Griselda's long-standing acquaintance with a cosmopolitan female
revolutionist understood to be of Russian Polish extraction. Owing, it
was further understood, to her pronounced opinions and pronounced manner
of expressing them, she had long ceased to be welcome in the land that
gave her birth; at any rate, she avoided it studiously and existed
chiefly at a series of epoch-making revolutionary meetings which she
addressed by turns in bad German, worse French, and worst English. She
wrote vehement pamphlets in all these languages and prided herself on
the fact that, on the Continent at least, they were frequently
suppressed by the police; wore tartan blouses, a perennial smile, and a
hat that was always askew. For some reason or another she was the
possessor of a cottage in the heart of the Belgian Ardennes--which she
visited on the rare occasions when she was not plying her epoch-making
activities in London, Vienna, or New York. A week once a year was about
all the use she made of it--reappearing after her seven days' seclusion
with a brace of new pamphlets burning for the Press, and like a giant
refreshed for the fight. This estimable woman was as good-natured as
she was revolutionary, and hearing that Griselda was thinking of a rural
honeymoon, she hastened to offer the happy couple the loan of her
Belgian property, which was as secluded as heart could desire.
Griselda, since her fortnight at Interlaken, had hankered for another
stay abroad; she jumped at the offer, and William--whose acquaintance
with foreign parts was limited to an International Socialist Congress in
Holland---jumped gladly in unison with her. Madame Amberg beamed with
joy at their delighted acceptance of her offer; she kissed Griselda,
shook hands with William and promised to make all the necessary
arrangements for their stay--to write to the old woman who looked after
the cottage and tell her when to expect them. She babbled rhapsodically
of honeymoons and the joys of the Forest of Arden--forgetting how bored
she was in the Forest of Arden at the end of a seven-days' stay
there--and further directed them how to reach it, looked out trains and
suggested hotels.
Heaven smiled on the opening of their married life; Dover was a receding
beauty in the distance and the Channel a good-natured lake. As their
boat chunked between the long piers of Ostend they held and squeezed
each other's hands ecstatically, the crowd collecting on the gangway
side enabling them to do so unnoticed. The consciousness of their total
ignorance of the language of the country gave them an agitated moment as
they set foot on foreign soil--but, taken in tow by a polyglot porter,
they were safely transferred from the quay to a second-class carriage,
with instructions to change at Brussels; and, having changed obediently,
were in due course set down at Namur. Madame Amberg had advised them to
lodge with economy at the Hotel de Hollande near the station; but
another specimen of the polyglot porter pounced down and annexed them
firmly for his own more distant establishment, and after a feeble
resistance they followed him meekly and were thrust with their bags into
the omnibus lying in wait for them. They felt it their duty as the
vehicle rattled them along to make a few depreciatory and
high-principled remarks on the subject of the towering fortifications;
but having thus satisfied their consciences they relapsed into mere
enjoyment of rest, novelty, a good dinner, and a view of the lazy Meuse.
After dinner, when the fortress above them was fading into the soft
blackness of a warm summer night, they walked arm-in-arm by the river
and were quite unutterably happy.
They rose early in the morning to catch the little river boat for
Dinant; caught it with the aid of their guardian, the porter, and camped
side by side on its deck to enjoy the sauntering trip. They enjoyed it
so much and engrossingly that for the space of a morning they forgot
their high principles, they forgot even Woman and Democracy; they were
tourists only, agape and delighted, with their green Cook's tickets in
their pockets. Yet, after all, they were something more than tourists;
they were young man and woman who loved each other tenderly and whose
happy lives were in tune with the happy landscape. Often they forgot to
look at the happy landscape for the joy of gazing into each other's dear
blue eyes.
The boat puffed finally to Dinant, where they stayed the night as
planned; where they stared at the cupola'd church and the cliffs, walked
to the split rock on the road to Anseremme, and bought some of the
gingerbread their guide-book had told them to buy. They ate it next
day, with no particular approval, on the final stage of their journey,
in a train that puffed and pottered between heights and orchards in the
winding company of a stream. It puffed and pottered them at last to
their wayside destination--where a smiling and loutish country boy
slouched up to take possession of them and their modest baggage. They
understood not a word of his thick-throated patois, but knew from
information imparted beforehand by Madame Amberg that this was their
housekeeper's grandson and deputed to serve as their guide. He gripped
a bag easily in either hand, and led the way past the few small houses
ranged neatly as a miniature village alongside the miniature
station--and so by the white road that kept the river company. After a
mile or thereabout they left the white road, turning sharply to the
right at a cleft in the riverside cliff and striking a cart-track,
scarcely more than a path, into a valley twisted back among the hills.
