Title: The Worn Doorstep
Author: Sherwood, Margaret Pollock, 1864-1955
Language: English
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THE WORN DOORSTEP


BY

MARGARET SHERWOOD


BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1917

_Copyright, 1916_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

_All rights reserved_

Published, September, 1916
Reprinted, October, 1916
November, 1916 (five times)
December, 1916 (five times)
February, 1917

Printers
S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U.S.A.



THE WORN DOORSTEP


August 25, 1914. At last I have found the very place for our
housekeeping; I have been searching for days: did you know it, dear?
The quest that we began together I had to follow after you went to the
front; and, through the crashes of tragic rumours that have rolled
through England, I have gone on and on, not running away or trying to
escape, but full of need to find the right corner, the right wall
against which I could put my back and stand to face these great
oncoming troubles. I have travelled by slow trains across quiet country
which does not as yet know there is war; I have driven in an
old-fashioned stage or post wagon,--you never told me that there were
such things left in your country,--past yellow harvest fields in calm
August weather; I have even walked for miles by green hedgerows, which
wear here and there a belated blossom, searching for that village of
our dreams where our home should be, quiet enough for the work of the
scholar, green for two lovers of the country, and grey with the touch
of time. I knew that now it could be almost anywhere; that it did not
matter if it were not near Oxford, and it seemed to me that I should
rather have it a bit--but not too far--away from the "dreaming spires."
So I went on and on, with just one thought in my mind, because I was
determined to carry out our plan to the full, and because I did not
dare stay still. There's a great strange pain in my head when I am
quiet, as if all the mountains of the earth were pressing down on it,
and I have to go somewhere, slip out from under them before they crush
me quite.

Often, at a distance, I thought that I had found it; thatched roofs or
red tiles, or a lovely old Norman church tower would make me sure that
my search was done; but again and again I found myself mistaken, I can
hardly tell you why. You know without telling, as you must know all I
am writing before I make the letters, and yet it eases my mind to
write. At no time did you seem very far as I searched hill country and
level lands, watching haystacks and flocks of sheep, sometimes through
sunny showers of English rain.

But now I have discovered our village, the very one that I dreamed in
childhood, that you and I pictured together, and I know that at last I
have come home. I knew it by the rooks, for I arrived late in the
afternoon, and the rooks were flying homeward to the great elms by the
church,--groups of them, here, there, and everywhere, black against the
sunset. Such a chattering and gossiping, as they went to bed in the
treetops! Such joy of home and bedtime! I knew it by the grey church
tower in its shelter of green leaves, and the ancient little stone
church on the top of the gentle hill among its old, old, lichen-covered
tombstones.

The village homes, in a straggling row, looked half familiar; the
grassy meadow that rolls to the village edge, still more so; and the
quaint old Inn, where I spent the night and where I am writing--surely
some of my ancestors, centuries ago, slept at that very Inn, for I half
remember it all,--low ceilings, latticed windows, stone floor, and
great, smothering feather bed. Everywhere, indoors and out, I am aware
of forgotten chords of sympathy. Those small boys in short trousers,
trudging home on tired legs and little bare feet--"did I pass that way
a long time ago?" Did some one back of me in the march of life--my
ancestors came from this East country--grow tired and rebel in a
village like this and run away to America? In some way, by memory, by
prophecy, all seems mine; the worn paths; the hollowed door-stones; the
ruddy faces moving up and down the walled streets, and the quiet under
the grass in the churchyard. And you are everywhere, interpreting,
making me understand, with that insight compounded of silent humour and
silent sympathy. I am too tired to do anything to-night but have my tea
and bit of toast and egg, and warm my fingers at the open fire, for the
evening is chill; but to-morrow I shall go searching for our house, and
I know I shall find it, for I have a curious sense that this is not
only the place for my home with you, but that some far, far back sense
of home broods here.

The grey war-cloud drifts closer and grows darker. Namur has fallen
into German hands; there are rumours--God grant that they are not
true!--that the French and the English troops are retreating. In spite
of the entire confidence of the people here in their island security,
there is fear in my heart for England, this England which seems so
remote from cruel struggle, as if created in some moment of Nature's
relenting, when she was almost ready to take back her fell purpose,--it
is so full of fragrances, of soft colours of flowers, of softer green
of hedgerows and meadows. There is something in you, you Englishmen of
finer type, shaped by this beauty, quiet and self-contained, of hill
and dale and meadow. Surely in you too I know this quietness, this
coolness, the still ways of the streams.


August 26. Past the grey church, and down the hill, at the edge of the
great green meadow, and a bit apart from the village, I found our
house, with its wooden shutters and its white front door closed, a
quaint old brick cottage, waiting for life to come to it again. It has
a brick front walk, and a brick wall stands about it, save at the back,
where the stream that skirts the meadow flows at the very garden edge.
Can you see it, the wistaria, the woodbine, the honeysuckle over the
wee porch, the climbing, drooping, straggling vines that make the whole
little house look oddly like a Skye terrier? It is all unkempt; grass
grows in tufts between the bricks, and weeds in the neglected grass.
The chimney needs repairing; some of the little diamond panes in the
latticed windows are broken, alas! I did not venture inside the
wrought-iron gate, for the encompassing veneration for property rights
is strong upon me; not in the British Isles shall I be caught
trespassing! Can you not imagine, as I can, how a dainty order,
satisfying even your fastidious taste, could grow out of its present
desolation, with a little weeding here, a little trimming there, a
nail, a bit of board, a few bricks,--surely we could find a few old
weathered ones to match. There must be touches of the new, but careful
preservation of all the old, of all the eloquent worn edges that tell
of the coming and going of past life.

Something--anything--to keep away the thoughts I refuse to harbour. I
can not, I can not even yet, think of the misery of this war. It beats
in my ears, like great hard waves; it clangs and clamours, strikes,
comes in imagined horrible shrill whistles and great explosions. There
is nothing in me that understands war; new tracks will have to be
beaten out in my brain before I can grasp any of it. It is a vast,
unmeasured pain beyond my own pain.

I have got to have a place of my own in which to face them both, for a
little while, a little while, where I may stand and think,--perhaps
even pray.

No one was about, except a shaggy pony, grazing in the rich green
meadow, with a rough lock of hair over his eyes. I find a little stone
bridge across the stream and try to make his acquaintance. He lifts his
head and looks at me through his forelock, seems to respond with
cordiality to my overtures, whinnies, and even takes a step or two
toward me as I draw near; then, when I can almost touch him, gives a
queer little toss of his head, kicks up his heels, and dashes off to a
rise of ground, where he stands with a triumphant air, his legs planted
wide apart, seeming to say: "Such be forever the fate of those who try
to catch and harness me!" Then he falls to grazing again, keeping one
eye out to see whether I am coming near.

Presently came an old man with a rake, and I made some inquiries about
the house, but the haymaker's dialect was as hard for me to understand
as mine was for him. I learned only that the little 'ouse belonged to
the 'All; that it had been occupied by one of the functionaries at the
'All;--it will be good for you, you Englishman, to live in a little
house once inhabited by an unimportant person, good for you to forget
caste and class and bend a bit, if need be, at your own front door!
Like yourself, young Master went with the first adventurers to the war,
the old man said, and the 'All was closed. And he added, with
significant gestures with his rake, what he would do to "they Germans",
if he once got hold of them. I judged, by the red satisfaction in his
face, that the wooden rake in a shaking old hand constituted for him a
vision of "preparedness for war."

So there it stands, on the edge of a great estate that sweeps out to
eastward; low-lying lines of green in the west mean forest, and that
soft look of sky and cloud in the east means the sea. It is absolutely
the place for which we looked so long and will satisfy the home sense,
so strong in both of us. I wonder at my good fortune in finding it, as
I carried on the search alone, and I refuse to entertain the idea that
I may not have it for my own. The roof droops low over the windows;
there is a tall poplar by the wrought-iron gateway; the brick wall,
vine-covered in places, will shut us away from all the world, belovèd.
Within we shall plant our garden, and light our fire on the hearth, and
live our life together, you and I, just you and I.


August 27. But can I get it? I am in a prolonged state of suspense.
Nobody in the village seems to know anything, but everybody is of firm
conviction that somebody higher up knows everything, and that all is
well. I appealed to my landlady; she very pleasantly informed me with
an air of great wisdom that it might be I could 'ave it, it might be I
couldn't; nobody could say. No, she could not tell me to whom to apply,
with the 'All closed, as it was, 'm, and the Squire away.
Standing--there was barely standing-place--in her own over-furnished
sitting room, filled to its low ceiling with bric-a-brac, whatnots with
unshapely vases, tall glass cases with artificial flowers or alabaster
vases under them, porcelain figures,--one a genuine purple cow,--she
seemed, as many a more imposing person on this side of the water and
the other seems, a victim of property.

"An' I do 'ave difficulty, Miss, in gettin' about," she said, as her
apron knocked a Dresden china shepherdess and a Spanish guitar player
off an over-crowded table; "but I don't quite know what to do about
it."

"A broom!" I suggested.

"Broom? Oh, it's nicely swept, and everything dusted regularly once a
week, 'm," she assured me. Oh, for one German bomb!

Luncheon time, and no solution of my problem; a futile visit to the
postmistress, who informed me that I should have to wait until the war
was over, and Master came home to the Hall. I was meditating an inquiry
at the vicarage, though that involved more audacity than I can easily
summon, when my landlord came riding home on a big bony steed and had a
conference with his wife in the kitchen. He, it seems, is temporarily
agent for the property; he has the keys to the little red house and to
my future destiny. I try hard to think what will be pleasing to so huge
and so important a personage, as I walk down the village street at his
side, two steps to his one. An unfortunate conjecture about the retreat
of the British brings forth the emphatic statement that the British
never retreat. With a train of thought of which I am, at the time,
unconscious, I tell him that I am an American; he listens
indifferently. I tell him that my uncle is at the head of an important
New York banking house; he at once becomes responsive and respectful.
We go through the little iron gate and up the brick walk; out of a vast
pocket he takes an old wrought-iron key and unlocks the white front
door.

As we entered, I had a curious sense that you were inside; I never draw
near a closed door without a feeling that it may open on your face.
Instead, there was only the blankness and the empty odour of a house
long closed, and yet it seemed hospitable, as if glad to have me come.
I examined every inch of it, peered into each corner, and explored
every nook and cranny. It is just as it should be, with low ceilings,
old brown rafters, and brick fireplaces,--the one in the kitchen has a
crane. The little dining room is panelled, the living room wainscoted;
I like the dull old oak woodwork and the solidity of everything, which
seems to belong to an elder, stable order, not to this earth-quakey
world of to-day. The living room, facing the south, and thus the meadow
and the brook, is sunny, but not over-light, with its window seats and
casement windows, diamond-paned. The stairs are narrow and a bit
cramped, but my landlord of the Inn gives me permission--ah, I forgot
to say that he tells me I may have the house and grounds for fifty
pounds a year; fifty pounds for all this and a running stream
too!--permission to make a few changes which I hesitatingly suggested,
and for which I shall pay, as the rent is low. There must be a
bathroom--perhaps water can be piped from the stream; a partition is to
be knocked down, and the stairs will then go up from the living room,
not in the little box wherein they are at present enclosed. Where can I
find an old stair rail and newel post suitable for the old house? Mine
host will himself attend to the roof and the chimneys; and he says that
there are some discarded diamond-paned windows lying in an outhouse at
the Inn, from which glass may be taken to replace those that are
broken, if any one can be found to set it properly.

He was amused that I wanted them, amused by my pleasure in the old and
quaint. If he had his way, large new panes of glass should go into all
windows wheresoever; he would like everything shiny and varnishy.
Naturally I did not confess, when he apologized for the lack of this
and that, that I was glad of the inconveniences, glad of relief from
the mechanical and tinkling comforts of our modern life; he would never
understand! To speak of an old-fashioned American would be to him a
contradiction in terms; yet in some ways we are one of the most
conservative people on earth, holding certain old ways of thought most
tenaciously. It is only our muscles that are modern! I am very like a
Pilgrim mother in my convictions of right and wrong.

There is some deep reason why many Americans care so profoundly for old
buildings, old furnishings, old habits which we find here; they typify
inner characteristics which we must not forget in a young land where
changes come too swiftly. There is a steadfastness about it all; these
old stone houses wear a look as if they had been built for something
more immutable than human life. Never as in these recent wanderings
have I had this sense of England, innermost England, of that enduring
beauty of spirit best expressed in Westminster and the old Gothic
churches; that England of ancient faiths and old reverences. Delicate
carving and soft tinted glass bear witness to the richness of inherited
spiritual life and make visible the soul of a people grown fine, old,
and wise. Old shields, grey with hoary dust, still hang on the tombs of
those who have fought and conquered, or have been defeated; a sense of
old sacredness lingers at Oxford's heart,--and yours. There is
something here which not all the sins and shortcomings and decadences
of contemporary life can change; not the luxury and the selfishness of
titled folk whose high glass-guarded walls shut miles of green land
away from common people; not the mistakes--and they are many--of the
government. Back of all this, and beyond, is a something which means
keeping, as no other nation keeps, the old and sacred fire,
safeguarding civilization from the over-new, the merely efficient, the
unremembering.

My new abode is lowly and cozy, with a fine simplicity in the antique
furniture, carved chest, and plain chairs. The fundamental things are
here; you should see the walnut table in the living room, with its deep
glow of red-brown colour. There must be some new things, of course,
fresh chintzes, linen, kitchen utensils, but for the most part only oil
and turpentine and a pair of good red sturdy English arms are needed to
remove a certain dinginess.

So I've a home of my own, though earth crashes and kingdoms fall and a
comet strikes against us and puts us out. For a little I have a
fortified spot wherein to defy the worst that time can do. I am a
householder, on my own plot of ground, crossing and re-crossing my own
threshold; and the big wrought-iron key is in my hand. There are ashes
still upon the hearth,--from whose fire? New flame shall go up from the
old grey ashes,--the central spark of home shall be rekindled here; and
that is the whole story of human life.

How fortunate, and how unusual, in so small a house, that the hall
leads all the way through from green to green! We shall get all the
breezes that blow, for the house faces the west, as all houses should
face; and always and forever we shall hear the stream. There's a step
there at the back, down to the garden walk, that you must remember, you
who are so absent-minded.

--I keep forgetting that you are dead.


September 6. I have been away for a week, a week in which I have not
dared leave one moment unoccupied. To keep my sanity, I must be busy
all the time; life cannot be cut short in this way. When great forces
have begun to stir within you, like the gathering of all waters far and
near, you cannot safely stop them all at once; I must have, in the
weeks to come, some outlet for this surging energy.

London is quiet, and awful with the self-control of great tension. The
war-terror mounts, though few speak of it; the Germans have crossed the
Marne; the French government has moved to Bordeaux, and all the world
seems tottering. Back in my charmed village, I wait and listen. They
would not take me at the front; did you know that, the day after you
left, I made an attempt to follow? No training, and physically unfit,
was the verdict. I thought that I could perhaps prove to you in act
that of which I could not convince you by argument in our dispute the
day we walked to Godstow,--that women have the kind of courage
possessed by men.

I live at the Inn during these days while my house is being put in
order. A glazier has been found who can re-set the old diamond panes;
carpenter and plumber are hard at work. The hideous wall-papers in the
chambers have been scraped off; they were so ugly that they actually
hurt. You always told me, you remember, that I minded too much the
things that make for ugliness, that my eye was too sensitive to
evil-coloured and unshapely things, and that I must live more in the
world of thought. The contrast between these, in their wicked purples
and magentas, and the wonderful cottage itself with its dim beauty of
old brick and dusky panelling, makes one wonder at the potential
depravity of the heart of modern man or woman! There's a shop in
London,--I was going to take you there,--where they have reproductions
of quaint old papers, the kind made a hundred years ago, with little
landscapes, and sheep and shepherds, and odd flower designs. I chose
three of these, and they are going on at this minute; I must go to see
that they piece the two bits of the shepherdess together neatly and do
not leave her head and her beribboned hat dangling several inches above
her embroidered bodice. It is a relief to escape from the purple cow
and the hundred and one china abominations in this sitting room.

My landlady, fingering her black alpaca dress apron, assures me as I
go, that the best of news, 'm, has come from the front; that the
Germans are in full retreat, and the French and the British are nearing
Berlin! If only this insular confidence that for Britons there is no
defeat be not too rudely broken!

Don went with me; I went to Oxford to get him during my week away. I am
so glad, so very glad that you let me have him when you went to war. He
potters along behind me or runs ahead, with all his questing little
fox-terrier soul in his eyes, sure, like myself, that around some
corner, or on some blessed rise of ground, we shall meet you. At each
fresh disappointment he turns to me with that look of perfect trust in
his eyes that I, some day when it seems fit, will give you back to him.
Within five minutes, at his first visit to the little red house, he had
sniffed every corner, and he dropped with a deep sigh of content on the
warm brick walk, knowing the place for his own.

The cloistered Oxford gardens, with their incredibly smooth grass, were
unchanged, but the immemorial quiet is broken. Your Oxford is a new
Oxford, awake, struggling, suffering, nursing the wounded, while the
noblest of her sons follow you to the war. Thinking of all these things
as I walk, I decide not to go to the house, after all; there is a sound
of hammering and an air of disquiet. I cross the little stone bridge
and follow the stream; this, like the pony, is a new neighbour with
which I must become acquainted, and it proves more friendly than that
other. There is a touch of September gold everywhere, of autumn
perfectness in things, that belies wrong anywhere upon the earth. And
all the old days float down the stream; something, the way of the water
with the grasses, the ripple of the water, brings back May, and my
first English spring, and you.

