CHAPTER XIV

XIV--AUNT MAY

The sun had set, but as yet the daylight was scarcely faded. Under the trees the fowls muttered in subdued cluckings, and occasionally one of them would flutter up into the lower branches with a squawk of effort and then settle herself with a great fluttering and swelling of feathers, and all the suggestion of a fussy matron preparing for the night--preparing only, for these early roosters sat open-eyed and watchful, as if they knew that there was no chance of sleep for them until every member of that careless crowd below had found its appointed place in the dormitory.

"We put 'em inside in the winter," remarked Aunt May, as she and Blanche paused, "but they prefer the trees. We haven't any foxes here, but I've noticed that the wild things seem to be coming back."

Blanche nodded. She was thinking how much there was to learn concerning those matters which appertained to the production of food.

"They're rather a poor lot," Aunt May continued, "but they have to forage for themselves, except for the few bits of vegetable and such things we can spare them. We've no corn or flour or meal of any kind for ourselves yet. But a farmer's wife about a mile from here has got a few acres of wheat and barley coming on, and we shall help her to harvest and take our share later. We shall be rich then," she added, with a smile.

"I'm town-bred, you know," said Blanche. "We've got an awful lot to learn, Millie and me."

"You'll learn quickly enough," was the answer. "You'll have to."

"I suppose," returned Blanche.

At the end of the orchard through which they had been passing they came to a knoll, crowned by a great elm. Round the trunk of the elm a rough seat had been fixed, and here Aunt May sat down with a sigh of relief.

"It's a blessed thing to earn your own bread day by day," she said. "It's a beautiful thing to live near the earth and feel physically tired at night. It's delightful to be primitive and agricultural, and I love it. But I have a civilized vice, Blanche. I have a store of cigarettes I stole from a shop in Harrow, and every night when it's fine I come out here after supper and smoke three; and when it's wet I smoke 'em in my own bedroom, and--I dream. But to-night I'm going to talk to you, because you want help."

She produced a cigarette case and matches from a side pocket of her jacket, lit a cigarette, inhaled the smoke with a long gasp of intensest enjoyment, and then said: "Men weren't fools, my dear; they had pockets in their coats."

"Yes?" said Blanche. She felt puzzled and a little awkward. She knew that this woman was a friend, but the girl's town-bred, objective mind was critical and embarrassed.

"Do you smoke?" asked Aunt May. "I can spare you a cigarette, though I know the time must come when there won't be any more. Still, it's a long way off yet. Bless the clever man who invented air-tight tins!"

"No, I don't smoke, thanks," replied Blanche, conventionally; and, try as she would, she could not keep some hint of stiffness out of her voice. Modern manners take a long time to influence suburban homes of the Wisteria Grove type.

"Ah! well, you miss a lot!" said Aunt May; "but you're better without it, especially now, when tobacco isn't easy to get, and will soon be impossible."

"But do you think," asked Blanche, drawing her eyebrows together, "that this sort of thing is going on always?"

"I dare say. Don't ask me, my dear; the problem's beyond me. What we poor women have got to do is to keep ourselves alive in the meantime. And that's what we've come out here to talk about. What about your mother and you two girls? Where are you going? And what are you proposing to do?"

"I don't know," said Blanche. "I--I've been trying to think."

"Good!" remarked Aunt May. "I believe you'll do. I'm doubtful about your sister."

"We'll have to work on a farm, I suppose."

"It's the only way to live."

"Only where?"

"That's what I've been trying to worry out," said Aunt May. "We do get news here, of a sort. Our girls work in Mrs Jordan's fields, and meet girls and women who come from Pinner, and the Pinner people hear news from Northwood, and the Northwood people from somewhere else; and so we get into touch with half a county. But, coming to your affairs; you see, we here are just the innermost circle. Most of the women who came from London missed this place and passed us by, thanks be!... Now, that poor unfortunate Miss Grant, down the road, had to defend herself with weapons. Fortunately she's strong."

"Is Miss Grant the awful woman with the broomstick?" asked Blanche.

"She's not really awful, my dear," said Aunt May, smiling; "she's a very good sort. A little rough in her manners, perhaps, and quite mad about the uselessness of the creatures we used to know as men, but a fine, generous, unselfish woman, if she does boast of her three murders. Did she tell you that, by the way?"

Blanche nodded.

"She would, of course; and I believe it's true; but her theory was to defend her own people. She said they'd all have died if she hadn't. I'm not sure about the ethic, but I know dear old Sally Grant meant well. However, I'm wandering--I often do when I talk like this. The point was that just this little circle here, close to London, is very thickly populated, and there's precious little food ready to be got any way; but you'll have to pass through the country beyond Pinner before you'll find a place where they'll give you work and keep you. There's a surplus in the next ring, I gather, too much labour and too little to grow. You'll have to push out into the Chilterns, out to Amersham at the nearest. It's all on the main road, of course, which is bad in a general way, because that's the road they all took. But I think if you'll cut across towards Wycombe you might, perhaps, find a place of some sort, though whether they'll feed your mother free gratis I can't say. Women are of all sorts, but this plague hasn't made 'em more friendly to one another, or perhaps it is we notice it more, and the worst of the lot are the farmers' wives and daughters who've got the land. They get turned out, though, sometimes. We hear about it. The London women have made raids; only, you see, the poor dears don't know what to do with the land when they get it, so they have to keep the few who do know to teach 'em--when they're sensible enough--the raiders, I mean. They aren't always."

"It'll be an adventure," remarked Blanche.

Aunt May threw away the very short end of her second cigarette and lighted her third. "Adventure will do you good," she said.

It was nearly dark under the elm. The things of the night were coming out. Occasionally a cockchafer would go humming past them, the bats were flitting swiftly and silently about the orchard, and presently an owl swept by in one great stride of soundless flight.

