A Dorset Chronicle
“So this is to be your room,” said Mrs. Otter. “I knew you’d want to see it at once; as you have to dress, of course, for dining at the House? It’s not large, but I think it’s rather comfortable. My son Jason said only just now that he felt quite envious of it. His own room is just opposite, looking on the back garden, as yours does on the front. I think we might show him Jason’s room, don’t you, Darnley? It’s so very characteristic! At least we try to keep it so, don’t we, Darnley? Darnley and I do it ourselves, when he’s out.” Her voice, as the two men stood in the doorway staring at Solent’s pieces of shabby luggage, which they had just carried in, sank into a confidential whisper. “He’s out now,” she added. They both moved aside as she proceeded to make her way across the small passage. “There!” she exclaimed, opening a door; and Wolf peered into complete and rather stuffy darkness. “There! Perhaps you have a match, Darnley?”
Darnley obediently struck a match and proceeded to set alight two ornate candles that stood on a chest of drawers. The whole look of the chamber thus revealed, was detestable to the visitor.
Above the bed hung an enormous Arundel print of a richly gilded picture by Benozzo Gozzoli; and above the fireplace, where a few red coals still smouldered, was a morbidly sanctimonious Holy Family by Filipino Lippi.
“I’d better open the window a little, mother, hadn’t I?” said Darnley, moving across the room.
“No—no, dear!” cried the lady hurriedly. “He feels the draught so terribly when he’s indoors. It’s only cigarette-smoke—and a little incense,” she added, turning to Wolf. “He finds incense refreshing. We order it from the Stores. Darnley and I don’t care for it. So a little lasts a long time.”
“He must have gone to Blacksod again,” remarked the son grimly, glancing at his watch and looking very significantly at his mother.
“If he has, I’m sure I hope they’ll be nicer to him than they were last time,” murmured the lady.
“At the Three Peewits?” retorted her son drily. “Too nice, I daresay! I wish he’d stick to Farmer’s Rest.”
“We are referring to the inns in this neighbourhood where my son meets his friends,” remarked the mother; and Wolf, contemplating the thin, peaked face, the smooth, high forehead, the neatly brushed pale hair, the nun-like dress of the little woman, felt ashamed of the first rush of inconsiderate contempt that her manner of speech had provoked in him.
“There’s something funny about all this,” he thought to himself. “I’ll be interested to see this confounded incense-burner.”
Left to himself to unpack his things, he looked round with anxious concern at the room that was to be his base of operations, his secret fox’s hole, for so prolonged a time. There was a Leighton over the mantelpiece, and a huge Alma-Tadema between the two windows; and he divined at once that the spare-bedroom was used as a depository by this household for mid-Victorian works of art.
He leaned out of one of the windows. A sharp scent of jonquils was wafted up from some flowerbed below; but the night was so dark he could see nothing except a row of what looked like poplar-trees and a clump of thick bushes.
He quickly unpacked his clothes and put them away in easily-opening, agreeably-papered drawers. There was a vase of rust-tinted polyanthuses on the dressing-table; and he thought to himself, “The poet’s mother knows how to manage things!”
He decided at first to confine himself to a dinner-jacket; but realizing that he had only one pair of black trousers, and that these went best with the tailcoat, he changed his mind and put on full evening-dress.
As he finally tied his white tie into a bow at the small mahogany-framed looking-glass, he could not help thinking of the many unknown events that would occupy his thoughts as he stood just there in future days—events that were only now so many airy images, floating, drifting, upon the sea of the unborn.
“How will Mr. Urquhart receive me?” his thoughts ran on. “This brother of Otter’s doesn’t like him; but that’s nothing. … I’ll deal with these awful pictures later!” And he carefully extinguished his candles and stepped out on the landing.
The little dining-room of Pond Cottage faced the drawing-room at the foot of the stairs; and when he stood in the hall, hesitating over which room to enter, he was surprised to find himself beckoned to, eagerly and surreptitiously, by a bent old woman in a blue apron, laying the dinner. He crossed the threshold in answer to this appeal.
