PART TWENTY-TWO

“SUNFLOWERS”

§ 1

Peter Jameson returned to his unit in a very peculiar frame of mind: a mixture of gladness at having left his business annoyances behind him, regret for missed enjoyments, and determination not to allow anything that might happen at home to interfere with his work as a soldier—a determination slightly tinged with fanaticism, which did not improve his temper.

He detrained at Steenwerck, in pitch darkness, after a nine-hour train-journey; was accosted by his groom at the exit from the station.

“Hope you had a good leaf, sir.” The squat little man saluted awkwardly.

“Thanks, Jelks. Quite good. Where are the horses?”

“Just over there, sir. I tied them up to the fence.”

“Both of them all right?”

“Queen Bess had a bit of a cold, sir. Captain Horrocks made me keep her in for two days. She’s all right now.”

They made their way across shadows; untethered the horses. Peter mounted.

“Colonel told me to bring your gas-helmet, sir.” Jelks divested himself of the extra satchel he wore slung from his shoulder; handed it up to his master. “He told me to tell you, sir, with his compliments”—Jelks grinned as the Weasel had grinned when he gave the message—“orders is that both officers and men should take their gas-helmets when they go on leaf.”

Peter, rather annoyed at being called over the coals for infraction of an order nobody ever obeyed in those early days, put Little Willie to a trot. They rode, under vague starlight, through La Creche into the main Bailleul-Armentières Road; were challenged at the barrier. As they turned leftwards up the pavé for Neuve Eglise, a mild wind blew across their faces. Passing the low huts of Divisional Baths, a sentry saluted them. “Gas Alert, sir,” he called out.

Peter called back, “Thanks.”

At the canvas house which hid the naval gun from hostile airmen, another sentry gave the same warning. Peter slackened to a walk; summoned his groom.

“We’ll go round by Kortepyp,” he said. “It’s quicker.”

“Very good, sir. Turning’s about a hundred yards on.”

They found it; veered away from the trees into flat country. Now the wind blew direct in their faces. In front of them, Véry lights glowed skyward, hung and disappeared silently behind the trees. “Devilish quiet,” thought Peter. Not a gun boomed, not a rifle cracked. . . . He seemed to catch the faint sound of a gong; halted hand-to-ear.

Again, the gas-gong belled faintly down wind; a distant gunflash winked across the darkness ahead. Then, maniacally, the countryside awoke. Sound swept back, as a wave sweeps, leaping down the valley towards them—horns shrieked, gongs dinned, whistles blew: rifle-fire crackled, burst to a roar: guns boomed dully from beyond the horizon; they caught the far crash of shell-fire. The sky blazed with electric flashes, with whitely-soaring lights, with orange hints of machine-gun flame. Hedges, trees, crest-line, sprang from shadow into silhouette. And suddenly, near and high above the silhouetted valley, soared the crimson rockets of the S.O.S. station on Hill 63; hung a moment; waking pandemonium as they drooped to ground.

A mile away among the trees, our own guns awoke, red and roaring; the flames of them cut great gashes against the sky, the voice of them drowned the far crash of shells, the crackle and sputter of rifle-fire. But shrill above the voice of the guns, Peter and Jelks heard the howling shrieking Klaxons. “Gas,” they shrieked, “Gas! Gas! Gas!”

“Better dismount, I think,” said Peter calmly. “It’s hardly likely to come as far back as this; but there’s no sense in taking risks.”

They stood, bridles over arms, watching and listening. Every now and then, Peter sniffed at the breeze. “Gas-training”—beyond the putting-on of the helmet—had not yet been invented. He felt irritatingly ignorant. How long would the stuff take to reach them? Would he be able to see it? What did it look like? Smell like? Could it kill horses?

Driver Jelks began fiddling at his satchel; extracted the clammy “P. H.” mask; shook it out; pulled it half-on, tucking up the glass eye-pieces and the rubber mouth-valve over his head. Peter saw that the man’s hands were shaking.

“Not frightened, are you?” he asked.

“I don’t mind shells, sir,”—stammered Jelks—“but this gas, it fairly puts the wind up me, sir.”

“Don’t be a damn fool, man,” said Peter gruffly. “You’re all right as long as you’ve got your helmet on.”

