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Title: Lolly Willowes
        or, the loving huntsman

Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner

Release date: November 25, 2023 [eBook #72223]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Chatto & Windus

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOLLY WILLOWES ***





                            Lolly Willowes

                                  OR

                          THE LOVING HUNTSMAN

                                SYLVIA
                            TOWNSEND WARNER

                             Published by

                            CHATTO & WINDUS
                                LONDON
                                   *
                        CLARKE, IRWIN & CO. LTD
                                TORONTO


                         First published 1926

                                 _To_

                            BEA ISABEL HOWE




                            LOLLY WILLOWES




_Part_ I


When her father died, Laura Willowes went to live in London with her
elder brother and his family.

‘Of course,’ said Caroline, ‘you will come to us.’

‘But it will upset all your plans. It will give you so much trouble. Are
you sure you really want me?’

‘Oh _dear_, yes.’

Caroline spoke affectionately, but her thoughts were elsewhere. They had
already journeyed back to London to buy an eiderdown for the bed in the
small spare-room. If the washstand were moved towards the door, would it
be possible to fit in a writing-table between it and the fireplace?
Perhaps a bureau would be better, because of the extra drawers? Yes,
that was it. Lolly could bring the little walnut bureau with the false
handles on one side and the top that jumped up when you touched the
spring by the ink-well. It had belonged to Lolly’s mother, and Lolly
had always used it, so Sibyl could not raise any objections. Sibyl had
no claim to it whatever, really. She had only been married to James for
two years, and if the bureau had marked the morning-room wall-paper, she
could easily put something else in its place. A stand with ferns and
potted plants would look very nice.

Lolly was a gentle creature, and the little girls loved her; she would
soon fit into her new home. The small spare-room would be rather a loss.
They could not give up the large spare-room to Lolly, and the small
spare-room was the handiest of the two for ordinary visitors. It seemed
extravagant to wash a pair of the large linen sheets for a single guest
who came but for a couple of nights. Still, there it was, and Henry was
right--Lolly ought to come to them. London would be a pleasant change
for her. She would meet nice people, and in London she would have a
better chance of marrying. Lolly was twenty-eight. She would have to
make haste if she were going to find a husband before she was thirty.
Poor Lolly! black was not becoming to her. She looked sallow, and her
pale grey eyes were paler and more surprising than ever underneath that
very unbecoming black mushroom hat. Mourning was never satisfactory if
one bought it in a country town.

While these thoughts passed through Caroline’s mind, Laura was not
thinking at all. She had picked a red geranium flower, and was staining
her left wrist with the juice of its crushed petals. So, when she was
younger, she had stained her pale cheeks, and had bent over the
greenhouse tank to see what she looked like. But the greenhouse tank
showed only a dark shadowy Laura, very dark and smooth like the lady in
the old holy painting that hung in the dining-room and was called the
Leonardo.

‘The girls will be delighted,’ said Caroline. Laura roused herself. It
was all settled, then, and she was going to live in London with Henry,
and Caroline his wife, and Fancy and Marion his daughters. She would
become an inmate of the tall house in Apsley Terrace where hitherto she
had only been a country sister-in-law on a visit. She would recognise a
special something in the physiognomy of that house-front which would
enable her to stop certainly before it without glancing at the number or
the door-knocker. Within it, she would know unhesitatingly which of the
polished brown doors was which, and become quite indifferent to the
position of the cistern, which had baffled her so one night when she lay
awake trying to assemble the house inside the box of its outer walls.
She would take the air in Hyde Park and watch the children on their
ponies and the fashionable trim ladies in Rotten Row, and go to the
theatre in a cab.

London life was very full and exciting. There were the shops,
processions of the Royal Family and of the unemployed, the gold tunnel
at Whiteley’s, and the brilliance of the streets by night. She thought
of the street lamps, so impartial, so imperturbable in their stately
diminuendos, and felt herself abashed before their scrutiny. Each in
turn would hand her on, her and her shadow, as she walked the unfathomed
streets and squares--but they would be familiar then--complying with the
sealed orders of the future; and presently she would be taking them for
granted, as the Londoners do. But in London there would be no greenhouse
with a glossy tank, and no apple-room, and no potting-shed, earthy and
warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and
sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in thick paper bags, and
hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray. She must
leave all this behind, or only enjoy it as a visitor, unless James and
Sibyl happened to feel, as Henry and Caroline did, that of course she
must live with them.

Sibyl said: ‘Dearest Lolly! So Henry and Caroline are to have you.... We
shall miss you more than I can say, but of course you will prefer
London. Dear old London with its picturesque fogs and its interesting
people, and all. I quite envy you. But you mustn’t quite forsake Lady
Place. You must come and pay us long visits, so that Tito doesn’t forget
his aunt.’

‘Will you miss me, Tito?’ said Laura, and stooped down to lay her face
against his prickly bib and his smooth, warm head. Tito fastened his
hands round her finger.

‘I’m sure he’ll miss your ring, Lolly,’ said Sibyl. ‘You’ll have to cut
the rest of your teeth on the poor old coral when Auntie Lolly goes,
won’t you, my angel?’

‘I’ll give him the ring if you think he’ll really miss it, Sibyl.’

Sibyl’s eyes glowed; but she said:

‘Oh no, Lolly, I couldn’t think of taking it Why, it’s a family ring.’

When Fancy Willowes had grown up, and married, and lost her husband in
the war, and driven a lorry for the Government, and married again from
patriotic motives, she said to Owen Wolf-Saunders, her second husband:

‘How unenterprising women were in the old days! Look at Aunt Lolly.
Grandfather left her five hundred a year, and she was nearly thirty when
he died, and yet she could find nothing better to do than to settle down
with Mum and Dad, and stay there ever since.’

‘The position of single women was very different twenty years ago,’
answered Mr. Wolf-Saunders. ‘_Feme sole_, you know, and _feme covert_,
and all that sort of rot.’

Even in 1902 there were some forward spirits who wondered why that Miss
Willowes, who was quite well off, and not likely to marry, did not make
a home for herself and take up something artistic or emancipated. Such
possibilities did not occur to any of Laura’s relations. Her father
being dead, they took it for granted that she should be absorbed into
the household of one brother or the other. And Laura, feeling rather as
if she were a piece of family property forgotten in the will, was ready
to be disposed of as they should think best.

The point of view was old-fashioned, but the Willoweses were a
conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways. Preference, not
prejudice, made them faithful to their past. They slept in beds and sat
upon chairs whose comfort insensibly persuaded them into respect for the
good sense of their forbears. Finding that well-chosen wood and
well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed that the same law
applied to well-chosen ways. Moderation, civil speaking, leisure of the
mind and a handsome simplicity were canons of behaviour imposed upon
them by the example of their ancestors.

Observing those canons, no member of the Willowes family had risen to
much eminence. Perhaps great-great-aunt Salome had made the nearest
approach to fame. It was a decent family boast that great-great-aunt
Salome’s puff-paste had been commended by King George III. And
great-great-aunt Salome’s prayer-book, with the services for King
Charles the Martyr and the Restoration of the Royal Family and the
welfare of the House of Hanover--a nice example of impartial piety--was
always used by the wife of the head of the family. Salome, though
married to a Canon of Salisbury, had taken off her embroidered kid
gloves, turned up her sleeves, and gone into the kitchen to mix the
paste for His Majesty’s eating, her Venice-point lappets dangling above
the floury bowl. She was a loyal subject, a devout churchwoman, and a
good housewife, and the Willoweses were properly proud of her. Titus,
her father, had made a voyage to the Indies, and had brought back with
him a green parrokeet, the first of its kind to be seen in Dorset. The
parrokeet was named Ratafee, and lived for fifteen years. When he died
he was stuffed; and perched as in life upon his ring, he swung from the
cornice of the china-cupboard surveying four generations of the Willowes
family with his glass eyes. Early in the nineteenth century one eye fell
out and was lost. The eye which replaced it was larger, but inferior
both in lustre and expressiveness. This gave Ratafee a rather leering
look, but it did not compromise the esteem in which he was held. In a
humble way the bird had made county history, and the family acknowledged
it, and gave him a niche in their own.

Beside the china-cupboard and beneath Ratafee stood Emma’s harp, a green
harp ornamented with gilt scrolls and acanthus leaves in the David
manner. When Laura was little she would sometimes steal into the empty
drawing-room and pluck the strings which remained unbroken. They
answered with a melancholy and distracted voice, and Laura would
pleasantly frighten herself with the thought of Emma’s ghost coming back
to make music with cold fingers, stealing into the empty drawing-room as
noiselessly as she had done. But Emma’s was a gentle ghost. Emma had
died of a decline, and when she lay dead with a bunch of snowdrops under
her folded palms a lock of her hair was cut off to be embroidered into a
picture of a willow tree exhaling its branches above a padded white
satin tomb. ‘That,’ said Laura’s mother, ‘is an heirloom of your
great-aunt Emma who died.’ And Laura was sorry for the poor young lady
who alone, it seemed to her, of all her relations had had the misfortune
to die.

Henry, born in 1818, grandfather to Laura and nephew to Emma, became
head of the house of Willowes when he was but twenty-four, his father
and unmarried elder brother dying of smallpox within a fortnight of each
other. As a young man Henry had shown a roving and untraditional
temperament, so it was fortunate that he had the licence of a cadet to
go his own way. He had taken advantage of this freedom to marry a Welsh
lady, and to settle near Yeovil, where his father bought him a
partnership in a brewery. It was natural to expect that upon becoming
the head of the family Henry would abandon, if not the Welsh wife and
the brewery, at least Somerset, and return to his native place. But this
he would not do. He had become attached to the neighbourhood where he
had spent the first years of his married life; the ill-considered jest
of his uncle the Admiral, that Henry was courting a Welshwoman with a
tall hat like Mother Shipton’s who would carry her shoes to church, had
secretly estranged him from his relations; and--most weighty reason of
all--Lady Place, a small solid mansion, which he had long
coveted--saying to himself that if ever he were rich enough he would
make his wife the mistress of it--just then came into the market. The
Willowes obstinacy, which had for so long kept unchanged the home in
Dorset, was now to transfer that home across the county border. The old
house was sold, and the furniture and family belongings were installed
at Lady Place. Several strings of Emma’s harp were broken, some feathers
were jolted out of Ratafee’s tail, and Mrs. Willowes, whose upbringing
had been Evangelical, was distressed for several Sundays by the
goings-on that she found in Salome’s prayer-book. But in the main the
Willowes tradition stood the move very well. The tables and chairs and
cabinets stood in the same relation to each other as before; the
pictures hung in the same order though on new walls; and the Dorset
hills were still to be seen from the windows, though now from windows
facing south instead of from windows facing north. Even the brewery,
untraditional as it was, soon weathered and became indistinguishably
part of the Willowes way of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

Henry Willowes had three sons and four daughters. Everard, the eldest
son, married his second cousin, Miss Frances D’Urfey. She brought some
more Willowes property to the Somerset house: a set of garnets; a buff
and gold tea-service bequeathed her by the Admiral, an amateur of china,
who had dowered all his nieces and great-nieces with Worcester, Minton,
and Oriental; and two oil-paintings by Italian masters which the younger
Titus, Emma’s brother, had bought in Rome whilst travelling for his
health. She bore Everard three children: Henry, born in 1867; James,
born in 1869; and Laura, born in 1874.

On Henry’s birth Everard laid down twelve dozen of port against his
coming of age. Everard was proud of the brewery, and declared that beer
was the befitting drink for all classes of Englishmen, to be preferred
over foreign wines. But he did not extend this ban to port and sherry;
it was clarets he particularly despised.

Another twelve dozen of port was laid down for James, and there it
seemed likely the matter would end.

Everard was a lover of womankind; he greatly desired a daughter, and
when he got one she was all the dearer for coming when he had almost
given up hope of her. His delight upon this occasion, however, could not
be so compactly expressed. He could not lay down port for Laura. At last
he hit upon the solution of his difficulty. Going up to London upon the
mysterious and inadequate pretext of growing bald, he returned with a
little string of pearls, small and evenly matched, which exactly fitted
the baby’s neck. Year by year, he explained, the necklace could be
extended until it encircled the neck of a grown-up young woman at her
first ball. The ball, he went on to say, must take place in winter, for
he wished to see Laura trimmed with ermine. ‘My dear,’ said Mrs.
Willowes, ‘the poor girl will look like a Beefeater.’ But Everard was
not to be put off. A stuffed ermine which he had known as a boy was
still his ideal of the enchanted princess, so pure and sleek was it, and
so artfully poised the small neat head on the long throat. ‘Weasel!’
exclaimed his wife. ‘Everard, how dare you love a minx?’

Laura escaped the usual lot of the new-born, for she was not at all red.
To Everard she seemed his very ermine come to true life. He was in love
with her femininity from the moment he set eyes on her. ‘Oh, the fine
little lady!’ he cried out when she was first shown to him, wrapped in
shawls, and whimpering at the keen sunlight of a frosty December
morning. Three days after that it thawed, and Mr. Willowes rode to
hounds. But he came back after the first kill. ‘’Twas a vixen,’ he said.
‘Such a pretty young vixen. It put me in mind of my own, and I thought
I’d ride back to see how she was behaving. Here’s the brush.’

Laura grew up almost as an only child. By the time she was past her
babyhood her brothers had gone to school. When they came back for their
holidays, Mrs. Willowes would say: ‘Now, play nicely with Laura. She has
fed your rabbits every day while you have been at school. But don’t let
her fall into the pond.’

Henry and James did their best to observe their mother’s bidding. When
Laura went too near the edge of the pond one or the other would
generally remember to call her back again; and before they returned to
the house, Henry, as a measure of precaution, would pull a wisp of grass
and wipe off any tell-tale green slime that happened to be on her
slippers. But nice play with a sister so much younger than themselves
was scarcely possible. They performed the brotherly office of teaching
her to throw and to catch; and when they played at Knights or Red
Indians, Laura was dutifully cast for some passive female part. This
satisfied the claims of honour; if at some later stage it was discovered
that the captive princess or the faithful squaw had slipped away
unnoticed to the company of Brewer in the coachhouse or Oliver Cromwell
the toad, who lived under the low russet roof of violet leaves near the
disused melon pit, it did not much affect the course of the drama. Once,
indeed, when Laura as a captive princess had been tied to a tree, her
brothers were so much carried away by a series of single combats for her
favour that they forgot to come and rescue her before they swore
friendship and went off to the Holy Land. Mr. Willowes, coming home from
the brewery through a sunset haze of midges, chanced to stroll into the
orchard to see if the rabbits had barked any more of his saplings. There
he found Laura, sitting contentedly in hayband fetters, and singing
herself a story about a snake that had no mackintosh. Mr. Willowes was
extremely vexed when he understood from Laura’s nonchalant account what
had happened. He took off her slippers and chafed her feet. Then he
carried her indoors to his study, giving orders that a tumbler of hot
sweet lemonade should be prepared for her immediately. She drank it
sitting on his knee while he told her about the new ferret. When Henry
and James were heard approaching with war-whoops, Mr. Willowes put her
into his leather arm-chair and went out to meet them. Their war-whoops
quavered and ceased as they caught sight of their father’s stern face.
Dusk seemed to fall on them with condemnation as he reminded them that
it was past their supper-time, and pointed out that, had he not
happened upon her, Laura would still have been sitting bound to the _Bon
Chrétien_ pear-tree.

This befell upon one of the days when Mrs. Willowes was lying down with
a headache. ‘Something always goes wrong when I have one of my days,’
the poor lady would complain. It was also upon one of Mrs. Willowes’s
days that Everard fed Laura with the preserved cherries out of the
drawing-room cake. Laura soon became very sick, and the stable-boy was
sent off post-haste upon Everard’s mare to summon the doctor.

Mrs. Willowes made a poor recovery after Laura’s birth; as time went on,
she became more and more invalidish, though always pleasantly so. She
was seldom well enough to entertain, so Laura grew up in a quiet
household. Ladies in mantles of silk or of sealskin, according to the
season of the year, would come to call, and sitting by the sofa would
say: ‘Laura is growing a big girl now. I suppose before long you will be
sending her to a school.’ Mrs. Willowes heard them with half shut eyes.
Holding her head deprecatingly upon one side, she returned evasive
answers. When by quite shutting her eyes she had persuaded them to go,
she would call Laura and say: ‘Darling, aren’t your skirts getting a
little short?’

Then Nannie would let out another tuck in Laura’s ginghams and merinos,
and some months would pass before the ladies returned to the attack.
They all liked Mrs. Willowes, but they were agreed amongst themselves
that she needed bracing up to a sense of her responsibilities,
especially her responsibilities about Laura. It really was not right
that Laura should be left so much to herself. Poor dear Miss Taylor was
an excellent creature. Had she not inquired about peninsulas in all the
neighbouring schoolrooms of consequence? But Miss Taylor for three hours
daily and Mme. Brevet’s dancing classes in winter did not, could not,
supply all Laura’s needs. She should have the companionship of girls of
her own age, or she might grow up eccentric. Another little hint to Mrs.
Willowes would surely open the poor lady’s eyes. But though Mrs.
Willowes received their good counsel with a flattering air of being just
about to become impressed by it, and filled up their teacups with a
great deal of delicious cream, the silk and sealskin ladies hinted in
vain, for Laura was still at home when her mother died.

During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually
more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the
final perfected expression of this skill. It was as if she had said,
yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, ‘I think I will go to my grave now,’ and
had left the room, her white shawl trailing behind her.

Laura mourned for her mother in skirts that almost reached the ground,
for Miss Boddle, the family dressmaker, had nice sensibilities and did
not think that legs could look sorrowful. Indeed, Laura’s legs were very
slim and frisky, they liked climbing trees and jumping over haycocks,
they had no wish to retire from the world and belong to a young lady.
But when she had put on the new clothes that smelt so queerly, and
looking in the mirror saw herself sad and grown-up, Laura accepted the
inevitable. Sooner or later she must be subdued into young-ladyhood; and
it seemed befitting that the change should come gravely, rather than
with the conventional polite uproar and fuss of ‘coming out’--which odd
term meant, as far as she could see, and when once the champagne bottles
were emptied and the flimsy ball-dress lifted off the thin shoulders,
going-in.

As things were, she had a recompense for the loss of her liberty. For
Everard needed comfort, he needed a woman to comfort him, and abetted by
Miss Boddle’s insinuations Laura was soon able to persuade him that her
comfortings were of the legitimate womanly kind. It was easy, much
easier than she had supposed, to be grown-up; to be clear-headed and
watchful, to move sedately and think before she spoke. Already her hands
looked much whiter on the black lap. She could not take her mother’s
place--that was as impossible as to have her mother’s touch on the
piano, for Mrs. Willowes had learnt from a former pupil of Field, she
had the _jeu perlé_; but she could take a place of her own. So Laura
behaved very well--said the Willowes connection, agreeing and approving
amongst themselves--and went about her business, and only cried when
alone in the potting-shed, where a pair of old gardening gloves repeated
to her the shape of her mother’s hands.

Her behaviour was the more important in that neither of her brothers was
at home when Mrs. Willowes died. Henry, now a member of the Inner
Temple, had just proposed marriage to a Miss Caroline Fawcett. When he
returned to London after the funeral it was impossible not to feel that
he was travelling out of the shadow that rested upon Lady Place to bask
in his private glory of a suitable engagement.

He left his father and sister to find consolation in consoling each
other. For though James was with them, and though _his_ sorrow was
without qualification, they were not likely to get much help from James.
He had been in Germany studying chemistry, and when they sent off the
telegram Everard and Laura reckoned up how long he would take to reach
Lady Place, and planned how they could most comfortingly receive him,
for they had already begun to weave a thicker clothing of family
kindness against the chill of bereavement. On hearing the crunch of the
wagonette in the drive, and the swishing of the wet rhododendrons, they
glanced at each other reassuringly, taking heart at the thought of the
bright fire in his bedroom, the carefully chosen supper that awaited
him. But when he stood before them and they looked at his red twitching
face, they were abashed before the austerity of a grief so differently
sustained from their own. Nothing they had to offer could remedy that
heart-ache. They left him to himself, and sought refuge in each other’s
society, as much from his sorrow as theirs, and in his company they sat
quietly, like two good children in the presence of a more grown-up grief
than they could understand.

James might have accepted their self-effacement with silent gratitude;
or he might not have noticed it at all--it was impossible to tell. Soon
after his return he did a thing so unprecedented in the annals of the
family that it could only be explained by the extreme exaltation of mind
which possessed him: for without consulting any one, he altered the
furniture, transferring a mirror and an almond-green brocade settee from
his mother’s room to his own. This accomplished, he came slowly
downstairs and went out into the stable-yard where Laura and his father
were looking at a litter of puppies. He told them what he had done,
speaking drily, as of some everyday occurrence, and when they, a little
timidly, tried to answer as if they too thought it a very natural and
convenient arrangement, he added that he did not intend to go back to
Germany, but would stay henceforth at Lady Place and help his father
with the brewery.

Everard was much pleased at this. His faith in the merits of brewing had
been rudely jolted by the refusal of his eldest son to have anything to
do with it. Even before Henry left school his ambition was set on the
law. Hearing him speak in the School Debating Society, one of the
masters told him that he had a legal mind. This compliment left him with
no doubts as to what career he wished to follow, and before long the
legal mind was brought to bear upon his parents. Everard was hurt, and
Mrs. Willowes was slightly contemptuous, for she had the old-fashioned
prejudice against the learned professions, and thought her son did ill
in not choosing to live by his industry rather than by his wits. But
Henry had as much of the Willowes determination as either his father or
his mother, and his stock of it was twenty-five years younger and
livelier than theirs. ‘Times are changed,’ said Everard. ‘A country
business doesn’t look the same to a young man as it did in my day.’

So though a partnership in the brewery seemed the natural destiny for
James, Everard was much flattered by his decision, and hastened to put
into practice the scientific improvements which his son suggested.
Though by nature mistrustful of innovations he hoped that James might be
innocently distracted from his grief by these interests, and gave him a
new hopper in the same paternal spirit as formerly he had given him a
rook-rifle. James was quite satisfied with the working of the hopper.
But it was not possible to discover if it had assuaged his grief,
because he concealed his feelings too closely, becoming, by a hyperbole
of reticence, reserved even about his reserve, so that to all
appearances he was no more than a red-faced young man with a moderate
flow of conversation.

Everard and Laura never reached that stage of familiarity with James
which allows members of the same family to accept each other on surface
values. Their love for him was tinged with awe, the awe that love learns
in the moment of finding itself unavailing. But they were glad to have
him with them, especially Everard, who was growing old enough to like
the prospect of easing his responsibilities, even the inherent
responsibility of being a Willowes, on to younger shoulders. No one was
better fitted to take up this burden than James. Everything about him,
from his seat on a horse to his taste in leather bindings, betokened an
integrity of good taste and good sense, unostentatious, haughty, and
discriminating.

The leather bindings were soon in Laura’s hands. New books were just
what she wanted, for she had almost come to the end of the books in the
Lady Place library. Had they known this the silk and sealskin ladies
would have shaken their heads over her upbringing even more deploringly.
But, naturally, it had not occurred to them that a young lady of their
acquaintance should be under no restrictions as to what she read, and
Mrs. Willowes had not seen any reason for making them better informed.

So Laura read undisturbed, and without disturbing anybody, for the
conversation at local tea-parties and balls never happened to give her
an opportunity of mentioning anything that she had learnt from Locke on
the Understanding or Glanvil on Witches. In fact, as she was generally
ignorant of the books which _their_ daughters were allowed to read, the
neighbouring mammas considered her rather ignorant. However they did not
like her any the worse for this, for her ignorance, if not so sexually
displeasing as learning, was of so unsweetened a quality as to be wholly
without attraction. Nor had they any more reason to be dissatisfied with
her appearance. What beauties of person she had were as unsweetened as
her beauties of mind, and her air of fine breeding made her look older
than her age.

Laura was of a middle height, thin, and rather pointed. Her skin was
brown, inclining to sallowness; it seemed browner still by contrast with
her eyes, which were large, set wide apart, and of that shade of grey
which inclines neither to blue nor green, but seems only a much diluted
black. Such eyes are rare in any face, and rarer still in conjunction
with a brown colouring. In Laura’s case the effect was too startling to
be agreeable. Strangers thought her remarkable-looking, but got no
further, and those more accustomed thought her plain. Only Everard and
James might have called her pretty, had they been asked for an opinion.
This would not have been only the partiality of one Willowes for
another. They had seen her at home, where animation brought colour into
her cheeks and spirit into her bearing. Abroad, and in company, she was
not animated. She disliked going out, she seldom attended any but those
formal parties at which the attendance of Miss Willowes of Lady Place
was an obligatory civility; and she found there little reason for
animation. Being without coquetry she did not feel herself bound to
feign a degree of entertainment which she had not experienced, and the
same deficiency made her insensible to the duty of every marriageable
young woman to be charming, whether her charm be directed towards one
special object or, in default of that, universally distributed through a
disinterested love of humanity. This may have been due to her
upbringing--such was the local explanation. But her upbringing had only
furthered a temperamental indifference to the need of getting
married--or, indeed, of doing anything positive--and this indifference
was reinforced by the circumstances which had made her so closely her
father’s companion.

There is nothing more endangering to a young woman’s normal inclination
towards young men than an intimacy with a man twice her own age. Laura
compared with her father all the young men whom otherwise she might have
accepted without any comparisons whatever as suitable objects for her
intentions, and she did not find them support the comparison at all
well. They were energetic, good-looking, and shot pheasants with great
skill; or they were witty, elegantly dressed, and had a London club; but
still she had no mind to quit her father’s company for theirs, even if
they should show clear signs of desiring her to do so, and till then she
paid them little attention in thought or deed.

When Aunt Emmy came back from India and filled the spare-room with
cedar-wood boxes, she exclaimed briskly to Everard: ‘My dear, it’s high
time Laura married! Why isn’t she married already?’ Then, seeing a
slight spasm of distress at this barrack-square trenchancy pass over her
brother’s face, she added: ‘A girl like Laura has only to make her
choice. Those Welsh eyes.... Whenever they look at me I am reminded of
Mamma. Everard! You must let me give her a season in India.’

‘You must ask Laura,’ said Everard. And they went out into the orchard
together, where Emmy picked up the windfall apples and ate them with the
greed of the exile. Nothing more was said just then. Emmy was aware of
her false step. Ashamed at having exceeded a Willowes decorum of
intervention she welcomed this chance to reinstate herself in her
brother’s good graces by an evocation of their childhood under these
same trees.

But Everard kept silence for distress. He believed in good faith that
his relief at seeing Laura’s budding suitors nipped in their bud was due
to the conviction that not one of them was good enough for her. As
innocently as the unconcerned Laura might have done, but did not, he
waited for the ideal wooer. Now Emmy’s tactless concern had thrown a
cold shadow over the remoter future after his death. And for the near
future had she not spoken of taking Laura to India? He would be good. He
would not say a word to dissuade the girl from what might prove to be to
her advantage. But at the idea of her leaving him for a country so
distant, for a manner of life so unfamiliar, the warmth went out of his
days.

Emmy unfolded her plan to Laura; that is to say, unfolded the outer
wrappings of it. Laura listened with delight to her aunt’s tales of
Indian life. Compounds and mangoes, the early morning rides along the
Kilpawk Road, the grunting song of the porters who carried Mem Sahibs in
litters up to the hill-stations, parrots flying through the jungle,
ayahs with rubies in their nostrils, kid-gloves preserved in pickle jars
with screw-tops--all the solemn and simple pomp of old-fashioned Madras
beckoned to her, beckoned like the dark arms tinkling with bangles of
soft gold and coloured glass. But when the beckonings took the form of
Aunt Emmy’s circumstantial invitation Laura held back, demurred this way
and that, and pronounced at last the refusal which had been implicit in
her mind from the moment the invitation was given.

She did not want to leave her father, nor did she want to leave Lady
Place. Her life perfectly contented her. She had no wish for ways other
than those she had grown up in. With an easy diligence she played her
part as mistress of the house, abetted at every turn by country servants
of long tenure, as enamoured of the comfortable amble of day by day as
she was. At certain seasons a fresh resinous smell would haunt the house
like some rustic spirit. It was Mrs. Bonnet making the traditional
beeswax polish that alone could be trusted to give the proper lustre to
the elegantly bulging fronts of talboys and cabinets. The grey days of
early February were tinged with tropical odours by great-great-aunt
Salome’s recipe for marmalade; and on the afternoon of Good Friday, if
it were fine, the stuffed foxes and otters were taken out of their glass
cases, brushed, and set to sweeten on the lawn.

These were old institutions, they dated from long before Laura’s day.
But the gradual deposit of family customs was always going on, and
within her own memory the sum of Willowes ways had been augmented. There
was the Midsummer Night’s Eve picnic in Potts’s Dingle--cold pigeon-pie
and cider-cup, and moth-beset candles flickering on the grass. There was
the ceremony of the hop-garland, which James had brought back from
Germany, and the pantomime party from the workhouse, and a very special
kind of sealing-wax that could only be procured from Padua. Long ago the
children had been allowed to choose their birthday dinners, and still
upon the seventeenth of July James ate duck and green peas and a
gooseberry fool, while a cock-pheasant in all the glory of tail-feathers
was set before Laura upon the ninth of December. And at the bottom of
the orchard flourished unchecked a bed of nettles, for Nannie Quantrell
placed much trust in the property of young nettles eaten as spring
greens to clear the blood, quoting emphatically and rhythmically a rhyme
her grandmother had taught her:

    ‘If they would eat nettles in March
      And drink mugwort in May,
     So many fine young maidens
      Would not go to the clay.’

Laura would very willingly have drunk mugwort in May also, for this
rhyme of Nannie’s, so often and so impressively rehearsed, had taken
fast hold of her imagination. She had always had a taste for botany, she
had also inherited a fancy for brewing. One of her earliest pleasures
had been to go with Everard to the brewery and look into the great vats
while he, holding her firmly with his left hand, with his right plunged
a long stick through the clotted froth which, working and murmuring,
gradually gave way until far below through the tumbling, dissolving rent
the beer was disclosed.

