They and I

I wanted to keep him in good humour. I had three things to talk to him about: the cow, the donkey, and Dick.

“No, it wasn’t,” he answered. “A philosopher would have remained a stockbroker and been just as happy. Philosophy does not depend upon environment. You put the philosopher down anywhere. It is all the same to him, he takes his philosophy with him. You can suddenly tell him he is an emperor, or give him penal servitude for life. He goes on being a philosopher just as if nothing had happened. We have an old tom-cat. The children lead it an awful life. It does not seem to matter to the cat. They shut it up in the piano: their idea is that it will make a noise and frighten someone. It doesn’t make a noise; it goes to sleep. When an hour later someone opens the piano, the poor thing is lying there stretched out upon the keyboard purring to itself. They dress it up in the baby’s clothes and take it out in the perambulator: it lies there perfectly contented looking round at the scenery – takes in the fresh air. They haul it about by its tail. You would think, to watch it swinging gently to and fro head downwards, that it was grateful to them for giving it a new sensation. Apparently it looks on everything that comes its way as helpful experience. It lost a leg last winter in a trap: it goes about quite cheerfully on three. Seems to be rather pleased, if anything, at having lost the fourth – saves washing. Now, he is your true philosopher, that cat; never minds what happens to him, and is equally contented if it doesn’t.”

I found myself becoming fretful. I know a man with whom it is impossible to disagree. Men at the Club – new-comers – have been lured into taking bets that they could on any topic under the sun find themselves out of sympathy with him. They have denounced Mr. Lloyd George as a traitor to his country. This man has risen and shaken them by the hand, words being too weak to express his admiration of their outspoken fearlessness. You might have thought them Nihilists denouncing the Russian Government from the steps of the Kremlin at Moscow. They have, in the next breath, abused Mr. Balfour in terms transgressing the law of slander. He has almost fallen on their necks. It has transpired that the one dream of his life was to hear Mr. Balfour abused. I have talked to him myself for a quarter of an hour, and gathered that at heart he was a peace-at-any-price man, strongly in favour of Conscription, a vehement Republican, with a deep-rooted contempt for the working classes. It is not bad sport to collect half a dozen and talk round him. At such times he suggests the family dog that six people from different parts of the house are calling to at the same time. He wants to go to them all at once.

I felt I had got to understand this man, or he would worry me.

“We are going to be neighbours,” I said, “and I am inclined to think I shall like you. That is, if I can get to know you. You commence by enthusing on philosophy: I hasten to agree with you. It is a noble science. When my youngest daughter has grown up, when the other one has learnt a little sense, when Dick is off my hands, and the British public has come to appreciate good literature, I am hoping to be a bit of a philosopher myself. But before I can explain to you my views you have already changed your own, and are likening the philosopher to an old tom-cat that seems to be weak in his head. Soberly now, what are you?”

“A fool,” he answered promptly; “a most unfortunate fool. I have the mind of a philosopher coupled to an intensely irritable temperament. My philosophy teaches me to be ashamed of my irritability, and my irritability makes my philosophy appear to be arrant nonsense to myself. The philosopher in me tells me it does not matter when the twins fall down the wishing-well. It is not a deep well. It is not the first time they have fallen into it: it will not be the last. Such things pass: the philosopher only smiles. The man in me calls the philosopher a blithering idiot for saying it does not matter when it does matter. Men have to be called away from their work to haul them out. We all of us get wet. I get wet and excited, and that always starts my liver. The children’s clothes are utterly spoilt. Confound them,” – the blood was mounting to his head – “they never care to go near the well except they are dressed in their best clothes. On other days they will stop indoors and read Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs.’ There is something uncanny about twins. What is it? Why should twins be worse than other children? The ordinary child is not an angel, Heaven knows. Take these boots of mine. Look at them; I have had them for over two years. I tramp ten miles a day in them; they have been soaked through a hundred times. You buy a boy a pair of boots – ”

“Why don’t you cover over the well?” I suggested.

“There you are again,” he replied. “The philosopher in me – the sensible man – says, ‘What is the good of the well? It is nothing but mud and rubbish. Something is always falling into it – if it isn’t the children it’s the pigs. Why not do away with it?’”

“Seems to be sound advice,” I commented.

“It is,” he agreed. “No man alive has more sound commonsense than I have, if only I were capable of listening to myself. Do you know why I don’t brick in that well? Because my wife told me I would have to. It was the first thing she said when she saw it. She says it again every time anything does fall into it. ‘If only you would take my advice’ – you know the sort of thing. Nobody irritates me more than the person who says, ‘I told you so.’ It’s a picturesque old ruin: it used to be haunted. That’s all been knocked on the head since we came. What self-respecting nymph can haunt a well into which children and pigs are for ever flopping?”

He laughed; but before I could join him he was angry again. “Why should I block up an historic well, that is an ornament to the garden, because a pack of fools can’t keep a gate shut? As for the children, what they want is a thorough good whipping, and one of these days – ”

A voice crying to us to stop interrupted him.

