THE THINGS WHICH BELONG—
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
CRUMP FOLK GOING HOME
THE LONELY PLOUGH
THE OLD ROAD FROM SPAIN
BEAUTIFUL END
THE SPLENDID FAIRING
THE TRUMPET IN THE DUST
THE THINGS WHICH
BELONG—
(“The things which belong unto thy peace”)
BY
CONSTANCE HOLME
MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.1
Published 1925
Made and printed in Great Britain at
The Mayflower Press, Plymouth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The author wishes to say that, in spite of the “local colour” in this book, the situation between the characters is purely imaginary.
CONTENTS
THE
THINGS WHICH BELONG—
PROLOGUE
HE dropped the pen.... More strictly speaking, it fell as if weighted from his fingers. He had an extraordinary feeling that he would never use a pen again.
A flush came into Mattie’s face, but she said nothing. He had always expected that, if ever this moment arrived,—impossible as it had seemed that it ever should arrive,—she would meet it with a flood of joyful speech; but now she was silent. It was the second time this evening that she had surprised him by her silence,—this wan and weary early-spring evening which marked the finish of a bleak and soulless day. Searching vaguely, however, among recollections which had left impression without form, he remembered that people often did fall silent at the late fulfilment of a long desire....
Instead of speaking, she sighed. It was such a sigh, he thought, as the dying give just before they pass on into new life. In that last breath there is everything that they see before them, and everything that they leave behind. Mattie’s sigh was like that.
Not that she looked like dying, as she got to her feet at last, heavily a little, but pushing her chair from her more quietly than usual, not in the almost rough way she used sometimes, as if the very furniture of the house clogged and held her ardent spirit. She stood beside him a moment, looking down at the letter he had just written, a splendid woman, growing old,—and older in the evenings than in the mornings,—but still full of vitality and fire. Again he expected her to break out into some form of expression, either of satisfaction or relief, but still she said nothing. Sometimes, as he knew, on occasions of this kind, relief took the form of a recapitulation of past miseries, and he would not have been surprised if Mattie had shown hers in that fashion. But dumbness seemed to have fallen upon her. Even her face had grown strangely inexpressive. There was no hint in it that she was thinking either of old sorrow or new joy. It was simply blank, as if it was no longer able to register the workings of the mind that lay behind it.
Turning away from him, she moved almost aimlessly across the kitchen. It was as if she had been switched suddenly on to another plane, and did not know any longer what to do on this. Stooping, she put out her hand for the poker, as if meaning to stir the fire, but she put it out to the wrong side. That seemed to paralyse her more than ever. She seemed incapable of reaching across to it where it stood in its accustomed place, but remained stooping, her hand dropped loosely at her side. It was only after a long pause that she straightened herself slowly, and, swinging round, stared about the room with eyes which hardly seemed to recognise it.
He continued to watch her, fascinated. It was all so different, he was saying to himself; not in the least what he had expected. If only she would speak!... It couldn’t be that she was disappointed?—he found himself thinking, startled; and suddenly there came into his mind the absurd fear that, in giving her what she wanted, he had perhaps taken away from her something that she wanted more....
She moved away from the hearth, and as she did so the firelight shot up, so that her shadow on the wall shot up, too, and became huge and menacing in the kitchen. Too big for the room, it pressed itself against ceiling and walls, as if trying to force a way out of what was no longer able to contain it. He watched it struggle for a moment, saw it sink and leap in a still more furious effort, and then the fire dropped and it dropped with it. He waited for it to shoot up again, expecting every second to see it beat and battle afresh. But it did not shoot up again. Instead, there came presently into the stillness a little tinkling sound which showed that the fire had dropped still lower.
The window of the cottage had long since gone black, making a dark velvet background for the gold flower of the lamp at his elbow. The gardens outside were as blank as Mattie’s face, gone out as completely as if it was only in the daytime that they had any concrete existence. The letter on the table looked a white, untouched square, with the impress of his handwriting barely visible upon it.
There was very little in the letter, but it had taken a long time to put it down. They had been so long over it, indeed, that already it was time for bed. The kitchen clock told them that, breaking the silence almost impertinently, and Mattie started. And then she, too, broke silence.
“Eh, well! So that’s the end of that!” she said, from the stairfoot, speaking apparently not so much to him as to a hundred other things about her; and, turning determinedly towards the stairs without further comment, mounted them with her strong though heavy step, and vanished.
He sat still for some time after she had gone, feeling a little defrauded and more than a little exasperated. Even now, when she had spoken, her voice had told him nothing. It was rather unfair, he said to himself.... It seemed incredible that the great moment of her life should have come and gone, and that she should have had so few words,—and none too comprehensible words, either,—with which to greet it.
But she was glad,—he did not need telling that; so glad, perhaps, that only tears could really express her gladness. Probably she was crying upstairs, even now, weeping the tears which it is better not to stop. Because it was wiser to let her weep he stayed on where he was, watching the night deepen over the gardens and droop closer upon his cottage.
He was glad, too, he said to himself; relieved, too, even though he did not feel inclined to weep about it. He felt instead that lightness which comes with choice after a long and difficult approach to a parting of the ways. He told himself as he waited that he had only hesitated until now because he knew that the moment had not arrived. He had hesitated and rebelled, and therefore he had suffered; but he did not suffer now. On the contrary, in this curious, almost unbelievable way, he actually felt glad.
He got up, after a while, and on a sudden impulse went and opened the house-door. He knew that the gardens were there, the moment he did that. It was only through the window that they seemed to have faded away. He could feel them stretching about him on either hand; could see, without knowing how he saw, the actual shapes of bed and tree. But to-night he felt no thrilling link with the place which had been in his charge for the last forty years. He had passed on, as Mattie had long ago passed on. He had written the letter, and he was glad.
Without being conscious that he had done so, he left the door still open when he went upstairs to bed.
PART I
HIS
I
THE letter was still there when he came down....
He had known that it would be there, of course,—had, indeed, lain awake half the night, thinking about it,—but he was surprised to see it, nevertheless. More and more, as he thought, it had taken upon itself the quality of a dream; so that, when he saw it again, a white shape set upon an expanse of red-clothed kitchen table, it met him with a shock.
He put it away from him, however, at once. After that first glance, which was not so much a glance as an actual physical encounter thrust upon him as he came in, he did not look at it again. But he was aware of it even while he refused to recognise it. He ignored it, indeed, with something of the self-conscious effort with which one ignores a vivid human presence, going about his tasks as if under actual human eyes. That he was oppressed by it was evident from the way in which he flung the window wide and the door wider, as if in an attempt to get rid of something which threatened to take up its permanent abode.
For this morning he was not quite so sure that he was glad....
Lighting the fire, he set the kettle to boil, afterwards going into the shadowy little larder to look for milk. His wife would be awake before long, and he would take her up a cup of tea as soon as the kettle permitted. Both he and Mattie were getting on in years,—he seventy and she sixty-nine—but they were able to do for themselves yet. It was a good thing, he said to himself, considering all that lay before them, that they were able to do for themselves yet.... He said it to himself more than once as he found a cup and saucer and the sugar that Mattie loved; passing about the house with the careless precision of practice, as well as with something more,—the delicate, kindly step of one accustomed to move in narrow and crowded places, and among fragile things like flowers.
And never once did he look at the letter.
The kettle was slow in boiling, for the fire burnt lazily, this morning. Fires were sensitive things, people said, which knew when those who lighted them were in trouble.... He checked himself guiltily when he found himself thinking that, because of course there was no trouble. On the contrary, there was a great deal of happiness ahead, as well as excitement and adventure and reunion and new life. The last especially appealed to him, because, as head gardener at Ings Hall, he was continually bringing new life into existence. It was surely always a wonderful thing to be about to greet new life!
Mattie would think it wonderful, at all events, in spite of her wordlessness last night. She had continued to keep silence even when he had joined her upstairs, and as he had refrained from looking at her, in his delicate, sensitive way, he would never know now whether or not she had cried. But while he had lain awake she had slept peacefully,—peacefully, silently, graciously,—slept as he had hardly ever known her to sleep, for she was too active a woman, both in body and mind, to sleep very well. Indeed, for months before the letter came to be written, she had hardly slept at all.... But last night she had slept as those sleep who for years have felt themselves to be behind bars, until the time comes at last when they lie down with relaxed limbs and smooth brows, knowing themselves free.
It was a great thing, of course, to be free. Mattie had said it so often that he supposed it must be true. He supposed it, just as he supposed that he himself was not free, because she had said that so often, too. He had never been able really to understand what she meant, because he could not think of a freer life than one spent among trees and fruit and flowers. But she must know better than he did what freedom meant, because she had thought about it so much. Talked about it so much, too, year in and year out.... Yes, it was a great thing to be free.
The day coming in at the door was going to be a fine one, he saw, although he had known that, indeed, as soon as he opened his eyes. But it was a shrouded day as yet, with the mist still high above the river, and threaded in and out among the woods which surrounded the gardens. In any case, he could not have seen either the river or the Hall, for they were a hundred feet below, but even his usual glimpse of the fells across the valley, beautifully vignetted by the stems of larch and beech, was hidden from him by the mist.
It was very quiet in his special domain on its steep little hill,—very quiet and very shut-in. There were the walls round it, first, the big, mellow, kitchen-garden walls, and then there were the mist and the trees, and then there was more mist again. The men had not yet come to work, and there was not even the sound of an approaching footstep. The sun had not yet broken through, bringing with it that sense of movement which is largely the play of light and shade. Only the birds were awake and beginning the day in their usual rushing way; and the river, which never slept at all, but ran and talked all night.
It was quiet in the house, too, except for the lazy crackle of the idle fire, and the loud, determined strokes of the tactless clock. Mattie, he knew, must be still asleep, for if she had stirred he would have heard the bed creak in the room above. Even if she had not stirred he would have known if she was awake, for her vitality would have flowed down through the house and touched him as if with an actual hand.
He loved the quietness. He loved being shut in on the top of his hill, and would have been only the better pleased if there had been thirty barriers about him instead of three. This was the time when the place was wholly his, before his staff stirred in the bothy or climbed the hill from the park. The men, when they came, had an air of possession even in their tread, and in the way they handled things and struck spades into the soil. It was natural, of course, but he felt that it robbed him a little. He had to share the gardens with them. His employers had the possessive air, too, although not so much as the men, both because they knew their place better and because they did not strike tools into the ground. But he had to share the gardens with them, all the same. They said: “What are you going to grow just here, Kirkby?” Or: “Don’t you think we might have so-and-so, this year, instead of this-and-that?” So they robbed him, too.
