Lark Rise to Candleford (68 page)

Those were the days for Laura when almost everything in
literature was new to her and every fresh discovery was like one of Keats's own
Magic casements opening on the foam
. Between the shabby old covers of
that one book were the 'Ode to a Nightingale', Shelley's 'Skylark', Wordsworth's
'Ode to Duty', and other gems which could move to a heart-shaking rapture.
Willie took their readings more calmly. He liked where Laura loved. But he did
honestly like, and that meant much to Laura, for none of those she had previously
known in her short life, except her brother Edmund, cared twopence for poetry.

But one incident she shared with Willie remained more vivid
in her memory than the poetry readings or the scrapes he got into with other boys,
such as being let down into a well by the chain to rescue a duck which had
spent a day and a night, quacking loudly, as it searched in vain for a shore to
that deep, narrow pool into which it had tumbled, or the time when the hayrick
was on fire and, against the advice of older men, he climbed to the top to beat
the burning thatch with a rake.

She had gone one day to his home with a message from Miss
Lane to the housekeeper and, finding no one at home in the house, had crossed
the yard to a shed where Willie was working. He was sorting out planks and, intending
to tease and perhaps to shock her, he showed her a pile at the farther end of
the shed in the semi-darkness. 'Just look at these,' he said. 'Here! Come right
in and put your hand on them. Know what they're for? Well, I'll tell you.
They're all and every one of them sides for coffins. I wonder who this one's
for, and this and this. This nice little narrow one may be for you; it looks
about the right size. And this one at the bottom'—touching it with his toes—'may
be for that very chap we can hear kicking up such a row with his whistling
outside. They're all booked for somebody, mostly somebody we know, but there aren't
any names written on them.'

Laura pretended to laugh and called him a horrid boy, but the
bright day seemed to her suddenly to become dark and cold, and, afterwards, whenever
she passed that shed she shivered and thought of the pile of coffin boards
waiting in the half-darkness until they should be needed to make coffins for
people now going happily about the green on their business and passing the shed
without a shudder. The elm or the oak which had yet to make her coffin must
then have been growing green, somewhere or other, and Willie had no coffin tree
growing for him, for his was a soldier's grave out on the veld in South Africa.

He, the youngest, was the first of the three Williams to go.
Soon after, the middle William died suddenly while working at his bench, and
his father followed him next winter. Then the carpenters' shop was demolished
to make way for a builder's showroom with baths and tiled fireplaces and w.c.
pans in the window, and only the organ in church and pieces of good woodwork in
houses remained to remind those who had known them of the three Williams.

Squeezed back to leave space for a small front garden,
between the Stores and the carpenters' shop, was a tall, narrow cottage with
three sash windows, one above the other, which almost filled the front wall. In
the lowest window stood a few bottles of bullseyes and other boiled sweets, and
above them hung a card which said:
Dressmaking and Plain Sewing
. This
was the home of one of the two postwomen who, every morning, carried the
letters to outlying houses off the regular postman's beat.

Unlike her colleague, who was old, grumpy and snuffy, Mrs.
Macey was no ordinary countrywoman. She spoke well and had delicate, refined,
if somewhat worn, features, with nice grey eyes and a figure of the kind of which
country people said: 'So-and-So'd manage to look well-dressed if she went
around wrapped in a dishcloth.' And Mrs. Macey did manage to look well-dressed,
although her clothes were usually shabby and sometimes peculiar. For most of
the year on her round she wore a long grey cloth coat of the kind then known as
an 'ulster', and, for headgear, a man's black bowler hat draped with a black
lace veil with short ends hanging at the back. This hat, Miss Lane said, was a
survival of a fashion of ten years before. Laura had never seen another like
it, but worn as Mrs. Macey wore it, over a head of softly waving dark hair drawn
down into a little tight knob on the neck, it was decidedly becoming. Instead
of plodding or sauntering country fashion, Mrs. Macey walked firmly and
quickly, as if with a destination in view.

