Experience
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Title: Experience
Creator: Catherine Cotton
Release date: July 8, 2015 [eBook #49400]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/49400
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPERIENCE ***
Produced by Al Haines.
This charming chronicle has no plot.
It is an attempt to present a happy, witty simple-minded woman who
attracted love because she gave it out, and tried to make her home a
little well of happiness in the desert of the world. After all most
people live their lives without its incidents forming in any sense a
"plot." However, to tell this sort of story is difficult; the attention
of the reader must be aroused and held by the sheer merit of the
writing, and the publishers believe they have found in Catherine Cotton
a writer with just the right gifts of wit, sympathy, and understanding.
*EXPERIENCE*
_by_
*CATHERINE COTTON*
LONDON 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO LTD
GLASGOW SYDNEY AUCKLAND
Copyright
First Impression, June, 1922
Second Impression, November, 1922
Third Impression, January, 1923
Fourth Impression, September, 1923
Fifth Impression, March, 1925
Sixth Impression, April, 1926
Seventh Impression, October, 1927
Eighth Impression, February, 1928
Ninth Impression, October, 1928
Tenth Impression, July, 1929
_Printed in Great Britain_
TO
ARTHUR, CHARLIE, ROSS, ALEC, AND BOB
(Five very gallant gentlemen who gave their lives
for England)
*PREFACE*
It has been said that 'Novelists are the Showmen of life.' Perhaps
because the world has passed through a time of special stress and strain
it has come about that the modern novel is largely concerned with the
complexities of life and is very often an unhappy and a tiring thing to
read.
Yet humour, happiness, and love exist and are just as real as gloom, so
need the 'realism' of a book be called in question because it pictures
pleasant scenes?
For there are still some joyous souls who smile their way through life
because they take its experience with a simplicity that is rarer than it
used to be.
This, then, is the story of a woman whose outlook was a happy one; whose
mind was never rent by any great temptations, and who, because she was
NOT 'misunderstood in early youth,' never struggled for
'self-expression,' but only to express herself (in as many words as
possible!) to the great amusement and uplifting of her family!
For these reasons this book, like that of the immortal Mr Jorrocks,
'does not aspire to the dignity of a novel,' but is just a story--an
April mixture of sun and shadow--as most lives are; a book to read when
you're tired, perhaps, since it tells of love and a home and garden and
such like restful things. And if it makes you smile and sigh at times,
well, maybe, that is because life brings to many of us, especially to
the women folk, very much the same 'experience.'
C. C.
*PART I*
'When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I
thought as a child....'
*CHAPTER I*
Aunt Constance was away, but, as it was my birthday, I invited myself to
lunch with Uncle Jasper. Father and Ross came too. In the middle of
lunch my uncle looked at me over the top of his glasses and said,--
'Well, Meg, so you are seventeen and have left school. What are you
going to do now?'
An idea that had been simmering in my mind for some days suddenly came
on top,--
'I'm going to write a book.'
Ross stared at me, aghast. 'Jerubbesheth!' he exclaimed, 'when you
could hunt three days a week, walk a puppy, and do the things that
really matter. What fools girls are!'
'Have you sufficient knowledge of any one subject to write a book about
it?' Uncle Jasper inquired.
'Oh, my angel,' I exclaimed, 'I don't refer to the stuff you and father
produce. I'm not going to write a treatise on architecture, or Dante,
or the Cumulative Evidences of the Cherubim. I mean fiction--a story--a
novel.'
'But even so,' persisted my uncle, 'you can't write about things of
which you know nothing!'
'But you don't have to know about things when you write fiction. You
make it up as you go along, don't you see?'
'You only want a hero and a heroine and a plot,' my brother giggled.
'And a strong love interest,' said father, and he twinkled at me; 'even
Dante----'
'Oh, daddy, _must_ you bring in Dante?' I said. 'He was such a terrible
old bore and he didn't even marry the girl.'
Uncle Jasper gazed at me as if I were a tame gorilla or a missing link,
or something that looked as if it ought to have brains but somehow
hadn't. 'Dear me!' he said. 'Well, go on, Meg, but if you merely make
up your story as you go along you will get your background dim and
confused and your characterisation weak.'
'I can't think what you mean,' I groaned.
'Why, Meg, if you lay your plot in the fourteenth century, for instance,
your characters must be clear cut, mediaeval, and tone with the
background, don't you see? It would require a great deal of research to
get the atmosphere of your century right.'
'But I shan't write about the fourteenth century,' I said in slow
exasperation. 'My book will be about the present time. I shall write
of the things I know.'
'Well, but what _do_ you know, little 'un? That's what we are trying to
get at,' said daddy, with his appalling habit of bringing things
suddenly to a head.
'It's rather difficult to say offhand, father, but I know something of
the fauna of the South Pole, and about Influenza (I've had it four
times), and a lot about ski-ing----'
'If you could see yourself ski-ing you wouldn't say so,' said my brother
with his usual candour, 'your methods are those of a Lilienfeldian
wart-hog, and as for your Telemarks--ye gods!'
I ignored my brother and continued: 'My knowledge of flowers is
extensive, and I know two bits of history and----'
'Could we have the two bits now without waiting for the novel?'
'Oh, certainly, Uncle Jasper.' (I always like to oblige my family when I
can). 'The first is the one that everybody remembers: William I., 1066,
married Matilda of Flanders, but I have had an expensive education, as
daddy often says, so I know, too, that William II., 1087, never
married.'
'Dear me,' said my uncle, again with his indulgent-to-the-tame-gorilla
look.
Daddy laughed and got up. 'Well, I should think it would be a most
interesting book, though how you will work in the two bits of history
with the fauna of the South Pole, influenza, and ski-ing passes the
comprehension of a mere male thing!'
Then he kissed me for some extraordinary reason and said that he
expected I should get to know some other things as I went along, and
Uncle Jasper blew his nose violently, and Ross observed that I was a
funny little ass. After that we went home.
Father had a choir practice or something after dinner, and Ross said he
had to see a man about a dog (he can't possibly want another), so I
retired to my own special domain to start my novel.
I was rummaging in my handkerchief box for a pencil when Nannie came in
with a ream of sermon paper and a quart bottle of ink, followed by a
procession of servants bearing the _New English Dictionary_ as far as
the letter T, which Daddy thought might be useful. In the course of the
next hour Ross sent up a wet towel and a can marked 'Midnight Oil,' and
a note arrived from Uncle Jasper to say that he had omitted to mention
that it was better 'to resolutely avoid' split infinitives (whatever
they are), and that if I felt bound at times to write of things I didn't
know, it was quite a good tip to shove in a quotation from the best
authority on the subject, and that his library was at my disposal at any
time. He said, too, that he had a spare copy of the _Record
Interpreter_, if it would be of any use.
My uncle's jokes are like that; no ordinary person can see them at all.
But two can play at 'pulling legs,' so I sewed up the legs of my
brother's pyjamas, put the wet towel and the can of oil in his bed, and
the dictionary in father's, and, having poured the quart of ink in their
two water-jugs, I sat down with great contentment to fulfil my life's
ambition.
I thought over the subjects on which my knowledge was irrefutable, but a
novel inspired by any one of them seemed impossible, and by 10.30 p.m. I
was suffering from bad brain fag. Then Nannie came in to brush my hair,
so I confided my troubles to her, as I always do.
'I seem to be a most ignorant person, Nannie; the only thing I really
know about is the family.'
'Well, write a book about that, dearie, I'm sure it's mad enough.'
'But then there wouldn't be a plot.'
'No more there is in most people's lives, not the women's, anyway.'
'Has your life been very dull, darling?' I asked.
'My life,' said Nannie solemnly, 'has been one large hole with bits of
stocking round that I have had to try and draw together.'
When Ross came up his remarks about his bed were of so sulphurous a
character that I swear I could almost see the brimstone blowing under my
door. And in the silent watches of the night I decided that my book
_shall_ be about the family, from the time it was born to the day it was
buried. Surely something in the nature of a plot will turn up in
between.
*CHAPTER II*
To begin at the beginning. When I was waiting to be born I must have
run up to God and said,--
'Please, _could_ this little boy come, too?'
And perhaps He laughed and answered,--
'Oh, certainly, Miss Fotheringham, as you make such a point of it,' for
Ross and I are twins, and we have lived all our life in this little
Devonshire village that is tucked into a hollow in the hills. Daddy is
the parson here and Uncle Jasper the lord of the manor. But this place
is not 'clear cut,' as Uncle Jasper says my 'background' ought to be.
It is just a soft jumble of ferns and flowers, of misty mornings and
high hedges, of sunshine, of shadows and sweet scents, of hills and
dales, of all the countless things that go to make the village so lovely
and so baffling.
I think Devonshire is like a beautiful but elusive woman. You think you
know her very well, you walk about her lanes and woods, but when you
think to capture her soul she ripples away from you in one of her little
rushing torrents, just as a woman escapes from the lover who thought he
had almost caught and kissed her!
This old-world Vicarage stands in a large and fragrant garden opposite
the entrance to the park. If you walk through the great gates and up the
long avenue you come to the Elizabethan manor house where my aunt and
uncle live with their son, Eustace, and all the family retainers.
Oh! and they are a priceless couple. He isn't interested in anything
'later' than the Middle Ages, she in nothing 'earlier' than Heaven. But
their lives are most harmonious, and together they 'wallow in old
churches,' he absorbed in aumbries and piscinas, she in the prayer and
praise part. Then, perhaps, he'll call her,--
'Constance, look at this floating cusp!'
She admires his treasure, her eyes limpid and sweet with saints and
angels, and thinks, 'Why, if I stopped praising the very stones here
would cry out,' and so they both take a deep interest in the moulding
for quite different reasons.
It's the same with meals. He's always late--she's always patient. She
doesn't try to be, she _is_. He'll come in half an hour after the time
for luncheon. 'Constance, I'm so sorry, I'm afraid I'm late, I hope you
haven't waited. I found such a fascinating bit of Norman work in that
church.' She knows he doesn't mean to be discourteous, but that he's
got simply no idea of time, while she is always thinking of eternity, so
she says gently, 'It doesn't matter, Jasper, if you hurry now, dear. I
always prefer to wait.'
She is such a stately beauty, such a very great lady. She makes all the
other women feel their gloves are shabby. Her white hair shines so that
I always think it's 'glistering,' and her nose is quite straight, the
kind you see in a cathedral on a stone archbishop, and her clothes are
'scrummy,' so _really_ beautiful that you hardly realise them. They are
part of her, and she harmonises with the background. Her tweeds are
just the heather she walks about in, and at night it's only her lovely
old lace that shows you where her neck leaves off and her shimmering
cream satin gown begins.
Uncle Jasper worships the ground she walks on, while for her, 'Jasper'
comes just after God.
But although my uncle thinks her so adorable, he can't keep even his
compliments quite free of his ruling passion.
'Constance,' he said one day, 'you _are_ beautiful, why, you've got
mediaeval ears!'
And 'Constance' blushed at that because, coming from him, it was a most
tremendous compliment, and she was secretly rather glad, I expect, that
when ears were doled round she got a pair with the lobes left out.
Funny old Uncle Jasper!
But though--
'For him delicious flavours dwell
In Books, as in old muscatel,'
he's quite a decent landlord. There are no leaky roofs on his estate.
Daddy says it's because of his feudal mind. I don't know if that is why
the whole village seems like a family. We are interested in all the
cottage folk, and they in us, just as our fathers were before us. Uncle
Jasper looks after their material interests and Daddy saves their souls;
Ross bosses all the boys, and I cuddle the babies, while Aunt Constance
is like that lady in E. B. Browning's poem, whose goodness was that
nice, invisible sort. She too
'Never found fault with you, never implied
Your wrong by her right, and yet men at her side
Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town
The children were gladder that pulled at her gown.'
Father is an Evangelical, but my Aunt Constance is what the village
people call a little 'high' in her religion. She would like flowers and
candles, too, in church, if daddy would have them, which he won't, and
she keeps the fast days, but unostentatiously. Yet she and father live
in harmony and love, and only laugh a little at each other!
But my cousin Eustace annoys me. He is so good and holy. He is short
and thin and pale and vacillating, and wears overcoats and carries an
umbrella. In fact, he is everything that his mother and father aren't.
Ross doesn't get on with him, and finds him 'tiring.' Daddy says he is
a throwback. I asked Eustace once if one of his ancestors could possibly
have been a nun as he is so like a monk himself. He said I was simply
abominable and wouldn't speak to me all day. In the evening he said he
was sorry, as quite obviously I didn't know what I was talking about.
Naturally I wouldn't speak to him then. Such a way to apologise!
Nannie was our old nurse, but since mother died she has been
housekeeper. She is a comfortable kind of person. Any one who is
tired, or cold, or hurt, or hungry, or very small is always Nannie's
'lamb,' though how the radiant six-foot-one and still-growing Ross can
come under that category I don't know, unless it's because he's always
hungry. But he has ever been, and is, and will remain, her 'lamb.'
Father is Uncle Jasper's brother and not an easy person to explain. He
is a handsome, great tall thing, and a mixture of Dante and horses,
dogs, humility, sport, and autocracy, but he is most adorable and has a
divine sense of humour. Aunt Constance says he is a mystic, but I don't
know what she means. I have never been able to understand how he came
to be a parson at all, for every inch of him is soldier. He has got a
temper, too, only he doesn't lose it when most people lose theirs. He's
dreadfully difficult about some things. He is so fastidious about
clothes, especially mine. I think his eyes must magnify like a
shaving-glass. He sees holes which are perfectly invisible to me. There
is in me a certain carelessness about the things that show (I _must_ be
perfect underneath), but a button off my shoe doesn't really worry me
unless the shoe comes off. A jag in my tweeds leaves me cold, and the
moral aspect of a hole in my glove doesn't weigh with me at all.
Besides, as I said to father one day when I was being rowed,--
'If I have a _hole_ in my skirt it would appear as if I had just torn
it, but if I have a darn it would look like premeditated poverty.'
My brother Ross is going into the army. He's awfully like father if you
leave out Dante and the humility part and shove in a perpetual bullying
of his sister. But he's not a mystic. Oh, dear, no! He loves this
world with all its pomps and horses, adores its vanities, its coloured
socks and handkerchiefs and ties. He is a radiant person with a great
capacity for friendship. He is nice to every one until a chap spills
things down his clothes, and then my brother slowly freezes and curls up
and is 'done with him.'
He and I do not always dwell together in harmony and love. We 'fight'
most horribly at times, but I adore him really, though I wouldn't let
him know it. It would be frightfully bad for him. I run my male things
on the truest form of kindness lines. They always loathe it.
And mother? Oh, I can't write about her at all, even though it's so
long since she died; she was half Irish and so pretty and so gay. She
fell off a step ladder one day when she was gathering roses, and Ross
found her unconscious, and that night she died. I couldn't understand
why a broken arm should kill her till daddy explained that the hope of
another little son went with her, too. Father's eyes have never looked
the same since; there is still a hurt look in them.
Then there's Sam. He is not a relative, but always seems like one; he
is the jolly boy who lives at Uncle Jasper's lodge and is Ross's
greatest friend and most devoted slave. Why, when Ross first went to
Harrow Sam ran away from home and turned up as the school boot-boy (and
got an awful licking from my brother for his pains), and now as Ross is
at Sandhurst he has got taken on there, too. He will do anything to be
within a hundred miles of Ross. I come in for a share of his devotion
because I am his idol's sister. What that boy doesn't know about
fishing, birds' eggs, and the Hickley woods isn't worth knowing. But
Sam has been known to turn and rend Ross for his good (I love to see him
doing it), just as Brown, Sam's father, who is head gardener at the
Manor House, turns and rends Uncle Jasper once every ten years or so,
when his ideas have become too archaic to be borne by any man who wants
to make some alterations to improve the gardens.
*CHAPTER III*
We have a family skeleton. It is my Aunt Amelia. She isn't illegitimate
or anything like that. This book is quite respectable. Nor is she
thin. She has a high stomach and is as proud as it is high. She always
wears black broche dresses, even the first thing in the morning. Nannie
says they are most beautiful quality and would stand alone. She adorns
herself with cameo brooches and rings with hair inside, and she wears
square-toed boots and stuff gloves that pull on without buttons. Daddy
says all Evangelicals do, except his daughter.
She has been a widow for many years. Indeed she only lived with her
husband six months from her virginity, and then he died of the
'Ammonia,' as the village children call it. My aunt never goes out
without her maid, Keziah, and she carries a disgusting 'fydo'
everywhere. She talks religion all day long, and quotes texts at
people. She brings out my prickles.
Father says that no one will know what a 'fydo' is, and that I am not to
be disrespectful, because she is a really good woman and has the
missionary spirit. Father is like that, he has a kind of humility that
won't let him say beastly things about any one. My brother is not so
particular. He used to say that he wouldn't let the chaps at school
know he had an aunt who talked about his soul like a little Bethel for
anything this world could offer him. Besides, I should have thought
that any one would know that a 'fydo' is any bloated dog of uncertain
ancestry that stinks and pants.
Our only other relative is daddy's cousin Emily. She lives in Hampstead,
next door but five to Aunt Amelia. Her parrot can say the collect for
the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity.
Cousin Emily is a spinster, but she has a grand passion in her life, and
it is animals. She will have nothing killed, with the result that her
house is overrun with mice and the garden's full of snails. She visits
the poor in the East End and gives away flannel petticoats at Christmas
large enough to fit the dome of St Paul's. The last time father stayed
there she caught a flea in the slums, but of course she couldn't destroy
it. She was greatly agitated and went about the house with the wretched
creature clasped in her arms, as it were, waiting for an inspiration as
to what to do with it. Finally she decided to put it on the cat's back,
and was quite happy till father wickedly said he did not think that
arrangement was fair on the cat.
Then she wished she had thrown it down the cellar stairs, but daddy
teased her and said, 'the poor thing might have broken its leg and lain
amid the wine bottles in anguish, unable even to help itself to brandy
or anything.' The poor old dear thereupon said, 'But, dear cousin, what
shall I do if I find another?' and her dear cousin advised her strongly
to let the house furnished.
But I like her awfully. So does Ross. He says she is a ripping old
bird. She gives us topping presents. She sent me two of the darlingest
white and fawn rabbits, exactly alike, when I was a kiddie. One was
called 'Nada the Lily' and the other 'dear Buckiebuckie,' but I found
the mental strain of life too great when I found ten little rabbits in
dear Buckiebuckie's cage. He seemed so pleased with them, too; that's
what worried me so. He didn't seem to know how wrong it was, and
neither did Nada the Lily, for she sat in placid indifference by her
empty nest box.
Aunt Amelia was staying with us at the time, so I asked her about it,
but she said it was not a nice thing for any little girl to talk about,
especially a clergyman's daughter. I shed tears then and ran out in the
woods, but Nannie followed me,--
'Oh, what an old fool the woman is; how much longer is she going to
stay? Don't you worry, dearie, 'tisn't the first time that a buck and
doe's got mixed, and won't be the last neither. I expect you got 'em
muddled when you cleaned them out.'
Thus Nannie brought a situation, electric with insuperable difficulties,
down to the level of homely everydayness, where I felt I could cope with
it. She is always like that. I changed dear Buckiebuckie's name then to
'Adam and Eve,' because he was the mother of all living and he'd 'ad em!
Somehow, when we were children there always seemed to be trouble when
Aunt Amelia was in the house. We always said dreadful things in front
of her, or else the things we usually said were noticed more.
The very first time she came to stay, when we were six years old, there
were two ructions in as many minutes.
We had a hen at that time called 'The Old Maid,' because she was of
uncertain age and used to peck the others, and as she hadn't earned her
board and keep we had her boiled for luncheon. It was some one's
birthday and we kids were allowed to lunch downstairs. Father carved
and in great disgust said,--
'Whatever bird is this?'
'"The Old Maid," daddy,' said Ross.
'Well, it doesn't seem to have much breast.'
'But then,' as my small brother remarked, 'you wouldn't expect an old
maid to have much, would you?'
I made the next _faux pas_, but it was kindly meant. Aunt Amelia
grumbled that she had been quite chilly in the night and hadn't been
able to sleep, so I said,--
'Mother, couldn't we search the parish for a young virgin for Aunt
Amelia like King David had when he was old and gat no heat?'
Father exploded into his tumbler. But Aunt Amelia said she had hoped
that I would grow up a good, pure woman like my grandmother. Daddy lost
his temper then and said he profoundly hoped his daughter wouldn't grow
up 'a good, pure woman' if it meant that----'
'Anthony!' said mother.
And father said 'Sorry, Biddy,' and asked Aunt Amelia if she'd have some
more bread sauce.
(Mother and daddy always called hot water bottles 'Young Virgins' after
that!)
After lunch we all went down to the lake, and going through the woods I
said something was 'infernal,' and there was a horrid silence. Daddy is
like that, he so seldom says anything. It's what he doesn't say that's
so beastly if he's displeased with one, so I said, 'Mustn't I, daddy?'
and he replied, 'I think you know quite well, darling.'
'But,' I expostulated, 'surely one might sometimes.' I looked round
that wood. 'Why, daddy, I might say we were in fernal regions now, look
at them all up that bank.'
Daddy looked amused and his eyes all curled up at the corners,--
'Well, darling, perhaps you're right, but you must always think of
Devonshire if you do.'
Aunt Amelia said she didn't know what his dear, dead mother would say,
after the Christian upbringing he had had, too. Daddy seemed inclined
to lose his temper again and remarked that a certain kind of Christian
upbringing was only another name for spiritual slavery. Aunt Amelia
threw up her hands and said 'Shocking.' Then father whispered to mother
that if Aunt Amelia didn't return to Hampstead soon he'd have to go into
lodgings! He always says that if he's worried.
