“And me cardigan,” added Meg, pulling half of that garment out from her overcoat. “Look, Farder.”
“
And
her rubber boots,” said Louise. “And on Tuesday we have bacon and egg pie, Father, and on Wednesday boiled shell eggs …”
“Look!” Jenny stopped short in a patch of long moist grass and pointed upwards. She was smiling, as if offering her family a present. They all gazed at the heavens, following the dark line of her finger in its woollen glove and there, hidden until now among the clouds but at last revealed as they thinned and rolled away at sunset, was a pink November moon.
“A moon!” said Jenny. “Now it doesn’t matter how late we are, because we can see,” and she ran off into the meadows, followed by Louise.
“Meg will get out,” announced Meg, struggling with the strap that confined her.
“Oh no Meg won’t. It’s too wet. Father will push the pram now, because the ground is bumpy, and Meg will have a nice ride,” said Ronald, taking over the pram from Alda, who placidly dropped her hands into her pockets and strolled along smiling absently at the ground, while he steered the pram round molehills and the tussocks of last spring’s grass, and patiently extracted details from her about the lease and rent for Pine Cottage and the terms of the agreement.
“But there
is
inside sanitation, Ronald. Didn’t I tell you? I
thought
I did.
And
a bathroom. But no electric light. Oh look, children, there’s a rabbit! Quick, Louise, there by the hedge! You can see his white scut.”
“Oh Mother,
where
?” Louise’s voice was anguished. “Quick!”
“There,” said Jenny scornfully, and her finger came steadily over her sister’s twisting shoulder, and pointed, “In a direct line with my finger.”
But it was no use; Louise could not see, and the rabbit, startled by their voices, suddenly whisked and was gone. Louise came silently over to her father and slipped her cold hand into the one that left the handle of the pram to meet it.
“And four bedrooms, Alda?” Ronald went on. “That sounds all right. Is it properly furnished?”
“Indeed it is, rather too much so. You wait till you see the pictures. You’ll hate them.”
“I shan’t have much opportunity to hate them, sweetheart.”
“O Ronald, why?” Startled, she looked up at him.
“I’m being sent to Germany.”
“O
darling
! O Ronald, how unutterably sickening. When did you hear?”
“Only this morning. I didn’t want to spring it on you the minute we met.”
“How long for, in heaven’s name?”
“Indefinitely, but I shall get leave of course.”
“Won’t you even be here for
Christmas
, Father?” demanded Jenny, outraged. “I do think, now the war is over, they might let you. They are beasts.”
“I’m afraid not, old lady.”
Alda was silent for a moment; then she said: “Well, we must just look forward to leave, that’s all. It’s too bad, losing you again after we’d just got you after four years, but it’s no use grumbling, I suppose, and we’ll have a lovely time while you
are
here. You’ll be out altogether soon. When do you go?”
“Next week, I’m afraid, lovey.”
She said no more, but slipped her arm through his and pressed it. Her gay, rebellious spirit would never learn patience but she no longer wasted energy in defying the inevitable, and they had long ago decided that, should he be sent to Germany, they would not risk her accompanying him with the children.
“Over here,” she said presently, withdrawing her arm and beginning to climb a slip-gate marking the entrance to the next field. Beyond its bars of silvery oak, Ronald could see another dim green meadow placidly extending away into the gathering twilight, while overhead the pink moon had changed to gold amidst fragile grey clouds. The evening bus to Horsham with all its lights blazing cheerfully was passing along the main road three fields away.
“How would you have managed with the pram if I hadn’t been here?” he demanded, when he had lifted the pram over the slip-gate. “Seriously, Alda, is it much further? How on earth you’re going to manage in the winter——”
“Oh, this is the
long
way round,” she laughed, turning back from hurrying up the rising slope of the meadow with her daughters. “The cottage is only two or three hundred yards from the Froggatt road. We came this way to-day to meet your train. There!” She stopped, pointing. “There it is.”
He had not realised, so gradual was the incline which they had been ascending, that they now stood on the highest point for miles around, and could command a wide prospect over dusky woods and darkening meadows ending at last in the long, rolling line of the downs fifteen miles away, sable and mysterious against the fading yellow sky. Immediately below lay a group of barns and other buildings with black wooden walls and mild grey thatched roofs, and beyond these, standing upon another low incline and surrounded by dark pines amongst whose pointed tops flashed a star, was a small, square house.
But stronger than his admiration of the scene was his relief that a cart track, unmistakable even in the dusk, ran across the meadows from the farm buildings to the cottage, and even as he
looked,
the headlights of a car, reassuringly close, glided past on the Froggatt road.
“Isn’t it a marvellous position?” demanded Alda.
“Those pines will make it damp,” he pronounced, beginning to push the pram forward again. “How far did you say you are from the village?”
“Not more than a mile and a half—well, say a mile and three-quarters——”
“Or two miles,” he muttered.
“And there’s a good road, downhill all the way. And there,” pointing away towards the woods, “is the convent where Jenny and Louise are going.” (Here Louise made a remarkable face expressing repugnance and despair, but Jenny looked attentively at her mother.)
“I went to see Sister Alban yesterday. It
is
so lovely and clean there, Ronald, with that marvellous feeling convents always have—you know?”
Ronald said, “H’m.”
“You can h’m, but they do.”
“How do you feel about it, Jen?” turning to his eldest daughter.
“I will deal with the situation as it arises,” answered Jenny sedately, quoting one of his own expressions. “All schools are beastly except Miss Mottram’s, so what does it matter?”
Louise looked at her sister respectfully, as one who hears of an ancient and honourable grief. She herself could barely remember the school in Ironborough which the sisters had attended before their home had been destroyed and their present nomadic existence had begun, but Jenny remembered it all; every schoolfellow, every detail of the day’s routine, every article of furniture in the large old-fashioned mansion converted into a school, and longed to return there.
