Laughing House by Warwick Deeping (grave mercy .txt) 📕

on the land was delayed, but when the cold spell broke it was as though the sap was released in a night, and the earth began to go green. We rushed in early potatoes, and got a tilth ready for the oats. Maize and buckwheat and main crop spuds could wait. I became quite handy with the Auto-Culto, and scuffled the soil and ploughed out drills for the seed potatoes. Even the poor old garden across the way began to look less sad, and flaunted a wildness that had a beauty of its own. Nature can flout destructive man, and even a mauled tree will dress itself with blossom. Daffodils flowered in wild places, and I could see a great old flowering currant flushed with colour. I watched the buds swell, and heard the birds rejoicing.

That spring brought us other cause for rejoicing. Potter gave me the news. The Unit in possession was going, and another taking its place. I wondered what the change would bring us. Anyhow the new could not be worse than the old. In the months ahead, when I talked the matter over with Peter Nash, we arrived at the same conclusion. The men who had made such a sorry mess of the old place had been townsmen, and not very likeable townsmen at that, and quite without feeling for the country, and hostile to any house that roused envy, hatred and malice. Peter was a Progressive, but not a Socialist. He had a ready wit, and for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity he substituted the slogan Envy, Hatred and Malice, all dressed up in secondhand surplices and wearing false haloes.

The common town-bred man can be quite insensitive to beauty. He just does not see it, having had his vision limited by bricks and mortar. I suppose that is yet another curse imposed upon us by too much industrial ism. A large part of the population has become beautyblind, and that in a country that had developed the most lovely domestic architecture in all the world. Graciousness passed with the Georges. It had been a gentleman’s architecture, interpreted by craftsmen who were country-minded and had eyes, but with too much industrialism it became the product of the commercialist and the cad.

I remember Peter telling me that he had talked to some of the city bred men in his unit, and had discovered to his astonishment that not only did they not know the name of a single tree, but that they were incapable of distinguishing one tree from another. The country might have been all cabbage. They had eyes, but their brains were blind.

I have digressed. We were at work in Valley Mead when the army took the road. I don’t know how many lorries rolled out through the gateless gaps, and left behind them scarred and piebald turf ornamented with black splodges of oil. It was a different world from ours, for in the other war we had foot-slogged, these fellows were given rides. We watched them go in the direction of Framley, and I remember the last lorry packed with grinning faces, and several of those faces might have had thumbs to noses and fingers spread. Such was their blessing upon three old men.

“Good riddance to rubbish,” said old Potter, “wonder what the next lot’ll be like.”

I too wondered, but I had other designs in me.

For the House was alone with itself after all these months, and it seemed to call to me “Come, look, I am free for a few hours. Come, see what I have suffered, and the scars I have won in the war.” Both curiosity and a shrinking fear possessed me, but I knew that I had to go.

I went. All the ground about the house looked as though it had suffered from mange. Most of the paint had been rubbed off the lower part of the two white pillars, but they stood. The big front door with its Requisition notice suggested that it had been kicked open by numberless army boots. The key had been left in the lock, but before exploring I toured the yards and garden. It was a scene of desolation and dirt. Old Potter’s cottage had been broken into, and I found that some of the doors and the casing of the stairs had been torn down, to be used as firewood. It was the same in the stables. The match-board lining had been wrenched away and I suppose burnt. What would the House be like? I went round the garden, or what had been a garden. I looked into huts, and saw their dirty floors. Rubbish lay around, old sandbags and what-not, in all sorts of corners. Shrubs and trees were broken, the glass-houses useless. The poor little orangery stank, and some of the latrine buckets had not been emptied. I found a great pit in .the middle of the rose border which had been used as a midden, and the filth below camouflaged with a few shovelfuls of soil. Yet, there Was growth; the flowering shrubs and trees were undefeated. The two big Pyrus Floribundas were masses of pink bud, and Purpurea was in full flower. I found my favourite Daphne broken off short. As for the fruit garden, it was a wilderness. The great fruit-cage had been smashed, and the wire netting lay on gooseberries and currants.

I will admit that I shrank from entering the house, but its blind windows appealed to me. I unlocked the front door and pushed it open, and its hinges creaked as in pain. The hall was paved with squares of black and white marble, and in the old days had been rubbed over with a polisher. Now it looked all blurred and worn like ground glass, and one could trace a trackway across it where boots, boots, boots had gone to and fro. The walls were dirty, and in places the plaster had been broken. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and cornices. And then I saw the stairs. They had been painted white but now they looked grey, and halfway down the first flight the handrail and bannisters had gone. The great arched window on the landing had been boarded up.

