Chapter I: SEEM to have wandered a long way from Eileen, but it was really she (1)

who brought the birds to my mind.

I got up early the morning after our arrival, in order to show her the way about, and because it is not one of my daily duties to be the first down in the morning, I noticed all the more how the opening of the doors and windows, to let in the day, is something much more than the mere undoing of locks and latches. There is nothing to compare with the inrush of sweet morning air that greets you on the threshold, as you take your first look-out on a dew-sparkling garden, probably all alive with the songs and chirps and twitters of the birds, and teeming with the scents of things seen and unseen, each pouring forth its gratitude in its own way for the ever-new miracle of the sun’s return.

This letting in of light and clean air, sunshine, song and scent, after the inanimate darkness of the night, is so wonderfully symbolic that it seems a mistake that it has come to be regarded as one of the inferior domestic tasks, relegated to the minor members of the household. And though I am not one of those exceptionally virtuous people who habitually rise at six o’clock, waking every one else within earshot and taking vain pride in their performances, whenever I chance to be the first one to welcome the morning and let in the day, I feel there are decided compensations for the wrench of getting out of bed minus a cup of tea.

I also realize how easy it is, in the flush of exhilaration produced by the early morning air, to make oneself a nuisance to all who are less energetic. For some unaccountable reason, when I am down extra early, I always want to bustle about, and do all sorts of rackety things that never occur to me on the days when I do not put in an appearance till breakfast is ready.

I had opened the windows in the living-room, and had set Eileen to make the fire, and was seeing to things in the kitchen, when she followed me with an excited squawk: “Oh, ma’am, there’s somebody has lost their canary! It was on the window ledge just now, and it’s flown into a tree. Have you got a bird-cage handy? I expect I could catch it. There it is again”—pointing to a handsome yellow and black tit who was pecking eagerly at some bacon rind I had just hung up outside the window.

I explained.

“Wild, is he? _Wild?_” she exclaimed; “and don’t they charge you nothing for them?”

She finished the room with one eye perpetually on the windows.

Having a healthy appetite, that had been touched up a little extra with the hill-top air, she was more than willing to help me get the meal ready. I made the usual preliminary inquiries as to her experience in regard to cooking, and was surprised to hear that she had actually won a silver medal at a Cookery Exhibition.

Surely this was unexpected good fortune, and I asked myself if I really deserved such a heaven-sent boon as a silver-medalled cook! I decided, however, that in view of all I had undergone in the past at the hands of those who were not so decorated, it was nothing more than my due that I should be so blessed in my declining years. My only regret was that war-time would allow so little scope for her genius!

Feeling very light-hearted, and wondering how she would get on with Abigail when cook gave one of her periodical notices and I placed Eileen on the permanent staff, I said: “Then I needn’t bother about the breakfast! We will have poached eggs on toast. I’ll lay the cloth while you get them ready.”

But she looked at me doubtfully. “We didn’t ever have _poached_ eggs at the boarding-house,” she began. “But I think I know how to do ’em. You just break them on the gridiron over the top of the fire, don’t you?”

After all, it was I who poached the eggs, while Eileen explained that the medal had been awarded to the cookery class at the orphanage _en bloc_, for making a Swiss roll. . . . No, unfortunately, she didn’t know how to make Swiss roll either, as she had been down with scarlet fever that term. Still, it was her class that got the medal, so of course she had as much right to it as anyone else.

I trust I bore the disappointment complacently. I’m fairly hardened to such sudden drops in the kitchen thermometer.

The great thing about Eileen was her willingness, and her anxiety to learn.

When I was seeking to impart knowledge, however, she seemed to think it was for her also to contribute some general information. Hence our duologues often ran on these lines:—

“When you make the tea or coffee, be sure that the water is _quite_ boiling; or else——”

“Yes, ma’am. Do you know, one of the young gentlemen where I used to live, couldn’t help being bald, no matter if he used a whole bottle of hair restorer every day. It ran in his fambly.”

“Really! Well, now we’ll fry some bacon. You put a little of the bacon fat from this jar into the pan first of all to get hot. Like this.”

“Yes, ma’am. Isn’t it strange, grandmother won’t never have red roses in her bonnet. Can’t bear red.”

She also excelled in asking questions; from morn till eve life seemed one long series of conundrums which I was expected to answer. I never realized before how many queries country life presents; hitherto it had seemed to me such a simple, straightforward state of existence.

An old man had been secured to do an occasional odd day’s work (at highest London prices). He described some misfortune that, last autumn, had befallen “Hussy,” the cow who comes for change of air into my orchard at intervals—an apple she had eaten (one of mine, of course) being blamed for the fact that her milk turned off, “like vinegar ’twas.”

Eileen—in common with every other young human under twenty years of age—thrilled at the word apple, and inquired if “Hussy” had stolen it off a tree?

“Stolen it off a tree!” scoffed the man; “and why should she bother to creek her neck up’ards when they was lying by the thousand as thick on the ground in that thur orchard as—as—well, as apples!”

Eileen looked incredulous.

