CHAPTER TWO

‘The Village Named Morality’

Up on the high veld our rivers are apt to be strings of pools linked by muddy trickles—­the most stagnant kind of watercourse you would look for in a day’s journey.  But presently they reach the edge of the plateau and are tossed down into the flats in noble ravines, and roll thereafter in full and sounding currents to the sea.  So with the story I am telling.  It began in smooth reaches, as idle as a mill-pond; yet the day soon came when I was in the grip of a torrent, flung breathless from rock to rock by a destiny which I could not control.  But for the present I was in a backwater, no less than the Garden City of Biggleswick, where Mr Cornelius Brand, a South African gentleman visiting England on holiday, lodged in a pair of rooms in the cottage of Mr Tancred Jimson.

The house—­or ‘home’ as they preferred to name it at Biggleswick—­was one of some two hundred others which ringed a pleasant Midland common.  It was badly built and oddly furnished; the bed was too short, the windows did not fit, the doors did not stay shut; but it was as clean as soap and water and scrubbing could make it.  The three-quarters of an acre of garden were mainly devoted to the culture of potatoes, though under the parlour window Mrs Jimson had a plot of sweet-smelling herbs, and lines of lank sunflowers fringed the path that led to the front door.  It was Mrs Jimson who received me as I descended from the station fly—­a large red woman with hair bleached by constant exposure to weather, clad in a gown which, both in shape and material, seemed to have been modelled on a chintz curtain.  She was a good kindly soul, and as proud as Punch of her house.

‘We follow the simple life here, Mr Brand,’ she said.  ’You must take us as you find us.’

I assured her that I asked for nothing better, and as I unpacked in my fresh little bedroom with a west wind blowing in at the window I considered that I had seen worse quarters.

I had bought in London a considerable number of books, for I thought that, as I would have time on my hands, I might as well do something about my education.  They were mostly English classics, whose names I knew but which I had never read, and they were all in a little flat-backed series at a shilling apiece.  I arranged them on top of a chest of drawers, but I kept the Pilgrim’s Progress beside my bed, for that was one of my working tools and I had got to get it by heart.

Mrs Jimson, who came in while I was unpacking to see if the room was to my liking, approved my taste.  At our midday dinner she wanted to discuss books with me, and was so full of her own knowledge that I was able to conceal my ignorance.

‘We are all labouring to express our personalities,’ she informed me.  ’Have you found your medium, Mr Brand? is it to be the pen or the pencil?  Or perhaps it is music?  You have the brow of an artist, the frontal “bar of Michelangelo”, you remember!’