Cold Comfort Farm

Cold Comfort Farm

by STELLA GIBBONS

This edition copyright 2018 Dead Authors Society.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

TO ANTHONY POOKWORTHY, ESQ., A.B.S., L.L.R.

My dear Tony,

It is with something more than the natural deference of a tyro at the loveliest, most arduous and perverse of the arts in the presence of a master-craftsman that I lay this book before you. You know (none better) the joys of the clean hearth and the rigour of the game. But perhaps I may be permitted to take this opportunity of explaining to you, a little more fully than I have hitherto hinted, something of the disabilities under which I had laboured to produce the pages now open beneath your hand.

As you know, I have spent some ten years of my creative life in the meaningless and vulgar bustle of newspaper offices. God alone knows what the effect has been on my output of pure literature. I dare not think too much about it—even now. There are some things (like first love and one’s reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.

The effect of these locust years on my style (if I may lay claim to that lovely quality in the presence of a writer whose grave and lucid prose has permanently enriched our literature) has been perhaps even more serious.

The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realize the magnitude of the task which confronted me when I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.

Far be it from me to pretend that the following pages achieve what first burned in my mind with pure lambency ten years ago. Which of us does? But the thing’s done! Ecco! E finito! And such as it is, and for what it is worth, it is yours.

You see, Tony, I have a debt to pay. Your books have been something more to me, in the last ten years, than books. They have been springs of refreshment, loafings for the soul, eyes in the dark. They have given me (in the midst of the vulgar and meaningless bustle of newspaper offices) joy. It is just possible that it was not quite the kind of joy you intended them to give, for which of us is infallible? But it was joy all right.

I must confess, too, that I have more than once hesitated before the thought of trying to repay some fraction of my debt to you by offering you a book that was meant to be... funny.

For your own books are not... funny. They are records of intense spiritual struggles, staged in the wild setting of mere, berg or fen. Tour characters are ageless and elemental things, tossed like straws on the seas of passion. You paint Nature at her rawest, in man and in landscapes. The only beauty that lights your pages is the grave peace of fulfilled passion, and the ripe humour that lies over your minor characters like a mellow light. Tou can paint everyday domestic tragedies (are not the entire first hundred pages of The Fulfilment of Martin Hoare a masterly analysis of a bilious attack?) as vividly as you paint soul cataclysms. Shall I ever forget Mattie Elginbrod? I shall not. Your books are more like thunderstorms than books. I can only say, in all simplicity, Thank you, Tony.

But funny... No.

However, I am sure you are big enough, in every sense of the word, to forgive my book its imperfections.

And it is only because I have in mind all those thousands of persons, not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle, that I have adopted the method perfected by the late Herr Baedeker, and firmly marked what I consider the finer passages with one, two or three stars. In such a manner did the good man deal with cathedrals, hotels and paintings by men of genius. There seems no reason why it should not be applied to passages in novels.

It ought to help the reviewers, too.

Talking of men of genius, what a constellation burns in our midst at the moment! Even to a tyro as unpractised as myself, who has spent the best creative years of her life in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of newspaper offices, there is some consolation, some sudden exaltation into a serener and more ardent air, in subscribing herself,

Ever, my dear Tony,

Your grateful debtor,

Stella Gibbons

Watford.

Lyons’ Corner House.

Boulogne-sur-Mer.

January 1931-February 1932

CHAPTER I

THE education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.

Her father had always been spoken of as a wealthy man, but on his death his executors were disconcerted to find him a poor one. After death duties had been paid and the demands of creditors satisfied, his child was left with an income of one hundred pounds a year, and no property.

Flora inherited, however, from her father a strong will and from her mother a slender ankle. The one had not been impaired by always having her own way nor the other by the violent athletic sports in which she had been compelled to take part, but she realized that neither was adequate as an equipment for earning her keep.

She decided, therefore, to stay with a friend, a Mrs Smiling, at her house in Lambeth until she could decide where to bestow herself and her hundred pounds a year.

The death of her parents did not cause Flora much grief, for she had barely known them. They were addicted to travel, and spent only a month or so of each year in England. Flora, from her tenth year, had passed her school holidays at the house of Mrs Smiling’s mother; and when Mrs Smiling married, Flora spent them at her friend’s house instead. It was therefore with the feelings of one who returns home that she entered the precincts of Lambeth upon a gloomy afternoon in February, a fortnight after her father’s funeral.

