A few days later Sherman was hurrying through the town of Ballah. It
was Saturday, and he passed down through the marketing country people,
and the old women with baskets of cakes and gooseberries and long
pieces of sugarstick shaped like walking-sticks, and called by children
‘Peggie’s leg.’
Now, as two months earlier, he was occasionally recognized and greeted,
and, as before, went on without knowing, his eyes full of unintelligent
sadness because the mind was making merry afar. They had the look we
see in the eyes of animals and dreamers. Everything had grown simple,
his problem had taken itself away. He was thinking what he would say
to Mary Carton. Now they would be married, they would live in a small
house with a green door and new thatch, and a row of beehives under
a hedge. He knew where just such a house stood empty. The day before
he and his mother had discussed, with their host of the Imperial
Hotel, this question of houses. They knew the peculiarities of every
house in the neighbourhood, except two or three built while they were
away. All day Sherman and his mother had gone over the merits of the
few they were told were empty. She wondered why her son had grown so
unpractical. Once he was so easily pleased--the row of beehives and the
new thatch did not for her settle the question. She set it all down to
Miss Leland and the plays, and the singing, and the belladonna, and
remembered with pleasure how many miles of uneasy water lay between the
town of Ballah and these things.
She did not know what else beside the row of beehives and the new
thatch her son’s mind ran on as he walked among the marketing country
people, and the gooseberry sellers, and the merchants of ‘Peggie’s
leg,’ and the boys playing marbles in odd corners, and the men in
waistcoats with flannel sleeves driving carts, and the women driving
donkeys with creels of turf or churns of milk. Just now she was trying
to remember whether she used to buy her wool for knitting at Miss
Peter’s or from Mrs. Macallough’s at the bridge. One or other sold
it a halfpenny a skein cheaper. She never knew what went on inside
her son’s mind, she had always her own fish to fry. Blessed are the
unsympathetic. They preserve their characters in an iron bottle while
the most of us poor mortals are going about the planet vainly searching
for any kind of a shell to contain us, and evaporating the while.
Sherman began to mount the hill to the vicarage. He was happy. Because
he was happy he began to run. Soon the steepness of the hill made him
walk. He thought about his love for Mary Carton. Seen by the light of
this love everything that had happened to him was plain now. He had
found his centre of unity. His childhood had prepared him for this
love. He had been solitary, fond of favourite corners of fields, fond
of going about alone, unhuman like the birds and the leaves, his heart
empty. How clearly he remembered his first meeting with Mary. They were
both children. At a school treat they watched the fire-balloon ascend,
and followed it a little way over the fields together. What friends
they became, growing up together, reading the same books, thinking the
same thoughts!
As he came to the door and pulled at the great hanging iron
bell-handle, the fire-balloon reascended in his heart, surrounded with
cheers and laughter.