The Romance of His Life Part 7

"Why do Michael and the gardeners wear smock frocks and blue stockings?"

"It is so comfortable for one thing, and for another it is the old national peasant dress. We naturally all wish to be dressed alike nowadays, at any rate when we are in the country, just as the Scotch have always done."

"I remember," said John, "when I was a small child a splendid old man of ninety, Richard Hallmark, who used to come to church in a smock frock and blue worsted stockings and a tall black hat. His grown-up grandsons in bowler hats and ill-made coats and trousers looked contemptible beside him, but I believe they were ashamed of him."

His dim eyes scanned the familiar lawns and terraces of the gardens that had once been his, and the wide pasture lands beyond.

It was all as it had been in his day. Nevertheless he seemed to miss something.

"The rooks," he said at last. "I don't hear them. What has become of the rookery in the elms?"

"They've gone," she said. "Ten years ago. Michael felt it dreadfully.

Even now he can hardly speak of it. I hope, Father, you will never reproach him about it."

"Did he shoot them?" asked the old man in a hollow voice.

"No, no. He loved them, just as you did, but when he installed the Power Station he put it behind the elm wood to screen it from the house, and he did not remember, no one remembered, the rookery. You see rooks build higher than any other birds, and that was not taken into account in the radiation. At first everything seemed all right. The old birds did not appear to notice it. Even the smallest birds could pa.s.s through the current it was so slight. But when the spring came it proved too much for the fledgelings. They died as they were hatched out in the nest.

Then the old birds made the most fearful outcry, and left the place."

"There has always been a rookery at Marcham," said John, his voice shaking with anger. "I suppose I shall hear of Michael shooting the foxes next."

Serena did not answer. She looked blankly at him.

Presently John asked that his chair might be wheeled up the steep path through the wood to the little clearing at the top. Michael eagerly offered to draw the chair himself, but John refused. He had been distant towards his son since he had heard about the rookery.

Serena, with the help of a gardener, conveyed him gently to the heathery knoll, just breaking into purple.

John looked out once more with deep emotion at the familiar spot in the golden stillness of the September afternoon.

"I sat here with my wife the last afternoon before I went to the front,"

he said in his reedy old man's voice. "The heather was out as it is now."

His eyes turned to the peaceful landscape, the wooded uplands, the river, the cl.u.s.tered villages, and far away the city and the tall chimneys of his factories. As he looked he gave a gasp, and his jaw fell.

"The factories aren't working," he said.

"Yes, dear, indeed they are."

"They're _not_. Not a sign of smoke. It used to hang like a curtain over the city."

"Or like a shroud," said Serena looking fixedly at him. "It hung over the grimy overworked mothers, and the poor grimy fledglings of children in the little huddled houses. The factories consume their own smoke now."

"There was a law to that effect in my time," said John, "but n.o.body obeyed it."

"No one," she agreed. "No one."

As he looked it seemed as if a cloud of dust rose from the factories, and eddied in the air. As it drew near it resembled a swarm of bees.

"What on earth is that?" he asked.

"It is the work people going home to the garden city behind the hill. It would not do for them to live near the factories, would it? The ground is marshy. There are five or six streams there. And the gas from the factories has killed all the trees. What was not good for trees could not be good for children."

"They all lived there in my time. It was handy for work. There was always a great demand for houses. I know I had to build more."

Serena's eyes fell.

The flight of aeroplanes pa.s.sed almost overhead followed by two enormous airs.h.i.+ps waddling along like monstrous sausages.

"Are those Zeppelins?"

"They are aero busses built on the German models. They superseded the ground electrics a few years ago. Those two are to carry back the workers who are more or less deficient, and can't be trusted to fly an aeroplane; the kind of people who used to be shut up in asylums.

They can do sufficient work under supervision to pay for their own maintenance. We group with them the hysterical and the melancholy, and people who can't take the initiative, and those who suffer from inertia and tend to become blood suckers and to live on the energies of others.

Their numbers grow fewer every year."

Serena and Michael talked long about his father that night.

"But surely he must have seen it was a crime to house his factory hands like that."

"He didn't seem to. You see he compared well with many employers. He doesn't know--how could he, that his generation let us in. We paid their bill. All the wickedness and the suffering of the great black winter had their root in the blindness and self-seeking of his generation and the one before him."

"He's never been the same to me since he found I killed the rookery.

What's a rookery to a thousand children reared in a smoky swamp. What will he think of me when he hears that I stalked and shot the last fox in the county?"

"He must not hear it. We must guard him," said Serena, "and I pray that his life may not be long. It can't be, I think, and we have been warned that any sudden shock will kill him. I wish he could have a joyful shock and die of it, but there aren't any joyful shocks left for him in this world I am afraid."

"Have you explained to him that his grandchildren are coming home to-morrow from the Rocky Mountains?"

"I have told him that they are coming, but not that they have been in the Rockies. He might think it rather far to go for a fortnight's fis.h.i.+ng."

"Serena, what on earth will Father make of Jack. Jack is so dreadfully well-informed. I hardly dare open my mouth in his presence. Jack says he is looking forward to meeting his grandfather, and realising what he calls his feudal point of view."

"Jack only means by that expounding to his grandfather his own point of view. I don't think your Father will take to him, but he will love Catherine; she is so like your Mother, and _she_ never wants to realise any point of view."

Jack arrived first with his servant and a large hamper of fish. The air lorry followed with the tents and the fis.h.i.+ng tackle and the mastiffs.

"But where is Catherine," asked Michael, as Jack came in pulling off his leather helmet and goggles.

Jack grinned and said with a spice of malice:

"Catherine fell into the sea."

"She didn't!" said Serena. "That's the second time. How tiresome. She always has a cold on her chest if she gets wet."