Laughing House, Warwick Deeping [best romance books of all time .txt] 📗

minus paint and showing the grain of the wood. Also, the piece of dam aged roof needed re-slating. His advice was sound, and I agreed with him, and soon ladders were up, and paint-burners, putty-knives and brushes busy. Old Brown had a trick for stabilizing ladders other than planting a man to stand on the bottom rung all day, and pick his nose and gaze vacantly at the landscape. He drove an iron pike into the ground and lashed the ladder to it.

I remember that morning early in October a serene morning when I felt the house smiling at me. Young Brown had been at work on the portico pillars and the great front door, and there they were as of old, brilliant and white in the sunlight. The house was beginning to laugh, and something within me laughed with it.

I wondered what Peter would think, a Peter who would soon be with me.

Wicks turned up with two lorries and a gang of men and girls and set about the two huts. It astonished me the way these lusty young women got to work with wrenches and hammers. Wicks, too, had his coat off j he was large and swarthy with hairy forearms, and he tossed corrugated iron about like cardboard. In an as tonishingly short time they had the huts down and loaded. Wicks came across to me. Did I want to keep the wire netting and iron grips and chestnut paling that had been spread to prevent the lorries bogging? I did not. If he wanted the stuff he could have it with my blessing.

I took him into the house for a whisky.

“Going to re-sow with grass seed, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Time’s getting a bit short.”

“I know. Potter is keen on an autumn sowing.”

He held up his glass to me.

“Here’s hell to Hitler. I’ll send a tractor up and plough that ground, if it will help.”

“That’s very good of you.”

“Well, you’ve been easy with me, sir.”

They stripped the ground of the netting and chest nut fencing, and next day Wicks’ tractor driver turned up and made a nice job of ploughing. Old Potter rubbed his backside as though he had the itch, which he had, to get on with his sowing. The weather kept good, and when the ground dried a bit Potter put our Auto-Culto to work and scuffled the soil into a tilth. Next day he and Tom were sowing grass seed and scuffling it in to finish with a good rolling.

XV

BIKING down for tea that afternoon I ran into the unexpected, nothing less than Peter in mufti, swinging along rather stiffly on a new leg. I nearly fell off my bike into a hedge, and Peter helped to right me.

“Well, of all the—! How did you?”

“Got a taxi. Can you put up with me?”

“Ask Ellen.”

“I have.”

“I think I know what Ellen said.”

He looked colourful and bright of eye, and I felt that the gloom had gone from him. He had a green hat, a pale blue shirt, a green jacket and grey trousers, and a pearl grey tie and pull-over. I looked him over and found him good.

“Regular peacock, my lad,”

He laughed.

“I never want to see brown again, Uncle. I am regis tering a human protest.”

We had tea together, and nothing would satisfy him but a visit to the house. I got the old car out, for I saw that he was very new to his leg. We were lucky in the evening, for the sombreness of summer had gone, and the beeches were flecked with colour. The slanting sunlight shot over the house and threw a kind of glamorous veil over it. A little smoky mist was rising from the pool, and the sky was clear and cold.

Peter got himself and his new leg out of the car, and stood head up. He had come without a hat. That which was becoming familiar to me was new to him, the fresh white window frames, the white door with its clean brass fittings I had cleaned them myself the great strong white pillars. The house seemed to stand like some Henry the Eighth, but without the arrogance of that corpulent cad.

“Here I am. Here I stand. I am I, and I am strong and free.”

Peter turned to me suddenly,

“Uncle, it’s laughing.”

“Maybe it is.”

“There’s not enough laughter in the world. We all want to laugh. Not politics but ‘Punch.’”

And then he saw that the two huts had gone, and the neat brown carpet of rolled soil.

“Gosh, I hadn’t noticed that! Two bloody hippopotami vanished into air. Is that grass?”

“It will be.”

“English lawns. Say, I feel good. Let’s go in.”

I warned him that we had not yet tackled the interior, but somehow the evening light was soft and gentle to the house. The old place did not laugh, but seemed to sigh and draw happy tranquil breaths. And it was clean. We stood at a window, and looked at the pool, and the steep green valley and the soaring woods above. They had the sunlight on them.

Peter slipped an arm into mine.

“Oh, gracious land, oh stately trees. I feel that it is going to be good, Uncle, good for human eyes. I have seen the mess man makes. We can do something better here.”

I took him into the kitchen, for I had a surprise for him. All our new gear had arrived and was stored in the kitchen.

“Even gadgets can be good.”

“Gosh, Uncle, how did you get all this?”

“It was largely Sybil.”

He laughed.

“It would be. The Navy always does it. Christ, do you know what’s what?”

“And what is what?”

“Since I have been inside here I haven’t felt my fake leg.”

Over our evening meal we had an argument. I had said that Peter could stay with me, and he had countered with: “Yes, Uncle, if I pay.”

