Part 9

As none of us knew anything about them, we concluded the handy man must have returned, bent on some new errand of mercy. But he disowned them; had not been near the place since the previous forenoon, and the snow had not fallen till five o’clock. It looked exceedingly queer, not to say uncanny, and we recalled the fact that the dog had barked violently after we were in bed. So far as I knew, there was no resident on those hills who would think of wandering round the house after dark; and no tramp or odd wayfarer would ever scale those heights unless he had some very urgent reason for so doing, and had a definite destination. It is too stiff a climb to take on a casual chance of picking up anything; moreover, unless a man knew his way, he would soon lose himself. Though the footprints really perplexed me, I did not say very much about them; but Eileen did.

When Mr. Jones from a neighbouring farm arrived with milk, I heard the full description being given him at the kitchen door. He expressed due interest, and described a mysterious case he had just read about, in the weekly paper, of a servant who had disappeared from a house in London where she had been in service for years, and no trace of her had been found since. Eileen and he agreed as to the many points of similarity between the two cases.

When the lad from the butcher’s came to know what portion I wished to bespeak of the sheep they would be killing, come Friday, I heard Eileen once more going through the story of the footprints, combined with details of the missing domestic. He, in turn, told her how a burglar had been one morning in a house next door to his grandmother’s in Bristol, and how, when they chased him, he jumped right over the garden wall, into the very dish of potatoes his aunt was peeling for his dinner. (The pronouns were confusing, but I don’t think it was for the burglar’s dinner the potatoes were intended.)

The farmer’s daughter who came to inquire if I would like a fowl, after hearing the story, offered to lend Eileen a novelette she had just been reading, where there were footprints exactly like these; and in the last chapter it turns out that the footprints were those of—I forget who or what, but it was very enthralling, and Eileen gratefully jumped at the offer of the loan.

The old man who came to say that they couldn’t deliver any coals till the weather broke, remarked that he didn’t like the look of it at all, and said he should be quite nervous if he were she, and asked her if she had heard about the old woman who had been found dead in her bed in Yorkshire, died of cold, and fifty golden sovereigns tied up in the middle of her pillow? Eileen had not heard of it. The old man said it was as well to keep your eyes open, as there were funny people in the world, and this seemed to him just such another affair.

And much more to the same effect.

* * * * *

That night I was suddenly awakened by a sound, though at first I could not tell what it was. I lay wide awake, holding my breath: then it came again, a gentle rasp, rasp, as though someone were scraping something with a metal tool. At the same moment I heard Virginia and Ursula stirring in the next room. I stole in to them; they too were listening. And then we realised that the burglar had really come! From the direction of the sound we knew he was scraping away the putty, or something of the sort, from a pane of glass that was let into the scullery door. If he managed to get through that, he could undo the bolt, and would be free of the place.

What were we to do, we asked each other in whispers? Of course, previously, I had always known what I should do if a burglar ever came to my house. I should go downstairs, throw open the door and confront him unafraid, asking him in a firm but most melodious voice what had brought him to such a low moral depth, and urging him to better things. He would be so undone by the sight of me and the sound of the music of my voice, that he would crumple up at my feet and confess all his past burglaries. Whereupon, I should motion him to come in and take a seat, while I hastily prepared a cup of Bovril, and cut him a large plate of cold roast beef; and on his observing that I had passed him the mustard pot without first removing the silver spoon, he would be so overcome by my confidence in him that he would voluntarily vow to turn over a new leaf. He would leave with half-a-crown in his pocket. And years afterwards a prosperous man would knock at my door, bearing in his hand half-a-crown, etc.

But this particular case did not seem to fit in with my previous programme for the reception of burglars. In the first place there was no Bovril in the house; and secondly, there was no beef, only a tiny piece of cold mutton in the larder—and you can’t do anything heroic with only cold mutton.

Meanwhile the man was scraping away downstairs, and we did not know but what he would be in upon us any moment.

“Shall we let the dog loose?” said Virginia.

“The dog!” I repeated. “Why, where _is_ the dog? Why isn’t he barking?” Until that moment we had forgotten him entirely. There was no sound of him below; and he is a ferocious little thing if strangers come anywhere near the place.

