Part 8

THE snow was meaning to have a good time of it; there was no question about that. Further work in the clearing line was obviously impossible.

Virginia tilted up her coal-scoop in the porch, beside the pathetic remains of small brass shovel No. 1 (which broke in half quite early in the proceedings), and small brass shovel No. 2 (which also was giving wobbly indications of impending collapse). Ursula, possessing the only serviceable tool in the whole collection, had with unusual forethought carried in the kitchen shovel, and hidden it surreptitiously—realising that it was a much-coveted treasure at that moment.

But she did suggest that if we just took the ladder upstairs and let it down out of the end bedroom window she could climb down, and that would bring her close to the wood shed; she could get from the roof of that on to a low wall, and walk along the wall to the gate, which she would then climb over (as it was blocked each side with snow), and in this way she could get out into the lane to the spring of water, and bring back a can of water by the same route. This she would tie to a cord let down from the bedroom window, which could then be hauled up. Then she would get into the wood shed—which would not be difficult, as the door opened inwards, and would not be blocked by the snow on the inside; getting together some logs, she would next lash them up so that they also could be hauled up like the water; finally, she would herself return, _viâ_ the roof and the ladder and the bedroom window, to the bosom of the family.

This suggestion was received with gratitude, only everyone else wanted to take Ursula’s place, and make the tour instead of her. We pointed out to her that, as she had already meanly annexed the only workable shovel, she ought at least to relinquish the rôle of leading lady in this expedition. We might have wasted much time in arguing with her had not Eileen reminded us that the ladder—like everything else we needed—was up the garden safely snowed up under the laurel hedge. So that project fell through.

“We may as well leave that collection of old metal in the porch,” said Virginia, “since there is no fear of callers arriving and putting us to the blush this afternoon.” Then there was nothing left to do but to stamp off the snow, and shed rubbers, and ulsters, and scarfs, and woollen gloves, and possess our souls in patience indoors, till such time as the snow should give over.

“And to think how I’ve always prided myself on going away from home prepared for _every_ emergency!” sighed Virginia. “My dressing-case is simply crammed with such valuable data as a bandage for a possible sprained ankle, court plaster, a pocket-knife with a corkscrew on it, a specially strong smelling-bottle for fainty ones, a nightlight, a box of matches, ammoniated quinine, wedges for rattling windows, a box of tin-tacks—no, not a hammer, I always use the heel of my shoe—a two-foot rule—what should I want that for? I’m sure I don’t know, but then you never can tell! But with all my precautions, it never occurred to me to pack a spade and broom in with my luggage. This snowstorm has shown me the weak points in my outfit.”

“It has shown _me_ the weak points in my joints,” groaned Ursula. “And, moreover, I never knew before how many parts of us there were that could ache. I’m just painful from head to foot. I never realised what a noble, self-sacrificing calling snow-shovelling is. And when I think of the men who come round in town, offering to sweep the snow from the path—and a good long path too—for a few pence, it seems a positive scandal that they should get so little. I’m sure there is quite ten shillings’ worth of me used up already!”

We certainly did ache. And only those who have been suddenly called upon to attack a bank of snow, with inexperience and feeble tools, can know the extent of our stiffness. We were content to let it snow, without the slightest desire to crick our backs any further. And after all there is something exceedingly restful and soothing to over-worked brain and over-strained nerves, in merely sitting in a low chair by a roaring fire, taking only such exercise as is required to put on an extra log, secure in the knowledge that neither telegram, nor visitor, nor any communication whatsoever from the outside world can possibly break in upon the quiet and peace. You need to spend your life in the heart of the great metropolis, amid the never-ceasing turmoil of London streets, with your days one long maddening distraction of callers, telephone bells, endless queries and perpetual noise, to appreciate the joy of the solitude in that snowed-up cottage among the hills.

