None-Go-By

Front matter

THIS is the story of a husband and wife who wish to escape from their friends and relations, and all the friction of human intercourse, its complications and its affairs. So they go to a small cottage called "None-Go-By," and think that there they can settle down to the eventless life they desire. In this, for a time, they are conspicuously disappointed, but in the end they realise all and more than that for which they had hoped. None-Go-By is an extremely lively, human, and witty book, and one of the best Mrs. Sidgwick has written.

Also by Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

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Chapter 1

Two elderly people with moderate means and no incumbrances ought to be able to lead a quiet life. For a long time Thomas and I had said this to each other, but we had not done it. We have no children of our own, but we have relatives and friends, and somehow or other we get mixed up in their affairs. We do not wish to be because by nature we are curmudgeons, but it happens. I cannot see, for instance, why Martin and Rachael should have done their courting at our house at Wimbledon instead of in Onslow Square, where my brother James Wilmot, the father of Rachael, lives. We certainly introduced the young people to each other, but with misgivings, for Rachael at the time was an ardent post-war feminist, while Martin's opinons and politics were as old and crusted as the port he gave you at his house in Hampshire when you dined with him. We could not foresee that Martin would write in his diary the night he first saw our niece, "met Rachael Wilmot. Shall marry her." He is a methodical man and dogged. He besieged Rachael, who happened to be staying with us after a worse row than usual at home, and in the end she succumbed. It was a great relief to me when she did, because I was suffering at the time from a cook, who objected to visitors and had no sympathy with a love affair that entailed extra work in the kitchen. The courtship was transferred to Onslow Square after Rachael accepted Martin, and a year ago they were married amidst general rejoicings. We went to the wedding, and her sister Susan said she hoped I should soon do as much for her. The baggage!

"Your uncle and I are going to live in the country," I said to her at Christmas when we were dining with her parents.

"What for?"

"To get away from all of you. We're tired."

"You won't get away from us. We shall come and see you."

"You will not. I refuse to have any of you."

"I shall get round Uncle Thomas. He never refuses me anything."

"He would not ask people to the house if I did not want them."

"Oh, wouldn't he?" said Susan. "How little you know him. Shall we have five shillings on it?"

I refused, because . . . well, because I did not want to. It would have been undignified. Besides, Susan was wrong. I do know Thomas. That very night he said to me:

"Shall we have a spare room in that cottage?"

"A very small one."

"Then they can't come at the same time."

"Who can't come at the same time?"

"Susan and Harry Johns. She told me to-day that he was interested in my last book and wanted a quiet time. . . ."

Thomas's last book is called "The Ideality of Space," and required for its right understanding more higher mathematics than most people possess.

Harry Johns is doing his bit in the Kaffir Market, and had told me that very afternoon that he never read books. He is an engaging, healthy young male with some capacity for business and a breezy contempt for what he does not understand, and just at present he would say the world was flat if Susan told him to.

"Susan and Harry Johns are not going to have a quiet time in our cottage," I said firmly. "We want one ourselves. I hope you didn't ask Susan to stay with us, Thomas?"

"I did not," said Thomas, moving a pawn.

When he had finished this manoeuvre satisfactorily he still looked at the board in an absorbed way and said:

"She may have invited herself."

"Not definitely?"

"I don't think so, but perhaps you'd better find out. I believe she asked me what we were doing at Easter."

"What did you say?"

"I can't remember saying anything."

I'm so used to this kind of conversation with Thomas that I didn't groan. When a man's mind is eternally fixed on Time and Space it may be very bright up there, but here below it moves in a fog. Besides, although Thomas is a philosopher by trade, his hobby is chess; and the combination makes life with him a continual surprise. You never know what sort of hash he will prepare for you next.

"We are not going to have any visitors at None-Go-By," I reminded him; for only two days ago we had agreed on that.

He looked up from his chess board.

"What did you say?"

"I said None-Go-By. It is the name of our cottage. If we don't have a quiet life there we shall never have it anywhere."

"Perhaps we shall never have it anywhere," said Thomas.