“Yes, by the thousand they was, and not wuth picking up, no one wanted ’em; no men to make cider; no sugar to jam ’em; child’un all got colic a’ready as bad as bad could be, couldn’t swaller no more; too damp to keep. Ay, and we that short o’ cider as we be!” And the aged one—who had been coining money hand over fist, with letter carrying, and the sale of eggs and poultry, and a couple of pigs, and the hay in his paddock, to say nothing of gilt-edged easy little jobs waiting for him all about the place at any price per hour he cared to charge, and old age pensions paid regularly to himself and wife—paused to shake his head and sigh over the misfortunes of the times.

Eileen was likewise moved. To think of it—unwanted apples! And no one to eat them! She reverted to the phenomenon several times that day, with such queries as these:—If eating one apple turns the cow’s milk to vinegar, would eating fifty turn it to cider? If so, wouldn’t it be cheaper to make the cow grow cider, as the old man said cider had riz to 7_d._ a quart, and milk was only 6_d._ You would then make a penny a quart profit that you could put into the Savings Bank to help the War.

After watching some vegecultural operations she inquired: “Why is it, when he puts potatoes in the ground and beans in the ground all the same way, the beans come out at the top of the plant and the potatoes come out at the bottom?”

Another time it was: “What do they use the sting of the nettle for?” And when she had enlarged her garden vocabulary, she inquired: “Is a spider an annual or a perennial?”

“I can’t find a tap out there to turn off the water,” and she indicated the spring outside the gate, tumbling out of a little wooden trough wedged in among the rocks, into a pool below. “I suppose they stop it at the main. What time do they turn it off? . . . _Never?_ It runs like that always! Then how long is it before the whole lot runs away and it’s all dried up? And don’t they ever come down on you for wasting the water?”

* * * * *

Yet more accomplished people than Eileen have often surprised one by their ignorance. An experienced and supposed-to-be-highly-qualified cook came to me one day with the sad news that we couldn’t have any stuffing with the duck for dinner that day as there wasn’t a single bottle of herbs in the house. I reminded her that there was an almost unlimited amount of everything in the garden, including a sage bush growing on a wall that now measures 15 feet by 6 feet. “In the garden?” she repeated in surprise. “But I didn’t know it was good unless it was bottled! You don’t mean that country people use those things raw?”

I felt such an apologetic cannibal as I explained!

She it was who split up the chopping board to light the fire, the first morning after her arrival, because she couldn’t find a bundle of firewood anywhere. On being referred to the stack of dry kindling wood in the coal shed—she had never heard of lighting fires with trees before; never thought, indeed, to live with a family that expected you to do such things!

* * * * *

On one occasion, when I was in one of the largest and poorest of the London Elementary Schools, where the children looked as pitifully sordid and poverty-stricken as I have ever seen them, I asked a few questions of one small girl in the front row of a class. Her outside dress consisted of an old dilapidated waistcoat worn over a dingy flannelette nightgown, while a ragged piece of serge fastened around the waist with a safety-pin did duty for a skirt. But she was only one among a classful of rags and tatters.

“What is your name?” I asked, by way of starting conversation.

“Victorine,” the forlorn-looking little thing replied.

“And what is your lesson about?” I then inquired.

“Therdelfykorrickul,” she informed me.

Seeing the bewildered look on my face, the head mistress, who was showing me round, said, “Enunciate your words more carefully, Victorine, and speak slowly.”

Victorine understood what “speak slowly” meant, and so she said very deliberately, “The—Delphic—Horricul.”

“So you are learning about the Delphic Oracle. And what are you going to do when you grow up?” was my next query.

“I’m going to work in the laundry like muvver!”

We went into another classroom; here more ragged unwashed clothes greeted me on every hand. I had no need to ask the subject of the lesson, for the girls were facing a blackboard on which was written “The Characteristics of Shelley’s Poetry.”

After I had seen more tatters in a third room, where a lesson was being given on “Infinitive Verbs,” I said to the head mistress, “If I had this school, do you know what I should do? I should take a class at a time, and give out needles and cotton, and tell them to do the best they could to sew up the rags in their dresses and their pinafores. I would not mind if they did not put on patches even to a thread in the regulation way, so long as they made some attempt to run together those rents and slits and yawning gaps. I would let the other lessons go till this was done. And I would not let a girl take her place in a class in the morning till she had mended as well as she could any rents she had worn to school.”

The head mistress shook her head. “That would not be practical; you see, it isn’t in the Syllabus.”

I don’t pretend to understand the inwardness of syllabuses, but I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t an opening here for a new one. While so much unpractical stuff is taught to the poorer classes in elementary schools, is it any wonder that the children know so little of the things appertaining to daily life?

Eileen didn’t exactly suffer from rags. She was as neat and patched and wholesome as her clean, sensible grandmother could make her; but she was forlorn-looking to the last degree. One of the first things I tried to do was to get her to take a little pride in her personal appearance. And it was wonderful how she responded. With her hair released from the uncompromising, tight screw that had been kept in place by three big iron-looking hair-pins, and done higher up, and more loosely over the forehead, and a pretty collar and blue bow for her Sunday blouse, she looked a different being.