I turned into the drawingroom, Sibilla’s room. The glass doorhandle had gone. It would appear to have been used as a mess, and that described it, for the floor was stained and worn into splinters, and here and there the paper hung from the walls. Nails had been driven in, and the old cream surface scribbled on. Over the mantelpiece some wag had scrawled a rude caricature of Hitler.

I felt profoundly depressed. I went elsewhere, and my depression deepened. Painted on the walls of the various rooms were large black letters “Four Men” “Six Men,” etc. I found myself in Sibilla’s room staring at something on the wall where her bed had stood, an obscene picture, and on the opposite wall a crude study of a woman. And there were obscene scribblings here and there. This angered me, and moved me to a poignant disgust. Need the beasts have so fouled a room that was full for me of sacred memories and anguish. My wife had died in this room.

No rambling record such as this plans to be dramatic, but my trespassing here was to produce a touch of drama. I must have been so absorbed in the House’s tragic state that I did not hear a car pull in. I had reached the first floor landing and was looking at the gap in the handrail when I became aware of a brown figure standing in the hall below me. He was a tall, slim lad and I could see his face quite clearly, a rather pale and sensitive face with dark eyes and well marked eyebrows.

For a moment or two we looked at each other in silence. He had two pips on his shoulder, and I guessed that he was an officer of the new unit.

I spoke first.

“Good morning. I suppose I’m a trespasser. I was the owner of this house. I wanted to see what it had suffered.”

He saluted me.

“Quite so, sir. You are Sir John Mortimer?”

I nodded. His dark eyes were scanning me with peculiar seriousness, and I imagined that he might have been told that I was an awkward old curmudgeon.

I walked down the stairs and held out my hand. I said: “Even old houses have to suffer war wounds.”

He was a lad who looked you straight in the eyes.

“I can see that, sir. It must hurt.”

Hurt? I smiled at him. He was a pleasant contrast after that boozing, bumptious Major.

“Houses have souls of their own, sir. Those other fellows seem to have been a casual crowd.”

“Very casual.”

“I should like to look round with you, sir. I am the advance officer. My name’s Nash,”

We wandered through the lower rooms, and I could see scorn on his sensitive face. He did not say much, but I could divine his feeling about the damage that had been done. And then I took him up the stairs and into that particular room and let him see that obscene emblem. He stared at it, tense and frowning.

I said: “My wife died in this room. Her bed stood just there.”

He did not look at me, and I liked him for that.

“The dirty beasts. I’ll have that painted out at once, sir.”

We went out together into the garden and up the steep path through the terraces. A high seat had stood in a little recess sheltered by clipped yews and the wall of the fruit garden, but the seat had gone. We found it later doing duty in the sergeant’s mess. The view across the valley here was very lovely, especially so on a spring day such as this, and as we stood side by side I somehow knew that I had a lover of such things beside me.

He said: “What a damnable mess! Had you been here long, sir?”

“All my life. My great grandfather built the house. I had two boys, both killed in the last war.”

He was silent, gazing, and a little shimmery look came into his eyes.

“That beech wood up there. Yours, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Marvellous, the way the valley rushes up to those great trees. Have we—?”

“No. No lorries there.”

“That’s good. There’s such mystery green gloom and great grey trunks. And that pool. Pure Maurice Hewlett.”

I was surprised.

“You read Hewlett?”

“Yes.”

“I thought he was dead to the young.”

He gave me a quick, laughing glance.

“I must be one of the old young. By the way, sir, I think we can do better than the last crowd. My C.O. is what they used to call a sahib, and the men are a decent crowd.”

“Thanks perhaps to their officers.”

He did not laugh at that, but took it with dark seriousness.

“Well, we try to set a standard. After all character does count.”

“More than cleverness?”

“Much more,” said he.

So, that was how we met and became friends, and what he had said proved true. His crowd were a decent lot, many of them country lads, and his C.O. a gentleman.

“We will do some clearing up here,” was one of the first things he said to me, “and if you care to, come and look round whenever you please.”

I thanked him, and he asked me to dine in the mess.

VI

I WILL not be so foolish as to declare that one Army unit was wholly bad, and that the second was made up of honest, English lads with speedwell blue eyes, but the House was happier with Peter Nash’s crowd, and so were we. The hutments could not be helped, nor the lorries, nor the many, booted feet, but Peter’s C.O. made