Conference at Cold Comfort Farm Read online

  She swallowed a tea-cake and filled her mouth with tea and swished it about.

  ‘Peccavi! Painter Portuguese, isn’t he? Do you know his stuff? I went to the Private View of his last show here! Odd stuff, very odd, but it had quite something! Of course he went through Hell in the trouble out there!’

  So did the people who went through his last show here, thought Flora.

  ‘Are they having an art show at the Conference?’ enquired Mrs Smiling, frowning slightly at Flora, who was looking mutinous.

  ‘Sculpture, painting, readings from unpublished works and a one-day Exhibition of Transitorist Art!’ Mrs Ernestine Thump waved the leaflet in her face. ‘Now who else is there? Thanks,’ accepting the last tea-cake. (Flora saw Sneller make a gesture, at once hopeless and threatening, at Mrs Smiling, who looked distressed. She began to fear that Mrs Thump was never going home, for although all the food had gone there was still tea in the pot and sugar and milk in the basin and jug.)

  ‘Messe, Transitorist craftsman,’ continued Mrs Ernestine Thump, gnawing the tea-cake and scattering crumbs as she read. ‘Hacke, sculptor. Tom Jones, poet, contributor to the quarterly journal Nadir. Mdlle Adrienne Avaler, representing the Existentialist Movement –’

  ‘Oh, yes! Existentialism. Now, do tell me – what is Existentialism?’ exclaimed Flora and Mrs Smiling together, but before Mrs Thump had time to banish a slightly baffled expression which for the first time clouded her bluff arriviste countenance, Mrs Smiling went on in her low, soft, vague voice:

  ‘Isn’t it just being? What I mean is, I read in some French magazine; my French is not awfully good –’

  ‘We plan to make it compulsory for everybody, everywhere!’ bellowed Mrs Ernestine Thump, beginning (to Flora’s relief) to gather up her papers.

  ‘– and so far as I could make out, if you are an Existentialist you go to the facts themselves in all their innocence, interrogating them without asking any leading questions and waiting patiently for their answer.’

  ‘No time for that!’ shouted Mrs Ernestine Thump, heaving herself up from the sofa. ‘Can’t wait! Get on with the job! Plenty for everybody to do nowadays!’ and her glistening little eye was fixed upon Mrs Smiling, who looked as if she had plenty of time and nothing to do in it.

  ‘Another thing it said was,’ continued Mrs Smiling, ‘Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced. I liked that, myself.’

  ‘All this is Above My Head,’ announced Mrs Ernestine Thump – jokingly, of course. ‘I leave you to deal with the Ideas, ladies, and I must Run Off. I’ve got a Committee at five, I’m seeing my dentist at six (he makes an exception for me, dear man), and then down to the House. You two girls are jolly lucky,’ she added with sinister jocularity as she bustled past Sneller, who was attempting to show her out, and nearly sent him flying, ‘if your grading permits you to sit here chin-wagging! You’ – pointing a finger in a dirty glove at Flora – ‘get off on the score of having children under fourteen, I presume, but how about you’ – transferring the finger to Mrs Smiling. ‘Delicate health? Aged parents?’

  ‘Sneller, my butler,’ drawled Mrs Smiling. ‘While being responsible for my delicate health, he also stands to me in loco parentis. Good-bye, Ernestine. Come again soon.’

  Through the window they watched Mrs Ernestine Thump shoehorning herself into a small car driven by a depressed-looking girl, and then being driven away.

  ‘My dear Mary, what people you do take up with,’ sighed Flora, leaning back in her chair.

  ‘Mrs Ernestine Thump is a very good woman who does a lot of valuable public work,’ replied Mrs Smiling reprovingly.

  ‘All right; never mind her now. If the Bazaar on the 17th could be postponed, I could go to the Conference. Could you be ill for a week, Mary?’

  ‘Surely. But, Flora, are you really sure you want to go? I thought some of those people – Peccavi and Hacke and so forth – sounded a bit much.’

  ‘It isn’t the Conference really, it’s Cold Comfort Farm. I have not had any news from there for over five years. Mary, I do feel that all is not well at the farm.’

  Mrs Smiling poured herself out a cup of tepid tea and answered that considering what sort of a place the Farm was, and what kind of people lived there, it would be surprising if all were well. ‘Like the human race,’ she ended pensively. ‘What was the last news you had from the Farm?’