“Poor little thing, she has never had a soul take any interest in how she looks,” Ursula remarked to me. “And even though we’re not allowed to cast our bread upon the waters, nowadays, they haven’t said anything officially about ribbons.” And so we searched our drawers for suitable finery that might bring a little colour into Eileen’s hitherto drab outlook. Virginia followed suit, remarking that she liked to scatter little seeds of kindness by the wayside, since you never know what may result.

True! She didn’t!

Meanwhile, Eileen gloated over the odds and ends, fixing weird and crazy-looking bows to her black sailor hat, draping her shoulders with bits of lace to see if they would make a collar, and standing in front of the kitchen glass trying the effect of pinks and purples under her chin.

For a time, the questions ceased.

VIII

A Cold Snap

FOR a couple of days the sun was radiant, and the air actually warm. We agreed with each other that Italy and the South of France weren’t in it.

We started gardening with all the zest of backwoods-women, who know that the only vegetables they can hope for are those they themselves grow. Unlike the majority of Londoners, the War had not added much to our knowledge in this direction. I had not owned a house in the country many months before I learnt the value of first-hand home production. Hence, when the allotment fever set in, we were quite able to keep pace with the rest of the world despite our failing intellects. The only thing that differentiated us from the remainder of our fellow-citizens in the Metropolis, was the fact that we appeared to be the only ones who did not feel themselves competent to bestow unlimited information and advice, in season and out of season, to all and sundry, on every imaginable and unimaginable point connected with the raising of food crops.

One of the many reasons for the charm that envelops our life at the hillside cottage lies in the fact that it brings us much closer to the fundamental principle of keeping alive than is ever possible in town with its over-civilization. Of course, it isn’t desirable that our mental and spiritual interests should centre in the question of what we shall eat and what we shall drink, and wherewithal shall we keep warm and comfortable, but I think a woman suffers a distinct loss when she eliminates these matters entirely from her horizon.

I know, from personal experience, that there comes a period in our lives when we women feel that there are much higher enterprises beckoning us, that we (individually, not collectively) are called to do some work in the world that is far greater than seeing to meals, and keeping the household machinery moving unobtrusively and with regularity; but it is fortunate that there eventually returns to us (if we are properly balanced) a realization that some of our very best work can be put into the making of a home, and that far from it being narrow and sordid and selfish to devote a large part of ourselves to household administration, it is in reality one of the widest spheres that a woman can choose, and one that will give her the biggest scope for bringing happiness and strength and health to others—and, after all, isn’t that the avowed aim of the most advanced of modern feminists?

Still, I admit that our cramped surroundings and jaded, strained existence in cities do not always make a round of domestic duties seem alluring to the woman who has to cram her belongings and her aspirations into a small modern flat, or who has to do her cooking in one of the unhealthy, sunless basements that prevail in the older houses in towns. A woman needs fresh air, sunshine and a garden if the best is to be brought out of her. Oh, yes, I know some few women have done great things without one or another of these items—but probably they would have done still more if they had had the opportunity to come to their full development under more favourable circumstances.

I’m not surprised that women, whose existence is limited by the narrow environment of towns, so continually beat the air with a longing to do something more than seems possible in the flat or dull suburban villa. Civilization has taken out of their hands so many of the useful occupations that formerly kept women busy—and worthily busy too; and it is not to be wondered at that they cry out for something to do, and invent Causes on which to expend their zeal and energy. The preparation of food, the laundry work, and indeed most household duties are now done for us in cities on the “penny-in-the-slot” principle (only we have to put a shilling in the slot, as a rule, for the pennyworth of result that we receive); and it is small wonder that so few of us can work up any interest in the process.

But how are matters to be altered? you ask me. I don’t know! Pray don’t think I’m proposing to find solutions for grave problems in these stories! I’m only giving you a record of facts, just simple everyday little happenings “of no value to anyone save the owner.” And we’ll leave it at that, if you don’t mind, and return to the garden.

* * * * *

Before the War labour was not so scarce, and there was no need for us to plant the vegetables ourselves, unless we desired to do so. Now, however, one’s own personal work was a valuable asset, and we put our backs into it—at least Ursula and I did; Virginia was engaged most of the time in describing the sort of tools she would make, if she were in that line of business, to obviate the grave spinal trouble she was certain she was developing.

I don’t mean to imply that Virginia isn’t a good gardener; she can be an excellent one when she likes, for she knows what gardening really stands for in the way of hard work. Whereas some of my would-be assistant gardeners seem to think the chief requisites are a comfortable hammock and a book; or, at most, a “picture” muslin frock and a pretty basket and a pair of baby scissors. Such girls remind me of many who write and inquire if I have a vacancy for a sub-editor in my office, the chief qualification stated in their letters being that they “do so love to browse among books.”

Virginia isn’t like that; she puts on a business-like garb, and knows—and annexes—a good tool when she sees it. But it is her bright ideas that are the hindrance to progress. She wasted ten minutes that morning explaining to me that she was sure, if I would only have turnips planted in the mint bed, it would be another war economy, as the mint flavour might permeate the turnips, and thus save double expense with lamb.