"How they are all coming back!" murmured Aunt May. "All the wild things. I never saw an owl here before this year."

"I should be frightened if you weren't here," said Blanche.

"Nothing to be frightened of, yet."

"Yet?"

"In a few years' time, perhaps. I don't know. We killed a wild cat who came after the chickens a few days ago. The cats have gone back already, and the dogs aren't so respectful as they used to be. The dogs'll interbreed, I suppose, and evolve a common form--strike some kind of average in a beast which will be somewhere near the ancestral type, smaller, probably, I don't know. It's a wonderful world, and very interesting. I could almost wish man wouldn't return for twenty years or so--just to see how much of his handiwork Nature could undo in the interval. I often think about it out here in the evenings."

"I wish I knew more about it," said Blanche timidly. "Are there any books, do you know, that----"

"You won't want books, my dear. Keep your eyes open and think."

They lapsed into silence again. The third cigarette was finished, but Aunt May gave no indication of a desire to get back to the house, and Blanche's mind was so excited with all the new ideas which were pouring in upon her that she had forgotten her tiredness.

"It's awfully interesting," she said at last. "It's all so different. Mother and Millie hate it, and they'd like all the old things back; but I don't think I would."

"You're all right. You'll do," replied her companion. "You're one of the new sort, though you might never have found it out if it hadn't been for the plague. Now, your sister will do one of two things, in my opinion; either she'll stop in some place where there's a man--there's one at Wycombe, by the way--and have children, or she'll turn religious."

Blanche was about to ask a question, but Aunt May stopped her. "Never mind about the man, my dear," she said. "You'll learn quickly enough. It's like Heaven now, you see--no marrying or giving in marriage. With one man to every thousand women or so, what can you expect? It's no good kicking against it. It's got to be. That's where Fanny----" She broke off suddenly, with a little snort of impatience. "I think to-night's an exception," she went on. "I like talking to you, and one simply can't talk to Allie yet, so just to-night I'll have one more." She took out her cigarette case with a touch of impatience.

It was dark under the elm now, and she had to hold up her cigarette case close to her face in order to see the contents. "Two more," she announced. "It's a festival, and for once I can speak my mind to some one. An imprudence, perhaps, like this habit of smoking, but I shall probably never see you again, and I'm sure you won't tell."

"Oh, no!" interposed Blanche eagerly.

"You're not tired? You don't want to go to bed?"

"Not a bit. I love being out here."

"I can't see you, but I know you're speaking the truth," said Aunt May, after a pause. "In the darkness and silence of the night I will make a confession. I look weather-worn and fifty, I know, but I feel absurdly romantic, only there's no man in this case. I used to write novels, my dear--an absurd thing for any spinster to do, but they paid, and I've got the itch for self-expression. That's the one outlet I miss in this new world of ours. Sally Grant and I can't agree, and, in any case, she wants to do all the talking. And sometimes I'm idiot enough to go on writing little bits even now when I have become a capable, practical woman with at least four lives dependent upon me. Well, it shows, anyhow, that we writing women weren't all fools...." She hung on that for a moment or two, and then continued.

"Are you religious?"

"I don't know--I suppose so. We always went to Church at home," said Blanche. "I thought every one was, almost. Not quite like Mrs Pollard, of course."

"Oh, well!" said Aunt May. "There's no harm and a lot of good in being religious, if you go about it in the right way. I don't want to change your opinions, my dear. It's just a question to me of the right way. And I can't see that Fanny's way is right. Here we are, and we've got to make the best of it; and to my mind that means facing life, and not shutting yourself into one room with a Bible and spending half your time on your knees. Fanny never was good for much. She brought up Alfred--my nephew, you know--with only one idea, and she stuffed him so full of holiness that the English Church couldn't hold him, and he had to work some of it off by going over to Rome. He thought he'd have better chances of saintship there. He was a poor, pale thing, anyway. Of course, that was anathema to Fanny. She might have forgiven him for committing a murder, but to become a Roman Catholic----! Oh, Lord! She's been praying for him ever since. And, my dear, what difference can it make? Alfred's apostasy, I mean. Do you think it matters what particular form of worship or pettifogging details of belief you adopt? Why can't the Churches take each other for granted, and be generous enough to suppose that all roads lead to Heaven, which is, according to all accounts, a much better place than Rome? But, oh! above all, if you have a religion, do be practical! Come out and do your work, instead of sighing and psalm-singing, and wearying dumb Heaven with fulsome praise and lamentations of your unworthiness, as if you were trying to propitiate a rich customer!

"There, my dear, I won't say any more. My last cigarette's done, and wasted, because I was too excited to enjoy it. I know I've been disloyal; but it's my temperament. I could slap Fanny sometimes. And she shan't have Allie.... It's the night that has affected me. To-morrow I shall be just as practical as ever, and you'll forget that you've seen this side of me. Come along. We must go to bed."

"This is the greatest night of my life," thought Blanche as they walked back in silence to the house.

Even when she was in bed, she did not go to sleep at once. She lay and listened to the heavy breathing of her mother and Millie, and she wondered. Everything, indeed, was different, but everybody was just the same, only, in some curious way, individualities seemed more pronounced.

Could it be that everybody was more natural, that there was less restraint?

Blanche was not introspective. She did not test the theory on herself. She thought of the women she had met that day, and of her mother and Millie.

She fell asleep, determined to be more like Aunt May.

XV--FROM SUDBURY TO WYCOMBE

1

Allie knocked on the Goslings' door at sunrise the next morning, and Blanche, who had come to bed two hours after her mother and sister, was the only one to respond. She woke with the feeling that she had something important to do, and that the affair was in some way pleasant and inspiring.

Millie was not easily roused. She had slept heavily, and did not approve the suggestion that she should get up and dress herself.

