Goodbye Mr Mackenzie Liquid Rooms

[Klaudia Aricas]

Thediscussion was given another turn by the entrance of Mr. Godboldhimself. He was not at all concerned for his trap, and indeed by anasseverated indifference to its welfare he conveyed the impression that,new though it were, it was so much firewood, if the gentleman wantedfirewood. No, the trap did not matter, but what about Mr. Hazlewood'sknees?

"I suppose it must be the bus," said Guy. On such a sleepy afternoon hecould argue no longer. The books must be unpacked to-morrow; and theword lulled like an opiate the faint irritation of his disappointment.The porter's reiterated altruism was rewarded with a fee so absurdly inexcess of anything he had done, that he began to speak of a possibilityif after all the smallest case might not be squeezed ... but Mr. Godboldflicked the pony, and the trap rattled up the station road at a pacequite out of accord with the warmth of the afternoon. Presently heturned to his fare:

"Mrs. Godbold said to me only this morning, she said, 'You ought to havehad a luggage-flap behind and that I shall always say.' And she wasright. Women is often right, what's more," the husband postulated.

"Very often," he repeated, but as Guy would neither contradict nor agreewith him, Mr. Godbold relapsed into meditation upon the justice of hisobservation. The pony had settled down to his wonted pace and jogged onthrough the golden haze of fine September weather. Soon the village ofShipcot was left behind, and before them lay the long road windingupward over the wold to Wychford. Guy thought of the friend who had lefthim that afternoon and wished that Michael Fane were still with him toenjoy this illimitable sweep of country. He had been the very person toshare in the excitement of arranging a new house. Guy could not rememberthat he had ever made a suggestion for which he had not been asked; norcould he call to mind a single occasion when his appreciation hadfailed. And now to-night, when for the first time he was going to sleepin his own house, his friend was gone. There had been no hint ofdeparture during the six weeks of preparation they had spent together atthe Stag Inn, and it was really perverse of Michael to rush back toLondon now. Guy jumped down from the trap, which was climbing the hillvery slowly, and stretched his long legs. He was rather bored by hisloneliness, but as soon as he had stated so much to himself, he wasshocked at the disloyalty to his ambition. After all, he reassuredhimself, he was not going back to a dull inn-parlour: to-night he wasgoing to sleep in an hermitage for the right to enjoy the seclusion ofwhich he had been compelled to fight very hard. It was weak to imaginehe was lonely already, and to fortify himself against this mood, hepulled out of his pocket his father's last letter and read it againwhile he walked up the hill behind the trap.

I agree with some of what you say, but I disagree with a good dealmore, and I am entirely opposed to your method of procedure, whichis to put it very mildly rather casual. Your degree was not so goodas it ought to have been, but I did not reproach you, because inthe Consular Service you had chosen a career which did not callspecially for a first. At the same time you could, if you hadworked, have got a first quite easily. Your six months with theMacedonian Relief people seems to have knocked all your consularambitions on the head rather too easily, I confess, to make me feelvery happy about your future. And now without consulting me youtake a house in the country for the purpose of writing poetry! Youimply in answer to my remonstrances that I am unable to appreciatethe 'necessity' for your step. That may be, but I cannot helpasking where you would be now if I at your age, instead of helpingmy father with his school, had gone off to Oxfordshire to writepoetry. Perhaps I had ambitions to make a name for myself with thepen. If I had, I quenched them in order to devote myself to what Iconsidered my duty. I do not reproach you for refusing to carry onthe school at Fox Hall. Your dear mother's last request was that Ishould not urge you to be a schoolmaster, unless you were drawn tothe vocation. Her wishes I have respected, and I repeat that I amnot hurt at your refusal. At the same time I cannot encourage whatcan only be described as this whim of yours to bury yourself in aremote village where, having saddled yourself with theresponsibilities of a house, you announce your intention of livingby poetry! I am the last person to underestimate the value ofpoetry, but as a livelihood it seems to me as little to be reliedupon as the weather. However, you are of age. You have 150 a yearof your own. You are with the exercise of the strictest economyindependent. And this brings me to the point of your last letterin which you ask me to supplement your own income with an allowance150 a year from me. This inclination to depend upon your father isnot what I conceive to be the artist's spirit of independence. Thisover-drawing upon your achievement fills me with dismay for thefuture. However, since I do not wish you to begin hampered by debtand as you assure me that you have spent all your own money on thisidiotic house, I will give you 150, to be paid in quarterlyinstalments of 37 10s. as from the 21st of this month for oneyear. Furthermore, at the end of next year if you find that poetryis less profitable than even you expect, I will offer you a placeat Fox Hall, thereby securing for you the certainty of a lifemoderately free from financial worries. After all, even aschoolmaster has some spare time, and I daresay our greatest poetsdid much of their best work in their spare time. The idea ofwriting poetry all day and every day appeals to me as enervatingand ostentatious.