And then, suddenly, he saw the poison—a low gray wraith, rushing down the darkness; heard himself say, “Pull that helmet down _quick_”; caught a whiff as of rotten pears; closed mouth and nostrils; felt Little Willie wrench at bridle over his right arm; whipped gas-helmet out and on, stuffing the flaps of it under his collar. He found the rubber tubing with his lips; sucked on it; realized instantaneously that the valve leaked!

Now fear had its way with him. The eye-pieces blurred. To breathe meant death. . . . He must breathe. . . . His lungs would burst. . . . Blood drummed in his ears. . . .

Came another wrench at bridle-rein; with it the madness of inspiration. His right hand found the peak of the saddle, his left the cantle, swung him from ground to horse. . . . Teeth unclenched from rubber, breath surged through mouth and nostrils. . . . Now death was certain. Be damned, though, if he’d die in that acrid clammy darkness. . . .

Peter jerked up the stifling cloth; felt cool air on his eyes, sweet air in his nostrils; failed for a second to realize the miracle. Then, instinctively, he knew that his leap to horse had poised him above the heavy gas-cloud, that he was looking down on it, as a man riding the fields at dusk looks down on the ground mist. . . . But even as Peter looked, the tail of the poison-belt blew clear!

For a full minute, he sat his horse—motionless, amazed, still afraid to breathe. The horror had come and gone like some bestial dream. Guns were still flashing and roaring; the sky still blazed; Klaxons howled all round him. Jelks’ squat figure, cowled in its goggling mask, Queen Bess’s bridle over its arm, stood within three yards of his stirrup.

Little Willie began coughing; fidgeted for a second; stood still again.

“You can take that thing off,” said Peter.

“Beg pardon, sir,” answered a muffled voice.

“You can take that damn thing off,” roared Peter.

Fumblingly, the man removed his helmet. “Was it gas, sir?” he asked.

“Very much so,” began Peter; “and the next time you bring me a gas-helmet, I wish to Christ. . . .” He bit off the end of the sentence. After all, the fault lay with himself, not with his man.

They waited half-an-hour; heard the shriek of the Klaxons die away to silence, the roar of the guns to an intermittent crackling.

“I think we might go on now,” said Peter. “It doesn’t seem to have hurt the horses, thank goodness.”

Nevertheless, since the wind still blew fairly from the north-east, he kept ears and nostrils a-cock as they made gingerly for Headquarters.

“That you, Jameson?” called Stark’s voice from the lighted doorway of the villa.

“Yes, sir.”—Peter dismounted—“Is Captain Horrocks up, sir?”

“Up? Everybody’s up, except our ruddy Belgian landlord. He and his wife have got their respirators on, their heads under the bed clothes, and the fear of God in ’em. Why do you want Horrocks?”

The Weasel looked a quaint figure. His red hair was still towzled with sleep. He wore a “British Warm” coat over silk pyjamas, striped white and crimson, rather short in the leg, and heelless slippers of red morocco-leather. From his bare neck depended a vast respirator (one of the earliest experiments in that direction), whose square box—thick tube hanging down like a diminutive elephant-trunk—bobbed at his chest whenever he spoke.

“I’m afraid the horses got a whiff or two of that damn stuff, sir,” explained Peter. “Oh, and thank you very much for sending me my helmet.”

“Some sense in Corps Orders occasionally,” said the Weasel grimly. “I told Mr. Black to pick you out a new one. Hope it was all right.”

Peter, not wishing to make trouble, kept silence. Horrocks, also in pyjamas, appeared clutching a whisky-and-soda; fingered his moustaches professionally; gave it as his opinion that gas, except in very large quantities, had no effect on horses. Peter dismissed Jelks; and the three passed into the Mess-Room.

Dr. Carson, in mauve and yellow pyjamas, gas-helmet perched drunkenly on his white hair, was just opening a potted tongue. Purves, fully dressed except for his tie, and very _affairé_, stood tracing imaginary lines on the large-scale map above the mantelpiece. Morency, barefoot in unlaced breeches and striped vest, held a huge bottle of Perrier in one hand, a tin of sardines in the other.

