‘Our friend Rich,’ the Archdeacon of Oxford had been known to say, ‘is inclined to view his sacerdotal function through somewhat antique spectacles. He might come straight out of Mansfield Park.’ Both these assertions were true, although the second stood in some need of qualification. Henry Rich had taken Holy Orders when the expression ‘the family living’ could still pass entirely without remark, and it was his expectation that his elder brother, Sir Richard Rich, would in due season present him as a proper person to enter into the enjoyment of just such a benefice. But – as not in the case of Miss Austen’s Edmund Bertram – there was some hitch in this convenient arrangement. Henry was not, of course, left out in the cold – there were Rich connections who saw to that – and he suffered no further inconvenience than finding himself, in the year 1933, installed in the vicarage of Mallows in a wholly unexpected part of England. The move brought him, indeed, within reach of his old Oxford college, where he held dining rights of a limited sort; hunting was possible with either the Heythrop or the Old Berks; there proved to be several landowners round about who were benevolently disposed to a parson who was no mean performer with a gun.
Henry was an out-of-doors man and something of an athlete; at Oxford (and this we cannot very readily imagine of Edmund Bertram) he had stroked his college Eight. But he was also quite intelligent after a fashion (it was thus that his tutor spoke of young Rich) and this rendered him occasionally vulnerable to religious doubt. In the main, however, he managed comfortably enough, regarding the priesthood as simply one of the professions open to a gentleman, in which from day to day there is honest work to be done.
When he had been some twelve years at Mallows ill-fortune befell Henry Rich. His wife died, and he was left with their only child, a girl called Penelope, who was scarcely out of her nursery. His physical constitution, which remained exceedingly robust in middle age, for long prompted the expectation that he would marry again, if only for the simplest of carnal reasons. But no such marriage took place. He had been devoted to his wife, and although sexual deprivation was disagreeable it somehow didn’t occur to him not to accept it. Being pestered in the matter by several ladies on either their own or a friend’s behalf, he even made some changes in his clerical attire suggesting the sort of Anglican High Churchiness that flirts with the doctrine and discipline of clerical celibacy. There was an incongruity about this fox-hunting parson in a soutane that many did not fail to remark. It increased a certain distrust of the vicar which, although seldom spoken aloud, was perceptible among a number of his parishioners. But the older cottagers liked him, saying that he reminded them of Squire Winton, who had owned Mallows Hall before it was bought by the Ferneydales.
‘Papa,’ Penelope Rich asked over the breakfast table one morning early in her ninth year, ‘are the Ferneydales good people?’
Here might have been supposed a question very proper to be propounded by a clergyman’s daughter as touching the moral probity of near neighbours. But it was not in this sense that it had been put – a fact indicative of a certain oddity in the notions to which Penelope was being brought up.
‘Well, not exactly, my dear,’ Mr Rich said amiably. (He was commonly a very good-natured man.) ‘They have been respectable people, I don’t doubt, for quite a long time. But in a somewhat humble station.’
‘A station?’ Penelope repeated, puzzled. The word suggested a distant and glamorous region to her, since the nearest railway line was four miles off. On a quiet day, and when the wind was right, you could sometimes faintly hear, romantic as the horns blowing in a tale of chivalry, the long drawn out wail of a steam locomotive.
‘Mr Ferneydale’s father,’ Mr Rich continued, ‘was, I believe, an officer in the Indian Army.’
This seemed romantic too, but was evidently designed as not to be received in a wholly favourable light.
‘But, Papa’ – Penelope spoke as if concerned to vindicate the importance of the Ferneydales – ‘they live in a very big house.’
‘It is certainly bigger than the vicarage.’ Watching his daughter finish her porridge, and helping himself to marmalade, Mr Rich laughed easily at this comical conversation. ‘Mr Ferneydale is in business. He is what is called a business man. Business men are concerned to make money, as people like ourselves are not. And Mr Ferneydale, I suppose, has succeeded at it rather well.’
Mr Rich was far from speaking as one who held his neighbour and principal parishioner in disregard. The Ferneydales were rich (or so it was believed) and the Riches were poor. But it was the Riches who were, beyond cavil, good people, and a knowledge of this was an element in the perfect complacency with which the vicar regarded the family at the Hall. There was nothing wrong with their manners. The men had been at decent public schools. They did their duty – or at least the parents did – by the parish. James Ferneydale himself even read the lessons on Sunday morning from time to time. It was true that the fellow was rather far from professing himself a believer. But Henry Rich couldn’t quarrel with him here, since he had become a little shaky about the Thirty-Nine Articles a good many years back.
‘I like Fulke and Caspar Ferneydale,’ Penelope said decidedly.
‘They appear to be very nice boys – or, rather, young men now.’ The vicar had sometimes wondered how the Ferneydales had come to give their two sons those Christian names. ‘Their father has told me that there is less than a year between them.’
‘So that they just missed being twins?’
‘Hardly that.’ Mr Rich realised that the facts of life would have to be communicated to Penelope quite soon by one means or another. ‘And they are very far from being like twins; from resembling each other, that is, in any way.’
‘I like watching them play tennis. I think I understand the rules now, and the funny way of scoring. I’m going to play tennis in my first term at school. And then they’ll let me play with them sometimes, perhaps.’