“Oh, then they’ve poisoned him!” gasped Ursula, almost in tears. “They’ve got some poisoned meat in to him somehow, under the door perhaps, and he’ll be lying there a corpse, and we never thinking of him.” We all three crept as silently as we could downstairs, to find “the corpse” remarkably cheerful, with his nose at the crack of an outer door, every hair of his body on end with tension, his ears cocked up, and every muscle of him on the alert—but not a ghost of a bark did he give, only a perfunctory waggle of his tail, just as an acknowledgment of our presence, and an apology that he was too much engaged at the moment to give us more attention. There was not much poison about that dog! As the scraping got louder, and my teeth were chattering violently (but only with the cold, as I explained to the other two), I fled upstairs again, and they followed.

“What _do_ you usually do when burglars come?” whispered Virginia.

“I don’t know. I’ve never had one before,” I moaned.

“Didn’t you once tell me you had a bell, or something of the sort?” said Ursula.

“Why, yes; I had forgotten that.” I keep a huge bell under the bed at the head, and I always intended to ring it violently out of the window if a burglar ever came. (Scrape, scrape, scrape, continued down below.) “I don’t suppose anyone on these hills would wake up to listen; but, at any rate, it might worry the burglar and send him off.”

“Let’s ring it now,” said Virginia eagerly, “and then, when he is well _outside_ the gate, of course, we’ll let the dog run out after him.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “But first I want to go into Eileen’s room, and peep out of her window and see _who_ is below. Her window is just over the scullery door, and is always open at night. If it is anyone from the district—though I don’t believe it is—I should recognise him.”

So we tip-toed into Eileen’s room, where she lay sound asleep.

“When I give the signal, you ring,” I said.

Cautiously, slowly, silently, I got my head a little further and further out of the window, shaking with ague from head to foot. And there I saw the burglar—he was Farmer Jones’s dog (alias the wolf, you remember), and he had got hold of a sardine tin that had been emptied that day. He was having a lovely time, licking that tin out, and as he licked, so it scraped and scraped on the stones. No wonder my own dog did not bark; he knew it was his ancient enemy without, and the instinct of the dog of war was to wait stealthily till the foe should get within his reach.

“Don’t ring the bell!” I whispered hoarsely, and we crept out of the room.

“I think it’s just as well Eileen did not wake,” I said, as we made ourselves a midnight cup of tea before turning in again, “for I’ve no desire to hear _this_ episode being related all day long at the kitchen door!”

* * * * *

Have you ever sat by the fire indoors, when the ground has been covered with snow, and the sky grey and heavy, till you have been “absolutely _perished_ with the cold,” and then someone has come and dragged you out (or, if you have wonderfully uncommon sense, you have dragged yourself out), and plunged right into it—a shrivelled-up martyr! After ten minutes spent in trying to sweep the snow from the path, what have you felt like?

I plunged right out into it—simply because the two girls were bragging such a deal about their own heroic fortitude in forsaking the fireside at the call of life’s stern duties, or something like that. But first of all I put on a knitted hug-me-tight; then my leather motoring undercoat; then my big cloth coat; and finally, my mackintosh. I tied on a woollen sports cap with a winter motor scarf; I turned up my coat collar, and put on a fur necklet; and, of course, I didn’t forget gaiters and warm gloves.

Then I stood on the doorstep and looked out—if you believe me, the cold went right through me, and fairly rattled my bones inside.

Still, I wasn’t going to be outdone in misery by the other two, and noticing that the bushes were actually breaking down under the load of snow, I seized a broom and sallied forth. After all, if one has to die a martyr’s death, one may as well occupy the final moments in doing useful kindnesses for one’s family.

It is some sort of solace to picture how they will eventually say, “To think of her doing all that, when——”; or, “To the last she never gave in; why only the very day——!”; or, “Ah! how often have I seen the poor dear——!” etc.

So I made for the pink rhododendron, that was suffering badly; being evergreen, its large rosettes of leaves, surrounding each flower-bud of the future, had caught and held great masses of snow; the lower branches were literally buried beneath the heavy drifts.

