Chapter I: SEEM to have wandered a long way from Eileen, but it was really she (3)

Having got him in, and rubbed him down, and wrapped him up in his favourite bit of old blanket, and given him a bone (which he couldn’t eat, poor little chap, but he had it in his basket with him, against such times as his mouth was in working order again), I returned to the garden—you couldn’t have kept me out of it now! I found I didn’t need the hug-me-tight, however, and I left it on the orchard gate.

What a work it was, tumbling over stone edgings one forgot were there, tripping over tree trunks and logs—the whole place seemed strewn with obstacles one never noticed until the snow covered them over.

I picked myself up continually, and worked on with my broom. Virginia came up once to point out to me my appalling lack of scientific method; but as I have never had any illusions on this point, it didn’t worry me. Ursula volunteered the information that I looked like Don Quixote tilting at a windmill, each time I attacked a bush or tree. I knew she was merely jealous of my ability. I’m not one to let a little thing like that deter me from my course of well-doing. I merely took off my fur necklet and thick motor scarf, and left them on a stile, so sunburnt was I getting beneath them.

And how grateful even the dry cracking twigs of the rose bushes seemed to be for the lifting of the load that bowed down one and all. The hollies had been trying bravely to hold up their heads, but it was hard work; every leaf had held out a little curved hand to catch a few snowflakes as they fell, and the total result was a mound that threatened to break the trees to pieces. They, too, shook themselves cheerfully, when I relieved them of their burden.

I could not do much to help the lesser plants; they were mostly buried beneath the snow, and I hoped they were the warmer in consequence. The poor wallflowers, that had been so sprightly with opening yellow buds when we arrived, now showed only shrivelled branches above the snow.

As I broomed my way towards the vegetable garden, I noticed that the birds were gathering near—they had kept away before, while the dog was about. But now the starlings began to shriek from the roof of the big barn. “Look at her! Look at her! What’s the use of wasting time on rose trees! No grub’s there! Look at her! Shaking snow down! Just as though there wasn’t enough on the ground before!”

“Oh, do be quiet!” shouted back a rook. “Just look at our nest! It would have been such an up-to-date affair, too; wife built it on the new war-economy lines—clever bird my wife is—only three sticks, you know; saves waste; and _now_ look at it! Wife can’t even find the sticks!”

“Serves her right,” cawed a neighbour (a lady, I feel sure). “She shouldn’t have started so early—always trying to get ahead of everyone else with her spring cleaning!”

* * * * *

The sun had got the better of the clouds, and had changed the whole earth from grey to gold, from dead white to a gleaming brilliance, yellow in the sunlight, blue—undiluted blue—in the shade. I had seen blue snow in pictures, and had hitherto regarded it as an artistic exaggeration. But now I saw the blue with my own eyes on the north side of the walls and barns, and where long shadows were cast by the Wellingtonia, the hollies, and the evergreen firs. The mist still hovered over the valleys, and shut us off from the lower lands, but it was no longer cold and sombre; indeed, it was no longer mist at all; it seemed just light enmeshed, a liquid golden atmosphere.

The snow gleamed and scintillated with its diamond-dusted surface; the trunks of the Scots firs surprised one with the sudden warmth of red they showed when struck by the sunbeams, and the lovely colour still left in their blue-green foliage.

Far and wide the birds answered the call of the sun. Big pinions flew across the sky, casting shadows on the snow-scape as they passed; small birds darted in and out of holes in tree trunks, or crannies under the eaves; there was a cheeping and a chattering all over the garden and the orchard; while up and down the larches flitted the tits—the blue-tits swinging upside down, almost turning somersaults, as the notion chanced to take them; the coal-tits, any number of them, skipping about from branch to branch, never still a moment, always talking in their brisk little twitter; while over all there rang incessantly the “Pinker, pinker, peter, peter,” of the great-tit.

Near at hand, robin, my little garden companion, was having a good deal to say. At first I think he was reiterating what he had often said before: that he considered the dog a nuisance that ought to be banished from any properly conducted garden, since his habit of chasing every moving object within sight was disturbing, to say the least of it, to a conscientious worm-hunter.

Having finished on this subject, he began to talk about other things; but try as I would, I could not understand what he said; yet I knew he was trying to tell me _something_. He kept taking short flights over to the wall, and then back to some branch near at hand. “Twitter, twitter,” he kept on saying; yet he never even noticed the path I was clearing, back he would fly to the wall.

At last, as he impatiently fluffed out his feathers, perched on a white currant bush, till he looked like a ball, saying a lot more the while, I made my way through the snow to the wall. He darted after me, and stood on top of a mound of leaves that had been swept together last autumn, and left to stand till the spring digging should start. Being on the south side of the wall, and sheltered a little by the wide-spreading branches of a big Spanish chestnut, it had escaped a good deal of the snow, though it was frozen hard on the surface.

Here robin stood, and when he saw I was looking at him, he pecked several times with his beak at the solid mass. Then he flicked his tail and gazed at me. “Surely you understand what I want?” he said with his beady eyes. “No? Oh! how stupid human beings are! Well, watch me again!” Dab, dab, dab, went the small beak once more, without making the slightest impression on the ice-bound lumps.

Then I grew intelligent.