Botany and brewery she now combined into one pursuit, for at the spur of
Nannie’s rhyme she turned her attention into the forsaken green byways
of the rural pharmacopœia. From Everard she got a little still, from the
family recipe-books much information and good advice; and where these
failed her, Nicholas Culpepper or old Goody Andrews, who might have been
Nicholas’s crony by the respect she had for the moon, were ready to help
her out. She roved the countryside for herbs and simples, and many were
the washes and decoctions that she made from sweet-gale, water purslane,
cowslips, and the roots of succory, while her salads gathered in fields
and hedges were eaten by Everard, at first in hope and trust, and
afterwards with flattering appetite. Encouraged by him, she even wrote
a little book called ‘Health by the Wayside’ commending the use of
old-fashioned simples and healing herbs. It was published anonymously at
the local press, and fell quite flat. Everard felt much more slighted by
this than she did, and bought up the remainders without telling her so.
But mugwort was not included in the book, for she was never allowed to
test its virtues, and she would not include recipes which she had not
tried herself. Nannie believed it to be no less effective than nettles,
but she did not know how to prepare it. Once long ago she had made a
broth by seething the leaves in boiling water, which she then strained
off and gave to Henry and James. But it made them both sick, and Mrs.
Willowes had forbidden its further use. Laura felt positive that mugwort
tea would not have made her sick. She begged for leave to make trial of
it, but to no avail; Nannie’s prohibition was as absolute as that of her
mistress. But Nannie had not lost her faith. She explained that the
right mugwort for the purpose was a very special kind that did not grow
in Somerset, but at the gates of the cobbler in her native village the
mugwort grew fair enough. Long after this discussion had taken place,
Laura found in Aubrey’s _Miscellany_ a passage quoted from Pliny which
told how Artemis had revealed the virtues of mugwort to the dreaming
Pericles. She hastened to tell Nannie of this. Nannie was gratified, but
she would not admit that her faith needed any buttressing. ‘Those Greeks
didn’t know everything!’ she said, and drove a needle into her red cloth
emery case, which was shaped like a strawberry and spotted over with
small yellow beads.

For nearly ten years Laura kept house for Everard and James. Nothing
happened to disturb the easy serenity of their days except the birth of
first one daughter and then another to Henry and Caroline, and this did
not disturb it much. Everard, so happy in a daughter, was prepared to be
happy in granddaughters also. When Henry apologised to him with dignity
for the accident of their sex Everard quoted to him the nursery rhyme
about what little boys and girls were made of. Henry was relieved to
find his father taking so lightly a possible failure in the Willowes
male line, but he wished the old man wouldn’t trifle so. He could not
stoop to give his father the lie over this unscientific theory of sex.
He observed gloomily that daughters could be very expensive now that so
much fuss was being made about the education of women.

Henry in his fears for the Willowes’ male line had taken it for granted
that his brother would never marry. And certainly if to lie very low
about a thing is a sign that one is not thinking about it, James had no
thought of marriage. He was nearly thirty-three when he announced with
his usual quiet abruptness that he was going to marry. The lady of his
choice was a Miss Sibyl Mauleverer. She was the daughter of a clergyman,
but of a fashionable London clergyman which no doubt accounted for her
not being in the least like any clergyman’s daughter seen by Everard and
Laura hitherto. Miss Mauleverer’s skirts were so long and so lavish that
they lay in folds upon the ground all round her when she stood still,
and required to be lifted in both hands before she could walk. Her hats
were further off her head than any hats that had yet been seen in
Somerset, and she had one of the up to date smooth Aberdeen terriers. It
was indeed hard to believe that this distinguished creature had been
born and bred in a parish. But nothing could have been more parochial
than her determination to love her new relations and to be loved in
return. She called Everard _Vaterlein_, she taught Laura to dance the
cake-walk, she taught Mrs. Bonnet to make _petits canapés à
l’Impératrice_; having failed to teach Brewer how to make a rock garden,
she talked of making one herself; and though she would have liked old
oak better, she professed herself enchanted by the Willowes walnut and
mahogany. So assiduously did this pretty young person seek to please
that Laura and Everard would have been churlish had they not responded
to her blandishments. Each, indeed, secretly wondered what James could
see in any one so showy and dashing as Sibyl. But they were too discreet
to admit this, even one to the other, and contented themselves with
politely wondering what Sibyl could see in such a country sobersides as
James.

Lady Place was a large house, and it seemed proper that James should
bring his wife to live there. It also seemed proper that she should take
Laura’s place as mistress of the household. The sisters-in-law disputed
this point with much civility, each insisting upon the other’s claim
like two queens curtseying in a doorway. However Sibyl was the visiting
queen and had to yield to Laura in civility, and assume the
responsibilities of housekeeping. She jingled them very lightly, and as
soon as she found herself to be with child she gave them over again to
Laura, who made a point of ordering the _petite canapés_ whenever any
one came to dinner.

Whatever small doubts and regrets Everard and Laura had nursed about
James’s wife were put away when Sibyl bore a man child. It would not
have been loyal to the heir of the Willowes to suppose that his mother
was not quite as well-bred as he. Everard did not even need to remind
himself of the Duchess of Suffolk. Titus, sprawling his fat hands over
his mother’s bosom, Titus, a disembodied cooing of contentment in the
nursery overhead, would have justified a far more questionable match
than James had made.

A year later Everard, amid solemnity, lit the solitary candle of his
grandson’s first birthday upon the cake that Mrs. Bonnet had made, that
Laura had iced, that Sibyl had wreathed with flowers. The flame wavered
a little in the draught, and Everard, careful against omens, ordered the
French windows to be shut. On so glowing a September afternoon it was
strange to see the conifers nodding their heads in the wind and to hear
the harsh breath of autumn go forebodingly round the house. Laura gazed
at the candle. She understood her father’s alarm and, superstitious
also, held her breath until she saw the flame straighten itself and the
first little trickle of coloured wax flow down upon the glittering tin
star that held the candle. That evening, after dinner, there was a show
of fireworks for the school children in the garden. So many rockets were
let off by Everard and James that for a while the northern sky was laced
with a thicket of bright sedge scattering a fiery pollen. So hot and
excited did Everard become in manœuvring this splendour that he forgot
the cold wind and took off his coat.

Two days after he complained of a pain in his side. The doctor looked
grave as he came out of the bed-chamber, though within it Laura had
heard him laughing with his old friend, and rallying him upon his
nightcap. Everard had inflammation of the lungs, he told her; he would
send for two nurses. They came, and their starched white aprons looked
to her like unlettered tombstones. From the beginning her soul had
crouched in apprehension, and indeed there was at no time much hope for
the old man. When he was conscious he lay very peacefully, his face
turned towards the window, watching the swallows fly restlessly from
tree to tree. ‘It will be a hard winter,’ he said to Laura. ‘They’re
gathering early to go.’ And then: ‘Do you suppose they know where
they’re going?’

‘I’m sure they do,’ she answered, thinking to comfort him. He regarded
her shrewdly, smiled, and shook his head. ‘Then they’re wiser than we.’

When grandfather Henry, that masterful man, removed across the border,
he was followed by a patriarchal train of manservants and maidservants,
mares, geldings, and spaniels, vans full of household stuff, and slow
country waggons loaded with nodding greenery. ‘I want to make sure of a
good eating apple,’ said he, ‘since I am going to Lady Place for life.’
Death was another matter. The Willowes burial-ground was in Dorset, nor
would Henry lie elsewhere. Now it was Everard’s turn. The dead appeared
to welcome him without astonishment--the former Everards and Tituses,
Lauras and Emmelines; they were sure that he would come, they approved
his decision to join them.

Laura stood by the open grave, but the heap of raw earth and the planks
sprawling upon it displeased her. Her eyes strayed to the graves that
were completed. Her mind told the tale of them, for she knew them well.
Four times a year Mrs. Willowes had visited the family burying place,
and as a child Laura had counted it a solemn and delicious honour to
accompany her upon these expeditions. In summer especially, it was
pleasant to sit on the churchyard wall under the thick roof of lime
trees, or to finger the headstones, now hot, now cold, while her mother
went from grave to grave with her gauntlet gloves and her gardening
basket. Afterwards they would eat their sandwiches in a hayfield, and
pay a visit to old Mrs. Dymond, whose sons and grandsons in hereditary
office clipped the grass and trimmed the bushes of the family enclosure.
As Laura grew older the active part of these excursions fell upon her;
and often of late years when she went alone she half yielded her mind to
the fancy that the dead mother whose grave she tended was sitting a
little apart in the shade, presently to rise and come to meet her,
having just recalled and delicately elaborated some odd trait of a
neighbouring great-uncle.

The bees droned in the motionless lime trees, A hot ginny churchyard
smell detached itself in a leisurely way from the evergreens when the
mourners brushed by them. The sun, but an hour or so declined, shone
with an ardent and steadfast interest upon the little group. ‘In the
midst of life we are in death,’ said Mr. Warbury, his voice sounding
rather shameless taken out of church and displayed upon the basking
echoless air. ‘In the midst of death we are in life,’ Laura thought,
would be a more accurate expression of the moment. Her small body
encased in tremendous sunlight seemed to throb with an intense vitality,
impersonally responding to heat, scent, and colour. With blind
clear-sighted eyes she saw the coffin lowered into the grave, and the
earth shovelled in on top of it. She was aware of movement around her,
of a loosening texture of onlookers, of footsteps and departures. But it
did not occur to her that the time was come when she too must depart.
She stood and watched the sexton, who had set to work now in a more
business-like fashion. An arm was put through hers. A voice said: ‘Dear
Laura! we must go now,’ and Caroline led her away. Tears ran down
Caroline’s face; she seemed to be weeping because it was time to go.

Laura would have turned for one more backward look, but Caroline
prevented her. Her tears ran faster and she shook her head and sighed.
They reached the gate. It closed behind them with a contented click, for
they were the last to leave.

Opposite the churchyard were the gates of the old home. The drive was
long, straight, and formal; it had been a cart-track across a meadow
when the old home was a farm. At the end of the drive stood the grey
stone house. A purple clematis muffled the porch, and a white cat lay
asleep in a bed of nasturtiums. The blinds were drawn down in respect to
the dead. Laura looked at it. Since her earliest childhood it had been a
familiar sight, a familiar thought. But now she saw it with different
eyes: a prescience of exile came over her and, forgetting Lady Place,
she looked with the yearning of an outcast at the dwelling so long ago
discarded. The house was like an old blind nurse sitting in the sun and
ruminating past events. It seemed an act of the most horrible
ingratitude to leave it all and go away without one word of love. But
the gates were shut, the time of welcome was gone by.

For a while they stood in the road, none making a move, each waiting for
the other’s lead. A tall poplar grew on the left hand of the churchyard
gate. Its scant shadow scarcely indented the white surface of the road.
A quantity of wasps were buzzing about its trunk, and presently one of
the wasps stung Henry. This seemed to be the spur that they were all
waiting for; they turned and walked to the corner of the road where the
carriages stood that were to drive them back to the station.

Every one was sorry for Laura, for they knew how much she had loved her
father. They agreed that it was a good thing that Henry and Caroline
were taking her to London. They hoped that this change would distract
her from her grief. Meanwhile, there was a good deal to do, and that
also was a distraction. Clothes and belongings had to be sorted out,
friends and family pensioners visited, and letters of condolence
answered. Beside this she had her own personal accumulation of vagrant
odds and ends to dispose of. She had lived for twenty-eight years in a
house where there was no lack of cupboard room, and a tradition of
hoarding, so the accumulation was considerable. There were old toys,
letters, stones of strange shapes or bright colours, lesson-books,
water-colour sketches of the dogs and the garden; a bunch of dance
programmes kept for the sake of their little pencils, and all the little
pencils tangled into an inextricable knot; pieces of unfinished
needlework, jeweller’s boxes, scraps cut out of the newspaper, and
unexplainable objects that could only be remembrancers of things she had
forgotten. To go over these hoards amused the surface of her mind. But
with everything thrown away she seemed to be denying the significance of
her youth.

Thus busied, she was withheld all day from her proper care. But at dusk
she would go out of the house and pace up and down the nut alley at the
foot of the garden. The cold airs that rose up from the ground spoke
sadly to her of burial, the mossy paths were hushed and humble under her
tread, and the smells of autumn condoled with her. Brewer the gardener,
stamping out the ashes of his bonfire, saw her pass to and fro, a
slender figure moving sedately between the unmoving boughs. He alone of
all the household had taken his master’s death without exclamation.
Death coming to the old was a harmless thought to him, but looking at
Laura he sighed deeply, as though he had planted her and now saw her
dashed and broken by bad weather.

Ten days after Everard’s death Henry and Caroline left Lady Place,
taking Laura with them. She found the leave-taking less painful than
she had expected, and Caroline put her to bed as soon as they arrived in
Apsley Terrace, which simplified her unhappiness by making her feel like
an unhappy child.

Laura had heard the others agreeing that the move to London would make
her feel very differently. She had thought them stupid to suppose that
any outward change could alter her mood. She now found that they had
judged better than she. In Somerset she had grieved over her father’s
death. In London her grief was retracted into sudden realisations of her
loss. She had thought that sorrow would be her companion for many years,
and had planned for its entertainment. Now it visited her like sudden
snow-storms, a hastening darkness across the sky, a transient whiteness
and rigour cast upon her. She tried to recover the sentiment of
renunciation which she had worn like a veil. It was gone, and gone with
it was her sense of the dignity of bereavement.

Henry and Caroline did all they could to prevent her feeling unhappy. If
they had been overlooking some shame of hers they could not have been
more tactful, more modulatory.

The first winter passed by like a half-frozen stream. At the turn of
the year it grew extremely cold. Red cotton sandbags were laid along the
window-sashes, and Fancy and Marion skated on the Round Pond with small
astrakhan muffs. Laura did not skate, but she walked briskly along the
path with Caroline, listening to the rock and jar of the skates grinding
upon the ice and to the cries of the gulls overhead. She found London
much colder than the country, though Henry assured her that this was
impossible. She developed chilblains, and this annoyed her, for she had
not had chilblains since she was a child. Then Nannie Quantrell would
send her out in the early morning to run barefoot over the rimy lawn.
There was a small garden at Apsley Terrace, but it had been gravelled
over because Henry disliked the quality of London grass; and in any case
it was not the sort of garden in which she could run barefoot.

She was also annoyed by the hardness of the London water. Her hands were
so thin that they were always a little red; now they were rough also. If
they could have remained idle, she would not have minded this so much.
But Caroline never sat with idle hands; she would knit, or darn, or do
useful needlework. Laura could not sit opposite her and do nothing.
There was no useful needlework for her to do, Caroline did it all, so
Laura was driven to embroidery. Each time that a strand of silk rasped
against her fingers she shuddered inwardly.

Time went fester than the embroidery did. She had actually a sensation
that she was stitching herself into a piece of embroidery with a good
deal of background. But, as Caroline said, it was not possible to feel
dull when there was so much to do. Indeed, it was surprising how much
there was to do, and for everybody in the house. Even Laura, introduced
as a sort of extra wheel, soon found herself part of the mechanism, and,
interworking with the other wheels, went round as busily as they.

When she awoke, the day was already begun. She could hear iron noises
from the kitchen, the sound of yesterday’s ashes being probed out. Then
came a smell of wood smoke--the kitchen fire had been laid anew and
kindled in the cleansed grate. This was followed by the automatic noise
of the carpet-sweeper and, breaking in upon it, the irregular knocking
of the staircase brush against the banisters. The maid who brought her
morning tea and laid the folded towel across the hot-water can had an
experienced look; when she drew back the curtains she looked out upon
the day with no curiosity. She had seen it already.

By the time the Willowes family met at breakfast all this activity had
disappeared like the tide from the smooth, garnished beach. For the rest
of the day it functioned unnoticed. Bells were answered, meals were
served, all that appeared was completion. Yet unseen and underground the
preparation and demolition of every day went on, like the inward
persistent workings of heart and entrails. Sometimes a crash, a banging
door, a voice upraised, would rend the veil of impersonality. And
sometimes a sound of running water at unusual hours and a faint
steaminess in the upper parts of the house betokened that one of the
servants was having a bath.

After breakfast, and after Henry had been seen off, Caroline descended
to the kitchen and Laura read the relinquished _Times_. Then came
shopping, letter-writing, arranging the flowers, cleaning the
canary-cage, and the girls’ walk. Such things as arranging flowers or
cleaning the canary-cage were done with a kind of precautious routine
which made them seem alike solemn and illicit. The flowers were always
arranged in the ground-floor lavatory, where there was a small sink;
vases and wire frames were kept in a cupboard, and a pair of scissors
was strung to a nail. Then the completed affair was carried carefully
past the coats that hung in the lobby outside and set down upon some
established site.

Every Tuesday the books were changed at the library.

After lunch there was a spell of embroidery and more _Times_. If it was
fine, Caroline paid calls; if wet, she sat at home on the chance of
receiving them. On Saturday afternoons there was the girls’
dancing-class. Laura accompanied her nieces thither, carrying their
slippers in a bag. She sat among the other parents and guardians upon a
dais which shook to the primary accents of the pianist, watching lancers
and polkas and waltzes being performed, and hearing Miss Parley say:
‘Now we will recommence.’ After the dancing was over there was a March
of Grace, and when Fancy and Marion had miscarried of their curtseys she
would envelop their muslin dresses and their red elbows in the grey
ulsters, and walk them briskly home again.

They were dull children, though their dullness did not prevent them
having a penetrating flow of conversation. Their ways and thoughts were
governed by a sort of zodiacal procession of other little girls, and
when they came down to the drawing-room after tea it seemed to Laura
that they brought the Wardours, or the Wilkinsons, or the de la Bottes
with them.

Dinner was at half-past seven. It was a sensible rule of Caroline’s that
at dinner only general topics should be discussed. The difficulties of
the day (if the day had presented difficulties) were laid aside. To this
rule Caroline attributed the excellence of Henry’s digestion. Henry’s
digestion was further safe-guarded by being left to itself in the
smoking-room for an hour after dinner. If he was busy, this hour of
meditation would be followed by some law-work. If not, he would join
them in the drawing-room, or go to his club. When they were thus left by
themselves Laura and Caroline went off to bed early, for they were
pleasantly fatigued by their regular days and regular meals. Later on
Laura, half asleep, would hear Henry’s return from his club. The thud of
the front door pulled to after him drove through the silent house, and
this was followed by the noise of bolts and chains. Then the house,
emptied of another day, creaked once or twice, and fell into repose,
its silence and security barred up within it like a kind of moral family
plate. The remainder of the night was left at the disposal of the
grandfather’s clock in the hall, equitably dealing out minutes and
quarters and hours.

On Sunday mornings Henry would wind the clock. First one and then the
other the quivering chains were wound up, till only the snouts of the
leaden weights were visible, drooping sullenly over the abyss of time
wherein they were to make their descent during the seven days following.
After that the family went to church, and there were wound up for the
week in much the same manner. They went to evening service too, but
evening service was less austere. The vindictive sentiments sounded less
vindictive; if an umbrella fell down with a crash the ensuing silence
was less affronted; the sermon was shorter, or seemed so, and swung more
robustly into ‘And now to God the Father.’

After evening service came cold supper. Fancy and Marion sat up for
this, and it was rather a cheerful meal, with extra trivialities such as
sardines and celery. The leaden weights had already started upon their
downward course.

Caroline was a religious woman. Resolute, orderly and unromantic, she
would have made an admirable Mother Superior. In her housekeeping and
her scrupulous account-books she expressed an almost mystical sense of
the validity of small things. But like most true mystics, she was
unsympathetic and difficult of approach. Once only did she speak her
spiritual mind to Laura. Laura was nursing her when she had influenza;
Caroline wished to put on a clean nightdress, and Laura, opening the
third drawer of the large mahogany wardrobe, had commented upon the
beautiful orderliness with which Caroline’s body linen was arranged
therein. ‘We have our example,’ said Caroline. ‘The graveclothes were
folded in the tomb.’

Looking into the large shadowy drawer, where nightgowns and chemises lay
folded exactly upon each other in a purity that disdained even lavender,
Laura shuddered a little at this revelation of her sister-in-law’s
private thoughts. She made no answer, and never again did Caroline open
her mind to her upon such matters.

Laura never forgot this. Caroline seemed affectionately disposed towards
her; she was full of practical good sense, her advice was excellent,
and pleasantly bestowed. Laura saw her a good wife, a fond and discreet
mother, a kind mistress, a most conscientious sister-in-law. She was
also rather gluttonous. But for none of these qualities could Laura feel
at ease with her. Compared to Caroline she knew herself to be
unpractical, unmethodical, lacking in initiative. The tasks that
Caroline delegated to her she performed eagerly and carefully, but she
performed them with the hampering consciousness that Caroline could do
them better than she, and in less time. Even in so simple a matter as
holding a skein of wool for Caroline to wind off into a ball, Caroline’s
large white fingers worked so swiftly that it was she who twitched the
next length off Laura’s thumb before Laura, watching the diminishing
thread, remembered to dip her hand. But all this--for Laura was humble
and Caroline kind--could have been overcome. It was in the things that
never appeared that Laura felt her inadequacy.

Laura was not in any way religious. She was not even religious enough to
speculate towards irreligion. She went with Caroline to early service
whenever Caroline’s inquiries suggested it, and to morning service and
evening service every Sunday; she knelt beside her and heard her pray
in a small, stilled version of the voice which she knew so well in its
clear everyday ordinances. Religion was great-great-aunt Salome’s
prayer-book which Caroline held in her gloved hands. Religion was a
strand in the Willowes’ life, and the prayer-book was the outward sign
of it. But it was also the outward sign of the puff pastry which had
been praised by King George III. Religion was something to be preserved:
it was part of the Willowes life and so was the prayer-book, preserved
from generation to generation.

Laura was bored by the church which they attended. She would have liked,
now that she was come to London, to see the world, to adventure in
churches. She was darkly, adventurously drawn to see what services were
like amongst Roman Catholics, amongst Huguenots, amongst Unitarians and
Swedenborgians, feeling about this rather as she felt about the East
End. She expressed her wish to Caroline, and Caroline, rather
unexpectedly, had been inclined to further it. But Henry banned the
project. It would not do for Laura to go elsewhere than to the family
place of worship, he said. For Henry, the family place of worship was
the pew upon whose ledge rested great-great-aunt Salome’s prayer-book.
He felt this less explicitly than the straying Laura did, for he was a
man and had less time to think of such things. But he felt it strongly.

Laura believed that she would like Caroline if she could only understand
her. She had no difficulty in understanding Henry, but for no amount of
understanding could she much like him. After some years in his house she
came to the conclusion that Caroline had been very bad for his
character. Caroline was a good woman and a good wife. She was slightly
self-righteous, and fairly rightly so, but she yielded to Henry’s
judgment in every dispute, she bowed her good sense to his will and
blinkered her wider views in obedience to his prejudices. Henry had a
high opinion of her merits, but thinking her to be so admirable and
finding her to be so acquiescent had encouraged him to have an even
higher opinion of his own. However good a wife Caroline might choose to
be, she could not quite make Henry a bad husband or a bad man--he was
too much of a Willowes for that: but she fed his vanity, and ministered
to his imperiousness.

Laura also thought that the law had done a great deal to spoil Henry. It
had changed his natural sturdy stupidity into a browbeating
indifference to other people’s point of view. He seemed to consider
himself briefed by his Creator to turn into ridicule the opinions of
those who disagreed with him, and to attribute dishonesty, idiocy, or a
base motive to every one who supported a better case than he. This did
not often appear in his private life, Henry was kindly disposed to those
who did not thwart him by word or deed. His household had been well
schooled by Caroline in yielding gracefully, and she was careful not to
invite guests who were not of her husband’s way of thinking.

Most of their acquaintance were people connected with the law. Laura
grew familiar with the legal manner, but she did not grow fond of it.
She felt that these clean-shaven men with bristling eyebrows were
suavely concealing their doubts of her intelligence and her probity.
Their jaws were like so many mouse-traps, baited with commonplaces. They
made her feel shy and behave stiffly.

This was unfortunate, as Henry and Caroline had hoped that some one of
them would fall sufficiently in love with Laura to marry her. Mr.
Fortescue, Mr. Parker, Mr. Jermyn, Mr. Danby, Mr. Thrush, were in turn
selected as suitable and likely undertakers. Every decent effort was
made by Henry and Caroline, and a certain number of efforts were made by
the chosen. But Laura would make no efforts at all. Henry and Caroline
had lost heart when they invited Mr. Arbuthnot to tea on Sunday. They
invited him for pity’s sake, and but to tea at that, for he was very shy
and stammered. To their surprise they saw Laura taking special pains to
be nice to him. Equally to their surprise they saw Mr. Arbuthnot laying
aside his special pains to observe a legal manner and stammering away
quite enthusiastically about climbing Welsh mountains and gathering
parsley fern. They scarcely dared to hope, for they felt the time for
hope was gone by. However, they invited him to dinner, and did their
best to be on friendly terms with him.

Mr. Arbuthnot received their advances without surprise, for he had a
very good opinion of himself. He felt that being thirty-five he owed
himself a wife, and he also felt that Laura would do very nicely. His
aunt, Lady Ross-Price, always tried to get servants from the Willowes
establishment, for Mrs. Willowes trained them so well. Mr. Arbuthnot
supposed that Mrs. Willowes would be equally good at training wives. He
began to think of Laura quite tenderly, and Caroline began to read the
Stores’ catalogue quite seriously. This was the moment when Laura, who
had been behaving nicely for years, chose to indulge her fantasy, and to
wreck in five minutes the good intentions of as many months.

She had come more and more to look on Mr. Arbuthnot as an indulgence.
His stammer had endeared him to her; it seemed, after so much legal
manner, quite sympathetic. Though nothing would have induced her to
marry him, she was very ready to talk to him, and even to talk naturally
of what came uppermost in her thoughts. Laura’s thoughts ranged over a
wide field, even now. Sometimes she said rather amusing things, and
displayed unexpected stores (General Stores) of knowledge. But her
remarks were as a rule so disconnected from the conversation that no one
paid much attention to them. Mr. Arbuthnot certainly was not prepared
for her response to his statement that February was a dangerous month.
‘It is,’ answered Laura with almost violent agreement. ‘If you are a
were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without
knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely
to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.’

Henry and Caroline glanced at each other in horror. Mr. Arbuthnot said:
‘How very interesting! But I really don’t think I am likely to do such a
thing.’ Laura made no answer. She did not think so either. But she was
amusing herself with a surprisingly vivid and terrible picture of Mr.
Arbuthnot cloaked in a shaggy hide and going with heavy devouring
swiftness upon all-fours with a lamb dangling from his mouth.

This settled it. Henry and Caroline made no more attempts to marry off
Laura. Trying to do so had been a nuisance and an expense, and Laura had
never shown the smallest appreciation of their trouble. Before long they
would have the girls to think of. Fancy was sixteen, and Marion nearly
as tall as Fancy. In two years they would have to begin again. They were
glad of a respite, and made the most of it Laura also was glad of a
respite. She bought second-hand copies of Herodotus and Johnson’s
Dictionary to read in the evenings. Caroline, still sewing on buttons,
would look at her sister-in-law’s composed profile. Laura’s hair was
black as ever, but it was not so thick. She had grown paler from living
in London. Her forehead had not a wrinkle, but two downward lines
prolonged the drooping corners of her mouth. Her face was beginning to
stiffen. It had lost its power of expressiveness, and was more and more
dominated by the hook nose and the sharp chin. When Laura was ten years
older she would be nut-crackerish.

Caroline resigned herself to spending the rest of her evenings with
Laura beside her. The perpetual company of a sister-in-law was rather
more than she had bargained for. Still, there she was, and Henry was
right--they had been the proper people to make a home for Laura when her
father died, and she was too old now to begin living by herself. It was
not as if she had had any experience of life; she had passed from one
guardianship to another: it was impossible to imagine Laura fending for
herself. A kind of pity for the unused virgin beside her spread through
Caroline’s thoughts. She did not attach an inordinate value to her
wifehood and maternity; they were her duties, rather than her glories.
But for all that she felt emotionally plumper than Laura. It was well to
be loved, to be necessary to other people. But Laura too was loved, and
Laura was necessary. Caroline did not know what the children would do
without their Aunt Lolly.

Every one spoke of her as Aunt Lolly, till in the course of time she had
almost forgotten her baptismal name.

‘Say How-do to Auntie Laura,’ said Caroline to Fancy. This was long ago
in the re-furbished nursery at Lady Place where Laura knelt timidly
before her first niece, while the London nurse bustled round them
unpacking soft hairbrushes and pots of cold cream, and hanging linen to
air upon the tall nursery fender.

‘How-do, Auntie Lolly,’ said Fancy, graciously thrusting forward a fur
monkey.

‘She’s taken to you at once, Laura,’ said Caroline. ‘I was afraid this
journey would upset her, but she’s borne it better than any of us.’

‘Journeys are nothing to them at that age, ma’am,’ said the nurse. ‘Now
suppose you tell your new auntie what you call Monkey.’

‘Auntie Lolly, Auntie Lolly,’ repeated Fancy, rhythmically banging the
monkey against the table-leg.

The name hit upon by Fancy was accepted by Marion and Titus; before long
their parents made use of it also. Everard never spoke of his daughter
but as Laura, even when he spoke of her to his grandchildren. He was too
old to change his ways, and he had, in any case, a prejudice against
nicknames and abbreviations. But when Laura went to London she left
Laura behind, and entered into a state of Aunt Lolly. She had quitted so
much of herself in quitting Somerset that it seemed natural to
relinquish her name also. Divested of her easily-worn honours as
mistress of the household, shorn of her long meandering country days,
sleeping in a smart brass bedstead instead of her old and rather pompous
four-poster, wearing unaccustomed clothes and performing unaccustomed
duties, she seemed to herself to have become a different person. Or
rather, she had become two persons, each different. One was Aunt Lolly,
a middle-aging lady, light-footed upon stairs, and indispensable for
Christmas Eve and birthday preparations. The other was Miss Willowes,
‘my sister-in-law Miss Willowes,’ whom Caroline would introduce, and
abandon to a feeling of being neither light-footed nor indispensable.
But Laura was put away. When Henry asked her to witness some document
for him her _Laura Erminia Willowes_ seemed as much a thing out of
common speech as the _Spinster_ that followed it. She would look, and
be surprised that such a dignified name should belong to her.

Twice a year, in spring and in summer, the Willowes family went into the
country for a holiday. For the first three years of Laura’s London life
they went as a matter of course to Lady Place. There once more arose the
problem of how two children of one sex can play nicely with a much
younger child of the other. Fancy and Marion played at tea-parties under
the weeping ash, and Titus was the butler with a tin tray. Titus would
presently run off and play by himself at soldiers, beating martial
tattoos upon the tray. But now there was no danger of the youngest
member of the party falling into the pond, for Aunt Lolly was always on
guard.