Not that he was one of those jealous gardeners who grudge the stuff they grow even to the people for whom they grow it. He was not foolish about the gardens, or greedy in any way. He grew things for a purpose, and he liked them to fulfil that purpose. Only he was the gardens, so to speak, after all these years, and when anything was taken from them it was part of him that was taken away.
He was certainly like a garden, as he stood at his house-door, looking out. When most people open their doors and stare, the things outside come awake, but they took no notice of Kirkby. The gardens, as it were, did not even look up. They were no more disturbed by his appearance than by one of their own shadows lying under the bushes, or by the long, ghostly lines of the green and crystal hoar-frost.
He was old and gentle, like an English garden, but he was hale, too, and not by any means run to seed. His clothes, good clothes, now pleasantly shabby, had a mellow tone which blended softly with their setting. His fresh complexion and faded but clear eyes had the pale tints of some of his own blossoms. The very droop of his shoulders was less like the slow curve which comes with age than the gentle stoop of a flower.
Especially he loved the quietness because it was at this hour that he had a vision of the gardens as he planned them for the year. This was his creative time, these few moments before the men came and broke and scattered his thoughts. It was then that he saw the long succession of colours and kinds with which the gardens would sum up their rich total before the winter came again. He would lose some of it later, of course, owing to other people’s follies and fancies, and the stolid frustration of concrete facts. But some of it would persist, even through worries and contradictions and the hard blows of the northern weather; so that, by the time the resting-months for the gardens came round once more, he would always in some measure have fulfilled his dream.
He was not always able to snatch these god-like moments in which he controlled the future. Often enough, Mattie was downstairs first, and he could not call up his pictures while she was working and talking. Husbands and wives were so near to each other that they got in each other’s way over things like those,—things that had to have you all to themselves, or they would not come. But he always took his moments when he could get them, because he needed them. His days were poorer without them and the assurance they brought him, as days are poorer without a prayer.
And just now was the time when the vision was strongest and clearest, when there was promise of new life all around, and still it was only promise. Like all artists, he saw his creation best when there was still nothing but a blank page in front of him. It had then a clarity, a sweep, a combined passion and restraint which it never achieved again after he had once begun to work upon it. It altered, no matter how he tried to preserve it. Alien ideas crept in, upsetting the balance of his scheme. Beautiful ideas they were, too, sometimes, but they were alien, nevertheless. Often he had tried to convince himself that the altered plan was all for the best; but as soon as the springtime both of the gardens and of his inspiration came round again, he knew that the thing which he saw then was the finer and purer.
The whole panorama of the seasons passed in colour and shape before his inward eye, running at the same time through his brain like a well-known piece of music. Familiar as it was, however, it was also highly intricate, with its many different parts overlapping and intertwining. Not only was there the kitchen garden to think of, but there were the glass-houses as well, fruit grown inside and out, tomatoes, orchids, carnations, violets. Then down at the Hall there were the rose-gardens and lawns, tennis-courts and flower-borders, and the long yew and beech-hedges to be kept trim and close. And besides all these there was the big rock-garden across the river, full of plants which, however much you might suppress them, grew as giants grow in a single night.
He saw the vegetables he would grow with the warm, homely thrill with which the farmer sees his crops, and the housewife her stores of linen and jam. The fruit he saw as an artist sees his finished task,—as gleaming jewels of price which you can hold and weigh in your hand. But the flowers he saw as the mystic and the dreamer see Heaven,—not in concrete form, but as sheer colour and light, and an ecstasy of shaded tones.
He had, too, the knowledge which enabled him to see under the soil, as the geologist sees the strata under his feet, and the drainer sees where the streams run under the apparently dry surface. Beneath the quiet beds and the still grass he saw the forces of life already waking to work, sending the spring-urge through the seeds which had slept there during the winter, or conserving their energies for those which should be given into their charge later.
But for that insight and knowledge there would have seemed little enough encouragement from the brown waste lying before him, and curving away behind potting-sheds and glass to come back to him again along empty borders. The gardens were not actually empty, of course, for there were evergreen climbers and shrubs, patches of colour made by the remains of the winter greens, jasmine in flower, and the wing-like flashes of snowdrops and crocuses. But by comparison with his vision it was altogether desolate and barren, for in that he saw all the miracle of each season at once, smiled upon by a cloudless heaven.
First—and this he always saw first, and indeed it was already hard upon the heels of his vision—he saw the crimson ribes glowing over the countryside, that precious pink flame which appears so suddenly and amazingly among the pale yellows of the spring. Then—a quieter beauty, but equally as thrilling—the infinitely pure green that comes creeping over the brown thorn. He saw the purples of lilac and iris, the cool white and green of lily-of-the-valley, the vivid yet delicate spirit-stains of the azalea. He saw red and white jewels hung by the thousand on raspberry canes and currant bushes, and the creamy ovals of new potatoes. He saw roses, not singly, but in arches and flung handfuls, and a cloud of sweet peas like pinioned butterflies. Backing it all he saw green again, the young live green of the early spring, and the deep, sap-running green of the flush of summer. But above all he saw blue, that colour so precious in a northern county which is kept short of blue skies. Lupins and forget-me-not and delphiniums and periwinkle, and the blue that is never quite blue of the hydrangea. When he looked across the gardens it was chiefly blue that he saw,—blue against the brown of the soil and the green of the shrubs and the mist-wrapped sepia of the wet tree-trunks.
Not every other gardener, he found, had the passion for blue to anything like the extent that he had. All of them grew blue flowers, of course, filling their borders with them, and flinging them profusely about their rockeries. But they did not worship them, as he did,—did not wait and watch for them, feeling, as they looked at them, that what they looked at was pure spirit. Mostly they preferred deep-coloured roses and rich carnations, the tawny hues of chrysanthemums or the flaming shades of rhododendrons and dahlias. They did not seem to see the wistfulness of blue against a northern landscape, and how it was answered by the smoke-blue of far-off mountains and the steel-blue of frozen tarns.
This year, however, they were to have a new blue flower which had attracted quite a lot of attention at a northern show, last summer. It had been brought into being by a north-country horticulturist, and so naturally the northern papers had made a great to-do about it. One of them had said that the new “dawnbell,” as it was called, had a certain quality which only a northern mind could have infused into it; and another said that it seemed to contain all the fundamental blues of the world, as the rose seemed to contain all the fundamental pinks. Kirkby had not quite understood what either of the papers was talking about, but it did not matter. All that he knew, as he paid his homage to the dawnbell in its airless tent, was that, set against the background of his fells at home, it would have the exquisiteness and the appeal of a little child.
But not only did he see the glory of the garden unrolled before him; he saw the daily work, the infinite pains which led to the production of it. He saw the trenching, the sowing, the thinning, the potting and pruning, the staking and tying, the watering and weeding. He saw the daily fight with the myriad living creatures which strive to share the results of man’s labours with him. And when he had finished with the growing, there was still the cropping, the gathering for the Hall, the London house, the shooting-box, the market. And when the heaviest work in that way was beginning to get over, there was the layering and manuring and dividing; and always the continual battle for order with the leaf-storms flung upon him by the autumn gales.
Not that he saw this side of his vision as mere drudgery, or in any way secondary to the rest. It was all one to him, indeed, and of equal interest and beauty, for to the artist the craft is as fascinating as the dream. He knew, who had done every job in a garden in his time, the contentment that may wait upon a man when he is working out even the smallest detail of a great conception. Long ago he had learned that the whole is implicit in the part; so that, while he broke his way through stiff soil, or toiled patiently with the knife, he felt his material quiver with the message of all that was yet to come, and saw, not the apparently trivial task upon which he was engaged, but the beauty that should be.
He was so still during the few minutes in which his vision passed before him that the very bushes and trees, chained and weighted with heavy drops, seemed by comparison to be full of animation. It was as if the actual life were being drained out of him in order to supply vitality to the temporarily vivid picture. The light had brightened a little, and the mist was lifting. Far below, from the direction of the park, a sweet-whistled snatch swam up to him through the mist as the faint chimes of sunk church-bells are said to swim up through the sea. The men were coming to work. Behind him the kettle boiled over with a sudden angry hiss, and at the same moment he heard the bed creak in the room above.
Turning, he saw the letter....
II
ONCE again, however, he shut it out, firmly refusing to look at it as he stepped across to the kettle. Yet again his awareness of it was apparent in his every movement. His hand shook as he made the tea; and when the bed upstairs creaked again, with that sharp, emphatic creak which he had come to regard as actually emanating from his wife rather than as the mere protest of a piece of furniture, he hurried out of the room as if thankful to get away from it.
Cup in hand, he went upstairs, and entered the low bedroom, with its window looking out on to the little plot of ground which was private to the house, separated from the rest of the gardens by a privet hedge which he had planted forty years ago, and which had now grown thick and high. He had never ceased to feel surprised when he looked at that hedge, not because it had done so well, but because it was there at all. He would never have thought of planting it but for his wife, because it would never have occurred to him to feel the need of it. Either the whole place was his, or else none of it was,—that was how he looked at it. Nevertheless, he had planted the hedge to please her, because she wanted a spot where she could “get away.” In the same way she had chosen the bedroom which looked out on that particular side, because it made her feel that she “wasn’t there.” He had had some difficulty in understanding either of these rather puzzling statements, but he had made no bones about them. He himself had never wanted either to get away or to feel that he wasn’t there; but of course it wasn’t to be expected that he and Mattie should always feel the same.
She was sitting up in bed when he went in, and leaning forward a little, as if some eagerness in her had sent her spirit before her to unburden itself to him. The paralysis which had seemed to afflict her on the previous night,—the result, perhaps, of over-emotion or fatigue—had completely dropped from her. This morning, indeed, she looked alive to her very finger-tips. Her strong, buxom figure looked hale and wholesome in its good longcloth nightgown. Her plaited hair, run through with silver, was still silky and thick. Her eyes were shining and her cheeks flushed. She took the cup from him in a grasp that was as firm and capable as when he had first known her.
“Eh, but I’ve slept sound!” she announced, yawning and smiling in a breath, while the vibrant tones of her voice, running through the room, seemed to stir up the atmosphere of the house, and even to assist at the awakening of the world outside. “I don’t know that I ever remember sleeping like that before.”