In talking of the cottage to Thomas I always dwelt on the peace and leisure we should have there and not on its cheapness. I meant to let that aspect of it steal upon him unawares. For a long time we had been living on the edge of our income, and edges are uncomfortable. Thomas hardly noticed it, but I did. The kind of thing that upsets him is having his room turned out or losing his pipe. I've been married to Thomas most of my life, but even now I don't understand about his pipes. The pewter pots on his chimney piece are crammed with them, and the last time I tidied his room I put away seven myself in a drawer of his Japanese smoking cabinet. He was rather annoyed about that because one of them happened to be the pipe he smoked, and he said I might have known he never kept it in a drawer.

"If you always smoke that pipe why can't the others be thrown away?" I asked; but Thomas will not answer sensible questions. He only looks worried and says he would like a little peace while he does a chess problem. He plays chess by post with his friend Dr. Ambleside, and the days the post cards come you can't get him to take an interest in anything. A game lasts the best part of a year, and when one is finished another begins. Besides the games there are problems. I don't even know the moves myself, so I'm not going to write about chess. All I have to say is that while we decided to leave Wimbledon and take a country cottage, a particularly interesting set of problems was engaging Thomas's attention. At any rate my memories of this tide in our affairs throw up a picture of him bending in an absorbed way over his red and white men and assenting, with the amiability of indifference, to everything that I proposed.

"Are you quite sure that you would like to leave Wimbledon and live in Cornwall?" . . . I would say while we were making up our minds. "I should want my books with me; and a few other things."

"You must have your books, of course; but do you realise that the cottage we propose to take is the size of a rabbit hutch and has no bathroom?"

"Shall you like that?"

"We shall have baths in our bedrooms."

"Confound that bishop," murmured Thomas.

People who do not know him will point out that I chose my moment badly and that I ought to have discussed our plans with him at meals or in the watches of the night. But how can you discuss plans with a man who takes no interest in them and is ready to do anything you please provided he has his pipe, his chess-board, his books, and his few other things? This sounds as if Thomas was easy-going, and in some ways he is. As the time for our departure came near he got rather interested in our cottage and explained to every one he met that we were going to live in the country with water laid on. One night when we were dining with the Rosetrees in Grosvenor Gardens, I heard him telling old Lady Rosetree (née Abrahams) that we had taken a cottage in Cornwall with water laid on; and the pride in his voice was quite equal to the pride in hers when she told him that the recent alterations in her little place had just cost her ten thousand pounds.

"Every guest suite has its own bath-room now," she added. "Any other arrangement I consider piggy, don't you?"

I did not hear what Thomas answered, but he came up to me towards the end of the evening with a troubled face and said that he had just been talking to Southernwood, the well-known literary critic, and that in Southernwood's opinion we were making a mistake. Cornwall had been overdone. Cornwall was banal. As a setting for a novel I could not use it.

Like the hairdresser in The Tinted Venus, I said, "Lor!" What else could I say? And I flashed a beckoning eye towards Mr. Southernwood, who is a friend of mine though hardly half my age.

"This is serious!" I said when he came across the room.

"Why didn't you ask me before you did it?" said he.

"I can call it Cumberland," I suggested, "or Cheshire."

"But you'll have to use the dialect, and the dialect will pin you down."

"It won't," I assured him. "When I get going, nothing pins me down."

"If you made it Yorkshire I could see to it," offered Thomas, always ready to help.

"Yorkshire has been overdone," opined Mr. Southernwood.

"Perhaps we had better give up the cottage," I sighed.

"I think I should," said Mr. Southernwood.

But we didn't. It is very well for the young and the adventurous to find new settings in strange places, but unfortunately I am not young and I am not detached. For more years than I can count I have been married to Thomas and Thomas has his books to write and his books require no settings. I picked up the last one yesterday, and here is a quotation from it:

"Our intuitions of extended things do not themselves possess those properties which make up the content intuited, and there do not exist between them those spatial connexions the existence of which between the objects intuited is indicated by them."

When you can write like that it does not matter whether your scenery is in Cornwall or the Balkans. Besides, I wanted a quiet life myself and a gentle climate and that sixpence more than our income so important to happiness. When the winds of March were scattering the streets of London with dust and bits of straw, we trekked to Porthlew in the Riviera express and waited in that engaging town for our possessions to arrive. There was only one van with furniture, for the cottage would not hold much, and we had stored the rest; but there were three truck loads belonging to Thomas. You will remember that besides his books he had said he would want a few other things.