General conversation is apt to languish in Aunt Amelia's presence and to
come back like a boomerang to some exhausting topic that most people
never discuss. She understands father better now and thinks he's 'one
of the right sort' because he happens to be an Evangelical, but she says
he is 'dangerously charitable,' and always tries to find out if he's
_really_ sound on the subject of candles.
I remember once daddy, gently teasing, said,--
'But, dear Amelia, I thought it was your friends Ridley and Latimer who
lighted a candle in England which should never be put out. If I were
asked to celebrate at a church where they had lights what do you think I
ought to do?'
And Amelia answered, 'I should hope you'd blow 'em out.' Then daddy
said,--
'What a pearl you are, Amelia!' and laughed and kissed the stern old
Calvinist. Somehow daddy could live with an Anabaptist or the Pope, and
both would say, 'He's one of the right sort,' even though they'd
disagreed with every single thing he'd said. Darling daddy!
*CHAPTER IV*
Well, I have got in the 'background' now, and the dramatis personae too,
but do they 'tone' with one another and how can I make them when they
are all different? Is my Aunt Amelia in the least like Devonshire?
Does her fydo remind one of its sweet scents? How can I reconcile my
prehistoric uncle with the twentieth century?
I went to the Manor House to-day to consult him as to the 'atmosphere'
of the century. Perhaps I can at any rate get that right. He wasn't
particularly illuminating. I don't think clever people ever are. The
more they know the less they can impart. There was a woman at school
who tried to teach me German. She had heaps of letters after her name
like Uncle Jasper has. She said the verb must go at the end, but she
never could make me understand which part of the verb. I got so
desperate at last that I used to say, 'gehabt gehaben geworden sein' at
the end of _every_ sentence and let her take her choice. That's partly
why I left school when I did. The head mistress seemed to think
parental control was what I needed.
So I said to Uncle Jasper, 'What would you say was the atmosphere of
this century?'
'You have raised a point of particular perspicacity, Meg,' he replied.
'The atmosphere of this century is becoming increasingly materialistic,
as is manifested in its deplorable lack of spirituality and intellectual
originality. The universal diminution of intelligent ratiocination, the
vacuous verbosity of a vacillating press; the decadent and open
opportunism of our public men, the upward movement of the proletariat,
inspired by the renegade and socialistic vampires that suck the national
blood--all these are symptomatic of the recrudescence of materialism.'
He stopped to breathe here, and I felt I must say gehabt gehaben
geworden sein. He doesn't always talk like that. Sometimes I think he
does it to aggravate me, but I know anything modern upsets him. I
offered to go with him to look at the Saxon work in the church, as it
usually has a calming influence on him, but he said he was better and he
hoped he had made himself clear!
When I got home I asked Nannie.
'The atmosphere of this century, dearie,' she said. 'Oh, the same as
it's always been, I should think--three white frosts and a wet day, or
three fine days and a thunderstorm.'
I observed that she had made a remark of particular perspicacity, and
she asked me if I felt feverish. It is trying when I am trying to
increase my vocabulary. Still, on the whole she was helpful, for she
said why didn't I do what I said I was going to and write of the things
I know about. 'Tell about the Hickley woods and how you fell in the
water, dearie.'
'But will the general public like that, Nannie?'
'I should think they'd prefer it to the stuff your uncle writes.'
I feel that she's right. I must take a firm stand with my relatives. I
cannot be blown about by every breath of their doctrine. Besides, my
family's views differ. Uncle Jasper says,--
'The general public is at its best in Oxford and Canterbury.'
'At Epsom or Ascot,' my brother asserts.
'Hunting,' says daddy.
'At early celebration on Easter Day,' says Aunt Constance, with eyes
like a Murillo Madonna.
But _I_ like the general public, always, everywhere. It sort of twinkles
at one, so I shall tell about the Hickley woods and hope that it will
like them just as much as I do.
Oh, if only I could get the splendour of the woods down on my paper--the
flaming beeches in the autumn, the fairyland of hoar frost later on, the
gradual waking of the trees and birds and flowers in the spring, the
scent of clover, and the sheets of daffodills, the mist of bluebells and
the clouds of lilies. I know where the earliest primroses blow and the
hedge where the birds build first. I could show you where to find the
biggest blackberries and the bit of bog covered with the kingcups and
milkmaids. There are ant hills, too, and a wasps' nest in a hollow
tree. The little paths and lanes are carpeted with moss and the
undergrowth is sweet with honeysuckle. The woods are always lovely, but
in the evening they grow 'tulgy,' and the trees take fantastic shapes
and the mossy lanes seem hushed and filled with mystery. When I was
little I used to be glad then that the boys were with me, though I
wouldn't have admitted a creepy feeling down my spine to any one but
father. The beautiful Hickley woods!
They have a strange effect upon me. They seem to 'wash' my mind. I
never found it easy to be obedient, my bit of Irish blood always making
me 'agin the government.' I've got claws inside me, and feathers
underneath my skin that get ruffled when I'm crossed. So when I was
little and rebellious I always ran out of the house and across the
garden into the woods. And sometimes Ross would come flying after me
with comfort and advice.
'Why do you always run out in the woods Meg, when you're naughty?'
''Cos they wash me.'
'Oh, you are funny, darling,' and then with a little air of protection
that is always associated in my mind with Ross and sticks of chocolate,
he would give me one and say,--
'But you _were_ raver naughty, you know; I think you'd better come in
now and be sorry.'
So when the woods had 'washed' me sufficiently I would go in and say I
was dutiful now if father pleased. But once when I was five and some
reproof of daddy's had cut me to the heart, I added,--
'But my quick still hurts me. It's all bluggy.'
I seem to have lived the best part of my life out in the woods. In them
we played our games and had our endless picnics. In them I had the
great adventure which caused me to become a doormat and let my brother
trample on me all his life.
When Ross and I were twelve we went out very early to spend a long day
in the woods with Sam and all the dogs. We made for the lake. It was
always the first item on our programme to dump the lunch and tea in a
special hidyhole. While the boys were busy I decided that the one and
only thing I wanted to do was to climb out and sit on the branch of a
tree that overhung the water. I got halfway across it when Ross shouted
to me angrily to come back, and Sam said the branch was rotten.
'I'm going to the end,' I said, 'it isn't rotten.'
'_Will_ you come back, Meg?'
'No, I won't,' I cried, my Irish grandmother at once 'agin the
government.' I just loved that crawl across that tree, because the boys
were simply furious and could do nothing. It was no use coming after me
if the branch were rotten, it would only have made things worse. When I
got to the end I said elegantly, 'Yah, I told you it wasn't,' and as I
said it the beastly thing snapped and I went into the lake with a
splash. I could swim all right but hadn't had any practice with my
clothes on. Sam and Ross were in after me like a flash and got me back
to land, and we stood three dripping objects, two in a perfect fury with
the third. Then, as my luck was dead out, we heard the horses, and
there were mother and daddy, Uncle Jasper and Aunt Constance out for a
morning ride. Uncle Jasper was suddenly jerked back out of the Middle
Ages: Aunt Constance tumbled out of heaven, mother looked frightfully
worried, and daddy lost his temper, and said it was simply abominable
that two big boys of their age couldn't look after a little girl of
mine. But how he reconciled that remark with his Christian conscience I
don't know, seeing there was only six months difference between the
eldest and the youngest--but those boys would always grow so.
Daddy ordered them to go home at once, and when they had got into dry
things to wait in his dressing-room till he had leisure to give them the
biggest thrashing they'd ever had yet.
Then mother wrung out my clothes, and Uncle Jasper remarked that the
children who lived before the Reformation never behaved so badly; Aunt
Constance had got to that bit of the General Thanksgiving where you
bless Him for preservation, especially of nieces and nephews and boys
who live at lodges; Ross and Sam were just turning to go home when
I--honestly it was the first minute I could speak, I had swallowed such
a lot of water--exclaimed,--
'Father, how dare you be so wickedly unjust?'
Every one looked at me as I hurled that bombshell. People didn't usually
speak so to father--least of all his children, but daddy never gets
angry at the things you'd think he would, and all he said was,--
'What do you mean, little 'un?'
'Why, father, they told me not to go.'
'It was my fault, sir; I ought to have seen she didn't,' Ross
interrupted.
'I don't suppose she heard me say the branch was rotten, sir,' said Sam.
But I exclaimed,--
'Oh, daddy, they are telling frightful lies; I did hear Sam say that it
was rotten, and Ross told me not to go.'
So father said, 'Sorry, old chaps,' to Ross and Sam, and they said, 'It
was quite all right, sir.' So father said, 'Well, run her home, boys,
so that she doesn't catch cold,' and mother called after us, 'Give her
some hot milk.'
So Ross and Sam ran me home and said I was a jolly decent kid, which was
drivel. And after Nannie had got me dry, I went and waited in father's
dressing-room. As he and mother came upstairs I heard daddy say,--
'Well, I suppose I must get into a dog collar as I've got this beastly
clerical meeting.'
And mother laughed,--
'I don't think the collar makes much difference when the rest of you
smells so of dogs and stables.' And then she added in her delicious
Irish brogue, 'I know it isn't seemly to ask a parson to leave the Word
of God and serve tables, but _do_ you know a savoury that would do for
to-night?'
And daddy said,--
'I've just seen a beauty in the woods.'
'What _do_ you mean, Anthony,' laughed mother. And father replied,--
'An angel on horseback, darling,' and told her not to blush. He came in
then, and saw me, and said,--
'Hallo, little 'un, what are you doing here?'
'I thought _I_ had to come, father, as I did it.'
'Oh--ah, yes, of course--I've got to give you the biggest thrashing
you've ever had in your life, haven't I?' And he sat down and pulled me
on his knee.
'Why did you do it, Meg? No, don't say it was your Irish grandmother'
(taking the very words out of my mouth) 'it was pure, unadulterated
devil, and mother doesn't feel that she can ever let you go out in the
woods again, and I don't think the boys will take the responsibility of
you any more, either.'
'Father!' I exclaimed, going cold all over.
'Well, you see, darling, it isn't the first time is it? There was that
wasps' nest, for instance. You know those boys do understand that sort
of thing. And unless you promise in future you will do exactly what
they tell you, I won't let you go, but shall keep you chained up in my
dressing-room. I really can't let my only daughter drown, I shouldn't
mind so much if I had dozens. Promise?'
So I said, 'Yes, daddy, sorry, I----'
But father interrupted. 'I've simply got to give you a thrashing as
well, little 'un, because once or twice before you've said you were
sorry, but it will have to be a moral one. I can't thrash a thing your
size; why _don't_ you grow? I'm sure you could if you really tried,
it's just cussedness. Now you go down to Sam and Ross, they're in the
harness room, and tell them you're sorry and that you're going to do
what they tell you in future.'
And I said, 'Daddy, I simply couldn't; why, I'd never hear the last of
it, I couldn't get it out.'
So father said, 'Well, you can take your choice between your pride and
the Hickley Woods, darling.'
So I went down to the harness room and got it out somehow. Ross said,
'Oh, I say, Meg, _don't_ say any more, it won't make a scrap of
difference, but if you wouldn't mind about wasps' nests and that kind of
thing, we would be so obliged, wouldn't we, Sam?'
And Sam said 'Rather' and gave me a red apple. I always got one from
Sam if I were in a row.... Of course, I've had a dog's life with the
pair of them ever since.
*CHAPTER V*
When Ross and I were fifteen we got to know a topping boy named Charlie
Foxhill. He is amphidextrous. His father is most frightfully rich. He
made his money in cement, but this is never mentioned because Mrs
Foxhill is the daughter of an impecunious peer, and she is as proud as
the cement is hard. The Foxhills came to live in the next village to
ours. My great friend, Monica Cunningham, lives there too, at least she
is there sometimes. Her father is a baron, but you would never know it
to look at him. He takes a great interest in patent manures and the ten
lost tribes.
Charlie is two years older than Ross, but so much shorter that they seem
the same age. He is an agnostic. His mother has driven him to it, she
is so 'steeped in saints.'
'It's bad enough to be steeped in poets like my sister,' said Ross, 'but
saints! I never can imagine how people can stomach all that crowd.
They bore me stiff. The only one I like is the chap that finds lost
things.
'St Elian?'
'Fat lot you know about saints, Foxhill,' remarked my brother politely.
'I know an awful lot; I've not lived with my mother for nothing,' said
Charlie lugubriously.
'Well, I never could see that a saint was anything more than a dead
sinner,' remarked my brother, 'and some of them make a perfect nuisance
of themselves--look at St Vitus.'
'Oh,' I giggled, but my brother was wound up and ignored my
interruption.
'And St Swithin--isn't he the absolute limit? Look how he mucks the
summer up if he gets the chance! All because he thought he was going to
be buried where he didn't want to be--keeping the feud up all these
years, too.'
Charlie admires my friend Monica awfully and calls her a Greek poem
because she is so graceful, but Ross says that it is a pity she suffers
from pride of race and spends her time in looking up people's pedigrees.
Her brother is the Master of Rullerton. Daddy asked her once if she had
ever looked up the pedigree of the Master of the Universe, as He was a
gentleman on his mother's side, and daddy showed her a funny old book
where it said, 'He might, if He had esteemed of the vayne glorye of this
world, have borne coat armour.'
That took Monica's fancy frightfully. She said it made Him seem quite
interesting. Aunt Amelia thought it 'shocking,' of course, but daddy
said,--
'We don't all travel by the same road, Amelia.'
'There is only one way, and it is narrow,' groaned my aunt.
'Yes, but not narrow-minded,' daddy retorted. He is funny.
Though Charlie Foxhill is such a friend of Ross they are not a bit
alike; Charlie is so diffident, Ross so sure of everything. But then
Charlie has had one of those unfortunate 'Christian upbringings' that
daddy calls only another name for spiritual slavery, when square parents
try to shove their round children into square holes, and of course the
children hate it and some of them go to the devil in the process. Mrs
Foxhill actually insists on reading all her children's letters, and
expects them to think and feel just as she does about everything.
But Charlie won't be put into his parents' mould, he refuses to be
shoved into their square hole, he utterly declines to be steeped in
saints. If he differs from his mother on any subject he is answered
with a mass of words and arguments, reproaches, or worse still, tears;
consequently Charlie says nothing now and veils all he really feels in a
cloak of absurdities or feigned indifference.
At first we couldn't get him to give an opinion about anything,
especially in front of father, but gradually as he got to know us better
and found that Ross expressed his views quite freely and that daddy
treated them with respect and consideration, even if they were
diametrically opposed to his own, Charlie began gradually to develop and
say what he really thought, but always with a certain diffidence as if
he half expected a storm of opposition. But he is always courteous
about his mother--'steeped in saints' is the only criticism he ever
makes. For the rest he is silent and suppressed, but the cold politeness
with which he treats his people is quite different from the deference
Ross pays to daddy.
Monica, too, is not a bit like me. I always know exactly what I want;
she never does--till afterwards. Father says, however, that Monica will
be a fine character when she learns that a man can be all the things
that really matter, even if he never had a grandfather, and that she
will rise to the occasion some day and do the splendid thing even if she
doesn't always know whether she wants to play tennis with Ross or
Charlie.
*CHAPTER VI*
When I was sixteen my governess got married and daddy said it was a good
opportunity for me to go to school for a bit. I was therefore sent to
the one in London where Monica was. The head mistress was a friend of
Aunt Amelia. I suppose that's why my prickles were always out and my
old Adam gave me such a lot of trouble.
There was that last unfortunate Sunday, for instance. It was the 27th
April, and Monica and I awoke at four o'clock. We peeped out of the
bedroom window just as the dawn was coming. The London garden had all
the glamour of the woods at home, and there in the half light we could
see the six or seven trees with bluebells growing round--a mist of blue,
enchanting, adorable, divine. The scent blew across the grass and the
birds called us. We slipped downstairs and ran over the delicious cool
lawn into that lovely blue light at the foot of the trees. We gathered
handfuls of blossoms and ferns all drowned with dew. We went quite mad
with the call of the spring, and danced, for I thought I heard distant
music. It may have been only a blackbird; could it have been the pipes
of Pan? Anything was possible that morning. We got back, as we thought
unseen, stole some scones and milk, and as we tumbled into bed again
Monica swore she heard the cuckoo, but I'm certain it was only the clock
on the stairs, because this 'Bird' ooed before it cucked!
Then the same day I behaved badly in church. Of course, the general
behaviour of the sons and daughters of the clergy is always more
unseemly than that of other people's children. Daddy says it's because
they're so frightfully handicapped in having the clergy for their
fathers.
But that day two such absurd things happened. I believe even St Paul
with his love of decency and order would have been obliged to smile,
while Peter, of course, would have giggled. Monica passed me a bit of
paper shortly after we arrived, on which was written the mystic message:
'Eyes right. Psalm 57, verse 5. She will remember.' I looked to the
right, and seated in the pew immediately in front of us was a spinster
of uncertain age in a smart blue toque, in the hollow crown of which lay
a complete set of false teeth with an unholy smile still lingering about
them. I suppose the poor dear had put them on her hat to remind her to
put them in her mouth. I collapsed into weak giggles, which increased
when I looked up the Psalm we were about to sing, which contained the
verse: 'Whose teeth are spears and arrows.' I am afraid I must confess
I didn't attempt to follow the service, I simply lived for verse 5.
Sure enough, as Monica had predicted, 'she remembered.' She was singing
away lustily, 'And I lie even among the children of men that are set on
fire whose----' then a violent start, a wild clutch at the toque, and a
dash down the aisle. The churchwarden, who thought she was ill,
followed her into the porch with a glass of water.
I could see Monica's shoulders shaking though her face was
preternaturally solemn. I felt quite ill with suppressed laughter. I
tried to remember all the things I had been taught to think about in
church, but I was in that weak state I couldn't stop giggling. The next
Psalm began with the question: 'Are your minds set upon righteousness, O
ye congregation.' I felt neither Monica nor I could answer in the
affirmative.
After a while my eyes stopped running and I was able to attend a little
better. Then we had the second lesson. It was Acts xxvii, all about
the shipwreck of St Paul. I noticed poor old Admiral Stopford, who is a
bit weak in the head, was getting very fidgety. His nurse whispered to
him once or twice, but in vain, for when the vicar read how they cast
the cargo over to lighten the ship he suddenly got up and said loudly,--
'Never ought to have been necessary, bad navigation, bad navigation.'
His nurse hurried him out, purple in the face, and Monica and I
followed. I felt if I couldn't laugh aloud I should spontaneously
combust. We found a flat tombstone in a secluded part of the churchyard
on which we sat and rocked.
On arriving back at the house there was a most frightful row because one
of the neighbours had telephoned to say that he had seen us in the
garden in the early morning. The head mistress said we had brought
disgrace on the school and that I was the chief offender. She
telegraphed to father,--
'Seriously worried about your daughter come the first thing on Monday.'
Daddy was frantic and thought that I was dying, and wired to Ross at
Harrow to go to Hampstead at once, and that he would come up by the
first train he could catch.
Ross was out, so he only got to the school half an hour before father.
Meantime Aunt Amelia had been sent for, and I was in the head mistress's
room being rowed when Ross was announced. He looked quite old as he
came in and said, 'Is my sister still alive?'
He was so relieved when he saw me that he was just going to kiss me, but
Aunt Amelia stopped him and said he'd better not.
'Have you got _another_ cold?' he asked, 'but I'm not afraid of germs.'
Ross wouldn't sit down because I wasn't allowed to. I felt like a
prisoner at the bar while he was told all my crimes from the beginning
of time to 'this last disgraceful episode which could not be passed
over.'
Ross could not see their point of view at all. When she told him about
the scones he exclaimed,
'But if my sister was hungry surely----?' and she said, 'But is that any
reason why your sister should leave the house in the middle of the
night?' and Aunt Amelia remarked she did not know what my dear dead
mother would say if she could know it.
My quick hurt then! I know it's awfully weak-minded to cry when you're
in a row, but I couldn't stand that bit about mother. Ross seemed to
get suddenly about seven feet high and his face went like a granite
sphinx, and he put his arm round me and said, 'There darling,' several
times.
'Oh, Ross,' I sobbed, 'I never left the house at all, I only ran out
into the garden.'
'Of course, darling.'
'And it wasn't the middle of the night either, Ross, it was four o'clock
in the morning.'
And he agreed that it was _quite_ different.
When daddy came the Mistress regretted that I would have to be expelled,
but she trusted that a father's care and watchful eye were all I needed.
She hoped and believed I had no vice.
I cried some more against father's sleeve then, because Ross had said
once that people were only expelled for really rotten things,--
'It was the bluebells, daddy.'
'Of course it was, darling,' he said, 'but they're heaps bigger in
Devonshire.'
'That child is on the road to ruin,' groaned my aunt.
Father said to Ross in the cab that crabbed age and youth never could
live together, and that woman was enough to make an Evangelical parson
turn Papist.
But something happened while I was at school that I can't forget. We
were allowed occasionally to go to Evensong, and once in the dimness of
the church I saw a man gazing at me. He looked like a soldier in the
Indian army--not a bit handsome, but he had a certain rugged strength
that made his face seem rather splendid. The keen, clear eyes were gray
and stern, but softened as they looked at me. I felt as if I knew him.
I have often thought since of that 'absent face that fixed me,' and I
find myself comparing other men with him, and somehow, I can't explain
it very well, I think I feel a little older since I saw him.
*CHAPTER VII*
Oh, it was topping to get home. Nannie said I was most frightfully
thin. She seemed quite worried about it, but the cook said
consolingly,--
'Oh, we all ebbs and flows, especially gals. She only wants the crip o'
the crame and an egg beat up in a drop of good milk.'