And then another ten minutes went in enlarging on the grasping nature of the makers of gardening gloves in not supplying four pairs of extra thumbs with each pair, since any intelligent gardener could wear out eight thumbs with one pair in the simplest day’s gardening. She offered to let me use the idea free of charge in my magazine, if I would undertake to keep her supplied with gardening gloves for the rest of her natural life; but she stipulated that they must be proper leather ones, not the four-and-sixpenny war variety she was then wearing, composed of unbleached calico, with merely a chamois postage-stamp stuck on the front of each finger and thumb.

In the intervals of conversation she aided us with our digging, yet, in spite of the National Call to spend as much on seed potatoes as would keep the family in vegetables for a couple of years, we continually found ourselves drifting away from the ground we were trenching, for the violets were already out, also some early primroses, and little white stars were showing on the wild strawberry trails in sheltered corners under walls that faced south.

And the garden is full of sheltered nooks, despite its being so high up. As the ground slopes towards the south, every wall that props up the garden—and there are so many, like giant steps down the steep hillside—gives protection from the cold winds to the little growing things that nestle in every crevice and on the ground below. Everywhere the pennywort was sending out clear green disks from the mysterious depths of crannies in the wall. Crocuses were showing orange buds in the garden beds. One precocious pansy held up a white flower, streaked and splashed with purple.

“Spring has really come,” we all chorused. And oh, how good it seemed to be done with the winter; such a winter too! Surely the longest and most awful winter humanity has ever known!

With spring and summer immediately before us, as it seemed, we decided to leave the trenching just for that day, and explore the lanes and woods. The lichens and mosses were at the height of their beauty—a beauty that would fade once the sun got any power. The wall-stones were splashed with browns and greys, rust-colour and orange, black and olive, and one particular lichen that is our especial joy tints the stone a milky pea-green shade that is unlike any other colour I can recall.

Last year’s bramble leaves were purple and scarlet and crimson and yellow. Where the small ivy creeping up the walls had been touched by the frost, it had turned a vivid yellow mottled with warm brown and crimson. And it is surprising, once you take note of it, how much crimson is used by Nature where you would expect to find only green; and not merely a dull red, it is a brilliant, vivid carmine that is dropped about in quiet, unsuspected places, lighting up dark patches, emphasizing sombre details that one might otherwise overlook.

We were turning over a handful of brown leaves under an oak tree in the wood; there we found the streak of crimson showing inside an acorn that had just burst to let out a young shoot that was seeking about for roothold below and light up above. Not only one, but hundreds of similar brilliant touches were scattered about where the fertile acorns lay among the moss and last year’s fern.

In one secluded spot, where the cold had not been severe enough to wither last year’s foliage on the undergrowth, long sprays of ground ivy, climbing over a fallen branch, had turned to deep wine colour, stems and all, and lay, as Eileen said, “beautiful enough for one of them lovely wreaths of leaves they put round best hats.” Certainly it looked more artificial than natural, if one didn’t happen to know that ground ivy often takes on this tint in its declining days.

Thanks to Tennyson, we all know that rosy plumelets tuft the larch; but it doesn’t matter how many times you see them, they are always worth looking at—and marvelling at—again.

And there seems no limit to the crimson splashes. Is there anything anywhere that can compare with the Herb Robert, its leaves far more radiant than its blossoms; or the leaves of the evening primrose when they start to fade at the bottom of the stem; or the waning foliage of the sorrel?

To make a list of the crimson touches (as distinct from the reddish-brown) that one finds on stems and foliage any day in the country, would be a revelation to most of us.

* * * * *

Though the sun had been so bright when we started, it doesn’t do to trust too much in an English spring, and we presently noticed a very decided change; the temperature dropped with great rapidity, as clouds came up and hid the sun, and the hills that towered about us suddenly loomed gloomy and forbidding. The wind veered round from south-west to north-east; and by evening it was piercingly, bitterly cold.

Taking a last look round with the lantern before we locked up for the night, not a sound could be heard; everything was absolutely still, with that unearthly silence of a land suddenly gripped by overpowering cold. I glanced at the thermometer hanging on the outside wall; it already registered three degrees below freezing; it would probably be ten before morning.

We bolted the door and shut out the cold, hoping no one was wandering lost on the hills that night (not that anyone ever is, but it is pleasant to have kind charitable thoughts like that, on a bleak night, as you put yet another log on the fire).

* * * * *

Next morning, as it was colder and more perishing than ever, I decided to cope with several days’ arrears of office work, piling itself up in all directions. Virginia said it was just as well the weather necessitated our remaining indoors, as she could now get on with _her_ work. Of course we asked: What work?

She informed us that she was engaged upon an anthology, “Shakespeare and the Great War.” She felt that “Shakespeare and Everything Else” had been done pretty thoroughly—by less competent people than herself, it is true; but, all the same, the poet had been dealt with exhaustively from every point of view but that of the War. Also, the War had been dealt with, _in extenso_, from every point of view but Shakespeare’s. Hence, her present literary effort.

And would I kindly give her any quotations I could think of, that had any bearing on this world-crisis.