Came a rap at the panelled door, a breathless signaller: “Ack Battery report infantry asking for retaliation, sorr. They have begun firing, sorr. And they want to know if Gas Alert has been cancelled, sorr. I told them it had not been cancelled, sorr. . . .”

“Better go and see what they want, P.J.,” Stark nodded to his Adjutant. “Doesn’t look as though we shall get much sleep tonight.”

And as a matter of cold fact, it was 5:0 A. M. on the morning of his return from leave to that “cushy” spot Neuve Eglise, before Peter at last crawled between his Jaeger blankets.

“Wonder if Pat’s awake,” he thought. . . .

§ 2

“Can’t we come too, Mummy?” asked Evelyn.

“You might take us?” pleaded Primula.

The children came running into Heron Baynet’s garage where Patricia—in smock and wash-leather gloves—stood tinkering under the open bonnet of her car.

“No, you can’t. And you’re both very wicked children. How on earth did you manage to get here? Without your hats, too!”

She stood there, the faulty sparking-plug in her hand, half-smiling, half-frowning at the two pinafored figures.

“Well,” said Evelyn proudly. “It was my idea. Miss Merridew left us alone. So _I_ said to Primula, ‘Let’s just _rush_ downstairs, open the front-door, and go to Mummy. It’s only at the end of the road.’ . . .”

“We did keep on the pavements,” remarked Primula airily; and added: “Even if you don’t take us with you, you’ll _have_ to drive us as far as the front-door.”

“I shall do nothing of the sort”—Patricia knew how easily children grow to dominate their parents—“I shall telephone Miss Merridew to fetch you, and you’ll both do half-an-hour’s extra lessons.”

“Oh, Mummy,” began Evelyn: but her mother had already stepped to the house-telephone; was ringing up for their governess,—who appeared, flustered and hatless, a few minutes afterwards; dragged the culprits back to their multiplication table.

“That woman,” thought Patricia as she returned the cleaned plug to its socket, “is a fool, an untrained fool and an expensive fool. I shall have to take on the kids’ education myself.”

She peeled off smock and wash-leather gloves; arranged toque and furs at the cracked mirror over the shelf whereon Heron Baynet’s chauffeur (long since enlisted) had kept his “spares”; cranked up; and backed the car steadily out through the folding doors. . . .

Peter had been gone nearly a fortnight. He had written her—his usual scribbles. Reading between the lines of them, her heart forgave him its wounds. But now, she too had her work to do, little time for musing.

She thought of that work as her firm hands steered the Crossley towards Endsleigh Gardens. She had been her father’s unpaying guest long enough. The sale of the Lowndes Square house made her homeless; and she was not the type of woman who could be without a home. She needed her own things about her; needed the bother and the fret and the pleasure of housekeeping. And London, with its darkness and its air-raids, was no place for children.

So Patricia’s imagination had taken unto itself a “little place in the country”; a place to which Peter could come back—on leave if his luck held, to recover if he were wounded. For that other contingency, his death and her own widowhood, even Patricia’s stout heart refused to face. . . .

She pulled up at the entrance to the hospital; jumped down from the driving-seat; slammed door behind her; ran lightly up the steps.

“Captain Gordon?” she inquired at the porter’s office.

“He’s in the drawing-room, Miss,” the orderly smiled back at her. (She had been there nearly every day for five months; and the orderly knew her name perfectly. But she looked young, and she looked attractive, and she always came to see the same officer. So he called her “Miss” instead of “Madam.” In days gone by, when he had been a skate-fitter at Olympia, the little trick had earned Private Johnson, R.A.M.C.,[14] many tips!)

Patricia walked swiftly through the hall—(the Endsleigh Gardens Hospital had been a hotel before the war)—into the ornate and over-furnished drawing room; found Francis alone.

He had been “up” only three weeks; rose to greet her with difficulty, supporting himself first on the arms of his chair, then on two rubber-shod sticks.

“Morning, Pat,” he said. “I’m all ready, you see.”

The months of illness had told on him, graven lines of pain on his temples, at the corners of his mouth. His hair, too, had grayed a little above close-set ears. His eyes seemed to have grown darker. But his clothes—he wore mufti in sublime defiance of Regulations—were immaculate as ever.

