Part 14

Awake! why, sleep had been impossible in that cottage for hours past!

For sheer undiluted racket, commend me to two earnest-souled girls, who get up early, and go about with a stealthy tread that creaks every old board in the place, and commune with each other in stage whispers that penetrate through every crack in the floor, all on the pretext of making the fire!

We had decided that we could manage very well ourselves, without sending for anyone to take Abigail’s place; and in order to forestall me, the others had got up about cockcrow, and then began such a whirligig below, that I just lay still and endeavoured to allocate every fresh noise.

They raked and shovelled at the grate, and appeared to be scattering cinders all over the place. They broke up applewood twigs with resounding snaps, and argued as to the amount required to set the fire going. Ursula said you ought to put in handfuls till you got a good crackling blaze; Virginia said that was a childish, brainless way of doing it, to say nothing of the chance of waste; by rights the quantity of twigs employed ought to be strictly in inverse ratio to the quantity of inflammable gas contained in the coal. I dare say I should have heard a good deal more as to the way to assess the ignitable quality of coal, but fortunately the fire burnt up quickly, and they gave their attention to other domestic details.

They dashed about the brass fender; they whacked the blacklead brush against the oven-door at every turn; they set down the zinc pail with a ringing thud, and then scoured the hearth with zeal enough to take off half an inch of stone surface; they polished the brass fire-irons with some concoction of bath-brick and salt which they invented on the spot, as they couldn’t find any metal polish; they banged the hearthrug out of doors till the surrounding hills reverberated with the echoes; they rinked the carpet-sweeper up and down till it made me dizzy to listen; and as this was not thorough enough for Ursula, she also got a short stiff brush and apparently pommelled out any dust that might be under the settle and in other obscure corners; they dusted with equal energy, and then went off into the kitchen to consult about the breakfast menu, while the kettle chose the opportunity to boil all over the fire, thereby raising clouds of white ash that settled on everything, and they said, “Oh, dear! Just _look_ at it.”

Finally, I heard the white cloth being flapped over the table; cups and saucers and plates were chinked and rattled off the dresser; knives and forks and spoons jingled on to the table, and I knew that breakfast was well under way. It was just then that Virginia put her head through the staircase-door to ask—in moderated tones calculated not to disturb me should I still be slumbering!—was I awake?

Hastily hopping out on to the rug, I replied that I was “nearly dressed, and would be down in a minute.”

“No hurry,” she replied artlessly, “we’ve only just come down ourselves, and are going to see to breakfast. But what I want to know is: Where do you keep your frying-pan?”

“Hanging on its proper nail in the kitchen,” I replied.

“Well, it isn’t there.... No, it isn’t on the saucepan shelf, either—we’ve hunted _everywhere_.... But Abigail didn’t use it yesterday—don’t you remember? We had boiled eggs, and some of that cold ham we brought with us.... All right, we can just as well have eggs again.... That’s true, we shan’t want bacon, with that pork coming for dinner; but be quick, as the kettle’s boiling now.... Oh, it’s not a bit of trouble.”

* * * * *

Whether it was due to the sunshine, or to the tonic of the air, or to the virtuous feeling that always overtakes those who get up early in the morning and disturb everyone else, I cannot say; but at any rate Ursula announced that she intended to start right in, immediately after breakfast, and give the whole cottage a thorough spring cleaning.

The domesticities of the morning seemed to have whetted her appetite for such matters, and she said she felt she must give the place a “Dutch” turn-out, and have every shelf and stool and all the pots and pans scrubbed and scoured and tilted out of doors to dry, as they do in Holland.

Virginia said that she, too, felt a strong force—it might be her sub-conscious self, or she might have a dual personality, she couldn’t say which—within her, impelling her to turn the house inside out.

So I told them to go ahead; I’m the last one to discourage anyone from doing my work for me. I suggested, however, that for the first day they should confine their attentions to the living-rooms downstairs.

