SKIRLE Cottage lies tucked away in a hollow of Blencarn Fell.
The fells, as I have before indicated, are one great sweep of low hills
facing the west; they are continuous and almost unbroken yet by the
local custom they are divided into sections, each with a name of its
own.
Blencarn Fell, so called, perhaps, from the village of Blencarn at its
foot, is as wild and, perhaps, in summer, as lovely as any other part of
the Pennine Range.
Skirle Cottage, lying in a depression of it, was as far removed from
human eye as it is possible for a house to be.
It was a fairly large cottage, a barn was attached to it in the
Cumberland fashion, so that the whole building was of one piece.
The hollow in which it lay, was, of a summer afternoon, perfumed with
the smell of those wild flowers that grow in Cumberland as they grow
nowhere else, and filled with the murmur of bees. At dusk of a summer’s
evening it was a veritable cup of twilight and silence.
Even in summer, when the sky was blue above, when the wild strawberries
were in their glory and the hills were hazy with heat, there was
something strangely melancholy about this tiny valley, with the little
cottage nestling in its heart.
There were days in the long winter of Cumberland when the valley and the
cottage seen from above, presented a picture dreary to the point of
being tragic.
The high road, at the foot of the fells, was scarcely a quarter of a
mile away, yet the cottage was quite invisible from it.
The Arol-Johnston car, with its single occupant, drew up on the road
level with the unseen cottage. Sir Anthony Gyde descended, and leaving
the car to take care of itself, opened the gate, passed through, and
struck up the rising ground.
There was not a breath of wind, the air was keen with frost, there was
not a living thing in sight, save in the sky, far up, under the cold
grey clouds, a hawk poised, now moving with a flutter of the wings, now
motionless as a stone.
One might stand here seemingly unseen; it would have appeared that one
might commit any act, unseen by eye, save the eye of God. Yet far up the
fell, so small a figure as to be unnoticeable, a boy, Robert Lewthwaite,
son of a shoe-maker in Blencarn, attracted by the hum of the approaching
car on the high road far below, was watching.
From that elevation he could see the car approaching; he saw it stop and
the occupant get out. He recognized him at once as Sir Anthony Gyde. He
saw him cross the field and enter the little valley.
Here Sir Anthony looked around him, sweeping the fell face as though to
see if he were observed. Apparently satisfied, he knocked at the cottage
door; the door was opened for him, he entered, and the door was closed.
All this vastly interested the boy. Klein, the German artist, had
greatly exercised the local mind. A man whose face and personality would
have drawn attention in a city, excited the deepest interest among these
primitive folk.
Primitive, perhaps, but full of imagination, and more than ordinarily
speculative.
He, too, like Sir Anthony Gyde, had been labelled a stracklin; besides
being a stracklin he was “Waugh.”
No boy in the village would have approached Skirle Cottage after dark.
There was something about its occupant that fascinated them, but it was
a fascination composed three parts of fear.
He cooked his own food, and though the food he cooked was the food he
bought from the village shop and the surrounding farms, there were
sinister suspicions in the minds of the young people in the
neighbourhood that he cooked and ate other things besides eggs and bacon
and fell mutton.
An old woman of the village, Mrs Braithwaite, called every day at noon
to clean up the place and make the bed (Klein was a late riser, another
suspicious point about him), and her tales about the artist and his
doings did not detract from the villagers’ pre-conceived impressions.
She declared, at times, that he was enough to “mak’ t’ flesh creep up
yan’s back to think on,” but he paid her five shillings a week, and as
money was scarce in the Braithwaite household, and the work to be done
at Skirle Cottage occupied only half an hour or so a day, she kept on
with the job.
There was, besides the money, a sort of eerie fascination about the
stranger that was not entirely distasteful to the old lady’s heart.
Once, a small boy named Britten, greatly daring, had peeped through the
window at the ogre. The door opened and the ogre came out, and Britten
ran, returning home drenched, and with the following lucid description
of the incident and the cause of his wetting. “He chased me an’ I rin,
ah catcht mi teea ower a cobble and down ah went, end-ower-end inta the
beck.” So it was not surprising that Bob Lewthwaite, seeing Sir Anthony
Gyde going in to the ogre’s cottage and the door closing upon him,
waited, forgetting everything else in the world, to see what was going
to happen.
He waited a long time, nearly three-quarters of an hour, then the door
opened and Sir Anthony Gyde came out.
He was carrying a black bag in his hand.
He closed the door and looked around him, just as he had done before
entering. Satisfied, apparently, that he was unobserved, he came down
the valley towards the road, got into the motor-car and drove off.
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