All my brain was equal to was—

“Tell me, where is fancy bred?”

which undoubtedly indicated that the War Loaf was known to pall on the public taste even in Shakespeare’s time.

She said she had expected me to say that, it was so obvious. Nevertheless, I noticed she hurriedly jotted it down.

We asked her to read her MS. so far as she had gone; it seemed a pity for us to overlap.

“I’ve made a fair start,” she explained, “but the trouble is they all turn out so awkwardly. For instance, the first quotation I have down is—

‘She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat
to her household’

—anyone can see Daylight Saving there——”

Naturally, I opened my mouth to speak, but she cut me short, testily:

“Of course I know as well as you that it isn’t Shakespeare—at least I wasn’t reared a heathen!—but that’s just the tiresome part of it. Every quotation I think of isn’t Shakespeare at all. Here’s another that would do beautifully (and take up a nice bit of space on the page too),

‘The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-flags’ sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.’

“Even a child could tell you they were the searchlights trying to spot a Zepp.—only it isn’t Shakespeare! It’s very worrying. Yet I know if only I could get the book done, there would be a fortune in it. W. S. always sells, and he’s so respectable too!”

I said I was sorry my office duties had prior claim on my time, and I urged Ursula to do her sisterly part. But she said she couldn’t be bothered just then; her mind was more than fully occupied in trying to lay the blame for everything on the right person.

So I took Virginia’s MS. and read it down.

“How full of briars is this working-day world.”

This proves that barbed wire entanglements were known
in the seventeenth century.

“How far that little candle throws his beams!”

This indicates clearly that Shakespeare was fined for
failing to comply with the Lighting Restrictions.

That he was compelled to pay War Profits out of the
“royalties” on his plays is evidenced by these poignant
words in _Macbeth_:—

“Nought’s had, all’s spent,”

and doubtless there was a subtle reference to War
taxation in

“Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite
variety.”

The unfailing hold of Shakespeare on humanity is the
fact that he touched upon all phases of life. (This
sentence was Virginia’s own literary contribution to
the “Anthology.”) For example (she went on), even a
sugar shortage was known in his day. To what else could
he have been referring when he wrote

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,”

and can anyone doubt that

“Double, double, toil and trouble,
Fire burn and cauldron bubble,”

points to meatless days?

Here we were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was Miss Primkins, an elderly lady who lives by herself (or at least with Rehoboam, her cat) in a pretty little cottage further down the hill. Miss Primkins has been hard hit by the War, but no matter how she has to skimp and save in other ways, she never relaxes her work for the wounded.

And it was about her contribution to Queen Mary’s Needlework Guild that she came up to consult me. Not that we started there straight away—of course not. We talked about the shortage of sugar, and the high cost of boots, and the scarcity of chicken food, and the price of meat, and the difficulty of knowing how to feed Rehoboam adequately and yet in strict accordance with official regulations, and the colour of the bread, and “what are we coming to,” and other topical matters like that. Then, when I had pressed Miss Primkins several times to stay to our midday meal, and she had as many times assured me that she must not stay another minute, grateful though she was for my kind invitation, as she had put on the potatoes to boil before she came out, she produced (in an undertone) a paper parcel from her bag, and with much hesitation explained that she wanted advice on a private matter.

I was all attention.

Undoing the paper, she displayed what looked like a round bolster case made of pink and blue striped flannelette. As she held it up for inspection, it “flared” at the top (to use a dressmaker’s term) with merely a small round opening at the bottom.

I glanced it over as intelligently as I knew how, and then inquired what it was.

“It’s a pyjama for a soldier,” she murmured modestly, in a very low voice. “I’ve cut it exactly by the paper pattern, yet Miss Judson, who saw it yesterday, says she doesn’t believe it’s right. We’ve neither of us ever made one before, so I thought I would run up to you with it; you would be _sure_ to know.”

“Er—h’m—ah—yes,” I said, as light dawned. “It’s all right so far as it goes; but where’s the other leg?”

“The other leg?” she echoed, “there was only one in the pattern.”

“Of course; but you should have cut it out in double material; the garment requires two legs, you know.”

“Does it!” she exclaimed in genuine surprise. “Why, I thought it must be intended for a soldier who had had his other leg amputated!”

* * * * *

Before Virginia put away her “Anthology,” preparatory to having lunch, she added another quotation to her list—

“For never anything can be amiss
When simpleness and duty tender it,”

and against this she scribbled, “one-legged pyjamas”—doubtless for elucidation and amplification at a later date. I hope I haven’t forestalled her.

IX

Snowdrifts

IT was later in the day, and the zest for Shakespeare had waned. Virginia had moved from beside the fire and was sitting nearer the window, in order to get what light there was from the sun just disappearing behind the opposite hills. She was very busy with some crochet edging she had lately started. It was the first time within the memory of living woman that Virginia had been seen with a crochet-hook in her hand—fancy-work had never been her strong point—hence the inordinate pride with which she patted out the short fragment on any available surface at frequent intervals, surveying it from different points of view with her head cricked at various angles, and calling upon all and sundry to admire.

