Chapter I.
The Paston Oatvile Dormy-house
Nothing is ever wasted. The death of the animal fertilizes the vegetable world: bees swarm in the disused pillar-box; sooner or later, somebody will find a use for the munition-factories. And the old country-seats of feudal England, that bask among their figured terraces, frowning at the ignoble tourist down secular avenues and thrusting back the high-road he travels by into respectful detours—these too, although the family have long since decided that it is too expensive to live there, and the agents smile at the idea of letting them like one humouring a child, have their place in the hero-tenanted England of to-day. The house itself may be condemned to the scrap-heap, but you can always make a golf-course out of the Park. Acres, that for centuries have scorned the weight of the plough, have their stubborn glebe broken with the niblick, and over-populated greens recall the softness and the trimness of earlier lawns. Ghosts of an earlier day will walk there, perhaps, but you can always play through them.
Paston Oatvile (distrust the author whose second paragraph does not come to ground in the particular) seemed to have been specially adapted by an inscrutable Providence for such a niche in the scheme of things. The huge Italianate building which the fifteenth Lord Oatvile raised as a monument to his greatness (he sold judiciously early out of the South Sea Company) took fire in the nineties of last century and burned for a whole night; the help given by the local fire brigade was energetic rather than considerate, and Achelous completed the havoc which Vulcan had begun. It stands even now, an indecent skeleton, papered rooms and carved mantelpieces confronting you shamefacedly, like the inside of a doll’s house whose curtain-wall has swung back on the hinge. What secrets that ball-room, those powder-closets must have witnessed in the days of an earlier gallantry, when the stuccoed façade still performed its discreet office! Poor rooms, they will never know any more secrets now. The garden, too, became involved in the contagion of decay: weeds have overgrown its paved walks, and neglected balustrades have crumbled; a few of the hardier flowers still spring there, but half-smothered in rank grass, shabby-genteel survivors of an ancien régime. For the family never attempted to rebuild; they prudently retired to the old Manor at the other end of the park, a little brick and timber paradise which had served the family for a century and a half as dower-house. In time, even this reduced splendour was judged too expensive, and the family sold.
No need, then, to mourn for Paston Oatvile; the sanctities of its manorial soil will be as interminable as golf. An enterprising club, seconded by an accommodating railway, has invested its rural solitude with an air of suburbanity; it is only an hour’s journey from London, and the distance could be covered in three-quarters of the time if the club were less exclusive. Bungalows, each fitted with its own garage, and cottages that contain billiard-rooms have sprung up in the neighbourhood; thirty or forty of these, all rough-cast and red tiles, conceal by a series of ingenious dissimilarities their indebtedness to the brain of a single architect. In the middle of these—the cathedral, the town hall, the market-place around which all their activities centre—stands the dower-house of the Oatviles, the dormy-house of to-day. The committee have built on to it largely in what is understood to be the same style, and indeed, the new part is undeniably brick and timber, though in wet weather the timber is apt to warp and fall off. It is not only a club-house, of course, it is also an expensive hotel—if we may call it an hotel, and not rather a monastic settlement; for the inhabitants of these pleasant rooms all live for one end—golf: twice daily they go round the course, with all the leisurely solemnity of Benedictines reciting their office, and every night they meet in corona to discuss the mysteries of their religion.
Which reminds me that I have forgotten to mention the village Church. There is still a village, that straggles mysteriously, like so many English villages, in the form of a hollow square. In the old days, the Church interposed itself between the village and the Great House, a kind of mercy-seat through which the squire could be appeased upon occasion. Though much older than the Park or the fortunes of the Oatvile family, it had acquired, from its enclosed position, the air of a parasitical institution, an undergrowth of Protestant feudalism. To-day, it somehow strikes the eye as a by-product of the golfing industry; people who ask the way to it (and they are rare) are directed to the fifteenth green; the service on Sunday is at half-past nine, so as to allow for the improbable chance of anybody wanting to fortify himself for the morning round by divine worship; the sexton will caddy for you except on the afternoon of a funeral. Conformably with this, the incumbent of the parish, who is to figure in this story, was a golfing parson presented by an absentee squire to a living which offered few material attractions. He had managed to let the parsonage, which was more than twenty minutes’ walk from the first tee, and lived in the dormy-house permanently; arguing, not without reason, that it was the centre of all the life there was in the parish. If you are disposed to take a look at him, you have only to open the smoking-room door; there he sits, this October afternoon of rain and fog, with three equally weatherbound companions, a foursome in potentia.
