‘It’s quite right that they should poach,’ said Mary, watching him tugging at the wire. ‘I wonder whether it was Alfred Duggins or Sid Rankin? How can one expect them not to, when they only make fifteen shillings a week? Fifteen shillings a week,’ she repeated, coming out on the other side of the hedge, and running her fingers through her hair to rid herself of a bramble which had attached itself to her. ‘I could live on fifteen shillings a week— easily.’
‘Could you?’ said Ralph. ‘I don’t believe you could,’ he added.
‘Oh yes. They have a cottage thrown in, and a garden where one can grow vegetables. It wouldn’t be half bad,’ said Mary, with a soberness which impressed Ralph very much.
‘But you’d get tired of it,’ he urged.
‘I sometimes think it’s the only thing one would never get tired of,’ she replied.
The idea of a cottage where one grew one’s own vegetables and lived on fifteen shillings a week, filled Ralph with an extraordinary sense of rest and satisfaction.
‘But wouldn’t it be on the main road, or next door to a woman with six squalling children, who’d always be hanging her washing out to dry across your garden?’
‘The cottage I’m thinking of stands by itself in a little orchard.’
‘And what about the Suffrage?’ he asked, attempting sarcasm.
‘Oh, there are other things in the world besides the Suffrage,’ she replied, in an off-hand manner which was slightly mysterious.
Ralph fell silent. It annoyed him that she should have plans of which he knew nothing; but he felt that he had no right to press her further. His mind settled upon the idea of life in a country cottage. Conceivably, for he could not examine into it now, here lay a tremendous possibility; a solution of many problems. He struck his stick upon the earth, and stared through the dusk at the shape of the country.
‘D’you know the points of the compass?’ he asked.
‘Well, of course,’ said Mary. ‘What d’you take me for?—a Cockney like you?’ She then told him exactly where the north lay, and where the south.
‘It’s my native land, this,’ she said. ‘I could smell my way about it blindfold.’
As if to prove this boast, she walked a little quicker, so that Ralph found it difficult to keep pace with her. At the same time, he felt drawn to her as he had never been before; partly, no doubt, because she was more independent of him than in London, and seemed to be attached firmly to a world where he had no place at all. Now the dusk had fallen to such an extent that he had to follow her implicitly, and even lean his hand on her shoulder when they jumped a bank into a very narrow lane. And he felt curiously shy of her when she began to shout through her hands at a spot of light which swung upon the mist in a neighbouring field. He shouted, too, and the light stood still.
‘That’s Christopher, come in already, and gone to feed his chickens,’ she said.
She introduced him to Ralph, who could see only a tall figure in gaiters, rising from a fluttering circle of soft feathery bodies, upon whom the light fell in wavering discs calling out now a bright spot of yellow, now one of greenish-black and scarlet. Mary dipped her hand in the bucket he carried, and was at once the centre of a circle also; and as she cast her grain she talked alternately to the birds and to her brother, in the same clucking, half- inarticulate voice, as it sounded to Ralph, standing on the outskirts of the fluttering feathers in his black overcoat.
He had removed his overcoat by the time they sat round the dinner-table, but nevertheless he looked very strange among the others. A country life and breeding had preserved in them all a look which Mary hesitated to call either innocent or youthful, as she compared them, now sitting round in an oval, softly illuminated by candle-light; and yet it was something of the kind, yes, even in the case of the Rector himself. Though superficially marked with lines, his face was a clear pink, and his blue eyes had the long-sighted, peaceful expression of eyes seeking the turn of the road, or a distant light through rain, or the darkness of winter. She looked at Ralph. He had never appeared to her more concentrated and full of purpose; as if behind his forehead were massed so much experience that he could choose for himself which part of it he would display and which part he would keep to himself. Compared with that dark and stern countenance, her brothers’ faces, bending low over their soup-plates, were mere circles of pink, unmoulded flesh.
‘You came by the 3.10, Mr Denham?’ said the Reverend Wyndham Datchet, tucking his napkin into his collar, so that almost the whole of his body was concealed by a large white diamond. ‘They treat us very well on the whole. Considering the increase of traffic, they treat us very well indeed. I have the curiosity sometimes to count the trucks on the goods’ trains, and they’re well over fifty—well over fifty, at this season of the year.’
The old gentleman had been roused agreeably by the presence of this attentive and well-informed young man, as was evident by the care with which he finished the last words in his sentences, and his slight exaggeration in the number of trucks on the trains. Indeed, the chief burden of the talk fell upon him, and he sustained it tonight in a manner which caused his sons to look at him admiringly now and then; for they felt shy of Denham, and were glad not to have to talk themselves. The store of information about the present and past of this particular corner of Lincolnshire which old Mr Datchet produced really surprised his children, for though they knew of its existence, they had forgotten its extent, as they might have forgotten the amount of family plate stored in the plate-chest, until some rare celebration brought it forth.
After dinner, parish business took the Rector to his study, and Mary proposed that they should sit in the kitchen.
‘It’s not the kitchen really,’ Elizabeth hastened to explain to her guest, ‘but we call it so—’
‘It’s the nicest room in the house,’ said Edward.
‘It’s got the old rests by the side of the fireplace, where the men hung their guns,’ said Elizabeth, leading the way, with a tall brass candlestick in her hand, down a passage. ‘Show Mr Denham the steps, Christopher . . . When the Ecclesiastical Commissioners bv were here two years ago they said this was the most interesting part of the house. These narrow bricks prove that it is five hundred years old—five hundred years, I think—they may have said six.’ She, too, felt an impulse to exaggerate the age of the bricks, as her father had exaggerated the number of trucks. A big lamp hung down from the centre of the ceiling and, together with a fine log fire, illuminated a large and lofty room, with rafters running from wall to wall, a floor of red tiles, and a substantial fireplace built up of those narrow red bricks which were said to be five hundred years old. A few rugs and a sprinkling of arm-chairs had made this ancient kitchen into a sitting-room. Elizabeth, after pointing out the gun-