Do you remember that my very first glimpse of you was at the Union? You
were debating, very convincingly, on the subject of disarmament, and
proved the possibility, the practicability, of peace among nations. I
was idly interested in you; Gladys had whispered that you were one of
her friends. That night,--but never again,--you were just one of a type
to me, with the fine, lean, English look of race, the fine self-control
of every nerve and emotion and muscle. I noticed that you were already
beginning to have a touch of the scholar stoop, and that you were a
shade, just a shade, too slender. It was quite a surprise, and
something of a blow to me, to find you English men not, on the whole,
so stalwart as the men in America. All our lives we have read of the
hale and hearty John Bull, yet our first glimpse of you makes us think
that John Bull and Uncle Sam will have to change places in the
caricatures if this transformation keeps on.

The hardest thing in the world for me to understand is that the great
things of life may hang on mere trifles. If I had not, acting on a
moment's impulse, promised to go into lodgings with Gladys in Oxford
because she would go there to study Celtic, Icelandic, and Greek, I
should never have known you, never have walked with you in glory
through an English spring, never have picked crocuses in Iffley meadows
and anemones in Bagley wood, never have known that green rippling
beauty of Oxford stream and meadow and the piercing joy of life and
love that came with you. And now----

The vastness of my loss I can not even grasp; my world is swept away
from under my feet, and I am alone, with nothing to stand on, nothing
to reach in space. Dying myself could hardly mean such utter letting
go; I am aware only of a great blankness. I have not even tried to
measure my disaster, to understand. I shall have all the rest of my
life to learn to understand; I come of a long-lived race.

That which comes more often than my sense of loss is the sense of my
part in letting you go, making you go! You remember that August
afternoon when we drifted down the river, for you even forgot to row;
the trailing willow branches ruffled our hair and gently took off my
hat. It was a lazy, sunshiny, misty afternoon, such a happy afternoon,
except for the war-cloud beyond the peace and the exquisite grey and
green calm of Oxford. You were wondering, idly enough, about war; how
was it to be justified? What right had England, with her love of
peaceful enlightenment, to take this swift plunge into the awful
horror? And you went, my Lord Hamlet, with that deepening look which
showed a soul drawn far within, into a long philosophic discussion as
to whether war is ever justifiable; no one could adjust philosophic
niceties of thought better than you. Could a man of ethical conviction,
without outrage to his better self, go into that barbaric hell? All the
time that your intellect was balancing, weighing, and deciding "no!"
old impulses were stirring, old heroic fingers were tugging from their
graves, old simple-minded forebears were alive and awake, impelling
you.

The green, lovely banks grew dim; the shadows lengthened across the
rippling water, and sunset flushed the western sky beyond the
overhanging branches, while you fought it out. When you turned and
asked me squarely, what could I say? It had seemed so piteously,
cruelly simple to me from the first, so simple and so great! Of course,
I come of the practical American race. Back of me lie generations of
ancestors who have had to act and act quickly without exhausting the
ultimate possibilities of thought on any subject. I do not mean that
they have done unjustifiable things, but that they have had to take
life at the quick. When the Indian brandished his tomahawk inside the
door at the baby in the cradle, some one had to shoot and shoot
instantly, without stopping to ask any authority whether shooting was
wrong. That actually happened in my family; it was a little
great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of mine. Her Pilgrim father
was quite right. Even if his mind told him that it was wrong, which I
judge was not the case, there was something in him deeper down and
farther back than mere intellect; he did the right thing and did it
instinctively, Lord Hamlet. Of course, in reality, his intellectual
problem had been settled when he loaded his gun.

All life is transition, and always has been. As I understand it, with
one's ancestor one has to load one's gun with one hand, while reaching
forward with the other to one's descendant for the pipe of peace. One
has to keep collected, centered, ready to do one's utmost in any need;
the luxury of the last shade of reasoning is denied us as yet: our task
is not to fail at the crisis.

What could I say, when you asked me, except the cruelly hard thing
which I did say? Back of me, as back of you, lie the same fighting,
plucky ancestors. The same heroic impulses that stirred their dust stir
mine, and yours,--alas that it has but feminine dust to stir in me! To
me, as to you, there is but one answer in the world to a question like
that. There had never been any real doubt in my mind as to what you
would do; I think that there had never been any real doubt in your own
mind. In the great moments, life seems neither right nor wrong, but
something greater; it seems inevitable.

Poor Belgium and the baby in the cradle come back to my mind together,
the highly "efficient" tomahawk replaced by the highly "efficient"
siege guns. But even apart from the high justice of this issue, England
was in trouble, England was fighting. What was there for you to do but
help? I said only the one word "go," and even now I can recall the
stillness and the wash of the ripples against our boat and through the
grasses. The silence of perfect beauty rested on sky and tree and
water, and the river no longer seemed a little inland stream flowing
softly through grassy meadows with retarding locks, but a flowing
passageway to some great sea.

The days that followed I count off on my fingers as one counts a
rosary; there were not many, not so many as our prayers. Such little
scraps of them, mere fragments, come to me, shining fragments which I
treasure and shall always treasure like bits of priceless jewels: in
all my mental store there is nothing quite so precious. I was busy
every minute, trying to console your mother and your sister, who
thought you ought not to go; trying to make them see. It is as if the
sun were still illuminating those days, making them forever radiant. It
seemed enough to live, to try, to give one's all, not knowing; it was
not hard _then_; nothing could be hard in moments of exaltation like
those.

They were full too of homely toil; such queer things we had to do in
getting you ready, dear. Of course you were not a trained soldier; how
to become a trained soldier in a week of short days is a harder problem
than many a one in philosophy. When you decided that you would be a
despatch bearer and join the motorcycle brigade, because thus you could
go to the front sooner, I am proud that I did not say one word of
protest, though I knew that it was the most dangerous task of all.
Being a despatch bearer seemed a fitting service for an intellectual
leader.

How we laughed as you practised riding! Lord Hamlet on a motorcycle,
with no time for thought, no time for scruple! How we searched out
rough bits of road and watched you try to cross a newly-mown meadow,
where late poppies, I remember, were blossoming in the stubble. Once
you struck a stone and fell, and your mother amazed you by crying out.
I laughed and horrified her; but I kissed its handles before you went.
The motorcycle had been to me the most hateful of modern inventions,
inexcusable, unmentionable. And here it became a symbol of dauntless
courage and highest service; beyond the bravery necessary for a charge
in battle is the bravery needed here; this evil, roaring, puffing thing
might turn into the chariot that would carry you over the borders of
the sun.

That one brief hour that we found to steal away to Bagley wood lingers
yet. The anemones were gone, but all about was the soft midsummer
murmur, and the ripe fulness of August life. What practical things we
talked about! I think that we sent you out fitted up as well as any
German soldier of them all. Who, in the Kaiser's army, had a more
complete or smaller sewing kit? Who had thread wound off on very
diminutive bits of cardboard to save the space that spools would
take,--white linen and black linen and khaki coloured, all very strong?
What Teuton could challenge you on the score of buttons? It was good,
it was very good, in your mother to let me help.

You thought I never wavered; when you were doubting, I was sure; when
you were sure,--you never knew that I wrote you a note that last night
and took back my decision, saying that thinkers had their own separate
task, and that you should stay. I burned it.... I would not have you
back, dear, if it meant giving up that inmost you I knew in those
glorified few days. You have fulfilled yourself.


September 15. Who is going to keep house for me--that is the problem?
Somebody there must be to cook and clean and polish; a staff composed
of one British female is what I need, for I can do many, very many
things myself.

Mine host and my landlady took counsel; I let them do a great deal of
thinking for me, for their minds are rusty from disuse; you can
actually hear a kind of creaking when they try to make them go. They
finally decided that I was to drive in a pony cart to a village off to
eastward, to consult Madge and Peter Snell, man and wife, both from a
different part of the country, lately employed at the Hall as
under-cook and gardener, now out of work because the Hall is closed. I
readily agreed; yes, I was used to driving, and the directions--first
turn at the left, then a bit of road and a turn at the right, 'm, and
then a long stretch across a dike to a stone bridge and a stream and a
village spire--seemed clear enough.

But when my equipage is drawn up at the Inn door, whom do I see but my
wayward friend of the meadow, harnessed to an absurd little basket-cart
as diminutive as he. I am delighted to see him; is the pleasure mutual?
He gives me one look out of his eyes that seems to say he will be even
with me yet; Don leaps to a place of honour in the cart, and we go
flying down the village street with sparks flashing from the iron-shod
little hoofs. Drive? Yes, I am accustomed to driving _horses_, but
not Pucks, not changelings; I never, never drove a mischievous kitten
fastened to a baby carriage! And that little "trap" was a trap indeed!
What breed my pony is, as mortals reckon things, I do not know; he is
too big for a Shetland, too little for a horse; perhaps he is an Exmoor
pony, or the product of some northern heath. We go gaily to the left,
somewhat perilously near a corner at the right, and we are out racing
over a long dike built across what was once a low-lying sea-meadow. Don
looks up at me with vast enjoyment in his eyes, and that little quiver
of the face that means a fox-terrier smile.

About half-way across we come to a gate; there is nothing to do but for
me to get out to open it, and this I do. Swift as a flash, my Puck
whirls about and goes dashing for home; holding tightly to the reins, I
run also, laughing as I have not laughed for days. Don, with his paws
on the edge of the cart, barks furiously. Pulling and dragging with all
my might, at length I stop the pony. The little wretch looks at me
almost respectfully as I turn him about, and he trots meekly back; he
was only trying me out, to see of what stuff I was made. He stood as
firmly as the Tower of London as I shut the gate and climbed into the
cart. Then came the stream and the stone bridge and the village spire;
and a row of small garden plots with yellow, late summer things
blossoming in them, and Madge and Peter standing by a garden gate.

I knew at first glance that they must both come; now that I think of
it, I have quite a garden, though it will seem little to one who has
worked at the 'All; there are always heavy things to be done about the
kitchen, and Peter knows more than he will admit about the drudgery
necessary to sustain human life. Peter, it seems, has been a soldier,
has served in the South African war, and is a time-expired man who has
beaten his sword into a ploughshare,--or is it a pruning hook? But none
of his accomplishments is my real reason; the half-belligerent
affection on the face of husband and wife shows me that they should not
be separated.

Madge, the look of anxiety already lifting from her smooth and comely
face,--one sees that look here in many of the unemployed,--looks
questioningly at Peter when I extend my invitation. I assure him that I
need a man to look after the garden and the pony; at this Puck pricks
up his ears and gives me a half glance. Yes, I have decided to have
him, if I may, for my very own. There is a remote something in Peter's
gait and bearing that suggests the soldier, but it is the soldier whose
long leisure re-acts against the discipline.

"But perhaps you were thinking of going to the war?" I ask.

"No, Miss," said Peter, "I weren't."

He spoke so emphatically that I may have raised my eyebrows; perhaps I
shook my head. I shall be afraid of borrowing unconsciously some of the
pony's gestures; these strong personalities always leave their impress.

"War," said Peter firmly, "is against my principles. I am a socialist."

"It's a fine way to keep from serving King and Country, being a
socialist," said Madge unkindly. Madge is evidently not progressive.

"My fellow man," said Peter, striking the gate post with a heavy fist,
"is more to me than King or 'Ouse of Lords."

"Or fellow woman, either," murmured Madge, thinking that I did not
hear.

From these advanced radical theories Madge and I turn back, as women
will, to the old and homely needs of human life. She fingers her apron.

"I'm sure, Miss, if the laundry could be put out----"

"Yes."

"And a charwoman for the rough scrubbing----"

"Yes."

"And if you wouldn't mind me knowing little about waiting at table----"

"With but one person in the family, that isn't very complex," I say
reassuringly. Don looks reproachfully at me; was I forgetting him?

I watched Don to see how he would take them; his manner was
perfection,--polite but distant, refusing any intimate advances, but
refraining from growling. There was a certain approving condescension
in his air, as if he thought they were quite well in their way. He
never for a moment forgets that he is a gentleman's dog, and his flair
for social distinctions is as fine as that of any of his fellow Oxford
dons. That delicate snobbery showed to-day in his air of
connoisseurship while he weighed the matter with daintily snuffing nose
and then assumed an air of invitation to these two to come and keep
their place.

I was delighted when they said that they would come, and we trotted
merrily home to the shining companionship of the hearth fire,
flickering on pewter pots and copper pans as on my landlady's red
cheeks; to the comfort--ah, that I, a twentieth-century American, dare
confess it--of a feather bed!


September 29. Here I live in mine own hired house, like the gentleman
in the Bible,--who was it,--Paul? I hope only that he had one half the
sense of entire possession that is mine. I look at Madge and Peter,
busy in kitchen and garden, at Don, guarding the little iron gate, at
the pony grazing beyond the stream, and I feel like a feudal lord.
Especially do I feel so when we rout out the utensils in the
kitchen,--knives, forks, skillets. Some of them surely antedate the
feudal era; they were probably left by the cave men; their prehistoric
shape, in its ancient British clumsiness, looks as if it might have
archæological, if not practical, value. I shall use them for gardening;
the forks will be a great help in wrestling with mother earth.

Wrestle I do, indoors and out; I dare not be idle, and besides, I like
to do these things. The Vicar's lady, passing, is shocked to see me
scraping the putty off of my new-old diamond-paned windows; but
somebody had to get it off; Madge couldn't, so why not I? Madge watches
me working about, torn between her old attitude of maid at the Hall,
with its fixed ideas as to what the gentry should do, and a something
new that is slowly creeping into her mind. Throughout England, I am
told, the gentry are doing things they used not to do,--for economy,
for possible service to the country in its day of need. And it is
slowly dawning on us all that its need is great. The Germans have been
halted on the Marne, and we breathe more easily, but it is rumoured
that they have brought their great siege guns up to Antwerp, and the
poor Belgians are flocking over here in hordes.

Madge, as she sees me toiling over my chintz curtains, and sees the
bothersome things come down to my undoing, wants to know why I wished
to come, quite by myself; why I didn't take lodgings somewhere,--it
would be far less trouble. She doesn't understand in the least when I
tell her that I cannot endure the irrelevance of lodgings, the
antimacassars, the hideous bric-a-brac, the rooms packed full of
horrors, where I cannot collect my mind. A home of your own is worth
while, if only to keep it bare of human clutter; bad pictures
intimidate me; ugly upholstery defeats my soul. Of provincial England I
could say, if it weren't profane, all thy tidies and thy ugly reps have
gone over me. The publicity of hotel or boarding house I cannot endure,
nor the kind of tissue-paper life that one must live there. Not among
gilt cornices but beside meadows and running waters I choose my lot.
Your relatives are kindness itself in inviting me to stay with them,
but just now I cannot bear kindness; I want people to be as cruel as
God! Was I not lonely enough, after my own family had vanished into the
silence; why did you come into my life only to leave me more alone?

This is my _apologia pro domicilio meo_, but why, after all, should I
need to explain a longing for my own rooftree, my own hearth, my own
pathway leading to my own front door? I must have come into the world
with a belief that for every woman born was intended a little nook or
corner or cranny of her own. So here is mine, a quarter of a mile from
the village, not many miles from the sea, seventy odd miles from
London, and how far from that heaven where you are? Can you tell me the
way and the length of the road? Sometimes it seems set on the very edge
of eternity, and I keep expecting to see stray cherubim, seraphim, and
angels stop to ask the rest of the way.

I haven't begun on the garden; in a way I haven't let myself see it,
there has been so much to do in the house; but, if you will believe it,
and of course you will, being an Englishman, a plum tree and a pear
tree are espaliered on the sunny southern wall of the house, branching
out a bit over one of the windows. There are two apple trees, a clump
of holly, ferns in a corner, rosebushes, and climbing roses. I shall
not know all the colours until next summer, though some of them bloom
late; I have discovered white ones, and pale yellow, and one of a deep
and lovely red. The garden is neglected, weedy, and grass-grown, but I
find hollyhocks, foxglove, larkspur, and a forgotten violet bed. A
small kitchen garden borders my lady's garden, and Peter shall till
this. Don walks up and down the paths with a step so exactly fitted to
your old pace in the college gardens that I feel always a little shock
of surprise in not seeing you, as of old, just ahead.

Scraps of conversation drift to me from Madge and Peter when they
happen to work together; upon the invincibility of the British they
agree, and upon the fact that no foe will ever dare set foot upon the
British isles, but in matters of social opinion they are hopelessly at
variance. Madge is a conservative, standing staunchly by the Church,
the 'All, the 'Ouse of Lords; Peter is an extreme radical, a
"hatheist", as he solemnly informed me, eager for anything new in word
or thought, and usually misappropriating both. He reads American
paper-covered novels, and a touch of transatlantic slang creeps now and
then into his conversation, or a queer abstract phrase from some
socialist lecturer whom he doesn't understand but accepts entire. Many
a bit of stubborn debate comes to me through open door or window, as
Peter defends his rights as man and scoffs at the social system.

"Wy _'im_ at the 'All? Wy not me?" was the last I heard.

"You!" said Madge scornfully. "You couldn't even stand up on the
floors, they are that shiny and polished."

With the fragrance of ripening fruit, and the warmth of the brick wall
about me,--September is September everywhere,--I sit here upon my own
threshold, a worn old threshold made wise by the coming and going of
life through unnumbered years. There is something comforting about a
place where many lives have been lived; the windows have a strange air
of wisdom, as if experience itself were looking out. I am tired,
physically tired, with all the work, but I am well content with it: are
you? All within is nearly finished. Your books, for your mother gave me
many of them, are in a set of shelves I had made by the fireplace; my
own in a low case that runs all across one side of the room. The window
seats have chintz cushions; two easy chairs flank the fireplace; the
old walnut table with reading lamp is placed where it can command
either the flame of the hearth or the sunset flame: do you like all
this, I wonder? In the little dining room a stately armchair stands
ready for you always, as befits the master of the house, and your place
at table shall be always set, the cover laid. So begins our divine
housekeeping, you on your side, I on mine--alas!--of the universe and
life and time.

