The end of the house of Alard

by Sheila Kaye-Smith

“I like the way they live,” said Jenny—“they seem so quiet and solid—so—so without a struggle.”

“Oh, Godfrey must be pretty well off, I suppose. I don’t know how he’s made his money—I expect his father did it for him. But he paid us cash down for the land, and doesn’t seem to feel it.”

“I don’t suppose they’re better off than we are. It’s simply that they aren’t in the mess we’re in—and they haven’t got to keep up appearances. They’re free, so they’re contented.”

Peter evidently suspected a fling at Alard in this speech, for he answered gravely.

“All the same, it’s up to us to stand by our own class. I daresay the Godfreys are happier and more comfortable than we are, but we can’t ever be like them. We can’t shelve our responsibilities. We’ve got a tradition as old as theirs, and we have to stick to it, even if at present it seems to be going under. Personally I’m proud of it.”

Again Jenny felt herself unable to argue, to tell Peter, as Gervase would have done, that what he called responsibilities were only encumbrances, that what he called tradition was only a false standard. Instead she was acutely conscious of her disloyalty to her people’s cause, of how near she stood to betraying it.

She had not quite realised this before, she had not grasped the full implications of the inward movements of her heart. She had seen herself first, in bitter shame, as a young woman whose sexual consciousness had been stirred by a young man of a lower class; then she had seen herself as enticed not merely by his health and comeliness but by his happy independence, his freedom from the shackles that bound her—till at last he had become a symbol of the life outside the Alard tradition, of the open country beyond the Alard estate, a contrast to all that was petty, arbitrary and artificial in her surroundings. And now, this evening, at Fourhouses, she had met the man again, and met him without shame. She knew now that she was attracted to him not merely in spite of his class but because of it—because he belonged to the honourable class of the land’s freemen. He appealed to her as a man, speaking to her with his eyes the language that is common to all men, and he appealed to her as a freeman, because she knew that if she went to him she would be free—free of all the numberless restrictions and distresses that bound her youth.

The problem before her now was not whether she should be ashamed or not ashamed of his attraction, but whether she should yield to it or turn away. She faced these new thoughts during the rest of her walk with Peter, between the dry, abstracted phrases of her conversation—during dinner and the long dreary evening of cards and desultory talk—and at last, in greater peace, when she had gone to bed and lay watching the grey moonlight that moved among the trees of the plantation.

What was she to do? What had she done? Had she fallen in love with Godfrey? Was she going to tear her life out of its groove and merge it with his, just on the strength of those three meetings? She did not know—she was not sure. She could not be in love yet, but she felt sure that she was going to be. At least so she should have said if he had been a man of her own class. Then why should she act any differently because he was not? Her defiance grew. Godfrey’s class was a good class—his family was old, substantial and respected. It was silly and snobbish to talk as if he belonged to some menial order—though, hang it all, any order was better than the order of impoverished country families to which she belonged.

Resentfully Jenny surveyed her tribe. She saw the great families of the Kent and Sussex borders struggling to show the world the same front that they had shown before they were shaken. She saw them failing in that struggle one by one—here a great house was closed, and for sale, with no buyers because of its unwieldy vastness and long disrepair—here another was shorn of its estate stripped off it in building plots and small holdings—yet another had lost its freedom in mortgages, and kept its acres only at the price of being bound to their ruin. There was no need for Gervase to tell that the Squires, having outlived their day, were going under—her broken romance with Jim Parish had shown her that. She had realised then that it was not likely that she would ever marry into her own class. The young men who were her friends and associates in the life of the county must marry wealth. Peter had gone outside the county and married money—she too one day would have to go outside and marry money—or marry where money did not matter. The days were gone when Manor mated with Manor and Grange with Grange—mighty alliances like the marriages of Kings. Nowadays, just as Kings could no longer mate with the blood royal but sought consorts among their subjects, so the Squires must seek their wives outside the strict circle of the “county”—and not even in the professional classes, which were nearly as hard-hit as themselves, but in the classes of aspiring trade, nouveaux-riches, war-profiteers....