“They’ll never let you out of the door in that get-up,” pronounced Patricia—eyeing the “Barnard” motoring-cap, the blue-and-black old Etonian tie, the loose fitting brown over-coat.

“Wonderful what one can do in this place if one only smiles at the sisters, bullies one’s doctor, and gives half-crowns to the orderlies,” laughed Francis.

He shuffled awkwardly across the impeding carpet, through the swing-doors Patricia opened for him. Prout emerged from the basement by the elevator-shaft; and together the two helped the invalid down the steps into the car.

Patricia swung the crank-shaft; climbed to her seat; switched gear-lever into “first”; let in the clutch.

Watching them as they glided out of sight, round the corner of the square, Prout’s thoughts turned to bygone and merrier days. “Poor Mister Francis,” muttered the old man. “And him that was always so fond of dancing. . . .”

[14] Royal Army Medical Corps.

§ 3

“. . . And what perfectly-appointed country residences do we inspect today, Pat?” asked “poor Master Francis” as they threaded the traffic of Tottenham Court Road.

“Look at them if you like. They’re in that pocket.”

Francis lifted the leather flap in the door, which she indicated; pulled out and opened a long envelope; began to study the house-agent’s slips.

“Berkshire,” he read out. “Berkshire again. Oxfordshire, border of Berkshire. Berkshire, border of Oxfordshire. . . . None of them sound very promising, Pat.”

“No,” she admitted, “but I like the idea of living in that part of the world. My mother was Oxfordshire, you know. Besides, we might _find_ something.”

“I don’t know why you’re so keen about the country all of a sudden, Pat,” went on Francis. “What about your lonely leave-men. Who’ll motor them home to their wives?”

Patricia drove on in silence for a few minutes; then she said: “A woman with six hundred a year and two children to educate, can’t indulge in the luxury of unpaid war-work, Francis. And besides there are heaps of people meeting the leave-trains now: it’s become quite fashionable.”

“Then why not take a paid job?” he suggested.

“Because other women”—she thought of Miss Macpherson—“not only need the money more than I, but can do the work a great deal better.”

By now they had cleared the heat-haze which brooded over inner London. Up and out from his cloud-veils, clambered the sun. The laburnum trees in the little suburban gardens were all a-bloom with yellow. It promised a glorious day.

And promise fulfilled itself. They left the last tram-lines of Brentford astern; emerged mile by mile into the full splendour of England’s Maying. The home-counties unrolled beneath their questing wheels in vista upon vista of young green fields, of pink and white hedgerows, of orchards all alight with blossoms, of silver river-reaches, of pleasant homes where pigeons fluttered dazzingly to age-reddened roofs and the lilac bloomed palest amethyst over the glowing emerald of close-clipped lawns.

But there was never a pleasant home among those which Patricia’s house-agents had persuaded her to visit!

§ 4

“Never mind, Pat. It’s been a topping drive,” said Francis consolingly.

It was nearly four o’clock; and his cousin’s wife had just emerged from her last disappointment—a drainless waterless abomination of mouldy stone-work, with acres of unkempt gardens, ten miles from anywhere among the bleak hills beyond Ipsden.

“Where now?” he went on.

“Home, I suppose,” said Patricia, drawing her map out of its case. “We’d better make for Henley, I think.”

She felt tired, out of patience. The house-agents were idiots: three of the places they recommended turned out to be glaring brick villas on the outskirts of Reading; at the fourth—a converted farmhouse near Bix—a long-haired foreigner had informed her, after gibbering for three quarters of an hour, that “vot he vanted vas to sell de place, not to let it”; the fifth, as far as they could ascertain from the inn at Nettlebed which gave them lunch, did not exist at all: to crown disaster she had wasted time, temper and petrol on this mid-Victorian mare’s-nest.

“It’s done me all the good in the world,” went on Francis. “For two pins I’d let my flat—the Lord knows if I’ll ever be able to manage those stairs again—and come to live in the country myself.”

“Apparently, you’d have to camp out in it,” said Patricia. . . .