‘Do you know, I have enjoyed occasionally watching Fulke and Caspar on the tennis court too?’ The vicar’s voice had changed slightly. There was nobody much in the parish with whom to talk except in the most discouragingly banal fashion. And already, without being clearly aware of it, he was coming from time to time to treat his daughter as an intelligent grown-up. ‘If you know the game fairly well – as I think I do – you see something that bears out what I’m saying: that the brothers are very unlike each other. Fulke’s play is imaginative, at times almost freakish – whereas Caspar’s is logical. Fulke brings off something that surprises himself; Caspar thinks out a rally as it goes along.’
‘What does that mean about which of them is best, and likely to win prizes?’ On these occasions Penelope could herself usually manage a bit of a rally; she felt that when her father became interesting like this it was up to her to try hard.
‘That’s a difficult question. Success in games doesn’t depend entirely on the choice and mastery of one or another technique. There’s the factor of who most wants to win. Which of these brothers is most a games-player at heart? I think it may be Fulke.’
‘You mean Fulke is more determined?’
‘Perhaps more determined about some things, and less determined about others. They’re both said to be clever. But Caspar is possibly something of an intellectual: a highbrow, as the Americans say. Not powerfully so, perhaps. But the inclination is there.’
Penelope was now out of her depth. But she understood that an analytical comparison was still in progress.
‘Mrs Gibbins,’ she said, ‘has told me Fulke used to do funny things when he was younger.’ Mrs Gibbins was the cook. ‘But not as young as me.’
Mr Rich didn’t respond to this information. He disapproved of gossiping with servants. Instead, he reflected that Penelope, being indeed quite young, was likely to prove a heavy and sometimes perplexing responsibility for many years ahead. He even wondered whether it had been part of his duty to make that second marriage, thereby providing her with such sustained guidance and support as a stepmother might afford. But that, as we have seen, hadn’t happened, and he felt it to be too late now. Vaguely in his mind had been the thought that it would do honour to his wife’s memory so to contrive matters that their child would one day be mistress in the house from which her mother had been so untimely taken away. But equally – he told himself in a momentary dejection – some sort of selfishness had been at work. He had entrenched himself anew in bachelor habits, and sunk surprisingly deep in them. In none but the most privy relations of life could he imagine the arrival of a strange woman in his household as other than a discommodity and vexation. So he had worked out Penelope’s immediate future in terms of governesses and a boarding-school. Mrs Gibbins, a most respectable woman, had been given some extra money and the style of housekeeper. Fortunately she already bore unquestioned authority over the two other maidservants in the vicarage.
‘Before you can give the Ferneydales a game,’ Mr Rich said, ‘you will have to play a good deal of tennis at school, my dear. And perhaps at home too.’
‘At home, Papa?’
‘It has been in my mind that we ought to have a tennis court. That we are without one is almost an unsuitable thing. Perhaps it might be a hard court, since they are said to be so satisfactory nowadays.’
‘That would be very nice,’ Penelope said – composedly, although she was round-eyed. She already understood, indeed, that the poverty of the Riches was of a comparative order. Her father kept two hunters – and without any possibility of pretending that they were ‘dual purpose’ horses. She herself had a pony while several of her friends had to put up with bicycles. But that a tennis court might suddenly appear at the vicarage struck her as very wonderful indeed.
‘But, Papa,’ she asked virtuously, ‘are you sure we can afford it?’
‘With some tightening of the belt elsewhere, my dear.’ Mr Rich, who was far from being a slim-waisted man, patted himself humorously on the stomach. ‘I myself would like to play a little more than I am able to do at present. At my age, you know, a man oughtn’t to let himself get too heavy for the saddle.’ The vicar said this with the robust conviction he was accustomed to employ when addressing similar admonitions on the Christian life to his humbler parishioners. ‘Everybody has a duty to keep fit.’
‘Yes, Papa.’
‘And now let us think of another duty, Penelope. Are you properly prepared for Mrs Martin today?’ Mrs Martin was the current governess, and designed as being the last. She was a vigorous woman who arrived on foot from a neighbouring hamlet every morning, rain or shine, at nine o’clock.
‘Yes, I think so. Except that I still have some sentences to translate into French.’
‘Then go along and see what you can do about them.’
Being at this time a well-conducted child, Penelope Rich did as she was told and withdrew to the schoolroom, leaving her father to consider more fully the project to which he had more or less committed himself. It was true that he would himself enjoy being able to play tennis other than at the invitation of friends, which was how the matter stood at present. The importance of ‘keeping his form’ (and he didn’t mean in the pulpit) was very real to him. His own father had failed in this regard, turned flabby, and taken to the bottle: a course of things which would be even more censurable in a clergyman than a baronet. His brother Richard, the present holder of the title, was certainly not going to go that way. Richard was an abstinent character — except, indeed, in bed, where he had begotten no fewer than five sons, thereby ensuring that nothing short of unspeakable catastrophe would do anything much for their uncle. Richard was set to become an octogenarian — or a nonagenarian, for that matter — only the more assuredly because he didn’t hunt and had therefore almost no chance of breaking his neck. Henry bore no conscious wish to survive his elder brother, and would not have done so even had he been that brother’s heir. But he did feel it would be agreeable to wear as well, even in such a trivial matter as continuing to play tolerable tennis at sixty.
