She leaned against the tree bole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.
‘Now I am sure you will never laugh at me,’ she went on after a long silence. ‘Nor at them.’
‘Goodness! No!’ I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. ‘A man who laughs at a child – unless the child is laughing too – is a heathen!’
‘I didn’t mean that, of course. You’d never laugh at children, but I thought – I used to think – that perhaps you might laugh about them. So now I beg your pardon … What are you going to laugh at?’
I had made no sound, but she knew.
‘At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a pillar of the State and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned me for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was disgraceful of me – inexcusable.’
She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk – long and steadfastly – this woman who could see the naked soul.
‘How curious,’ she half whispered. ‘How very curious.’
‘Why, what have I done?’
‘You don’t understand … and yet you understood about the Colours. Don’t you understand?’
She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a roundel behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller, and the set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips. They, too, had some child’s tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly astray there in the broad sunlight.
‘No,’ I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t understand yet. Perhaps I shall later – if you’ll let me come again.’
‘You will come again,’ she answered. ‘You will surely come again and walk in the wood.’
‘Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me play with them – as a favour. You know what children are like.’
‘It isn’t a matter of favour but of right,’ she replied, and while I wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped forward. ‘What is it, Mrs Madehurst?’ she asked.
The woman flung her apron over her head and literally grovelled in the dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits’ end, and so forth, with repetitions and bellowings.
‘Where’s the next nearest doctor?’ I asked between paroxysms.
‘Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I’ll attend to this. Be quick!’ She half supported the fat woman into the shade. In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the front of the House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the crisis like a butler and a man.
A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles away. Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors, at the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the verdict.
‘Useful things cars,’ said Madden, all man and no butler. ‘If I’d had one when mine took sick she wouldn’t have died.’
‘How was it?’1 asked.
‘Croup. Mrs Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight miles in a tax cart for the doctor. She was choked when we came back. This car’d ha’ saved her. She’d have been close on ten now.’
I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you were rather fond of children from what you told me going to the cross-roads the other day.’
‘Have you seen ’em again, Sir – this mornin’?’
‘Yes, but they’re well broke to cars. I couldn’t get any of them within twenty yards of it.’
He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger – not as a menial should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.
‘I wonder why,’ he said just above the breath that he drew.
We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses, whitened already with summer dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.
A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the sweetmeat shop.
‘I’ve be’n listenin’ in de back-yard,’ she said cheerily. ‘He says Arthur’s unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck just now? Unaccountable bad. I reckon t’will come Jenny’s turn to walk in de wood nex’ week along, Mr Madden.’
‘Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is slipping,’ said Madden deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.
‘What does she mean by “walking in the wood”?’ I asked.
‘It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I’m from Norfolk myself,’ said Madden. ‘They’re an independent lot in this county. She took you for a chauffeur, Sir.’
I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with Death. ‘Dat sort,’ she wailed – ‘dey’re just as much to us dat has ’em as if dey was lawful born. Just as much – just as much! An’ God he’d be just as pleased if you saved ’un, Doctor. Don’t take it from me. Miss Florence will tell ye de very same. Don’t leave ‘im, Doctor!’
‘I know, I know,’ said the man; ‘but he’ll be quiet for a while now. We’ll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as we can.’ He signalled me to come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what followed; but I saw the girl’s face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I felt the hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.
The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car under the Oath of Aesculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we convoyed Mrs Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick bed till the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebrospinal meningitis), and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the owners of great houses – magnates at the ends of overarching avenues whose big-boned womenfolk strode away from their tea-tables to listen to the imperious Doctor. At last a white-haired lady sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and surrounded by a court of magnificent Borzois – all hostile to motors – gave the Doctor, who received them as from a princess, written orders which we bore many miles at top speed, through a park, to a French nunnery, where we took over in exchange a pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at the bottom of the tonneau telling her beads without pause till, by short cuts of the Doctor’s invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once more. It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles; and I went home in the dusk, wearied out, to dream of the clashing horns of cattle; round-eyed nuns walking in a garden of graves; pleasant tea-parties beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented, grey-painted corridors of the County Institute; the steps of shy children in the wood, and the hands that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.
* * *
I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the wild rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear from the south-west, that brought the hills within hand’s reach – a day of unstable airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was free, and set the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to
dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water, and, across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first dry sample of autumn leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my lips.
Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers – mallow of the wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden – showed gay in the mist, and beyond the sea’s breath there was little sign of decay in the leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare-legged, bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout ‘pip-pip’ at the stranger.