* * * * *

For long months and months the guns in Flanders had sent a muffled boom over my London garden every hour of the day, and had shaken my windows violently every hour of the night; and there is no need to set down in writing the ache and the anxiety that each dull thud brought to the heart. Every one who has husband or brother or son out yonder knows what question comes wafted over each time the guns send out their deadly roll.

But our craving for quiet was not a desire to get out of earshot of the guns. It dated farther back than the War; it was the inevitable outcome of the over-wrought hurry of the twentieth century, when one’s nerves get so frazzled in the vain attempt to do everything, and do it all at once, that at last life is simply one intense longing for that “nest in the wilderness” out of reach of the clamour of the market-place and the vain, foolish, soul-wearing struggle for material things.

In that enchanted period of life, known as “before the War,” we used often to discuss the desirability of moving to an uninhabited island and spending the rest of our days there in unalloyed peace. It had been an absorbing dream with me, ever since I first read Sarah Orne Jewett’s book, _The Country of the Pointed Firs_. I dare say it was selfish to think of being _quite_ out of reach of the noise and dirt and bustle and din of cities, and where there would be no next-door piano, and no gramophone in the house the other side, and no soots floating in the windows—but it was a very pleasant one, and I used to add to it occasionally by imagining what it would be like to wake up one morning and find that some unknown but generous friend had left me an uninhabited island as a legacy; one not far from the mainland, and somewhere around the British Isles, of course.

When such a thing happens, it will find me quite prepared, for we have built the house there, and furnished it, and mapped out our life there many and many a time; all I am waiting for is—the island! That seems hard to come by! I’ve had one or two offered me (not as gifts, but to purchase), like Lundy, for instance, but they cost too much and are not uninhabited. So we have still to content ourselves with plans only.

We were recalled to The Island (we always refer to it in capital letters) as we sat round the fire, by Virginia inquiring what books I should take with me when I moved there. She said she concluded that, being a booky sort of a person, a library would be an essential.

But I set my face firmly against taking unnecessary literature. My house gets choked with books, ninety per cent. of which I never open a second time. I am for ever turning them out, and yet they go on accumulating. Virginia has a perfect mania for hoarding impossible books, that she could never find time to read through again if she lived to be the age of Methuselah; yet she keeps them all, on the chance that some day she may require to refer to a solitary sentence in one of them. Her cupboards are full, and her shelves are packed behind and before, and she has had sets of drawers made just to hold “papers”; which means hundredweights of abstruse pamphlets, and learned magazines, and cuttings—well, I dare say you know the sort of girl she is, and what it’s like when their flat gets spring-cleaned, and she insists that no one must lay a finger on _her_ books!

Ursula isn’t much better; but at least she is more practical, and believes in spring cleaning; hence, in _her_ case, she does have a turn-out occasionally, and just throws away indiscriminately whole shelf-loads of books in a fit of desperation, when she has managed to get every article in the flat jumbled up in a heap in the room it has no business in, and no one can find anything. I believe at such time she surreptitiously disposes of some of Virginia’s tomes, too; but this I only suspect. At any rate, Virginia is always bewailing a number of “_most_ important books” that never can be found after one of Ursula’s domestic upheavals.

Knowing all this, I said that only a definite number of books would be allowed on The Island. Both girls said it would be impossible to fix any limit that would meet the case. I said I was quite sure humanity, more especially the intellectual feminine portion of it, could do with far less books than they thought they could.

Vehement protests!

Then I suggested, to prove my words, that we should each start to make out a list of the books we couldn’t possibly do without on The Island—_only_ those we couldn’t possibly do without—and see what it amounted to. “Jot down any book or author that occurs to us as being essential, irrespective of any sort of classification,” I said. “And we had better compare notes every ten books, as we go along.”

Forthwith, we each scribbled down our first ten _absolutely indispensable_ books (they were to be exclusive of religious and devotional works). When we compared notes in a few minutes’ time, these were our lists:—

VIRGINIA.