Nevertheless it was Penelope he was genuinely considering. As she grew older it would be increasingly important that her home should be attractive to her friends; in particular to suitable schoolfellows when she got round to inviting them to come and stay at the vicarage during holidays. Not all children were taught to ride nowadays. There were people of very good family so wretchedly circumstanced that they simply couldn’t find the money for it. But most children played tennis. So a tennis court would be just the right thing, and the cost of its upkeep would be considerably less than that of maintaining the ability to mount three or four young people at a time.
Having finished his breakfast (and after retiring, with a healthy brevity, into what his mother had called private life), Mr Rich went to his study to attend to his correspondence. It was seldom an invigorating task, and the room itself had always struck him as the most depressing in the whole commodiously ugly Victorian house. Architects of that period had felt that clergymen, although entitled to materials and workmanship of the first quality, ought to be so equipped as to afford their peculiar position in society visible embodiment, tangible authentication, in whatever direction they looked or moved. This held especially of an apartment in which sermons were to be composed and godly thoughts entertained. The windows of Mr Rich’s study were of gothic configuration and embellished with blobs and rims of coloured glass; the woodwork was of a vestry-like pitch pine; on the encaustic tiles constituting the floor there were to be distinguished designs of half-hearted and non-romish liturgical suggestion; the two doors swung on massive and ramifying wrought-iron hinges, as if they gave not on a breakfast-room and a lobby respectively, but on some superior line in mediaeval tombs. Mr Rich seldom got through his parochial chores amid these surroundings without some fleeting thought of the elegant Georgian rectory of which he had been cheated through that hitch in the matter of the family living. On this occasion he licked his last postage-stamp with satisfaction and made for the open air.
The garden at least was to his taste; reflected his taste, indeed, since he had taken a good deal of care with it. It was under control without being in a suburban fashion tidy and trim, as if here nature could be trusted on a loose rein. Sometimes, when the Old Berks drew the nearer coverts, the pack would come yelping and lolloping across the lawns and even through the flower-beds, while the field waited, strategically poised here and there on the open land beyond. And the damage would be only so much as one could chuckle over or moderately swear about at the end of the day’s last run.
Bounding the garden to the south was a stream, and beyond the stream lay the glebe. But just short of this was a flat expanse of turf supposed to have been at one time a bowling green, but now for long resigned to the obscure activities of moles. Mr Rich had been assured that this area was sufficiently elevated above the water, and sufficiently susceptible of enlargement, to admit of the construction of a tennis court on its site. For some minutes he paced up and down in verification of this – moving briskly, since it was a February day of bright sunshine and hard frost. The sun was important; one had to consider how it would be behaving on those late afternoons in summer when play was most likely to be taking place. And then there were the moles: how were they to be eradicated, or at least humanely moved on? Formerly there had been a professional mole-catcher in the village, but when he died nobody had inherited the job. A great many things had changed during and since the war, and now close ahead was the dip into the second half of the twentieth century. Mr Rich – particularly if a little off-colour – was given to reflecting on the unimaginable touch of time – blunting the lion’s paws and burning the long-liv’d phoenix in her blood. He occasionally referred sombrely to these effects (and incomprehensibly to the rural mind) in his sermons.
But unless we believe, with some weird sects, that the Grand Combustion lies just round the corner, we have to plan ahead intelligently, despite the fact that an everlasting stream is busy bearing us all away. Mr Rich himself had the duty in particular of so planning ahead for Penelope. He was conscious that he had not always borne financial considerations sufficiently in mind when endeavouring to do this. His manner of life – apart, perhaps, from those two hunters, which were certainly unexampled among the clergy of the diocese – appeared to him in no way inappropriate to a man in his position who was not wholly without private means. The private means, however, were something of a headache. They had been diminishing steadily, and it was even possible to feel that they might one day evaporate altogether amid the disorders of the times. What if his daughter failed to marry – or, what would almost be worse, married some totally penniless person? It was true that a small income was secured to her under a family trust, but it was no more than might decently stand in for a dowry. It would certainly not support her in single life. If that were to be her fate, she would actually have to earn the better part of her living. In an office, it was to be supposed, and as a typewriter. That a Rich might have to become a typewriter was a dire possibility indeed.
Perhaps because from this corner of the vicarage grounds the roof of Mallows Hall was clearly visible, the vicar found his mind turning again to Fulke and Caspar Ferneydale. He was far from clear as to whether or not he regretted their being respectively ten and nine years older than his daughter. Penelope hadn’t yet gone to school; these boys were already liberated from it and in their first year at Oxford. That they had gone up to the university in the same term didn’t necessarily mean that Caspar was brighter or more precocious than his elder brother. One boy might hang on at a public school even beyond his nineteenth birthday in order to enjoy coveted power and status as a prefect or the like, while another might want to be quit of the place as quickly as he could. This had perhaps been how it stood with the Ferneydales; it chimed in with the vicar’s sense – based on only casual association – of the difference between them. Penelope was clearly in the condition of vastly admiring them both indifferently. But the situation was such that she would never be put to the trouble of significantly preferring one to the other.