“I know’d yer,” the crone whispered. “I know’d ’twas none o’ they, soon as I did hear yer feet. Looksy here, Mister! Master Darnley’ll want to go up to Squire’s with ’ee. Don’t ’ee let ’un go! That’s what I’ve got to say to ’ee. Don’t ’ee let ’un go! ’Tis no walk up to House. ’Tis straight along Pond Lane and down Lenty, and there ’a be! Just ’ee go off now, quiet-like, afore they be comed downstairs. I’ll certify to Missus that I telled ’ee the way to House. Don’t ’ee stand staring at a person toad-struck and pondering! Off with ’ee now! Be an angel of a sweet young gent! There! Don’t ’ee wait a minute. They’ll be down, afore ’ee can holler yer own name. Out wi’ ’ee, and God bless ’ee. Straight to the end of Pond, and then down Lenty!”
It was the nature of Wolf Solent, when other things were equal, to be easy, flexible, obliging. So without asking any questions he silently and expeditiously obeyed the old servant. He snatched up his hat and his overcoat, and vanished into the darkness of the night.
“I suppose this is Pond Lane,” he said to himself, as he made his way in the direction pointed out by the old woman. “But if it isn’t, I can’t help it. They’re all on the jump about that chap’s coming home. She wanted to keep Otter in the house to deal with the beggar.”
Fortune favoured him more than he might have expected. Just where Pond Lane turned into Lenty, he met a group of children, and under their direction he had no difficulty in finding the drive-entrance to King’s Barton Manor.
It was not a long drive and it did not lead to a big house. Built in the reign of James the First, Barton Manor had always remained a small and unimportant dwelling. Its chief glory was its large and rambling garden—a garden that needed more hands to keep it in order than the present owner was able to afford.
And, standing on the top of the weather-stained, lichen-spotted stone steps, after he had rung the bell, Wolf Solent had time, before anyone answered his ring, to imbibe something of the beauty of this new surrounding. The sky had cleared a little, and from a few open spaces, crowded with small faint stars, a pallid luminosity revealed the outlines of several wide, velvety lawns, intersected by box-hedges, themselves divided by stone-flagged paths. Wolf could see at one end of these lawns a long, high yew-hedge, looking in that uncertain light so mysterious and ill-omened that it was easy to imagine that on the further side of it all manner of phantasmal figures moved, ready to vanish at cockcrow!
For one moment he had a queer sensation that that wretched human face he had seen on the Waterloo steps hung there—there also, between the branches of a tall obscure tree that grew at the end of that yew-hedge. But even as he looked, the face faded; and instead of it, so wrought-upon were his nerves at that moment, there appeared to him the worried, anxious, mackerel-coloured eyes of Darnley Otter.
He was disturbed in these fancies by the opening of the carved Jacobean door. The manservant who admitted him was, to his surprise, dressed in rough working-clothes. He was an extremely powerful man, and had a swarthy, gipsy-like complexion and coal-black hair.
“Excuse me, Sir,” he said with a melancholy smile, as he took the visitor’s coat and laid it on a great oak chest that stood in the hall. “Excuse me, Mr. Solent, but I’ve been working till a few minutes ago in the stable. He never likes me to apologize to gentlemen who come; but that’s the way I am; and I hope you’ll excuse me, Sir.”
Even at the very moment he was muttering an appropriate reply to this somewhat unusual greeting, and allowing his thoughts, below the surface of his words, to reflect how oddly the servants in King’s Barton behaved, Wolf became aware of the approach of an imposing personage coming down the long hallway towards them. This figure, limping very much and leaning upon a stick, was in evening-dress; and as he approached he muttered, over and over again, in a low, soft, satiny voice: “What’s this I hear, eh? What’s this I hear, eh? What’s this I hear, eh?”
The tall coachman, or gardener, or whatever he was, did not wait for his master’s arrival. With one quick glance at Solent and a final “Excuse me, Sir!” he vanished through a side-door, leaving Wolf to face his host without any official announcement.
“Mr. Solent? Very good. Mr. Wolf Solent? Very, very good. You received my letter and you came at once? Excellent. Very, very good.”
Uttering these words in the same low voice that made Wolf think of the unrolling of some great, rich bundle of Chinese silk, he offered his left hand to his visitor and kept his right still leaning upon the handle of the stick that supported him.
