Looking at his eyes, ingenuously hanging on her answer, her nerve went. It was her own sister; but what did she know of her, when it came to the depths?
‘You never know. I wouldn’t give up.’
Young Croom pressed her arm.
‘Sorry to be talking of my mania. Only, when one longs day and night –’
‘I know.’
‘I must buy a goat or two. Horses don’t like donkeys; and as a rule they shy at goats; but I want to make these paddocks feel homey. I’ve got two cats for the boxes. What do you think?’
‘I only know about dogs, and – pigs theoretically.’
‘Come and have lunch. They’ve got a rather good ham.’
He did not again speak of Clare; and, after partaking together of the rather good ham, he put Dinny into her car and drove her the first five miles of the way home, saying that he wanted a walk.
‘I think no end of you for coming,’ he said, squeezing her hand hard: ‘It was most frightfully sporting. Give my love to Clare,’ and he went off, waving his hand, as he turned into a field-path.
She was absent-minded during the rest of the drive. The day, though still south-westerly, had gleams of sunlight, and sharp showers of hail. Putting the car away she got the spaniel Foch and went out to the new pigsties. Her father was there, brooding over their construction like the Lieutenant-General he was, very neat, resourceful, faddy. Doubtful whether they would ever contain pigs, Dinny slipped her arm through his.
‘How’s the battle of Pigsville?’
‘One of the bricklayers was run down yesterday, and that carpenter there has cut his thumb. I’ve been talking to old Bellows, but – dash it! – you can’t blame him for wanting to keep his men in work. I sympathize with a chap who sticks by his own men, and won’t have union labour. He says he’ll be finished by the end of next month, but he won’t.’
‘No,’ said Dinny, ‘he’s already said that twice.’
‘Where have you been?’
‘Over to see Tony Croom.’
‘Any development?’
‘No. I just wanted to tell him that I’ve seen Mr Muskham, and he won’t lose his job.’
‘Glad of that. He’s got grit, that boy. Pity he didn’t go into the army.’
‘I’m very sorry for him, Dad; he really is in love.’
‘Still a common complaint,’ said the General drily: ‘Did you see they’ve more than balanced the Budget? It’s an hysterical age, with these European crises for breakfast every other morning.’
‘That’s the papers. The French papers, where the print is so much smaller, don’t excite one half so much. I couldn’t get the wind up at all when I was reading them.’
‘Papers, and wireless; everything known before it happens; and headlines twice the size of the events. You’d think, to judge from the speeches and the “leaders,” that the world had never been in a hole before. The world’s always in a hole, only in old days people didn’t make a song about it.’
‘But without the song would they have balanced the Budget, dear?’
‘No, it’s the way we do things nowadays. But it’s not English.’
‘Do we know what’s English and what isn’t, Dad?’
The General wrinkled up his weathered face, and a smile crept about the wrinkles. He pointed at the pigsties.
‘Those are. Done in the end, but not before they must be.’
‘Do you like that?’
‘No; but I like this hysterical way of trying to cure it even less. You’d think we’d never been short of money before. Why, Edward the Third owed money all over Europe. The Stuarts were always bankrupt. And after Napoleon we had years to which these last years have been nothing, but they didn’t have it for breakfast every morning.’
‘When ignorance was bliss!’
‘Well, I dislike the mixture of hysteria and bluff we’ve got now.’
‘Would you suppress the voice that breathes o’er Eden?’
‘Wireless? “The old order changeth, yielding place to new. And God fulfils himself in many ways,” ’ quoted the General, ‘ “lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” I remember a sermon of old Butler’s at Harrow on that text – one of his best, too. I’m not hidebound, Dinny, at least I hope not. Only I think everything’s talked out too much. It’s talked out so much that it’s not felt.’
‘I believe in the Age, Dad. It’s dropped its superfluous clothes. Look at those old pictures in The Times lately. You smelt dogma and flannel petticoat.’
‘Not flannel,’ said the General, ‘in my day.’