Part 10

He shut the door carefully and shot the bolt into its socket. Very cold it was—silly of him to stand at the open door like that—hoped he hadn’t got a chill. Lighting his candle in the hall, he switched off all the electric lights and climbed the stairs to bed; a nice fire warmed his dressing-room, and his pyjamas were put out for him over the back of a chair in front of the fire; he undressed, thinking that he was glad he wasn’t a poor devil out in the cold. His wife was already in bed, and by the light of her reading-lamp he saw the curlers that framed her forehead, and the feather-stitching in white floss-silk round the collar of her flannel nightgown.

“What a long time you’ve been, Paul. I was just thinking, I shan’t be able to try that Patience to-morrow evening, because we’ve got the Howard-Ellises coming to dinner.”

“So we have. I’d quite forgotten. We must give them champagne,” he said mechanically; “they’ll expect it.”

He got into bed, turned out the lamp, and lay down beside his wife, staring into the dark.

HER SON _To H. M._

I

She awoke that morning earlier than was her wont, emerging from a delicious sleep into a waking no less pleasant. Lazily she slipped her hand under her pillows—there were a lot of pillows, all very downy, into which her head and shoulders sank as into a nest; she liked a lot of pillows; that was one of her little luxuries, and she was in the habit of saying, what was one’s own house if not a place where one’s little luxuries could be indulged?—lazily she slipped her hand under the pillows, feeling about, and having found what she wanted, pressed the spring of the repeater watch lying there tucked away. Its tiny, melodious chime came to her, muffled but distinct. Seven clear little bells; then two chimes for the half-hour; then five quick busy strokes; five-and-twenty minutes to eight. Five-and-twenty minutes still before she would be called. She lay contentedly on her back, with her arms folded beneath her head, watching the daylight increase through the short chintz curtains of her windows opposite. The chintz, a shiny one, was lined with pink; the light came through it, pink and tempered. She lay wondering whether she should get up to pull the curtains aside, but she was so comfortable, so softly warm, and in so pleasant a frame of mind, that she would not break the hour by moving. She had a little world inside her head to-day making her independent of the world outside. And besides, she knew so well what she would see, even did she make the effort and get up to pull the curtains; she would see what she had seen every day for forty years, the barn with the orange lichen on the roof, the church tower, the jumbled roofs of the village, the bare beautiful limbs of the distant Downs; she knew it all, knew it with the knowledge of love; and yet, in spite of this intimate knowledge, she was frequently heard to remark that the country had always some new surprise, some gradation of light one had never seen before, so that one was always on the look out and one’s interest kept alive from day to day. The seasons in themselves constituted a surprise to which, in her five-and-sixty years of life, she had never grown accustomed; she forgot each beauty as it became replaced by a newer beauty; in the delight of spring she forgot the etched austerity of winter, and in winter she forgot the flowers of spring, so it was always with a naïve astonishment that she recognized the arrival of a new season, and each one as it became established seemed to her the best. A discovery took some time before it settled itself into its place in the working of her mind, but, once there, it held with a gentle obstinacy, and, because there were not very many of these discoveries, none of them were very far away from the circling current of her thoughts. Nor was she eager for fresh acquaintances among her thoughts, any more than for fresh acquisitions among her friends; just as she liked faces to be familiar, so she liked ideas to be well-tested and proven before she admitted them to the privilege of her intimacy; the presence of strangers was an inconvenience; good manners forbade little jokes from which strangers were excluded, little allusive or reminiscent smiles in which they could not share. It followed, logically enough—although she enjoyed the small, carefully-chosen dinner parties she gave once a fortnight on summer evenings—that she was really happiest alone with her house and garden, because, as she said, one never knows anybody so well as one knows oneself, and even one’s most approved friends are apt to contradict or to disagree, or to advance unforeseen opinions; to disconcert, in fact, in a variety of ways impossible to the silent acquiescence of plants or furniture; and the one person whose constant companionship she would have chosen, had hitherto been absent.

She was perfectly happy now as she lay waiting for eight o’clock and the beginning of the day, agreeable anticipations floating in her mind as her eyes wandered over the comfort of her room, from the chintz curtains to the bright stoppered bottles and silver on her dressing-table, from the small bookcase full of nicely-bound books to the row of photographs on the mantelpiece. All was very still. One of the curtains bellied out a little in front of an open window. From time to time a smile hovered over her lips, and once she gave a sigh, and moved slightly in her bed, as though the very perfection of her thoughts were giving her a deliciously uneasy rapture. But she never allowed herself to indulge for long in reveries which, however pleasant they might be, led to nothing practical. She knew that she had a great deal to see to that morning; and if all were not done in an orderly way, something would be forgotten. She stretched out her hand and took from off the table by her bed a memorandum book, fitted with a pencil and bound in green leather, across which was written in gilt lettering, “_While I remember it_.”

