In Mr. Knox's Country Part 16

VI

MAJOR APOLLO RIGGS

PART I

The leave of Captain Andrew Larpent, R.E., was expiring, dying hard, "in rings of strenuous flight," (and my motor) on the road between Shreelane and Licknavar, which is the home of the Chicken Farmers.

Philippa, who regards a flirtation with an enthusiasm that is as disinterested as it is inexplicable, a.s.sured me that the state of affairs was perfectly unmistakable. She further said that the male determination to deny and ignore these things was partly sympathetic secretiveness, partly the affectation of despising gossip, and mainly stupidity. She took a long breath after all this, and, seeing Andrew approaching along the garden path in apparently romantic meditation, enjoined me to be nice to the poor thing, and departed.

The sun was bright, with the shallow brightness of early October, and the Virginian creeper made a conflagration on the weather-slated end of the house. The poor thing deposited himself beside me on the garden seat. I noticed that his eye rested upon a white chicken with a brilliant scarlet comb; it was one of several, purchased from the Chicken Farmers. I would not for worlds have admitted it to Philippa, but there was undoubtedly sentiment in the glance.

"I hear they're having beastly weather at the Curragh," he said, leaning back and looking gloomily up into the melting blue sky.

"Stunning that red stuff looks on the house!" He surveyed it, and sighed; then, suddenly, sentiment faded from his glance. "D'you know, old boy, that chimney up there is well out of the perpendicular. It'll be down about your ears some day."

I replied that it had maintained that angle for the seven years of my tenancy.

"It won't do it much longer," returned my guest. "Look at that crack in the plaster!"

"Which crack?" I said coldly. (Mr. Flurry Knox is my landlord, and it is my misfortune to have a repairing lease.)

"Take your choice," said Andrew, scanning the chimneys with the alert and pitiful eye of the Royal Engineer. "My money's on the northern one, under the jackdaw."

"Oh, confound you and the jackdaws!" I said pettishly. "The chimney draws all right."

But the matter did not end there. Before luncheon, Andrew and I had made a tour of the roof, and he had demonstrated unanswerably, and with appalling examples from barracks that he had repaired in Central India, and built in Wei-hai-Wei, that nothing but habit and family feeling induced any one of the chimney stacks to stand up.

At luncheon he told Philippa that he hoped she would insure the children before the next westerly gale. Philippa replied by asking if he, or anyone else, had ever heard of a chimney falling, unless it had been struck by lightning, in which case it wouldn't matter if it were straight or crooked; and though this was manifestly worthless as an argument, neither Andrew nor I could remember an instance in support of our case. That the case had now become mine as well as Andrew's was the logical result of illogical opposition, and at Philippa's door I deposit the responsibility for a winter of as varied discomforts as it has been our lot to endure.

The matter matured rapidly. In the mellow moment that comes with coffee and cigarettes, I began, almost pleasurably, to lay out the campaign.

"I can't see any point in wasting money on a contractor," said Andrew airily. "Any of your local masons could do it if I explained the job to him. A fortnight ought to see it through."

It was at this point that I should have sat heavily upon Andrew. I was not without experience of the local mason and his fortnights; what could Andrew know of such? I had a brief and warning vision of Captain Larpent, seated at an office table adorned with sheets of perfect ground-plans and elevations, issuing instructions to a tensely intelligent Sapper Sergeant. I saw the Sergeant, supreme in scientific skill (and invariably sober), pa.s.sing on the orders to a scarcely less skilled company of prompt subordinates--but my "worser angel"

obliterated it. And that very afternoon, on our way to Aussolas, we chanced to meet upon the road the local mason himself, William Shanahan, better known to fame as "Walkin' Aisy." He was progressing at a rate of speed that accorded with his sub-t.i.tle, and, as I approached him, a line of half-forgotten verse came back:

"Entreat her not, her eyes are full of dreams."

Nevertheless, I stopped the car.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Walkin' Aisy."]

In answer to enquiries, he mused, with his apostolic countenance bent upon the ground; after a period of profound meditation, he asked me why wouldn't I get one of the big fellas out from the town? I have never known Walkin' Aisy to accept a job without suggesting that some one else could do it better than he (in which he was probably quite right).