In a general way one would like one’s child to be of an age with what might be thought of as potentially eligible neighbours. But on the whole Mr Rich was well content that Fulke and Caspar would in all probability be married men before Penelope came out. No doubt acceptable and remunerative careers lay ahead of them, and he had no positive reason to suppose that their characters were other than unexceptionable. Nevertheless his approval of them was accompanied by reservations. They weren’t exactly – or not so far as he knew – rebels against the accepted order of things as that order was conceived of by people like himself. But at the same time, if in an indefinable way, they didn’t quite fit in.
At this point in his ruminations the vicar left his own property through a small gate giving directly on the park of Mallows Hall. James Ferneydale was very insistent that this territory should be regarded by his neighbours, whether gentle or simple, as available to them to walk abroad in and recreate themselves. He made it known that he would wish even his gardens to be similarly accessible. Nobody treated this second wish as other than a somewhat excessive expression of courtesy, indicative of at least a residual sense of social insecurity. But the park was a different matter, and Mr Rich took a short turn in it on most fine days, since this was agreeable in itself and moreover furthered good informal relations with its owner.
His favourite route was round an artificial expanse of water, just large enough to be known as the lake, which lay in a hollow near the centre of the park. It was stocked with water-fowl of an ornamental sort, and in the summer holidays the Ferneydale boys had been accustomed to make it their bathing place. Circling it now, the vicar recalled how, four or five years before, he had come upon them thus engaged – with a very small Penelope sitting on the bank, clasping a doll and seriously regarding them. Diving, swimming, spread-eagled on the grass, the brothers afforded a pleasant spectacle, and Mr Rich had felt no strong prompting to consider it as marred by the fact that they were entirely naked. The young Ferneydales were in a secluded part of their own property, and moreover, as he happened to know, merely maintaining a convention that obtained in the open air swimming pool at their public school. Had Penelope possessed brothers, he would have been far from insisting that their state of nature should invariably be concealed from her – although he might, somewhat illogically, have entertained doubts about the propriety of nudity exhibited the other way on.
He had felt a certain uneasiness upon that occasion, nevertheless. Fulke and Caspar were already far from being small boys. They were tall youths, with the signs of their adolescence apparent upon them. And anybody – some neighbour’s maidservant, say, straying aside a little when on an errand to the Hall – might come upon this spectacle unawares. What would the young Ferneydales do then? Would they dive headlong and remain submerged to the chin until the indecorous moment passed, or would they continue capering and showing off? Even as it was, ought they not perhaps to have responded a little more sensitively to the appearance on the bank of a gazing small girl? Mr Rich had known perfectly well that these questions were silly, and he even accused himself of bearing in the matter something very like a prurient mind. But they did betray the fact that in some obscure fashion he slightly distrusted Fulke and Caspar Ferneydale. Later he was to ask himself more than once whether Penelope’s continued lively interest in the young males at the Hall had its origin in an incident which, probably enough, was no longer within her conscious memory.
Having rounded the deserted lake on the present occasion, Mr Rich returned home without lingering. The air was chilly still, and moreover it was the day of the week upon which he commonly took a cup of mid-morning coffee with Mrs Martin, and perhaps received from her some account of Penelope’s progress. Mrs Martin would not have gone down at all well as any sort of dependant at Mansfield Park; quite as much as Henry Rich she had been brought up on horseback; and although now the impoverished widow of an unsuccessful barrister she had no notion that a governess’s place in society is of a lowly and inconsiderable sort. Mr Rich (who shared a good many ideas with Sir Thomas Bertram) had been a little put off by her at first, but had taken to her as soon as he discovered that she got on with her pupil particularly well. Lately he had felt bound to acknowledge that it was sometimes from Mrs Martin that he learnt things about Penelope which, had he been a more talented parent, he would have found out for himself. He was even coming to regret the fact that with the child booked to go off to boarding-school so soon the connection with Mrs Martin must be terminated. Might it not be better that his daughter should continue to be educated at home in the old-fashioned way? Mrs Martin appeared to have a good command of French and German, and he himself could manage Latin and – if such erudition seemed desirable – a little New Testament Greek. There was something pleasant and edifying in the thought of taking Penelope through one of the Gospels in that way.
So over the coffee-cups in the schoolroom, and with the child despatched to attend to her pony, Mr Rich made a cautious approach to these possibilities. Mrs Martin had never evinced any design to set her cap at him, but he had become habitually on his guard against embarrassing misapprehension where eligible ladies were concerned. It would be very dreadful if he appeared merely to be seeking a pretext for securing the governess’s continued presence at the vicarage. As it was, Mrs Martin listened to him patiently, and then gave short shrift to his observations.
‘There is little to be said, Mr Rich, for preparing a child to live in the manner of its grandparents. Penelope will have to make her way in totally different circumstances.’
‘Surely it is young men, Mrs Martin, who have to “make their way” in that sense? When a girl marries—’
‘Not all girls marry.’
‘That, of course, is true.’ Mr Rich had to admit to himself that the possibility of this misfortune befalling his daughter had lately been in his own head.