With the pencil poised above the first fair page, she paused. Would it be better to execute her business in the village first, or to do what she had to do about the house? The village first, by all means; if any of the tradesmen made a mistake, there would be the more time to rectify their blunder. She began, in her mind, her journey up the village street, stopping at the stationer’s, the grocer’s, the fishmonger’s.

How difficult it was to cater for the wants of a man! So long since she had done it; she had lost the habit. What would he want? The _Times_. She noted “_Times_,” and added, after a long concentration, “_The Field_.” Then she remembered that he liked J pens; she herself always used Relief; how lucky that she had thought of that. There was nothing else from the stationer’s; of all the ordinary requirements, writing-paper, blotting-paper, ink, pencils, gummed labels, elastic bands, envelopes of assorted sizes, she kept in her cupboard an exhaustive store. The grocer next; and she had already, a long way back, when she first heard that Henry was coming, made a note that he liked preserved ginger. She renewed this note, neatly, under the proper heading in her list: Ginger, Brazil nuts, a small Stilton, anchovies—he would want a savoury for dinner, and he should have it—chutney. She could not think of anything else, but once she was in the shop she could look round and perhaps see something that he would like. She passed on to the fishmonger’s, and with a delighted smile wrote down, “Herring roes” and “Kippers.” How amused and pleased he would be when he realized how well she had remembered all his tastes! Not the taste he had when he was a little boy, and which she might have remembered out of sentiment; no, he should see that she had kept pace with his years, and remembered his preferences as a man up to five years ago, when she had last seen him.

She had finished now with the village, for all the more staple requirements had, of course, been ordered at the beginning of the week, and these were only the extras which she had treasured up to do herself on the last morning. There was more to be seen to at home. Flowers—no, she need not make a note of that; she would not forget to do the flowers. But there were other things which, unless noted, might slip her memory:

“Order the motor; eggs (brown) for breakfast; honey; fire in his room; put out the port; put out the cigars; early morning tea.”

At that moment she heard the church clock beginning to strike eight, and with a knock on the door her maid came in, carrying a little tray in one hand and a can of hot water in the other. There were a few letters slipped under the edge of the saucer on the tray, and Mrs. Martin read them while she drank her tea, but they were not very interesting, only the annual appeal from the local gardeners’ society—she thought it unthrifty to send that by post, when it could so easily have been left by hand—a couple of bills, a bulb catalogue from Holland (“Early every morning will be seen dozens of parties of men, women and children tramping up the mountains between France and Spain, singing the popular song of Harry Lauder, ‘We’re all going the same way, we’ve all gone down the hills.’ Now perhaps you will ask me why I tell this in a Bulb Catalogue, and here I will give you the answer: In the valleys of those beautiful Pyrenees mountains live numerous daffodils, which are the richest flowering of these garden-friends I ever meeted. Will you not try a couple of hundred from our stock? and you will be convinced to have invested fife bob on the good horse.”), and a letter from her sister in Devon which she put aside to read later on. The maid moved about the room, putting everything ready very quietly and skilfully. The curtains were drawn back now, and from her bed Mrs. Martin could see the wide autumn sky, gold-brown behind the scarlet trail of splay-leaved Virginia creeper that hung down outside the window. She was glad that it was neither raining nor windy. She would have the motor opened before it started for the station.

The day had really begun.

A rising tide of excitement made her want very much to talk to Williams, but this was against her principles, and she restrained herself. She kept glancing at Williams whenever the maid’s back was turned, or her head bent over the linen in the tidy drawers, and opening her lips to speak, but the remark faded away each time into a nervous smile, which she concealed by drinking again from her cup of tea. But when Williams came and stood by her bed to say, “The bath is quite ready, ma’am,” she could not prevent herself from speaking; she wanted to say, “You know, it’s to-day, Williams, to-day!” but instead of that she said, with detachment, “Is it a fine morning, Williams?” and Williams replied, respectful as ever, “A beautiful morning, ma’am,” but Mrs. Martin, as she got out of bed and slid her feet into the warmed bedroom slippers that were waiting for her, felt that between herself and Williams a perfectly satisfactory understanding existed.