Laura enjoyed the visits to Lady Place, but her enjoyment did not go
very deep. The knowledge that she was now a visitor where she had
formerly been at home seemed to place a clear sheet of glass between her
and her surroundings. She felt none of the grudge of the dispossessed;
she scarcely gave a thought to the old days. It was as if in the agony
of leaving Lady Place after her father’s death she had said good-bye so
irremediably that she could never really come there again.

But the visits to Lady Place came to a sad end, for in 1905 James died
suddenly of heartfailure. Sibyl decided that she could not go on living
alone in the country. A manager was found for the brewery, Lady Place
was let unfurnished upon a long lease, and Sibyl and the four-years-old
heir of the Willowes name and traditions moved to a small house in
Hampstead. Sibyl had proposed to sell some of the furniture, for there
was a great deal more of it than she needed, and most of it was too
large to fit into her new dwelling. This project was opposed by Henry,
and with considerable heat. The family establishment must, he admitted,
be broken up, but he would allow no part of it to be alienated. All the
furniture that could not be found room for at Hampstead or at Apsley
Terrace must be stored till Titus should be of an age to resume the
tenure of Lady Place.

To Laura it seemed as though some familiar murmuring brook had suddenly
gone underground. There it flowed, silenced and obscured, until the
moment when it should reappear and murmur again between green banks. She
thought of Titus as a grown man and herself as an old woman meeting
among the familiar belongings. She believed that when she was old the
ghost-like feeling that distressed her would matter less. She hoped that
she might not die before that day, if it were only that she would
remember so well, as Titus could not, how the furniture stood in the
rooms and the pictures hung on the walls.

But by then, she said to herself, Titus would have a wife with tastes of
her own. Sibyl would have liked to alter several things, but tradition
had been too strong for her. It would be a very different matter in
twenty years’ time. The chairs and tables and cabinets would come out
blinking and forgetful from their long storage in darkness. They would
have lost the individuality by which they had made certain corners so
surely their own. The Lady Place she had known was over. She could
remember it if she pleased; but she must not think of it.

Meanwhile Emma’s harp trailed its strings in her bedroom. Ratafee was
removed to Hampstead. Titus had insisted upon this.

She wondered if Henry felt as she did. He had shown a great deal of
Willowes spirit over the furniture, but otherwise he had not expressed
himself. In person Henry, so it was said, resembled his grandfather who
had made the move from Dorset to Somerset--the sacrilegious move which
the home-loving of the Willoweses had so soon sanctified that in the
third generation she was feeling like this about Lady Place. Henry
seemed to resemble his grandfather in spirit also. He could house all
the family traditions in his practical mind, and for the rest talk about
bricks and mortar. He concerned himself with the terms of Sibyl’s lease,
the agreement with the manager of the brewery, and the question of
finding a satisfactory place to carry his family to for the holidays.

After some experiments they settled down to a routine that with a few
modifications for the sake of variety or convenience served them for the
next fifteen years. In spring they went to some moderately popular
health resort and stayed in a hotel, for it was found that the
uncertainty of an English spring, let alone the uncertainty of a
Christian Easter, made lodgings unsatisfactory at that time of year. In
summer they went into lodgings, or took a furnished house in some
seaside village without any attractions. They did this, not to be
economical--there was no need for economy--but because they found rather
plain dull holidays the most refreshing Henry was content with a little
unsophisticated golf and float-fishing. The children bathed and played
on the beach and went on bicycling expeditions; and Caroline and Laura
watched the children bathe and play, and replenished their stock of
underclothes, and rested from the strain of London housekeeping.
Sometimes Caroline did a little reading. Sometimes Sibyl and Titus
stayed with them, or Titus stayed with them alone while his mother paid
visits.

Laura looked forward with pleasure to the summer holidays (the Easter
holidays she never cared about, as she had a particular dislike for
palms); but after the first shock of arrival and smelling the sea, the
days seemed to dribble out very much like the days in London. When the
end came, and she looked back from the wagonette over the past weeks,
she found that after all she had done few of the things she intended to
do. She would have liked to go by herself for long walks inland and find
strange herbs, but she was too useful to be allowed to stray. She had
once formed an indistinct project of observing limpets. But for all her
observations she discovered little save that if you sit very still for a
long time the limpet will begin to move sideways, and that it is almost
impossible to sit very still for a long time and keep your attention
fixed upon such a small object as a limpet without feeling slightly
hypnotised and slightly sick. On the lowest count she seldom contrived
to read all the books or to finish all the needlework which she had
taken with her. And the freckles on her nose mocked her with the
receptivity of her skin compared to the dullness of her senses.

They were submerged in the usual quiet summer holidays when the war
broke out. The parish magazine said: ‘The vicar had scarcely left East
Bingham when war was declared.’ The vicar was made of stouter stuff than
they. He continued his holiday, but the Willoweses went back to London.
Laura had never seen London in August before. It had an arrested look,
as though the war were a kind of premature autumn. She was
extraordinarily moved; as they drove across the river from Waterloo she
wanted to cry. That same evening Fancy went upstairs and scrubbed the
boxroom floor for the sake of practice. She upset the bucket, and large
damp patches appeared on the ceiling of Laura’s room.

For a month Fancy behaved like a cat whose kittens have been drowned. If
her family had not been so taken up with the war they would have been
alarmed at this change in her demeanour. As it was, they scarcely
noticed it. When she came in very late for lunch and said: ‘I am going
to marry Kit Bendigo on Saturday,’ Henry said, ‘Very well, my dear. It’s
your day, not mine,’ and ordered champagne to be brought up. For a
moment Laura thought she heard her father speaking. She knew that Henry
disapproved of Kit Bendigo as a husband for Fancy: Willoweses did not
mate with Bendigos. But now he was more than resigned--he was ready. And
he swallowed the gnat as unswervingly as the camel, which, if Laura had
wanted to be ill-natured just then, would have surprised her as being
the greater feat. Willoweses do not marry at five days’ notice. But
Fancy was married on Saturday, and her parents discovered that a hasty
wedding can cost quite as much as a formal one. In the mood that they
were in this afforded them some slight satisfaction.

Kit Bendigo was killed in December 1916. Fancy received the news calmly;
two years’ war-work and a daughter thrown in had steadied her nerves.
Kit was a dear, of course, poor old Kit. But there was a war on, and
people get killed in wars. If it came to that, she was working in a
high-explosive shed herself. Caroline could not understand her eldest
daughter. She was baffled and annoyed by the turn her own good sense
inherited had taken. The married nun looked at the widowed amazon and
refused battle. At least Fancy might stay in her very expensive flat and
be a mother to her baby. But Fancy drew on a pair of heavy gauntlet
gloves and went to France to drive motor lorries. Caroline dared not say
a word.

The war had no such excitements for Laura. Four times a week she went to
a depot and did up parcels. She did them up so well that no one thought
of offering her a change of work. The parcel-room was cold and
encumbered, early in the war some one had decorated the walls with
recruiting posters. By degrees these faded. The ruddy young man and his
Spartan mother grew pale, as if with fear, and Britannia’s scarlet cloak
trailing on the waters bleached to a cocoa-ish pink. Laura watched them
discolour with a muffled heart. She would not allow herself the cheap
symbolism they provoked. Time will bleach the scarlet from young men’s
cheeks, and from Britannia’s mantle. But blood was scarlet as ever, and
she believed that, however despairing her disapproval, that blood was
being shed for her.

She continued to do up parcels until the eleventh day of November 1918.
Then, when she heard the noise of cheering and the sounding of hooters,
she left her work and went home. The house was empty. Every one had gone
out to rejoice. She went up to her room and sat down on the bed. She
felt cold and sick, she trembled from head to foot as once she had done
after witnessing a dog fight. All the hooters were sounding, they seemed
to domineer over the noises of rejoicing with sarcastic emphasis. She
got up and walked about the room. On the mantelpiece was a photograph of
Titus. ‘Well,’ she said to it, ‘you’ve escaped killing, anyhow.’ Her
voice sounded harsh and unreal, she thought the walls of her room were
shaking at the concussion, like stage walls. She lay down upon her bed,
and presently fainted.

When she came to herself again she had been discovered by Caroline and
put to bed with influenza. She was grateful for this, and for the
darkened room and the cool clinking tumblers. She was even grateful for
the bad dreams which visited her every night and sent up her
temperature. By their aid she was enabled to stay in bed for a
fortnight, a thing she had not done since she came to London.

When she went downstairs again she found Henry and Caroline talking of
better days to come. The house was unaltered, yet it had a general air
of refurbishment. She also, after her fortnight in bed, felt somehow
refurbished, and was soon drawn into the talk of better days. There was
nothing immoderate in the family display of satisfaction. Henry still
found frowning matter in the _Times_, and Caroline did not relinquish a
single economy. But the satisfaction was there, a demure Willowes-like
satisfaction in the family tree that had endured the gale with an
unflinching green heart. Laura saw nothing in this to quarrel with. She
was rather proud of the Willowes war record; she admired the stolid
decorum which had mastered four years of disintegration, and was stolid
and decorous still. A lady had inquired of Henry: ‘What do you do in
air-raids? Do you go down to the cellar or up to the roof?’ ‘We do
neither,’ Henry had replied. ‘We stay where we are.’ A thrill had passed
through Laura when she heard this statement of the Willowes mind. But
afterwards she questioned the validity of the thrill. Was it nothing
more than the response of her emotions to other old and honourable
symbols such as the trooping of the colours and the fifteenth chapter of
Corinthians, symbols too old and too honourable to have called out her
thoughts? She saw how admirable it was for Henry and Caroline to have
stayed where they were. But she was conscious, more conscious than they
were, that the younger members of the family had somehow moved into new
positions. And she herself, had she not slightly strained against her
moorings, fast and far sunk as they were? But now the buffeting waves
withdrew, and she began to settle back into her place, and to see all
around her once more the familiar undisturbed shadows of familiar
things. Outwardly there was no difference between her and Henry and
Caroline in their resumption of peace. But they, she thought, had done
with the war, whereas she had only shelved it, and that by an accident
of consciousness.

When the better days to come came, they proved to be modelled as closely
as possible upon the days that were past. It was astonishing what little
difference differences had made. When they went back to East
Bingham--for owing to its military importance, East Bingham had been
unsuited for holidays--there were at first a good many traces of war
lying about, such as sandbags and barbed-wire entanglements. But on the
following summer the sandbags had rotted and burst and the barbed-wire
had been absorbed into the farmer’s fences. So, Laura thought, such
warlike phenomena as Mr. Wolf-Saunders, Fancy’s second husband, and
Jemima and Rosalind, Fancy’s two daughters, might well disappear off the
family landscape. Mr. Wolf-Saunders recumbent on the beach was indeed
much like a sandbag, and no more arresting to the eye. Jemima and
Rosalind were more obtrusive. Here was a new generation to call her Aunt
Lolly and find her as indispensable as did the last.

‘It is quite like old times,’ said Caroline, who sat working beside her.
‘Isn’t it, Lolly?’

‘Except for these anachronisms,’ said Laura.

Caroline removed the seaweed which Jemima had stuffed into her work-bag.
‘Bless them!’ she said absently. ‘We shall soon be back in town again.’




_Part 2_


The Willoweses came back to London about the second week in September.
For many years the children’s schooling had governed the date of their
return; and when the children had grown too old for school, the habit
had grown too old to be broken. There was also a further reason. The
fallen leaves, so Henry and Caroline thought, made the country unhealthy
after the second week in September. When Laura was younger she had
sometimes tried to argue that, even allowing the unhealthiness of fallen
leaves, leaves at that time of year were still green upon the trees.
This was considered mere casuistry. When they walked in Kensington
Gardens upon the first Sunday morning after their return, Caroline would
point along the tarnishing vistas and say: ‘You see, Lolly, the leaves
are beginning to fall. It was quite time to come home.’

It was useless to protest that autumn begins earlier in London than it
does in the country. That it did so, Laura knew well. That was why she
disliked having to come back; autumn boded her no good, and it was hard
that by a day’s train-journey she should lose almost a month’s reprieve.
Obediently looking along the tarnishing vistas, she knew that once again
she was in for it.

What It was exactly, she would have found hard to say. She sometimes
told herself that it must be the yearly reverberation of those miserable
first months in London when her sorrow for her father’s death was still
fresh. No other winter had been so cold or so long, not even the long
cold winters of the war. Yet now her thoughts of Everard were mellowed
and painless, and she had long ago forgiven her sorrow. Had the coming
of autumn quickened in her only an experienced grief she would not have
dreaded it thus, nor felt so restless and tormented.

Her disquiet had no relevance to her life. It arose out of the ground
with the smell of the dead leaves: it followed her through the darkening
streets; it confronted her in the look of the risen moon. ‘Now! Now!’ it
said to her: and no more. The moon seemed to have torn the leaves from
the trees that it might stare at her more imperiously. Sometimes she
tried to account for her uneasiness by saying that she was growing old,
and that the year’s death reminded her of her own. She compared herself
to the ripening acorn that feels through windless autumnal days and
nights the increasing pull of the earth below. That explanation was very
poetical and suitable. But it did not explain what she felt. She was not
wildly anxious either to die or to live; why, then, should she be rent
by this anxiety?

At these times she was subject to a peculiar kind of day-dreaming, so
vivid as to be almost a hallucination: that she was in the country, at
dusk, and alone, and strangely at peace. She did not recall the places
which she had visited in holiday-time, these reproached her like
opportunities neglected. But while her body sat before the first fires
and was cosy with Henry and Caroline, her mind walked by lonely
sea-bords, in marshes and fens, or came at nightfall to the edge of a
wood. She never imagined herself in these places by daylight. She never
thought of them as being in any way beautiful. It was not beauty at all
that she wanted, or, depressed though she was, she would have bought a
ticket to somewhere or other upon the Metropolitan railway and gone out
to see the recumbent autumnal graces of the country-side. Her mind was
groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that
was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something
that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water
gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen.
Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of
ungodly hallowedness--these were the things that called her thoughts
away from the comfortable fireside.

In this mood she would sometimes go off to explore among the City
churches, or to lose herself in the riverside quarters east of the Pool.
She liked to think of the London of Defoe’s _Journal_, and to fancy
herself back in the seventeenth century, when, so it seemed to her,
there were still darknesses in men’s minds. Once, hemmed in by the
jostling tombstones at Bunhill Fields, she almost pounced on the clue to
her disquiet; and once again in the goods-yard of the G.W.R., where she
had gone to find, not her own secret, but a case of apples for Caroline.

As time went on Laura grew accustomed to this recurrent autumnal fever.
It was as much a sign of the season as the falling leaves or the first
frost. Before the end of November it was all over and done with. The
next moon had no message for her. Her rambles in the strange places of
the mind were at an end. And if she still went on expeditions to
Rotherhithe or the Jews’ Burying-Ground, she went in search for no more
than a little diversion. Nothing was left but cold and sleet and the
knowledge that all this fuss had been about nothing. She fortified
herself against the dismalness of this reaction by various small
self-indulgences. Out of these she had contrived for herself a sort of
mental fur coat. Roasted chestnuts could be bought and taken home for
bedroom eating. Second-hand book-shops were never so enticing; and the
combination of east winds and London water made it allowable to
experiment in the most expensive soaps. Coming back from her
expeditions, westward from the city with the sunset in her eyes, or
eastward from a waning Kew, she would pause for a sumptuous and furtive
tea, eating _marrons glacés_ with a silver fork in the reflecting warm
glitter of a smart pastry-cook’s. These things were exciting enough to
be pleasurable, for she kept them secret. Henry and Caroline would
scarcely have minded if they had known. They were quite indifferent as
to where and how she spent her afternoons; they felt no need to question
her, since they could be sure that she would do nothing unsuitable or
extravagant. Laura’s expeditions were secret because no one asked her
where she had been. Had they asked, she must have answered. But she did
not examine too closely into this; she liked to think of them as secret.

One manifestation of the fur-coat policy, however, could not be kept
from their knowledge, and that manifestation slightly qualified their
trust that Laura would do nothing unsuitable or extravagant.

Except for a gradual increment of Christmas and birthday presents,
Laura’s room had altered little since the day it ceased to be the small
spare-room and became hers. But every winter it blossomed with an
unseasonable luxury of flowers, profusely, shameless as a greenhouse.

‘Why, Lolly! Lilies at this time of year!’ Caroline would say, not
reproachfully, but still with a consciousness that in the drawing-room
there were dahlias, and in the dining-room a fern, and in her own
sitting-room, where she did the accounts, neither ferns nor flowers.
Then Laura would thrust the lilies into her hands; and she would take
them to show that she had not spoken with ill-will. Besides, Lolly would
really see more of them if they were in the drawing-room. And the next
day she would meet Laura on the stairs carrying azaleas. On one occasion
even Henry had noticed the splendour of the lilies: red lilies, angular,
authoritative in form and colour like cardinal’s hats.

‘Where do these come from?’ Caroline had asked, knowing well that
nothing so costly in appearance could come from her florist.

‘From Africa,’ Laura had answered, pressing the firm, wet stalks into
her hand.

‘Oh well, I daresay they are quite common flowers there,’ said Caroline
to herself, trying to gloss over the slight awkwardness of accepting a
trifle so needlessly splendid.

Henry had also asked where they came from.

‘From Anthos, I believe,’ said Caroline.

‘Ah!’ said Henry, and roused the coins in his trousers pocket.

‘It’s rather naughty of Lolly. Would you like me just to hint to her
that she mustn’t be quite so reckless?’

‘No. Better not. No need for her to worry about such things.’

Husband and wife exchanged a glance of compassionate understanding. It
was better not. Much better that Lolly should not be worried about money
matters. She was safe in their hands. They could look after Lolly.
Henry was like a wall, and Caroline’s breasts were like towers.

They condoned this extravagance, yet they mistrusted it. Time justified
them in their mistrust. Like many stupid people, they possessed acute
instincts. ‘He that is unfaithful in little things ...’ Caroline would
say when the children forgot to wind up their watches. Their instinct
told them that the same truth applies to extravagance in little things.
They were wiser than they knew. When Laura’s extravagance in great
things came it staggered them so completely that they forgot how
judiciously they had suspected it beforehand.

It befell in the winter of 1921. The war was safely over, so was their
silver wedding, so was Marion’s first confinement. Titus was in his
third year at Oxford, Sibyl was at last going grey, Henry might be made
a judge at any moment. The Trade Returns and the Stock Exchange were not
all that they should be, and there was always the influenza. But Henry
was doing well enough to be lenient to his investments, and Aunt Lucilla
and her fortune had been mercifully released. In the coming spring
Caroline proposed to have the house thoroughly done up. The lesser
renovations she was getting over beforehand, and that was why Laura had
gone out before the shops shut to show Mr. Bunting a pair of massy
candlesticks and to inquire how much he would charge for re-plating
them. His estimate was high, too high to be accepted upon her own
responsibility. She decided to carry the candlesticks back and consult
Caroline.

Mr. Bunting lived in the Earls Court Road, rather a long way off for
such a family friend. But she had plenty of time for walking back, and
for diversion she thought she would take a circuitous route, including
the two foxes who guard the forsaken approach in Holland Park and the
lane beside the Bayswater Synagogue. It was in Moscow Road that she
began to be extravagant. But when she walked into the little shop she
had no particular intention of extravagance, for Caroline’s parcel hung
remindingly upon her arm, and the shop itself, half florist and half
greengrocer, had a simple appearance.

There were several other customers, and while she stood waiting to be
served she looked about her. The aspect of the shop pleased her greatly.
It was small and homely. Fruit and flowers and vegetables were crowded
together in countrified disorder. On the sloping shelf in the window,
among apples and rough-skinned cooking pears and trays of walnuts,
chestnuts, and filberts, was a basket of eggs, smooth and brown, like
some larger kind of nut. At one side of the room was a wooden staging.
On this stood jars of home-made jam and bottled fruits. It was as though
the remnants of summer had come into the little shop for shelter. On the
floor lay a heap of earthy turnips.

Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the
glistening red plums, the greengages. She thought of the woman who had
filled those jars and fastened on the bladders. Perhaps the
greengrocer’s mother lived in the country. A solitary old woman picking
fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the
smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched
arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing
out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches. It grew
darker and darker; still she worked on, methodically stripping the
quivering taut boughs one after the other.

As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. It weighed upon her
like the load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the
other customers, her own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the
people going by on the wet pavements. She forgot that she was in London,
she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone
in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to
the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals
of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. The air about her
was cool and moist. There was no sound, for the birds had left off
singing and the owls had not yet begun to hoot. No sound, except
sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie
there a compact shadow among shadows. The back of her neck ached a
little with the strain of holding up her arms. Her fingers searched
among the leaves.

She started as the man of the shop came up to her and asked her what she
wished for. Her eyes blinked, she looked with surprise at the gloves
upon her hands.

‘I want one of those large chrysanthemums,’ she said, and turned towards
the window where they stood in a brown jar. There were the apples and
pears, the eggs, the disordered nuts overflowing from their
compartments. There on the floor were the earthy turnips, and close at
hand were the jams and bottled fruits. If she was behaving foolishly, if
she looked like a woman roused out of a fond dream, these were kindly
things to waken to. The man of the shop also had a kind face. He wore a
gardener’s apron, and his hands were brown and dry as if he had been
handling earth.

‘Which one would you like, ma’am?’ he asked, turning the bunch of
chrysanthemums about that she might choose for herself. She looked at
the large mop-headed blossoms. Their curled petals were deep garnet
colour within and tawny yellow without. As the light fell on their sleek
flesh the garnet colour glowed, the tawny yellow paled as if it were
thinly washed with silver. She longed for the moment when she might
stroke her hand over those mop heads.

‘I think I will take them all,’ she said.

‘They’re lovely blooms,’ said the man.

He was pleased. He did not expect such a good customer at this late
hour.

When he brought her the change from her pound-note and the
chrysanthemums pinned up in sheets of white paper, he brought also
several sprays of beech leaves. These, he explained, were thrown in
with her purchase. Laura took them into her arms. The great fans of
orange tracery seemed to her even more beautiful than the
chrysanthemums, for they had been given to her, they were a surprise.
She sniffed. They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood
to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn
imagination. She stood very still to make quite sure of her sensations.
Then: ‘Where do they come from?’ she asked.

‘From near Chenies, ma’am, in Buckinghamshire. I have a sister living
there, and every Sunday I go out to see her, and bring back a load of
foliage with me.’

There was no need to ask now who made the jams and tied on the bladders.
Laura knew all that she wanted to know. Her course lay clear before her.
Holding the sprays of beech as though she were marching on Dunsinane,
she went to a bookseller’s. There she bought a small guide-book to the
Chilterns and inquired for a map of that district. It must, she
explained, be very detailed, and give as many names and footpaths as
possible. Her eyes were so bright and her demands so earnest that the
bookseller, though he had not that kind of map, was sympathetic, and
directed her to another shop where she could find what she wanted. It
was only a little way off, but closing-time was at hand, so she took a
taxi. Having bought the map she took another taxi home. But at the top
of Apsley Terrace she had one of her impulses of secrecy and told the
driver that she would walk the rest of the way.

There was rather a narrow squeak in the hall, for Caroline’s parcel
became entangled in the gong stand, and she heard Henry coming up from
the wine cellar. If she alarmed the gong Henry would quicken his steps.
She had no time to waste on Henry just then for she had a great deal to
think of before dinner. She ran up to her room, arranged the
chrysanthemums and the beech leaves, and began to read the guide-book.
It was just what she wanted, for it was extremely plain and unperturbed.
Beginning as early as possible with Geology, it passed to Flora and
Fauna, Watersheds, Ecclesiastical Foundations and Local Government.
After that came a list of all the towns and villages, shortly described
in alphabetical order. Lamb’s End had three hundred inhabitants and a
perpendicular font. At Walpole St. Dennis was the country seat of the
Bartlet family, faced with stucco and situated upon an eminence. The
almshouses at Semple, built in 1703 by Bethia Hood, had a fine pair of
wrought-iron gates. It was dark as she pressed her nose against the
scrolls and rivets. Bats flickered in the little courtyard, and shadows
moved across the yellow blinds. Had she been born a deserving widow,
life would have been simplified.

She wasted no time over this regret, for now at last she was simplifying
life for herself. She unfolded the map. The woods were coloured green
and the main roads red. There was a great deal of green. She looked at
the beech leaves. As she looked a leaf detached itself and fell slowly.
She remembered squirrels.

The stairs creaked under the tread of Dunlop with the hot-water can.
Dunlop entered, glancing neither at Laura curled askew on the bed nor at
the chrysanthemums ennobling the dressing-table. She was a perfectly
trained servant. Before she left the room she took a deep breath,
stooped down, and picked up the beech leaf.

Quarter of an hour afterwards Laura exclaimed: ‘Oh! a windmill!’ She
took up the guide-book again, and began to read intently.

She was roused by an unaccustomed clash of affable voices in the hall.
She remembered, leapt off the bed, and dressed rapidly for the family
dinner-party. They were all there when she reached the drawing-room.
Sibyl and Titus, Fancy and her Mr. Wolf-Saunders, Marion with the latest
news from Sprat, who, being in the Soudan, could not dine out with his
wife. Sprat had had another boil on his neck, but it had yielded to
treatment. ‘Ah, poor fellow,’ said Henry. He seemed to be saying: ‘The
price of Empire.’

During dinner Laura looked at her relations. She felt as though she had
awoken, unchanged, from a twenty-years slumber, to find them almost
unrecognisable. She surveyed them, one after the other. Even Henry and
Caroline, whom she saw every day, were half hidden under their
accumulations--accumulations of prosperity, authority, daily experience.
They were carpeted with experience. No new event could set jarring foot
on them but they would absorb and muffle the impact. If the boiler
burst, if a policeman climbed in at the window waving a sword, Henry and
Caroline would bring the situation to heel by their massive experience
of normal boilers and normal policemen.

She turned her eyes to Sibyl. How strange it was that Sibyl should have
exchanged her former look of a pretty ferret for this refined and waxen
mask. Only when she was silent, though, as now she was, listening to
Henry with her eyes cast down to her empty plate: when she spoke the
ferret look came back. But Sibyl in her house at Hampstead must have
spent many long afternoons in silence, learning this unexpected beauty,
preparing her face for the last look of death. What had been her
thoughts? Why was she so different when she spoke? Which, what, was the
real Sibyl: the greedy, agile little ferret or this memorial urn?

Fancy’s Mr. Wolf-Saunders had eaten all his bread and was at a loss.
Laura turned to him and asked after her great-nephew, who was just then
determined to be a bus-conductor. ‘He probably will be,’ said his father
gloomily, ‘if things go on as they are at present.’

Great-nephews and great-nieces suggested nephews and nieces. Resuming
her scrutiny of the table she looked at Fancy, Marion, and Titus. They
had grown up as surprisingly as trees since she first knew them, and yet
it did not seem to her that they were so much changed as their elders.
Titus, in particular, was easily recognisable. She caught his eye, and
he smiled back at her, just as he had smiled back when he was a baby.
Now he was long and slim, and his hay-coloured hair was brushed smoothly
back instead of standing up in a crest. But one lock had fallen forward
when he laughed, and hung over his left eye, and this gave him a
pleasing, rustic look. She was glad still to be friends with Titus. He
might very usefully abet her, and though she felt in no need of allies,
a little sympathy would do no harm. Certainly the rustic forelock made
Titus look particularly congenial. And how greedily he was eating that
apple, and with what disparagement of imported fruit he had waved away
the Californian plums! It was nice to feel sure of his understanding and
approval, since at this moment he was looking the greatest Willowes of
them all.

Most of the family attention was focussed on Titus that evening. No
sooner had coffee been served than Sibyl began about his career. Had
Caroline ever heard of anything more ridiculous? Titus still declared
that he meant to manage the family brewery. After all his success at
Oxford and his popularity, could anything be more absurd than to bury
himself in Somerset?

His own name was the first thing that Titus heard as he entered the
drawing-room. He greeted it with an approving smile, and sat down by
Laura, carefully crossing his long legs.

‘She spurns at the brewery, and wants me to take a studio in Hampstead
and model bustos,’ he explained.

Titus had a soft voice. His speech was gentle and sedate. He chose his
words with extreme care, but escaped the charge of affectation by
pronouncing them in a hesitating manner.

‘I’m sure sculpture is his _métier_,’ said Sibyl. ‘Or perhaps poetry.
Anyhow, not brewing. I wish you could have seen that little model he
made of the grocer at Arcachon.’

Marion said: ‘I thought bustos always had wigs.’

‘My dear, you’ve hit it. In fact, that is my objection to this plan for
making me a sculptor. Revive the wig, and I object no more. The head is
the noblest part of man’s anatomy. Therefore enlarge it with a wig.’

Henry thought the conversation was taking a foolish turn. But as host it
was his duty to take part in it.

‘What about the Elgin Marbles?’ he inquired. ‘No wigs there.’

The Peruke and its Functions in Attic Drama, thought Titus, would be a
pretty fancy. But it would not do for his uncle. Agreeably he admitted
that there were no wigs in the Elgin Marbles.

They fell into silence. At an ordinary dinner party Caroline would have
felt this silence to be a token that the dinner party was a failure. But
this was a family affair, there was no disgrace in having nothing to
say. They were all Willoweses and the silence was a seemly Willowes
silence. She could even emphasise it by counting her stitches aloud.

All the chairs and sofas were comfortable. The fire burnt brightly, the
curtains hung in solemn folds; they looked almost as solemn as organ
pipes. Lolly had gone off into one of her day dreams, just her way, she
would never trouble to give a party the least prod. Only Sibyl fidgeted,
twisting her heel about in her satin slipper.

‘What pretty buckles, Sibyl! Have I seen them before?’

Sibyl had bought them second-hand for next to nothing. They came from
Arles, and the old lady who had sold them to her had been such a
character. She repeated the characteristic remarks of the old lady in a
very competent French accent. Her feet were as slim as ever, and she
could stretch them out very prettily. Even in doing so she remembered
to ask Caroline where they were going for the Easter holidays.

‘Oh, to Blythe, I expect,’ said Caroline. ‘We know it.’

‘When I have evicted my tenants and brewed a large butt of family ale, I
shall invite you all down to Lady Place,’ said Titus.

‘But before then,’ said Laura, speaking rather fast, ‘I hope you will
all come to visit me at Great Mop.’

