A Small Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

said as she went upstairs.
    ‘She doesn’t seem to care a bit,’ Tom said when they were alone again. ‘Hard as nails, Catrin. Just as well, perhaps. My mother and the old girl are enough to put up with.’
    ‘Hard as nails!’ Edward said. ‘I’ve never seen a girl so altered, the shadow of a shadow. Last summer she was.... Now she looks.... She’s still beautiful, but.... Oh well, there’s no use expecting you to notice, I suppose. This soup’s wonderful. No one can make soup like Miss Rees. Tom, old chap, I’ll only be able to stay a week or so this time.’
    ‘That’s quite all right. Just as well, perhaps. Things will be pretty miserable here, I’m afraid.’
    ‘It’s not that. Not that at all. I’d be glad to be with you through this business, very glad. lt’s not that at all. You see, it’s Rose.’
    Tom and Edward left the table and stretched out in a couple of armchairs with their pipes.
    Tom wasn’t really disposed to hear about Rose, who was Edward’s fiancée, an active suffragette, and in Tom’s opinion – he had met her half a dozen times – spoilt, headstrong, and altogether unsuitable for Edward who was easy-going and easily hurt.
    ‘She’s determined to be a martyr, old chap.’
    ‘Will you be able to stop her?’
    Edward took several puffs of the pipe which he had at last managed to light.
    ‘No,’ he said afterwards. ‘But all the same, I think I should be around.’
    Edward was two years older than Tom. He was fair-haired and tall, whereas Tom was dark and, though not short, several inches shorter than Edward. They had lodged together for two years. Neither had another close friend.
    ‘Remarkable man, your father,’ Edward said after a few moments’ silence.
    ‘Remarkable fool.’
    Tom unfolded the letter again and re-read it. To his embarrassment, his eyes were suddenly full of tears. He turned his head as though to get more light from the big lamp on the table and blinked once or twice. ‘Twenty-three years,’ he said, when he was sure of being able to speak steadily. ‘To throw it all away. A farm like this.’
    ‘It’s your mother’s farm.’
    ‘What’s that got to do with it? When did she ever give any orders? Did you ever hear her give any orders? Say anything at all about running the farm?’
    ‘No no. Only she told me several times it was her father’s farm, her grandfather’s, great-great-grandfather’s. How many generations?’
    ‘It was.’
    ‘That’s all I said old chap. It’s her farm. It’ll be your farm. But it wasn’t his.’
    ‘All right. All right. I take your point. But what’s he got now? What’s he got instead? He lived very well whether it was his farm or not. He never wanted for anything. My mother has always been stingy as hell towards me, but that’s because of her damned Puritanism. She’s so terrified that I’ll become a gambler or a drunkard, or both, instead of a respectable lawyer. But she was never mean towards him.’
    ‘But surely the fact that you can make that statement implies that the whole thing was on the wrong footing? “She was never mean towards him.” ’
    ‘You’re a fine one, you are,’ Tom said at last. ‘You’ve been preaching women’s rights to me for two years; almost had me converted. But the first time you come across it in real life you find it rather distasteful.’
    ‘I’m a mass of contradictions,’ Edward agreed.
    ‘My grandfather left his farm to his only daughter, entailed to me. What’s wrong with that? My mother was five or six years older than my father. If she had died first, he might have married again and left it to another son or sold it.’
    ‘I don’t think he would have.’
    ‘My grandfather probably wasn’t the psychologist that you are.’
    ‘Probably not.’
    Tom managed a small smile.
    ‘Things like this just don’t happen in this part of the world,’ he said, then.
    ‘Things like this happen everywhere, from time to time.’
    ‘I can’t think of another