“You oughtn’t to expect too much, Fram,” the old man said. “This countryside has been drained, triply drained, of all its best, three times in a hundred years. The chances of commerce drained it once, the prospects of the colonies a second time; then the War took the rest. You’ve got the average, dead-level here.”
“Well, I want to make it a living level, if it has to be a level.”
“It’s living, all right, with a good deal of courage and kindness. It’s a bit stupid sometimes, I daresay, but then you must make allowances. The world does not need guns and explosives, like you, all the time; it wants to jog along and dig its potato patch, and knock off while the hounds go by. This village that you’re building will be based on what? Fear of war, and the hope of killing the other fellow first. Those can’t be abiding things in life. These people here used to have fear of God and the hope of salvation. It became fear of squire and the hope of being able to muddle through somehow. It’ll change; it is changing.”
“Yes. I know it’s changing,” his son said, “and which way’s it changing? To a greater humanity or to a more degraded mechanism? I’ve grown up in ease to see certain things as important and to have them. I’d be a skunk if I didn’t strain a point to let the other chap have his share.”
“His share of what he wants, Fram, not of what you want.”
“The cheap Press and the Government have killed all personal wants in ’em,” Frampton answered. “They soon won’t even marry unless they draw a bonus.”
The pushing on of the work at St. Margarets was his chief interest that autumn; he had some hundred and fifty men working there. During the summer, when earth was green and the land dry, this work was not an eyesore; but when the autumn storms came in with wet and the thinning of the leaf, those who had known the empty Waste and woodland cursed Frampton for making such a mess. His lorries had churned the roads. Annual-Tilter’s car stuck there; the angry ham’s car stuck there; the Member wrote to complain.
“You wait, my swine,” Frampton thought. “When once we get going, your old happy seat in the places of obstruction will be damn near bust.”
It fell, that at the middle of that October, he had invited an artist and his wife to Mullples for the week-end. He had planned to have a fresco in the maids’ sitting-room, with portraits of all the maids in it, and wished to discuss it with the painter. The maids had looked forward to this, and he had had some expectations, for he believed that the young man might do a remarkable work. However, early in the Saturday morning the artist telegraphed that his wife was ill and that he could not come.
Frampton was vexed at this, for he was now at Mullples for the week-end without any companion. He had some thought of telephoning to ask his father if he might go there for the week-end, but remembered that his father had to be in London that week-end. It was a raw, cold morning, with the barometer falling and a dull south-east wind coming from a greasy sky. Dirty weather was coming; and as such weather always did, it brought to Frampton a sense of unsettledness and coming danger. He went up and down and in and out, all the morning, unable to settle to anything. He could neither write letters, nor draw designs; he could not think about guns, nor read a book. He loathed Mullples. It was the house that he “had built to be so gay with,” and this was the gaiety vouchsafed to him: Margaret dead, and himself loathed and loathing. He hated being alone there. He had some thoughts of bolting back to London, but the unsettledness in his mind due to the storm kept him there. He thought of various men whom he might ask to come along for the week-end, but the same unsettledness kept him from telephoning; as he planned, the opposite of the plan formed itself and checked the plan. Either there was something against the fellow, or it would never do to ask him at such short notice.
He debated and havered thus until lunch-time, unable to ask anybody. By lunch-time he was hating himself and Mullples, life and its messes, country and town. After lunch, when it was too late to ask anybody, he regretted that he had been so squeamish. They would have been glad to come, anyway, since sitting by the fire at Mullples, over some very good port, would have been better than sitting over a fire in a studio in London.
In the afternoon, the mizzling rain set in and the glass dropped steadily. The leaves were falling from the trees; the garden had lost most of its colour; there were a few roses still and a few wretched little pansies who looked, as Frampton told himself, like artists at a public school. It was a vile afternoon. In his uneasiness, Frampton could not endure the thought of sitting to a book or books; he did not feel like work; he could not draw; something in the storm made him want to dodge it somehow, by getting drunk or going out on a spree. He thought of going for a long walk, but the day was dirty and mizzle was falling; he thought that it would not be worth the mess. He would only be wet through and plastered with mud, and wouldn’t enjoy a trudge with his own thoughts, through a wet landscape, with all the views blotted by rain. He wondered if there were any local man who would come out for a talk or a walk. He could think of none who seemed in any way endurable. The rectors and others he put aside. Hard up as he was for companionship, he could not stand those fellows; besides, he would get into disputes with them about faith and so forth. He was half prompted to do half a dozen things, and yet could not feel urged to do any.
The pub of old Hordiestraw seemed the best that the country offered; a game of darts with a few of the lads there and a chat about old times with a few of the oldsters; he would get something good to remember all his days from those fellows. Yet, on second thoughts, he could not stomach the thought of the bar, with its stink of stale tobacco and old drinks and old swinky habituées.
Still, something had to be done; he did not quite see what; he would go melancholy mad there doing nothing till midnight.
He might go back to London and go on a bust. But going on a bust had no attractions for him; the thought of it made him sick. He loathed cinemas; he hated theatres; he disliked concerts, for so often a concert made him endure two hours of what he didn’t want for ten minutes of what he did.
One of the maids knocked at the door; he called to her to come in. She was a comely girl who had got herself engaged since coming to Mullples to a young man who ran a poultry farm. She brought in the afternoon’s post: a bill, two receipts, two begging letters, a request for an autograph, “thanking him in anticipation,” an answer to an enquiry about a supply of a new alloy called ferro-baryl, and a copy of the week’s Tatshire Times.
He looked through the letters; they did not keep him five minutes; then he opened the paper, and at once saw the heading: “Ancient Paintings Laid Bare in Stubbington Church.” He read, that two days before (which may have meant two days before the writing of the article, on the Wednesday of the week), some ancient wall-paintings had been laid bare by the removal of some panellings. The works were supposed to be of the fourteenth century, and to represent King Stubba’s fight with the pagans and subsequent conversion to Christianity. These works were in a little church called St. Lawrence in the Peppery. He had not heard of the church and had not seen it, but had heard of the Peppery as a place where people had once made long tobacco pipes; there was a couplet somewhere: