Portrait of Elmbury (16 page)

The name Doe is said to be legal fiction; Mrs. Trotwood certainly thought so, for she lifted her turkey again to Pen 36, where I sold it to the warrior wife of that old warrior Pistol for nineteen and six. The trade in turkeys improved somewhat as I came towards the end of them. Mrs. Trotwood hopefully removed her turkey successively to Pens 42, 49 and 55, where I sold it successively to a Mrs. Attwood, a Mrs. Phillpots and a Mrs. Holmes for prices ranging from nineteen shillings to a guinea. Mrs. Trotwood then lost hope and went to fetch her hamper in order to take the turkey home. In blissful ignorance of the storm which was about to burst over my head I went on to sell the geese, ducks, cockerels, the little boys' rabbits and guinea-pigs, the ferrets, the bunches of mistletoe and all the other odds and ends which were somewhat oddly lumped together under the heading of “Poultry.”

I had nearly finished when I became aware of a disturbance in the region of Pen 55. Mrs. Trotwood, Mrs. Holmes, and a turkey seemed to be engaged in a noisy flurry. I fondly imagined the matter had nothing to do with me, and went on selling.

The row got worse; for Mrs. Phillpots and Mrs. Attwood had now joined in. I sent Fred Pullin to see what it was about; but Fred was excessively stupid and only succeeded in setting the four women more fiercely at loggerheads. Moreover Mrs. Pistol had now blown into the battle like a tornado. Fred retired discomfited.

I had now finished selling, so I went across to see what was the matter. The row was appalling: five women—and a turkey —all cackling at once. There must have been something, a distinguishing mark or label perhaps, which made it possible to recognise the turkey; for Mrs. Doe and Mrs. Peel arrived on the scene and hastened to claim it. Mrs. Doe, far from being a legal fiction, turned out to be a most ferocious and belligerent woman with an umbrella which she waved recklessly to emphasise her claim. This provoked the anger of that Volumnia, Mrs. Pistol, who called up the whole clan to her aid: Pistol, Bardolph and Nym were always to be found hanging about the market on the chance of earning a tip, begging a drink, or finding something they could scrounge. They eagerly joined the noisy crowd which surrounded Mrs. Trotwood's wretched turkey.

A brief glance at Fred Pullin's ill-written sheet told me what had happened: I had sold the turkey six times, but each time for less than the reserve; there were therefore seven claimants for it, since Mrs. Trotwood insisted on taking it back. I tried to explain the situation to the impassioned women. I might as well have tried to reason with a thunderstorm, to seek compromise with a cloudburst, to still the north wind with soft words. Mrs. Trotwood was easily squared; I promised to pay her 22/- for the turkey, which was what she wanted for it, and she went away satisfied. But there remained seven other women who all had an equal claim to the creature; who all complained that it was the only turkey they had been able to buy; who all protested that
unless they took it home their husbands and their loving children would have to go without their Christmas dinner.

“Seven children,” said Mrs. Pistol, “looking forward to the turkey I promised 'em three months ago.”

“No Christmas dinner,” echoed Pistol, Bardolph and Nym ominously.

Mrs. Doe, Mrs. Phillpots, Mrs. Attwood, Mrs. Peel and Mrs. Holmes all had a similar tale to tell. On sentimental as well as purely ethical grounds none had a better right to the turkey than the rest; legally, it seemed to me, each one of them owned it. Solomon, who solved an analogous but simpler problem, would, I felt sure, have been confounded by this one; and I was no Solomon. Tired of abusing each other, all six of the women now started to abuse me. There was no remedy but in flight. I therefore winked at Pistol, whom I knew would do anything for a drink, and suggested that he and I should discuss the matter in the market office. Bardolph and Nym, of course, followed us. As soon as we were out of hearing of the women, I said: “Let's leave them to settle it. We shall find it quieter in the Red Lion,” and thither we hastened, where Pistol told me a lengthy and fantastic and probably untrue story about some long-forgotten campaign in Baluchistan, so that I never knew what happened in the end to Mrs. Trotwood's turkey, nor which one of the six belligerent women triumphed over the rest. I heard tell of Mrs. Doe prodding Mrs. Pistol with her umbrella; and of Mrs. Holmes fetching a policeman; and of Mrs. Pistol pulling the bird's tail-feathers out in handfuls when Mrs. Attwood tried by force to bear it away. But all that is hearsay; for as I have said I was leaning comfortably upon the Red Lion bar with Pistol, Bardolph and Nym and hearing them confess that though they feared neither shot nor shell, nor cannon's roar, nor sniper's bullet, nor tribesman's knife, nor Zulu's assegai, yet a pack of angry old women struck terror into their hearts. Uhlans were lambs, the fuzzywuzzy was a kitten, the wily Pathan was a cooing dove, said Pistol, by comparison with a woman in a temper. And he should have known.