The next day I woke up with a spot on my chest, and Nannie said I was
feverish, and daddy got in a panic and sent for Doctor Merriwater. His
name is Tobias, but we always call him Toby. When he came he looked at
my spot most earnestly and said,--
'Why, good gracious, the child has got the measles, the one and only
measle, she's in a frightfully dangerous state. Don't let her get up
for at least two days and I'll send you round a collar and a chain at
once or I'm afraid her measle will be gone before the morning.'
When I was better I asked father if I could be presented, as I had left
school, and Monica was going to be.
'No,' he said, 'I've had quite enough of London for you for the moment.'
'Oh, daddy, why not?'
Father turned autocratic then and said, 'Because I don't choose,
darling.' So, of course, I couldn't say any more.
But after a minute he twinkled at me,--
'Sorry, little 'un, but a parson has to "rule his children!" It's one
of Timothy's conditions.'
'Oh, that was deacons, daddy! and you're a vicar.'
'Or if "a man desires the office of a bishop," Meg.'
'But _do_ you, father?' I asked gravely, 'for if you don't you haven't
got a leg to stand on, and I----'
'No, I don't desire the office of a bishop, Meg; I don't want to do
anything different from what I am doing now. I don't, I don't.'
'Why, father,' I exclaimed, 'does anybody want you to?'
'I loathe natives,' he replied, and went out of the room hurriedly.
Sometimes I don't understand my father; he says things that don't seem
to have the slightest bearing on the subject under discussion.
When Ross came home in the summer for the holidays he was bigger than
ever. I had the greatest difficulty in keeping him in his place. He
seemed to think he could go straight on from that moment when he went
seven feet high and said, 'There, darling.' He actually had the cheek
to say, 'Because I don't choose' to me once, and we had words about it!
Aunt Amelia invited herself to stay for six weeks while he was home.
Relations were slightly strained all the time and when she said to
father in front of Ross, 'I hope Meg has been quite steady since.' I
really thought they were both going to blow up, but we escaped with a
slammed door and father's threat to go into lodgings.
Ross calmed down later in the day and observed that 'It was a quaint
family, all cracked on something: Aunt Amelia on Calvinism, Uncle Jasper
on Archaeology, Cousin Emily on animals, and you,' he added rudely,
'on--er bluebells.'
'And daddy?' I asked, ignoring the insult.
'Oh, daddy's passion is souls,' and he changed the conversation quickly.
But I was never so horrified in all my life. To think that my brother
should compare father with Aunt Amelia.
'Souls,' I gasped, 'whatever do you mean? Are you _ab-so-lu-tely_
dotty, Ross?'
'You never _can_ see anything farther than your nose, Meg. What do you
suppose he said he was going to change the kids' service for that
Sunday?'
For 'that Sunday' was the one that comes once a month, when the village
children have to go to church, to say the catechism to father, instead
of having Sunday school. He said at lunch if we had no other
engagements he'd be most awfully obliged if Aunt Amelia and I would go
and help keep the kids quiet as several of the teachers were away.
Aunt Amelia observed that she never had engagements on Sunday (she is
tiring), and of course I said I would go, though privately I thought it
was a sin and a shame to spend that gorgeous afternoon in learning what
your godfathers and godmothers did for you. Ours never did anything for
us, except to send us ten bob at Christmas, though Ross's godmother says
she is going to leave him all her money and me her diamonds.
It was so hot in church, and the children were so naughty. The small
boy next to me was a little devil. His name was Tommy Vellacott. He
had a picture in his Prayer Book and he would keep sticking pins in it.
Father stopped once and asked what he was doing.
'Pwicking holes in the Virgin Mawry,' he said, and all the children
tittered. Daddy started the Catechism again and said to Tommy,--
'What is thy duty towards God?'
Tommy looked bored but replied that his duty was to believe in Him, to
fear Him, and to love Him.'
Father seemed to think it was a heaven-sent opportunity to point a
practical moral, so remarked that if children really loved God, they
ought not to bring a dead mouse in church to frighten the others with,
and that if Tommy were sorry he had better put it in the porch. (That's
the worst of father, he isn't satisfied with repentance; you have to
burn the vanities as well).
'Don't love God,' said Tommy.
Father stared down at the little heathen with a startled look on his
face.
'You don't love God, Tommy?'
'No,' said Tommy, who is nothing if not truthful, 'course I don't, only
believe in Him.'
I thought it was the most humorous thing I had ever heard, but Aunt
Amelia was horrified, and at tea said that the present generation was
hopeless and that Tommy's remark was a specimen of the apostasy of the
age.
'Well, I belong to the church militant, Amelia, so I'm not willing to
leave it at that,' said daddy, rather as if he were trying to keep his
temper. So I, by way of pouring oil on the troubled waters, said,--
'But, daddy, don't most people feel like Tommy? They "believe," but I
think it's most frightfully difficult to love the Man of Sorrows.'
Father looked at me with much the same expression as he had when he
looked at Tommy, but he only said gently,--
'Darling, I don't think you will love the Man of Sorrows until you've
become acquainted with grief yourself.'
I felt a pig for the rest of the day; it seemed such a rotten thing to
have said to father.
The next time the kids had to go to church father said he was going to
chuck the catechism and tell them stories instead, and let them choose
their own hymns.
Aunt Amelia (who was still staying with us for our sins) observed that
nothing was gained by leaving the old paths; and then father made
another of those extraordinary remarks that don't seem to have the
slightest connection with the rest of the conversation.
'"A Hindoo, though dying of thirst, will refuse water if offered in a
foreign cup, but he will drink the _same_ water if offered in his own."'
When daddy got into church he said to the kids,--
'It's much too hot to stay indoors this lovely day, we'll all go out and
sit in the shade in the meadow.'
The children were frightfully bucked, and when they were all seated
daddy said,--
'Now, somebody choose a hymn.'
Tommy Vellacott said he would like the one about the little boy who
stole the old gentleman's watch. Father, with great difficulty,
discovered that he meant
'The old man, meek and mild.
The Priest of Israel slept.
_His watch_ the Temple child
The little Levite _kept_.'
I could feel Aunt Amelia's expression down my backbone.
Then daddy said,--
'Now, children, I will tell you a story.'
'A Sunday one?' asked Tommy, and when father said, 'Oh, yes, certainly,'
he appeared to be about to take no further interest in the proceedings.
Father has a beautiful voice for story telling. He seems to fill it at
will with fun and laughter, magic, mystery, tenderness, and tears. I
wish I could put down on paper its beautiful tone and quality and show
you the gentle softening of his strong face as he watched the little
children sitting so contentedly in the meadow, listening to his tale.
Always after that daddy told them the old stories in a new way and the
children were so interested and liked to choose the hymns. (They loved
the ones for the burial of the dead). One day Tommy Vellacott sent
daddy this note,--
'Please Mother says i can't go to church this afternoon and nor can
emily she give me a green apple and i have got the dire rear and so has
she so will you come to our house and tell us a story please your
respectful tommy.'
And after the children's service, when daddy went down the village to
see his two sick parishioners he had on his 'contented look,' as if what
Ross calls his 'passion for souls' was somehow being satisfied by
Tommy's desire to hear a Bible story. He is so dear and funny.
*CHAPTER VIII*
When Ross went to Sandhurst I got influenza, and then when I was better
I got it again. Toby was very angry and said if I were going to turn
into a trap for that bug he'd chuck up his profession and take in the
village washing. By the time I had recovered the second time it was
nearly Christmas, and Aunt Constance went to London, and I invited
myself to lunch with Uncle Jasper on my seventeenth birthday, and oh!
why I've got up to Chapter I again.... So the General Public can behold
me now quite grown up, staid, and in my right mind, having been
baptized, confirmed, and had the measles. But whatever else can I put
in my novel? A little while after this I asked Uncle Jasper.
'Why, darling,' he said, 'I thought you just made it up as you went
along.'
'But could you seriously advise me?' I ventured.
So he remarked that all the chapters must be about the same length and
must be linked together by a strong plot, 'The General Public likes
strong meat,' he said, and he looked at me and then across at father,
and they laughed and telegraphed things to one another.
Nannie is the only person who really helps me. She said,--
'Why, you haven't got anything in yet about the old church, dearie, and
after that I should write a chapter every day about what you do.'
'But the chapters won't be all the same length then.'
'I shouldn't worry about a thing like that,' said Nannie with her usual
homely common sense, 'because even the General Public knows that some
days are much longer than others. Why the calendar marks the longest
and the shortest, doesn't it.'
'Yes,' I said doubtfully.
'Well, then!' said Nannie.
So I _will_ tell about the old church and "marey Falkner's" chemise.
Archaeologists say that our church is 'a perfect gem.' The walls are
very thick, nearly three feet in some places, and the axe marks are
still visible. The nave and chancel are about 1100. There is a Norman
priest's door on the south side of the church and a perfect Norman arch,
dividing the nave from the chancel. There are _two_ of the consecration
crosses still remaining, and some bits of Saxon work.
There is no tower, but a little shingled wood turret with two bells, one
of which is cracked. The pulpit and the canopy over it are 1628, and
there are some splendid ancient candlesticks of brass. The church has
small Norman lights mixed up with early English ones, and the pews are
all old oak.
Uncle Jasper is simply absorbed in the history of the little place, and
one day he showed me the deeds and some of the old Churchwarden
accounts. I will copy out the one I like best, although he says it is
not sufficiently 'early' to be really interesting.
'ACCOMPT FOR YE YEAR 1685.
L s. d.
Received from ye ffor: Churchwarden 00 10 02
Reed ffrom ye psh on Two Rates .. 01 17 03
----------
Totall Received 02 07 05
----------
to ye house of Correction .. .. 00 12 04
Ffor Bread and wine & at ye Comm 00 07 06
ffor necessarie Repaire of ye Church 00 15 07
ffor Releiving poor passengers .. 00 02 06
----------
Payd out 01 17 11
Rests due to ye psh .. .. 00 09 06
These Accompts were examin'd and Allowe'd by us
FRED SLOCOMBE ROB COCKRAN
WILLIAM COPP ALLIN VELLACOTT
I'm sure they had an awful bother to make the accounts balance, they
must have got so muddled with all those noughts, especially Rob Cockran.
I suppose Tommy Vellacott is a descendant of Allin's, and I've just
remembered that there is an old woman who lives at the last house in the
village and her name is Slocombe. She is thrice widowed and exceedingly
rotund. She says she has only the Almighty to look after her now, and
that all her troubles went innards and turned to fat. She has varicose
veins. These things do link one up with the centuries.
(Father has just looked over my shoulder and says that really, 'after
all the money that has been spent on my education!' But I don't know
what he means. I'm certain varicose is spelled correctly, for I looked
it up in the dictionary.)
It seems that some land and some money were given to the church by
William the First 'for the health of his soul.' (Perhaps he'd been
beastly to Matilda of Flanders and gave it as a kind of penance.)
Father says, 'Oh, no. Probably it was a thank-offering when she died.'
'But,' I said, '_did_ she die first?' Father remarked that he thought
she shuffled off this mortal coil in 1084, but that he couldn't bother
to remember an unimportant little detail like that about a woman!
Apparently it was quite a nice bit of land, sufficiently large and
fertile to supply pasture for '80 romping, roaming, and rollicking
swine.'
Some of the things the tenants had to do were very quaint. How would
the village people like daddy to come down on them now to 'dam the water
to overflow the meadows once a year,' and if they didn't do it make them
pay a halfpenny? Or supposing they got a message that they had 'to fill
two dung carts every two days or pay twopence,' or 'thresh and winnow
white wheat,' and for every two bushels that they didn't do have to pay
'somewhere about three farthings.'
But the thing that fascinates me so is the entry in the accounts about
marey Falkner's chemise. I'll copy it out:--
1792--to pare shoes for Marey Falkner .. 4 6
To shift 16d Ell for marey Falkner .. 2 8
Two pare stockens 16d Do. .. 1 4
To Handkerchief 14d. Do. .. 1 2
Paid for maken Shift .. .. .. 6
and then
1793 for menden marey Falkners shoes 1 6
Oh, she must have been a proud girl when she got that outfit! But I
hope the churchwarden's wife gave her the shift: it seems an
embarrassing present to receive from an Evangelical churchwarden. I
wonder if there was a ribbon round the top of it, and wasn't she a good
girl to make her shoes last out so long? I do hope there was a ribbon.
I've always had such heaps of them; the distribution of life's trimmings
is very unequal; poor little marey Falkner.
The account goes on to say that Dame Crane received two and six for
nursing John Insgridle, but they paid Dame Hollice 8/0 for nursing
Snellings' wife, which seemed dear, unless there was a baby. H. Delva
had to be examined and 'hors and cart to take her thare' cost six bob,
which was a lot, I think. Then the churchwardens seem to have bought a
lock for the church wicket and one Hedgehog, and paid four shillings for
a hat for Richard Helsey. They procured a Polcat and a Stote and a mat
for the 'Cumionion for the minister' and then got another Hedgehog and
'releived a porper' (doesn't it look poverty-struck spelled that way? I
always told father that was the right way to spell relieved), and they
finished up with seventy-two dozen Sparrows at three pence a dozen.
Whatever did they do with such a Zoo?
But the thing I like best of all in the church is the record of a
naughty boy who evidently behaved as disgracefully in the seventeenth
century as my brother does in the twentieth, for very badly carved in
the chancel near our seat is
R. Fotheringham. 1660.
There is a monument, too, to a Margaret Fotheringham on the opposite
wall. She died young. I am so glad she did, for I have always loathed
her, because Aunt Amelia used to tell me I ought to try to follow her
good example. There is a long list of her virtues, and then it says:--
'This monument was erected by her afflicted
father who, when he looks upon this place,
knows that he gazes on an angel's tomb.'
But then, as Ross used to say when we were seven and I was extra
specially fed up with my angelic ancestress, 'I don't suppose she really
was as good and holy as all that, Meg, all men are liars; it says so in
the Bible.'
Monica once said I ought to be proud of such ancient lineage, but I
don't see why. We all go back to Adam.
'Yes,' said Monica, tilting up her chin, 'but it isn't every one that
has written down how they did it.'
Of course I _do_ see that these things _do_ link one up to one's family.
'Just as varicose veins do to the centuries, little 'un,' father
laughed, but he didn't condescend to explain what he meant. He is
sometimes intentionally ambiguous.
*CHAPTER IX*
I fainted the day before yesterday, and I feel anxious about my health.
I have been since I had the 'flu twice last winter. They say the after
effects are worse than the disease. I have delusions: I find centipedes
in my sponge. There was another yesterday, and I felt my condition was
getting serious, so I spoke to Ross about it.
'Lawks, got 'em _again_,' he said, 'would you like a gun to shoot 'em
with?'
I mentioned it to father, but, he, too, seemed to think I only thought I
saw them. I went downstairs and found him mending a riding-whip.
'Do you ever see centipedes walking out of your sponge, father?'
'Never, I'm thankful to say,' he replied, dropping the whip suddenly and
looking at me anxiously. 'But, Meg, what other symptoms have you? Does
your head ache? Do you vomit? Does everything revolve? How many
fingers am I holding up? Am I ever twins?'
'Do be serious, father.'
'I am,' he replied, trying to feel my pulse; 'I think it's frightfully
serious. I shall get Toby to see you to-day and take you up to a
specialist to-morrow. I understand it's frightfully on the increase
amongst women.'
Well, I have heard of people with an _idee fixe_, and if there is such a
thing as an insect fixe I must have it, and pretty badly, too, for
another dropped out just before lunch when I was going to wash my face.
Nannie came in then and said, 'Dearie, why don't you keep your sponge on
the top of your water jug instead of by the window; that's the fourth
centipede I've found in your basin this week.'
She is a comfort.
But to-day I had another kind of delusion, for I went out alone in Uncle
Jasper's woods to gather early primroses. It was in the dusk, just when
the woods were growing dark and filled with mystery. But I'm not
frightened now, for ever since I saw that man in church I love to go out
in that gloaming time and let the 'longing that is not akin to pain'
steal over me.
And then I saw him coming down the little path, and when he drew quite
near he saw me, too, and a startled look came in his eyes and a great
wonder. He stopped a moment and it seemed as if he half held out his
hands to me.
And I? I don't know what I felt save that it seemed again as if I had
met some one I had _known_ before. I dropped my flowers and ran home
with my heart beating. But I knew, of course, he did not _really_ stop.
I _must_ have dreamed the startled wonder of his face, that look of
sudden adoration in his eyes.
Father met me at the entrance of the Park.
'Why, darling! were you frightened in the woods?'
'No,' I said, but I clung to his arm, and he turned autocratic then, and
in his funny way forgot that I am grown up now, and forbade me to go out
alone so late, because he thought that I had had a sudden fright such as
I had when I was little, and the woods grew tulgy, and the trees turned
to fantastic shapes, and strange things rustled in the undergrowth.
Then daddy told me a most amazing piece of news. There has been a
family row at the Manor House, the first I ever remember.
Eustace told his father that he didn't want to go into the army after
all, but that he wished to join the Roman church and be a monk instead.
Imagine that bombshell in an Evangelical parish. Mercifully Aunt Amelia
is not staying here just now. Ross's comments are not really printable.
Uncle Jasper came over to see father about it in a towering temper just
before dinner. I don't know what daddy said to him, but I was in the
garden when he went away and I heard him say,--
'Yes, Anthony, I promise, at least, that it shan't be you over again.
But I will never consent to it, never. A monk! My son!'
I wonder what that bit about father meant.
Daddy went to dine at the Manor House, so Ross and I had dinner alone as
we weren't asked. My brother's mind is full of Monkeries, as he
persists in railing them.
'What a mug Eustace is,' said he. 'Fancy wanting to give up his dogs
and horses.'
'But giving up is very hard.'
'Yes, but it isn't giving up in his case; he was never keen on
horses--thought the Derby wicked.'
'Well, but Ross, you know----'
'Oh, for goodness' sake,' said Ross with great exasperation, 'don't tell
me that you think racing's wicked, surely _you_ don't believe that
because people gamble that the thing itself is wrong; you'll be going
into a Monkery yourself next,' he said, glaring at me angrily. 'What do
you suppose the horses were made capable of such speed for, if they
weren't to run? I suppose you think they ought to be kept in their
stables and fed on barley sugar, and you father's daughter,' said Ross
disgustedly. 'Oh, don't talk to me, Meg; people like Aunt Amelia and
Eustace make me sick. They just stick up a little set of opinions and
call it religion. They always say the things _they_ don't like are
wicked; can you see Aunt Amelia ski-ing or hunting? Would she exchange
that disgusting fydo for my bulldog? But because I like those things
they both say that I'm "worldly" and she calls me her "poor misguided
nephew." No, my dear girl, it won't wash, that sort of rot does all the
harm. And then the parsons! with their everlasting "venture to think."
When a chap in the pulpit gets up and says, "My brethren, I venture to
think," I always want to heave a hymn book at him and say, "Oh, don't
venture such a lot, get on with it." I never venture. I just think and
say so, why can't he?'
'Yes,' I murmured, 'I'm sure you do, Ross!'
'Look at the stuff they preach, too. Always harping on the mild and
simple tack! Who wants to be mild or simple? How can they think that
will attract _men_?'
'Or women,' I said as he paused for breath.
'No, or women,' agreed my brother.
'But, Ross, it does say He was meek and gentle.'
'But not mild, that's the hymn, and they only put it in to rhyme with
"child." I hate hymns, except "Onward Christian Soldiers," and "Fight
the Good Fight," and decent ones like that. Why do parsons nearly
always leave out the other side of Him? Think how strong He was, and
strong people are always gentle. Look at daddy. Could you have a
stronger man, mentally, morally, or physically, and yet he is most
extraordinarily gentle sometimes; meek, too, about some things. I wish I
was!'
'I were, Ross.'
'Oh, no! you weren't, _never_ Meg. I will not be reproved for grammar
by a twin. Oh, yes, you were meek once, about some bluebells. You're
rather a sweet kid sometimes; I mean you used to be,' my brother
corrected hastily, lest I should be puffed up with pride.
'Now, if _I_ went into a Monkery,' he continued, being thoroughly wound
up, 'it might be a good thing. It would be discipline for me. I should
never be able to say prayers all day. I'd always be falling foul over
the law of obedience, and if there were a dog fight outside I'd have to
go and separate them. It would take me years to get to what Eustace is
now and--oh these nuts have got bugs in them, pass me an apple.'
When I went to bed and thought over what Ross had said I remembered that
once when we were children, he and I and Eustace were taken round the
National Gallery by Aunt Constance, and Ross came up to me privately and
said 'Meg, I can't stand all these saints and Madonnas, and the
paintings of Him are beastly, why, they're only women with beards.
They're not a bit like the picture of Him that's in my head,' said the
little chap with a proud tilt to his chin.
'What's your picture of Him like, Ross?' I remember asking.
'On a horse, of course, with a sword and crown like it tells you in the
Revelation.'
And then, for that masculine English horror of 'talking religion' was
developed strongly in him even at that early age, he wouldn't say any
more, only, 'Let's come and see if we can find some lions!'
When daddy came in to wish me 'good-night' he said that Uncle Jasper was
still in a most frightful bate with Eustace about 'this idea that he has
got into his head,' and that Eustace has agreed to wait a year or two
before chucking up the army.
I can't understand my cousin. Last time I saw him his young man's fancy
had lightly turned to thoughts of loving me. Now he desires a Monkery.
But which is 'the idea'? that's the question that I felt would keep me
awake all night. Has he really a vocation? If so, I suppose I was
merely a kind of centipede that got, for a moment, into his sponge.
Time alone will give the answer.
But, oh dear me, I didn't keep awake all night. I only wish I had.
