EPISTLE DEDICATORY

Dear Mistress of Bassetts,

You and Audrey have so often proclaimed the need—in our world of sorrow and care—of a “bland” novel, defining it as one to be read when in bed with a sore throat, that as an adventurer in letters I have frequently felt tempted to write one for you. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and seemed perversely to have turned against novels altogether, perhaps because I had been labelled “novelist,” as though one had set up a factory. (Two a year is, I believe, the correct output.) However, here is a novel at last—my first this century—and there is a further reason for presuming to associate you with it, because it is largely from the vantage-point of your Essex homestead that I have, during the past twenty years, absorbed the landscape, character, and dialect which finally insisted on finding expression, first in a little play, and now in this elaborate canvas. How often have I passed over High Field and seen the opulent valley—tilth and pasture and ancient country seats—stretching before me like a great poem, with its glint of winding water, and the exquisite

blue of its distances, and Bassetts awaiting me below, snuggling under its mellow moss-stained tiles, a true English home of “plain living and high thinking,” and latterly of the rural Muse! I can only hope that some breath of the inspiration which has emanated from Bassetts in these latter days, and which has set its picturesquely clad poetesses turning rhymes as enthusiastically as clods, and weaving rondels as happily as they bound the sheaves, has been wafted over these more prosaic pages—something of that “wood-magic” which your granddaughter—soul of the idyllic band—has got into her song of your surroundings.

The glint of blue where the estuary flows,

Or a shimmering mist o’er the vale’s green and gold:

A little grey church which ’mid willow-trees shows;

A house on the hillside so good to behold

With its yellow plaster and red tiles old,

The clematis climbing in purple and green,

And down in the garden ’mid hollyhocks bold

Sit Kathleen, Ursula, Helen, and Jean.

And yet it must not be thought that either “Bassetts” or “Little Baddow” figures in the “Little Bradmarsh” of my story. The artist cannot be tied down: he creates a composite landscape to his needs. Moreover, in these last four or five years a zealous constabulary can testify out of what odds and ends the strange inquiring figure, who walked, cycled, or rode in carriers’ carts to forgotten hamlets or sea-marshes, has composed his background. Nor have I followed photographic realism even in my dialect, deeming the Cockneyish forms, except when unconsciously amusing, too ugly to the eye in a long sustained narrative, though enjoyable enough in those humorous sketches which my friend Bensusan, the true conquistador of Essex, pours forth so amazingly from his inexhaustible cornucopia. I differ—in all diffidence—from his transcription on the sole point that the Essex rustic changes “i” into “oi” in words like “while,” though why on the other hand “boil” should go back to “bile” can be explained only by the perversity

which insists on taking aspirates off the right words and clapping them on the wrong, much as Cockney youths and girls exchange hats on Bank Holiday. I have limited my own employment of this local vowelling mainly to the first person singular as sufficiently indicative of the rest. In the old vexed question of the use of dialect, my feeling is that its value is simply as colour, and that the rich old words, obsolete or unknown elsewhere, contribute this more effectively and far more beautifully than vagaries of pronunciation, itself a very shifting factor of language even in the best circles. It is not even necessary for the artistic effect that the reader should understand the provincial words, though the context should be so contrived as to make them fairly intelligible. In short, art is never nature, though it should conceal the fact. Even the slowness and minuteness of my method—imposed as it is by the attempt to seize the essence of Essex—are immeasurable velocity and breadth compared with the scale of reality.

In bringing this rustic complex under the category of comedy I clash, I am aware, with literary fashion, which demands that country folk should appear like toiling insects caught in the landscape as in a giant web of Fate, though why the inhabitants of Belgravia or Clapham escape this tragic convention I cannot understand. But I do not think that you, dear Aunt by adoption, see the life around you like that. Even, however, had you and I seen more gloomily, the fashionable fatalistic framework would have been clearly inconsistent with the “blandness” of your novel. Such a novel must, I conceive, begin with “once upon a time” and end with “they all lived happy ever after,” so that my task was simply to fill in the lacuna between these two points, and supply the early-Victorian mottoes, while even the material was marked out for me by Dr. Johnson’s definition of a novel as “a story mainly about love.” I am hopeful that when you come to read it (not, I trust, with a sore throat), you will admit that I have at least tried to make my

dear “Jinny” really “live happy ever after,” even though—in the fierce struggle for literary survival—she is far from likely to do so. But at any rate, if only for the moment, I should be glad if I had succeeded in expressing through her my grateful appreciation of the beautiful country in which my lot, like Jinny’s, has been cast, with its many lovable customs and simple, kindly people.

