IT was a fresh rain-repentant afternoon, following a morning that had
been sultry and torrentially wet by turns; the sort of afternoon that
impels people to talk graciously of the rain as having done a lot of
good, its chief merit in their eyes probably having been its recognition
of the art of moderation. Also it was an afternoon that invited bodily
activity after the convalescent languor of the earlier part of the day.
Elaine had instinctively found her way into her riding-habit and sent an
order down to the stables—a blessed oasis that still smelt sweetly of
horse and hay and cleanliness in a world that reeked of petrol, and now
she set her mare at a smart pace through a succession of long-stretching
country lanes. She was due some time that afternoon at a garden-party,
but she rode with determination in an opposite direction. In the first
place neither Comus or Courtenay would be at the party, which fact seemed
to remove any valid reason that could be thought of for inviting her
attendance thereat; in the second place about a hundred human beings
would be gathered there, and human gatherings were not her most crying
need at the present moment. Since her last encounter with her wooers,
under the cedars in her own garden, Elaine realised that she was either
very happy or cruelly unhappy, she could not quite determine which. She
seemed to have what she most wanted in the world lying at her feet, and
she was dreadfully uncertain in her more reflective moments whether she
really wanted to stretch out her hand and take it. It was all very like
some situation in an Arabian Nights tale or a story of Pagan Hellas, and
consequently the more puzzling and disconcerting to a girl brought up on
the methodical lines of Victorian Christianity. Her appeal court was in
permanent session these last few days, but it gave no decisions, at least
none that she would listen to. And the ride on her fast light-stepping
little mare, alone and unattended, through the fresh-smelling leafy lanes
into unexplored country, seemed just what she wanted at the moment. The
mare made some small delicate pretence of being roadshy, not the staring
dolt-like kind of nervousness that shows itself in an irritating
hanging-back as each conspicuous wayside object presents itself, but the
nerve-flutter of an imaginative animal that merely results in a quick
whisk of the head and a swifter bound forward. She might have
paraphrased the mental attitude of the immortalised Peter Bell into
A basket underneath a tree
A yellow tiger is to me,
If it is nothing more.
The more really alarming episodes of the road, the hoot and whir of a
passing motor-car or the loud vibrating hum of a wayside
threshing-machine, were treated with indifference.
On turning a corner out of a narrow coppice-bordered lane into a wider
road that sloped steadily upward in a long stretch of hill Elaine saw,
coming toward her at no great distance, a string of yellow-painted vans,
drawn for the most part by skewbald or speckled horses. A certain rakish
air about these oncoming road-craft proclaimed them as belonging to a
travelling wild-beast show, decked out in the rich primitive colouring
that one’s taste in childhood would have insisted on before it had been
schooled in the artistic value of dulness. It was an unlooked-for and
distinctly unwelcome encounter. The mare had already commenced a sixfold
scrutiny with nostrils, eyes and daintily-pricked ears; one ear made
hurried little backward movements to hear what Elaine was saying about
the eminent niceness and respectability of the approaching caravan, but
even Elaine felt that she would be unable satisfactorily to explain the
elephants and camels that would certainly form part of the procession.
To turn back would seem rather craven, and the mare might take fright at
the manœuvre and try to bolt; a gate standing ajar at the entrance to a
farmyard lane provided a convenient way out of the difficulty.
As Elaine pushed her way through she became aware of a man standing just
inside the lane, who made a movement forward to open the gate for her.
“Thank you. I’m just getting out of the way of a wild-beast show,” she
explained; “my mare is tolerant of motors and traction-engines, but I
expect camels—hullo,” she broke off, recognising the man as an old
acquaintance, “I heard you had taken rooms in a farmhouse somewhere.
Fancy meeting you in this way.”
In the not very distant days of her little-girlhood, Tom Keriway had been
a man to be looked upon with a certain awe and envy; indeed the glamour
of his roving career would have fired the imagination, and wistful desire
to do likewise, of many young Englishmen. It seemed to be the grown-up
realisation of the games played in dark rooms in winter fire-lit
evenings, and the dreams dreamed over favourite books of adventure.