Guy stood still when he had finished the letter, and execrated mutelythe damnable dependence that compelled him to accept gratefully andhumbly this gift of 150. Yet with no money of his own coming in tillDecember, with actually a housekeeper on her way from Cardiff and hishouse already furnished, he must accept the offer. In a year's time hewould have proved the reasonableness of his request; and he began tocompose a scene between them, in which his father would almost on bendedknees beg him to accept an allowance of 300 a year in consideration ofthe magnificent proof he had afforded to the world of being in thedirect line of English poets.

"That wouldn't do for me at all," said Mr. Godbold, shaking his head."You see I'm the father of nine, and if I wasn't always right, sir, Ishouldn't be no better than a bull in a china-shop where I live. I'vegot to be right, Mr. Hazlewood."

"Now do you reckon this here Pope they speak of really exists in amanner of speaking?" Mr. Godbold asked, as the trap bowled along thelevel stretch of upland road. "You know there's some of thesenarrow-minded mortals at Wychford as will have it that Mr. Grey, ourparson, is in with the Pope, and I said to one or two of them the othernight while we was arguing in the post-office, I said, 'Have any of youwise men of Gotham ever seen this Pope as you're so knowing about?'"

"Not one of them," said Mr. Godbold. "And I thought to myself as I waswalking up home, I thought now what if there wasn't no such thing as aPope any more than there's women with fish-tails and all this rubbishyou read of in books. If you ask my opinion of books, Mr. Hazlewood, Itell you that I think books is as bad for some people as wireworms isfor carnations. They seem to regular eat into them."

Guy laughed. Misgivings about the wisdom of his choice vanished, and hewas being conscious of a very intimate pleasure in thus driving back toWychford from the station. The country tossed for miles to right andleft in great stretches of pasturage, and when Mr. Godbold pulled up fora moment to look at a trace, the air brilliantly dusted with autumnalgold seemed to endow him with the richness of its silence: along thesparse hedgerow chicory flowers burned with the pale intense blue of theSeptember sky above, and Guy felt like them worshipful of the cloudlessscene. The road ran along the upland for half-a-mile before it dippedsuddenly down into the valley of the Greenrush from which the spire ofWychford church came delicately up into the air, like a coil of smokeascending from the opalescent corona that hung over the small townclustered against the farther hillside. Down in that valley close to thechurch was Plashers Mead; and Guy watched eagerly for the first sight ofhis long low house. Already the sparkle of the more distant curves ofthe Greenrush was visible; but Plashers Mead was still hidden by theslope of the bank. Presently this broke away to a ragged hedge, and thehouse displayed itself as much an integral part of the landscape as anoutcrop of stone.

"Tasty little place," commented Mr. Godbold, while the trap joltedcautiously down the last twist of the hilly road. "But I reckon oldBurrows was glad to let it. You're young though, and I daresay you won'tmind being flooded out in winter. Two years ago Burrows's son's wife'snephew was floating paper boats in the front hall. But you're young, andI daresay you'll enjoy it."

"That's right," Mr. Godbold agreed; and the tenant passed through thegateway into the garden where every path had its own melody of runningwater. He examined with proprietary solicitude the espaliers ofapple-trees and admired for the twentieth time the pledge they offeredby their fantastic forms of his garden's antiquity. He pinched severalpippins that seemed ripe, but they were still hard; and he could findnothing over which to exert his lordship, until he saw by the edge ofthe path a piece of groundsel. Having solemnly exterminated the weed,Guy felt that the garden must henceforth recognize him as master, and hewalked on through a mass of dropsical cabbages and early kale until hecame face to face with the house, the sudden view of which like thisnever failed to give him a peculiar pleasure. The tangled garden, longand narrow, was bounded on the right, as one entered, by the Greenrush,over which hung a thicket of yews that completely shut out the firststraggling houses of Wychford. On the left the massed espaliers endedabruptly in a large water-meadow reaching to the foot of the hill alongwhich the high road climbed in a slow diagonal. By the corner of thehouse the garden had narrowed to the apex of a thin triangle, so thatthe windows looked out over the water-meadow and, beyond, up the widevalley of the Greenrush to where the mighty western sky rested onrounded hills. At this apex the Greenrush flung a tributary stream towash the back of the house and one side of the orchard, whence it woundin extravagant curves towards the easterly valley. The main branch,dammed up to form a deep and sluggish mill-stream, flowed straight on,dividing Guy's domain from the churchyard. At the end of the orchard onthis side was a lock-gate through which a certain amount of watercontinuously escaped from the mill-stream, enough indeed to make theorchard an island, as it trickled in diamonded shallows to reinforce theidle tributary. Somewhere in the farther depths of the eastern valleyall vagrant waters were united, and somewhere still more remote theycame to a confluence with their father the Thames.

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