Excepting Miss Lane, who was more of a patron than a friend,
Mrs. Macey had no friends in the village. She had been born and had lived as a child
on a farm near Candleford Green where her father was then bailiff; but before
she had grown up her family had gone away and all that was known locally of
fifteen years of her life was that she had married and lived in London. Then,
four or five years before Laura knew her, she had returned to the village with
her only child, at that time a boy of seven, and taken the cottage next to the
Stores and put the card in the window. When the opportunity offered, Miss Lane
obtained for her the letter-carrier's post and, with the four shillings a week
pay for that, a weekly postal order for the same amount from some mysterious organization
(the Freemasons, it was whispered, but that was a mere guess) and the money
earned by her sewing, she was able in those days and in that locality to live
and bring up her boy in some degree of comfort.

She was not a widow, but she never mentioned her husband
unless questioned, when she would say something about 'travelling abroad with his
gentleman', leaving her hearer to conclude that he was a valet or something of
that kind. Some people said she had no husband and never had had one, she had
only invented one as a blind to account for her child, but Miss Lane nipped
such suspicions in the bud by saying authoritatively that she had good reasons
which she was not at liberty to reveal for saying that Mrs. Macey had a husband
still living.

Laura liked Mrs. Macey and often crossed the green to her
house in the evening to buy a screw of sweets or to try on a garment which was
being made or turned or lengthened for her. It was as cosy a little place as can
be imagined. The ground floor of the house had formerly been one largish room
with a stone floor, but, by erecting a screen to enclose the window and
fireplace and cut off the draughty outer portion, where water vessels and
cooking utensils were kept, Mrs. Macey had contrived a tiny inner living-room.
In this she had a table for meals, a sofa and easy chair, and her
sewing-machine. There were rugs on the floor and pictures on the walls and
plenty of cushions about. These were all of good quality—relics, no doubt, of
the much larger home she had had during her married life.

There Laura would sit by the fire and play ludo with Tommy,
with Snowball, the white cat, on her knee, while Mrs. Macey, on the other side
of the hearth, stitched away at her sewing. She did not talk much, but she
would sometimes look up and her eyes would smile a welcome. She seldom smiled
with her lips and scarcely ever laughed and, because of this, some villagers
called her 'sour-looking'. 'A sour-looking creature,' they said, but any one
with more penetration would have known that she was not sour, but sad. 'Ah!
you're young!' she once said when Laura had been talking a lot, 'You've got all
your life before you!' as though her own life was over, although she was not
much over thirty.

Her Tommy was a quiet, thoughtful little lad with the
man-of-the-house air of responsibility sometimes worn by fatherless only sons.
He liked to wind up the clock, let out the cat, and lock the house door at
night. Once when he had brought home a blouse which Mrs. Macey had been making out
of an old muslin frock for Laura and with it the bill, for some now incredibly
small amount—a shilling at the most, probably ninepence—Laura, by way of a mild
joke, handed him her pencil and said, 'Perhaps you'll give me a receipt for the
money?' 'With pleasure,' he said in his best grown-up manner. 'But it's really
not necessary. We shan't charge you for it again.' Laura smiled at that 'we',
denoting a partnership in which the junior partner was so very immature, then
felt sad as she thought of the two of them, entrenched in that narrow home against
the world with some mysterious background which could be felt but not fathomed.

Whatever the nature of the mystery surrounding the father,
the boy knew nothing about it, for twice in Laura's presence he asked his
mother, 'When will our Daddy come home?' and his mother, after a long pause, replied:
'Oh, not for a long time yet. He's travelling abroad, you know, and his
gentleman's not ready to come home.' The first time she added, 'I expect
they're shooting tigers', and the next, 'It's a long way to Spain.'

Once Tommy, in all innocence, brought out and showed Laura
his father's photograph. It was that of a handsome, flashy-looking man posing
before the rustic-work background of a photographer's studio. A top-hat and gloves
were carefully arranged on a little table beside him. Not a working man,
evidently, and yet he did not look quite like a gentleman, thought Laura, but
it was no business of hers, and when she saw Mrs. Macey's pained look as she
took away the photograph she was glad that she had barely glanced at it.