Chapter 2

When the Russians and the Japs were at war in 1904 there was much talk of the town of Mukden, and the name on English lips so truly describes the invariable condition of Thomas's carpentering room that it has stuck ever since. I used to offer to tidy it for him, but I never do now. It makes him too miserable. Even if I stand at the open door he gets suspicious and wishes I would go. He keeps the door locked. Once when she was first married Caroline coaxed her way in and for a whole day helped him to sort the indescribable rubbish he collects, and when she had finished she was sick. Thomas said it must have been what she ate for lunch. Our friends always offer Thomas débris of an imperishable nature that would otherwise be thrown into a dustbin, and he accepts it all, explaining to me that you never know what you may want. Before we came to Cornwall I tried to persuade him to throw his old hoards away and begin new ones. I assured him that even in Cornwall he might find rusty hinges, old nails, bits of leaden pipes, three legged chairs, broken door handles, and such like; but he would not be persuaded. Nor would he leave a foot of wood behind. Thomas loves wood. When I want a little job done in the house he is always ready to do it provided he can order wood. He can't carpenter without wood, he says. The other day I asked him to put me up a shelf in an alcove about two feet long and one wide. He said he thought he could manage it if he got some wood. I said it was hardly worth while ordering wood for such a small job and that any stray bit would do; but a few days later the Morwenna lorry buzzed up to our gate with a whole load of planks of varying sizes, three pounds' worth perhaps, and all too big for an overcrowded Mukden.

"You wanted your shelf," argued Thomas when I reproached him.

At None-Go-By there was a coach-house at the end of the garden that we turned into a Mukden. I would have had a floor and a window put in, but Thomas would only have the window, because he said it would save money if he made the floor himself and that he could easily do it if he ordered the wood. When I saw the amount of wood he was taking to Cornwall with him I thought some of it might be used for the floor, but he looked rather pained when I suggested this. He said his was seasoned wood.

"Won't that do for the floor?" I asked.

He said none of it was the right width or length, and that anyhow he wanted it for other purposes. So directly we got to Porthlew he went to a timber merchant and ordered the wood for his floor. At least he ordered wood. When it arrived at None-Go-By he owned that it was more than he needed for the moment, but he pointed out that I was sure to want shelves and that there was still room in the barn. For though the cottage itself was small it had a barn and a coach-house, both most useful to Thomas. I had counted on the barn myself as a lumber room, but I never got it. Thomas said that I should have it soon, but for the moment Mukden was in a transition state. I knew what that meant, and made up my mind to do without the barn while we lived at None-Go-By.

We went into the cottage on a fine warm afternoon in March, Thomas and I, Emma and our fox-terrier Bob. Emma had been our cook at Wimbledon, but at None-Go-By she was going to be the one and only, which was a come down in the world for us and for her. We none of us felt this as we should have done till the day when one of the Morwenna maids took tea with Emma and explained that she had always lived with the aristocracy and had never associated with a general before.

"It was very kind of her to come then, wasn't it?" I said.

"She ain't a'comin' agen," said Emma. "The aristocracy may 'ave 'er."

For Emma, though small, was fiercely independent. Her guiding motto in life was "keep yourself to yourself," and though Thomas and I gave satisfaction in most ways we never quite reached her standard in this. However, at first the world was not with us at None-Go-By. On that March afternoon when we stood in the little front garden in a golden light and watched the empty furniture van lumber up the hill, Thomas and I believed that we had come to a solitude.

"As long as we live here we shall only have each other to speak to," I said. "I hope you won't get sick of it, Thomas."

Thomas said he thought he could bear it for a time, and opened his chess-board.

"You're not going to play chess with the house in the state it is," I cried.

"But I'm not in the house," he argued.

"You might come in and help."

"I will the moment I've got at my tools. I can't do anything without tools, and I haven't found that jemmy yet. I expect you've tidied it away."