  ‘Reuben used to send me a card every Christmas with “Best regards from Coz. Reuben” on it, and the last one I received also said, “All th’ chaps but me and Urk has gone to South Afriky”.’

  ‘It does not tell one much.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was Reuben’s writing agitated or barely legible?’

  ‘Not more barely legible than usual. I used to hear regularly from Elfine Hawk-Monitor, but since her husband got his knighthood and went to Washington I have not heard so often, and during Recent Events, of course, some of her letters may have been lost. So I have had no news from her for some time.’

  ‘It seems strange that a Conference should be held at the farm.’

  ‘It is strange, Mary; it is very strange indeed, and that is just what disturbs me. Can there no longer be Starkadders at Cold Comfort?’

  ‘Perhaps they have hired it out by the week. You would not put that past them, would you?’

  ‘No, indeed. And yet – I do not know. They all had a fierce passion for the place. I do not think they would hire it out to strangers.’

  ‘And such strangers!’ Mrs Smiling picked up the leaflet dropped by Mrs Ernestine Thump. ‘Representatives of the Managerial Revolutionary Party will attend the Conference,’ she read aloud. ‘What in heck is that?’

  ‘Well, broadly speaking, they are experts. They possess technical knowledge which most ordinary people do not possess. For instance, suppose absolutely everything except a few things were simply blown sky-high and we were all rushing about with nothing to eat and no pure water and no artificial heat and no clothes and no houses and frightful diseases everywhere –’

  Flora paused for breath, and Mrs Smiling sipped her tea and said: ‘Do go on.’

  ‘And then suppose there were a few people who understand how to build gas-mains and collect electricity or whatever it is you do, they would have a terrific advantage over all the people who knew nothing about it, wouldn’t they? They could, and would, manage all of us, as well as managing the gas-mains. It would be a managerial revolution.’

  ‘I suppose so. But I don’t like the idea.’

  ‘Nobody does. Everybody is afraid of them. The trouble is, of course, that they are both necessary and fearfully useful.’

  ‘I get you. And some of them will be at this Cawnference?’

  ‘Yes.’ Flora now read aloud from the leaflet.

  ‘Delegates from the Managerial Revolutionary Party will include Production Managers, Operating Executives, Superintendents, Administrative Engineers and Supervisory Technicians.’

  ‘It doesn’t say anything about gas-mains, and I don’t think you will like being there, Flawra.’

  ‘I know.’

  And Flora reflected for a moment. (Sneller was now shakily removing the tea. What he had thought of Mrs Ernestine Thump, Mrs Smiling did not dare to imagine.)

  Flora knew that if she went to the Conference she would be buttonholed just when she wanted to be quiet, and asked her opinion of this or that or (worse still) what was going to happen about the other; she would daily be confronted by huge faces bursting with pseudo-energy and thrusting their views down her throat hocus-pocus and willy-nilly; there would also be long, nervous faces timidly intimating that nothing was going to be any use anyway, so why do it? and, worst of all, there would be the Works of Peccavi, Hacke and Messe, to say nothing of themes from Bob Flatte’s new opera The Flayed blown (as she had just observed when her glance fell on the leaflet) by the composer himself upon a recorder. No, thought Flora, I will write to Mr Mybug and tell him that I cannot go.

 
; ‘I think it is your duty to go, Flawra,’ suddenly said Mrs Smiling.

  ‘I feared you would say that, Mary.’ And Flora sighed.

  ‘I am not thinking of all those intellectuals and people. They like it. I am thinking of your Cousin Reuben, who always sounded such a nice guy, and that girl he married, and the farm itself –’

  ‘And the International Thinkers, Mary!’ exclaimed Flora, suddenly taking fire. ‘All those poor souls! I might be able to help them! I do feel –’

  ‘That remark always means that your Florence Nightingale complex is raging, Flawra. And “those poor souls” include the most prarminent exponents of arl that is most vital and dynamic –’

  ‘That will do, Mary; I am not a Women’s Club in Negaunee. If you think I ought to go, I will. I think I ought to, too. I will begin to make arrangements at once.’

  ‘Give me time to work up my grippe, darling.’

  ‘I forgot your illness, Mary. But have no fears; I will make the preliminary arrangements in secret.’

  ‘Can you go awf, and leave Charles, and all the children, just like that?’ marvelled Mrs Smiling, accompanying her friend through the hall.

