_ It was a fresh rain-repentant afternoon, following a morning that
had been sultry and torrentially wet by turns; the sort of
afternoon that impels people to talk graciously of the rain as
having done a lot of good, its chief merit in their eyes probably
having been its recognition of the art of moderation. Also it was
an afternoon that invited bodily activity after the convalescent
languor of the earlier part of the day. Elaine had instinctively
found her way into her riding-habit and sent an order down to the
stables--a blessed oasis that still smelt sweetly of horse and hay
and cleanliness in a world that reeked of petrol, and now she set
her mare at a smart pace through a succession of long-stretching
country lanes. She was due some time that afternoon at a garden-
party, but she rode with determination in an opposite direction.
In the first place neither Comus or Courtenay would be at the
party, which fact seemed to remove any valid reason that could be
thought of for inviting her attendance thereat; in the second place
about a hundred human beings would be gathered there, and human
gatherings were not her most crying need at the present moment.
Since her last encounter with her wooers, under the cedars in her
own garden, Elaine realised that she was either very happy or
cruelly unhappy, she could not quite determine which. She seemed
to have what she most wanted in the world lying at her feet, and
she was dreadfully uncertain in her more reflective moments whether
she really wanted to stretch out her hand and take it. It was all
very like some situation in an Arabian Nights tale or a story of
Pagan Hellas, and consequently the more puzzling and disconcerting
to a girl brought up on the methodical lines of Victorian
Christianity. Her appeal court was in permanent session these last
few days, but it gave no decisions, at least none that she would
listen to. And the ride on her fast light-stepping little mare,
alone and unattended, through the fresh-smelling leafy lanes into
unexplored country, seemed just what she wanted at the moment. The
mare made some small delicate pretence of being roadshy, not the
staring dolt-like kind of nervousness that shows itself in an
irritating hanging-back as each conspicuous wayside object presents
itself, but the nerve-flutter of an imaginative animal that merely
results in a quick whisk of the head and a swifter bound forward.
She might have paraphrased the mental attitude of the immortalised
Peter Bell into
A basket underneath a tree
A yellow tiger is to me,
If it is nothing more.
The more really alarming episodes of the road, the hoot and whir of
a passing motor-car or the loud vibrating hum of a wayside
threshing-machine, were treated with indifference.
On turning a corner out of a narrow coppice-bordered lane into a
wider road that sloped steadily upward in a long stretch of hill
Elaine saw, coming toward her at no great distance, a string of
yellow-painted vans, drawn for the most part by skewbald or
speckled horses. A certain rakish air about these oncoming road-
craft proclaimed them as belonging to a travelling wild-beast show,
decked out in the rich primitive colouring that one's taste in
childhood would have insisted on before it had been schooled in the
artistic value of dulness. It was an unlooked-for and distinctly
unwelcome encounter. The mare had already commenced a sixfold
scrutiny with nostrils, eyes and daintily-pricked ears; one ear
made hurried little backward movements to hear what Elaine was
saying about the eminent niceness and respectability of the
approaching caravan, but even Elaine felt that she would be unable
satisfactorily to explain the elephants and camels that would
certainly form part of the procession. To turn back would seem
rather craven, and the mare might take fright at the manoeuvre and
try to bolt; a gate standing ajar at the entrance to a farmyard
lane provided a convenient way out of the difficulty.
As Elaine pushed her way through she became aware of a man standing
just inside the lane, who made a movement forward to open the gate
for her.
"Thank you. I'm just getting out of the way of a wild-beast show,"
she explained; "my mare is tolerant of motors and traction-engines,
but I expect camels--hullo," she broke off, recognising the man as
an old acquaintance, "I heard you had taken rooms in a farmhouse
somewhere. Fancy meeting you in this way."
