Read The Hollow Land for Free Online Page B

now. Kind of place you could position machine guns if you’ve a mind.”
    â€œWould they have had fires? Celts up there?”
    â€œThey’d have died of cold else,” said Kendal. “Curious old wigwam things they had—like Indians. You can see them still if you look over Yorkshire way on the moors. Mind you, them fellers were real savages, them Celts. No better than Russians. Maybe they were Russians.”
    â€œMaybe Kendals were Russians,” said one of James’s friends.
    Kendal looked very put out.
    â€œYou mean you wouldn’t have cleaned their chimneys if they were Celts?” said Mr. Bateman thinking out a short article for his paper.
    â€œWe would, but we’d have charged the more.”
    â€œYou mean then that if a Welsh family or an Irish family came to a holiday cottage up here you’d charge more than you do us? From London where we can be anything? That’s most interesting. And I’m afraid it’s racism.”
    â€œNo it ain’t,” said Kendal, “no Welsh family would come up here to start with and the only Irishman I ever saw on North or South Stainmer or Hartley or Nateby Birket had to leave after a week on account of the farm having good bath, sink and taps but he’d omitted to see if there was water.”
    â€œIt was not kind of you not to tell him,” said the London mother. “Would you have told a Welshman?”
    â€œA Welshman would have been too proud to ask. And if it was a Scotsman—though it wouldn’t have been—we’d have said the house was sold already.”
    â€œThat
is
racism,” said Mrs. Bateman. “It’s dreadful. It’s what people say about the north of England. The trouble is I can never tell if you’re joking. I must say you’ve always been very kind to us.” (She thought briefly of a first fuming hay-time when abominable things had nearly happened.)
    â€œThere’s reasons for that,” said Kendal.
    â€œWhat?” James asked—because it’s always nice to know why people like you.
    â€œOne,” said Kendal, “you eat local. You don’t come stacked up with London frozen stuff. Two, because you’re not too grand to pass the time of day, and three”—he thought of the London mother’s very nice letter of apology two or three years back which everyone had heard about above and below the church and as far away as Mallerstang and Whaw—“because you’re sociable folk. Which is more than can be said for some visitors and incomers. Did you ever hear of the incomer over Stainmer Old Spital?”
    â€œNever,” said all of them—all but Harry, full of fish on the sofa, who had fallen asleep like a kitten.
    â€œWait a moment,” said his mother. “I’ll make some tea. Clear the worst away all of you and we’ll wash up tomorrow. Some of you stack up the fire. Mr. Kendal, do please take off those wellington boots—you’re sure you won’t ring Mrs. Kendal? It’s eleven o’clock at night.”
    â€œShe knows me thank you. I’ll be moving the minute I’ve finished my tale. But not till—for it’s a tale you should hear from me or you’ll go reading it in some book or other published in Oxford or Cambridge or Cardiff and places and no good for owt but reference libraries.
    â€œNow then—
    â€œOn a night not unlike this one a couple of hundred years ago there was a knock on a door not unlike the one behind me as I’m sitting. A door at the top of some stone stairs, a flight not unlike that of Light Trees again. The old farmer answered the door and let in an old woman in a long black cloak. She blew in rather than walked in, groaning and complaining. Groaning and complaining about being lost on Stainmer, that was no more of a friendly place then than it is now, and it was a night not fit for Christians. Not fit for devils.
    â€œThe old