Encyclopædia. A Dictionary. Jane Austen’s Novels. “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.” A Time Table. Franklin’s “Voyages.” “Punch” (regularly). A good Atlas. “The Spectator” (regularly). “A Child’s Garden of Verse.” R. L. Stevenson.

URSULA.

A good Guide to London. A large selection of Needlework and Crochet Books. My old Scrapbook. Mudie’s Catalogue. An Almanac giving the changes of the moon. “The Old Red Sandstone.” Hugh Miller. The Stores Price List. Mrs. Hemans’ Poems. The Scottish Student’s Song Book. Kipling’s “Kim.”

SELF.

All Ruskin’s Works. “The Wide, Wide World.” “The Country of the Pointed Firs.” S. O. Jewett. All my Gardening Books and Florists’ Seed Catalogues. All my Wild Flower Books. “A Little Book of Western Verse.” Eugene Field. Poems by Ann and Jane Taylor. All my Cookery Books. All the Board of Agriculture’s Leaflets. A Book on Deer Culture.

Of course, we each gazed in profound surprise and contempt on the others’ lists, and asked why this and that had been put down. Why did Ursula want a guide to London, when the object of going to The Island was to get away from London?

She said she thought you ought to keep in touch with things even if you were away; and if it came to that, why did I want a Deer book, since I couldn’t look at venison?

I said I felt it in me that I should start keeping deer as soon as I landed, and there was more sense in doing that than in reading a Time Table, for instance!

Virginia protested a Time Table was absolutely essential, else how would you ever be able to get away when you wanted to? And you never knew _when_ you might be summoned to anyone’s funeral in a hurry, and was she supposed to be cut off from _all_ human enjoyment? Whereas no one could possibly want a Student’s Song Book, when they couldn’t sing two notes in tune; and, also, why Mrs. Hemans, might she venture to ask?

“Yes, who would dream of carting around a Mrs. Hemans in these days?” I scoffed.

“The frontispiece engraving of Mrs. Hemans always reminded me of mother’s Aunt Matilda,” said Ursula impressively. “I only saw her twice, but on the first occasion she gave me a doll, and on the second a blue and white bead necklace; I’ve got three of the beads left, in my workbox. And I’ve always loved beads, and I loved her in consequence, and I wouldn’t dream of being parted from Mrs. Hemans. And, in any case, why bring a Dictionary?”

“Because I may require to look up a more expressive word occasionally, or enlarge my flow of vocabulary,” Virginia explained. “And I conclude I’m not expected to be absolutely dumb when we get there!”

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that these are necessarily the books we should have named had we sat down thoughtfully to compile a list most representative of our tastes and needs; but whatever list I had made, I’m sure I should have included the volumes I named; and it goes to show that the books that make an individual appeal to us are not necessarily those that our friends expect us to name.

The library catalogue was never completed, for, before we had time further to criticize each other’s preferences, we were pulled up short by a sound.

We all stopped our chatter on an instant, for surely and certainly there could be no mistaking it, there was the ring of an iron spade chinking on stone! When last we had looked out, just after breakfast, not a stone had been visible for a spade to chink against in the whole vicinity. We flew to the door, and there, touching his hat with a smiling “Good morning, ma’am,” stood the elderly handy man who ought to have been in bed with his bad cold; and behold, a clear path to the lane. He had worked from the gate inwards, and we had been so busy with our discussions indoors, we had not heard him till he reached the porch.

“I was only able to get down downstairs yesterday,” the invalid explained. “But in any case it wasn’t no good coming over till that spell o’ snow was down, even if I’d been fit to come out.” Then, after a detailed description of symptoms and sufferings and so forth—“Yes, I think there’s a good bit more to come down yet. Nothing won’t be able to be got up from the village yet awhile; they tell me the drifts is eight feet deep in places. Maybe in a few days I’ll be able to get down. I’ll be wanting some sharps soon myself for the fowls, so I’ll have to try and get down by the end of the week. And the butcher’s killing himself this week, I could bring you up a j’int. I’ve knocked up a good bit of kindling wood in the wood shed, so you’ll be all right now.”

