Chapter Eleven

Colonel Weatherhead and the Bishop

Colonel Weatherhead was pulling up Bishop’s weed in his garden. He had a fearful tussle with the Bishop every autumn, for the Bishop was entrenched in a thorn hedge at the bottom of the garden near the river, and however much of him Colonel Weatherhead managed to eradicate there was always enough root left embedded in the thickest part of the hedge to start him off again next year.

Colonel Weatherhead had a kind of sneaking admiration for the Bishop—here was an enemy, worthy of his steel. The Colonel went for him tooth and nail, he dug and tore and burned the Bishop, and the sweat poured off him in rivulets. Sometimes he stood up, and straightened his back, and felt himself round the waist, and wondered if that horrible two inches had diminished at all.

He was in the thick of the fight, and his hair was standing on end, and his face and hands were scratched with thorns, and one of his brace buttons had flown off in the struggle—in fact he was as filthy and as completely happy as a little boy making mud pies—when he heard a car drive up to his front door. He peered through the bushes and saw that it was Mrs. Featherstone Hogg’s car, and there was Mrs. Featherstone Hogg herself, getting out of the car and going into his house.

The Colonel swore a regrettable oath. He did not like Mrs. Featherstone Hogg at the best of times, but even supposing he had liked her immensely she would have been unwelcome just now. Colonel Weatherhead was in no condition to appear before a lady. He would be in no condition to appear before a lady until he had soaked himself in an extremely hot bath and changed all his clothes.

The Colonel now perceived to his horror that Simmons was coming down the garden to find him—Simmons was the Colonel’s soldier servant, an excellent creature in his way, and thoroughly conscientious, but somewhat lacking in initiative. Colonel Weatherhead made a rapid reconnaissance of his position and sprinted for the toolshed. It was a dark musty place (as toolsheds so often are) filled with worn-out tools, and a wheelbarrow and a lawnmower, and festooned with spiders’ webs; but the Colonel was already as dirty as any man could be, so there was no need to be fastidious. He crawled underneath the wheelbarrow and pulled a piece of sacking over his legs. He was concerned to find that he was breathing heavily. It was partly the short sprint and partly the excitement, but it showed he was out of training. I must shorten the tobacco ration, he thought, regretfully.

Simmons looked all round the garden faithfully. He even glanced into the toolshed, although it was unlikely that Colonel Weatherhead would be there, then he returned to the house and informed Mrs. Featherstone Hogg that the Colonel seemed to have gone out.

“What do you mean?” inquired that lady haughtily. “You said Colonel Weatherhead was in the garden.”

“I thought he was, ma’am,” replied Simmons.

“Either the Colonel is out, or else he is in,” said Mrs. Featherstone Hogg. “What do you mean by saying he seems to have gone out?”

“Well, I can’t find him, ma’am,” Simmons returned, scratching his ear in perplexity, “and yet I’d take my affy davvy he’s somewhere about, for he wasn’t dressed to go out, so to speak.”

“It’s most annoying,” Mrs. Featherstone Hogg said. “I suppose it is no use waiting for the Colonel—you don’t know when he will be in?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t—and that’s the truth. I don’t know where he’s gone, and I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

Mrs. Featherstone Hogg looked at him with disapproval, then she produced a brown paper parcel and laid it on the table. “You will give this parcel to Colonel Weatherhead directly he comes in,” she informed Simmons, “and tell him that I came down here specially to see him—you understand?”

Simmons replied that he did.

“It is very important,” said Mrs. Featherstone Hogg.

Colonel Weatherhead waited until he heard the car drive off before he emerged from his lair. He was even dirtier than he had been. There were spiders’ webs in his hair, his face was streaked with soil, and he had torn a jagged rent in his trousers with a nail. His language might have set fire to the toolshed if it had not been so damp—

Should he have another go at the Bishop, or should he return to the house and bathe? That was the question. He consulted his watch and found that there was half an hour before tea. He took up the fork and hesitated—bath or Bishop? A spider chose the moment to crawl over the Colonel’s ear.

“Ugh, damn and blast!” he cried, rubbing his ear with a thoroughly grimy hand, and decided for a bath. The decision had been made for him by a spider (not for the first time had this intelligent insect helped a gallant soldier to make an important decision at a critical moment. It will be remembered that Robert the Bruce was similarly guided). Robert Weatherhead put the fork into the toolshed and went up to the house.

Simmons was waiting for him when he emerged from the bathroom clean and pink as a newly washed baby.

“Mrs. Featherstone ’ogg was here, sir, and I was to say she came down special to see you, sir, and this parcel’s very important,” he recited glibly.

The Colonel slapped on his braces and grunted.

“I looked everywhere for you, sir.”