But as I found I couldn’t get at it without clearing a way through a three-foot bank of snow, I set to work with a spade. It sounds simple enough, I know; but unless you’ve been getting your living at snow-clearing, you would never believe what a lot there is to it, when you start to make a nice serviceable path through a drift from two to three feet deep, and six feet long.

I reached the pink rhododendron at last. Getting my broom against a main stem, I shook it gently. What a lovely shower came down! I don’t know that I needed it all over me, personally; nor was it necessary to choke up half the cutting I had just made. Still, down it came, white billows and a rain of silver powder. I never knew what snow was really like, till I shook it all over me, and the sun suddenly came out and turned the cascade to a gleaming white radiance.

Having got well smothered to start with, I decided I might just as well go on; and that I could dispense with the motor undercoat, which I left hanging on the bush. Lower down the garden I could hear the clink and scrape of shovel and spade against the stones, as the other two cleared the snow from the various little flights of rough stone steps that take you up or down, from one level of the garden to another. But I didn’t feel like clearing steps just then; it was too niggly. I wanted something bigger than that, and I somehow had a desire to work alone, so I struck a path that went up the garden, and began to work my way towards the top gate, clearing as I went.

As I bent over the smooth glistening surface, I was amazed to see the number of messages written there for those who know the language of the wilds well enough to read them! What a scurrying to and fro of little feet had been going on since the snowfall, all on the one quest—food and water! Birds innumerable had left their signatures; some I knew, some I could not identify, save that they were birds. Rabbits I could trace; stoats, too, might have made some of the writing in the snow; and there were bigger tracks—perhaps a fox.

Everywhere there were tidings of other wayfarers, other workers, other seekers—the many other dwellers who have their homes somewhere between the larch-woods and the weir. The moment before the place had seemed a frost-locked, deserted, uninhabitable waste of snow; now I saw it was teeming with life, brave, persistent, not-to-be-daunted life, that in spite of cold and hardship and privation and a universal stoppage of supplies, still set out, with unquenchable faith, on the quest for the food which they have learnt to know is invariably forthcoming, “in due season.”

The surprising thing to me is the fact that such small bodies can ever survive such a welter of snow. Aren’t they afraid they will sink down and be swallowed up in it? Have they no fear lest they lose their way, with the old landmarks obliterated? Doesn’t it strike terror to the heart when they find their doorway blocked, and themselves snowed up in burrow or hole? Yet, judging by outside evidence, it would seem that none of these things daunt them; an obstacle is merely something to be surmounted.

To my mind the most pathetic thing about it all is the fact that their chief fear seems to be fear of human beings, a dread of the very ones who could, and ought to, befriend them.

In my clearing I moved a small wooden box that had been used for seedlings, and since had lain unnoticed beside a hedge. Underneath a tiny field mouse had taken refuge. It seemed almost paralysed with terror when I suddenly lifted the box, and escape was blocked on every side by banks of snow. The poor little thing just sat up on its hind legs and looked at me most pitifully. I can’t say that I exactly cultivate mice, in an ordinary way, but—here was a fellow-creature in distress, such a little one too; I couldn’t have refused its appeal. I quickly put the box over it again, and clearing a space by the hole it had used as a door, I put down some bird-seed—I always carry something in my coat pocket for the birds—and I went away. Ten minutes later, every bit was gone.

* * * * *

Working my way round to another thicket of rhododendrons, that is a bank of purple and creamy white in June, once more I sent the silver-dust flying with my trusty broom. As one great mass came hurtling down, it so deluged me that for the moment I had to hold my breath, shut my eyes, and clutch on to a branch to keep myself from being buried under it. And then I heard a tragic whimper.

Turning round, I saw the small white dog, shaking himself out of the mass—and such a dingy-dirty object his _passé_ white coat looked against the snow! I had left him indoors, a melancholy little figure, very sorry for himself, by reason of a swelled face. He will persist in lying with his nose to the bottom crack of the back door, irrespective of wind or weather, ever hopeful that a hare or a fox may come trailing by; and then—oh joy! what a turmoil there is within (he quite fancies he is “baying”), and what a scurrying of fur and feet without!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I grew intelligent.

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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