They climbed, sputteringly, up a rough road; dropped to an uninhabited valley; climbed again; left the bare lands behind. Now, their way led through burgeoning woods of beech and larch-trees past a quiet village-green, into woods again.

Patricia drove slowly. The scent and the silence of the woods summoned her, bidding her stay. She wanted to stop the car, to wander away all alone over that flower-strewn moss, down those long brown avenues, under that pale-green canopy of spring-time.

All day long “country” before her eyes had been calling to “country” in her veins. A long clear call, dominant, heart-compelling. The country! She knew so little of it; the simplest names of its trees and its flowers were mysteries to her. Yet the trees and the flowers spoke to Patricia that afternoon; spoke to her of happiness. “Here, here, here and here only,” they seemed to say, “will you find that for which you are seeking. . . .”

And then, sudden as a dream, she saw the house of her dreaming. They were still among the woods; and the house—she knew—stood beyond the woods, at the brow of the hill. Yet Patricia saw it, clear and perfect in the eye of her mind—a long low red-roofed home, with square windows opening out from walls of mellow brick-work, criss-crossed with weather-beaten oak, onto terraced garden. Below the garden pastures sloped to dark-green tree-clumps; and beyond the tree-clumps, shining silver in the gaps between, wound the river. . . .

The road forked. Instinctively Patricia swung the car left-handed. Trees closed in above them; macadam under their wheels narrowed to a turf-edged track.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” asked Francis.

“Certain,” she answered; and drove on, between the serried tree-trunks,—beech and larch and alder, slim pillars of brown, gray-green and silver about their path.

“Look,” said Patricia, “the woods end.”

She spoke very quietly, pointing to the door of blue which widened as they climbed to it, letting them out from the trees. The car dropped a hundred yards between the warm coral-and-ivory of hawthorn hedgerows; seemed to stop of its own accord at a quaint red-walled brown-gabled house whose lower windows were almost level with the Crossley’s wheels.

“This isn’t the place,” thought Patricia. Yet somehow the peaked and ivied gable with its one leaded window looked familiar—familiar as the road they had climbed through the woods. Just under the window, half-hidden by the ivy, was an old sign-board: “T. Tebbits. Builder & Contractor,” read Patricia. But Francis, sharper-eyed, had seen the other sign which peered over the garden-hedge—a plain square of oak, newly painted with the words:—

“TWO GOOD HOUSES TO LET.”

“I say, Pat,” he said, pointing to it, “why not try here? . . .”

There came out of the house a hatless man with weather-beaten face, clean-shaven except for the fringe of hair under his chin, bushy of eyebrows, dressed collarless in a rusty black cardigan jacket and corduroy-trousers. He had hard blue eyes, hairy ears, thin lips; might have been any age from fifty-five to eighty.

“Might you be wanting anything?” he asked.

“Are you Mr. Tebbits?” Patricia smiled down at him.

“That’s my name, missis.”

“We came about the houses,” went on Patricia, indicating the notice-board.

“Be you from the agents?” asked Mr. Tebbits suspiciously.

“No. We were just passing, and we thought. . . .”

“Well, that’s a good thing.” The old man smiled grimly. “Because I won’t have no more agents. They be all robbers, it seems to me. Now what sort of a house was you looking for, missis? I asks because it’s no good a wasting your time if you wants the sort of house I hasn’t got. There be two of ’em, one’s a bit cottage-like and t’other’s bigger. But they bain’t neither of ’em what you’d call big.”

“Are they a long way away?” interrupted Patricia.

“Well, missis, one is middling far and t’other’s quite close. Sunflowers—that’s the name of the bigger one and a silly name it be, to my way of thinking, because there bain’t never a sunflower near it—her’s just up the road. T’other. . . .”

“Could we go and see it, do you think?” Patricia interrupted again.

“Aye. If you’ll bide a minute, I’ll just go and get my cap.” He disappeared into the house; re-appeared.

“Now if you’ll drive on slowly, missis, I’ll follow you. ’Tis the first house you comes to on the left hand side of the road. ’Bout a hundred and fifty yards down, two hundred mebbe.”

Mr. Tebbits declined a lift, and they motored on without him; rounded a bend in the hedge-rows; and saw in front of them, half hidden by greenery, low red roofs that curled up to high red chimney-stacks and down to square windows, set in walls of mellow brick-work criss-crossed with the gray of weather-beaten oak.