II

She came downstairs in due course, dressed in a brown holland dress with a big black straw hat tied with black ribbons under her chin. Her fresh old face looked soft and powdered, her white hair escaped in puffs from under her hat, on her nose she wore a pair of round horn spectacles, and on her hands a pair of big brown leather gauntlets. Over her arm she carried a garden basket, a pair of garden scissors dangling by a ribbon from the handle. She was going to do the flowers first; one never knew, at this time of year, whether a sudden shower might not come down and dash their beauty.

In the hall, at the bottom of the stairs, the grandfather clock ticked quietly. The doors all stood open; looking to the left she could see into the sitting-room, with its deep, chintz-covered chairs and sofas; looking to the right, down the passage, into the dining-room, where presently luncheon would be laid for two; and straight ahead of her, facing the stairs, was the front door, which opened on to the little forecourt and the flagged path leading up to the porch. She went out. Some white pigeons were sunning themselves on the roof of the great barn; its doors were propped open, and a farm-hand came out, followed by two farm horses, their hoofs going clop-clop after him, their harness clanking loosely, and their blinkers and the high peaks of their collars studded with shining brass nails. Their tails and manes were plaited up with straw and red braid. Mrs. Martin nodded to the man, as he touched his cap to her, and stood looking after the horses lumbering their way out towards the lane. She liked having the farm so close at hand, and had never thought of putting the barn, although it stood so near the house, forming one side of the forecourt, to any other than farm uses. She went across the court now, and looked into it. A smell of dust and sacking; gold motes in a shaft of sunlight; two farm waggons with red and blue wheels; a pile of yellow straw, and some trusses of hay. She was very well content. Behind the barn stood the rickyard, and here were the garnered stacks, pointed like witches’ hats, a double row of them: the farm was doing well. When the time came, she would have a prosperous inheritance to bequeath to her son.

She turned away from the shadows of the barn, and went through the door in the wall that led into the garden. It was quite warm; the ground steamed slightly, so that a faint mist hung low, and everything was wet, with but a dangerously narrow margin between the last splendour of autumn and its first sodden decay. She walked slowly up the garden path, looking at the bronze, red, yellow and orange flowers that were bent down towards the ground by the moisture; she walked up to the path, swinging her scissors, till she came to the clump of Scotch firs at the top of the garden, and stood surveying the country that swept down to the valley, rising to the Downs beyond, the woods in the valley golden through the mist, and blue smoke hanging above the deep violet pools of shadow, between the woods and the hills; all unstirred by any breath; rust-colour and blue in every shade from the pale tan of the stubble to the fire of the woods, from the wreathing smoke-blue to the depths of amethyst driven like wedges into the flanks of the Downs. Below the clump of Scotch firs the ground fell away rapidly; in the valley gleamed a sudden silver twist of the river. The river was Mrs. Martin’s boundary, the natural frontier to her eight hundred acres. They had not always been eight hundred acres. Once they had only been five hundred, and only thanks to stringent frugality and a certain astuteness on Mrs. Martin’s part had they been extended to that natural frontier which was the river. She could not think of that astuteness now without a measure of discomfort. Had she been _quite_ as fair as she might have been—_quite_ as scrupulous? Would she ever have persuaded Mr. Thistlethwaite to part with the required three hundred if she hadn’t canvassed for him quite so enthusiastically before the poll? Was she quite sure that she agreed with all his political convictions? Was she even sure that she understood them? She dismissed these qualms, hurriedly and furtively, when they nudged her. Anyway, the three hundred acres were hers, and whatever she had done, she had done it for her son; let that be her defence in everything. She would bring him out here after luncheon, and he would stand looking over the valley, and possibly he would say, as he had said once before, years ago, “I wish our land went down as far as the river, don’t you?” And then in a great moment she would reply “It does!” For she had never told him about the extra three hundred acres; she had kept that secret out of the long weekly letter she had written to him overseas during all the five years of his absence. There was no detail of her life that she hadn’t told him; she had told him, separately, about each of her dinner parties; about the work on the farm, and about the agricultural experiments that she and Lynes, the bailiff, were making, their failure or their success; she had kept him informed of all the events in the village; but the three hundred acres she had hugged to herself as a secret and a surprise. Lynes was her accomplice; she had had to warn him that he must never let out the secret should he have occasion to write to Mr. Henry. It had created a great link between herself and Lynes. There had, of course, been the danger that somebody or other in the district would be writing to Henry on other matters, and would mention his mother’s purchase; but up to the present it was clear from Henry’s letters that no one had done so. He had written to her with fair regularity, though not so often as she could have wished; but then she would have liked a letter by every mail, as he received from her, and that was unreasonable; and though sometimes his letters were brief, and clearly written in a hurry, she was too loyal to ask herself what he could possibly have to do with his evenings on a ranch where work would be finished by dusk.

