Selected short stories

Margaret Mahuntleth, in the corner of the big settle, basked in the hearth-glow like one newly come to heaven. Warm light reddened her knitted shawl, her white apron, and her face, worn and frail. It was as if the mortal part of it had been beaten thin by the rains and snows of long roads, baked, like fine enamel, by many suns, so that it had a concave look--as though hollowed out of mother o' pearl. Some faces gather wrinkles with the years, like seamed rocks on mountains, others only become, like stones in a brook, smoother, though frailer, in the conflicting currents. Margaret's was one of these. And though she was a bit of a has-been, yet her face, as it shone from the dark settle-back, seemed young and almost angelic in its irrefragable happiness. For Marg'ret had never dreamed (no, not for an instant!) as she fought her way to Thresholds Farm through weather that made her whole being seem a hollow shell, that she would be invited into the kitchen. Usually she did her work in the barn. For Marg'ret was a chair-mender.

She travelled, on her small birdlike feet, all over the county, carrying her long bundle of rushes. With these she mended chairs at farms and cottages and even in the kitchens of rectories and in parish rooms and at the backs of churches where the people from the almshouses sat. She mended chairs mostly for other people to draw up to glowing fires and well-spread tables. She made them very flawless for weddings. For funerals she made them strong, because the people who attend funerals are generally older than those who attend weddings, and the weight of years is on them, and they have gathered to themselves, like the caddis worm, a mass of extraneous substance.

For dances Marg'ret also made them strong, knowing that in the intervals young women of some twelve stone would subside upon the knees of stalwarts rising fifteen stone.

Marg'ret knew all about it. She had been to some of the dances years ago, but people forgot to ask her to dance. Her faint tints, her soft, sad, downcast eye, her sober dress, all combined with her personality to make her fade into any background. She was always conscious, too, of the disgrace of being only a chair-mender; of not being the gardener's daughter at the Hall, or Rectory-Lucy. So people forgot she was there, and she even forgot she was there herself.

She worked hard. She could make butter-baskets and poultry-baskets through which not the most centrifugal half-dozen fowls could do more than insinuate anxious heads. She could make children's ornamental basket-chairs, and she could do the close wicker-work of rocking-chairs for nursing-mothers. Winter and summer she tramped from place to place, over frozen roads and dusty roads and all the other kinds of roads, calling at farms with her timid knock and her faint, cry, plaintive and musical, soon lost on the wind--'Chairs to mend!'

Then she would take the chair or basket or mat into the orchard or the barn, and sit at her work through the long green day or the short grey day, plaiting with her pale, hollow hands. Within doors she never thought of going. She would have been the first to deprecate sheeding rushes all o'er. The warm kitchen was a Paradise to which she, a Peri, did not pretend. Its furnishings she knew intimately, but she knew them as a church-cleaner might know the altar and its chalices, being, if such a thing were possible, excommunicated. Under the bowl of the sky, across the valleys she came, did her work featly as an elf, and was gone, as if the swift airs had blown her away with the curled may-petals of spring, the curved leaves of autumn.

If night drew on before she had done her work, she would sleep in the hayloft. Nobody inquired where she usually slept, any more than they concerned themselves about the squirrel that ran along the fence and was away, or the thistledown that floated along the blue sky.

So Marg'ret had never dreamed of being invited to the hearth-place. It was the most wonderful thing. Outside, the wan snowflakes battered themselves upon the panes like birds, dying. The night had come, black, inevitable, long. And to those who have no house the night is a wild beast. In every chimney a hollow wind spoke its uncontent. There were many chimneys at Thresholds Farm. It was a great place, and the master was a man well-thought-of, rich.

Marg'ret trembled to think she was here in the same room with him. He might even speak to her. He sat on the other side of the hearth while the servant-girl laid tea--the knife-and-fork tea of farms, with beef and bacon and potatoes. A tea to remember.

He sat leaning forward, his broad, knotted hands on his knees, staring into the fire. The girl slammed the teapot down on the table and said--

'Yer tea, master.'

Marg'ret got up. She supposed it was time now for her to creep to bed in the hospitable loft, after a kindly cup of tea in the back kitchen. It had been wonderful, sitting here--just sitting quietly enjoying the rest and the dignity of the solid furniture and the bright fingers of the firelight touching here a willow-pattern plate and there a piece of copper. It was one of those marvellous half-hours of a life-time, which blossom on even to the grave, and maybe afterwards. She had never dreamed--

She softly crept toward the door, but as she went the master lifted his gloomy, chestnut-coloured eyes under their thatch of grizzled hair, and so transfixed her. She could not move with that brown fire upon her, engulfing her. So he always looked when he was deeply stirred. So he had looked down at his father's coffin long ago, at his mother's last year. So he had looked into the eyes of his favourite dog, dying in his arms. The look was the realization of the infinite within the finite, altering all values. Never once in all fifteen years during which she had been calling here had he seemed to look at Marg'ret at all.

In the almost ferocious intensity of the look she felt faint. Her face seemed like a fragile cup made to hold an unexpressed passion which was within his soul, which must find room for itself somewhere, as the great bore of water that rushes up a river must find room, some valley, some dimple where it may rest, where it may spread its strangled magnificence. She stood. Firelight filled her hollow palms; her apron, gathered in nervous fingers, so that it looked like a gleaner's ready to carry grain; the pale shell of her face.

The servant-girl, perturbed by some gathering emotion that had come upon the kitchen, remained with a hand on the teapot-handle, transfixed. Marg'ret trembled, saying no word. How shall a conch-shell make music unless one lends it a voice? She was of the many human beings that wait on the shores of life for the voice which so often never comes.

Suddenly the master of the house said loudly, with his eyes still hard upon her--

'Bide!'

It was as if the word burst a dam within him.

Her being received it.

'Bide the night over,' he added, in the same strange thunderous voice.

She took that also into her soul.

'And all the nights,' he finished, and a great calm fell upon him. It had taken all the years of his life till now for the flood to find its valley.

Then seeing that she stood as mute and still as ever, he said--

'Coom then, take bite and sup.'

And when she was seated, like a half-thawed winter dormouse at its first feast, he said to the servant-girl, who still remained holding the Britannia-metal teapot (which seemed to mock Marg'ret with its inordinate convexity)--

'Make a bed for the Missus!'

He was determined that no misunderstanding should vex his new-found peace, and when the girl had gone, breathing hard like an exhausted swimmer, he remained staring at Marg'ret in a kind of hunger for giving. And she, perfectly receptive, empty-handed as a Peri, let his flaming eyes dwell on her face, let his fire and his food hearten her, and so gave him her charity. And this was how Marg'ret Mahuntleth, the poor chair-mender, without will of her own or desert of her own, as far as she could see, came to be the mistress of the house and lawful wife of the master of Thresholds.

The vicarage lawn, bright green in the August sunshine, with beds of golden violas, had been galvanized into frantic gaiety by the incursion of the entire village. It was the great day of the year in Cherrington Magna; for the school treat and the festival of the local club had been rolled into one enormous revel. A tea, a dance, and races were included in the programme. Tea was over and, with the lusty country scorn of digestion which prevails at such festivals, everybody was now prepared to run races. Their faces shone with pleasure, hope of useful prizes, and honest yellow soap. They were of the good but unemotional type produced by preoccupation with the material side of life, and they had the touch of harshness which comes from absorption in petty worries. The women's dresses, of homely stuffs, in neutral or primary colours, made dark or brilliant patches on the green grass.

Apart from the rest, in deepest black, stood a tall, rather harsh-featured woman, who seemed to have about her something of the atmosphere of the pariah. She leaned against the church-yard wall in the purple shadow of the yew-tree, which spread its flat, dark masses over the daisied lawn from the dank enclosure of the churchyard, and she had the look of a creature at bay--sullen and inexpressive. She was of the age that corresponds to the apple-tree's time of hard, green fruit, half-way between maturity and middle age. She had the spare angularity and weathered complexion of all field-workers. Yet, although she had no beauty, she was, in a curious subtle way, arresting. She had the air of remoteness that some people always take with them, so that their lives seem to move to a different rhythm from the lives around them, and one surprises in their eyes an impassioned secrecy, and feels in their presence the magnetism of great things for ever unrevealed. She stood fronting a little crowd.

'I'll run for pig,' she said.

'What?' cried Mrs. Parton of the shop, roundly, 'd'you mean to tell me, Selina Stone, as you're going to run for pig, and your lawful 'usband lying by lonesome over the churchyard wall?'

A slight flicker of emotion lit Selina's face and passed. It might have been anger or scorn or even mirth.

'I'll run for pig,' she repeated tonelessly.

The sexton's wife took up the argument as of inalienable right. 'And poor Bobbie Stone only measured for coffin Friday was a week!'

'Scarce cold! Scarce cold!'

This was from Mrs. Marsh, the washerwoman, whose face was large and white, and had the appearance of perpetually reflecting the full moon, and whose hands were always bleached and wrinkled and water-logged. But her feet were, as she put it, 'as the Lord made 'em,' and she intended to compete for the pig, and would have been pleased to know that Selina, with her long tireless legs, was out of it.

.'It's not what the Vicar will like,' said Miss Milling, the schoolmistress, very quiet in grey silk, and having the air of politely ignoring the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Jane, the Vicar's cook, whose hair was so tidy that it looked like black paint, said, 'That it inna!' She was going to run herself, as proxy for her sister, whose complaint it was that providence, while giving her an enormous progeny and thus making her both need and deserve bacon at Christmas, saw fit every year to incapacitate her for competing for the pig by decreeing that she should be in the family way. So Jane was to run for the family, and she felt that she was supremely in the right, and that this muscular Selina had no call to triumph over her slight stoutness (due to the generous living at the vicarage) by thus breaking all the laws of good taste.

Jane's sister looked up from suckling the latest addition to the family. 'She's got no little uns to feed. She dunna need bacon,' she said decisively.

A murmur that matched the wind in the yew-tree ran over the group, a shocked, and withal an interested, sigh.

'Run she will!'

'Dear 'eart, to think of it!'

'Run for pig, and poor Bob not sodded!'

'You're a bad 'oman, Selina Stone!'

Selina's sallow face looked sallower. She swallowed hard, but she gazed unflinchingly into the moon-face of the washer-woman, and she remained self-poised, like a heavy pebble in a water-course. She held on to her own personality, though whelmed in the currents of public opinion.

Jane's sister tried the human note, looking up over the bundle that was her new, creased, enthralling baby.

'My dear, you've no need to do any such thing. Bob was insured, as I very well know. Think how my little uns could enjoy that dear little pig come Christmas. Dunna rob them! Of such is the kingdom of 'eaven.'

'Amen!' said her husband.

Three or four girls looked at their young men and giggled. Save for these young men, the race would have been a walkover for them, but the consciousness of admiring eyes seriously disturbed their breathing and, by the justice of things, gave the older folk a chance.