Last night I laid a scarf of yours, which I had been wearing, across
your chair; Don sniffed at it and whimpered, then jumped up into the
chair and whined piteously. No, do not be afraid! I shall not whine,
even if my heart break. I shall come to you smiling, belovèd, and
whatever wrinkles are on my face shall not be worn by tears. Everybody
is _game_ in England now; I will be game too! There are no cowards
among those who go to fight, or those who are left at home: my
battlefield lies here. You need not think I am going to mourn in
loneliness; I shall not let you go, though you are dead; I am going to
live my life in and for you, and every least wish I ever heard you
express shall be carried out. After dinner Don and I sat on the rug in
front of the fire and talked about you; it is sorry comfort for both of
us, but it is all we have. For him, as for me, I think, the sense of
you comes more strongly in favoured nooks and corners, by the fire on
the hearth, or by the living room windows in the sunshine. He knows you
better than anybody else does, except me, and I sometimes feel,--at
least, he remembers farther back than I can, and I am envious of him
and of every one else who knew you first. He has chosen his permanent
abiding-place, for he went close to the right side of the hearth, sat
down, wagged his tail beseechingly, and held up one paw as he does when
he is begging for things.

So I have closed my little iron gate,--Madge, Peter, Don, and I inside,
and all the world shut outside. Perhaps I am moved by the instinct of
the hurt animal to go away by itself and hide. It cannot be wrong--now;
henceforth I must live in the past; the dropping of the latch will be
the signal, and the old days will slip back one by one over the brick
wall. I shall establish a blockade; haven't I a right? The pain, at
times, is more than I can bear, and every face I see recalls the sight
of happy people, the sight of wretched people alike. Safe, with my
sorrow, inside these walls; and outside, the surge of great sorrows,
anguish, perplexity.


October 8. Of course I take long walks day by day, yet nothing more
intensifies my sense of loss, perhaps, because we walked so much
together. The country is as green as it was that July day when we
stopped and helped the haymakers in the Oxford meadows, and they jeered
good-naturedly at our way of raking. I have found relief in watching
the harvesting and the gathering of the fruit; looking resolutely at
field and stream, centering mind and soul there, my grief softens and
grows more kind. Everywhere I see the picturesque and finished charm of
English life.

As I climb the hill past the church, the old, old woman who lives in
the little house by the lych gate,--the churchyard gate, the gate of
the dead,--and sells gingerbread, biscuit, and ginger ale, is putting
out her wares. She is so old, so much a part of the other world, she
lives so near the edge of this, that I half suspect her, as I catch a
glimpse of the green mounds through the rusted wrought-iron bars, of
ministering to those we cannot see. None but the English would think of
selling gingerbread at heaven's gate! Over the soft gurgle of ale from
the stone jars we exchange greetings; she is only another of your
daring and delightful incongruities, seen in the gargoyles on your
cathedrals, the jokes in your tragedies, and the licensed mischief of
your Oxford students on Commemoration Day.

The practical necessities of life take me, perforce, beyond my own
domain. I have made the acquaintance of butcher and baker; that of the
candlestick maker is still to come. The passing faces of people in the
village street, even of farmers stopping at the Inn, I begin to
recognize; the latter look little more concerned about the present
crisis than do their stout nags. Life goes quietly on here, as it has
always done, I fancy; steps are scrubbed, and brasses of knocker and
door latch are polished until you can see your face there. Is this
encompassing calm mere apathy, or is it conscious strength? In his
little shop the sleepy chemist wakens unwillingly to deal out his
wares; the sleepy service goes on as of old in the little church. It is
grey with dust; perhaps the caretaker does not think it worth while to
dust in war-time, yet I doubt whether he knows there is war. In the
bakeshop window day by day are displayed the great clumsy loaves of
bread with the foolish little loaf tucked on at one side. Why? There's
neither rhyme nor reason nor symmetry in it; the force of custom may be
wise and may be merely stupid. Here one gets constantly an impression
of the overwhelming power of old habit and has a feeling that unless
these people are shocked out of some of their ancient ways, disaster
will follow. As I collect my wares, I fall to wondering whether either
this nation, which worships its past, or we, who worship our future, is
wholly right.

If, at times, a doubt intrudes in regard to this British clinging to
the past, it is when the door of the one village shop tinkles at my
entrance, and I ask in vain for the common necessities which it is
supposed to supply. Here are pictures of Queen Victoria and all the
royal family, but no tapes, no trustworthy thread, no pins, at least no
pins with points. I brought home a paper of these soft little British
crowbars, but alas! fingers cannot drive them in; they but crumple if,
in desperation, you urge them too vigorously. How can a nation rule the
sea; above all, how can it conquer in a mechanical war when it cannot
even make decent _pins_?

My mood softens as I stroll toward home; the glow of the blacksmith's
forge fascinates me; there at least is tremendous strength, which is
also skill, welding in this most ancient art, blow upon blow,
old-fashioned horseshoes, which I am told are the best. Past quaint old
doorways my path leads; the sight of these, and of fine old-fashioned
faces behind the windowpanes, revives my normal mood of affection. What
other people would, in reverence to wishes of those long dead, give out
the dole of widows' bread at Westminster, the daily dole at Winchester,
or administer the Leicester charity at Warwick in the spirit in which
it was meant? What other people would be honest enough to do it? There
is a basic honesty here which recalls the old tale of Lincoln and the
money he saved for many years, in order to give back the identical
coins with which he had been entrusted.

As I enter my own domain, I observe once more that my gate does not
latch properly; all this time, when I have found it left open, I have
reproached Peter.

"Peter, you did not shut the gate."

"No, Miss," rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand.

"You must be more careful."

"Yes, Miss."

This has happened several times; today I found that no power could make
it really latch, and I confided the fact to Peter.

"Yes, Miss, I knew it all along, Miss."

"But why--" there I stopped; I should rather never know why than to try
to penetrate the wooden impenetrability of mind of the British
serving-man. There are no "whys" in their vocabularies, no "whys" in
their minds, only "thus and so." Things are as they are; it has always
been so; theirs to stand under the atlas weight of caste and class,
prejudice and custom, not theirs to reason why, when they are blamed by
their masters for things not their fault; theirs to go on digging, very
respectfully digging.

"Peter, will you get some one to fix it, please?"

"Fix it, Miss?" He does not understand Americanese unless he chooses.

"Put it in order." I am quite red and haughty now, and as dignified as
Queen Alexandra.

"I'll try, Miss. I expect that was broken a long time ago." Peter half
salutes and goes on spading the earth for next year's flowers.

"Peter," I say severely, "the most lamentable thing about you English
is that you are always 'expecting' things that have already happened.
It's both grammatically and politically wrong to expect things in the
past." He has not the slightest idea of my meaning, but of course he
assents.

"You were a soldier once, weren't you?"

"Yes, Miss. It's a nasty business."

"Slavery," I venture, "would be worse."

"I can't say, really," answers Peter.

"Sometimes I wonder that you do not volunteer for this war, Peter," I
suggest.

Stolid Peter goes on digging.

"There h'isn't any war, Miss!"

"But Peter, what do you mean?"

A fine look of cunning incredulity over-spreads Peter's broad face, as
he stops and wipes his forehead, for this October day is warm.

"No, Miss; it is just a scare got up by the 'Ouse of Lords to frighting
the common people."

"What for?" I ask stupidly.

"To take their minds off the 'Ouse of Lords; we had threatened their
power, 'm, and they wish to keep their seats. It is what you call a
roose."

"Peter," I say severely, "day by day we hear through the newspapers of
terrible fighting going on all the time; how can you say such a foolish
thing?"

"The newspapers, 'm," said Peter, with frightful audacity, "are
corrupted, bought by the 'Ouse of Lords. They say what they are
hordered to."

"The poor Belgians are pouring into this country," I say in wrath.

"Beg parding, Miss, but I haven't seen a Belgian," answers doubting
Peter.

"Day by day we hear of recruits going by hundreds to the recruiting
stations----"

"I'm not denying that they may be making up the army, 'm, and that
there may be war some day; but that a war is on, I deny, 'm."

So this is what happens when the British lower classes begin to think!
There really ought to be some better way of bridging the gulf between
their old, automatic habits and the new working of their minds.

"They are carrying soldiers across the Channel by thousands," I say
indignantly.

"All bunkum, if you'll kindly excuse the word, Miss. Did Robinson
Crusoe really happen? We 'ear of these things going on, but do
_you_ know of anybody who has actually been killed, 'm?" asks
Peter.

I looked at him, but I could not speak. Where are you lying, dear, in
that awful field of death?


October 11. I was pruning and tying up rose vines, by my wrought-iron
gate that stands ajar, when I heard a noise,--first, a skurrying of
feet, and a shout, then a rush of something small and swift. The
tiniest grey kitten imaginable had dashed in through the opening and
was trembling in a corner under my rosebush. I picked it up and went
quickly to the gate; there was a red-faced urchin waiting, his mouth
open, a stone in one hand ready to throw at the kitten if it came out,
but shy of entering,--the British respect for a gate! Neither my pleas
nor my scolding brought a shade of expression to his face; it was as
guileless, as soulless, as a jack-o'-lantern. I give the boy tuppence,
and tell him to go away, and to be kind to animals; the kitten curls
itself about my neck and purrs, as I work in the earth. Of course I
shall keep it; I am glad that the latch will not hold, and I shall not
even try to have it repaired. Perhaps my garden may serve as a refuge
for small hunted things, suffering things. I might have a ring put on
my gate; you remember the ring upon the cathedral door at Durham to
which a fugitive could cling? All the village criminals--I wonder who
the village criminals are? Probably the ones who look least so!--could
cling to it, and Peter could rescue them, and Madge and I could give
them tea.

And now to help on the millennium a bit by establishing an intimacy
between the refugee kitten and snobbish little Don. In his heart I
think he wants to make friends; but when a common kitten, with no
pedigree and no Oxford training, spits at him, what is he to do? He
looks piteously at me as I bid him be gentle; sniffs in half friendly
fashion, and keeps his delicate nose well away from the claws.
Meanwhile, how can I teach the kitten _noblesse oblige_? I shall
name it the Atom, because, it being (so much of the time) invisible,
like the scientists I am unable to tell whether or not it exists; and
because at moments it seems only a "mode of motion."

Not long after came a little squeal, as of a tiny pig; my flower beds!
I hurry down; the gate is farther open, and there is a huge baby, a
gingerbread baby,--no, it is alive, but it has the shape of gingerbread
babies in the shops, and it has the motions of a gingerbread baby,--not
a joint in its body; "moving all together if it move at all." Its round
blue eyes, its round red mouth look frightened in Don's presence and
mine; then, with another little squeal, it flings itself upon Don, who
draws away, looks at me inquiringly, with that questioning paw
uplifted, shivering a little, all his class-consciousness astir: must
he make friends with _this_?

It is a solid British lump, but friendly beyond belief. In feeling that
it would further the _entente cordiale_ between the two peoples, I find
myself making a playhouse, with tiny pebbles. The infant Briton is not
so phlegmatic, after all; it shouts with delight, flings itself upon my
knees, and embraces them so suddenly and so lustily that I nearly fall
over.... I must find out its name and send to London for a Teddy bear
and some toys. My gate is wide open, ever since Peter started to escort
home my uninvited guest....

It proves quite a day for adventure, and yet I have not been beyond my
garden wall. As I sit on my threshold to watch the sunset, I see,
pausing at that open gate, a tired-looking woman, with her baby in her
arms. She starts to move away, but I speak to her, and she enters; at
first glance I know that she is neither tramp nor beggar and half
divine her errand. Yes, she is a soldier's wife; he is going in a few
days to the front, and she is walking a good part of the way from the
north of England to his training camp at Salisbury Plain, to let him
see and say good-bye to the baby on whom he has never set his eyes; it
is only seven weeks old and was born after he volunteered. She had
money enough to come only a certain distance by train.

The mother is a north-country woman, with a touch of Scotch about her,
clean and sweet, though a bit dusty with the long road. Of course I
take her in for the night; we have a wee guest-chamber. Don and the
kitten and I try to make friends with the baby, but it merely howls.
Madge wanted to keep the travellers in the kitchen, but I would not
permit this and said that my soldier's wife must dine with me. I forgot
to say, I took it for granted that Madge would know enough to lay
another cover at table and was not prepared to see the stranger in your
place. Naturally, though I winced, I could not make any change, and
there she sat, a bit awed; probably she would have been happier in the
kitchen with the baby; but she brightened up and told me some of the
border legends, when she found that I already knew some. My desire to
take her out of your chair lasted through the soup and half-way through
the modest roast; when we reached the salad, there was a hurt sense
somewhere within me that it was right. I had become a Christian by the
time the dessert came on, and in the afterglow by the fire, while she
sang her baby to sleep most enchantingly with an old north-country
song, I resolved to do just this: keep your chair for wandering guests,
fugitives from these highways and hedges. Your intense present life
with me, your subtle nearness needs, after all, no help from outer
object or material thing. Alas for my blockade!... Forts are proving
useless, the war news says.

It sets me to thinking, and I sit by the fire long after my guests have
gone to sleep. After all, it seems a pity to work so hard over a house
and to get it ready, unless you get it ready for something. I don't
know how it could be managed in a maiden lady's home, but what if I
resolved that all the things that should happen in a house should
happen here? In my heart of hearts I know, in spite of this blinding
sorrow, that I do not want to be shut off from the main streams of
human life. They used to tell me that I have a genius for home; suppose
I establish this as a wee home in a warring universe for the use of
whomsoever? Not a Home with a large H, but a little home, with a dog
and a cat and a singing teakettle. The Lord did not make me for great
causes,--not for a philanthropist, nor a leader of men, nor a
suffragette. I have no understanding of masses of mankind, and so am
lost in this era, and hopelessly behind the times. Life seems to me, as
it did to my grandfather, primarily as the conscientious fulfilment of
individual obligation, which inevitably reaches out to other lives. The
troubles of individual men and women and children I used to understand,
to try to help; perhaps I can again. Though it means confessing that I
belong to a type of woman rapidly becoming extinct, all my life long I
have felt that I should be content with a hearthstone and threshold of
my own, with natural relationships and real neighbours. If I can
understand and pity and try to help, why am I not doing it now, pig
that I am? Birth, and death, and marriage, and hours of common life!
Ah, if the little red house could only lend itself once more to all
human need!


October 15. My Jeannie Deans is gone; she was in such haste that she
could hardly wait for her breakfast. I got mine host to drive her to
the station, for I shall not let her walk the rest of the way, and I
gave her all the money I could find in the house, including all I could
extract from Madge's and Peter's pockets, and from Madge's broken
teapot. Unfortunately, it was not so much as I could have wished, but
it will provide for a few days. Now we haven't ha'pence in the house;
so much the better, if the burglar with whom I am threatened by the
boding village gossips should call; but I must drive over to
Shepperton, the market town, and call at the Outland and County Bank,
and get some of those clean, crisp, dainty notes that are a delight to
touch.

It seems lonely without Jeannie; Peter has gone away over hill and dale
to get fertilizer for my garden; my house is empty, swept, and
garnished--I have been dreading the moment when everything would be
done. I carry on Madge's education, for I am trying to teach her
English history. Yesterday it was William the Conqueror; she did not
believe a word of it, but she very politely said: "Just fancy!" Most of
these people know so little of their own history that they scorn the
idea that anything unfortunate ever happened to England and scoff at a
statement that she has ever been worsted in a fight. It has always been
as it is, the King on the throne, the Vicar in the pulpit, the Squire
at the Hall, and the island secure from all attack. To butcher and
baker and candlestick maker in the village, danger or threatened change
is inconceivable; England's past defeats sound to them like fairy
stories devised by enemies, though they lend a willing ear to the tale
of England's triumphs. Going back to ancient times, I told Madge about
the Danes and their landing on this coast, about the burning and
pillaging done by these wild folk: all that she remarked was: "How
awkward!" I could not get her to entertain for a moment the idea,
though we are only a few miles from the North Sea, that the enemy could
ever land on English shores. "Hengland rules the seas," and that is all
there is to it. Antwerp has fallen, but even this does not shake the
prevailing sense of security. Antwerp is not England!

In contemporary matters Madge is quite interested; she thinks great
scorn of the suffragettes: "Breaking the windows, 'm, and biting Mr.
Hasquith, 'm; it's not for ladies to be taking part in public matters;
they 'aven't it in them!" I reminded her of Queen Elizabeth, but she
had never heard of Queen Elizabeth, and refused to entertain the idea
that any such woman had ever ruled England. Even the tale of the Virgin
Queen boxing the courtiers' ears she disbelieved with the rest. She
admitted Queen Victoria, but said that it was "so different, 'm, and
she a mother and a grandmother."

Some of this went on while Madge was doing up the guest room; she
wanted simply to spread the coverlid over the bed, as it probably would
not be used again for a long time. I insisted, however, that the bed be
made ready with fresh sheets; some one might stop at any minute, I
explained. Madge looked at me with question in her eye; her impression
of me up to this point is that I am an amiable lunatic who may at any
minute change to violence.

