Part I



        My family are a great anxiety to me. Sometimes when Saunders is doing my hair -- it's been up for ages -- nearly six months -- I look in the glass, and wonder why it's not grey -- the hair, I mean.

        There is my brother Bob, for instance. He's much better, now, of course, for I have worked very hard on him; but when he first went to Oxford he was dreadful. He required the very firmest treatment on my part.

        And even father, when my eye is not on him. . . There was that business of the right-of-way for example.

        It happened the summer before I put my hair up. I had been away for a visit to Aunt Flora. She is one of my muddling aunts, not nearly so nice as Aunt Edith, but, on the other hand, not perfectly awful like Aunt Elizabeth. I was glad to get back.

        The motor was waiting for me at the station. I sat in front instead of in the tonneau, because I wanted to talk to Phillipps, the chauffeur. He always tells me what has been happening while I have been away, and what the butler thinks about it.

         To-day he started about old Joe Gossett. Joe is an old man who earns a little by winding up some of the big clocks in the village -- the church clock, the one over the stables at home, and one or two more. At least, he's supposed to; but he often forgets, and then the clocks stop, and there's rather a fuss. I like Joe. He is a friend of mine. We have long talks about pigs. He loves talking about pigs. He has two of his own, and they are like sons to him. I have known him talk for three-quarters of an hour about them.

        "Old Joe," said Phillipps, "he forgot to wind up the stable clock again. He's careless, Miss."

        I said: "Poor Joe! Was father cross?"

        Phillipps chuckled. He is the only chauffeur I have met who ever does chuckle.

        "Ah!" he said. "You're right, miss. Old Joe, he's always talking about his blessed pigs, till he forgets there's anything except them in the world." Phillipps let the car go a mile before he said anything else. He's like that. He turns himself off like a tap.

        He started again quite suddenly.

        "Rare excitement in the village, miss, about that there right-of-way."

        That was the first I had heard of it. Phillipps told me the story in jerks.

        It was like this. I am condensing Phillipps' explanation, and leaving out what he said to the butler about it, and what the butler said to him.

        Beyond the wood at the end of our lake is a field. The villagers have always used it as a short cut. It saved them going round two sides of a big triangle. Father didn't mind. They never went off the path, but simply walked straight from gate to gate. They had been doing it as long as I could remember. Well, father, after letting them do it for years, has suddenly said they mustn't, and closed the field. And now there was great excitement, because the villagers said that they had a legal right to use the path, and father said no, they hadn't anything of the sort, and that he had a perfect right to stop them.

        I couldn't understand it a bit, because father had always been so nice to the villagers, and there didn't seem any reason for suddenly being horrid to them.

        Then Phillipps explained further, and I understood.

        "Mr. Morris," he said -- Morris is our butler -- "says that it's not, rightly speaking, the colonel's doing at all. Mr. Morris says it was Mr. Rastrick as put Jim up to it, and made him do it. Mr. Morris says he heard him at dinner. Mr. Morris says Mr. Rastrick kept on telling the colonel he was being put upon, and must stand up for his rights, and about the thin edge of the wedge. Mr. Morris says that what's set the colonel off."

        Then I saw the whole thing, because I knew Mr. Rastrick, and knew just how he would talk father over. I hate Mr. Rastrick. He was at school with father, and sometimes comes to stay with us. He has a private school near London. My brother Bob says he bears him no grudge for that, but that what he objects to is that Mr. Rastrick seems to look on our house as a sort of branch of his private school. He is one of those horrid men who will try to manage everybody's business. I have heard him telling Morris how to look after a cellar. He sometimes lectures Phillipps on motors. And he was always giving me advice in a horrid managing way when he was last stopping with us.

        I could see him persuading father. My brother Bob once said to me that, if you were tactful, father would let you sit on his lap and help yourself out of his pockets; but that, if he got the idea that he was being let in on the quiet, he ramped.

        Evidently he had ramped about this right-of-way business.

        I made up my mind that I would try and stop it if I possibly could, because I know that in a day or two, when he had had time to think it over quietly, he would wish that he hadn't done it, only he would be too proud to give in then.

        I thought a great deal about it as I dressed for dinner.

        * * * * *

        When I got down to the dining room, I found father and Mr. Rastrick there, and Mr. Rastrick's son, Augustus. He looked about fifteen. I had never seen him before.

        "You know Joan," said father.

        "Whoop-oop-oop," said Mr. Rastrick. "How you have grown! Quite the little woman, Romney, eh?"