Instead, I had a most appalling nightmare. I dreamed that Ross was
going into a nunnery. He would do it, in spite of all I said to him. I
found myself in the passage in floods of tears, hammering on his door
and sobbing, 'Oh, don't, don't. Think of the privations.'
The next moment I was on my own bed with Ross and father beside me.
'Am I dying?' I asked, seeing my family gathered round my couch.
'Dying!' said my brother, giving me a shake with one hand and a stick of
chocolate with the other, 'it's we who are dying, with laughter.'
'I thought you were going into a nunnery,' I wailed, 'and----'
'And very nice too,' said Ross, 'if I had a nice little nun to cuddle.'
That woke me right up. I don't know how my brother can say such things!
Father says that really some of the family jokes _can't_ go in my novel.
But I can scratch them out after.
*CHAPTER X*
It's a whole month since I wrote a chapter of my book. I don't seem to
have had much time lately, although I know we all have all the time
there is, as the Bishop reminded the lady who complained that she had
not had enough in which to say her prayers!
And now it is full spring and the woods are a pageant of flowers, and
there is a glory of green over the garden. It is warm like summer and
the nights are still, and that wondrous thing called 'Love' has come to
me.
I wish that I could get its fragrance down and put into my book
something of its perfection.
My father twinkles at me and says that although I have got in William
I., and 'the strong love interest' has turned up, William II. and the
fauna of the South Pole have still to be inserted.
I think it's difficult to write of love, but Nannie says,--
'Oh, no. Just tell about the time you saw him first, and what he said
to you, and you to him.'
But that first time, in church, he only looked at me, and the second
time, out in the woods, I ran away! But two days after that, Aunt
Constance had a dinner party, and the Foxhills came, and with
them--Michael. I saw that same glow of adoration on his face, and I was
afraid to let him see my eyes lest he should catch an answering look in
them.
After dinner I slipped away into the Great Hall alone.
He followed me and said,--
'The garden is very sweet to-night, won't you come out with me?'
It seemed as if he had the right to ask that I should go, and I the
right to go since he had asked it.
Out in the warm, sweet night he told me a little of his life in
India--of the loneliness of his frontier station, but the splendour of
it, too. I caught the lure and glamour of the mountains he loved to
climb with two faithful guides who went out to him from Switzerland year
after year whenever he had leave. I guessed a little of the strenuous
simplicity of the life of this man whose face had 'fixed me.'
And then there came a little silence which he broke by telling me that
once in a London church he had seen 'a girl's face like a cameo, cut in
the grayness of the wall behind.'
'I loved you then,' he said, 'I loved you in the woods that day--I love
you now.'
And I? what did I do and say? Oh, what would any woman--out in the warm
darkness with a man she'd hardly spoken to before? I chose to forget
that moment in the woods when all my heart went out to him. I selected
my words with daintiness and my sentences with care, and built up little
barriers of aloofness all around me. I said that 'I must go in now, but
that I had been so interested in all he'd told me of his life in India,
that I would think of him sometimes climbing his mountains.' And as I
turned to go out of the garden I added airily, 'Write? Oh, yes, perhaps
I might even write occasionally. I liked writing to my friends. When
he came home again in three years' time on leave we might even meet
again. Perhaps--perhaps----'
But there were primal instincts at work that night out in the scented
garden, and this gentleman, in conventional evening dress, suddenly
reverted to the caveman who had seen his woman and quite definitely
meant to have her. So with a certain ruthlessness that I discovered
afterwards was typical of the man, he refused to let me go, but stormed
the fortress of my heart with most exceeding suddenness. He brushed
aside all my objections and the words and sentences chosen with such
care, knocked down my carefully erected barriers and swept me off my
feet, and swamped and drowned and deluged me in love, and with 'What
does all that matter? You belong to me,' he took me in his arms and
kissed me with a kiss that thrilled while it subdued me.
It seemed as if I had been with him in some dim, past age and then had
somehow lost him, and had been restless ever since, striving to find
what I had lost, and yet had been unconscious of the thing I sought
until I found it, in a moment, in his arms.
As father and I went home I spoke to him with subtlety and with guile.
'Daddy, how old was mother when you married her?'
'Eighteen. Why, darling?'
'Just my age now.'
'Oh, nonsense, Meg, I quite decline to have a grown up daughter, you're
only eight!'
'Have you ever felt it was too young for her to marry.'
'Never,' said father with great vigour, 'it was just the right age.'
'Do you believe in love at first sight, daddy?'
'Why, yes, I think I do in some cases. I loved your mother the moment I
saw her, and then there's your friend Dante, little 'un, and----'
'Then, father, may I marry Captain Ellsley, please?'
But my father was not consistent, neither was he humble. He behaved
like a man who not only desired the office of a Bishop, but was actually
a whole bench of them at that moment, and intended therefore to 'have
his children in subjection with all gravity.' He said he'd never in all
his life heard anything quite so preposterous, he'd hardly seen the
hulking chap (we do not see ourselves as others see us. Michael is an
inch and a half shorter than father), never even noticed if he ate with
his knife or not, so was it likely that----'
'But, father, Dante----'
'Yes, but he didn't marry the girl, as you've often said, Meg.'
Thus did I fall into my own pit, and in the net which I had spread for
another were my own feet taken. The Bench of Bishops preferred not to
discuss the subject further, so I went upstairs to bed in utter
desolation, because I couldn't give up Michael even though father was so
displeased with me.
But when he came upstairs ages afterwards he scratched on my door and
said,--
'Are you Meg?'
'Oh, daddy, of course I am.'
He came in then. 'How many?' he asked.
'Four.'
'Oh, darling! never in all the years do I remember any tragedy that took
more than three, even when you were so worried about "Adam-and-Eve's"
family!'
He was sweet to me then, and took away my four little wet handkerchiefs
and gave me his big dry one, and gathered me in his arms and said,--
'We can't have two rows in one family, Meg. Tell me about it, darling.'
So I told him.
'Oh, Meg,' he said when I had done, 'so love, that very perfect thing,
has really come to you, my little girl, but, oh, why do you choose a man
who will want to take you away to India, my darling?'
And then father made one of those strange remarks that he does sometimes
which I can't understand.
'My harness piece by piece He has hewn from me.'
'What _do_ you mean, daddy.'
'Perhaps I'll tell you some day, little 'un,' and he sighed and kissed
me and said he would at any rate see Michael in the morning. So I felt
more cheered. As he got up to go I thought how wonderful it is to love,
so I said,--
'Daddy, what is it that makes me now understand all the lovers of the
world? Jacob and Rachel, Elizabeth and Robert, even Dante----'
'Why, experience, darling,' father said, and came back and kissed me
again, smiling with faint amusement.
When he'd gone I turned down the lamp and peeped out of the window and
saw that it was moonlight. All the flowers I love so in the day-time
were still waiting in the garden--waiting for Michael. In the bright
moonlight I could see all sorts of funny things that I have never seen
before. There was a little elf in the laburnum tree making yellow
tassels, another was stamping out stars from a bit of cloud and throwing
them on to the clematis, and a third was taking off the bracken's curl
papers. Just as I was thinking I had better try to go to sleep, I saw a
little old woman with a face like a rosy, wrinkled apple walking down
the garden path. She was in a great hurry and rather cross.
'How people can expect me to make scent,' she said, 'with no flowers.
Ah, this is better,' and she looked round the garden with great
satisfaction. 'I remember now, this one's always nice.' Then she began
to gather flowers and somehow I didn't mind a bit, though usually I
should very much object if some unauthorised person came into the garden
unbidden. She pulled bits of lilac and a great deal of honeysuckle,
some bluebells, and an armful of wallflowers, lilies of the valley, and
such a lot of primroses, and threw them into a still, which I never
remember noticing in the garden before. Then she damped them with
dewdrops and threw in more flowers--daffodils and gorse-blooms (the
thorns didn't prick her fingers, though her hands were very white and
soft.) Then more primroses and a few late violets, honeysuckle, and
bluebells. She added just a wisp of wood smoke, too, from a bonfire and
some damp earth and a shower of rain, and stirred the mixture with a
sunbeam. She laughed softly and her voice sounded like a faint breeze
rippling over the tree tops. Then she walked, or perhaps she floated,
round the garden, and on every bush and tree she scattered little
showers and sprays of scent, so that I could smell not just one thing
like lilac or bluebell, but a delicious harmony of flowers, wet earth,
and rain. She looked up at me as she went out of the garden and
laughed.
'It will last till he comes in the morning.'
And I smiled back because I loved that dear Dame Nature. When Nannie
came to wake me she said,--
'How sweet the garden smells. Hasn't the laburnum and clematis come out
in the night? I suppose it's the rain, Meg.'
But I knew better!
Then Michael came, prepared, I think, to interview a Bench of Bishops,
but found--my father--who remarked later in the day,--
'Well, he doesn't eat with his knife, Meg, and he--um--seems to know his
own mind, too. I don't think that "gentle knight" would have desired to
go into a Monastery if his ladye had refused him the first time he asked
her.'
Now how on earth did father guess that?
And I smiled to myself as I wondered if 'you belong to me' could
conceivably be considered by a Bench of Bishops as the speech of a
gentle knight 'asking' his ladye.
When I told Ross that I was going to marry Captain Ellsley in the
summer, he said coldly,--
'Never heard of the chap.'
'But,' I said, 'you must have heard of him, he's----'
'You don't mean _the_ Ellsley; that man that climbs in the Himalayas?'
'Yes, I do, Ross.'
'My hat,' he exclaimed, 'why he might have married anybody,' and then he
stared at me as if he had suddenly seen me in quite a new light and put
an arm round me and called me 'Jonathan' and said,--
'Oh, Meg, I'll have to change into the Indian Army so that I can murder
him if he isn't good to you!'
Funny old 'David.'
*CHAPTER XI*
Here's more than half the summer slipped away. The house has buzzed and
overflowed with the boys whom Ross brings home.
Every day for eight whole weeks I have been out, riding or walking in
the Hickley woods, sometimes with father, many times alone with Michael.
I love this man I'm going to marry very deeply, but I wouldn't let him
know it. He dislikes 'the truest form of kindness' even more than all
my other male things do!
Sometimes after a day of delight together he says as he goes home,--
'I've hardly seen you, darling.'
'Why, I've let you stay _all_ day,' I say reproachfully.
'Yes, but I haven't really had you; you've eluded me. You drive me mad,
Meg, with your little air of cool aloofness.'
But what would he? Is a woman to be done out of her wooing because a
man chose once to be a caveman and talked of things belonging to him,
before he'd even got them? So naturally I tilt my chin a little when he
talks like that, and hold out my hand to say good-night, and watch out
of the tail of my eye to see how he is liking it! But sometimes
it's----'
'No, I won't stand _any_ more of it to-night.' and then follows that
mastering kiss which makes me really his for just that moment, and sends
my thoughts and feelings whirling so that I try the harder to elude him
afterwards!
One day this week I felt unusually romantic, so I read the Sonnets from
the Portuguese.
'Oh, beautiful, Elizabeth,' I said, 'but simple, when you come to think
of it. I'm sure that I could write one just as good, and I love my man
every bit as much as you did Robert.'
So here is my Maiden Effort and probably my Swan Song:--
'At night I think of you, beloved.
Dream that I see your face,
Fancy I feel you kiss me
As I rest in your embrace.
But at the rose glow of morning
You fade like a summer mist,
And I wake, and long
For a dream that has gone,
For a face that I fancied I kissed.'
Of course it is not strictly accurate, for I never have the luck to
dream of Michael, 'but a _Poet_,' I observed as I wrote the last lines
down, 'is not expected to be verbally truthful in a _Poem_.'
'What, still slinging ink, little 'un?' said father, coming into my room
at this point, 'why, you've got a blob on your neck!'
And then he picked up this chapter in that impertinent way he has and
read it, with his eyes all curled up at the corners.
'Might one criticise the poem, Meg?' he asked diffidently.
'Oh, do,' I replied, conscious that it was beyond all criticism.
'Your "poem,"' he said, getting the word out with difficulty, 'has
defective rhymes, darling. "Long" does not rhyme with "gone," nor is
the--um--"poem" a sonnet.'
'But I never said it was, daddy.'
'No, Meg?'
'Oh, father,' I said, shaking his arm, 'it would look deliriously
beautiful printed on good paper with wide margins and rough edges?'
Nannie said, 'You give it to Master Michael, dearie. He'll like it, and
as to rhymes, why the stuff your father reads never has any.'
So I presented it to Michael, and I had no illusions then as to whether
I were kissed or not.
Later, at tea, father had just observed that, like the Ephesians, we
were 'in danger to be called in question for this day's uproar,' when a
telegram was brought to him.
'The tone of this household will have to buck up a bit,' he remarked as
he read it.
'It will after to-morrow,' grinned Charlie Foxhill, 'when Meg's gone,
sir.'
(For oh, to-morrow is my wedding day, just fancy.)
'It's got to buck up before that,' father replied; 'this wire is from
the new Bishop of Ligeria, he's coming here this afternoon and wants to
stop the night. He'll have to stay on for the wedding, of course.'
'Oh, daddy,' I exclaimed in great disgust, 'we can't have this Ligerian
fossil here to-morrow, it'll spoil everything, besides, there isn't a
bed.'
'He'll have to sleep in his suit-case then, and his chaplain in the lid,
Meg; there's no time to put him off, and _do_ try to behave like 'a
clergyman's daughter' while he's here, little 'un! Why, good gracious!'
For there was the Bishop of Ligeria, and a livid kind of chaplain who
looked like a limp curl-paper, alighting at the front door from a
motor-car.
Daddy rushed out into the hall and I after him. I wished I had had time
to change into something black, as father seemed so anxious to make a
good impression on the Bishop, but I managed to part my hair in the
middle by the hall glass and I turned the collar of my blouse up instead
of down.
And then one of those terrible delusions came over me, for I thought
father seized the Bishop by the hand and shook it violently,
exclaiming,--
'Hallo, Porky, what priceless luck.'
'What about that ten bob, old bean?' said Porky.
Then father turned and saw _me_ with my hair parted down the middle, and
the _chaplain_, partially paralysed with horror.
'My daughter, me lud,' he said, and led the Bishop and his attendant
into the drawing-room for a belated tea.
I got away as soon as I could. I felt I must have quiet to think things
out. Is this another delusion, or did father really call a Bishop
'Porky'? Nannie said once that putting the feet in hot water draws the
blood from the head and eases mental strain, so I decided to have a bath
before dinner.
I ran into daddy in the corridor.
'Meg, you've torn the lace on your dressing-gown; I told you so
yesterday. Why isn't it mended?'
'Cotton,' I wailed, 'is threepence a reel.'
'Bad as that, Meg?'
'Worse, my honoured parent, worse.'
'Wild oats, Meg?'
'Sacks.'
'Debts?'
I nodded.
'Tell me the uttermost, my erring child.'
'Fourpence to Nannie, and five and threepence to Ross.'
I escaped into the bathroom and slammed the door. I sang a hymn as I
bathed; it was that one the children love so, 'Days and Moments Quickly
Flying.' I thought it might help to restore the tone of the household.
Daddy shoved five and sevenpence under the door with a note to say that
a lady in the house was very ill and would I either sing something else,
or go in the next street, as that hymn made her nervous, so I chanted
(being always anxious to oblige)--
'Beer, beer, glorious beer,
Drink till you're made of it,
Don't be afraid of it,
Glorious, glorious beer.'
Another note was pushed under the door then to say that the lady was
dead now, and the Bishop thought it would be well for me to sign the
pledge (enclosed).
The Bishop took me into dinner. I behaved just like a clergyman's
daughter.
'Sorry,' said Michael, suddenly dropping his fish fork, 'but I can't,
after all.'
'Can't what?'
'Marry the girl, sir.'
'De'ah me,' said the Bishop, 'this is most distressing, very.'
'What would your ludship advise,' said father, looking at me hopelessly,
'you see, I can't keep her here either, for the sake of the parish.'
'There is a home for Decayed Gentlewomen at Putney,' the Bishop began;
'I should be very happy if my vote and influence would be of any help,
but I doubt'--he continued surveying me solemnly--'whether they would
take her. She is so ah--er--um--so _exceedingly_ decayed.'
After dinner the Bishop nodded in the direction of his chaplain and
whispered to me,--
'It sings. Most painful. Very.'
So of course I asked it to. Aunt Constance accompanied its impassioned
wail.
'If I should die
To-night,
My friends would look upon my face
With tears,
And kissing me, lay snow-white flowers against
My hair.
Keep not your kisses for my cold,
Dead face,
But let me feel them
Now.'
(Unknown author).
Father looked round the congregation with a cold eye. He has views
about guests.
'Thank you very much, Mr Williams. Won't you sing something else?'
And Mr Williams went upstairs to get another.
'Oh,' sobbed Charlie Foxhill, laying his head down on Ross's shoulder,
'keep not your kisses for my cold----'
'No one,' my brother giggled, 'can look upon _your_ face _without_
tears, old thing, but you shall have snow-white flowers all right; here,
can you feel them now?' and he shoved a camellia and several wet
carnations down Charlie's collar, and the Bishop mopped his eyes and
remarked in his best Oxford drawl,--
'Such a good chap, really, if he only wouldn't. Top-hole, very.'
At nine-thirty father said to Michael, 'You can go away now.'
'Where, sir.'
'Anywhere you jolly well like so long as it's far enough. I'm going to
take my only daughter for a last walk in the woods. Of course, if you
thought it worth while to be at the park gates at ten-thirty to say
good-night I might----'
'If you could make it twenty to eleven I could bear it better,' said
Michael, 'it would be ten minutes less----'
'Ten-thirty is _the_ very latest, Michael. An hour is as much as I can
stand of her myself,' said father firmly, shoving him out into the hall.
'Oh, daddy,' I giggled, as we wandered out into the summer night, 'I
haven't laughed so much for years. _Who_ is Porky, and why and when did
you bet him ten bob?'
'He was my fag at Eton, Meg, and I bet him ten bob he'd never be a
Bishop.'
'Have you paid him yet?'
'I've given him six and tenpence on account, little 'un. Why, he's only
a colonial.'
'Oh, daddy! you really are a poppet; you're much too nice to be a
parson; whatever made you want to go into the Church?'
'I didn't want to, Meg. He made me.'
'What, that man, the Bishop of Ligeria?'
'No, _The Man_, the Bishop of my soul, darling.'
'Oh, father!'
'Didn't you know that I was once going into the army, Meg? It seemed to
me then, as now, the only conceivable thing to do, as the Fotheringhams
have always been soldiers. But I found that HE had other views about
it, and I had to chuck it up at the last minute. My father was so
furious with me that he chucked me out.'
'Oh, daddy!'
'And I have felt lately that there is something else I am required to
do, and I don't want to do it. Sometimes I think that this pleasant
Devonshire life is not the one to which I am to be allowed to 'settle
down.'
'And yet you like Him, father?'
'And yet I "like Him," Meg, but, oh, I really don't think I can let you
be married in the morning. I shall have to get Porky to say the bit of
the service that really matters, for I shall be tempted to leave it
out.'
And although father laughed as he said it, yet, from the struggle in his
face, I seemed to understand suddenly that my marriage was for him only
another 'bit of harness' which had been 'hewn' away. But why?'
Then Michael met me at the gate at half-past ten.
'There's a little cottage high up on a Cornish cliff, Meg.'
'How interesting,' I said.
'It's rather a sweet place for a day or two.'
'Oh, really?'
'And after that a bit of sea, which will be smooth'--(but _will_
it?)--'and a long journey, till we come to a little village where two
men will be sitting on a wall waiting for me, _and then_ the mountains
for my honeymoon, my Paradiso!'
You see, I am to have a quite unusual wedding tour. There is to be no
dallying with love beside a rippling and sequestered waterfall, alone
with Michael, who, at intervals, would strain me to his heart. _No_,
there will always be those two young men with us who are going to strain
my muscles all the time. I am going up a 'chimney' for my honeymoon. I
have had an ice-axe for a wedding present and a most amazing pair of
boots If I love and honour Michael, and obey him and the other two young
men, I may _even_ go up the wrong side of a mountain some day! 'It all
depends!'
Now I had not felt worried about these arrangements till that moment by
the gate, but Michael's _then_ unveiled my eyes. I understood all in a
moment that here was the stark and awful tragedy of my life. The
mountains were his honeymoon, the two young men--his bride. The cottage
and the cliffs, the sea, the long journey?--less than the rust that
never stained his ice-axe. His wife? Just a Cook's tour (personally
conducted) to his bride--his two young men--his mountains--his
honeymoon--his Paradiso.
But he learned there, by the gate, that an inferno comes for some before
their paradiso. In a storm of indignation I declined to be his Cook's
tour!
'All is over, Captain Ellsley.'
'No, it has not yet begun, Meg.'
'Oh, Michael! Oh, _please_, Michael.'
'And so do you think to-morrow you could bring yourself to kiss me of
your own accord, just once, my darling?'
And now I am alone in my own little room for the last time, for by this
hour to-morrow I shall have more 'experience,' I shall be linked up with
all the other wedded lovers of the world: Charles Kingsley and Fanny
Grenfell, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, William Gladstone and
Catherine Glynn! Oh! poor old Dante! Why wasn't he content to love his
Beatrice and not marry Gemma? But then the classics would have been the
poorer. He might not have written his _Inferno_ or said:--
'My wife
Of savage temper, more than aught beside
Hath to this evil brought me.'
What?
Oh, yes, I know he didn't actually say it of himself, but his own
domestic hearth suggested it. And, anyway, I will _not_ be reproved for
ignorance of Dante by--the General Public.
FIFTEEN MONTHS LATER
'But when I became mature, I put away childish things.'
