“Are you quite by yourselves? Has the wolf gone?”
“Open the door at once, and don’t talk nonsense,” I said firmly, trying
not to sound as irritated as I felt.
“Oh, but it isn’t nonsense. I’ve seen them out there! One was there
just now. And I’m not going to risk my life by opening the door if he’s
there still.”
Evidently _our_ lives were unimportant! “If you don’t open the door
this very instant,” I said, “I’ll get in through the window. You must
be out of your senses, and you have always professed to be so brave!”
The key grated in the lock, and the door opened half an inch, while
Eileen’s nose peeped at the crack, to make sure we were not the
wolf. Then she explained, “If you’d been here for hours and hours,
as I have”—(we had actually been gone an hour and a half, though
I could understand the sudden storm, and our delay, had made her
nervous)—“hearing those wolves outside a-howling and howling and
gnashing their horrid fangs, you wouldn’t wonder I was afraid to open
the door. I saw one skulking off just before you came in.”
I understood the situation immediately. “Eileen,” I said severely,
“what have you been reading?”
“I couldn’t help just seeing what it was all about when I spread the
sheets on the dresser. You said I must have fresh papers for the
dresser and shelves——”
“Fresh paper on the dresser?” I exclaimed, and went hurriedly into the
kitchen. Sure enough, the dresser, the pantry and scullery shelves, and
all other available surfaces, including the deep window-sill and the
tops of the safes, had been carefully covered with white paper; prompt
investigation proved them to be pages from some of the various MSS. I
had left in piles on the settle when I went out. Of course the writing
was face downwards. I lifted things and examined what was beneath. The
vegetable dishes on the dresser were reposing on portions of a serial
story; canisters, saltbox and biscuit-tins shared the back of one of
a series of Nature Study articles; the Siberian wolves were gnashing
their horrid fangs beneath the knife-machine. I left the anonymous
letter to an amiable if inglorious end, laid along the saucepan shelf,
but I hurriedly collected the rest to the accompaniment of Eileen’s
plaintive tones—
“I thought you had put them there for waste paper. And the back of
every sheet was so beautifully clean, and I had made my kitchen look
_so_ nice with them.”
All of which goes to illustrate the risk one runs in sending MSS. to
editors, more especially to feminine editors possessed of kitchens.
* * * * *
Though the fall of snow did not last very long, the wind howled and
moaned around the house all the evening, and roared in the wide
chimneys like a 32-feet open diapason pedal pipe. Virginia suggested
to Eileen that she should go out and put a little salt on the wolves’
tails to see if that would quiet them.
I thoroughly enjoy the moaning of the wind if I am surrounded by
creature comforts—a big fire, a good cup of tea, or something
interesting in that line. I never feel a desire for intellectual
or introspective pursuits when the moan is most robust. When a raw
nor’wester or a bullying sou’wester howls outside the door and windows,
making the pine trees creak and groan like the wheels of an old timber
waggon, and the evergreen firs wildly wave their branches like long
dark plumes, I want to be able to hug myself to myself in the midst
of warmth and good cheer, and in the company of some congenial fellow
being. Then I give the fire a further poke and another log, remarking
contentedly: “Just _hark_ at the wind! _What_ a night! Isn’t it cosy
indoors!” And the brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and the plates
and jugs and dishes on the dresser blink acquiescence.
Under such circumstances I love the howlers on these hills. But if
I were a studious ascetic, burning the midnight oil—and very little
else—I’m afraid that the sound of the wailing up and down the scale in
minor sixths, coupled with the lack of comforting food and blazing fire
and sympathetic companionship, would make me desperately melancholy
indeed.
Now we were indoors we could defy the weather, and here at least
firewood was plentiful—not the “five sticks a penny, take it or leave
it,” that had been our portion in town, but as much as ever one wanted,
and plenty more where the last came from. We soon had crackling blazes
all over the house, and you should have seen Eileen’s almost awestruck
countenance when she was told to make herself a fire in her own
bedroom! “_Now_ I know what it’s like to be the Queen!” she exclaimed.
I had been literally fire-starved, owing to the need for economizing
on fuel in town; and now I was loose among my own woods again, with
snapped branches lying in all directions among the undergrowth, I went
in for an orgy of warmth. Large chunks of apple wood and stubby bits
the wind had tossed down from the creaking fir-trees, made crackling
glowing fires in the big open grates. An absurd butterfly unthawed
itself from some crevice among the ceiling beams and came walking
deliberately down the window curtain, evidently under the impression
that he was in for a sultry summer.
* * * * *
For some time we sat and watched the splendour of it all.
When you are burning logs from old, sea-going ships, you see again the
blue and saffron of the sky, and the green and peacock tints of the
ocean; and in like manner you can see leaping from our forest logs the
crimson and yellow and gold that once blazed in the autumn glory of the
tree-covered hills, and the glow of the fire gives back the warmth and
the sunshine that the trees caught in their leaves and cherished in
their rugged branches.