"All right, B., all right!" she mumbled, and cuddled down under the bedclothes like a dormouse into its straw.

"Oh! do get up!" urged Blanche, impatiently, and at last resorted to physical force.

"What is the matter?" snapped Millie, struggling to maintain her hold of the blankets. "Why can't you leave me alone?"

"Because it's time to get up, lazy!" said Blanche, continuing the struggle.

"Well, I said I'd get up in a minute."

"Well, get up then."

"In a minute."

"No--now!"

"Oh, bother!" said Millie.

Blanche succeeded at last in obtaining possession of the blankets.

"You'll wake mother!" was Millie's last, desperate shaft.

"I'm going to try," replied Blanche.

Millie sat up in the bed and wondered vaguely where she was. These scenes had often been enacted at Wisteria Grove, and her mind had gone back to those delightful days of peace and security. When full consciousness returned to her, she was half inclined to cry, and more than half inclined to go to sleep again.

Mrs Gosling was quite as difficult.

"What's the time?" was her first question.

"I don't know," said Blanche.

"I'm sure it's not seven," murmured Mrs Gosling.

Millie, still sitting on the bed, wondered whether Blanche would let her get to the blankets which were tumbled on the floor a few feet away.

"No, you don't!" exclaimed Blanche, anticipating the attempt.

Finally she lost her temper and shook her mother vigorously.

At that, Mrs Gosling sat up suddenly and stared at her. "What in 'eaven's name's wrong, gel?" she asked. Her instinct told her with absolute certainty that it was still the middle of the night by Wisteria Grove standards.

"Oh! my goodness! I'm going to have my hands full with you two!" broke out Blanche impatiently. Her imagination pictured for her in that instant how great the trouble would be. She would never be able to wake them up....

They took the road before eight o'clock. Aunt May was generous in the matter of eggs and fruit, and she left her many urgent duties to point the way for the inexperienced explorers.

"Get right out as far as you can," was her parting word of advice.

They did not see Mrs Pollard again. She was still in bed when they set out.

2

Despite the promise of another cloudless day, none of the three travellers set out in high spirits. To all of them, even to Blanche, it seemed a return to weariness and pain to start out once more pushing that abominable truck. That truck represented all their troubles. It had become associated with all the discomforts they had endured since they left the Putney house. It indicated the paucity of their possessions, and yet it was intolerably heavy to push. After their brief return to the comfort and stability of a home and natural food, this adventuring out into the inhospitable country appeared more hopeless than ever. If they could have gone without the truck, they might, at least, have avoided that feeling of horrible certainty. They might have cheated themselves into the belief that they would return. The truck was the brand of their vagabondage.

Mrs Gosling did not spare her lamentations concerning the hopelessness of their endeavour, and gave it as her opinion that they had been most heartlessly treated by Aunt May.

"Turning out a woman of my age into the roads," she grumbled. "She might 'ave kept us a day or two, I should 'ave thought. It ain't as if we were beggars. We could 'ave paid for what we 'ad."

She had, indeed, made the suggestion and been repulsed. Aunt May had firmly put the offer on one side without explanation. She understood that explanations would be wasted on Mrs Gosling.

Millie was inclined to agree with her mother.

Blanche, at the handle, did not interrupt the statement of their grievances. She was occupied with the problem of the future, trying to think out some plan in her own confused inconsecutive way.

Their progress was tediously slow. Against the combined brake of the truck and Mrs Gosling, they did not average two miles an hour; and even before they came to Pinner it was becoming obvious to the two girls that they might as well let their mother ride on the trolly as allow her to lean her weight upon it as she walked.

They took the road through Wealdstone to avoid the hill and found that they were still in the track of one wing of the foraging army which had preceded them. That first rush of emigrants had ravaged the stores and houses as locusts will ravage a stretch of country. The suburb of regular villas and prim shops had been completely looted. Doors stood open and windows were smashed; the spread of ugly houses lay among the fields like an unwholesome eruption, awaiting the healing process of Nature. Wealdstone also was deserted by humanity. The flood had swept on towards the open country.

But as they approached Pinner the signs of devastation and desertion began to give way. Here and there women could be seen working in the fields; one or two children scuttled away before the approach of the Goslings and hid in the hedges, children who had evidently grown furtive and suspicious, intimidated by the experiences of the past two months; and when the outlying houses were reached--detached suburban villas, once occupied by relatively wealthy middle-class employers--it was evident that efforts were being made to restore the wreckage of kitchen gardens.

The Goslings had reached the point at which the wave had broken after its great initial energy was spent. Somewhere about this fifteen-mile limit, varying somewhat according to local conditions, the real disintegration of the crowd had begun. As the numerous tokens of the road had shown, a great number of women and children--possibly one-fifth of the whole crowd--had died of starvation and disease before any harbour was reached. From this fifteen-mile circle outwards, an increasing number had been stayed in their flight by the opportunities of obtaining food. Work was urgently demanded for the future, but the determining factor was the present supply of food, and the constriction of immediate supply had decided the question of how great a proportion of the women and children should remain. Here, about Pinner, was more land than the limited number of workers could till, but little of it was arable, and this year there would be almost no harvest of grain.

Vaguely, Blanche realized this. She remembered Aunt May's advice to keep her eyes open, and looking about her as she walked she found little promise of security in the grass fields and the rare signs of human activity.

Mrs Gosling, eager to find some home at any price, expressed her usual optimistic opinion with regard to the value of money. She saw signs of life again, at last, conditions familiar to her. She thought that they were returning once more to some kind of recognizable civilization, and began, with some renewal of her old vigour, to advise that they should find an hotel or inn and take "a good look round" before going any further.

Millie, heartened by her mother's belief, was of much the same opinion, and Blanche was summoned from the pole to listen to the proposition.