'Selina! O Selina Stone!' quavered a very old man with an impressive falsetto voice. 'You'll ne'er run, my wench?'

'Ah, I'll run.'

'You'll fall afore the fall of the leaf if you do wrong by the dead.'

'Oot give it up if Vicar says no?'

Selina, weary of repetition, merely shook her head and leaned back against the churchyard wall. Hostile eyes focused themselves upon her, hostile thoughts washed over her. A man pushed his way through the little crowd and came to her.

'My girl,' he said, stooping so that she could hear his undertone, 'best not! Looks queerlike. Ye can have a plenty of bacon when ye set up with me.'

People nudged each other. This was Bill Jakeways, the hedger, to whom, it was said, Selina had given all he asked when, in sultry summer evenings, she had worked overtime, hoeing turnips, and he had done piecework at the hedges between hay-harvest and corn-harvest. What he had ever seen in her had always been a puzzle to the village. He might have taken his pick, it was said. He was, the best-looking man in the place, a splendid creature, like a statue, minded like the naive dumb things of wood and meadow. Like a dumb creature he had worked for Selina, carrying water, lugging wood, helping her in the fields.

'I won'er what Stone thinks of it!'

This was one of the village phrases. But Bobbie Stone, slight and frail and tired, coughing now and again over his bespoke boots in Selina's tidy kitchen, had never divulged by any word or look what he thought. He and Selina had lived like middle-aged people, far outside the scope of passion. He would look up and smile when she came in from the fields to get his tea of bacon and potatoes; and if she was late and more flushed than usual he never seemed to notice it. They were judged by the village to be well matched, for she had always been poor favoured and he was not much of a chap--a rickety piece.

So life went on until Bobbie, coughing a little more each month, became too tired to push the needle through the leather. The doctor ordered this and that. Selina sat up at night and often stayed away from the fields. Bill was sent here and there for medicines and delicacies. But none the less, when the hot weather came, Bobbie laid his weary head on the pillow, and smiled wistfully at Selina, and said, 'I'm tired, lass. I'll sleep a bit.'

And he slept on now under the ugly battened mound of brown earth. The pansies nodded golden heads as they did last year, the pig awaited the race with the same complacent ignorance as had the pig of last year.

Jakeways was rather shocked at this callousness of Selina's. 'I doubt it's no good to fly in the face of folk. It's the same in pleachin'--yo mun lay the bough the way it wants to go,' he said.

'Fine and pleased they be,' remarked Mrs. Marsh to the sexton's wife, 'and it wunna be above a month or so before there's a wedding in Cherrington.'

'She's a lucky woman, no danger!'

'Ah! A tidy chap. Keeps off the drink too. Never merry but of a Saturday night.'

Meanwhile the competitors were gathering for the most exciting race of the day. Even the Vicar and the Doctor drew toward the course to see the ladies distinguish themselves. The Vicar kept a deaf ear turned to the broad jokes and the betting among the young men, each of whom backed his own girl, speaking of her in racing terms.

The Doctor, knowing everybody's constitution to a nicety, was entrusted with the handicapping. He gave Mrs. Marsh a tremendous start, because he knew she had incipient dropsy. Nobody else knew it, however, so there was a general groan. Mrs. Marsh decided to glaze the Doctor's collars as no collars had ever been glazed. She stood far up the course, and the judge, at the winning-post, saw her round white face shining there like an argent shield. Jane, with her cheeks as suddenly red as those of a Dutch doll, and her neat black hair, also like a Dutch doll's, was heavily handicapped; and so were the half-dozen giggling village girls.

Behind all the rest stood Selina.

'You're not in the race, of course, Mrs. Stone,' said Dr. Pierce.

'Ah, sir, I be.'

He looked surprised. The Vicar was distressed.

'No, no, Selina! Think!'

'I be to run, sir.'

'It's not wise, Mrs. Stone,' murmured the Doctor.

'No, already there are strange rumours about,' said the Vicar. 'It would not take much to make them say you murdered poor Bob.'

Selina flung her head back with the air of a savage queen. 'What do I care if they do, saving your presence, sir! Let 'em talk till their tongues shrivel! I shanna hear 'em.'

'Ready!' shouted the starter.

The pig was placed in position by his owner's oddman, and firmly held in spite of expostulation. Mrs. Marsh took off her bonnet. So might Britannia, for some enormous conflict, temporarily doff her helmet. The girls flung their hats to their mothers or friends.

Selina turned to Jakeways with a smile of great sweetness and sadness. It came on her harsh face like dawn on a mountainside. It was clear from her smile that she loved him, but with an anguished love.

'I'm bound to run, lad,' she said.

There was in her voice the mournful note that the wind raises about the shell of ruined masonry, its lament around old dead cities, its cry in the cornices of abandoned homes.

'Ready--steady--go!'

The oddman let the pig go, and tumult broke over the course--yells from the various backers, squeals from the pig, hands held out to snatch, flying feet, laughter, fury.

'Selina runs as if life and all was on it.'

'I'll be bound she'll win.'

'Go it, Mrs. Marsh!' shouted the Doctor.

Like a nest of hungry birds, Jane's nephews and nieces lifted their voices--

'Keep at it, a'ntie!' Then, jubilantly, 'Mrs. Stone's fell down.'

'But she's got the pig,' wailed their mother. Far up the course, with both arms round the pig, lay Selina. The roar of applause died away as she still lay there.

The crowd surged forward.

'It's a judgment.'

'Ah! She's strook.'

'Sarve un right.'

'Being so desper't set on a pig! And poor Stone not sodded!'

'Well, seems like she's done for herself now, no danger.'

'Struck down in 'er pride!'

'What is it?'

'What's took the woman?'

''Twas poor Bobbie Stone as come agen in the middle of the race and called 'er. They come agen very bad afore they're sodded, you mind.'

Meanwhile, by the silent Selina and the shrieking pig knelt the Doctor. She was coming round, but he knew the case was hopeless. It was heart-failure.

'You know what I told you after that influenza--about your heart, Mrs. Stone?'

'Yes.'

'You knew what would happen. Why take such a risk for a pig?'

'A pig? What pig?'

The Doctor was puzzled, but silent.

Jakeways elbowed through the crowd, and, seeing her deathly face, burst into tears. He knelt down and loosened her tense, unconscious fingers from the pig.

'There wunna no call for you to do it,' he said mournfully. 'I'd ha' seen as you'd enough o' meat, if you'd set up with me.'

'I know ye would.'

'I like ye right well, Selina.'

'And I like you. Only I was sore set on poor Bob. Baby an' all was Bob to me.'

Dr. Pierce returned with the Vicar. 'But if she didn't want the pig, what did she run for?' he was saying. 'Ask her, Vicar!'

The dreamy Vicar stooped and took her hand. Their eyes met, and understanding flashed from one to the other. Then Selina's heavy lids came down, and the only reply the Doctor ever had was her faint, enigmatic smile

The hut crouched upon the mountain flank, round and brown like a hedgehog. Above it, three miniature pine-trees, very old and heavy-topped, leaned to the east as the westerly gales dictated. In their dark masses all the winds, finding nothing else on the hill to resist them, thundered and lamented.

The hut, made of stakes and furze and thatched with bracken, became once every week a centre of life and gaiety. Here came Daniel Garner, commonly called Dan'l Breadman, riding his old white pony, the panthers on either side of the saddle stuffed with quartern loaves. And hither, by ones and twos, from hidden cottages in the hollows, came the hill folk to buy their weekly bread.

Daniel's silver hair was wild on the wind as the frosty hair of Time. He was an old man now, past seventy. But old as he was, he never missed his day, however savage the weather. Late sometimes, but always faithful, he was to be seen riding like an ancient Viking along the tops of the precipitous slopes. His voice, quavering but courageous, rose and fell amid the tumult like the voice of a storm-riding gnome, crying to his pony through the whistling of the bents:

'Now Jinny, my wench, tabor on a bit!'

When they came to a hillside like the slope of a roof, he would say briefly:

'Scrat up!'

On a day in February, when their shadows, of a faint bird's-egg blue on the cold snow, accompanied them with gentle obstinacy, Daniel broke open the frozen door, lit a fire of brush-wood within, and set out his bread on a table made of fir logs. He made the bread himself; and he was proud of his handiwork, for it had the unvarying perfection of mastery. He could no more make a bad loaf than a stammering prayer.

Once a month he set aside business for an hour, spread a white cloth on the table, cut up one of his loaves, and administered the Sacrament to his customers. He was famed in the hills as the man who walked with God the day long.

The sign of his advent was the spire of blue smoke that went up from his old little chimney like a conjurer's plant, with a swift long stalk and a sudden flower.

'Breadman's come, mother!' would be the cry in the only cottage in sight, and a waved tablecloth, a small messenger or the tintinnabulation of a tray would convey the news to the next dwelling.

As Daniel stooped under the fir branches to pull out logs for the fire, the pine needles, each cased so thickly in ice that it was like a green streak in a prism, clashed faintly.

Frost had set in, hard and bitter, and seemed likely to endure for many weeks. But inside the fire blazed, the place was radiant with dancing daffodil light, and full of the splendid, clean smell of bread. The big cottage loaves stood shoulder to shoulder on the table, for to-day was not Sacrament day. Beside the loaves was Daniel's cash-box--a small red flower-pot.

Soon a customer arrived, and after a time about a dozen assembled. They were mostly old, bent men like Daniel, grave with the conscious upholding of the morals of the community--no light task in a community so primitive, where deeds flare up with the inconsequence of will-o'-the-wisps, and where passions, if momentary, are devastating.

'Come Friday, it'll be Sacrament agen,' observed old Purkis of the moors. 'And the Lord grant a thaw by then, for my bones be weary of this bitter old frost.'

A thaw, to these benumbed children of the mountain, came near to symbolizing the very love of God.

The loaves gradually disappeared; the hobnail tracks that led up to the Bread House were matched by other tracks leading away from it. In the dark pine-tree a thrush, that braved the winter there for the sake of Daniel's crumbs, settled itself fluffily for the night, and the frost strengthened its fortifications round the pine needles.

Daniel shook the pennies and sixpences and shillings out of his cash-box into his purse--an old sock tied with string. As he did so, he heard in the settled stillness of the outer cold the whirr of disturbed grouse, as though another customer was coming. As all his customers had been, Daniel was puzzled.

There was a crunching of footsteps on the hard snow, and a man entered.

'Dan'l Garner?' he asked in a velvet-soft sing-song, very different to the curt voices of the hill folk.

'Ah! Garner's the name I answer to, but most says Breadman.'

'Good names, good names! And him as wears 'em has a name also for chapel righteousness,' said the visitor caressingly.

'Well, well, neighbours will talk! But I didna think it had spread to strangers,' said Daniel, trying to keep the childlike pleasure out of his honest old face.

The visitor made no reply, but stooped and stirred the fire with a stick, so that the hut was all in a clear glow of saffron light.