Of course, the reader of average intellect will wonder what necessity there could be for any such upheaval, seeing that the place would obviously have been overhauled before we arrived; but this brings me back to Mrs. Widow. “A worthy body and an honest soul,” the Rector said, when he originally recommended her to me, all of which was quite true; but, alas, thoroughness in regard to house-cleaning is not her strong point.

When I first sought her out and broached the subject of the caretaker I was requiring, she listened in a non-committal way. I stated how much a year I was willing to pay—naming an exceptionally good sum—and explained that for this money the house must be looked after in my absence, and be got quite ready for me whenever I should come down, while anything she might do while I was “in residence” would be paid for as an extra.

She showed no indecorous haste to secure the appointment. She merely said she would talk it over with her married daughter, and if she thought any more of it she would let me know. A few hours later she came to me, and said casually that on second thoughts she didn’t mind obliging me. (No one ever “works” for you in our village, they merely “oblige.”) In the interval, however, the whole village had gone into committee on the subject, and everyone’s advice had been sought, and very freely given.

Once more I went through the terms of the agreement, and she said she quite understood. Nevertheless, subsequent events led me to believe that she regarded the annual wage in the light of a retaining fee only, since most of the work is always left to be done after I arrive, when it will have to be paid for as a separate transaction if it is more than Abigail can wrestle with.

At the same time I can truly endorse the Rector’s tribute to her honesty. If I were to strew the floor with sovereigns or diamond rings, I know I should find them on the mantelpiece when next I returned, and she never annexes anything permanently.

But the fact that one has a village-wide reputation for honesty need not detract from one’s worldly prosperity—so long as one can borrow with light-hearted frequency, and borrow for indefinite periods, too! Mrs. Widow has reduced borrowing to a fine art, but her honesty is demonstrated by the fact that I have never known her decline to return any of my possessions; indeed, so scrupulous is she that she will bring back the tin of metal polish, when it is empty, explaining that she was quite sure I wanted it to be used rather than wasted!

Abigail invariably spends the first couple of days at the cottage in skirmishing and reclaiming missing articles. Knowing all this, I was not surprised when I heard the frying-pan was minus; I also knew that time would reveal other vacancies.

Had it been July or August, the preserving-pan—a family treasure—would have been gone, too. Mrs. Widow is always very solicitous for its welfare about fruit-gathering time; she says damp would easily hurt a really good preserving-pan, so she takes it home with her to keep it dry. Yet the poor thing will be left to face the winter in my kitchen with never a thought bestowed on its delicate constitution.

And it is just at jam-making time, too, that my kitchen scales and weights require the ameliorated atmosphere of Mrs. Widow’s cottage; my own kitchen, with the midsummer sun upon it all day, being obviously far too cold and damp for such highly-strung _bric-à-brac_ as one pound and half-pound weights.

A town acquaintance once said to Virginia: “I suppose Miss Klickmann goes down to her cottage for poetic and literary inspiration?”

“Oh, dear, no!” was the reply. “She simply goes down, as a mere matter of feminine curiosity, to see what is left.”

* * * * *

“Where do you keep your tea-towels?” Ursula began, as she prepared to wash up the breakfast things.

“There ought to be a pile in one of the drawers of the kitchen table,” I said. “They are not there? Oh, well, they’ll come back presently!”

While we were speaking, a small girl appeared at the side door, holding in one hand a basket containing a nice chunk of pork (wrapped in one of my tea-towels), and in the other hand my mincing-machine. This was Mrs. Widow’s grandchild.

“If you please, ma’am, father’s killed the pig, and mother thought you might like just a little piece of griskin, and mother’s been taking care of the mincer so’s it shan’t get rusty.”

An exchange of courtesies having been effected by means of a bottle of pear-drops, the small maid departed with her empty basket; the mincer was restored to its proper niche in the pantry, and we were at least one tea-towel to the good.

I might mention that Mrs. Widow’s married daughter had recently acquired considerable local fame by making “faggots,” which were in great demand. You know the dish?—a combination of liver, pork, sage and onions, etc., baked in squares. Other people in the district made faggots, too, but none could rival hers, and orders came to her from many of the big houses.