He nodded, looking at her affectionately as he stood beside the bed in one of those still attitudes of his which suggested the poise of a flower on a windless day.
“Yes. You’ve slept grand. You were tired, likely, with all that settling and such-like.”
She laughed at that, showing teeth that were still fine, and stirring her tea with a steady hand.
“Nay, not I!” she said in the same voice, the very strength of which was an added denial. “It’d take a deal more than that to knock me out.” Then suddenly she sobered, staring thoughtfully at the cup before her. “I was just sort of—satisfied—I suppose.”
He said: “That’s right! That’ll be it,” in his quiet tones, nodding at her again, although this time she wasn’t looking at him; the little action and the repeated phrase seeming to warn off something inside him that was making him feel guilty.
“I was dreaming a deal, although I was so sound....” She lifted her eyes to him once more in their shining eagerness. “I dreamt I was There!”
He grew, if possible, a trifle more still. So far, he had evaded the letter successfully, but he could not evade this. In another minute, and in spite of himself, he, too, would be There....
“I saw the whole spot as plain as plain!” Mattie went on rapidly. “There was Luke’s house, first of all, and then Joe’s, and then Maggie’s and her husband’s,—all nearabouts together, just as they’ve always said.”
He murmured, “Yes, yes! Yes, yes!” trying to hold himself back, but feeling that he was going, all the same.
“Ellen was there, too, though she lives a good bit off....” She ruminated a little, as if trying to work out in her mind how Ellen had managed it. “It was all just as they said, only a deal bigger. All of ’em together, just as they used to be, and things as snug as snug!”
“Yes, yes! Yes, yes!”
She paused a moment, contentedly sipping her tea, and staring at the knitted quilt on the bed as though she saw the whole pattern of her dream laid out there before her.
“There was another house as well,” she said presently, still staring,—“a house you and me know of, as isn’t built yet, but will be, before long....”
“Yes, yes! Yes, yes!”
“And between the houses there was that garden they talk so much about,—a great big stretch of a place as seemed to go on for ever and ever.”
He did not say anything to that, for the simple reason that he was no longer present to say it. He was There now, just as she had been There, all during those night-hours when he had lain awake and she had slept so sweetly. The garden had taken him, as he had known it would take him, if she began to speak of it. He could fight against all the rest,—the houses and their occupants, even that other house which was going to be so important, although it was not yet even built; but he could not fight the garden. The very mention of it was sufficient to drag him out of the safe place in which he had lived so long, and to carry him overseas.
“It was all just as we thought,” Mattie was saying again,—“only a deal bigger.” She had forgotten her tea, for the time being, and her gaze at the quilt seemed not so much to be seeing pictures upon it as to pierce through it and beyond. “There was that much room,—more room than I’d ever thought there was in the whole world! Even the sky seemed bigger and higher than our sky over here.” She drew a deep breath, as if even in imagination it was a delight to fill her lungs under that higher and wider sky.... “The children were there and all,” she went on, after a pause, her voice softening. “You’ll hardly believe it, but I knew ’em as well as well, even though I’ve never seen no more of ’em than just their photos! There was Luke’s Joe, and Joe’s Luke, and little Sally, and Daisy May; little Eric, too ... and Maggie’s last, as hasn’t done as well as it should.... I couldn’t have known them better if I’d brought them up myself! And the queerest thing of all was that they knew me!... Just before I woke up I told ’em I’d got to go, and they set to and cried fit to break their hearts.”
“It was only a dream,” he tried to console her, speaking with an effort as if from a great distance.
“Yes, but it wasn’t like dreaming; it was like being!” she said quickly, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. “It was that real!”
He came back then from his leap across the ocean, and, reaching out his hand, patted her on the shoulder.
“It’ll be real enough soon,” he reminded her gently. “It’s only a matter of being patient a few weeks more.”
“Only a few weeks, that’s all,” she repeated after him in a curiously childlike fashion, heartening herself both with the words and with a sip of the cooling tea. “But it’s a long while, all the same.... Seems strange, doesn’t it, you should feel as if you couldn’t wait a few more weeks, when you’ve waited for years and years?”
“You won’t notice you’re waiting,” he pointed out. “You’ll be too busy. There’ll be a deal to do.”
She brightened at that, her vitality mounting at the very thought of the approaching period of activity. “Ay, and I’m keen to be at it!” she retorted briskly. “I shan’t feel it’s really real until I begin to pack!”
She was launched now upon a subject of which the possibilities were endless, and was already deep in its details when the same whistled snatch reached them which Kirkby had heard earlier from the park. He moved automatically. “There’s the men. I must be off,” he said, turning towards the door.
Mattie nodded, her mind still full of delightful problems.
“It’s time we were both moving,” she agreed, though vaguely. “I’m late this morning.... It’s that dream, I suppose,” she added, passing her hand over her eyes as if to remove something which still lingered before them, “but I don’t rightly feel as if I was back!”
“Oh, you’re back, right enough!” he smiled at her from the door; and at the words the thing which had stayed in front of her eyes fled, and she looked across at him.
“Ay, I’m back,” she said in a curious tone, and looked away from him and about her. “Back!”—and her glance went to the privet hedge beyond the window.... He waited a moment, staring at her uncertainly and rather uncomfortably, and then slipped quietly from the room. Half-way down the stairs, he heard her say “Back!” again, and hesitated in his step as if meaning to return to her; only to hurry on afterwards more rapidly than ever.
III
AS he entered the kitchen he was met by the letter with the now familiar shock, but this time he did not attempt to evade it. On the contrary, he went deliberately across to it, and stood by the table, looking at it. A glance at the clock had shown him that he was earlier than he had imagined, and he was in no mood to meet his staff before he was obliged. That whistling first-comer would be Len Machell, a skilled gardener and his right-hand man. Len was always early, and he had always liked him for it; but he was not so sure that he liked him for it, this morning. Deep down in his mind lurked an uncomfortable suspicion that Len had a reason for coming early to-day....
The letter, addressed in his small but flowing handwriting, was directed to his employer at the Hall. He was always slightly ashamed of his pale, delicate script, especially when he happened to see it beside his wife’s black and sturdy hand. The scant imprint of the one seemed almost a purposed reproach to the brave intensity of the other. It was true that Mattie, in helping to draft the letter, had used so much of the ink, writing and re-writing, and underlining and exclaiming, that there had been very little of it left by the time he came to it; but of course that was no excuse. She would have got her effect, he knew, even with a dried-up bottle and a broken nib!... He felt unhappily that his effort looked even feebler this morning than it had done last night, as if it had faded for lack of volition on the part of the writer.
Yet, after all, he said to himself, straightening himself as he stood, it was his weak pen which had altered their destinies. Mattie’s handwriting, superior though it was, could not in this case have had the weight of his. The ink that was left had been more than sufficient for the few, colourless words in which, after forty years’ service, he had sent in his notice.
It had seemed so impossible a thing before it was done, and, now that it was done, it seemed so easy. Simple and easy, as death seemed, when you saw it close.... But it was wrong of him to keep on thinking of the change that was coming in terms of trouble or death. Once already that morning he had had to remind himself that what it really stood for was new life.
Yet it was only in terms of death, he said to himself obstinately, that he could think of the actual break. It seemed absurd that the snapping of a tie like that could be brought about by the mere scraping of a rusty pen. It should be accomplished, he thought, in some more dramatic way, like the call to attention of clean shot, and the lowering of something into a grave.
Forty years’ service was in that letter, but there was so much more besides. He had been bred on the estate, like his parents before him, and he had never left it. All that was in it, too. Old customs and ways of thought, closer and closer growth to human beings and to the soil,—links that had loosened and even broken, but had always welded again,—all these were there. Not in the actual wording of the letter, of course, but in its very texture; so that it seemed as if one man alone could never carry its weight of association and memory, and its long tale of the years.
And more besides.... Not only was there forty years’ service in the letter, but there was forty years’ struggle ... all that long contest between himself and his wife, which had begun in the first year of their marriage and never stopped,—never, that is, until last night with the writing of the letter, when it had stopped as a clock stops in a house where somebody dies.
Even this morning he had that same feeling as of a clock stopped somewhere in the house, followed as it always was by a silence that could be heard....
Well, it was all over,—the talks, the disputes, the discussions as to ways and means. She had always wanted to go, and he had never been able to go; first, because he hadn’t the money and, second, because he hadn’t the heart. He had grown to believe that the discussions would go on for ever, and now they were at an end. It almost seemed as if they would have nothing to talk about any more.
She had never liked the place from the very start; never settled or learned to look upon it as home. He had waited for the years to work their magic upon her, and they had never worked it. She had never settled.... Always she had gone on longing and reaching out for something that wasn’t there, something that in the very nature of things couldn’t possibly be there.
It had taken him a long time to understand, and he was not sure that he understood, even yet. All that he had definitely learned from the clash of wills was that the heart must face its own way; that one man’s meat may be another man’s poison, and that the holy, inhabited place wherein one soul can find its peace may be nothing but an airless vacuum to another.
Yet it was not, he sometimes argued with himself, as if he had taken her from such a very different existence. She was a gardener’s daughter, as he was a gardener’s son, and had been born to the same tranquil round and lovely isolation. He had thought her happy enough when he saw her at home, cheerful and busy and making her own interests; but that, as he knew now, was merely because of her youth. The soul can lay out its own pleasure-grounds when it is young. Later, when it ceases to do so, it sees the little ring-fence surrounding it only too plainly.
Right up to the time of her wedding, indeed, Mattie had been so busy, one way and another, that she had never realised her own requirements. Even if she had thought about them, she would have taken it for granted that marriage would mean a wider life, and instead she had found life narrow down upon her. Existence in her native place had been narrow, too, as she was ready to admit, but not so narrow; for in the home of one’s youth there is always a way of escape through the magic door of childhood.
It was tragic that she had not known that she needed a wider scope,—tragic for both of them. But she had not known, and there had been nobody—apparently—to tell her. It was the gardens which told her eventually,—his dear, charmed circle of the gardens,—when it was too late.
He had found her, one evening,—as very soon after their marriage he had come to look for her,—sitting beside an upstairs window. The window was open, and by putting out her head she could see between the trunks of the trees to the coloured canvases of the fells. It was a circumscribed view at the best, with only a section of the hills visible when the weather permitted, together with a strip of sky laid nun-wise across their foreheads; but it was better than nothing. He had called up to her laughingly to ask her “what she was at,” and she had told him in reply that she was “shoving the walls away.”