Daniel was smiling, thinking--as when did he not?--of the treasure he was laying up in heaven, and of his savings, soon to be invested in a Paradisal security. For he was going to build, here where the Bread House stood, a chapel with a window of coloured glass, that would shine out on his arriving neighbours in wintry weather, and shine in on the earthen floor in summer. With the help of a carpenter who lived next door to him in the hamlet at the foot of the hill, where his bakery was, he could build a little one-roomed chapel very cheaply. The money was almost gathered together now. He had been saving for many years, and he was a bachelor and lived frugally. To his simple mind it seemed that by thus giving his all to God he would gain some sort of copyhold in those many mansions of which he loved to read--a tenement of everlastingness fronting the golden street, and inscribed in starry letters over the door with the name of Daniel Garner.

The visitor, smiling with a kind of elfin irony, drew from his pocket a small round mirror which he evidently used for vanity's sake, being a very handsome man, supple and well made. A bright handkerchief set off the sunburnt beauty of his face and throat. His small hands with their long fingers and black nails were brilliant with rings. His coat was fastened with two buttons of broken bone and three of solid gold. He seemed to keep within himself the vital, cynical brilliance of a diamond.

He crossed the room to Daniel with his easy, padding walk. Daniel was thrown into an amazement by this strange creature.

'Look a' this'n!' said the young man, holding the glass before Daniel's own face.

He looked obediently but dreamily. For in the way of people who live much alone and nurse a single dream, he was apt to let outward things slip by him.

'Now,' ordered his guest imperiously, 'look a' this'n!'

Pointing to his own face with a splendid gesture, he struck an attitude.

Daniel looked, for the first time attentively, and his cry startled Jinny so that she plunged in the snow.

It was not on the rings and the gold buttons that Daniel's horrified eyes were fixed, but on the face, the beautiful face, before him--on the high brow, the speedwell-blue eyes, the large passionate mouth and long chin.

For the face of the young man was his own face, only different in expression. Daniel had the spiritual look that comes from long crushing of the flesh for the sake of an idea. The other was as soulless as a squirrel.

With a long, wild gaze the old eyes looked into the young ones across the declining firelight. The likeness to himself smote Daniel as the strong black arms of the pines smote the roof of the Bread House, violently, mercilessly.

'Can you mind,' said the suave voice, 'can you mind the Fair at Outspan six-and-thirty year ago come midsummer? Can you mind it, dear 'eart?'

He was as gentle as a cat with a mouse. Daniel groaned.

'Eh, my soul, that night of nights the man as walks with God the day-long was as drunk as a Romany at a pony show.'

'Oh, the sin, the sin!' muttered Daniel. 'Forgive, Lord in Heaven! Ah, I was drunk that night. But never since--never since!'

'A righteous man was Daniel Garner that night, surely to goodness!'

'The past,' shouted Daniel, stung to wrath, 'is between my God and me!'

'And me, my dear,' purred the tormentor, disregarding the anger. 'Do you please to call to mind a well-favoured wench with yaller eyes that kept the cokernut shy?'

'Give over! Let be!'

'That was my mam. . . Dad!'

Daniel sprang up, goaded past endurance.

'The past be past. I've made confession to the Lord. It inna for you to give judgment.'

He looked with a kind of terror at the face he had brought into the world. His hands trembled and his face was ashen.

'I never thought--'he began.

'Never thought there was a chyild, a nice lickle chyild to comfort your old age,' suggested his son.

'The past is washed away.'

'I be the past!'

The stranger drew his body insolently to its commanding height, laughing with a flash of white teeth.

'And I be here.'

'What'n you want?'

'Now you talk straight talk. Now we understand each other, Dad.'

He spoke admiringly. The old man looked at him with an anxiety which pleased him.

'I heard talk, dear soul, of a lickle chapel, and a bag of money to build it with.'

There was a dreadful silence. Outside, Jinny fidgeted, for the cold strengthened, also she had eaten the only wimberry bush within reach, and there was a presage of snow, and she wanted to be home. She sighed.

'A tuthree pound for buttons,' went on the gentle ironical tones within, 'and a tuthree pound for rings, and the rest for a skewbald pony--a beautiful lickle pony!--and never a penny for the brick-and-mortar men.'

'No!' said the old man loudly. 'No!'

'If you dunna give it, Dad, I'll come whome along of you. I'll come with you when you bring the bread. I'll bide with you in lying down and in rising up. Folk only need to look at me to know, for I'm the very spit and image of my holy Dad. They wunna take the money. They wunna build the chapel. They'll turn you out for a sinner.'

Daniel knew it was true. If he did not manage to conceal this dreadful thing, his chapel would never be built. But neither could it be built if he gave up the money, for he was too old to save it over again.

'Well, Dad,' said the reasonable voice, 'I'll give you till next bread day to ponder it.'

'Sacrament Day!' muttered the old man.

'You can bring the bag of money then. Best come early, so nobody'll see me. When I've got it, I'll go.'

'Never will I bring it. Not till Doom breaks!'

They stared at one another hungrily, like two people who want the same loaf.

Then with a scintillating flash of eyes and rings and buttons. the young man was gone.

When at last Daniel roused himself, locked the door, and untied Jinny, the snow was falling with a weighty softness, and night was upon them.

The old man swept a blue, tear-dimmed eye round the landscape Grey freezing sky. Whining, clashing mountain trees.

'Bitter!' he murmured. 'A bitter old frost! Please God, send us a thaw!'

On Sacrament Day the door of the Bread House was open several hours earlier than usual, for Daniel wanted time to collect his thoughts, and to fortify himself for that which must happen.

He set out the white cloth and cut up the bread. His obstinate chin and long upper lip were fixed in changeless resolution. Come what might, his son should not have the money. He, Daniel, was going to lay it up before the Lord for ever, and the savour of it was to ascend to His nostrils like the good smell of new bread.

He had sent the money to his sister, a woman noted for piety, and the chapel was to be built in her name. He was quite determined that his son should not have a penny of it. He was going to tell him so, and let him do his worst. Then, disgraced but victorious, Dan'l Breadman would go forth into a wintry world.

Daniel had aged in these seven days. His hands shook like poplar leaves before rain. He felt the cold as he never had before, yet he forgot to light his fire.

The hurricane made a whirlpool of wind around the Bread House. In the wind, although the frost still held, was a presage of change.

Daniel crept about, making his preparations, with another roaring in his ears besides that of the wind in the pine trees. Sometimes this other roaring stilled and the wild beating in his left side, which seemed connected with it, sank to nothing, and he held to the table for fear of falling.

'I be mortal tired,' he said. He sat down by the table and rested his head on his arms. A great stillness fell upon the place.

Outside, the storm was less violent. The wind had crept round to the south. A faint thudding of water-drops began. The pine needles freed themselves from their icy cases. Snow slid from the Bread House roof. The sun came out, so that the rows of loaves shone ripely brown, and the flower-pot glowed like, a bloodstone.

Silence met the young man's mocking voice. And when he tried to wake the sleeper, he could not. He saw upon his father's face a smile compounded of triumph, peace and mockery. Finding nothing to stay for, and being oppressed by the silence, he took the old man's watch and a few odd coppers, and went away.

Suddenly, from the topmost branch of the pine tree, the thrush that had wintered on Daniel's crumbs piped out to the limpid sky that the thaw had come.

Cherry Orchard was for sale. The impossible thing, the thing that had yet threatened them always out of the misty future, had become fact. She could not believe it. She crouched under the lee of the sandstone wall of the garden, where the sun shone, for the spring wind was sharp and eager, and the slow, grinding poverty of years had worn all the wool out of her clothing. The beautiful old timbered house where she and her invalid father lived had consumed their small income as long as Laura could remember. She kept the place neat with own hands, toiling in the vast, bare kitchen and in the wild, half-abandoned garden.

'I'd as lief,' she muttered, 'think of selling myself.'

The dark shadows under her eyes grew darker as a flush ran from chin to forehead, for she remembered--and would remember till the end of her life--the things Julius Winter had said to her yesterday.

Julius Winter was the new owner of Bitterne Hall. He had brought with him a wife almost as rich as himself, a Lady in her own right, and exactly like a pink sweet. Before Julius shone a vista of pleasant days with many smaller pink sweets about him.

Yesterday he had come with Lady Angela to return Laura's timid call--timid, because she never quite knew whether she was technically a 'lady' or not; whether she would be snubbed or not.

They had tea out of the depleted seaweed tea-set in the room that was so low and hollow-sounding, full of green light from the laurel outside the western window.

Lady Angela was tired.

'Laura, my dear,' said her father in his sad, disillusioned voice, which had faded since the advertisement of Cherry Orchard appeared, 'please show our guest the orchard.'

They went out through the French window, past the laurel that lifted its ancient, snakily twisted trunk almost to the casement window above, which was hers.

'This is my name-tree,' she said. 'Do you know the old belief about name-trees? If the tree dies, you die. If you sicken, the tree withers. If you desert it, a curse falls.'

'I can believe it, here.'

They came to the orchard. Roofed with pale ivory, heady with the thin, pure perfume of the cherry-blossom and of the cowslips in the dew-grey grass beneath, walled with apple-green to the east, where the tall hawthorn hedge had burst into leaf and with black-green to the north, where a plantation of fir-trees held up white candles, the place lay wrapped in spells, dreaming its own dream.

It was the intolerable sweetness of it, of the sharp smell of crushed nettles, of the white cherry petals that wandered down the stirless air like tears, of the soft, pale cowslip calyxes, that shook her fortitude.

Beneath his questions, his instant perception, she sobbed helplessly, while his mocking, absorbed eyes dwelt upon her tear-blotted face.

'A cherry-flower in the rain,' he thought.

'Such passion for a place,' he said, 'is absurd.'

'Why?'

'Your love should be given to a man. Such passion as yours should bear fruit.'

She was silent.

'Is it race-memory? Because your ancestors loved it?'

'Maybe; but it goes further back than that.'

'Love of beauty?'

'No. I love the ugly things as much as the others. I'm as fond of the nettles as of the cowslips.'

'What is it, then?'

'It is that I've got roots here--the roots of my name-tree, and they go so deep. Did you hear this song, ever?

"She was born and bred with the birds.
Their words were her words.
For she was come out of the earth and water;
From lily leaf and ash bole.
She said, I am the moaning forest's daughter,
A tree hath my soul.
She slipped away between sunset and moonrise,
Between town hall and steeple,
Back to her own people.
Who knows where she wanders, where she lies?"'

She gleamed on him, and the light in her face astonished him. He had quite discarded the idea that she was posing. Lady Angela posed about the beauty of nature: but this woman was incapable of it. She had real, vital, savage passion in her fragile body. He had not thought passion of just that quality existed in the modern world. Certainly the women he had known had not possessed it. This woman had it, and she wasted it on a place. He watched her, standing slim and gauche, in her old brown dress, her soul tormented by love for something vague and mysterious, something he could not touch or name, that seemed to lie beneath the earthly beauty that she saw, like a dreaming god. Desire surged over him--the poignant longing that jonquils bring, the longing to touch the silken petals, to gather the brittle, faintly scented stalks.

