be calling
“Wake! Wake!”
“Bloody awful noise those birds make,” said Cosser.
“Got your map? Now . . .” He plunged at once into business.
They walked about that village for two hours and saw with their own eyes all the abuses and anachronisms they came to destroy. They saw the recalcitrant and backward labourer and heard his views on the weather. They met the wastefully supported pauper in the person of an old man shuffling across the courtyard of the alms-houses to fill a kettle, and the elderly rentier (to make matters worse she had a fat old dog with her) in earnest conversation with the postman. It made Mark feel as if he were on a holiday, for it was only on holidays that he had ever wandered about an English village. For that reason he felt pleasure in it. It did not quite escape him that the face of the backward labourer was rather more interesting than Cosser’s and his voice a great deal more pleasing to the ear. The resemblance between the elderly rentier and Aunt Gilly (when had he last thought of her? Good Lord, that took one back . . .) did make him understand how it was possible to like that kind of person. All this did not in the least influence his sociological convictions. Even if he had been free from Belbury and wholly unambitious, it could not have done so, for his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance: any real ditcher ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational group,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.
And yet he could not help rather liking this village. When, at one o’clock, he persuaded Cosser to turn into the Two Bells, he even said so. They had both brought sandwiches with them, but Mark felt he would like a pint of beer. In the Two Bells it was very warm and dark, for the window was small. Two labourers (no doubt recalcitrant and backward) were sitting with earthenware mugs at their elbows, munching very thick sandwiches, and a third was standing up at the counter conducting a conversation with the landlord.
“No beer for me, thanks,” said Cosser, “and we don’t want to muck about here too long. What were you saying?”
“I was saying that on a fine morning there is something rather attractive about a place like this, in spite of all its obvious absurdities.”
“Yes, it is a fine morning. Makes a real difference to one’s health, a bit of sunlight.”
“I was thinking of the place.”
“You mean this?” said Cosser, glancing round the room. “I should have thought it was just the sort of thing we wanted to get rid of. No sunlight, no ventilation. Haven’t much use for alcohol myself (read the Miller Report), but if people have got to have their stimulants, I’d like to see them administered in a more hygienic way.”
“I don’t know that the stimulant is quite the whole point “. said Mark, looking at his beer. The whole scene was reminding him of drinks and talks long ago-of laughter and arguments in undergraduate days. Somehow one had made friends more easily then. He wondered what had become of all that set-of Carey and Wadsden and Denniston, who had so nearly go this own Fellowship.
“Don’t know, I’m sure,” said Cosser, in answer to his last remark. “Nutrition isn’t my subject. You’d want to ask Stock about that.”
“What I’m really thinking about,” said Mark, “is not this pub, but the whole village. Of course you’re quite right: that sort of thing has got to go. But it had its pleasant side. We’ll have to be careful that whatever we’re building up in its place will really be able to beat it on all levels-not merely in efficiency.”
“Oh, architecture and all that,” said Cosser. “Well, that’s hardly my line, you know. That’s more for someone like Wither. Have you nearly finished?”
All at once it came over Mark what a terrible bore this little man was, and in the same moment he felt utterly sick of the N.I.C.E. But he reminded himself that one could not expect to be in the interesting set at once; there would be better things later on. Anyway, he had not burnt his boats. Perhaps he would chuck up the whole thing and go back to Bracton in a day or two. But not at once. It would be only sensible to hang on for a bit and see how things shaped.
On their way back Cosser dropped him near Edgestow station, and as he walked home Mark began to think of what he would say to Jane about Belbury. You will quite misunderstand him if you think he was consciously inventing a lie. Almost involuntarily, as the picture of himself entering the flat, and of Jane’s questioning face, arose in his mind, there arose also the imagination of his own voice answering her, hitting off the salient features of Belbury in amusing, confident phrases. This imaginary speech of his own gradually drove out of his mind the real experiences he had undergone. Those real experiences of misgiving and of uneasiness, indeed, quickened his desire to cut a good figure in the eyes of his wife. Almost without noticing it, he had decided not to mention the affair of Cure Hardy; Jane cared for old buildings and all that sort of thing. As a result, when Jane, who was at that moment drawing the curtains, heard the door opening and looked round and saw Mark, she saw a rather breezy and buoyant Mark. Yes, he was almost sure he’d got the job. The salary wasn’t absolutely fixed, but he’d be going into that to-morrow. It was a very funny place: he’d explain all that later. But he had already got on to the real people there. Wither and Miss Hardcastle were the ones that mattered. “I must tell you about the Hardcastle woman,” he said, “she’s quite incredible.”
Jane had to decide what she would say to Mark much more quickly than he had decided what he would say to her. And she decided to tell him nothing about the dreams or St. Anne’s. Men hated women who had things wrong with them, specially queer, unusual things. Her resolution was easily kept, for Mark, full of his own story, asked her no questions. She was not, perhaps, entirely convinced by what he said. There was a vagueness about all the details. Very early in the conversation she said in a sharp, frightened voice (she had no idea how he disliked that voice), “Mark, you haven’t given up your Fellowship at Bracton?” He said No, of course not, and went on. She listened only with half her mind. She knew he often had rather grandiose ideas, and from something in his face she divined that during his absence he had been drinking much more than he usually did. And so, all evening the male bird displayed his plumage and the female played her part and asked questions and laughed and feigned more interest than she felt. Both were young, and if neither loved very much each was still anxious to be admired.
VII
That evening the Fellows of Bracton sat in Common Room over their wine and dessert. They had given up dressing for dinner, as an economy during the war and not yet resumed the practice, so that their sports coats and cardigans struck a somewhat discordant note against the dark Jacobean panels, the candle-light, and the silver of many different periods. Feverstone and Curry were sitting together. Until that night for about three hundred years this Common Room had been one of the pleasant quiet places of England. It was in Lady Alice, on the ground floor beneath the soler, and the windows at its eastern end looked out on the river and on Bragdon Wood, across a little terrace where the Fellows were in the habit of taking their dessert on summer evenings. At this hour and season these windows were of course shut and curtained. And from beyond them came such noises as had never been heard in that room before-shouts and curses and the sound of lorries heavily drumming past or harshly changing gear, rattling of chains, drumming of mechanical drills, clanging of iron, whistles, thuddings, and an all-pervasive vibration. Saeva sonare verbera, tum stridor ferri tractaegue catenae, as Glossop, sitting on the far side of the fire, had observed to Jewel. For beyond those windows, scarcely thirty yards away on the other side of the Wynd, the conversion of an ancient woodland into an inferno of mud and noise and steel and concrete was already going on apace. Several members even of the Progressive Element-those who had rooms on this side of College-had already been grumbling about it. Curry himself had been a little surprised by the form which his dream had taken now that it was a reality, but he was doing his best to brazen it out, and though his conversation with Feverstone had to be conducted at the top of their voices, he made no allusion to this inconvenience.
“It’s quite definite, then,” he bawled, “that young Studdock is not coming back?”
“Oh, quite,” shouted Feverstone. “He sent me a message through a high official to tell me to let the College know.”