Your affectionate Nephew,

THE AUTHOR

Sussex

New Year 1919

PREAMBLE

I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal.

“As You Like It.”

Once upon a time—but then it was more than once, it was, in fact, every Tuesday and Friday—Jinny the Carrier, of Blackwater Hall, Little Bradmarsh, went the round with her tilt-cart from that torpid Essex village on the Brad, through Long Bradmarsh (over the brick bridge) to worldly, bustling Chipstone, and thence home again through the series of droughty hamlets with public pumps that curved back—if one did not take the wrong turning at the Four Wantz Way—to her too aqueous birthplace: baiting her horse, Methusalem, at “The Black Sheep” in Chipstone like the other carters and wagoners, sporting a dog with a wicked eye and a smart collar, and even blowing a horn as if she had been the red-coated guard of the Chelmsford coach sweeping grandly to his goal down the High Street of Chipstone.

Do you question more precisely when this brazen female flourished? The answer may be given with the empty exactitude of science and scholarship. Her climacteric was to the globe at large the annus mirabilis of the Great Exhibition, when the lion and the lamb lay down together in Hyde Park in a crystal cage. But though the advent of the world-trumpeted Millennium could not wholly fail to percolate even to Little Bradmarsh, a more veracious chronology, a history truer to local tradition, would date the climax of Jinny’s unmaidenly career as “before the Flood.”

Not, of course—as the mention of Methusalem might mislead you into thinking—the Flood which is still commemorated in toyshops and Babylonian tablets, and anent which German scholars miraculously contrive to be dry; but the more momentous local Deluge when the Brad, perversely swollen, washed away cattle, mangold clamps, and the Holy Sabbath in one fell surge, leaving the odd wooden gable of Frog Farm looming above the waste of waters as nautically as Noah’s Ark.

In those antediluvian days, and in that sequestered hundred, farm-horses were the ruling fauna and set the pace; the average of which Methusalem, with his “jub” or cross between a lazy trot and a funeral procession, did little to elevate. It was not till the pride of life brought a giddier motion that the Flood—but we anticipate both moral and story. Let us go rather at the Arcadian amble of the days before the Deluge, when the bicycle—even of the early giant order—had not yet arisen to terrorize the countryside with its rotiferous mobility, still less the motor-mammoth swirling through the leafy lanes in a dust-fog and smelling like a super-skunk, or the air-monster out-soaring and out-Sataning the broomsticked witch. It is true that Bundock, Her Majesty’s postman, had once brought word of a big-bellied creature, like a bloated Easter-egg, hovering over the old maypole as if meditating to impale itself thereon, like a bladder on a stick. But normally not even the mail or a post-chaise divided the road with Master Bundock; while, as for the

snorting steam-horse that bore off the young Bradmarshians, once they had ventured as far as roaring railhead, it touched the postman’s imagination no more than the thousand-ton sea-monsters with flapping membranes or cloud-spitting gullets that rapt them to the lands of barbarism and gold.

Blessèd Bundock, genial Mercury of those days before the Flood, if the rubbered wheel of the postdiluvian age might have better winged thy feet, yet thy susceptible eye—that rested all-embracingly on female gleaners—was never darkened by the sight of the soulless steel reaper, cropping close like a giant goose, and thou wast equally spared that mechanic flail-of-all-work that drones through the dog-days like a Brobdingnagian bumble-bee. For thine happier ear the cottages yet hummed with the last faint strains of the folk-song: unknown in thy sylvan perambulations that queer metallic parrot, hoarser even than the raucous reality, which now wakens and disenchants every sleepy hollow with echoes of the London music-hall.