  ‘Of course not; it will need Herculean efforts; it always does. But Charles can, at need, be self-supporting, the spiv is devoted to the children, and finally the Vicarage will be guarded by the great boarhound Cripps. Good-bye, dear Mary; except for your awful friend it was a lovely tea.’

  Mrs Smiling was taken ill two days before the 17th of June, so Flora was able to telephone to Mr Mybug and tell him that circumstances permitted her to fall in with his suggestion.

  ‘Oh “stout work”!’ cried Mr Mybug, with all his former boyish enthusiasm. ‘I’m . . . pretty grateful, Flora. You don’t mind my using the old name, do you?’

  It’s all the same if I do, thought Flora.

  ‘And I say – great luck!’ continued Mr Mybug. ‘Peccavi is lending us his great painting The Excreta and he’s bringing Riska!’

  Flora made an interrogative sound.

  ‘You know her, of course. She’s been his model for six months now . . . the loveliest thing in de Salazar’s Portugal.’

  ‘How delightful!’

  ‘Of course, they’re neither of them easy,’ warned Mybug. ‘Sexual tension between them is very strong.’

  That will be fun, thought Flora.

  ‘And Hacke, the sculptor, is lending Woman with Child and Woman with Wind. They’re priceless, of course; no firm will insure them, so Hacke and I are travelling down with them in the guard’s van. My dear lady, no car is strong enough to take them!’ in reply to a suggestion from Flora, ‘and I couldn’t charter a lorry. They are enormous, of course; monumental; Assyrian.’

  That made it more difficult to avoid seeing them. But Flora was not going to turn back now.

  ‘And Messe has promised, as you saw by the advance publicity I sent you, to do us a one-day show of Transitorist Craft work. Do you know his stuff? He won’t use materials lasting longer than one day, and he mostly works in pastry made from national flour, contemporary sausage-meat, and modern dyestuffs. Of course, I don’t put him within miles of Peccavi. I should put him somewhere between Pushe and Dashitoffski.’

  ‘I see that a delegate from the East is expected,’ said Flora, thinking of places to put Messe.

  ‘Oh yes, a sort of a sage; I don’t know his name. And Tom Jones; he’s got a food fixation, but otherwise he’s all right. You’ll like Tom.’

  ‘How is Rennett?’ asked Flora, having heard quite enough about the delegates.

  ‘Oh, Rennett is – Rennett,’ returned Mr Mybug, with a light laugh. ‘We’ve got three boys, you know. Healthy enough, but they’ve all three got fixations on us. I’ve had them analysed; no good.’

  ‘Dear me, I am sorry. Er – what form does the fixation take?’

  ‘Oh, liking to be with us, wanting to be kissed good night, and that sort of thing. We’ve tried everything – it only gets worse.’

  ‘Do they go to school?’

  ‘Heavens, yes; we sent Trafford at eighteen months. They all go to a progressive school – Badlands, at Edgware. No rules, no lessons, no teachers. The children listen to total recall from a member of the staff chosen by themselves for fifteen minutes every morning. Otherwise they just fool about. By the way, have you any family?’

  Flora answered that she had five, but, not wishing to hear Mr Mybug’s comments upon their stodgy schools, she went on hastily:

  ‘Oh, perhaps you can tell me. What has happened to the Farm? Why is a Conference being held there? Aren’t there Starkadders at Cold Comfort any more?’

  Mr Mybug replied indifferently that he really did not know. He had heard no news of the Farm for years. It was Tom Jones who had suggested it as a meeting-place for the Conference, and he had written to The Occupier asking if the dates were free. The name appeared on a list of premises to be hired for conferences and he, Mr Mybug, presumed that it had been taken over by some trust or committee of sorts; it was just the sort of place that might have been. He knew nothing about the Starkadders nowadays.

  ‘I say, have you read The Dromedary?’ he said suddenly. ‘I don’t expect you have, but it’s superb.’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ retorted Flora, controlling an impulse to add, So there, see?

  ‘And what did you think of it?’

  ‘I thought it marvellous,’ replied Flora with truth, reflecting that the passing years had done nothing to mitigate Mr Mybug’s boundless asininity.

  Mr Mybug seemed to want to go on talking about The Dromedary, but Flora ended their conversation by making a brief and definite arrangement to meet his train outside Beershorn Station at four o’clock on the afternoon of the following Sunday, June 16th, and rang off.