Every one turned to stare at her in bewilderment.

‘Of course, it won’t be as comfortable as Lady Place. And I don’t
suppose there will be room for more than one of you at a time. But I’m
sure you’ll think it delightful.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Caroline. ‘What is this place, Lolly?’

‘Great Mop. It’s not really Great. It’s in the Chilterns.’

‘But why should we go there?’

‘To visit me. I’m going to live there.’

‘Live there? My dear Lolly!’

‘Live there, Aunt Lolly?’

‘This is very sudden. Is there really a place called ...?’

‘Lolly, you are mystifying us.’

They all spoke at once, but Henry spoke loudest, so Laura replied to
him.

‘No, Henry, I’m not mystifying you. Great Mop is a village in the
Chilterns, and I am going to live there, and perhaps keep a donkey. And
you must all come on visits.’

‘I’ve never even heard of the place!’ said Henry conclusively.

‘But you’ll love it. “A secluded hamlet in the heart of the Chilterns,
Great Mop is situated twelve miles from Wickendon in a hilly district
with many beech-woods. The parish church has a fine Norman tower and a
squint. The population is 227.” And quite close by on a hill there is a
ruined windmill, and the nearest railway station is twelve miles off,
and there is a farm called Scramble Through the Hedge....’

Henry thought it time to interrupt. ‘I suppose you don’t expect us to
believe all this.’

‘I know. It does seem almost too good to be true. But it is. I’ve read
it in a guide-book, and seen it on a map.’

‘Well, all I can say is....’

‘Henry! Henry!’ said Caroline warningly. Henry did not say it. He threw
the cushion out of his chair, glared at Laura, and turned away his
head.

For some time Titus’s attempts at speech had hovered above the tumult,
like one holy appeasing dove loosed after the other. The last dove was
luckier. It settled on Laura.

‘How nice of you to have a donkey. Will it be a grey donkey, like
Madam?’

‘Do you remember dear Madam, then?’

‘Of course I remember dear Madam. I can remember everything that
happened to me when I was four. I rode in one pannier, and you, Marion,
rode in the other. And we went to have tea in Potts’s Dingle.’

‘With sponge cakes and raspberry jam, do you remember?’

‘Yes. And milk surging in a whisky bottle. Will you have thatch or
slate, Aunt Lolly? Slate is very practical.’

‘Thatch is more motherly. Anyhow, I shall have a pump.’

‘Will it be an indoor or an outdoor pump? I ask, for I hope to pump on
it quite often.’

‘_You_ will come to stay with me, won’t you, Titus?’

Laura was a little cast-down. It did not look, just then, as if any one
else wanted to come and stay with her at Great Mop. But Titus was as
sympathetic as she had hoped. They spent the rest of the evening
telling each other how she would live. By half-past ten their
conjectures had become so fantastic that the rest of the family thought
the whole scheme was nothing more than one of Lolly’s odd jokes that
nobody was ever amused by. Henry took heart. He rallied Laura, supposing
that when she lived at Great Mop she would start hunting for catnip
again, and become the village witch.

‘How lovely!’ said Laura.

Henry was satisfied. Obviously Laura could not be in earnest.

When the guests had gone, and Henry had bolted and chained the door, and
put out the hall light, Laura hung about a little, thinking that he or
Caroline might wish to ask her more. But they asked nothing and went
upstairs to bed. Soon after, Laura followed them. As she passed their
bedroom door she heard their voices within, the comfortable fragmentary
talk of a husband and wife with complete confidence in each other and
nothing particular to say.

Laura decided to tackle Henry on the morrow. She observed him during
breakfast and saw with satisfaction that he seemed to be in a
particularly benign mood. He had drunk three cups of coffee, and said
‘Ah! poor fellow!’ when a wandering cornet-player began to play on the
pavement opposite. Laura took heart from these good omens, and,
breakfast being over, and her brother and the _Times_ retired to the
study, she followed them thither.

‘Henry,’ she said. ‘I have come for a talk with you.’

Henry looked up. ‘Talk away, Lolly,’ he said, and smiled at her.

‘A business talk,’ she continued.

Henry folded the _Times_ and laid it aside. He also (if the expression
may be allowed) folded and laid aside his smile.

‘Now, Lolly, what is it?’

His voice was kind, but business-like. Laura took a deep breath, twisted
the garnet ring round her little finger, and began.

‘It has just occurred to me, Henry, that I am forty-seven.’

She paused.

‘Go on!’ said Henry.

‘And that both the girls are married. I don’t mean that that has just
occurred to me too, but it’s part of it. You know, really I’m not much
use to you now.’

‘My dear Lolly!’ remonstrated her brother ‘You are extremely useful.
Besides, I have never considered our relationship in that light.’

‘So I have been thinking. And I have decided that I should like to go
and live at Great Mop. You know, that place I was talking about last
night.’

Henry was silent. His face was completely blank. Should she recall Great
Mop to him by once more repeating the description out of the guide-book?

‘In the Chilterns,’ she murmured. ‘Pop. 227.’

Henry’s silence was unnerving her.

‘Really, I think it would be a good plan. I should like to live alone in
the country. And in my heart I think I have always meant to, one day.
But one day is so like another, it’s almost impossible to throw salt on
its tail. If I don’t go soon, I never shall. So if you don’t mind, I
should like to start as soon as possible.’

There was another long pause. She could not make out Henry at all. It
was not like him to say nothing when he was annoyed. She had expected
thunders and tramplings, and those she could have weathered. But thus
becalmed under a lowering sky she was beginning to lose her head.

At last he spoke.

‘I hardly know what to say.’

‘I’m sorry if the idea annoys you, Henry.’

‘I am not annoyed. I am grieved. Grieved and astonished. For twenty
years you have lived under my roof. I have always thought--I may be
wrong, but I have always thought--that you were happy here.’

‘Quite happy,’ said Laura.

‘Caroline and I have done all we could to make you so. The
children--_all_ the children--look on you as a second mother. We are all
devoted to you. And now, without a word of warning, you propose to leave
us and go and live at a place called Great Mop. Lolly! I must ask you to
put this ridiculous idea out of your head.’

‘I never expected you to be so upset, Henry. Perhaps I should have told
you more gradually. I should be sorry to hurt you.’

‘You have hurt me, I admit,’ said he, firmly seizing on this advantage.
‘Still, let that pass. Say you won’t leave us, Lolly.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t quite do that.’

‘But Lolly, what you want is absurd.’

‘It’s only my own way, Henry.’

‘If you would like a change, take one by all means. Go away for a
fortnight. Go away for a month! Take a little trip abroad if you like.
But come back to us at the end of it.’

‘No, Henry. I love you all, but I feel I have lived here long enough.’

‘But why? But why? What has come over you?’

Laura shook her head.

‘Surely you must have some reasons.’

‘I have told you my reasons.’

‘Lolly! I cannot allow this. You are my sister. I consider you my
charge. I must ask you, once for all to drop this idea. It is not
sensible. Or suitable.’

‘I have reminded you that I am forty-seven. If I am not old enough now
to know what is sensible and suitable, I never shall be.’

‘Apparently not.’

This was more like Henry’s old form. But though he had scored her off,
it did not seem to have encouraged him as much as scoring off generally
did. He began again, almost as a suppliant.

‘Be guided by me, Lolly. At least, take a few days to think it over.’

‘No, Henry. I don’t feel inclined to; I’d much rather get it over now.
Besides, if you are going to disapprove as violently as this, the
sooner I pack up and start the better.’

‘You are mad. You talk of packing up and starting when you have never
even set eyes on the place.’

‘I was thinking of going there to-day, to make arrangements.’

‘Well, then, you will do nothing of the kind. I’m sorry to seem harsh,
Lolly. But you must put all this out of your mind.’

‘Why?’

‘It is impracticable.’

‘Nothing is impracticable for a single, middle-aged woman with an income
of her own.’

Henry paled slightly, and said: ‘Your income is no longer what it was.’

‘Oh, taxes!’ said Laura contemptuously. ‘Never mind; even if it’s a
little less, I can get along on it.’

‘You know nothing of business, Lolly. I need not enter into explanations
with you. It should be enough for me to say that for the last year your
income has been practically non-existent.’

‘But I can still cash cheques.’

‘I have placed a sum at the bank to your credit.’

Laura had grown rather pale too. Her eyes shone.

‘I’m afraid you must enter into explanations with me, Henry. After all,
it is my income, and I have a right to know what has happened to it.’

‘Your capital has always been in my hands, Lolly, and I have
administered it as I thought fit.’

‘Go on,’ said Laura.

‘In 1920 I transferred the greater part of it to the Ethiopian
Development Syndicate, a perfectly sound investment which will in time
be as good as ever, if not better. Unfortunately, owing to this
Government and all this socialistic talk the soundest investments have
been badly hit. The Ethiopian Development Syndicate is one of them.’

‘Go on, Henry. I have understood quite well so far. You have
administered all my money into something that doesn’t pay. Now explain
why you did this.’

‘I had every reason for thinking that I should be able to sell out at a
profit almost immediately. During November the shares had gone up from
5¾ to 8½. I bought in December at 8½. They went to 8¾ and since then
have steadily sunk. They now stand at 4. Of course, my dear, you needn’t
be alarmed. They will rise again the moment we have a Conservative
Government, and that, thank Heaven, must come soon. But you see at
present it is out of the question for you to think of leaving us.’

‘But don’t these Ethiopians have dividends?’

‘These,’ said Henry with dignity, ‘are not the kind of shares that pay
dividends. They are--that is to say, they were, and of course will be
again--a sound speculative investment. But at present they pay no
dividends worth mentioning. Now, Lolly, don’t become agitated. I assure
you that it is all perfectly all right. But you must give up this idea
of the country. Anyhow, I’m sure you wouldn’t find it suit you. You are
rheumatic----’

Laura tried to interpose.

‘--or will be. All the Willoweses are rheumatic. Buckinghamshire is
damp. Those poetical beech-woods make it so. You see, trees draw rain.
It is one of the principles of afforestation. The trees--that is to say,
the rain----’

Laura stamped her foot with impatience. ‘Have done with your trumpery
red herrings!’ she cried.

She had never lost her temper like this before. It was a glorious
sensation.

‘Henry!’ She could feel her voice crackle round his ears. ‘You say you
bought those shares at eight and something, and that they are now four.
So if you sell out now you will get rather less than half what you gave
for them.’

‘Yes,’ said Henry. Surely if Lolly were business woman enough to grasp
that so clearly, she would in time see reason on other matters.

‘Very well. You will sell them immediately----’

‘Lolly!’

‘--and reinvest the money in something quite unspeculative and unsound,
like War Loan, that will pay a proper dividend. I shall still have
enough to manage on. I shan’t be as comfortable as I thought I should
be. I shan’t be able to afford the little house that I hoped for, nor
the donkey. But I shan’t mind much. It will matter very little to me
when I’m there.’

She stopped. She had forgotten Henry, and the unpleasant things she
meant to say to him. She had come to the edge of the wood, and felt its
cool breath in her face. It did not matter about the donkey, nor the
house, nor the darkening orchard even. If she were not to pick fruit
from her own trees, there were common herbs and berries in plenty for
her, growing wherever she chose to wander. It is best as one grows
older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a
tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.

As she left the room she turned and looked at Henry. Such was her mood,
she could have blessed him solemnly, as before an eternal departure. But
he was sitting with his back to her, and did not look round. When she
had gone he took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

Ten days later Laura arrived at Great Mop. After the interview with
Henry she encountered no more opposition. Caroline knew better than to
persist against an obstinacy which had worsted her husband, and the
other members of the family, their surprise being evaporated, were
indifferent. Titus was a little taken aback when he found that his
aunt’s romantic proposals were seriously intended. He for his part was
going to Corsica. ‘A banal mountainous spot,’ he said politely,
‘compared with Buckinghamshire.’

The day of Laura’s arrival was wet and blusterous. She drove in a car
from Wickendon. The car lurched and rattled, and the wind slapped the
rain against the windows; Laura could scarcely see the rising
undulations of the landscape. When the car drew up before her new home,
she stood for a moment looking up the village street, but the prospect
was intercepted by the umbrella under which Mrs. Leak hastened to
conduct her to the porch. So had it rained, and so had the wind blown,
on the day when she had come on her visit of inspection and had taken
rooms in Mrs. Leak’s cottage. So, Henry and Caroline and their friends
had assured her, did it rain and blow all through the winter in the
Chilterns. No words of theirs, they said, could describe how dismal and
bleak it would be among those unsheltered hills. To Laura, sitting by
the fire in her parlour, the sound of wind and rain was pleasant.
‘Weather like this,’ she thought, ‘would never be allowed in London.’

The unchastened gusts that banged against the side of the house and
drove the smoke down the chimney, and the riotous gurgling of the rain
in the gutters were congenial to her spirit. ‘Hoo! You daredevil,’ said
the wind. ‘Have you come out to join us?’ Yet sitting there with no
companionship except those exciting voices she was quiet and happy.

Mrs. Leak’s tea was strong Indian tea. The bread-and-butter was cut in
thick slices, and underneath it was a crocheted mat; there was plum jam
in a heart-shaped glass dish, and a plate of rather heavy jam-puffs. It
was not quite so good as the farmhouse teas she remembered in Somerset,
but a great deal better than teas at Apsley Terrace.

Tea being done with, Laura took stock of her new domain. The parlour was
furnished with a large mahogany table, four horsehair chairs and a
horsehair sofa, an armchair, and a sideboard, rather gimcrack compared
to the rest of the furniture. On the walls, which were painted green,
hung a print of the Empress Josephine and two rather scowling classical
landscapes with ruined temples, and volcanoes. On either side of the
hearth were cupboards, and the fireplace was of a cottage pattern with
hobs, and a small oven on one side. This fireplace had caught Laura’s
fancy when she first looked at the rooms. She had stipulated with Mrs.
Leak that, should she so wish, she might cook on it. There are some
things--mushrooms, for instance, or toasted cheese--which can only be
satisfactorily cooked by the eater. Mrs. Leak had made no difficulties.
She was an oldish woman, sparing of her words and moderate in her
demands. Her husband worked at the sawmill. They were childless. She
had never let lodgings before, but till last year an aunt with means of
her own had occupied the parlour and bedroom which were now Laura’s.

It did not take Laura very long to arrange her belongings, for she had
brought little. Soon after supper, which consisted of rabbit, bread and
cheese, and table beer, she went upstairs to bed. Moving about her small
cold bedroom she suddenly noticed that the wind had fallen, and that it
was no longer raining. She pushed aside a corner of the blind and opened
the window. The night air was cold and sweet, and the full moon shone
high overhead. The sky was cloudless, lovely, and serene; a few stars
glistened there like drops of water about to fall. For the first time
she was looking at the intricate landscape of rounded hills and scooped
valleys which she had chosen for learning by heart.

Dark and compact, the beech-woods lay upon the hills. Alighting as
noiselessly as an owl, a white cat sprang up on to the garden fence. It
glanced from side to side, ran for a yard or two along the top of the
fence and jumped off again, going secretly on its way. Laura sighed for
happiness. She had no thoughts; her mind was swept as clean and empty as
the heavens. For a long time she continued to lean out of the window,
forgetting where she was and how she had come there, so unearthly was
her contentment.

Nevertheless her first days at Great Mop gave her little real pleasure.
She wrecked them by her excitement. Every morning immediately after
breakfast she set out to explore the country. She believed that by
eating a large breakfast she could do without lunch. The days were
short, and she wanted to make the most of them, and making the most of
the days and going back for lunch did not seem to her to be compatible.
Unfortunately, she was not used to making large breakfasts, so her
enthusiasm was qualified by indigestion until about four P.M., when both
enthusiasm and indigestion yielded to a faintish feeling. Then she
turned back, generally by road, since it was growing too dark to find
out footpaths, and arrived home with a limp between six and seven. She
knew in her heart that she was not really enjoying this sort of thing,
but the habit of useless activity was too strong to be snapped by change
of scene. And in the evening, as she looked at the map and marked where
she had been with little bleeding footsteps of red ink, she was
enchanted afresh by the names and the bridle-paths, and, forgetting the
blistered heel and the dissatisfaction of that day’s walk, planned a new
walk for the morrow.

Nearly a week had gone by before she righted herself. She had made an
appointment with the sunset that she should see it from the top of a
certain hill. The hill was steep, and the road turned and twisted about
its sides. It was clear that the sunset would be at their meeting-place
before she was, nor would it be likely to kick its heels and wait about
for her. She looked at the sky and walked faster. The road took a new
and unsuspected turn, concealed behind the clump of trees by which she
had been measuring her progress up the hill. She was growing more and
more flustered, and at this prick she lost her temper entirely. She was
tired, she was miles from Great Mop, and she had made a fool of herself.
An abrupt beam of light shot up from behind the hedge as though the sun
in vanishing below the horizon had winked at her. ‘This sort of thing,’
she said aloud, ‘has got to be put a stop to.’ She sat down in the
extremely comfortable ditch to think.

The shades that had dogged her steps up the hill closed in upon her as
she sat in the ditch, but when she took out her map there was enough
light to enable her to see where the nearest inn lay. It was close at
hand; when she got there she could just read its name on the sign. Its
name was The Reason Why. Entering The Reason Why, she ordered tea and a
conveyance to drive her back to Great Mop. When she left the inn it was
a brilliant night of stars. Outside stood a wagonette drawn by a large
white horse. Piled on the seat of the wagonette were a number of
waterproof rugs with finger-rings on them, and these she wrapped round
her with elaborate care.

The drive back to Great Mop was more filled with glory than anything she
had ever experienced. The wagonette creaked over bare hill-tops and
plunged downwards into the chequered darknesses of unknown winter woods.
All the stars shook their glittering spears overhead. Turning this way
and that to look at them, the frost pinched her cheeks.

That evening she asked Mrs. Leak if she would lend her some books. From
Mrs. Leak’s library she chose _Mehalah_, by the Rev. Sabine
Baring-Gould, and an anonymous work of information called _Enquire
Within Upon Everything_. The next morning was fine and sunny. She spent
it by the parlour fire, reading. When she read bits of _Mehalah_ she
thought how romantic it would be to live in the Essex Marshes. From
_Enquire Within Upon Everything_ she learned how gentlemen’s hats if
plunged in a bath of logwood will come out with a dash of
respectability, and that ruins are best constructed of cork. During the
afternoon she learned other valuable facts like these, and fell asleep.
On the following morning she fell asleep again, in a beech-wood, curled
up in a heap of dead leaves. After that she had no more trouble. Life
becomes simple if one does nothing about it. Laura did nothing about
anything for days and days till Mrs. Leak said: ‘We shall soon be having
Christmas, miss.’

Christmas! So it had caught them all again. By now the provident
Caroline herself was suffering the eleventh hour in Oxford Street. But
here even Christmas was made easy.

Laura spent a happy afternoon choosing presents at the village shop. For
Henry she bought a bottle of ginger wine, a pair of leather gaiters, and
some highly recommended tincture of sassafras for his winter cough. For
Caroline she bought an extensive parcel--all the shop had, in fact--of
variously coloured rug-wools, and a pound’s worth of assorted stamps.
For Sibyl she bought some tinned fruits, some sugar-biscuits, and a pink
knitted bed-jacket. For Fancy and Marion respectively she bought a
Swanee flute and a box with Ely Cathedral on the lid, containing string,
which Mrs. Trumpet was very glad to see the last of, as it had been
forced upon her by a traveller, and had not hit the taste of the
village. To her great-nephew and great-nieces she sent postal orders for
one guinea, and pink gauze stockings filled with tin toys. These she
knew would please, for she had always wanted one herself. For Dunlop she
bought a useful button-hook. Acquaintances and minor relations were
greeted with picture postcards, either photographs of the local War
Memorial Hall and Institute, or a coloured view of some sweet-peas with
the motto: ‘Kind Thoughts from Great Mop.’ A postcard of the latter kind
was also enclosed with each of the presents.

Titus was rather more difficult to suit. But by good luck she noticed
two heavy glass jars such as old-fashioned druggists use. These were not
amongst Mrs. Trumpet’s wares--she kept linen buttons in the one and horn
buttons in the other; but she was anxious to oblige such a magnificent
customer and quite ready to sell her anything that she wanted. She was
about to empty out the buttons when Laura stopped her. ‘You must keep
some for your customers, Mrs. Trumpet. They may want to put them in
their Christmas puddings.’ Laura was losing her head a little with the
excitement. ‘But I should like to send about three dozen of each sort,
if you can spare them. Buttons are always useful.’

‘Yes, miss. Shall I put in some linen thread too?’

Mrs. Trumpet was a stout, obliging woman. She promised to do up all the
parcels in thick brown paper and send them off three days before
Christmas. As Laura stepped out of the shop in triumph, she exclaimed:
‘Well, that’s done it!’

For the life of her she could not have said in what sense the words were
intended. She was divided between admiration for her useful and
well-chosen gifts and delight in affronting a kind of good taste which
she believed to be merely self-esteem.

Although she had chosen presents with such care for her relations, Laura
was surprised when counter presents arrived from them. She had not
thought of them as remembering her. Their presents were all of a warm
nature; they insisted upon that bleakness and draughtiness which their
senders had foretold. When Caroline wrote to thank Laura, she said:

‘I have started to make you a nice warm coverlet out of those pretty
wools you sent. I think it will look very cheerful and variegated. I
often feel quite worried to think of you upon those wind-swept hills.
And from all I hear you have a great many woods round you, and I’m
afraid all the decaying leaves must make the place damp.’

Heaping coals of fire was a religious occupation. Laura rather admired
Caroline for the neat turn of the wrist with which she heaped these.

In spite of the general determination of her family that she should feel
the cold Laura lived at Great Mop very comfortably. Mrs. Leak was an
excellent cook; she attended to her lodger civilly and kindly enough,
made no comments, and showed no curiosity. At times Laura felt as though
she had exchanged one Caroline for another. Mrs. Leak was not,
apparently, a religious woman. There were no texts on her walls, and
when Laura asked for the loan of a Bible Mrs. Leak took a little time to
produce it, and blew on the cover before she handed it over. But like
Caroline, she gave the impression that her kingdom was not of this
world. Laura liked her, and would have been glad to be upon less distant
terms with her, but she did not find it easy to break through Mrs.
Leak’s reserve. She tried this subject and that, but Mrs. Leak did not
begin to thaw until Laura said something about black-currant tea. It
seemed that Mrs. Leak shared Laura’s liking for distillations. That
evening she remarked that the table-beer was of her own brewing, and
lingered a while with the folded cloth in her hand to explain the
recipe. After that Laura was given every evening a glass of home-made
wine: dandelion, cowslip, elderberry, ashkey, or mangold. By her
appreciation and her inquiries she entrapped Mrs. Leak into pausing
longer and longer before she carried away the supper-tray. Before
January was out it had become an established thing that after placing
the bedroom candlestick on the cleared table Mrs. Leak would sit down
and talk for half an hour or so.

There was an indoor pleasantness about these times. Through the wall
came the sound of Mr. Leak snoring in the kitchen. The two women sat by
the fire, tilting their glasses and drinking in small peaceful sips. The
lamplight shone upon the tidy room and the polished table, lighting
topaz in the dandelion wine, spilling pools of crimson through the
flanks of the bottle of plum gin. It shone on the contented drinkers,
and threw their large, close-at-hand shadows upon the wall. When Mrs.
Leak smoothed her apron the shadow solemnified the gesture as though she
were moulding an universe. Laura’s nose and chin were defined as sharply
as the peaks on a holly leaf.

Mrs. Leak did most of the talking. She talked well. She knew a great
deal about everybody, and she was not content to quit a character until
she had brought it to life for her listener.

Mrs. Leak’s favourite subject was the Misses Larpent, Miss Minnie and
Miss Jane. Miss Minnie was seventy-three, Miss Jane four years younger.
Neither of them had known a day’s illness, nor any bodily infirmity, nor
any relenting of their faculties. They would live for many years yet, if
only to thwart their debauched middle-aged nephew, the heir to the
estate. Perhaps Miss Willowes had seen Lazzard Court on one of her
walks? Yes, Laura had seen it, looking down from a hill-top--the park
where sheep were penned among the grouped chestnut trees, the long white
house with its expressionless façade--and had heard the stable-clock
striking a deserted noon.

The drive of Lazzard Court was five miles long from end to end. The
house had fourteen principal bedrooms and a suite for Royalty. Mrs. Leak
had been in service at Lazzard Court before her marriage; she knew the
house inside and out, and described it to Laura till Laura felt that
there was not one of the fourteen principal bedrooms which she did not
know. The blue room, the yellow room, the Chinese room, the buff room,
the balcony room, the needle-work room--she had slept in them all. Nay,
she had awakened in the Royal bed, and pulling aside the red damask
curtains had looked to the window to see the sun shining upon the tulip
tree.

No visitors slept in the stately bedrooms now, Lazzard Court was very
quiet. People in the villages, said Mrs. Leak coldly, called Miss Minnie
and Miss Jane two old screws. Mrs. Leak knew better. The old ladies
spent lordily upon their pleasures, and economised elsewhere that they
might be able to do so. When they invited the Bishop to lunch and gave
him stewed rabbit, blackberry pudding, and the best peaches and Madeira
that his Lordship was likely to taste in his life, he fared no worse and
no better than they fared themselves. Lazzard Court was famous for its
racing-stable. To the upkeep of this all meaner luxuries were
sacrificed--suitable bonnets, suitable subscriptions, bedroom fires,
salmon and cucumber. But the stable-yard was like the forecourt of a
temple. Every morning after breakfast Miss Jane would go round the
stables and feel the horses’ legs, her gnarled old hand with its diamond
rings slipping over the satin coat.

Nothing escaped the sisters. The dairy, the laundry, the glass-houses,
the poultry-yard, all were scrutinised. If any servant were found
lacking he or she was called before Miss Minnie in the Justice Room.
Mrs. Leak had never suffered such an interview, but she had seen others
come away, white-faced, or weeping with apron thrown over head. Even the
coffins were made on the estate. Each sister had chosen her elm and had
watched it felled, with sharp words for the woodman when he aimed
amiss.

When Mrs. Leak had given the last touches to Miss Minnie and Miss Jane,
she made Laura’s flesh creep with the story of the doctor who took the
new house up on the hill. He had been a famous doctor in London, but
when he came to Great Mop no one would have anything to do with him. It
was said he came as an interloper, watching for old Dr. Halley to die
that he might step into his shoes. He grew more and more morose in his
lonely house, soon the villagers said he drank; at last came the morning
when he and his wife were found dead. He had shot her and then himself,
so it appeared, and the verdict at the inquest was of Insanity. The
chief witnesses were another London doctor, a great man for the brain,
who had advised his friend to lead a peaceful country life; and the
maidservant, who had heard ranting talk and cries late one evening, and
ran out of the house in terror, banging the door behind her, to spend
the night with her mother in the village.

After the doctor, Mrs. Leak called up Mr. Jones the clergyman. Laura had
seen his white beard browsing among the tombs. He looked like a blessed
goat tethered on hallowed grass. He lived alone with his books of Latin
and Hebrew and his tame owl which he tried to persuade to sleep in his
bedroom. He had dismissed red-haired Emily, the sexton’s niece, for
pouring hot water on a mouse. Emily had heated the water with the
kindest intentions, but she was dismissed nevertheless. Mrs. Leak made
much of this incident, for it was Mr. Jones’s only act of authority. In
all other administrations he was guided by Mr. Gurdon, the clerk.

Mr. Gurdon’s beard was red and curly (Laura knew him by sight also).
Fiery down covered his cheeks, his eyes were small and truculent, and he
lived in a small surprised cottage near the church. Every morning he
walked forth to the Rectory to issue his orders for the day--this old
woman was to be visited with soup, that young one with wrath; and more
manure should be ordered for the Rectory cabbages. For Mr. Gurdon was
Mr. Jones’s gardener, as well as his clerk.

Mr. Gurdon had even usurped the clergyman’s perquisite of quarrelling
with the organist. Henry Perry was the organist. He had lost one leg and
three fingers in a bus accident, so there was scarcely any other
profession he could have taken up. And he had always been fond of
playing tunes, for his mother, who was a superior widow, had a piano at
Rose Cottage.

Mr. Gurdon said that Henry Perry encouraged the choir boys to laugh at
him. After church he used to hide behind a yew tree to pounce out upon
any choir boys who desecrated the graves by leaping over them. When he
caught them he pinched them. Pinches are silent: they can be made use of
in sacred places where smacking would be irreverent. One summer Mr.
Gurdon told Mr. Jones to forbid the choir treat. Three days later some
of the boys were playing with a tricycle. They allowed it to get out of
control, and it began to run downhill. At the bottom of the hill was a
sharp turn in the road, and Mr. Gurdon’s cottage. The tricycle came
faster and faster and crashed through the fence into Mr. Gurdon, who was
attending to his lettuces and had his back turned. The boys giggled and
ran away. Their mothers did not take the affair so lightly. That evening
Mr. Gurdon received a large seed-cake, two dozen fresh eggs, a packet of
cigarettes, and other appeasing gifts. Next Sunday Mr. Jones in his kind
tenor voice announced that a member of the congregation wished to return
thanks for mercies lately received. Mr. Gurdon turned round in his place
and glared at the choir boys.

Much as he disliked Henry Perry, Mr. Gurdon had disliked the doctor
from London even more. The doctor had come upon him frightening an old
woman in a field, and had called him a damned bully and a hypocrite. Mr.
Gurdon had cursed him back, and swore to be even with him. The old woman
bore her defender no better will. She talked in a surly way about her
aunt, who was a gipsy and able to afflict people with lice by just
looking at them.

Laura did not hear this story from Mrs. Leak. It was told her some time
after by Mrs. Trumpet. Mrs. Trumpet hated Mr. Gurdon, though she was
very civil to him when he came into the shop. Few people in the village
liked Mr. Gurdon, but he commanded a great deal of politeness. Red and
burly and to be feared, the clerk reminded Laura of a red bull belonging
to the farmer. In one respect he was unlike the bull: Mr. Gurdon was a
very respectable man.

Mrs. Leak also told Laura about Mr. and Mrs. Ward, who kept the Lamb and
Flag; about Miss Carloe the dressmaker, who fed a pet hedgehog on
bread-and-milk; and about fat Mrs. Garland, who let lodgings in the
summer and was always so down at heel and jolly.