         Father beamed. I felt like scratching. I hate men who talk like aunts.

         I said: "How do you do, Mr. Rastrick?" in a cold voice I usually keep for horrid boys, who forget that I have grown up, and call me by my Christian name because we used to play tennis together in some prehistoric age. It usually goes right through the boys like an east wind; but Mr. Rastrick didn't seem to notice it. He leaned against the mantelpiece and went on telling father what he ought to put on the croquet lawn in winter.

        Mr. Rastrick was a tall man, with large penetrating grey eyes and a pointed black beard. He was of what they call commanding aspect. I always thought he looked like those old photographs you see in albums, where the father of the family is shown holding a scroll in one hand, apparently just about to address the multitude. Mr. Rastrick always looked as if he were just about to address the multitude. His son Augustus was short and fat. He looked to me a furtive boy. From the time I first saw him to the end of dinner he did not utter a single word, but just pounded away at his food, as if that was all he was there for. He was a little pig of a boy. Saunders, my maid, told me when he had gone that he had spent most of his visit in or near the kitchen, trying to get the cook to give him buns.

        Still, it didn't matter, his being silent. His father made up for it. Between them, they talked just enough for two.

        Mr. Rastrick finished off the croquet lawn before the bell rang. He took a short rest during the soup. When the fish came he started on cricket.

        "Whoop-oop-oop," he began -- I forgot to say he had a sort of impediment in his speech. When once he was fairly started, he talked at a tremendous rate; but he always began his speeches with those three words. It was just like a motor goes before it glides off. It was just as if somebody had started his engines.

        "The young fellows nowadays," said Mr. Rastrick, beginning to glide off, "have no notion of what I call real cricket. Put them on a billiard-table, and they can play forward all day. What I like to see is the man who can make runs on a good old-fashioned village pitch. Your Frys, and Haywards, and Pulairets, where would they be on a village green? What about their three thousand runs in a season then? Why I tell you my boy Gussie would bowl them all out in a twinkling."

        Gussie, who had been stuffing himself with salmon, looked round the table with his mouth full in a sort of hunted way, and remained silent.

        "My boy Gussie," Mr. Rastrick went on with pride, "is a capital bowler -- capital. I have trained him myself. I didn't let him bowl fast, like so many stupid boys. I said to him: 'Gussie, if I catch you trying to plug them in,' as I believe the expression is, 'I'll thrash you!' And I'd have done it too."

        Gussie looked sad and thoughtful, as though he were brooding over painful memories.

        "Whoop-oop-oop," said Mr. Rastrick enthusiastically. "Playing for my school last term against the Charchester College third eleven, an exceedingly powerful combination, including the cousin of an Oxford blue, my boy Gussie scored seven wickets for forty-six runs."

        "No, did he, upon my word?" said father. "We must get up a village match for you to play in, Augustus. Seven for forty-six! By George! Excellent!"

        "Whoop-oop-oop, including the cousin of an Oxford blue," said Mr. Rastrick.

        "Splendid!"

        The gorging boy gnawed his second helping of salmon without uttering.

        It was just then that I had my idea. Do you ever notice how, when you have been thinking very hard about something, and can't decide on anything, it sometimes comes to you suddenly when you aren't thinking about it? It was just like that now. I had been trying all the time I was dressing to find some way of settling this quarrel between father and the village, and I couldn't think of anything. And now it came to me all of a sudden.

        I said: "Father, I've thought of a splendid way of settling the right-of-way thing. Of course, I know they haven't any business in the field really. Still you've always let them go through it."

        "Who told you about it?" asked father.

        I said Phillipps had. I said: "Why not get up a match to decide it, father? It would be awful fun. If they win, let them have the right-of-way. And if we win, you could do what you liked, and shut up the field. I wish you would. Don't you think it's a good idea, father?" Because, you see, I thought the village were certain to win. Father used to be a splendid bat, and is still very good; but I didn't think we had anyone much except him, Bob being away on a cricket tour with the Authentics; and some of the village team bat very well.

        I know Mr. Rastrick was just opening his mouth to say "Whoop-oop-oop, preposterous!" but it was too late. Father always likes anything sporting, and I could see he loved this idea.

        "Excellent! Capital!" he cried. "A splendid idea. I don't want to be hard on these fellows. It doesn't matter to me whether they go through the field or not. It's only the principle of the thing. I'll arrange it tonight."

        "Whoop-oop-oop," began Mr. Rastrick disapprovingly; but father's mind was made up.

“Now let me see,” he said. “About our team.”

       
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