Here a lady rose and asked if anyone had thought of approaching Mrs S. P. Solleret? Mrs Roscoe Forrester pursed her lips and closed her eyes in a manner which made it plain that she had spoken to Mrs Solleret, and that she did not wish to go into the matter of Mrs Solleret’s reply.
It was at this point that Professor Vambrace, who had been primed by Mrs Forrester before the meeting, rose hesitatingly to his feet.
“Has any thought been given to St Agnes’?” said he.
Mrs Forrester’s eyes flew open, and she seemed to project beams of new hope from them at the audience. “I hadn’t thought of it,” said she. “I suppose it is because Miss Webster is likely to be a member of the cast, and we just never thought of looking among the cast for—er—um.” Mrs Forrester found these uncompleted sentences, the Greek rhetorical device of aposiopesis, very handy in her duties as president. She would drop a sentence in the middle, completing it with a speaking look, or a little laugh, thereby forcing other people to do her dirty work. Professor Vambrace, that bony and saturnine hatchet-man of the Salterton Little Theatre, obliged her now.
“May I suggest,” he said, standing in the half-squatting, jackknife position of one who wishes to address a meeting without making a formal speech, “that Miss Griselda Webster be appointed a committee of one to approach her father regarding the performance of The Tempest in the gardens at St Agnes’.”
That was how it was done.
The approach which Griselda used might have surprised the meeting. It took this form.
“Daddy, have any sharks been after you for the garden this year?”
“Two or three. I said I’d think about it.”
“The Little Theatre has put me up to asking you if you’d let them do the play here. They thought I didn’t see through them, but I did. They asked a few first, and pretended there was no place to go unless you kicked through. You don’t have to say yes because of me.”
“Do you want to have it here?”
“Well, there’s no denying that it would be nice.”
“Was that why they hinted about giving you a leading part?”
“Probably. But they wrought better than they knew. I’m really quite a good actress. And I’m not what you’d call plain. At least, not what you’d call plain when you consider that the only other possible person is Pearl Vambrace, who has rather a moustache. I’ll be quite good even if we do it on Old Ma Bumford’s little hanky of a weedy lawn, with half the audience sitting in the road.”
“It sounds like one of Nellie Forrester’s sneaky tricks.”
“Yes. But Daddy: if you let them have your garden you have a good excuse for refusing it to everybody else for the rest of this summer. Had you thought of that?”
“Yes; I suppose so. All right. Remind me in the morning to tell Tom.”
Tom took it very well. Very well, that is to say, for a gardener. He pointed out that it was not the damage to the lawns that he minded; that could be repaired by a month or so of rolling. It was the way people got their feet into his borders that bothered him. However, he realized that his employer had to lend the garden sometimes, and from what he had heard, the Little Theatre performances did not draw very big crowds, so it might not be too bad.
Mr Webster sympathized. Nevertheless, he said, if the thing was to be done, it must be done properly. Therefore Tom was to give the Little Theatre people any help they wanted. Mr Webster did not intend to have anything to do with the business himself. It pained him to see people in his garden who did not appreciate it as much as he did, and he did not propose to give himself needless pain.
Tom accepted this direction with a mental reservation. If it was in any way possible, he meant to keep the intruders out of the part of his domain which was called The Shed. It was here that he kept his tools, neatly hung up in rows, and tidily arranged on his workbench. The sight of a rake or a hoe standing on the floor, however neatly, offended Tom’s professional sense. He was the kind of gardener who sharpened hoes with a file. Mr Webster had once remarked that he had been shaved with razors which were duller than Tom’s hoes. In The Shed, Tom was in the capital of his kingdom. It is a measure of his affection for Freddy that he had permitted her to store her homemade wines in a corner of The Shed, in some racks which he built for her himself. They were covered by a folded tarpaulin. Insofar as a gardener’s workshop can be neat, The Shed was neat.
The Shed was a misleading name for this workshop. It was in fact a conservatory, built by the Victorian owner of St Agnes’ who had bought it from Prebendary Bedlam’s heirs. It was an elaborate and hideous erection; from the ground rose a stone foundation three feet high, and, above this, iron supports soared upward, to meet in an arch. Between the iron-work was glass, so that, inside and out, The Shed presented the appearance of an oblong birdcage. An elaborate system of canvas curtains had been devised to keep the sun from scorching the plants within, and these curtains were drawn up or let down by an intricate system of cording, like the rigging of a sailing-ship, which added to the birdcage a strong suggestion of a spider-web. The iron framework was ornamented at intervals with outbreaks of iron leafage and iron fruitage, which had grown rusty with time. There were no broken panes of glass in it, for Tom would not have permitted such an offence against neatness, but not all the panes matched, and some of them were discoloured by rust from the ironwork. In this conservatory Victorian lovers had doubtless flirted and whispered. And in its warmth, among displays of fern and large, opulent plants which were valued for their rarity rather than their beauty, rheumatisms long since at peace, and gouty toes which have ceased to twinge, were eagerly discussed and described by their owners. But the glory of the conservatory had fled. It was now The Shed, and the plants which served the garden and the house were grown in a modern greenhouse behind the garage. But The Shed was Tom’s citadel, and he meant to defend it to the last.
As luck would have it, The Shed was the first thing to fall into the hands of the Little Theatre. It happened about a week after Griselda had spoken, as a committee of one, to her father; since then Freddy had allowed no day to pass without working upon Tom, heartening him for a vigorous resistance to any invasion of The Shed.
It was a Friday afternoon, and after a threatening morning a businesslike rain had begun to fall. Tom sat by his workbench, mixing some stuff which was related to the future welfare of begonias; Freddy sat on a pile of boxes, reading George Saintsbury’s Notes On A Cellar Book, which was a favourite volume of hers. The door burst open without warning and Mrs Roscoe Forrester, Professor Vambrace and Griselda ran in.
“You’ll be dry here,” said Griselda; “I’ll go into the house and see if I can find some umbrellas.”
She ran out into the rain again; the door which led from The Shed into the rest of the house had been locked for many years, and a heavy cupboard stood before it.
“You’ll be Freddy,” said Mrs Forrester, who liked to use this Gaelic form of assertion jocosely. She was not a Scot herself, but she liked to enrich her conversation with what she believed to be Scottish and Irish idioms. “How sweet you look, sitting there with your wee bookie!”
“I am Fredegonde Webster,” said Freddy rising. “Good afternoon. You are from the Little Theatre. This is Mr Gwalchmai, the gardener: Tom—Mrs Forrester and Professor Vambrace.”