Although she knew so much about her neighbours, Mrs. Leak was not a
sociable woman. The Misses Larpent, the dead doctor, Mr. Jones, Mr.
Gurdon, and Miss Carloe--she called them up and caused them to pass
before Laura, but in a dispassionate way, rather like the Witch of Endor
calling up old Samuel. Nor was Great Mop a sociable village, at any rate
compared with the villages which Laura had known as a girl. Never had
she seen so little dropping in, leaning over fences, dawdling at the
shop or in the churchyard. Little laughter came from the taproom of the
Lamb and Flag. Once or twice she glanced in at the window as she passed
by and saw the men within sitting silent and abstracted with their mugs
before them. Even the bell-ringers when they had finished their practice
broke up with scant adieus, and went silently on their way. She had
never met country people like these before. Nor had she ever known a
village that kept such late hours. Lights were burning in the cottages
till one and two in the morning, and she had been awakened at later
hours than those by the sound of passing voices. She could hear quite
distinctly, for her window was open and faced upon the village street.
She heard Miss Carloe say complainingly: ‘It’s all very well for you
young ones. But my old bones ache so, it’s a wonder how I get home!’
Then she heard the voice of red-haired Emily say: ‘No bones so nimble as
old bones, Miss Carloe, when it comes to--’ and then a voice unknown to
Laura said ‘Hush’; and she heard no more, for a cock crew. Another
night, some time after this, she heard some one playing a mouth-organ.
The music came from far off, it sounded almost as if it were being
played out of doors. She lit a candle and looked at her watch--it was
half-past three. She got out of bed and listened at the window; it was a
dark night, and the hills rose up like a screen. The noise of the
mouth-organ came wavering and veering on the wind. A drunk man, perhaps?
Yet what drunk man would play on so steadily? She lay awake for an hour
or more, half puzzled, half lulled by the strange music, that never
stopped, that never varied, that seemed to have become part of the air.

Next day she asked Mrs. Leak what this strange music could be. Mrs. Leak
said that young Billy Thomas was distracted with toothache. He could not
sleep, and played for hours nightly upon his mouth-organ to divert
himself from the pain. On Wednesday the tooth-drawer would come to
Barleighs, and young Billy Thomas would be put out of his agony. Laura
was sorry for the sufferer, but she admired the circumstances. The
highest flights of her imagination had not risen to more than a
benighted drunk. Young Billy Thomas had a finer invention than she.

After a few months she left off speculating about the villagers. She
admitted that there was something about them which she could not fathom,
but she was content to remain outside the secret, whatever it was. She
had not come to Great Mop to concern herself with the hearts of men. Let
her stray up the valleys, and rest in the leafless woods that looked so
warm with their core of fallen red leaves, and find out her own secret,
if she had one; with autumn it might come back to question her. She
wondered. She thought not. She felt that nothing could ever again
disturb her peace. Wherever she strayed the hills folded themselves
round her like the fingers of a hand.

About this time she did an odd thing. In her wanderings she had found a
disused well. It was sunk at the side of a green lane, and grass and
bushes had grown up around its low rim, almost to conceal it; the
wooden frame was broken and mouldered, ropes and pulleys had long ago
been taken away, and the water was sunk far down, only distinguishable
as an uncertain reflection of the sky. Here, one evening, she brought
her guide-book and her map. Pushing aside the bushes she sat down upon
the low rim of the well. It was a still, mild evening towards the end of
February, the birds were singing, there was a smell of growth in the
air, the light lingered in the fields as though it were glad to linger.
Looking into the well she watched the reflected sky grow dimmer; and
when she raised her eyes the gathering darkness of the landscape
surprised her. The time had come. She took the guide-book and the map
and threw them in.

She heard the disturbed water sidling against the walls of the well. She
scarcely knew what she had done, but she knew that she had done rightly,
whether it was that she had sacrificed to the place, or had cast herself
upon its mercies--content henceforth to know no more of it than did its
own children.

As she reached the village she saw a group of women standing by the
milestone. They were silent and abstracted as usual. When she greeted
them they returned her greeting, but they said nothing among themselves.
After she had gone by they turned as of one accord and began to walk up
the field path towards the wood. They were going to gather fuel, she
supposed. To-night their demeanour did not strike her as odd. She felt
at one with them, an inhabitant like themselves, and she would gladly
have gone with them up towards the wood. If they were different from
other people, why shouldn’t they be? They saw little of the world. Great
Mop stood by itself at the head of the valley, five miles from the main
road, and cut off by the hills from the other villages. It had a name
for being different from other places. The man who had driven Laura home
from The Reason Why had said: ‘It’s not often that a wagonette is seen
at Great Mop. It’s an out-of-the-way place, if ever there was one.
There’s not such another village in Buckinghamshire for
out-of-the-way-ness. Well may it be called Great Mop, for there’s never
a Little Mop that I’ve heard of.’

People so secluded as the inhabitants of Great Mop would naturally be
rather silent, and keep themselves close. So Laura thought, and Mr.
Saunter was of the same opinion.

Mr. Saunter’s words had weight, for he spoke seldom. He was a serious,
brown young man, who after the war had refused to go back to his bank in
Birmingham. He lived in a wooden hut which he had put up with his own
hands, and kept a poultry-farm.

Laura first met Mr. Saunter when she was out walking, early one darkish,
wet, January morning. The lane was muddy; she picked her way, her eyes
to the ground. She did not notice Mr. Saunter until she was quite close
to him. He was standing bareheaded in the rain. His look was sad and
gentle, it reflected the mood of the weather, and several dead white
hens dangled from his hands. Laura exclaimed, softly, apologetically.
This young man was so perfectly of a piece with his surroundings that
she felt herself to be an intruder. She was about to turn back when his
glance moved slowly towards her. ‘Badger,’ he said; and smiled in an
explanatory fashion. Laura knew at once that he had been careless and
had left the henhouse door unfastened. She took pains that no shade of
blame should mix itself with her condolences. She did not even blame the
badger. She knew that this was a moment for nothing but kind words, and
not too many of them.

Mr. Saunter was grateful. He invited her to come and see his birds. Side
by side they turned in silence through a field gate and walked into Mr.
Saunter’s field. Bright birds were on the sodden grass. As he went by
they hurried into their pens, expecting to be fed. ‘If you would care to
come in,’ said Mr. Saunter, ‘I should like to make you a cup of tea.’

Mr. Saunters living-room was very untidy and homelike. A basket of
stockings lay on the table. Laura wondered if she might offer to help
Mr. Saunter with his mending. But after he had made the tea, he took up
a stocking and began to darn it. He darned much better than she did.

As she went home again she fell to wondering what animal Mr. Saunter
resembled. But in the end she decided that he resembled no animal except
man. Till now, Laura had rejected the saying that man is the noblest
work of nature. Half an hour with Mr. Saunter showed her that the saying
was true. So had Adam been the noblest work of nature, when he walked
out among the beasts, sole overseer of the garden, intact, with all his
ribs about him, his equilibrium as yet untroubled by Eve. She had
misunderstood the saying merely because she had not happened to meet a
man before. Perhaps, like other noble works, man is rare. Perhaps there
is only one of him at a time: first Adam; now Mr. Saunter. If that were
the case, she was lucky to have met him. This also was the result of
coming to Great Mop.

So much did Mr. Saunter remind Laura of Adam that he made her feel like
Eve--for she was petitioned by an unladylike curiosity. She asked Mrs.
Leak about him. Mrs. Leak could tell her nothing that was not already
known to her, except that young Billy Thomas went up there every day on
his bicycle to lend Mr. Saunter a hand. Laura would not stoop to
question young Billy Thomas. She fought against her curiosity, and the
spring came to her aid.

This new year was changing her whole conception of spring. She had
thought of it as a denial of winter, a green spear that thrust through a
tyrant’s rusty armour. Now she saw it as something filial, gently
unlacing the helm of the old warrior and comforting his rough cheek. In
February came a spell of fine weather. She spent whole days sitting in
the woods, where the wood-pigeons moaned for pleasure on the boughs.
Sometimes two cock birds would tumble together in mid air, shrieking,
and buffeting with their wings, and then would fly back to the
quivering boughs and nurse the air into peace again. All round her the
sap was rising up. She laid her cheek against a tree and shut her eyes
to listen. She expected to hear the tree drumming like a telegraph pole.

It was so warm in the woods that she forgot that she sat there for
shelter. But though the wind blew lightly, it blew from the east. In
March the wind went round to the south-west. It brought rain. The
bright, cold fields were dimmed and warm to walk in now. Like embers the
wet beech-leaves smouldered in the woods.

All one day the wind had risen, and late in the evening it called her
out. She went up to the top of Cubbey Ridge, past the ruined windmill
that clattered with its torn sails. When she had come to the top of the
Ridge she stopped, with difficulty holding herself upright. She felt the
wind swoop down close to the earth. The moon was out hunting overhead,
her pack of black and white hounds ranged over the sky. Moon and wind
and clouds hunted an invisible quarry. The wind routed through the
woods. Laura from the hill-top heard the various surrounding woods cry
out with different voices. The spent gusts left the beech-hangers
throbbing like sea caverns through which the wave had passed, the fir
plantation seemed to chant some never-ending rune.

Listening to these voices, another voice came to her ear--the far-off
pulsation of a goods train labouring up a steep cutting. It was scarcely
audible, more perceptible as feeling than as sound, but by its
regularity it dominated all the other voices. It seemed to come nearer
and nearer, to inform her like the drumming of blood in her ears. She
began to feel defenceless, exposed to the possibility of an overwhelming
terror. She listened intently, trying not to think. Though the noise
came from an ordinary goods train, no amount of reasoning could stave
off this terror. She must yield herself, yield up all her attention, if
she would escape. It was a wicked sound. It expressed something
eternally outcast and reprobated by man, stealthily trafficking by
night, unseen in the dark clefts of the hills. Loud, separate, and
abrupt, each pant of the engine trampled down her wits. The wind and the
moon and the ranging cloud pack were not the only hunters abroad that
night: something else was hunting among the hills, hunting slowly,
deliberately, sure of its quarry.

Suddenly she remembered the goods yard at Paddington, and all her
thoughts slid together again like a pack of hounds that have picked up
the scent. They streamed faster and faster; she clenched her hands and
prayed as when a child she had prayed in the hunting-field.

In the goods yard at Paddington she had almost pounced on the clue, the
clue to the secret country of her mind. The country was desolate and
half-lit, and she walked there alone, mistress of it, and mistress, too,
of the terror that roamed over the blank fields and haunted round her.
Here was country just so desolate and half-lit. She was alone, just as
in her dreams, and the terror had come to keep her company, and crouched
by her side, half in fawning, half in readiness to pounce. All this
because of a goods train that laboured up a cutting. What was this cabal
of darkness, suborning her own imagination to plot against her? What
were these iron hunters doing near mournful, ever-weeping Paddington?

‘Now! Now!’ said the moon, and plunged towards her through the clouds.

Baffled, she stared back at the moon and shook her head. For a moment it
had seemed as though the clue were found, but it had slid through her
hands again. The train had reached the top of the cutting, with a
shriek of delight it began to pour itself downhill. She smiled. It
amused her to suppose it loaded with cabbages. Arrived at Paddington,
the cabbages would be diverted to Covent Garden. But inevitably, and
with all the augustness of due course, they would reach their bourne at
Apsley Terrace. They would shed all their midnight devilry in the pot,
and be served up to Henry and Caroline very pure and vegetable.

‘Lovely! lovely!’ she said, and began to descend the hill, for the night
was cold. Though her secret had eluded her again, she did not mind. She
knew that this time she had come nearer to catching it than ever before.
If it were attainable she would run it to earth here, sooner or later.
Great Mop was the likeliest place to find it.

The village was in darkness; it had gone to bed early, as good villages
should. Only Miss Carloe’s window was alight. Kind Miss Carloe, she
would sit up till all hours tempting her hedgehog with bread-and-milk.
Hedgehogs are nocturnal animals; they go out for walks at night,
grunting, and shoving out their black snouts. ‘Thrice the brindled cat
hath mewed; Thrice, and once the hedgepig whined. Harper cries, “’Tis
time, ’tis time.”’ She found the key under the half-brick, and let
herself in very quietly. Only sleep sat up for her, waiting in the
hushed house. Sleep took her by the hand, and convoyed her up the narrow
stairs. She fell asleep almost as her head touched the pillow.

By the next day all this seemed very ordinary. She had gone out on a
windy night and heard a goods train. There was nothing remarkable in
that. It would have been a considerable adventure in London, but it was
nothing in the Chilterns. Yet she retained an odd feeling of respect for
what had happened, as though it had laid some command upon her that
waited to be interpreted and obeyed. She thought it over, and tried to
make sense of it. If it pointed to anything, it pointed to Paddington.
She did what she could; she wrote and invited Caroline to spend a day at
Great Mop. She did not suppose that this was the right interpretation,
but she could think of no other.

All the birds were singing as Laura went down the lane to meet
Caroline’s car. It was almost like summer, nothing could be more
fortunate. Caroline was dressed in sensible tweeds. ‘It was raining when
I left London,’ she said, and glanced severely at Laura’s cotton gown.

‘Was it?’ said Laura. ‘It hasn’t rained here.’ She stopped. She looked
carefully at the blue sky. There was not a cloud to be seen. ‘Perhaps it
will rain later on,’ she added. Caroline also looked at the sky, and
said: ‘Probably.’

Conversation was a little difficult, for Laura did not know how much she
was still in disgrace. She asked after everybody in a rather guilty
voice, and heard how emphatically they all throve, and what a pleasant,
cheerful winter they had all spent. After that came the distance from
Wickendon and the hour of departure. In planning the conduct of the day,
Laura had decided to keep the church for after lunch. Before lunch she
would show Caroline the view. She had vaguely allotted an hour and a
half to the view, but it took scarcely twenty minutes. At least, that
was the time it took walking up to the windmill and down again. The view
had taken no time at all. It was a very clear day, and everything that
could be seen was perceptible at the first glance.

Caroline was so stoutly equipped for country walking that Laura had not
the heart to drag her up another hill. They visited the church instead.
The church was more successful. Caroline sank on her knees and prayed.
This gave Laura an opportunity to look round, for she had not been
inside the church before. It was extremely narrow, and had windows upon
the south side only, so that it looked like a holy corridor. Caroline
prayed for some time, and Laura made the most of it. Presently she was
able to lead Caroline down the corridor, murmuring: ‘That window was
presented in 1901. There is rather a nice brass in this corner. That bit
of carving is old, it is the Wise and the Foolish Virgins. Take care of
the step.’

One foolish Virgin pleased Laura as being particularly lifelike. She
stood a little apart from the group, holding a flask close to her ear,
and shaking it. During lunch Laura felt that her stock of oil, too, was
running very low. But it was providentially renewed, for soon after
lunch a perfect stranger fell off a bicycle just outside Mrs. Leak’s
door and sprained her ankle. Laura and Caroline leapt up to succour her,
and then there was a great deal of cold compress and hot tea and
animation. The perfect stranger was a Secretary to a Guild. She asked
Caroline if she did not think Great Mop a delightful nook, and Caroline
cordially agreed. They went on discovering Committees in common till
tea-time, and soon after went off together in Caroline’s car. Just as
Caroline stepped into the car she asked Laura if she had met any nice
people in the neighbourhood.

‘No. There aren’t any nice people,’ said Laura. Wondering if the bicycle
would stay like that, twined so casually round the driver’s neck, she
had released her attention one minute too soon.

As far as she knew this was her only slip throughout the day. It was a
pity. But Caroline would soon forget it; she might not even have heard
it, for the Secretary was talking loudly about Homes of Rest at the same
moment. Still, it was a pity. She might have remembered Mr. Saunter,
though perhaps she could not have explained him satisfactorily in the
time.

She turned and walked slowly through the fields towards the
poultry-farm. She could not settle down to complete solitude so soon
after Caroline’s departure. She would decline gradually, using Mr.
Saunter as an intermediate step. He was feeding his poultry, going from
pen to pen with a zinc wheelbarrow and a large wooden spoon. The birds
flew round him; he had continually to stop and fend them off like a
swarm of large midges. Sometimes he would grasp a specially bothering
bird and throw it back into the pen as though it were a ball. She leant
on the gate and watched him. This young man who had been a bank-clerk
and a soldier walked with the easy, slow strides of a born countryman;
he seemed to possess the earth with each step. No doubt but he was like
Adam. And she, watching him from above--for the field sloped down from
the gate to the pens--was like God. Did God, after casting out the rebel
angels and before settling down to the peace of a heaven unpeopled of
contradiction, use Adam as an intermediate step?

On his way back to the hut Mr. Saunter noticed Laura. He came up and
leant on his side of the gate. Though the sun had gone down, the air was
still warm, and a disembodied daylight seemed to weigh upon the
landscape like a weight of sleep. The birds which had sung all day now
sang louder then ever.

‘Hasn’t it been a glorious day?’ said Mr. Saunter.

‘I have had my sister-in-law down,’ Laura answered. ‘She lives in
London.’

‘My people,’ said Mr. Saunter, ‘all live in the Midlands.’

‘Or in Australia,’ he added after a pause.

Mr. Saunter, seen from above, walking among his flocks and herds--for
even hens seemed ennobled into something Biblical by their relation to
him--was an impressive figure. Mr. Saunter leaning on the gate was a
pleasant, unaffected young man enough, but no more. Quitting him, Laura
soon forgot him as completely as she had forgotten Caroline. Caroline
was a tedious bluebottle; Mr. Saunter a gentle, furry brown moth; but
she could brush off one as easily as the other.

Laura even forgot that she had invited the moth to settle again; to come
to tea. It was only by chance that she had stayed indoors that
afternoon, making currant scones. To amuse herself she had cut the dough
into likenesses of the village people. Curious developments took place
in the baking. Miss Carloe’s hedgehog had swelled until it was almost as
large as its mistress. The dough had run into it, leaving a great hole
in Miss Carloe’s side. Mr. Jones had a lump on his back, as though he
were carrying the Black Dog in a bag; and a fancy portrait of Miss
Larpent in her elegant youth and a tight-fitting sweeping amazon had
warped and twisted until it was more like a gnarled thorn tree than a
woman.

Laura felt slightly ashamed of her freak. It was unkind to play these
tricks with her neighbours’ bodies. But Mr. Saunter ate the strange
shapes without comment, quietly splitting open the villagers and
buttering them. He told her that he would soon lose the services of
young Billy Thomas, who was going to Lazzard Court as a footman.

‘I shouldn’t think young Billy Thomas would make much of a footman,’
said Laura.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered consideringly. ‘He’s very good at standing
still.’

Laura had brought her sensitive conscience into the country with her,
just as she had brought her umbrella, though so far she had not
remembered to use either. Now the conscience gave signs of life. Mr.
Saunter was so nice, and had eaten up those derisive scones, innocently
under the impression that they had been prepared for him; he had come
with his gift of eggs, all kindness and forethought while she had
forgotten his existence; and now he was getting up to go, thanking her
and afraid that he had stayed too long. She had acted unworthily by
this young man, so dignified and unassuming; she must do something to
repair the slight she had put upon him in her own mind. She offered
herself as a substitute for young Billy Thomas until Mr. Saunter could
find some one else.

‘I don’t know anything about hens,’ she admitted. ‘But I am fond of
animals, and I am very obedient.’

It was agreed that she might go on the following day to help him with
the trap-nesting, and see how she liked it.

At first Mr. Saunter would not allow her to do more than walk round with
him upon planks specially put down to save her from the muddy places,
pencil the eggs, and drink tea afterwards. But she came so punctually
and showed such eagerness that as time went on she persuaded him into
allowing her a considerable share in the work.

There was much to do, for it was a busy time of year. The incubators had
fulfilled their time; Laura learnt how to lift out the newly-hatched
chicks, damp, almost lifeless from their birth-throes, and pack them
into baskets. A few hours after the chicks were plump and fluffy. They
looked like bunches of primroses in the moss-lined baskets.

Besides mothering his chicks Mr. Saunter was busy with a great
re-housing of the older birds. This was carried out after sundown, for
the birds were sleepy then, and easier to deal with. If moved by day
they soon revolted, and went back to their old pens. Even as it was
there were always a few sticklers, roosting uncomfortably among the
newcomers, or standing disconsolately before their old homes, closed
against them.

Laura liked this evening round best of all. The April twilights were
marvellously young and still. A slender moon soared in the green sky;
the thick spring grass was heavy with dew, and the earth darkened about
her feet while overhead it still seemed quite light. Mr. Saunter would
disappear into the henhouse, a protesting squawking and scuffling would
be heard; then he would emerge with hens under either arm. He showed
Laura how to carry them, two at a time, their breasts in her hands,
their wings held fast between her arm and her side. She would tickle the
warm breasts, warm and surprisingly bony with quills under the soft
plumage, and make soothing noises.

At first she felt nervous with the strange burden, so meek and inanimate
one moment, so shrewish the next, struggling and beating with strong
freed wings. However many birds Mr. Saunter might be carrying, he was
always able to relieve her of hers. Immediately the termagant would
subside, tamed by the large sure grasp, meek as a dove, with rigid
dangling legs, and head turning sadly from side to side.

Laura never became as clever with the birds as Mr. Saunter. But when she
had overcome her nervousness she managed them well enough to give
herself a great deal of pleasure. They nestled against her, held fast in
the crook of her arm, while her fingers probed among the soft feathers
and rigid quills of their breasts. She liked to feel their acquiescence,
their dependence upon her. She felt wise and potent. She remembered the
henwife in the fairy-tales, she understood now why kings and queens
resorted to the henwife in their difficulties. The henwife held their
destinies in the crook of her arm, and hatched the future in her apron.
She was sister to the spaewife, and close cousin to the witch, but she
practised her art under cover of henwifery; she was not, like her sister
and her cousin, a professional. She lived unassumingly at the bottom of
the king’s garden, wearing a large white apron and very possibly her
husband’s cloth cap; and when she saw the king and queen coming down
the gravel path she curtseyed reverentially, and pretended it was the
eggs they had come about. She was easier of approach than the spaewife,
who sat on a creepie and stared at the smouldering peats till her eyes
were red and unseeing; or the witch, who lived alone in the wood, her
cottage window all grown over with brambles. But though she kept up this
pretence of homeliness she was not inferior in skill to the
professionals. Even the pretence of homeliness was not quite so homely
as it might seem. Laura knew that the Russian witches live in small huts
mounted upon three giant hen’s legs, all yellow and scaly. The legs can
go; when the witch desires to move her dwelling the legs stalk through
the forest, clattering against the trees, and printing long scars upon
the snow.

Following Mr. Saunter up and down between the pens, Laura almost forgot
where and who she was, so completely had she merged her personality into
the henwife’s. She walked back along the rutted track and down the steep
lane as obliviously as though she were flitting home on a broomstick.
All through April she helped Mr. Saunter. They were both sorry when a
new boy applied for the job and her duties came to an end. She knew no
more of Mr. Saunter at the close of this association than she had known
at its beginning. It could scarcely be said even that she liked him any
better, for from their first meeting she had liked him extremely. Time
had assured the liking, and that was all. So well assured was it, that
she felt perfectly free to wander away and forget him once more, certain
of finding him as likeable and well liked as before whenever she might
choose to return.

During her first months at Great Mop the moods of the winter landscape
and the renewing of spring had taken such hold of her imagination that
she thought no season could be more various and lovely. She had even
written a slightly precious letter to Titus--for somehow correspondence
with Titus was always rather attentive--declaring her belief that the
cult of the summer months was a piece of cockney obtuseness, a taste for
sweet things, and a preference for dry grass to strew their egg-shells
upon. But with the first summer days and the first cowslips she learnt
better. She had known that there would be cowslips in May; from the day
she first thought of Great Mop she had promised them to herself. She had
meant to find them early and watch the yellow blossoms unfolding upon
the milky green stems. But they were beforehand with her, or she had
watched the wrong fields. When she walked into the meadow it was bloomed
over with cowslips, powdering the grass in variable plenty, here
scattered, there clustered, innumerable as the stars in the Milky Way.

She knelt down among them and laid her face close to their fragrance.
The weight of all her unhappy years seemed for a moment to weigh her
bosom down to the earth; she trembled, understanding for the first time
how miserable she had been; and in another moment she was released. It
was all gone, it could never be again, and never had been. Tears of
thankfulness ran down her face. With every breath she drew, the scent of
the cowslips flowed in and absolved her.

She was changed, and knew it. She was humbler, and more simple. She
ceased to triumph mentally over her tyrants, and rallied herself no
longer with the consciousness that she had outraged them by coming to
live at Great Mop. The amusement she had drawn from their disapproval
was a slavish remnant, a derisive dance on the north bank of the Ohio.
There was no question of forgiving them. She had not, in any case, a
forgiving nature; and the injury they had done her was not done by them.
If she were to start forgiving she must needs forgive Society, the Law,
the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament, great-great-aunt
Salome and her prayer-book, the Bank of England, Prostitution, the
Architect of Apsley Terrace, and half a dozen other useful props of
civilisation. All she could do was to go on forgetting them. But now she
was able to forget them without flouting them by her forgetfulness.

Throughout May and June and the first fortnight of July she lived in
perfect idleness and contentment, growing every day more freckled and
more rooted in peace. On July 17th she was disturbed by a breath from
the world. Titus came down to see her. It was odd to be called Aunt
Lolly again. Titus did not use the term often; he addressed his friends
of both sexes and his relations of all ages as My Dear; but Aunt Lolly
slipped out now and again.

There was no need to show Titus the inside of the church. There was no
need even to take him up to the windmill and show him the view. He did
all that for himself, and got it over before breakfast--for Titus
breakfasted for three mornings at Great Mop. He had come for the day
only, but he was too pleased to go back. He was his own master now, he
had rooms in Bloomsbury and did not need even to send off a telegram.
Mrs. Garland who let lodgings in the summer was able to oblige him with
a bedroom, full of pincushions and earwigs and marine photographs; and
Mrs. Trumpet gave him all the benefit of all the experience he invoked
in the choice of a tooth-brush. For three days he sat about with Laura,
and talked of his intention to begin brewing immediately. He had refused
to visit Italy with his mother--he had rejected several flattering
invitations from editors--because brewing appealed to him more than
anything else in the world. This, he said, was the last night out before
the wedding. On his return to Bloomsbury he intended to let his rooms to
an amiable Mahometan, and to apprentice himself to his family brewery
until he had learnt the family trade.

Laura gave him many messages to Lady Place. It was clear before her in
an early morning light. She could exactly recall the smell of the
shrubbery, her mother flowing across the croquet lawn, her father’s
voice as he called up the dogs. She could see herself, too: her old
self, for her present self had no part in the place. She did not suppose
she would ever return there, although she was glad that Titus was
faithful.

Titus departed. He wrote her a letter from Bloomsbury, saying that he
had struck a good bargain with the Mahometan, and was off to Somerset.
Ten days later she heard from Sibyl that he was coming to live at Great
Mop. She had scarcely time to assemble her feelings about this before he
was arrived.




_Part 3_


It was the third week in August. The weather was sultry; day after day
Laura heard the village people telling each other that there was thunder
in the air. Every evening they stood in the village street, looking
upwards, and the cattle stood waiting in the fields. But the storm
delayed. It hid behind the hills, biding its time.

Laura had spent the afternoon in a field, a field of unusual form, for
it was triangular. On two sides it was enclosed by woodland, and because
of this it was already darkening into a premature twilight, as though it
were a room. She had been there for hours. Though it was sultry, she
could not sit still. She walked up and down, turning savagely when she
came to the edge of the field. Her limbs were tired, and she stumbled
over the flints and matted couch grass. Throughout the long afternoon a
stock dove had cooed in the wood. ‘Cool, cool, cool,’ it said,
delighting in its green bower. Now it had ceased, and there was no life
in the woods. The sky was covered with a thick uniform haze. No ray of
the declining sun broke through it, but the whole heavens were
beginning to take on a dull, brassy pallor. The long afternoon was
ebbing away, stealthily, impassively, as though it were dying under an
anaesthetic.

Laura had not listened to the stock dove; she had not seen the haze
thickening overhead. She walked up and down in despair and rebellion.
She walked slowly, for she felt the weight of her chains. Once more they
had been fastened upon her. She had worn them for many years,
acquiescently, scarcely feeling their weight. Now she felt it. And, with
their weight, she felt their familiarity, and the familiarity was worst
of all. Titus had seen her starting out. He had cried; ‘Where are you
off to, Aunt Lolly? Wait a minute, and I’ll come too.’ She had feigned
not to hear him and had walked on. She had not turned her head until she
was out of the village, she expected at every moment to hear him come
bounding up behind her. Had he done so, she thought she would have
turned round and snarled at him. For she wanted, oh! how much she
wanted, to be left alone for once. Even when she felt pretty sure that
she had escaped she could not profit by her solitude, for Titus’s voice
still jangled on her nerves. ‘Where are you off to, Aunt Lolly? Wait a
minute, and I’ll come too.’ She heard his very tones, and heard
intensely her own silence that had answered him. Too flustered to notice
where she was going, she had followed a chance track until she found
herself in this field where she had never been before. Here the track
ended, and here she stayed.

The woods rose up before her like barriers. On the third side of the
field was a straggling hedge; along it sprawled a thick bank of
burdocks, growing with malignant profusion. It was an unpleasant spot.
Bitterly she said to herself: ‘Well, perhaps he’ll leave me alone here,’
and was glad of its unpleasantness. Titus could have all the rest: the
green meadows, the hill-tops, the beech-woods dark and resonant as the
inside of a sea-shell. He could walk in the greenest meadow and have
dominion over it like a bull. He could loll his great body over the
hill-tops, or rout silence out of the woods. They were hers, they were
all hers, but she would give them all up to him and keep only this
dismal field, and these coarse weeds growing out of an uncleansed soil.
Any terms to be rid of him. But even on these terms she could not be rid
of him, for all the afternoon he had been present in her thoughts, and
his voice rang in her ears as distinctly as ever: ‘Wait a minute, and
I’ll come with you.’ She had not waited; but, nevertheless, he had come.

Actually, she knew--and the knowledge smote her--Titus, seeing her walk
by unheeding, had picked up his book again and read on, reading slowly,
and slowly drawing at his pipe, careless, intent, and satisfied. Perhaps
he still sat by the open window. Perhaps he had wandered out, taking his
book with him, and now was lying in the shade, still reading, or
sleeping with his nose pressed into the grass, or with idle patience
inveigling an ant to climb up a dry stalk. For this was Titus, Titus who
had always been her friend. She had believed that she loved him; even
when she heard that he was coming to live at Great Mop she had half
thought that it might be rather nice to have him there. ‘Dearest Lolly,’
Sibyl had written from Italy, ‘I feel quite reconciled to this wild
scheme of Tito’s, since you will be there to keep an eye on him. Men are
so helpless. Tito is so impracticable. A regular artist,’ etc.

