The Rose and the Yew Tree

‘But principally politics,’ she said. ‘After all, a General Election will be on us any minute.’

‘Have you ever taken any interest in politics, Teresa?’

‘No, Hugh, I haven’t. It has always seemed to me unnecessary. I have confined myself to voting for the candidate who seems to me likely to do least harm.’

‘An admirable policy,’ I murmured.

But now, Teresa said, she would do her best to take politics seriously. She would have, of course, to be a Conservative. Nobody who owned Polnorth House could be anything else, and the late Miss Amy Tregellis would turn in her grave if the niece to whom she had bequeathed her treasures was to vote Labour.

‘But if you believe Labour to be the better party?’

‘I don’t,’ said Teresa. ‘I don’t think there’s anything to choose between them.’

‘Nothing could be fairer than that,’ I said.

When we had been settled in at Polnorth House a fortnight, Lady St Loo came to call upon us.

She brought with her her sister, Lady Tressilian, her sister-in-law, Mrs Bigham Charteris, and her grand-daughter, Isabella.

After they had left, I said in a fascinated voice to Teresa that they couldn’t be real.

They were, you see, so exactly right to have come out of St Loo Castle. They were pure fairy story. The Three Witches and the Enchanted Maiden.

Adelaide St Loo was the widow of the seventh Baron. Her husband had been killed in the Boer War. Her two sons had been killed in the war of 1914–18. They left behind them no sons, but the younger left a daughter, Isabella, whose mother had died at her birth. The title passed to a cousin, then resident in New Zealand. The ninth Lord St Loo was only too pleased to rent the castle to the old dowager. Isabella was brought up there, watched over by her guardians, her grandmother and her two great-aunts. Lady St Loo’s widowed sister, Lady Tressilian, and her widowed sister-in-law, Mrs Bigham Charteris, came to join her. They shared expenses and so made it possible for Isabella to be brought up in what the old ladies considered her rightful home. They were all over seventy, and had somewhat the appearance of three black crows. Lady St Loo had a vast bony face, with an eagle nose and a high forehead. Lady Tressilian was plump and had a large round face with little twinkling eyes. Mrs Bigham Charteris was lean and leathery. They achieved in their appearance a kind of Edwardian effect—as though time had stood still for them. They wore jewellery, rather dirty, indubitably real, pinned on them in unlikely places—not too much of it. It was usually in the form of crescents or horseshoes or stars.

Such were the three old ladies of St Loo Castle. With them came Isabella—a very fair representative of an enchanted maiden. She was tall and thin, and her face was long and thin with a high forehead, and straight-falling ash-blonde hair. She was almost incredibly like a figure out of an early stained-glass window. She could not have been called actually pretty, nor attractive, but there was about her something that you might almost call beauty—only it was the beauty of a time long past—it was most definitely not at all the modern idea of beauty. There was no animation in her, no charm of colouring, no irregularity of feature. Her beauty was the severe beauty of good structure—good bone formation. She looked medieval, severe and austere. But her face was not characterless; it had what I can only describe as nobility.

After I had said to Teresa that the old ladies weren’t real, I added that the girl wasn’t real either.

‘The princess imprisoned in the ruined castle?’ Teresa suggested.

‘Exactly. She ought to have come here on a milk-white steed and not in a very old Daimler.’ I added with curiosity, ‘I wonder what she thinks about.’

For Isabella had said very little during the official visit. She had sat very upright, with a sweet rather faraway smile. She had responded politely to any conversational overtures made to her, but there had not been much need for her to sustain the conversation since her grandmother and aunts had monopolized most of the talk. I wondered if she had been bored to come, or interested in something new turning up in St Loo. Her life, I thought, must be rather dull.

I asked curiously, ‘Didn’t she get called up at all during the war? Did she stay at home through it all?’

‘She’s only nineteen. She’s been driving for the Red Cross here since she left school.’

‘School?’ I was astonished. ‘Do you mean she’s been to school? Boarding school?’

‘Yes. St Ninian’s.’

I was even more surprised. For St Ninian’s is an expensive and up-to-date school—not co-educational, or in any sense a crank school—but an establishment priding itself on its modern outlook. Not in any sense a fashionable finishing school.

‘Do you find that astonishing?’ Teresa asked.

‘Yes, do you know, I do,’ I said slowly. ‘That girl gives you the impression that she’s never been away from home, that she’s been brought up in some bygone medieval environment that is completely out of touch with the twentieth century.’

Teresa nodded her head thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know what you mean.’

My brother Robert chimed in here. It just showed, he said, how the only environment that counted was home environment—that and hereditary disposition.

‘I still wonder,’ I said curiously, ‘what she thinks about …’

‘Perhaps,’ said Teresa, ‘she doesn’t think.’

I laughed at Teresa’s suggestion. But I wondered still in my own mind about this curious stick of a girl.