To possess this woman would be to ravish a forest.

Because he did not dare to touch her, he gathered a cowslip and ran his strong, dark fingers up and down its soft keys, bruising, breaking.

'Keys of Heaven,' she said. 'Every year I've watched them, from the first leaves, when the rooks were so loud in the March evenings, till the dry fruit.'

'Would you like to keep Cherry Orchard for ever?'

She looked at him, frowning.

'I will buy Cherry Orchard and give it you, if you will give me the keys of Heaven.'

'And Heaven is--?'

'Your love.'

The blossomy shadows lengthened. Somewhere in the elms beyond the orchard a pigeon moaned. Spiders went stealthily about their weaving, and the dew came with no sound upon leaf and flower. Still she was mute. It was as if the orchard expressed her mind. The dew fell. The dove mourned. The shadows lengthened.

'I have no love to give,' she said at last, 'to you or any man.'

'Before the fruit falls in your orchard,' he said, harsh and low, 'you shall give it to me.'

He cast one long look round the shadowy place. It was as if he gathered every tree into his arms.

She turned to the gate. This strange silence, full of the muttering of presage, terrified her.

They went back to the house, passing the old laurel.

'Your name-tree,' he said. He tore off a bunch of leaves in each hand, pressing them to his lips.

'Ah, you have hurt it! The curse will fall.'

He looked at her with the slow, ironical smile that Lady Angela dreaded. Then he held open the window for her to enter. And while his host made dignified protest against life and circumstance, the eyes of Julius brooded upon Laura, and saw in her lap the vision of a child--not a child like a sweet, but one compact of earth and dew, a child like a cherry flower. Before the fruit was set, Julius Winter began negotiations about the house. When the last faded cowslips were merged in the growing grass, he had bought it. Cherry Orchard, with its murmurs, its shadows, and its silences, was his.

Lady Angela, puzzled by this whim, said:

'It will do for Arthur.'

Arthur was their eldest.

Julius smiled. Then he laughed. There was something in his wife's remark that grew more amusing as he considered it. He could not imagine Arthur's small, round, complete entity presiding over that brooding place--that place where mists lingered and melodies sounded, and man wrestled with the spirit of earth.

'Arthur shall have it,' he said, 'if he can get it.'

'You mean, if you give it to him.'

'I can't give it to him.'

'Why?'

'I don't know why.'

'You are getting very strange in your manner, Julius. I believe it is that house. They tell me it is haunted.'

'Oh, it's haunted. I can vouch for that.'

At Cherry Orchard the old man said:

'It is the best that could have happened.'

'The best? Oh, you think it is the best?'

'The very best.'

She laughed; and her laughter, sad and wild as a frantic, imprisoned bird, beat on the rafters.

'You are very strange, my dear,' said her father.

When the rounded fruit softly acquiesced to ripeness, gathering gold and red in the midday sunshine; when the hay was cut and the long evenings thrilled with the singing of the swallows, Julius came every day, and the old man rejoiced to see his home being made so trim and weather-proof. Joy revived him, so that the illness which had held him loosened its grip. His voice lost its plaintive note.

'It is just as good as if it were my own again,' he said, 'with such a landlord.'

'With such a landlord!'

Her voice was full of little darts of fear and curiosity and scorn, that ran like lizards in and out of the words.

He came. As usual, they walked in the orchard after tea.

'The fruit is nearly ripe,' he said.

'Not yet.'

The trees brooded over them like jewelled birds in some ancient tapestry. They filled him with an ache of longing. He wanted to possess them, as a god might. He would possess them in her. His soul could only reach the outer fringes of hers; his voice strove to win her; his eyes burnt on hers, but she lowered her lashes and was mute. She remained aloof: but through the body he would reach her. She should have nothing of herself left, no corner of her spirit that was not his.

'I'll come for your answer this day next week, Laura. If it's no, you and your father will go at once.'

'And not see summer out?'

'And not see summer out.'

In one long, lingering look he took her face to himself, line by line, curve by curve.

'If it's yes--I know your window.'

So wild a gust of passion shook him that he left the place without another word, and came no more until the week was over.

'I'm glad you've finished at Cherry Orchard,' said Lady Angela. 'I'm sure the place is haunted. Still, perhaps it will do for Arthur.'

Moonlight was wan over Cherry Orchard, and the fruit shone, darkly polished, amid the soft, lulled leaves. The trees stood mute, quiescent in the pale light, and the laurel gave no faintest whisper as Julius and Laura passed it.

Once more they came to the orchard. Once more they stood beneath the great Morello tree.

'Ripe,' he said. 'Laura! Laura!'

She was silent. But a faint breeze, walking in the treetops, seemed to him to be her murmur of assent.

Only the sheer crudity of his desire for her, the strange universality of the mating he had willed, gave him courage to brave her white silence.

'To-night?' he said. 'Laura!'

Once again there fell from the treetops a vague, assenting murmur.

Laura wondered at her father, sitting in the western window, brisk and happy over his letters.

'I shall go to bed now, dear,' he said. 'But I had to write about the fruit. It is ripe.'

'Dead ripe,' said Laura.

She stood in the shadow of the laurel, and the large oval leaves seemed to be fingering her face.

She leaned from her window and saw the orchard huddled beyond its hedges like a flock at bay; saw the gables on the grass, and the ancient twisted trunk of the laurel climbing towards her window. In the faint airs the ivy breathed on the house like a living creature. In a meadow by the high road a corncrake, startled by some late traveller, set up its harsh crying.

Dawn, faintly reflected in the west, flowered in pale green and white, like an April orchard. Julius awoke. He wanted to shout in his ecstasy. He had imposed his being upon the white evanescence of a cherry flower. He had ravished the forest. Children minded like the forest should be his.

'Laura!' he whispered, 'I broke that old tree, I'm afraid; but Cherry Orchard is yours for ever.'

He stooped to kiss her, but she was dead.

His name--John Lloyd. His age--something verging on one hundred years. His home--a dusky cottage in an ancient borough. The cottage had one room below, very silent, full of shadows and soft lights from the low wood fire. An open staircase went up to the bedroom, so that when John Lloyd had supped, said his prayers and douted his fire, he could climb without much difficulty to his bed. In the corner by the fire stood his beadle's staff painted in bands of black and yellow. For that ancient borough kept its old customs. It was a very Rip-van-Winkle of a borough. Somewhere in the Middle Ages it had fallen asleep, and if you should wonder at the fashion of its garments, you must remember that it had not, since the day it fell asleep, changed its coat, its hosen or its hat. So John Lloyd kept his staff and in his hale years he would rap unruly lads on their round heads till you would think a woodpecker had come to church. Old folks, also, should they become too emotional in their prayers, did not escape his vigilant eye: but he would not touch them with his staff, only he would lay a reminding hand upon their shoulders. If the old lady whom he judged to have the right to communicate first was absorbed in prayer, he would gently insinuate his staff into her pew and give three little taps to her hassock. Noblesse oblige. She must not forfeit her prerogative, nor must she keep the congregation waiting.

But when I remember him, John was almost too feeble for his beadle's work. I was sent once a week as a small child to read the Bible to him. That was a great adventure! There was the walk of a mile down the country road, beside which ran a thread of a brook, except in the summer. In the hedgebanks grew a few sweet violets, and there you might find the largest, most brightly coloured snail-shells I have ever seen. But one must not linger too long, for down there, in the pool of hyacinth made by the valley shadows and the gentle smoke of hearth fires, John Lloyd waited to hear about the Many Mansions.

On then, down the brown road between its sloping fields of miraculous green, past the roaring smithy, past--if possible--the small square window which had the splendid glass marbles. (But it could be passed if one remembered that the person who painted the marbles was really not half so good an artist as the person who painted the snail-shells.) Down the street of blue shadows, past the church with its needling spire, with just one glance through the wrought-iron gates beyond which lived a lady in a garden of lilies--the most beautiful of ladies she seemed to me, white and gold like her flowers, so that when I read to John Lloyd about Mary of Galilee pondering things in her heart, I always saw her beyond gates of wrought iron, walking in a garden of lilies. But this was seldom, because John liked what he called 'the Many Mansions piece,' and when it was his turn to choose, he chose that. And when it was my turn to choose, remembering that this was John's party, I was in honour bound to choose that also.

Up three hollow steps, into the dusky room, silent as one of the porches of eternity, and there was John in his Windsor chair, his black and yellow wand beside him, his great black Bible, so heavy that it made my arms ache, ready on the deal table.

'Come thy ways in, my dear,' he would say. 'And God be with ye. A grand morning, seemingly?'

'Grand, John. And here's a snail-shell in case you'd like a game of conker.'

'Nay, my dear, I be past conker. You keep it.'

'Then I'll put it in my faery house.'

'Ah. You do.'

'What shall I read, John?'

He made a great show of considering, saying, 'Well, there's a good few nice pieces. There's "The greatest of these." Then there's "The pitcher be broken at the fountain," and "I will give you rest." Then he would pause and in a moment say, as if it were a totally new idea:

'How about the Many Mansions piece, my dear?'

I had no need to look for it; the book always fell open just there.

'In my Father's house are many mansions. ... If it were not so, I would have told you.'

John would strike his palm upon the table.

'Ah! Fair and square, He'd ha' told us,' he would say. 'If so be it was only a tuthree housen for the grand folk, and no room for us, He'd ha' said so, straight. But there's room for all, and He's gone to get it ready.'

'Shall you like going there, John?'

'Surely I shall, my dear.'

'Shall you go by train, or shall you get the cab from the Arms?'

He laughed at that, with a sound like the stirring of dry rushes.

'I doubt Tom Ostler would be put about to find that road.'

'Train, then?'

'No station!' said John tersely.

'Oh,' I said, 'I know! They're going to send for you!'

For I remembered how the lady of the garden once sent for me, and how I drove in unwonted glory past the violets and the snail-shells.

'Got it!' said John. 'Ah, they'll send.'

'A carriage?' I was glad for John.

'Horses of fire, and a chariot of fire!' said he, lights from the burning wood lit his old eyes to splendour.

'I'll come too!' I cried.

'You mun multiply by ten first.'

'How?'

'Ten tens a hunderd.'

'Wait for me, John!'

'Not to be done, my dear. They send when they've a mind.'

It is a long time now since they had a mind to send for John Lloyd, but I shall never forget the simple goodness of his face, his inexpressive righteousness, his bantering affection.

She wandered through the square of tall, stern, dilapidated houses that might well be called Tower-of-Babel-Square. She cried out upon the silent, curtained windows of Bayswater. She reached forth a lean hand, gripping the arm of a woman passing by--

'Lady, O Lady! Buy a bunch of palm. I've walked so far, my dear, on these poor feet. See, lady! It is but March, and it's all budded beautiful. Buy a little bit, lady!'