The helpless artist had arrived, and immediately upon his arrival walked
out to buy beer and raspberries. Sibyl might feel perfectly reconciled.
No cat could jump into the most comfortable armchair more unerringly
than Titus. ‘Such a nice young gentleman,’ said Mrs. Garland, smoothing
his pyjamas with a voluptuous hand. ‘Such a nice young gentleman,’ said
Miss Carloe, rubbing her finger over the milling of the new florin she
received for the raspberries. ‘Such a nice young gentleman,’ said Mrs.
Trumpet at the shop, and Mrs. Ward at the Lamb and Flag. All the
white-aproned laps opened to dandle him. The infant Bacchus walked down
the village street with his beer and his raspberries, bowing graciously
to all Laura’s acquaintances. That evening he supped with her and talked
about Fuseli. Fuseli--pronounced Foozley--was a neglected figure of the
utmost importance. The pictures, of course, didn’t matter: Titus
supposed there were some at the Tate. It was Fuseli the man, Fuseli the
sign of his times, etc., that Titus was going to write about. It had
been the ambition of his life to write a book about Fuseli, and his
first visit to Great Mop convinced him that this was the perfect place
to write it in. The secret, Titus said, of writing a good book was to be
cut off from access to the reading room of the British Museum. Laura
said a little pettishly that if that were all Titus might have stayed
in Bloomsbury, and written his book on Good Fridays. Titus demurred.
Suppose he ran out of ink? No! Great Mop was the place. ‘To-morrow,’ he
added, ‘you must take me round and show me all your footpaths.’

He left his pipe and tobacco pouch on the mantelpiece. They lay there
like the orb and sceptre of an usurping monarch. Laura dreamed that
night that Fuseli had arrived at Mr. Saunter’s poultry-farm, killed the
hens, and laid out the field as a golf course.

She heard a great deal about Fuseli during the next few days, while she
was obediently showing Titus all her footpaths. It was hot, so they
walked in the woods. The paths were narrow, there was seldom room for
two to walk abreast, so Titus generally went in front, projecting his
voice into the silence. She disliked these walks; she felt ashamed of
his company; she thought the woods saw her with him and drew back
scornfully to let them pass by together.

Titus was more tolerable in the village street. Indeed, at first she was
rather proud of her nephew’s success. After a week he knew everybody,
and knew them far better than she did. He passed from the bar-parlour of
the Lamb and Flag to the rustic woodwork of the rector’s lawn. He
subscribed to the bowling-green fund, he joined the cricket club, he
engaged himself to give readings at the Institute during the winter
evenings. He was invited to become a bell-ringer, and to read the
lessons. He burgeoned with projects for Co-operative Blue Beverens,
morris-dancing, performing Coriolanus with the Ancient Foresters,
getting Henry Wappenshaw to come down and paint a village sign, inviting
Pandora Williams and her rebeck for the Barleighs Flower Show. He
congratulated Laura upon having discovered so unspoilt an example of the
village community.

After the first fortnight he was less exuberant in the growth of his
vast fronds. He was growing downwards instead, rooting into the soil. He
began his book, and promised to stand godfather to the roadman’s next
child. When they went for walks together he would sometimes fall silent,
turning his head from side to side to browse the warm scent of a clover
field. Once, as they stood on the ridge that guarded the valley from the
south-east, he said: ‘I should like to stroke it’--and he waved his hand
towards the pattern of rounded hills embossed with rounded beech-woods.
She felt a cold shiver at his words, and turned away her eyes from the
landscape that she loved so jealously. Titus could never have spoken so
if he had not loved it too. Love it as he might, with all the deep
Willowes love for country sights and smells, love he never so intimately
and soberly, his love must be a horror to her. It was different in kind
from hers. It was comfortable, it was portable, it was a reasonable
appreciative appetite, a possessive and masculine love. It almost
estranged her from Great Mop that he should be able to love it so well,
and express his love so easily. He loved the countryside as though it
were a body.

She had not loved it so. For days at a time she had been unconscious of
its outward aspect, for long before she saw it she had loved it and
blessed it. With no earnest but a name, a few lines and letters on a
map, and a spray of beech-leaves, she had trusted the place and staked
everything on her trust. She had struggled to come, but there had been
no such struggle for Titus. It was as easy for him to quit Bloomsbury
for the Chilterns as for a cat to jump from a hard chair to a soft. Now
after a little scrabbling and exploration he was curled up in the green
lap and purring over the landscape. The green lap was comfortable. He
meant to stay in it, for he knew where he was well off. It was so
comfortable that he could afford to wax loving, praise its kindly
slopes, stretch out a discriminating paw and pat it. But Great Mop was
no more to him than any other likeable country lap. He liked it because
he was in possession. His comfort apart, it was a place like any other
place.

Laura hated him for daring to love it so. She hated him for daring to
love it at all. Most of all she hated him for imposing his kind of love
on her. Since he had come to Great Mop she had not been allowed to love
in her own way. Commenting, pointing out, appreciating, Titus tweaked
her senses one after another as if they were so many bell-ropes. He was
a good judge of country things; little escaped him, he understood the
points of a landscape as James his father had understood the points of a
horse. This was not her way. She was ashamed at paying the countryside
these horse-coping compliments. Day by day the spirit of the place
withdrew itself further from her. The woods judged her by her company,
and hushed their talk as she passed by with Titus. Silence heard them
coming, and fled out of the fields, the hills locked up their thoughts,
and became so many grassy mounds to be walked up and walked down. She
was being boycotted, and she knew it. Presently she would not know it
any more. For her too Great Mop would be a place like any other place, a
pastoral landscape where an aunt walked out with her nephew.

Nothing was left her but this sour field. Even this was not truly hers,
for here also Titus walked beside her and called her Aunt Lolly. She was
powerless against him. He had no idea how he had havocked her peace of
mind, he was making her miserable in the best of faith. If he could
guess, or if she could tell him, what ruin he carried with him, he would
have gone away. She admitted that, even in her frenzy of annoyance.
Titus had a kind heart, he meant her nothing but good. Besides, he could
easily find another village, other laps were as smooth and as green. But
that would never happen. He would never guess. It would never occur to
him to look for resentment in her face, or to speculate upon the mood of
any one he knew so well. And she would never be able to tell him. When
she was with him she came to heel and resumed her old employment of
being Aunt Lolly. There was no way out.

In vain she had tried to escape, transient and delusive had been her
ecstasies of relief. She had thrown away twenty years of her life like a
handful of old rags, but the wind had blown them back again, and dressed
her in the old uniform. The wind blew steadily from the old quarter, it
was the same east wind that chivied bits of waste paper down Apsley
Terrace. And she was the same old Aunt Lolly, so useful and obliging and
negligible.

The field was full of complacent witnesses. Titus had let them in. Henry
and Caroline and Sibyl, Fancy and Marion and Mr. Wolf-Saunders stood
round about her; they recognised her and cried out: ‘Why, Aunt Lolly,
what are you doing here?’ And Dunlop came stealthily up behind her and
said: ‘Excuse me, Miss Lolly, I thought you might like to know that the
warning gong has gone!’ She stood at bay, trembling before them, shaken
and sick with the grinding anger of the slave. They were come out to
recapture her, they had tracked her down and closed her in. They had let
her run a little way--that was all--for they knew they could get her
back when they chose. Her delusion of freedom had amused them. They had
stood grinning behind the bushes when she wept in the cowslip field.

It had been quite entertaining to watch her, for she had taken herself
and her freedom so seriously, happy and intent as a child keeping house
under the table. They had watched awhile in their condescending grown-up
way, and now they approached her to end the game. Henry was ready to
overlook her rebellion, his lips glistened with magnanimity; Caroline
and Sibyl came smiling up to twine their arms round her waist; the
innocent children of Fancy and Marion stretched out their hands to her
and called her Aunt Lolly. And Titus, who had let them in, stood a
little apart like a showman, and said, ‘You see, it’s all right. She’s
just the same.’

They were all leagued against her. They were come out to seize on her
soul. They were invulnerably sure of their prey.

‘No!’ she cried out, wildly clapping her hands together. ‘No! You shan’t
get me. I won’t go back. I won’t.... Oh! Is there _no_ help?’

The sound of her voice frightened her. She heard its desperate echo
rouse the impassive wood. She raised her eyes and looked round her. The
field was empty. She trembled, and felt cold. The sultry afternoon was
over. Dusk and a clammy chill seemed to creep out from among the
darkening trees that waited there so stilly. It was as though autumn had
come in the place of twilight, and the colourless dark hue of the field
dazzled before her eyes. She stood in the middle of the field, waiting
for an answer to her cry. There was no answer. And yet the silence that
had followed it had been so intent, so deliberate, that it was like a
pledge. If any listening power inhabited this place; if any grimly
favourable power had been evoked by her cry; then surely a compact had
been made, and the pledge irrevocably given.

She walked slowly towards the wood. She was incredibly fatigued; she
could scarcely drag one foot after the other. Her mind was almost a
blank. She had forgotten Titus; she had forgotten the long afternoon of
frenzy and bewilderment. Everything was unreal except the silence that
followed after her outcry. As she came to the edge of the wood she heard
the mutter of heavy foliage. ‘No!’ the woods seemed to say, ‘No! We will
not let you go.’

She walked home unheedingly, almost as though she were walking in her
sleep. The chance contact with a briar or a tall weed sent drowsy
tinglings through her flesh. It was with surprise that she looked down
from a hillside and saw the crouched roofs of the village before her.

The cottage was dark, Laura remembered that Mrs. Leak had said that she
was going out to a lecture at the Congregational Hall that evening. As
she unlocked the door she smiled at the thought of having the house all
to herself. The passage was cool and smelt of linoleum. She heard the
kitchen clock ticking pompously as if it, too, were pleased to have the
house to itself. When Mrs. Leak went out and left the house empty, she
was careful to lock the door of Laura’s parlour and to put the key under
the case with the stuffed owl. Laura slid her fingers into the dark slit
between the bottom of the case and the bracket. The key was cold and
sleek; she liked the feel of it, and the obliging way it turned in the
lock.

As she entered the room, she sniffed. It smelt a little fusty from being
shut up on a warm evening. Her nose distinguished Titus’s tobacco and
the hemp agrimony that she had picked the day before. But there was
something else--a faintly animal smell which she could not account for.
She threw up the rattling window and turned to light the lamp. Under the
green shade the glow whitened and steadied itself. It illuminated the
supper-table prepared for her, the shining plates, the cucumber and the
radishes, the neat slices of cold veal and the glistening surface of the
junket. Nameless and patient, these things had been waiting in the dark,
waiting for her to come back and enjoy them. They met her eye with
self-possession. They had been sure that she would be pleased to see
them. Her spirits shot up, as the flame of the lamp had cleared and
steadied itself a moment before. She forgot all possibility of distress.
She thought only of the moment, and of the certainty with which she
possessed it. In this mood of sleepy exaltation she stood and looked at
the supper-table. Long before she had come to Great Mop, the shining
plates had come. Four of them, she knew from Mrs. Leak, had been broken;
one was too much scorched in the oven to be presentable before her. But
these had survived that she might come and eat off them. The quiet cow
that had yielded so quietly the milk for her junket had wandered in the
fields of Great Mop long before she saw them, or saw them in fancy. The
radishes and cucumbers sprang from old and well-established Great Mop
families. Her coming had been foreseen, her way had been prepared.
Great Mop was infallibly part of her life, and she part of the life of
Great Mop. She took up a plate and looked at the maker’s mark. It had
come from Stoke-on-Trent, where she had never been. Now it was here,
waiting for her to eat off it. ‘The Kings of Tarshish shall bring
gifts,’ she murmured.

As she spoke, she felt something move by her foot. She glanced down and
saw a small kitten. It crouched by her foot, biting her shoelace, and
lashing its tail from side to side. Laura did not like cats; but this
creature, so small, so intent, and so ferocious, amused her into kindly
feelings. ‘How did you come here? Did you come in through the keyhole?’
she asked, and bent down to stroke it. Scarcely had she touched its hard
little head when it writhed itself round her hand, noiselessly clawing
and biting, and kicking with its hind legs. She felt frightened by an
attack so fierce and irrational, and her fears increased as she tried to
shake off the tiny weight. At last she freed her hand, and looked at it.
It was covered with fast-reddening scratches, and as she looked she saw
a bright round drop of blood ooze out from one of them. Her heart gave a
violent leap, and seemed to drop dead in her bosom. She gripped the back
of a chair to steady herself and stared at the kitten. Abruptly
pacified, it had curled itself into a ball and fallen asleep. Its lean
ribs heaved with a rhythmic tide of sleep. As she stared she saw its
pink tongue flicker for one moment over its lips. It slept like a
suckling.

Not for a moment did she doubt. But so deadly, so complete was the
certainty that it seemed to paralyse her powers of understanding, like a
snake-bite in the brain. She continued to stare at the kitten, scarcely
knowing what it was that she knew. Her heart had begun to beat once
more, slowly, slowly; her ears were dizzied with a shrill wall of sound,
and her flesh hung on her clammy and unreal. The animal smell that she
had noticed when first she entered the room now seemed overwhelmingly
rank. It smelt as if walls and floor and ceiling had been smeared with
the juice of bruised fennel.

She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a
compact with the Devil. The compact was made, and affirmed, and sealed
with the round red seal of her blood. She remembered the woods, she
remembered her wild cry for help, and the silence that had followed it,
as though in ratification. She heard again the mutter of heavy foliage,
foliage dark and heavy as the wings of night birds. ‘No! No!’--she
heard the brooding voice--‘We will not let you go.’ At ease, released
from her cares, she had walked homeward. Hedge and coppice and solitary
tree, and the broad dust-coloured faces of meadow-sweet and hemlock had
watched her go by, knowing. The dusk had closed her in, brooding over
her. Every shadow, every deepened grove had observed her from under
their brows of obscurity. All knew, all could bear witness. Couched
within the wood, sleeping through the long sultry afternoon, had lain
the Prince of Darkness; sleeping, or meditating some brooding
thunderstorm of his own. Her voice of desperate need had aroused him,
his silence had answered her with a pledge. And now, as a sign of the
bond between them, he had sent his emissary. It had arrived before her,
a rank breath, a harsh black body in her locked room. The kitten was her
familiar spirit, that already had greeted its mistress, and sucked her
blood.

She shut her eyes and stood very still, hollowing her mind to admit this
inconceivable thought. Suddenly she started. There was a voice in the
room.

It was the kitten’s voice. It stood beside her, mewing plaintively. She
turned, and considered it--her familiar. It was the smallest and
thinnest kitten that she had ever seen. It was so young that it could
barely stand steadily upon its legs. She caught herself thinking that it
was too young to be taken from its mother. But the thought was
ridiculous. Probably it had no mother, for it was the Devil’s kitten,
and sucked, not milk, but blood. But for all that, it looked very like
any other young starveling of its breed. Its face was peaked and its
ribs stood out under the dishevelled fluff of its sides. Its mew was
disproportionately piercing and expressive. Strange that anything so
small and weak should be the Devil’s Officer, plenipotentiary of such a
power. Strange that she should stand trembling and amazed before a
little rag-and-bone kitten with absurdly large ears.

Its anxious voice besought her, its pale eyes were fixed upon her face.
She could not but feel sorry for anything that seemed so defenceless and
castaway. Poor little creature, no doubt it missed the Devil, its warm
nest in his shaggy flanks, its play with imp companions. Now it had been
sent out on its master’s business, sent out too young into the world,
like a slavey from an Institution. It had no one to look to now but
her, and it implored her help, as she but a little while ago had
implored its Master’s. Her pity overcame her terror. It was no longer
her familiar, but a foundling. And it was hungry. Must it have more
blood, or would milk do? Milk was more suitable for its tender age. She
walked to the table, poured out a saucerful of milk and set it down on
the floor. The kitten drank as though it were starving. Crouched by the
saucer with dabbled nose, it shut its pale eyes and laid back its ears
to lap, while shoots of ecstasy ran down its protuberant spine and
stirred the tip of its tail. As Laura watched it the last of her
repugnance was overcome. Though she did not like cats she thought that
she would like this one. After all, it was pleasant to have some small
thing to look after. Many lonely women found great companionship with
even quite ordinary cats. This creature could never grow up a beauty,
but no doubt it would be intelligent. When it had cleaned the saucer
with large final sweeps of its tongue, the kitten looked up at her.
‘Poor lamb!’ she said, and poured out the rest of the milk. It drank
less famishingly now. Its tail lay still, its body relaxed, settling
down on to the floor, overcome by the peaceful weight within. At last,
having finished its meal, it got up and walked round the room,
stretching either hind leg in turn as it walked. Then, without a glance
at Laura, it lay down, coiled and uncoiled, scratched itself
nonchalantly and fell asleep. She watched it awhile and then picked it
up, all limp and unresisting, and settled it in her lap. It scarcely
opened its eyes, but burrowing once or twice with its head against her
knees resumed its slumber.

Nursing the kitten in her lap Laura sat thinking. Her thoughts were of a
different colour now. This trustful contentment, this warmth between her
knees, lulled her by example. She had never wavered for an instant from
her conviction that she had made a compact with the Devil; now she was
growing accustomed to the thought. She perceived that throughout the
greater part of her life she had been growing accustomed to it; but
insensibly, as people throughout the greater part of their lives grow
accustomed to the thought of their death. When it comes, it is a
surprise to them. But the surprise does not last long, perhaps but for a
minute or two. Her surprise also was wearing off. Quite soon, and she
would be able to fold her hands upon it, as the hands of the dead are
folded upon their surprised hearts. But _her_ heart still beat, beat at
its everyday rate, a small regular pulse impelling her momently forward
into the new witch life that lay before her. Since her flesh had already
accepted the new order of things, and was proceeding so methodically
towards the future, it behoved her, so she thought, to try to readjust
her spirit.

She raised her eyes, and looked at her room, the green-painted walls
with the chairs sitting silently round. She felt herself inhabiting the
empty house. Through the unrevealing square of the window her mind
looked at the view. About the empty house was the village, and about the
village the hills, neighbourly under their covering of night. Room,
house, village, hills encircled her like the rings of a fortification.
This was her domain, and it was to keep this inviolate that she had made
her compact with the Devil. She did not know what the price might be,
but she was sure of the purchase. She need not fear Titus now, nor any
of the Willoweses. They could not drive her out, or enslave her spirit
any more, nor shake her possession of the place she had chosen. While
she lived her solitudes were hers inalienably; she and the kitten, the
witch and the familiar, would live on at Great Mop, growing old
together, and hearing the owls hoot from the winter trees. And after?
Mirk! But what else had there ever been? Those green grassy hills in the
churchyard were too high to be seen over. What man can stand on their
summit and look beyond?

She felt neither fear nor disgust. A witch of but a few hours’ standing
she rejected with the scorn of the initiate all the bugaboo surmises of
the public. She looked with serene curiosity at the future, and saw it
but little altered from what she had hoped and planned. If she had been
called upon to decide in cold blood between being an aunt and being a
witch, she might have been overawed by habit and the cowardice of
compunction. But in the moment of election, under the stress and turmoil
of the hunted Lolly as under a covering of darkness, the true Laura had
settled it all unerringly. She had known where to turn. She had been
like the girl in the fairy tale whose godmother gave her a little
nutshell box and told her to open it in the hour of utter distress.
Unsurmised by others, and half forgotten by the girl, the little
nutshell box abided its time; and in the hour of utter distress it
opened of itself. So, unrealised, had Laura been carrying her talisman
in her pocket. She was a witch by vocation. Even in the old days of Lady
Place the impulse had stirred in her. What else had set her upon her
long solitary walks, her quests for powerful and forgotten herbs, her
brews and distillations? In London she had never had the heart to take
out her still. More urgent for being denied this innocent service, the
ruling power of her life had assaulted her with dreams and intimations,
calling her imagination out from the warm safe room to wander in
darkened fields and by desolate sea-bords, through marshes and fens, and
along the outskirts of brooding woods. It had haled her to Wapping and
to the Jews’ Burying Ground, and then, ironically releasing her, had
left her to mourn and find her way back to Apsley Terrace. How she had
come to Great Mop she could not say; whether it was of her own will, or
whether, exchanging threatenings and mockeries for sweet persuasions,
Satan had at last taken pity upon her bewilderment, leading her by the
hand into the flower-shop in the Moscow Road; but from the moment of her
arrival there he had never been far off. Sure of her--she supposed--he
had done little for nine months but watch her. Near at hand but out of
sight the loving huntsman couched in the woods, following her with his
eyes. But all the time, whether couched in the woods or hunting among
the hills, he drew closer. He was hidden in the well when she threw in
the map and the guide-book. He sat in the oven, teaching her what power
she might have over the shapes of men. He followed her and Mr. Saunter
up and down between the henhouses. He was nearest of all upon the night
when she climbed Cubbey Ridge, so near then that she acknowledged his
presence and was afraid. That night, indeed, he must have been within a
hand’s-breadth of her. But her fear had kept him at bay, or else he had
not chosen to take her just then, preferring to watch until he could
overcome her mistrust and lure her into his hand. For Satan is not only
a huntsman. His interest in mankind is that of a skilful and experienced
naturalist. Even human sportsmen at the end of their span sometimes
declare that to potter about in the woods is more amusing than to sit
behind a butt and shoot driven grouse. And Satan, who has hunted from
eternity, a little jaded moreover by the success of his latest organised
Flanders battue, might well feel that his interest in a Solitary Snipe
like Laura was but sooner or later to measure the length of her nose.
Yet hunt he must; it is his destiny, and whether he hunts with a gun or
a butterfly net, sooner or later the chase must end. All finalities,
whether good or evil, bestow a feeling of relief; and now, understanding
how long the chase had lasted, Laura felt a kind of satisfaction at
having been popped into the bag.

She was distracted from these interesting thoughts by the sounds of
footsteps. The kitten heard them too, and sat up, yawning. The Leaks
coming back from their lecture, thought Laura. But it was Titus.
Inserting his head and shoulders through the window he asked if he could
come in and borrow some milk.

‘I haven’t any milk,’ said Laura, ‘but come in all the same.’

She began to tickle the kitten behind the ears in order to reassure it.
By lamplight Titus’s head seemed even nearer to the ceiling, it was a
relief to her sense of proportion when he sat down. His milk, he
explained, the jugful which Mrs. Garland left on the sitting-room table
for his nightly Ovaltine, had curdled into a sort of unholy junket. This
he attributed to popular education, and the spread of science among
dairy farmers; in other words, Mr. Dodbury had overdone the
preservative.

‘I don’t think it’s science,’ said Laura. ‘More likely to be the
weather. It was very sultry this afternoon.’

‘I saw you starting out. I had half a mind to come with you, but it was
too hot to be a loving nephew. Where did you go?’

‘Up to the windmill.’

‘Did you find the wind?’

‘No.’

‘You weren’t going in the direction of the windmill when I saw you.’

‘No. I changed my mind. About the milk,’ she continued (Titus had come
for milk. Perhaps, being reminded that he had come in vain, he would go.
She was growing sleepy): ‘I’m sorry, but I have none left. I gave it all
to the kitten.’

‘I’ve been remarking the kitten. He’s new, isn’t he? You ugly little
devil!’

The kitten lay on her knees quite quietly. It regarded Titus with its
pale eyes, and blinked indifferently. It was only waiting for him to go,
Laura thought, to fall asleep again.

‘Where has it come from? A present from the water-butt?’

‘I don’t know. I found it here when I came back for supper.’

‘It’s a plain-headed young Grimalkin. Still, I should keep it if I were
you. It will bring you luck.’

‘I don’t think one has much option about keeping a cat,’ said Laura. ‘If
it wants to stay with me it shall.’

‘It looks settled enough. Do keep it, Aunt Lolly. A woman looks her best
with a cat on her knees.’

Laura bowed.

‘What will you call it?’

Into Laura’s memory came a picture she had seen long ago in one of the
books at Lady Place. The book was about the persecution of the witches,
and the picture was a woodcut of Matthew Hopkins the witch-finder.
Wearing a large hat he stood among a coven of witches, bound
cross-legged upon their stools. Their confessions came out of their
mouths upon scrolls. ‘My imp’s name is Ilemauzar,’ said one; and another
imp at the bottom of the page, an alert, ill-favoured cat, so lean and
muscular that it looked like a skinned hare, was called Vinegar Tom.

‘I shall call it Vinegar,’ she answered.

‘Vinegar!’ said Titus. ‘How do you like your name?’

The kitten pricked up its ears. It sprang from Laura’s knee and began to
fence with Titus’s shadow, feinting and leaping back. Laura watched it a
little apprehensively, but it did him no harm. It had awakened in a
playful frame of mind after its long sleep, that was all. When Titus had
departed it followed Laura to her bedroom, and as she undressed it
danced round her, patting at her clothes as they fell.

In the morning the kitten roused her by mewing to be let out. She awoke
from a profound and dreamless sleep. It took her a little time to
realise that she had a kitten in her bedroom, a kitten of no ordinary
kind. However it was behaving quite like an ordinary kitten now, so she
got out of bed and let it out by the back door. It was early; no one was
stirring. The kitten disappeared with dignity among the cabbages, and
Laura turned her thoughts backward to the emotions of overnight. She
tried to recall them, but could not; she could only recall the fact that
overnight she had felt them. The panic that then had shaken her flesh
was no more actual than a last winter’s gale. It had been violent enough
while it lasted, an invisible buffeting, a rending of life from its
context. But now her memory presented it to her as a cold slab of
experience, like a slab of pudding that had lain all night solidifying
in the larder. This was no matter. Her terror had been an incident; it
had no bearing upon her future, could she now recall it to life it would
have no message for her. But she regretted her inability to recapture
the mood that had followed upon it, when she sat still and thought so
wisely about Satan. Those meditations had seemed to her of profound
import. She had sat at her Master’s feet, as it were, admitted to
intimacy, and gaining the most valuable insight into his character. But
that was gone too. Her thoughts, recalled, seemed to be of the most
commonplace nature, and she felt that she knew very little about the
Devil.

Meanwhile there was the kitten, an earnest that she should know more.

‘Vinegar!’ she called, and heard its answer, a drumming scramble among
the cabbage leaves. She wished that Vinegar would impart some of his
mind to her instead of being so persistently and genially kittenish. But
he was a familiar, no doubt of it. And she was a witch, the inheritrix
of aged magic, spells rubbed smooth with long handling, and the
mistress of strange powers that got into Titus’s milk-jug. For no doubt
that was the beginning, and a very good beginning, too. Well begun is
half-done; she could see Titus bending over his suit-case. The Willowes
tradition was very intolerant of pease under its mattress.

Though she tried to think clearly about the situation--grapple, she
remembered, had been Caroline’s unpleasantly strenuous word--her
attention kept sidling off to other things: the sudden oblique movements
of the water-drops that glistened on the cabbage leaves, or the affinity
between the dishevelled brown hearts of the sunflowers and Mrs. Leak’s
scrubbing-brush, propped up on the kitchen window-sill. It must have
rained heavily during the night. The earth was moist and swelled, and
the air so fresh that it made her yawn. Her limbs were heavy, and the
contentment of the newly-awakened was upon her. All night she had bathed
in nothingness, and now she was too recently emerged from that absolving
tide to take much interest in what lay upon its banks. Her eyelids began
to droop, and calling the kitten she went back to bed again and soon
fell asleep.

She was asleep when Mrs. Leak brought her morning tea.

Mrs. Leak said: ‘Did the thunder keep you awake, miss?’

Laura shook her head. ‘I never even heard it.’

Mrs. Leak looked much astonished. ‘It’s well to have a good conscience,’
she remarked.

Laura stretched herself, sat up in bed, and began to tell Mrs. Leak
about the kitten. This seemed to be her real awakening. The other was a
dream.

Mrs. Leak was quite prepared to welcome the kitten; that was, provided
her old Jim made no unpleasantness. Jim was not Mr. Leak, but a mottled
marmalade cat, very old and rather shabby. Laura could not imagine him
making any unpleasantness, but Mrs. Leak estimated his character rather
differently. Jim thought himself quite a Great I Am, she said.

After breakfast Laura and Vinegar were called into the kitchen for the
ceremony of introduction. Jim was doing a little washing. His hind leg
was stuck straight up, out of the way, while he attended to the pit of
his stomach. Nothing could have been more suitable than Vinegar’s modest
and deferential approach. Jim gave him one look and went on licking.
Mrs. Leak said that all would be well between them; Jim always kept
himself to himself, but she could see that the old cat had taken quite a
fancy to Miss Willowes’s kitten. She promised Vinegar some of Jim’s
rabbit for dinner. Mrs. Leak did not hold the ordinary view of country
people that cats must fend for themselves. ‘They’re as thoughtful as
we,’ she said. ‘Why should they eat mouse unless they want to?’ She was
continually knocking at the parlour door with tit-bits for Vinegar, but
she was scrupulous that Laura should bestow them with her own hand.

Since Titus had come to Great Mop Laura had seen little of Mrs. Leak.
Mrs. Leak knew what good manners were; she had not been a housemaid at
Lazzard Court for nothing. Taken separately, either Titus or his aunt
might be human beings, but in conjunction they became gentry. Mrs. Leak
remembered her position and withdrew to it, firmly. Laura saw this and
was sorry. She made several attempts to persuade Mrs. Leak out from
behind her white apron, but nothing came of them, and she knew that
while Titus was in the village nothing would. Not that Mrs. Leak did not
like Titus; she approved of him highly; and it was exactly her approval
that made her barricade of respect so insuperable. But where Laura had
failed, the kitten succeeded. From the moment that Jim sanctioned her
kindly opinion of him, Mrs. Leak began to thaw. Laura knew better than
to make a fuss over this turn in the situation; she took a leaf out of
the Devil’s book and lay low, waiting for a decisive advance; and
presently it came. Mrs. Leak asked if Miss Willowes would care to come
out for a stroll one evening; it was pleasant to get a breath of air
before bedtime. Miss Willowes would like nothing better; that very
evening would suit her if Mrs. Leak had nothing else to do. Mrs. Leak
said that she would get the washing-up done as soon as possible, and
after that she would be at Miss Willowes’s disposal. However, it was
nearly half-past ten before Mrs. Leak knocked on the parlour door. Laura
had ceased to expect her, supposing that Mr. Leak or some household
accident had claimed her, but she was quite as ready to go out for a
walk as to go to bed, and Mrs. Leak made no reference to the lateness of
the hour. Indeed, according to the Great Mop standard, the hour was not
particularly late. Although the night was dark, Laura noticed that quite
a number of the inhabitants were standing about in the street.

