It was a pretty cottage he found, as, on the September evening, his
station fly drew up at the wicket-gate. They had come a long way from
the station, and, after leaving a small village, the winding lane, too,
had seemed long. He saw, nevertheless, as he alighted, that the rustic
building, old stones below and modern thatch above, could not be far
from the central group of which it formed an adjunct; for it had been
contrived, by devices dear to the heart of the week-ender, from two or
three labourers' cottages thrown into one and covered all over with the
capacious and brooding thatch. “Quaint,” Dorothy’s really inevitable
word, altogether expressed it, from the box hedges that ran on either
side of the flagged path, to the pale yellow hollyhocks beside the door.
A round-cheeked country girl, neatly capped and aproned, opened the door
on a square, rush-matted hall; and beyond that he saw a room full of the
sunset, where a table was being laid and from which Mrs. Baldwin came
out to greet him.
She was not tall, and had thick, closely bound braids. He had dreaded
finding himself at once dealt with as a case; but Mrs. Baldwin’s manner
was not even that of one accustomed to paying guests. Her murmur of
welcome, her questions about his journey, her mild directions as she led
him up to his room, "Be careful at this landing, the level of the floor
goes up and the beam comes down so low,"--were rather those of a shy and
entirely unprofessional hostess.
He thought, as soon as he took in his room, with its _voile-de-Gènes_
hangings and dear old furniture, that he pleased her by saying, “What a
delicious room!” and even more when, on going to the wide, low,
mullioned window, its panes open to the west, he added, “And what a
delicious view!” There were meadows and tall hedgerow elms, and, running
in a tranquil band of brightness, the stream that reflected the sky.
She did not say that she was glad he liked it, but her very gentle smile
at the welcome it all made for him was part of the welcome. What she did
say was, with the little air of shy preoccupation, while she wrung her
finger-tips together, those of one hand in those of the other, “I think
the water’s very hot. I have a rather young little maid. You’ll tell me
if you want anything. Are three blankets and the down quilt enough? The
nights are rather cold already.”
He said that three would be perfect, secure, from his glance at the
deep, comely bed, that they would be beautifully thick and fleecy.
“Then you’ll come down to us when you are ready.” She stood in the door
to look round again. “Matches here, you see; biscuits in the little
earthenware box; and the spirit-lamp is in case you should wake in the
night--you could make yourself a cup of cocoa? Everything is
there--cocoa, milk, and sugar. It usually sends one off again directly.”
It was all the slightly shy hostess rather than the businesslike soother
and sustainer; and, no, it wasn’t a bit cosy. He repudiated that word
indignantly, while he washed--the water _was_ very hot, admirably hot;
there was a complacency about cosy, and Mrs. Baldwin had no complacency,
though she was, for all her shyness and the unconscious gestures of
physical nervousness, composed. Her hands, he remembered, recalling
their little trick,--he had noticed it in the hall,--were like a
child’s; not the hands of a practical housewife. Yet, from the look of
that bed (yes, thank heaven, a box-spring mattress!), from the heat of
the water, and, above all, the deft and accessible grouping of the
spirit-lamp and its adjuncts, she proved that she knew how to make one
comfortable.
There were the meadows and--going again to the window, he wondered
leaning out,--could he see the autumn crocuses? Yes, surely; even at
this evening hour his eyes distinguished the pale yet delicately
purpling tint that streaked the pastoral verdure. What a delicious
place, indeed! He stood, absorbed in looking out, until the maid came to
say that supper would be ready in five minutes.
The long room, the living-room,--for it combined, he saw, all social
functions,--also faced the meadows at the back of the house, and the
primrose coloured sunset still filled it as he entered. Mrs. Baldwin was
busying herself with the table, and an old gentleman with a very long
white beard rose, with much dignity, from the grandfather’s chair near
a window-seat. Mr. Haseltine, so his daughter named him, had more the
air of seeing the visitor as a P.G., perhaps even as a shell-shock
patient; but he was a nice old man, Guy felt, although his beard was too
long. He wore a brown velveteen jacket, and Guy surmised that he might
have been a writer or scholar of some not very significant sort.
“Yes, we think ours a very favored nook indeed,” he said, as Guy again
praised the prospect. “Yes; three cottages. Very happily contrived, is
it not? There is a clever builder in the next town. He kept the old
fireplace, you see; that end was a kitchen and the beams are all the old
ones. Three gardens, too, thrown into one; but that is entirely my
daughter’s creation. Pig-styes used to be in that corner.”
Guy looked out at the squares of colour, the low beds of mignonette, the
phloxes, larkspurs, and the late sweet-peas a screen of stained-glass
tints against the sky. Where the pig-styes had been was a little
thatched summer-house with rustic seat and table. The bee-hives were
just outside the hedge, at an angle of the meadow. Mr. Haseltine
continued to talk while Mrs. Baldwin and the maid came in and out,
carrying tea and eggs and covered dishes.
“I hope you don’t mind high tea,” she said. “It seems to go with our
life here.”
He felt that high tea was his favourite meal. There was a big white
earthenware bowl on the table, filled with sweet-peas. “Where do you get
the old-fashioned colours?” he asked her. “I thought the growers had
extirpated them; one sees only the long-stemmed ones nowadays, with the
tiresome artistic shades.”
He pleased her again, he felt sure, and she told him that she always
saved the seed, liking the old bright colours better, too.
He was glad that he had come, although Mr. Haseltine’s beard was too
long and he feared that he would prove talkative in the worst way, the
deliberate and retaining way. He liked the smell of everything,--a
mingling of sweet-peas, rush-matting, and China tea,--and the look of
everything; good, unpretentious old oak furniture, fresh, if faded,
chintzes, and book-lined walls; and he presently liked the taste of
everything too.