*CHAPTER XII*
At other times when I have settled down to write, the words have seemed
to hurry from my brain so fast that my pen has had to race along to
catch the thoughts before they passed into oblivion. But now--though
the desire to write consumes me like a fire, the words come haltingly.
I am afraid lest I should mar the beauty of _this_ thing I know about.
For I have found in marriage the loveliest experience of all.
For on my wedding day, when all the flowers and jewels and lace were
laid aside, and all the good-byes said; the last kiss given to my
father, and the farewells waved to all the loving village folk who were
gathered at the gates to watch me go, I felt a little lonely, and
wondered, as I drove away, if anywhere could ever be again so sweet as
that old home.
When the little journey to the coast was made, and the sun set in a glow
of splendour in the sea, the quiet night came down and the stars hung
softly like jewelled lamps about a purple sky. Out in the windless,
magical sea-scented night my husband caught and kissed me suddenly,--
'You can't send me away to-night, you little fluttering thing.'
But there was something in the quality of his kiss that frightened me,
something almost ruthless in the finality of the words, so that I fled
away upstairs in wild rebellion, because the summer's dalliance was
over. I might elude the man no more. I must say like all the other
women,--
'Meet, if thou require it
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.'
Oh, if it only might be 'to-morrow, not to-night,' and when to-morrow
came? why then again--to-morrow. Thus Mother Eve passed on to me that
fear which caught her once when she, perhaps, was walking in the garden.
I went over to my window and leaned out. The sleeping world lay at my
feet. I looked across the cliffs to where the quiet beauty of the sky
met the wide splendour of the sea, and the great moon flooded the water,
luring me to adventure out upon that rippling, shining pathway, which
seemed to lead to God.
And as I looked I realised that all the natural world responded always
to the natural laws, and, because of that obedience, there was that
restfulness and harmony that had always soothed and quietened me, and
the old 'washed' feeling came and swept away rebellion. So--when that
time came that Michael shut the door, and there was no one in the room
but him and me--he found 'duty' waiting, and that primeval fear that Eve
passed down the ages to her daughter.
I suppose some of my thoughts were painted in my face, for I saw all
that was dogged and ruthless in the man rise up--directed against
himself, not me. I watched him beat down and back that ache and longing
that was in his eyes when he came in, till there was nothing left but a
vast, comprehending tenderness and the strength to wait, until such time
as that frightened look had passed from his ladye's eyes.
And in the quiet shelter of his arms I listened to the very perfect
things he chose to say. That by reason of the 'worship' he had sworn to
give me, there could be no 'demands,' only a lovely gift most urgently
desired if I could give a thing, so priceless, willingly.
And then at something wistful in his face, my love rose up and cast out
fear--that craven thing. And there was a little kiss upon my husband's
lips, so small and light, he hardly knew it there till it had gone--that
little first one that I ever gave him 'of my own accord.' He took my
hands and with the worship deepening in his eyes he asked,--
'Is my beloved mine?'
There flashed into my mind those words which, I suppose, express most
fully the completeness and the glory and perfection of our human love,
and which convey, so perfectly, the utter rest and peace and sweet
contentment which both should find in marriage, when they love.
So I leaned against my husband and he stooped to hear the whispered
words,--
'I am my beloved's, and his desire is towards me.'
So I gave. And in the old surrender of the woman to the man's exultant
mastery, I, too, found love's consummation--and lo!--there was bread and
wine--a chalice and a sacrament.
I have been married, really, such a very little while, yet in these
fifteen months in India I have learned that sometimes women do not give
ungrudgingly--that people speak and write of marriage as if its sweet
abandonment were a thing of which to be ashamed. But if it were, would
Christ have used it as a type of that other union--mystic and
wonderful--between His Church and Him?
And so it seems to me that first should come the 'marriage of the
minds.' If he 'demands' and she gives grudgingly or of necessity, or
with regret, as if for something spoiled--they too are 'wasteful' and
have 'cheapened Paradise.' They have not discerned the Sacrament, but
have
'Spoiled the bread, and spilled the wine
Which, spent with due respective thrift
Had made brutes men, and men divine.'
And, by the way, I'm sure it's time I got in all those other bits I know
about. Those poor birds of the South Pole, still waiting on the ice for
me to bring them fame! And then that other king, but oh! he was so
dull. He missed the best of everything in life: for William II., 1087,
never married; and so of course he never knew what we shall know in four
more weeks, that 'A child's kiss, set on thy sighing lips, shall make
thee glad.'
And when the labour and the travail are all done, and my baby rests in
my arms, I shall have more 'experience.' I shall be linked up with all
the other mothers of the world. Oh, dare I say it? Humbly I do. I
shall be linked up, faintly and far off, even with Mary.
*PART II*
*FOUR YEARS LATER*
*CHAPTER I*
'I start life on my own account and don't like it.'
Grammar is not my strong point, and I never could quote correctly, but
my geography is hopeless. I always remember, however, when I am at sea
that the earth revolves around the sun, and on its axis, too, for I can
feel the double motion in every fibre of my being.
Now that I am once more on dry land and the universe has ceased to rock
I have gone back to my childish and comfortable belief that the world is
a nice, firm, square thing fixed on four legs like a dining-room table.
I really am a shocking sailor, though 'the Gidger'[#]--my small
daughter--loves the sea. The stewardess was an angel of light to me,
yet she insisted on my turning out for all the boat drills. I felt I
would so much rather lie in my berth than bother about my place in a
boat if we were torpedoed, that it would be so much less exertion to go
down comfortably in the big ship than toss about in a small boat on the
chance of being saved. One great advantage of _mal de mer_ is that all
other sensations are obliterated. I was not conscious of the least fear
when the ship next to ours went down, and the fact that our own escaped
a like fate by a miracle left me cold. Even my loneliness and misery at
my first parting from Michael since our marriage were all
forgotten--swallowed up in one great desire to lie down flat and perhaps
take a little iced champagne, 'for my stomach's sake,' like poor darling
Timothy.
[#] _Re_ the nick-name Gidger, the first 'G' is pronounced as in Gideon
and the second 'g' as in German.
Over four whole years of life I've 'drawn a veil,' and, oh, so much has
happened since I finished the last chapter.
I've got to know my husband, that's one thing. A woman never really
knows a man when first she marries him. That old woman in our village
used to say 'the longer you live with a man, the less you like him,' and
she ought to know, she was 'thrice widowed.'
So I have discovered that mine is a very quaint person, with primitive,
old-world ideas, that make him ruthless with himself and other people
about 'work' and 'duty'; and because he never had a sister (and a mother
only for an hour), he's rather apt to think any woman who powders her
nose is of necessity a painted Jezebel! Shall I ever forget his face on
the steamer going out to India, when one of those dear, delicious,
natural, American women produced a small mirror and a powder puff in the
social hall and said to her friend,--
'Say, Sadie, why didn't you tell me I'd got a nose like a headlight?'
And his expression! when I told him that _of course_ I had the same
things in my pocket. Why, good gracious, is there any woman who doesn't
powder her nose, though I do agree with him that some of them put it on
thicker than they need.
Then, too, he can, and will, only talk upon subjects he understands.
Imagine the devastating dullness of a life lived on those lines. But
now. he says 'two in a family can't talk, there aren't enough words to
go round.' So my black beast (as I call him), has been content to adore
and bully me by turns, and fill his life with deeds, and leave the words
for other people and his wife. Consequently, I am not perfectly
positive yet how much less I like him.
One day, after the war had raged two years in France, he came and told
me that he was ordered to the Front, and I could see the soldier and the
lover struggling in his face.
'Oh, Meg, I'm going, so I shan't miss it after all, but how _can_ I
leave you?'
Other things besides the war have happened in those four years. Daddy
did not settle down in Devonshire, but his passion for men's souls has
driven him to one of the terrible places of the earth, where he lives
among natives, for whom he has always had a kind of abhorrence. He and
Porky wage war against the devil over an immense tract of country, for
daddy is on the Bench now, and his diocese is next to that of the Bishop
of Ligeria. They meet once a year, daddy and his old fag, both consumed
with a burning desire that men's bodies should be clean and their souls
washed white, both so muscular and so militant that they are utterly
unable to comprehend 'the church passive,' or to see why a man can't
shoot and ride and crack a joke as well as pray. But then, as Ross used
to say, 'Father is a man first and a parson afterwards.' I have
sometimes wondered, since I have learned to see things 'farther than my
nose,' whether the sentiment expressed so elegantly by my brother did
not contain an element of truth, _i.e._ 'that the chaps in the pews are
more likely to listen to what the chap in the pulpit is jawing about if
they know he's a good shot and rides as straight as they do.'
But the thrill of the years was Cousin Emily, who, without a word to any
one, let her house in Hampstead and turned up one day at daddy's
bungalow and announced that she had come to keep house for him and to
instil kindness to animals among the natives. My father (with that
mediaeval humour that made people in the Middle Ages put up gargoyles on
their churches) says 'Emily's parrot, Meg, has done more for the cause
than any missionary ever born will do. The natives simply love the
collect for the seventeenth Sunday after Trinity!'
At one of the annual meetings Porky asked Emily if he could borrow the
godly bird for _his_ diocese, but there was that in his eyes which made
her know he wanted her as well. So daddy married them, and they are now
like the parrot, 'continually given to all good works together!
The paralytic chaplain's health has given out. The strain of one of the
annual meetings (or else the climate) was too much for him, so he has
been sent home, and has a curacy in England and a wife now, who can lay
those 'snow-white flowers' against his hair! And talking of England
reminds me that while Michael wrestled with his packing in a kind of
sulphurous haze, I pulled strings. If you pull them hard enough in India
you can generally make the puppets work, so somehow I got a passage and
embarked for England three days after Michael sailed for France.
Captain Everard, a great friend of my brother, sailed in the same boat.
He was so kind when I felt sick and kept my small daughter amused.
When I got to Tilbury I was limper than Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
'damp rag hung over the back of a chair.' I don't know what I should
have done without the dear little stewardess to pack for me, and Captain
Everard to help me and the Gidger through the customs, and all the other
nightmare horrors of a landing in England in war time. I suppose I said
I was 'British' when the Aliens Officer asked me my nationality, but I
felt like a disembowelled spirit. (No, I don't mean disembodied!)
Captain Everard could not come to London with me, but got me a corner
seat in a carriage with only three men in it, nice chaps in the
Pioneers, one of whom Captain Everard knew slightly.
*CHAPTER II*
At last after an interminable and arctic journey, during which I passed
through every phase of land and sea sickness and might have died of cold
but for a timely dose of brandy from the Pioneers, the train glided into
the gloom of St Pancras station. Suddenly everything turned rose
colour. Such a delicious surprise! Waiting under one of the shaded
lamps was that wounded warrior--Ross. He looked so dear and big and
beautiful in his kilt. I flung myself and the Gidger, regardless of
life and limb, and the restraining hands of three Pioneers, out of the
carriage and into his arms almost before the train had stopped. Did you
ever know anything so delightful? He had coaxed the shipping company
for information about the boat and got leave from the hospital to meet
me. He enveloped us both in a huge hug with his one good arm. Oh, I
was pleased to see him after five years, my dear adorable twin brother.
I told him about the Pioneers, and he said,--
'Really, Meg, I think drinking spirits in a railway carriage with
strange soldiers is about the limit of anything even you've ever done!'
But he thanked them very nicely. He has such charming manners when he
chooses (he ought to have, I brought him up), he told them I was such a
bad traveller, and that he was much obliged to them for looking after
me. The Pioneers said it was a great relief to their minds that some
one had met me; so if it was to theirs you can imagine what it was to
mine.
The Gidger loved 'Uncle Woss' at once, and was deeply interested in his
M.C. ribbon and bandaged arm, and the admiration seemed mutual, for Ross
said,--
'Oh, what a Poppet, Meg.'
Whereupon the Gidger, ever athirst for information, asked,--
'What's a Poppet, Uncle Woss?'
My brother replied that a Poppet was a little girl in a white fur coat,
and immediately buttoned her up in one, while he called a soldier, who
was standing near, to 'bring the other coat,' and, as he helped me on
with it, he said, 'You remember Brown, don't you, Meg?'
'Why, Sam! of course I do,' and I shook hands. 'However do you always
manage it?'
'Oh, got a knee this time,' said Ross, and stared at Brown, who looked
extremely sheepish. 'Where's your maid?' he added.
'Haven't brought her, couldn't get a passage.'
'Oh, what rotten luck; how have you managed?'
'Captain Everard did a lot for me.'
'But not your hair, surely, Meg? (Get a porter, Brown, and fish the
baggage out.)'
So while Brown 'fished,' I revelled in my warm coat, and tried to see
how it set on me at the back and said, 'Why, Ross, it's sable.'
'Well, you don't think I'd give you a rabbit one, do you?' said my
brother.
Being uneconomically inclined myself, I felt I ought to add, 'But what
extravagance!'
He scoffed, and said he'd have me know his godmother had left all her
money to him, and not to me, that a fur coat was cheaper than pneumonia,
anyway, besides being less trouble to one's relatives, and for those two
reasons _only_ he had bought it. 'I've got a car waiting outside,' he
said, 'so that while remarks on finance, coming from you, are deeply
interesting, my child, they are also apt to be expensive, as it's up to
thirty bob by now, the train's so late.'
As we drove out of the station Ross said, 'Michael wired to the Savoyard
for your rooms, and my hospital is quite close,' and then he added in an
airy manner, 'Oh, by the way, I knew you'd want a nursemaid for the
Gidger, so I engaged one for you. She's pretty and seems nice, so I
didn't bother about references.'
I didn't want to appear ungrateful, so I only murmured that I could see
about those later on, and I drew a little closer to him and squeezed his
arm for joy at seeing him again, while the Gidger gazed, entranced, out
of the window at the traffic.
'Ross,' I said, 'how on earth does Sam always manage it?'
'I dunno,' said Ross, staring through the glass at Sam's impassive back.
'It's extraordinary. When I got this bullet in my arm he came up a
moment after, said he'd bust his knee. Sometimes I think he must have
some arrangement with the d----'
'With a person that we need not name.'
'Just so,' said Ross, and giggled as he used to do when I reproved him.
But, all the same, it is a funny thing that Sam always has managed to
get with Ross, from the time he turned up as the school boot-boy, to the
day he appeared in my brother's dug-out with a can and said, 'Hot water,
sir,' in just the same old way.
When I arrived at the hotel the 'pretty nursemaid' turned out to be my
darling Nannie.
'When you feel you can stop kissing them both, Meg would like your
references.'
'References given _and_ required,' laughed Nannie.
'Then the deal's off. Meg's past won't bear looking into.'
Ross had just crammed my rooms with flowers and the air was full of
scent. He said Michael told him 'heaps of lilies.' Did he remember
that the scent of those is love? I do think, however, he might have
ordered the removal of the earwigs.
I was so tired that I came upstairs directly after dinner. The Gidger
was already fast asleep.
'Pretty lamb,' said Nannie, just as she always used to do.
So like the gardener's cat in Punch, I felt that we could
'Sit among the greenhouse flowers
And sleep for hours and hours and hours.'
Just before I sailed I got a mail from daddy. He was about to start upon
a journey to some scattered mission stations 'to confirm the churches,'
and after that he said 'perhaps I shall come home.' Oh, won't it be too
topping if he does. He was very excited, too, over the two new
missionaries who had come out to the only healthy station. He writes:--
'They're really quite nice, Meg, the Reverend Mister has a heart of
gold. She's solid gold right through, only you know, little 'un, those
very gold people do have funny clothes and shoes sometimes. I'm afraid
she's rather inclined to think that curly hair is "wicked." I don't
know what she'd say to yours, Meg, but then the children of the clergy
always go quickest to the dogs; you've said that heaps of times, so of
course it must be right.'
He finished up:--
'Good-bye, darling, don't forget that whatever the next few months may
bring you, "underneath are the Everlasting Arms."'
Daddy is such a comfortable person, he doesn't, like Aunt Amelia, jaw
about the war and say it's 'a judgment' _every_ time he writes. When it
first broke out he said that God seemed to be speaking to the world with
great vigour about something, and was I listening for the bit He meant
for me?
Really, when you come to think of it, arms are nice things when one is
tired. War makes one tired, all women hate it. I wish Michael wasn't
in France. I wish he could have seen his way to take the staff job he
was offered.
*CHAPTER III*
I have had such a glorious sleep! The gardener's cat wasn't in it, but
the earwig was--in my bed--and Nannie wouldn't let me kill it because
'earwigs are such good mothers.'
Oh, what bliss a bed is after a bunk, the joy of a motor hoot instead of
a fog horn, and the sight of a house opposite one's windows instead of a
sickening swirl of green water and sky.
But I felt rather at a loose end, and when Nannie came in with my
breakfast I said,--
'I wonder what I'd better do to-day?'
'Buy a hat, I should think, dearie, and then go to the Bank.'
She is a comfort!
She sat on the edge of my bed while the Poppet and I had breakfast. I
believe her private opinion is that Michael has kept us short of food,
as we ate everything but the crockery, but when a person has lived on a
dry biscuit for weeks, a person is apt to feel a bit peckish at the end
of such a fast.
Dear old Nannie hasn't altered much, she carries her years lightly, it's
just the same kind face, with the hair a little grayer. She says she
would have come out to India to me ages ago if it hadn't been for the
war. We had so much to say to one another that I got rid of quite a
respectable amount of the conversation which had accumulated during the
voyage, for I was too sick even to talk!
It is good to be in London. I went to my old shop. 'Estelle'
remembered me and said, 'Madame is of a youthfulness inconceivable to
have such a big little daughter,' which is most satisfactory. The 'big
little daughter' looks enchanting in a white fur cap to match her coat,
and I got a small soft brown thing 'of a price preposterous.' Captain
Everard called to inquire after me, so I asked him to lunch and thanked
him for all he had done for me. He said he hardly recognised me in a
vertical position, having seen me prostrate so long. After lunch I
spent the afternoon with Ross. He said he was 'quite well.'
'Then why are you in bed?' I inquired politely.
'Matron's orders,' snapped the soldier bit of him. 'Drat the woman,'
said my brother.
He hasn't altered much, though the war has painted shadows and grim
lines about his mouth; his eyes, too, are sterner than they used to be,
otherwise he is the same good-looking, big, teasing, maddening brother.
He thought I hadn't changed, and seemed the 'same rum kid.' I saw
matron afterwards. She told me that his arm is very badly injured, and
she feared at first that he would lose it, but it is on the mend at
last, though it will be months before he can go out again, 'for which,'
she said, 'you won't be sorry.' Then she added, 'I don't know if you've
any plans, but he would be much better if he could be somewhere where
it's quiet. When the pain comes on we simply cannot keep the place
quiet enough. The slamming of a door, the noise of footsteps in the room
make his pain almost unendurable. It's the shot nerve, you know. You
can't, in a house like this, keep every door from banging, though we do
our best. He would be much better with you in the country, though you
would need a nurse. A right arm makes a man so helpless; he can't cut
his food up, or dress himself. Of course, there's Sam,' and then she
laughed. 'He'll probably be leaving his hospital soon; he's close by,
you know.'
'But could he manage? How could he wait on Ross if he can't walk?'
'Oh, he can walk enough for that,' she said. 'He's already interviewed
me on the subject more than once. He says the captain only wants an arm
which _he_ has got. If you could let him rest his knee all day and just
help your brother night and morning it might do, though you'd have the
pair of them really on your hands.'
'But do the men ever get leave from hospital like that?' I asked.
'Oh, there is such a thing as extended hospital furlough,' said matron;
'it doesn't usually apply to knees, but all the hospitals are crammed.
I dare say I could work it. You'd have to give him time off sometimes
to go before his M.O.'
'Well, if you think you can work it,' I said doubtfully.
'You can work most things, if you know how! Your brother's very angry
with me to-day because I made him stay in bed after the excitement of
your arrival. I am in very deep disgrace,' said matron, smiling.
As I went along the frosty streets I promised myself a perfect orgy of
shopping. My wardrobe is too diaphanous for this climate. The cold is
almost unbelievable after India. When I got back to the hotel I found
the Gidger had had a gorgeous afternoon at the Zoo, and was sitting up
in bed, eating her supper, while Nannie cut her bread and butter into
'ladies' fingers,' as she had done, oh, how many times for me when I was
four years old.
I told Nannie matron's views, and she said, 'Why don't you go into
rooms, Miss Margaret? Then you could have him. You and I could manage
for him.'
'You can see him letting a "parcel of women" hang round him, can't you,
Nannie? No, it must be a nurse or Sam, if we can get him.' But I
agreed to wire to Fernfold, where a pal of Nannie lives, who has a
friend who takes in lodgers, and would make us comfortable.
Just as I was going down to dinner I got a trunk call. It was Uncle
Jasper. 'Your aunt wants to know when you are coming down to us,' he
boomed.
'Where are you speaking from?' I asked; 'the Manor House?'
'No, we're at Rottingdean.'
'Wallowing in old churches, at least your uncle is,' came my aunt's
voice, a long way off. 'Won't you come to us, darling, I'm so worried
about Eustace. No, I can't tell you on the telephone, and we'd so love
to have you.'
'Why aren't you at home?' I said.
'Yes, another call; oh, ... don't cut us off!'
'Your aunt,' said Uncle Jasper, seizing the receiver, 'has been very ill
with influenza.'
'Nonsense,' said Aunt Constance, 'don't frighten the child, Jasper. I'm
all right now, darling.'
'Shall I meet the 2.5 to-morrow?' said my uncle.
So I told him about Ross and Fernfold.
'What's the church there?' he inquired; 'Norman or Early English?'
I could hear his snort of indignation when I said I thought it was a new
Wesleyan Chapel! Then we got cut off.
