The Elderbrook Brothers by Gerald Bullet Page A

successor to theshipwrecks and explorings of earlier years; young Felix, who at the time had a fancy for following in the footsteps of Irving, received a personal shock when he read how a popular actor of melodrama had been stabbed to death by a demented stranger at the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre: for days he could think of little else, and for a long time the incident retained for him a curious vividness, as though it were happening to himself. But the larger, the world events made less mark at Up-marden than, for example, the compulsory muzzling of old Rover the sheepdog, in the interests of a government campaign against rabies: a matter, this, for indignation, Rover being one of the most amiable and harmless of his kind. And for the children that too was of small account compared with the brief annual excitement of the Boat Race. Each year, with dramatic suddenness, came a day when every child in the neighbourhood was asking every other child: ‘Are you Oxford or Cambridge?’ And everyone ‘was Oxford’, because Oxford always won: everyone except, for the same reason, Guy. Guy, a perverse supporter of the traditionally losing side, had at last his reward; but the victory of Cambridge came too late for him to flaunt it among his neighbours, for by then he was translated to another sphere.
    Of the three brothers, Matthew was the most diligent reader of the newspaper and the least likely to be much concerned by its news. He was the stay-at-home, and to read of things beyond his horizon had a sharper appeal for him not because he rebelled against his destiny but rather because he had embraced it. He was not, as Felix was, cast out into a strange world for two-thirds of the year; he did not, as Guy did, dream of escape into a vaguely triumphant future; he remained rooted in the tradition of his fathers. He was a farmer born and bred, and a gardener too: unusual combination. He had, as they said, green fingers. He had an uncanny sense of when it was best to do what, and a way with animals, and a feeling for weather that enabled him, nine times out of ten, to forestall its vagaries. Joe Elderbrook was in the habit of boasting toneighbours that Matt was a better farmer than his dad. And the more Matthew read in the newspaper of the miseries and dangers endured by workers in some urban industries, such as lead poisoning in the manufacture of china, and phosphorus poisoning in the making of matches, subjects dragged into unwelcome prominence as the century neared its end, the more was he persuaded that if farming had not chosen him he would have chosen farming. It was an arduous but satisfying life. You did not get rich on it, but with care and contriving and hard work you paid your way, and at least you did not condemn your work-people to an early death, as these big manufacturers didn’t mind doing: of if they did mind, Matthew argued, why did they raise such an outcry against proposals to eliminate the dangers?
    But Matthew, too, had his discontents. He was not quite the lump of meek good-natured earth that a superficial observer might have taken him for. Joe was a zealot in farming, and like all zealots he had an aptitude for tyranny. He had married comparatively late and was now an old man. He had had precisely his own way for so many years that the mere notion of conceding another and a younger man’s point of view affronted him. Whatever he might say of Matthew, in moments mellowed by drinking with his cronies, he never allowed this model son of his to forget who was master, and he was quick to resent in him anything that looked like independent action. Nor was he generous in the matter of pay. The boy had a good home, hadn’t he? And if there was anything he wanted, a new suit of clothes, a horse of his own to ride, or even one of these newfangled freewheel bicycles, he had only to ask. So what could he want with a salary, like any hired labourer? ‘And when I’m gone,’ he said,