At that particular time I was suffering from an almost morbid self-consciousness about my own condition. I had always been a healthy and athletic person—I had disliked such things as illness or deformity, or ever having my attention called to them. I had been capable of pity, yes, but with pity had always gone a faint repulsion.

And now I was an object to inspire pity and repulsion. An invalid, a cripple, a man lying on a couch with twisted limbs—a rug pulled up over him.

And sensitively I waited, shrinking, for everyone’s reaction to my state. Whatever it was, it invariably made me flinch. The kindly commiserating glance was horrible to me. No less horrible was the obvious tact that managed to pretend that I was an entirely natural object, that the visitor hadn’t noticed anything unusual. But for Teresa’s iron will, I would have shut myself up and seen nobody at all. But Teresa, when she is determined on anything, is not easy to withstand. She was determined that I should not become a recluse. She managed, without the aid of the spoken word, to suggest that to shut myself up and make a mystery of myself would be a form of self-advertisement. I knew what she was doing and why she was doing it, but nevertheless I responded. Grimly I set out to show her I could take it—no matter what it was! Sympathy, tact, the extra kindliness in a voice, the conscientious avoidance of any reference to accidents or illness, the pretence that I was as other men—I endured them all with a poker face.

I had not found the old ladies’ reaction to my state too embarrassing. Lady St Loo had adopted the line of tactful avoidance. Lady Tressilian, a maternal type, had not been able to help exuding maternal compassion. She had stressed, rather obviously, the latest books. She wondered if, perhaps, I did any reviewing? Mrs Bigham Charteris, a blunter type, had shown her awareness only by rather obviously checking herself when speaking of the more active blood sports. (Poor devil, mustn’t mention hunting or the beagles.)

Only the girl, Isabella, had surprised me by being natural. She had looked at me without any suggestion of having to look away quickly. She had looked at me as though her mind registered me along with the other occupants of the room and with the furniture. One man, age over thirty, broken … An item in a catalogue—a catalogue of things that had nothing to do with her.

When she had finished with me, her eyes went on to the grand piano, and then to Robert and Teresa’s Tang Horse which stood on a table by itself. The Tang Horse seemed to awaken a certain amount of interest in her. She asked me what it was. I told her.

‘Do you like it?’ I asked her.

She considered quite carefully before replying. Then she said—and gave the monosyllable a lot of weight, as though it was important—‘Yes.’

I wondered if she was a moron.

I asked her if she was fond of horses.

She said this was the first one she’d seen.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I meant real horses.’

‘Oh, I see. Yes, I am. But I can’t afford to hunt.’

‘Would you like to hunt?’

‘Not particularly. There’s not very much good country round here.’

I asked her if she sailed and she said she did. Then Lady Tressilian began talking to me about books, and Isabella relapsed into silence. She had, I noticed then, one art highly developed; the art of repose. She could sit still. She didn’t smoke, she didn’t cross her legs, or swing them, or fiddle with her hands, or pat her hair. She sat quite still and upright in the tall grandfather chair, with her hands on her lap—long narrow hands. She was as immobile as the Tang Horse—it on its table, she in her chair. They had something, I thought, of the same quality—highly decorative—static—belonging to a bygone age …

I laughed when Teresa suggested that she didn’t think, but later it occurred to me that it might be true. Animals don’t think—their minds are relaxed, passive, until an emergency arises with which they have to deal. Thinking (in the speculative sense of the word) is really a highly artificial process which we have taught ourselves with some trouble. We worry over what we did yesterday, and debate what we are going to do today and what will happen tomorrow. But yesterday, today and tomorrow exist quite independently of our speculation. They have happened and will happen to us no matter what we do about it.

Teresa’s prognostications of our life at St Loo were singularly accurate. Almost at once we became plunged up to the neck in politics. Polnorth House was large and rambling, and Miss Amy Tregellis, her income diminished by taxation, had shut off a wing of it, providing this with a separate kitchen. It had been done originally for evacuees from the bombed areas. But the evacuees, arriving from London in mid-winter, had been unable to stomach the horrors of Polnorth House. In St Loo itself, with its shops and its bungalows, they might have been able to support life, but a mile from the town, along ‘that narsty winding lane—the mud, yer wouldn’t believe it and no lights—and anybody might jump out on yer from be’ind the hedge. And vegetables all mud out of the garden, too much green stuff, and milk—coming right from a cow quite hot sometimes—disgusting—and never a tin of condensed handy!’ It was too much for Mrs Price and Mrs Hardy and their offspring. They departed secretly at early dawn taking their broods back to the dangers of London. They were nice women. They left the place clean and scrubbed and a note on the table.

‘Thanking you, Miss, for your kindness, and we know you’ve done all you can, but it’s just too awful in the country, and the children having to walk in the mud to school. But thanking you all the same. I hope as everything has been left all right.’

The billeting officer did not try any more. He was learning wisdom. In due course Miss Tregellis let the detached wing to Captain Carslake, the Conservative agent, who also led a busy life as an Air Raid Warden and an officer in the Home Guard.