Making Vienna his headquarters, almost his home, he had rambled where he
listed through the lands of the Near and Middle East as leisurely and
thoroughly as tamer souls might explore Paris. He had wandered through
Hungarian horse-fairs, hunted shy crafty beasts on lonely Balkan
hillsides, dropped himself pebble-wise into the stagnant human pool of
some Bulgarian monastery, threaded his way through the strange racial
mosaic of Salonika, listened with amused politeness to the shallow
ultra-modern opinions of a voluble editor or lawyer in some wayside
Russian town, or learned wisdom from a chance tavern companion, one of
the atoms of the busy ant-stream of men and merchandise that moves
untiringly round the shores of the Black Sea. And far and wide as he
might roam he always managed to turn up at frequent intervals, at ball
and supper and theatre, in the gay Hauptstadt of the Habsburgs, haunting
his favourite cafés and wine-vaults, skimming through his favourite
news-sheets, greeting old acquaintances and friends, from ambassadors
down to cobblers in the social scale. He seldom talked of his travels,
but it might be said that his travels talked of him; there was an air
about him that a German diplomat once summed up in a phrase: “a man that
wolves have sniffed at.”
And then two things happened, which he had not mapped out in his route; a
severe illness shook half the life and all the energy out of him, and a
heavy money loss brought him almost to the door of destitution. With
something, perhaps, of the impulse which drives a stricken animal away
from its kind, Tom Keriway left the haunts where he had known so much
happiness, and withdrew into the shelter of a secluded farmhouse lodging;
more than ever he became to Elaine a hearsay personality. And now the
chance meeting with the caravan had flung her across the threshold of his
retreat.
“What a charming little nook you’ve got hold of,” she exclaimed with
instinctive politeness, and then looked searchingly round, and discovered
that she had spoken the truth; it really was charming. The farmhouse had
that intensely English look that one seldom sees out of Normandy. Over
the whole scene of rickyard, garden, outbuildings, horsepond and orchard,
brooded that air which seems rightfully to belong to out-of-the-way
farmyards, an air of wakeful dreaminess which suggests that here, man and
beast and bird have got up so early that the rest of the world has never
caught them up and never will.
Elaine dismounted, and Keriway led the mare round to a little paddock by
the side of a great grey barn. At the end of the lane they could see the
show go past, a string of lumbering vans and great striding beasts that
seemed to link the vast silences of the desert with the noises and sights
and smells, the naphtha-flares and advertisement hoardings and trampled
orange-peel, of an endless succession of towns.
“You had better let the caravan pass well on its way before you get on
the road again,” said Keriway; “the smell of the beasts may make your
mare nervous and restive going home.”
Then he called to a boy who was busy with a hoe among some defiantly
prosperous weeds, to fetch the lady a glass of milk and a piece of
currant loaf.
“I don’t know when I’ve seen anything so utterly charming and peaceful,”
said Elaine, propping herself on a seat that a pear-tree had obligingly
designed in the fantastic curve of its trunk.
“Charming, certainly,” said Keriway, “but too full of the stress of its
own little life struggle to be peaceful. Since I have lived here I’ve
learnt, what I’ve always suspected, that a country farmhouse, set away in
a world of its own, is one of the most wonderful studies of interwoven
happenings and tragedies that can be imagined. It is like the old
chronicles of medieval Europe in the days when there was a sort of
ordered anarchy between feudal lords and overlords, and burg-grafs, and
mitred abbots, and prince-bishops, robber barons and merchant guilds, and
Electors and so forth, all striving and contending and counter-plotting,
and interfering with each other under some vague code of loosely-applied
rules. Here one sees it reproduced under one’s eyes, like a musty page
of black-letter come to life. Look at one little section of it, the
poultry-life on the farm. Villa poultry, dull egg-machines, with records
kept of how many ounces of food they eat, and how many pennyworths of
eggs they lay, give you no idea of the wonder-life of these farm-birds;
their feuds and jealousies, and carefully maintained prerogatives, their
unsparing tyrannies and persecutions, their calculated courage and
bravado or sedulously hidden cowardice, it might all be some human
chapter from the annals of the old Rhineland or medieval Italy. And
then, outside their own bickering wars and hates, the grim enemies that
come up against them from the woodlands; the hawk that dashes among the
coops like a moss-trooper raiding the border, knowing well that a charge
of shot may tear him to bits at any moment. And the stoat, a creeping
slip of brown fur a few inches long, intently and unstayably out for
blood. And the hunger-taught master of craft, the red fox, who has