The Colonel grunted again.

Simmons laid the parcel on the dressing-table with reverent care and departed to the kitchen. He had shifted the responsibility of the parcel; his conscience was clear.

“I wonder where the old codger was,” he said to his wife as he sat down to his tea, and spread his bread with a liberal helping of butter and stretched out his arm for the jam.

“’Iding,” suggested Mrs. Simmons promptly.

“But I looked all over the place—I looked in the toolshed even—”

“More fool you!” retorted his better half scornfully. “If ’e ’ad bin in the toolshed it would ’ave meant ’e didn’t want to be found. What call ’ad you to be ’unting for the pore gentleman in the toolshed? None. If ’e didn’t want to be found it was yore place not to find ’im—see?”

Simmons saw. “You are a one!” he said in awed tones.

Colonel Weatherhead glanced at the mysterious parcel as he put on his collar and struggled with his stud—it looked like a book. He put out one hand and felt it—yes, it was a book; he could feel the hard edges of the cover through the brown paper. Why had Mrs. Featherstone Hogg sent him a book? What kind of a book would it be? Colonel Weatherhead was pretty certain that Mrs. Featherstone Hogg’s taste in literature was different from his—it would be one of those high-brow books, deadly dull. He left it on the dressing-table and went downstairs to have his tea. There was a novel of Buchan’s waiting for him to read; it had just come from the library—much more his style.

The Colonel drank his tea and read his Buchan. He was very comfortable after his exercise and his bath. He ate two crumpets. They were fattening, of course, but he felt entitled to them after his strenuous work.

At seven o’clock the telephone bell rang, and Simmons came to report that Mrs. Featherstone Hogg was on the line and wished to speak to him. Colonel Weatherhead lifted the receiver and heard a voice say—

“Have you read it?”

“Read what?”

“The book I left for you, of course.”

“Oh, yes. No, I haven’t read it yet. Been awfully busy, you know.”

“Read it,” said the voice that purported to be the voice of Mrs. Featherstone Hogg but did not sound like hers. “Read it immediately.”

“Yes, yes,” agreed the Colonel.

“I’m going to London on important business, but I shall be home on Saturday. I want to hear exactly what you think of it.”

“Yes, yes. All right, my dear lady,” soothed Colonel Weatherhead to the excited voice at the other end of the telephone, so unlike the usual languid, die-away tones of Mrs. Featherstone Hogg.

Something must have stung the old girl properly, he thought, as he returned to John Buchan and his comfortable fire.

That was Wednesday. It was not until Friday morning that he undid the wrappings of the book sent to him by Mrs. Featherstone Hogg, and looked at it curiously. He was sufficiently in awe of Mrs. Featherstone Hogg to feel that it would be wise to have read the book before she returned from London (or at any rate glanced through the thing). She would probably ring him up and ask him if he had done so. It was too much to hope that she would have forgotten all about it. Most people in Silverstream did what Mrs. Featherstone Hogg told them to do; it was easier in the long run, they found.

On first inspection the book seemed quite an ordinary sort of novel—not at all the high-brow stuff that he had expected. He started on it about eleven o’clock on Friday morning, for it was raining hard, and much too wet to go out and dig; besides he was somewhat stiff after a last struggle with the Bishop which had absorbed the major part of Thursday.

Disturber of the Peace amused him—“Damned good,” he commented as he read the description of Major Waterfoot, “not unlike that feller in the Dragoons.” At one o’clock he laid it on the table, open and face downward to keep his place, and went in to his solitary lunch. At one-thirty he was back in his chair, reading.

The rain fell steadily all afternoon and the Colonel read on. He chuckled once or twice and decided that the people were very real; it might almost be Silverstream. Simmons brought in his tea, and he continued to read.

Colonel Weatherhead finished the book about seven o’clock and sat and thought about it for a bit. It was an amusing and interesting book—he liked it—but he couldn’t see, for the life of him, why Mrs. Featherstone Hogg had been so excited about it. He would never have supposed that it was her style at all. The people in the book appealed to him; they were real live people, just the sort of people you met every day. Copperfield was a typical English village, and the people were typical English people. They were quite contented with their lot; they went on day after day doing the same things and saying the same things—a bit futile, wasn’t it? They never got anywhere; nothing ever happened to them except that they grew old. And then suddenly that Golden Boy came along with his pipes and stirred them all up. Fancy if a Golden Boy came to Silverstream and stirred us all up! Colonel Weatherhead thought. He reviewed his own life; it was pretty futile, pretty empty and lonely. It would become even more so as time went on and he got older and couldn’t do all the things he liked doing, such as walking, and digging, and fighting with the Bishop. Gradually all these things would desert him and he would be nothing but an old crusty crock. It was a horrible thought. He poked the fire fiercely, and went up to dress for his solitary dinner.