After luncheon I made Peter go and get the pony for me; yes, the pony
is now exclusively my own, for as long a time as I wish. He is almost
the most interesting personality I have ever known,--wilful,
conscientious, full of conviction in regard to what he considers his
duty and what he looks upon as his privileges. There are spurts,
attended by dashing heels and swishing tail, of strict and spirited
performance of his allotted tasks; there is peasant stubbornness,
attended by stiffened legs and tenacious hoofs, of resistance to evil.
He is British, or Scotch, to the core. Evidently he feels that his
ancestors had a hand, a hoof, I mean, in the Magna Charta, and all the
liberty that is coming to him he means to have, and all the obligations
resting upon him he means to fufil, in his own way, at his own time.
Sometimes he will do far more than he is asked, scornful of other
people's ideas; has he not his own? He is full of punctiliousness,
decency, order, when he feels like it; of utmost freedom, even license
also, when he feels like it. Now and then he runs away, purely, I
think, on the principle of: "British ponies never shall be slaves."
Gentle when you would least expect it, fractious when you are most
unprepared, he looks upon whizzing motor cars with calm tolerance, so
unlike my own feeling that I may well cultivate his acquaintance in
order to learn that wise indifference. It is as if he were disdainful
of anything the modern world could invent to frighten him or get in his
way; here is an ancient British self-possession, a sense of ownership
in the soil. His ancestors were here hundreds of years before these
trifling modernisms appeared; William the Conqueror and his Norman
steeds were but parvenus and upstarts to them. He will shy at a
floating feather, but I doubt if he would shy at a Zeppelin. Like many
another staunch character, he takes gallantly the real troubles of
life, balking only at the trifles.

"I should like to know," I said meekly, as we started, "whether it is
one of my days for obeying you, or one of your days for obeying me?
When I find out, I shall conduct myself accordingly." I got no answer,
yet I soon discovered. There is really something uncanny about him; he
seems to know more than horse or human should know; to have
foreknowledge of events. I must not tell his master, or the charges
will be raised from five shillings a week perhaps to eight; after all,
eight shillings for supernatural wisdom would not be unreasonable! On
the other hand, if it was just plain British contrariness, eight
shillings would be too much, as there is such an over-supply of the
commodity.

I was driving out in the forest to westward, and it is very beautiful
with its great oaks and birches, and its loveliness of yellowing fern.
In spite of the mellow Octoberness everywhere, I was thinking sad
thoughts; all day you can drive here and yet hardly cross one man's
possessions; much of the land lies idle, while people starve in
England; much of it is preserved,--the poor tame pheasants are as
friendly as domestic hens. The tax for charity here is one shilling
four pence a pound; as I read this, I thought of London with its
starving poor, its ribald poor, and I wondered if this great kingdom
will vanish because the people do not pull together better. The blind
selfishness of the upper class with their glass-guarded walls is a
greater menace than the German siege guns.

I came to a cross road, or cross path, grassy paths both, with creeping
green moss among the roots of the trees on either side. It was hard to
decide which way to go; I chose the right and pulled the rein; Puck
chose the left and started. I tugged at the right and told him to go
on; he said he wouldn't; again I told him, and he shook his head, shook
himself all over with his head down, until his harness rattled. When I
told him a third time, he stamped, kicked, and pulled with all his
might to the left. Of course he got his way; some people passed; I was
not going to be convicted of inadequate horsemanship, being only an
American, so I assumed a calm and masterful British look, as if that
were the way I had all along meant to go, and we jogged on. The
self-satisfaction in that little creature's air! He turned his head
around now and then, trying to see how I was taking it; having had his
own way, he went at a jolly pace; he loves to start rabbits and make
the pheasants fly up. Presently, at a turn in the road, he shied; he
did it quite theatrically, as if he had worked it all out in his mind
and had achieved the intended effect. He expected me to be startled and
to rein him in, fighting to control him, but I did nothing of the kind.
I merely let the reins lie loose and watched him; he subsided very
suddenly and dejectedly at having lost his fun.

Then I saw what he was shying at and stopped him; I think that he had
known all along what he was going to find! There, under a great oak
tree, partly hidden by tall bracken, lay a girl with her eyes closed,
her hat partly off her head, looking like one who was very tired and
had fallen in her tracks to go to sleep. In a minute I was at her side,
holding tightly to the reins, for fear of what that little wretch might
do, but he was as immovable as Stonehenge.

She was quite young, very wan and pale, fairly well dressed but
crumpled looking. Her hair was dark, and her eyes, when she slowly
opened them, proved to be dark also.

I do not know yet whether she had fainted, or whether she was asleep
from exhaustion; her poor feet showed that she had walked many miles,
for the soles of her shoes were worn through. At sight of me she sat
up, looking frightened, but, evidently finding that I was not so
terrible, at length smiled back,--a faint little smile. I knew enough
to be silent at first; this is something that I have learned from
animals: there are sympathies, understandings, that antedate words.
When I asked her very softly if she were ill, she shook her head, not
understanding. I tried French, and, though my French is odd, I know,
she brightened, clasped her hands together, giving a great sigh, and
then tears began to roll down her face. That villain of a pony looked
around now and then as if to say: "_Who_ was right about the road?
You would never have found her if I had not had my way."

If he had been commissioned by the government to help in giving first
aid, he could not have acted with more sense of responsibility than he
did in helping me take her home, standing motionless while she climbed
into the cart, so weak with hunger, she confessed, that she could
hardly move,--then speeding fast where the road was smooth, and going
very slowly where the carters' wheels have left deep ruts in the mossy
soil. He really has more than human sense at times! Don, of his own
accord, leaped in beside the fugitive; at times I think that his spirit
is really becoming more catholic, and that he demands less in the way
of credentials and introductions than of old. The girl's pluck
interested me, for, though she could hardly hold herself upright, she
refused my help. Suddenly, from nowhere, a phrase flashed into my mind,
"L'Independence Beige", and I knew--what afterward proved to be
true--that she was one of the many Belgian refugees in England, though
why she was wandering about by herself in this remote corner of England
I did not know until afterward. As we jogged on, over the meadows and
through the village street, she held herself so bravely that nobody
stared, though she was white to the lips. She even managed to walk into
the house, but, once inside, sank down on the couch and fainted quite
away. Madge and I worked over her, giving her drops of warm milk with a
wee bit of brandy, taking the shoes from her poor blistered feet, and
bathing them. You should have heard Madge when I told her that I
thought the girl was one of the fugitive Belgians; to take a red-hot
poker to the Kaiser seemed to be her lightest wish for vengeance.

When our guest was in bed, all fresh and clean, with her hair brushed
smoothly from her forehead, I could see that she was a sweet and
wholesome maiden, with a comely, housewifely air, and my heart ached
for her sufferings. She ate a little, then lay with her eyes full of
tears that she would not let fall; she kept winking her long lashes to
keep them back. Don jumped up beside her and snuggled close; she
smiled, lifted her hand to his head for a minute, then she went to
sleep. Such sleep I never saw,--deep, long, dreamless; hour by hour she
lay there, not moving all night long, for I crept in now and then: I
could not sleep. Don kept watch until morning.

She did not waken until after ten; there was a flush in her cheeks, and
her eyes were starry, but in her face, young as she seemed, was a
foreshadowing of the worn look of age and sorrow that the years should
bring, not the German army! She wore an air of wistful questioning to
which there is no answer, as she lay twisting weakly a simple ring
about her third finger.

We had a funny time trying to talk; La Fontaine's fables and Racine's
_Athalie_, as taught in a young ladies' finishing school, are not
the best basis for a conversation on the practical needs of life. I
wanted to ask her if she liked sugar and cream in her coffee; all I
could think of was

    "C'était pendant l'horreur d'une profonde nuit,
    Ma mère Jézebel devant moi s'est montrée."

I did succeed in telling her that this was probably not as good as
Belgian coffee; she sipped it gratefully and nibbled her toast, putting
her hand on mine and saying that it was "delicious, Mademoiselle, but
delicious."

My fugitive is still here; she was in bed two days, and then I let her
get up. She is wearing one of my gowns, and she spends much of her time
in the garden in the grapevine arbour, sitting very still, with the
shadow of the leaves upon her face. Don stays with her much of the
time, and she seems to like this; and the country smell of the garden
comforts her a little, I think,--the odour of the red apples ripening
in the sun and of grapes that will not quite ripen. She rarely moves,
except when a drifting autumn leaf falls on lap or shoulder; it is as
if body, mind, and soul were exhausted by the awful shock of her
experience, and she could not gather up her vital forces. I can only
dumbly wonder what terrors she has gone through, what unspeakable
things she has seen.

Her name is Marie Lepont; father and mother she has not, but she lived
with an aunt in a little villa near Brussels,--with a garden like this,
only _plus grand_, and she had a lover; oh, yes, for two years she
had been betrothed. I could not understand all that she said, but she
told of their awful suspense in waiting for the Germans and of their
taking refuge in the cellar,--the French for cellar I had never
learned, so she showed me my own. Then came the flight, of old men,
women, children, and pitiful animals; sickness, and falling by the way.
Her aunt died from sheer exhaustion in a peasant's hut and was hastily
buried at night. She could hardly tell what had happened, only that she
was quite lost and separated from everybody she had ever known. Her
lover was not in Brussels when the crisis came, and she had had no
tidings from him. Evidently she had been swept over in a great wave of
terrified humanity and had found herself on a steamer crowded with
refugees. She can remember very little about the voyage, but with many
others she reached a receiving camp near London, half ill and quite
dazed. She searched vainly for her lover, and, not being able to
discover any trace of him, stole away from the camp in a state of
mental bewilderment to try to find him. For days she walked, growing
more and more spent and hungry, for she was shy about asking for food,
and the country people did not understand her, evidently mistook her
for a gypsy, and treated her somewhat churlishly. When she reached the
forest she was happy, it was so cool and shady there, but she had
little to eat save mushrooms. If I had tried to pluck mushrooms for my
sustenance, it would have ended all my troubles! When I found her, she
had had nothing to eat for more than twenty-four hours.

I watch her as she sits in the sunshine, and I multiply her by hundreds
and thousands, innocent people, old folk and babies, old men and women
lying down by the roadside to die, and the horror comes like a great
tidal wave, sweeping all things before it, drowning all the joy of life
and the old sweet ways of living. It breaks on the brick wall of my
garden and is driven back; I will not be overwhelmed by any anguish of
human fate, my own, or that of any one else. Until some wandering star
strikes the earth and shivers it to atoms, there is hope somewhere, and
there are things to do! And Marie Lepont shall not be overwhelmed
either, in spite of the terrible things she sees, waking or sleeping,
for she starts up and cries out in the night; Don gives a little
comforting, reassuring bark, and she goes to sleep again. I've got to
find her lover for her, and how shall I begin?

I'll go and ask the pony!


October 14. My fugitive fits quietly into our life in the little red
house, saying little, trying to do much, and smiling more and more. I
do not talk to her, but now and then I sit and sew with her; I know
that she is most domestic, and that this will make her feel at home,
but I should hate to have her examine my seams and hems, for I am no
seamstress. I leave her much alone with the animals, and that seems to
help more than anything else; the Atom spends much of its time on her
shoulder. She has begged to be allowed to feed the chickens, for Madge
has insisted on our having chickens, and Peter has constructed a yard
for them, with a little house for winter, a bit down the stream. Sea
gulls come sailing on wide beautiful white wings and descend to the
chicken yard, walk about and steal food, to the helpless wrath of our
fowls. Even Hengist and Horsa retreat; they are two twin stately cocks,
and William the Conqueror is a bigger one, with spurs. He is quite the
greatest coward in the yard, and entirely in awe of his Matildas. It is
thus that I am making history concrete for Madge; my long line of
British queens does credit to the dynasty, though they are a bit
miscellaneous in ancestry. Boadicea is a dark beauty, wild and fierce;
my vainest, long-necked, red-brown hen is Queen Elizabeth; oh, the
cackling when she lays an egg! The large, fat, rather stupid one is
Queen Anne; I let Madge choose and name Queen Victoria herself, and she
selected a plump and comely grey fowl, rather diminutive, with an
imperative and yet appealing cluck, who will make, I know, an excellent
wife and mother. It is all very well to keep hens and to eat their
eggs, but I have given notice to Madge that not one of these companions
of my daily life shall be sold to the butcher or served upon my table.
The gingerbread baby comes giggling through the gate at least once a
day, and it has taken a great fancy to Marie. It proves to be the
eleventh and youngest child of my friend the blacksmith, and it has
early developed, probably from constant association with so many swift
feet, an abnormal talent for running away.

From morning until night I am busy with a thousand and one things,
commonplace things mostly, in the house, or the village, or beyond. And
wherever I go, you seem near, with your long, thin stride, and your
preoccupied face, as if your feet had a bit of difficulty in keeping up
with your mind. There is a strange sense always, when I walk in the
forest, or along the highway, even when I go to Farmer Wilde's to see
about butter and vegetables, that you are walking by my side.

Peter is very solicitous about the welfare of my guest, and I have seen
him looking at her with vast pity in his eyes.

"Peter," I reminded him, "you can no longer say that you have not seen
a Belgian refugee."

"No, Miss," was his only answer. He digs and prunes, still arguing his
country's lack of need of him in this pretence of war.

"There's the British fleet, 'm," he observed, with fine scorn. "It was
hordered out at the beginning of this so-called war, and told to sink
the henemy's fleet. Wot 'ave we 'eard of it since, 'm? Nothing, nothing
at all. It's just bluff, 'm; the fleet is out on the 'igh seas for
pleasure, junketing at our expense. Doubtless all the gentlemen enjoy a
cruise."

"Peter," I say solemnly, "don't you really know that a German submarine
sank three British cruisers on the twenty-second of September, the
_Hague_, the _Cressy_, and the _Aboukir_? Do you think that the gallant
men upon them went to the bottom for pleasure?"

Peter turned a trifle pale under the red of his forehead and cheeks.

"I heard that rumour," he remarked, with an attempt at airy skepticism,
"and I dessay you believe it. I dessay you think it actually happened.
But I refuse to believe it; when was the British fleet ever defeated?"

There was a tentative something, a touch of question, in the bravado of
his denial.

"Peter," I suggest, "our fall gardening is not a national necessity;
there is greater need of you elsewhere. Why not be a bomb-sweeper; you
like the sea, I believe?" Madge listens, her broom suspended in
mid-air, as if it were listening too. A look of embarrassment crosses
Peter's face, as he rubs his cheek.

"The bombs are very explosive, I've 'eard, 'm."

"Peter," I say, "if this is an imaginary war, those are imaginary
bombs and do not explode."

"I'm not so sure of that, Miss," says Peter shrewdly.

Another British cruiser, the _Hawke_, sunk October 16. There is
wakening fear in the hearts of the English people, and there is
deepening courage. The faces that I see here and in the near-by towns,
the letters that I get, have one expression. Party differences have
almost ceased to exist in the political world, and in other ways, I
think, the nation is being welded into one, as it has never been. Even
the voice of the Vicar's lady has lost something of its condescension
in speaking to common folk; I saw her at the blacksmith's as I took the
gingerbread baby home for the eighth time, and she spoke with less of
an air of coming down to the level of her audience than I should have
believed possible. The gentry are behaving a bit less as if the earth
were their private monopoly, and the subgentry, like our Vicaress, are
taking the cue.

A few days ago I went to London, chiefly to get clothing for Marie and
to set on foot inquiries about her betrothed. Nothing seemed greatly
changed, save that there were fewer people in the streets and the
restaurants, and that many uniforms are in evidence. The theatres are
open, and people are going about their work and their play in quite
usual fashion, but their faces wear a different expression, an
impersonal look, and a certain quiet exaltation. Oh, if the real
England, that England that I know chiefly through the expression of her
inmost self in her matchless literature, and through you, could only
win over that other of high, excluding walls and ancient entailed
rights of selfishness and of belittling snobbishness! You will admit
that something needs righting in a social condition represented by the
tale of the two sisters at Oxford,--one married to a tailor, one
married to a University professor,--who did not dare speak to each
other in the street for fear of consequences. I am hopelessly
democratic; the wonderfully good manners of the perfectly trained
English servant seem to me vastly higher, as human achievement, than
the manner of the superior who speaks brutally to him. The surprised
gratitude of many of the maids and scrub-women here when one addresses
them as if they really were human beings is piteous.

Yet I know that though these things be true, they reflect but the
surface, not the depths. Something in this crisis, something even in
Peter's crude attacks, has roused a deep race instinct in me, long
dormant. Though my forebears set sail for America in the 1630's, my
sense of the identity of our destiny with that of England deepens every
day. I am ceasing to say "your", and unconsciously slipping into "our";
perhaps I have been trying to criticize, to point out the things that
are wrong, partly as a measure of self-protection, for I am growing
sorry that the Revolutionary War ever happened! I long for England's
victory in this war, knowing that she is right; I dimly suspect that I
should long for it were she right or wrong; and I feel a little thrill
of pride that my home is in this England of yours, of ours.

Even I, who am often indignant in watching the Englishman's manner
toward those other Englishmen whom he considers his social inferiors,
can discern his profound sense of responsibility toward them.
Forgetting the mistakes of to-day, and thinking of the long
development, one can but be aware in England of a stable, enduring
spirituality, a practical idealism, unlike that of the earlier,
idealistic Germany,--a something tangential, disassociated with
life,--in that it is a constant sense of inner values working out in
everyday ways and habits. Those mystical habits of dreaming fine things
that are never done will not save the world. In my growing love for
England, I am more and more aware of its disciplined, mellow
civilization, treasuring the old and sacred in beliefs, in
institutions, in buildings; its right, controlling habits; its thousand
and one wise departures from the measure of rule and thumb; its
uncodified, unformulated truth of action; its conduct far more
logically right than its laws. In the very reproach oftenest brought
against England I find the deepest reason for trusting her, that she
allows human instinct a larger place and mere intellectual theory a
smaller place than does any other nation in working out its destiny. I
am deeply puzzled by my sense of the Englishman's wrong attitude toward
his supposed inferior while I recognize that inner instinctive sense of
necessary adjustments, that genius for living that makes them the best
colonizers in the world and makes their rule the most lasting anywhere.