Alda thought it wisest to ignore this, and said cheerfully:
“Here we are.”
They had now arrived at the house, and its square little face,
with
windows reflecting the yellow remnants of day, stared aloofly above them. Sussex tiles, pointed and decorated, covered the upper walls; there was a tiny porch over the front door, and the pines stood about it in a close half-circle. The front garden was primly enclosed by a wooden fence, and every foot of it was filled with thick, strong, bushy laurels whose branches pressed against the small front windows. Even on a bright day Pine Cottage never seemed full of light—the pine trees saw to that—and this evening in the eerie owl-light it actively breathed out darkness; the porch was a cave; the room beyond the laurel-shadowed windows might have been filled with squid-juice, so black was it, and every shadow from the surrounding woods seemed drawn into the circle of those sighing pines.
“Meg doesn’t like that little black house, Mudder,” remarked Meg, who had been silently looking up at Pine Cottage.
“We’ll soon make it light,” answered Alda cheerfully, pushing open the gate. It had a rustic catch, and it stuck.
When they tried to unlock the front door with the key produced by Alda, that stuck, too.
“Here…” said Ronald, putting his shoulder to it. “Let me try….”
“Meg, you may come out now,” said Louise in a low authoritative tone, beginning to unbuckle the strap round her sister’s middle. “You must be a very good girl, because mother and father will be busy looking at the house and they won’t want to be interrupted.
Come
along,” and she set Meg’s tiny boots of patched rubber down on the path (which was of gravel; there was nothing so pleasant as a firm path of large stones, that could steam after a light spring rain or hold the heat of a long summer day, at Pine Cottage).
“Merciful heavens,” exclaimed Alda, as the door gave way with a wounded screech and Ronald fell into the black passage, “Are you all right, darling?”
He answered rather shortly that everything was comparative and then, as Alda lit the lamp on a table, they all burst out laughing;
Meg
was especially pleased to do so and held her face up to the light, making loud ha-has with her eyes shut. A passage was now revealed which apparently ran slap through the house and out the other side through a back door. It was covered in worn oilcloth. The yellow walls glistened with damp and the air struck deathly cold.
“B-o-r-l-e-y——” spelled Ronald, with a significant glance at his wife.
“Borley Rectory, the Most Haunted House in England,” took up Jenny promptly. “It was always cold there because of the ghosts. Do you think this is haunted, Father? How
super
!”
“Of course not, don’t be absurd.” Ronald put his hand on the shoulder of Louise, whose eyes suddenly looked very large. “Come along, let’s explore.”
“What a howwid smell,” said Meg heartily, as Alda with some difficulty opened a door on the right.”
“Look, darling, the living-room
is
rather small; I expect we shall live in the kitchen,” said Alda, withdrawing her head.
“I should think so too; beastly little morgue. What’s this?” as they approached another door at the end of the long passage.
“The kitchen. It isn’t too bad.”
“Everything seems fairly clean,” he said, glancing suspiciously about him when they had succeeded in getting the door open.
“And there’s a little boiler that heats the water, and the coal lives in a shed out here——”
She hurried with the lamp from room to room, only pausing when held up by a door which stuck; demonstrating, explaining, throwing open cupboards and generally casting her own glow so successfully over Pine Cottage that her husband found himself in the familiar position of thinking that the place was not so bad after all. The children followed her, with their three heads of flaxen hair palely reflecting the warm gold of her own; all three had a water-fairy look, with pale grey or green eyes
and
lily skins, but Jenny’s hair had the darkest tint and her eyes the deepest colour.
“Now let’s go upstairs,” said Alda, when they had inspected coal shed and larder and even ventured out into a small back garden overlooking the fields. “Now, the bedrooms really are the best part of the house.”
It occurred to Ronald that this was as well, since, when damp and lack of sun and endless mud had done their work, his family would probably spend much of their time in bed. But he did not say so; the house was taken; the contract signed and stamped, and Alda and the children, in their own minds, already settled at Pine Cottage. If he put his foot down and insisted upon an upheaval, he would have to go to Germany in the following week leaving his family still unsettled for the winter, and he felt that he simply could not endure any fresh anxiety about them. They and he were so newly re-united, their shared happiness was still so sweet, that he could not cast a shadow over it by trying, perhaps unsuccessfully, to improve upon Alda’s plans. After all, they were sure of a roof for their heads when much of England and most of Europe was living in a damaged house, or homeless. Here his flock of excitable, talkative feminine creatures must stay, in this depressing little place that was neither villa nor cottage standing so unexpectedly in the lonely fields; and here at least, while he was quartered in some dying town in broken Germany, he would be able to think of them on the long winter nights; safe, and in a home…of a sort.
“This reminds me of the seaside lodgings we used to stay in when I was a boy,” he remarked, as they wandered in and out of the bedrooms, which were furnished with large brass bedsteads and solid Edwardian wardrobes and chests of drawers.
“
We
always stayed in hotels,” said Alda, whose father was a wealthy general practitioner in the provincial city where she had been born.
“Yes, you poor little beasts.” He was standing in front of a picture and shaking his head over it.
“We adored it; Jean and I used to get crushes on the waiters.”
“Jean? What was she doing there with you?”
“She used to come away with us whenever her wretched mother wanted to get rid of her.”
“The beds do bounce, Mother!” shouted Jenny from the next room.
“Don’t let Meg lie on them; they may be damp,” Alda called back. “It’s good that they bounce; they’ll be comfortable.”
“Didn’t you tell me that Mrs. Hardcastle died recently?” Ronald went on.