‘Many girls brought up in households like your own are obliged to earn their living, and some are determined to do so, whether they have to or not. Your daughter may turn out to be in one or other of these categories – which may indeed be called the coming thing. And she would be handicapped if she had been denied the companionship, and the stimulus and spirit of emulation and competition, fostered in a good school. Again, she may well want to go to one of the universities.’
‘Good heavens!’ The vicar was at once intrigued and alarmed by this conjecture. ‘You don’t mean she’s going to be an intellectual?’
‘At least she is going to have a clear head. As for Oxford or Cambridge, a girl almost as much as a boy is at a disadvantage if simply privately coached or crammed for entrance to a college.’ Having thus spoken with severity, Mrs Martin felt it judicious to let Mr Rich a little off the hook. ‘I consider that your existing proposals for Penelope are thoroughly sound.’
‘I am glad to hear that. I value your opinion highly, as you must be aware.’ The vicar actually contrived a small formal bow over his cup and saucer as he said this – rather with the effect of an eighteenth-century gentleman ‘taking wine’ with a meritorious fellow-diner. ‘But I have a further point in mind. Even at good schools now I gather that one is likely to find a very mixed crowd. For a boy it may be neither here nor there. Indeed, the minor public schools, Rugby and Radley and Repton and Rossall and such places – what one may call the littera canina crowd – were developed largely as melting-pots.’ Mr Rich paused for a moment, perhaps to allow Mrs Martin to catch up with his small learned joke about the doggy letter. ‘They gave the right cast of mind, you know, to the sons of newly prosperous persons. But it is rather different, surely, in the case of a girl. If she makes school-friends outside her own sort of people, undesirable consequences may obviously follow. Their brothers may turn up. That sort of thing.’
‘Certainly brothers have everywhere the habit of turning up.’ Mrs Martin briefly paused on this, glancing at Mr Rich much in the manner of a naturalist considering whether some small fossilised creature merits preservation under glass. ‘You wouldn’t care for the idea of Penelope marrying outside what you call her own sort of people?’
‘Decidedly not. And surely you agree with me?’
‘I have some reason for not doing so, Mr Rich. My father, as you may possibly have heard, was a respectable figure in the county: its Lord Lieutenant, in fact. My husband’s father was an engine-driver. Neither Jack nor I found the fact of a discrepant parenthood either here or there.’
‘How very interesting!’ The vicar uttered this exclamation only in the most feeble fashion. He was appalled at the enormity of his faux pas. It was the more unforgivable in that he could now dimly recall having heard some account of Mrs Martin’s distressing history. Charitably, he reflected that with such a mésalliance behind her she had done remarkably well.
‘I don’t know that I’d call it particularly interesting,’ Mrs Martin said. ‘But it has appealed to Penelope.’
‘To Penelope!’ The vicar was startled. Indeed, he gave an actual small jump, as he might have done at the appearance of a mouse in his pulpit. ‘You have told Penelope the—um—story of your marriage?’
‘Dear me, yes. We have had several conversations about marriage, and husbands and wives, and how babies arrive, and that sort of thing.’
Mr Rich almost said ‘How very interesting!’ again. It was disconcerting thus to discover that Mrs Martin took so broad a view of her pedagogic function, and that had he himself got round to the facts of life with his daughter in the manner he had recently been envisaging, it would have been to find that this somewhat commanding lady had been there before him. He might even have embarked on the subject, been tempted to soften one or two of its odder aspects, and suffered correction by a Penelope who knew just what went where. The thought of this grossness rendering him in fact speechless, he simply waited for what more Mrs Martin had to say.
‘Penelope happens to have a romantic view of engine-drivers, and when I told her about Jack’s father I went up in her estimation at once. I was reminded of a cousin of mine who took jobs as a private tutor in Vienna between the wars. Several of his pupils were utterly insufferable until he happened to tell them that he knew Edgar Wallace. It was a slight exaggeration, since he’d merely watched the great writer drink a bottle of whisky while holding forth to some undergraduate society. But he declared himself to have been personlich bekannt to this greatest of living Englishmen, and he was regarded with positive awe from then on.’
‘I hope Penelope was not insufferable until enlightened about your father-in-law, dear lady.’ The vicar found himself saying this with so much recovered good humour and courtly aplomb that he realised anew that he and Mrs Martin got on very well together. Her employment was humble, but she was out of the right stable and you knew where you were with her.
‘Penelope was delightful from the start: impetuous at times, but quick to acknowledge a mistake once she became aware of it as that. And I can at least assure you that she doesn’t intend to marry into engine-driving circles. She has quite other ideas.’
‘God bless my soul! The child loses no time in looking ahead. To an MFH, perhaps? Or a tennis champion or a polar explorer?’
‘Penelope intends to marry a poet.’
‘A poet!’
‘Or a deep philosopher. I think she has quite a lively idea of what a poet is. And there is a deep philosopher in one of her comic picture- books. He sits in a room full of enormous tomes, and is alone except for a cat. I don’t feel we need be disturbed over the deep philosopher. But the poet, of course, is another matter. I think he will probably be rather like Shelley.’