Soon came the story. Ah, those old, woeful, laughter-bringing, everlastingly young stories of the London streets!

'It's my little girl, lady. O my dear, she's sixteen only, and don't be offended, lady, if I tell you. I'll whisper it. She courted a man.'

'Well, but so did Eve.'

'O my dear, but she didn't char. And he's gone away now. And she's a-lost her job owing to not being as she should. And if I don't stir about, she'll be brought to bed without so much as a shift. So I says, "I'll walk with palm. I'll walk till I drop, but she shan't be brought to bed without a shift." Spare me a shift, my dear, for the palm, and I'll take no money.'

With a bundle of linen for the little Madonna of the gutter she departed, leaving many blessings.

'She'll look right tidy in that, my dear. And a ribbon to tie up her hair as well. Gold hair she's got, and it was her ruin. When the One above gave women gold hair and little taking ways, He didn't mean well by 'em. Not if they charred where questions was asked. But thank you kindly, lady, and take a blessing from the child as is to come, and its mother and its grandmother. And may no child ever look darkly upon you!'

Her palm stands up against the pale wall, softly budded in pale silver. Spring is in it. Light lingers on it. Looking at the slender boughs, one sees again in Tower-of-Babel-Square, the weary woman lifting up her voice in the sweet twilight of early spring, to speak her daughter's confession and magnificat. And one is reminded of long, brown country roads, and of the voices, penetrating, obstinate and melodious, of the clover-breathing kine lowing after their young.

Miss Myrtle Brown had never, since she unwillingly began her earthly course, received the gift of a box or a bouquet of flowers. She used to think, as she trudged away to the underground station every day, to go and stitch buttonholes in a big London shop, that it would have been nice if on one of her late returns, she had found a bunch of roses--red, with thick, lustrous petals, deeply sweet, or white, with their rare fragrance--awaiting her on her table. It was, of course, an impossible dream. She ought to be glad enough to have a table at all, and a loaf to put on it. She ought to be grateful to those above for letting her have a roof over her head.

'You might,' she apostrophized herself; as she lit her gas-ring and put on the kettle, 'not have a penny for this slot. You might, Myrtle Brown, not have a spoonful of tea to put in this pot. Be thankful!'

And she was thankful to Providence, to her landlady, to her employer, who sweated his workers, to the baker for bringing her loaf, to the milkman for leaving her half a pint of milk on Sundays, to the landlady's cat for refraining from drinking it.

To all these, in her anxious and sincere heart, she gave thanks. She had enough to keep body and soul together. How dared she, then, desire anything so inordinate as a bouquet?

'You might,' she remarked, holding up the teapot to get the last drop, 'be sleeping on the Embankment. Others as good as you, as industrious as you, sleep there every night, poor souls.'

Yet she could not help thinking, when she put out her light and lay down, of the wonderful moment if she ever did receive a bouquet.

Think of unpacking the box! Think of seeing on the outside, 'Cut Flowers Immediate,' undoing the string, taking off the paper, lifting the lid!

What then? Ah, violets, perhaps, or roses; lilies of the valley, whiter than belief in their startling bright leaves; lilac or pale pink peonies or mimosa with its benignant warm sweetness.

The little room would be like a greenhouse--like one of the beautiful greenhouses at Kew--with the passionate purity of tall lilies; with pansies, softly creased; with cowslips in tight bunches, and primroses edged with dark leaves, and daffodils with immense frail cups. She would borrow jam-pots from the landlady, and it would take all evening to arrange them. And the room would be wonderful--like heaven. The flowers would pour out incense, defeating the mustiness of the house and the permanent faint scent of cabbage.

To wake, slowly and luxuriously, on a Sunday morning, into that company--what bliss!

Red roses at the bed's head, white roses at the foot. On the table, pinks. Not a few flowers; not just a small box. Many, many flowers--all the sweetness the world owed her.

She dimly felt that it owed her something. All those buttonholes! Yes. There was a debt of beauty. She was the world's creditor for so much of colour and perfume, golden petals, veined mauve chalices, velvet purples, passion flower, flower of the orange. She was its creditor for small daisies and immense sunflowers; for pink water-lilies acquainted with liquid deeps; for nameless blooms, rich, streaked with strange fantastic hues, plucked in Efland; for starred branches dripping with the honeys of Paradise.

'Dr. to Myrtle Brown, the World. Item, love and beauty. Item, leisure. Item, sunlight, laughter and the heart's desire.'

She might, of course, out of her weekly wage, buy a bunch of flowers. She did occasionally. But that was not quite the perfect thing, not quite what she desired. The centre of all the wonder was to be the little bit of pasteboard with her name on it, and the sender's name, and perhaps a few words of greeting. She had heard that this was the custom in sending a bouquet to anyone--a great actress or prima donna. And on birthdays it was customary, and at funerals.

Birthdays! Suppose, now, she received such a parcel on her birthday. She had had so many birthdays, and they had all been so very much alike. A tomato with her tea, perhaps, and a cinema afterwards. Once it had been a pantomime, the landlady having been given a ticket, and having passed it on in consideration of some help with needlework.

Miss Brown liked the Transformation Scene. She liked the easy way in which the ladies who had been reclining on sharp, green peaks of ice in a snowbound country were suddenly, at the ringing of a bell, changed into languid, rosy summer nymphs with as many blossoms about them as even she could desire. She supposed they were only paper flowers and trees of cardboard, but still it would be pleasant to recline in a warm rosy light and see rows and rows of pleased faces. Yes. If she had been younger, she might have become a transformation fairy. She mentioned this when thanking the landlady for a pleasant evening.

'What? Go as one of those brazen girls? Dear me, Miss Brown, what next?'

'They only just lie there in a nice dress to be looked at,' said Miss Brown, with spirit.

'There's some,' replied the landlady darkly, 'as do more harm, just lying still to be looked at, than respectable people would do in a thousand miles.'

'I'm not young enough, anyway.'

'No. You don't get any younger. Time soon passes.'

She minced the meat for the first-floor dinners as if Time and Death were on the chopping-board.

Myrtle Brown was depressed at the idea of Time and Death marching upon her. She realized that there would come a time when she could not make any more buttonholes. She knew she ought to be saving every penny against the rainy day which, once it came, would go on. Even a bunch of snowdrops would not do.

'There'll come a day,' she said, as she washed her cup and saucer after a frugal tea, 'when you'll want a penny, when a penny may be life or death. Save, and be thankful!'

Yet always in her heart was the longing for some great pageant, some splendid gift of radiance. How she could enjoy it! With what zest she would tell over every smallest bit of it! Nothing that they could give her would go unnoticed. Every petal, every leaf would be told over like a rosary.

But nobody seemed anxious to inaugurate any pageant. Nobody wanted to light a candle at Miss Brown's shrine. And at last, on a bleak winter day when everything had gone wrong and she had been quite unable to be grateful to anybody, she made a reckless decision. She would provide a pageant for herself. Before she began to save up for the rainy day, she would save up for the pageant.

'After that,' she remarked, carefully putting crumbs on the window-sill for the birds, 'you'll be quiet. You'll be truly thankful, Myrtle Brown.'

She began to scrimp and save. Week by week the little hoard increased. A halfpenny here and a penny there--it was wonderful how soon she amassed a shilling. So great was her determination that, before her next birthday, she had got together two pounds.

'It's a wild and wicked thing to spend two pounds on what neither feeds nor clothes,' she said. She knew it would be impossible to tell the landlady. She would never hear the last of it. No! It must be a dead secret. Nobody must know where those flowers came from. What was the word people used when you were not to know the name?

'Anon'--something. Yes. The flowers must be 'anon.' There was a little shop at Covent Garden where they would sell retail. Tuberoses, they sometimes had. Wonderful things were heaped in hampers. She would go there on the day before her birthday.

'You ought,' she said, as she drank her cup of cocoa at five o'clock on a winter morning, 'to be downright ashamed of what you're going to do this morning. Spending forty shillings on the lust of the eye!'

But this rather enhanced the enjoyment, and she was radiant as she surveyed early London from the bus.

To-morrow morning, not much later than this, it would arrive--the alabaster box of precious nard.

She descended at Covent Garden, walking through the piled crates of greenstuff, the casks of fruit, the bursting sacks of potatoes, the large flat frails of early narcissi, exhaling fragrance. She came to her Mecca.

The shopkeeper was busy. He saw a shabby little woman with an expression of mingled rapture and anxiety.

'Well, ma'am, what is it?' he asked. 'Cabbage?'

Cabbage! And she had come for the stored wealth of a hundred flower-gardens!

'No, sir!' she replied with some asperity. 'I want some flowers. Good flowers. They are to be packed and sent to a lady I know, to-night.'

'Vi'lets?'

'Yes. Vi'lets and tuberoses and lilies and pheasant-eye, and maidenhair and mimosa and a few dozen roses, and some of those early polyanthus and gilly-flowers.'

'Wait a minute! Wait a minute! I suppose you know they'll cost a pretty penny?'

'I can pay for what I order,' said Miss Brown with hauteur. 'Write down what I say, add it up as you go on, put down box and postage, and I'll pay.'

The shopkeeper did as he was told.

Miss Brown went from flower to flower, like a sad-coloured butterfly, softly touching a petal, softly sniffing a rose. She was bliss incarnate. The shopkeeper, realizing that something unusual was afoot, gave generous measure. At last the order was complete, the address given, the money--all the two pounds--paid.

'Any card enclosed?' queried the shopman.

Triumphantly Miss Brown produced one.

'In affection and esteem.'

'A good friend, likely?' queried the shopman.

'Almost my only friend,' replied Miss Brown.

Through Covent Garden's peculiarly glutinous mud she went in a beatitude, worked in a beatitude, went home in a dream.

She slept brokenly, as children do on Christmas Eve, and woke early, listening for the postman's ring.

Hark! Yes! A ring.

But the landlady did not come up. It must have been only the milkman. Another wait. Another ring. No footsteps. The baker, she surmised.

Where was the postman? He was very late. If he only knew, how quick he would have been!

Another pause. An hour. Nothing. It was long past his time. She went down.

'Postman?' said the landlady, 'why, the postman's been gone above an hour! Parcel? No, nothing for you. There did a parcel come for Miss Brown, but it was a great expensive box with "Cut Flowers" on it, so I knew it wasn't for you and I sent it on straight to Miss Elvira Brown the actress, who was used to lodge here. She was always getting stacks of flowers, so I knew it was for her.'