  2

  She herself travelled down by coach, and all the children, the spiv and the great boarhound Cripps came to the end of the road, where the coach stopped, to see her off.

  Charles was unable to be present because he was teaching in Sunday School, but he kissed her a most tender good-bye and told her to enjoy (if it were possible to do so) her visit. He suspected that Mrs Smiling’s grippe was all baloney, and Flora knew that he suspected, and he knew that she knew, but neither mentioned it, and so the Parish was peacefully diddled and Flora went off in a placid frame of mind.

  ‘Good-bye, Mamma, good-bye!’ the children cried, waving frantically as Flora climbed into the coach, and the baby danced up and down upon the spiv’s padded shoulders, which were admirably designed for such exercise. The great boarhound Cripps bayed, the coach moved forward, and her journey had begun.

  ‘Good-bye, dear, dear Mamma! Good-bye!’

  ‘Good-bye! Don’t forget to feed the parrot!’ cried Flora through the window, in the phrase popular in the dear dead frivolous Twenties, and all the children shrieked back, ‘What parrot?’ just as they were meant to do. Flora sat down and, after one furtive glance at her fellow passengers to see if one of them looked like Peccavi, she opened Vogue, and hardly raised her eyes from it until, some hours later, the coach stopped outside the little station at Beershorn in the midst of the Sussex Downs.

  Flora alighted, and the coach went on its way towards the coast. She walked into the station, where the train of course had not arrived although it was twenty minutes overdue, and amused herself by inspecting well-remembered places: the waiting-room and offices suggesting those of an old-fashioned lazar-house, the rennet post to which Viper the gelding had been tethered by the ancient cowman Adam Lambsbreath on the night of her arrival sixteen years ago, the posters of the Owl and the Waverley Pen and Margaret Lockwood and Patricia Roc flapping drearily in the wind.

  Presently a car twenty feet long, with a huge, prosperous man sitting in the back and an Oriental at the wheel, drove into the station yard. At the same time an old-fashioned brake, drawn by two horses and driven by a local character, came down the hill and stopped at the other side of the road. Thinking that this must be the conveyance provided for
the delegates, Flora left the station and crossed the road towards the brake.

  Someone was sitting in it, nursing a paper bag, whose appearance was vaguely familiar to her, and she approached him, affecting not to hear a hissing noise behind her indicating that the Oriental chauffeur had alighted and was trying to attract her attention, probably to ask her the way to the Farm.

  She reached the brake, and resting one hand upon its back wheel and with the other shading her eyes from the sun, gazed up at its solitary occupant. At the same instant he rose to his feet.

  ‘Reuben!’ exclaimed Flora.

  ‘Cousin Flora!’ said Reuben, as near joyfully as a Starkadder could. ‘Why, I’d a know’d ee anywheer, coz, and right glad I am to shake ee again by th’ hand, soul!’

  They exchanged a hearty handclasp over the side of the brake. The chauffeur was still hissing away in the background, but Flora took no notice.

  ‘I will come down an’ join ee, Cousin Flora,’ said Reuben, beginning to descend. ‘Will ee drive wi’ me in th’ buggy (I’ll lay ee remembers th’ buggy?) back to – to th’ – th’ old place? Th’ buggy du be up th’ hill, in th’ liddle lane.’

  ‘I should like that above everything, Reuben, and you must tell me all your news; how Amos is getting on in America, and about Aunt Ada Doom, and all the other Starkadders – are they still in South Africa? and Nancy – have you any more children? – but first I must go down and meet the ladies and gentlemen who are coming for the Conference. I am helping Mr Mybug (you remember him?) to arrange everything.’

  ‘A fat chap wi’ fuzzled hair, allus jawin’,’ nodded Reuben. ‘Ay, I remember un well.’

  ‘Was it you to whom Mr Jones wrote about holding the Conference at the Farm?’ Flora went on, as they walked across the yard together.

  The Oriental chauffeur followed them, still hissing.

  Reuben paled beneath his tan. ‘Nay, Cousin Flora,’ he answered in a low, choked voice.

  Flora glanced at him in surprise, but the train had now arrived, and there was no time for further conversation. Hastily promising to meet her cousin in the little lane as soon as the brake had left with the delegates, she hurried into the station.