It was a valley the like of which they had never seen, which the world
seemed to have forgotten; a cool green vision of summer and solitary
peace. Water had cleft in the table-land above them a passage that time
had made leafy and gracious and laid aside for their finding. Through
the flat, lush pastures that divided the bold slopes there looped and
tangled a tiny brook on its way to the Meuse and the sea, a winding
ribbon of shadow, of shimmer and reflection. Up the slopes rising
steeply from the pastures there clustered tree above tree--so thickly
set that where the valley dwindled in the distance they might have been
moss on the hill-side. There was no one in sight and no sound but their
footsteps and the birds; it was all a green prettiness given over to
birds and themselves.
"Isn't it wonderful?" Griselda said, not knowing that her voice had
dropped and lost its shrillness. "I never thought there could be such a
place."
She spoke the truth, if in hackneyed and unthinking phrase; in her busy
and crowded little mind, the reflection of her busy little life, there
had been no room for visions of a deep and solitary peace.
Involuntarily, as they walked they drew nearer together and went closely
side by side; the sweet aloofness of the valley not only amazed them, it
awed them; they were dimly conscious of being in contact with something
which in its silent, gracious way was disquieting as well as beautiful.
Their theory and practice of life, so far, was the theory and practice
of their purely urban environment, of crowds, committees and grievances
and cocksure little people like themselves--and lo, out of an atmosphere
of cocksureness and hustle they had stepped, as it seemed without
warning, into one of mystery and the endless patience of the earth. Out
here, in this strange overpowering peace, it was difficult to be
conscious of grievances political or ethical; instead came a new,
undefined and uneasy sense of personal inadequacy and shrinkage, a sense
of the unknown and hitherto unallowed-for, a fear of something undreamed
of in their rabid and second-hand philosophy.... Not that they reasoned
after this fashion, or were capable of analysing the source of the
tremor that mingled with their physical pleasure, their sheer delight of
the eye; but before they had been in the valley many hours they
sympathized in secret (they did not know why) with Madame Amberg's
consistent avoidance of its loveliness, saw hazily and without
comprehension why, for all her praise of its beauties, she was so loth
to dwell there. The place, though they knew it not, was a New Idea to
them--and therefore a shadow of terror to their patterned and settled
convictions. As such their organized and regulated minds shrank from it
at once and instinctively--cautiously apprehensive lest the New Idea
should tamper with accepted beliefs, disturb established views and call
generally for the exercise of faculties hitherto unused. They had an
uneasy foreboding--never mentioned aloud by either, though troublous to
both--that long contact with solitude and beauty might end by confusing
issues that once were plain, and so unfitting them for the work of
Progress and Humanity--for committees, agitations, the absorbing of
pamphlets and the general duty of rearranging the universe.
There was something, probably, in the frame of mind in which they
approached the valley; they came of a migratory, holiday race, and had
seen green beauty before, if only fleetingly and at intervals. What
they had lacked before was the insight into beauty born of their own
hearts' content, the wonder created by their own most happy love....
They followed their guide for the most part in silence, relieved that he
had ceased his well-meaning attempts to make them understand his jargon,
and speaking, when they spoke at all, in voices lowered almost to a
whisper.
"What's that?" Griselda queried, still under her breath. "That" was a
flash of blue fire ahead of them darting slantwise over the stream.
Later they learned to understand that a flash of blue fire meant
kingfisher; but for the moment William shook his head, nonplussed, and
hazarded only, "It's a bird."