Yes, we were all right now, from one point of view; but I devoutly hoped he would not wait till the end of the week before he went for those “sharps,” for I had discovered that we had _only one loaf in the house_! And as they only bake twice a week in our village, and everyone knows how long war bread won’t keep, I need only add that already we had to cut off all the outside before bringing it to table, and by to-morrow it would be quite gorgonzola-ish right through!

As soon as he had gone, Ursula burst forth, “Don’t talk to me any more of the rights of women”—no one had been, but we let it pass—“don’t tell me they are the equals of men, and that all they want is a good education and scope for their energies. Look at us, haven’t _we_ all had good educations?” (Ursula and her sister are thoroughly acquainted with the literature of several European countries; they read Plato in the original; and can give you reliable information on such points as the similarity between the tribes on the borders of Tibet and the Patagonians—if any exists. They can certainly be called well educated.) “And wasn’t there scope enough for our energies out there? And then consider what we accomplished! While a man like that comes along—says he never went to school in his life, just risen from a sick bed, too, so none too strong—yet in an hour or so he’s done what _we_ should not have got through in a month. And look at the neat job he’s made of it, with the snow banked up trimly on each side; why, we were about as effective and as artistic as three fowls scratching on the surface of things. And then look at the stack of wood he got ready in no time. I’m sure I blushed to see him gazing at that collection of decrepit shovels standing in the porch——”

“And well you might blush,” edged in Virginia, “remembering how you selfishly stuck to the only decent shovel there was, with never so much as an offer to either of us to have a turn.”

“—Yes, we ought to have votes, we’re so—capable!” Ursula went on, but I begged her not to worry her head about votes just now, as the question of food was of greater national importance.

At the word “food” of course everyone was all attention, and we made ourselves into a Privy Council, and they appointed me Food Controller, because it would give them the right to do all the grumbling. But the matter was not quite as much of a joke as they thought. For so long they had been accustomed to a pantry stocked with bottles and tins and stores of all descriptions (and Virginia once remarked that to read the labels alone—if you had lost the tin-opener—was quite as good as a seven-course meal at a fashionable restaurant), that they forgot things were not like that now! In the dairy, too (which we use as a larder), it was the usual pre-war thing to see large open jam tarts in deep dishes, with a fancy trellis work over the top of the jam, and large pies with lovely water-lilies, made from the scraps of paste, on top, and spicy brown cakes, with a delicious odour, standing on the stone slabs—Abigail being a capital hand at pastry and cakes. The dairy is built on the north side, close under the hill, and the great stone wall that keeps the hill from tumbling down on top of the dairy is packed with hart’s-tongue and the British maiden-hair fern, and rosettes of the pretty little scaly spleenwort, and lacy tufts of wall rue, and practically every other kind of fern that loves damp shade and the English climate. And ivy runs over the lot right up to the top, where wild roses and honeysuckle and blackberry ramp about in the sunshine, and often peep down to see how it fares with their comrades in the cool ravine below. The long fronds of the fern wave in at the dairy window, and the ivy sends out little fingers, catching hold wherever it can, and creeping in, very much at home, through the wire-netting that does duty for a window. My guests always like to go into the dairy to see the wonderful array of ferns; but I sometimes suspect it is also to gaze on the appetizing-looking things that appeal irresistibly to all who have spent an hour or two in our hungry air!

But war had made a considerable difference alike to pantry and store-cupboard and larder, and we had to trust to the promise of Miss Jarvis, the lady at the village shop—and one of the most valuable members of the community—that we should not actually starve! As the stocks had been used, they had not been replenished. Cinnamon buns, lemon-curd cheese cakes, fruit cakes with a nice crack in the top, were no longer piled up in the larder. No home-cured ham, sewn up in white muslin, hung from the big hook in the kitchen ceiling. No large, dried, golden-coloured vegetable marrows hung up beside it for winter use.