In the not very distant days of her little-girlhood, Tom Keriway
had been a man to be looked upon with a certain awe and envy;
indeed the glamour of his roving career would have fired the
imagination, and wistful desire to do likewise, of many young
Englishmen. It seemed to be the grown-up realisation of the games
played in dark rooms in winter fire-lit evenings, and the dreams
dreamed over favourite books of adventure. Making Vienna his
headquarters, almost his home, he had rambled where he listed
through the lands of the Near and Middle East as leisurely and
thoroughly as tamer souls might explore Paris. He had wandered
through Hungarian horse-fairs, hunted shy crafty beasts on lonely
Balkan hillsides, dropped himself pebble-wise into the stagnant
human pool of some Bulgarian monastery, threaded his way through
the strange racial mosaic of Salonika, listened with amused
politeness to the shallow ultra-modern opinions of a voluble editor
or lawyer in some wayside Russian town, or learned wisdom from a
chance tavern companion, one of the atoms of the busy ant-stream of
men and merchandise that moves untiringly round the shores of the
Black Sea. And far and wide as he might roam he always managed to
turn up at frequent intervals, at ball and supper and theatre, in
the gay Hauptstadt of the Habsburgs, haunting his favourite cafes
and wine-vaults, skimming through his favourite news-sheets,
greeting old acquaintances and friends, from ambassadors down to
cobblers in the social scale. He seldom talked of his travels, but
it might be said that his travels talked of him; there was an air
about him that a German diplomat once summed up in a phrase: "a
man that wolves have sniffed at."
And then two things happened, which he had not mapped out in his
route; a severe illness shook half the life and all the energy out
of him, and a heavy money loss brought him almost to the door of
destitution. With something, perhaps, of the impulse which drives
a stricken animal away from its kind, Tom Keriway left the haunts
where he had known so much happiness, and withdrew into the shelter
of a secluded farmhouse lodging; more than ever he became to Elaine
a hearsay personality. And now the chance meeting with the caravan
had flung her across the threshold of his retreat.
"What a charming little nook you've got hold of," she exclaimed
with instinctive politeness, and then looked searchingly round, and
discovered that she had spoken the truth; it really was charming.
The farmhouse had that intensely English look that one seldom sees
out of Normandy. Over the whole scene of rickyard, garden,
outbuildings, horsepond and orchard, brooded that air which seems
rightfully to belong to out-of-the-way farmyards, an air of wakeful
dreaminess which suggests that here, man and beast and bird have
got up so early that the rest of the world has never caught them up
and never will.
Elaine dismounted, and Keriway led the mare round to a little
paddock by the side of a great grey barn. At the end of the lane
they could see the show go past, a string of lumbering vans and
great striding beasts that seemed to link the vast silences of the
desert with the noises and sights and smells, the naphtha-flares
and advertisement hoardings and trampled orange-peel, of an endless
succession of towns.
"You had better let the caravan pass well on its way before you get
on the road again," said Keriway; "the smell of the beasts may make
your mare nervous and restive going home."
Then he called to a boy who was busy with a hoe among some
defiantly prosperous weeds, to fetch the lady a glass of milk and a
piece of currant loaf.
"I don't know when I've seen anything so utterly charming and
peaceful," said Elaine, propping herself on a seat that a pear-tree
had obligingly designed in the fantastic curve of its trunk.
"Charming, certainly," said Keriway, "but too full of the stress of
its own little life struggle to be peaceful. Since I have lived
here I've learnt, what I've always suspected, that a country
farmhouse, set away in a world of its own, is one of the most
wonderful studies of interwoven happenings and tragedies that can
be imagined. It is like the old chronicles of medieval Europe in
the days when there was a sort of ordered anarchy between feudal
lords and overlords, and burg-grafs, and mitred abbots, and prince-
bishops, robber barons and merchant guilds, and Electors and so
forth, all striving and contending and counter-plotting, and
interfering with each other under some vague code of loosely-
applied rules. Here one sees it reproduced under one's eyes, like
a musty page of black-letter come to life. Look at one little
section of it, the poultry-life on the farm. Villa poultry, dull
egg-machines, with records kept of how many ounces of food they
eat, and how many pennyworths of eggs they lay, give you no idea of
the wonder-life of these farm-birds; their feuds and jealousies,
and carefully maintained prerogatives, their unsparing tyrannies
and persecutions, their calculated courage and bravado or
sedulously hidden cowardice, it might all be some human chapter
from the annals of the old Rhineland or medieval Italy. And then,
outside their own bickering wars and hates, the grim enemies that
come up against them from the woodlands; the hawk that dashes among
the coops like a moss-trooper raiding the border, knowing well that
a charge of shot may tear him to bits at any moment. And the
stoat, a creeping slip of brown fur a few inches long, intently and
unstayably out for blood. And the hunger-taught master of craft,
the red fox, who has waited perhaps half the afternoon for his
chance while the fowls were dusting themselves under the hedge, and
just as they were turning supper-ward to the yard one has stopped a
moment to give her feathers a final shake and found death springing
upon her. Do you know," he continued, as Elaine fed herself and
the mare with morsels of currant-loaf, "I don't think any tragedy
in literature that I have ever come across impressed me so much as
the first one, that I spelled out slowly for myself in words of
three letters: the bad fox has got the red hen. There was
something so dramatically complete about it; the badness of the
fox, added to all the traditional guile of his race, seemed to
heighten the horror of the hen's fate, and there was such a
suggestion of masterful malice about the word 'got.' One felt that
a countryside in arms would not get that hen away from the bad fox.