Rural Essex was long the unchanging East, and there are still ploughmen who watch the airmen thunder by, then plunge into their prog again. The shepherds who pour their fleecy streams between its hedgerows are still as primitive as the herdsmen of Chaldea, and there are yokels who dangle sideways from their slow beasts as broodingly as the Bedouins of Palestine. Even to-day the spacious elm-bordered landscapes through which Jinny’s cart rolled and her dog circumambiently darted, lie ignored of the picture postcard, and on the red spinal chimney-shaft of Frog Farm the doves settle with no air of perching for their photographs. Little Bradmarsh is still Little, still the most reclusive village of all that delectable champaign; the Brad still glides between its willows unruffled by picnic parties and soothed rather than disturbed by rusty, ancient barges. But when Gran’fer Quarles first brought little Jinny to these plashy bottoms, the region it watered—not always with discretion—was unknown even to the gipsy caravans and strolling showmen,

and quite outside the circuit of the patterers and chaunters who stumped the country singing or declaiming lampoons on the early Victoria; not a day’s hard tramp from Seven Dials where they bought their ribald broadsheets, yet as remote as Arabia Felix.

CHAPTER I

BUNDOCK ON HIS BEAT

He comes, the herald of a noisy world,

With spattered boots.

Cowper, “The Task.”

I

It had rained that April more continuously than capriciously, but this morning April showed at last her fairer face. The sunshine held as yet no sense of heat, only the bracingness of a glad salt wave. Across the spacious blue of the Essex sky clouds floated and met and parted in a restful restlessness. The great valley swam in a blue sea of vapour. Men trod as on buoyant sunshine that bore them along. The buds were peeping out from every hedge and tree, the blackthorn was bursting into white, the whole world seemed like a child tiptoeing towards some delightful future. Primroses nestled in every hollow: the gorse lay golden on the commons. The little leaves of the trees seemed shy, scarcely grown familiar with the fluttering of the birds. All the misery, pain, and sadness had faded from creation like a bad dream: the stains and pollutions were washed out, leaving only the young clean beauty of the first day. It was a virgin planet, fresh from the hands of its Maker, trembling with morning dew—an earth that had never seen its own blossoming.

And the pæan of all this peace and innocence throbbed exultingly in bird-music through all the great landscape. Over the orchard of Frog Farm there were only two larks, but you would have thought a whole orchestra.

A blot against this background seemed the blood-red shirt of Caleb Flynt in that same orchard; a wild undulating piece of primeval woodland where plum-trees and pear-trees indeed flourished, but not more so than oaks and chestnuts, briars and brambles, or fairy mists of bluebells. The task of regenerating it had been annually postponed, but now that Caleb was no longer the Frog Farm “looker,” it formed, like his vegetable garden, his wheat patch, or his wife’s piggery, a pleasant pottering-ground. He worked without coat or smock, chastening the ranker grass while the dew was still on it—or in his own idiom, “while the dag was on the herb.” White-bearded and scythe-bearing, he suggested—although the beard was short and round and he wore a shapeless grey hat—a figure of Father Time, incarnadined from all his wars. But in sooth no creature breathed more at one with the earth’s mood that morning than this ancient “Peculiar,” whose parlour bore as its text of honour—in white letters on a lozenge of brown paper: “When He

giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?”

Quietness was, indeed, all around him in this morning freshness: the swish of the scythe, the murmurous lapse of shorn grass, the drone of insects, the cooing of pigeons from the cote, the elusive cry of the new-come cuckoo, seemed forms of silence rather than of sound. And his inner peace matched his outer, for, as his arms automatically wielded the scythe, his soul was actually in heaven—or at least in the New Jerusalem which, according to his wife’s novel Christadelphian creed, was to be let down from heaven for the virtuous remnant of earth—and at no distant date! Not that he definitely believed in her descending city, though he felt a certain proprietary interest in it. “Oi don’t belong to Martha’s Church,” he reassured his brethren of the Peculiar faith, “but Oi belongs to she and she belongs to me.”