“Out of the way,” I said to him, and he flew to a low branch of the tree and watched me critically, while I drove the spade well into the mass.

“That’s right,” he chirped out excitedly, as I turned it over and got down to the softer portion, spreading the leaves about. “Why on earth couldn’t you have done that sooner!” as he swooped down to my very feet and seized something wriggly—gulp! I looked away.

What ninety-ninth sense is it, I wonder, that tells birds when food is about? One moment robin and I had the chestnut tree and its environment to ourselves. Next moment, directly I turned away, down came thrushes, and blackbirds, and starlings; and though robin put his foot down firmly, said it was all his, every worm of it, and dared anyone else to touch so much as a caterpillar-egg, or he’d know the reason why, he was outdone by numbers, and finally lost what he might have had because he considered it his duty to chastise Mr. Over-the-wall-robin, who had presumed to say that the leaf-heap belonged to him!

* * * * *

At last I got to the top gate, which is about one hundred feet higher than the lower part of the garden. What a wonderful world I gazed upon, so weird, so immensely mysterious it looked under the great snow covering. The valleys where the sun did not penetrate were entirely blotted out by soft mist. One seemed to be alone, high up in space, girdled about by white and grey, gold and mauve and steely-blue; I wanted to push on and on, to walk miles and miles, to fly if I could. The fact was, the exhilaration of the keen pure atmosphere was already beginning to tell on me, and was fast mounting to my head.

One thing I caught sight of on the opposite hills gave me pause for thought: it was a larch-wood in which every tree was blown so far over to one side, that there would be but little chance of their ever recovering or getting into the upright. I remembered that the handy man had told us trees were lying in all directions out in the main road. I decided to climb still higher up the hill and see what my own woods looked like. First, however, I took off the big coat, and left it hanging on the under bough of a larch inside the gate.

Out of the top gate I went, and along the lane that now showed a moderately hard path along the centre, where one and another had trampled it down. A few yards brought me to a field that in June is one dazzling, waving mass of moon daisies, mauve pyramidal orchises, rich purple orchises, quaking grass, and a hundred other flowers besides. Not a first class hay-crop, I admit; still, a fair-sized rick stands in one corner. And although it may not possess strong feeding qualities for cattle, this field has wonderful feeding qualities for mind and soul; I’ve lived on it many and many a day through dreary London fogs and amid dirty City pavements and sordid-looking bricks and mortar. And when town has seemed unendurable, with its noise and its hustle and its brain-and-body-wearying chase after the unnecessary, I’ve thought of the brook that slips out from among a great mass of Hard Fern in the birch and hazel coppice up above, and wanders across the orchis field, with ragged robins fluttering their tattered pink petals beside the sterner browns and greens of flowering reeds, and broad masses of marsh mint—that is a mass of bluey-mauve in August—spreading in big clumps and bosses wherever it can find a bit of damp earth.

I’ve shut my eyes in the noisy City train, and in a moment I’ve gathered a big bunch of the quaking grass, brown, with a tinge of purple, and the yellow stamens dangling from each little tuft. And the comfort that the brook and the orchises and the reeds and the under carpet of tiny flowers have brought me, has been worth more to me, personally, than the money that twenty haystacks might have realised.

But to-day the field was just one white sheet, like all the rest of the landscape. Along the south side of the wall the snow was not so heavy, and using the broom as an alpenstock, I plodded up the field—giving a wide berth to the place where the brook was down below—till at last I reached the woods, first a coppice of birch and hazel and oak, and adjoining it a larch-wood.

Once under the trees, the going was “all according”! It depended on whether the snow was still on the branches, or had come down in small avalanches to the ground beneath. But I determined to struggle on. I was warmer than I had been since the previous summer, and more pleased with life than I had been since before the War started. The larch-wood offered the easier travelling, since there are not the down-drooping, low-lying branches of sundries that are always catching at one’s hat and hair in the mixed woods. With the larches you know just what to expect and where to find it. The needles make a fairly soft carpet, brambles are rare, and all you have to do is to gauge the level of the lowest of the bare brown branches, and pitch your head accordingly.

I looked at the wood before I ventured in. Everything seemed as usual. The outside trees that border the field are mixed firs, pines, and Wellingtonia. These do not shed their leaves as the larches do, and they stood up strong and erect, save where the heaviest laden boughs were bending under their weight of snow.

For the first few yards the trees were normal, standing in orderly ranks, much like the aisles of an old ruined cathedral, wherein the snow has freedom of entry. Every twig, every cone, had its glistening decoration. When a gust of wind shook tree or branches, down came the snow, in powder for the most part, for the under branches broke the masses as they fell, and sent them flying in all directions.

Suddenly I emerged from the sombre half light of the wood, into brilliant sunshine, with clear space above. Yet—I wasn’t through the wood; what did it mean? And what were these great white masses that blocked all further progress? I had never seen this spot before, though I know every tree in that wood; to me they are like individual children.

Then I saw that what lay before me was a piled-up mass of trees, torn bodily up by the roots and lying in all directions one on top of each other. For a moment something almost akin to fear seized me, the awesomeness that comes over one when in the presence of a force that is utterly beyond one’s puny power to compass or restrain. Here was a footprint, indeed, of the storm that had done this stupendous thing.

