ARCHIBALD MARSHALL

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1918

Copyright, 1918, by

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.

TO

WILLIAM HENRY BATES

INTRODUCTION

This novel, though it is complete in itself, deals with the same characters as "Abington Abbey." Its publication gives me the opportunity of replying to some criticisms of that novel, which would apply equally to this one.

The criticisms to which I refer have to do, not with faults of authorship, to which it would not be becoming to reply, but with matters for which an apology, or at least an explanation, may be offered.

The first has been that in such times as these a novel dealing with minor currents of life as they existed before the war is something of an anachronism. Perhaps it is. In the fourth year of the war, life as it is depicted in these two novels seems already far away. But what is a novelist of manners to do, granted the assumption—admittedly debateable—that he is to go on writing novels at all? He must either write about the war, in one or other of its far-reaching effects upon life, or else he must leave it alone altogether. At least, those are the only alternatives that I have felt to be open to me; and, after having written one novel with the war as its deliberate climax, I have chosen the latter. When the war is over, it will be possible to take its adjustments into account as affecting everyday life, but while it is going on I do not think it is possible. It looms too big. Minor affairs would have their values in contrast with it, and truth would suffer.

If further justification were necessary, I think I could find it in the relief it brings from the heavy[Pg x] weight of the war to turn one's mind to those happy days in which life presented problems of less appalling significance than now, and to gain the comforting assurance that those days will come again. This relief I know to be felt by readers as well as by writers of fiction.

The second criticism upon which I should like to have my say is that the life I have depicted in those of my novels whose scenes are laid in the English country has been for some time a thing of the past, and after the war may be expected to disappear altogether. My American critics, kind as most of them are, often seem to accuse me of presenting an idyllic picture of a state of things which is based upon rotten foundations, and either of leaving out of account or of deliberately shutting my eyes to the rottenness.

I should not accept either charge. If it were worth anybody's while to read through those novels of mine in which the economic conditions of English landholding are touched upon, I think he would find in the first place that I have nowhere defended whatever abuses may still attach to the system, but have frequently satirised them; and in the second place that economic questions play but a small part in my fictions.

I think that if I had left such questions alone altogether there would be no criticism to meet. I could point to a dozen novelists who write about the same sort of people, living in the same surroundings, as I do, against whom it would not be brought, because they take the conditions for granted, and their readers take them for granted. If I touch upon such questions here and there it is because they interest me as factors in the lives of my characters; but they are not the factors which I have chosen as the main thesis of my novels, except in one instance. In "The Old Order Changeth"[Pg xi] I did seek to reflect the renewal that is always going on in English landowning, and always has gone on since the beginning,—where the new men come in to dispossess the old; and the social disturbance that takes place at each such upheaval, before the new become absorbed in their turn into the old.

That is how I see it. Whatever changes may have come and may be coming in the economic conditions of landholding, and of agricultural labour, the life of the country house, large or small, goes on much the same as ever, and will go on. Where it can no longer be supported by the land, it is supported by money made elsewhere. English people like the flavour of country life, and it is very seldom that a man who has made his fortune in business does not eventually buy or rent a country house. Many of the big estates in the United Kingdom have been acquired of late years by rich Americans, who buy them, I suppose, not as an investment in property, but because they also are attracted by the flavour of English country life. Country houses, from the great house such as is represented here by Abington Abbey down to the little house such as Stone Cottage, are scattered all over England, and I should say that in nine cases out of ten, taking large and small together, the people who inhabit them have no concern with the land, in the way of drawing any

part of their income from it, or of dealing with it as a productive agency. They have not come "back to the land" in any essential sense; they have only come back to the country. I believe that no economic changes that may affect those who live by the land, whether as employers or labourers, will much affect the social life of English country houses.

As far as my novels are concerned, it is simply a question of placing the sort of people whom I know[Pg xii] best in the surroundings of which I like to write. Where my characters are in direct contact with the business of the land, or are affected by it, I do not shirk reference to it, as far as it seems to bear upon the main purpose of my story. But I have not set out to present an all-round picture of the conditions of country life in any of the fictional districts I have chosen as the scene of my novels. The great majority of the inhabitants of any countryside are the people who work on the land and live by it, and these I have left out almost entirely; not because I do not recognise their actual importance, but because in the social scene of my stories they would not appear, or only in a very minor degree. It may be an unsatisfactory state of things which divides people off in that way, into social strata, but it undoubtedly exists, and it is not the business of a novelist to justify the conditions he finds, but to reflect them; unless, of course, he sets

out to make a discussion of those conditions the basis of his story.