After moving nearer the window she again patted out the seven small scallops on her knee, as usual, and then became meditative. No one paid much attention to her, however. I was sitting on the settle, with a heaped-up table before me, absorbed in MSS., which I was reading, and then sorting into various piles—for printer, for reserve, for return—and arranging these on the seat beside me; important work, which accounted for my preoccupation.

Ursula was busily engaged in the laudable endeavour to construct a pair of child’s knickers out of two pairs of stocking legs. Someone had told her this could be done. It had appealed to her as a serviceable way to use up done-with stockings (and she assured me the problem of what to do with these “done-withs” had been a long-standing mental burden), while at the same time one might be conferring a benefit upon the poor. The fact that the modern “poor” would have scorned anything so economical did not worry her.

At last Virginia broke the silence. “It’s really quite remarkable! I don’t know that I’ve met with a more extraordinary crochet pattern than this,” she said thoughtfully.

“Where did you get it from?” I asked rather absently, as I went on with my work.

“From one of the magazines you are supposed to edit,” she said blandly.

“What is there extraordinary about it?” I inquired, now thoroughly roused up to give the matter all my attention, while Ursula laid down the dislocated stocking leg she had been wrestling with.

“Well, it’s like this. There is the pattern, you see,” pointing to a picture I had seen before, “and there are the directions. When you’ve worked them through once, that makes one scallop. Do you see?”

We said we saw it quite plainly.

“Then, you notice it says at the very end, ‘go back and repeat from the first row’? Now this is the extraordinary part of the affair; every time I go back and repeat from the first row it makes an entirely different scallop. The last time but one, you see, the scallop came on the opposite side of the sewing-on edge; I thought _that_ was interesting enough! But now I find this last scallop has _turned a corner_. Funny, isn’t it?”

For the first time we gave Virginia’s bit of edging serious attention. What she had done with those directions it was impossible to say, but the result was certainly peculiar.

“That will be a valuable piece of lace by the time it’s finished,” I said. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m making it as a Christmas present for you,” she replied sweetly. “I think it may help to promote conversation if you display it at your social functions. I know you’re going to say how unselfish it is of me. I think, myself, I mellow as I age.”

“Not at all,” I replied politely, and suggested that we should go for a walk, lest such concentrated thinking should be too much for her.

“If you’d been a properly-minded hostess you would have proposed that long ago. I’ve been waiting anxiously for it, only there is Ursula absorbed in that outfit that no masculine infant anywhere would recognise——”

“Oh, I’ve given up the knicker idea long ago,” interrupted Ursula. “I’ve turned them into chest-protectors for the old people in the infirmary. And now, as a war economy, I’m going to enlarge your vests (I neither ask for, nor expect, gratitude!). The laundry having shrunk them to waistbands, I shall add an upper and a lower storey.”

“—and _you_ sit hour after hour reading MSS. What are they all about? What’s that one in your hand, for instance?”

“This one,” holding up some sheets of violently-written paper that almost burst through the envelope, “is an anonymous letter from some irate lady who objects to something or someone appearing in our pages. I haven’t time to read it, but if you care to wade through it——”

“Anonymous letters are so futile.”

“Anything but,” I told her. “It is always a pleasant thing, at the end of the day, to feel that you have, even in a slight way, contributed to anyone’s happiness. And I’m sure the lady who dug her pen into that anonymous letter was very happy when she posted it. Glad am I, therefore, to be the unworthy instrument permitted to promote her joy!”

Virginia merely snorted. “What’s the next MS. about?”

“This is a very long poem on the War, and the writer explains that she has made all the lines run straight on in order to save paper, but doubtless I can find out where it rhymes. It begins ‘Hail, proud mother of nations who dwell in these sea-girt islands for centuries past and centuries yet to be——’”

Virginia said she’d skip the rest, please, and wasn’t there a little light fiction anywhere in the chaos before me?

“This is a story of a beautiful Russian princess who was doomed to live in a lonely castle, with no one but her aged and decrepit nurse, in the very centre of a pathless Siberian forest, hundreds of miles from everybody, until the spell should be broken——”

“What spell?” inquired Ursula.

“(I don’t know—the writer doesn’t say)—until the spell should be broken, when she would be free. She was the most exquisite vision that ever burst upon human sight. Not only were her features perfect, and her hair a rippling cascade of gold, but her dress was grace and beauty combined.”

“Then it wasn’t one of _this_ season’s models!” ejaculated Ursula, “hence it must have been out-of-date. All the same, I’d like to know who was her dressmaker. Did they think to mention the name?”

(“No, that is not stated.)—She used to spend her days listening to the wolves who congregated all around the castle howling and gnashing their horrid fangs, till one day an honest, sturdy forester approached, and with one fell swoop slew dozens of them. Whereupon the Princess Elizabeth—for such was her name—opened the door and cried, ‘Welcome, deliverer!’ and in less time than it takes me to tell you, that aged and decrepit nurse had prepared, all unaided, a sumptuous wedding banquet, while gorgeously apparelled guests arrived in battalions from nowhere. Then, just as they were about to be married, the honest, sturdy forester, no longer able to conceal his identity, confessed that he was indeed the Prince.”