Mrs Smiling was fortunate in that she had inherited house property in Lambeth before the rents in that district soared to ludicrous heights, following the tide of fashion as it swung away from Mayfair to the other side of the river, and the stone parapets bordering the Thames became, as a consequence, the sauntering ground of Argentinian women and their bull-terriers. Her husband (she was a widow) had owned three houses in Lambeth which he had bequeathed to her. One, in Mouse Place, was the pleasantest of the three, and faced with its shell fanlight the changing Thames; here Mrs Smiling lived, while of the other two, one had been pulled down and a garage perpetrated upon its site, and the third, which was too small and inconvenient for any other purpose, had been made into the Old Diplomacy Club.

The white porcelain geraniums which hung in baskets from the little iron balconies of 1, Mouse Place, did much to cheer Flora’s spirits as her taxi stopped before its door.

Turning from the taxi to the house, she saw that the door had already been opened by Mrs Smiling’s butler, Sneller, who was looking down upon her with dim approval. He was, she reflected, almost rudely like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery.

Mrs Smiling was awaiting her in the drawing-room overlooking the river. She was a small Irishwoman of twenty-six years, with a fair complexion, large grey eyes and a little crooked nose. She had two interests in Hie. One was the imposing of reason and moderation into the bosoms of some fifteen gentlemen of birth and fortune who were madly in love with her, and who had flown to such remote places as Jhonsong La Lake M’Luba-M’Luba and the Kwanhattons because of her refusal to marry them. She wrote to them all once a week, and they (as her friends knew to their cost, for she was ever reading aloud long, boring bits from their letters) wrote to her.

These gentlemen, because of the hard work they did in savage foreign parts and of their devotion to Mrs Smiling, were known collectively as Mary’s Pioneers-O, a quotation from the spirited poem by Walt Whitman.

Mrs Smiling’s second interest was her collection of brassières, and her search for a perfect one. She was reputed to have the largest and finest collection of these garments in the world. It was hoped that on her death it would be left to the nation.

She was an authority on the cut, fit, colour, construction and proper functioning of brassières; and her friends had learned that her interest, even in moments of extreme emotional or physical distress, could be aroused and her composure restored by the hasty utterance of the phrase:

I saw a brassière to-day, Mary, that would have interested you...

Mrs Smiling’s character was firm and her tastes civilized. Her method of dealing with wayward human nature when it insisted on obtruding its grossness upon her scheme of life was short and effective; she pretended things were not so: and usually, after a time, they were not Christian Science is perhaps a larger organization, but seldom so successful.

Of course, if you encourage people to think they’re messy, they will be messy, was one of Mrs Smiling’s favourite maxims. Another was, Nonsense, Flora. You imagine things.

Yet Mrs Smiling herself was not without the softer graces of imagination.

Well, darling, said Mrs Smiling—and Flora, who was tall, bent and kissed her cheek—will you have tea or a cocktail?

Flora said that she would have tea. She folded her gloves and put her coat over the back of a chair, and took the tea and a cinnamon wafer.

Was the funeral awful? inquired Mrs Smiling. She knew that Mr Poste, that large man who had been serious about games and contemptuous of the arts, was not regretted by his child. Nor was Mrs Poste, who had wished people to live beautiful lives and yet be ladies and gentlemen.

Flora replied that it had been horrid. She added that she was bound to say all the older relatives seemed to have enjoyed it no end.

Did any of them ask you to go and live with them? I meant to warn you about that. Relatives are always wanting you to go and live with them, said Mrs Smiling.

No. Remember, Mary, I have only a hundred pounds a year now; and I cannot play Bridge.

Bridge? What is that? inquired Mrs Smiling, glancing vaguely out of the window at the river. What curious ways people have of passing their time, to be sure. I think you are very fortunate, darling, to have got through all those dreadful years at school and college, where you had to play all those games, without getting to like them yourself. How did you manage it?

Flora considered.