“I feel already as if I should sleep to-night,” he said to Mrs. Baldwin.
She sat behind the tea-urn a little distracted, if anything so mild
could be called distraction, by the plunging movements of the little
maid as she moved about the table. “That will do nicely, Cathy,” she
said. “We can manage now. You can bring in some more hot water if I
ring.--Oh, I do hope you’ll sleep. People usually sleep here.”
She was hardly middle-aged, though, after Dorothy’s bright browns and
pinks, Tommy might well have thought her so. Many years older than
Dorothy, of course, yet how many he could not in the least compute.
There was an agelessness, with something tough and solid, about her; she
was as little slender as she was stout; she might, with her neutral
tints,--hair, skin, dress,--have looked almost the same at sixty as she
did now. She wasn’t pale, or sallow, or sunburned; yet her complexion
seemed so to go with her hair that the whole head might have been carved
in some pleasantly tinted stone. Only her eyes gave any depth of
difference; gentle eyes, like a grey-blue breadth of evening. She had a
broad, short face and broad, beautifully drawn lips, and looked almost
mysteriously innocent.
Guy took her in to this extent, swift as he was at taking people in, and
sensitive as he was to what he found. He felt sure--and the depth of
comfort it gave him made him aware of all the reluctances Dorothy’s
decision had overborne--that she hadn’t the ghost of a method or of a
theory. Shell-shock people had merely happened to come and had happened
to get well quickly. He even gathered, as the peaceful evening wore
on,--Cathy clearing, placid lamps lighted, the windows still left open
to the twilight--that she didn’t really think very much about her cases,
in so far as they were cases and not guests. Having done her best in the
way of blankets, hot water, and spirit-kettles, and seen them settled
down into the life she had made for herself,--and not at all for
them,--she went her own way, irresponsible and unpreoccupied.
To-night she didn’t attempt to entertain him. It was Mr. Haseltine, at
supper, who kept up the conversation, and with the air of always keeping
it up, with even the air, Guy imagined once or twice, of feeling it
specially his part to make amends, in that sort of resource, for his
dear daughter’s deficiency. She was, Guy saw, very much his dear
daughter; but he felt sure that it had never entered the old gentleman’s
head that any one would find her interesting when he himself was there.
After supper she was occupied for a little while at her desk, adding up
figures, it appeared, in house-books; for she came to her father and
asked him if he would do a column for her. “It has come out differently
three times with me,” she confessed, but without ruefulness. “I’m so
dull at my accounts!”
Guy, as Mr. Haseltine fumbled for his large tortoise-shell eyeglasses,
offered to help her, and then came over and sat beside the desk and did
the rest of the sums for her. She was tidying up for the month, she told
him, and always found it rather confusing. “It’s having to put the
pennies, which are twelves, into pounds, which are twenties, isn’t it?”
she said, and thanked him so much.
But this could hardly be called entertaining him, nor could it, when he
accompanied her across the lane in the now deepening dusk, to shut up
her fowls. After that, there was the game of chess, during which Mrs.
Baldwin absented herself a good deal, helping Cathy, Guy imagined, with
the beds and hot-water bottles; and at nine-thirty they all lighted
their candles and went upstairs.
Bedtime had been, for many months, his most dreaded moment. The door
shut him in and shut away the last chance of alleviation. There was
nothing for it but to stretch himself haggardly on his couch and cling
to every detail in the day’s events, or in the morrow’s prospects, that
might preserve him from the past. To fight _not_ to remember was a
losing game, and filled one’s brain with the white flame of insomnia. He
had found that it was when, exhausted by the fruitless effort, he
suffered the waiting vultures to settle upon him, abandoned himself to
the beaks and talons, that, through the sheer passivity of anguish,
oblivion most often came.
To-night, from the habit of it, his mind braced itself as he came into
the room, and he was aware, as he had been for nearly a year now, that
Ronnie’s face was waiting, as it were, on the outskirts of
consciousness, to seize upon him. But, after he had lighted the candles
on his dressing-table and the candles on the mantelpiece, taken off his
coat, and started undressing, he found that his thoughts, quite
effortlessly, were engaged with his new surroundings, old Mr.
Haseltine’s beard and eyeglasses occupying them, and the clucking noise
he made in drinking the glass of hot ginger and water that had been
brought to them on a tray while they played; Mrs. Baldwin’s accounts,
her fowls, and the colour of her eyes. He decided that the colour was
Wedgwood, or perhaps periwinkle blue--some very dense, quiet colour.
As he moved about the room, this protective interest came to him from
the little objects he made acquaintance with: the round Venetian box,
dim gilt and blue and red, on the chest of drawers in which he found a
handful of tiny shells--shells, no doubt, that Mrs. Baldwin had picked
up during a seaside outing; the faded old blue leather blotter on the
writing-table, marked E. H., which had probably been hers since maiden
days (and did E stand for Ethel or Edith or Ellen?); the pretty
lettering in fine black script of the writing-paper so pleasantly
stacked; the dear old Dutch coffee-pot and jug on the mantelpiece, and
the bowl of mignonette that she, of course, had arranged. He sank his
face into its fragrance, and peace seemed breathed upon him from the
flowers.
He was wondering, as he got into bed, with a glance, before he blew out
the candle, at the birds and branches, the whites and blacks and roses
of the _voile-de-Gènes_, whether he would find the autumn crocuses open
in the meadows next morning; it had looked like the evening of another
fine day. Then, the candle out, his thoughts, for a little while, were
tangled in the magical dreamland of the _voile-de-Gènes_, and the breath
of the mignonette seemed to lie upon his eyelids with a soft compulsion
to peace, until, all thought sliding suddenly away, he dropped into
delicious slumber.