The fringe of the wood all round was intact; the blizzard seemingly having swirled down, a veritable whirlwind, into the very centre of the plantation, tearing the trees out of the ground, and flinging them about in uncontrolled fury.

It was an impressive sight—even with the kindly snow covering up the wounds and the gashes, and doing its best to obliterate the harsh look of devastation that lay over the scene.

Retracing my steps, I ran into another explorer who was likewise trying to dodge a snow-bath round a tree trunk.

It was Virginia.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your meditations,” she said politely, “and I won’t detain you a moment. I’ve merely come to ask if you would mind lending me your rubbers—not your best ones you have on, but the second best with the seven holes in the soles and one heel gone—in order that I may go to the neighbours and borrow a slice of bread. ‘We ain’t like them as asks,’” she went on, quoting a favourite expression of a well-known whiner in the village, whose practice is to take without asking, “‘but it do seem hard when you see yer own flesh and blood a-crying for vittels.’ Not that I would presume to interfere with your household arrangements and upset your meals, but what with Ursula in a dead faint making her will, and Eileen packing up to return to her grandmother in order to get something to eat——”

“What’s the time?” I cut her short.

“It was two when last I saw the clock, but I’ve wandered miles since then in search of you, hence the fact that my own rubbers are worn out.”

Then I remembered that I had never mentioned the matter of meals to Eileen that morning; though, in any case, there wasn’t much that could be cooked till that sheep was killed, come Friday: we had naught but the remains of a shoulder of mutton.

“How did you find where I was?” I enquired, as we ploughed our way back.

“Footprints, oh, blessed word!” she said. “In any case, you shed your garments wherever you went, and thoughtfully left your coat hanging in the larch avenue; Eileen saw it in the distance and came shrieking to us that the burglar had evidently hung himself from a tree by the top gate!”

As there proved to be nothing at all on the mutton bone, we decided to reckon it a meatless day, and we sat down to a lunch of bread and cheese and coffee—each reading a cookery book the while. The Food Authorities surely couldn’t object to _that_!—and you’ve no idea what a fillip it gives to a war-meal, if you’ve never tried it.

Collecting cookery books, ancient and modern, being one of my hobbies, there was a fine assortment to choose from. I selected “Ten Minutes with my Chafing Dish,” and what that author did in the time you would never credit! My bread and cheese became, in turn, braised terrapin, crayfish omelette, creamed oysters with Spanish onions, escalloped chicken with mushrooms, and fricaseed trout with paprika sauce.

I had it all at the one meal, no questions asked about the number of courses and the ounces of flour, and it only cost me about sixpence including the coffee.

Ursula, who had annexed a 1724 volume, ate her frugalities to the accompaniment of Double Rum Shrub; but, as I told her, I was thankful I had been better brought up.

Virginia chose “The Scientific Adjustment of Food Values”; and, before she had got through the first chapter, started to blame me for giving them cheese _and_ butter, when I might know that both contained a sweeping majority of proteids. Whereas, what she found she really needed was cheese and water-melon (though cantaloupe might take its place), and why wasn’t there water-melon (or cantaloupe) on the table? She had known all her life long that she needed it—always had an undefinable longing steal o’er her about twelve o’clock midday and again at four-thirty—but her want had never been made articulate before, simply because she wasn’t sure of the name of the missing link. Now, however, if I expected to retain my hold on their affections, she must really ask me to see that water-melon——

But I was too deep in the enjoyment of a dish of anchovy and caviare canapes at the moment to interfere. I left her at it.

* * * * *

In the afternoon, as we were short of milk, I suggested that we should go ourselves to the Jones’s farm in search of more. There was a beaten track along the lanes now, so we took the tin milk-can and started off uphill, thereby just missing the Head of Affairs, who came swinging up the road from the village. Having seen the finally departing back of the very last workman, he had caught the next train and arrived unannounced.

The wind was keen when he got up out of the valley, so he turned up his coat collar and rammed his cap well on his head. Finding the cottage door locked, he knocked briskly and started to inquire for me, when Eileen (whom he had never seen before, remember) opened the door in response to his knock. But, to his amazement, before he got a couple of words out, the door was banged to, in his face, and he was informed through the large keyhole—

“The lady is not—I mean—she _is_ at home, but she is engaged; she is—er—she is entertaining friends and can’t see anyone.”

Exceedingly bewildered, the caller waited a minute, trying in vain to catch sounds of hilarity within, and then rapped again; and, as the keyhole seemed the correct channel of communication, he said through the aperture—

“Kindly tell your mistress that her husband is here.”

There was a pause, then the voice within said—

“The lady is sorry she can’t see _anyone_ to-day, as she is ill in bed.”

The mystery thickened. Going round to the back door, which was also locked, the caller rapped more vigorously still. This time an agitated voice wailed from the inside—

“Are you still there? Oh, _please_ go away!”

But, though he was exceedingly astonished at this curious reception, he had no intention of going, and he said so. Eileen’s next question was unexpected.

“What is your Christian name?” she began. He told her. “What is the colour of your hair?”

He proceeded to describe himself, and added—

“If you have any doubt about me, let the dog out, he’ll soon tell you if I’m a genuine case or an impostor.”