For half-an-hour or so it was only the birds and themselves; then at a
turn in the narrowing valley they came in sight of cows nuzzling the
pastures. Several cows, parti-coloured black and white like the cows of
a Noah's Ark; and, further on, a tiny farm house standing close up to
the trees in its patch of vegetable garden. They knew from Madame
Amberg of the existence of the tiny farmhouse; it was an old woman
living there who would "do" for them during their stay at the
neighbouring cottage--cook and clean and make tidy in return for a
moderate wage. The barking of a kennelled nondescript brought the old
woman shuffling to the door--to welcome them (presumably) in her native
tongue and to take their measure from head to heel with a pair of
shrewd, sunken eyes. Of her verbal greetings they understood nothing
but the mention of Madame Amberg; but, having looked them up and down
enough, the old lady shuffled back into her kitchen for the key of the
revolutionist's property. She reappeared with the key in one hand and a
copper stewpan in the other--wherewith she waved the signal to advance,
and shuffled off in guidance, ahead of her grandson and the visitors. A
quarter of an hour's more walking on a dwindling path brought them in
sight of their sylvan honeymoon abode; it had originally been built for
the use of a woodman, and was a four-roomed cottage on the edge of the
wood overlooking the stream and the pasture of the black-and-white cows.
Madame Peys (they knew at least her name) unlocked the door and ushered
them into the kitchen, where the boy deposited their bags.
*CHAPTER IV*
The cottage was what any one who know Madame Amberg might have expected
her cottage to be. It was sparsely furnished, except with explosive
literature; there were very few chairs, and those few verging on
decrepitude, but numerous tracts and pamphlets in divers civilized
languages. Kitchen utensils were conspicuous chiefly by their absence,
and presumably the owner relied consistently on the loan of the copper
stewpan which had accompanied her guests from the farm. On the other
hand, the kitchen walls were adorned by photographs, more or less
fly-blown, of various political extremists, and a signed presentment of
Rosa Luxemburg adorned a bedroom mantelpiece.
While Madame Peys made play with the stew-pan and a kettle, the
honeymoon couple unpacked their bags and examined their new domain:
still, to a certain extent, overawed by the silence and loneliness
around it; still, unknown to themselves, speaking more gently and with
more hesitation than usual. It was the familiar tang of the books and
pamphlets, with which the shelves were crammed and the floor was heaped,
that first revived their quieted spirits and created a sense of home.
Woman and Democracy, even on the backs of books, had power to act as a
tonic and trumpet-call, to reflect the atmosphere of noise and
controversy where alone they could breathe with comfort. With
unconscious relief they turned from the window and the prospect of the
valley, green and untenanted, to entrench themselves against the
assaults of the unknown behind the friendly and familiar volumes that
had overflowed from Madame Amberg's deal book-shelves to Madame Amberg's
uncarpeted floor. Conning them, handling them and turning their pages,
they were again on the solid ground of impatient intolerance; they were
back amongst their own, their cherished certainties. William in the
presence of Belfort Bax felt his feet once more beneath him; Griselda,
recognizing a pamphlet by Christabel Pankhurst, ceased to be troubled by
the loneliness around her, grew animated and raised her voice.... And
the savoury mess which Madame produced from her stewpan, combined with
the no less excellent coffee that followed, dispelled for the moment the
sense of mystery and the shadow of the New Idea.
The shadow obtruded itself more than once during the next three weeks or
so; but on the whole they managed with fair success to be in the country
and not of it--to create in the heart of their immemorial valley a
little refuge and atmosphere of truly advanced suburbia. Their
existence in the Ardennes valley was one of mutual affection and
study--by which latter term they understood principally the reading of
books they agreed with. From the cares and worries of housekeeping they
were blissfully and entirely free; Madame Peys did their catering,
taking toll, no doubt, of their simplicity and ignorance of French, but
taking it with tact and discretion. Her bills were a weekly trouble to
Griselda but not on account of their length; what she disliked was the
embarrassing moment when she strove to conceal her complete ignorance of
the items and difficulty in grasping the total as set forth in
un-English-looking ciphers. Their tidying was also done daily and
adequately, their cooking more than adequately; Madame Peys called them
in the morning, set the house to rights and their various meals going,
and looked in at intervals during the day, departing for the last time
when supper was cooked and laid. Their daily doings fell naturally into
routine; they rose of a morning to coffee steaming on the stove; and,
having digested their breakfast, they usually proceeded to walk a
little, concluding the exercise by sitting under the trees with a book
which William read aloud to Griselda. They lunched sometimes in picnic
fashion, sometimes at home; in the afternoon took another stroll or sat
at home reading, with happy little interludes of talk. On two or three
days they made small excursions to one of the neighbouring villages; on
others William, with a pen and a frown of importance, would establish
himself at the table after lunch was cleared away; he had a tract in
hand on the Woman Question, and Griselda gently but firmly insisted that
even in the first ecstasy of their honeymoon he should not lay it aside.