For reasons other than this comic one I remember my last Christmas market. It was the last time my uncle sold the champion beast and the last time the great fat butcher bought it; for my uncle was growing deaf, he could no longer hear the bids, and the butcher was sick of some mortal malady from which a few weeks later he died. I remember my uncle inclining his silvery head towards the bidders with his hand up to his ear. “Come, come, gentlemen! Only fifty-seven pounds ten for Mr. Parker's champion beast! Only fifty-seven pounds ten I'm bid. Shall I make it sixty?” My uncle never shouted or swore or got excited when he was selling; he never mitigated his old-fashioned courtesy to match it to the rowdy, boisterous dealers, who stood round him now with their fat red shining faces rather like beeves themselves (for it always seemed to me that dealers grew to resemble the beasts they dealt in, that horse-dealers had a horselike countenance, sheep-dealers were inclined to baa and bleat, pig-dealers had little piggy eyes, and the cattle-men were generally rubicund and bull-like).

“Come, come, gentlemen!” said my uncle. In his little way he was himself a great gentleman; there was pomp and ceremony, dignity and good manners, whenever he mounted the rostrum, and his company always behaved as gentlemen, being treated so.

He looked towards the great fat butcher. “Come, offer me sixty,” he said.

The fat butcher hesitated, then nodded his head.

“Sixty it is. Sixty I'm offered. I'm going to sell this fine beast for sixty. You know where it comes from, gentlemen. Mr. Parker's of The Reddings. Mr. Parker, who's won the championship four years out of the last seven. At sixty. I'm selling at sixty. Going, going, gone.”

The fat butcher smiled.

“ 'Tis a lot of money, Mr. Moore,” he said.

“ 'Tis a lot of good meat,” said my uncle. “Congratulations.
Let me see, it's twelve years running, isn't it, that you've bought the champion beast? And this is the highest price you've ever paid, and this is the best beast, in my opinion. Congratulations to you and to Mr. Parker.”

There was a sudden burst of clapping. Somebody shouted out, “And congratulations to you, Mister! It's thirty-five years you've been selling here.”

“Is it? Thirty-five years! Well, well. One doesn't like being reminded of the years at my age. Dear, dear! Thirty-five years!”

“Aye. We be getting old, Mr. Moore,” said the butcher. (I wonder if he had some queer premonition, a flash of foreknowledge?) “We be getting old, you and I. We be going, going, gone!”

Three weeks later he fell ill, the great fat butcher with the fire-red cherubim's face. He bore his great mountain of flesh up to bed, and lay there for three days, and then he died. I went into the shop next week and his wife was there, carrying on as best she could (for she had no sons). The rosettes of the champion beasts still hung on the wall behind her: twelve rosettes in a row. I told her I was sorry; and she said surprisingly:

“He went very quiet, for a man of his size. As quiet as a little child, he lay. But once or twice he cried out, and once or twice he groaned; and I tried to hear what he was saying, but 'twas only a whisper. “What a job it is, Missus,” he said to me. “What a job it is, what a job!”

I felt a little shiver run down my spine; for although the words were different, I could hear an echo more than three hundred years old: a faint far echo of what Mistress Quickly said when Falstaff died.

That year, for the first time, we had sold no fat beast for Mr. Jeffs. He was at the market; and I watched him standing beside the ring while my uncle was selling; but he, who had always been larger than life, seemed suddenly to have grown smaller. A month or two before he had left his great farm on the hill; he was growing old, he said, and he could no longer get round it. He had bought “a little place” in which to spend his last days, and somehow he seemed to have shrunk as his lands had shrunk. He still wore the flower in his buttonhole, the well-cut tweeds, the grey bowler hat; but he was no longer distinguished-looking, he was no longer Mr. Jeffs of the Hill. You would scarcely have noticed him, you would scarcely have picked him out from the lesser men crowding about the ring.