Nannie says that her friend's friend prefers to board her lodgers, 'and
you'd better let her, dearie. You won't like contending with the
rations.' So it's settled we're to be boarded if we go to Fernfold. I'm
so dead tired I must be getting sleeping sickness. Will there be a
letter from 'the black beast' in the morning?
*CHAPTER IV*
Such shoppings! The Poppet and I are now considerably warmer than we
were, and, we hope, more beautiful. Certainly Michael is considerably
poorer.
I have seen several old friends and had lunch with Monica Cunningham.
She has grown very pretty and still moves in the graceful way that made
Charlie in the old days call her 'a Greek poem.' She has risen to the
occasion, as daddy always said she would, and done the splendid thing
like all the other girls--exchanged luxury for hospital work at
Hammersmith. She was very amusing about it. She said that at first she
had visions of herself in a becoming uniform holding the fevered hands
and smoothing the pain-racked brows of wounded warriors, but what she
got was all the kicks and none of the halfpence. However, she seemed
quite happy.
'Meg,' she said, 'those men I nurse--they are "everything that really
matters"--as your father used to say.'
And I wondered if she had learned that other bit of daddy's, _i.e._ that
the lack of grandfathers was not important then!
I tried to get her to talk about Charlie Foxhill, for I'm certain he's
been in love with her for years.
'Oh,' she said, 'he's quite a decent boy,' but I think her eyes said
something stronger, and I was glad, because I'm devoted to them both.
Then I took the Gidger to Hampstead to call on Aunt Amelia.
In the old days I used to heave a sigh of relief when I came away from 7
Victoria Gardens, and things are still unchanged. One enters a house
full of 'judgment' and leaves the 'love' outside in the garden. There
is the same high moral tone about Aunt Amelia's conversation. Her
'fydo' does the things he always did. Her drawing-room is still
decorated in tones of mustard and bestrewn with antimacassars. Only in
the throes of a bilious attack can one appreciate the scheme of colour.
My aunt greeted me with her accustomed coolness, but gave a peck to the
Gidger's cheek, which that small person promptly rubbed off; this was a
bad start.
The same sour-faced maid brought in the same uninteresting, microscopic
tea. The Poppet, who is used to a square meal at 4.30, said clearly,--
'Muvver, is this all the tea we're going to have?'
Aunt Amelia remarked acidly that she had bad table manners, and inquired
if she had begun to learn the catechism.
Here the Gidger said pleasantly, 'I should like to go home now.'
Whereupon Aunt Amelia observed that she seemed as badly brought up as
most modern children, and that my blouse was very low, and my neck
looked most unsuitable for a Bishop's daughter.
I wonder if my neck is unsuitable, and, if so, isn't the Bishop the one
to blame?
'Can you sing a hymn, child?' said my aunt.
'No, but I can say a little piece that Captain Everard taught me.'
'Can you, darling?' I said, rather frightened. I knew some of Captain
Everard's 'little pieces.' 'I don't suppose your great-aunt would care
for that.'
'But I should like to say it for her,' said the child obligingly. 'It's
what a poor man said when he was tired on Sunday.'
At the word 'Sunday' Aunt Amelia thawed a little, so the Poppet
recited,--
'To-morrow's Monday, Mrs Stout
Says she must put the washing out.
Why can't she save my scanty tin
And try and keep the washing in?
The next day's Tuesday, what a pest.
Why can't the devil let me rest?'
'That will do,' said Aunt Amelia, and rang the bell for her maid. 'Take
the child away, and perhaps you could teach her a hymn, Keziah.'
'Yes, my lady,' said Keziah.
Then I tried to tell my aunt a little about my journey. 'I was so ill,'
I said, 'the sea was simply awful.'
'Don't say "awful," Margaret, there's nothing awful but being in hell.'
I felt the conversation languishing. I asked if there was any news. It
seemed safer to let my Aunt do all the talking, besides 'my prickles'
were _all_ out.
'I suppose,' she said, 'you've heard about your cousin, Eustace?'
'No,' I replied. 'Aunt Constance said she was in trouble, but she
couldn't tell me why just then. What is it?'
'I expect she's ashamed,' said Aunt Amelia acidly. It's all her fault.
Your Uncle Jasper knows the truth, at least he ought to,' but as I could
not hear a word against those two beloveds, I said again,--
'Tell me about Eustace.'
'Monastery,' she said. 'Monks got hold of him and he has finally
decided. I'm sorry for your uncle; there'll be no heir now, but it
serves him right. He knows the truth and hasn't followed it. I look
upon it as a judgment on him. Your aunt's persuaded him to let the new
vicar--"priest," she calls him--put flowers in your father's old church.
Candles will come next, of course; it's only the thin end of the wedge.
And then your Aunt Constance talks about "union," but does she think
that I would ever unite with people who have flowers and candles?'
'But,' I put in, 'father always said you needn't unite about the flowers
and candles, but just in your mutual love of God.'
'Your father was always too charitable, but he's "one of the right
sort," and I don't know what he'll say when he gets my last letter.'
I thought to myself he'll say, 'What a pearl you are, Amelia,' or else
he'll lose his temper. Darling daddy! He'd die for the faith that is
in him, but he regards his Lord's 'Judge not' as a command, consequently
it is really rather pleasant to live with him.
'I think,' I remarked, getting up, 'I must go now,' so she rang for the
Gidger.
'Well, and have you learned a hymn, child?'
'She's learnt four lines, m'lady,' said Keziah. 'She isn't very quick.
Say them, miss.'
So the Gidger folded two small hands, shut her eyes in accordance with
instructions in a way that set my teeth on edge, and chanted,--
'Go bury thy sorrow,
The world hath its share.
Go bury it deeply,
Go hide it with care.'
But anything less like a person with a sorrow that needed burial was the
radiant Gidger when she opened her eyes.
'Very nice,' said Aunt Amelia, 'very suitable to these solemn times.'
'Yes, m'lady,' said Keziah.
'Look at my little cross Aunt Constance sent me,' said the Gidger,
showing the small pearl thing with great pride. Aunt Amelia threw up
her hands, while Keziah looked as if she'd like to.
'No one,' exclaimed my aunt 'can possibly be a Christian who wears a
cross or a crucifix. If this poor ignorant child came to stay in this
godly house we might begin to see some signs of grace. But of course,'
she added hastily, 'I couldn't possibly have her; a child in the house
would be too much for me.'
So then she pecked my cheek and gave me two incoherent tracts, one for
myself, called 'The Scarlet Woman,' and one for Ross, entitled 'Do you
drink, smoke, swear, or gamble?' To the poor Poppet she presented a
book called _Heaven or Hell?_ with lurid and appalling pictures of both
states as they appeared to the mind of the writer. Then we drove to the
hospital.
Ross was delighted with his tract, though he thought the questions
'rather intimate.' He said he should write one for Aunt Amelia,
entitled 'Do you paint, powder, or wear bust-bodices?'
The Gidger had a second tea and so much flattering attention that I was
afraid her head would be turned; the piece about the poor man who was
tired on Sunday being received with cheers.
'What a row,' said a voice at the door, 'oh, what an awful, wicked,
fiendish noise to make, you must be mad! I cannot spend my entire day
coming in to ask the joke so as to tell the others. You, as usual,
Captain Fotheringham, why, you're worse in bed.'
'Come in, sister,' four men shouted.
'No,' said the voice. 'I'm going out to fetch four cabs and keepers,
and you're all off to Bedlam this night. Why, you're not having more
tea?' she said, catching sight of a cup, and then she came right in and
saw me sitting by the fire.
'Oh,' she exclaimed, 'I beg your pardon. Brown wants to know if he can
do anything for you to-night,' turning to Ross.
'He can hang himself,' replied my grateful brother, 'after he's put my
sister in a cab.'
'I don't want a cab,' I said. 'I'd rather wait and go in one of
sister's four.'
Going home, the Gidger remarked, 'I don't think I like going to see my
gweat-aunt much. Need I go any more? and I hate hymns. What is a sign
of grace, muvver?'
A telegram awaited me at the hotel to say that the rooms at Fernfold are
vacant, so I have wired to say we will take them from the 28th of
January. Oh, when shall I get a letter from my Belovedest?
*CHAPTER V*
We left the Savoyard after lunch yesterday and arrived at this pretty
little village in time for tea.
I suppose Uncle Jasper would say that I must get in a bit of
'background' now, but I'd so much rather be 'dim and confused.'
And is Surrey 'clear cut'? Is any county in the south of England,
except perhaps Cornwall, with its spray-worn rocks and fringe of foaming
sea?
This little village--you can look it up on a map if you want to. It's
near a powder factory and a Pilgrim Way, and yet not so _very_ near
them! In summer it is cupped in a circle of gorse and broom, and all
the country round is a soft blur of silver birches and heather. There
are bits of common land and little woods with nightingales, there are
cowslip fields as well, but at the moment everything is deep in snow.
Our lodgings are in a house with a nice new thatch and my sitting-room
is exactly opposite one of the village pubs.
The landlady is a Mrs Tremayne--Cornish, of course--and a regular
character. She has a loud voice and she shouts all her remarks at the
top of it. She calls every one 'my dear,' in Cornish fashion. Her
first remark was, 'Well, now, my dear, I 'ope you'll be comfortable
like. You've had a 'ansome but cold day for travelling, and no
mistake.' She is a dear old thing, and Nannie seems to like her.
The Gidger made a conquest of her at once. She was a nurse for many
years before she married, so 'likes to hear a child about the house.'
The rooms were very clean, but bare, and in spite of a nice fire looked
rather appalling and comfortless as a prospective winter residence.
However, after a very sleepy Gidger had been put to bed, Nannie and I
unpacked. Ross had given me a big box of flowers, and I filled all the
vases and jars, and set out lots of photographs and books and cushions,
and by the time dinner was ready I had transformed my sitting-room into
quite a habitable place with the homey feel that books and flowers and
firelight always give, while Nannie worked miracles upstairs in
bedrooms.
The dinner was distinctly quaint: something funny in a pie-dish, with
potatoes on the top. The top was brown. I liked that part. Nannie
says I'm not to be dainty; food is very difficult just now.
At present we can only have two bedrooms and two sitting-rooms, as there
are artist ladies across the passage. Their rooms are my Naboth's
vineyard, as they would make such nice nurseries for the Poppet. We
shall want to spread out if Ross comes.
It is so quiet here after the noise and bustle of London, but the air is
lovely. It was rather an effort to be cheerful last night as I had so
hoped for a letter, and I missed Ross, but the Gidger woke me this
morning with 'Muvver, four letters from daddy. _Oh_, aren't you sleepy,
darling?'
When I could get my eyes sufficiently open I found Nannie and breakfast
(rather a queer one), and four precious letters from Michael arranged
round the tea-pot. Of course they had missed me at the Savoyard and
been re-directed. I was so pleased to get them.
I was in the middle of dressing when Mrs Tremayne brought up a wire.
Telegrams give one the creeps these days, but this was from Ross to say
that he was arriving by the 7.10 to-night. Nannie and I hurriedly held
a council of war on the subject of bedrooms. There is a small
dressing-room vacant, but it really will not do for Ross. He gets bad
nights, and he must be as comfortable as possible, so Nannie and I towed
all my things into the little room and made the other ready for him and
coaxed the landlady for a fire. Fires seem to be difficult to obtain in
this house, 'coal being such a price.'
Some of the things in my new room are very droll. There is a case of
stuffed birds, and a glass ship in a bottle, lots of ribbon bows, and a
hair-tidy like a balloon, made out of an electric light bulb encased in
yellow crochet, with an ingenious 'basket' constructed out of a small
jelly-pot covered in with yellow silk. The Gidger thought it was the
most fascinating thing she'd ever seen, and asked for it, but Nannie
said, 'Landladies don't like things moved.'
There is also a unique collection of pictures and a lot of texts, but
the thing which I most love is an engraving called 'The Believer's
Vision.' It is a priceless work. On a low couch, with folded hands and
a smug smile of satisfaction on her depressing countenance, lies 'the
Believer' fast asleep. She has a plate of grapes and oranges beside her
on a table, and there seems to be a good deal of Greek drapery about as
well. Up in one corner is 'The Vision'--two fat angels lying long-ways
on a hole they've scooped out of the ceiling. Oh, they are fat: two to a
ton, as Michael would say, and they are blowing trumpets and have heaps
of feathers. It is a most entrancing work of art.
After lunch, which I think was weirder than the dinner (I hope I am not
dainty) I took the Gidger for a walk and bought a lot of fruit and
biscuits. Fernfold is very sweet. All Surrey is, I think, with its
little woods and commons.
After tea I went down to the station, and Ross arrived, apparently in
the worst of tempers; Brown was with him.
'Why, Brown,' I exclaimed, 'I didn't know you were coming.'
'Nor I, but he's not staying,' growled Ross.
'It's quite convenient,' I said, 'only there isn't a bed. I expect we
could fix up something.'
'Oh, that don't matter, ma'am,' said Brown, 'don't bother about me.'
'Brown can sleep on the edge of a knife, Meg. And I hope it'll cut him,'
Ross said vindictively.
'Yes, sir, thank you, sir,' said Brown, with the greatest possible
deference, 'won't you get into the cab, sir? You oughtn't to stand
after the journey.'
'Oh, don't fuss. If you are going to fuss,' said Ross, 'you can go to
the----'
'Ross!'
'Can I never say it?'
'No,' I said severely, '_never_.'
'But if I go and stay at Hindhead, surely there I----'
'Yes, but there you must say "punchbowl" after it.'
'Seems a bit complicated, Meg; how pious you've grown! What are you
standing still for, Brown? Get the luggage and get a lick on you,' said
my amiable relative, 'and then go back to London, don't----'
Brown had however vanished on to the platform and I followed.
'Sam,' I remarked, and somehow all the years slipped back, and he was
just the jolly boy at Uncle Jasper's lodge, and I the Rector's little
daughter. 'You can't go back to-night; there's no train; the last one
goes at seven o'clock.'
'So the matron said, miss'--(what a wily bird, she said she'd 'work
it')--'but, don't you worry, miss, I'll come up presently, it'll be all
right, there ain't no call for you to worry, miss'--(there never was in
Sam's view)--'we've got through worse than this,' said Sam as we got
back to the cab.
'Got all the things?' asked Ross.
'Yes, sir.'
'Good-night, Brown.'
'Good-night, sir.'
'What happened about Brown?' I asked going home.
'Oh,' said Ross, as if the subject frankly bored him, 'matron sent me in
a cab to Waterloo, with an orderly to get my ticket. I was sitting in
my carriage, trying to turn the evening paper, when Brown said, "Allow
me, sir," and then before I could swear at him, he got out into the
corridor and the train went off. It was such a swot to try to find him,
so there it is.'
'Oh,' I began.
'I am tired, Meg, can't think why she made me come so late; never seems
much sense in women's orders.'
The first thing we did on arriving at the lodgings was to fight fiercely
about bedrooms. His room looked so pleasant with flowers, a cheerful
fire, a box of his favourite cigarettes, and a whole box of matches!
'Very nice,' said the invalid, 'and may I ask where you sleep?'
'Oh, I have a dear little room near by.'
'I should like to see this "dear little room near by," Meg.'
'You can't,' I said. 'It's all in a muddle and my things aren't put
away.'
'I should like,' reiterated Ross, in his most maddening manner, 'to see
this "dear little room near by."'
So of course he saw it. He wandered slowly round it, gazing at the
works of art, until he came to 'The Believer's Vision,' which seemed to
fascinate him. After a long pause in front of it he said, 'Well, it 'ud
wreck my faith completely,' and then he collected an armful of my
clothing and proceeded to hang it up in the other room that had been so
carefully prepared for him.
'Oh, Ross, don't,' I begged. 'I much prefer the little room.'
'Why didn't you choose it at first?' he said with unanswerable logic,
'and why isn't there a fire in it?'
'I made the other room so nice for you,' I wailed, and we can't all have
fires; coal is so expensive.'
'Parsons say the war has taught us many things,' said Ross, 'but I never
expected it would teach you to go without a fire because it happened to
be expensive. Why, it's a modern miracle, and ought to be reported to
the Pope.'
'But it's difficult to get, as well.'
'Then we'll buy millions of logs and cartloads of peat,' he said.
'You're not going to sleep in this room without a fire, or any other
room for the matter of that. Why, it's like an ice-house after India.
Come on, Nannie, help me to get this female gear out of my dug-out.
Don't be cross, old girl!'
But I was cross. I hate being called a 'female' and my clothes 'gear.'
Why do I always live with cavemen who will have their own way and
trample on my deepest feelings? I determined, however, that I would try
again and said, 'But the mattress has such lumps and----'
'I adore lumps; how can you be so selfish, Meg?'
'But I don't want to be turned out of my room like this.'
'Well, that's what I keep on saying,' said Ross. 'How inconsistent women
are. What time is dinner? Can I have a bath?'
'Just turned it on, sir,' said Brown, coming into the room and beginning
to unpack!
So I left them. When Ross went downstairs I heard him call back, 'Sam,
there are several things in my room that I don't want. I've left them
in the middle of the floor, get rid of them.' And I wondered how Sam
would carry out my brother's impossible orders, as landladies 'don't
like things moved.' I peeped in as I went down. Brown was gazing at a
weird assortment: all the antimacassars, some of the texts, the case of
birds, and the ship in the glass bottle, the hair tidy like a balloon
(which I rescued for the Gidger) and last but not least the 'Believer's
Vision,' which Ross had taken off the wall and stood upside down upon
the pile, in a frantic effort to save his faith from shipwreck.
I went down to dinner, and Brown waited. Liver and bacon! with that
variety of mashed potato which my refined relative has from his earliest
youth called 'worms.' I refused the liver and took some bacon; so did
Ross, remarking that he 'Never could eat "works."'
Brown handed Ross the next course, which was rice pudding.
'Why do you bother to offer me this filth?' said Ross indignantly to
Brown, 'you know I never touch it. What's the other stuff, jelly? I'll
have some of that.'
'Packet,' said Brown, 'by the look of it, sir; shouldn't recommend it.'
But I, determining not to be dainty, said it looked jolly good and I
would have some.
'Take it away, Brown, she's not going to eat hoofs and get a pain in her
gizzard to start off with. Give her some pudding.'
Ross helped himself liberally to bread and butter and cheese.
'What funny butter,' he observed.
'Margarine, sir.'
'Oh, how tiring,' said Ross, pushing it away, 'give me a clean plate.
Why _can't_ they colour it blue?'
Coffee consisted of a jug of hot milk and some black stuff in a bottle.
We adjourned to the fire and I had quite a nice supper of hot milk and
biscuits, apples, and chocolates; and we talked and talked, and got a
bit levelled up with life after five years of separation.
Then I went to bed. But, oh, not to sleep. The family's appalling
habit of leaving doors half open prevented that, and I heard Ross say to
Brown when he came up to bed (his voice does carry so), 'What's to be
done, Sam, they can't stop here?'
'Certainly not, Master Ross. Never saw such a dinner in my life, though
the cooking was all right.'
'Yes, it's the stuff they cooked that's wrong. Can't you do something?'
said Ross vaguely. Sam has always seemed to be able to do the things
that put our muddles right.
'Well, you see, sir,' said Brown, 'it's a bit awkward; Mrs Ellsley seems
to be paying very little, and food is expensive.'
'Have you ever known my sister pay very little for anything if it was
possible to pay a lot?'
'No, sir, and that's what I can't understand about it.'
'But how much _is_ she paying, then?' inquired my brother.
'Six guineas, sir.'
'But aren't there always extras in a place like this?' said Ross
vaguely, searching his mind for recollections of lodgings at the sea.
'Don't they always make the profits out of--cruets, I think they call
it?'
'Miss Margaret don't seem to have gone into any details,' said Brown.
'No,' agreed Ross, 'she wouldn't. But I should have thought you could
feed two women and a child better than that for eighteen pounds a week.
Well, they'll have to pay more, that's all.'
'But it isn't eighteen pounds,' said Brown.
'You said it was just now,' said Ross, 'six guineas each.
'But it was two guineas that was meant, sir. Six guineas for the lot of
them.'
I heard my brother sink into a seat and scrape his feet along the floor,
as he does when the burden of life becomes too heavy to be borne
standing up.
'Do you mean to say, Sam, that the landlady proposes to provide rooms,
beds, food, baths, boots, fires, cruets, and----' here Ross searched
violently in his mind for more things which Mrs Tremayne was willing to
provide, 'and "Believer's Visions" for two pounds a week each? Why,
she's a public benefactor.'
'That's the price, sir. She said she asked six guineas and the lady
agreed without arguing, as her lodgers usually do.'
'Well, of course, that's the explanation, Sam. She thought she meant
"each."'
'The "she's" me,' I said to myself, to make it clearer in my mind.
'Not a doubt about it, sir,' said Sam.
'Funny things, women,' said my brother reflectively, 'never seem able to
make a proper arrangement with a hotel, or book a cabin. The only mess
I ever got into on a ship was when I let one of my aunts book my berth
going out to--I forget where----'
'Indeed, sir,' said Brown, with interest.
'Yes, wrote and said she'd booked my berth but the ship was full and I'd
have to share a cabin with a Captain Booth. Hoped I didn't mind. I
loathed it, of course.'
'Of course,' said Brown.
'However, there was nothing to be done but put up with it, so I prayed
it might be the Captain Booth in the 4th Lancers that I knew a bit.
Where were you, Sam, that time?'
'Typhoid.'
'Oh, yes, of course. Well, I got down to the ship and turned in early,
as I was dead done after--forget what I'd been doing; kept half an eye
on the door to see what my stable companion was going to be like, and
then Captain Booth came in.'
