Colonel Julian And Other Stories (1952) - Plot & Excerpts
All across miles of unbroken pasture there was not another house. Up through the south avenue of elms, where dead trees lifted scraggy bone against spring sky, bluebells grew like thick corn, spreading into the edges of surrounding grass. The wind came softly, in a series of light circles from the west. Here and there an elm had died and on either side of it young green leaves from living trees were laced about smoke-brown brittle branches. In a quadrangle of wall and grass the great house lay below. ‘You never really see the beauty of the house until you get up here,’ the Captain said. Though still young, not more than forty-five or so, he was becoming much too fat. His ears were like thickly-veined purple cabbage leaves unfurling on either side of flabby swollen cheeks. His mouth, pink and flaccid, trembled sometimes like the underlip of a cow. ‘They have killed the elms,’ he said. ‘Finished them. They used to be absolutely magnificent.’ He stopped for a moment and I saw that he wanted to draw breath, and we looked back down the hill.
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