Conference at Cold Comfort Farm Read online

  ‘Nay, take un hence, Cousin Flora. ’Tes a message o’ fear an’ woe; they allus is,’ said Reuben fearfully, interrupted while breaking the leaves of the young plants to shade infant cauliflowers.

  ‘Of course it isn’t, it’s from one of the – er – lads. Do read it!’ said Flora.

  After some hesitation –

  ‘Whoam, whoam, like a wounded maggit,

  Love, Ezra.’

  Reuben slowly read aloud, and scratched his head.

  ‘Do ee reckon that means he’s a-comin’, Cousin Flora?’

  ‘Honestly, I’m dashed if I know, Reuben. What do you think? You know him better than I do.’

  ‘Nay, none knows our Ezra well, me least o’ all. ’Tes a waverin’, wanderin’, wearisomin’ soul.’

  ‘Oh well, then that’s just the kind of cable he would send, isn’t it? I expect it does mean that he is coming. But I am sorry he feels so low as to describe himself as a maggot. He won’t be much use on the farm.’

  Reuben uttered the short, guttural sound which served the Starkadders as a laugh.

  ‘Nay, Cousin Flora, ee mistakes. “Maggit” du be short fer marsh-tigget, like. Our Ezra means he’ll be whoamin’ like a marsh-tigget to uns rest.’

  ‘In other words, he is coming?’

  ‘Ay – if so be as we reads his meanin’ aright.’

  He readily agreed that Flora should open any other cables that might arrive during the day, and then she hastened away to tell the good news to Jane, otherwise Our Ezra’s Bespoke. Leaving the other female Starkadders burning feathers under Jane’s nose and rubbing hartshorn into her hair (she having swooned dead away on hearing the news), Flora returned to the Green Parlour and her book. Excitement among the Starkadder maidens had now mounted to alarming heights, and the run on smelling-salts and whin-water (an allegedly non-alcoholic decoction of hedgerow shoots with a kick like an ack-ack gun) was non-stop.

  Shortly before tea was served in the gardens, Hick Dolour appeared at the window again.

  ‘’Nother cable for Rube,’ he said. ‘’Ere, what is cookin’? Two cables in one day! I carn’t come up ’ere again, and that’s straight. I gotta class in the Psychology o’ the Pedestrian s’evenin’.’

  Flora was already reading the message, and only told him in an absent tone that in that case other arrangements must be made.

  Don’t ee do nothin’ till I comes. Micah

  said the second cable. This was more satisfactory than Ezra’s, hinting as it did at willingness to get to work, and Flora put it in her pocket with a mounting sensation of triumph. She would show it to Reuben after tea.

  Hick Dolour, who appeared to have time to spare, was lolling against the window, smoking.

  ‘Course, this aren’t in my line, reely,’ he began.

  Flora was collecting paper table-napkins from a store in the Green Parlour cupboard to furnish out the festal buffets, and she replied, still absently:

  ‘So I understand from Mr Urk Starkadder. Do you intend to make herb-picking your profession?’

  ‘Na! ’Erb-pickin’ as ’ad it. I’m a stoodent at ther Institoot o’ Mechanical Propulsion. (Drivin’ Schools, they used to be called.) More scientific than what you might think, mechanical propulsion is. Very interestin’. All these here noo road surfaces needs special techniques to propel the vehicle so as to co-ordinate its functions, see.’

  As he uttered the word ‘scientific’ he lowered his voice, and gave Flora a sidelong beaming glance, as if the very sound of those syllables must fill her with joy.

  ‘Are there many students at the College?’ she asked, trying to decide between two designs of paper napkin.

  ‘’Bout four ’undred of us. All picked men. It requires a special type er mentality, see. You ’ave to know ’ow the road surface is made, and ’ow the vehicle is made, an’ the correct psychological approach to the theory o’ mechanical propulsion, see.’

  Flora then enquired if he ever heard from his grandfather, Mark Dolour (Reuben having informed her of the relationship between the two).

  ‘Not since last Xmas, I ’aven’t. I been waitin’ to go in for me Intelligence Test some time, see, ’cause there’s a long list. Well, I comes out with ninety-eight per cent! So I drops a line to Grandad about it. Smatterofact I thought he might come across with a bit. Ninety-eight per cent! Why, thass only two points below the Genius ratin’, that is!’