Patricia’s heart gave a great leap: for this was the very home she had imagined as they came through the woods!

They drew up at a wooden gate, painted dull green, supported by low pillars of old brick-work between the hawthorn hedges; saw, peering through it, a small gravel-drive, a huge walnut tree just in leaf, and a long low house, door in centre, double-floored under projecting eaves.

“Francis,” cried Patricia, “this is _it_.”

He looked at her; saw a woman transformed. Her cheeks glowed; her lips were half-parted; her slumbrous eyes danced and kindled.

“My dear Pat . . .” he began.

“Don’t tell me I haven’t seen it yet, Francis. Don’t tell me it won’t do; that the drains will be all wrong; that it’s a hundred miles from anywhere. Because I don’t care. This is going to be my home—mine and Peter’s. . . .”

Mr. Tebbits found them by the gate.

“You been wounded, mister?” he asked, looking at the sticks Francis carried.

“Yes,” admitted Francis.

“Ah. At the war, I expect. This be a mighty bad war. I’ve got five sons there myself. All in the Ox and Bucks they be. Two’s Corporals. Charlie, he couldn’t go; nor Harry neither.” He turned to Patricia. “This be Sunflowers, missis. Likely you’d care to go in.”

He swung open the gate; held it while Francis hobbled through. “The paddick goes with the house,” explained Tebbits, “but if you wasn’t thinking ’bout keeping stock, I’d be just as glad to have it for my cows.”

Patricia looked dumbly over the knee-deep green to the sun-lit tree-fringe beyond. The house, _her house_, stood in a semi-circle of woodland; the green trees folded it lovingly. What did she care about keeping stock?

Mr. Tebbits drew a vast key from his trouser-pocket; opened the front-door.

“This be what we calls the hall,” he began, “the kitchens be along the passage. . . .”

Mr. Tebbits talked, as the British peasant talks, interminably repetitive, all the time they were inspecting “Sunflowers.” But Patricia hardly heard him. Already in her mind she had taken the place; was settling herself and her family into it.

This hall now, with its deep fireplace, its windows either side the door, (which would need heavy brown-velvet curtains), must be the drawing-room. The dining-room, leading out of the drawing-room, would be small, still. . . . And the tiny “study” must be Peter’s. “Kitchen-range good,” thought Patricia. “Hope it doesn’t burn too much coal. . . .”

She passed up the balustered stair-case, Tebbits clumping at her heels; found square bed-rooms, opening onto greenery, a good modern bath-room—(“wonder of wonders,” thought Patricia)—and, best of all, at the end of the corridor, running full-length of the north side, a long apartment which would be ideal for the children. . . .

Of course, she had fallen in love with the place; meant to have it at all costs. Yet even Francis, who had as yet very little sense of home, admitted to himself, as he waited in the bare hall, the excellence of Sunflowers. It was a strange combination of solid pre-Georgian brickwork without; of old wood and modern plaster within.

Mr. Tebbits’ grandfather had converted it originally, from the shell of a three-hundred-year-old tithe barn; running his floor-boards over beams of oak; letting in the heavy fan-lighted front door, the deep window-sashes; throwing out the red-tiled square-beamed kitchen. Mr. Tebbits’ father had unroofed the kitchen, carefully, preserving _his_ father’s tilework, added the long room above. Then the grandson of the original builder, dissatisfied with the narrow entrance corridor, had broken it down, joined it to the parlour. Till finally _his_ son Charlie—(“he be a bit new-fangled be Charlie”)—had seized the opportunity presented when the new Company ran its mains over the hill, to modernize the water-supply, to construct a bath-room. (“An’ a good job they boys made of it, missis. These pipes, they _be_ pipes.”)

It was while replastering and “making all good with Parian” that the idea of a “garrige” had come to Charlie Tebbits: and a “garrige” he and his brothers forthwith constructed, using (as their great-grandfather had used his tithe-barn) the shell of an old ramshackle stable, now concrete-floored and water-tight. But the “modern” stabling constructed by _their_ father, the “boys” had not touched, except for the throwing of two stalls into a loose-box—just “case any one might be wanting it.”

