game of draughts. For heaven’s sake, let’s go and drown our sorrows in croquet.’

‘Croquet? I thought you agreed with Mary—’

‘I always do. But when?’

‘When she said it was only fit for curates and dowagers, and then only if they’d first done a course in a criminal lunatic asylum.’

‘O we’re all qualified after this. Try a foursome: here’s Jim and Mr Margesson: ask them to join in.’

‘Did I hear someone pronounce my name disrespectfully?’ said Jim Scarnside. Fanny laughed beneath her white parasol. ‘Ah, it was my much esteemed and never sufficiently to be redoubted Miss Chedisford. You know,’ he said to Cuthbert Margesson, ‘Miss Chedisford hasn’t forgiven us for not making it a mixed match.’

‘Broom-sticks for the men?’ said Margesson.

‘Not at all,’ said Fanny.

Jim said, ‘I should think not! Come on: Margesson’s in next wicket down. It does seem rather cheek, when he’s captain, but after all it’s his demon bowling made him that, and his noted diplomacy. Let’s take him on and coach him a bit: teach him to slog.’

Anne Bremmerdale smiled: ‘Better than croquet.’ They moved off towards the nets.

‘Are you a bat, Miss Chedisford? Or a bowler?’ said Margesson.

‘Well, I can bat more amusingly than this.’ Fanny cast a disparaging glance at the game. ‘My brothers taught me.’

‘All the same,’ Margesson said, ‘Glanford’s playing a fine game. We shall beat you yet, Lady Bremmerdale. How is it you didn’t bring your brother over to play for Hyrnbastwick?’

‘Which one? I’ve five.’

‘I’ve only met one. The youngest. Your brother Edward, isn’t it?’

‘She couldn’t bring him because she hasn’t got him.’

Fanny said, ‘I thought he was staying with you now at Taverford?’

‘Not since early May.’

‘He’s the kind of man,’ said Jim, ‘you never know where he is.’

Fanny looked surprised. ‘I’d have sworn,’ she said, ‘it was Edward Lessingham I saw this morning. Must have been his double.’

‘Antipholus of Ephesus,’ said Jim: ‘Antipholus of Syracuse.’

‘About eight o’clock,’ said Fanny. ‘It was such a dream of a morning, all sopping with dew. I’d got up with the lark and walked the dogs right up onto Kelling Heath before breakfast. I’d swear no one in these parts had that marvellous seat on a horse that he has. So careless. My dear, I’ll bet you anything you like it was he: galloping south, towards Holt!’

‘Really, Fanny, it couldn’t have been,’ said Anne.

‘There are not many young men you’d mistake for him,’ said Fanny.

Jim said to them, ‘Talking of Kelling Heath, I’ll tell you an idea of mine; why can’t we get up a point-to-point there this autumn? What do you say, Cuthbert?’

‘I’m all for it.’

‘I tackled Colonel Playter about it today at lunch: very important to get him, as M.F.H., to bless it: in fact, he really ought to take it over himself, if it’s to be a real good show. He likes the idea. Did you sound Charles, Anne?’

‘Yes I did: he’s awfully keen on it, and means to get a word with you this evening. Of course you could have a magnificent run right over from Weybourne Heath to Salthouse Common, and back the other way; pretty rough and steep, though, in places.’

Fanny accepted the change of subject. May be she thought the more.

Bentham was out: caught at the wicket: six wickets down for a hundred and nine, of which Glanford had made sixty off his own bat. Margesson now went in, and (not because of any eggings on of impatient young ladies – unless, indeed, telepathy was at work – for Glanford it was who did the scoring), the play began to be brisk. Major Rustham, the Hyrnbastwick captain, now took Howard off and tried Sir Charles Bremmerdale, whose delivery, slowish, erratic, deceptively easy in appearance, yet concealed (as dangerous currents in the body of smooth-seeming water) a puzzling variety of pace and length and now and again an unexpected and most disconcerting check or spin. But Glanford had plainly got his eye in: Margesson too. ‘We’re winning, Nell,’ said Lord Anmering to his niece, Mrs Margesson. ‘A dashed fine stand!’ said Sybil Playter. ‘Shut up swearing,’ said her sister. ‘Shut up yourself: I’m not.’ People clapped and cheered Glanford’s strokes. Charles Bremmerdale now could do nothing with him: to mid-off, two: to mid-on, two: a wide: a strong drive, over cover’s head, to the boundary, four: to long-leg in the deep field, two – no – three, while Jack Bailey bungles it with a long shot at the wicket: point runs after it: ‘Come on!’ Four: the fieldsman is on it, turns to throw in: ‘No!’ says Margesson, but Glanford, ‘Yes! come on!’ They run: Bremmerdale is crouched at the wicket: a fine throw, into his hands, bails off and Glanford run out. ‘Bad luck!’ said Jim Scarnside, standing with Tom and Fanny Chedisford at the scoring table: Glanford had made ninety-one. ‘But why the devil will he always try and bag the bowling?’