When Thomas had finished with his chess-board he spent the rest of the afternoon looking for his jemmy, a burglarious tool to which he is attached. He said it was no use trying to open cases with anything else, because the jemmy did them quicker and that he wished Emma and I would leave his possessions alone. He always knew where he had seen a thing last, and he must have his jemmy before he could carry up mattresses or put down carpets or arrange his books. Luckily the mattresses were small, and so were the carpets. They had to be to fit the cottage, and if it had not been for the tumbled heap of Thomas's books on the side table in the dining-room Emma and I would have had the two tiny sitting-rooms straight in no time. I had offered to arrange the books for him on one of the occasions when he came in to look for his jemmy, but he said on no account was I to touch them, as he did not want them lost. The daylight was waning when I went into the garden expecting to find him up to the neck in the odds and ends he had brought for Mukden. But the cases with piles of wood were heaped outside it untouched: the door was closed and no sound reached me from within. The neglected garden came to an end just beyond it, and for a minute or two I stood there looking over the low granite wall at pastures and moorland beyond them. Sounds of life came through the quiet evening from the farmsteads on the hill. There were stars in the deep sky. The air was soft and windless. I heard the stream near us and the flutter of birds in the orchard just below the garden. We had come to a happy haven, I thought, where we could live as we were both minded to, possessing our souls.

"Take one end of it," shouted Thomas, and his voice seemed to come from a distance. I could not see him.

"An end of what?" I shouted.

"That dead thorn tree close to you."

There was a dead thorn tree close to me. I noticed it now. It formed the end of the garden, a barrier, I suppose, against probable cows. The bushy part was away from me and hid Thomas. I seized the trunk with both hands.

"Lift," directed Thomas, and I lifted as well as I could.

"What are you doing?" I screamed.

"Enlarging the garden," he yelled back, and he straightway enlarged it with my help by shoving the whole tree over the wall into the field below. He was out of breath when he had done, but after sitting down for a minute and panting he said:

"We've added all this pointed piece to it. I saw we could when I began building up the wall."

"Have you been building a wall, Thomas?" I said reproachfully.

"It's most important to keep pigs out," he said.

"Have you found my jemmy?"

"I came to tell you dinner was just ready . . . at least I think we had better call it supper here."

"Why?"

"It's such a small cottage."

Thomas said he could not follow my train of thought, but that I might call it anything I pleased as long as he got it, and that building the wall had made him uncommonly hungry. I explained that ordinary cooking had been impossible under the circumstances and that on this first night in our new surroundings I hoped he would not mind cold things and a dish of kidneys on toast. He said he would not mind anything if only he could find his jemmy and that the loss of it had delayed his progress all the afternoon.

Emma had lighted a fire for us in the little dining-room, and the flames were reflected cheerfully on the teapot brown tiles round the grate. The table was laid in a home-like way, but a little crowded with things that should have been on the side table.

"We must move these books before we go to bed," I said. "They are in the way. If I pack them on the shelves anyhow you can sort them . . ."

Bob, lying on the hearthrug in front of the fire, yawned, stretched himself and sniffed the air. An appetising smell came from the kitchen, and I discovered that I was hungry, too.

"Our first meal in our new home," I said.

"If I hadn't lost my jemmy I'd have opened that case of wine," said Thomas.

"It is open," I told him.

"Who opened it?"

"Emma, with a chisel."

Thomas gave a start and a smothered imprecation. Emma came into the room with a smoking dish of kidneys on toast, with little heaps of rose-leaf potatoes and petits pois engagingly garnishing them. She looked helplessly at the side table and at the dinner table and at me and as if the dish was too hot to hold another moment, set it on the floor.

"Where did you find my chisels?" cried Thomas. "Can't I keep anything to myself? Chisels are not case openers. What you wanted was my jemmy."

"I was that flummuxed," Emma explained afterwards. "I didn't know what was happening to any of us."

"Don't worry, Thomas," I said. "No one has been meddling with your chisels. Emma used an old blunt one. Come and have dinner."

Emma gave a shriek: a shriek of despair and amazement as she lifted the still smoking dish from the floor. Bob, licking his lips, stretched himself on the hearthrug again.

"E's 'ad all the kidneys," she wailed, "and Gawd knows what 'e's licked."

"Our first meal in our new house," said Thomas.

Chapter 3

The jemmy was under the books. I found it there when I ranged them in the shelves after supper. Thomas said he remembered now. He had put it on the side table for immediate use and how was he to know that some fool was going to heap books on it. If only people would leave his things alone the course of life would run smoothly for us all. Instead of which I ran up and down like a roaring lion tidying.

At that moment there was not much roar left in either of us. We sat opposite each other in two easy chairs glad the long tiring day was over, glad that night had come. Emma had gone to bed. There was no sound within the cottage, and hardly a sound outside until a reed warbler set up his melody close by. There were owls, too. We heard them calling to each other. All the troubles of life seemed to vanish as we sat there in the peace and shelter of our new home and listened to our new neighbours.