Nobody knew his real name. Nobody wanted to know it. He had always been just 'Owd Blossom'; always been considered simple. At the farms where he worked, his ungainly movements, his clumsy, unhandy ways could always be relied on to raise a laugh. He was very long and thin and knobby; his face went in where it should have gone out, and he wore a perpetual and rather fatuous smile. Beneath the smile, into the grave, wistful soul of the man, nobody ever thought of looking. Even the Vicar had never suspected Owd Blossom of complete sanity. People said he had an unket look, with his wispy hair and rheumy eyes. Then there were the flowers he always wore, from which he was named. Winter and summer, he had a posy, sometimes a flower-show of posies. His decorations varied from a single snowdrop in his buttonhole to a wreath of red roses in his hat, from an ear of wheat arranged as a tiepin to a shoulder-knot of mistletoe. He picked them mostly in the hedges, for he did not possess a garden, and the only time he could pluck red roses was when he gathered for market at the farms. He was happy on those days, and he would murmur, without any envy or malice, 'It's very pleasant for folks as owns a gyarden.'

Ridicule he met by the simple statement of his creed: 'I like a flower.'

He lived in a disused barn in the middle of the foldyard at Wainham's. On Sunday afternoon, before he went to litter-down the stock for the night, he would lean over a gate, or lie on the hillside, and brood upon the plain. Nothing ever came of his broodings; at least, there was never anything for anyone to see. He would shake back his flaxen hair, chew a stalk of bracken and murmur, 'I like a sunset.' That was all.

The farmers' wives were kind to him, for farmers' wives, perhaps from their continual care of small creatures, have motherly souls. They did not stint him in food or flowers, and when he gazed dumbly into the sunset or the flowering trees, they only said tolerantly, 'It's sad for the poor gwerian to have neither house nor child, nor flocks nor folk. It inna his fau't as the Almighty made him simple.'

Year after year, as the seasons shed their gold and purple, their rose and scarlet, on the pale shores of time, Owd Blossom absorbed them. He was like some pilgrim strayed into the great hospitable hall of a castle, who, finding the feast outspread with wine and fragrant bread, and minstrels singing in the glow of the faggots, forgot his pilgrimage and shared in the feast with silent gratitude.

Sometimes he would gently stroke the deep-coloured petals of a rose or a violet, or the round red cheek of little Daisy, the youngest of the Wainhams, and his caress was received confidingly, by flower and child.

Daisy loved him, and his dog idolized him. His dog was just the kind of animal you would expect him to possess. Everything about it was unexpected, queer. Its ears were wrong. Its colour was wrong. It lolloped. It was irretrievably ugly and utterly mongrel. They lived together in the whispering barn, keeping the feast of Christmas in great state by the glowing forge in the lower story, and making merry with such food as had been given to them. And if the kind Madonna of the old pictures, whose face is so motherly and sad and sweet, could have looked in on their revelry, she would certainly have stepped through the dark, starry window of the loft above and spread her rich blue robes on the straw, and given them her blessing between a smile and a tear.

Once Owd Blossom won a dubious celebrity by breaking his leg in saving this same mongrel--Tinker by name.

'Ah, well,' was the verdict of the farmhouse supper-table, 'if we 'adna known you was a poor simpleton, we'd know it now. Break your leg for a dawg!'

He simply smiled his old smile and said, 'I like a dawg.'

Tinker loved him better than ever, if that were possible. The seasons washed on over the sounding shores of time. Owd Blossom's hair paled from flaxen to white, like a hank of dyed wool left out in all weathers. He continued to gather for market, to feed the engine at threshing time, to litter-down the stock, to brood upon beauty, and to possess nothing but a dog that nobody else wanted.

Little Daisy grew taller and sweeter, till she stood in the vast, hushed, echoing porch of womanhood. She was so sweet that in a little while--in no time at all, as it seemed to Owd Blossom--she was spoken for, promised, and shouted in church. When she had been shouted three times, so Owd Blossom understood, she would be married.

Tinker and his master sat up late in the evenings, creating a wedding present. It was a box to keep salt in, and it was covered with pine-cones, varnished very splendidly. Tinker rolled the pine-cones towards his master, looked for rats in the box, and gave to the undertaking his whole-hearted sympathy. They saw, every green and golden summer evening, Daisy going to meet her lover across the wavelike undulations and dimples and shadows of the fifty-acre field, which was commanded by the window of their loft. Sometimes Daisy started too early, and then she would sit on the grass and pull the petals from her name-flower and say:

'He loves me; he loves me not.'

Or she would gather wild roses and bedeck herself, singing. Her lover always came at the same time, for haying had not begun, and he came straight from his work at six. Owd Blossom and Tinker liked to watch her, so the salt-box progressed slowly. It was through this long, loving vigil of his that Owd Blossom saw, on a clear-coloured evening between Daisy's first and second shouting, something that made him start from his seat and stare away to the farthest corner of the big field down where the stream made a pool. The stream ran from top to bottom of the field, and half-way up, where the path cut across it at right angles, was a spring. At the spring was Daisy. What was that by the pool down yonder?

Owd Blossom sprang for the ladder with a curse; through the foldyard he went, and out into the fifty-acre meadow with Tinker, gay and eager, at his heels.

What had his master seen to make him run so, to make him sweat so, and grunt in his running? Anyway, it was the best gallop they had ever shared.

'Oh, Lord!' muttered his master, and then he beckoned to Daisy and called:

'Come back, little Daisy! Go whome! There's the black bull from Bitterley down meadow!'

Daisy, with panic in her feet, fled past them, pale and gasping. For the black bull from Bitterley had 'savaged' two men with pikels last time he broke pasture. He had killed several dogs and nearly killed a cowman. As she passed them, she cried out in a sob: 'Johnnie!'

Owd Blossom had turned to follow her. He was exceedingly glad the gate and the farm were so near. He would fetch the Wainhams' men and Daisy's father with his gun. He had seen the bull lift his head from the pool and turn slowly to take his proud course up the field to the spring where the water was fresher. Soon he would stand beside the path--right in the way of Daisy's lover.

At that agonized cry of 'Johnnie!' Owd Blossom stopped. Intense concentration made him look more stupid than ever.

There was no way round. The field stretched its folded and dimpled acres, yellow with buttercups, on either hand. Daisy's lover would be in it now, striding across a little valley that lay beside the far fence. He would not see the bull until long after it had winded him, for its course lay in the valley where the stream was, and the wind was blowing straight for the stream, from the south, behind Johnnie.

If Owd Blossom followed Daisy, she would have no lover to meet across the meadows to-morrow. Even now he might be too late. He could see nothing of the bull nor of Johnnie, because of the undulations in the land.

To turn back in cold blood. To die. Not to finish the salt-box. Not to gather for market any more, nor brood on any more sunsets. The thoughts went round in his head like tadpoles in a pond. His hat-wreath of wild roses hung crookedly.

'Tinker!' he said.

Tinker made himself into half the letters of the alphabet.

'Whome, Tinker!'

His beloved friend should not be torn to ribands on those cruel horns.

Tinker was mutinous. His eyes said: 'You are home.'

Why should he go away out of the sound of this voice, out of this comfortable presence?

'Whome, curse yer!' shouted his master, and turned from the fleeing figure and the painted west against which were set the farm chimney-stacks, dark and solid and pleasant, with pale smoke from the supper fire trailing from one of them.

'Daisy! Little Flower!' muttered Owd Blossom, as he lolloped on with his falling wreath of roses, running as fast as he could to meet the black bull from Bitterley.

The story should end here, but it cannot. If it did, Love would be left for ever facing Death, and nobody would know whether the salt-box was finished, or whether Daisy met her lover in the fifty-acre meadow again.

She did. For she ran so fast for help that when Johnnie found the bull standing over Owd Blossom and tore a great branch of the oak-tree by the spring to keep him at bay, the Wainhams' men were already in the field. Tinker behaved with gallantry, and they carried Owd Blossom home with a kind of reverence. And because he was very tough and very case-hardened he managed not to die. So the salt-box was finished. And Daisy's lover took two small cottages instead of one big cottage. In the second lives Owd Blossom, with a garden of his own, meeting all questions about his bravery as he met those about his foolishness.

'I like a flower,' he says.

In the Red Valley were only two houses--that of Zedekiah Tudor, ferociously scarlet, and that of his God, coldly grey. The valley, bird-scorned since Zedekiah had lopped the trees and pleached the hedges, would have been mute but for the dark music of the weir, lamenting.

It was a bitter night when Zedekiah stood with Dinah, his wife, in the graveyard. They were hidden, except for occasional greenish moonlight, in inky gloom. When the moon tore suddenly through the driving wrack, the shadows of the graves seemed to Dinah to spring at her like creatures out of ambush. The wind drove down the valley, howling, and Zedekiah spoke even more loudly than usual.

'Woman, confess yer sin, by the chyild's grave!'

Dinah's face, floating up momentarily out of the darkness, quivered, looking in the moonlight like a green-tinted white flower on black water. She was afraid of Zedekiah and of his God, and of the ghostly child that had scarcely breathed and had attained for her superstitious mind in the last six months a kind of ghoulish entity. She dreaded hearing Zedekiah mention David, her lover, and tarnish with his thoughts her new, mysterious joy. Her look of anguish revealed, as such looks do, the depths of expression underlying her usual one, and Zedekiah might have seen that her love story was not on the plane he imagined. But, as the local pig-sticker, he could hardly be expected to indulge in the finer emotions; and being, as he said, outside prop and inside pillar of religion in the Red Valley, he knew that all men are vile, altogether born in sin.

'There wanna no sin, Zedekiah.'

'Dunna lie. You were along of the man, yea, many a time, in the spinney.'

'There wanna no fau't.'

'If there'd 'a' bin no fau't, what for did you go with un?'

Dinah was silent. How could she explain what was mysterious even to herself--. mysterious and wildly sweet? How could she show Zedekiah that David was her spirit's young companion, lover of that remote self in her which dwelt, silent and hitherto alone, far beyond the little noise of daily life? Even if she could have expressed these things, how could Zedekiah understand David? For David was one of those changelings sometimes found in hard, respectable, prosperous communities. He had an eager brain, emotions, a love of beauty, belief in impulse. He had shaken himself free of views such as Zedekiah held on religion, sex, and money. In the new, thrilling intimacy of the last two months there had simply been no time for the things that Zedekiah suspected. She realized wearily that it was no use trying to explain.

'In times gone by you'd 'a' stood in a sheet for it, a woman as was a sinner.'

'We on'y wanted to be together, Zedekiah; we'm clemmed each for other. And it inna our fau't as David come too late; if he'd 'a' come when you did, I'd 'a' chose him.'

This quiet putting of him in a lower scale than David enraged Zedekiah. It was a blow to his vanity that he never forgave.

'You'd follow the wastrel like a bitch,' he snarled.

She crouched on the grave, cowed, as are all sensitive temperaments, by the unbelievable coarseness and crassness of the world. She knew suddenly that her one desire was to follow David to the world's end, that so she would attain holiness. Yet how could that be, since she would be breaking the laws of God and man?

Instinct told her that David was beautiful and good, Zedekiah ugly and evil. Impulse cried, 'David!' across the waste places of her life. But tradition, herd-morality, were too strong for the new impulse. The night was dark, David absent, Zedekiah and his God imminent; and from the graves, threatening and grisly, she heard the dead preaching their dead creed. Superstition held its victim. She was bound to Zedekiah. She had married him because it was expected of her, and because the institution of marriage was the only respectable vocation open to her. On her wedding night she had feared him. When, at daybreak, satisfied and bland, he had recited the Magnificat, she had hated him. When her child was born she had cried out that it was a text and not a child that she was bringing into the world. When it died after three weeks she was not very sorry.