She shook her head stubbornly.

"I'm not going to argue it out all over again," she said. "You can just look round and see for yourselves that there's no food to be got here. We must get further out."

Mrs Gosling refused to be convinced, and advanced her superior knowledge of the world to support her judgment of the case.

"Oh! very well," said Blanche, at last. "Come on to the inn and see for yourselves."

The inn, however, was deserted. All its available supply of food, solid and liquid, had long been exhausted, and the gardenless house had offered no particular attractions as a residence. Houses were cheap in that place, the whole population of Pinner, including children, did not exceed three hundred persons.

They found a woman working in a garden near by, and she, with perhaps unnecessary harshness, warned them that they could not stay in the village. "There's not enough food for us as it is," she said, and made some reference to "silly Londoners."

That was an expression with which the Goslings were to become very familiar in the near future.

The appeal for pity fell on deaf ears. Mrs Gosling learned that she was only one of many thousands who had made the same appeal.

The sun was high in the sky as they trudged out of Pinner on the road towards Northwood. It was then Blanche suggested that her mother should always ride on the trolly, except when they were facing a hill; and after a few weak protestations the suggestion was accepted. The trolly was lightened of various useless articles of furniture--a grudging sacrifice on the part of Mrs Gosling--and the party pushed on at a slightly improved pace.

After her disappointment in Pinner, Mrs Gosling's interest in life began rapidly to decline. Seated in her truck, she fell into long fits of brooding on the past. She was too old and too stereotyped to change, the future held no hope for her, and as the meaning and purpose of her existence faded, the life forces within her surely and ever more rapidly ebbed. Reality to her became the discomfort of the sun's heat, the dust of the road, the creak and scream of the trolly wheels. She was incapable of relating herself to the great scheme of life, her consciousness was limited, as it had always been limited, to her immediate surroundings. She saw herself as a woman outrageously used by fate, but to fate she gave no name; the very idea, indeed, was too abstract to be appreciated by her. Blanche, Millie and that horrible truck were all that was left of her world, and in spirit she still moved in the beloved, familiar places of her suburban home.

3

As the Goslings trudged out into the Chilterns they came into new conditions. Soon they found over-crowding in place of desolation. The harvest was ripening and in a month's time the demand for labour would almost equal the supply, for the labour offered was quite absurdly unskilled and ten women would be required to perform the work of one man equipped with machines. But at the end of July the surplus of women, almost exclusively Londoners, had no employment and little food, and many were living on grass, nettles, leaves, any green stuff they could boil and eat, together with such scraps of meat and vegetables as they could steal or beg. Their experiments with wild green stuffs often resulted in some form of poisoning, and dysentery and starvation were rapidly increasing the mortality among them. Nevertheless, in Rickmansworth houses were still at a premium, and many of those who camped perforce in fields or by the roadside were too enfeebled by town-life to stand the exposure of the occasional cold, wet nights. The majority of the women in this ring were those who had been too weak to struggle on. They represented the class least fitted to adapt themselves to the new conditions. The stronger and more capable had persisted, and left these congested areas behind them; and it was evident that in a very few months a balance between labour and supply would be struck by the relentless extermination of the weakest by starvation and disease.

Blanche, if she was unable to grasp the problem which was being so inevitably solved by the forces of natural law, was at least able to recognize clearly enough that she and her two dependents must not linger in the district to which they had now come. Aunt May had warned her that she must push out as far as Amersham at the nearest, but Millie was too tired and footsore to go much further than Rickmansworth that night, and after a fruitless search for shelter they camped out half a mile from the town in the direction of Chorley Wood.

They made some kind of a shield from the weather by emptying and tilting the trolly, and they hid their supply of food behind them at the lowest point of this species of lean-to roof. The two girls had realized that that supply would soon be raided if the fact of its existence were to become known. They had been the object of much scrutiny as they passed, and their appearance of well-being had prompted endless demands for food, from that pitiful crowd of emaciated women and children. It had been a demand quickly put on one side by lying. Their applicants found it only too easy to believe that the Goslings had no food hidden in the truck.

"I hated to refuse some of 'em," Blanche said as they carefully hid what food was left to them, before turning in for the night, "but what good would our little bit have done among all that lot? It would have been gone in half a jiff."

"Well, of course," agreed Millie.

Mrs Gosling had taken little notice of the starving crowd. "We've got nothin' to give you," was her one form of reply. She might have been dealing with hawkers in Wisteria Grove.

She was curiously apathetic all that afternoon and evening, and raised only the feeblest protestation against the necessity for sleeping in the open air. But she was very restless during the night, her limbs twitched and she moved continually, muttering and sometimes crying out. And as the three women were all huddled together, partly to make the most of their somewhat insufficient lean-to, and partly because they were afraid of the terrors of the open air, both Blanche and Millie were constantly aroused by their mother's movements. Once they heard her calling urgently for "George."

"Mother's odd, isn't she?" whispered Blanche after one such disturbance. "Do you think she's going to be ill?"

"Shouldn't wonder," muttered Millie. "Who wouldn't be?"

In the morning Blanche was very careful with their food. For breakfast they ate only part of a tin of condensed beef between them--Mrs Gosling indeed ate hardly anything. The eggs which they had brought from Sudbury they reserved, chiefly because they had neither water nor fire.

They drank from a stream, later, and at midday Blanche and Millie each ate one of the eggs raw. Mrs Gosling refused all food on this occasion. She had been very quiet all the morning, and had made little complaint when she had been forced to walk the many hills which they were now encountering.

Blanche was uneasy and tried to induce her mother to talk. "Do you feel bad, mother?" she asked continually.

"I wish I could get 'ome," was all the reply she received.

"She'll be all right when we can get settled somewhere," grumbled Millie. "If such a time ever comes."

