Short Stories 1895-1926 (65 page)

And whether it was Mr Simmonds's words or the way he said them, as if for her comfort – and they were as much a part and parcel of his own good nature as were his brown hairy arms and his pitch-fork and the creases on his round face – or whether it was just the calm, copious gentle sunshine that was streaming down on them from across the low heavens, and on the roofs and walls of the yard, and on that rich brown-and-golden heap of stable manure with its delicate colonies of live things shedding their beauty on every side, nodding their heads in the lightest of airs; she could not tell. At that very moment and as if for joy a red cock clapped his wings on the midden, and shouted his
Qui vive
!

At this, a whelming wave of consolation and understanding seemed to have enveloped her very soul. Mr Simmonds may have actually seen the tears dropping from her eyes as she turned to smile at him, and to thank him. She didn't mind. It was nothing in the world in her perhaps that he would ever be able to understand. He would never know, never even guess that he had been her predestined redemption.

For a while they had stood there in silence, like figures in a picture. Nellie had long since wandered off, grazing her way across the meadow. She had now joined the other cows, though she herself was but a heifer, and had not yet calved or given milk. How ‘out of it' a Londoner was in country places! Her very love of it was a kind of barrier between herself and Mr Simmonds.

And yet, not an impassable one. Knowing that she was ‘ill', and being a ‘family man', and sympathetic, he had understood a little. She had at last hastened away into the house; and shutting her door on herself, had flung herself down at her bedside, remaining there on her knees, with nothing in the nature of a thought in her mind, not a word on her lips; conscious of no more than an incredibly placid vacancy and the realization that the worst was over.

The kitchen fire had lapsed into a brilliant glow, unbroken by any flame. Her lids smarted; she had stared so long without blinking into its red. She must have been kneeling there for hours, thus lost in memory. Her glance swept up in dismay to the clock; and at that instant she heard the scraping of her husband's latch-key in the lock – and his evening meal not even so much as laid yet!

She sprang to her feet and, stumbling a little because one of them had ‘gone to sleep', met him in the doorway. ‘I am late,' she breathed into his shoulder, putting her arms round his neck with an intensity of greeting that astonished even his familiar knowledge of her. ‘But there were the children to get off. And then I just sat down by the fire a minute. Jim: don't think I'm never thankful. You were kind to me that time I was ill. Kinder than ever you can possibly think or imagine. But we won't say anything about that.'

Her arms slipped down to her sides; a sort of absentness spread itself over her faintly-lit features, her cheeks flushed by the fire. ‘I've been day-dreaming – just thinking:
you
know. How queer things are! Can you really believe that that Mr Simmonds is at the farm
now,
this very moment?' Her voice sank lower. ‘It's all snow; and soon it will be getting dark; and the cows have been milked; and the fields are fading away out of the light; and the pond with the reeds … It's still; like a dream – and now …'

And her husband, being tireder than usual that afternoon, cast a rather dejected look at the empty table. But he spoke up bravely: ‘And how did the youngsters get off? They must have been a handful!'

He smoothed her smooth hair with his hand. But she seemed still too deeply submerged and far-lost in her memory of the farm to answer for a moment, and then her words came as if by rote.

‘“A handful”? They
were –
and that tiny thing! – I am sometimes, you know, Jim, almost afraid of those wild spirits – as if she might – just burst into tiny pieces some day – like glass. It's such a world to have to be careful in!'

The Lost Track

The Lost Track

8 Ranley Street,

S.W.2.

My Dear James,

You remember that night we stayed up talking – a week or two before Christmas, wasn't it. Anyhow, not very long after I came back from America. It was a good talk – the kind that always reminds me of old sherry and Bath Olivers (yours the Amontillado); but there came a moment in it when – well, bubbles began to rise. It was soon after Bettie had looked in – tilting us that queer half-derisive glance women always reserve for men surprised in their natural haunts and habits. She gave us up in despair, said good-night, and went off to bed. At that moment, I remember, you were humped up over the fire and knocking out your pipe on the bars of the grate; and you remarked between the two halves of a yawn: ‘So you didn't have any actual adventures, then? Worth talking about, I mean?'

I smiled to myself as I looked at you through the smoke. Worth talking about! Perhaps, if you had been the least bit less complacent and insular you would have noticed that I made no reply. Your taken-for-granted was, of course, first, that I am not the sort of creature to whom anything worth happening happens, and next, that in any case things worth happening are not in the habit of happening ‘over there'.

But in this particular case, you were wrong on both counts. At least, so I think. And from the moment when – as we steamed gently on – half-suffocated with home-sickness I caught my first glimpse of the low-lying lovely emerald of the Isle of Wight through a placid haze of English drizzle, I have been pining to share with you what I am going to tell you now. It sounds a little absurd to say that a promise given in America made this impossible until the day before yesterday; but so it is. But now that is done with. The whole episode is over and done with – so far at least as
anything
can be done with in a world where even the whirr of a grasshopper never ceases to echo.