She turned back along the path, and began cutting flowers wherewith she filled her basket. She cut very carefully where it would not show. No one else was allowed to cut the flowers. She was especially proud of this, her autumn border. On either side of the path, until it was brought up short at the end by the grey walls of the manor-house, it smouldered in broad bands that repeated the colours of the autumn woods. Orange snapdragon, marigold, and mimulus flowing forward on to the flagged path; then the bronze of coreopsis and helenium, stabbed by the lance-like spires of red-hot poker; and behind them the almost incredible brilliance of dahlias reared against the background of dark yew hedge. The border streamed away like a flaming tongue from the cool grey of the house. She had worked very hard and studied much to bring it to its present perfection; ten years of labour had at last been rewarded. Behind the yew hedges, to either side, were squares of old orchard, and the bright red apples nodded over the hedges like so many bright eyes peeping at the borders. In the grass under the apple-trees the bulbs lay dormant, that in the spring speckled the orchards with grape-hyacinths, anemones, and narcissi; but Mrs. Martin had forgotten about the spring. She was thinking, as she cut sheaves from the coreopsis and, more sparingly, from the snapdragons, that the autumn border was really the finest sight of the year, and that she was glad Henry should be coming now, and at no other time.

In the house, where she had everything conveniently arranged in the garden-room—a sink, taps, cloths for wiping the glasses, and a cupboard full of flower vases—she proceeded leisurely to do the flowers. No one had ever known Mrs. Martin be anything but leisurely; she always had plenty to occupy her time, but she was never hurried or ruffled. It was one of her greatest charms. She selected the flower vases with nice care; some were of rough pottery, but those now stood on one side, for she consecrated them to the spring flowers and to the roses; others were of glass, like green bubbles, glaucous and iridescent, light to the hand—for Mrs. Martin could not bear glasses that were not delicately blown, and as no one ever touched them except herself, they never got broken. She had a genius for handling fragility, quick and deft, and curiously tender. She was now wondering whether Henry’s wife would some day stand in her place at the sink in the garden-room. She often wondered this, for Henry’s wife was a personage she had long since absorbed into her thoughts. She thought of her without bitterness or jealousy, simply as a part of Henry, and consequently as another person to whom she would, in due course, have to hand over the house, the garden, and the estate—to render an account of her stewardship. Mrs. Martin was thinking about her as she snipped the ends off stalks that were too long, and lifted the vases that were already filled on to the tray standing ready to receive them. It made no difference that Henry should not yet have come across his wife; she was not thereby entitled, in Mrs. Martin’s eyes, to any separate existence of her own. She was Henry’s wife; the future mistress, when Mrs. Martin was dead, of the house and all it contained. It had taken a very long time for Mrs. Martin’s mind to grow accustomed to this idea, but now that it was there she accepted it quite placidly, and it came up in its turn for examination amongst the other ideas, or was taken out when she wanted something to think about. She had even got into the way of saying to Lynes, or to the gardener, “I’m sure that Mrs. Henry would approve of that,” and if, at first, they had been a little surprised, they had quickly come to take Mrs. Henry quite for granted. She had even an affection for Henry’s wife. She liked to think of them living here together in the country, so far away from London—the country that was England although London forgot about it—and of Henry tramping over the eight hundred acres with a gun and a spaniel, while his wife stooped over the flowers in the walled garden, and she never doubted that they would frequently recall her, who had made the place what it was; recall her with a sort of grudging tenderness—she was too humanly wise a woman to expect more than that—and say, “The old lady ought to rest quietly in her grave....” She carried the tray of flowers into the hall, and from there distributed them; a big vase of coreopsis on each window sill in the sitting-room, a bowl of marigolds on the table where the light of the lamp would fall straight on to them in the evening, a bowl of snapdragons in the centre of the hall, red and yellow nasturtiums on the dining-room table. There remained two little pots of snapdragon, which she took upstairs and put on the dressing-table in his bedroom. She came down again. The bronze of the flowers, she thought, suited the house, with its bits of oak panelling, the polished stairs of a golden-brown, and the pile carpet of mouse-brown in the sitting-room. She was pleased with her survey, though a little tired. She heaved the sigh of happy tiredness. Five years alone here, alone except for the neighbours; and although she liked being alone, and was quite content between Lynes and her garden in the daytime, and her books in the evening, she was very glad that Henry—who was really her unseen and constant companion, at the back of her mind in everything she did—should be coming back to her at last.

III