4

They came to Amersham in the afternoon. The signs of misery and starvation were here less marked. They were approaching the outer edge of this ring of compression, having passed through the node at Rickmansworth. The faint relief of pressure was evidenced to some extent in the attitude of the people they addressed. It is true that no immediate hope of food and employment were held out to them, but on the one hand Blanche's inquiries were answered with less acerbity and on the other they were less besieged by importunate demands for charity. Blanche gave an egg to one precocious girl of thirteen or so, who insisted on helping them to push the truck uphill, and she and Millie watched the deft way in which the child broke the shell at one end and sucked out the contents. Their own methods had been both unclean and wasteful.

They turned off the Aylesbury Road, towards High Wycombe late in the afternoon and about a mile from Amersham came to a farm where they made their last inquiry that day.

Blanche saw signs of life in the outbuildings and went to investigate, leaving Millie and her mother to guard the truck. She found three women and a girl of fourteen or so milking. For some minutes she stood watching them, the women, after one glance at her, proceeding with their work without paying her any further attention. But, at last, the eldest of the three rose from her stool with a sigh of relief, picked up her wooden bucket of milk, gave the cow a resounding slap on the side, and then, turning to Blanche, said, "Well, my gal, what's for you?"

"Will you change two pints of milk for a small tin of tongue?" asked Blanche. It was the first time she had offered any of their precious tinned meats in exchange for other food, but she wanted milk for her mother, who had hardly eaten anything that day.

The two other women and the girl looked round and regarded Blanche with the first signs of interest they had shown.

"Tongue, eh?" said the older woman. "Where from did you get tongue, my gal?"

"London," replied Blanche tersely.

"When did you leave there?" asked the woman, and then Blanche was engaged in a series of searching questions respecting the country she had passed through.

"You can have the milk if you've anything to put it in," said the woman at last, and Blanche went to fetch the tongue and the two bottles that they had had from Aunt May.

The bottles had to be scalded, a precaution that had not occurred to Blanche, and one of the other women was sent to carry out the operation.

"Well, your tale don't tell us much," said the woman of the farm, "but we always pass the news here, now. Where are you going to sleep to-night?"

Blanche shrugged her shoulders.

"You can sleep here in the outhouses, if you've a mind to," said the woman, "but I warn you we get a crowd. Silly Londoners like yourself for the most part, but we find a use for 'em somehow, though I'd give the lot for three labourers."

She paused and twisted her mouth on one side reflectively. "Ah! well," she went on with a sigh, "no use grieving over them that's gone; all I was goin' to say was, if you sleep here you'd better keep an eye on what food you've got with you. My lot'll have it before you can say knife, if they get half a chance."

"It isn't us girls, me and my sister," explained Blanche. "It's my mother. She's bad, I'm afraid. If she could sleep in your kitchen...? She wouldn't steal anything."

After a short hesitation the woman consented.

Yet neither the glory of being once more within the four walls of a house, nor the refreshment of the milk which she drank readily enough, seemed appreciably to rouse Mrs Gosling's spirits.

The woman of the farm, a kindly enough creature, plied the old lady with questions, but received few and confused answers in reply. Mrs Gosling seemed dazed and stupid. "A touch of the sun," the farmer's widow thought.

"The sun's been cruel strong the past week," she said, "but she'll be all right in a day or two, get her to shelter."

"Ah! that's the trouble," said Blanche.

That night the farmer's widow said no more on that subject. She allowed the three Goslings to sleep in an upstair room, in which there was one small bed for the mother, and the two girls slept on the floor. Exchanging confidence for confidence, they brought their truck into the kitchen; and then the farmer's widow proceeded to lock up for the night, an elaborate business, which included the fastening of all ground-floor windows and shutters.

"It's a thievin' crowd we've got about here," she explained, "and you can't blame them or anyone when there ain't enough food to go round. But we have to be careful for 'em. Let 'em go their own way and they'd eat up everything in a week and then starve. It looks like you're being hard on 'em, but it's for their own good. There's some, of course," she went on, "as you have got to get shut of. Only yesterday I had to send one of 'em packing. A Jew woman she was, called 'erself Mrs Isaacson or something. She was a caution."

Blanche wondered idly if this were the same Mrs Isaacson who had stayed too long with Aunt May.

The woman of the farm roused the Goslings at sunrise, and she, like Aunt May, had a brisk, practical, morning manner.

She gave the travellers no more food, but when they were nearly ready to take the road again she gave them one valuable piece of information.

"If I was you," she said, "I'd make through Wycombe straight along the road here, and go up over the hill to Marlow. Mind you, they won't let every one stop there. But you look two healthy gals enough and it's getting on towards harvest when there'll be work as you can do."

"Marlow?" repeated Blanche, fixing the name in her memory.

The farmer's widow nodded. "There's a man there," she said. "A queer sort, by all accounts. Not like Sam Evans, the butcher at Wycombe, he ain't. Seems as this Marlow chap don't have no truck with gals, except setting 'em to work. However, time'll show. He may change his mind yet."

They had some difficulty with Mrs Gosling. She refused feebly to leave the house. "I ain't fit to go out," she complained, and when they insisted she asked if they were going home.

"Best say 'yes,'" whispered the woman of the farm. "The sun's got to her head a bit. She'll be all right when you get her to Marlow."

Blanche accepted the suggestion, and by this subterfuge Mrs Gosling was persuaded into the truck. The girl found the ruins of an umbrella, which they rigged up to protect her from the sun.

Blanche and Millie were quite convinced now that their mother was suffering from a slight attack of sunstroke.

Both the girls were still footsore, and one of Millie's boots had worn into a hole, but they had a definite objective at last, and only some ten or twelve miles to travel before reaching it.

"We shall be there by midday," said Blanche, hopefully.