I suppose the smile with which I met your question was a sort of a lie – a colourless one, I hope. But even if I had answered you with the bare facts – you wouldn't have believed me. Probably you won't believe me now, though you are bound to confess human nature rarely writes a letter of this length merely to deceive without gain! And as you are off on Tuesday, and I shan't see you for weeks, this had better not wait.

Then again, it's a pretty little habit of yours to assume that life in these days is all but played-out and that the only things worth much consideration are of the mind or by way of books. In other words, that the really raw material of life is fit only for the newspapers, the police-courts, and the ‘movies'. In a way I agree with you. I agree, I mean, that events are only of importance in relation to our Selves. If they make
no
appeal to the imagination, that is, they are mostly null and void. Now the amusing thing (at least, I suppose it is amusing) is that my American adventure is as raw as pickled cabbage. It is precisely the stuff that films and shockers are made of. I can see – for I have returned from their fountain-head – the appropriate newspaper headlines. I believe you will agree too that it is of the ‘twopence coloured' variety, rather than the ‘penny plain'; and it continues to haunt me.

I don't see how things without any ‘meaning' – whatever that may mean – can do that. On the other hand, I can't be quite sure even of what I mean by its meaning. Still, there are things in life that drop like stones into a dark subterranean pool. One leans over, listens to the reverberations, hears them die away, looks up – and the grass is of a livelier green than ever, the sky of an incredible blue, and the butterfly on a tuft of thrift nearby a miracle.

What follows then is merely a plain and precise account. It is not intended to titillate your fastidious taste in style. You need not even bother to read it if you feel disinclined. But if you do read it, I should like a word later on concerning one or two points in it that will suggest themselves; and this, by the way, is the first word I have breathed on the subject to a living soul …

Time: Late-October; Scene: U.S.A.

By a piece of real good fortune I had been staying a day or two a little south – south of Washington, at any rate. For I saw the country. I had then been in America about seven weeks. If I use the phrase ‘American hospitality' you will probably shrug your thick shoulders and smile. The actual fact is, though, that that hospitality is
(a)
sincere;
(b)
boundless; and
(c)
may set one speculating a little closely on the English variety. From out of the bosom of one family into which I had been welcomed without the smallest hesitation or forethought I had sent on a letter of introduction to yet another American friend of English friends of mine: the usual kind of letter with the usual kind remarks concerning the bearer.

The answer came by return of post. In brief: Would I give the signatories – husband and wife – the inexpressible happiness of remaining their guest for the rest of my days on earth. I had discovered from a map that they were living thirty miles or so beyond a fairly large town across country still further south and west – I am not going to mention any names yet. I set out. And as I was still only a novice in the land where a twenty-four hours' railway journey is looked upon as a jaunt one can enjoy between tea and supper, the novelties were for me novelties still.

The green-upholstered armchair in the vast metallic Pullman car, for example; the sound of the voices; the cut of the faces; the ecstatic bill of fare in the dining-car – you write your order on a slip – Turkey and Cranberries, Chicken Pie, Six-inch Oysters, Corn on the Cob (eaten monkey fashion), the divinest Scallops in the world: and Prices to match! Then, too, the courteous white-laundered waiters with hands and faces ranging from blackest ebony to creamiest cream; the ice; and, of course, the landscape. On and on.

Rather neglected-looking woods and fields; suggesting that they are still scared by the encroachments of civilization; maize (‘corn') in stook; pumpkins (punkins) in heaps; running water; wooden houses; and the occasional town – with its ancient buggy; its drug-store; its Fords (early fourteenth-century); and the dread knolling of one's engine's bell – surely, apart from that monster's prehistoric trumpetings, the saddest sound in Christendom – as one's huge metallic caravan edges slowly through Main Street.

I am an excellent traveller, for throughout any journey in unknown parts I am in a continual effervescing state of anxiety and foreboding. I invariably expect to go astray, and as invariably hope, yet dread, that I shall. But you can't (any more than your baggage) go far astray on any American railway, provided you can understand what the ‘conductor' says.

All went well. The black fellow, smiling on me like Friday's long-lost father, gave me my ‘brush-off' (not brush-up or brush-down, you will notice), and I (a little shamefacedly) gave him a quarter. He took out my suit-case – my grip – he let down the clanging steps, and deposited the wooden stool beneath them. I descended. And there, with open arms and angelic faces, stood two strangers who, as quickly as you can switch on an electric light in a dark room, were at once my friends – and for life, I hope. We got into their car; it was latish afternoon; and in about half an hour were at their house. I had been talking so hard to my hostess that I had caught scarcely a glimpse of the view, though I had absorbed it through my pores, none the less.