They used to think me a slow dull reader for not getting on with my
lesson, but I used to sit and picture to myself the red hen, with
its wings beating helplessly, screeching in terrified protest, or
perhaps, if he had got it by the neck, with beak wide agape and
silent, and eyes staring, as it left the farmyard for ever. I have
seen blood-spillings and down-crushings and abject defeat here and
there in my time, but the red hen has remained in my mind as the
type of helpless tragedy." He was silent for a moment as if he
were again musing over the three-letter drama that had so dwelt in
his childhood's imagination. "Tell me some of the things you have
seen in your time," was the request that was nearly on Elaine's
lips, but she hastily checked herself and substituted another.
"Tell me more about the farm, please."
And he told her of a whole world, or rather of several intermingled
worlds, set apart in this sleepy hollow in the hills, of beast lore
and wood lore and farm craft, at times touching almost the border
of witchcraft--passing lightly here, not with the probing eagerness
of those who know nothing, but with the averted glance of those who
fear to see too much. He told her of those things that slept and
those that prowled when the dusk fell, of strange hunting cats, of
the yard swine and the stalled cattle, of the farm folk themselves,
as curious and remote in their way, in their ideas and fears and
wants and tragedies, as the brutes and feathered stock that they
tended. It seemed to Elaine as if a musty store of old-world
children's books had been fetched down from some cobwebbed lumber-
room and brought to life. Sitting there in the little paddock,
grown thickly with tall weeds and rank grasses, and shadowed by the
weather-beaten old grey barn, listening to this chronicle of
wonderful things, half fanciful, half very real, she could scarcely
believe that a few miles away there was a garden-party in full
swing, with smart frocks and smart conversation, fashionable
refreshments and fashionable music, and a fevered undercurrent of
social strivings and snubbings. Did Vienna and the Balkan
Mountains and the Black Sea seem as remote and hard to believe in,
she wondered, to the man sitting by her side, who had discovered or
invented this wonderful fairyland? Was it a true and merciful
arrangement of fate and life that the things of the moment thrust
out the after-taste of the things that had been? Here was one who
had held much that was priceless in the hollow of his hand and lost
it all, and he was happy and absorbed and well-content with the
little wayside corner of the world into which he had crept. And
Elaine, who held so many desirable things in the hollow of her
hand, could not make up her mind to be even moderately happy. She
did not even know whether to take this hero of her childhood down
from his pedestal, or to place him on a higher one; on the whole
she was inclined to resent rather than approve the idea that ill-
health and misfortune could so completely subdue and tame an
erstwhile bold and roving spirit.
The mare was showing signs of delicately-hinted impatience; the
paddock, with its teasing insects and very indifferent grazing, had
not thrust out the image of her own comfortable well-foddered
loose-box. Elaine divested her habit of some remaining crumbs of
bun-loaf and jumped lightly on to her saddle. As she rode slowly
down the lane, with Keriway escorting her as far as its gate, she
looked round at what had seemed to her, a short while ago, just a
picturesque old farmstead, a place of bee-hives and hollyhocks and
gabled cart-sheds; now it was in her eyes a magic city, with an
undercurrent of reality beneath its magic.
"You are a person to be envied," she said to Keriway; "you have
created a fairyland, and you are living in it yourself."
"Envied?"
He shot the question out with sudden bitterness. She looked down
and saw the wistful misery that had come into his face.
"Once," he said to her, "in a German paper I read a short story
about a tame crippled crane that lived in the park of some small
town. I forget what happened in the story, but there was one line
that I shall always remember: 'it was lame, that is why it was
tame.'"
He had created a fairyland, but assuredly he was not living in it. _