Glanford walked from the field, bat under his arm, shaking his head mournfully as he undid his batting-gloves. He went straight to the pavilion to put on his blazer, and thence, with little deviation from the direct road, to Mary. ‘I am most frightfully sorry,’ he said, sitting down by her. ‘I did so want to bring you a century for a birthday present.’

‘But it was a marvellous innings,’ she said. ‘Good heavens, “What’s centuries to me or me to centuries?” It was splendid.’

‘Jolly decent of you to say so. I was an ass, though, to get run out.’

Mary’s answering smile was one to smoothe the worst-ruffled feathers; then she resumed her conversation with Lucy Dilstead: ‘You can read them over and over again, just as you can Jane Austen. I suppose it’s because there’s no padding.’

‘I’ve only read Shagpat, so far,’ said Lucy.

‘O that’s different from the rest. But isn’t it delicious? So serious. Comedy’s always ruined, don’t you think, when it’s buffooned? You want to live in it: something you can laugh with, not laugh at.’

‘Mary has gone completely and irretrievably cracked over George Meredith,’ Jim said, joining them.

‘And who’s to blame for that?’ said she. ‘Who put what book into whose hand? and bet what, that who would not be able to understand what-the-what it was all driving at until she had read the first how many chapters how many times over?’

Jim clutched his temples, histrionically distraught. Hugh was not amused. The match proceeded, the score creeping up now very slowly with Margesson’s careful play. General Macnaghten was saying to Mr Romer, ‘No, no, she’s only twenty. It is: yes: quite extraordinary; but being only daughter, you see, and no mother, she’s been doing hostess and so on for her father two years now, here and in London: two London seasons. Makes a lot of difference.’

Down went another wicket: score, a hundred and fifty-three. ‘Now for some fun,’ people said as Tom Appleyard came on the field; but Margesson spoke a winged word in his ear: ‘Look here, old chap: none of the Jessop business. It’s too damned serious now.’ ‘Ay, ay, sir.’ Margesson, in perfect style, sent back the last ball of the over. Appleyard obediently blocked and blocked. But in vain. For one of Bremmerdale’s master-creations of innocent outward show and inward guile sneaked round Margesson’s defence and took his leg stump. Nine wickets down: total a hundred and fifty-seven: last man, nine. Hyrnbastwick, in some elation, were throwing high catches round the field while Dilstead, Anmering’s next (and last) man in, walked to the wicket. Margesson said to Tom Appleyard, ‘It’s up to you now, my lad. Let ’em have it, damn slam and all if you like. But, by Jingo, we must pull it off now. Only seven to win.’ Appleyard laughed and rubbed his hands.

There was no more desultory talk: all tense expectancy. ‘If Sir Oliver gets the bowling, that puts the lid on it: never hit a ball yet.’ ‘Why do they play him then?’ ‘Why, you silly ass, because he’s such a thundering good wicket-keeper.’ George Chedisford, about sixteen, home from Winchester because of the measles, maintained a mature self-possession at Lord Anmering’s elbow: ‘I wish my frater – wish my brother was in again, sir. He’d do the trick.’ ‘You watch Mr Appleyard: he’s a hitter.’ By good luck, that ball that had beaten Margesson was last of the over, so that Appleyard, not Dilstead, faced the bowling: Howard once more, a Polyphemus refreshed. His first ball was a yorker, but Appleyard stopped it. The second, Appleyard, all prudent checks abandoned, stepped out and swiped. Boundary: four. Great applaudings: the parson’s children and the two little Rustham boys, with the frenzy of Guelph and Ghibelline, jumped up and down jostling each other. The next ball, a very fierce one, pitched short and rose at the batsman’s head. Appleyard smashed it with a terrific over-hand stroke: four again – ‘Done it!’ ‘Match!’

