Mrs. Kerrick sat at a little teak-wood table in the verandah of a low-
pitched teak-built house that stood on the steep slope of a brown
hillside. Her youngest child, with the grave natural dignity of nine-
year old girlhood, maintained a correct but observant silence, looking
carefully yet unobtrusively after the wants of the one guest, and
checking from time to time the incursions of ubiquitous ants that were
obstinately disposed to treat the table-cloth as a foraging ground. The
wayfaring visitor, who was experiencing a British blend of Eastern
hospitality, was a French naturalist, travelling thus far afield in quest
of feathered specimens to enrich the aviaries of a bird-collecting Balkan
King. On the previous evening, while shrugging his shoulders and
unloosing his vocabulary over the meagre accommodation afforded by the
native rest-house, he had been enchanted by receiving an invitation to
transfer his quarters to the house on the hillside, where he found not
only a pleasant-voiced hostess and some drinkable wine, but three brown-
skinned English youngsters who were able to give him a mass of
intelligent first-hand information about the bird life of the region. And
now, at the early morning breakfast, ere yet the sun was showing over the
rim of the brown-baked hills, he was learning something of the life of
the little community he had chanced on. "I was in these parts many years
ago," explained the hostess, "when my husband was alive and had an
appointment out here. It is a healthy hill district and I had pleasant
memories of the place, so when it became necessary, well, desirable let
us say, to leave our English home and find a new one, it occurred to me
to bring my boys and my little girl here--my eldest girl is at school in
Paris. Labour is cheap here and I try my hand at farming in a small way.
Of course it is very different work to just superintending the dairy and
poultry-yard arrangements of an English country estate. There are so
many things, insect ravages, bird depredations, and so on, that one only
knows on a small scale in England, that happen here in wholesale fashion,
not to mention droughts and torrential rains and other tropical
visitations. And then the domestic animals are so disconcertingly
different from the ones one has been used to; humped cattle never seem to
behave in the way that straight-backed cattle would, and goats and geese
and chickens are not a bit the same here that they are in Europe--and of
course the farm servants are utterly unlike the same class in England.
One has to unlearn a good deal of what one thought one knew about stock-
keeping and agriculture, and take note of the native ways of doing
things; they are primitive and unenterprising of course, but they have an
accumulated store of experience behind them, and one has to tread warily
in initiating improvements."
The Frenchman looked round at the brown sun-scorched hills, with the
dusty empty road showing here and there in the middle distance and other
brown sun-scorched hills rounding off the scene; he looked at the lizards
on the verandah walls, at the jars for keeping the water cool, at the
numberless little insect-bored holes in the furniture, at the heat-drawn
lines on his hostess's comely face. Notwithstanding his present
wanderings he had a Frenchman's strong homing instinct, and he marvelled
to hear this lady, who should have been a lively and popular figure in
the social circle of some English county town, talking serenely of the
ways of humped cattle and native servants.
"And your children, how do they like the change?" he asked.
"It is healthy up here among the hills," said the mother, also looking
round at the landscape and thinking doubtless of a very different scene;
"they have an outdoor life and plenty of liberty. They have their ponies
to ride, and there is a lake up above us that is a fine place for them to
bathe and boat in; the three boys are there now, having their morning
swim. The eldest is sixteen and he is allowed to have a gun, and there
is some good wild fowl shooting to be had in the reed beds at the further
end of the lake. I think that part of the joy of his shooting
expeditions lies in the fact that many of the duck and plover that he
comes across belong to the same species that frequent our English moors
and rivers."
It was the first hint that she had given of a wistful sense of exile, the
yearning for other skies, the message that a dead bird's plumage could
bring across rolling seas and scorching plains.
"And the education of your boys, how do you manage for that?" asked the
visitor.
"There is a young tutor living out in these wilds," said Mrs. Kerrick;
"he was assistant master at a private school in Scotland, but it had to
be given up when--when things changed; so many of the boys left the
country. He came out to an uncle who has a small estate eight miles from
here, and three days in the week he rides over to teach my boys, and
three days he goes to another family living in the opposite direction. To-
day he is due to come here. It is a great boon to have such an
opportunity for getting the boys educated, and of course it helps him to
earn a living."
"And the society of the place?" asked the Frenchman.
His hostess laughed.
"I must admit it has to be looked for with a strong pair of
field-glasses," she said; "it is almost as difficult to get a good bridge
four together as it would have been to get up a tennis tournament or a
subscription dance in our particular corner of England. One has to
ignore distances and forget fatigue if one wants to be gregarious even on
a limited scale. There are one or two officials who are our chief social
mainstays, but the difficulty is to muster the few available souls under
the same roof at the same moment. A road will be impassable in one
quarter, a pony will be lame in another, a stress of work will prevent
some one else from coming, and another may be down with a touch of fever.
When my little girl gave a birthday party here her only little girl guest
had come twelve miles to attend it. The Forest officer happened to drop
in on us that evening, so we felt quite festive."
The Frenchman's eyes grew round in wonder. He had once thought that the
capital city of a Balkan kingdom was the uttermost limit of social
desolation, viewed from a Parisian standpoint, and there at any rate one
could get cafe chantant, tennis, picnic parties, an occasional theatre
performance by a foreign troupe, now and then a travelling circus, not to
speak of Court and diplomatic functions of a more or less sociable
character. Here, it seemed, one went a day's journey to reach an
evening's entertainment, and the chance arrival of a tired official took
on the nature of a festivity. He looked round again at the rolling
stretches of brown hills; before he had regarded them merely as the
background to this little shut-away world, now he saw that they were
foreground as well. They were everything, there was nothing else. And
again his glance travelled to the face of his hostess, with its bright,
pleasant eyes and smiling mouth.
"And you live here with your children," he said, "here in this
wilderness? You leave England, you leave everything, for this?"
His hostess rose and took him over to the far side of the verandah. The
beginnings of a garden were spread out before them, with young fruit
trees and flowering shrubs, and bushes of pale pink roses. Exuberant
tropical growths were interspersed with carefully tended vestiges of
plants that had evidently been brought from a more temperate climate, and
had not borne the transition well. Bushes and trees and shrubs spread
away for some distance, to where the ground rose in a small hillock and
then fell away abruptly into bare hillside.
"In all this garden that you see," said the Englishwoman, "there is one
tree that is sacred."
"A tree?" said the Frenchman.
"A tree that we could not grow in England."
The Frenchman followed the direction of her eyes and saw a tall, bare
pole at the summit of the hillock. At the same moment the sun came over
the hilltops in a deep, orange glow, and a new light stole like magic
over the brown landscape. And, as if they had timed their arrival to
that exact moment of sunburst, three brown-faced boys appeared under the
straight, bare pole. A cord shivered and flapped, and something ran
swiftly up into the air, and swung out in the breeze that blew across the
hills--a blue flag with red and white crosses. The three boys bared
their heads and the small girl on the verandah steps stood rigidly to
attention. Far away down the hill, a young man, cantering into view
round a corner of the dusty road, removed his hat in loyal salutation.
"That is why we live out here," said the Englishwoman quietly.