The dog was whining inside, and trying frantically to get out. The girl debated, and then said—

“All right; but you won’t mind waiting a minute?”

“Oh, not at all!” he replied, with sweet sarcasm. “I don’t mind in the least how long I stand here in the cold. I quite enjoy it.”

Then suddenly the door was flung open, and Eileen, holding a photo of the Head of Affairs in her hand, which she had fetched down from my bedroom, started to compare it carefully with the original.

“Yes,” she sighed; “you are something like it.”

But the visitor had walked in unceremoniously, with the joyful dog leaping around.

“Now,” he said severely, as he took off his coat. “Where is your mistress?”

Eileen looked mournful. “If you please, sir, I’m _very_ sorry, but I told you a _wicked_ story just now. The mistress isn’t entertaining friends”—that was self-evident, as the cottage living-rooms were empty, and it was hardly the kind of day one would choose to entertain friends in the garden—“and she isn’t ill in bed neither. She isn’t here at all. But I didn’t like to say so at first. I was afraid, not knowing who you were, and coming after the shock. Have you heard the awful news?”

“No!” exclaimed the harassed, hungry man, jumping to his feet again in alarm. “What’s happened?”

“Haven’t you heard?” and Eileen lowered her voice to an hysterical whisper. “_We’ve discovered footprints!_”

By this time the Head of Affairs was quite convinced in his mind that either the girl was not in the full possession of her senses, or else she had been to see a Robinson Crusoe pantomime, and it had turned her brain, so he merely said—

“Well, perhaps you’ll now try if you can discover some coffee, and that as quickly as possible.” And he dismissed her when he had ascertained where we had gone, as he was rather weary of the whole performance.

* * * * *

Meanwhile my guests and I were making a few neighbourly calls in passing. In a scattered community that is often cut off by the weather from intercourse with its fellow-kind, a little gossip is always welcome. Not idle gossip, I would have you understand; but talk on things of serious import. For instance, I was naturally very glad to learn from one of my neighbours that old Mrs. Blossom had not been secretly harbouring a German spy after all, as it turned out that the masculine under-vests that had been hung out each week lately with the wash really belonged to her late husband; and after cherishing them for five years, she had decided it was more patriotic to wear them herself at a time like this, than to buy herself new ones when wool was so badly needed for the troops.

It was a real satisfaction to get this mystery cleared up at last, as her clothes-line each Monday morning (when the weather was fine) had worried us greatly. When I say “us” I don’t mean myself necessarily, because I fear I hadn’t kept track of her washing as I ought to have done if I called myself a friend and neighbour. Most remiss of me, of course. Still, there it was; and I had no need now to creep along beside the hedge and take an inventory of her garments; neither need I fear for the safety of our hill.

Fortunately, with us time is of no importance, the clock really doesn’t signify, even if it goes, which isn’t guaranteed; we divide the day into three meals, which are regulated by the three trains that puff up the valley, week-days only. Sunday is more of a problem, if you have children to be got off to Sunday-school; but as Mrs. Jasper has the one reliable clock up in our corner of the hills, her children set the pace; and when Maudie Jasper’s starched China silk Sunday frock is seen to be coming along the lane, accompanied by other little Jaspers in Lord Fauntleroy blue velvet suits and a bunch of everlasting pea, blush roses and southernwood for teacher, then the two or three other cottages in the vicinity hurry up and add their quota to the little procession that walks decorously (so long as it is in sight of maternal eyes) down the hillside trail to the Sunday-school in the valley.

Of course awkward mistakes sometimes happen, as they do in the best of well-regulated families. It was so on the occasion of the first introduction of Daylight Saving. Naturally the weekly newspaper and the vicar and the schoolmaster, and everybody, had explained to everybody else that on a certain Saturday night the clock must be put forward one hour, etc. We are anything but behind the times on our hills, and no clocks in the whole of the British Isles were set forward an hour more eagerly than ours were; only, obviously, if you haven’t a clock that goes, you can’t set it forward; therefore our little corner looked feverishly in the direction of the Jasper clock, and frequently reminded the Jaspers of their national duty.

To make quite sure that the important rite wasn’t overlooked, Mrs. Jasper put the hands of the clock on an hour when first she got up on the Saturday morning, instead of last thing at night, as the authorities had decreed. An hour more or less made no difference to the family, seeing that it was Saturday and no school to be thought of. Meals came as a matter of course, and quite irrespective of clocks. Mrs. Jasper knew that if she didn’t see to the thing no one else would. So she got it off her mind nice and early.

Later in the day Mr. Jasper thought of the new official regulations _re_ Daylight Saving; and knowing the uselessness of ever hoping to get a brain that was merely feminine to grasp any great truth as set forth in newspapers, he himself put the clock on an hour; as master of the house he regarded it as his peculiar office to see that the law was duly enforced. He didn’t mention the matter to his wife; what would be the good? And it wasn’t her concern anyhow; but as he shut the door of the clock, he wondered where indeed the household would be if it were not for him and his thoughtful habits!

Then there was Maudie Jasper. Being a bright child of twelve, brought up on modern educational lines, naturally she had no very high opinion of her parents’ intellects. Since it was she who illumined the home with the torch of learning, she felt it devolved on her to see that the clock kept abreast of current events. Besides, she was a shining example in the matter of Sunday-school tickets; she didn’t intend to be late next morning. So she, too, put on the hands an hour.