I consulted some of the chief authorities in the Belgian relief work in
regard to Marie,--your England shows the real humanity at the heart of
her in this magnificent hospitality to an outraged nation,--and I put
advertisements into several papers. At home all was well, save that
William the Conqueror had choked, trying to swallow a piece of English
bacon too large for him, and was dead. So perish all who lust for
conquest!


October 24. Two days ago came a domestic, not to say a social crisis.
Two of the county ladies called on me, accompanied by the Vicaress;
they must have been told, I think, of my uncle the banker! Forgive this
gibe,--I could not resist making it; we always disputed, you remember,
as to whether your countrymen or mine were the more devout worshippers
of gold. To say truth, I have met these ladies at one or two committee
meetings in our relief work, and I feel duly honoured by the call. I
ring for Madge; Madge does not appear; going to the kitchen, I find it
empty, the fire out, water dripping forlornly from the faucet. The coal
in the sitting room grate I replenish myself and face the horror of the
situation: three English ladies and no tea! No one knows better than I
what blasphemy it would be to omit the sacred British rite of tea,
which is even more established than the Established Church. Rising to
the occasion, I heat water in a little copper kettle on the coals in
the sitting room,--"So resourceful, as all Americans are," murmurs one
lady. I concoct tea, and it proves very good tea indeed, served with
appetizing little cakes from yesterday's baking. My guests go away
mollified; not so am I! One of them had so many scathing things to say
about England's policies at home and abroad, the political friendship
with Russia, the desertion of Persia, the treatment of Ireland, the
mismanagement of the present war, that I was driven to an attitude of
defence. Surely there is something greater for English men and English
women to do now than to stand aloof and criticize! When I told her that
I thought it was a pity to confuse the soul of the English people with
mistakes of contemporary statesmen, she looked at me blankly, nor could
I make her understand. It is odd for me, who have so derided our
Anglomaniacs and superficial imitators of the English, to come so hotly
to the defence of England. I hardly know myself what is going on within
me. It is the England-in-the-long-run that I reverence, the England of
the great poetry, that soul of England full of "high-erected thoughts",
of sunny faiths, and sweet humanities. And of course, through you too,
I know its very best,--the breeding that makes no boast; its fine
reserve; its self-control; its matchless, silent courage.

It is a chilly day; Don and the Atom cuddle side by side at the hearth;
they are great friends now. Marie returns with bright eyes and red
cheeks from a walk. Presently home comes Peter, who has been away on
some errand of his own, to a fireless hearth and an empty room. Home
and garden and adjacent field he searches in vain.

"She will 'ave gone to one of her friends, Miss," says Peter stoutly,
proceeding to lay a fire.

I assent, but with misgiving. Madge had never failed before, nor had
she even gone away for half an hour without telling me. As Peter helps
me prepare a simple meal to serve instead of dinner, I turn the
conversation toward military training and matters of war. My own
contributions to the conversation, in regard to cavalry, infantry, and
manoeuvering I should not care to have Lord Kitchener hear. Very
casually I remark that, if I were a man, I should like to be a soldier.

"Would you now, Miss?" Peter responds amiably, as he takes up the
toasting-fork.

"There's a recruiting station at Shepperton," I suggest, as I cut the
bread. "There are five thousand men encamped for training in Wellington
Park; and I've been told that there are several hundred in the nearest
village,--what is it, Silverlea? I hardly see how you can go about so
much without seeing them."

"It is odd, isn't it?" Peter answers wonderingly. I found out afterward
that the villain had spent that very day at Wellington Park, watching
the recruits drill.

As it grew later, more chilly and darker on that autumn night, I could
see the British husband's awful wrath growing within Peter; he
evidently thought that his wife had run away with some one. Naturally I
had no idea what had happened, but I had my doubts of this. In the
first place, she was fundamentally good; in the second place, one
Briton was, I felt sure, enough for Madge.

Don and the Atom were the only members of the family who really enjoyed
their evening meal that day. They lapped from the same saucer, though
not at the same moment, each politely waiting a turn, the closest of
allies, and doing a bit after in the way of washing each other up.
Marie watched me with big, sympathetic brown eyes, and said nothing.
When nine o'clock came, I was as worried as was Peter, though I did not
admit it. We had decided that he should go to the Inn for the pony, and
that we would begin a systematic search. He went to his room to get
ready and presently appeared, alternately red with wrath and pale with
anxiety.

"My clothes, 'm, my Sunday clothes are gone. Boots and all, 'm. And my
'at, my Sunday 'at."

Despair could go no further than this intonation of Peter's Sunday 'at;
would that any 'at had ever meant so much to me!

"She 'as given them to 'im, Miss."

"To whom?"

"That's just what I don't know, 'm."

What could one think? Had Madge, the admirable, indeed a lover? That
was unthinkable; there must have been some accident. At least, there
was nothing to do but to notify mine host of the Inn, and to present
the case to the local Dogberry.

We were ready to start, when I heard a little click of my garden gate,
and soft footsteps came up the brick walk, down which streamed the
light of the porch lamp. Red rage mounted to Peter's eyes. "It's that
man," he cried, "in my clothes!" I kept a detaining arm on Peter's
sleeve,--his second-best sleeve. Where had his best been intriguing?

The kitchen door opened softly, very softly; we stood breathless in the
corner. If it were a burglar, we were ready; were not all the massive
British kitchen utensils near? The lamplight fell full upon the face
and form of a strange man, a very strange man, the strangest I ever
saw, plump, round of face, with straggling, irregular locks of hair
that had been newly shorn,--a decidedly strange man, in Peter's
clothes.

"You--you hussy!" said Peter, but the sorry epithet expressed a world
of relief, even, I thought, of endearment.

One would have supposed that Madge could not grow redder; yet her face
became even more a flame.

"You, a respectable British female," said Peter, advancing with slow
heaviness of tread, as if Madge's end would really come when he reached
her and the Sunday clothes; "You, a British female, and the wife of an
honest man, out on the highway in a man's clothes, _my_ clothes." He
took hold of her arm, but gently; he would not have dared do otherwise.
His wife looked at him steadily; he could not meet her glance, and his
eyes fell.

"You're little better than a suffragette," he said weakly.

"That may be," said Madge, not without a certain loftiness, touching
her hair with a novel feminine gesture, "that may be; but I _am_
better than an able-bodied man that doesn't hoffer himself to his
country. The suffragettes are fighting for theirs."

Peter was stricken; he had nothing to say. Don, arriving and unable to
understand, barked wildly at Madge, and she seemed to mind his remarks
much more than she had Peter's. I could help it no longer, and I burst
out laughing.

"Madge," I asked, "where have you been?"

"I've been to the recruiting station at Shepperton, 'm," said Madge,
with one look at Peter. "I could bear it no longer; not a finger raised
for King or Country."

Peter hung his head.

"Or the 'Ouse of Lords," Madge added witheringly. "I've been a-reading
and a-reading, 'm, in those papers of yours about the French women that
they find, fighting side by side with the men, for their country, and
about the Russian women fighting too; but when I saw yesterday that
German women had been found fighting, something gave way in my 'ead. I
think you call it brain-storm in America, 'm. Those barbarian women,
from God knows where, fighting for King and Country and their 'Ouse of
Lords! I said to myself that the Snell family should send one man to
the seat of war."

"I've been a-considering," said Peter. "I've been a-thinking it out."

"The present h'our," glared Madge, "is no time to _think_!"

"That was evidently the exact view of the European statesmen in
August," I ventured, but Madge and Peter were too intent to catch my
unkind whisper.

"So I put on Peter's clothes," said Madge, "and I went and walked to
Shepperton and offered myself. Your Queen Elizabeth would have done as
much."

_My_ Queen Elizabeth, indeed!

"What did they say to you?" demanded Peter.

"I shan't tell you," said Madge. And she never did.


October 22. I am so excited that I can hardly write; my fingers tremble
and make letters that look like bird-tracks. What do you think has
happened? Who do you think stopped this afternoon at my little iron
gate? It seems a terrible thing, an incredible thing to say, but I
could hardly have been happier about it if it had been you. I have so
much to do, to think about, while Marie--? Her little world had all
been swept away.

I was weeding this neglected garden; Peter, leaning on his spade, was
eyeing me with some disapproval.

"Ladies shouldn't be doing that 'ard work, Miss," he observed.

"That's a queer opinion for a socialist," I remarked, tugging at a
burdock root. He let me tug and went on with the exposition of his
political opinions, quite unaware of my meaning.

"This need not keep you from working, Peter," I suggested. "I've no
intention of spading that bed."

He dug his spade in with a little grunt.

"Everybody ought to work; that should be the first article of your
socialist creed."

"It isn't, 'm," said Peter eagerly.

"Wouldn't you respect the House of Lords more if they actually worked,
Peter?" This brought him to a full stop.

"They do less 'arm as it is, Miss," he said darkly.

Here we heard the gate creak; the broken latch gives a little
unnecessary click. An odd figure was standing there, looking like a
tramp, with worn and battered clothing, a Derby hat with holes in it,
and dark hair straggling over his forehead. Don, catching sight of him,
barked furiously; I never heard him bark that way. It was as if the
whole outraged spirit of the British upper classes were crying out upon
the poverty and the misery they have helped create; it was a perfect
yelp of class-consciousness. This naturally enlisted my sympathy on the
side of the tramp, and I scolded Don and even slapped him a little.
I've told him often enough that there is really nothing so vulgar as
display of a sense of social superiority, and I do not like these
relapses from the democratic spirit that I am trying to cultivate in
him.

It was the way in which the tramp watched me that made me suspect that
he was not a tramp at all; he had big, brown, appealing eyes, like
those of a nice dog,--not Don, but a friendly shepherd dog. The way in
which he took off his battered hat enlightened me further, as did his
little wistful smile. His face was a bit dirty, but my face has been
dirty in times past; so, doubtless, has yours, Lord Hamlet. When I
greeted him with good afternoon, he took a piece of paper from his
pocket, and at first I wondered if he were an Armenian with lace, going
about with a letter of introduction from a pastor,--or don't you have
them in England? But he did not look like an Armenian, and he very
evidently did not have lace, or any other kind of luggage. The paper
proved to be the advertisement that I had put in a London paper,--and
as I took it, it struck me that those holes in his hat might be bullet
holes.

"You're not really Henri Dupré?"

"I am," he said simply. My French is fairly inadequate in my calmest
moments; in times of excitement it is non-existent, but he must have
understood the joy in my face, and the hand I held out in welcome. He
shook his head; his hand was not clean; my own was less so, and I was
so proud! As I told Peter, if I had not been weeding, our guest would
not have been properly greeted. Don, the wretched little creature,
taking his cue from me, was gaily barking a welcome in a wholly
different tone of voice from that which he had used at first. You see,
he never would have known that the wayfarer was respectable if he had
not considered himself properly introduced by my handshake.

"Is Marie Lepont here?"

I told him in my matter-of-fact way that she was, and I said nothing
more; they might do their own explaining, I thought, as they understood
their own language, not to speak of anything else, far better than I.
So I only motioned to him and went on tiptoe to the corner of the
house; Marie was sitting in the garden, as she sits so often, in the
rocking-chair, knitting, knitting for the soldiers. The air is full of
the fragrance of ripening apples, of falling leaves, and fading fern.
She is very quiet in the sunshine, and the shadows of the grapevine
leaves upon her face hardly change for half an hour at a time. I
motioned to him, and then I ran away, back to my weeding,--to anything.
If it were really he! I wondered if even they felt an anguish so
intense, a joy so intense as my own. It must have lent me greater power
than I really have, for I tugged and tugged to relieve my feelings; the
burdock came up, root and all, and I sat down rather suddenly, panting.
Peter remonstrated mildly, shaking his head.

"You really shouldn't, Miss!"

"Then why don't you?" I asked. "It was here all the time, and you have
a spade."

"I've 'ad no directions, Miss," he said stiffly. "But I don't refer to
the weeding; I dessay it is because you are an American and don't
understand, but you really shouldn't let disrespectable people in that
way. He may be a burglar; he may be robbing the 'ouse at this very
minute. But why, if you don't mind me asking, are you crying, Miss?"

"I'm not!" I answered indignantly. "I never cry. Peter, will you lend
this man your precious Sunday suit?"

"Never, Miss!" declared Peter, somewhat heated, and mopping his
forehead. "A tramp like that!"

"You believe in the brotherhood of man, don't you?"

"Of course I do; certingly I do."

"Madge," I called through the kitchen window, "please start the heater
and get water ready for a bath. And please lay out Peter's Sunday suit;
he wants to lend it to a brother man."

"Brother man, indeed!" ejaculated Peter, and he went on digging. He is
getting a bed ready for next spring's daffodils.

"Peter," I said with some severity, "I want to see if I can respect
your social convictions; this is the first chance I have had to test
them."

"Yes, Miss," he answered, "but I don't see what that has to do with me
Sunday suit."

Not a sound came from the garden; I kept Don with me,--not even he
should break that moment. Then I told Peter who had come, how the
lovers had lost each other in that mad rush for safety, and how, for
days, I had been trying to find this man, for I was very sure that the
right man had come. Peter was spellbound, nor could he dig a stroke
while I was talking. Then he began to work, and he worked furiously, as
I have not seen him since he came.

"It's quite right, 'm, about the suit," he said presently.

I worked for perhaps an hour, while Peter dug like one inspired. Madge
heated water and got towels ready, peering out curiously to see why. A
touch of evening chill came into the air; the rooks began to go home,
and filmy rose-flushed clouds trailed over the sky at sunset. Finally I
shook the dirt off my hands, finding myself very stiff as I tried to
stand.

"Peter," I asked, "what shall I do next?"

"I think, 'm, I'd start making a wedding cake," he answered, after due
reflection.

"For a futile political theorist, you do have perfectly unexpected
moments of insight," I told him.

"Yes, Miss," said Peter.

Silence, except for the rooks, the sound of the brook, and a little
wayward flutter of the leaves where the wind was moving. I went to the
kitchen and added something un-British and digestible to the supper
menu, then walked up and down, wondering why a man probably famished
did not appear. Finally I decided that I must investigate and tiptoed
my way to the corner of the house. Marie was still sitting in her
chair; her knitting was on the ground beside her. The shadow of the
grapevine was gone, and her face was alive with light from within and
without. The level shafts of sunlight that touched it fell too on the
red brick wall behind her, where the espaliered pear tree was etched in
dark lines, and all the garden was a soft glow of October gold. The
stranger was sitting on the ground with his head against Marie's knees,
and her little shawl over his shoulders, sleeping like a child that had
found its way home.

As I crept near, Marie looked up, and a heavenly smile came over her
face. She took my hand and held it, kissing it more than once, and she
said over and over: "Mademoiselle; Mademoiselle," and again,
"Mademoiselle."

We let her lover stay as long as we dared on the brick walk, covering
him warmly with steamer rugs. Later we found that he had just reached
England and had hardly slept for a week. The sunset faded, and the
stars grew bright, and still he leaned his head against Marie's knee
and slept the sleep of exhaustion.

Presently we wakened him; there was a great sound of splashing water;
Marie ran up-stairs to do her hair over again and came down flushed
like a rose, revitalized, alive as I had not dreamed she could be
alive, and at last our guest appeared, clean and smiling. He was
evidently amused by the odd fit of Peter's clothes, but too tired and
too happy to say much. I sped to the kitchen to make the French
omelette; Madge cannot do it,--no Briton could; it has to be
manipulated in just the right fashion, turned at the exact fraction of
a second, and served in just the right way. You should have seen Don,
when he found the stranger in your place, apologizing, snuffing
daintily, touching him with a friendly and beseeching paw, pretending
that he had always known!

Of course the lovers were holding hands under the table; of course you,
as an Englishman, would have thought them effusive, but I should have
been terribly hurt if they had not been effusive about that omelette.
When I rise to the occasion like this, I like to be appreciated; I had
nothing to complain of that night. Tea and toast and jam; a few tears,
and much laughter, and a Sultana cake--the very kind that grew in
Oxford windows and graced our five o'clock banquets; a Sultana cake
calls to my mind the profoundest problems of life and destiny, so many
of them we discussed over the crumbs,--this, I am afraid, meant a
rather ascetic repast for the young Belgians, but I thought that
anything more, with their great draughts of happiness, would be
indigestible. Peter took Henri to the Inn and got a room for him.
Though he was there more than three weeks, mine host would not let me
pay a farthing,--no, indeed! The Belgians are the guests of the English
nation, he said, and he was glad to have his chance to shelter one of
them.


November 1. War, unceasing war in the trenches, with rumours of a
British naval defeat in South American waters, and little encouraging
news save that the Germans have failed to reach Dunkirk and Calais.
England's best are dying, your kind,--England's noblest sons rushing to
the danger places, foolishly, grandly brave. One can feel throughout
the country the great purpose shaping itself to the needs of the
moment, as it does slowly but surely in this land. That is the secret
of this people: they can rise to a challenge, meet any crisis whatever
when it comes; and though I know that unpreparedness has cost them
much, they are greater and better than if they had devoted their best
energy for five and twenty years to getting ready for war. Enthusiasm
kindles under the challenge of disaster; the finest have already
answered the call; the less fine make the great refusal. You go, but
Peter stays, and Peter's kind all over England stays....