'Was it Captain Booth of the 4th Lancers?' asked Brown.
'Salvation Army lass,' said Ross laconically, and Brown laughed, as he
used to do in Uncle Jasper's woods.
Suddenly somebody knocked violently on the wall.
'Anybody ill, do you think?' asked my brother.
'Oh, no, sir, making too much row--laughed a bit too loud, I expect,
woke up the other lodgers.'
'What a rum place,' observed my brother, and then there was silence till
the water ran in the bath, and the house for a few moments was turned
into a pond with a polar bear in it.
Then I went to sleep.
*CHAPTER VI*
Brown has, apparently, been 'doing things' the last few days.
Particularly nice breakfasts turn up now, a maid lights my fire and the
bath water is hot. Ross informed me that he had taken on the running of
the show, but that, with the best will in the world, Mrs Tremayne could
not supply butter, so he'd wired to Aunt Constance for a supply, and
that if I could put up with marmalade till it arrived it would ease his
mind.
I have recovered my temper, too, and have decided that cavemen have
their advantages. The one with whom my lot is cast at the moment knows
how to stoke a fire, if nothing else. The millions of logs have begun
to arrive, too, so at any rate we shall be warm. Ross says it's a pity
I didn't live in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, for then I could have got
really thawed on the days they lighted the burning fiery furnace.
The other occupants of the house are two maiden ladies--'artists.' Ross
calls them the 'spiders,' because they entice into their parlour all
their friends and acquaintances, and encourage them to buy their
'pictures,' and they borrow; oh, how they borrow! It is 'Could Mrs
Ellsley kindly lend some ink?' or 'We have run out of notepaper and
should be so obliged, etc.' Yesterday their newspaper hadn't come.
'Would Captain Fotheringham spare his for ten minutes?' Captain
Fotheringham spared it with a very ill grace, but as the ten minutes
became fifteen, and then twenty, and then thirty, he announced his
intention of singing Hymn 103 outside their door.
'Why a hymn?' I inquired.
'Because it expresses in concise, lucid, clear, and unbiased language
the perfectly intolerable situation which has arisen,' and he departed
down the passage, singing loudly, 'My Times are in thy hand.'
Alas! this afternoon we are in deep disgrace, for the Spiders have given
notice, and are going in about a week, because of us.
They object, it seems, to meeting Brown on the stairs and landings, and
to the number of baths we have. Since we arrived there is never any hot
water left for washing their blouses. The climax came, apparently, this
morning. Brown goes into the bathroom about 7.30 a.m. and cleans the
bath. I saw him do it once at home, so I know what happens. He
sprinkles it all over with some powder in a tin, and then scrubs and
scours it till you'd think all the enamel would come off. And then he
washes it out with hot water and a brush on a long handle, and then
dries it, and cleans the taps, and wipes the floor, and puts out soap
and heaps of towels, turns the cold tap on and then goes along to Ross
and says 'Bath's ready, sir.'
Then Ross goes and splashes it all up, and scatters soap about and
swamps the floor, and then, after breakfast, Brown cleans it just the
same all over again for me, only this time it's the hot tap, and Nannie
comes and says 'Bath's ready, dearie, hurry up now.' What would Ross
say if Brown suddenly said, 'Hurry up, now, dearie,' and if he wouldn't
stand it, why do I?
Well, for some reason or other this morning Ross went along to his bath
before Brown called him. He had on his new dressing-gown. His taste is
lurid and flamboyant, and Aunt Constance aids and abets him. This was a
really scrummy one, dull purple silk, with pink flamingoes. And Aunt
Constance had had bath shoes made to match with baby flamingoes on the
toes. She does spoil him abominably.
Well, Ross, resplendent in his purple and flamingoes, lounged in a chair
and smoked a cigarette, while Brown put the last polish on the taps and
'chucked the towels about,' as Ross expressed it. Brown was silently
absorbed in taps and Ross in watching him, when, suddenly, the door was
flung wide open and a Spider entered in a red flannel dressing-gown,
rather short, with a collar that had bits chewed out (I quote my
brother, he means pinked) while its feet were thrust in red felt shoes.
It had no cap on, but its hair was screwed into a tight, 'round button
on the top,' like the panjandram, and it was in a temper hot and
hissing.
Ross got up hurriedly and surveyed the apparition, feeling a little at a
disadvantage, with his hair rough and with pink flamingoes. Brown stood
at petrified attention by the bath.
'Oh, is it possible,' said the artist, for it was one of the sisters I
told you of, 'is it humanly possible that this room is _still_
occupied?'
'I've only just come,' my brother remarked.
'But that man has been here at least half an hour,' said the red flannel
dressing-gown.
'Have you, Brown?' asked Ross.
'I've had to clean the bath, madam,' said Brown.
'But surely,' said the Spider, 'surely the bath doesn't need cleaning.
I'm sure Mrs Tremayne keeps everything most beautifully. It really is
absurd. It's the same in the mornings, and at night, and sometimes
before dinner. The man's always in here, and I feel the time has come
to put my foot down. We all pay the same, and baths are included in the
price.'
So Ross, with that courtesy which he can't help showing to a woman, even
if he's furious with her, said 'I'm extremely sorry, but if you will
tell my man after breakfast what time it is convenient to you for me to
have my bath, I will fit in with you and will speak to my sister also.
See to it, Brown, will you?' and he turned away to close the
conversation.
But the Spider's conversation was not so easily closed, and she was just
about to begin again. However, she had bargained without Brown. Brown
had his orders, he had been told to 'see to it,' and meant to. Somehow
he hustled the little woman out and, with 'My master is waiting to have
his bath, madam,' he closed the door on the little spitfire, and Ross
exploded comfortably.
After luncheon they gave notice. 'Jolly good job, too,' says Ross. But
I feel sorry we've annoyed them, though I shall go in and possess my
Naboth's vineyard with great pride and pleasure.
Ross is only pretty well; he gets a good deal of pain and is sleeping
badly, but he generally manages to be cheerful, when he can't he goes
upstairs and stays there till the bout is over.
This evening he came into my room to say 'Good-night,' and his mind
seemed full of dressing-gowns. 'Meg,' he demanded, 'is your
dressing-gown red?'
'Yes,' I said, 'the one I'm using at the moment happens to be red.'
'But is it flannel?'
'No, but it's something quite as thick. Estelle thought it would be
warmer for me. It's over there, if you'd like to see it.'
He picked up the soft crimson thing that Estelle had made for me when I
first landed.
'Why, Meg, it looks like an evening dress.'
'Yes, but it buttons down the front, that's where the difference is.'
'Do you always button it, then, when you put it on?'
'Oh, always,' I replied, 'don't people usually?'
'I dunno,' he said, 'only this morning she had got hers sort of draped
across her tummy, kept together with the belt knotted. When you walk
about the passages in hotels, Meg, don't you wear a cap or something?'
'My dear child,' I observed, 'where do you think I was dragged up?'
*CHAPTER VII*
Fairy hands have been at work. Instead of a shining white world all is
green again. There has been a very rapid thaw. The frost has gone and
little brooks of melted snow are running down the lanes and paths. Tiny
green spikes have appeared in all the garden as if by magic. There is
even a half-drowned primrose out, telling that spring is coming very
soon this year.
The morning post brought me a letter from Michael 'written in the mud.'
It contains a most amazing suggestion. He asks me to try to find an old
house 'such as his soul loveth' and make a home.
Oh, how he must have misunderstood my letters and thought because I
frivolled and told him all our stupid jokes that I am happy. How can he
imagine I could even contemplate making a home in England without him
when it has been the dream of our lives to do it together. Surely he
knows by now that 'Home' for me is just that particular bit of mud in
Flanders in which his dear feet are embedded, and that any place without
him is exile, that life, till he returns, is merely marking time. I
don't care if I am talking like a little Bethel.... Ross thinks it's a
topping idea. Even Nannie didn't help me. When I told her, all she said
was, 'But of course you will if Master Michael wants you to.'
I felt, as I sometimes used to as a child, that 'every one's against
me,' and I decided to walk my devils off.
I went downstairs and found Ross reading.
'Going out?' he asked.
'Yes, will you come?'
'No, arm's bothering,' and he took up his book again.
I went for a long tramp, down the quiet lanes and through the little
spinneys, but there was no harmony--the old 'washed' feeling wouldn't
come. I slipped into the Intercession Service at the little church and
tried to pray for Ross and Michael and all the others. War seems very
near in England, only a few miles off--those guns--that one hears
sometimes in the night. I thought as I sat in church of all the death
and desolation, the suffering and the broken hearts and tears. A great
horror of the war came over me and a great rebellion. Why does God allow
such things? How can I think of Him as a beneficent Being when the
world is swamped with cruelty, blood, and separation? I feel like Tommy
Vellacott. I don't love God now. I only believe in Him.
When I got home my feet were soaked and my throat sore, so I went
upstairs early. I felt better in bed, and decided that I _would_ try to
find a house if it would give Michael the least scrap of happiness. If
he would feel 'less anxious' about me in a house of our own instead of
rooms, why a house it shall be. I grew quite excited and interested (as
my feet got warmer), planning the details of our dream--an old, old
house, standing in a big garden with long, low rooms full of oak
furniture, seventeenth century, for choice, with lots of flowers and
sunshine in the summer, and books and candlelight and glowing fires for
the winter evenings. But how awful it would be if, when Michael saw it
for the first time he should say,--
'This the dream house?--what a nightmare!'
Then Ross came in to say good-night. 'Better?' he queried.
'No, but I'm going to get up to-morrow,' I said defiantly.
'Are you,' he drawled, as though he hadn't the faintest interest in the
subject, but there was a look in his eyes somehow I didn't like. 'Why
is that wretched kitten up here again?' he said. 'I can hear it
wheezing,' and he looked under the bed.
'It's me,' I said.
'It's I,' said Ross.
'Oh, have you got it, too?' (I will not be reproved for grammar by a
twin).
'Are you making that noise for fun, Meg?'
'No, I can't help it,' I said crossly.
'Hadn't you better have one of those things on made out of a muslin
curtain, with hot muck inside,' he added vaguely, racking his brains for
medical knowledge. 'Can't think what the stuff's called.'
'No,' I said violently, 'I hadn't better!'
Presently the house grew quiet and I began to worry over Ross, his bad
nights, the constant pain and the absolute refusal to let any one do
anything for him; he won't have a fire and snaps Brown's head off if he
suggests a doctor. He was really angry with me on Saturday because
I--oh, well, it's no use worrying, I reflected, as I mopped my eyes.
Just as I was about to try to compose myself for slumber, with a little
folding of the hands to sleep, wishing I could drown the kitten, Nannie
came in. You will hardly believe it when I tell you that she carried in
between two hot plates the thing that Ross had mentioned, in a muslin
curtain.
'Master Ross says,' began Nannie.
'Nannie,' I retorted, and I was furious, 'I simply will not have that
beastly thing on just because Ross says so.'
'Well,' said Nannie soothingly, 'have it because I say so, if you'd
rather,' and she clapped it on.
And I decided, as she closed the door, that I should run away at dawn.
But the kitten wouldn't stop, and then I started choking. There was
dead silence in the house, so I hoped that Ross was sleeping well for
once, and I buried my head under the bedclothes and coughed comfortably.
I started up presently with a little shriek to find a giant in pyjamas
making up my fire.
'Sorry I frightened you,' said Ross. 'What have you got your head
buried for, can't you sleep?'
'No,' I replied.
'But I told you to knock if you wanted me, Meg.'
'I didn't want you,' I said crossly, 'that's why I didn't knock.'
'You're very difficult to take care of,' said Ross, surveying me from
the foot of the bed.
'Not nearly so difficult as you are,' I retorted, all the worry of his
continued sleepless nights coming to a head suddenly in my mind, 'you
won't let me do a thing for you. I cry about you sometimes.'
'You cry about _me_?' said the giant, suddenly sitting on the edge of
the bed.
'Yes,' and I leaned against him; he seemed a friendly sort of giant at
the moment.
'When did you cry last?' he demanded.
'To-night,' and I fumbled for a handkerchief I didn't really need.
'Why?' asked the giant.
'Because your arm's so bad, you aren't sleeping, you won't take anything
or do anything, or let any one else do anything for you. You're making
me perfectly miserable, and as for Sam, you've been absolutely rotten to
him all the week.'
'I told Brown to keep every one out of my room when I'd got a "go" on,
and he let you in on Saturday.'
'Yes, but Ross,' I said, 'how could he keep me out?'
'He'd had his orders. I can't be responsible for any difficulties that
may occur in the carrying of them out,' said Ross obstinately.
'You are hard,' I said.
'Scold away,' grinned Ross.
'No, but you are; you've simply looked through Brown and locked your
door, and been cold to me for days.'
'Can't stand disobedience in a soldier,' said Ross, shortly, 'never
could.'
'Nor in a sister, Ross?'
But there was no reply.
'Ross,' I exclaimed suddenly, desiring an armistice, 'I'm sorry. I
won't come in again, only, if you knew how I worry about you, you'd let
me. But,' I added, 'I thought when we embarked on this conversation,
that I was rowing you.'
'I haven't said a word,' protested Ross.
'No, I know you haven't, but conscience makes the head uneasy when it
wears a crown.'
'Are you feverish, darling?' said Ross anxiously.
'No, but I get quotations mixed at times. Will you forgive me?' I said
childishly.
So we smoked the pipe of peace with great contentment, smoked the
calumet, the peace pipe, and I said, 'My brother, listen,--
"See the smoke rise slowly, slowly,
First a single line of darkness,
Then a denser, bluer vapour,
Then a snow-white cloud unfolding,
Like the tree tops of the forest.
Ever rising, rising, rising,
Till it touched the top of heaven,"
Till it broke against the ceiling,
Till I sneezed.'
'Meg, I'm sure you're feverish.'
'I'm not.'
'Well, the only thing I've understood that you've said lately was the
sneeze.'
'And that,' I observed with pride, 'was the original bit. I always felt
I could be a poet if I tried. Now I'm going to finish rowing you.'
'But I thought we'd smoked the pipe of peace, Meg.'
'Oh, that----' I said.
'How like a woman. Fire away, then, and get it off your chest.'
So I fired away and got off all the wrongs of days.
'If you weren't so small,' said Ross, when at last he got a word in, 'I
shouldn't feel so inclined to bully you.'
'But that's an awful thing to say. Why, you never ought to hit a man
who's smaller than yourself.'
'Looks as if my moral nature is decaying and I seem to be a fair and
average all-round beast,' said Ross, with gloom. 'I didn't mean to hurt
you, darling. Sorry, little 'un. I'll try to be different,' he
promised, as he used when he was naughty as a boy.
'Have some coffee, Meg? Brown put some in my thermy.'
'Yes. I will if you will,' and because my brother was 'trying to be
different' he took a cup himself.
'Well, it's time you went to sleep,' remarked the giant, and got up to
go.
Outside the door, as he went out, I heard Brown say, 'Can't you sleep,
sir,' and then something about 'no dressing-gown with that cold on you.'
'Oh, dry up,' said Ross wrathfully, really trying to be different,
'you're as bad as a wet nurse. Go to bed and stop there, or I'll sack
you, Sam.'
So I knew Brown was forgiven, too.
When I woke up next time it was getting light. I fumbled for my watch.
It said the hour was twelve, so I knew it must be seven, or it might be
eight--the hour hand will slip round, though I can always tell the
minutes, which is what one usually wants to know.
Then there was a knock upon my door.
'This,' I thought, 'is my repentant brother. Now, after last night, I
must remember to be firm, but kind, and so help him to be different,'
and I called 'Come in.'
But an icicle in shirt sleeves entered that I'd seen several times
before.
'Meg,' it said, 'you're not to get up.'
'My dear sir,' I said to it (telling myself that I was not afraid of
icicles), 'I hadn't the slightest intention of doing such a thing for at
least an hour.'
'Not all day,' said the icicle, and as I opened my lips, intending to be
firm, but kind, it said in a voice cold as a glacier just before the
dawn, 'Don't argue, it's quite settled, Margaret.'
'But,' I objected, assuring myself again that firm kindness was the
_only_ way with icicles, 'you've got exactly the same cold, and you're
up. Sauce for a goose ought to be sauce for a gander.'
Suddenly a rapid thaw set in and the icicle subsided into a mere puddle
on the floor, and my brother answered, 'Sauce _from_ a goose is all I
know about,' and there we left it.
*CHAPTER VIII*
It took two days to drown that kitten, but now I'm up again and out, and
to-day I went to Tarnley, with the permission of my gracious keeper, 'if
I drove both there and back.' As it was sunny, and mercies are strictly
rationed just at present, I accepted the offer and went to all the
places I had meant to go to first, did a lot of shopping, and finally
interviewed one of the house agents.
I was quite clear and definite in my requirements--I wanted to _buy_ an
_old_ house; so of course every one he sent me to was _red brick_,
_modern_, and _to let_.
I went home and groused to Ross, and announced that the only really
satisfactory way to find a suitable dwelling was to walk the length and
breadth of England, and when you saw the house you wanted knock at the
door and beguile the owner into selling it to you, and that I intended
to adopt this plan and to begin my pilgrimage shortly.
Ross, as usual, was rude about it.
'Haven't you discovered all these years, you little ass, that agents are
a race apart?' said he; 'their minds are controlled by the law of
opposites. Now your heart, Meg, is set on a house, ancient and mellowed
with years, with long, low rooms and beams, and an old-world garden full
of wallflowers, phlox and herbs and perennials and----'
'But, Ross----'
'Don't interrupt me, Meg; consequently you must tell the agent that you
desire a new up-to-date dwelling with a small garden overlooked on
either side (since we are cheerful souls and love the company of our
fellows). Then they would give you orders to view old houses with
little latticed windows and winding stairs. Methinks if you said you
_must_ have lincrusta and white enamel you might even get oak
panelling.'
After dinner Ross departed upstairs, said he had things to do and then
he was going to bed.
To bed? To walk his room all night, with Brown, unbeknown to my
brother, pacing up and down the passage.
I sat by my fire and read. At one o'clock, Ross knocked me up. As I
went into the corridor Brown barred his door.
'I daren't, ma'am. Please don't ask me. Not after last time, miss.'
'Let her in, Brown,' cried Ross. 'I knocked her up, you ass!
Worrying?' he asked me laconically as I went in.
'Yes.'
'Like to make tea then? got such a rotten "go" on, Meg.'
And then he fainted, and I called to Brown. He got his master into bed,
while I flew round for brandy.
'Give me some water,' said my reviving brother.
'No, I won't,' said Brown, 'you'll take the brandy, Master Ross, or I'll
thrash you like I did that day in Hickley Woods when you fell and cut
your knee and sprained your ankle, and tried to prevent me going for the
doctor.'
Ross was so dumbfounded that he took the brandy meekly.
'Now these aspirins,' said Brown, 'and I'm going to light the fire. The
room is like an ice-house. I'm about fed up.'
When he arose from the fireplace he was once again the suave, impassive
servant. 'I should wish to give a month's warning, sir. I don't seem
able to give you satisfaction.' And there was a desolating silence.
'Anything more I can do for you to-night, sir?'
'Yes,' said Ross, 'stop playing the goat.'
But Brown's face remained hard and impassive.
'Want me to eat humble pie, I suppose,' said Ross, and surveyed his
servant as if he had just suddenly seen him.
'Yes, sir, I think it would be a good thing.'
'Well, then, I've been a devil all the week.'
But Brown still waited.
'Want more pie?' asked my erring brother.
'That's as you feel, sir,' said Brown.
So Ross, with the air of a man who thought it a pity to spoil the ship
of repentance for a ha'porth of grace, said 'Sorry.'
'Don't name it, sir,' said Brown, and I so rejoiced over the sinner that
repented that I forgot to remind him to say 'punchbowl.'
Just as Brown went through the door, Ross called out, 'Got another
place, Sam?'
Sam suddenly came to life again. 'Will you see the doctor in the
morning?'
'Oh, have it your own way,' growled Ross.
'Then I've got a place,' said Sam.
'Get us some tea, then,' my brother ordered, 'and come and have a cup
yourself.'
'Certainly not, sir, with Miss Meg--Margaret, I mean,' he said, getting
deeper into the mire.
'Do you usually call my sister by her Christian name?'
'No, sir, but you worry me so, I don't know half the time what I'm
a-saying.'
'Well, I'm a-saying now,' said his autocratic master, 'that it's time
the tea was here, and bring three cups. I want to talk about the
Hickley Woods. You've got a rotten temper, Sam.'
'Yes, sir, you can't touch pitch,' said Sam, firing the last shot.
So victory is not always to the strong.
'Oh, what a chap,' said Ross.
We spent a warm and pleasant hour talking birds, and fish, and rabbits,
and the years slipped away and we were back again in the Hickley
Woods--Ross, Miss Meg, and Sam.
After Brown had departed with the tea-cups, Ross said, 'Meg, do you
think I'm weak?'
'Well, darling,' I replied, 'you are sure to feel so after fainting, but
if you take care, you----'
'But I don't mean my body, Meg.'
'We are all sinners,' I said, 'but if you would like to see a clergyman
in the morning, I'll----'
'How can you be so aggravating; I don't mean my soul, either. I want to
talk about my Will.'
'I thought you had made it ages ago, but I'll wire for the lawyer in the
morning.'
'Oh, Meg, how you do exasperate a chap.'
'Well, what do you mean?' I giggled.
'I mean my will power. Do you think I'm weak?'
'About as weak as Michael,' I replied. 'Why?'
'Because,' said my brother seriously, 'doesn't it seem an awful thing
that a chap my size can't manage a chap his.'
'But there's only three inches between you, and he is six months older.'