* * * * *
I dropped off to sleep that night with the flickering fire-glow
whispering of comfort and rest for body and brain. Yes, despite the
soothing balm of it all, and the certainty of safety from “the terror
that walks by night” so that one could sleep without that sense of
constant listening that has become second nature with those of us who
live in town, I could not enjoy it with the old-time zest. Who could,
with the thought ever on one’s heart: what about this lad, and that
one? where are _they_ lying this bitter night?
Physical sense becomes numbed when one lives perpetually in the shadow
of possible tragedy.
* * * * *
Probably it was the after-effect of our struggle with the wind and
weather that caused us all to sleep very soundly that night; at any
rate, it was broad daylight before anyone stirred in the cottage next
morning, and we missed the doings of the storm king in the interval.
When I first opened my eyes I wondered what the white light could be
that was reflected on the ceiling. Then I looked out of the window, and
what a scene it was! The whole earth, so far as the eye could see, was
one vast fairyland of snow; moreover, the face of creation appeared
to have risen three or four feet nearer the bedroom window since
last I had looked out, though the full import of this did not occur
to me at the moment. I could merely look and look at the wonderful
transformation that had been effected so rapidly and so silently while
we slept. All trace of the garden had disappeared; shrubs and trees
alike were bowed down with billows of snow. In the more exposed places,
the wind had blown some of the snow from the firs and larches, but for
the most part the trees on the hillside were as laden with snow as
those in the garden. We might have been high up in the Alps. The sun
was trying to shine, and bringing a gleam and glint out of every snow
crystal, but the sky still looked leaden in the north.
Eileen, bringing the morning tea, imparted the thrilling intelligence
that the snow was several feet deep outside the doors, the outhouses
inaccessible.
“Then we must clear the snow from the path ourselves,” I said. “There
is nothing else for it.” The handy man was laid up with influenza in
his home several fields away. And there was small likelihood of any
other man coming our way. But the question of a few shovels of snow did
not seem a serious matter; we were quite lighthearted about it.
When we made our first survey of the situation, however, we found that
the snow was far higher outside the door than we had at first imagined.
Owing to the position of the house, and the way it nestles back in a
little hollow that has been cut out of the hillside to give it level
standing room, special inducement had been offered to the snow to pile
itself up in drifts and block each door in a most effectual manner.
Still—that snow had to be cleared away somehow, and we stood in the
doorway and discussed methods.
Hitherto I had always held the idea that people who allowed themselves
to remain “snowed up” were very dull-witted and lacking in enterprise.
Why not start clearing from the inside, beginning with the spadeful
nearest the doorstep, and so go on clearing, space after space, until
they had got through to the outer world? To me it seemed quite an easy
thing to do if you went about it systematically. But one slight detail
had never occurred to me, viz., what should be done with the first
spadeful of snow when you shovelled it up from beside the doorstep, to
say nothing of the next and the next! That was one of the questions
that bothered us now, though it was not the first difficulty we
encountered.
At the very outset, of course, we all said, “Just get a spade!” But,
alas, the spade was locked up in one of the inaccessible outhouses!
Next we called for a broom, but all brooms were in the same building.
Then I said, “Well, bring some shovels.”
“Here’s the kitchen shovel,” said Eileen (Ursula pounced on that at
once), “and here’s the scoop from the coal-scuttle, and here’s one of
the small brass shovels from upstairs.”
“But where is the big iron shovel?” I asked.
“That’s in the coal-shed” (likewise inaccessible!). Virginia turned a
deaf ear on the bedroom shovel, and possessed herself of the scoop. I
had no alternative but to start work with the small brass affair that
was about as effective as a fish-slice would have been!
We each shovelled up a mass (most of it tumbling off the shovel again
before we got it into mid-air), and then we looked at each other and
enquired what we were to do with it. It did not seem advisable to carry
it inside the house; and the only alternative was to toss it a foot or
two away from us; but then, that only meant adding to the pile already
there, which in any case we should have to clear away before we could
get anywhere! It _was_ a problem.
In the end we managed to clear about a square foot, and make a few
small burrows in the mound around us, by throwing the snow as far away
as we could each time. But what was that foot! We were still yards
away from the coal-shed and the wood-house, with only a limited supply
indoors, and still further away from the water. We had been working for
a solid hour, and seemed to have raised a haystack of snow a little way
off, where we had tossed our meagre shovelfuls. And then—as though to
mock our feeble attempts—down came the snow again, and covered up the
space we had cleared with such effort!
We looked at it in absolute despair.
“Why was I born an unmarried spinster?” exclaimed Ursula. “Oh, that a
man would hove in sight—or whatever the present tense of ‘hove’ may be.”
But no man obligingly hove in response!
X