The impression Wolf got from Mr. Urquhart’s face was extremely complicated. Heavy eyelids, and pendulous, baggy foldings below the eyes, made one aspect of it. Greenish-blackness in the eyes themselves, and something profoundly suspicious in their intense questioning gaze, made another. An air of agitated restlessness, amounting to something that might have been described as a hunted look, made yet a third. The features of the face, taken in their general outlines, were massive and refined. It was in the expression that flitted across them that Wolf detected something that puzzled and perturbed him. One thing was certain. Both Mr. Urquhart’s head and Mr. Urquhart’s stomach were unnaturally large—far too large for his feeble legs. His hair, which was almost as black as that of his manservant, caused Wolf to wonder whether or not he wore a wig.
Dropping his visitor’s hand, he suddenly stood stock-still, in the attitude of one who listens. Wolf had no idea whether he was arrested by sounds in the garden outside or sounds in the kitchen inside. He himself heard nothing but the ticking of the hall-clock.
Presently the squire spoke again. “They didn’t come with you then? They didn’t bring you to the door then?” He spoke with what Wolf fancied was a tone of nervous relief.
“I found my way very easily,” was all the visitor could reply.
“What’s that? You came alone? They let you come alone?” The man gave him a quick, suspicious glance, and limped a step or two towards the front-door. Wolf received an impression that he wasn’t believed, and that Mr. Urquhart thought that, if the door were opened and he called loud enough, someone would respond at once out of the darkness.
“Didn’t Darnley come any of the way with you?” This was said with such a querulous, suspicious accent that Wolf looked him straight in the face.
“They didn’t even know I had left the house,” he remarked sternly.
Mr. Urquhart glanced at the door through which the servant had vanished.
“I told him to lay three places,” he remarked. “I made sure they wouldn’t let you come alone.”
Wolf, at this, lifted one of his thick eyebrows; and a flicker of a smile crossed his mouth.
“Would you like me to run over and fetch him?” he said.
“What’s that, eh? Fetch him? Did you say fetch him? Of course not! Come, come. Let’s go in. Monk will have everything ready by now. Come along. This is the way.”
He led his visitor down the hall and into a small oak-panelled room. The table was laid for three; and no sooner were they seated, than Roger Monk, re-garbed as if by magic in a plain dark suit, and accompanied by a young maid in cap and apron, brought in two steaming soup-plates. The dinner that followed was an exceptionally good one, and so also was the wine. Both host and guest drank quite freely; so that by the time the servants left them to their own devices, there had emerged not only a fairly complete understanding as to the character of the work which Wolf was to undertake in that remarkable establishment, but also a certain rapport between their personalities.
Staring contentedly at a large monumental landscape by Gainsborough, where what might have been called the spiritual idea of a Country Road lost itself between avenues of park-like trees and vistas of mysterious terrace-walks, Wolf began to experience, as he sipped his port wine and listened to his host’s mellow discourse, a more delicious sense of actual physical well-being than he had known for many a long year.
He soon discovered that he was to labour at his particular share of their grandiose enterprise in a window-seat of the big library of the house, while Mr. Urquhart pursued independent researches in a room he called “the study.” This was excellent news to the new secretary. Very vividly he conjured up an image of that window-seat, ensconced behind mullion-panes of armorial glass, and opening upon an umbrageous vista resembling that picture by Gainsborough!
“Our history will be an entirely new genre,” Mr. Urquhart was saying. “What I want to do is to isolate the particular portion of the earth’s surface called ‘Dorset’; as if it were possible to decipher there a palimpsest of successive strata, one inscribed below another, of human impression. Such impressions are forever being made and forever being obliterated in the ebb and flow of events; and the chronicle of them should be continuous, not episodic.” He paused in his discourse to light a cigarette; which, when it was lit, he waved to and fro, forming curves and squares and patterns. His hand holding the cigarette was white and plump, like the hand of a priest; and, as he wrote on the air, a trail of filmy smoke followed the movements of his arm.
“Of course, a genuine continuity,” he went on, “would occupy several lifetimes in the telling of it. What’s to be done then, eh? D’ye see the problem? Eh? What’s to be done?”
Solent indicated as well as he could by discreet facial signs that he did see the problem, but left its solution to the profound intelligence in front of him.
Mr. Urquhart proceeded. “We must select, my friend. We must select. All history lies in selection. We can’t put in everything. We must put in only what’s got pith and sap and salt. Things like adulteries, murders, and fornications.”
“Are we to have any method of selection?” Wolf enquired.