  ‘And what did your Grandad say?’

  ‘Why, ’e says if I’m a genius, ’e’s Gawd Almighty,’ confided Hick in shocked reluctant tones. ‘Ignorant. Very be’ind the times, my Grandad is. Well, I must be movin’. Bye-bye.’

  Apparently he went to his class, for three later cables were brought up to the farm by Mrs Murther, who had now taken over the duties of post-mistress, and very cross she was at having to toil up Mockuncle Hill three times in one hot afternoon.

  The cablegrams said:

  I allus told ee so I longs to mock at ee in ee’s dark hour sincerely Caraway.

  Curses on ee for a dunderpate Reuben Starkadder see bed is proper aired Harkaway.

  Arriving ten fifteen by air Ticklepenny’s Field Sunday morning willing take on old job same wages plus bonus increased cost of living best respects Mark Dolour.

  ‘Mark seems slightly changed for the better,’ observed Flora to Reuben, as they sat over a late cup of tea in the latter’s cottage.

  ‘He allus was a likelyish chap, was Mark. Un’ll be main old, though, by now.’

  ‘None of them mention – er – the lasses, Reuben. I do hope that none of them are married again or anything.’

  ‘If so be as any of they du be, Cousin Flora, I knows what I wull do to un,’ growled Reuben, swelling.

  Flora tactfully changed the subject:

  ‘By air, Mark says. I wonder if they are all coming by air?’

  ‘Ticklepenny’s bean’t cut for haysel yet. Gurt old aery-plane her wull hev to land in all th’ tangle grasses. Hor! hor! hor!’

  ‘That will never do; it will crack itself or something,’ said Flora decidedly. ‘You must cut Ticklepenny’s before Sunday, Reuben.’

  ‘Cut un! Thirty acres of goathling soil our Ticklepenny’s du be, an’ me wi’out a reaper nor yet a tractor in th’ place!’

  ‘But there are scythes, Reuben. I saw fifteen of them only the other night, arranged over the sink in the Greate Scullerie.’

  ‘’Tes man’s work, scythin’.’

  ‘Not if it is done in relays. I could help, and Nancy, and perhaps some of the older children, and –’ Flora nodded towards the open door, where the Sage, the follower and the helper-out were peacefully partaking of their evening meal.

  ‘’Tes a black day for Cold Comfort, when heathens has to scythe Ticklepenny’s Field.’

  ‘They are not black, Reuben, they are brown; and besides, what does it matter? Now please make arrangements to have Ticklepenny’s cut to-morrow night. You had better start late, as the moon does not rise until nine. When it does, it will be full.’

  And Flora suppressed a sigh, for she would have preferred scything Ticklepenny’s Field by the light of a full moon to attending the Party. However, her plans were maturing successfully, and with the help of that comfort she contrived to pass unruffled through a very disturbed evening. Hacke, Messe and Peccavi suddenly decided that all their works must be instantly packed up in order to leave Sussex on the following morning, as they were due to appear at an Exhibition in Europe in a week’s time. Having gobbled their dinner even faster than usual, they all rushed down to the Greate Barne, accompanied by Riska and such of the delegates as had nothing better to do, and began strewing straw, newspaper, rope and packing-cases over the floor and taking pictures down from the walls. Then they began admiring each other’s work, and then fell to arguing, and at last, about twelve o’clock, they decided to postpone the packing until the next day, and all four curled up among the litter and went to sleep. Flora, whose services had been fussily requested earlier in the evening, had
to step over their recumbent forms to extinguish the lights, which they had of course left burning.

  9

  The next day was spent by the delegates in bickering among themselves and in coaxing or bullying other people into packing for them, and by Flora in writing a statement of the expenses incurred at the Conference, for perusal by the Treasurers of the International Thinkers’ Group and the Weaver’s Whim Trust. A cablegram arrived after luncheon saying:

  For the love o’ us all doan’t ee doan’t ee until I be whoam-gathered yours truly Luke

  followed shortly by another saying:

  Same as Luke Mark S.,

  and with the arrival of these messages Reuben had now heard from all his relations. Not one had declined (so far as could be deduced from the involved and dramatic style in which they were written) to come home. Indeed, from the speed with which they had replied, Reuben and Flora both deduced that affairs at Grootebeeste were black indeed.

