The kitchen is good; but so is the drawing room. We came in from our afternoon walk to find the vicar and his wife talking Art over the teacups. Yes, Art. For it was their first call since their visit to the Academy.
It is an annual affair. Every year on the day following Ascension Day they take the 8:52 to town and pay the tribute that even Religion owes to Art—Established Religion and Established Art. They scour every corner of Burlington House, annotating the catalogue as they go round, humorously, wherever humour is admissible—for Mr. Truby (who looks rather like Noah in a child’s ark) is one of those facetious churchmen who crack jokes in order to show that, in spite of the black coat and the reversed collar, they are “human,” “good chaps,” etc.
Plumply pretty Mrs. Truby is less uproariously waggish than her husband, but is none the less what upper middle class readers of Punch would call a “thoroughly cheery soul,” up to any amount of innocent fun and full of quaint remarks. I looked on and listened, fascinated, while Elinor drew them out about the parish and the Academy, feeling like Fabre among the coleoptera. Every now and then some word of the conversation would cross the spiritual abysses separating Elinor’s mother from her surroundings, would penetrate her reverie and set up a curious reaction. Oracularly, disconcertingly, with a seriousness that was almost appalling in the midst of the Truby waggeries, she would speak out of another world. And outside, meanwhile, the garden is green and flowery. Old Stokes, the gardener, has a beard and looks like Father Time. The sky is pale blue. There is a noise of birds. The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment’s notice wherever the fancy may suggest—it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something—the house, Mrs. Inman, Dobbs, facetious Truby from the parsonage, the tulips in the garden, and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something—for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder.
Lord Edward and his brother were taking the air in Gattenden Park. Lord Edward took it walking. The fifth Marquess took it in a bath chair drawn by a large grey donkey. He was a cripple. “Which luckily doesn’t prevent the mind from running,” he was fond of saying. It had been running, mazily, hither and thither, all his life. Meanwhile, the grey ass only walked, very slowly. Before the two brothers and behind stretched Gattenden Broad Walk. A mile in front of them at the end of the straight vista stood a model of Trajan’s column in Portland stone, with a bronze statue of the first Marquess on the top and an inscription in large letters round the pedestal setting forth his claims to fame. He had been, among other things, Viceroy of Ireland and the Father of Scientific Agriculture. At the end of the Broad Walk, a mile behind the brothers, rose the fantastic towers and pinnacles of Gattenden Castle, built for the second Marquess by James Wyatt in the most extravagant style of Strawberry Hill Gothic, and looking more medieval than anything that the real chronological Middle Ages had ever dreamt of. The Marquess lived permanently at Gattenden. Not that he particularly liked the house or the surrounding scenery. He was hardly aware of them. When he wasn’t reading, he was thinking about what he had read; the world of appearances, as he liked, platonically, to call visible and tangible reality, did not interest him. This lack of interest was his revenge on the universe for having made him a cripple. He inhabited Gattenden because it was only at Gattenden that he could safely go for drives in his bath chair. Pall Mall is no place for grey donkeys and paralytic old gentlemen who read and meditate as they drive. He had made over Tantamount House to his brother and continued to drive his ass through the beechwoods of Gattenden Park.
The ass had halted to browse at the wayside. The fifth Marquess and his brother were having an argument about God. Time passed. They were still talking about God when, half an hour later, Philip and Elinor, who had been taking their afternoon walk in the park, emerged from the beechwood and unexpectedly came upon the Marquess’s bath chair.
“Poor old creatures!” was Philip’s comment when they were once more out of earshot. “What else have they got to talk about? Too old to want to talk about love—too old and much too good. Too rich to talk about money. Too highbrow to talk about people and too hermit-like to know any people to talk about. Too shy to talk about themselves, too blankly inexperienced to talk about life or even literature. What is there left for the poor old wretches to talk about? Nothing—only God.”
“And at the present rate of progress,” said Elinor, “you’ll be exactly like them ten years from now.”
XX
Of Philip Quarles’s father old John Bidlake used to say that he was like one of those baroque Italian churches with sham façades. High, impressive, bristling with classical orders, broken pedimenta and statuary, the façade seems to belong to a great cathedral. But look more closely and you discover