As for my family of Graftons, who are real and dear to me, I have pictured them in the sunny days of peace. But in my vision, at least, the shadow of the war lies over them, as it does in retrospect over all immediately pre-war fictional characters. Dick Mansergh and Maurice Bradby would have been fighting since the beginning; Young George and his friend Jimmy would have been caught up in it by this time. In the slaughter of bright youth that is going on, it would hardly be expected that not one out of the four would be killed or wounded. George Grafton would be "doing something," with the men of his generation, and would hardly be able to regard life now as going so easily for him as to make of it a spiritual danger. The girls must have known sorrow and a much changed outlook, unless they have been more fortunate than most.

[Pg xiii]

Yes, these are stories of the past, as much as if they had been written about people living forty or fifty years ago instead of four or five. But the shadow will pass away, and life will emerge again into the sunshine. I have looked forward, in writing them, as much as I have looked back.

Archibald Marshall. March, 1918.

[Pg 1]

CHAPTER I

SURLEY RECTORY

The old man lay dying at last. He had lingered on for months, now getting a little better and giving hope that the end might be deferred for a time, now sinking, so that it seemed as if it had come; but with all the alterations in his state moving onwards slowly and surely towards his rest. Now there was no longer any hope, even for a few days more. His two daughters and his son sat by his bedside, waiting. There was nothing to do but to wait, and to think.

It was towards the close of a sunny April day. The windows of the large eastward-facing room were wide open to admit the fragrant air. The birds were making a great to do in the Rectory garden, where the flowers of early spring flaunted their bright colours, and the lawns answered them with living verdure. Nearly every morning for five and forty years the old man who was dying had arisen from the bed on which he lay to look out on this scene. It might almost be said to have been what he had lived for. At the age of thirty-four, still a young man, with a wife still younger, and his two little girls, he had come to this assured haven, with no thought of leaving it until he had lived his life out to the full, where there was everything to make life what he wished it to be.

[Pg 2]

There was the pleasant roomy house, so admirably adapted to the delights of a quiet home life, the beautiful garden, the glebe and the outbuildings and the two or three cottages which added what was almost a little farm to what was almost a country mansion. And there was the substantial income, which would provide for the pleasures and hospitalities as well as the responsibilities of country life.

There was a little queer eighteenth century church, hardly more than a meeting-house, but big enough to hold such proportion of the three hundred or so inhabitants of the parish of Surley as would make a practice of attending it. It was to serve them that the Reverend William Cooper had been appointed to the living by the Bishop of the Diocese, and the house and the garden and the glebe and the substantial income were to be the reward of his service. None of the parishioners were very poor; the income would not be greatly depleted by the calls of charity. Nor would the time of their ministrant be too much occupied by them, supposing him to have other uses to which to put it.

He had done his work and taken his reward. There had never been any question in his mind that the one was not fitted to the other, nor any sense of diffidence before others who were spending themselves in the vineyard with material reward barely existent. It had been rather the other way about. The Rector of Surley was almost a dignitary, by reason of the reward, and carried himself so before his lesser brethren, but not with arrogance, for he was an amiable likeable man, and only[Pg 3] living up to his position. These things were so; it was not even necessary to excuse them, at least in those days.

An amiable likeable man! He had gone about his parish for five and forty years, until there were only two or three in it who were older than he. Most of them now living he had christened into the Church, many he had buried, some he had married, a few he had helped, as one helps friends, not as one gives doles to the poor. He had touched the lives of all of them, and they had been satisfied with him. It was not for them to complain of the established order. These things came from above. If the Rector of Surley lived in a big house, with a thousand a year, the Squire lived in a bigger one, with ten thousand a year. The one was no more explicable than the other, and no more or less to be criticised. What might come from either to ameliorate the lot of the less fortunate would depend upon what sort of Squire or Rector there might be.

Lying in his bed, as he had lain for months past, or when his strength had rallied sitting wrapped up in a big chair by the window, the old man must sometimes have occupied himself in casting up his accounts preparatory to the great Audit to which he would soon have to submit them.

His life had been kindly and useful. He had never turned a deaf ear to the call of sympathy, nor shirked any of his easy duties, as easy duties are sometimes apt to be shirked when no punishment is to be expected[Pg 4] from the shirking except from the disapproval of conscience. Probably he had given more thought to the episodes of his long life as they affected himself and his family than to the affairs of his ministry.

His wife had managed him until she had died, and then his daughters had managed him. In neither case had the managing been done in such a way as to irritate, or to lessen his dignity before the world. Perhaps he had hardly known that he had been managed, for he had had his own way, and had not been aware that it was often the way into which he had been guided. If both wife and daughters had sometimes raised bristles on the backs of neighbours, it had been his part to smooth them down, and he had gained liking by the contrast between himself and them. When his wife had died he would greatly have missed her sure capable hand in the affairs of life if his daughters had not then been of an age to fill her place. He was a man to be dependent upon women, and to draw the best that was in them towards himself.

The guidance exercised by women, however, seldom earns love, even when it escapes domination, and the guidance exercised by the old Rector's daughters did not always escape it, though they made his welfare the chief object in their lives. It was his son whom he loved, and thought most about, during the long hours in which he lay drifting towards the end.