“What Prince?” inquired the interrupter again.

“I don’t know, and the writer doesn’t say, and I wish you would remember, Ursula, that in the larger proportion of MSS. sent to editors it is customary for the writers to omit the essential details!”

“Then I’d just as soon go for a walk as hear any more,” she said with decision.

Whereupon we got into big coats and thick gloves and tied on our hats with motor scarfs, I don’t mean the filmy wisps one wears when motoring in the park, but those large, solid, thick, brown, woollen scarves that look as though they had been made from a horse-blanket—the sort that the West End window dresser in desperation labels “dainty!” But the air was bitingly cold, and we were so high up among the hills, that no wraps would have been too warm that day. Then we started off, after I had said a final word to Eileen about the necessity for keeping the kettle boiling, as we shouldn’t be gone long. She had assured me many times already that she wasn’t the least bit nervous about being left alone—rather liked it, in fact. She was blissfully engaged at the moment in trying to construct a “dainty evening camisole” (as per some penny weekly she had bought coming down) out of the satin ribbon and lace from Virginia’s last year’s hat.

The small white dog with the brown ears accompanied us to the gate, but decided that, with the thermometer just where it was at that moment, home-keeping hearts were happiest; so he promptly returned to the hearthrug.

The sun had disappeared, but there was still light on the hill-tops, though the valley below was fast settling down to darkness. Virginia suggested the lantern, but I thought we should not need it, more especially as a moon was due immediately. So we set off at a swinging pace.

Already, owing to the severity of the frost, the roads rang like iron to our tread. Every stalk and twig was glistening with rime and feathered with hoar-frost. No sign of life did we see in all that walk. Where were the birds, and squirrels, and rabbits, and pheasants, and all the hundreds of timid wild things we were accustomed to meet on our summer rambles? We hoped they were safely tucked away in barns or burrows, or sleeping in warm hayricks, for nothing else above ground would give them any shelter. I thought of the row of twittering swallows that always perch themselves along the ridge of the cottage roof on hot summer afternoons, and felt glad they had gone off to a warmer climate.

But for ourselves, we would not have exchanged the weather that moment for any other, no matter how balmy. There is something remarkably exhilarating in the clear cold air of such a day on the hilltops, and as we mounted up and up our spirits rose with us—even though the roads were rough and terribly hard on war-time leather.

I once remarked to a local resident that I found our stony hillside roads a bit trying, to say nothing of the side paths.

“Well now, I do be s’prised to hear ’ee a-say that,” he replied. “For the on’y time I were up to Lunnon—I went for a day scursion—d’you know my legs did that _hake_ when I got back, I were a week getting over it. It were all along o’ they flat stones what they do have up there; why, if you believe me, I was a-near toppling over every other minute. There weren’t ne’er a blessed thing to catch holt onter with your toes! I felt as though the pavemint was a-coming up to knock my head. Now on these here roads o’ ourn you can’t slip far, because there’s always summat of a rock or big stone to trip up agin.”

For myself, however, I sometimes think I would prefer the said rocks and stones if they were boiled a bit, and then mangled.

* * * * *

At last we reached the crest of the hill, and paused to get our breath. The silence was awe-inspiring. At all other times there is a persistent hum of insects, or cheep of birds, or the rustling of leaves and swaying grasses—movement and sound somewhere, night as well as day. But when the earth has been swept by the magic of frost, then there is silence indeed. From where we stood, we might have been alone on the very edge of the world. No house was visible, and although we knew that the little village lay in the valley below us, we could see nothing of it.

All was grey, merging into indigo in the depths of the coombes. Grey were the trees on the farther hills, grey unrelieved by the lights and shadows that gaily chase each other over the steeps in sunny weather, as the white clouds sail across the sky above them.

Near at hand the trees took on more individuality. The straight columns of the larches were mysterious-looking and awe-inspiring, suggesting regiments of soldiers suddenly called to a halt. Pale grey beeches, that in damp weather show a vivid emerald green down the north side of their huge trunks, where moss flourishes undisturbed, were now stretching out strong bare arms over the carpet of many years’ leaves lying thickly beneath them. Silver birch stems gleamed in contrast to the glossy dark green of innumerable aged yews that dotted the woods—ancient inhabitants, indeed, standing hoary and heroic like some dark-visaged guardians of the forest, among a host of newcomers of a far younger generation.

* * * * *

But while we were standing there, a sound suddenly broke the stillness, a sound I have heard hundreds of times on those hills, yet never without an eerie feeling. It begins far away, a low undertone murmur; gradually it comes nearer and nearer, getting louder and louder, till it becomes almost a roar, and then—_diminuendo_—it passes on and is finally lost in the far distance.

It is only the wind as it suddenly rushes through the river gorge; but as it tears at the forests on the hillsides, and lashes the branches together, it produces a strangely uncanny sound, more especially when the trees are bare and extremely vibrant.