But he was wise, I think, to get out of the business when he did. He knew which way the wind was blowing; and he knew it was going to be a cold wind for farmers. Stock prices were beginning to sag; wheat at seven shillings a bushel was scarcely worth growing; many of his friends, who had less capital than he, were giving up their farms not because they chose to but because they must. The Bank was beginning to call in its mortgages; mortgages which had been taken up in the prosperous times just after the Great War, when land was selling for twice its real value. My uncle's firm had sustained within a month three bad debts each amounting to more than a hundred pounds. “Dear, dear!” said my uncle, shaking his courtly old head. “Poor old So-and-So—and I've known him for thirty years!” He thought of the debtors' misfortune before he thought of his own. My uncle in his declining years had a theory that if only he had known a man sufficiently long, there could be nothing wrong with the man; and this was associated with a still more dangerous theory, that if the man could afford to owe the firm a sum as large as a hundred pounds, he must be financially stable. Both notions did great credit to my uncle's heart, but great harm to his pocket.

“Don't press him!” he would say. “Write him a nice letter, John. I wouldn't hurt the old fellow's feelings for worlds!”

Mr. Jeffs' farm had been sold by my uncle at Michaelmas, in the long market-room at the Swan Hotel. In contrast to the bustle and noise and boisterous fun of stock markets there was always a pleasant quiet dignity about property sales. The presence of lawyers, who always like things to be done according to the form and the tradition, lent to the occasion something of the air of dusty respectability which hangs about their offices. There was no badinage or shouting; for the sale of several hundred acres of green English land was a solemn occasion and out of respect for the owner who was like a tree about to be uprooted the company seated themselves in hushed silence. There was a rustle of papers as they re-read the Particulars of Sale which they already knew by heart. Then my uncle got up, stroked his silvery hair, and began in his silvery voice to describe the property. “It is not very often, gentlemen, even in my experience—fifty-two years of it: it was fifty-two years last month that I joined my late father's firm—it is not very often that I have the pleasure (a pleasure, though, mixed with regret) of offering for sale by auction a farm such as this. Four hundred and forty-two acres, two roods, five perches of rich, loamy, easily-worked arable land and sound old pasture; its orchards well planted with mature fruit trees in full bearing, including the choicest cherries, Early Prolific plums, Blenheim, Russet, and Cox's Orange Pippin apples, and Bon Chrétien pears. (Only two years ago I sold the fruit in these orchards for more than three hundred pounds.) The farmhouse, whose hospitality many of you have known”—a few respectful handclaps—“was well and solidly built in the time of Queen Anne; the byres and buildings are modern and commodious; I don't need to describe the place to you, you know it well. As I say, it is very rarely, even in a long life such as mine, that one sees such a property come under the hammer. Such places
remain—as they should remain, as we all would wish them to remain—in the hands of our old farming families, passed down from father to son, from generation to generation. But I do not need to remind you of the sad circumstances, which we all most deeply regret, which have caused this valuable, this unique and valuable possession, to come into the open market and to be offered for sale by auction this day.”

My uncle was referring to the death of Mr. Jeffs' sons in the Great War. If they had lived, they would, of course, have taken on the farm from their father.

“Now, gentlemen,” my uncle went on, adjusting the little hour-glass which he always had before him when he sold property —an old-fashioned affectation, for if there was a chance of another bid he took no notice of the sands running out inside it— “Now, gentlemen, I have taken up too much of your valuable time already. What are you going to offer me for this splendid farm, with its beautiful house, its dairies and outbuildings, its arable land, pastures, well-watered meadows, orchards and coppices—the timber alone is valued at four hundred and fifty pounds—and its four labourers' cottages all in good repair? What shall I say for a start, what will you give me—come, come, gentlemen, surely you will not remain silent for long with one of the best and most famous farms in all the county going a-begging?”

The farm was sold to Jerry, Mr. Nixon's son of Downend, he who rode in the Midnight Steeplechase and married Dorrie Monks in consequence; and that pleased everybody, including Mr. Jeffs, who saw in him, perhaps, a shadow of those two sons of his own who fell with the Yeomanry.