'Yes, but three inches is three inches, and what's six months, Meg?'
'You say forty minutes is enough when you boss me.'
'Oh, twins are different, but with Brown I get along all right when I
take my stand on the King's Regulations. But when he brings in the
Hickley Woods I go to water.'
'No, to brandy.'
'Oh, rub it in,' said Ross, and then because he was so quaint and sweet
and I loved him, and he had fainted, and because the lion seemed very
tame, I forebore to tease him further and was really nice, kissed him
once and petted him a little, and then when I got up to go he said,--
'Pity you aren't always as dutiful as that.'
'Dutiful!' I shrieked. 'Oh, what a word,' and so we parted coldly after
all.
*CHAPTER IX*
And the doctor's verdict is 'Two days in bed and bromide. First dose
now.'
'I'll stay in bed,' said Ross, with the air of a man conferring a great
favour, 'I'll not take drugs.'
'I'll get it down,' said Brown to the doctor, as he saw him to the car,
'somehow,' he added grimly.
'Sam,' I inquired, 'how are you going to get it down?'
'Can't imagine, miss. After last night he won't stand much. Well, it
was a bit thick.'
'Sam, do you think if your knee gave out and it hurt you to keep
standing when you argued, that it might have weight?'
'Can but try, miss.'
So Brown's knee, of course, has given out. They are a happy pair, one in
bed and the other with his leg up on a chair, talking woods and
shooting, fishing, and birds' eggs, and they're smoking--how they smoke!
I think the bromide's swallowed. There's a contented look in Sam's eyes
and a 'Oh-well-stretched-a-point-for-once,' in my dear brother's.
So I proceeded to carry out my patent plan of finding houses and had a
delightful and exciting morning. It was a lovely day, the hedges were a
soft promise of green, and the bright sunshine and some saucy robins
made a brave pretence of summer. I rambled down all kinds of little
lanes and by-paths, but never a house did I see to suit me, till at last
I chanced on Lynford, a little place I fell in love with at first sight
and which I am sure is after Michael's own heart.
The village is built on the slope of a hill, with a little church on the
summit and charming old world cottages clustered together in picturesque
confusion just below.
Alas, the cottages were quite small ones, with only four or five rooms
at most, and so not practicable. The last house in the village was a
great surprise. It was larger than the others, with quaint little
diamond windows and a glorious old red roof, and lots of creepers
climbing over, which would make it in the autumn a thing of flaming
beauty.
In the flower borders crocuses and snowdrops were already peeping, and
the porch was aflame with yellow winter jasmine. The view was superb,
for the hill sloped steeply from the house, and at my feet lay beautiful
water meadows all in flood after the snow, with the ruins of an old
abbey in the near distance.
Without stopping to think of anything but the fact that it was the kind
of habitation I was looking for, I boldly walked up to the front door
and rang the bell. Here my courage, which I had thought was screwed to
the sticking point, began, in the most horrible manner, to trickle out
of my boots, but before I could escape an elderly and severe domestic
opened the door and glared at me as if I wanted to sell her something.
I inquired if I might see the owner on a matter of business. She
hesitated and, after looking me well up and down, most reluctantly said,
'I'll see.'
She departed down the old flagged passage, leaving me on the mat with my
last shred of courage in tatters and my knees a jelly. After a minute
or two she returned and said, 'The master will see you,' and if ever a
woman's sour visage said 'More fool he,' that woman's did.
As the last moments of a drowning man are crammed with the recollections
of a lifetime, so all the silly, impulsive things I have done in my life
crowded on me as I followed down that stone passage. Why, oh, why did I
have an Irish grandmother to lead me into this scrape? What on earth
could I say to 'the master' that wouldn't sound the most appalling
impertinence?
I entered his presence rather more quickly than I meant to, as I fell
down a small step.
I looked across the charming room, and by the bright wood fire was an
old gentleman seated at breakfast at eleven o'clock in the morning.
'Good-morning,' I said, 'I'm afraid I'm rather early.'
'Not at all,' said he. 'I'm afraid I'm rather late. Have some
breakfast?'
'No, thank you, I haven't come to call.'
'Oh, he replied, 'I thought you had.'
'No,' and my words began to tumble over one another in my agitation,
'that is to say, not in the ordinary sense of the word, but I came--I
hope you won't mind--I hope you won't think it awful cheek, but now I am
inside your house I feel it is, though outside it seemed the most
ordinary thing to do, but the fact is I am looking--oh----' I broke off
as the appallingness of the situation came upon me afresh. 'Promise you
will not be offended, but that you will take my visit in the spirit in
which it is intended.'
'Is this to be an offer of marriage, my dear young lady?'
'Oh, no,' I gasped, 'much worse, it's an offer for your house.'
'Aha, aha,' said he, 'I thought I heard the tenth commandment crack as
you fell down the step.'
'Crack,' I exclaimed, 'it's broken into a million pieces.'
'Well, I think that we had better see what we can do to patch it up
again, as it's really quite a nice commandment, and breaking it is apt
to cause distressing situations. Sit down and have some breakfast and
tell me why you are coveting your neighbour's house and if you want my
men and maid servants, oxen and she asses, too?'
'Not your maidservant, anyway,' I said, and his eyes twinkled. He was
so friendly and kind that I sat down, and over tea and toast, which he
insisted I should have, I told him about Michael and of our passion for
old houses, and Ross, and the Gidger, and indeed all about everything.
'Ah,' he said, 'so you love old houses. Well, I sympathise, but this
one will not be to let until I am carried out feet first.'
'God forbid that I should ever have it, then,' I said, and got up to go,
'and it's dear of you not to have been offended.'
'Offended!' he laughed, as he said good-bye, 'I was never so entertained
in all my life.'
When I got home I went up to tell Ross about it, and he remarked as I
finished the tale,--
'Well, there's to be no more house-hunting on those lines, Meg; you
might have been most frightfully insulted. It's all right as it's
happened; Michael would be simply furious with me for letting you do it
if he knew.'
'But I told you I was going to,' I expostulated.
'It never occurred to me that you meant it. Of course, I thought you
were fooling, you little idiot.'
And Ross did one of his atrocious lightning changes. Instead of a
ragging brother one was merely 'fighting' with there was a man whose
'Sorry, darling, but I mean you mustn't do it again' closed the
discussion, for all that it was very gently said.
Then he kissed me and said, 'Oh, Meg, you are so sweet and funny when
you're "meek."'
As a rule people who bully me are not allowed to kiss me--but--my
brother was ill in bed!
*CHAPTER X*
Ross seemed fairly well this morning, and, having announced 'Time's up,'
said that _he_ would go to the house agents at Tarnley to-day, and that
if I liked I might come too.
I had previously said to Sam,--
'Don't you think another day in bed would do him good?'
'Not a doubt about it, miss,' said Sam, 'but I couldn't work it: thought
we should have hardly lasted out the time as it was. We've drove him a
bit hard lately. Better not press him too much, miss, he don't take
kindly even to the snaffle.'
So we sallied forth to call on Messrs Cardew Thompkins.
My brother was in one of his mad moods and announced that he should
pretend we were just married, and that I was to look as shy and modest
as my brazen countenance would allow, and to blush at intervals if I
could. An elegant young man, with a waist, received us with a bow,
begged us to be seated and state our requirements.
'Take a pew, Florrie,' said Ross to me. I took one and hoped I looked
shy and modest.
'I want,' said Ross, bursting with newly married pride and importance,
'to rent a small house for myself and my er----'
The agent coughed discreetly and said, 'Quite so.'
My face by this time was perfectly crimson with suppressed laughter. I
hope Mr Cardew Thompkins thought it was shy blushes.
'The house must be as small as possible,' continued Ross, 'and quite
new, with no garden, as my wife doesn't like slugs, do you, lovey? It
must be in a row, or at most, semi-detached, as my er----'
'Quite so,' said the agent again.
'My wife is nervous at nights. We haven't been married very long,' said
the incorrigible Ross in a burst of confidence.
'We should like it opposite a railway station, if possible, and we want
white paint--enamel, I mean--and fireplaces with tiled hearths, nice
cheerful wall-papers, and a dodo in the hall.'
'Dado,' I murmured.
'What, sweetie?' said Ross, 'what did you say, my pet?'
I could have murdered him.
'But it must be quite a new house,' said Ross, as I didn't answer, 'as
you don't like beetles, do you, duckie? We don't even mind if it isn't
quite finished, because----' Here Ross's powers of invention mercifully
failed him.
'Because,' said the agent, 'then you could choose your own decoration.
I quite understand.'
I was pulp by this time, and as I was in imminent danger of exploding I
retired to the window and made curious noises into my handkerchief,
while the house agent looked through a number of small cards in a little
box.
'You're in a draught, my pretty,' said Ross, 'come and sit near to
hubby, while Mr Cardew Thompkins writes us the order to view.'
I came lest worse should befall me, and Ross tried to hold my hand but
didn't succeed.
'There's a little old house out at Crosslanes,' began the agent--Ross
nudged me violently.
'Also one at Stoke, which is slightly larger and older.'
'It's beginning to work,' whispered Ross.
'I will give you orders to view both of these.'
'Are they near the railway?'
'I haven't actually seen them myself,' said Mr Cardew Thompkins, 'but I
think from the description of your requirements they are just what you
need. Good-morning.'
If he had looked out of his office window a moment later he would have
seen Ross and me with our handkerchiefs stuffed in our mouths fleeing
down the road till we got round the corner out of sight.
'Oh,' sobbed Ross, 'do stop. I told you so, but it's worked better than
I thought. Read this:--
'"St JULIANS.--Very desirable gentleman's country residence."'
'Oh, that won't do, Meg.'
'Why not? Sounds rather nice, I think.'
'Is Michael a very desirable gentleman?'
'Oh, I never notice those mistakes, or spelling ones, I wish I did;
they're so amusing when you see them.'
'Can't think what they teach in girls' schools,' said Ross gloomily.
'Daddy used to groan about the bills, tons of extras too, and when it's
all said and done you don't know the most elementary things.'
'Grammar,' I observed, 'is very difficult; some of the best people can't
spell.'
'But geography, your geography's no better. Why, I heard some one tell
you the other day that her son was in Dunkirk, and you said that she
must be so thankful to have him in Scotland. I could see the woman
thought you dotty, only she was too polite to say so.'
'But, Ross, Dunkirk is so difficult, don't you see how Scotch it sounds.
It's one of those places that I try to remember by reversing it. There
is a system like that. I think of shortbread and then I know it's
France.'
'Well, your system doesn't seem to have worked that time. But now I
come to think of it, Meg, you're right. There is a system, whatever is
the beastly thing called? Mell-gell-Hell-man-ism, I think it is.'
'Ross!'
'What?'
'You're not to put bad words into my mind.'
'I'm not, I said a sentence.'
'But no sentence could possibly begin with "Hell man."'
'Of course it could. I could say heaps.'
'Yes, but not fit for my young ears.'
'Meg, I could say one that a Plymouth Brother wouldn't mind Aunt Amelia
hearing.'
'I'll give you a bob if you can while I count twenty.'
So my brother thought hard and said, 'Suppose.'
'But that doesn't begin with the right word,' I said.
'I must tell you the context, child. Suppose a Plymouth Brother were
arguing with an atheist.'
'One, two, three,' I counted.
'He might with perfect propriety say.'
'Four, five, six.'
'Hell, man, is _not_ a myth. Aunt Amelia would say he was "one of the
right sort," so that's worth 3d. extra. Give me that bob, Meg.'
So I gave him six pennies, six halfpennies, and a threepenny bit, and he
said it wasn't a bob. He said it was a shilling, which was different,
and he "couldn't be fashed with all that muck in his pockets," so we
bought sweets.
Then he exclaimed,--
'Come on, Meg,' as if it had been I who had stopped first.
'But,' I protested, 'what is the hurry, there was such a pretty girl
looking at you in that shop.'
'Meg, will you come, there's a man staring at you.'
'But I don't mind the pretty girl staring at you, Ross;' but my brother
said,--
'One really couldn't have one's women stared at by a chap like that.'
'Really, Ross,' I said, 'I'm not a harem.'
'You're a jolly sight more trouble to look after.'
'Oh, have you had much experience,' I asked. And then he said I was
'abominable.'
So we walked on.
'No,' said my brother, reverting violently to my education, 'girls'
schools are simply rotten. I could run one better than your woman did.
Don't even seem to have fed you properly, judging by the size you've
grown, or rather not grown. I wonder if it's too late to bring an
action for insufficient nourishment considering the price paid. There's
one thing you do really well though, and that's arithmetic.'
So I cheered up.
'I never knew anybody, no, not any single person that could add up her
wants so accurately and subtract them from her husband's bank balance
with such lightning speed.'
'I think, Ross,' I said with dignity, 'it would be better if we went
back to St Julian's.'
So he read out:--
'"10 bed and dressing-rooms, 5 reception rooms, 6 acres of pleasure
gardens, stabling and coachhouse, usual domestic offices. For sale
only."
'Here's another:--
'"Charming country cottage for sale, 5 miles from Whittington station,
combines old-world charm with every modern convenience, capable of being
added to."
'Oh! Meg, isn't it priceless? Let's get a taxi and go and see them.
Mop up your eyes, child, I don't want to look as if I were eloping with
an unwilling bride.'
We got to the 'charming country cottage' first. It was miles away from
anywhere. It was a bungalow--at least I suppose it was, at any rate the
upper storey had disappeared. It seemed to be nearly tumbling down.
There was only one large room, with a lovely old bread oven and one or
two small cupboard-like apartments leading out of it. I stared at it in
amazement.
'Capable of being added to?'
'Of course,' said Ross, 'very true, indeed, about the only thing you
could honestly say of it. You could build a new house around it and use
the present structure for a coal-hole. Next, please. I feel St Julian's
will be the one, Florrie.'
This, however, proved to be a young barrack. If there were eighteen
rooms, there were hundreds, I should think. The type of house that a
polygamist might fancy. Damp oozed from the walls and most of the paper
had peeled off and lay in little mouldering heaps on the floor. Rats
scuttled in the wainscoting, and in the bathroom, which was on the
ground floor, lay two or three of the largest cockroaches I have ever
seen.
'You see,' said Ross, pointing to them with great pride, 'how the charm
works. "My wife is afraid of beetles"--you get them--beautiful
specimens. You want a house not quite finished--you are sent to one
tumbling down. Now, if this could be worked out to its logical
conclusion you would, of course, get your ideal home. I must do it on
paper and try to get a formula. Let's go back to the agents, Florrie.'
'Not I--never again,' I said. So we returned to Fernfold for lunch.
It's so jolly now the Spiders have gone. The Poppet has a nice day
nursery and Ross a better bedroom. He says he misses the lumps in his
mattress dreadfully, and his bed is now so comfortable that he cannot
sleep.
To-night, after I was in 'my byes,' as the Gidger calls it, Ross came to
say good-night. He was so quaint.
'Meg, something that you said to-day has rankled horribly.'
'Practically everything you say every day always does with me.'
'No, but Meg, _do_ I ever put bad words into your mind?'
'Oh, Ross,' I said, and giggled hopelessly.
'But, darling, do you know any?'
'Why, yes, I know several: Damn's one, only daddy forbade me to say it
once, and somehow I've never got into the way of it, and since the war I
say Hell sometimes, not that I mean to swear, only it does seem like
Hell.'
'The Germans seem inspired by the devil, if that's what you mean,' said
Ross.
'And I say "infernal" sometimes. Daddy told me I might.'
'I bet he didn't, Meg.'
'He did, I tell you, if I always thought of Devonshire when I said it.'
'Daddy is topping,' said my brother, as he remembered the old joke,
'well, go on.'
'I think that's all I know,' I replied.
'Oh, he said, 'how white women are. I wish they were all I knew.'
'But surely, Ross, not knowing a thing doesn't make a person "white."
If you know a lot and don't say them, by the grace of God, I should have
thought that was being "white."'
*CHAPTER XI*
The Gidger came in from a drive bursting with excitement and importance.
'Muvver, _I've_ found you a house, it's the darlingest you ever saw,
very old, and the drawing-room has got a pump in it, and there's a pig,
too.'
'In the drawing-room, Gidger?' Ross inquired; 'that sounds as if it
might do. Your mother likes a pig under her bed, and so did her
grandmother.'
'Nannie and I went all over it, muvver. One of the bedrooms has a funny
little place leading out of it, the lady said she thought it was a
powdering closet.'
'Get the telegraph forms and tell Mr Cardew Thompkins we're suited,'
cried Ross, getting up in a great hurry. 'Of course it's _the_ house;
you're a jewel, Gidger. We never in our wildest moments hoped for a
powdering closet.'
'I don't know what the drainage is like,' said Nannie.
'Fancy talking of drainage and a powder closet in the same century,'
said Ross indignantly, 'let's have lunch at once, Meg, and catch the
Longcross bus and go and see it.'
We had a bit of a scrimmage to catch the bus. It starts from the other
inn, called The Ramping Cat. The guide-book says 'it is a small but
well-conducted hostelry on the main road to London.' It seems an
unfortunate name to have chosen for a place with so high a moral tone.
However, as we got half-way to it we saw the bus, looking, as Ross
expressed it, 'about to weigh anchor, and we're late as usual.' So I
ran on ahead to ask the man to wait for Ross, as I didn't want his arm
to be joggled.
The bus was a quaint affair, a kind of square sarcophagus on wheels, the
door opened in two bits like a stable, and the driver informed us that
'the upper part 'ad jammed that tight he couldn't get it open no'ow.'
So we crawled into the beastly thing's bowels (I quote my brother), but
after we had started the upper part flew open, and nothing I could do
(or Ross say) would induce it to remain shut, so at last we gave it up
as a bad job and left it idly flapping in the breeze.
Presently the bus stopped and the man poked his head in at the window
and said,--
'I'm sorry to 'ave to ask you, mum and sir, to get down, but the 'orse
is going to throw a fit.'
We hastily descended and found the poor beast trembling violently and
looking wretched.
'Does he often have them?' inquired Ross.
'No,' said the man, 'only if 'e's upset about anythink--when the young
lady come up in the yard and asked me to wait, I thought 'e was going to
throw one, but I 'oped we'd get to Longcross before 'e did.'
'Goodness!' said Ross, hurrying me away, 'what a perfectly ghastly
effect your face seems to have on animals, Meg; I should think we'd
better walk back unless you could buy a thick veil in the village. If
you come out here to live you'll have to buy a motor; that poor beast's
health would soon be undermined if you used the bus constantly!'
The little brown house, as the Gidger called it, turned out to be two
cottages, one of which is at present occupied by the owner, who is
moving shortly. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that it is
really one biggish house, which, about fifty years ago was divided into
two small ones, each with an acre of garden. By taking down a partition
and unblocking a doorway or two, it could be restored to its original
state. It stands on the slope of a hill overlooking miles of common
which will soon be ablaze with gorse, and in the distance there is a low
ridge of purple hills with a crown of fir trees.
Most of the rooms have windows at each end, an arrangement I like, as it
is delightful to follow the sun round. There is the most glorious old
roof you can imagine, with beautiful curves and crooked chimneys,
lovely, warm, red tiles and mossy eaves.
There are eight bedrooms and an oak-panelled hall, with a fireplace big
enough to sit in and a place for your elbow and your pint pot. There is
only one modern fireplace in the whole house. Most of the bedrooms lead
out of one another, and some of 'the domestic offices,' as Mr Cardew
Thompkins would call them, are a little unusual. The larder, for
instance, is in the present dining-room, and so is the back door, so
that while you are at lunch your butcher might arrive. But these are
details which, no doubt, could be altered. There is a powdering closet,
also a pump, not actually in the drawing-room, as the Gidger said, but
in the 'potato shed,' which leads immediately out of it. The potato
shed has a glass roof and will make a tiny conservatory.
The back of the house faces south-west and is a regular sun-trap. Both
the cottages are half-timbered and pargetted, with splendid beams and
diamond-leaded windows, and roses and honeysuckle everywhere, and such a
garden!--all on a slope, of course, with little steps here and there to
break the levels, flowers, strawberries, and vegetables all mixed up,
and lots of trees, and bush fruit, and a little copse with bluebells;
already the exciting green spikes are showing, and there are a few
snowdrops out.
It's the dream-house, and the Gidger found it!
We have got through a tremendous lot of business since we first saw the
cottage, and I hope Michael will think we have done all the sensible
things we ought. Ross telegraphed to the lawyers and they sent down a
surveyor yesterday afternoon to value it and see it wouldn't tumble down
the moment we bought it. The verdict is 'that it will outlast many a
modern villa.' I wanted a builder to give me an estimate for doing it
up. I asked the owner, who advised me to go to Jones, who had always
given her satisfaction. So to Jones I went. He is the quaintest
character. His hair and his whiskers grow with such velocity that on a
Friday night he is double the size he was the previous Saturday, after
his weekly hair-cut. He wears old stained overalls and a battered hat,
and altogether looks a most frightful ruffian, the sort of person one
would prefer not to meet in a dark lane. But his eyes redeem him, they
are so blue and clear. The second time I saw him he said,--
'Have you any relations in the Isle of Man, mum?'
'No,' I said, 'why?'
'Oh, because my wife comes from there, and she was a Miss Ross, and when
the captain come to the door yesterday, so nice and friendly like, my
wife says to me afterwards, "I do see Uncle John in 'im.'" (How
delightful these unexpected relationships are, and I suppose he thinks I
call my brother by his surname!)
The house needs very little doing up, but I should like it distempered
throughout, and 'Uncle John' says that the alterations I want in 'the
domestic offices' can be quite easily managed. Even now I can't
describe it. I have a confused impression of beams and panelling,
diamond-leaded windows with wreaths of creeper, but, ah,
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