Having a due sense of the value of his epoch-making work, he did not
require much pressing; and while he frowned and scribbled and frowned
and paused, she would sit by reading, and now and again glance up that
she might meet his eye and smile. Long afterwards, months afterwards,
when he had forgotten the epoch-making work and all he had meant to
prove by it, he would remember how she had risen and come behind him,
smoothing and fondling his ruffled hair and bending over to kiss him.
He would drop his pen and lift his face to hers, sometimes in silence
and sometimes murmuring foolishness.
In time, as the peaceful days crept by, they were sorry that, yielding
to a romantic impulse, they had directed that neither paper nor letter
should be forwarded during their absence. As a result of this
prohibition their entire correspondence while they stayed in the valley
consisted of one picture-postcard despatched by Madame Amberg from
Liverpool at the moment of her embarkation for an extended lecture tour
in the States. It was sent three days after their wedding, and
expressed exuberant affection, but was singularly lacking in news of the
outside world. To remove the prohibition would be to confess failure
and suggest boredom, therefore neither ventured to hint at it; all the
same, they knew in their secret hearts that they had overrated their
resourcefulness. It was not that they palled on each other--far from
it; but part at least of their mutual attraction was their mutual
interest in certain subjects and limited phases of activity. Madame
Amberg's revolutionary library, valuable as it was in distracting their
thoughts from the silence and beauty around them and defending them
against the unknown, could not entirely supply the place of daily whirl
and unceasing snarl and argument; William pined unconsciously for the
din and dust of the platform and Griselda missed the weekly temper into
which she worked herself in sympathy with her weekly _Suffragette_. She
missed it so much that at last she was moved to utterance--late on a
still, heavy evening in August, when once or twice there had come up the
valley a distant mutter as of thunder.
"Dear," she said gently, as they sat by the window after supper, "I
don't know how you feel about it, but I am beginning to think that our
life here is almost too peaceful. It is beautiful to sit here together
and dream and forget the world--but is it a preparation for the life we
are to lead? Is it a preparation for our work?"
William sighed a gentle sigh of relief, and his hand went out to his
wife's in a squeeze of agreement and gratitude. As usual, their minds
had jumped together and the thought of twain had been uttered by the
lips of one.
"I've been thinking the same thing myself," he said. "It has struck me
more than once. As you say, it's beautiful here in the heart of the
country--nothing could be more beautiful. But I have wondered,
especially lately, if it isn't enervating. It is good for some people,
perhaps; but when you have an aim in life and the fighting spirit in
you----"
"Yes," Griselda flared responsively, "it's the fighting spirit--and the
Cause calling to us. I've been hearing the call getting louder and
louder; we can't stand aside any longer, we haven't the right to stand
aside. How can I--how dare I--rest and enjoy myself when, there are
noble women struggling for freedom, suffering for freedom, keeping the
flag flying----?"
And the unconscious little humbug clasped her hands and, from force of
habit, rose to her feet, addressing an imaginary audience. William, an
equally unconscious humbug, also rose to his feet and kissed her. It
was one of those happy and right-minded moments in which inclination
agrees with duty, and they were able to admire themselves and each other
for a sacrifice which had cost them nothing.
The decision taken, there remained only the details of their speedy
departure to settle. Their first impatient impulse was to leave for
Brussels on the morrow, but on consideration they decided that the
morrow would be too soon. Investigation of a local time-table revealed
the fact that the connection with Brussels--the only tolerable
connection--meant a start in the very early morning; but an early start
meant an overnight warning to the farm-boy, Philippe, that his services
would be needful to carry their bags to the station--and the
farm-people, all of them, went to bed soon after the sun and were
certainly by now asleep. There was, further, the old lady to settle
with where financial matters were concerned, and it always took time to
make out her illegible bill. On reflection, therefore, they decided for
the following day.