Hearing this, one can understand the origin of the old-time legends about headless horsemen galloping past on windy nights, and similar hair-raising stories. As a child, when I often visited at another house in this region (for four generations of us have climbed these hills and explored the valleys), I heard these same “headless horsemen” gallop along the slopes on many stormy nights; and despite my years and my common sense, I still feel the same creepy shiver in the back of my neck when they have a particularly mad stampede past my cottage door, for then they always pause to give the weirdest of howls through the keyholes!

“How dark it is getting!” exclaimed Ursula. “Where is your moon? And just hear the wind coming up the valley!”

It had not reached us as yet, but the words had scarcely left her lips before it came—swish—full upon us. We had to grip each other and plant our walking-sticks firmly on the ground to keep our feet. And then we knew what the sudden change meant, for next moment down came the snow—snow such as the town-dweller knows nothing about, for in cities there are buildings to break the force of the elements; but on these heights there is nothing to impede the fury of the storm as it gallops over the upper regions, crashing and smashing as it goes.

The snow dashed in our eyes; it got inside our coat-collars; it clogged up our hair; it swirled and “druv” (as they say locally) till it made our heads dizzy, and our eyes smarted with trying to see through the whirling mass.

Owing to our exposed position we felt the full force of the storm, and it was a difficult matter to make headway in the blinding flakes and stinging wind.

“There is a short cut through the wood, further along the road; let us get home as soon as we can,” I said, leading the way, and we staggered on against the blizzard, till we came to the wood, and plunged from the road into its recesses. But I soon found it is one thing to know the way through a dense mass of trees in bright sunshine with a path clearly defined, and quite another thing to find one’s way in the twilight, with a gale blowing in one’s teeth and every landmark obliterated by the rapidly falling snow.

We stumbled along for some time, over the rough stones and great boulders, lovely enough in summer with their coverings of ivy, moss, and fern, but very painful and cold for the shins when you tumble over them in the snow. Before long it was quite evident to me that we were merely wandering at large among the trees, and scrambling among the undergrowth of stalks and bracken, our hats catching in the hanging branches, our skirts being clutched at by the all-pervading bramble—path there was none. I had to admit I had lost my bearings, though as we were going steadily downhill, I knew we should arrive at the other side presently, as downhill was our destination. What little conversation we indulged in—beyond the usual exclamations every time we tripped over something—had to be done in shouts, so high was the wind.

In this way we tumbled on for about half an hour. Just as Virginia was confiding to me—_fortissimo_ above the blizzard—how she wished she had been nicer to her family when she had the opportunity, and how sweet and forgiving she would have been to them all had she but known that I was going to take her out to an arctic grave, the snow ceased, the clouds broke, the moon appeared, and at the same time we cleared the wood and struck a familiar lane—“Agag’s Path” we had named it, on account of the need for walking delicately.

By way of keeping up our spirits, Ursula began to chant, to some lilting, sprightly tune, that most lugubrious poem, “Lucy Gray.”

“The storm came up before its time,
She wandered up and down;
And many a hill did Lucy climb,
But never reached the town.”

When she got to the verse—

“They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank,
And farther there were none!”—

Virginia exclaimed, “For mercy sake, if you _must_ wail, do wail something cheerful and lively. ‘The Boy stood on the Burning Deck,’ for instance, would warm one up a bit, instead of that other shivery thing.”

By the time we reached our gate the storm was over, though the wind was still sweeping restlessly over the hills. A dog belonging to a neighbouring farmer jumped over the garden wall. He had evidently called in the hope of getting a chance to settle a long-standing score he had against my own innocent-looking animal, who was ever a terrible fighter! We paid no attention to the dog, however, but hurried up the path, only too thankful to see the lights of home, and glad that Eileen had forgotten to pull down the dark blinds. Nevertheless, I wondered that she did not open the door so soon as she heard the gate. I put my hand on the latch, but to my surprise the door was locked! I rattled the latch and knocked. The dog whined inside and gave impatient little short barks which always mean a summons to someone to open the door and let me in. But the door remained locked.

Then Eileen’s voice within—

“Are you quite by yourselves? Has the wolf gone?”

“Open the door at once, and don’t talk nonsense,” I said firmly, trying not to sound as irritated as I felt.

“Oh, but it isn’t nonsense. I’ve seen them out there! One was there just now. And I’m not going to risk my life by opening the door if he’s there still.”

Evidently _our_ lives were unimportant! “If you don’t open the door this very instant,” I said, “I’ll get in through the window. You must be out of your senses, and you have always professed to be so brave!”

The key grated in the lock, and the door opened half an inch, while Eileen’s nose peeped at the crack, to make sure we were not the wolf. Then she explained, “If you’d been here for hours and hours, as I have”—(we had actually been gone an hour and a half, though I could understand the sudden storm, and our delay, had made her nervous)—“hearing those wolves outside a-howling and howling and gnashing their horrid fangs, you wouldn’t wonder I was afraid to open the door. I saw one skulking off just before you came in.”

I understood the situation immediately. “Eileen,” I said severely, “what have you been reading?”

“I couldn’t help just seeing what it was all about when I spread the sheets on the dresser. You said I must have fresh papers for the dresser and shelves——”