The Splendid Fairing

her, covering all the years, yet remaining aloof as pictures, and never stirring her pulse. So clear they were that they might have been splashed on the canvas that instant with a new-filled brush. They sprang into being as a group springs under the white circle of a lamp, as the scenes the alive and lit brain makes for itself on the dark curtain of the night. The few journeys she had taken in life she travelled over again⁠—rare visits to Lancashire and Yorkshire⁠ ⁠… Grasmere⁠ ⁠… Brough Hill Fair. They had stayed in her mind because of the slow means by which they were achieved, but they counted for very little in the tale of things. It is not of these casual experiences that the countryman thinks when the time comes for a steady reviewing of his life, that intent, fascinated returning upon tracks which is the soul’s preparation for the next great change. They flit to and fro, indeed, like exotic birds against a landscape with which they have nothing to do, but it is the landscape itself which holds the eye, and from which comes the great, silent magic that is called memory, and mostly means youth. It is the little events of everyday life that obsess a man at the last, the commonplace, circular come-and-go that runs between the cradle and the grave. Not public health problems, or new inventions, or even the upheavals of great wars, but marriage, birth and death, the coming of strangers destined to be friends, the changing of tenants in houses which mean so much more than they ever mean themselves. Binding all is the rich thread of the seasons, with its many-coloured strands; and, backing all, the increasing knowledge of Nature and her ways, that revolving wheel of beauty growing ever more complex and yet more clear, more splendid and yet more simple as the pulses slow to a close.

She loved the plain, beautiful farming life that a man may take up in his hand because it is all of a piece, and see the links of the chain run even from end to end. Even now she could see the fair-haired child she had been still running about her home, the child that we all of us leave behind in our sacred place. She could hear the clatter of clogs in her father’s yard, and all about her the sound of voices which the daisied earth had stopped. It was strange, when she came to think of it, that she never heard her own. In all her memories of the child it seemed to her lip-locked, listening and dumb. Perhaps it was because she was shut in the child’s brain that she could not hear it speak. She could hear her mother’s voice, light and a little sharp, and her father’s a deep rumble in a beard. Even in the swift pictures flashing by her he looked slow, drifting with steady purpose from house to farm. Because of his slowness he seemed to her more alive than his wife; there was more time, somehow, to look at him as he passed. Her bustling, energetic mother had become little more than a voice, while the seldom-speaking man was a vital impression that remained.

Rising up between the shadows that blotted them out was a certain old woolly sheepdog and the red torch of the flowering currant beside the door. There was also a nook in the curve of the garden wall, where, under a young moon, she had seen the cattle coming across the fields, sunk to their horns in a fairy-silver mist.⁠ ⁠…

It was an open-air life that took her long miles to school, clogging on frozen roads, through slanting rain or fighting against the wind. School itself seemed patched in a rather meaningless fashion on that life, much as the books in the parlour on the busy, unthinking house. A life of constant and steadily increasing work, from errands of all sorts, feeding the hens and fetching home the cows, to the heavier labour of washing and baking, milking, helping with the stock. Presently there had been the excitement of the first shy dance, and then the gradual drawing towards marriage as the tide draws to the moon.

And all the time there had been Eliza making part of her life, from the plump little girl whom people stopped to admire to the bold intruder at the altar-rail. Looking back, she could see herself as a stiff and grave-eyed child, grimly regarding the round-faced giggler from the start. Even then she had always been the dumb man in the stocks, of whom the street-urchin that was Eliza made mock as she danced and played. Only once had she ever definitely got the better of her, and it had had to last her all her life. Eliza had had many lovers, drawn by the counterfeit kindliness which hid her callous soul, but when she had chosen at last, it was Simon who was her choice. Perhaps the one gleam of romance in Eliza’s life had been when she looked at Simon⁠ ⁠… and Simon had looked away. Quite early he had fixed his affections on Sarah, and during their long courtship he had never swerved. Plain, businesslike Sarah had drawn him after her as the moon draws the willing tide.⁠ ⁠…

She began to put away the things she had bought in Witham, stowing them in a cupboard between the pot-rail and the door. During the morning she had felt royally that she was buying half the town, but now she saw how small her share of the marketing had been. There was a troubled feeling at the back of her mind that something had been missed, and even though she was sure of her purchases, she counted them again. Afterwards, she stood muttering worriedly through the list⁠ ⁠… tea, candles, a reel of cotton⁠ ⁠… and the rest. And then, suddenly, without any help from the candles and cotton, she remembered what it was, and smiled at the