Midsummer Rent

The Sogmarsh Year — No. 4½ Sump Lane, Drudgeford, in the Long. A tale: being the ground-rent that falls due at Midsummer, and the reasons, none of them Horace's, that it is never paid.

The ground beneath Sump Lane belongs to Aunt Euphemia Bastable, who owns the earth under half of Drudgeford and most of the parish besides; and the rent for the patch under No. 4½ falls due, as it has fallen due since before anyone can prove, at Midsummer. Horace P. Dudgeon has never once paid it. This is not, whatever Horace believes, on account of his genius.

Each Midsummer Horace mounts what he calls the Grand Deferral — a pageant whose entire and secret purpose is to arrive at the very moment of payment and, by sheer weight of occasion, sail straight past it. There is bunting. There is Billy Saltaway in a sash, blowing a whistle he has been trusted with against his history. There is a procession the length of the lane to the door of the great cold Bastable house, and there, upon the step, Horace delivers his oration — On the Ancient and Cordial Relations Between the Independent Literary Republic of Dudgeon and the Noble House of Bastable — building, and building, to the ceremonial presentation of a single folded paper: a Voucher, drawn upon a treasury of nothing, redeemable never, and signed with a flourish that has taken him a week to practise.

And Aunt Euphemia — ancient, upright, immensely rich, and not fooled for the smallest part of a second — receives the whole absurd business every year with exactly the gravity it does not deserve. She accepts the Voucher in two gloved fingers. She files it, so she says, "with the others" — and there are four hundred others, in a drawer, in order. And she defers the rent one further year, "in recognition of the Republic's continued goodwill," and Horace marches his procession home down the lane magnificent, certain he has out-generalled his landlord once more.

Here is the first thing nobody says. Euphemia Bastable could have the rent any Midsummer she liked. She could have the house. She could have Horace in a debtor's cell by the following bell and never feel the loss of him. She chooses the pageant instead — chooses it, and keeps the rent forever unpaid, because paid rent ends the pageant. She is old, and she is rich, and she is alone in a house with too many rooms, and once a year a ragged, beloved, ridiculous procession comes down her lane with a homemade sash and a whistle and a fat man who treats her doorstep as a state occasion — and it is the only day in her year that anyone comes to her door for any reason at all but money. So she pays, quietly and very dearly, in the one coin that keeps them coming: she keeps the debt owed. The unpaid rent is the last thread by which the warmth of the parish still reaches the great cold house, and she will not, for anything, let it be cut by so vulgar a thing as settlement.

And here is the second thing nobody says. The rent is paid — only not by Horace, and not in coin, and not on the day of the pageant. The morning before it, every Midsummer, Mercy Crimp walks up to the Bastable house with a basket on her arm. Mercy takes in the parish's mending; it is the real income of No. 4½ and it is never discussed; and up at the great house she spends the whole long light of that morning at it — darning Euphemia's stockings, turning her worn collars, mending the linen of a woman with money enough to buy a hundred new and no one, any longer, to sit and sew with. She takes no coin for it. The two women do not call it rent. It is rent, near enough — paid hand to hand, in thread, by the one person in either house who knows precisely what is owed, and to whom, and why. They do not speak of that either. They speak of collars, and of the weather, and of a wedding thirty years gone that Mercy will not discuss with Mavis Grutch but will, it seems, discuss with Euphemia Bastable; and the morning goes, and the basket empties, and the rent is paid in the only currency that was ever really at stake, which was company.

So it holds, the whole daft and tender machinery of it: Mercy lets Horace keep his pageant and his genius; Euphemia lets Horace keep his victory; and between them, over a basket of mending in the long Midsummer light, the two women quietly keep an old woman warm and a rented half-house standing, and let the man of the house go on believing to his bones that he did it all himself, with a Voucher, by the bold policy of not paying.

On the day itself the procession forms, and Billy blows his whistle, and the bunting sags in the heat, and Horace clears his throat upon the step for the four-hundred-and-somethingth reading of the Ancient and Cordial Relations. And Euphemia Bastable opens her own door — she always opens it herself, on this one day, having sent the girl away so as not to share it — and for just a moment, before the gravity comes down over her face like a lid, there is something on it, at the sight of them all coming, that no rent in the realm could buy and no Voucher could ever be drawn against; and then it is gone, and she is the landlord again, and the pageant begins.

The rent went unpaid that Midsummer, as it has gone unpaid four hundred years, and will, if the parish is kind, go unpaid four hundred more.