In this mutual belonging he felt himself the brake and Martha the spirited mare who could never stand still. No doubt her argument that we were here to learn and to move forward was plausible enough—how could he traverse it, he who had himself changed from Churchman to Peculiar? But her rider: “We don’t leave the doctrine, we carry it with us,” struck him as somewhat shifty. And her move from “Sprinkling” to “Total Immersion”—even if the submergence did in a sense include the sprinkling—was surely enough progression for one lifetime. He did not like “this gospel of gooin’ forrard”: an obstinate instinct warned him to hold back, though with an uneasy recognition that her ceaseless explorations of her capacious Bible—to him a sealed book—must naturally yield discoveries denied to his less saintly and altogether illiterate self. Discoveries indeed had not been spared him. Ever since she had joined those new-fangled Christadelphians—“Christy Dolphins” as he called them—she had abounded in texts as crushing as they were

unfamiliar; and even the glib Biblical patter he had picked up from the Peculiars was shown to imply at bottom the new teaching. Curtain lectures are none the less tedious when they are theological, and after a course of many months—each with its twenty-eight to thirty-one nights—Caleb Flynt was grown wearisomely learned in the bold doctrine launched by the great John Thomas that “the Kingdom of God on earth” actually meant on earth and must be brought about there and nowhere else, and that Immortality enjoyed except in one’s terrestrial body—however spiritualized—was as absurd a notion as that it was lavished indiscriminately upon Tom, Giles, and Jerry.

The worst of it was he could never be sure Martha was not in the right—she had certainly modified his belief in “Sprinkling”—and he fluttered around her “New Jerusalem” like a moth around a lighthouse. Had anybody given a penny for his thoughts as he stooped now over his scythe, the fortunate investor would have come into possession of “the street of pure gold, as it were transparent glass,” not to mention the sapphires and emeralds, the beryls and chrysolites and all the other shining swarms of precious stones catalogued in Revelation. If he had kept from her the rumour that had reached his own ears of such a treasure-city of glass actually arising in London at this very moment, it was not because he believed this was veritably her celestial city, but because it might possibly excite her credulity to the pitch of wishing to see it. And the thought of a journey was torture. Already Martha had dropped hints about the difficulties of “upbuilding” in the lack of local Christadelphians to institute a “Lightstand”: the wild dream of some day

breaking bread in an “Ecclesia” in London had been adumbrated: it was possible the restless female mind even contemplated London itself as a place to be seen before one died.

But surely the New Jerusalem, if it descended at all, would—he felt—descend here, at Little Bradmarsh. A heaven that meant girding up one’s loins and wrenching out one’s roots was a very problematic paradise, for all the splendour with which his inward eye was now, despite himself, dazzled.

II

From this jewelled Jerusalem Caleb was suddenly brought back to the breathing beauty of our imperfect earth, to pear-blossom and plum-blossom, to the sun-glinted shadows under his trees and the mellow tiles of his roof. The sound of his own name fell from on high—like the city of his daydream—accompanied by a great skirring of wings, and looking up dazedly, the pearly gates still shimmering, his eye followed the tarred side-wall of the farmhouse till, near the roof, it lit upon his wife’s night-capped head protruded from the tiny diamond-paned casement that alone broke the sheer black surface of the wood.

A sense of the unusual quickened his pulses. It stole upon him, not mainly from Martha’s face, which, despite its excited distension, wore—over wrinkles he never saw—the same russet complexion and was crowned by the same glory of unblanched brown hair that had gladdened his faithful eyes since the beginning of the century; but, more subtly and subconsciously, through the open lattice which framed this ever-enchanting vision. In the Flynt tradition, windows—restricted at best by the window tax still in force—were for light, not air. Had folks wanted air, they would have poked a hole in the wall; not built a section of it “of transparent glass.” People so much under the sky as Caleb and Martha Flynt had no need to invite colds by artificial draughts. They were getting a change of air all day long. But their rooms—their small, low-ceiled rooms—were not thus vivified, even in their absence; the ground-floor windows were indeed immovable, and an immemorial mustiness made a sort of slum atmosphere in this spacious, sun-washed solitude.

Hence Caleb’s sense of a jar in his universe at the familiar, flat pattern of the wall dislocated into a third dimension by the out-flung casement: a prodigy which he was not surprised to find fluttering the dovecot, and which presaged, he felt, still vaster cataclysms. And to add to the auspices of change, he observed another piebald pigeon among his snowy flock.

“Yes, dear heart,” he called up, disguising his uneasiness and shearing on.