This may have been humility, due to the fact that his father had been that despised thing, "a dry-wall builder"; it may have been from coquetry, but I am inclined to think it was due to a mixture of other-worldliness and sloth.

On pressure he said that he had still a small pieceen of work to finish, but he might be able to come down to-morrow to travel the roof and see what would be wanting to us, and on Monday week, with the help of G.o.d, he would come in it. His blue eyes wavered towards the horizon. The interview closed.

"'Fair and young were they when in hope they began that long journey,'"

cooed Philippa, as we moved away. The quotation did not, as I well knew, refer to our visit to the Knoxes.

At Aussolas I aired my project to my landlord. Flurry is not a person to whom it is agreeable to air a project.

"Rebuild the chimneys, is it? Oh, with all my heart. Is there anything the matter with them?"

Andrew explained the imminence of our peril, and Flurry listened to him with his inscrutable eye on me.

"Well, it'll be some fun for you during the winter, Major, but be careful when you're cutting the ivy!"

I was betrayed into asking why.

"Because there's only it and the weather-slating keeping the walls standing."

"If I may presume to contradict one so much younger than myself," said old Mrs. Knox, "Shreelane is as well built a house as there is in the county." Her voice was, as ever, reminiscent of a bygone century and society; it was also keen-edged, as became a weapon of many wars, ancient and modern. She turned to me. "In the storm of '39 I remember that my father said that if Shreelane fell not a house in Ireland would stand. Every one in the house spent that night in the kitchen."

"May be that was nothing new to them," suggested Flurry.

Mrs. Knox regarded her grandson steadfastly and continued her story.

It has already been noted that when he and she were of the same company they considered no other antagonist worthy of their steel.

"It was my great-grandfather who built Shreelane in honour of his marriage," she went on. "He married a Riggs of Castle Riggs, a cousin of the celebrated Major Apollo--and thereby hangs a tale!" She blinked her eyes like an old rat, and looked round at each of us in turn. I felt as if I were being regarded through a telescope, from the standpoint of a distant century.

"They knew how to build in those days," she began again. "The bas.e.m.e.nt story of Shreelane is all vaulted."

"I daresay the kitchen would make a nice vault," said Flurry.

His grandmother looked hard at him, and was silent, which seemed to me a rather remarkable occurrence.

On the following day, Andrew and Walkin' Aisy "travelled the roof," and I accompanied them--that is to say, I sat on the warm lead, with my back against the sunny side of a chimney, and smoked torpidly, while Andrew preached, firmly and distinctly, from the top of a ladder.

Walkin' Aisy stood at the foot of the ladder, submissive, with folded hands, and upturned bearded face, looking like an elderly saint in the lower corner of a stained-gla.s.s window. At the conclusion of the lecture he said that surely the chimneys might fall any minute, but, for all, they might stand a hundred years; a criticism almost stupefying in its width of outlook.

The following day Captain Larpent departed to the Curragh, and, as is often the way of human beings with regard to their guests, we partly breathed more freely, and partly regretted him. On the whole it was restful.

A fortnight pa.s.sed, and I had almost forgotten about the chimneys; I was in the act of making an early start for an absence of a couple of days at the farther side of my district, when I encountered Walkin'

Aisy at the hall door.

"I'm here since six o'clock this morning, but I had no one to tend me,"

he began.

I was familiar with this plaint, and proffered him the yard boy.

"The young fella's too wake," replied Walkin' Aisy, in his slow and dreamy voice, "and they takes him from me." His mild eyes rested upon me in saddened reverie. "And there should be morthar mixed," he resumed slowly, "and there's not a pick of gravel in the yard."

I said, as I pulled on my gloves, that he could have Johnny Brien from the garden to minister to him, and that there was no hurry about the mortar.

"Well, it's what I was saying to the gardener," returned Walkin' Aisy very slowly, "I have no business coming here at all till those chimneys is taken down. The sahmint that's on them is very strong. It's what the gardener said, that quarry-men would be wanting."

"Why the devil didn't you say this at first?" I demanded, not without heat. "You and Captain Larpent told me that the old cement had no more hold than the sugar on a cake."