“Shoving what walls? And whatever for?” he had enquired, puzzled, and she had flung out her hands with a thrusting movement towards the walls surrounding the gardens.
“Them walls!” she had said vehemently. “They make me feel sort of choked. There’s times I feel I could hag ’em down with my own hands, brick by brick!”
He had been so surprised by that that he had stayed under the window, staring, and wondering whether she wasn’t well, or whether something had happened to upset her. It seemed incredible to him that people should think of garden walls as shutting them in, when everybody knew that what they were really there for was to shut things and people out.
“What, there was walls at home, wasn’t there?” he reminded her, at last. “Ay, and a deal higher than ours, too, now I come to think of it!”
It had been her turn to stare, then, turning the problem over in her mind.
“I never thought of ’em as high,” she returned slowly, pondering. “Anyway, I never felt shut in. Likely it was just because things seem that much bigger and wider to a child, but I remember thinking the garden was nearabouts as big as the whole world!”
“Well, I’m not saying this here’s quite as big as that!” he had tried to laugh her out of her brooding. “But it’s a fairish size. You’ll not find a better kitchen-spot anywhere in the North.”
“It’s terribly shut-in, all the same,” she persisted obstinately. “And terribly small. That small,” she added suddenly, with a characteristic flash which might have stood equally for bitterness or humour, “I could happen put it inside my wedding-ring!”
It had grown no bigger for her, either, as time went on. She had never ceased to find it small and shut-in, never ceased to rebel against its limitations. Many a day she had sat by the upstairs window during the years that followed, but she had never succeeded in pushing the walls away. It was he who had done it in the end by writing the letter, laying them flat with his pen as effectively as with any Jericho trumpet.
Still, it was her will that ran behind the pen, even though it was his hand that held it. He knew that well enough, even while his loyalty had no intention of admitting it. The disputes and discussions had seemed futile enough at the time, but they had done their work in the end. Her hours of silent revolt, equally with her passionate clamourings to be free, had accumulated at last into a dynamic force which seemed able to move mountains.
Once, before, indeed, she had almost succeeded in getting her way, only to find, just as she was on the point of turning into it, that it led to a dead end. The affair was so long ago now that he had practically forgotten it, but it came back to him, this morning. Contemplating it to-day, he was struck by one curious fact,—that what he had nearly done then seemed to him now far more incredible than what he had actually done, last night. The sudden reassertion of that distant point of view showed him how much he had altered since that date; how far he had travelled, although unknowingly, along the road to Mattie’s desire.
It was at a local flower-show that the opportunity had come, tumbled from Heaven, as it seemed, in answer to Mattie’s pleading. He had been present at the show in the capacity of judge, and a visiting landowner had taken a fancy to him. At the end of the afternoon, his new friend, without actually offering him the post, had yet managed to convey to him that his own head gardener’s situation, which happened to be vacant at the moment, could be Kirkby’s for the mere formality of asking.
He had forgotten the incident, as has been said, but at least he had no difficulty in remembering how his wife had taken the news. It had acted upon her like a charm, turning her, even at the mere prospect of escape, into a different creature, so that already she moved and spoke as if breathing a freer air. All evening they had debated the question, and had gone up to bed resolved upon accepting the unspoken invitation. He recalled Mattie’s elation over their luck, her gratitude to Providence, her almost childlike happiness. Yet it was he who had slept, that night, even under the sword of impending change; while she, for all that her prayer was about to be granted, had lain awake.
And in the morning the whole of her evening dream had fallen to pieces.... She had come downstairs silent and apathetic, dimmed as a candle is dimmed by the coming of daylight. She ignored any reference on his part to the decision of the night before, and when he definitely tried to reopen the subject, she pushed it away. Later, when he insisted that the matter should be settled, one way or the other, she told him that she had given up all idea of leaving.
“It’d make no difference, even if we did go,” she had said dully. “I didn’t see it, first thing, but I do now. It’d be the same thing over again, that’s all, and happen worse.”
His heart had leaped in spite of him at the unexpected reprieve, but he had tried to encourage her, nevertheless.
“What, it’ll be a fresh spot, anyhow!” he reminded her bravely. “That’s something, surely? Fresh folks and a fresh house, as well as a different sort of air, as’ll likely suit you better.”
She shook her head.
“It’d only look fresh on the outside. It wouldn’t be fresh in any way as really mattered.”
“If it’s the walls as is still bothering you, they’ve no call to, as I’ve told you already. The house at the new spot is outside the gardens altogether. I asked Colonel Brangwyn special.”
But she refused to be heartened.
“It’d be the same thing over again,” was all she would say, repeating herself endlessly. “Just exactly the same. You and me and the gardens, and me choking myself to death.”
“What is it you do want, d’you think?” he had asked her at last patiently, and she had shaken her head again, looking away from him almost shyly.
“Nay, I don’t know. I’m daft, I suppose. It’s just room.... Ay, well, it’s no use talking about it any more. But you needn’t apply for Colonel Brangwyn’s.”
Much the same situation had recurred at intervals, later on, but it had always ended in the same way. Always she had drawn back again at the last moment. Always it had seemed to her that she had found the right road at last, only to realise that it led nowhere. Always she had seen in time that, no matter where she went, to this country-house or that, she would always have the little ring of an English garden round her.
Things had been better for her after the children began to come, but they had also been worse. The gardens had grown fuller for her, after their arrival, but they had grown no larger. Moreover, the increasing family had put a stop to any chance of retirement as well as to the occasionally-discussed project of “setting up for ourselves.” Money had continually grown tighter. With each fresh child that appeared, they were forced to “plough a furrow nearer the fence.”
Yet if it was the children who in the first instance had closed the door to escape, it was the children who in the long run had thrown it open. One by one, as they grew up, they had all of them left the gardens. They had loved them,—all, perhaps, except Ellen,—just as they loved their parents; but they had left them, nevertheless. Something of their mother’s longing for space must have entered into them at birth, making it impossible for them to remain. And not only had they found the gardens too small, but England itself, so that they had allowed Canada to swallow them up, as it swallowed so many.
It was not long, however, before they began to regret this wholesale snapping of ties. Not only did they get together as soon as possible on the other side, but, the moment they were on their feet, they wrote, urging their parents to join them. Sometimes it was Luke who wrote, and sometimes Joe; Maggie, sometimes, and sometimes Ellen. Later on, when they were all married, the boys’ wives wrote, too, and the girls’ husbands; and, later still, it was the grandchildren who, with their first handling of a pen, added their unsteady scrawls to the general petition.
It was really the grandchildren who had beaten him in the end....
IV
ALL the same, a long time had elapsed before he had finally given in. He was middle-aged and over even when the letters first began to come, and he had not felt able to face the venture. Mattie was all agog for it, of course, seeing it as the chance for which she had waited all her life, but he refused to consider it. He had said “no” so often, indeed, that it had seemed as if he could go on saying it for ever. But he had not gone on saying it for ever, or anything like it. Quite suddenly he had blotted out all those accumulated “noes” with a single “yes.”
Yet, perhaps, now that he came to think of it, it had not been as sudden as he imagined. It seemed to him now, looking back, that the “noes” had had no significance at all; that, in point of fact, he had been defeated from the very start. Right from that first occasion upon which he had found his wife upstairs, pushing the walls away, he had known that he would go....
Nevertheless, for ten years at least he had successfully resisted both Mattie’s persuasions and the calls from over the sea. It seemed extraordinary to him now that he should have been able to hold out so long. But then it was not he himself that had been able to hold out, but something outside him,—something that would not break, that never could have broken, so he had firmly believed, until it had given way on the previous evening.
Still, it had not been an easy matter, keeping his ears and his heart shut, all those years. Not only were there Mattie’s arguments to contend with, and of course the letters, but there was a constant succession of photographs as well. Snapshots of the party across the ocean were always arriving,—pictures of his children, of their wives and husbands, their homes, their families. And besides all these there were photographs of the nursery garden which they ran among them, and which they were rapidly turning into a big business. For in this one thing at least they had remained true to type. Without hesitation they had turned naturally and successfully to gardening.
At first he had felt little more for their far-off efforts than the aloof if kindly contempt of the finished workman for the crude beginner. He was glad, of course, that the children had kept to the old trade, but conditions were different “out there,” and at first he found them difficult to follow. As time went on, however, and the photographs showed the garden to be increasing in size and scope, his interest began to quicken. He had it fixed in his mind now what they were planting and when, and what they were growing for the different markets. Presently he was even trying some of their new-fangled ideas on his own account, although he was careful not to say very much about them. Thinking about that distant garden while he worked in his own, he came at last to that point where the mind passes so easily between place and place that the body might equally well be in either.
Mattie, of course, had reached that particular state long since. Her dream of last night had been only a vivid extension of it. Often, for instance, she would talk of the grandchildren as if they were no further away than round the corner. “Little Joe’s first day at school to-day,” she would say, bending over her sewing. “I hope they got him off in good time.” Or— “Maggie’s May’s not so grand with that cough of hers. I must see about getting her a bottle of something from the chemist’s.”
He had done his best to conceal from her his growing absorption in the Canadian enterprise, but it was not long before she discovered it. Dropping her talk of the grandchildren to some extent, she concentrated upon the business, surprising him, times without number, by her intimate knowledge of it. She, who had never shown even the faintest enthusiasm for his particular job, seemed to know every seed that was sown in that nursery across the Atlantic.
“Potatoes have done well for them, this year,” she would inform him, glibly reeling off a list of varieties. “‘Grand Elephant’s’ the best, though, they say. I’d like to try ’em. That sort we had ourselves wasn’t worth the planting.”
“Main crop was ‘Grand Elephants,’” he would remind her mildly, but without arousing her to any excitement.
“Eh, now! Fancy that!” she would answer, in a tone of polite wonder. “And I never knew!... Likely it’s the soil or something as makes the difference. Anyhow, all I can say is I thought ’em right poor.”
For some time she had contented herself with merely stimulating his increasing interest, but after a while she came out into the open with it as a weapon.
“You’d settle sharp enough, you’d see,” she was saying presently, when the eternal subject came cropping up again. “It’s the same job, when all’s said. ’Tisn’t as if you’d be going to something different.”
“It’d be different, though, in lots of ways,” he had replied firmly, much in the same hopeless but obstinate tone in which she had so often asserted that “it would be just the same.” “Come to that,” he had added with spirit, “I wonder you’re so keen on it yourself if it’s not to be fresh, seeing you’ve always been so set against gardening and such-like?”