Unconsciously, every one was using a new measure of time.

XVI--THE YOUNG BUTCHER OF HIGH WYCOMBE

1

Near Wycombe a woman rose from under the hedge as the Goslings approached, and came out into the middle of the road. She was a stout, florid woman, whose age might have been anything between forty and fifty. Her gait and the droop of her shoulders, rather than the flaccidity of her rather loose skin, gave her the appearance of being past middle age.

"Goot morning," she said as the Goslings came up. "If it iss no inconvenience I would like to come with you." She spoke with a foreign accent, thickening her final consonants and giving a different value to some of her vowels.

"Where to?" asked Blanche curtly.

"Ah! that! what does it matter?" returned the woman. "I have been living with a farmer's wife further back along the road there. But she was not company for me. She was common. Now I see that you and your mother are not common. And I do not care to live with farmers' wives. But where we go? Does it matter? We all go to find work in the fields--aristocrat as much as peasant. But iss it not better that we who are not peasants should go together?"

Millie giggled surreptitiously, and Mrs Gosling appeared conscious of the fact that some one was addressing them.

"We're goin' 'ome," she remarked, and Millie gently prodded her in the back.

"Goin' 'ome," repeated Mrs Gosling firmly.

"Ach! You are lucky. There are few that have homes now," replied the strange woman. "I had a home, once, how long ago. Now, during two months, I have no home." She was evidently on the verge of tears.

"Mother's got a touch of the sun," Blanche said in a low voice, "and we have to pretend we're going home. You needn't tell her we're not."

"Have no fear," replied the stranger. "I am all that is most discreet, yes."

Blanche hardened her heart. This woman took too much for granted. "I don't see it's any use your coming with us," she said.

"Ach! we others, we should cling together," said the stranger, with a large gesture.

"We're nobody," replied Blanche, curtly.

"It iss well to say that. I know. There iss good reason. I, too, must tell the common people that I am a nobody, I call myself, even, Mrs Isaacson. But between us there iss no need to say what iss not true. I can see what you are. Although I am not English, I have lived many years already in England, and I can see. It iss well that we cling together? Yes?"

"Oh!" burst out Blanche. "You're Mrs Isaacson, are you? I've heard of you."

For one moment Mrs Isaacson's fine eyes seemed to look inwards in an instantaneous review of her past. "Ach! so! Then we are friends already," she said cautiously.

"I heard of you from Aunt May," said Blanche, and the faint air of respect with which she pronounced the name did not escape the notice of the alert Jewess.

"Ach! the so dear and so clever Auntie May," she said. "But she iss too kind, and work so hard while her sister do always nothing. See, I will help you to draw your poor mother who has a touch of the sun. You and I at the handle and your beautiful sister to push, while we talk a little of the clever Auntie May. Yes?"

Blanche had been forewarned. She could only put one construction on the little she had heard of Mrs Isaacson. But the Jewess's manner no less than her conversation was subtly flattering. Moreover, she had made no appeal for help; finally there was a certain urgency about her, a force of will which Blanche found it difficult to resist. And as the girl still hesitated Mrs Isaacson bravely seized her side of the trolly handle and the procession moved on.

The Goslings found a use for her when they came to the drop of Amersham Hill, going down into High Wycombe. Blanche proposed that Mrs Gosling should walk down, but the old lady did not seem to understand her. She looked perplexed and kept saying, "I don't remember this road. Are you sure we're goin' right, Blanche?"

"Ah! she must not walk in this heat," put in Mrs Isaacson. "We three can manage very well." And, indeed, although she manifestly suffered greatly from the exertion, the Jewess was of very great assistance in retarding the speed of the trolly as they made the perilous descent.

After that there could be no question of calmly telling her to go her own way.

By the time they had crossed the almost deserted town--at that hour nearly all the women were either in their houses or working in gardens and fields--and had found their way to the Marlow road, Mrs Isaacson had quite become one of the party, and by no means the least energetic.

"We'll have something to eat and some milk, when we get through the town," said Blanche as they faced the long hill up to Handy Cross.

"Presently, presently," replied the heaving Mrs Isaacson, as though food were of little importance to her, but accepting the admission that she had earned the right to share equally with the others.

Their first burst of energy after they had faced the ascent brought them to the gates of Wycombe Abbey, and there they decided to rest and lunch, blissfully ignorant of the long climb which lay before them.

"It will be nice and quiet here in the shade," suggested Mrs Isaacson.

2

The old conventions would not have suffered them to sit and eat thus under the walls, at the very gates of Wycombe Abbey. Their clothes and their boots were wearing badly, and Mrs Isaacson, at least, was not too clean. It was noticeable, however, that, despite the dryness of the weather, little dust clung to them. The surface of the roads had not been pounded and crushed into powder during the past six weeks by the constant passage of wheeled traffic, and even in the tracks frequented by farm carts the roads were stained with green. Indeed, everything was greener than in the old days, everything was more vigorous. Whether because the year had been favourable, or because it was relieved from the burden of choking dust which it had had to endure in other years from May onwards, the vegetation in hedges and by the wayside appeared to grow more strongly and with a greater self-assertion. And by contrast with this vigour and cleanness of plant life, the four women in their tumbled clothes and untidy hats, feeble and unsightly remnants of forgotten fashion, were as much out of place as if they had been set down in ancient Greece. The dowdy foolishness of their apparel marked them out from every other living thing about them, they were intruders, despoilers of beauty.

Some dim consciousness of this came to Blanche.

They had spoken little as they ate--Mrs Gosling would touch nothing but milk, and Mrs Isaacson strove desperately and with some success to control the greed that showed in the concentrated eagerness of her eyes and the grasping crook of her fingers--and when they had finished, lingering in the relief of the shade, they were still silent. It seemed as if the first word spoken must necessarily hasten the continuation of their journey.