November 5. Peter does not stay! Peter is going to the war! For several
days he has been very critical of civilization, very severe upon his
country and her rulers; at times he seemed to think himself the only
real pillar of Church and State. Some struggle was going on within him;
I have learned enough of him to know that if he expresses a feeling, it
is one he does not have! For him, as for me, the horror of the present
moment has been intensified by coming into contact with those who have
actually suffered. All that I could understand of Henri Dupré's account
I have translated into English for Peter's benefit, and the sight of
the bullet-riddled hat has plunged him in deep thought.

He saw your picture, the picture of you in khaki. Madge, unpermitted,
had taken it into the kitchen to polish the frame of oak. Peter looked
at it uneasily.

"A friend of yours, Miss?"

"Yes, Peter."

"At the front, 'm?"

"At the front, Peter," I answered. I could not have said anything else,
and even if I live to be a hundred, I shall not think of you any other
way except as at the front, fighting if need be, carrying messages
across the danger zone, with no thought of danger.

It was a great advance in Peter to admit the existence of a front; he
has persisted in declaring the war a bit of sensational romance,
devised by the House of Lords for their own entertainment. It was a
brooding Peter who busied himself with rubbing up the knives,--he has
been unusually attentive to Madge since her escapade; his mind seemed
to be running on troubles greater than his own.

"Do you know where our army is supposed to be now, 'm?" he asked, when
I told him that we had no good news from the seat of war.

_Our_ army! We were getting on! I gave him my best information about
our hard-pressed line in the west.

"It's astonishing that those Germans are able to fight at all, 'm, when
they have once met the British," said Peter gloomily, polishing a huge
carving knife as if it were a sword. "Meeting the French, that is
different; they are a flighty people and very hexcitable."

"Your knowledge of history needs to be brought up to date, Peter," I
ventured. "Anything less flighty than that magnificent people of France
at this present moment the world has never seen."

"It must be very difficult, 'm, fighting on the Continent, for one who
does not speak the foreign tongues. And I couldn't eat frogs, 'm; I'd
almost rather 'ave the Germans as allies; sausages aren't as bad as
frogs by 'alf."

Later I heard him muttering to himself.

"If the 'Ouse of Lords is really in trouble," said Peter, fighting the
great fight with self, "if the 'Ouse of Lords really needs me--Of
course, the throne is more or less a figure'ead, but I shouldn't like
to see it fall just now, especially if the henemy is coming.... I
should like to himpress them as much as possible." It was when he was
sweeping the walk that I heard him say: "And I should like to see Bobs
once more."

But one day determined Peter's future destiny and his rank as a man and
a Briton. Peter had gone to the coast, with Puck and the cart, spending
the night at a sister's on the way. He had some business at Yarmouth,
he said. I devised some errands for him and encouraged his going. I
thought that it would perhaps prove to be his farewell to his sister
before going to war.

Those were strange days, the days of Peter's absence,--tense, full of
nameless anxiety. That early-morning feeling of suspense, of
expectancy, lasted into the afternoon; and one early morning had
brought us the unmistakable sound of guns from the sea. Peter came
rattling home in the late afternoon, a pale, distraught Peter, who
seemed to have lost several pounds. He came into the garden where I was
tying up rosebushes for the winter; at first he seemed unable to speak,
but at last gasped out, "Those ---- Germans!" and the gasp ended in a
little sob. As I watched him, I found myself sharing his trembling
indignation.

"German ships, 'm, men-of-war, standing off our coast, bombarding; it
has never been attacked before. I saw them with my own eyes; I 'eard
them with my own ears!"

The firing, then, had had the significance that we dreaded. It began at
about seven o'clock in the morning on November third, terrifying the
peaceful folk of the seacoast town, shell after shell, report after
report for nearly half an hour. Peter, who was getting an early start
for home, had taken Puck and the cart to a house on the outskirts of
the town, where he was getting a bag of very superior fertilizer. Then
came the great noise and the splashing; little if any actual damage was
done to buildings or to people, yet Peter contended that Puck was
actually struck on the shoulder by some fragment of splintering wood or
flying stone dislodged by a shell. Those shells may have missed their
intended mark, but they went home to the heart of the time-expired man,
Peter Snell. He knew at last that there was a war, and I knew--what he
himself had not yet realized--that he was going to it.

Peter lacks descriptive powers; I got from him little idea of the
actual scene in all the fright and confusion. When he had found that
there was nothing he could do to help, he had sped toward home, intent
on carrying out his unavowed purpose. Asking how Puck, now standing
with drooping head at the gate, had behaved at the crisis, I got the
account that I expected, and, as we petted this veteran of the war and
dressed a small hurt on his shoulder, I heard how he, the most antic
pony in the British Isles, had held his ground, had jumped only
moderately, had endured the crashing and the splashing, standing with
his four legs braced in the sand, trembling all over, while Peter,
dazed a bit at first, came to his senses.

"And I will say, 'm, that he showed more 'ead than I 'ad myself, for
the reins were loose on his back, I 'aving dropped them to put in the
bag of fertilizer. 'E never offered to run, 'm!"

Puck, the war veteran, took our praises modestly, making no claim to be
recognized as a hero; he helps me understand the British temper, not to
say the British constitution. No paper theories for him! The unwritten
law of common sense available when needed is admirably embodied in him.
That power of keeping your head while others lose theirs is what wins
in the long run, and despite the discouragement of this present moment,
I feel confident that the English will win in the end. The Germans
plan, theorize, show great forethought, but are lost without a
programme. Life does not go by plans and charts; no known precautions
can foresee its emergencies. Unless some chemical or electric invention
of the Teutons can remove the element of uncertainty from existence,
surely victory will go to the people who can meet the unforeseen; pull
themselves together and know, without forethought, what to do in an
instant's danger. All these meditations passed through my head as Puck
shook his mane, making light of his adventure, and trotted away down
the street to his stable with an unmistakable air of "England expects
every pony to do his duty."

The country thrills with indignation, surprise, and increasing
resolution; the impossible has happened, and these inviolate shores
have been desecrated by attack.

Peter is away, Peter in khaki, with something already gone from his
laggard step, with firmer and more self-respecting tread, recalling the
old training which he was beginning to forget. Surely, because of his
experience as a soldier, they will let him go soon to the front. The
sympathy and the admiration in the eyes of our fugitives have nerved
him, as nothing else has done, for the great adventure. I heard Henri
giving him some French lessons, strictly along the line of requests for
food and drink; the French will make up in swiftness of understanding
what he lacks in pronunciation. His last days with Madge have been
funny and tragic too. Her first remark, on hearing of the Yarmouth
incident, was along the old line of urging him to war.

"Some minds," she remarked firmly, "need shot and shell to open 'em."
But I could not help noticing that when he began to talk about going,
she stopped talking about it. Her face has been tragically comic as she
has watched him, in a Falstaff "He-that-died-o'-Wednesday" mood,
packing his belongings. I heard the sound of loud sobbing in the
kitchen as she made herself a cup of tea the afternoon he went away.
Could it be Madge who was muttering questions as to why the King didn't
go to war himself if he wanted war?


November 25. A wedding, actually a wedding, in the little red house,
which wakens gladly to its ancient responsibilities! Weddings enough
have I seen, but this is the first that I ever managed from start to
finish; it was much more my own than if I had been married myself, for
I had to do all the planning, coach the actors, superintend the
catering, and do the decorating with my own hands. The only thing I did
not attempt was performing the ceremony.

We had such joyous weeks, after the banns were published! Marie, I am
sure, quite forgot her sorrow; I quite forgot you, most of the time,--I
mean in my upper and superficial mind. Down under, of course, in the
vital part of my soul, you are I, I am you: there is no remembering or
forgetting, for I am living your life and mine in a fashion profound
and strange. We were busy every minute, busy with the outer things of
life that ride on the surface of the deep currents,--bobbing up and
down in the sunshine.

First, there was Marie's trousseau. She begged me with tears to get her
nothing more; but a girl must have clothing, be she married or single,
so we purchased much muslin,--"calico," they call it, oh, horrors! What
can one think of a nation that calls cotton flannel "swan's-down
calico"? We found a little sewing woman in the village, and she did her
inefficient best on an ancient sewing machine. Much of the finishing we
had to do ourselves, so afternoons we sat in the garden and stitched.
My buttonholes would not call forth commendations from any ladies'
journal, but what they lacked in delicacy they made up in strength.
Buttonholes for war, I consoled myself, as I saw the barricades that I
had erected round the little gashes, are a different matter from
buttonholes for peace.

Marie's ready-made travelling suit, for which I sent to London, fitted
fairly well; as did the boots for both of them. When they overwhelmed
me with thanks, I had to talk very earnestly with them; at least I am
growing more fluent, and they never laugh, only once or twice I have
seen the corners of their mouths twitching uncontrollably, and once
tears came into Marie's eyes as she tried to keep from laughing. They
are exquisitely courteous, and would die rather than be rude. I
summoned all my resources from grammar, dictionary, and heroic plays;
at last the world has faced an occasion that justifies the
grandiloquence of French tragedy.

I told them that we were honouring ourselves in being allowed to care
for any members of this stricken, dauntless nation. More than anything
that could be done for them had they done for the world; how could we
ever repay our debt to this little people with its heroic young King?
What I was doing I did, not for them (think of having sufficient French
to be able to prevaricate in it already!), but for my country and their
country--and for England; it was not a personal but an international
matter. They may not have understood all my syntax, but my general
meaning they understood perfectly, and Don helped me very greatly by
sitting on his hind legs and offering to shake hands, first with one
and then with the other. _He_, at least, understands my academic
French!

There had to be a wedding dress; I insisted on a white one; it was only
China silk, made with a simplicity which, I presume, outraged Marie's
grandmother's traditions. As I explained to her, if she goes back to
London to help the authorities with the refugees, while Henri returns
to Belgium to enter the army, she could doubtless loan this gown for
other weddings, for among the fugitives many--I hoped many--another
pair of lovers would perhaps be reunited. At this, her eyes filled with
tears, and she uttered not another word of remonstrance; she starts on
a quest to find others to wear it.

So she wore the white frock at her wedding, and the house was brave in
its bridal array! Yellowing ferns, autumn leaves, and great golden
chrysanthemums and white decked the living room; outside the dim red
and gold of the autumn woods in hazy distance recalled the ancient
manuscripts that you showed us in the sacred recesses of the Bodleian.
To think that I should live to see a Roman Catholic priest marrying two
young folk by my fireplace! Marie and Henri were quite polite but very
determined to be married according to the rites of their own Church,
and it was done. His Reverence plainly did not want to officiate at my
house, but not in vain have I associated with Puck, choosing him for
guide, philosopher, and friend, and obstinacy won. Henri wore a new
dark tweed business suit which Peter insisted on giving him; he is a
fine-looking man when you see him clothed and in his right mind, the
torn hat vanished. Both faces have a look of sorrow and of shock that
should not be on faces so young, but there is also a look of intense
and quiet happiness. Even if they are separated again, they will have
had something of the joy of life in these brief hours and days since
they found each other.

Our wedding feast was the simplest ever set before mortals, unless
possibly our Pilgrim fathers and mothers had a simpler in starvation
days in the old colony, with bride cake made perhaps of Indian meal! We
had tables in the garden, and a few simple things to eat and drink,
centering in that wedding cake upon which Peter had insisted. Had not
Madge and I spent a whole morning over it, with its raisins and its
currants, its spices and its chopped nuts? "Leave off the frosting,
'm!" Madge had ejaculated in horror. "That would be a heathing thing to
do!" When I told her that for most people nowadays the frosting was
rubbed off of life, she looked at me as if she thought me mad. So she
does, but harmless mad.

Perhaps the mild November air, which harmonizes all things,--sad, soft
and sweet,--helped harmonize the diverse elements at that wedding
feast. There were the Vicar and the Roman priest peacefully grazing as
one; the Vicaress was affably chatting with mine host and hostess as on
equal terms; one of my county ladies was entertaining the little
dressmaker who cannot sew. I did my best in inviting them to outrage as
many conventions as possible; they submitted to the necessities of the
occasion, and still the House of Lords stands, or sits, King George is
on his throne, and the kingdom has not fallen.

I hope it never will!

It had been hard to induce the Vicar to come, but I reminded him that
our Church had been a Roman Catholic Church before Queen Elizabeth's
day, and that, in the holy ground of the churchyard, Roman Catholic
dust was mingled with Church of England dust. How, at this cruel moment
in the world's history, the truth cries out that there should be no
struggle between Christian and Christian, only between Christian and
Pagan! He came; high and low alike nibbled our little cakes and
consumed our ices, and drank the simple beverage made of lemons and
other ingredients served from a wonderful old blue punch bowl. Ay, we
were all allies that day!

So they were married and fêted, and when it was all over, mine host
drove them to the railway station, and I followed with Puck and the
pony cart, Don sitting beside me, and the gingerbread baby with two of
its brothers sitting on the other side. The village windows and
doorways were crowded with friendly faces, for the story of the two
re-united lovers had spread far, and many a kindly good-bye was spoken
by people who had never met them. I had determined that Puck, who had
found Marie, and to whom the happy outcome of the story was due, should
have a place of honour at the parting moment, but Marie's last glimpse
of him showed him indignantly shaking off the white rosettes that had
been fastened to his headstall.

They waved back quite a merry farewell, and then they disappeared,
vanishing behind the great cloud of tragedy that hangs so close. I can
see only suffering ahead of them. They consented to take a loan from
me, not to be repaid until their country is free, and they promised
again and again to let me know if they came to want.

                     *      *      *      *      *

It is lonely to-night, belovèd, under my roof.


December 27. Winter is gentler here than at home, bringing at times
enfolding grey mist and hours of rain; yet we have had many days of
clear and sunny cold, and snow has fallen on the roof of the little red
house. My royal family of fowls lives a subdued but happy life in the
house of Peter's making; Puck has taken up his residence at the Inn,
for cold has come, and Peter is far away. The English robin stays with
us evidently throughout the winter; the rooks have not deserted; and we
are visited daily by silver-winged gulls which come all the way from
the sea for the food we put out.

My home with the little "h" is seldom empty; for two of these winter
weeks we had here two small Belgian boys, eight and ten years old, very
red of cheek and black of hair, and very much boy. What a two weeks!
The Atom immediately retreated to the loft over the kitchen, coming
down only for its meals. It found a warm corner by the chimney where it
cuddled in safety.

Don clung close to my side; he would not make friends. His dictum was
that he would associate with either the aristocracy or the peasantry,
but that the lower middle class he would not tolerate. Those boys, who
had tried to tie a tin can to his tail, _his_ tail, that organ of fine
expressiveness, equal to English prose style at its best, were not
gentlemen, and he would have nothing to do with them.

I was glad to see that the suffering of the past weeks had not ruined
their young lives, but I admit a failure in managing my guests. Even
Madge could do nothing with them, though her hand is heavy; I do not
approve of corporal punishment, but life in theory and life in practice
seem amazingly different at times, and I looked the other way. They
demanded the tail feathers of Hengist and Horsa for their play of
American Indian, and I discovered as I defeated their purpose that they
thought they were living with an Indian lady and were trying to garb
themselves appropriately. I rose to the challenge as best I could; have
I not vowed, whatever happens, never to be an "old maid"? I romped with
them in the meadow, played "tag," and helped them make boats to sail on
the stream, but I had no control over them. Puck was the only perfectly
successful disciplinarian, and whenever they tried to climb on his
back, or ride by clinging to his tail, his quick little hind
heels--fortunately only his fore feet are shod--accomplished what
neither coaxing, admonition, nor enforced fasting could accomplish.
They were not really bad, only dwelling in that Stone Age through which
so many men-children pass. A neighbouring farmer and his wife wanted to
adopt them, and I thankfully let them go, calling in the village
carpenter to help Madge and me make the necessary repairs.

There was peace, we are told, for a few hours on Christmas day in the
trenches; but Christmas should mean lasting peace! The attack, less
than two weeks ago, on our undefended coast towns, Hartlepool,
Scarborough, Whitby, has enkindled as nothing else has done the dull
glow of English wrath. The recruiting goes more swiftly; a number of
young men have gone from our village in the last few days; the
blacksmith's shop is closed, and the forge fire is out,--he has gone to
work in a munition factory. We who stay are knitting for the trenches
and sewing for the hospitals; I never dreamed that I should live to
know such human anguish and human want,--yet it is good to learn that
one need not stand alone, bearing the pain of life in solitude. I have
joined every possible relief association and have pledged almost my
uttermost penny. We are even selling eggs for the hospital funds; spite
of cold weather, the Matildas, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Anne, and Queen
Victoria are rising magnificently to the crisis. The London people are
using the house occasionally as a temporary shelter for one or two
people at a time before permanent places are found for them. The Inn
also serves for this, and mine hostess and I have many a conference;
fortunately, in the haste and confusion, some of the bric-a-brac is
getting broken; one alabaster vase and one glass case covering
artificial flowers have disappeared.

Madge has amused me by finding a way to express, in rather original
fashion, her deepening sympathy with humankind. A courting is going on
in our kitchen; every Friday night the lovers come, she from the
village, he from a farm lying beyond the Hall; and every Friday night
Madge either goes to bed early, or steps out to see her friends. The
girl is a country lass rather ill-treated by a mistress who shall be
nameless; she has no place to receive her lover, save the stone wall of
the bridge across the stream. She steals here in the dusk on her one
free evening; why not? The young man is a perfectly suitable wooer, and
they are safer in my kitchen than out in the cold. Yet I admit that I
feel a bit guilty when I very formally return the very formal greeting
of the unconscious mistress.