waited perhaps half the afternoon for his chance while the fowls were
dusting themselves under the hedge, and just as they were turning
supper-ward to the yard one has stopped a moment to give her feathers a
final shake and found death springing upon her. Do you know,” he
continued, as Elaine fed herself and the mare with morsels of
currant-loaf, “I don’t think any tragedy in literature that I have ever
come across impressed me so much as the first one, that I spelled out
slowly for myself in words of three letters: the bad fox has got the red
hen. There was something so dramatically complete about it; the badness
of the fox, added to all the traditional guile of his race, seemed to
heighten the horror of the hen’s fate, and there was such a suggestion of
masterful malice about the word ‘got.’ One felt that a countryside in
arms would not get that hen away from the bad fox. They used to think me
a slow dull reader for not getting on with my lesson, but I used to sit
and picture to myself the red hen, with its wings beating helplessly,
screeching in terrified protest, or perhaps, if he had got it by the
neck, with beak wide agape and silent, and eyes staring, as it left the
farmyard for ever. I have seen blood-spillings and down-crushings and
abject defeat here and there in my time, but the red hen has remained in
my mind as the type of helpless tragedy.” He was silent for a moment as
if he were again musing over the three-letter drama that had so dwelt in
his childhood’s imagination. “Tell me some of the things you have seen
in your time,” was the request that was nearly on Elaine’s lips, but she
hastily checked herself and substituted another.
“Tell me more about the farm, please.”
And he told her of a whole world, or rather of several intermingled
worlds, set apart in this sleepy hollow in the hills, of beast lore and
wood lore and farm craft, at times touching almost the border of
witchcraft—passing lightly here, not with the probing eagerness of those
who know nothing, but with the averted glance of those who fear to see
too much. He told her of those things that slept and those that prowled
when the dusk fell, of strange hunting cats, of the yard swine and the
stalled cattle, of the farm folk themselves, as curious and remote in
their way, in their ideas and fears and wants and tragedies, as the
brutes and feathered stock that they tended. It seemed to Elaine as if a
musty store of old-world children’s books had been fetched down from some
cobwebbed lumber-room and brought to life. Sitting there in the little
paddock, grown thickly with tall weeds and rank grasses, and shadowed by
the weather-beaten old grey barn, listening to this chronicle of
wonderful things, half fanciful, half very real, she could scarcely
believe that a few miles away there was a garden-party in full swing,
with smart frocks and smart conversation, fashionable refreshments and
fashionable music, and a fevered undercurrent of social strivings and
snubbings. Did Vienna and the Balkan Mountains and the Black Sea seem as
remote and hard to believe in, she wondered, to the man sitting by her
side, who had discovered or invented this wonderful fairyland? Was it a
true and merciful arrangement of fate and life that the things of the
moment thrust out the after-taste of the things that had been? Here was
one who had held much that was priceless in the hollow of his hand and
lost it all, and he was happy and absorbed and well-content with the
little wayside corner of the world into which he had crept. And Elaine,
who held so many desirable things in the hollow of her hand, could not
make up her mind to be even moderately happy. She did not even know
whether to take this hero of her childhood down from his pedestal, or to
place him on a higher one; on the whole she was inclined to resent rather
than approve the idea that ill-health and misfortune could so completely
subdue and tame an erstwhile bold and roving spirit.
The mare was showing signs of delicately-hinted impatience; the paddock,
with its teasing insects and very indifferent grazing, had not thrust out
the image of her own comfortable well-foddered loose-box. Elaine
divested her habit of some remaining crumbs of bun-loaf and jumped
lightly on to her saddle. As she rode slowly down the lane, with Keriway
escorting her as far as its gate, she looked round at what had seemed to
her, a short while ago, just a picturesque old farmstead, a place of
bee-hives and hollyhocks and gabled cart-sheds; now it was in her eyes a
magic city, with an undercurrent of reality beneath its magic.
“You are a person to be envied,” she said to Keriway; “you have created a
fairyland, and you are living in it yourself.”
“Envied?”
He shot the question out with sudden bitterness. She looked down and saw
the wistful misery that had come into his face.
“Once,” he said to her, “in a German paper I read a short story about a
tame crippled crane that lived in the park of some small town. I forget
what happened in the story, but there was one line that I shall always
remember: ‘it was lame, that is why it was tame.’”
He had created a fairyland, but assuredly he was not living in it.