She had laughed without resentment at his mild attack, too enchanted with her happy project to be stirred to anger.
“It’d be different in my way,” she admitted,—“I give you that—but I don’t know as it’d be that much different in yours. It’d be bigger-freer—nay, I can’t explain! But sticking things into the ground and taking them out again seems to me much the same job all the world over.”
He had said nothing to that, partly because it did not seem worth while, but also because his mind instinctively retreated when she mentioned size. She liked to think of the Canadian garden as prairie-wide, a great, untrammelled stretch of a place under an arching sky,—but that view of it repelled him. The photographs, of course, had shown him something of what it was like, but he chose to ignore them. Hidden away in his imagination was his own impression of the place, as a time-mellowed, sheltered circle of anciently-tilled soil....
It was perhaps because he had been dwelling upon the garden in that particular guise that yesterday he had given in. Also he had had an annoying day, spoilt by several of those tiresome little incidents able even to take the glamour out of the work which is nearest to one’s heart. But it was chiefly the weather which had overset his mind, hard and clear as it was with that sinister hardness and clearness which scarifies the soul. It was the only weather that ever made him feel really old, stripping as it did the veils from his various shrines. He had gone indoors for his evening meal, feeling that his life, under its present conditions, had nothing further to offer him.
The mail was in, he found, as he sat down,—it had seemed to him, of late years, that the mail was always in,—and a letter from Canada was lying on the table. Mattie had opened it, apparently, and presumably read it, but she made no attempt to force it upon his notice. She neither mentioned it, indeed, nor even as much as pushed it towards him, and perhaps because of this lack of coercion, he found himself eyeing it longingly. In his momentary state of depression it seemed to offer him the exact stimulant which he needed, and after resisting the impulse for a short time, he reached out and drew it towards him.
The atmosphere changed around him almost as soon as he opened the letter. Canada leaped out of the pages at him as he read,—Canada, live and free, and with red blood rushing in its veins. It had always seemed to him a country where everybody was young, and to-day more than ever it seemed peopled with radiant youth. The letter was full of vitality, of hope, of healthy happiness and success. He forgot his annoyances as he read, and his depression vanished. By the time he had finished the letter he, too, felt young, breathing the air of that land which seemed to know nothing of growing old....
The garden was in the letter, too, needless to say; in fact, it might almost be said that it was more garden than letter. It was almost as if the writer had posted a piece of the actual soil.... Kirkby, holding it in his earth-sensitive hand, found it an amulet transporting him so far that he lost all sense of his present surroundings.
He looked up after a time to find his wife’s gaze fixed upon him, and the teapot suspended in her hand. Apparently she had been about to speak, and then had been checked by a realisation of the importance of the moment. He stared at her as if he found some difficulty in focussing her, and she lowered the teapot slowly to the table.... He tapped the letter.
“Mattie,” he said. “We’d likely best go....”
It was really the garden which had beaten him in the end.
V
HE came back from re-tracing the slow trend which had led to the writing of the letter to find Machell staring at his open doorway from across the garden. From that distance, as he knew, the man could see nothing of what was happening inside; yet he bestirred himself sharply and moved away from the table. Len’s attitude affected him unpleasantly, just as his coming early had done; so that, when he went out at last to join him and give him his orders for the day, he had an uncomfortable feeling that this morning he was an enemy rather than a friend.
The feeling passed, however, as soon as he came into contact with him. Len was apparently his usual genial self, with nothing more sinister at the back of his mind than the preparations for peas and potatoes. The rest of the men arrived presently, and the gardens fell into their usual routine. By the time the sun had broken through, Kirkby was again beginning to wonder whether the letter and all that it stood for had been anything more than a dream.
The very weather of yesterday, that soul-troubling weather which had helped so largely towards his decision, now seemed like a dream, too. Looking at the fresh yet quiet colouring of to-day, at outlines diamond-clear and yet soft as human breath, he found it impossible to re-imagine it. But that was the worst of weather, as he knew, even although at the same time it was the wonder of it. You were happy on the good days, feeling that they would go on for ever; but, on the other hand, the bad days seemed as if they would go on for ever, too. And the bad days were very dangerous, because they were apt to make you lose heart. On the bad days, if you were not careful what you were doing, you might find yourself signing the whole of your life away....
Yesterday had been a destructive day, so bitter and killing that it seemed as if this morning everything should have been withered; but instead of being withered things were pulsing with new vigour. Even where there was no life showing above the soil, life spoke to him from below. The air, vivifying yet soft, had that baptismal touch which comes only at one time of the year. And running all through Nature was the thrill which comes out of nowhere, like the Spirit, so that the quiet land seemed to heave and thrill like sunlit waves of sea.
It came to him now that, next year, when the thrill was in the air, he would be in Canada. It would be the same thrill, he told himself hurriedly, because Nature’s magic was the same everywhere; and yet it would not be quite the same. On the soil where you had been born and bred there was always something more. Not only did you feel the thrill of the spring that was coming, but the thrill of the springs that were gone; so that, with each fresh spring on your native ground, the thrill deepened because of the past.
That thrill, at least, if he went to Canada, he would never feel again....
He had been right about Machell, he discovered later.... He discovered it after breakfast,—a breakfast which seemed to him more like a meal in a railway station than anything else. Beyond removing a few things from the mantelpiece, and routing a few other things out of a cupboard, Mattie had not actually begun her preparations for packing, but she managed to give the impression, nevertheless. The ebb and flow of her talk, rising and falling as she passed between kitchen and larder, came to him like the signals of approaching or departing trains.... Finishing his meal more hurriedly than usual, he went out to find Len again standing staring at the cottage.
This time, however, Machell made no attempt at concealment. Instead, he came forward to meet his chief awkwardly but eagerly.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” he began hastily, as if unable to contain himself any longer, “but there’s something I’d like to ask you. It’s all over the place you’re giving up your job, and I thought happen you’d put in a word for me if I was to apply for it.”
For a moment or two after he had spoken Kirkby did not know how to answer. He should have been prepared for the shock, he knew, but the fact remained that he was not prepared for it. Absurd as it seemed, it had not yet occurred to him that this sort of thing would follow naturally upon his “notice.” It would have come to him, of course, with the actual sending of the letter, but so far he had not progressed beyond the actual writing of it. His intuition had been trying to warn him, it was true, but he had not been able to grasp what it wished to tell him. But it was clear enough to him now why Len had seemed to him like a stranger who might possibly do him harm....
“What makes you think I’m meaning to give up?” he enquired at last, evading the question, and shifting his gaze from the man’s face to the greenhouse behind him.
Len wriggled uncomfortably.
“Nay, I don’t know ...” he began, looking down. “But it’s been all over the spot for a long while now. They’ve got it down at the village, too. Mrs. Kirkby’s always talked a deal about leaving, you see,” he added, rather more confidently, “and lately it’s seemed to me you were leaning that way yourself.”
“How d’you mean—‘leaning’?” Kirkby questioned him a second time, and Machell wriggled again.
“Well, sir, you haven’t been like yourself for a bit now, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Absent-minded and such-like, and not hearing when folks spoke.... And, begging your pardon again, sir,” he finished, with a nervous burst, “but you’re getting on. It’s only in reason you should be thinking of retiring before so long....”
He found himself presently on the further side of the greenhouse, without quite knowing how he had got there, or what he had said to Machell before he went. He felt pretty sure, however, that he must have promised him his support, for he could still see the smile on the man’s face, though distorted by panes of glass. But he had got away quickly because he had not felt equal to smiling at him in return. Indeed, never in his life had he come so near to experiencing the emotion of positive hate.
He understood now that he had never known how much he had valued his position until he was on the point of losing it. He had done well at his job, of course, arriving early, and achieving a horticultural reputation, not only in his own immediate neighbourhood, but in a wider district. Visitors to the Hall treated him with deference, and consulted him as an authority. He was invited to lecture, to judge at flower-shows, to sit on the committees of various societies. He had also written pamphlets,—one, upon an Alpine plant which nobody else in England had been able to grow, but which grew quite simply and easily for Kirkby, merely, as far as one could make out, because he wished it to do so.
Successful, however, as he had been in his own little world, he had never allowed it to upset him. He had never been over-elated about his doings, or tried to create an impression. Indeed, he had hardly ever thought about himself at all. He had taken the rewards of life, when they came, as simply as he took the fact of the pollen in the ripened flower.
But he had grown used to the situation, all the same. He had grown to expect the deference and the recognition, without knowing that he expected them. They had ended by creating a special atmosphere of his own in which he moved and breathed as naturally as in the air around him.
That atmosphere would be one of the things which he would have to leave behind him when he went to Canada. He would be nobody,—out there. People might be kind to him, of course, might even like him, but they would know nothing about him. If they thought of him at all, it would probably be only as somebody’s father, old-fashioned and rather a nuisance. They would never know that he had done anything or been anything,—out there.
He felt ashamed of himself at first for caring so much about the loss of a thing like that, but as he pondered the question further, he saw deeper. It was not just conceit and vanity that made people want recognition when they were old. What they were looking for when they asked for it was a definite confirmation of their personality,—a vital necessity, without which they were apt to wither away. They were like cut flowers, he thought, once they had lost their special identity. That was why so many lingered on in the place where they had lived and worked, feeling that they would die if they were taken away from it. Even those who had been neither pleasant nor useful in their lives received some sort of recognition in the place where they had lived. The new folks whom you met when you were old often seemed tacitly to deny that you had ever lived at all. You fought against it, at first, but you could do nothing about it. Presently, perhaps, you even came to see yourself through their eyes as a sort of ghost,—a ghost who would never have any future, and who had never had any past....
And along with your life, of course, they denied your work,—that work which was part of you and yet was so much bigger than you, and which you had fondly imagined would still live on in people’s minds, even after you, who mattered so much less than the work, were dead and crumbled away....
One of the several garden-cats appeared at that moment around a corner of the greenhouse, and twined itself lovingly about his legs. He could see another inside the greenhouse, sitting on one of the stages, and still another sunning itself happily inside one of the frames. They were an old breed now, which had been in the gardens for years—so old, indeed, that he had ceased to distinguish between the generations. For the same reason, and because of their puzzling likeness to one another, they had no individual names, but were known collectively as The Cat.
They were an ugly breed, he supposed, although he admitted it grudgingly,—brindled, with the darker spots of the brindling appearing invariably in the wrong places,—but he liked to see them about. It gave him a sense of pleasure to watch the sun bringing out on their glossy sides the tawny hues which went so well with wood and soil. He had grown so accustomed to them, indeed, that a cat of any other description about the place would have offended his artistic eye.
