Portrait of Elmbury Read Online Free PDF Page A

pettifogging regard to convention and smug routine. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, going his doctor’s rounds in a gig, encountered one morning a very aggrieved prize-fighter, pacing furiously up and down beside a famous landmark called the Four Shires Stone. When he asked the large and murmurous crowd what was the matter, my grandfather learned that they were all very angry and disappointed because the prize-fighter’s opponent had taken fright and failed to turn up. “I have a long morning,” said my great-grandfather promptly, “what with measles and confinements and one thing and another, but if somebody will hold my horse I shall be delighted to give the gentleman a fight if he is willing.” They fought with bare fists, and my greatgrandfather did so much damage to the prize-fighter’s face that he had to stitch it up for him. He is said to have demanded hisfee for this service. He then wiped his hands and went on to the confinements and the measles.
    His son, my mother’s father, inherited the practice, and
his
form of self-expression was to break his bones out hunting. He avoided breaking his neck, however, and miraculously died in bed. By all accounts, he was a man much loved; even the gipsies, whose wandering tribes he doctored, knew him as their friend, and often when he was riding on his twenty-mile round he would stop for breakfast or dinner at one of their encampments. Gipsies have long memories; and only two years ago I was told that the tinkers still talk of him, and his mercurial chestnut mare which danced and pirouetted continually, while my grandfather sat it like a jockey, one light hand on the reins, the other holding his little black bag.
The Bourgeois at Work
    My relations on my father’s side were much more stolid; they would never, I think, have sat down to a dish of roast hedgehog at a Romany camp fire. They had lived in and about Elmbury for so long, and moreover there were so many of them, that they seemed to have proprietary rights in the place. They were Mayors, Justices of the Peace, Churchwardens. Most of them were comfortably off, none of them was rich. Most of them were able, few of them were clever. In fact, they mistrusted cleverness. That was the sort of people they were. Cleverness, they thought, generally got you into trouble; and it was true enough that the only one of them who was really clever finished up by drinking himself to death. His name was Clem; and he was brilliant. He became a Barrister, which was outside the family tradition, and upon the threshold of a great career he paused, hesitated, and turned back. He liked the local pub better. But when we children asked what had happened to him, and why Clem who was so gay and handsome did not come to visit us any more, there was always an uncomfortable pause. The family didn’t like talking about Clem. “He was veryclever, of course, but cleverness isn’t everything.” We had to be content with that.
    The others, lacking this terrible handicap of cleverness, prospered moderately and lived long respectable lives. They were all large and substantial, rather like family portraits come to life; Uncle Reg the doctor; Uncle Jim the lawyer; Uncle Tom and my father, the auctioneers. They sat together upon the Town Council; they took it in turns to be Mayor, and Chairman of the local Conservative Association; they administered charities and trusts with meticulous care; they shared a monopoly of the post of churchwarden of the Abbey. The editor of the local paper had little trouble when they died; the same obituary notice, with a few trifling alterations would serve for all of them. “He played a prominent part in Public Life.” And that indeed was their tradition; so long as the Public was not too large. Elmbury with its five thousand inhabitants was just big enough; if you ventured into the world beyond, you got mixed up in wider politics, which were administered by