Mr Rich saw that he was being made gentle fun of. It seemed to him that – in a harmless way – it was unfairly. He would have acknowledged that he was a man of somewhat conventional mind, and that he had just exhibited a commonplace view of what might be in a young girl’s head. But it wasn’t true that he would prefer a polar explorer to a poet, or even a tennis champion to a deep philosopher, in the character of a son-in-law. He read a little poetry every day, and also believed that if he ever committed anything to the press it would be an unassuming treatise of a philosophical nature – for wasn’t he, after all, much interested in that most intractable of metaphysical conundrums, the Problem of Time?
‘What you are really telling me,’ he said, ‘is something that a parent is no doubt prone to forget, and so I am grateful. A daughter, like a son, has a mind of her own, and a right to such a mind. To oppose any rationally defensible inclination to which it may come is a step to be taken only after the most anxious thought. I invariably make the point when, as sometimes happens, I am consulted in such a situation by parishioners. And I hope I’d stick to it myself. Were Penelope indeed resolved at some future time to go up to one of the ladies’ colleges at Oxford I don’t doubt that I should eventually concur in the plan – although I might endeavour to recommend Cambridge, where the women have pitched their camps not quite so close to the men. But marriage is a little different.’
‘It is a different branch of education, I suppose.’
‘Quite so.’ Mr Rich had been uncertain whether this remark was intended as a witticism. There had been an educational aspect to his own marriage, but he had thought of it as consisting in schooling his wife in the consequence of the Riches and the sound conservative views proper to be held in the household of a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England. ‘I must confess again,’ he now said, ‘that I should be unhappy were Penelope to marry other than into our settled and traditional country society.’
‘But there is little left either settled or traditional about it, Mr Rich – at least if by “country” you mean “county”, as you almost certainly do.’ Mrs Martin, a sensible woman but not without her hobbyhorses, seemed suddenly to have decided there were things the Vicar of Mallows ought to hear. ‘My father talked about the “county” without the slightest self-consciousness. But now it’s a word like “gentleman” – which is what you are when you enter a public lavatory. There’s a Cambridge don – male, you’ll be glad to know – at Trinity, who has coined the phrase “the gentry of aspiration”. They go back quite a long way, of course. Both Nimrod and Surtees knew them on your hunting-field. But now there are far more of them than there are of your relations, or mine. They are probably the people who are tough enough to take England through what is coming to us. But I suppose we have our prejudices, all the same. Some of them say “the county” so that you curl your toes.’
‘That is perfectly true.’ The vicar was astonished by the cogency of this remark. It was as if he had gone through life hitherto supposing that toe-curling was a discomfort peculiar to himself alone.
‘Have you ever reckoned how many country houses – “country houses” in the old sense – within visiting distance of Mallows are owned by the same families as a hundred years ago? For that matter, do you know how many, throughout England, were simply demolished last year? Five every week.’
‘Gracious lady, spare me!’ Mr Rich had taken refuge in a whimsical dismay. ‘Tempus ferox, tempus edax rerum.’
‘Time has certainly gobbled up the squirarchy, and it will be the turn of their betters next.’
‘Their betters?’ The vicar was amazed.
‘The great houses are tumbling after the big ones, are they not? Or they’re at least what’s called “opening up” as show places at half-a-crown a head. I expect your neighbours the Ferneydales may be doing it soon. Although perhaps the Hall is not quite grand enough.’
‘No Ferneydales by Reynolds or Gainsborough, eh? An odd name, isn’t it? Never heard of it, until those folk arrived in the neighbourhood.’
‘It holds at least a pleasingly rural suggestion. And I believe some such name to have been borne by a well-reputed musician.’
‘Is that so?’ The vicar’s tone conveyed both a proper respect for the arts and an underlying sense that a fiddler or the like might be called anything. ‘But what we are talking about does constitute a most disturbing trend, of course. Knocking down decent houses, and so forth.’ Mr Rich glanced rather misdoubtfully at Mrs Martin, whose tone struck him as lacking the elegiac quality proper to the topic on which they had embarked. He supposed that he was again being made fun of in a fashion. ‘As for James Ferneydale, he’s a fellow in some big commercial way, and can’t stand in need of taking pennies at the door. But it certainly couldn’t be said that his family’s connection with Mallows is lost in the mists of antiquity.’ Mr Rich laughed his secure and good-humoured laugh. ‘Any more than mine is—eh, Mrs Martin? Not that one can be sure that money of that sort – the stock market and so on – will still be found tomorrow where it is today. I was thinking about the younger Ferneydales earlier this morning, as a matter of fact, when I was taking my usual turn in the park. Penelope is something of an admirer of the young men. But of course they are too old for her. For dances, and so on. As “escorts”, as people say nowadays. I doubt whether they are much aware of her existence – any more, I’m sorry to say, than they are of mine.’
‘But if they continue much at home, they may improve their acquaintance, if not with you, yet with Penelope in all sorts of ways.’ Mrs Martin’s amusement at the direction in which the vicar’s mind was moving was not completely masked. ‘And what is ten years, after all? You might return from an afternoon’s pastoral care – or even an afternoon’s fishing – and find that either Fulke or Caspar had carried your daughter off to Gretna Green.’
‘Now you want to make my flesh creep.’ Mr Rich said this indulgently, but in a tone which at the same time hinted that here was enough of levity. And Mrs Martin, if with a mild irony, at once became more circumspect.