The evening stretched before him like a desert. Damn that book, he thought, it’s upset me. It’s upset me frightfully. Something queer about that book to upset me like this—

As he sipped his coffee he noticed that the rain was no longer beating against the windows. He pulled aside the blind and looked out; it was fine. The moon sailed like a silver crescent in a cloudless sky; the stars were brilliant.

“I shall go out, Simmons,” said the Colonel. “Bring my galoshes, will you?”

Simmons brought his galoshes and he went out. The air was very sweet after the rain. The moon silvered the leaves of the evergreens, the bushes dripped heavily, the hedge was a mass of diamonds. The moon turned the flooded paths to silvery streams.

“Dashed pretty!” said Colonel Weatherhead. It made him feel quite poetical. But all the same it was a sad eerie sort of scene, not the sort of scene to cheer you up when you were feeling a bit blue, not the sort of scene to be out in all by yourself. The gorgeous moonlight reminded the Colonel of that love scene he had just been reading about, when Major Waterfoot had proposed in such a dashing manner to the pretty Mrs. Mildmay. He had thought it “dashed good” at the time. It had made him feel quite young and ardent. That’s the way to propose to a woman, by Jove it is! he had thought. That fellow knows what he is writing about. But, unfortunately, thinking of it now, made the Colonel feel even lonelier than before.

He splashed along the drive in his galoshes and went through the gates on to the road; it would be cleaner on the road. Mrs. Bold’s small house was just opposite, he could see the lighted windows of her dressing-room through the—now almost bare—branches of the trees. The pink curtains which were drawn across the windows gave it a particularly cozy appearance.

“I haven’t seen her for days,” he said to himself, hesitating before the gate of Cozy Neuk. “Hope she’s not ill or anything. Nice sensible little woman—pretty too—perhaps it would be neighborly to inquire.”

He pushed the gate open and went in.

Mrs. Bold was sitting on a sofa by the fire making herself a “nightie” of peach-colored crêpe-de-chine. She huddled it into her work basket as the Colonel was announced and looked up, a trifle flustered.

“Just looked in to see how you were getting on,” he apologized.

“How nice of you! I was feeling so lonely,” said Mrs. Bold smiling at him pathetically.

By Jove, she was lonely too, thought Colonel Weatherhead—must be dashed lonely for a woman living by herself, and she was always so bright and cheery. Plucky little creature! Pretty little creature! He was emboldened to pat the hand which she held out to him—Mrs. Bold made no objection.

“Well,” he said, “it is lonely living alone—nobody to talk to or anything.” He sat down beside her on the sofa and told her all about how lonely he was, living in The Bridge House all by himself. Mrs. Bold listened and sympathized.

It was very cozy and comfortable in Mrs. Bold’s drawing-room. The fire burned brightly. Colonel Weatherhead noticed that it was composed of coal and logs—an ideal fire. He said so to his hostess. They talked about fires and found that their tastes tallied exactly—it was astonishing.

Colonel Weatherhead began to think he had been a fool. He had known Mrs. Bold for four years—she had lived opposite his gate for that period—and, although he had always liked and admired the little woman in a vague way, he had never, until this moment, realized how charming she was, how sensible and intelligent, how sympathetic.

He glanced at her sideways; her eyes were fixed upon the fire that irradiated her small round face with rosy light—how pretty she was! Her hair was pretty too. It was brown with reddish glints in it, and it curled prettily round her forehead and at the back of her neck. She was talking about the Coal People and telling Colonel Weatherhead what trouble she had with them. She had ordered two tons that morning, and the men had insisted on bringing the heavy carts into the garden instead of carrying it in bag by bag as they usually did. The consequence was they had broken a drain pipe which had been put too near the surface of the drive. She had known this would happen—it had happened before when she moved into the house and the furniture van had driven in—but the coal-man wouldn’t listen to her and now she would have to send for a plumber. Colonel Weatherhead had no idea—she told him—how dreadfully these sort of people imposed on a lone woman.

“Don’t be one anymore, Dorothea,” said Colonel Weather-head earnestly.

This fell far short of the dashing manner in which Major Waterfoot had proposed to Mrs. Mildmay, but it was quite as effective. Dorothea was in his arms and he was kissing her before he knew where he was—it was a delightful sensation.

The Colonel did not go home until it was quite late; the moon was still shining, but it did not make him feel sad, in fact it made him feel somewhat light-headed. Simmons and his wife had gone to bed long ago of course. The Colonel let himself into his silent house and went to bed also—he had all sorts of strange unusual feelings. Presently he went to sleep and dreamed about Dorothea.