  ‘But we mun niver speak o’ it to th’ lads, Cousin Flora,’ said Reuben while he and Flora were in the Lytel Scullerie in the late afternoon. Flora was standing upon the massive plate-rack reaching down the fifteen scythes daintily arranged upon the wall and handing them to him as he stood below.

  ‘’Tes nigh on three year ago that our Micah did write tu me, answerin’ me when I did ask news o’ Grootebeeste. Niver speak o’ Grootebeeste, he did write tu me. So I bewarns ee, coz.’

  ‘Thank you, Reuben. I shall not forget, though I am not in the least likely to want to speak of it, I assure you. There!’ and she handed him the last scythe. ‘They are not at all rusty; the lasses have kept them bright and clean.’

  ‘Like tu un’s true hearts, Cousin Flora. And now th’ long, wearisome years o’ waitin’ is over and un’s reward is at hand!’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I hope so,’ replied Flora with less warmth; thirteen years of marriage seemed to have softened Reuben’s former strictly realistic outlook upon life. ‘Let us put the scythes in that wheelbarrow, and then you can take them over to Ticklepenny’s and arrange matters with your helpers.’

  She anticipated that the Starkadder temperament might prevent Reuben from successfully organizing the cutting of the field, but when she visited the cottage at moonrise that evening, just before the Party began, she found affairs in good train. The scything had begun, and all the cottage party was usefully employed, for even the Sage, whom no one had dared to ask to take a hand, had offered of his own accord to keep watch over a vast Shepherd’s Pie baking for the workers’ supper. Flora surveyed the scene with satisfaction, and returned to her duties at the Farm. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks glowed beneath her smooth hair dressed with two white peonies, for all went well, and she was content.

  The Party went on until seven o’clock the next morning, when the last drop of drink was swallowed and the last cigarette lit, and then there were complaints (as well there might be, only they were not the complaints that a detached observer might have been expected to make in the circumstances). Fairly early in the evening Riska and Peccavi disappeared; that was one good thing; and a little later Mr Mybug went to sleep in the copper; that was another. Peccavi had been in topping form, tripping up the dancers with trick wire flown specially from Lisbon by a friend of his who smuggled drugs, and dropping tobacco ash in the fruit-cup. Mr Mybug said that his malice was deliciously, characteristically unpredictable. Mdlle Avaler looked pure and lovely as an angel in white satin and pearls, and it was shortly after her arrival that Mr Mybug sought sanctuary from Cupid’s darts in the copper, emerging at intervals to tell everyone how amusingly cosy it was in there.

  Rennett rushed round screaming with laughter and banging everybody except Mr Claud Hubris with a bladder provided by Peccavi. Professors Breed and Brood slowly, smilingly, silently drank, until they slipped down under a buffet and gradually became buried in cigarette ash, like contemporary Babes in the Wood. Frau Dichtverworren sat in a corner, watching everybody, and smiling now and again to herself as she made a note.

  The massy beams of Cold Comfort Farm’s ceilings resounded until they hummed again to the zooming whack of the bladder wielded by Rennett, and to the yells of the scientists, who had formed themselves into a long serpentine procession and wound in and out of the dim rooms screaming: ‘We – want – Reality! Give – Us – the – Unsplittable!’ Dance bands, relayed from all those foreign stations which sound louder after eleven o’clock, sent forth their cacophany or their briskly indelicate songs into the pandemonium, and the Starkadder maidens, who were supposed to be handing round the food and drink, fled the scene after half an hour of it.

  Flora had planned to retire at midnight, but the gaiety developed so rapidly and so soon reached its height that at ten o’clock she found herself compelled to take refuge upon the broad stone mantelpiece of the Greate Kitchene. No one observed her, because she was seated well above the level of the bar and the buffet, which were the highest points to which anyone’s eyes were raised; and she was even turning the pages of Charlotte Yonge’s story Hopes and Fears, a copy of which had lain at the back of the mantelpiece for some years undisturbed, and wondering if she could venture to read it by the light of the lamp in its wrought-iron lantern immediately above her head, when, chancing to glance down into the gladsome throng, she met the eyes of Peccavi, enormous, black, glittering with malice. He had returned, and was even riper than usual for mischief.