They walked down the road in silence as far as the milestone, and turned
into the track that went up the hillside and past the wood. Others had
turned that way also. The gate stood open, and voices sounded ahead. It
was then that Laura guessed the truth, and turned to her companion.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she said. Mrs. Leak made no answer, but in
the darkness she took hold of Laura’s hand. There was no need for
further explanation. They were going to the Witches’ Sabbath. Mrs. Leak
was a witch too; a matronly witch like Agnes Sampson, she would be
Laura’s chaperone. The night was full of voices. Padding rustic
footsteps went by them in the dark. When they had reached the brow of
the hill a faint continuous sound, resembling music, was borne towards
them by the light wind. Laura remembered how young Billy Thomas,
suffering from toothache, had played all night upon his mouth-organ. She
laughed. Mrs. Leak squeezed her hand.

The meeting-place was some way off, by the time they reached it Laura’s
eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness. She could see a crowd of
people walking about in a large field; lights of some sort were burning
under a hedge, and one or two paper garlands were looped over the
trees. When she first caught sight of them, the assembled witches and
warlocks seemed to be dancing, but now the music had stopped and they
were just walking about. There was something about their air of
disconnected jollity which reminded Laura of a Primrose League gala and
fête. A couple of bullocks watched the Sabbath from an adjoining field.

Laura was denied the social gift, she had never been good at enjoying
parties. But this, she hoped, would be a different and more exhilarating
affair. She entered the field in a most propitious frame of mind, which
not even Mr. Gurdon, wearing a large rosette like a steward’s and
staring rudely and searchingly at each comer before he allowed them to
pass through the gate, was able to check.

‘Old Goat!’ exclaimed Mrs. Leak in a voice of contemptuous amusement
after they had passed out of Mr. Gurdon’s hearing. ‘He thinks he can
boss us here, just as he does in the village.’

‘Is Mr. Jones here?’ inquired Laura.

Mrs. Leak shook her head and laughed.

‘Mr. Gurdon doesn’t allow him to come.’

‘I suppose he doesn’t think it suitable for a clergyman.’

Perhaps it was as well that Mr. Gurdon had such strict views. In spite
of the example of Mr. Lowis, that old reading parson, it might be a
little awkward if Mr. Jones were allowed to attend the Sabbath.

But that apparently was not the reason. Mrs. Leak was beginning to
explain when she broke off abruptly, coughed in a respectful way, and
dropped a deep curtsey. Before them stood an old lady, carrying herself
like a queen, and wearing a mackintosh that would have disgraced a
tinker’s drab. She acknowledged Mrs. Leak’s curtsey with an inclination
of the head, and turned to Laura,

‘I am Miss Larpent. And you, I think, must be Miss Willowes.’

The voice that spoke was clear as a small bell and colourless as if time
had bleached it of every human feeling save pride. The hand that rested
in Laura’s was light as a bird’s claw; a fine glove encased it like a
membrane, and through the glove Laura felt the slender bond and the
sharp-faceted rings.

‘Long ago,’ continued Miss Larpent, ‘I had the pleasure of meeting your
great-uncle, Commodore Willowes.’

Good heavens, thought Laura in a momentary confusion, was great-uncle
Demetrius a warlock? For Miss Larpent was so perfectly witchlike that it
seemed scarcely possible that she should condescend to ordinary
gentlemen.

Apparently Miss Larpent could read Laura’s thoughts.

‘At Cowes,’ she added, reassuringly.

Laura raised her eyes to answer, but Miss Larpent had disappeared. Where
she had stood, stood Miss Carloe, mincing and bridling, as though she
would usurp the other’s gentility. Over her face she wore a spotted
veil. Recognising Laura she put on an air of delighted surprise and
squeaked like a bat, and immediately she too edged away and was lost in
the darkness.

Then a young man whom she did not know came up to Laura and put his arm
respectfully round her waist. She found herself expected to dance. She
could not hear any music, but she danced as best she could, keeping time
to the rhythm of his breath upon her cheek. Their dance was short, she
supposed she had not acquitted herself to her partner’s satisfaction,
for after a few turns he released her, and left her standing by the
hedge. Not a word had passed between them. Laura felt that she ought to
say something, but she could not think of a suitable opening. It was
scarcely possible to praise the floor.

A familiar discouragement began to settle upon her spirits. In spite of
her hopes she was not going to enjoy herself. Even as a witch, it
seemed, she was doomed to social failure, and her first Sabbath was not
going to open livelier vistas than were opened by her first ball. She
remembered her dancing days in Somerset, Hunt Balls, and County Balls in
the draughty Assembly Rooms. With the best intentions she had never
managed to enjoy them. The first hour was well enough, but after that
came increasing listlessness and boredom; the effort, when one danced
again with the same partner, not to say the same things, combined with
the obligation to say something rather like them, the control of
eyelids, the conversion of yawns into smiles, the humbling consciousness
that there was nothing to look forward to except the drive home. That
was pleasant, and so was the fillip of supper at the drive’s end, and
the relief of yielding at last to an unfeigned hunger and sleepiness.
But these were by-blow joys, of the delights for which balls are
ordained she knew nothing.

She watched the dancers go by and wondered what the enchantment was
which they felt and she could not. What made them come out in the middle
of the night, loop paper garlands over the trees, light a row of candles
in the ditch, and then, friends and enemies and indifferents, go bumping
round on the rough grass? That fatal comparison with the Primrose League
recurred to her. She was not entertained, so she blamed the
entertainment. But the fault lay with her, she had never been good at
parties, she had not got the proper Sabbath-keeping spirit. Miss Larpent
was enjoying herself; Laura saw the bonnet whisk past. But doubtless
Miss Larpent had enjoyed herself at Cowes.

These depressing thoughts were interrupted by red-haired Emily, who came
spinning from her partner’s arms, seized hold of Laura and carried her
back into the dance. Laura liked dancing with Emily; the pasty-faced and
anaemic young slattern whom she had seen dawdling about the village
danced with a fervour that annihilated every misgiving. They whirled
faster and faster, fused together like two suns that whirl and blaze in
a single destruction. A strand of the red hair came undone and brushed
across Laura’s face. The contact made her tingle from head to foot. She
shut her eyes and dived into obliviousness--with Emily for a partner
she could dance until the gunpowder ran out of the heels of her boots.
Alas! this happy ending was not to be, for at the height of their
performance Emily was snatched away by Mr. Jowl, the horse-doctor. Laura
opened her eyes and saw the pale face disappearing in the throng as the
moon sinks into the clouds.

Emily was in great request, and no wonder. Like a torch she was handed
on from one to another, and every mutation shook down some more hair.
The Sabbath was warming up nicely now, every one was jigging it, even
Laura. For a while Mrs. Leak kept up a semblance of chaperonage.
Suddenly appearing at Laura’s elbow she would ask her if she were
enjoying herself, and glancing at her would slip away before she could
answer. Or with vague gestures she indicated some evasively bowing
partner, male or female; and silently Laura would give her hand and be
drawn into the dance, presently to be relinquished or carried off by
some one else.

The etiquette of a Sabbath appeared to consist of one rule only: to do
nothing for long. Partners came and went, figures and conformations were
in a continual flux. Sometimes the dancers were coupled, sometimes they
jigged in a circle round some specially agile performer, sometimes they
all took hands and galloped about the field. Half-way through a very
formal quadrille presided over by the Misses Larpent they fell abruptly
to playing Fox and Geese. In spite of Mr. Gurdon’s rosette there was no
Master of Ceremonies. A single mysterious impulse seemed to govern the
company. They wheeled and manœuvred like a flock of starlings.

After an hour or two of this Laura felt dizzy and bewildered. Taking
advantage of the general lack of formality she tore herself from Mr.
Gurdon’s arms, not to dance with another, but to slip away and sit
quietly in the hedge.

She wondered where the music came from. She had heard it quite clearly
as she came over the hill, but upon entering the field she had lost it.
Now as she watched the others she heard it once more. When they neared
it grew louder, when they retreated into the darkness it faded with
them, as though the sound issued from the dancers themselves, and hung,
a droning exhalation, above their heads. It was an odd kind of music, a
continuous high shapeless blurr of sound. It was something like
mosquitoes in a hot bedroom, and something like a distant threshing
machine. But beside this, it had a faintly human quality, a metallic
breathing as of trombones marking the measure; and when the dancers took
hands and revolved in a leaping circle the music leaped and pounded with
them, so much like the steam-organ music of a merry-go-round that for a
moment Laura thought that they were riding on horses and dragons,
bobbing up and down on crested dragons with heads like cocks, and horses
with blood-red nostrils.

The candles burnt on in the dry ditch. Though the boughs of the
thorn-trees moved above them and grated in the night-wind, the candle
flames flowed steadily upwards. Thus lit from below, the dancers seemed
of more than human stature, their bodies extending into the darkness as
if in emulation of their gigantic upcast shadows. The air was full of
the smell of bruised grass.

Mrs. Leak had forgotten Laura now. She was dancing the Highland
Schottische with a lean young man whose sleeves were rolled up over his
tattooed forearms. The nails in his boots shone in the candle-light, and
a lock of hair hung over his eye. Mrs. Leak danced very well. Her feet
flickered to and fro as nimbly as a tongue. At the turn of the figure
she tripped forward to be caught up and swung round on the young man’s
arm. Though her feet were off the ground they twitched with the
movements of the dance, and set down again they took up the
uninterrupted measure. Laura watched her with admiration. Even at a
Witches’ Sabbath Mrs. Leak lost none of her respectability. Her white
apron was scarcely crumpled, she was as self-contained as a cat watching
a mouse, and her eyes dwelt upon the young man’s face as though she were
listening to a sermon.

She preserved her dignity better than some of the others did. Mr. Gurdon
stood by himself, stamping his foot and tossing his head, more like the
farmer’s bull than ever. Miss Carloe was begging people to look at the
hole in her leg where the hedgehog sucked her; and red-haired Emily,
half-naked and holding a candle in either hand, danced round a tree,
curtseying to it, her mouth fixed in a breathless corpse-like grin.

Miss Minnie and Miss Jane had also changed their demeanour for the
worse. They sat a little retired from the dancers, tearing up a cold
grouse and gossiping with Mrs. Dewey the midwife. A horrible curiosity
stretched their skinny old necks. Miss Minnie had forgotten to gnaw her
grouse, she leant forward, her hand covered the lower half of her face
to conceal the workings of her mouth. Miss Jane listened as eagerly, and
questioned the midwife. But at the answers she turned away with
coquettish shudders, pretending to stop her ears, or threatening to slap
her sister with a bone.

Laura averted her eyes. She wriggled herself a little further into the
hedge. Once again the dancers veered away to the further side of the
field, their music retreating with them. She hoped they would stay away,
for their proximity was disturbing. They aroused in her neither fear nor
disgust, but when they came close, and she felt their shadows darkening
above her head, a nameless excitement caught hold of her. As they
departed, heaviness took its place. She was not in the least sleepy and
yet several times she found herself astray from her thoughts, as though
she were falling asleep in a train. She wondered what time it was and
looked up to consult the stars. But a featureless cloud covered the sky.

Laura resigned herself. There was nothing to do but to wait, though what
she waited for she did not know: whether at length Mrs. Leak would come,
like a chaperone from the supper-room, and say: ‘Well, my dear, I
really must take you home’--or if, suddenly, at the first cock-crow,
all the company would rise up in the air, a darkening bevy, and
disperse, and she with them.

She was roused by a shrill whistle. The others heard it too. Miss Minnie
and Miss Jane scrambled up and hurried across the field, outdistancing
Mrs. Dewey, who followed them panting for breath and twitching her
skirts over the rough ground. The music had stopped. Laura saw all the
witches and warlocks jostling each other, and pressing into a circle.
She wondered what was happening now. Whatever it was, it seemed to
please and excite them a great deal, for she could hear them all
laughing and talking at once. Some newcomer, she supposed--for their
behaviour was that of welcome. Now the newcomer must be making a speech,
for they all became silent: a successful speech, for the silence was
broken by acclamations, and bursts of laughter.

‘Of course!’ said Laura. ‘It must be Satan!’

As she spoke she saw the distant group turn and with one accord begin
running towards where she sat. She got up; she felt frightened, for
their advance was like a stampede of animals, and she feared that they
would knock her down and trample her underfoot. The first runner had
already swooped upon her, she felt herself encompassed, caught hold of,
and carried forward. Voices addressed her, but she did not understand
what was said. She gathered that she was being encouraged and
congratulated, as though the neglectful assembly had suddenly decided to
make much of the unsuccessful guest. Presently she found herself between
Mrs. Leak and red-haired Emily. Each held an arm. Mrs. Leak patted her
encouragingly, and Emily whispered rapidly, incoherently, in her ear.
They were quite close to the newcomer, Satan, if it were he, who was
talking to Miss Minnie and Miss Jane. Laura looked at him. She could see
him quite clearly, for those who stood round had taken up the candles to
light him. He was standing with his back to her, speaking with great
animation to the old ladies, bowing, and fidgeting his feet. As he spoke
he threw out his hands, and his whole lean, lithe body seemed to be
scarcely withheld from breaking into a dance. Laura saw Miss Jane point
at her, and the stranger turned sharply round.

She saw his face. For a moment she thought that he was a Chinaman; then
she saw that he was wearing a mask. The candle-light shone full upon
it, but so fine and slight was the modelling that scarcely a shadow
marked the indentations of cheek and jaw. The narrow eyes, the slanting
brows, the small smiling mouth had a vivid innocent inexpressiveness. It
was like the face of a very young girl. Alert and immobile the mask
regarded her. And she, entranced, stared back at this imitation face
that outwitted all perfections of flesh and blood. It was lifeless,
lifeless! But below it, in the hollow of the girlish throat, she saw a
flicker of life, a small regular pulse, small and regular as though a
pearl necklace slid by under the skin. Mincing like a girl, the masked
young man approached her, and as he approached the others drew back and
left her alone. With secretive and undulating movements he came to her
side. The lifeless face was near her own and through the slits in the
mask the unseen eyes surveyed her. Suddenly she felt upon her cheeks a
cold darting touch. With a fine tongue like a serpent’s he had licked
her right cheek, close to the ear. She started back, but found his hands
detaining her.

‘How are you enjoying your first Sabbath, Miss Willowes?’ he said.

‘Not at all,’ answered Laura, and turned her back on him.

Without glancing to left or right she walked out of the field, and the
dancers made way for her in silence. She was furious at the affront,
raging at Satan, at Mrs. Leak, at Miss Larpent, with the unreasoning
anger of a woman who has allowed herself to be put in a false position.
This was what came of attending Sabbaths, or rather, this was what came
of submitting her good sense to politeness. Hours ago her instinct had
told her that she was not going to enjoy herself. If she had asserted
herself and gone home then, this odious and petty insult would never
have happened. But she had stayed on, deferring to a public opinion that
was not concerned whether she stayed or went, stayed on just as she used
to stay on at balls, stayed on to be treated like a silly girl who at
the end of a mechanical flirtation is kissed behind a palm.

Anyway, she was out of it now. Her feet had followed the windings of a
little path, which crossed a ditch by a plank bridge: it passed through
a belt of woodland, and led her out on to a space of common that sloped
away into the darkness. Here she sat down and spread out her palms upon
the cool turf.

She had been insulted and made a mock of. But for all that she did not
feel truly humiliated. Rather, she was filled with a delighted and
scornful surprise at the ease with which she had avenged her dignity.
The mask floated before her eyes, inscrutable as ever, and she thought
no more of it than of an egg-shell that she could crush between her
finger and thumb. The Powers of Darkness, then, were no more fearful
than a herd of bullocks in a field? Once round upon them and the
sniffing encumbering horde made off, a scramble of ungainly rumps and
foolish tails.

It had been a surprising night. And long, endlessly long, and not ended
yet. She yawned, and felt hungry. She fancied herself at home, cutting
large crumbling slices from the loaf in the cupboard, and spreading them
with a great deal of butter and the remains of the shrimp paste. But she
did not know where she was, and it was too dark to venture homewards
with no sense of direction. She grew impatient with the night and
strained her ears for the sound of cock-crow. As if her imperious will
had wrenched aside the covering of cloud, a faint glimmer delineated
part of the horizon. Moonset or sunrise, westerly or easterly she did
not know; but as she watched it doubtfully, thinking that it must be
moonset, for it seemed to dwindle rather than increase, a breeze
winnowed the air, and looking round her she saw on every side the first
beginnings of light.

Sitting up, her hunger and sleepiness forgotten, and all the
disappointments and enigmas of the Sabbath dismissed from her mind, she
watched the spectacle of the dawn. Soon she was able to recognise her
surroundings, she knew the place well, it was here that she had met the
badger. The slope before her was dotted with close-fitting juniper
bushes, and presently she saw a rabbit steal out from one of these,
twitch its ears, and scamper off. The cloud which covered the sky was no
longer a solid thing. It was rising, and breaking up into swirls of
vapour that yielded to the wind. The growing day washed them with
silver. Every moment the web of cloud seemed to rise higher and higher,
as though borne upward by a rising tide of light. The rooks flew up
cawing from the wood. Presently she heard the snap of a dead twig.
Somebody was astir. Whistling to himself, a man came out of the wood. He
walked with a peculiarly slow and easy gait, and he had a stick in his
hand, an untrimmed rod pulled from the wood. He switched at the head of
a tall thistle, and Laura saw the dew fly off the astonished blossom.
Seeing her, he stopped short, as though he did not wish to intrude on
her. He showed no surprise that she should be sitting on the hillside,
waiting for the sun to rise. She smiled at him, grateful for his good
manners, and also quite pleased to see a reasonable being again; and
emboldened by this, he smiled also, and approached.

‘You are up very early, Miss Willowes.’

She did not recognise him, but that was no reason why he should not
recognise her. She thought he must be a gamekeeper, for he wore gaiters
and a corduroy coat. His face was brown and wrinkled, and his teeth were
as white and even as a dog’s. Laura liked his appearance. He had a
pleasant, rather detached air, which suited well with the early morning.
She said:

‘I have been up all night.’

There was no inquisitiveness in his look; and when he expressed the hope
that she felt none the worse for it, he spoke without servility or
covert amusement.

‘I liked it very much,’ said Laura. Her regard for truth made her add:
‘Particularly when it began to be light. I was growing rather bored
before then.’

‘Some ladies would feel afraid,’ said he.

‘I’m not afraid when I’m alone,’ she answered. ‘I lived in the country
when I was a girl.’

He bowed his head assentingly. Something in his manner implied that he
knew this already. Perhaps he had heard about her in the village.

‘It’s pleasant to be in the country again,’ she continued. ‘I like Great
Mop very much.’

‘I hope you will stay here, Miss Willowes.’

‘I hope so too.’

She spoke a little sadly. In this unaccustomed hour her soul was full of
doubts. She wondered if, having flouted the Sabbath, she were still a
witch, or whether, her power being taken from her, she would become the
prey of a healthy and untroubled Titus. And being faint for want of food
and want of sleep, she foreboded the worst.

‘Yes, you must stay here. It would be a pity to go now.’

Laura nearly said, ‘I have nowhere to go,’ but a dread of exile came
over her like a salt wave, and she could not trust herself to speak to
this kind man. He came nearer and said:

‘Remember, Miss Willowes, that I shall always be very glad to help you.
You have only to ask me.’

‘But where shall I find you?’ she asked, too much impressed by the
kindness of his words to think them strange.

‘You will always find me in the wood,’ he answered, and touching his cap
he walked away. She heard the noise of swishing branches and the scuff
of feet among dead leaves growing fainter as he went further into the
wood.

She decided not to go back just yet. A comfortable drowsiness settled
down upon her with the first warmth of the risen sun. Her mind dwelt
upon the words just spoken. The promise had been given in such sober
earnestness that she had accepted it without question, seeing nothing
improbable in the idea that she should require the help of a strange
gamekeeper, or that he should undertake to give it. She thought that
people might be different in the early morning; less shy, like the
rabbits that were playing round her, more open-hearted, and simpler of
speech. In any case, she was grateful to the stranger for his goodwill.
He had known that she wanted to stay on at Great Mop, he had told her
that she must do so. It was the established country courtesy, the
invitation to take root. But he must have meant what he said, for seeing
her troubled he had offered to help. Perhaps he was married; and if
Mrs. Leak, offended, would keep her no longer, she might lodge with him
and his wife in their cottage, a cottage in a dell among the beechwoods.
He had said that he lived in the woods. She began to picture her life in
such a cottage, thinking that it would be even better than lodging in
the village. She imagined her whitewashed bedroom full of moving green
shades; the wood-smoke curling up among the trees; the majestic arms,
swaying above her while she slept, and plumed with snow in winter.

The trees behind her murmured consolingly; she reclined upon the sound.
‘Remember, Miss Willowes’ ... ‘Remember,’ murmured the trees, swaying
their boughs muffled with heavy foliage. She remembered, and understood.
When he came out of the wood, dressed like a gamekeeper, and speaking so
quietly and simply, Satan had come to renew his promise and to reassure
her. He had put on this shape that she might not fear him. Or would he
have her to know that to those who serve him he appears no longer as a
hunter, but as a guardian? This was the real Satan. And as for the
other, whom her spirit had so impetuously disowned, she had done well to
disown him, for he was nothing but an impostor, a charlatan, a dummy.

Her doubts were laid to rest, and she walked back through the fields,
picking mushrooms as she went. As she approached the village she heard
Mr. Saunter’s cocks crowing, and saw the other cock, for ever watchful,
for ever silent, spangle in the sun above the church tower. The
churchyard yews cast long shadows like open graves. Behind those white
curtains slumbered Mr. Jones, and dreamed, perhaps, of the Sabbath which
he was not allowed to attend.

As Laura passed through Mrs. Leak’s garden she remembered her first
morning as a witch when she had gone out to give the kitten a run. The
sunflowers had been cut off and given to the hens, but the
scrubbing-brush was still propped on the kitchen window-sill. That was
three weeks ago. And Titus, like the scrubbing-brush, was still there.

During those three weeks Titus had demanded a great deal of support; in
fact, being a witch-aunt was about twice as taxing as being an ordinary
aunt, and if she had not known that the days were numbered she could
scarcely have endured them.

At her nephew’s request she made veils of butter-muslin weighted with
blue beads to protect his food and drink. Titus insisted that the beads
should be blue: blue was the colour of the Immaculate Conception; and as
pious Continental mothers dedicate their children, so he would dedicate
his milk and hope for the best. But no blue beads were to be found in
the village, so Laura had to walk into Barleighs for them. Titus was
filled with gratitude, he came round on purpose to thank her and stayed
to tea.

He was no sooner gone than Mrs. Garland arrived. Mrs. Garland had seen
the veils. She hoped that Mr. Willowes didn’t think she was to blame for
the milk going sour. She could assure Miss Willowes that the jugs were
mopped out with boiling water morning _and_ evening. For _her_ part, she
couldn’t understand it at all. She was always anxious to give
satisfaction, she said; but her manner suggested less anxiety to give
than to receive. Laura soothed Mrs. Garland, and sat down to wait for
Mr. Dodbury. However, Mr. Dodbury contented himself with frowning at
that interfering young Willowes’s aunt, and turning the bull into the
footpath field. Laura thought that the bull frowned too.

Though veiled in butter-muslin, the milk continued to curdle. Titus came
in to say that he’d had an idea; in future, he would rely upon condensed
milk out of a tin. Which sort did Aunt Lolly recommend? And would she
make him a kettle-holder? Apparently tinned milk could resist the Devil,
for all was peace until Titus gashed his thumb on the raw edge of a tin.
In spite of Laura’s first aid the wound festered, and for several days
Titus wore a sling. Triumphant over pain he continued the Life of
Fuseli. But the wounded thumb being a right-hand thumb, the triumph
involved an amanuensis. Laura hated ink, she marvelled that any one
should have the constancy to write a whole book. She thought of
_Paradise Lost_ with a shudder, for it required even more constancy to
write some one else’s book. Highly as she rated the sufferings of
Milton’s daughters, she rated her own even higher, for she did not
suppose that they had to be for ever jumping up and down to light the
poet’s cigarette; and blank verse flowed, flowed majestically, she
understood, from his lips, whereas Titus dictated in prose, which was
far harder to punctuate.

Nor did it flow. Titus was not feeling at his best. He hated small
bothers, and of late he had been seethed alive in them. Every day
something went wrong, some fiddle-faddle little thing. All his ingenuity
was wasted in circumvention; he had none left for Fuseli.

Anyhow, dictation was only fit for oil-kings! He jumped up and dashed
about the room with a fly-flap. Fly-flapping was a manly indoor sport,
especially if one observed all the rules. The ceiling was marked out in
squares like a chess-board, and while they stayed in their squares the
flies could not be attacked. The triangle described by the blue vase,
the pink vase, and the hanging lamp was a Yellowstone Park, and so was
the King’s Face, a difficult ruling, but Titus had decided that of two
evils it was more tolerable that the royal countenance should be crawled
over by flies than assaulted by the subject. All this from a left-handed
adversary--the flies had nothing to complain of, in his opinion. Laura
owned his generosity, and sat, when she could, in the Yellowstone Park.

By the time Titus had recovered the use of his right hand the flies had
lost their sanctuaries one by one, and could not even call the King’s
Face their own. They swarmed in his sitting-room, attracted, Mrs.
Garland supposed, by the memory of that nasty foreign cheese Mr.
Willowes’s Mr. Humphries had brought with him when he came to stay. They
swarmed in his bedroom also, and that--Mrs. Garland said--was what
brought in the bats. Laura told Titus the belief that if a bat once
entangles itself in a woman’s flowing hair there is no remedy but to cut
away hair and bat together. Titus turned pale. That afternoon he went up
to London to visit his hairdresser, and returned with hair cropped like
a convict’s.

All this had unsettled her victim a good deal; but it had not unseated
him, and meanwhile it was sufficiently unsettling for her. So far, she
thought, the scheme and its execution had been the kitten’s--she could
recognise Vinegar’s playful methods. She gave him credit for doing his
best. But he was young and inexperienced, this was probably his first
attempt at serious persecution; it was not to be wondered at if his
methods were a little sketchy. Now that the Devil had taken matters into
his own hands--and of this she felt assured--all would soon be well.
Well for her, well for Titus. Really, it was time that poor boy was
released from his troubles. She felt complete confidence in the Devil, a
confidence that the kitten had never inspired. There was a tinge of
gratuitous malice in Vinegar’s character; he was, as one says, rather a
cat. She suspected him of meditating a scratch which would give Titus
blood-poisoning. She remembered with uneasiness what cats are said to
do to sleeping infants, and every night she was careful to imprison
Vinegar in her bedroom, a useless precaution since he had come in by the
keyhole and might as easily go out by it. The Devil would get rid of
Titus more speedily, more kindly (he had no reason to be anything but
kind: she could not imagine Titus being of the smallest interest to
Satan), more economically. There would be no catastrophe, no
pantechnicon displays of flood or fire. He would proceed discreetly and
surely, like a gamekeeper going his rounds by night, he would remove
Titus as imperturbably as Dunlop had removed the beech-leaf. She could
sit back quite comfortably now, and wait for it to happen.

When Titus next appeared and complained that he had been kept awake for
two nights running by a mouse gnawing the leg of his bedstead, Laura was
most helpful. They went to Mrs. Trumpet’s to buy a mouse-trap, but as
Mrs. Trumpet only kept cheese they walked very pleasantly by field-paths
into Barleighs, where Denby’s stores had a larger range of groceries.
During their walk Titus recalled anecdotes illustrative of mice from
Soup from a Sausage Peg, and propounded a scheme for defending his bed
by a catskin valance. The day was fine, and at intervals Titus would
stop and illustrate the landscape with possessive gestures.

He was particularly happy. He had not enjoyed himself so much for some
time. The milk and the mice and the flies had checked his spirits; he
was not doing justice to Fuseli, and when he went out for long
encouraging walks an oppressed feeling went with him. Twice or thrice he
had felt horribly frightened, though at what he could not tell. The
noise of two iron hurdles grating against each other in the wind, a dead
tree with branches that looked like antlers, the stealthy movement of
the sun towards the horizon: quite ordinary things like these were able
to disquiet him.

He fell into the habit of talking aloud to himself. He would reason with
appearances. ‘I see you, old Horny,’ he said to the dead tree. And once,
as dusk pursued him homeward, he began repeating:

    As one that on a lonesome road
      Doth walk in fear and dread,
    And having once turned round, walks on,
      And turns no more his head;
    Because he knows a frightful fiend
      Doth close behind him tread:

when the sound of a crackling twig made every nerve in his body stiffen
with terror. Some impulse not his own snatched him round in the path,
only to see old Luxmoor going out with his snares. Old Luxmoor touched
his cap and grinned in an embarrassed way. Every one knew that Luxmoor
poached, but it was not polite to catch him at it. He did not appear to
have overheard Titus or noticed his start of terror. But there had been
one instant before recognition when Titus had almost known what he
dreaded to see.

So it was pleasant to find that the company of his aunt could exorcise
these ghostly enmities. Clearly, there was nothing in it. To-morrow he
would go for a long walk by himself.

Laura also went for a walk that afternoon. It was a hot day, so hot and
still that it felt like a Sunday. She could not do better than follow
the example of the savages in _Robinson Crusoe_: go up on to a hill-top
and say O! No pious savage could have ejaculated O! more devoutly than
she did; for the hill-top was scattered over with patches of that small
honey-scented flower called Tailors’ Needles, and in conjunction with
the austere outlines of the landscape this perfume was exquisitely sweet
and surprising. She found a little green pit and sat down in it, leaning
her back against the short firm turf. Ensconced in her private warmth
and stillness she had almost fallen asleep when a moving figure on the
opposite hillside caught her attention. Laura’s grey eyes were very
keen-sighted, she soon recognised that long stride and swinging gait.
The solitary walker was Titus.

There is an amusing sense of superiority in seeing and remaining unseen.
Laura sat up in her form and watched Titus attentively. He looked very
small, human, and scrabbly, traversing that imperturbable surface. With
such a large slope to wander upon, it was faintly comic to see Titus
keeping so neatly to the path; the effect was rather as if he were being
taken for a walk upon a string.