The Cat was another of the things which he would have to leave behind him when he went to Canada,—the things which already he was beginning to count over and to weigh before the time came to let them go. He wondered for a moment or two whether it would be possible to take one of the breed with him, but came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t do. Mattie might not like it; the people at the other end might not like it; and most certainly the cat wouldn’t like it. No, it would never do.
He pulled himself together, after a while, and went off about his business, but the beauty of the young spring day was largely spoiled for him. He even shrank from it, now, especially when it called to him, attracting his attention with scent and sigh in the fashion peculiar to the spring. Instead of soothing and heartening him, as it had always done before, it now seemed almost to attack him. He shrank from The Cat, too, especially from the sight of the sun touching it as it stalked across the gardens; and, going into his little office to examine his post which had just arrived, he shrank when he found catalogues and circulars addressed to “The Head Gardener.”
But most of all he found himself shrinking when he had to approach any of his men, fearing to find some other of them with Len’s petition ready upon his lips. As it happened, indeed, not one of them as much as hinted at his going, let alone applied for his post; but he continued to shrink from them, nevertheless. Self-conscious with his staff for almost the only time in his life, he felt that they talked about him when they saw him coming, and talked again when he went away.
He felt sure, at all events, that they knew what was happening or about to happen, together with the fact of Machell’s application. Discreet as they might choose to be on their own account, they must at least be aware of that. He wondered how long the question of his retirement had been discussed among them, and how much time they had given him. It humiliated him to think that the struggle between himself and his wife should apparently be common knowledge. Perhaps they had even betted upon the contest, he said to himself, bitterly, backing first one and then the other? Or, perhaps, he added, with a cynicism which was very foreign to him, they, too, had known that he would be defeated from the start?...
VI
THE impending change, he found, was already at work upon the house when he went in to his dinner. The whole place was upset. Cupboards and doors stood open; shelves had been stripped; while the contents of the parlour looked as though they had been having a waltzing competition. There was a large packing-case in the coal-hole, and another in the larder. Things which were usually upstairs had somehow managed to get down, while other things, which he had not seen for years, were strewn about the kitchen. The very atmosphere of the house seemed to have been shaken and churned,—to have been stirred up as violently as Mattie stirred her puddings. If he had felt at breakfast as though they were already at the station, he was now absolutely convinced that they were actually on the steamer.
Only in one instance, however, did he make any comment upon the upheaval. Mattie, as far as he could see, had moved almost every piece of furniture in the house, merely, it would appear, in order to prove that it was possible to move it. He ventured to point out that some time would have to elapse before they could even hold their sale, and she answered him rather curiously as they sat down to their meal.
“Nay, I know it looks rather silly to be moving the stuff so soon, but I’d a reason for doing it. We’ve got to settle what we’re going to take, you’ll think on, and what we’re going to sell; and I thought the sooner I started in at the job, the better. But I found when I came to think about it that I couldn’t see the things in any spot but this! In fact, it wasn’t till I’d started pushing and pulling ’em about that I could do anything with ’em at all!”
“You do get used to seeing things in the same spot,” Kirkby said, feeling at the sight of the “pushed and pulled” objects surrounding him much as he would have felt before a bed of uprooted flowers.
“You do that!” Mattie agreed, passing a hand over her heated face. “That used you forget what they’re like altogether. Why, I found I didn’t even know the shapes and sizes of things when I came to look at them!”
“They get part of a place,—that’s what it is,” Kirkby said. “You don’t see them as if they were by themselves, but as if they were built in.”
“Ours seemed built in right enough, this morning, anyhow,—I know that! I never remember them taking such a lot of managing before. It was almost as if they knew what it was all about, and didn’t mean to budge if they could help it!”
It was warmer this morning, Kirkby said, and likely she was feeling it a bit,—looking out as he spoke at the thin, young, spring-glow lying over the gardens, and wondering again how yesterday could have been so different.
“Nay, it wasn’t that altogether, though I’m not saying it mightn’t have something to do with it....” Getting up, Mattie set an open tart, light as an autumn leaf, on the table between them. “But I can tell you I was real taken aback when I found I didn’t even know my own furniture! I made sure, for instance, as that dresser of ours would be first-class for the new house, but now that I’ve had a right good look at it, I doubt it’s over-big. Then I thought as how that corner-cupboard we bought would do nicely for our pots, but as soon as I got it down I saw it was too small. It’s a queer thing, it seems to me, when you’re so far out with your own stuff! It’s like living with folks that long you don’t even know their faces.”
“They get part of you,” Kirkby said once more, as he had said about the house. “Faces or furniture, it’s the same thing. They get that much part of you, after a while, you don’t rightly seem to notice them.”
Mattie looked about her at the disordered fittings with a mixture of affection and distaste, much as a mother might look at a host of unruly children. “Ay, they do get part of you,” she agreed reluctantly. “I never thought I should mind parting with anything in this house. I never liked the things, as you don’t need telling, even though we bought ’em together; nay, nor the house, neither. But I found, when it came to it, that I wasn’t over-keen on letting any of ’em go. It seemed sort of cruel, somehow, to go leaving them behind.”
“You’ll not think twice about ’em,” he assured her, “once they’re out of the road. There’s no need to go fretting yourself over a thing like that.”
“I’m not fretting myself, not I,—nor likely to be!...” She laughed across at him, her lips curving and her eyes shining. She had always been a woman of a fluid temperament, easily up and down, but of late years it had seemed to him that she had grown a little dry. “Dry” seemed particularly the right word, he thought, looking at her to-day, reminding him as she did of a thirsty plant that was lifting its head in the rain.
“I’d be likely to fret, wouldn’t I, on a day like this?”... She leaned towards him, laying her arms on the table, and emanating so much sheer radiance of spirit that it almost seemed as if there were an actual halo round her. “Why, I’ve been rubbing my eyes half the morning thinking it couldn’t be true! That was why I was in such a hurry to get things sorted out. It seemed as if it helped to bring it all that much nearer.”
“It’s near enough, as it is,” he answered, in perfectly good faith, and then looked up guiltily, startled by something in his tone which he had not intended to be there. But she was too busy thinking to notice it.
“You’re right there! In fact, it beats me how we’ll ever be ready if we’re to get off, this spring. Old folks like us can’t afford to be kept waiting about.... It won’t be too soon for them Over There, anyhow,—I know that!” She laughed contentedly, looking past him over his shoulder as if she saw welcoming hands reaching towards her, and welcoming eyes turned her way. “They’ll be sending word, like enough, as we’re to go by flying-machine!”
“You’ve not got word written to them yet we’re meaning to come?” Kirkby asked. “We ought to let ’em know by the first mail.”
“Well, I’ve not got as far as putting pen to paper, yet, if you mean that; but the letter’s written all right! What, I had it off as pat as you like before ever I’d had my breakfast!... Come to that,” she added, “I’ve written that letter many a time in my head during these last ten years,—ay, and set it down as well, just to liven myself with the sight of it!... In fact, I’ve done it that often, it seems almost as if there’d be no need to do it now.”
“If you go thinking about it like that, you’ll likely never get it done at all,” he warned her, but she only smiled.
“There’s no fear of that! I’ve never had a bonnier job to do before, and I’ll likely never have as good again!... Every spring when it came round I’ve prayed as this might happen, and it’s happened at last. It was always worse in the spring. You can stand a deal of things in the winter when you’re comfortable like, and you’ve your own hearth-fire; but you want to be stirring in the spring.”
He did his best to nod sympathisingly at the wistfulness in her tone, but he could find no answer to give her. He had never known what it was to be afflicted by the fever of spring-wandering. He had never wanted to leave his gardens at any time, but especially not in the spring. Leaving a garden before the spring-sowing was finished would have seemed to him like leaving a child before it was able to walk....
It was true, of course, that last night he had signed his gardens away, and that, too, in the spring. But he had only signed them away in exchange for another garden, and the work would be well on its way before he went. It was not restlessness but weariness which had forced him to a reaching-out towards new life; not the spring-fret but the overwhelming pressure of years which was driving him overseas.
“I just can’t believe we’re really going!” he discovered Mattie to be saying, when his mind returned to her. “It don’t seem possible. To think we’re going to see the lads once more, and hear ’em speak! They’ll have altered a deal, I reckon, especially Joe. I always said Joe would make something to look at, if he once got going, and it’s queer if he hasn’t, out there. They say the air’s that grand, it’s like fine wine. I don’t know much about wine, but I’ve always hankered after the sort of air that sounded like it. I’ve sometimes thought I could breathe a bit of it, after reading the letters.... Then there’s the girls, too,—I fair ache to set eyes on ’em. Maggie, now,—she was always a good sort; but I don’t know how I’ll contain myself when I see Ellen. I thought a deal of ’em all, as you know, and lads is always lads, but I’ve sometimes thought I kept the softest spot of all for my little Ellen!”
He heard the words at first as one hears a familiar tune played from afar off, familiar but unmeaning; but presently the intensity of her feeling got home to him, and his outlook brightened. He had been troubled when he first came into the house, jarred both by its chaotic state and by the events of the morning, but as the meal proceeded he found himself calming gradually. It was impossible, in any case, not to find something infectious in Mattie’s attitude; to feel, if only as a pale reflection, something of her ecstasy. With a deliberate effort he adjusted his angle of mind, setting aside his preoccupation with the things that he must lose, and forcing himself to turn his attention to the things that he would gain.
“They’ll be taken aback, Over There, when they hear we’re coming!” he contributed presently, more cheerfully. “I doubt they won’t credit it, at first, we’ve been so long about it!”
“Nay, they’ll credit it all right!” Mattie laughed contentedly. “Many’s the time Maggie’s told me she’s dreamt we were on the road. All the same, they’ll be on pins till we’ve actually arrived. They’ll be thinking every day as we might go and change our minds.”
He shook his head without looking at her.
“Nay, we’ll not do that. It’s too big a thing, is this, to go playing about with.”
“Too big a thing, and too short of time. It’s got to be yes or no with folks when they get to our time of life. Just yes or no.... Anyway, they’ll know it won’t be me as’ll be likely to change,” she added, with a touch of defiance. “It’s you they’ll be afraid of, if it’s anybody.”
“They’ve no call to be afraid, nor you, neither. I’ve passed my word, and I’m going to keep it. I shouldn’t have written that letter if I hadn’t meant it.”