"Oh! bother this old hat," said Blanche at last. "I'm going to take mine off," and she drew out the solitary pin which remained to her and cast the hat into the ditch.

"That won't do it any good," remarked Millie but she, too, took off her hat with a sigh of relief.

"I'm going to chuck hats," said Blanche. "What's the good of 'em?"

Mrs Isaacson looked doubtful. "They are a protection from the sun," she said.

"Allie never wore a hat, and she didn't come to any harm," returned Blanche.

"No?" said Mrs Isaacson, and looked thoughtful.

Millie was running her fingers through the masses of her red-brown hair, loosening it and lifting it from her head.

"It is a relief," she remarked. "My head gets so hot."

"Ah!" said Mrs Isaacson, "and what beautiful hair! It does not seem right to hide it. I haf a comb in my bag. It is almost all I haf left. Let me now comb your beautiful hair for you."

"Oh! don't you bother," said Millie sheepishly, but she allowed herself to be persuaded. "Don't lose the hair-pins," she warned her newly-found lady's maid.

"It seems so funny out here in the open road," giggled Millie.

Mrs Isaacson's praise was fulsome.

Blanche watched without comment. Mrs Gosling was plunged in meditation. She was involved in an immense problem relating to the housekeeping at Wisteria Grove. She was debating whether the lace curtains at the front windows could be washed at home when they went back.

Suddenly the attention of the three younger women was caught by unnatural sounds that came from the further side of the wall against which they were leaning--sounds of voices, laughing and singing, the crunch of wheels and the stamping of horses.

The two girls jumped to their feet. Mrs Isaacson rose more deliberately, with a grunt of expostulation. Mrs Gosling was in a world far removed and continued to debate her problem.

Millie's hands were fumbling at her hair, and Blanche was first at the gate.

"Oh! my!" she exclaimed. "Why, whatever...."

"Goody!" squealed Millie, still struggling with her loose mane.

3

The centre and object of the curious crowd which moved slowly down the drive was a landau and pair. The horses were decorated as if for a May-day fête, grotesquely, foolishly decorated with roses, syringa and buttercups made into shapeless bunches and tied to the harness. Three or four women walked at the horses' heads, leading them with absurdly beflowered ropes.

Round the landau a dozen girls and young women were dancing, chattering, singing, laughing; constantly turning to the occupant of the carriage, for whose benefit the whole performance was being conducted. Some of them had their necks and breasts bare, and all appeared to be frankly shameless. They twisted and danced with clumsy eagerness, threw themselves about, screamed and shrieked, unaware of any observer but the one whose notice they were seeking to attract. They were graceless, civilized savages; Bacchantes who had never known the beauty of unconscious abandonment. There was the ugliness of conscious purpose in their every attitude, and no trace of the freedom that comes from careless rapture.

In the carriage a man and a woman were sitting side by side. The man was young, with strong claims to physical beauty--tall, broad-shouldered, swarthy, with boldly modelled features and heavily lidded eyes. But his skin was coarse; the bulk of his body was too gross for clean, muscular strength; his curly, well-oiled hair was thinning at the temples; his loose mouth leered and gaped. He was dressed in a suit of broadly-patterned tweed, his great red fingers were covered with rings, he wore a heavy gold bangle on each thick, round wrist, and a sweet, frail rose was thrust into his black and greasy hair.

The woman beside him was the typical courtesan of the ages, low-browed and full-lipped. Her eyes were eloquent with the subtleties of love, with invitation, retreat, fear and desire. Had she been dressed becomingly she would have been beautiful; but she was English and modern, and her great meaningless hat and senseless garments were of the fashion that had been in vogue just before the plague. This reigning sultana and her lover were more incongruous in that setting than the two dishevelled, travel-worn girls, who retreated timidly to let the landau pass out between the great iron gates.

The Bacchantes eyed the Goslings with obvious disfavour, but the beauty in the landau seemed unaware of their presence until her lord's attention was attracted by the sight of Millie's hair--it was all down again, rippling and spreading to her waist.

The young butcher had been lolling back in a corner of his carriage, magnificently indolent, sure of worship; but his satiety was pierced by the sight of that flaming mane. He sat up and looked at Millie with the experienced eyes which had served him so well in his judgment of cattle.

"'Ere, 'alf a jiff," he commanded the nymphs at his horses' bridles, and the carriage was stopped.

Millie, covered with shame, shrank back, and cowered behind Blanche, who threw up her chin and met the butcher's eyes with all the contempt of which she was capable--little enough, perhaps, for she, too, was weak with unreasoning terror. Behind their backs the Jewess grimaced her scorn of them.

"You needn't be afraid of me--I ain't goin' to 'urt yer----" began the butcher, but his lady interrupted him.

Her fine eyes grew bright with anger. "If you stop here, I shall get out," she said, and her inflexion was not that of the people.

The butcher visibly hesitated. It may be that this chain had held him too long and was beginning to gall him, but he looked at her and wavered.

"No 'arm in stoppin'," he muttered. "Pass the news an' that."

"Are you going on?" demanded the beauty fiercely.

"All right, all right," he returned sullenly. "You needen' get so blasted 'uffy about it, old gal. Oh, gow on, you!" he added to the nymphs. "Wot the 'ell are yer starin' at?"

As the landau moved on, he looked back once at Millie.

4

"What a brute," said Blanche when the procession had passed on down the hill towards Wycombe.

"How he stared at my hair," said Millie, with a giggle. "I did try to get it up, but it's that stubborn with the heat or something."

"Lucky for us he had that creature with him," commented Blanche.

Millie assented without fervour. She was bold enough now the danger had passed.

Mrs Isaacson looked from one to the other and attempted no criticism of the adventure.

"You must let me do up your beautiful hair," she said to the simpering Millie.