It was rather a queer meal, that first dinner that evening. I remember talking nineteen to the dozen and noticing how unusually brilliant a sparkle the silver and glass had, and also how much more violent my headache was than it had been in the train. I recalled the heated frequency of my visits to the little ice-water reservoir in the railway carriage. You drink it out of a small envelope. I got to bed, however, without saying anything. But next morning there was no disguising the fact that I had a rollicking temperature, pains in the limbs, aching at the back of the eyes and so on: all the usual symptoms.

Did my host and hostess tack me up instantly in a piece of old sacking, replace me in their car, and dump me down on the nearest goods platform? Not a bit of it. Nor did they pour oil and smuggled wine into my wounds and pass me on with twopence to the nearest innkeeeper. They stood on either side of the bed, irradiated with delight. Now, if a stranger from over the seas were taken ill in my house, I should first assure him what an exquisite privilege and joy it would be to nurse him back to health again. And then I should go downstairs and muse gently how pitiful it is that mortality may be subject to ills so inconsiderate.

Not so my friends in America (and no names yet, so we will call them Flora and John). They were enraptured. Their eyes shone with triumph as they brandished the thermometer. If you'd only die, they all but assured me, we'd give you a costlier funeral than ever was on sea or land. Bricks, both of them.

The doctor – the doc – came, saw, and sent me a bottle of medicine. It was 'flu, of course, and for days together I lay there, in Luxury's ample lap, looking out from my bed through a window over the countryside, reading Isabel Ostrander, Freeman Wills Crofts, with interludes of O. Henry, nibbling grapes, and imbibing beef-juice – not to speak of oysters and champagne (think of it) in due season.

I had come for a week-end. It was six days before I was up again. On the eighth I was ‘down'. Even then, said the doctor, I must not yet attempt to go on my travels. He knew his patrons. His veto was followed by a chorus of delicious ‘Surelies!' from Flora and John. By the Wednesday of that week I was horribly normal, and being taken for walks and drives. The following Friday, my host and hostess were booked for a visit themselves. Did they speed the parting guest? Not they. They insisted that I should stay on at their house until they came back. Was I quite, quite sure that I should be perfectly happy and comfortable? The servants were, with one exception, black, but comely. Did I really mind being left alone? It was hateful of them to have to go; they would never forgive themselves, but … I hesitated, languished, and gave way.

Allons,
once more. Now, in the first place, I suppose you suppose there isn't any ‘country' in the United States? There are excuses for you, because I myself had read a good many American novels without fully realizing what country there is; and till then I had seen chiefly cities. But, gracious heavens, what country! There it was a little like a beautiful kind of Wiltshire or Somerset; but vaster, stretching leagues and leagues away to Columbus knows where, and still all but virgin: virginally free, virginally romantic.

It was October, you will remember, and I had chanced on one of the loveliest falls since the
Mayflower
landed its pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. I was by this time as right as a trivet again, though still conscious of the queer sense of novelty and unexpectedness in things which even a slight illness produces, especially 'flu. Every mere man supposes, of course, that a rising temperature is a summons to the grave. Mine had proved only a
caveat,
and I was at once roving around in the little two-seater that Flora and John had handed over to me for my special recreation.

They left the house on a Friday afternoon, and on the next my adventure began. I must have trundled on at haphazard about fifteen or twenty miles or so, having turned off from the State road perhaps ten minutes after I left the house, and having clean forgotten that the area of the two Virginias is more than half as large as England. The lane or by-road in which I then found myself had grown steadily more and more like a cart-track, and ever wilder and lovelier. Apart from the incessant multitudinous rasping of the grass-green katydids and crickets – some brilliantly coloured, that fly for a few yards at a stretch – the air was marvellously still over those low hills of fading woods. Above them hung a pale blue afternoon sky, brimmed with sunshine of a gentle and mellow intensity, its shafts eddying silken soft through the dells and dingles around me; shafts, discs, splashes, gilding the very marrow in my bones, surfeiting my eyes and bathing me with delight – a satisfaction, by the way, not discounted by the thought of the weather you were probably enduring at home.

And the colours! Our English autumn, poor beloved sweetheart, is a comparative child in such matters. Here the trees – oak, dogwood, maple, hickory, sumach – masquerade for weeks together in coats that would have made Jacob weep aloud: amber-yellow, coral-pink, a wondrous rose, blood-red – Bluebeard red. Mounting in cones and domes and triangles above the greyish grass and the sand-colour of the soil, they draped the hills around me, while the track steadily edged off out of civilization, and I went bobbing over its boulders and chasms like a Jack-in-a-box or a monkey-on-a-stick. The only fellow human I had passed – and that was miles behind – was an old negro with a grizzled head who was leading a long-eared mule attached to a low, faded, red-and-green farm-cart.