“No one ever manages to get them chopped so beautifully fine as she does,” said Miss Bretherton when recommending them to my notice. “I advise you to try them.”

Still, whatever obligation there may have been was offset, surely, by the piece of pork. The griskin is the lean portion of some part of the quadruped’s anatomy after the fat has been cut off for curing. This joint—which we never see in London—is always popular with us in the country; so popular, that I had ordered a piece only the day before from the butcher. It was just the season when people were killing their pigs, and the butcher had suggested griskin. Still, it was easy to put the extra piece in salt, and the flavour would only be improved thereby; my one regret was that the butcher had sent a very large joint, when I had particularly mentioned that I only wanted a little piece.

I had originally intended to devote the day to gardening, not to house-cleaning.

“Of course you keep a permanent gardener?” people inquire of me. “I see; a general handy man; it comes to the same thing; he will save you all trouble.”

Those of my acquaintances who have never had a place out of town to look after, always conclude that country districts fairly bristle with capable, willing men, and poor-but-honest, hard-working women, all of them anxious to do my work—and at a merely nominal wage too; whereas one has the utmost trouble to get either man or woman to do a day’s work at any price. I pay the handy man the same wage per day as I pay my thoroughly experienced London gardener; and he can only manage to spare me a small amount of his time at that price.

He knows very little about flowers, but he weeds in an enlightened manner, and he understands the elementary principles underlying vegetable growing on a small scale. For the most part the villagers bother very little about their gardens, only cultivating just sufficient ground for their immediate needs.

The unenlightened local method of dealing with weeds is this. He-who-is-paid-to-garden leaves them to grow to a fair height—especially if no one is likely to be there for some weeks to see them. Then, when they have absorbed a generous amount of nourishment from the ground, and generally suffocated everything small within their reach, he merely turns the soil over, with the weeds on the underneath side, draws a rake over the surface, and presto! you have a nice tidy bed.

This method is known as “digging in.”

Of course, in twenty-four hours the good-natured things start to poke cheerful noses through the soil again. But that doesn’t matter. Life is long, and the gardener is paid to clear them away again.

There is an optional method, referred to as “cleaning up the beds.” In that case, he leaves the weeds to grow higher, more especially in beds that are full of promising seedlings; in fact, he doesn’t worry about them at all until there is sudden and urgent reason why the garden should present a kempt, well-cared-for appearance.

Then, the weeds being so healthy and luxuriant that they would raise the face of creation a couple of inches if he attempted to dig them in, he simplifies matters by removing the surface of the earth, weeds and seedlings and all; this he wheels away in a barrow, perchance to lay it down on some rough and rubbly bit of lane that the road-menders have ignored.

When she-who-pays arrives, all expectation, and inquires for the missing seedlings, the tiller of the soil shakes his head lugubriously, and refers to the recent plague of slugs (or thunderstorms, or frost, or east winds, or whatever other natural phenomena seem most convincing), and says he had a hard job to save what is left in the garden—this last in a martyr-like tone of voice, indicating that though all his self-sacrificing labour is passed over unrecognised, he himself has the virtuous consciousness of having at least done his simple duty, and what man can do more!

Now I come to think of it, there are many different ways of gardening; that must be why it is always interesting to go round the garden with the gardener. When I say different ways, I don’t mean such trifling divergencies of method as landscape gardens versus intensive culture, or tomatoes under glass versus gloxinias. These primarily concern the pocket; the differences that interest me are temperamental.

There is Miss Bretherton, for instance, a most diligent and vigilant gardener. And yet she never seems to me to get much genuine, unalloyed pleasure out of her garden; she never basks in its beauty—though for the matter of that Miss Bretherton never basks anywhere! A middle-aged woman who does her duty by a scattered parish, conscientiously and thoroughly and unremittingly, never has time for that sort of dissipation! Miss Bretherton deals with her garden much as she deals with the parish. At best it is a case of striving to lead reluctant feet in the paths of virtue, while by far the greater part of her efforts is an unflagging wrestle with original sin.