“Am on my round. Can’t come,” he shouted.

“But you must,” explained the voice.

He turned so quickly that he almost knocked me over. “Bother and confound them all!” he said. “Why don’t they keep to the time-table? There’s no system in this place. That is what ruins farming – want of system.”

He went on grumbling as he walked. I followed him. Halfway across the field we met the owner of the voice. She was a pleasant-looking lass, not exactly pretty – not the sort of girl one turns to look at in a crowd – yet, having seen her, it was agreeable to continue looking at her. St. Leonard introduced me to her as his eldest daughter, Janie, and explained to her that behind the study door, if only she would take the trouble to look, she would find a time-table —

“According to which,” replied Miss Janie, with a smile, “you ought at the present moment to be in the rick-yard, which is just where I want you.”

“What time is it?” he asked, feeling his waistcoat for a watch that appeared not to be there.

“Quarter to eleven,” I told him.

He took his head between his hands. “Good God!” he cried, “you don’t say that!”

The new binder, Miss Janie told us, had just arrived. She was anxious her father should see it was in working order before the men went back. “Otherwise,” so she argued, “old Wilkins will persist it was all right when he delivered it, and we shall have no remedy.”

We turned towards the house.

“Speaking of the practical,” I said, “there were three things I came to talk to you about. First and foremost, that cow.”

“Ah, yes, the cow,” said St. Leonard. He turned to his daughter. “It was Maud, was it not?”

“No,” she answered, “it was Susie.”

“It is the one,” I said, “that bellows most all night and three parts of the day. Your boy Hopkins thinks maybe she’s fretting.”

“Poor soul!” said St. Leonard. “We only took her calf away from her – when did we take her calf away from her?” he asked of Janie.

“On Thursday morning,” returned Janie; “the day we sent her over.”

“They feel it so at first,” said St. Leonard sympathetically.

“It sounds a brutal sentiment,” I said, “but I was wondering if by any chance you happened to have by you one that didn’t feel it quite so much. I suppose among cows there is no class that corresponds to what we term our ‘Smart Set’ – cows that don’t really care for their calves, that are glad to get away from them?”

Miss Janie smiled. When she smiled, you felt you would do much to see her smile again.

“But why not keep it up at your house, in the paddock,” she suggested, “and have the milk brought down? There is an excellent cowshed, and it is only a mile away.”

It struck me there was sense in this idea. I had not thought of that. I asked St. Leonard what I owed him for the cow. He asked Miss Janie, and she said sixteen pounds. I had been warned that in doing business with farmers it would be necessary always to bargain; but there was that about Miss Janie’s tone telling me that when she said sixteen pounds she meant sixteen pounds. I began to see a brighter side to Hubert St. Leonard’s career as a farmer.

“Very well,” I said; “we will regard the cow as settled.”

I made a note: “Cow, sixteen pounds. Have the cowshed got ready, and buy one of those big cans on wheels.”

“You don’t happen to want milk?” I put it to Miss Janie. “Susie seems to be good for about five gallons a day. I’m afraid if we drink it all ourselves we’ll get too fat.”

“At twopence halfpenny a quart, delivered at the house, as much as you like,” replied Miss Janie.

I made a note of that also. “Happen to know a useful boy?” I asked Miss Janie.

“What about young Hopkins,” suggested her father.

“The only male thing on this farm – with the exception of yourself, of course, father dear – that has got any sense,” said Miss Janie. “He can’t have Hopkins.”

“The only fault I have to find with Hopkins,” said St. Leonard, “is that he talks too much.”

“Personally,” I said, “I should prefer a country lad. I have come down here to be in the country. With Hopkins around, I don’t somehow feel it is the country. I might imagine it a garden city: that is as near as Hopkins would allow me to get. I should like myself something more suggestive of rural simplicity.”

“I think I know the sort of thing you mean,” smiled Miss Janie. “Are you fairly good-tempered?”

“I can generally,” I answered, “confine myself to sarcasm. It pleases me, and as far as I have been able to notice, does neither harm nor good to anyone else.”

“I’ll send you up a boy,” promised Miss Janie.

I thanked her. “And now we come to the donkey.”

“Nathaniel,” explained Miss Janie, in answer to her father’s look of enquiry. “We don’t really want it.”

“Janie,” said Mr. St. Leonard in a tone of authority, “I insist upon being honest.”

“I was going to be honest,” retorted Miss Janie, offended.

“My daughter Veronica has given me to understand,” I said, “that if I buy her this donkey it will be, for her, the commencement of a new and better life. I do not attach undue importance to the bargain, but one never knows. The influences that make for reformation in human character are subtle and unexpected. Anyhow, it doesn’t seem right to throw a chance away. Added to which, it has occurred to me that a donkey might be useful in the garden.”