The Elderbrook Brothers by Gerald Bullet

sometimes of a kind to make one squirm.
    â€˜Oh, I don’t know,’ said Felix. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he realized, with regret, that perhaps they sounded ‘modest’.
    â€˜Yes, a rough passage,’ Mr Surrey insisted. ‘But you weren’t afraid, were you? You knew who the Pilot was.’
    â€˜Er … yes,’ said Felix uncertainly. But his puzzled look betrayed him.
    â€˜Jesus, who else?’ said Mr Surrey. ‘Our Saviour and our Friend in Need. We can always take our troubles to Him. Always. That’s the good news I’m hoping to carry with me across the ocean, Elderbrook, some day, when God wills. I am with you always, that’s what He said. And He meant it, just like that. It’s quite simple, the old simple gospel. No long words. Nothing mysterious. Just honest, healthy religion, and English, through and through, like cricket and footer. We know the rules and we must play the game. You know why. You don’t need me to tell you,’ said Mr Surrey, resolved to do just that. ‘It’s because we’ve got such a grand Captain, eh?’ He gave his audience an intent earnest look, then suddenly grinned, and seemed to shake himself, saying heartily: ‘Well, well! No more preaching!’ He rose to his feet and shook hands. ‘Buck up and get strong again, old chap. We all miss our Elderbrook.’
§ 13
    Upmarden did not greatly concern itself with what went on outside Mercestershire. Why should it? Within those broad confines (or narrow, if you chose to think them so) the whole human drama of love and birth and death had ample scope; and no matter how far you travelled, no matter in what distant hemispheres of the mind you searched, you would get no deeper knowledge of reality than your own lives or the lives of yournearest neighbours could give you. National and imperial affairs scarcely touched these private lives. That the Queen was immured in Balmoral or Windsor, nursing her years-old grief, was a fixed fact, like the sun in heaven; but unlike that luminary it did not affect the cycle of the seasons, or the price of cattle, or the leap of young blood in springtime. It was wonderful, if you stopped to think of it, that in that small, stubborn, unimaginative personage the might and majesty of a great Empire was symbolized; but so it had always been within the memory of all but the very oldest, and that it would not be so for ever was beyond normal imagining. The year of the Diamond Jubilee was made memorable, for at least one of the Elderbrooks, not by solemn thoughts of the Queen’s majesty but by the gift of a satchel from Aunt Dolly. It was a thing of beauty and Guy fell in love with it instantly. Its shape and colour, and especially its smell, enchanted him. Yet he was uneasily conscious of being already too big to carry a satchel and was shy of exhibiting it among schoolmates who, like himself, had never felt the need for such an aid to the acquisition of learning; moreover he would very soon, he hoped, be leaving them. But it gave him a profound secret satisfaction to have it hanging from, a nail in the wall at his bed-head, in the room which he still shared with Matthew. There he left it, and there it served the purpose of a shelf for the books Mr Cowlin lent him. In the early days of its possession it was the first thing he looked for on waking.
    In the world beyond Mercestershire astonishing things happened, but with rare exceptions they made no great impression on the Elderb rooks and their neighbours. They were remote and scarcely real, little more than a confused rambling serial story brought into the house every day in the form of the
Mercester Chronicle
. The death of the aged Mr. Gladstone provoked Joe to an unwonted outburst of moralizing, for Mr Gladstone was a great hero of his; the rush to the Klon-dyke goldfields, the year before, had provided Guy and Felix with a new game in the summer holidays, a