It was just as Mrs. Jasper was going upstairs to bed at night, tired out with the Saturday night bathing of the children, that the clock stared her in the face, and the question arose: Had she, or had she not, put on that clock an hour as she had meant to? Her memory isn’t good at the best of times, and she was especially done up with a day that somehow had not seemed _nearly_ long enough for its accustomed duties, though she couldn’t make out why. But to make quite sure, she gave the hands a flick round; better be quite certain than have Maudie late for Sunday-school. Only she did wish they didn’t leave _everything_ for her to do!

Next morning, when the Vicar drew up his blind at 7 A.M., as is his unfailing wont, he saw a small group of children standing forlornly outside the Sunday-school door, waiting for the 10 o’clock opening!

* * * * *

Mrs. Jasper’s was the next cottage we called at, to inquire after her husband, who was now at the front. Mrs. Jasper was delighted to see us, and of course asked if we had further news of the burglar, the fame of our footprints having spread far and wide. She told us all about the neuralgia in her head, and seemed much relieved when we assured her that it was not at all likely to turn to appendicitis.

She had had a lurking fear that if it became appendicitis, she would have to go to a hospital, and she hadn’t much belief in hospitals. There was her sister’s little boy Tommy, up in London, just four years old, and all nerves, as you may say; screamed and kicked like anything if you didn’t give him what he wanted the moment he asked for it. They couldn’t do nothing with him.

At last they decided to take him to a hospital; so her sister-in-law and “his” mother went with her. And what do you think the doctor said, after they’d told him the symptoms? “Temper,” he says; “just bad temper. Take him home, and spank him next time it comes on.” And that was all they got!—cost them fivepence each for car-fares too!

We asked after her own family. Maudie was getting on splendidly at school, “really a first-class scholard she is, although it’s I that say it. Can read the Bible beautifully now—or at any rate the Testament” (with a desire to be absolutely truthful). “And when I’m writing to her father, and can’t quite rec’lect how to spell a word, she can tell me two or three different ways of spelling it, right off pat!”

At the next cottage we stopped to inquire after a man who had met with an accident, which necessitated the amputation of one leg below the knee. Having given him all our own “Surgical Aid” letters, and fleeced our friends of theirs, I naturally asked why he wasn’t wearing the artificial limb that had been procured? (it was reposing artistically on the top of the chest of drawers in the kitchen, a stuffed sea-gull under a glass shade on one side, balanced by a wedding-cake-top-ornament under glass on the other). Wasn’t it comfortable? I asked. Didn’t it fit?

“Oh, yes’m, thank you; it fits beautiful. But that’s my _best_ leg; and the missus likes me to keep it there where she can show it to everyone, and I only uses it for Sundays and Bank ’Ollerdis.”

Then we looked in on Mrs. Granger, a happy-go-lucky widow who is always passing round the hat. When we knocked at the kitchen door, she was pouring down the sink the liquor in which she had just boiled a piece of bacon. I couldn’t help asking mildly and deferentially: “Have you ever tried using the liquor of boiled bacon for making pea-soup? It’s very nourishing, as well as tasty.”

Mrs. Granger smiled at me indulgently. “Well, ma’am, seeing that I’ve buried two husbands and three children, no one, I fancy, can give _me_ points about feeding a family!”

At Mrs. Jones’s we made a longer call; we simply had to, as we were wanting milk, and she made no move to get it, but merely stood talking. There was the mirror over the parlour mantelpiece, she particularly wanted us to see that. Arundel Jones (aged eleven) had smashed a hole right through the glass when practising bomb-throwing in there. But would you ever know it, the way Patricia (aged seventeen) had decorated it? And as we couldn’t think what to say, we looked long and earnestly at the bunch of artificial and rather faded roses from Patricia’s hat that had been stuck in the hole, with some green paint daubed around on the glass to represent leaves. Fortunately, Mrs. Jones didn’t wait for our opinion—took it for granted, indeed, since there could only be one opinion about such a masterpiece—and proceeded to ask what I thought could be done with so artistic a girl.

And that reminded her, could I tell her where she could write to in London for some Loop Canvas at a penny a yard? Patricia wanted to make some slippers for a young man friend of hers who was at the front, and sweetly pretty too, with forget-me-nots all over; but it said you must have penny Loop Canvas. She had asked for it in Chepstow, but they had never heard of it, the cheapest they had was 1_s._ 4¾_d._, and no loops in it at that. But, of course, you could get everything in London.

I had never heard of the canvas myself (and I thought I knew most that was going!), but in any case, she wouldn’t get any canvas at 1_d._ a yard now, I told her; she had evidently got hold of some very old directions.

No, she hadn’t; it was in last week’s _Home Snippets_, and she got the periodical out from among an assortment of similar data under the horse-hair sofa squab, to show me.

There, under the heading—

“A DAINTY COSY-COMFORT FOR YOUR BOY IN THE TRENCHES,”

it described how to make a pair of wool-work slippers, commencing with “Get a yard of Penelope canvas.”