We had plenty of potatoes, fortunately (and never had we valued potatoes as we did this year!), and we had the usual “remains” that are in the larder, when the butcher has not called for a few days and a family lives from hand to mouth, as one has had to do recently, lest one should be suspected of hoarding!

There was a tin of lunch biscuits, some cheese, and cereals; but the rest of the store cupboard seemed exasperatingly useless when it came to sustaining life in a snow-bound household. What good was a tin of linseed, for instance, or a bottle of cayenne, or a bottle of evaporated horse-radish (with the sirloin presumably still gambolling about somewhere in the valley)? Why had I ever laid in a bottle of tarragon vinegar, a bottle of salad dressing, a box of rennet tablets, a tin of curry powder, desiccated cocoanut, a bottle of chutney? Even the tin of baking powder and the nutmegs and capers seemed extravagant and superfluous. Oh, for a simple glass of tongue—but we had opened our only one the day we arrived!

One thing was certain: while the snow remained at its present depth, to say nothing of an increase, no provisions could be got up from the village. The steep roads were like glass the last time we were out; now they would be impassable for horses or vehicles, even though a man might manage to get over them somehow. Milk we could obtain from a neighbouring farm, perhaps a few eggs, possibly a fowl as a very special favour, now that our path was cleared; but that was the utmost we could hope to raise locally. The point to be considered was: How long could we hold out?

“Well, there is only one other thing I can think of,” said Virginia; “you must fly signals of distress, and hoist a flag up at the top of the chimney—they always do in books. . . . How are you to get the flag up the chimney? I’m sure _I_ don’t know if you don’t! What’s the good of being an editor if you don’t know a simple little thing like that?”

But the problem was solved for me by a tap at the door, and then one realised the superiority of the servants of the Crown over all ordinary individuals. It was the postman. He said “Good morning” with the modest air of one who knows he has accomplished a great deed, but leaves it for others to extol.

“I’ve brought up the letters,” he said; “but I couldn’t get up the parcels to-day. There are a good many.” I knew what that meant. My post is necessarily a very heavy one, more especially when I am away from town, and great packages of things are sent down daily. “Is there anything I can take back with me?” he inquired.

I hastily scribbled some telegrams on urgent matters, glad of this chance to get them sent off; and I knew the Head of Affairs would be glad to hear we were all well. As I handed them to the man, he rather hesitatingly produced a bulky newspaper parcel that had been hidden under his big mackintosh cape, with an apologetic look, as it were, to the Crown, that the garment should have been put to so unofficial an use. Then in an undertone, lest the Postmaster-General in London might overhear, he said—

“Miss Jarvis was afraid you might be running short of things.” The thoughtful Lady of the Village Shop had sent up a loaf, a piece of bacon and a pound of sugar. How I blessed her!

Next day he managed to get up some of the small postal packages. The first one I opened was from one of the Assistant Editors in town.

“I see in the papers that you’ve had a heavy fall of snow,” she wrote, “and as there was not a solitary line from you this morning, I’m wondering if you are isolated? At any rate, I’m sending you a home-made cake and a box of smoked sausages by this post (instead of MSS.) in case you may be cut off from supplies.”

“If that isn’t bed-rock common sense,” said Ursula. “Most intelligent girls would have improved the occasion by sending you newspaper cuttings with statistics of the latest submarine sinkings, to keep your spirits up.”

Another slight fall of snow was all the late afternoon brought us, not enough to spoil the newly cleared path, but sufficient to reveal the fact next morning that someone with large masculine boots had been promenading round the cottage, for there were the footprints, a clear track that even a detective could not have failed to see, leading from the gate to the outhouses, from the outhouses to the scullery door, from the scullery door to the best door (it’s absurd to call it the front door, because each side is as much the front as the other excepting the part that backs into the hill!), from the best door to the door with the porch, and so on, out of the gate again.