A walk round the rectory garden is usually like this. Miss Bretherton always picks up a pair of gardening scissors and a basket mechanically as she steps out.

“What a wonderful glow of colour!” I exclaim, as I bury my nose in a magnificent Gloire de Dijon.

“But it is such a wretched thing for sending up suckers,” Miss Bretherton replies. “I’m always digging them up. Why, I declare there is one a foot high,” giving it a drastic prod with the scissors. “I thought I’d cut them all away yesterday”; more prods till the sucker is finally unearthed.

“And aren’t those hollyhocks tall!”

“Not nearly so fine as they would have been if that red-spotty blight hadn’t attacked them. Just look at these leaves!”

Snip, snip, snip! Off came a dozen or so.

I stop to admire the fairy flowers in the Virginia stock, rosy carmine, lemon and mauve, just opening in the sun.

“I don’t think there is anything sweeter for a border,” I remark.

“The trouble with Virginia stock is that it so soon looks untidy,” Miss Bretherton says dispiritedly. “Do what I will, I can’t keep the edges tidy once that goes off bloom. I pull it all out at last, and then that leaves a bare rough-dried looking space with nothing in it.”

I praise the white lilies—such a stately row of spotless beauty.

“I wish I could do something to hide that raggedness at the bottom of the stems. They do look so shabby. Excuse me, I see that Canterbury bell has withered off—that’s the worst of them. They all go at once so suddenly, and look such a withered mass. I must cut off those dead blooms, it may send up a second crop. But there, if it does, they will only be small bells!”

* * * * *

I’m not sure whether the handy man’s method is temperamental, but I know it is very conversational, if you can call it a conversation when he insists on doing the whole of it himself. He is an elderly bachelor; and Mrs. Widow once explained the situation to me:

“You see, he ain’t never had no wife to talk his head off for him, so he talks it off for hisself.”

I give him copious instructions whenever I leave, which he promises to carry out; but no matter what I may have asked him to do—whether it was to nail up the yellow roses over the front door, or to set lavender cuttings—it all works out to the same thing in the end: it is only the vegetables that are deemed worthy of mention. The flowers are just tolerated because—well, because I keep on putting them in the ground, and you can’t expect practical common-sense from a woman anyhow! But after all, it isn’t reasonable to expect an untrained cottager to make a garden different from those he sees around.

You can understand, however, that we are usually kept pretty busy from the moment we arrive till the hour we go away.

But this particular morning gardening was out of the question. The two girls started with the spring-cleaning on most vigorous lines. Virginia said the hygienic way was to place everything that was movable out-of-doors, so that, scientifically speaking, the sun’s rays could penetrate every fibre and tissue, and neutralise the harmful germs that would assuredly be lurking by the million in every stick and shred in a house as neglected as that one had been.

I objected to my cherished possessions being referred to as sticks and shreds, and I said so, with emphasis.

Ursula said if we were going to argue at that length it would be the August Bank Holiday before we got things back in their place again. For her part, she regarded all that germ-business as a harmless fairy-tale that was very suitable and safe reading for a mild intellect like Virginia’s. All the same, she quite agreed that everything ought to be put outside, so as to give more elbow-room indoors; moreover, things that were washed and scrubbed would, of course, dry quicker in the sun.

So out they all came!

Then we saw how badly the boards around the carpet needed re-staining, and we dispatched Virginia to the village to see what she could get in the way of oak or walnut floor-stain.

She returned with a large bottle of rheumatic lotion. Miss Jarvis, who keeps the village shop, hadn’t a bottle of stain left, but Virginia turned over everything she had and decided on the lotion, as it was thickish and a nice rich brown. She bore it off, Miss Jarvis beseeching her to remember it was for outward application only.

It wasn’t bad, only it flavoured the air rather strongly for days.