Altogether, an amazing find. And amazing the fore-knowledge of this detail and that which overcame Patricia as she passed from room to room. But most amazing of all the certainty with which she flung open the Eastward window half-way up the staircase; looked out onto the gravel terrace, and the slopes of green pasturage dotted with dark tree-clumps through which, molten in the drooping sun, flashed far glimpses of the river Thames.

“That be Arlsfield village, missis,” explained Tebbits, pointing a two-mile-distant cluster of buildings above which the smoke spired lazily. “You can’t see the Hall from here. Them big chestnuts do hide it. Too close to the Hall, they be: and often I’ve told the old Colonel so myself. But he’s that set on his trees. . . .”

“What’s the name of the Hall?” interrupted Pat.

“Arlsfield Hall, mum.”

And, for the second time, the name sounded familiar. Indeed in all that smiling prospect—jade fields of young wheat, emerald of pasture, trees and village and far-away river—only one feature puzzled Patricia. The oily magnolia-leaves at window-sill, she seemed to know; and the ochre gravel below, and every detail of the sloping country beyond them. But the slip of orchard, foaming in wave on wave of wave-green grass and snow-white blossom between her terrace and the country-side, her strange inward memories could not recall.

“Planted they trees ’bout twenty-five years ago. Good trees they be, too. Blenheims mostly,” said Tebbits. . . .

It was long after five when Patricia finished her inspection. “Likely, you’d care for a dish of tea, missis,” invited the old man: and to tea in Mr. Tebbits’ kitchen the three went.

Miss Tebbits—she was sixty and the old man’s daughter all over, from thin lips to the hair in her ears,—served them their “dish of tea” in china which had no right to exist outside a museum; brought home-made cake, home-made bread, a great dish of saffron butter: and while the daughter served, her father talked.

“He didn’t believe in leases,” he told Patricia. “If so be she wanted the house, all she had to do was to say so. He’d always got his sixty pounds a year for it: ’cept when people didn’t keep stock. Then he took fifty-five. ’Twas a bit dear like, but his son Charlie wouldn’t have him take less. . . .” And here the old man explained how Charlie had moved the building business to Arlsfield, leaving him and Harry with the farm. “I be a bit old for the building, missis. Turned eighty-five. But Charlie, he’ll do all the papering and the painting for you. We don’t let any one ’cept ourselves touch our houses. . . .”

Tea over, he stood cap-in-hand to bid them good-bye.

“We’ll be down again tomorrow, Mr. Tebbits,” smiled Patricia, engine throbbing under her finger on the throttle-lever.

“Very good, missis. I’ll have Charlie come up here to meet you. Likely, if you take the house, there’ll be one or two things to talk over.”

§ 5

They came not only next day but the day after, and the day after that. Charlie, a huge hairy man, only one degree less obstinate than his father, consented after some persuasion to an agreement being drawn up by a Henley lawyer; promised Patricia that she should be “in” by the end of June; proposed ribbed papers, whites and creams and pale lemons for the walls, brown paint for this room, cream for that; suggested diffidently that if by any chance she were short of furniture, he could easily make “chairs and tables and sideboards and such like”—in proof of which he took her to his own thatched-roofed cottage, and showed her specimens of his work, fine solid stuff, chiselled simply and lovingly from the seasoned oaks and walnuts of which his timber-yard still held store. For Charlie Tebbits was craftsman by heritage.

But the village, apart from Charlie’s cottage and workshops, proved disappointing: most of the old cottages had been crowded out by jerry-built atrocities; a tin-roofed chapel, a pseudo-artistic public house, a “Recreation Room” (also of tin, but painted red), and a peculiarly offensive stucco school-house, betrayed all too clearly the trail of the urban serpent.

“Never mind, Pat,” consoled Francis. “You can hardly see it from Sunflowers.”

Church and vicarage stood, (as if fearing contamination, they had withdrawn themselves from these evidences of humanity), a full mile away on the road to Arlsfield Hall—a fine Georgian house, ring-fenced, among green vistas of parklands and woods much in need of the axe.