Then Mrs. Jones was uneasy about her step-daughter, Kathleen, who was in service near Chepstow. “The food’s all right; but the lady isn’t what I call a good wife—never thinks of brushing her husband’s best clothes and putting them away for him of a Monday morning, and yet I’ve never once missed doing that since I married Jones. And I assure you, when I married him, he hadn’t a darned sock to his back. I’m sorry Kathleen hasn’t a better example before her, for she’s inclined to be flighty. She’s got a week’s holiday next month, and nothing will do but she must go and visit her cousin, who is working at munitions in Cardiff. I say to her, ‘Cardiff’s a nasty noisy place; why don’t you go and visit your Aunt Lizzie at Penglyn, she’s so worried she can hardly hold her head up some days, and cries from morning till night; and would be thankful to have someone to talk things over with; or your father’s Cousin Ann at Caerleon, they’ve had a sight of trouble there, and never see a soul nor go out of the house from week end to week end; they’d love to have you.’ But no, it’s Cardiff she wants,” and Mrs. Jones sighed at the unaccountable taste of one-and-twenty!

“Ah, no one knows what an anxiety that girl’s been to me,” went on the buxom, good-natured woman, who in reality never makes a trouble of anything, and has been a real mother to Kathleen. “I sometimes wonder why I married her father! But there, I will say it looks better on your tombstone to have ‘The beloved wife of,’ rather than plain Martha Miggins (as I was), all unbelongst to no one, as it were.”

Don’t imagine for a moment that this implied matrimonial divergence on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, for a more contented couple you couldn’t find in the village. It is merely the polite way we have, locally, of discounting our blessings, lest we should seem to be flaunting our happiness in the face of less fortunate people.

“By the way,” she said, as we were going out of the door, “have you heard who it was walked around your place the other night? Well, now, to think I should have forgotten to mention it, but it was no one, after all, but the policeman! My husband was over to the police-station this morning about that mare we’ve lost, and he mentioned it; and, sure enough, the policeman had got it down in his book that he crossed the hill by our road that night, and had looked over your house.”

And then I remembered that there was a police-station in the next village, that did duty for a very wide area of miles. And it was usual for the policeman to patrol from one village to another, by various routes, last thing at night, ascertaining if the inhabitants’ doors _en route_ were all duly locked. We were much relieved in our minds, and started for home discussing the situation, when Virginia suddenly said—

“Surely that is our dog barking further along the lane?”

We paused to listen.

“Yes, it is,” I said in surprise. “Whatever can he be doing out here?” and we hurried on; for the dog is a valuable one, and is never let out without an escort. A turn in the lane brought us face to face with a tall, familiar masculine figure.

“Why, wherever have you come from?” I exclaimed.

“I’ve just made my escape from the tame lunatic who seems to be in charge of the cottage,” said the Head of Affairs cheerfully, as he relieved Ursula of the quart of milk. “And I would suggest, my dear, that the next time you propose to turn your house into a sanatorium for ‘Mentally Deficients,’ you might give your family due notice. A shock like that isn’t good for one after climbing such a hill.”

* * * * *

And he might not have been particularly mollified when, later in the evening, Eileen offered the following apology:—

“I’m very sorry, sir, that I kept you waiting outside all that time in the cold; only how was I to know you were a gentleman, sir, when you looked so _exactly_ like a burglar?”

But, fortunately, in the interval he had discovered, in his dressing-room, a new-but-forgotten pair of boots, and a not-at-all-bad-considering-it’s-war-time overcoat; and, naturally, he was inclined to take a roseate view of life.

XI

Exit Eileen

IT was six months later, and about as broiling a Sunday afternoon as London can produce. Virginia and I were reading in the coolest spot in the garden, when Abigail came out and announced, with slight acidity, “That young person wants to know if she can see you, madam. I told her you were engaged, but she said she would wait.”

“What is her name?” I queried; there are so many young persons in the world.

“That Eileen!” she answered, this time with a definite sniff.

“She can come out here,” I said, and forthwith there sailed across the lawn a vision such as never before had graced my garden.

Eileen was wearing a white Jap silk skirt; a transparent rose pink blouse, that revealed the satin ribbon and lace camisole beneath; pink cotton open-work stockings; white shoes; one of those long stoles made of metallic-looking, lustre-brown fur, so beloved of the laundry girl; a big white hat, trimmed with the most violent of tangerine-coloured velvet, said velvet hanging in festoons down the back, and loops of it caught round the front and fastened to the fur stole—on one side with a large would-be-diamond lizard, about four inches long, and on the other with a crescent of similar make. Her hair, which was done in a wild imitation of the latest eccentricity of fashion, was radiant with more crescents and a sparkling three-tiered back comb. A string of large pearls adorned her neck.

To say I was taken aback at the sight, is to put it mildly; I was fairly dumb with astonishment. Where in the world had that demure, mouse-like orphan been to pick up such ideas! Even though I knew she had gone to work in a munition factory, I wasn’t prepared for such developments. She soon enlightened us.

After mutual polite inquiries about each other’s health, and a few more relative to the grandmother, she folded her hands in her lap, sat as though posing for a photograph, and then said: “And please, how do you think I look?”

“You are certainly very bright,” I stammered, striving valiantly after truth.