Ursula’s labours were bearing much fruit. To look at the scene outside the cottage, you might have thought a distraint had been made on the contents for rent. Chairs, tables, meat-safes, crockery, saucepans, oak chests, pictures, books, the warming-pan, brass candlesticks, coal-scuttles, fenders, were all basking unblushingly, and in the direst confusion, in the sunshine.

What pained me most was to notice how the furniture that had looked delightfully appropriate in the subdued lights of indoors, became appallingly shabby when subjected to the glare of day. I remarked that if I had confronted the things on a London burglar’s barrow, I should neither have recognised them nor have desired to claim them.

Ursula tried to reassure me by reminding me that the things were mostly very old, and antique things are invariably shabby as well as very valuable. Virginia contributed the consoling information that she had noticed, whenever people moved, they always left their good furniture behind in the empty house, for they only removed shabby-looking things.

I tried to feel duly proud of my possessions once more; but all the same I suggested that we should hurry on as fast as we could; I had a strong conviction that if any of my county neighbours called, they would probably be more impressed with the disreputable appearance of my belongings than with their priceless antiquity.

Of course, people came while we were still in chaos, as I knew they would. The first to arrive was Miss Primkins, who apologised for calling at such an hour, but she wanted to consult me on a private matter, she was so very worried. Was I busy? (with an inquiring glance at the all-pervading marine-store). Naturally I said I wasn’t.

The difficulty was to find a seat indoors to accommodate us while we talked; it wasn’t warm enough, as yet, to sit in the open. I found two chairs in the china pantry—a fair-sized apartment with a big window, even though it is called a pantry—and here we established ourselves, Miss Primkins reiterating how kind she thought it of me to receive her in this homely way, treating her just like one of the family. I tried to make her understand, however, that, as a general rule, it was not the family custom to foregather in the crockery cupboard!

She was a long while getting to the cause of her worry. I wonder why it is that so many women, when they start out to say anything, wander about and deviate into innumerable side channels and backwaters before they get to the point?—but there, I do myself, so we won’t follow up that line of thought.

Eventually, it transpired that when war was declared, and the attendant moratorium, Miss Primkins had hidden away what little gold she had in the bottom of a coffee canister, with the coffee put in again artlessly on top. Since then she had added to her store of gold, till at last she had £12 in all.

On hearing this I scented the trouble, and began to commiserate: “You don’t mean to say someone has stolen it! Who could it have been?”

“Oh, no; it hasn’t been stolen—though sometimes I almost wish—but there, I oughtn’t to say that! No, the difficulty is that now I don’t know how to get rid of it! I never thought there was any harm in putting a little by, in case anything happened, till I saw in the papers that someone said” (lowering her voice) “that those who hoard gold are traitors to their country, and” (in a still more shocked tone) “actually helping Germany! I’d never had any such idea! Why, it’s the very last thing I should wish to do!

“So I started unhoarding at once and took a sovereign when next I went out to pay my little grocery bill. Miss Jarvis wasn’t in the shop herself—she wouldn’t have been so rude!—but her assistant said, ‘Well, I never! Doesn’t it seem odd to see a sovereign again! I can’t tell you when I saw one last. I didn’t know there was a solitary one left in the village! Wherever did you get it from, Miss Primkins?’

“Do you know, I went hot and cold all over; didn’t know what to do with myself, for fear she should guess I’d been hoarding and helping the country to be a traitor—no, I mean helping Germany to be—well—you understand. I just said quietly, with all the composure I could muster, ‘I chanced to have it in my purse,’ because, after all, it wasn’t her business, was it?”

I agreed that it wasn’t.

“Then I thought I would change half a sovereign—that would be smaller and look less hoardingish—at the station, as I was going into Chepstow to get some more wool for those socks for Queen Mary. Would you believe it?—the station-master said—you know his jocular way—‘Why, Miss Primkins, what bank have you been robbing? I haven’t had my hand crossed with gold, I don’t know when! I’d like to keep it myself, for luck, only the Prime Minister would be down on me for hoarding, I suppose.’