‘But I don’t know that they will continue much at home,’ she said. ‘They don’t often turn up at people’s parties, but I run into them from time to time, and I’m always pleased when it happens. There’s a certain liveliness in their talk, which I imagine is already standing them in good stead at Oxford. It’s something we are a little short of in these parts.’
‘It is, indeed, Mrs Martin – and one of the reasons why I so much enjoy running into you.’ This sort of compliment was something that the vicar knew how to carry off very well. ‘Do the young Ferneydales complain about us as a dull crowd at Mallows?’
‘It may be what they say to one another, but they don’t to me, any more than they would to you. There’s nothing boorish about them. All they do is to express themselves as a little baffled by those who find steady satisfaction in country pursuits.’
‘They certainly don’t hunt.’
‘No, indeed. Fulke says he doesn’t like horses, and Caspar declares that he finds Jeremy Bentham’s condemnation of killing foxes for sport to be unanswerable, and that he can’t understand how a man who would feel insulted by an invitation to go cock-fighting or bull-baiting is content to make a far greater nuisance of himself hallooing over the countryside, pursuing one quadruped while bestriding a second and urging on a whole rabble of howling and snuffling others.’
‘One has to acknowledge that very generous feelings may be enlisted in the case against fox-hunting.’ Mr Rich said this stoutly and honestly at once – while at the same time telling himself how right was his instinct a little to distrust the young men at the Hall. ‘But I wish I knew them rather better,’ he went on conscientiously. ‘They do at least sound stimulating. Do you know much about their more positive interests?’
‘Caspar, I think, is inclined to be studious.’
‘Ah, yes! I believe I’d have guessed that. Walks about with a book under his arm.’ Mr Rich, being by profession a clerk and man of learning, naturally didn’t say this in a disparaging way. But he didn’t sound exactly approbatory, either.
‘So he does. And he much wants to be up to date. So the book is probably by Kierkegaard.’
‘Kierkegaard?’ The vicar was puzzled. ‘Kierkegaard was some sort of gloomy Dane. Like Hamlet, you might say, seeing everything out of joint at Elsinore. But he must have died more than a hundred years ago. He can’t even be as up to date as the old bore Ibsen.’
‘He may have returned into vogue. Indeed, I have gathered so much from Caspar himself. Caspar tells me that he has clarified his speculative position and finds himself to be an Existentialist.’
‘Finds himself a fiddlestick! He’s a schoolboy – or was, the day before yesterday. And we’re all for existing, I suppose: foxes and fox-hunters and natterers about cruel blood-sports.’ Mr Rich, who had begun this speech in his most tolerant tone, seemed to regret its having gone astray. ‘But Fulke,’ he went on quickly, ‘—what about him?’
‘Fulke is a very observing young man. I have even teased him as being just like a private eye.’
‘Like a what?’ The vicar was at a loss before this strange expression.
‘A kind of up-dated Sherlock Holmes, with a very pale-blue and penetrating gaze. I am rather inclined to respect it in Fulke Ferneydale. He seems to me to possess real intellectual curiosity. Of course he expresses it in a half-baked way. I asked him once what he intended to do when he left Oxford, and he told me that he was going to be an experimental psychologist.’
‘And just what is that, Mrs Martin?’
‘I asked him that too. He said it is one who subjects a human guinea-pig to excessive bewilderments and notes the precise length of time that these take to drive the unfortunate individual mad.’
‘I don’t think I like the sound of Fulke.’
‘He may be better than he sounds. Remember that he is only a nineteen-year-old boy, conscious of ability and bored with his home surroundings – and that he was being badgered by an elderly female who goes about teaching children their ABC.’
‘I can’t see you badgering anybody, Mrs Martin. But you do appear to be quite interested in this young man.’ Mr Rich made his remark sound ever so slightly comical. Stopping just short of facetiousness was part of the technique of what Mrs Martin called his pastoral care.
‘It would be very tiresome to him if it were apparently so. Perhaps I am just a little bored myself. But I hope that at least I don’t seem vulgarly inquisitive when I have the chance of casual talk with Fulke Ferneydale. For I do feel that he is a young man with a secret.’
‘Dear me!’ The vicar disapproved, if not of a young man having a secret, at least of his revealing the fact to a lady. ‘Does Fulke go out of his way to suggest himself as intriguingly mysterious?’
‘Nothing of the sort. It is a wholly involuntary betrayal. Or you may say I simply divine that he knows something about himself – perhaps something about a bent or capacity – which Mallows would find perplexing. But I don’t think it’s anything sinister. He certainly doesn’t give the impression of being without a good deal of confidence about himself. He is an ambitious youth.’
‘You make me feel remiss, Mrs Martin, in not knowing more about him. Only this morning I was speaking confidently, indeed, to Penelope about how the brothers play tennis. But that is a matter of quite superficial observation, and beyond it I have only a general notion of their differing temperaments. The truth is I feel a little diffident about the young Ferneydales, since I can scarcely claim them as belonging to my flock. Neither of them has so much as come to matins of a Sunday for many months. It may be sloth – in itself not a trivial weakness. But I sadly fear they see themselves positively as highly enlightened infidels.’