  She could dimly discern Riska in the background, looking like a snake all done up in red sequins and four-inch heels, urging him on. She calmly awaited the instant when he gripped the mantelpiece with both hands, then banged down Hopes and Fears as hard as she could upon his fingers, and he fell off into the bowl of steaming punch. This created a diversion, and while Mr Mybug (having struggled out of the copper) was wiping him down, and Messe was ecstatically burning himself with the silver punch-ladle, Flora opened Hopes and Fears and began to read.

  So great was the confusion below that she knew it would be impossible to make her way through the dancing, drinking, embracing, arguing forms, but she awaited that inevitable moment when they should all surge out to the duckpond and drag off their clothes and jump into it. Then she could slip down and hasten through the deserted rooms and upstairs to bed.

  Lifting her eyes occasionally from her book to judge whether that moment was near, she noticed some figures loitering uncertainly, and presently she made out (for the rooms were illuminated only by candles and the farm’s home-made electricity) that these laggards were all Managerial Revolutionaries. Flora felt rather sorry for the poor little things, many of whom had specialized in Sexual Psychology or the History of Dancing or the Theory and Practice of Alcoholic Fermentation, but none of whom knew how to kiss or dance or drink. Some of them did try, as the evening went on, but they only made themselves sick. It was a shame, Flora thought.

  She half-reclined upon the broad stone shelf, now letting her eyes move along the page of small close print as she followed Miss Yonge’s calm but entrancing story, and now lifting them beyond the solid thickness of the old book into the pit beneath, where brilliantly clothed figures (for many of the delegates had essayed fancy dress) writhed and showed off in the dimness, and occasionally a shower of sandwiches, like soundless miniature white aeroplanes, skimmed through the smoky air from the hand of Hacke, who had established himself behind the more distant buffet and had set himself the task of filling the punch-bowl with bread. Two powerful wirelesses and the screams of the scientists and the recurrent banging of Rennett’s jester-bladder combined with the ceaseless shrill babble of human voices in a din that ended by sending Flora off into a doze.

  She was aroused by silence. Lifting her head from Hopes and Fears, where drowsiness had pillowed it, she looked down into a dimness pierced by two broad shafts of moonlight. The room was empty. Clocks were striking midnight, and she heard far off the Comus cries and shouts of the rabble. She rapidly climbed down by the projecting iron bars at the side of the mantelpiece where bunched onions h
ad once been hung, and, clasping Hopes and Fears to her bosom, sped through rooms lit by flickering candles and failing electric light until she reached the Greate Staircasee.

  An arm shot out from under a sofa as she trod on the first stair – an arm which, judging by the dripping duckweed yet festooning it, belonged to Peccavi – but a backward kick from her small shoe hurled off his fumbling clasp, and she bounded onwards and gained the safety of her bedroom.

  Earlier in the evening the helper-out had informed her that the scything of Ticklepenny’s Field was to be followed by A Bit of A Do for the scythers, and now, as she gazed out of her window for a few minutes before getting into bed, she saw a little fire flickering high up on Ticklepenny’s ridge and dark figures dancing about it. Strains of music, apparently from an accordion, were wafted upon the gusts of summer wind, which after some doubt she identified as part of a song called Boiled Beef and Carrots. They were followed by a wavering Oriental air which threatened to go on for ever, but when it did change (rather abruptly) to a song called All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor, she did not hear, because she was asleep.

  At this hour, an air liner was leaving the African shores. It was followed by a glider containing an elderly but still handsome bull, reclining upon thick trusses of straw and passing the time alternately by gazing out through the windows dimmed by his own sweet breath and eating the wreath hung round his neck by admirers at the Cape Town airport. Beside him slept Ezra Starkadder, elderly but not still handsome, and in the liner were Micah, Harkaway, Caraway, Luke, Mark, and Mark Dolour, and they were all quarrelling like mad.

  10

  Punctually at eight o’clock the next morning, refreshed and calm, Flora came down the Greate Staircasee.

  Stepping over someone lying at the foot, and making a detour round the Laocoon groups huddled all over the Greate Kitchene floor, she made her way past the copper in the Greate Scullerie, whence protruded Mr Mybug’s boots. Festooned all over him like washing was Rennett. At least it is Rennett, thought Flora. There was no sign of Mdlle Avaler, whose national elegance had prevented her from passing what remained of the night upon the floor amidst the ash, drips, wet bread, shoes, braces, duckweed, cigar stumps, cigarette butts, corks, streamers, confetti and other objects.