Mr. Urquhart chuckled. “Do you know what I’ve thought?” he said. “I’ve thought that I’d like to get the sort of perspective on human occurrences that the bedposts in brothels must come to possess—and the counters of barrooms—and the butlers’ pantries in old houses—and the muddy ditches in long-frequented lovers’ lanes.”
“It’s in fact a sort of Rabelaisian chronicle you wish to write?” threw in Wolf.
Mr. Urquhart smiled and leant back in his chair. He drained his wine-cup to the dregs, and with half-shut malignant eyes, full of a strange inward unction, he squinnied at his interlocutor. The lines of his face, as he sat there contemplating his imaginary History, took to themselves the emphatic dignity of a picture by Holbein. The parchment-like skin stretched itself tightly and firmly round the bony structure of the cheeks, as though it had been vellum over a mysterious folio. A veil of almost sacerdotal cunning hovered, like a drooping gonfalon, over the man’s heavy eyelids and the loose wrinkles that gathered beneath his eyes. What still puzzled Wolf more than anything else was the youthful glossiness of his host’s hair, which contrasted very oddly not only with the extreme pallor of his flesh, but also with the deeply indented contours of his Holbein-like countenance. Mr. Urquhart’s coiffure seemed, in fact, an obtrusive and unnatural ornament designed to set off quite a different type of face from the one it actually surmounted.
“Is it or isn’t it a wig?” Wolf caught himself wondering again. But each furtive glance he took at the raven-black cranium opposite him made such a supposition less and less credible; for by the flicker of the candles he seemed to detect the presence of actual individual hairs, coarsely and strongly growing, on either side of the “parting” in the centre of that massive skull. While he was considering this phenomenon, he became conscious that Mr. Urquhart had left the matter of Dorset Chronicles and was speaking of religion.
“I was brought up an Anglican and I shall die an Anglican,” he was saying. “That doesn’t in the least mean that I believe in the Christian religion.”
There was a pause at this point, while the squire refilled his own glass and that of his visitor.
“I like the altar,” the man continued. “The altar, Mr. Solent, is the one absolutely satisfactory object of worship left in our degenerate days.” There came into Mr. Urquhart’s face, as he uttered these words, an expression that struck Wolf as nothing less than Satanic.
“It—does—not—matter—to you then, Sir,” threw out Wolf cautiously, “what the altar represents?”
Mr. Urquhart smiled. “Eh?” he muttered. “Represents—did you say?” And then in a vague, dreamy, detached manner he repeated the word “represents” several times, as if he were mentally examining it, as a connoisseur might examine some small object; but his voice, as he did this, grew fainter and fainter, and presently died away altogether.
The new secretary bowed discreetly over his plate of almonds and raisins. He suspected that if it had not been for the excellence of the wine, the great swaying pontifical head in front of him would have been more reserved in its unusual credo.
“Is the church in King’s Barton ritualistic enough for your taste, Sir?” he enquired.
And then straight out of the air there came into his mind the image of Mr. John Urquhart, stark naked, with a protuberant belly like Punch or Napoleon, kneeling in the dead of night, while a storm of rain lashed the windows, before the altar of a small, dark, unfrequented edifice.
“Eh? What’s that?” grumbled his entertainer. “The church here? Oh, Tilly-Valley’s all right. Tilly-Valley’s as docile as a ewe-lamb.” He leaned forward with a sardonic leer, lowering his head between the candles as if he possessed a pair of sacred horns. “Tilly-Valley’s afraid of me; just simply afraid.” His voice sank into a whisper. “I make him say Mass every morning. D’ye hear? I make him say Mass whether there’s anyone there or not.”
The tone in which Mr. Urquhart uttered these words roused a definite hostility in Wolf’s nerves. There came over him a feeling as if he had been permitted, on an airless night, to catch a glimpse of monstrous human lineaments behind the heavy rumble of a particular clap of thunder. There was something abominably menacing in this great wrinkled white face, with its glossy, carefully parted hair, its pendulous eyelids, its baggy eye-folds, butting at him between the candle-flames.