“Yes, I look very nice, don’t I?” she went on; “and I felt I ought to come round and show you, because, as I tell everybody, it’s all entirely due to _you_, ma’am, that I’m so stylish. I shouldn’t never have _thought_ to dress like this, if you hadn’t taught me how. And now I’m going round to show myself to Mrs. Griggles.”

XII

The Old Wood-House

THE old wood-house stands on the lee-side of a belt of trees, part of the Squirrels’ Highway, as we call it, that runs down one side of the Flower-patch, sheltering it from the bleak north winds.

Picture to yourself a building rather smaller than a very small church, built of great blocks of grey stone, with walls nearly two feet thick in places, a red-tiled pointed roof, a door at one end; and in case the walls should prove too flimsy to stand the winter gales, huge stone buttresses prop it up on the “off” side (i.e. the side where the ground goes on running downhill), lest the structure should take it into its head to run down-hill too!

In place of a spire, above the door, a weathercock swings its arrow to the winds—at least, it would swing it on any well-conducted apex, but being merely mine it permanently points south. Not that it is particular where it points; all it asks is to be left in peace to close its eyes in meditative contemplation of the landscape. We occasionally get a ladder and then a long stick, and move it round, trying to urge it to deeds of derring-do, but it falls asleep the moment our ministrations cease.

The last time, it was a neighbouring farmer who climbed the ladder to reason with it, after I had assured him there was no penalty under the Defence of the Realm Act for regulating weathercocks. He was a bit reluctant to touch it at first; as he said, what with clocks not being allowed to tick as they pleased, and the time being jiggered with anyhow, you didn’t know where you was with nothing. But once I had taken full responsibility for the affair, he went up with right goodwill, and—forgetting that it was the arrow alone that needed to move—he gave a sturdy tug to the north, south, east, and west arrangement, and sent the arms of that in all directions.

Then when we wanted to fix it up again, the question arose, which was the north? A local light supposed to know everything, who chanced to be passing, was summoned for consultation. After carefully surveying the various corners of heaven, as though looking for enemy air-craft, he said he didn’t know as he could say ezackly which wur the north, unless he had summat to tell him (we all felt like that, too!); but if we would a-float a needle on the top of a basin of water, then either the point of the needle—or—le’s see? maybe ’twas the heye, he wasn’t quite certain which—would point to the north, for sure.

Well, all hands rushed for basins and needles, as you may suppose; because, whether it was the point or the eye didn’t matter much, since we knew the direction in which the north lay; all we wanted was the precise angle. But alas, every needle promptly sank to the bottom of the basin, without so much as a kick!

Eventually we refixed the north pole approximately, pending such time as the Head of Affairs should arrive, when I knew we could rely on the small compass at the end of his watch chain. But Virginia, who uses the weathercock more than most of us, as she sees it from her bedroom window, and says it is so useful to dress by, was lugubriously certain his watch would be stolen on the next journey down, and begged me to place the arrow—still asleep—pointing south; even an approximate south, she said, might at least help to keep her spirits up, when a northeaster was blowing.

And south it remaineth unto this day, despite all our blandishments, and probably will do so till the end of the War, when the retirement of the Food Controller—who, presumably, supervises weathercocks—may permit of our using a modicum of grease.

* * * * *

The old wood-house (which, by the way, was originally used for coals, though no trace of this is left upon its clean, lime-washed interior) is the first building you run across as you enter by the top gate, which is the widest entrance we possess. Here you step from the lane right into a tiny larch plantation, and the path to the cottage is arched over with the boughs of the trees, while the brown cones crunch under your boots, or roll away down the steep incline of the path when your foot touches them. It was among these trees that a small clearing was made in the distant past to accommodate this particular out-building; though why the coal-house was considered the most artistic bit of bric-à-brac to greet you as you enter the main gate is not clear.

The actual outline of the building is not remarkable, being merely four walls and a pointed roof, with a door and a window; but at least it looks simple, dignified, and solid, and what it lacks in architectural decoration has been supplied by Nature herself. When we first saw it, we called it the private chapel; but later on I found Abigail & Co. calling it the picture palace.

At any rate, there it stands, shadowed by great oaks seemingly immovable, with their gnarled wide-stretching arms spread as in blessing over the lowlier woodland things; a big Spanish chestnut, though tardy in coming into leaf, scatters worthless burrs around later on, with generous goodwill; a walnut-tree invites the passer-by to rub its aromatic leaves, and is there any treasure-trove quite like the walnuts that one finds in the long wet grass on a windy autumn morning? Larches and firs make shady colonnades, with their straight uprising shafts, and dark drooping branches; silver birches, always graceful, no matter how they may have had to twist their trunks to accommodate themselves to their environment, give lightness and vivacity to the whole.

Incense there is in abundance. The warm resinous odour of the larches is always abroad; mountain-ash-trees load the air with scent in the late spring, and are ablaze with crimson in August. Two or three lichen-covered, twisted old apple-trees hang out bunches of pale-green mistletoe, for all to see during the winter months, and then surprise one with a bride-like flush of white and pink in the spring. Where the sun is brightest, a big hawthorn carpets the ground with white petals in May.