Millie was grateful. "It is kind of you, Mrs Isaacson, I'm sure," she said. "My hair is a trouble. I sometimes think I'll cut it all off and be done with it...."

She appeared excited and chatted incessantly while the hair-dressing continued, and Blanche restored the remains of their meal to the trolly.

With some difficulty they succeeded in getting Mrs Gosling back into her carriage. She had taken no notice of the procession, but as they were starting again she awoke from her abstraction to ask: "When d'you expect we'll be 'ome, Blanche? I've been thinkin' about them curtains in the drawin'-room...."

"We'll be home in an hour or two, now," Blanche said, reassuringly. She did not know what a struggle awaited them before they should top the hill at Handy Cross.

Mrs Isaacson had forsaken her place at the pole. "I shall be able to push more strongly behind," she had said, but despite the theoretical gain in mechanical advantage obtained by the new arrangement, the hill seemed never-ending. They had to rest continually, and always they looked with increasing irritation at the quiet figure in the trolly, chief cause of their distress.

"I believe she could walk all right," Millie broke out at last.

"If it was for a little way, it would help," commented Mrs Isaacson.

But when Blanche put the proposition to her mother, Mrs Gosling seemed unable to comprehend it, and pity influenced them to renew the struggle.

So they toiled on with growing impatience until they reached level ground again; and presently, looking down over the long slope of the valley, saw, two miles and a half away, the spire of Marlow Church.

They rested under a hedge for a time, and when they started again Millie followed her sister's example and discarded her hat. Blanche, with a certain courage of opinion, had left hers under the walls of Wycombe Abbey, but Millie's hat found a place in the trolly.

The ease of the long descent permitted a renewal of conversation, and Mrs Isaacson and Millie talked in undertones as they made their way down towards Marlow. Blanche took little notice of them; she was struggling perplexedly with the problems of life. Mrs Gosling's presence was negligible.

"That was a very handsome fellow in the carriage," remarked Mrs Isaacson suddenly, "I think you do well not to go near that place again." Her fine eyes fixedly regarded the broad, rusty back of Mrs Gosling and the broken ribs of her umbrella.

Millie simpered. "Oh! I should be safe enough. His wife'd see to that."

"She was not his wife," returned Mrs Isaacson. "Men would not marry now that they are so few."

"Well! there's a thing to say!" exclaimed Millie on a note of expostulation, interested nevertheless.

"It iss true," continued Mrs Isaacson. "I haf heard of this handsome young fellow. He iss a butcher, and he goes every day to kill the sheep and cows, because the women do not like that work. And he iss very strong, and clever also. He teach a few of the women how to cut up the sheep and the cows. And he iss much admired, it iss of course, by all the young women; but he does not marry because he is one man among so many women, and it would not be right that he should love only one, for so there would be so few children and the world would die. Yes! But he has for a time one who iss favourite, for another time another favourite. And that iss why I warn you not to return. Because I see that he admire your so beautiful hair. And I see that if you had not been so modest and so good, and hide behind your sister, he would have come down from his carriage and put you up there beside him. And he would have said to that bold ugly woman. 'Go, I tire of you, I will haf beside me this one who iss young and beautiful and has hair of gold.' It iss not safe for you, there."

"Oh! I say," commented Millie.

"It iss true," nodded Mrs Isaacson, with intensest conviction.

"Oh! well, thank goodness, I'm not one of that sort," said Millie, warm in the knowledge of her virtue.

"Truly not," assented Mrs Isaacson. "You must not be displeased that I warn you. It iss not your goodness that I doubt. It iss that this man iss so powerful. He iss able to do what he wishes. He iss a king."

"Goody!" was the mark of surprise with which Millie punctuated this remarkable piece of information, and for several yards they trudged on in silence.

But Millie soon revived this fascinating subject by saying thoughtfully, "Well, you don't catch me over there again."

"Truly not. It iss not wise," agreed Mrs Isaacson, and proceeded to enlarge upon Millie's dangerous beauty.

It was a topic entirely new to Millie. She simpered and giggled, disclaimed her attractions, protested that Mrs Isaacson was "getting at" her, and became so absorbed in the fascination of her disavowal that she forgot her weariness, her tender feet--naked to the road in two places--and all her discouragements. She walked with a more conscious air, straightening her back and lifting her head. The blood moved more freely in her veins, and she presently became so vivacious in her replies that Blanche was aroused to a sense of something unfamiliar. She checked the trolly and looked back at her sister, past the quiet brooding figure of Mrs Gosling.

"What is it, Mill?" she asked.

"Oh! nothing!" replied Millie. "We were just talking."

"Seem to be enjoying yourselves," said Blanche.

"We were saying that we shall soon now arrive at some place where we can rest. Yes?" put in Mrs Isaacson, and thus established a ground of confidence between herself and Millie.

"P'raps. I dunno!" returned Blanche. She sighed and looked round her.

In the fields between them and Marlow they could see here and there little figures stooping and straightening.

"Ooh!" exclaimed Millie, suddenly.

"What?" asked Blanche.

"There's another man," said Millie, pointing. "We'd better scoot!"

But they made no attempt to put such an impossible plan into action. The man had evidently seen them. He was coming towards them across one of the fields, shouting to attract their attention. "Hi! wait a minute!" they thought he was saying.

"Mill!" exclaimed Blanche, with extraordinary emphasis.

"What?" asked Millie, nervously. She was flushed and trembling.

"Do you see who it is?"

"It isn't the one out of the carriage...." hesitated Millie.

"No! Silly. It's that young fellow who used to live with us, our Mr Fastidious. What was his name? Thrale! You remember."

"Goody!" said Millie. She was conscious of a quite inexplicable feeling of disappointment.

"He iss a friend? Yes?" asked Mrs Isaacson.