“Fudge,” said L

“I won’t be a parasite. I have been putting money by. Uncle, I’d much rather.”

“Very well, my lad, then I shall have to begin paying you a salary.”

Then, we looked at each other and laughed, because I think that it occurred to both of us that we were arguing, magnanimously, about an entity which to us was not of prime importance. The job was the thing. The world had got bogged in economics, and I think I was absorbing the spirit of the more generous and en lightened youngsters. Man had to live, but not by bread or cash alone; his urge might be to live more graciously, more cleanly, less loutishly.

“Well, we shall have to compromise. What about postponing the argument?”

He gave me a whimsical grin.

“We have to make the place pay its way, Uncle, but I rather, believe that neither of us care a damn about the filthy lucre.”

“Not always so filthy.”

“Of course not. I’m not one of the fools who won’t see that a man must have a cake to cut at, and that the better he is at his job, the bigger his slice should be.”

“Applied intelligence.”

“Yes,” said he, “backed by character.”

I gave him a benignant look.

“Glad you know that. But you would. I’m not too old to learn things. I think we are going to have tremendous fun with our show.”

He nodded.

“Yes, gorgeous fun.”

Peter and I held a consultation with Mr. Brown on the subject of baths and basins. He tickled his goatee beard and looked at us slyly.

“That isn’t in the contract, sir.”

“I know, nor is our permission to spend—”

“Nout said who’s the wiser?”

He pointed out to us that before any decorating was done on the top floor basins and baths and lavatories should be installed, which was obvious. Piping, etc., would have to be laid, and walls broken through. It was Peter who made the wise suggestion.

“Supposing we opened with one floor, and took in the other rooms later?”

“What about noise?” said L

“Well, the rough work and the hammering might be got through earlier. Mr. Brown understands all that.”

Mr. Brown swallowed the flattery.

“That be a good idea, sir. We could do the plumbing on the quiet. No need for Nosey Parkers.”

“We can settle the extras in hard cash,”

“That’ll suit me, sir.”

The weather had broken, October gales, but nearly all the outside work had been finished, and Brown & Co. were experimenting with our scheme of decoration, We tried it first on the study, and the result was charming. The flowery blues, reds and greens of the old pat tern showed softly through the distemper. Peter in particular was delighted with it.

The stained surround of the floor boards had been worn away, and one morning I found Peter busy with a pot of stain and a brush. He was whistling.

“Found a job, Uncle.”

“So I see.”

“Makes one feel good.”

He was to find himself all sorts of jobs, putting up curtain rods, cleaning up finger-plates, polishing stoves, cleaning up baths and bath-taps, polishing lavatory seats.

He was getting used to his leg, and the stump was ceasing to hurt him; he seemed to be in a perennial and sweet temper.

Old Potter and Tom were sweating in the garden. They tackled the greenhouses, and the broken fruit-garden wall, and did a creditable piece of amateur brick laying. Spades and scythes and sickles were busy in fine weather, and weeds were disappearing. The lawns were growing a crop of green hair.

I found Peter at the breakfast table looking very solemn over a letter. I could guess its origin.

“How’s Sybil?”

“Swearing.”

“Dear, dear!”

“She says: ‘Damn this war. Why don’t they get on with it. The blighters won’t let me out. But I’ve got an idea!”

“Sybil is full of ideas.”

Peter looked bothered.

“I wonder what this one is.”

Rain, rain, rain, and the war news damnable. The Germans have broken the American line just when we thought the beasts were finished.

Damn everything! What a nice Christmas present!

The house was very damp, and we were afraid of the walls sweating and spoiling the new distemper, a,nd it was an occasion for trying out the furnace and radiators. Thank Heaven we found no sign of leaks. One drenching day Potter and Tom cleaned out the furnace and saw that the cistern in the roof was full, and stoked up the furnace with dry wood and some coke which the army had left behind. We toured the house watching the radiators., but thank God the installation was in order, and the old house began to warm up and to dry. For days the windows had been blurred with moisture.

Peter came to me on this particular day,

“Great snakes, Uncle, we have forgotten something!”

“What?”

“Dining-room tables.”

So we had! The big mahogany table I possessed would be useless, so we went touring antique shops for pedestal, or three-legged tables, and even gate-legged specimens, and they cost me much. Our idea was to have polished tables which would save cloths and laundry.

I was preparing to expand our food production, and add geese, ducks and rabbits to our poultry, but I needed more help with Potter and Tom so busy and young Potter not yet with us. Through Wicks I managed to win a Land-Girl, one Polly, a large, buxom, sunny crea ture with a retrousse nose and curly hair. She was a trained poultry-woman, and as strong as a man, and with a temper that was as sweet as milk. It was Polly who persuaded me to keep two cows, Jerseys, and to make herself responsible for them. Incidentally, Polly was to be most valuable in a crisis and in saving a situation. The cry would