Then there are the lovely limes—and the lime-tree is much more of a stately lady than is realized by those who only know the sad, maimed and distorted stumps that disfigure suburban gardens in London. But see this lime-tree that forms a link in the Squirrels’ Highway! Its trunk measures about ten feet round. Under the shadow of its drooping far-sweeping branches you could give a small Sunday-school treat. Though the lowest branches spring from the trunk at least nine feet from the ground, their far ends touch the grass, forming a complete tent of translucent green and gold as you look upwards, through a multitude of layers of leaves, to a sun you cannot see, but which seems to have turned the whole tree into a rippling mass of molten colour. And when it shakes out its bunches of scented yellow blossoms, and trails them by the thousand down each branch and stem, then indeed the lime-tree is a lovely lady, and the bees and the butterflies come from far and near to pay her homage.

And each tree has a special and distinct winter-beauty of its own in the outline of branches and stems and twigs—a beauty that is lost to us once the leaves appear, but which suggests an exquisite etching in winter when the dark lines are silhouetted against the sky. The most graceful is the birch, with its light tracery of fine filaments, often with tassel-like catkins dangling at the end. The oak and beech give the impression of enormous strength in the ease with which they fling outright their massive arms with seldom any tendency to droop.

And each tree has its special and distinct melody when the wind signals the forest orchestra; there is the sea-surge of the beeches, the swish of the heavily plumed firs, the rain-sound of the twinkling aspen, the soft whisper of the birches, the æolian hum of the pines, and the sibilant rustle of the dead leaves still clinging to the winter oak.

* * * * *

Outside the wood-house door there is a little clearing adjoining the grove of trees, where a perfect thicket of wild flowers smiles at you for the greater part of the year. First come the early violets clustering about the roots of the trees, and in the shelter of the grey rock fragments; while primroses dot the grass with their crinkly leaves, and then send up pink stems covered with silver sheen, and delicately scented flowers each as big as a penny. Oxlips grow on the bank that borders one side of the clearing.

Later, it is an expanse of moon-daisies—thousands of them swaying the whole day long to the motion of the wind like the ever-restless surface of the sea. And with the moon-daisies are buttercups, crimson clover, rosy-purple knapweed, spikes of pink orchis delicately pencilled with mauve—all trying to grow to the height of the big yellow-eyed daisies; while here and there ruddy spears of sorrel out-top them all.

Tall grasses of every kind are here, some like a fine translucent veil of purple, others grey, or a pinky-green; some shaking out yellow or heliotrope stamens; some ever trembling like the quaking-grass—but all mingling with the tall flowers, softening the surface of the mass of white blossoms that seem in the sunshine almost too dazzling to look upon, were it not for the mist of the grasses that envelops them.

Underneath the tall flowers there is a wonderful carpet of lesser-growing things—masses of trefoil, the yellow blossoms often touched with fiery orange; patches of heath bed-straw, with its myriads of tiny gleaming white flowers, cling to any spot where the grasses leave it room to breathe, its first cousin, the woodruff, preferring a shadier part of the bank at the side—the bank where the wild strawberries grow to a luscious size, and whortleberry bushes add a touch of wildness to the spot.

The smaller clovers, both yellow and white, seem to thrive under the bigger flowers, where most else would suffocate. Pink-tipped daisies bloom wherever they can find room to hold up a little face. Rosy-pink vetches wander about at pleasure, and pretend they are going to do great things when they start to climb the stems of the moon-daisies.

Where the big fir trees throw a shadow, and the sun only touches the grass when it is getting round to the west, foxgloves send up shafts of colour and the pale-blue spiked veronica carpets the ground.

Still further back, where the sunshine never penetrates, even here something strives to give beauty to barrenness and soften austerity, for the small-leaved ivy starts to climb the hard tree trunks, undoubtedly one of the most beautiful of the many living things that are neighbour to the old wood-house.

And always in the grass there lie the snapped-off twigs and branches of the larches, with their brown picots up stems that are studded with exquisite cones. We strive hard to better Nature, to make new designs, to evolve fresh beauty; but with all our skill and experiments we have yet to improve on the cone as a design, with its rhythmic re-iteration of the one small motif and the perfection of its proportions. In my mind it ranks with the smoked-silver seed ball of the dandelion, both of them examples of absolute beauty derived from the simplest of outlines.

* * * * *

The walls of the wood-house have their share of green; on the north side an ivy, with a gnarled main stem the size of a fair sized tree trunk, sends evergreen branches over roof as well as walls. Outside the door, which opens to the south, stone-crop has planted itself in masses among the stones, a perfect carpet of it, that in June is a bright yellow. In the “good old times,” before my day, the stone-crop served as a convenient spot on which to dump the coal sacks!

On the western side where the ground drops down—a warm, snug and sheltered bank—in the long grass white violets bloom by the thousand in the early spring, their sweet little blossoms streaked with mauve, nestling up to the old grey walls with the trustfulness of little children. Add to this long-fronded ferns growing out from among the wall stones, and you have an idea of the geography of the place.

On a hot day the cool shade on the north side is an ideal resting place; on a chilly day the south side gives you a shield from the wind. A pile of tree trunks and old logs lying outside fairly ask you to sit for a moment and take in some of the loveliness of the scene—you can never exhaust the whole of it—and if you sit for a minute you will probably sit there for hours.