It presented itself to his mind as a clear issue, that he had now really come across a person who, in that mysterious mythopoeic world in which his own imagination insisted on moving, was a serious antagonist—an antagonist who embodied a depth of actual evil such as was a completely new experience in his life. This idea, as it slowly dawned upon his wine-befogged brain, was at once an agitating threat and an exciting challenge. He deliberately stiffened the muscles of his body to meet this menace. He straightened his shoulders and glanced carelessly round the room. He composed his countenance into an expression of cautious reserve. He stretched out his legs. He threw one of his arms over the back of his chair. He clenched together the fingers of his other hand, as it lay on his knee beneath the table. He knew well enough that what Mr. Urquhart saw in these manifestations was an access of casual bonhomie in his new secretary, a bonhomie amounting to something almost like youthful bravado. He knew that what he did not see was a furtive gathering together of the forces of an alien soul, a soul composed of metaphysical chemicals directly antipodal to those out of which his own was compounded.
What Wolf felt in his own mind just then summed itself up in vague half-articulated words uttered in that margin of his consciousness where the rational fades away into the irrational. “This Dorsetshire adventure is going to be serious,” he said to himself. And then he became suddenly aware that though quite ignorant of all that was occurring in the mind and nerves of his visitor, the squire of King’s Barton had grown alive to the fact that his remarks were not meeting with the same magnetic response that they had met with at first. After a minute or two of silence, Mr. Urquhart rose and limped towards the door of the dining-room. He opened the door for Wolf and they both went out into the hall.
“I think,” he said, as they stood at the foot of the stately Jacobean staircase, “I think I will not show you the library tonight. You have had a tiring day, and if I take you upstairs there’s no knowing when we shall separate! By Jove”—and he glanced at the hall-clock—“it’s past ten already! Better say good night before we start talking again, eh? You’ve got a walk before you, too. Better say good night before we get too interested in each other, eh? What? Where’d that idiot put your things? Oh, good! Very good. Well, come again by ten o’clock tomorrow morning and we’ll settle everything. I am very relieved to find how much we’ve got in common. My History will not be betrayed by your assistance as it was by my last helper.”
Wolf walked to the place where his coat had been laid down by the manservant, and after he had put it on, and picked up his hat and stick, he turned to his host, who kept uttering meaningless monosyllables in a silky, propitiatory whisper, as if he were ushering out a madman or a policeman; and asked him point-blank who this ill-advised predecessor of his was, turning as he did so the handle of the front-door. The question seemed to disturb Mr. Urquhart’s mental equanimity, as much as the chilly March wind that blew in with a gust when the door was opened, disturbed his physical balance.
“Eh? What? What’s that? Didn’t Darnley tell you? The boy ruined my History at the start. I had to tear up every scrap. He dropped it and went—all in a minute. Eh? What? Didn’t Darnley tell you? He left it in chaos. He played hopscotch with it!”
Struggling with the heavy door and the gusty wind, Solent muttered a propitiatory reply.
“Very annoying—I hope, indeed, I shall do better, Sir! You had to get rid of him, then?”
The wind whistled past him as he spoke, so that his host’s final word was scarcely audible. In fact, the last thing he saw of Mr. Urquhart was a feeble attempt the man seemed to be making to cover his rotund stomach with the flaps of his dress-suit.
When at last the great door had really closed between them and he was striding down the stone steps, he found his mind full of the impression which that inarticulate final word had made upon him; and before he reached the end of the drive and passed through the iron gates into Lenty Lane, he had come to the startling conclusion that his predecessor in the study of Dorset Chronicles had died, as they say in that county, “in the het of his job.”
“Good Lord!” he thought, as he turned into Pond Lane. “If all he feels for his assistants when they die at their post is anger like that, he must be a queer chap to deal with. Or did he mean something quite different? Dead? Dead? But that wasn’t the word he used. What was the word he used?” And he continued worrying over the windblown sarcasm he had caught in the doorway, without coming to any solution of the riddle. “If it wasn’t that he meant the fellow was dead, what did he mean?”
His mind was so full of this problem that he arrived at the gate into the small garden of Pond Cottage before he was aware of it. There was a faint reddish light in the window of what he knew was his own bedroom. “She’s given me a fire!” he thought to himself; and he looked forward with keen anticipation to his first night in Dorset after twenty-five years.
Opening the door quietly, he lit a match as soon as he was inside, and turned the key in the lock. He then took the precaution of taking off his shoes; and lightly and stealthily he slipped upstairs and entered his room.
