第45章 CHAPTER VIII(5)
The thing that's wrong about it is that, do what you will, you can't get it to go off before six o'clock in the morning. I set it on Sunday evening for half-past four--we farmers do have to work, I can tell you. But it's worth it. I had no idea that the world was so beautiful. There is a light you never see at any other time, and the whole air seems to be full of fluttering song. You feel--but you must get up and come out with me, Dad. I can't describe it. If it hadn't been for the good old cow, Lord knows what time I'd have been up. The clock went off at half-past four in the afternoon, just as they were sitting down to tea, and frightened them all out of their skins. We have fiddled about with it all we know, but there's no getting it to do anything between six p.m. and six am. Anything you want of it in the daytime it is quite agreeable to. But it seems to have fixed its own working hours, and isn't going to be bustled out of its proper rest. I got so mad with it myself I wanted to pitch it out of the window, but Robin thought we ought to keep it till you came, that perhaps you might be able to do something with it--writing something about it, she means. I said I thought alarm clocks were pretty well played out by this time; but, as she says, there is always a new generation coming along to whom almost everything must be fresh. Anyhow, the confounded thing cost seven and six, and seems to be no good for anything else.
"Whatever was it that you really did say to Robin about her room?
Young Bute came round to me on Monday quite upset about it. He says it is going to be all windows, and will look, when finished, like an incorrect copy of the Eddystone lighthouse. He says there will be no place for the bed, and if there is to be a fireplace at all it will have to be in the cupboard, and that the only way, so far as he can see, of her getting in and out of it will be by a door through the bathroom. She said that you said she could have it entirely to her own idea, and that he was just to carry out her instructions; but, as he points out, you can't have a room in a house as if the rest of the house wasn't there, even if it is your own room. Nobody, it seems, will be able to have a bath without first talking it over with her, and arranging a time mutually convenient. I told him I was sure you never meant him to do anything absurd; and that his best plan would be to go straight back to her, explain to her that she'd been talking like a silly goat--he could have put it politely, of course--and that he wasn't going to pay any attention to her. You might have thought I had suggested his walking into a den of lions and pulling all their tails. I don't know what Robin has done to him, but he seems quite frightened of her. I had to promise that I would talk to her. He'd better have done it himself. I only told her just what he said, and off she went in one of her tantrums. You know her style: If she liked to live in a room where she could see to do her hair that was no business of his, and if he couldn't design a plain, simple bedroom that wasn't going to look ridiculous and make her the laughing-stock of all the neighbourhood, then the Royal Institute of British Architects must have strange notions of the sort of person entitled to go about the country building houses; that if he thought the proper place for a fire was in a cupboard, she didn't; that his duty was to carry out the instructions of his employers, and if he imagined for a moment she was going to consent to remain shut up in her room till everybody in the house had finished bathing it would be better for us to secure the services of somebody possessed of a little commonsense; that next time she met him she would certainly tell him what she thought of him, also that she should certainly decline to hold any further communication with him again; that she doesn't want a bedroom now of any sort--perhaps she may be permitted a shakedown in the pantry, or perhaps Veronica will allow her an occasional night's rest with her, and if not it doesn't matter.
You'll have to talk to her yourself. I'm not going to say any more.
"Don't forget that Friday is the St. Leonards' 'At Home' day. I've promised Janie that you shall be there in all your best clothes.
(Don't tell her I'm calling her Janie. It might offend her. But nobody calls her Miss St. Leonard.) Everybody is coming, and all the children are having their hair washed. You will have it all your own way down here. There's no other celebrity till you get to Boss Croker, the Tammany man, the other side of Ilsley Downs. Artists they don't count. The rumour was all round the place last week that you were here incognito in the person of a dismal-looking Johnny, staying at the 'Fisherman's Retreat,' who used to sit all day in a punt up the backwater drinking whisky. It made me rather mad when I saw him. I suppose it was the whisky that suggested the idea to them. They have got the notion in these parts that a literary man is a sort of inspired tramp. A Mrs. Jaggerswade--or some such name--whom I met here on Sunday and who is coming on Friday, took me aside and asked me 'what sort of things' you said when you talked? She said she felt sure it would be so clever, and, herself, she was looking forward to it; but would I--'quite between ourselves'--advise her to bring the children.
"I say, you will have to talk seriously to Veronica. Country life seems to agree with her. She's taken to poaching already--she and the twins. It was the one sin that hitherto they had never committed, and I fancy the old man was feeling proud of this.
Luckily I caught them coming home--with ten dead rabbits strung on a pole, the twins carrying it between them on their shoulders, suggesting the picture of the spies returning from the promised land with that bunch of grapes--Veronica scouting on ahead with, every ten yards, her ear to the ground, listening for hostile footsteps. The thing that troubled her most was that she hadn't heard me coming; she seemed to fear that something had gone wrong with the laws of Nature.