It was while circling Arlsfield Hall that Francis and Patricia found Mr. Tebbits’ second “house”—a straggling cottage, brown-roofed and mellow-walled. The cottage lay in a hollow of the road. Woods crept down to it from the west; eastwards, corn fields swelled to a fringe of spruce trees. South of it, lay the park of Arlsfield Hall; and north, a mile by the trodden short-cut across the pasture, Tebbits Farm and “Sunflowers.”

Exploring they found undulating corridors, quaint octagonal rooms, panelled in age-dark oak, and—at the top of a broad shallow stair-case, up which Francis scarcely needed Patricia’s arm—an enormous apartment, looking through huge windows clean across the park to sunlit hills.

“Lord, Pat,” exclaimed Francis, “a man could write here.”

He looked about the room, measuring with one of his sticks, the window-seat, the distance from window-seat to fireplace, the recesses on either side of the fireplace; pointing out where the desk should stand, where the bookcases. . . . And in that moment—though it took two more visits, the first accompanied by Charlie Tebbits, the second by Prout, before Francis eventually made up his mind—Patricia knew that she would not be neighbourless at Sunflowers. . . .

§ 6

The night after he had signed the agreement for Glen Cottage, Francis dined at Harley Street.

“A fine pair of idiots you two seem to have made of yourselves while I’ve been away,” commented Heron Baynet, who had just returned from a fortnight’s holiday, after listening for over an hour to the usual chatter of people obsessed with new possessions. “Within six months, you’ll both be yearning for London.”

“I wonder,” said Francis. “Certainly Arlsfield doesn’t possess a picture-palace. . . .”

“Arlsfield,” interrupted the doctor, (as if by common consent, neither had mentioned the name of that unhappy village), “Arlsfield!”

For a moment he sat perfectly still, staring at one of the electric candle-sticks on the dinner-table: then he pulled note-book and pencil out of his pocket; turned to Patricia; and said, in the level voice of the consulting-room:—

“You mentioned a little while ago, Pat, that this house—what’s its name again?—Sunflowers—thanks—seemed familiar to you. I want you to describe to me, as accurately as you can, just in what way it seemed familiar.”

“Why do you want to know, pater?”

“Never mind about that. Tell me just how you felt both before you came to it and when you were in it. . . .”

Astonished, Patricia began her story, doing her utmost to recall each fleeting sensation of that first afternoon.

“All except the orchard, I seemed to know perfectly,” she finished.

And her father, looking up from his note-book, said, “No. You couldn’t be expected to know about that. As far as I can recollect, there wasn’t one.”

Francis, instinctively setting a story, glanced first at the lined face of the little consultant, then into the astonished eyes of his daughter.

“Explain please, pater,” commanded Patricia. “What was it? One of those cases of pre-natal vision you’ve always wanted to confirm.”

“No such luck!” Her father closed the note-book, returned it to his pocket. “Very interesting though. You _had_ seen the place before. When you were two years old, your mother and I drove you there—probably through the very road up which you and Francis motored. She wanted me to buy a country practice. Sunflowers—I’d forgotten the name till Francis mentioned Arlsfield—was a doctor’s house in those days. You ask old Tebbits and see if I’m not right.”

“Curious thing the human brain,” he went on, “always taking snap-shots—just like a camera. Stores its pictures away too, and keeps them for when they’re wanted. We’re working on this ‘picture’ theory now—for our shell-shock cases. If anything weakens the brain—a shock for instance, or overwork—the pictures get mixed up: confused, we call it. No one seems to know how soon the brain starts taking its snapshots: some say the process starts prior to birth. I don’t believe that. . . . Then there are imaginative pictures. You know the impression of reality a good book makes on you, or a well-told story. . . .” He expanded the theory, ending: “It was because I didn’t want you to make imaginative pictures that I took my notes _before_ I told you the truth.”

“Well I’m glad there was no mystery,” smiled Pat. “I don’t want any ghosts at Sunflowers.”

But Francis Gordon, whose writer’s brain could summon and set aside both real and imaginative pictures at will, sat very silent, visioning in pale gold against the dark panelling of his new home the head of a girl in America—a girl whose last letter had concluded:

“Somehow or other I don’t think I shall ever get married.”