He had no sooner done so than a figure rose up from a chair by the fire and stumbled towards him. It was a middle-aged man, in a long, white, old-fashioned nightshirt, with a woollen shawl wrapped about his shoulders. There was no light but the firelight in the room; and the man’s countenance was a mere blur above the folded shawl.
“Was writing poetry … let my fire out … came before expected … humbly apologize … hope you’ll sleep well …” Without further explanation the man pushed past him and went out, leaving these broken sentences humming in the air like the murmurs of some thick, muffled, mechanical instrument. Once more Wolf found himself alone with the Landseer and the Alma-Tadema pictures.
“This is too much!” he muttered furiously. “If I can’t have my room to myself I’ll go somewhere else,” he thought. “Does this incense-burner suppose that everyone in the world must humour his whimsies?” He opened both windows wide and lit the candles on his dressing-table.
Apparently Jason Otter had retired quietly to his bedroom, for the house was now as silent as the darkness outside it. He began slowly undressing. For a while his irritation was prolonged by the way the wind kept making the candles flare; but gradually, in the freshness of the cool garden-smells, his accustomed equanimity returned. After all, there would be plenty of time to adjust all these things! He must propitiate these people to the limit at present, and feel his way. It would be silly to show touchiness and cantankerousness at the very start.
By the time he had blown out the flickering candles and was safe in bed, his habitual mood had quite reasserted itself. He went over in his mind his conversation with Mr. Urquhart, and wondered how far his imagination had led him on to exaggerate the sinister element in the man. He wished intensely that he had caught the drift of that final word about his predecessor. Was he dead? Or was it only that he had been ignominiously dismissed?
As he grew sleepy, all manner of trivial occurrences and objects of this adventurous day began rising up before him, emphasizing themselves, out of all proportion to the rest, in a strange half-feverish panorama. The long, enchanted road revealed in that Gainsborough picture hovered before him and beckoned him to follow it. The abrupt apologies of Roger Monk melted into the furtive exhortations of the old woman in the blue apron. Framed in the darkness that closed in upon him, the coarse black hairs, that had refused to be reduced to a wig, metamorphosed themselves into similar hairs, growing, as he knew they could grow, upon a long-dead human skull! The jogging grey haunches of the mare that had brought him from Ramsgard confused themselves with the grey paws of the cat upon Selena Gault’s knees.
Very vividly, more vividly than anything else, he saw the waiter at the Lovelace, as he leaned heavily upon their tea-table. He remembered now both the queer whitish scar on the back of that hand and the resemblance to the Waterloo-steps face.
And then, all suddenly, it seemed that he could think of nothing else but the completely unknown personality—apparently that of the clergyman of the place—referred to so contemptuously by Mr. Urquhart as “Tilly-Valley.” While the syllables “Tilly-Valley” repeated themselves in his brain, the person concealed behind that odd appellation ceased to be a man. He became some queer-shaped floating object that could not be put into words, and yet was of the utmost importance. What was of importance was that an obstinate bend in that floating object should be straightened out. Something was preventing it from being straightened out, something that emanated from a black wig and a woollen shawl, and was extremely thick and heavy, and had a taste like port wine!
But there was another thing, far down, far off, covered up, as if by masses of dead leaves, a thing that was stirring, gathering, rising, a thing that, in a minute more, would give him illimitable reassurance and strength. When this thing rose to the surface, the bent twig would be straightened out—and all would be well! This “all being well” implied that that calm, placid cow which was eating plantain-leaves under Basingstoke church-tower, should stop eating and lie down. The cow lying down would be a beautiful green mound covered with plantains—plantains that grew larger and larger, till they became enormous succulent leaves as big as elephants’ ears; but the cow couldn’t quite lie down. Something thick and heavy and sticky, like port wine, impeded its movements. …
Everything in the world was material now. Thoughts were material. Feelings were material. It was a world of material objects, of which his mind was one. His mind was a little bluish-coloured thing, soft, fluffy, like blue cotton-wool; and what was rising out of the dead leaves was blue too, but the sticky impeding thing was brown, and the bent twig was brown. …
It was as if in that slow sinking into sleep his soul had to pass all the long, previous, evolutionary stages of planetary life, and be conscious with the consciousness of vegetable things and mineral things. This is what made every material substance of such supernal importance to him—of an importance which perhaps material substances really did possess, if all were known.