At one end of the green, balancing the doctor's house at the
other end, stood what was known there as a quality house, which meant one
larger than a cottage, but smaller than a mansion. There were several such houses
in the neighbourhood of Candleford Green, mostly occupied by ladies, elderly
maiden or widowed, but here there lived only one gentleman. It was a white
house with a green-painted balcony, green outside shutters, and a beautifully
kept lawn with clipped yew trees. It was a quiet house, for Mr. Repington was a
very old gentleman and there were no young people to run in and out or to go to
parties or hunting. His maidservants were elderly and uncommunicative, and his
own man, Mr. Grimshaw, was as white-headed as his master and as unapproachable.

Sometimes, on summer afternoons, a carriage with champing
horses, glittering harness, and cockaded coachman and footman would stand at
the gate, while, from within, through the open windows, came the sounds of tinkling
teacups and ladies' voices, gossiping pleasantly, and every year, at strawberry
time, Mr. Repington gave one garden party to which the local gentlepeople came
on foot because his stabling accommodation and that of the inn was strained to
the utmost by the equipages of guests from farther afield. That was all he did
in the way of entertaining. He had long given up dining out or dining others,
on account of his age.

Every morning, at precisely eleven o'clock, Mr. Repington
would emerge from his front door, held ceremoniously open for him by Grimshaw,
visit the Post Office and the carpenters' shop, stand for a few minutes to talk
to the Vicar or any one else of his own class whom he happened to meet, pat a
few children on the head and give a knob of sugar to the donkey. Then, having
made the circuit of the green, he would disappear through his own doorway and
be seen no more until the next morning.

His dress was a model of style. The pale grey suits he
favoured in summer always looked fresh from the tailor's hand, and his spats
and grey suede gloves were immaculate. He carried a gold-headed cane and wore a
flower in his button-hole, usually a white carnation or a rosebud. Once when he
met Laura out in the village he swept off his Panama hat in a bow so low that
she felt like a princess. But his manners were always courtly. It was not at
all surprising to be told that he had formerly held some position at the Court
of Queen Victoria. Which perhaps he had, perhaps not, for nothing was really
known about him, excepting that he was apparently rich and obviously aged.
Laura and Miss Lane knew and the postman may have noticed that he had many
letters with crests and coronets on the flap of the envelope, and Laura knew that
he had once sent a telegram signed with his Christian name to a very great
personage indeed. But, his servants being what they were, such things were not
matter for village gossip.

Like all those of good birth Laura met when in business, his
voice was quiet and natural, and he was pleasant in his manner towards her. One
morning he found her alone in the office, and perhaps intending to cheer what
he may have thought her loneliness, he asked: 'Do you like ciphers?' Laura was
not at all sure what kind of a cipher he meant—it could not be the figure
nought, surely—but she said, 'Yes, I think so,' and he wrote with a tiny gold
pencil on a leaf torn from his pocket-book:

U O A O, but I O thee. I give thee A O, but O O me,

which, seeing her puzzled look, he interpreted:

'You sigh for a cipher, but I sigh for thee. I give thee a
cipher, but O sigh for me.'

And, on another occasion, he handed her the riddle:

The beginning of Eternity, The end of Time and Space, The
beginning of every end And the end of every place,

to which she soon discovered that the answer was the letter
'E'.

Laura wondered in riper years how many times and in how many
different environments he had written those very puzzles to amuse other girls, unlike
her in everything but age.

There were a number of small cottages around the green, most
of them more picturesque than that occupied by Mrs. Macey. Of these Laura knew every
one of the occupants, at least well enough to be on speaking terms, through
seeing them at the post office. She did not know them as intimately as she had
known similar families in her native hamlet, where she had been one of them and
had had a lifelong experience of their circumstances. At Candleford Green she
was more in the position of an outside observer aided by the light of her
previous experiences. They appeared to have a similar home life to that of the
Lark Rise people, and to possess much the same virtues, weaknesses, and
limitations. They spoke with the same country accent and used many of the old
homely expressions. Their vocabulary may have been larger, for they had adopted
most of the new catchwords of their day, but, as Laura thought afterwards, they
used it with less vigour. One new old saying, however, Laura heard for the
first time at Candleford Green. It was used on an occasion when a woman, newly
widowed, had tried to throw herself into her husband's grave at his funeral.
Then some one who had witnessed the scene said dryly in Laura's hearing: 'Ah,
you wait. The bellowing cow's always the first to forget its calf.'