"It is like being on a desert island with none of the disadvantages," I said. "You are quite sure that there is no one within miles who will want to know us, Thomas?"

"I'm not sure at all," said Thomas sleepily. "Let's go to bed."

"But we have come here to be quite by ourselves and see no one."

"So you say."

"If we are firm from the beginning. . . ."

"We needn't begin to-night," said Thomas, "I'm sleepy. After a night's rest I may feel firmer."

"I shall tell every one that you are writing a book called Time as a Fourth Dimension."

"That might frighten them off," said Thomas doubtfully.

"If you would only talk as you write, no one would ever come near us," I said.

"I don't see how I can do that unless Wilson comes, and then he'd talk in the same way. I should like to get him down here. He's very refreshing."

"Thomas, the paint isn't dry on the walls . . ."

"I know it isn't," said Thomas. "Look at this coat. Did you bring some turps?"

"And you are talking of getting some one down here. Didn't we both swear we felt sick and tired of visitors?"

"You did; but with you the feeling wears off in an hour or two. I shall be glad of a quiet time. We'll start on the garden to-morrow."

"We can't do anything in the garden till we get a man to dig it over."

"I can do a great deal," said Thomas.

"Will you dig it?" I asked rather surprised, for we had had a small garden in Wimbledon. The only thing Thomas ever did in it was to walk up and down. He used to stop and stare at a plant sometimes as if he was interested, but that was when he had an exciting idea about space and wanted to develop it. When we went to None-Go-By I did not know what a keen gardener Thomas was about to become in his own way and what the effect would be on the flower beds.

"I don't care much about digging," he said, and lighted our candles.

We had stored most of our books and furniture and brought as little as possible to the cottage. Nevertheless, it took Emma and me all next day and most of the day after to get straight. Even then we were not straight, because we could not be until Thomas hung the pictures and put up some shelves we wanted, and whenever I asked him about them, which was whenever I saw him, he said they should be his next job; but that if there was one thing in the world he disliked it was to be called off what he was doing to do something else.

"But what are you doing?" I said at last. "Have you unpacked your cases and arranged things in Mukden?"

"Not what you'd call arranged. They're in a transition state. . . . But I can find things2"

"Can you find picture hangers? All our pictures are stacked against the walls waiting for you to hang them."

"I could live without pictures," said Thomas.

"But I can't live with them sliding about the floors," I said. "Bob knocked down three just now hunting for rats—he broke the glass of one."

"Never mind," said Thomas. "Come and see what I've done in the garden."

I thought of the two hampers of plants I had brought from Wimbledon, and wanted to get into the ground as soon as possible: "Have you dug over a bit at the back?" I asked hopefully. "If we could just put them in by the heels2"

For the cottage had not been inhabited and the garden had not been touched for a year, and no one who has not lived in Cornwall can imagine what it looked like. It was not a case of plants and shrubs being choked by weeds as it might have been in other places. There were no plants. There were no shrubs. The flagged path in front of the cottage was visible, but all the other paths were one with the borders and you could not tell where our predecessors had delved or whether they had ever grown anything except weeds. Thomas said he had never seen finer cow parsley, and that the dandelion had always been one of his favourite flowers: "We should save ourselves a lot of trouble if we left it all just as it is, and concentrated on wall gardening," he said now. "I had no idea what you could do with walls till I came here. Look at this one."

I looked.

"The great thing about wall gardening is to have plenty of earth in the crevices," continued Thomas, speaking with the air of an expert. "This wall is rather tiresome because it inclines the wrong way, but by wetting the earth carefully . . ."

I looked again. The wall faced east and had a decided slant towards us and not a weed had taken root in its arid, draughty crevices. In this climate that told its tale. However, Thomas had brought in bits of fern as well as stone-crop, thyme and pennywort from the hedges and planted them in handfuls of wet earth wherever he saw a large enough hole.

"I think I shall like gardening here," he said. "I shall grow gunneras—six or seven gunneras in this garden would save all trouble."

"If your only idea is to save trouble you had better not have a garden at all," I said.

"It would have been better," he agreed, "but here we are . . . so we may as well enjoy ourselves."

"I could not enjoy a garden of gunneras," I told him. "One perhaps near a pond or in a swampy place."