Zedekiah's voice rose harshly above the grievous water and the gentle sea-murmur of the larches in the spinney beyond the valley. 'Swear! Swear you'll ne'er see un agen in the face o' flesh!'

The water cried out like a soul in prison. It had come from afar; it journeyed into mystery; it chafed at the forbidding banks of Zedekiah's valley.

'Oh, I canna! I canna!'

'Swear or burn.'

'But there's naught wicked in giving David good day.'

'It wouldna be only good day as you'd give un.'

Dinah knew, with feminine shrewdness, that Zedekiah's words had a germ of truth, that some day the fire of physical love must leap up between her and David. This put her in the wrong. She had been brought up in the demonology that Zedekiah professed. She believed in his terrible devil, his yet more terrible God.

'Where their worm dieth not,' shouted Zedekiah. 'Swear!'

She moaned. To her an oath was unbreakable, and her love for David was a fierce, primitive thing, as are all spiritual needs.

'It's not as I want you,' said Zedekiah; 'it's what the neighbours 'ud say; and the saving of your soul.' He added this as an afterthought. 'Here I am, ready to forgive the sin and take yer back.'

'But I dunna want to come back! It's David I'm fond on.'

The darkness hid the rage in Zedekiah's close-set black eyes.

'If you swear to-night,' he said persuasively, 'you'll maybe save him as well.'

Dinah thought of the town of Heaven, full of people singing part-songs without wrong notes or practice; she and David would be able, in the general stir, to slip away somewhere and be at peace. She joined the multitudes that sacrifice life to eternity.

'I swear!' she said, and slipped down in a heap on the cold, unfriendly little grave.

Dinah stood at the door of the Red House and looked down the valley. Nothing had changed, although forty-five years had passed over it since the wild night of her vow. Four more cold little graves had been added to the first, for Dinah's children had been stillborn.

Zedekiah had let it be tacitly understood that they died because the Lord was angry with Dinah, and as Zedekiah was a religious man everyone believed him. So an impregnable wall of prejudice rose around Dinah, imprisoning her, shutting her away from sympathy. Every Sunday, in the house of their God, the small congregation eyed her stonily. Coming out on dark winter nights, it seemed to Dinah that the eyes of her unbreathing children followed her with the same sneering coldness as did the eyes of Zedekiah's grandmother, whose portrait (done in plentiful oils, and unforgivably like Zedekiah) hung in the parlour. Dinah watched this portrait every evening, when, with his small eyes shut and his long, inquisitive nose pointing toward the hearth-rug, Zedekiah prayed aloud that she might be forgiven, while the treetops in the spinney kept up their inward, promising music, all unheeded.

Zedekiah felt that he had been very forbearing with Dinah; he had never forgiven the wound to his vanity, and whenever she shrank from him he was silently furious. He expressed his anger in a scheme of daily petty tyrannies, under which Dinah grew yearly more feckless and spiritless, coming at last to believe that only by lifelong penitence could she save her soul. The house pressed upon her with its hideous comfort, and the water, clamant in the night, had a summoning tone. Ten years ago, she had been called simple; now she was openly spoken of as a gwerian. Zedekiah ceased to regard her as worthy of his supervision. Free for the first time, she began to wander. She was so mentally inert that she had a kind of kinship with inanimate things, and they began to murmur and mutter in her ears. She had lost the sanity of others, which had been her madness, and now that men called her mad she drew near to the patient reason of nature.

As she stood--a small, bent figure--in the pretentious doorway with its surrounding brickwork of yellow and red, she felt a stirring in her mind of something almost approaching to impulse. The April day was like the underside of a waterfall. Green rain was blown in glassy gusts along the blue lower slopes of the hills and through their far-flung shadows. Another green rain of soft needles hung in the larches, whose tops just showed above the high ground that closed the valley. It was as if they grew in a submerged country, an enchanted country lying deep in mist and magic. Dinah had not been to the spinney since her last meeting with David.

'I've a mind to go,' she said to herself. She fetched her shawl and set off. The spinney, when she pushed the white wicket open and entered, dripped and burned with light. She wandered, mazed, into its heart, and saw how the soft golden chalices of the Lent lilies dipped and rose among their green spears--how they shone down the long slopes under the larches--how they caressed each other, flower on soft flower, sleek leaf on leaf. She gathered a handful and buried her lined face in them, breathing their vast, vague freshness--healing and tear-compelling--while all about her, with a hushed fairy clamour, the finches sang. It was then, brought by some green charm, that the full flood of madness--as the neighbours would have called it--came upon Dinah. Intuition was awake. She had unconsciously, by virtue of complete passivity, reached the state which the mystic attains consciously. And from the secret centre of the radiant day her message came. She, who had cowered so long, stood up straight in the ardent warmth; she gazed up into the pure, pale sky, and her grey eyes shone suddenly with love and joy. Then she spoke, and her voice, quavering but confident, dominated by its undernote of ecstasy the mysterious, lifting murmur of the treetops and the delicious hilarity of the finches.

'I be clemmed for David. I be going whome to David, and You can send me to the Bad Place if You've a mind!'

There did not seem to be any criticism in the bright world--all made of amber and green and pale blue glass--as she left the spinney and set forth with a brave heart on her twenty-mile walk. She would find her way, she was sure, to the tiny cottage that was David's own, where he dwelt under the southern slopes of Caer Cariad. She knew exactly, for David had told her, how it looked and where it stood--long dreamed of, long desired.

By mossy tracks where primroses bloomed in bridal bouquets; through grave beech-woods transparently roofed with young leaves; over the quick, pointed grass that pricked up, thick and wet, through a powder of daisies with delicate elation; across the brown, rounded hills she passed, grotesque and sombre. When horses galloped or bullocks bellowed in roadside fields, her timid heart leaped fearfully, but she kept on.

What would David be doing when she got there? 'Setting taters, likely,' she thought. She wondered what he would say. It did not occur to her to wonder how he would look. In the late afternoon shadows she came, faint and stiff, to the brow of a hill overlooking a great stretch of country. Wind-tormented may-trees embowered her. They were breaking into blossom, and their fresh green was jewelled with curd-white buds. She did not know that she herself, gnarled and stricken as their ancient trunks, outshone their budding promise by the sudden white flowering of her spirit. She was absorbed in contemplation; for there, across the Paradisal land that ran thick with evening's honey, standing in sweet and homely majesty on a crest of rose and pearl, was Caer Cariad. As she shaded her eyes she could see, nestling in its lower woods, a cottage, small and creamy as a hawthorn flower. It was far away indeed, but it was there, and it was David's. It beckoned her. Mile after mile the willing old feet trudged on. But now came the fear that always dogs fulfilled desire. Maybe David would not want her; he might be married; she had not thought of that. He might be gone away. To keep down the darkest thought of all she began to sing, and her cracked, plaintive voice sounded strangely in the gathering dusk.

It was dark when she climbed, sick with exhaustion, up the steep garden to the cottage door. The neglected borders, the windows, uncurtained and unlit, almost stopped her low pulses. Was there to be any welcome for her in the dark house? Was not the fire dead on the hearth, the singing-bird dead in the window?

She knocked and waited, while from the last purple summit of Caer Cariad the light lapsed.

Then, low and rich with promise of love past the bargaining loves of the world, there came on the quiet scented air the voice of David, the voice of the beloved--

'Come thy ways in!'

But when Dinah stood in the doorway she saw, not the David of her dreams, but an old man--white-haired and feeble--crouching over a low wood fire in a neglected and disordered room. And suddenly all the triumph of attainment, the joy of the imagined meeting, died within her.

'Life gone by!' she said, 'and I met 'a' been along of you. Life gone by!'

'Why, Dinah, my dear!'

David spoke soothingly. He asked no questions, showed no surprise. A sense of peace began to steal over Dinah. She surveyed the table, stacked with unwashed china; the grey ashes in the grate; the tiled floor--of a uniform mud-colour; the grease-covered candlestick in which David had just lit the candle.

'You didna get married, then?'

'It dunna look much like it.' David smiled humorously at his own expense. 'I got on pretty tidy till I took ill,' he explained.

'And never-a-one to do for you?' she asked, torn between the wish that he should have been comfortable and a fierce jealousy of any other woman who should have dared to look after him.

'I couldna take up with any but you, Dinah.'

'An' now I've come and I'm only an ugly old woman!' cried Dinah in misery.

'Dunna you dar' say it! And you wi' such pretty eyes! Didna I allus say you'd got pretty eyes?'

'Ah!'

The syllable expressed a whole world of content. There was no one else, and she was not ugly to him. All was well. Her eyes began to rove round the room possessively.

There crept into them the joy of battle, of creative art. Her fecklessness was gone, and excitement had overcome weariness.

'Afore I sleep,' she announced, 'I be going to clean the place, grate and quarries an' all. And I be going to wash up!'

She fell upon the disorder, and David, moving his chair from point to point, followed by the silently protestant cat, watched her with awed amusement. Never had an old woman worked with such fury, with such joy. She was labouring with her own hands for her beloved; she wanted no other Paradise. When at last, hours later, she brought the supper table to the hearth in the clean, firelit, toast-scented room, and they sat hand in hand contemplating the Lent lilies in a jampot, he said--

'The place be all a-blossom, my dear, now as you've come.'

'I've broke the vow to come, lad, and I'll go to the Bad Place, but I dunna care.'

'I'm thinking the only Bad Place is minding what we met 'a' done each for other when it be too late,' said David. 'And I'm thinking Caer Cariad's a long way on to Paradise--a long way on it is.'

The workhouse dozed in the Sunday afternoon hush. In the old women's room all was very quiet; only a single bee groped clumsily up and down the shut windows, seeking the free air, flowers, the sounding hives.

The gloomy July afternoon laid an atmosphere of disillusionment over everything. The sky was of the same sad grey as the workhouse stockings. Ninety-eight feet, clad in these stockings, were posed in various attitudes down the long room, swinging, tapping, crossed, or set out stilly side by side like those on tombs.

Forty-nine women, dressed in decent Sunday garments with white aprons, sat in rows on benches facing one another. Forty-nine souls, varied and strange and wistful, clamant for delight as the bee, were shut in here. All these life-stories, full of sad and joyous and wild happenings, had stopped here, and were only waiting for Death to break the final thread. Life was over. They were conscious of it, dumbly, uncomplainingly. They could not have been more completely sundered from their past lives if they had died and gone to Purgatory. But every heart, in this house that was not home, kept, clear and changeless, the picture of the home it had lost; garden, shippen and fold; all the small, precious, sacramental things surrounding their busy lives--things they had hardly known to be precious until they were lost. For in those homes they had been individuals, centres of warmth and love. Here they were herded in a cold, almost derisive comfort; and through the long grey corridors the feet of the flame-clad, the laughter-bringer, the tear-giver--Love, were seldom heard.