‘I don’t know about Fulke. Caspar has recently been received into the Roman Catholic Church.’
‘Good heavens!’ The vicar had sprung to his feet in great agitation. ‘The boy might at least have let me know. My predecessor christened him, and he was confirmed at his school in the normal and proper way. It’s a most uncivil thing.’
‘That is one aspect of it, no doubt.’
‘I have always thought of Caspar Ferneydale as at least decently brought up. How can he have decided to flout me in so grave a case?’
Mrs Martin might have said, ‘He disapproves of your hunting’, or even, ‘He laughs at your going about in les jupes.’ But she had been needlessly upsetting, and regretted it. So she held her peace.
‘You don’t think that Fulke’s precious secret may simply be that he has become a Hindu?’ The vicar achieved this sarcasm only with an effort. ‘And the boy’s father!’ he burst out again. ‘He ought surely to have alerted me. It’s a serious matter – perversion to papistry in a household of some standing in the neighbourhood. I’d never have supposed James Ferneydale capable of being so neglectful of a duty. It will be my own duty to make my displeasure known to him.’
‘If you feel you must tackle somebody, ought it not to be Caspar in person?’ Mrs Martin, who liked Mr Rich and didn’t care to think of him doing something foolish, was unconcerned at any failure to comport herself as a governess should. ‘And in a spirit of friendly enquiry, really. I gather there are Catholic Existentialists, but it nevertheless sounds a little heterodox. You might ask Caspar to explain that particular position. Positions are rather his thing. He is still very young in all his ways, of course, but he has a restless intelligence which promises I don’t know what. He might enjoy informed conversation with you. I doubt whether either his brother or his father is much interested in theological questions. And although I’m inclined to think that Fulke has the most interesting character in the family I’m fairly confident that Caspar has the most interesting mind.’
During these composing remarks the vicar had taken a turn up and down his daughter’s schoolroom. And when he came to a halt before his daughter’s governess it was to an unexpected effect.
‘Dear lady,’ he said, ‘you may well be right. I give weight to your words, as I should always wish to do, and it may be that I would indeed be wrong were I to make a personal matter of this. We live, after all, in an ecumenical age. We must remember that an eirenic spirit is abroad, and that in its light the Christian Church is to be seen as essentially one and indivisible. Caspar Ferneydale may cure himself of his vagary, and if he is as intellectual as you appear to believe he will arrive all the more quickly at a perception of the errors of Rome.’
Mr Rich (who believed strongly in comfortable states of mind) had arrived at this more accommodating view of things with surprising speed, and certainly without any sense of involving his argument in contradiction. Mrs Martin might have congratulated herself on handling the situation with considerable address. But in fact as she walked home at the end of the day’s lessons it was in a self-critical mood.
On the question of Penelope’s future education, indeed, she had managed well enough. No more would be heard of the child’s continuing to be taught at home. From Mrs Martin’s own point of view this was to be regretted, since she was fond both of Penelope and of the vicar’s monthly cheque. If Henry Rich was something of a goose (and she did so regard him in a perfectly friendly way) he might be said – although sexually the metaphor was slightly confused – to lay agreeable little golden eggs. But Mrs Martin, being a woman of spirit, had no difficulty in disregarding this. She judged that a girl brought up entirely in the Mallows vicarage under its present incumbent, although she might know about tempus ferox and the doggy letter, would eventually have to step ill-prepared into the contemporary world from a dwelling as remote, it might be said, as Noah’s Ark. Penelope Rich was a child for whom the right boarding-school would be very much the right thing.
But about the Ferneydale boys Mrs Martin hadn’t done so well. She had enhanced in the vicar a distrust of them which she knew to be already there, and this on the strength of mere coffee-time conversation thoughtlessly carried on. She didn’t share Mr Rich’s view that Fulke and Caspar were ‘too old’ for Penelope. All that could confidently be said was that at present she was too young for them. The situation – as, indeed, she had pointed out to the vicar – might be quite different ten years on. So it had been injudicious to prejudice a conceivable state of affairs in which Penelope was of marriageable age and still possessed as close neighbours at Mallows Hall two able and attractive young bachelors whom she had vastly admired as a child.
Mrs Martin held no view on the general desirability or undesirability of matrimony succeeding upon long contiguity of that sort. It was a species of conduct popularly regarded as a resource which young men held in reserve while hoping for some more glamorous fortune, and she didn’t like to imagine Penelope as being thus fallen back upon by a Ferneydale. It was, of course, a far-fetched apprehension. Not quite so far-fetched was the fear that Penelope mightn’t marry at all. Nothing of the kind was at present her father’s wish; he had spoken only of anxiety that his child should make a right choice in the end. But Henry Rich was both a widower and a self-regarding if well-meaning man. Mrs Martin could think of more than one daughter of a widowed clergyman permanently entombed in the paternal vicarage or rectory in a strikingly grisly way – having been progressively pressurised into the belief that neither her parent nor his parish could do without her. The risk of this fate befalling Penelope Rich might be lessened at some critical time if she had behind her a girlhood spent largely away from home.
Having arrived at this perception, Mrs Martin felt that her firmness about her pupil’s future schooling had been doubly wise.