Just now, no one is staying with us, and there is blessed quiet.
Through the silences in the little house, old moods, old laughter, old
half-merry tears come back; you blend with all my days. Sometimes I
feel, not as at first, that this is the end of things for me, but as if
it were a little truce of God while I am waiting. To-day I found my
first grey hairs; there were two, one on each temple; have you any to
match them, I wonder? Ah, I keep forgetting, forgetting; keep thinking
of you as still alive and suffering in this war. Remembering, I envy
you; the many years ahead look formidable.

Do you remember the day we took our fifteen-mile walk from Oxford in
May, and sat to rest on the flat grey stones in an old, old village
churchyard, with a tangle of wild vines at our feet, and primroses and
violets blossoming near,--do you remember that we talked of immortality
and decided that when one died it was death, that having lived was
enough? At least you did; I always had "ma doots o' ma doots." I think
it was just May that made us feel that way,--the fragrances, the bird
songs, the sun-flecked clouds over the Cumnor Hills; you too were far
more influenced by things outside the world of pure thought than you
ever knew, my philosopher; have I not seen you mistaking a sunbeam for
an optimistic syllogism? We doubted, dear, but we were wrong; you do
not die; you are more intensely alive than ever.

I am stealing a little time to try to do a portrait of you, though it
is long since I have had a brush in my hand; you know that I was
something but not much of an artist. What were the half-gifts meant
for, I wonder, all the aspiration that goes into them, the denied hope?
I used to suffer because I could not create the things I saw and
dreamed, but that kind of suffering has vanished utterly,--life flows
out in so many ways. There's a bit of attic with a north light near the
Atom's lair that I have fitted up as a studio, and I have unpacked
there my easel and canvases. To-day I shut myself up and began my
portrait of you, merely sketching, for the outlines blurred. I had a
curious experience. So clear is my inner vision of you that it blinded
my eyes, and that which was in my mind a perfect picture would prove,
if I left the room and came back to look at it afresh, a set of
meaningless lines.


December 30. For three days I tried and tried in vain; then came sudden
success, for your very mouth half smiled at me from the canvas where I
had been putting random strokes. As I work, I feel that I never before
really knew you; deeper understanding comes to me of your doubts, your
resolutions, your long growth, and what you are. Little things long
forgotten come drifting back, concerning your boyhood in the old
rectory, the hard awakening of an English public school. Chance remarks
that you made carelessly long ago waken in memory and reveal you to me
anew. The first time I realized the depth of feeling within you was
when I caught a glimpse of you listening to music at a concert in the
Sheldonian theatre; once, at least, your over-guarded face betrayed the
real you. I learned to know your quiet sympathy, your concealed
sensitive understanding of the needs of humankind, and to comprehend
your difficulty in showing it, making it available. You built up the
excluding barrier of an Englishman's expression between you and the
world; only animals and children dared break through. I can see them
yet rubbing their fuzzy heads against you, from the big Angora at Grey
friars, to little Lady Matilda at Witton Hall.


December 31. I cannot finish this portrait, for the eyes baffle me, and
each time I try you seem to be looking at me appealingly, as if you
wanted me to express something that I but dimly see. My present
knowledge of you seems in some strange way to outstrip your remembered
face. My sketch--for I shall leave it a mere sketch--suggests all your
suffering and all my sorrow, and yet not all is said. What knowledge
have you now that I do not share? Tell it very gently in the quiet, and
I shall know; am I not always listening? I am hungry for your wisdom of
death.


January 12, 1915. Deepening cold drives us all closer to the hearth;
perhaps it is only in winter that one gets the full flavour of home.
Don curls up by the fire with me, or takes glorious cross-country
walks. The little old gingerbread woman of the lych gate has
disappeared; I half suspect her of crawling temporarily into one of the
graves to keep warm. In snug farmyards, by great sunny ricks of hay,
the cattle of the countryside shelter themselves contentedly. Now, even
more than in summer, this land seems home from end to end; in every
nook and corner is something of the appeal of the fireside; no other
country so suggests from shore to shore one great threshold and hearth.
Its churchyards, with their dead softly tucked in, the comforting grass
above; its low-roofed villages; its individual homes in their great
loveliness wear one expression.

There are wonderful sunsets over the brown earth or white snow. This is
that England on whose domain the sun never sets, yet it sets most
exquisitely day by day, did they but know.

For a week we had with us a little nun, who prayed and prayed, looking
about her with big, frightened eyes. Luckily, my acquaintance with His
Reverence, who officiated at Marie's wedding, solved the problem, and
she went gladly to the shelter of a convent roof. Then for a few days
we cared for an old, old man, who swore and swore, softly, constantly,
but with an air of question, as if no oaths could quite meet the need
of the present moment. It was most incongruous, for he was very
evidently a gentleman, and he very evidently thought that he was
expressing himself politely, even if inadequately. My knowledge of the
French language was greatly extended, but this new vocabulary is, alas!
as unavailable for the uses of ordinary life as that which I learned
from Corneille! Our fugitive was a most pathetic old creature whose
mind had been somewhat unsettled by suffering and exile. Fortunately a
relative of his was discovered, a prosperous Belgian merchant living in
the outskirts of London, and my guest bade me a profane but grateful
farewell. A few days' care seems but little to offer these flitting
guests on their sorrowful journey, but it is a great relief to me to do
even this little, and as each one goes, I feel like saying "Thank you!"
as the well-trained British waiter says when you deign to take
something from the offered plate.

We really need Peter's advice,--think of that: Peter's advice, which I
have scorned to take! In our zeal we became victims of one bit of
imposture, which, however, did not involve us in irretrievable
loss,--only spoons! Two dark-skinned folk presented themselves one
cold, wintry day when all the desolation of the earth seemed dripping
down in icy rain. They asked for food, telling us that they were
Belgian refugees in need of help; evidently the habits of this
household have been rumoured abroad. We were a bit suspicious, but
resolved to err upon the right side. While Madge was cooking and I had
gone to order fresh supplies, they decamped with my spoons and my
purse, luckily a very lean purse. Don had simply absented himself; he
no longer trusts his instincts, finding himself in a world whose
standards he does not comprehend. The old order changes, giving place
to new; old caste distinctions are ignored, and he has not as yet had
time to learn new mental habits. He has found for himself a little
agnostic den in a corner behind the kitchen range, and he goes there
when he cannot make up his mind. When we discovered our loss and began
our search, he came out wagging his tail with a self-congratulatory air
to say, "I told you so!" But he had not told us so; he had only
deserted us when we needed him most. Our light-fingered guests have
been found in a gypsy tribe passing through to the north, but my spoons
have not been found. Must I lap my supper from a saucer with Don and
the Atom?


January 19. As I sit by the fire and toast my toes in my few minutes of
blessed idleness, I cannot help living over old days and hours, and I
see again the dusk of that evening when you and your family escorted me
to Hinksey to hear the nightingales; the sunshine of that afternoon
when you and I searched in vain the meadows beyond Iffley for
pink-tipped English daisies. Often I find myself again arguing things
out with you, even getting a bit angry now and then, forgetting that
you cannot answer. Many and many a dispute we had, many and many a
disagreement, with the invariable outcome of deeper understanding.

Sometimes the unshared jests hurt most of all; what has become of your
humour, dear, that rare, dry humour that betrayed itself most plainly
in your eyes? When first I knew you, I thought that you had no sense of
humour; I soon found that it was deeper than my own, because of your
insight into the irony of the human predicament. At times it touched
the tragic. I learned to understand your quiet enjoyment in watching
people, your wordless jests, and the silent drollery of your half
smile. How you loved to tease me about the foibles of my countrymen.

"No other people," you would say, "would come dashing into the
courtyard of a French hotel, with flags flying from the carriage,
singing their national hymn at the top of their voices; no other people
would motor swiftly to the entrance of a French cathedral, crying out:
'You do the inside, and we'll do the outside, and it won't take us more
than five minutes!' And there is always the pleasing memory of the lady
from Montana who deplored the inadequacy of the Louvre because the
pictures couldn't compare with the exhibition that they had had in the
winter at Wilkins Bluff. But of course this represents a class of
Americans that you would not know."

That was the day we had tea by the river; I was hot with helping you
get the boat past the lock, hot with making the tea, and I grew hotter
still.

"I admit that we are vulgar, and loud-voiced, and ostentatious," I told
you; "but we aren't selfish, and we aren't insolent. On the contrary,
we are usually quixotically good-natured and generous. We do not look
in blank surprise as the British do if any one questions their right to
be served before all other people with the choicest of everything. You
have little idea of what we suffer who meet many of the travelling
English of to-day, with their quiet and total selfishness in securing
and sitting upon all that is best. Of course, this represents a class
of the English that you would not know." This you forgave, but you
never quite forgave, I fear, my wicked suggestion that the moat about
the Bishop's palace was preserved in order to keep out the poor and
needy.

But the things about which we quarrelled were only surface things; I
knew and loved my England more than I ever admitted to you; and you,
for all your criticism of my countrymen (much of it was abundantly
justified), had divined the spirit of idealism in our democracy. The
development of the individual in righteous freedom for you, as for us,
was the great hope of the world. Under all the crudeness of America,
under the arrogance of England, lives, and has lived from earliest
days, a something great and fine, shared by republican France,--a
passion for liberty. The little things do not matter if the great
convictions at the heart of nations are akin; have not people of late
cared too much about little things? If our two peoples become aware of
the greatness of their common destiny, will they not stop fussing about
the American accent and English incivility? As I walk alone nowadays, I
try to drive this haunting, insistent world-suffering from my mind by
dreams of a great future wherein your country and mine go hand in hand,
helping secure for all time liberty for the human race.

Each has something to contribute that the other lacks. I really think
that we, in our sense of the dignity of the individual man, in
willingness to forego shades and differences of taste for the sake of
something greater, have outgrown you. You, with your keen insight, had
divined the need of democracy, had accepted it in theory, but found the
inevitable consequences hard to accept. Nothing is more agreeable than
good taste; perhaps there are things more profoundly important. Dare I
say that I think we have out-stripped you in generosity of act and of
thought?

But you are greater than we, and your life runs in deeper channels than
our own, in that you keep faith with the past, refusing to let the
hard-won spiritual achievement of the race be swept away by the
externalism of the present. To you, as to no other people, we look to
save the world from the terrible material forces, without conscience,
without insight, which threaten to dominate the whole of life. You who
refuse to give up fine standards of an elder day are the influence that
we of America greatly need, for in matters intellectual, we are all too
prone to be led, and have been too much cowed by this later
Germany--who forgets.


February 1. We are living on, as best we may, through cold and thaw and
cold again. The horror of that January night, when human beings and
birds wakened, with fear dropping from the sky, when innocent women and
children were killed by bombs from German Zeppelins, lingers and grows
deeper. The tension was greatest for those who could not hear what the
birds heard, but listened to the great outcry of blackbirds, pheasants,
and other winged things, to the loud cawing of the rooks, and wondered
and waited in nameless anguish. There seems to be no refuge in earth or
sky or sea. Can this world of shot and shell and conquering chemicals
be that world that was so beautiful, and that suddenly seemed so
strangely _safe_ when you came into my life?


March 10. Such days of excitement and of strain! My little house has
performed its supreme service,--has sheltered a body, while the soul
was going out.

It began three days ago; I was walking down the village street with Don
at my heels, when I noticed a large touring car at the Inn, with a
group of people very much excited, gesticulating and talking with a
vehemence that usually means Latin blood. Mine hostess of the Inn was
running to and from the car with bottles and flannel cloths; turpentine
on warm flannel is her cure for every human ailment. Then I saw in the
car an old, old lady--quite ill, evidently--leaning heavily on the
shoulder of a younger woman. I shall not soon forget the look of that
grey-white face under the snow-white hair and black widow's bonnet, set
in a group of strange faces, among which I remember one of a little
boy, watching breathlessly with his mouth wide open, and a smaller
girl, staring apathetically with her eyes full of tears that looked as
if they had long been there. I did not need to be told that this
oddly-assorted set of people were refugees. I had seen too many utter
strangers, from diverse surroundings, hastily gathered together, clad
in velvet, clad in rags, to share one suffering.

I found that they were being taken from London, where they had been
cared z many weeks, to different destinations in the northern
counties, but the man in charge had evidently lost his way and was
making an unnecessary detour toward the coast. He could not speak their
language, nor they his, and he seemed entirely at a loss in this
dilemma. Oh, the loneliness, and the desolation, and the bitter shame
of it all!

"The old lady's took ill, of a sudden, 'm," said the landlady, stopping
her little trot near me.

I asked the younger woman, whose face was very kindly, if this was her
mother, but she shook her head.

"I don't know who she is; I never saw her until we started."

Then I begged and pleaded; the chauffeur looked greatly relieved, and
so did mine hostess, though she remonstrated that it would be quite too
much for me.

"Are you sure, Miss, that you want her? We don't know what it is; it
may be contagious."

"I don't care what it is!" I said so suddenly that Don barked out;
there was a little feeling of joy within me at the thought that there
might be danger; it is hard to be shut out from the great danger that
circles the world.

So the big touring car was turned about, with much puffing and panting;
my little iron gate was opened wide to let two men carry the poor old
creature to my guest room, and I sent the others on, with such comforts
as I could supply. The small boy went nibbling a cookie, the little
girl with hers in her hand, too dazed to eat it. Haven't you ever seen
a frightened little bird holding something in its mouth, not daring to
swallow?

The village doctor and Madge and I worked for hours over the fugitive.
She only looked at us with eyes that had in them all the weariness of
the world since the dawn of time. There was evidently no malady; actual
physical pain did not seem to be there; only overwhelming mental pain
or shock that means destruction of the very forces of life. She was not
unconscious, nor was she fully conscious of what was going on around
her. The comfort of warm water on her body, the comfort of soothing
drink she hardly realized, nor could she swallow, except with great
difficulty and reluctance. Just once she stretched herself out at full
length with a look of relief, and lay motionless.

I shall never know what weary ways she had trodden in her escape from
the swift ruin of war, nor how in her tottering age she had escaped at
all. She seemed to be one who, her life long, had walked the same
peaceful paths over and over, as her forefathers had done before. Was
she one of those who, driven from home and fireside, had lain down in
the dust of the road, longing to die? Contagious! Heartbreak does seem
contagious in these days; who shall escape? Who can wish to, when other
hearts break?

Life can never bring me anything so strange, perhaps it can never bring
me anything so wonderful, as this silent companionship with a soul that
had almost passed. She did not understand the words I used, but she did
understand that we were trying to help her; though her lips were still,
her eyes followed us,--eyes full of knowledge that can not come before
the last. She did not try to thank us, dwelling in some world of
instinctive understanding, making one feel that the long ages of much
speaking were folly. She had let go of all tangible things and was no
longer aware of time or circumstance; there was no look of fear in her
eyes, no look of sorrow; she was done with earth and with feeling,
having neither reproaches nor regrets. She had gone beyond pain, beyond
joy, beyond those simple human affections that linger to the last, to
some region of ultimate peace, or of quiet beyond peace.

The falling of March rain upon the roof; sunshine, with the notes of
the returning birds; the cawing of the rooks, and the soft ripple of
the brook--even Madge was subdued by the majesty of it all and forgot
to rail at the Kaiser, or to storm in misplaced aspirates at the
Germans. A world beyond hate was with us, where it was good to be.

The end was hardly different from the days that went before; there was
no motion, no outburst, only a quiet ceasing of that which had hardly
been breathing. Our departing guest folded her wrinkled hands upon her
breast herself, as if to save us trouble, and so I found her. Who was
she? Who belonged to her? Where are the children and grandchildren who
should have been gathered about her bed?

The doctor and the village nurse took charge of her; when she was ready
for burial, more quiet than earth itself,--one never knows quiet until
one sees it so,--I put roses beside her; one of the county ladies keeps
me supplied from her conservatory. Yet I hesitated; it seemed wrong to
recall in this presence any mere tangible and visible beauty, or aught
from the world of things. The lovely contours and outlines, the perfume
of the roses reproached me, as if I were pursuing her to bring her back
to mere self, hampering her escape. With her we seemed to be swept away
into some great consciousness that meant relief from individual
sorrow,--sharing her rest, a repose so deep that it rested us for all
the days to come.

Madge mourned over her as if it were her own mother,--I hardly know
why: could it have been merely the three days of trying to care for
her? Or was she touched, in some depth of her nature never reached
before, by the grandeur of that loneliness?

There was a brief service in the little church on the hill, a sound of
song, of praying; but nothing in the burial service could quite express
the pathos of that moment when we buried some one's mother, not even
knowing her name. We left her in the churchyard, within hearing of the
stream, where deep shadows fall on grave after grave. This cold winter
grass which grows above the other graves will soon, with the quickening
of spring, cover hers also; already it is freshening, and crocuses peep
out here and there.

There is no name to put on a stone at her head. It is perhaps at best
folly to mark the resting-places of the dead, yet I had a feeling that
no token of respect must be lacking, and I begged that an old grey
tombstone, standing by the churchyard wall, a stone so old that all
that was carved on it has been worn away, might be placed at her head.
It has told the passing of one human soul, and shall tell that of
another; in its grey, fine-worn beauty it symbolizes the vast
impersonality of the end.

I come here now even oftener than I used. Surely death has never
appeared so gentle, so much a member of the family, as in these English
churchyards with their sweet hominess. It seems fitting that we meet
"My sister, the Death of the Body" on these grass-grown paths which
wear a look of every day and common happenings. The little river, the
lichen-grown stones, the sense of long continuance, give one a feeling
that there are no gaps, no fissures between life and death, that the
sight of the eyes slips inevitably into the vision of the soul. The sky
seems near in England, with the crumbling grey of old Norman tower and
churchyard wall touching its veiled blue, and the low white clouds
almost within reach; the old home-like look of the flat stones makes
one feel as if the sleepers are still, as it were, sitting on the
threshold, or on the old bench by the door. There is no sense of
distance or separation, no feeling of far away.