Then, at the fourth ball, Appleyard slogged, missed, and was caught in the slips. And so amid great merriment, chaff and mutual congratulations, the game came to an end.

‘Come into the Refuge,’ said Jim Scarnside, overtaking Mary as they went in to dress for dinner: ‘just for two twos. I left my humble birthday offering in there, and I want to give it to you.’

‘O, but,’ she said, pausing and looking back, one foot on the threshold of the big French window: ‘I thought it was a bargain, no more birthday presents. I can’t have you spending all those pennies on me.’ Her right hand was lifted to a loose hanger of wistaria bloom, shoulder-high beside the doorway: in her left she carried her hat, which she had taken off walking up from the garden. The slant evening sun kindled so deep a Venetian glory in her hair that every smooth-wound coil, each braid, each fine straying little curl or tendril, had its particular fire-colour, of chestnut, tongued flame, inward glow of the brown-red zircon, burnished copper, realgar, sun-bleached gold: not self-coloured, but all in a shimmer and interchange of hues, as she moved her head or the air stirred them.

‘Twenty pennies precisely,’ said Jim. ‘Can’t call that breaking a bargain. Come. Please.’

‘All right,’ she smiled, and went before him through the small tea-room and its scents of pot-pourri, and through the great skin-strewn hall with its portraits and armour and trophies and old oak and old leather and Persian rugs and huge open fire-place filled at this season with roses and summer greenery, and so by a long soft-carpeted passage to the room they called the Refuge: a cosy sunny room, not belonging to Mary specially or to her father, but to both, and free besides to all dogs (those at least that were allowed in the house) that lived at Blunds, and to all deserving friends and relations. Those parts of the walls that were not masked by bookcases or by pictures showed the pale reddish paper of Morris’s willow pattern; a frieze of his rich dark night-blue design of fruit, with its enrichments of orange, lemon, and pomegranate and their crimson and pallid blooms, ran around below the ceiling. There was a square table with dark green cloth and upon it a silver bowl of roses: writing things on the table and chairs about it, and big easy chairs before the fire-place: a bag of tools (saws, hammers, screw-drivers, pliers and such-like) behind the door, a leather gun-case and fishing-rods in this corner, walking-sticks and hunting-crops in that, a pair of field-glasses on the shelf, some dog-medicines: pipes and cigar-boxes on the mantel-piece: on a bureau a large mahogany musical-box: an early Victorian work-table, a rack full of newspapers, a Cotman above the mantel, an ancient brass-bound chest covered with an oriental rug or foot-cloth of silk: a Swiss cuckoo-clock: a whole red row of Baedekers on one of the bookshelves, yellowbacks on another: Wuthering Heights open on a side-table, Kipling’s Many Inventions open on a chair, and a text of Homer on the top of it: a box of tin soldiers and a small boy’s cricket bat beside them: over there a doll or two and a toy theatre, with a whole mass of woolly monkeys, some in silver-paper armour and holding pins for swords: a cocker spaniel asleep on the hearth-rug, and a little dark grey hairy dog, a kind of Skye terrier with big bat-like ears and of beguiling appearance, asleep in an armchair. There pervaded this room, not to be expelled for all the fresh garden air that came and went through its wide windows and door which opened on the garden, a scent curiously complex and curiously agreeable, as of a savoury stew compounded of this varied apparatus of the humanities. Plainly a Refuge it was, and by no empty right of name: a refuge from tidiness and from all engines, correctitudes, and impositions of the world: in this great household, a little abbey of Thélème, with its sufficient law, ‘Fay ce que vouldras’.

Mary sat on the table while Jim unearthed from somewhere a little parcel and presented it to her, with scissors from the work-table to cut the string. ‘Twenty, you see, for the birthday cake,’ he said, as she emptied out on the green baize a handful of little coloured candles.

‘You are so absurd.’

‘We ought to have the cake,’ he said. ‘No time for it now, though. Look: there are heaps of colours, you see. Do you know what they mean?’