He was a man now approaching middle age, a bachelor and unambitious. You would say that he had a clerical face—is that clerical face a mark of predestination, or does it develop by natural mimicry?—but the enthusiasm which it registered was, it is to be feared, principally directed towards one object, and that object a game. He was mild-mannered, and had been known to keep his temper successfully in the most trying circumstances, even at the ninth; no oath was ever heard to escape his lips, though his invariable phrase, “What tam I doing?” was held by some to have a relish of perdition in it. The other three were acquaintances of his, as acquaintance goes at Paston Oatvile, where you know everybody’s handicap, nobody’s politics or religion. One of them, indeed, Alexander Gordon in nature and in name, could hardly be known otherwise than by his handicap, for in politics, in religion, in every subject that could form a digression from the normal conversation of the dormy-house, his point of view was entirely undistinguished and British to the last degree. He was not, like the others, a permanent inmate, but was on a holiday visit to his more interesting friend, Mordaunt Reeves.
Reeves was a permanent inmate, more by force of circumstances than from any natural indolence. He had left school at the beginning of the War, and had been incapacitated for active service by an extreme short-sightedness which gave his face a penetrating, not to say a peering, look. Work had been found for him easily enough in an outlying department of the War Office, and he was perhaps a little too fond of beginning his sentences with, “When I was in the Military Intelligence.” The picture which the words conjured up to the uninitiated was that of Mordaunt Reeves concealed behind the arras with a revolver at half-cock, overhearing the confidential discussions of German super-spies. Actually, his business had been to stroll into a very uncomfortable office at half-past nine in the morning, where a docket of newspaper cuttings, forwarded from another department, awaited him. Singling out some particularly fire-eating utterance of a Glasgow shop-steward, he would have it typed out and put in a jacket; then he would scrawl across it: “Can something be done about this? Please initial”—and so the document would be caught up in that vast maelstrom of unregarded jackets that circulated aimlessly through the sub-departments of Whitehall. An orphan, with a comfortable income, he had found himself unable to settle down to ordinary employment on the outbreak of peace. He had put several romantic advertisements into the daily papers, indicating his readiness to undertake any mysterious commissions that might call for the services of an “active, intelligent young man, with a turn for the adventurous”: but the supply of amateur adventurers was at the time well ahead of the demand, and there was no response. In despair, he had betaken himself to Paston Oatvile, and even his ill-wishers admitted that his game was improving.
That Mr. Carmichael, the fourth member of the party, had been a don you knew as soon as he opened his mouth. There was that precision in his utterances, that benignity in his eye, that spontaneity in his willingness to impart information, that no other profession breeds. A perpetual fountain of interesting small-talk, he unnerved his audience with a sense of intellectual repletion which was worse than boredom. Not that he talked the “shop” of the learned: his subject had been Greek archæology; his talk was of county families, of travels in the Near East, of the processes by which fountain-pens are manufactured, of county families again. He was over sixty—he, alone of the party, was married, and lived in one of the bungalows with a colourless wife, who seemed to have been withered by long exposure to the sirocco of his conversation: at the moment she was absent, and he was lodging in the dormy-house like the rest. It must be confessed that his fellow-members shunned him, but he was useful upon occasion as a last court of appeal on any matter of fact; it was he who could remember what year it was the bull got loose on the links, and what ball the Open Championship was won with three years back.
Marryatt (that was the clergyman, yes; I see you are a proper reader for a detective-story) rose once more and took a good look at the weather. The fog was lifting, but the rain still fell pitilessly. “I shouldn’t wonder,” he said, “if we had some showers before nightfall.”
“It’s a curious thing,” said Carmichael, “that the early Basque poets always speak of the night not as falling but as rising. I suppose they had a right to look at it that way. Now, for myself———”