It is not sad to leave her here, now when the whole earth seems one
great family of the sorrowing, where the children and the grandchildren
of many other folk are so near.


May 20. Spring, with the thawing of the icicles, and the sunshine
growing warmer on the southern wall of the house,--spring comes back in
the old and lovely way to a world never in such anguish before. What an
April, to bring the cowardly murder of soldiers in the trenches by
volumes of poisonous gas! What a May, to bring the _Lusitania_
massacre of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children at sea! What
a Germany, quite, quite mad:

    "O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown,
    The soldier's, scholar's----"

but I am not quoting correctly and am too busy to look up the lines. I
dare not even try to speak of my sense of these things; words are
lacking to express it, but surely this marks the parting of the ways.
To me it seems that the time has come for the nations of the
earth--would that my own would join them--to band together once more in
a holy crusade and do battle with the Pagan, not for the tomb of our
Lord, but for the faith He taught.

As time goes on, I see more clearly what the real England stands for.
My mind works slowly, for I am but a practical American; it isn't as if
I were a thinker like yourself, who could reason things out on purely
intellectual grounds. The war between my great love of England and my
indignant sense of things that are wrong gives way to something more
impersonal, as I have more chance to see the way in which her customs
serve humanity. Complete fulfillment of her great purposes has not yet
been achieved, yet surely the human race has got no further: liberty
for the individual, fair play,--these watchwords of England are the
hope of the human race. What other land could rule many alien peoples
and make them so proudly content? As England has kept faith with the
past, she has, barring some great mistakes, kept faith with humanity.
The recent magnificent bravery of the Canadians in the battles with
flaming gas only intensifies the splendour of the voluntary tribute of
England's colonies to England in distress. Earth has not seen the like
of this empire resting on the will of man; from the four quarters of
the globe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, they come sailing
swiftly home, counting it great gain to die for that for which she
stands. It means that at the heart of England is something too precious
to lose, a faith in the working possibility of human freedom. Crude
races, races old and outworn, need to learn at her feet the practical
way of making good this immemorial hope of the race. Under her rule,
the individual has his chance of self-government; if he fails to take
it, falling into the net of sloth and old habit as he often does in
England, the fault is his own. His individual conscience is left him;
he is not compelled to become a soulless cog in a gigantic
conscienceless mechanism.

I do not care what Mr. Asquith has done wrong; what Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain did wrong; what King George the Third and all the Georges
have done or failed to do: I trust this people as I trust no other.
Guilty of sins and blunders they may be and are, but the blunder is
followed by the honest effort to find again and do the right; you come
down always to a groundwork of character, sincerity, integrity. England
has been in a way the conscience of the world. What other race-name is
a word to conjure with? All over the earth where confusion comes, it is
whispered: "The troubles are dying down; the English are drawing near."
And in the councils of the world, her voice has been the great arbiter
of right and wrong.

No one here now can doubt that England is going through that great
anguish wherein the soul of a people is re-born. The unity, the calm,
the quickening determination are part of a great spring-time that will
lead, God grant, to harvest days of peace. There is slow knitting up of
the sinews of war; more and more her sons respond to the call which
still leaves them free to choose; old England is getting ready as ever,
resolved, incredulous of defeat; the spring knows it; the rooks know
it, busy in their elm tree parliament. The great sorrow and the great
endeavour have turned the very soil of the country into holy ground.
Among my bonfires of spring,--for I like to keep that old, religious
rite of purification,--I burned half a dozen volumes of recent English
fiction, decadent, erotic; a volume or two of flippant and sensational
criticism; and one of affected futurist poetry, or some brand like unto
it. They belong to the England whose follies and foibles are being
burned in a great fire of affliction; they are not worthy of this great
England that is emerging from the flame.

As I write, the tinkle of the English sheep bells from afar comes like
the very sound of peace.

February, with the vanishing of the icicles, brought snowdrops and
crocuses. All kinds of growing things of which I had not dreamed came
peeping up in this old garden: crocuses, purple and gold, grow in a
little clump where the wind just fails to reach them; royal daffodils
nod and sway, or stand erect and golden, those from new planting
outshining the rest. In March the violets were out, and primroses
followed; the pony's meadow is full of them, deep in the grass; and
these are only a part of the lovely procession of flowers,--bluebells,
anemones, and unnumbered others.

To me it seemed that the birds came very early,--birds that are
strangers to me, birds that I know; and we were glad once more in the
companionship of wings. I was thankful when the swallows came,
circling, flying high, flying low; wrens, old friends of mine, are
building under my porch roof; a merry little blue tit, a friend quite
new, disports himself among the leaves. I have heard the cuckoo
calling, calling beyond the stream; you were the first to tell me that
this was the cuckoo's note. English larks are very near neighbours;
every day I can hear them singing at "heaven's gate."

We have all been as busy as bees since the melting of the snow, humans
and animals alike. Back with the first suggestion of warmer sunshine
Hengist and Horsa began to crow; alas for William the Conqueror, who
will never crow again! and my many queens of the hen-yard began to lay
and cackle as boastfully as in times of peace. Every living thing came
crawling out of hole and hiding-place and took up its task; the little
gingerbread woman came back to the lych gate to sit in the sun; Puck,
once more one of the family, as he grazes beyond the stream, trotted
merrily to Shepperton again and again to bring seeds and young plants,
for I intend to have a garden that will astonish Peter when Peter comes
back from the war. It seems to me that there is an added touch of
determination in the pony's gait and in the toss of his shaggy head
since he became a hero of the war, an upholder of the kingdom, a
defender of the faith.

Madge is the busiest of all living things and will not be idle for a
moment for fear of "thinking long." Never was there such a be-scrubbed,
be-polished, shining house as the little red house! I tremble for my
own face when I see her with the soap and sand, the brass polish, the
silver polish, the long-handled mop, and the wooden pail. It is Madge
with a changed face, with deepening lines between the eyes, a worrying,
anxious Madge, who steals the newspaper and reads it in the kitchen
before she brings it to me. I cannot help noticing that she talks less
and less of the glory of England and more and more about Peter. Laconic
post cards with peculiar spelling tell us that Peter is alive and well
in the trenches. Peter, because of his old experience as soldier, was
allowed to go speedily to the front, and is now at close quarters with
the enemy.

In earliest April, the little red house sheltered the grand adventure,
the greatest adventure, for death seems safe and easy by the side of
the great adventure of being born. I had a whole family quartered here,
father, mother, and two small winsome children, boy and girl; we tucked
them away where we could. And a wee man-child came into the world
during their stay here, with much pomp and circumstance and attendance
of mine hostess from the Inn, and of the village doctor, whose lot in
life has evidently been to stand helpless and aghast, watching mortals
who will venture into a world which seems to be no safe place for them.
If it had rested with him, small Jean would have had no chance at all;
but Madge and mine hostess came to the rescue, and all went well, on to
that first little weird lonely cry.

It was little bigger than the Atom. It slept, during all its first
days, a troubled, puckered sleep. Don worshipped it, and whenever it
cried, gave an anxious whine or a sharp short bark. In the Atom's loft
I unearthed a prehistoric cradle that may have been left by the Danes
or the Saxons. Of course I know that rocking is most unhygienic, but I
thought that if this little, frightened fugitive mother found any
comfort in rocking her baby by the fireside, rock it she should. It
isn't, I believe, supposed to injure anything except the brain, and the
brain counts for so little nowadays in the contemporary ideal of
development that I am sure small Jean will have enough left to play his
part in the civilization of the future. He had, I noticed, square and
sturdy little fists, and he may be some day one of the many who will
fight for England, when England's guests defend the door so generously
opened to shelter them. The Atom insisted upon sharing the cradle; why
not? It had discovered the cradle in the first place and had a certain
right to it. So it curled up in a corner, and Jean gurgled and grew fat
and rosy in its companionship. It was a joy to have a real baby in the
house while the birds were building, and the spring flowers budding,
and the young ferns uncurling in the forest.

The father of the family was a farmer whose house and barns had been
wiped out of existence within ten minutes one cruel winter day. Mine
host has found a place for him; another man is needed on one of the
farms belonging to the estate; a small house there was vacant, and
thither they have moved, bag and baggage, baby and baby's cradle. They
wanted the Atom, but the Atom and I have lived through such hard days
together, cheek to cheek, that I could not let it go. The new house is
not far, quite within Puck distance, and Don and I make frequent calls.


May 30. May, with its young leaves, its radiance of blossoming fruit
trees, its spring greenness,--never have I known such green,--lingers
yet, with its sweet spring chill and its ripple of slow English streams
among the grasses. Such a world of beauty, and a world of sorrow!
Petals of apple blossom drift even through the open doorway, and
everywhere is the murmur of the little wind among the leaves. I sit in
my garden, under my apple trees, or walk where the sunshine filters
down, clear and still, through the lime trees in the lane, thinking of
many things. Close by the stream, at my garden's edge, grow palest
purple irises, and at times they seem spirit lilies, delicate as light,
growing beside you in your far place.

A few days ago Don dug one of your books out of the case,--he loves to
touch them with his faithful paw. It was Dante's _Paradiso_ and as
it fell open I saw that you had marked certain words with my name:
"dolce guida e cara," "sweet guide and dear." That was too beautiful a
thing to say of a mere mortal woman.

I find myself thinking consciously less about you as the days go on; a
touch in the darkness, a gleam across the stars, a whisper by the
river,--so you come back to me; but the different things we said and
did do not return with quite such sharp distinctness and sharp pain.
Yet I exist more and more in you, living your life and mine too, spirit
to spirit.

Loneliness seems forever impossible since you went out and left the
gate ajar, and all the world came in, and all its sorrows. The griefs
that enter, in some strange way solace my own, and this increasing
sense of the anguish of the world is lightened and lifted by sharing it
with other folk. It is good to feel so passionately and so utterly a
part of all that lives and throbs and suffers. Though the life that
goes on in the little red house must inevitably lack something of the
human warmth and joy that we should have known together, more life and
greater enters, I think, than would have been ours if our old dream of
happiness had come true. One can bear whatever happens, so long as it
makes one understand.

I started out in loneliness to tell my story, to you and to myself, for
comfort in the long silences, and lo! I have no story; I do not seem to
be merely I; I have gone out of myself and cannot find my way back. In
this relieving greatness is, perhaps, dim foreknowledge of what is to
come. I have nothing left to ask of life, no demands to make: a little
service, work, and sleep,--and then?


June 15. Peter, can it be Peter, with that expression upon his face? He
is really here, and a transfiguring look of suffering has worn away
forever a something of earth and of stubbornness,--a Peter who seems to
have gained greatly in strength and in stature, although one arm is
gone, and an empty sleeve hangs by his side. If I had known how to
salute I should have saluted Peter when I saw him home from the war;
mentally I do it whenever I see him working with his one poor hand in
my garden beds. One of the first things he said to me when he came home
was that he was going to Shepperton to try to get work that a one-armed
man could do, selling papers or something of the kind. But Peter, who
has faced the enemy and the poisonous gases, flinched before my
countenance when I heard this. Peter knows now that the little red
house and the garden can never get on without him.

It is odd to see the animals with him; Don cannot be attentive enough,
but you would expect a dog to understand. Puck is a wonder, standing as
meekly as a lamb to let himself be harnessed by a one-armed man, though
he used to dance an ancient British war-dance as the straps went on.
The old racial love of fair fighting shines out in him; man to man it
used to be, or man to pony, when both were able-bodied, but he will
take no advantage of a handicap. He seldom shies now, even at a feather
or a floating leaf, but he watches constantly in every direction,
waiting for some great danger in which he can comport himself with
perfect self-control for the sake of a one-armed man; defying the whole
modern era to invent a mechanism that can frighten him. I should like
an equestrian statue of Puck _not_ shying at a Zeppelin!

Madge is pathetic; she has lost her old moorings of prejudice and
conviction and sails in an uncharted sea of life. Church and State are
to her only a shade less reprehensible than the Germans, since Peter
came home without an arm. While Peter, completely changed, and loyal to
the government, for the country he has served so well is his country
indeed, sits with her on the bench by the kitchen door in the twilight,
full of affectionate talk of "Kitchener" and "Bobs"--his grief over
Lord Roberts' death was both sincere and personal--Madge mutters
fiercely against the 'Ouse of Lords for its selfishness and its
incompetence. If women ruled, all would be different! Her condemnation
of the government would suggest that she is in a fair way to become
both an anarchist and a suffragette. She never would have let Peter go
a step to war if she had supposed that he would be wounded.

Peter came home, not with a Victoria Cross, but with an Iron Cross, and
I can never tell whether he is joking or in earnest when he explains
his possession of it. When I asked him how he got it, he replied: "I
bestowed it upon meself, Miss." It seems that he had taken it from a
German with whom he had fought in a terrible bayonet charge.

"He was a man, he was," Peter says admiringly. "If I got the better of
the man who had earned it, it stands to reason that I'm a better man
than him and fit to wear it." So Peter wears his Iron Cross, to the
wonder and admiration of the farmers baiting their horses at the Inn,
the blacksmith's eleven children, and the inhabitants in general of our
village. How much he tells those eager listeners of the horrors he has
seen I do not know, but sometimes from that bench by the kitchen door,
I hear fragments of his tales of suffering that make me sick and faint.
Yet he is very reticent in regard to it, having evidently a feeling
that he must protect others from knowing what he has known. As I make
his acquaintance anew I realize that his great loss is truly exceeding
gain; there is more of his real self in his wakened mind and soul than
he lost in his arm.

But Peter, invalided home, returned not alone. It seemed to me, as he
came up the walk, that he was over-heavily weighed down by luggage,
though he had a brother soldier to help him.

"If you please, 'm," said Peter diffidently, when our first greetings
were over, "I've taken the liberty of bringing some one 'ome."

"Nothing could please me better," I said, holding out a welcoming hand
to the tall soldier at his side.

"If you please, 'm," said Peter, grinning,--if heroes can be said to
grin,--"she's inside."

He opened the big old-fashioned basket he was carrying, made of osier,
a kind that I remember seeing in my grandmother's attic many years ago,
and there--O Pharaoh's daughter, how I understand you now!--was a
little child of perhaps ten months, asleep. She had soft dark hair,
hands a bit too thin for a baby, eyes that proved to be, when she
wakened and opened them, big and brown; and a mouth that had learned
and not forgotten, like so many sorrowful mouths to-day, how to smile.

"Where did you find her?" Madge and I cried out in one breath.

"She was in the village where I was taken when I was wounded; you will
hexcuse me, 'm, but I cannot say its name, I really cannot. A woman had
taken charge of her for weeks; she had been found quite deserted by the
roadside, I believe, 'm, earlier in the war, when people were trying to
escape from the henemy. The nurse used to bring her into the 'ospital
just to let the soldiers see her."

Peter was disappointed that I could not speak, but speak I could not.

"She's a French baby, 'm," he added. "I took a great fancy to her, and
when I came away I told them----"

"What did you tell them, Peter?" I asked sternly. The little thing had
grasped my finger and was trying to pull herself up. It was the first
touch from any of my fugitives that seemed to come from my very own,
and I knew that the French baby had come into my life to stay.

"Knowing your 'abits, Miss, I told them I thought I knew a good 'ome
for her, so they sent her on with a nurse who was coming back, reserved
for me, as it were. They kindly allowed me to bring her down from
London meself, but I 'ad difficulty in 'olding her, so I took out me
clothes and put them in a paper, and she fitted very nicely in the
basket."

Peter still mistook my silence for hesitation.

"I thought if you didn't care to adopt her, I would, 'm; but from what
they told me about her clothing and all and from the look of her, I
fancy she's rather your class than mine, 'm."

"I couldn't aspire to your class, Peter," I said; "you belong among the
heroes. We will all adopt her, you and Madge and I and Don and Puck and
the Atom and our English queens. Among us all she will get a
well-rounded training."

                     *      *      *      *      *

The stream is rippling past with its old music; the pony is grazing in
the meadow; my June roses glow within my garden, yellow, white, and
deep red; and still the vast sea of human sorrow breaks, breaks against
my garden wall, and no one knows whither its tides may draw. Is it thus
that the whole earth must gain the finer knowledge that comes alone
through suffering and learn how false are the gods it has been
following with swift feet?

I hardly dare confess my foolishness, but when I saw Peter that day of
his return come down the village street with a tall khaki-clad figure
beside him, I thought for one whole blissful, awful moment that he had
found you, living, and had brought you home. Through many such moments
I could not live; all the joy and the anguish of time and of eternity
were crowded into it. Yet even in that flash I knew that no mere human
contact could ever bring you so close as you are now to me. Separated
by walls of mere flesh and bone, there could no longer be this entire
one-ness of soul with soul. You, belovèd, are forever too near to
touch. What death may be I know not, but it is something far different
from what we mortals think.

Then I saw that Peter's companion was only another British Tommy, who
needed my hospitality; and I helped make ready his beef and beer with
great gladness in my heart.

... Content for you. Men from old time have died for the faith they
held, and men have died for dreams. I know no faith, no dream better
worth dying for than this for which you gave your life, the dream of
human freedom. It is our race pride that a passion for liberty was
kindled early in our remotest forebears; there is no nobler task than
keeping this divine spark alive upon the human hearth. In my moments of
insight I know that life has no greater boon than a chance to die for
one's faith, and you have died for this. I would not take from you,
even if I could, your hour of glory, your great hour of death.


THE END





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