Further on the path was lost in a tangle of brambles and rusty foxglove
stems which marked the site of Folly Wood, a larch plantation cut down
during the war. In her map the wood had still been green. She had looked
for it on one of her early explorations, and not finding it had felt
defrauded. Her eyes now dwelt on the bramble tangle with annoyance. It
was untidy, and fretted the hillside like a handful of rough-cast thrown
on to a smooth wall. She turned back her gaze to see how Titus was
getting on. It struck her that he was behaving rather oddly. Though he
kept to the path he was walking almost like a drunken man or an idiot,
now hurrying his pace, now reforming it into a staid deliberation that
was certainly not his natural gait. Quite abruptly he began to run. He
ran faster and faster, his feet striving on the slippery turf. He
reached the outskirts of Folly Wood, and Laura could gauge the roughness
of the going from his leaps and stumbles. Midway through the wood he
staggered and fell full-length.

‘A rabbit-hole,’ she said. ‘Now I suppose he’s sprained his ankle.’

But before any thought of compunction could mitigate the rather scornful
bewilderment with which she had been a spectator of these antics, Titus
was up again, and behaving more oddly than ever. No amount of sprained
ankle could warrant those raving gestures with which he beat himself,
and beat the air. He seemed to be fending off an invisible volley of
fisticuffs, for now he ducked his head, now he leaped to one side, now
he threatened, now he quailed before a fresh attack. At last he made off
with shambling speed, reeling and gesticulating as though his whole body
bellowed with pain and fear. He reached the summit of the hill; for a
moment he was silhouetted against the sky-line in a final convulsion of
distress; then he was gone.

Laura felt as if she were releasing her gaze from a telescope. Her
glance strayed about the landscape. She frowned and looked inquiringly
from side to side, not able to credit her eyes. Blandly unconscious, the
opposite hillside confronted her with its familiar face. A religious
silence filled the valley. As the untroubled air had received Titus’s
roarings and damnings (for it was obvious that he had both roared and
damned) without concerning itself to transmit them to her hearing, so
her vision had absorbed his violent pantomime without concerning itself
to alarm her brain. She could not reason about what she had seen; she
could scarcely stir herself to feel any curiosity, and still less any
sympathy. Like a masque of bears and fantastic shapes, it had seemed
framed only to surprise and delight.

But that, she knew, was not Satan’s way. He was not in the habit of
bestowing these gratuitous peep-shows upon his servants, he was above
the human weakness of doing things for fun; and if he exhibited Titus
dancing upon the hillside like a cat on hot bricks, she might be sure
that it was all according to plan. It behoved her to be serious and
attend, instead of accepting it all in this spirit of blank
entertainment. Even as a matter of bare civility she ought to find out
what had happened. Besides, Titus might require her ministrations. She
got up, and began to walk back to the village.

Titus, she reflected, would almost certainly have gone home. Even if he
did not run all the way he would by now have had time to settle down and
get over the worst of his disturbance. A kind of decency forbade her to
view too immediately the dismay of her victim. Titus unmenaced, Titus
invading her quiet and straddling over her peace of mind, was a very
different thing from Titus melting and squirming before the fire of her
resentment. Now that she was walking to his assistance she felt quite
sorry for him. My nephew who is plagued by the Devil was as much an
object for affectionate aunt-like interest as my nephew who has an
attack of measles. She did not take the present affliction more
seriously than she had taken those of the past. With time, and a change
of air, she was confident that he would make a complete recovery.

As for her own share in the matter, she felt no shame at all. It had
pleased Satan to come to her aid. Considering carefully, she did not see
who else would have done so. Custom, public opinion, law, church, and
state--all would have shaken their massive heads against her plea, and
sent her back to bondage.

She reached Great Mop about five o’clock. As she turned up Mrs. Leak’s
garden-path, Titus bounded from the porch.

‘There you are!’ he exclaimed. ‘We have just come to have tea with you.’

She perceived that Titus was not alone. In the porch playing with the
kitten was Pandora Williams, Pandora Williams whom Titus had invited to
play the rebeck at the Flower Show. Before Laura could welcome her Titus
was exclaiming again.

‘Such an afternoon as I’ve had! Such adventures! First I fell into a
wasps’-nest, and then I got engaged to Pandora.’

So that was it. It was wasps. Wasps were the invisible enemies that had
beset and routed him on the hill-side. O Beelzebub, God of flies! But
why was he now going to marry Pandora Williams?

‘The wops-nest was in Folly Wood. I tripped up, and fell smack on top
of it. My God, I thought I should die! They got into my ears, and down
my neck, and up my trousers, they were everywhere, as thick as spikes in
sodawater. I ran for my life, I ran nearly all the way home, and most of
them came with me, either inside or out. And when I rushed up the street
calling in an exhausted voice for onions, there was Pandora!’

‘I had been invited to tea,’ said Pandora rather primly.

‘Yes, and I’d forgotten it, and gone out for a walk. Pandora, if I’d had
my deserts, you would have scorned me, and left me to perish. Pandora, I
shall never forget your magnanimous way of behaving. That was what did
it, really. One has to offer marriage to a young woman who has picked
dead wasps out of one’s armpit.’

Laura had never seen Titus so excited. His face was flushed, his voice
was loud, the pupils of his eyes were extraordinarily dilated. But how
much of this was due to love and how much to wasps and witchcraft it was
impossible to say. And was Pandora part of the witchcraft too, a sort of
queen wasp whose sting was mortal balm? Why should Titus offer her
marriage? Why should Pandora accept it? They had always been such
friends.

Laura turned to the girl to see how she was taking it. Pandora’s smooth
cheeks and smooth lappets of black hair seemed to shed calm like an
unwavering beam of moonlight. But at Laura’s good wishes she started,
and began nervously to counter them with explanations and apologies for
coming to Laura’s rooms for tea. She had dropped Titus’ teapot, and
broken it. Laura was not surprised that she had dropped the teapot. It
was clear to her that Pandora’s emotions that afternoon had been much
more vehement than anything that Titus had experienced in his mental
uproar. How well--thought Laura--she has hidden her feelings all this
time! How well she is hiding them now!

These fine natures, she knew, always found comfort in cutting
bread-and-butter. Pandora welcomed the suggestion. She covered three
large plates, and would have covered a fourth if the butter had not
given out. There were some ginger-bread nuts as well, and a few
bull’s-eyes. Mrs. Leak must have surmised a romance. She marked her
sense of the occasion by the tea, which was almost purple--as strong as
wedding-cake, Titus said.

It was a savagely plain tea. But had it consisted of cocoa and
ship’s-biscuit, Laura might have offered it without a qualm to guests so
much absorbed by their proper emotions. Titus talked incessantly, and
Pandora ate with the stealthy persistence of a bitch that gives suck.
Meanwhile Laura looked at the new Mr. and Mrs. Willowes. They would do
very well, she decided. Young as she was, Pandora had already the air of
a family portrait; such looks, such characters change little, for they
are independent of time. And undoubtedly she was very much in love with
Titus. While he talked she watched his face with the utmost attention,
though she did not seem to hear what he was saying. Titus, too, must be
considerably in love. Despite the unreality of his behaviour, and a
swelled nose, his happiness gave him an almost romantic appearance.
Perhaps it was that too recently she had seen him dancing on the Devil’s
strings to be able to take him quite seriously; perhaps she was
old-maidishly scornful of the authenticity of anything that a man may
say or do; but at the back of her mind Laura felt that Titus was but a
proxy wooer, the ambassador of an imperious dynastic will; and that the
real match was made between Pandora and Lady Place.

Anyhow, it was all very suitable, and she must be content to leave it at
that. The car from the Lamb and Flag was waiting to take them to the
station. Titus was going back to London with Pandora to see her people,
as Pandora had refused to face their approval alone. The Williamses
lived pleasantly on Campden Hill, and were typical of the best class of
Londoners, being almost indistinguishable from people living pleasantly
in the country. What, indeed, could be more countrified than to be in
town during September? For a moment Laura feared that she too would be
obliged to travel to London. The lovers had insisted upon her company as
far as the station.

‘You must come,’ said Titus. ‘There will be all sorts of things I shall
remember to ask you to do for me. I can’t remember them now, but I shall
the moment the car starts. I always do.’

Laura knew this to be very truth. Nevertheless she stood out against
going until Pandora manœuvred her into a corner and said in a desperate
whisper: ‘O Miss Willowes, for God’s sake, please come. You’ve no idea
how awful it is being left alone with some one you love.’

Laura replied: ‘Very well. I’ll come as a thank-offering.’

Pandora’s sense of humour could just contrive a rather castaway smile.

They got into the car. There was no time to spare, and the driver took
them along the winding lanes at top speed, sounding his horn
incessantly. It was a closed car, and they sat in it in perfect silence
all the way to the station. Before the car had drawn up in the station
yard Titus leaped out and began to pay the driver. Then he looked wildly
round for the train. There was no train in sight. It had not come in
yet.

When Laura had seen them off and gone back to the station yard she found
that in his excitement Titus had dismissed the driver without
considering how his aunt was to get back to Great Mop. However, it
didn’t matter--the bus started for Barleighs at half-past eight, and
from Barleighs she could walk on for the rest of the way. This gave her
an hour and a half to spend in Wickendon. A sensible way of passing the
time would be to eat something before her return journey; but she was
not hungry, and the fly-blown cafes in the High Street were not
tempting. She bought some fruit, and turned up an alley between garden
walls in search of a field where she could sit and eat it in peace. The
alley soon changed to an untidy lane and then to a cinder-track running
steeply uphill between high hedges. A municipal kindliness had supplied
at intervals iron benches, clamped and riveted into the cinders. But no
one reposed on them, and the place was unpeopled save by swarms of
midges. Laura was hot and breathless by the time she reached the top of
the hill and came out upon a bare grassy common. Here was an obvious
place to sit down and gasp, and as there were no iron benches to deter
her, she did so. But she immediately forgot her exhaustion, so arresting
was the sight that lay before her.

The cinder-track led to a small enclosure, full of cypresses, yews,
clipped junipers and weeping-willows. Rising from this funereal plumage
was an assortment of minarets, gilded cupolas and obelisks. She stared
at this phenomenon, so byronic in conception, so spick and span in
execution, and sprouting so surprisingly from the mild Chiltern
landscape, completely at a loss to account for it. Then she remembered:
it was the Maulgrave Folly. She had read of it in the guide-book, and of
its author, Sir Ralph Maulgrave, the Satanic Baronet, the libertine, the
atheist, who drank out of a skull, who played away his mistress and
pistolled the winner, who rode about Buckinghamshire on a zebra, whose
conversation had been too much for Thomas Moore. ‘This bad and eccentric
character,’ the guide-book said, disinfecting his memory with rational
amusement. Grown old, he had amused himself by elaborating a
burial-place which was to be an epitome of his eclectic and pessimistic
opinions. He must, thought Laura, have spent many hours on this
hillside, watching the masons and directing the gardeners where to plant
his cypresses. And afterwards he would be wheeled away in his
bath-chair, for, _pace_ the guide-book, at a comparatively early age he
lost the use of his legs.

Poor gentleman, how completely he had misunderstood the Devil! The
plethoric gilt cupolas winked in the setting sun. For all their bad
taste, they were perfectly respectable--cupolas and minarets and
cypresses, all had a sleek and well-cared-for look. They had an assured
income, nothing could disturb their calm. The silly, vain, passionate
heart that lay buried there had bequeathed a sum of money for their
perpetual upkeep. The Satanic Baronet who mocked at eternal life and
designed this place as a lasting testimony of his disbelief had
contrived to immortalise himself as a laughing-stock.

It was ungenerous. The dead man had been pilloried long enough; it was
high time that Maulgrave’s Folly should be left to fall into decent ruin
and decay. And instead of that, even at this moment it was being trimmed
up afresh. She felt a thrill of anger as she saw a gardener come out of
the enclosure, carrying a flag basket and a pair of shears. He came
towards her, and something about the rather slouching and prowling gait
struck her as being familiar. She looked more closely, and recognised
Satan.

‘How can you?’ she said, when he was within speaking distance. He, of
all people, should be more compassionate to the shade of Sir Ralph.

He feigned not to hear her.

‘Would you care to go over the Folly, ma’am?’ he inquired. ‘It’s quite a
curiosity. Visitors come out from London to see it.’

Laura was not going to be fubbed off like this. He might pretend not to
recognise her, but she would jog his memory.

‘So you are a grave-keeper as well as a gamekeeper?’

‘The Council employ me to cut the bushes,’ he answered.

‘O Satan!’ she exclaimed, hurt by his equivocations. ‘Do you always
hide?’

With the gesture of a man who can never hold out against women, he
yielded and sat down beside her on the grass.

Laura felt a momentary embarrassment. She had long wished for a
reasonable conversation with her Master, but now that her wish seemed
about to be granted, she felt rather at a loss for an opening. At last
she observed:

‘Titus has gone.’

‘Indeed? Isn’t that rather sudden? It was only this afternoon that I met
him.’

‘Yes, I saw you meeting him. At least, I saw him meeting you.’

‘Just so. It is remarkable,’ he added, as though he were politely
parrying her thought, ‘how invisible one is on these bare green
hillsides.’

‘Or in these thick brown woods,’ said Laura, rather sternly.

This sort of Satanic playfulness was no novelty; Vinegar often behaved
in the same fashion, leaping about just out of reach when she wanted to
catch him and shut him up indoors.

‘Or in these thick brown woods,’ he concurred. ‘Folly Wood is especially
dense.’

‘Is?’

‘Is. Once a wood, always a wood.’

Once a wood, always a wood. The words rang true, and she sat silent,
considering them. Pious Asa might hew down the groves, but as far as the
Devil was concerned he hewed in vain. Once a wood, always a wood: trees
where he sat would crowd into a shade. And people going by in broad
sunlight would be aware of slow voices overhead, and a sudden chill
would fall upon their flesh. Then, if like her they had a natural
leaning towards the Devil, they would linger, listening about them with
half-closed eyes and averted senses; but if they were respectable people
like Henry and Caroline they would talk rather louder and hurry on.
There remaineth a rest for the people of God (somehow the thought of the
Devil always propelled her mind to the Holy Scriptures), and for the
other people, the people of Satan, there remained a rest also. Held fast
in that strong memory no wild thing could be shaken, no secret covert
destroyed, no haunt of shadow and silence laid open. The goods yard at
Paddington, for instance--a savage place! as holy and enchanted as ever
it had been. Not one of the monuments and tinkerings of man could impose
on the satanic mind. The Vatican and the Crystal Palace, and all the
neat human nest-boxes in rows, Balham and Fulham and the Cromwell
Road--he saw through them, they went flop like cardhouses, the bricks
were earth again, and the steel girders burrowed shrieking into the
veins of earth, and the dead timber was restored to the ghostly groves.
Wolves howled through the streets of Paris, the foxes played in the
throneroom of Schönbrunn, and in the basement at Apsley Terrace the
mammoth slowly revolved, trampling out its lair.

‘Then I needn’t really have come here to meet you!’ she exclaimed.

‘Did you?’

‘I didn’t know I did. I thought I came here to be in the country, and to
escape being an aunt.’

‘Titus came here to write a book on Fuseli, and to enjoy himself.’

‘Titus! I can’t believe you wanted _him_.’

‘But you do believe I wanted you.’

Rather taken aback she yet answered the Devil honestly.

‘Yes! I do believe you wanted me. Though really I don’t know why you
should.’

A slightly malevolent smile crossed the Devil’s face. For some reason
or other her modesty seemed to have nettled him.

‘Some people would say that you had flung yourself at my head.’

‘Other people,’ she retorted, ‘would say that you had been going about
seeking to devour me.’

‘Exactly. I even roared that night. But you were asleep while I roared.
Only the hills heard me triumphing over my spoil.’

Laura said: ‘I wish I could really believe that.’

‘I wish you could, too,’ he answered affably; ‘you would feel so
comfortable and important. But you won’t, although it is much more
probable than you might suppose.’

Laura stretched herself out on the turf and pillowed her head on her
arm.

‘Nothing could feel more comfortable than I do, now that Titus is gone,’
she said. ‘And as for importance, I never wish to feel important again.
I had enough of that when I was an aunt.’

‘Well, you’re a witch now.’

‘Yes.... I really am, aren’t I?’

‘Irrevocably.’

His voice was so perfectly grave that she began to suspect him of
concealing some amusement. When but a moment before he had jested she
had thought a deeper meaning lay beneath his words, she almost believed
that his voice had roared over her in the thunder. If he had spoken
without feigning then, she had not heard him; for he had stopped her
ears with a sleep.

‘Why do you sigh?’ he asked.

‘Did I sigh? I’m puzzled, that’s all. You see, although I’m a witch, and
although you sitting here beside me tell me so, I can’t really
appreciate it, take it in. It all seems perfectly natural.’

‘That is because you are in my power. No servant of mine can feel
remorse, or doubt, or surprise. You may be quite easy, Laura: you will
never escape me, for you can never wish to.’

‘Yes, I can quite well believe that, I’m sure I shall never wish to
escape you. But you are a mysterious Master.’

‘You seem to me rather an exacting servant. I have shaped myself like a
jobbing gardener, I am sitting on the grass beside you (I’ll have one of
your apples if I may. They are a fruit I am particularly fond of), I am
doing everything in my power to be agreeable and reassuring.... What
more do you want?’

‘That is exactly what I complain of. You are too lifelike to be
natural; why, it might be Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann. No! if
I am really a witch, treat me as such. Satisfy my curiosity. Tell me
about yourself.’

‘Tell me first what _you_ think,’ he answered.

‘I think’--she began cautiously (while he hid his cards it would not do
to show all hers)--‘I think you are a kind of black knight, wandering
about and succouring decayed gentlewomen.’

‘There are warlocks too, remember.’

‘I can’t take warlocks so seriously, not as a class. It is we witches
who count. We have more need of you. Women have such vivid imaginations,
and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they
are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a
nuisance. Do you understand?’

He was silent. She continued, slowly, knitting her brows in the effort
to make clear to herself and him the thought that was in her mind:

‘It’s like this. When I think of witches, I seem to see all over
England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as
blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of
respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and
Puritans. In places like Bedfordshire, the sort of country one sees
from the train. You know. Well, there they were, there they are,
child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dishcloths on currant
bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening
to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite
different to the way women talk, and men listen, if they listen at all.
And all the time being thrust further down into dullness when the one
thing all women hate is to be thought dull. And on Sundays they put on
plain stuff gowns and starched white coverings on their heads and
necks--the Puritan ones did--and walked across the fields to chapel, and
listened to the sermon. Sin and Grace, and God and the----’ (she
stopped herself just in time), ‘and St. Paul. All men’s things, like
politics, or mathematics. Nothing for them except subjection and
plaiting their hair. And on the way back they listened to more talk.
Talk about the sermon, or war, or cock-fighting; and when they got back,
there were the potatoes to be cooked for dinner. It sounds very petty to
complain about, but I tell you, that sort of thing settles down on one
like a fine dust, and by and by the dust is age, settling down. Settling
down! You never die, do you? No doubt that’s far worse, but there is a
dreadful kind of dreary immortality about being settled down on by one
day after another. And they think how they were young once, and they see
new young women, just like what they were, and yet as surprising as if
it had never happened before, like trees in spring. But they are like
trees towards the end of summer, heavy and dusty, and nobody finds their
leaves surprising, or notices them till they fall off. If they could be
passive and unnoticed, it wouldn’t matter. But they must be active, and
still not noticed. Doing, doing, doing, till mere habit scolds at them
like a housewife, and rouses them up--when they might sit in their
doorways and think--to be doing still!’

She paused, out of breath. She had never made such a long speech in the
whole of her life, nor spoken with such passion. She scarcely knew what
she had said, and felt giddy and unaccustomed, as though she had been
thrown into the air and had suddenly begun to fly.

The Devil was silent, and looked thoughtfully at the ground. He seemed
to be rather touched by all this. She continued, for she feared that if
she did not go on talking she would grow ashamed at having said so
much.

‘Is it true that you can poke the fire with a stick of dynamite in
perfect safety? I used to take my nieces to scientific lectures, and I
believe I heard it then. Anyhow, even if it isn’t true of dynamite, it’s
true of women. But they know they are dynamite, and long for the
concussion that may justify them. Some may get religion, then they’re
all right, I expect. But for the others, for so many, what can there be
but witchcraft? That strikes them real. Even if other people still find
them quite safe and usual, and go on poking with them, they know in
their hearts how dangerous, how incalculable, how extraordinary they
are. Even if they never do anything with their witchcraft, they know
it’s there--ready! Respectable countrywomen keep their grave-clothes in
a corner of the chest of drawers, hidden away, and when they want a
little comfort they go and look at them, and think that once more, at
any rate, they will be worth dressing with care. But the witch keeps her
cloak of darkness, her dress embroidered with signs and planets; that’s
better worth looking at. And think, Satan, what a compliment you pay
her, pursuing her soul, lying in wait for it, following it through all
its windings, crafty and patient and secret like a gentleman out
killing tigers. Her soul--when no one else would give a look at her body
even! And they are all so accustomed, so sure of her! They say: “Dear
Lolly! What shall we give her for her birthday this year? Perhaps a
hot-water bottle. Or what about a nice black lace scarf? Or a new
workbox? Her old one is nearly worn out.” But you say: “Come here, my
bird! I will give you the dangerous black night to stretch your wings
in, and poisonous berries to feed on, and a nest made of bones and
thorns, perched high up in danger where no one can climb to it.” That’s
why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe
business, to satisfy our passion for adventure. It’s not malice, or
wickedness--well, perhaps it _is_ wickedness, for most women love
that--but certainly not malice, not wanting to plague cattle and make
horrid children spout up pins and--what is it?--“blight the genial bed.”
Of course, given the power, one may go in for that sort of thing, either
in self-defence, or just out of playfulness. But it’s a poor twopenny
housewifely kind of witchcraft, black magic is, and white magic is no
better. One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to
run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick.
It’s to escape all that--to have a life of one’s own, not an existence
doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many
ounces of stale bread of life a day, the workhouse dietary is
scientifically calculated to support life. As for the witches who can
only express themselves by pins and bed-blighting, they have been warped
into that shape by the dismal lives they’ve led. Think of Miss Carloe!
She’s a typical witch, people would say. Really she’s the typical
genteel spinster who’s spent herself being useful to people who didn’t
want her. If you’d got her younger she’d never be like that.’

‘You seem to know a good deal about witches,’ remarked Satan. ‘But you
were going to say what you thought about me.’

She shook her head.

‘Go on,’ he said encouragingly. ‘You have compared me to a
knight-errant. That’s very pretty. I believe you have also compared me
to a hunter, a poaching sort of hunter, prowling through the woods after
dark. Not so flattering to my vanity as the knight-errant, but more
accurate, I daresay.’

‘O Satan! Why do you encourage me to talk when you know all my
thoughts?’

‘I encourage you to talk, not that I may know all your thoughts, but
that you may. Go on, Laura. Don’t be foolish. What do you think about
me?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I don’t think I do think. I only
rhapsodise and make comparisons. You’re beyond me, my thought flies off
you like the centrifugal hypothesis. And after this I shall be more at a
loss than ever, for I like you so much, I find you so kind and
sympathetic. But it is obvious that you can’t be merely a benevolent
institution. No, I must be your witch in blindness.’

‘You don’t take warlocks so seriously, I know. But you might find their
point of view illuminating. As it’s a spiritual difficulty, why not
consult Mr. Jones?’

‘Poor Mr. Jones!’ Laura began to laugh. ‘He can’t call his soul his
own.’

‘Hush! Have you forgotten that he has sold it to me?’

‘Then why did you mortgage it to Mr. Gurdon? Mr. Jones isn’t even
allowed to attend the Sabbath.’

‘You are a little dense at times. Hasn’t it occurred to you that other
people might share your sophisticated dislike for the Sabbath?’

‘You don’t attend the Sabbath either, if it comes to that.’

‘How do you know? Don’t try to put me in your pocket, Laura. You are not
my only conquest, and I am not a human master to have favourites among
my servants. All are souls that come to my net. I apologise for the pun,
but it is apt.’

She had been rebuked, but she did not feel particularly abashed. It was
true, then, what she had read of the happy relationship between the
Devil and his servants. If Euphan Macalzean had rated him--why, so, at a
pinch, might she. Other things that she had read might also be true, she
thought, things that she had till now been inclined to reject. So
easy-going a Master who had no favourites among his servants might in
reality attend the Sabbath, might unbend enough to eat black-puddings at
a picnic without losing his dignity.

‘That offensive young man at the Sabbath,’ she remarked, ‘I know he
wasn’t you. Who was he?’

‘He’s one of these brilliant young authors,’ replied the Devil. ‘I
believe Titus knows him. He sold me his soul on the condition that once
a week he should be without doubt the most important person at a party.’

‘Why didn’t he sell his soul in order to become a great writer? Then he
could have had the party into the bargain.’

‘He preferred to take a short-cut, you see.’

She didn’t see. But she was too proud to inquire further, especially as
Satan was now smiling at her as if she were a pet lamb.

‘What did Mr. Jones----’

‘That’s enough! You can ask him that yourself, when you take your
lessons in demonology.’

‘Do you suppose for one moment that Mr. Gurdon would let me sit closeted
with Mr. Jones taking lessons in plain needlework even? He would put his
face in at the window and say: “How much longer are them Mothers to be
kept waiting?” or: “I should like to know what your reverence is doing
about that there dung?” or: “I suppose you know that the cowman’s girl
may go off at any minute.” And then he’d take him down to the shrubbery
and scold him. My heart bleeds for the poor old gentleman!’

‘Mr. Jones’--Satan spoke demurely--‘will have his reward in another
life.’

Laura was silent. She gazed at the Maulgrave Folly with what she could
feel to be a pensive expression. But her mind was a blank.

‘A delicate point, you say? Perhaps it is bad taste on my part to jest
about it.’

A midge settled on Laura’s wrist. She smacked at it.

‘Dead!’ said Satan.

The word dropped into her mind like a pebble thrown into a pond. She had
heard it so often, and now she heard it once more. The same waves of
thought circled outwards, waves of startled thought spreading out on all
sides, rocking the shadows of familiar things, blurring the steadfast
pictures of trees and clouds, circling outward one after the other, each
wave more listless, more imperceptible than the last, until the pool was
still again.

There might be some questions that even the Devil could not answer. She
turned her eyes to him with their question.

Satan had risen to his feet. He picked up the flag basket and the
shears, and made ready to go.

‘Is it time?’ asked Laura.

He nodded, and smiled.

She got up in her turn, and began to shake the dust off her skirt. Then
she prodded a hole for the bag which had held the apples, and buried it
tidily, smoothing the earth over the hole. This took a little time to
do, and when she looked round for Satan, to say good-bye, he was out of
sight.

Seeing that he was gone she sat down again, for she wanted to think him
over. A pleasant conversation, though she had done most of the talking.
The tract of flattened grass at her side showed where he had rested, and
there was the rampion flower he had held in his hand. Grass that has
been lain upon has always a rather popular bank-holidayish look, and
even the Devil’s lair was not exempt from this. It was as though the
grass were in league with him, faithfully playing-up to his pose of
being a quite everyday phenomenon. Not a blade of grass was singed, not
a clover-leaf blasted, and the rampion flower was withering quite
naturally; yet he who had sat there was Satan, the author of all evil,
whose thoughts were a darkness, whose roots went down into the pit.
There was no action too mean for him, no instrument too petty; he would
go into a milk-jug to work mischief. And presently he would emerge,
imperturbable, inscrutable, enormous with the dignity of natural
behaviour and untrammelled self-fulfilment.

To be this--a character truly integral, a perpetual flowering of power
and cunning from an undivided will--was enough to constitute the charm
and majesty of the Devil. No cloak of terrors was necessary to enlarge
that stature, and to suppose him capable of speculation or metaphysic
would be like offering to crown him with a few casual straws. Very
probably he was quite stupid. When she had asked him about death he had
got up and gone away, which looked as if he did not know much more about
it than she did herself: indeed, being immortal, it was unlikely that he
would know as much. Instead, his mind brooded immovably over the
landscape and over the natures of men, an unforgetting and unchoosing
mind. That, of course--and she jumped up in her excitement and began to
wave her arms--was why he was the Devil, the enemy of souls. His memory
was too long, too retentive; there was no appeasing its witness, no
hoodwinking it with the present; and that was why at one stage of
civilisation people said he was the embodiment of all evil, and then a
little later on that he didn’t exist.

For a moment Laura thought that she had him: and on the next, as though
he had tricked himself out of her grasp, her thoughts were scattered by
the sudden consciousness of a sort of jerk in the atmosphere. The sun
had gone down, sliding abruptly behind the hills. In that case the bus
would have gone too, she might as well hope to catch the one as the
other. First Satan, then the sun and the bus--_adieu, mes gens!_ With
affectionate unconcern she seemed to be waving them farewell, pleased to
be left to herself, left to enter into this new independence
acknowledged by their departure.

The night was at her disposal. She might walk back to Great Mop and
arrive very late: or she might sleep out and not trouble to arrive till
to-morrow. Whichever she did Mrs. Leak would not mind. That was one of
the advantages of dealing with witches; they do not mind if you are a
little odd in your ways, frown if you are late for meals, fret if you
are out all night, pry and commiserate when at length you return. Lovely
to be with people who prefer their thoughts to yours, lovely to live at
your own sweet will, lovely to sleep out all night! She had quite
decided, now, to do so. It was an adventure, she had never done such a
thing before, and yet it seemed most natural. She would not sleep here:
Wickendon was too close. But presently, later on, when she felt inclined
to, she would wander off in search of a suitable dry ditch or an
accommodatingly loosened haystack; or wading through last year’s leaves
and this year’s fern she would penetrate into a wood and burrow herself
a bed, Satan going his rounds might come upon her and smile to see her
lying so peaceful and secure in his dangerous keeping. But he would not
disturb her. Why should he? The pursuit was over, as far as she was
concerned. She could sleep where she pleased, a hind couched in the
Devil’s coverts, a witch made free of her Master’s immunity; while he,
wakeful and stealthy, was already out after new game. So he would not
disturb her. A closer darkness upon her slumber, a deeper voice in the
murmuring leaves overhead--that would be all she would know of his
undesiring and unjudging gaze, his satisfied but profoundly indifferent
ownership.





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