They were knitting more grey stockings to wear when the others should be worn out. Their balls of wool, all exactly the same, lay beside them, and a blue-eyed kitten, passionately in love with itself, raced up and down the lines of passive feet and bullied the stout, unresisting balls.

'I'd lief be you!' said Fidelia Thatcher, who sat--tall, emaciated, white-capped--at the window end of a bench.

'That's a wicked imagination, Fidelia!'

This came from a neighbour, a stout, rosy old woman.

'Cats 'anna got souls,' she added.

Fidelia raised mild eyes, and her sweet, obstinate mouth took a firmer line as she said--

'Soul or no, I'd lief be that kit-cat.'

Her face, tanned golden by decades of suns and snows, had the dignity of an ancient Egyptian bas-relief. And though her long upper lip, high forehead, and arched nose were intimidating, her eyes--dark and dovelike, brooding upon the furiously energetic kitten and the anxious bee--were beautiful as the eyes of a heifer. Her large hands, twisted and swollen at the knuckles from years of work, lay quietly in the white union apron. She dreamed herself into the past. She was desperately afraid that in this place she might some day cease to believe in that past--in all the blossomy days that stretched away backwards from the day of her entrance here to her clover-scented childhood. To forget them would be like breaking faith with a lover.

One casement below and one above. What could a lone woman have wanted more? A pink rose-tree, a white rose-tree, and a lilac. These had presided over her garden. The white lupins had grown as tall as herself, and stood beside the wicket in pale dignity, like swordless angels. Her pigeons sunned themselves on the roof and paraded the tiles with soft pink feet. And, hearing the pattering enthusiasm of those pink feet above her attic morning by morning, and seeing the round cheeks of the roses pressed so confidingly against her window, she had almost forgotten that none would ever call her mother. Ah! Where was it now, that warm, scented peace? Where were those glad, laborious days when she scrubbed and rinsed the buttermits at the farm, returning in the evening with her perquisites of milk or pork or butter, with her small wage and her large content, and having her simple supper while dusk fell and the owls began to stir?

No conqueror of the world ever fought a harder, a grimmer battle, than Fidelia's battle against Fate--against hunger and the grey defeat that was its alternative. She had 'clemmed' and she had sweated. It was over now. She sat, a shade among shades, neither in Hell nor Heaven.

She rose and let out the bee. At the sudden cessation of its note the atmosphere grew more tense and heavy.

'Theer!' she said. 'Out o' prison.'

'Prison? What for, "prison"?' asked a flat-faced, meek woman. 'We gets our bellyful and a bed.'

'What's meat?' cried Fidelia suddenly, out of her bitterness. 'What's meat, with no heart to eat it? What's sleep with naught to wake for in the morning light?'

Down the benches ran a rustle and a sigh, like the wind in old, dry-leaved trees. There were murmurs.

'That's Gospel!'

'That's the righteous truth!'

'Delia's i' the right, no danger!'

With faces turned toward her as to a prophetess, they took courage to remember the days gone by. Those days, those homes, those fields, those dear lost faces shone in their souls with the peculiar lustre that mingled love and tears give to the human memory, like the carven ivories that were painted long ago in silver and gold and rich, dim enamels, and studded with burning gems.

'I mind,' said one, 'ah! I mind as if it was yesterday--'

At the magic of those words, 'I mind,' these pictures of the soul took shape and colour; from homely sentences and broken phrases, a sigh, a tear; so that to every eye in the room the dun-coloured walls were obliterated, glowing like painted windows, garlanded with memories, hung with the little eikons of forty-nine homes. Even the flat-faced materialist had possessed a home, and she was as jealous of its recollection as an ugly woman of a lover.

The balls of sad-coloured wool became inextricably tangled, as the exultant kitten seized her happy hour. Stockings were forgotten. Grey was forgotten. The matron was forgotten. Even the solemn festival that was to take place this very evening was forgotten.

'Cushat-doves!' murmured Fidelia in a low and dreamy voice. 'I kept cushat-doves. And my gyarden most always had a flower.'

'Dahlias was what our maister was set on,' said a very old woman with bright blue eyes. 'Ah! he liked a dahlia.'

'Roses, ours fancied,' put in the stout woman.

'Ah? I clem for the smell of a cabbage rose,' said Fidelia.

She became mysterious, and dived into the deep pocket of her skirt.

'Look ye!' she whispered. 'I couldna bide all summer without the smell of a cabbage rose. And this morning they'd left the ladder by our ward windy, being fluskered with the Bishop coming. So I crep' out and went to the matron's gyarden afore it was light and pulled this 'ere.'

She held up a deep red rose amid cries of admiration and reproof.

And just as she held it up, the matron entered.

'That's the third time you've trespassed, broken bounds, and stolen,' said the matron wearily. She was a kind-hearted woman, but her promotion depended on the strictness of her discipline. She was part of a machine. If it was a bad machine, she had neither time nor inclination to try to alter it.

'You'll stop away from service at the chapel to-night, and you won't go to the harvest tea at the Rectory,' said the matron. Fidelia's Egyptian profile was unmoved; but tears stood in her eyes. Festivals were very few, and the harvest tea was the event of the year.

There was a sound of wheels. The Bishop! He entered with the Rector and some ladies. Everyone stood up. Only the kitten remained unimpressed.

The Bishop had thought, as he saw the workhouse from a turn of the road, that it looked dreary. He had thought that it would be good to turn the eyes of these old women to the mansions of the blest. He was really kind and sympathetic, only he was not gifted with imagination, and he had never been an old, homesick, knitting woman on a bench.

So he said cheerfully, 'Suppose we sing "Jerusalem, my happy home!" and then, in lighter vein, "Home, sweet home!"'

He intended to weave these into his speech, and only to bring in mention of the consecration of the chapel toward the end.

They sang, 'Jerusalem, my happy home!' It was a little quavering, a little irregular, but that was put down to age. Toward the end came an audible sound from Fidelia. Then they sang, 'Home, sweet home!'

What with the memories, and the talk, and Fidelia's sob, there were a good many sniffs and surreptitious wipings of eyes.

In the last line Fidelia flung her apron over her head and wept aloud.

'Thatcher!' said the matron.

'There, there!' soothed the Bishop; and he gave her shoulder a little pat, and told her to sit down, and was sure his speech would comfort her.

But, alas! his speech did not comfort. It lacerated. It destroyed the pictures that had glowed on the wall. It hammered to pieces the little eikons of home. It built up a picture of Heaven which had in it no touch of the loved fold and cottage, but which appeared to ninety-eight alarmed eyes to be exactly like the workhouse. It was grand and large and rather pompous. It had nothing in it of firelit evenings and the bit of sewing and father winding the clock. And the more the Bishop struggled to comfort a sorrow he could not grasp, the more formal he became.

When he had finished, Fidelia emerged from her apron, and her face was that of one who has been through an agony.

So that was Heaven!

No lilac. No pink rose, nor white rose. No work. No pink feet on the tiles. Nothing but an enormous, everlasting old women's ward built of solid gold, and without even a kitten.

She looked at the Bishop and beheld him as a thief robbing her of all hope. She had thought, without exactly formulating her thought, that Heaven would be a place with homely corners in it where the poor might dwell as of old. This man was robbing her of her dream, and it was all she had. She stood up.

'It inna true!' she cried. 'It's words, words, words, a mort of words; but it inna true. And if it's true I dunna want it. It's for Squire and Rector and you. It inna for us. We'm lost our whomes; we'm gone back to school like, after working 'ard a many years. And if the Lord, as was but a carpenter's prentice 'isself and the Lord's Mother, as was but a carpenter's wife, canna give poor folk a bit o' comfort in the next world, I dunna want to go there.'

She sat down and retired into her apron. Every face in the lines of benches was strained forward toward the group that symbolized authority, waiting for doom to fail.

'Matron,' said the Bishop, 'the poor thing's overwrought.'

'Not quite herself' said the Rector's wife.

'A little--queer. A little--wandering,' added another lady.

'Do not punish her,' said the Bishop. 'The day must not be darkened.'

'But she's hardly responsible, is she?' said a guardian.

The matron, trembling with distress and wrath, whispered to the Rector--

'The asylum side?'

'Yes, yes,' said the Rector in what he meant to be a whisper, 'the asylum side.' But he was a hearty man, used to open-air sports, and his whisper was quite audible.

The visitors went away to tea at the Rectory. Service was not till seven. The old women filed out to their mugs of tea and slabs of bread and margarine. Fidelia remained where she was--a derelict. Discipline was momentarily relaxed because she did not count any more. The asylum side! The asylum side! She could not understand it. She, Fidelia Thatcher, the best butter-maker in the district, a self-respecting, self-supporting woman, had come to this. To-morrow she would be like a dumb beast driven hither and thither, under physical authority, bathed by attendants, slapped, taken for walks in a drove with imbeciles and lunatics--mad. No home on earth. No home in Heaven--if the Bishop was right.

'No!' she muttered. 'It's lies, what he says.' To-morrow, blackness of darkness; but she had to-night. She must think. She must efface herself to gain time.

The old women's room had a door opening into a paved, flowerless space which ought to have been a garden. Under the roof of the porch was a swallow's nest, hydra-headed with young. Fidelia loved to see the parent birds dart to and fro. She had watched them since they brought the first dabs of mud, until now when the young were ready to fly. She brought out a bench. No one ever came here in the evenings. They would go to the service and forget her. With folded hands, she sat in her corner so still that the birds were not afraid of her.

'Wings!' she murmured. 'Wings!'

But there were no wings for her. Even if she desired to creep away and die by the roadside, she could not, for across the workhouse entrance was a locked gate. She watched the swallows flash across the slack clothes-line on which the grey stockings were dried, dart to the nest with that infinitesimal pause in which the food is miraculously transferred from beak to beak, and sweep away into the silent evening. And the swallows put into her mind what she would do. She fetched the yard broom, and raked down the nest.

'Fly!' she said. 'Ye can!'

The four young swallows were gone into the soft, dove-coloured evening. From the chapel came the sound of the anthem.

'Blessed are the meek.'

Fidelia, with the broom in her hand, looked at the broken house of clay.

'It inna true,' she said to the depths of grey air. 'They binna blessed. Them as is blessed is them as can fly.'

With steady fingers she untied the clothes-line, and looped it over the beam of the porch. She drew forth her rose and smelt it. She saw again the pink rose-tree and the white rose-tree and the lilac. She climbed on to the bench.

'This minute,' she said to herself, 'I be a pauper lunatic by the mercy of men. The next minute I'll make a trial of the mercy of God. Fidelia Thatcher, fly! Ye can!'

And just as the concluding strains of 'Blessed are the meek' sounded harmoniously, Fidelia Thatcher stepped off the bench.