“There’s many a letter gets written as is never sent,” Mattie said, half-mischievously, dallying, as human nature loves to do, on the very threshold of happiness. “I was saying something of the sort only just now.”
“This here’ll get sent right enough, don’t you fear....” He straightened himself a little, and his mouth set firmly. “Where’s it got to, by the way? I’ll be making the round of the place, this afternoon, and I could leave it as I pass.”
She nodded a trifle vaguely in the direction of one of the cupboards.
“I sided it away, so it wouldn’t get lost.... I could likely run down with it for you if you’re busy?”
He said “no” to that, however, speaking with the same air of determination which sat so strangely upon him. It might be Mattie who, in the long run, had brought about the present position, but dignity demanded that at least he should hand in his own notice.
“I’d best see to it myself,” he told her, getting up from the table. “Mind and give it me before I go.”
“Likely I’d forget to give it you, isn’t it?” she laughed; and then, still laughing, shivered.... “It fair gives me the creeps to think how, if that letter never went, things’d be just the same as before!”
“They wouldn’t be quite the same, no matter what happened. Folks pass on, somehow. Even trying to do things makes a difference.”
“A deal o’ difference it’d make to me, I’m sure,” Mattie answered him cynically, “if I found myself still landed in this one-eyed spot!... Ay, well, I won’t go fretting about things, just when they’re shaping so nicely,” she corrected herself quickly. “Anyway, I’m glad you’ve seen your way to facing the job at last.”
There was a hint of interrogation in her tone as to how he had arrived at his decision, together with another and fainter one as to how he was taking it. Standing, he looked away from her through the window while he answered her unspoken questions.
“It just came over me, as it were, that I might never see the lads again if I didn’t do something about it. You go on thinking there’s time enough and to spare, and then all of a sudden there comes a day when you think there’s no time. That was how it was, yesterday. I just sort of felt I’d be rare and glad to see ’em all again.”
The tears came into Mattie’s eyes.
“You’ll never know how glad till you do see ’em!” she said, with a break in her voice. “There’s nothing like your own flesh and blood, when all’s said and done. And there’s the grandchildren an’ all.”
“Ay, and the garden....” He turned to her then, smiling a little shyly, a little shamefacedly. “I’ve never let on to you about it, Mattie, but I’ve been fair wild to see that garden!”
She laughed back at him and his hesitation, triumph and good-humoured affection mingled on her countenance.
“You’d no need to let on.... It was plain enough, I’m sure! I’ve known for a long while now you were thinking a deal about it.”
“Ay, well, it’d be queer if you hadn’t, I suppose,—you’re that sharp! But I’ve often thought I’d like to take a look in and see how the lads were framing.”
“You’ll be seeing how all right before you’re a couple of months older!...” She got to her feet, too, and began sweeping the pots together in a series of joyous movements. “Eh, but I hardly know how to hold myself in about it! I was fair tongue-tied, last night, when you said as we’d best go, but I’m that full of it all to-day, I can’t keep it from wagging! What, I’ve been clacking to the furniture all morning for want of anything better,—telling it all about it as if it was human beings! You’d have laughed fit to crack if you’d seen the way I went on. Len Machell popped in for a word and catched me doing it, and he looked scared out of his life!”
He stiffened a little at Machell’s name, feeling a cold wind blow in upon him and his manufactured enthusiasm. As before, the situation had remained more or less in the air until Len touched it; but as soon as he laid a finger upon it, it became concrete.... He said “Machell?” after her, not as a question, but as if weighing a sound which, in the space of a morning, had grown sinister and threatening. But she took no notice.
“I was making pretence this house was Over There, and the furniture was the lasses and lads. ‘Eh, Ellen, my girl,’ says I, hugging the grandfather clock, ‘I’m that glad to see you I could cry!’... ‘And is this little Sally?’ I says, kissing yon little stool. ‘She’s grown rarely since her last photo!’ Right daft I must have looked, and no mistake, but I couldn’t help it. I was that chock with it all I had to get shot of it, one way or another.”
She was laughing and crying as she talked, busy living over again the absurd scene which had yet been so vivid and poignant, but for once she did not receive the kindly smile with which he usually rewarded her attempts at humour. Instead, he turned away from her again, almost as if he had been wounded and wished to hide it.
“What was Len doing, hanging about the place?” he enquired, surprising her both by his words and by his faintly-sharp tone, for he was a lenient master with his men.
“Nay, what, he was only in the house half a minute or so! You’ve no call to be vexed with him, I’m sure. He just looked in to say you’d told him we were leaving, and to ask if there was anything he could do. He said his missis would be glad to come up any time to lend a hand with the packing, so I said the sooner we set about it, the better.”
“I never told him we were going,” Kirkby said, in the same almost angry tone, making her stare again. “It was him as said it.... He said it was all over the spot, and had been for long; and he wanted to know if it was true.”
She answered him soothingly as she carried off the pots to be washed in the back kitchen.
“Ay, well, it doesn’t matter, does it, one way or t’other? He’d have had to know, anyway, before so long. I must say I was a bit surprised to find you’d been so glib about it, but it makes no odds. He didn’t tell me it was all over the spot, but I might have guessed it. Folks always seem to know what you’re meaning to do a deal sooner than you do yourself!”
He picked up his hat from a side table, and moved towards the door. The impulse was strong in him to tell her of Machell’s application, but he restrained it, being uncertain of her attitude. He was longing for sympathy on the subject, despising himself as he did for the bitterness in his heart, and knowing that sympathy would assuage it. But she had never seemed to value his position as head gardener,—had, indeed, constantly made him feel that it was something to be ashamed of,—and he dared not risk the reference. Yet he lingered before going out, still playing about the question, as if hoping that something or other might occur to ease the trouble in his mind.
“I can’t say I’m best pleased to think Len’s been settling our business for us,” he said, as she came back into the kitchen. “He’s paid to attend to his own job, and not to go prying into ours.”
“He hasn’t settled it for us,—not he! We’ve settled it ourselves. And as for a bit of gossip and such-like, I don’t see how you’re going to keep folks from taking an interest in those about them.”
“I don’t look for Machell and the rest of the staff to go taking an interest in my private affairs.” He lifted his voice a little, and felt a flame rise in him as she laughed. This was the second time to-day that he had felt that sudden spurt of hate, and in his horror at its recurrence his bitterness deepened. He hastened to get outside the door in case the hate should suddenly decide to vent itself in angry words.
Mattie followed him to the threshold.
“It’d be queer if the whole place didn’t know I’d wanted to go!” she said briskly. “There’s been times, I’m sure, when I’ve felt like telling it all round England. It isn’t a crime, anyway,—not as far as I know. We’d a right to go if we liked. As for Machell, he’s a decent-enough lad. I don’t see why you’re so mad with him. Mrs. Machell’s a good little soul, too, though she hasn’t much about her. Let ’em talk if it pleases ’em! A deal o’ difference it’ll make to us what they’re saying and doing here, once you and me are a thousand miles away!”
She stopped to draw breath both for fresh laughter and fresh speech, and in the pause he managed to break away from her. He went slowly, it is true, still longing for the consolation which he had been denied, and bowed by her last words as though she had set a weight upon him. The thousand miles of which she had spoken were laid like lead about his neck. But he went, all the same.... By the time she was speaking again he had rounded the corner of the greenhouse and was lost to her. He heard her voice continuing for a moment, as if not even the consciousness of his departure could force it into silence, and then break as if something had snapped it. He walked on blindly, not heeding where he was going.
And neither of them had remembered the letter.
VII
HE had intended to set off on his round as soon as he had finished his dinner, but in the end it was half-past two and after before he finally started out. Something seemed to detain him, whispering in his ear that this was the last time, and he could not bear that it should be the last time. It was not true, of course, since he would be certain to make the round of the gardens many times yet before he left, but he felt as if it was true. It was true, in point of fact, in so far as it was the last round of his period of settled service. In any case, he shrank and lingered a little before setting out, as a man shrinks and lingers a little before starting upon a world-circling journey from which he may never return.
Yet all the time he was longing to be gone, and to be able to ease the strain upon his nerves by fresh scenes and steady movement. He was still nervous of the men; the kitchen garden still irked him; the sight of The Cat stealing softly across the soil still foolishly made him ache. But it was not until the gilded freshness of the short spring day began to dim a little that he roused himself to action, hurrying now where he had loitered and fretted, as if in a sudden panic lest he should be too late.
Passing the last of the greenhouses, he crossed between borders of box to an arch in the high wall, where there were cherry-trees nailed flat to left and right like the sticks of so many fans. There was a little wicket-gate beneath the arch, and as he laid his hand upon it he turned. Even from that distance he could discern the figure of Machell in one of the houses, and by the stillness of his attitude he could tell that he was watching him. Watching to see the last of him, he said to himself, bitterly!... Watching as he would watch him on that last day, when he saw him leave the home of his youth for ever.
Even when he had passed along to the right, so that the wall came between him and Len, he could still feel his eyes fixed upon him, following him. They troubled him, making him nervous and uncertain in his movements, conscious that his back was bent and his step not altogether steady. He became so obsessed by them, at last, that suddenly he swung round, certain that Len had followed him across the garden, and was watching from the gate. There was no one under the arch, however, and he moved on again, feeling hot and foolish; yet nevertheless the intolerable sensation of being spied upon remained.
Down the steep rush of the hill he went beneath tall, splendidly-spaced trees, the smooth grass between which would presently be coloured and starred by daffodils and wild white hyacinths. Under the leafless boughs of beech he could see the hills,—the mountain-land and moorland which ring in all this part of the country, except where, on the one side, it runs rolling to the sea. In the natural arches to his right were framed the long slopes of the park, and almost beneath his feet as he came down were the massed roofs of the Hall.
He had never thought very much about the Hall before, even though the greater part of his life had been spent in its vicinity. He had accepted it, of course, as the central fact of the situation, the reason for which he and his work existed at all; but he had not thought much about it. The gardens were his world, especially the kitchen garden, and once outside their limits things were apt to seem a little blurred. There were many days when the Hall, empty and still, and wrapped in rain or mist, seemed almost as far away from him as his lads in Canada.
But to-day he looked at it as he came down, trying to see it, to take it in, so that, once safely photographed on his memory, it should never afterwards escape him. And at once he found, as Mattie had found with the furniture, that he could not see it. Instantly association was upon him, refusing to allow his mind to focus on shape or size. He could not decide whether the house were beautiful or ugly, dignified or insignificant, of this period or that. As he had said to Mattie of her household gear, it was no more possible to judge it than it was to judge a familiar face.