"Well—first of all, I used to stand quite still and stare at the trees and not think about anything. There were usually some trees about, for most games, you know, are played at in the open air, and even in the winter the trees are still there. But I found that people would bump into me, so I had to give up standing still, and run like the others. I always ran after the ball because, after all, Mary, the ball is important in a game, isn’t it? until I found they didn’t like me doing that, because I never got near it or hit it or did whatever you are supposed to do to it.

"So then I ran away from it instead, but they didn’t seem to like that either, because apparently people in the audience wondered what I was doing out on the edge of a field all by myself, and running away from the ball whenever I saw it coming near me.

"And then a whole lot of them got at me one day after one of the games was over, and told me I was no good. And the Games Mistress seemed quite worried and asked me if I really didn’t care about lacrosse (that was the name of the game), and I said no, I was afraid I didn’t, really; and she said it was a pity, because my father was so ‘keen’, and what did I care about?

So I said, well, I was not quite sure, but on the whole I thought I liked having everything very tidy and calm all round me, and not being bothered to do things, and laughing at the kind of joke other people didn’t think at all funny, and going for country walks, and not being asked to express opinions about things (like love, and isn’t so-and-so peculiar?). So then she said, oh, well, didn’t I think I could try to be a little less slack, because of Father, and I said no, I was afraid I couldn’t; and after that she left me alone. But all the others still said I was no good.

Mrs Smiling nodded her approval, but she told Flora that she talked too much. She added:

Now about this going to live with someone. Of course, you can stay here as long as you like, darling; but I suppose you will want to take up some kind of work some time, won’t you, and earn enough to have a flat of your own?

What kind of work? asked Flora, sitting upright and graceful in her chair.

Well—organizing work, like I used to do. (For Mrs Smiling had been an organizer for the L.G.G. before she married Diamond Tod Smiling, the racketeer.) Do not ask me what that is, exactly, for I’ve forgotten. It is so long since I did any. But I am sure you could do it Or you might do journalism. Or book-keeping. Or bee-keeping.

Flora shook her head.

I’m afraid I couldn’t do any of those things, Mary.

Well... what then, darling? Now, Flora, don’t be feeble. You know perfectly well that you will be miserable if you haven’t got a job, when all your friends have. Besides, a hundred pounds a year won’t even keep you in stockings and fans. What will you live on?

My relatives, replied Flora.

Mrs Smiling gave her a shocked glance of inquiry, for, though civilized in her tastes, she was a strong-minded and moral woman.

Yes, Mary, repeated Flora firmly, "I am only nineteen, but I have already observed that whereas there still lingers some absurd prejudice against living on one’s friends, no limits are set, either by society or by one’s own conscience, to the amount one may impose upon one’s relatives.

Now I am peculiarly (I think if you could see some of them you would agree that that is the word) rich in relatives, on both sides of the family. There is a bachelor cousin of Father’s in Scotland. There is a sister of Mother’s at Worthing (as though that were not enough, she breeds dogs). A female cousin of Mother’s lives in Kensington. And there are also some distant cousins, connections of Mother’s, I believe, who live in Sussex...

Sussex . . . mused Mrs Smiling. I don’t much like the sound of that. Do they live on a decaying farm?

I am afraid they do, confessed Flora, reluctantly. However, I need not try them unless everything else fails. I propose to send a letter to the relatives I have mentioned, explaining the situation and asking them if they are willing to give me a home in exchange for my beautiful eyes and a hundred pounds a year.

Flora, how insane!. cried Mrs Smiling; you must be mad. Why, you would die after the first week. You know that neither of us have ever been able toabide relatives. You must stay here with me, and learn typing and shorthand, and then you can be somebody’s secretary and have a nice little flat of your own, and we can have lovely parties...

Mary, you know I hate parties. My idea of hell is a very large party in a cold room, where everybody has to play hockey properly. But you put me off what I was going to say. When I have found a relative who is willing to have me, I shall take him or her in hand, and alter his or her character and mode of living to suit my own taste. Then, when it pleases me, I shall marry.

Who, pray? demanded Mrs Smiling, rudely; she was much perturbed.

Somebody whom I shall choose. I have definite ideas about marriage, as you know. I have always liked the sound of the phrase ‘a marriage has been arranged’. And so it should be arranged! Is it not the most important step a mortal creature can take? I prefer the idea of arrangement to that other statement that marriages are made in Heaven.

