Mr. Waddington of Wyck Part 20

"Lots. When he wants to get something. He wanted to get f.a.n.n.y....

Besides, he does them to get power, to get a hold on you. It's really for himself all the time. It gives him a certain simplicity and purity.

He isn't a sn.o.b. He doesn't think about his money or his property, or his ancestors--he's got heaps--quite good ones. They don't matter.

Nothing matters but himself."

"How about his book? Doesn't that matter?"

"It does and yet again it doesn't. He pretends he's only doing it to amuse himself, but it's really a projection of his ego into the Cotswolds. On the other hand, he'd hate it if you took him for a writing man when he's Horatio Bysshe Waddington. That's how he's got it into such a mess, because he can't get away from himself and his Manor."

"Proud of his Manor, anyhow."

"Oh, yes. Not, mind you, because it's perfect Tudor of the sixteenth century, _nor_ because the Earl of Warwick gave it to his great-grandfather's great-great-grandfather, but because it's his Manor.

Horatio Bysshe Waddington's Manor. Of course, it's got to be what it is because any other sort of Manor wouldn't be good enough for Bysshe."

"It's an extension of his ego, too?"

"Yes. Horatio's ego spreading itself in wings and bursting into ball-topped gables and overflowing into a lovely garden and a park.

There isn't a tree, there isn't a flower that hasn't got bits of Horatio in it."

"If I thought that I should never want to see roses and larkspurs again."

"It only happens in Horatio's mind. But it does happen."

So, between them, bit by bit, they made him out.

And they made out the book. Here and there, on separate slips, were great outlying tracts of light, contributed by Ralph, to be inserted, and sketches of dark, undeveloped stuff, sprung from Waddington, to be inserted too. Neither Ralph nor Barbara could make them fit. The only thing was to copy it out clear as it stood and arrange it afterwards.

And presently it appeared that two pages were missing.

One evening, the evening of Mr. Waddington's return, looking for the lost pages, Barbara made her great discovery: a sheaf of ma.n.u.script, a hundred and twenty pages in Ralph's handwriting, hidden away at the back of the bureau, crumpled as if an inimical hand had thrust it out of sight. She took it up to bed and read it there.

A hundred and twenty pages of pure Ralph without any taint of Waddington. It seemed to be part of Mr. Waddington's book, and yet no part of it, for it was inconceivable that it should belong to anything but itself. Ralph didn't ramble; he went straight for the things he had seen. He saw the Cotswolds round Wyck-on-the-Hill, he made you see them, as they were: the high curves of the hills, multiplied, thrown off, one after another; the squares and oblongs and vand.y.k.es and spread fans of the fields; and their many colours; gra.s.s green of the pastures, emerald green of the young wheat, white green of the barley; s.h.i.+ning, metallic green of the turnips; the pink, the brown, the purple fallows, the sharp canary yellow of the charlock. And the trees, the long processions of trees by the great gra.s.s-bordered roads; trees furring the flanks and groins of the parted hills, dark combs topping their edges.

Ralph knew what he was doing. He went about with the farmers and farm hands; he followed the ploughing and sowing and the reaping, the feeding and milking of the cattle, the care of the ewes in labour and of the young lambs. He went at night to the upland folds with the shepherds; he could tell you about shepherds. He sat with the village women by their firesides and listened to their talk; he could tell you about village women. Mr. Waddington did not tell you about anything that mattered.

She took the ma.n.u.script to Ralph at the White Hart with a note to say how she had found it. He came running out to walk home with her.

"Did you know it was there?" she said.

"No. I thought I'd lost it. You see what it is?"

"Part of your book."

"Horatio's book."

"But you wrote it."

"Yes. That's what he fired me out for. He got tired of the thing and asked me to go on with it. He called it working up his material. I went on with it like that, and he wouldn't have it. He said it was badly written--jerky, short sentences--he'd have to re-write it. Well--I wouldn't let him do that, and he wouldn't have it as it stood."

"But--it's beautiful--alive and real. What more does he want?"

"The stamp of his personality."

"Oh, he'd _stamp_ on it all right."

"I'm glad you like it."

"_Like_ it. Don't you?"

Ralph said he thought he'd liked it when he wrote it, but now he didn't know.

"You'll know when you've finished it."

"I don't suppose I shall finish it," he said.

"But you must. You can't _not_ finish a thing like that."

"I own I'd like to. But I can't publish it."

"Why ever not?"

"Oh, it wouldn't be fair to poor old Waddy. After all, I wrote it for him."

"What on earth does that matter? If he doesn't want it. Of course you'll finish it, and of course you'll publish it."

"Well, but it's all Cotswold, you see. And _he's_ Cotswold. If it _is_ any good, you know, I shouldn't like to--to well, get in his way. It's his game. At least he began it."

"It's a game two can play, writing Cotswold books."

"No. No. It isn't. And he got in first."

"Well, then, let him get in first. You can bring your book out after."

"And dish his?"

"No, let it have a run first. Perhaps it won't have any run."

"Perhaps mine won't."

"_Yours_. That heavenly book? And his tosh--Don't you see that you _can't_ get in his way? If anybody reads him they won't be the same people who read you."

"I hope not. All the same it would be rather beastly to cut him out; I mean to come in and do it better, show how bad he is, how frightful. It would rub it in, you know."

"Not with him. You couldn't."

"You don't know. Some brute might get up and hurt him with it."

"Oh, you _are_ tender to him."

"Well, you see, I did let him down when I left him. Besides, it isn't altogether him. There's f.a.n.n.y."