POSSESSION.
The dear old home has been let to strangers. An interloper occupies the messuage. A foreign master controls the demesne.
To-day especially, when as I write the air is balmy and the skies are blue, it is agonising to feel that our own spring rhubarb is growing crimson only to be toyed with by alien lips, and that the thrush on our pear-tree bough——But no, I am wrong; the pear-tree bough is in the garden of No. 9; it is only the trunk that stands in the garden of No. 10. That, by the way, is an accident that frequently occurs to estate-owners. Consider critically for a moment those well-known lines in which Browning says—
"Hark where my blossom'd pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field,"
and then goes on to speak of "the wise thrush" on "the bent spray's edge" as "singing his song twice over." It is pretty obvious that the reason the poet assigns to this action on the bird's part is not the correct one. Evidently the part of the tree on which it was sitting was on the other side of the hedge in the next-door fellow's garden, and it was conscientiously trying to allot one performance to each of the two rival householders. But I seem to have wandered a little from the ancient home.
Come with me in imagination, reader, and let us have a look at it together. The fourth house to the left in this winding road that fringes the common, you see it standing there gazing a little wistfully, yet with a quiet air of semi-detachment, out over the wide expanse of green. Half right and half left are two monstrous blocks of red brick flats overlooking it with a thousand envious eyes. The middle distance is dotted pleasantly with hawthorn bushes and the pretty pieces of sandwich-paper that are always the harbingers of London's Spring. Beyond these things, and far away to the front, you may detect on clear days a white church-tower nestling like Swiss milk amongst immemorial trees. And this view is mine—mine, like the old home. If we linger for a moment in the road we shall probably see the scornful face of the proud usurper at one of the windows calmly enjoying this view of mine, all unconscious that I, the rightful owner, am standing beneath. Does it not remind you of the films?—
"Charles Carruthers, an outcast from his ancestral halls, eyes mournfully the scene of merry junketing within. Charles Carruthers—blick! blick!"—and you see him eyeing mournfully outside—"blick! blick!"—and you see the junketers eating his junket within.
On looking back in a calmer mood on the lines which I have just written, I feel it possible that I may have let my emotions run away with me and conveyed a slightly false impression. I may have suggested that the old home has belonged to my family since Domesday Book or dear-knows-when or some other historic date in our island story. That would not be strictly true. As a matter of fact I have never lived in the house, nor have any of my relations either. It has belonged to me, to be quite accurate, since March 25th, 1920, and the interloper was interloping on a short lease when I bought the long lease over his head. It is also true that by an awkward and absurd convention I have to restore the old home to the ground landlord in 1941. But who cares about what is going to happen in 1941? The Coalition may have come to an end by that time, and the first Labour Government, under Lord Northcliffe or Mr. Jack Jones, may be in power. Some bricklayer, in a mood of artistic frenzy, may have designed the plan of a new brick and had it passed by the Ministry of Housing. Dempsey may have met Carpentier.