He had come to him late in life. He was now not yet twenty-four. If he had been only a year older[Pg 5] the great anxiety which had shadowed the old man's last months would have been lightened.

The living of Surley was in the gift of the Bishop, but it had been held by a Cooper for three generations, covering a period of nearly eighty years. If only it could be handed on to Denis!

He had been ordained in the previous Advent, with a title to his father's curacy. He had done the work of the parish, with the help, or oversight, of his sisters, and taken such of the services as is permitted to a Deacon. The people liked him, and if these matters were arranged by the popular voice he would certainly have been the next Rector of Surley. But he would not be eligible for Priest's Orders for another seven months. It was almost too much to hope that the Bishop would present a Deacon of only a few months' standing to one of the richest livings in his gift.

But the old man could not give up hope. These things had been done before; he had a dozen cases at his fingers' ends. But unfortunately they were all cases dating back many years, to a time when the fitting of rewards to work done, or to be done, in the Church, had not seemed of such importance as now. Fifty years ago nobody would have made any fuss about such an appointment; now-a-days there would certainly be a fuss. But he would not admit that there ought to be; he only tacitly accepted the fact that it was impossible for him to take any steps to bring about what he so ardently desired.

[Pg 6]

The Bishop had been to see him during his illness. Perhaps he might have put in a word then; he had thought beforehand that he might. But he had not done so. To that extent he accepted the changed conditions. But none the less he deplored them. He felt it to be hard, for one thing, that he would have to die without knowing what should happen after him. His own uncle, whom he had succeeded in the living, had been made contented by a promise on his deathbed. He himself had known that he would be presented to the living a month or more before it had become vacant.

Ah! things were ordered better in those days. There was more human kindliness, and not so many Radicals, to interfere with what had been established for so long and had worked so well.

The two women and the young man sat by the bedside, speaking sometimes in low voices to one another, otherwise busy with their thoughts. Now and then one of them would rise and put a hand to pillow or sheet, but more to give herself the comfort of performing some little service for him who would soon be beyond her care than because he still needed it. For he lay quite still, with eyes closed, breathing faintly as if in sleep. They would not have known that the end was very near if the doctor had not told them that the quiet breathing might cease at any time, and left them to wait for the end.

There was not much emotion in the minds of either of them. The passing had been too long and too gradual.[Pg 7] Their brains were weary, if their active bodies were not. They had nursed him turn and turn about, with help from one or another of the faithful women about the house, but the nursing had made no great demands upon them. Neither would have admitted to the other that there was a slight sense of relief in the end having come at last. Gladly they would have kept him with them and spent themselves in his service, even if he should never speak to them or open his eyes upon them again. But they had grown used to the idea of losing him all the same. Life was strong in them, and there would be many things to do when he had gone.

The end came as the dusk began to gather in the corners of the room, with a fluttering breath that was like a faint sigh, and a silence hardly more complete than the silence that had been before. The old Rector of Surley was dead, and the way was open for a new Rector to be appointed.

The two sensible self-controlled women, who had for so long given their service with a cheerful capability that had seemed almost hard in its efficiency, faced a reaction that neither of them had been prepared for. They sobbed together, and confessed, each of them, that they had not so ardently wished that the dear old man should survive for a few hours or a few days longer than they now wished he had. They would never have him again alive. The thought was hardly to be borne. Their lives would be desolate.

This mood lasted all the evening, and was genuine[Pg 8] enough in its regret for a time now past and not valued enough while it had lasted. Denis was accused, though not to his face, of want of heart, because he said very little, and had shed no tears whatever. By the end of the evening the fact that they had, and could still do so, had come to be a consolation. By the next morning it had become difficult to shed tears at will, though they still came on occasions, but at rarer intervals. When all the business in connection with the funeral and the notifying of friends and relations had to be met they were ready to meet it, and found satisfaction in the occupations with which every hour of the days that followed were filled.

The letters and the calls of sympathy were most gratifying, as showing the high esteem in which the late Rector, and his family, were held. One of the first to call was Mrs. Carruthers, from Surley Park. There had been a coolness, but death overrode everything.

The sisters were writing letters at the dining-room table.

"We had better go in together," said Rhoda. "It will be less awkward."

"If she doesn't say anything I don't see why we should," said Ethel. "Let bygones be bygones, I say, at a time like this."

"I wonder if the Bishop has said anything to her," said Rhoda, as they went across the hall together. The Bishop of the Diocese was Mrs. Carruthers's uncle.

Mrs. Carruthers was very young and very pretty; too young, the Misses Cooper were accustomed to say,[Pg 9] and perhaps too pretty, though there might be two opinions about that, to be mistress of a property like Surley, which had been left to her unconditionally by her husband. The old Rector had been fond of her before the dispute had parted the Park and the Rectory, and even afterwards, for its details had been kept from him, and he had not realised that the break had been so complete as it actually had been.