"I hope," Griselda meditated, "that I shall be able to make Madame Peys
understand that we want the boy the first thing in the morning. I
expect she will see what I mean if I show her the train in the
time-table and say 'Philippe,' and point to the bags. That ought to
make it clear. It rather detracts from the enjoyment of being
abroad--not being able to make people understand what you say.
Interlaken was much more convenient in that way; all the waiters spoke
English quite nicely. And the understanding is even more difficult than
the speaking. To-night Madame was talking away hard to me all the time
she was cooking our supper, but I couldn't make out one word she
said--only that she was very excited. I said, 'Oui, oui,' every now and
then, because she seemed to expect it, and I was sorry to see her upset.
I thought perhaps one of the people at the farm was ill, but I've seen
her son and his wife and the boy since, so it can't be that. Of course,
she may have other relations in some other part of the country--or
perhaps something has happened to one of the cows. I could see she was
worried."
They sat until late side by side by the open window and talked in
snatches of the world they were going back to--the dear, familiar,
self-important world of the agitated and advanced. Its dust was already
in their nostrils, its clamour already in their ears; in three days more
they would be in it once again with their own little turbulent folk.
The mere thought increased their sense of their own value, and they grew
gay and excited as they talked and planned, instinctively turning their
backs on the window and shutting out sight and sound of the country
peace, the oppressive peace in which they had no part.
"What shall we do to-morrow, darling?" Griselda asked at length. The
question was prompted by her longing for to-morrow to be over and her
mind was in search of some method for inducing it to pass with
swiftness.
They considered the point with that object in view, and decided that
should the day prove fine they would spend it away from the cottage,
taking their lunch with them. There was a winding path leading up
through the woods to the heights which they had not yet explored except
for a short distance; they would start out, provisioned, soon after
breakfast, to go where the path led them, and eat their meal on the
hill-top. Then home to supper, settlement with Madame, and an early
departure next morning.... So they planned comfortably and without
misgiving, while the world seethed in the melting-pot and the Kaiser
battered at Liege.
"If it's fine," William cautioned again as they mounted the stairs to
bed. "I've heard thunder several times in the distance, so we may have
a storm in the morning."
There was no storm or sign of a storm in the morning. It must have
passed over, Griselda said; she had listened to its faint and distant
mutterings for half-an-hour before she fell asleep. Their meal of
coffee and new-laid eggs was waiting on the stove as usual, and Madame
Peys had vanished as usual before they came down to partake of it. They
hard-boiled more eggs while they breakfasted, and, the meal disposed of,
set to work to cut plentiful sandwiches and otherwise furnish their
basket. As their road up the hill did not lead them past the farm, and
Madame Peys had not yet put in an appearance for the process of tidying
up, William inscribed in large round-hand on an envelope the word
"_Sorti_," as a sign to their housekeeper that the preparation of a
midday meal was unnecessary; and having placed the announcement on the
kitchen table, duly weighted with a saucer, he took the basket on one
arm, his wife on the other, and set out.
They met not a soul that morning as they mounted the winding little
path--somewhat slowly, for the winding little path was not only longer
than they had expected but very steep in places. Further, the day was
hot even under the trees, and they rested more than once before they
reached their goal, the heights that crowned the valley; rested with
their backs against a beech-trunk, and talked of themselves and what
interested them--of meetings past and to come, of the treachery of the
Labour Party, of the wickedness of the Government and the necessity for
terrifying its members by new and astounding tactics. The idea had been
to lunch when the heights above them were gained; but the weight of the
basket made itself felt in the heat, and they were still some distance
from their goal when they decided it was time to lighten it. They did
so in the customary fashion, ate well and heartily, and although they
allowed an unhurried interval for digestion were even less enthusiastic
about their uphill walk than they had been before partaking of lunch.
It was a relief to them when at last they emerged from the trees and
found themselves high above the valley and entering on a wide stretch of
upland; the wide stretch of upland had no particular attraction, but it
denoted the limits of their excursion and a consequent return downhill.