He brushed the crumbs of his demolished pie off the cords of his breeches, carefully picking up the larger fragments of crust and inserting them into his mouth between his broad red lips. He asked if ’er Ladyship knew whether the Cahptn wanted the mare that afternoon. If not ’e might’s well turn ’er on the Common. She said that she did not know; the Captain had said nothing to her about it. He said he supposed ’e might’s well. Cramp said ’e would not have the settee ready to go to the station fore mornin. If she would wait there he would go git some tepid water and they would moisten the eggs. She did not ask better.
He scrambled to his feet and lumbered down the stone path towards the house. She stood in the bright day regarding the long grass of the orchard, the gnarled, whitened trunks of the fruit trees, the little lettuces like aligned rosettes in the beds, and the slope of the land towards the old stones of the house that the boughs of the apple-trees mostly hid. And she acknowledged that, in effect, she did not ask better. A Norman, if Mark had died in the ordinary course, she would no doubt have gone back to the neighbourhood either of Falaise or Bayeux, from which places came the families of her grandfather and grandmother respectively. She would probably have married a rich farmer or a rich grazier, and, by choice, she would have pursued a life of bottling off cider and moistening the eggs of sitting hens. She had had her training as a coryphée at the Paris opera, and no doubt if she had not made her visit to London with the Paris opera troupe and if Mark had not picked her up in the Edgware Road where her lodgings had been, she would have lived similarly with some man in Clichy or Auteuil until with her economies she would have been able, equally, to retire to one or other of the pays of her families, and marry a farmer, a butcher, or a grazier. She acknowledged, for the matter of that, that she would probably not have raised more succulent poulets au grain or more full-bodied cider than came from the nest-boxes and the presses here, and that she was leading no other life than that which she had always contemplated. Nor, indeed, would she have wanted any other henchman than Gunning who, if you had given him a blue blouse with stitchery and a casquette with a black leather peak, would have passed for any peasant in Caen market.
He swung up the path, carrying gingerly a large blue bowl, just as if his blouse bellied out round him; he had the same expression of the mouth; the same intonation. It was nothing that she obstinately spoke French to him. On his subjects he could tell by intuition what her answers to his questions were and she understood him well enough.
He said that he had better take the ’ens off the nesteses fer fear they peck ’er ’ands, and giving her the bowl, brought out from the shadows a protesting, ruffled and crooning hen, before which he dropped a handful of bran paste and a lettuce leaf. He came out with another and yet others. Then he said she could go in and sprinkle the eggs. He said that it always bothered him to turn the eggs; his clumsy ol’ ands bruk ’em ’s often as not. He said:
“Wait whilst I brings out ol’ mare. Bit o’ grass wunt do ’er much mischief.”
The hens, swollen to an enormous size, paraded hostilely against one another about her feet; they clucked; crooned; pecked at lumps of paste; drank water eagerly from an iron dog-trough. With an exaggerated clatter of hoofs old mare emerged from the stable. She was aged nineteen, obstinate, bitter, very dark bay, extremely rawboned. You might fill her with oats and mash five times a day but she would not put on flesh. She emerged into the light from the door with the trot of a prima-donna, for she knew she had once been a famous creature. The hens fled; she bit into the air, showing immense teeth. Gunning opened the orchard gate, just at hand; she went out at a canter; checked; crumpled her knees together; fell on her side and rolled and rolled; her immense lean legs were incongruous, up in the air.
“Yes,” Marie Léonie said, “pour moi-même je ne demanderais pas mieux!”
Gunning remarked:
“Don’t show ’er age, do she? Gambolling like a five day lamb!” His voice was full of pride, his grey face joyful. ’Is Lordship once sed that ol’ mare had orter be put in the Orse Show up to Lunnon. Some yeers ago that was!
She went into the dark, warm, odorous depths of the henhouse-stable shed; the horsebox being divided off from the hen half by wire netting, nest-boxes, blankets extended on use-poles. She had to bend down to get into the hen-half. The cracks of light between the uprights of the walls blinked at her. She carried the bowl of tepid water gingerly, and thrust her hand into the warm hay hollows. The eggs were fever-heat or thereabouts; she turned them and sprinkled in the tepid water; thirteen, fourteen, fourteen, eleven—That hen was a breaker!—and fifteen. She emptied out the tepid water and from other nests took out egg after egg. The acquisition gratified her.
In an upper box a hen brooded low. It crooned menacingly, then screamed with the voice of poultry disaster as her hand approached it. The sympathetic voices of other hens outside came to her, screaming with poultry disaster—and other hens on the Common. A rooster crowed.
She repeated to