Mrs Smiling shuddered at the compelling, the almost Gallic, cynicism of Flora’s speech. For Mrs Smiling believed that marriages should arise naturally from the union of two loving natures, and that they should take place in churches, with all the usual paraphernalia and hugaboo; and so had her own marriage arisen and been celebrated.

But what I wanted to ask you was this, continued Flora. Do you think a circular letter to all these relatives would be a good idea? Would it impress them with my efficiency?

No, returned Mrs Smiling, coldly, I do not think it would. It would be too putting-off. You must write to them, of course (making it an entirely different letter each time, Flora), explaining the situation—that is, if you really are going to be so insane as to go on with the idea.

Don’t fuss, Mary. I will write the letters to-morrow, before lunch. I would write them to-night, only I think we ought to dine out—don’t you?—to celebrate the inauguration of my career as a parasite. I have ten pounds, and I will take you to the New River Club—angelic place!

Don’t be silly. You know perfectly well we must have some men.

Then you can find them. Are any of the Pioneers-O home on leave?

Mrs Smiling’s face assumed that brooding and maternal look which was associated in the minds of her friends with thoughts of the Pioneers-O.

Bikki is, she said. (All the Pioneers-O had short, brusque nicknames rather like the cries of strange animals, but this was quite natural, for they all came from places full of strange animals.)

And your second cousin, Charles Fairford, is in town, continued Mrs Smiling. The tall, serious, dark one.

He will do, said Flora, with approval. He has such a funny little nose.

Accordingly, about twenty minutes to nine that night Mrs Smiling’s car drove away from Mouse Place carrying herself and Flora in white dresses, with absurd little wreaths of flowers at the side of their heads; and opposite sat Bikki and Charles, whom Flora had only met half a dozen times before.

Bikki, who had a shocking stammer, talked a great deal, as people with stammers always love to do. He was plain and thirtyish, and home on leave from Kenya. He pleased them by corroborating all the awful rumours they had heard about the place. Charles, who looked well in tails, spoke hardly at all. Occasionally he gave a loud, deep, musical Ha Ha! when amused at anything. He was twenty-three, and was to be a parson. He stared out of the window most of the time, and hardly looked at Flora.

I don’t think Sneller approves of this excursion, observed Mrs Smiling, as they drove away. He looked all dim and concerned. Did you notice?

He approves of me, because I look serious, said Flora. A straight nose is a great help if one wishes to look serious.

I do not wish to look serious, said Mrs Smiling, coldly. There will be time enough to do that when I have to come and rescue you from some impossible relations living in some ungetatable place because you can’t bear it any longer. Have you told Charles about it?

Good heavens, no! Charles is a relation. He might think I wanted to go and live with him and Cousin Helen in Hertfordshire, and was angling for an invitation.

Well, you could if you liked, said Charles, turning from his study of the glittering streets gliding past the windows. There is a swing in the garden and tobacco flowers in the summer, and probably Mother and I would quite like it if you did.

Don’t be silly, said Mrs Smiling. Look—here we are. Did you get a table near the river, Bikki?

Bikki had managed to do that; and when they were seated facing the flowers and lights on their table they could look down through the glass floor at the moving river, and watch it between their slippers, as they danced. Through the glass walls they could see the barges going past, bearing their romantic red and green lights. Outside it had begun to rain, and the glass roof was soon trickling with silver.

In the course of supper Flora told Charles of her plan. He was silent at first; and she thought he was shocked. For though Charles had not a straight nose, it might have been written of him, as Shelley wrote of himself in the Preface to Julian and Maddalo, Julian is rather serious.

But at last he said, looking amused:

Well, if you get very sick of it, wherever you are, phone me and I will come and rescue you in my plane.

Have you a plane, Charles? I don’t think an embryo parson should have a plane. What breed is it?

A Twin Belisha Bat. Its name is Speed Cop II.

But, really, Charles, do you think a parson ought to have a plane? continued Flora, who was in a foolish mood.

What has that to do with it? said Charles calmly. Anyway, you let me know and I will come along.

Flora promised that she would, for she liked Charles, and then they danced together; and all four sat a long time over