He had, it is true, an impression of fine stone, of moulded windows and doors, a wide courtyard, pillars, steps, and soft-coloured, slated roofs. But always he found it impossible to see it as it would have looked unclad and without its background. Always his eye went to the creepers which he had tended upon it, to the shelter of the woods behind it, the run of the park before it, to the long lawns and the gravel sweep and the curving boundary of the river. And even those he could not see as another person would have seen them, for he had looked at them so long that it was only the spirit he saw, and never the bodily forms which contained and expressed that spirit....
Yet this place, grown so impalpable to him that he could not even focus it, had him closely welded to it. He knew vaguely that you could not separate him from it without hurting him, any more than you could strip the creepers from the walls without leaving a scar. House and land had grown impalpable to him because between him and them moved the pictures of his past, so that you could not sever him from them without damaging him, because what you would really be separating him from was his own life.
There was a centralising power about the mansion of a big estate of which those who had never been connected with one could have no knowledge. It was like a huge buoy to which you were attached,—so safely attached that, no matter what came or went on the ocean outside, you, at least, could never slip away. Those outside must often feel a little lost, he had sometimes thought, shrinking from that possible isolation even in his mind. But, anchored to a place like the Hall, you had no fear of getting lost. Although you could not see it because you knew it so well, it was at all events a background against which you could see yourself,—as small, indeed, and comparatively unimportant, but still more or less plainly. Once broken away from that background, however, and out in the open,—in Canada, for instance,—it seemed highly probable that you would not be able to see yourself at all.
He spoke to one or two of his men who were busy about the grounds, rolling the gravel or trimming the turf, but always with the same anxiety and suspicion which had afflicted him all the morning. They were not Machell, it was true, but each one of them seemed to him to represent Machell, and, when he left them, he felt that they followed him with Machell’s searching eyes.... It seemed an incredible thing that he, who had always taken his fellow-beings so simply and so kindly, should now be unable to meet them with an open mind. It made him ashamed and angry, so that his glance refused to meet theirs, and his voice sharpened when he spoke to them, as it had done with Mattie during the scene in the cottage. Even the Hall servants he would have regarded doubtfully if he had chanced to come across them, feeling sure that they, too, knew what was about to happen to him, and would spring their knowledge upon him before he was ready to meet it.
But he saw nobody as he passed in front of the house, walking with what he felt to be a furtive step which he was yet unable to alter, and pausing only to inspect the rose-bushes fronting the long line of the low terrace. Nobody opened the door and came to him, or hailed him from the stone verandah. He glanced nervously at the windows over his shoulder, but nobody looked out. The whole place, indeed, had a strangely hushed appearance, almost as if it had veiled its eyes while this its servant went on his last round.
Hurrying in the same almost slinking fashion along the central walk, he came to the cliff-side, and stood looking across the beautiful, dangerous stream to the mountain-wall beyond. He could scarcely remember a time when, passing through the grounds, he had not paused just there, with the great trees around and above him, and the rocky river below. The wide view, passing over the wooded cliff across, and rising by green and russet slopes to that last long line of loveliness above, sometimes many-coloured and strong, and sometimes faint and phantasmal as a cloud, had been all that he had ever wanted by way of “escape.” It seemed impossible now that, yesterday, when he had needed it so much, he should never even have thought of it. One look at the open fells, at the swift river running black between its carved banks, at the endless crossing and re-crossing of fine bough-traceries against the colourless sky, and his sudden revolt against his environment would have been as suddenly stilled. Just that one look, and things would have found their proper balance again; one look, and he would never have dreamed of writing the letter....
He swung round on his heel when he remembered the letter, and stood staring towards the Hall as if through its solid structure he
could see Mattie waving to him from the hill beyond. Mattie would think that he had forgotten the letter on purpose, and he did not want her to think that. He could hardly believe that, having spoken of it just as he was on the point of leaving the house, he could yet have managed to come away without it. He even searched his pockets, as if feeling that, by sheer determination, he could persuade it to materialise; stared at his hands, as if thinking that they might contain it without his knowledge. But it was obvious that he had not got it, and with a curious inconsistency he felt furious and frustrated. He said to himself that he wanted the matter over and done with,—that he could not bear to have it hanging on like this. He even retraced his steps for a short distance, as if meaning to climb the hill again in order to fetch the letter. If he had discovered it in his possession at that particular moment, he would have thrust it in at the Hall not only with relief but with actual triumph.
But almost at once he turned again as though somebody had tugged at his jacket. He was tired, this afternoon, and knew that he would regret the extra effort before he was half-way up the hill. Time was getting on, too, and if he lingered much longer it would be dusk before he was back from across the river. And Machell could take the letter.... He smiled a wry little smile as he reflected with what keen delight Machell would take the letter!...
He cast another glance at his view as he came back, remembering how often he had tried to persuade Mattie to find in it the release which he found in it himself, and how dismally he had failed. Mattie had had no use for it either as a view or as an outlet. She had liked the space and the height, but she had disliked the hills. For her they had merely been other and greater walls, which she could not push away. And she had hated the river.... Besides, nearly the whole of the view was to the north and east, and Mattie had spent the greater part of her life with her heart turned towards the west....
Also she had not cared much for being seen about the Hall grounds, even at those times when the owners happened to be away. It was only with difficulty that he had induced her to attend any of the Hall functions,—the cottage-garden show, the tenants’ garden-party, or the servants’ ball,—and then she had only appeared under protest. His employers had sensed the protest, he felt sure. In as close and delicately-dovetailed a corporation as that of an estate, it was always easy to detect the person who deliberately stood outside.
Nor had she ever attempted to make intimate friends of any of the people in the district. They would have accepted her all right, for she was both amusing and clever, as well as a hard worker. But right from the first she had either rejected her neighbours’ overtures, or accepted them against her will, and gradually they had come to acknowledge the situation, and to realise that they could get no further.
He had spoken to her quite early upon the subject, seeing where she was drifting, but he had not succeeded in changing her mind.
“What’s to do you won’t take tea with Mrs. Grisedale?” he had enquired one afternoon, as he came in. “I met her just now when I was down at station after some weed-killer as hasn’t turned up, and she was right grieved about it. They’re having a few friends in, she says, for that christening-party of theirs, and she’s keen for you to be there.”
“I just didn’t fancy it, that’s all,” Mattie had said, although taking care not to meet his eye. “It’s a bit of a trial, I always think, talking to folks as you don’t know.”
“Well, that’s easy mended, isn’t it, and the sooner you start in at it the better? Mrs. Grisedale, for one, ’ll not take you long. She seems a decent little soul.”
“Oh, ay, she’ll do.”
“There’s Mrs. Ellwood an’ all,—she’s asked you time and again. She told me she’d never taken to anybody as she’s taken to you.”
“And she’ll do, too.”
“Well, then, what’s to do you can’t make friends with the pair of them?” Kirkby had blundered on. “You couldn’t have a nicer couple of folks than them two, and you’ll be wanting somebody.”
But he had had to probe for some time before she would give him the explanation.
“It’s like this,” she had said at last, half-ashamed, as he could see, and yet determined upon her line of action. “It just isn’t worth while. Making friends takes a deal of time and a deal of patience, and once you’ve got ’em made, it takes a deal of getting over if you’ve got to leave them. Well, it isn’t worth it. I’m set on getting away from this spot, as you don’t need telling, and if I take up with any of the folk, it’ll all be wasted.”
“Nay, what, friendship and such-like is never wasted, surely!” he had affirmed stoutly. “I don’t hold with gardeners getting too thick with folks, nor their wives, neither. There’s some as’ll seek you out just for the sake of what’s behind you. But it isn’t good, all the same, to be always by yourself, and a few nice friends’d likely help you to settle down.”
But, unfortunately for his cause, he had hit on the one plea that was least likely to weigh with her.
“Nay, but that’s just what I don’t want to do,” she had said, looking past him, with the effect, which he was later to know so well, of seeing beyond him into great distances. “I don’t know how to put it, but it would be wrong for me, would that. It’d be losing something as is right down necessary to me. If making friends with folks is going to mean settling down, then I’m best without it.”
That part of the explanation he had been quite unable to understand, so he had concentrated upon the other.
“I don’t see there’ll be that much wasted just by you going to Mrs. Grisedale’s christening-party!” he had said humorously. “It seems a real pity you shouldn’t have a pill-gill now and then. I’ve always thought you were just cut out for going amongst folks and keeping ’em all lively.”
At all events he had succeeded in making her laugh at that, changing her, to his relief, from the far-gazing woman who chilled him with her strangeness to the brisk, cheerful girl whom he had sought in marriage.
“Ay, I generally manage to make a stir, wherever I am!” she had said gaily. “I’m not one for sitting mum in corners, and never was. If I’d had luck to hit on a spot I liked, I’d have done as much as anybody to keep things going; but it’s no use thinking about it here.”
And she had never swerved from her determination during the years which followed,—never swerved at heart, that is, for she had not been hard and fast about it. She had got to know both Mrs. Grisedale and Mrs. Ellwood in the end, as well as the usual run of people in the district. She had gone to parties in her time. She was never behindhand, either, when help of any sort was required, for she was a kind enough woman, in spite of her discontent. But she had never got to the point of making intimate friends. Always she had looked beyond her neighbours to that distant thing in which they had neither lot nor part.
Descending the steep steps which led to the water’s edge, he came to the catamaran moored in its pool between the wooded sides of the worn gorge. Going aboard, he began to wind himself from bank to bank, the light, wooden raft moving easily on its steel pulleys. The water was quiet enough here, black and almost still, but on either hand he could see the fretted rush of one of the fastest streams in England. A beautiful river, winding and sweeping and leaping.... A river which could rise in a few hours and become a broad, flying torrent, with crisp, curling waves like those of the neighbouring sea.
And at once, almost the very moment, it seemed, that he pushed off, the ache at his heart left him, succumbing to that curious influence which water has upon the human mind. The detachment it breeds worked upon him even in that black pool which could for no more than a moment give pause to the sea-going mountain stream. The smooth rush out across the unrippled surface was a steady rush into peace. His nerves eased in the gliding movement of the raft, held to earth though it was by that velvet pull on its under side. He drew deep breaths as he worked at the creaking handle. His released mind took to itself wings.