I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs Madehurst met me with a fat woman’s hospitable tears. Jenny’s child, she said, had died two days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow, would not willingly insure such stray lives. ‘Not but what Jenny didn’t tend to Arthur as though he’d come all proper at de end of de first year – like Jenny herself.’ Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried with a pomp which, in Mrs Madehurst’s opinion, more than covered the small irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and without, the glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.
‘But how’s the mother?’ I asked.
‘Jenny? Oh, she’ll get over it. I’ve felt dat way with one or two o’ my own. She’ll get over. She’s walkin’ in de wood now.’
‘In this weather?’
Mrs Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.
‘I dunno but it opens de ‘eart like. Yes, it opens de ‘eart. Dat’s where losin’ and bearin’ comes so alike in de long run, we do say.’
Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers, and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road, that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the lodge gates of the House Beautiful.
‘Awful weather!’ I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.
‘Not so bad,’ she answered placidly out of the fog. ‘Mine’s used to ‘un. You’ll find yours indoors, I reckon.’
Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind inquiries for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.
I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and warmed with a delicious wood fire – a place of good influence and great peace. (Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the truth of those who have lived in it.) A child’s cart and a doll lay on the black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that the children had only just hurried away – to hide themselves, most like – in the many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of the hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing – from the soul:
In the pleasant orchard-closes.
And all my early summer came back at the call.
In the pleasant orchard-closes,
God bless all our gains say we –
But may God bless all our losses,
Better suits with our degree.
She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated –
Better suits with our degree!
I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against the oak.
‘Is that you – from the other side of the county?’ she called.
‘Yes, me – from the other side of the county,’ I answered, laughing.
‘What a long time before you had to come here again.’ She ran down the stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. ‘It’s two months and four days. Summer’s gone!’
‘I meant to come before, but Fate prevented.’
‘I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won’t let me play with it, but I can feel it’s behaving badly. Hit it!’
I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.
‘It never goes out, day or night,’ she said, as though explaining. ‘In case anyone comes in with cold toes, you see.’
‘It’s even lovelier inside than it was out,’ I murmured. The red light poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses and lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped convex mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting afresh the distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the curves of a ship. The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog turned to stringy scud. Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad window I could see valiant horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against the wind that taunted them with legions of dead leaves.
‘Yes, it must be beautiful,’ she said. ‘Would you like to go over it? There’s still light enough upstairs.’
I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.
‘Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children.’ She swung a light door inward.
‘By the way, where are they?’ I asked. I haven’t even heard them today.’
She did not answer at once. Then, ‘I can only hear them,’ she replied softly. ‘This is one of their rooms – everything ready, you see.’
She pointed into a heavily timbered room. There were little low gate tables and children’s chairs. A doll’s house, its hooked front half open, faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a child’s scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.
‘Surely they’ve only just gone,’ I whispered. In the failing light a door creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of feet – quick feet through a room beyond.
‘I heard that,’ she cried triumphantly. ‘Did you? Children, oh, children! Where are you?’
The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect note, but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden. We hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three steps there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One might as well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret. There were bolt-holes innumerable – recesses in walls, embrasures of deep slitten windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and abandoned fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or twice had seen the silhouette of a child’s frock against some darkening window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the gallery, just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.
‘No, I haven’t seen her either this evening, Miss Florence,’ I heard her say, ‘but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed.’
‘Oh, Mr Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the hall, Mrs Madden.’
I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and deep in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind an old gilt leather screen. By child’s law, my fruitless chase was as good as
an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to force them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children detest, of pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little huddle, no more than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an outline.
‘And now we’ll have some tea,’ she said. ‘I believe I ought to have offered it you at first, but one doesn’t arrive at manners somehow when one lives alone and is considered – h’m – peculiar.’ Then with very pretty scorn, ‘Would you like a lamp to see to eat by?’
‘The firelight’s much pleasanter, I think.’ We descended into that delicious gloom and Madden brought tea.
I took my chair in the direction of the screen ready to surprise or be surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.
‘Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?’ I asked idly. ‘Why, they are tallies!’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘As I can’t read or write I’m driven back on the early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I’ll tell you what it meant.’
I passed her an unburned hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her thumb down the nicks.
‘This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last year, in gallons,’ said she. ‘I don’t know what I should have done without tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It’s out of date now for everyone else; but my tenants respect it. One of them’s coming now to see me. Oh, it doesn’t matter. He has no business here out of office hours. He’s a greedy, ignorant man – very greedy or – he wouldn’t come here after dark.’
‘Have you much land then?’
‘Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this Turpin is quite a new man – and a highway robber.’
‘But are you sure I shan’t be –?’
‘Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn’t any children.’