Read Ebook: The Worn Doorstep by Sherwood Margaret Pollock

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 332 lines and 34354 words, and 7 pages

THE WORN DOORSTEP

MARGARET SHERWOOD

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1917

Published, September, 1916 Reprinted, October, 1916 November, 1916 December, 1916 February, 1917

Printers S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U.S.A.

THE WORN DOORSTEP

August 25, 1914. At last I have found the very place for our housekeeping; I have been searching for days: did you know it, dear? The quest that we began together I had to follow after you went to the front; and, through the crashes of tragic rumours that have rolled through England, I have gone on and on, not running away or trying to escape, but full of need to find the right corner, the right wall against which I could put my back and stand to face these great oncoming troubles. I have travelled by slow trains across quiet country which does not as yet know there is war; I have driven in an old-fashioned stage or post wagon,--you never told me that there were such things left in your country,--past yellow harvest fields in calm August weather; I have even walked for miles by green hedgerows, which wear here and there a belated blossom, searching for that village of our dreams where our home should be, quiet enough for the work of the scholar, green for two lovers of the country, and grey with the touch of time. I knew that now it could be almost anywhere; that it did not matter if it were not near Oxford, and it seemed to me that I should rather have it a bit--but not too far--away from the "dreaming spires." So I went on and on, with just one thought in my mind, because I was determined to carry out our plan to the full, and because I did not dare stay still. There's a great strange pain in my head when I am quiet, as if all the mountains of the earth were pressing down on it, and I have to go somewhere, slip out from under them before they crush me quite.

Often, at a distance, I thought that I had found it; thatched roofs or red tiles, or a lovely old Norman church tower would make me sure that my search was done; but again and again I found myself mistaken, I can hardly tell you why. You know without telling, as you must know all I am writing before I make the letters, and yet it eases my mind to write. At no time did you seem very far as I searched hill country and level lands, watching haystacks and flocks of sheep, sometimes through sunny showers of English rain.

But now I have discovered our village, the very one that I dreamed in childhood, that you and I pictured together, and I know that at last I have come home. I knew it by the rooks, for I arrived late in the afternoon, and the rooks were flying homeward to the great elms by the church,--groups of them, here, there, and everywhere, black against the sunset. Such a chattering and gossiping, as they went to bed in the treetops! Such joy of home and bedtime! I knew it by the grey church tower in its shelter of green leaves, and the ancient little stone church on the top of the gentle hill among its old, old, lichen-covered tombstones.

The village homes, in a straggling row, looked half familiar; the grassy meadow that rolls to the village edge, still more so; and the quaint old Inn, where I spent the night and where I am writing--surely some of my ancestors, centuries ago, slept at that very Inn, for I half remember it all,--low ceilings, latticed windows, stone floor, and great, smothering feather bed. Everywhere, indoors and out, I am aware of forgotten chords of sympathy. Those small boys in short trousers, trudging home on tired legs and little bare feet--"did I pass that way a long time ago?" Did some one back of me in the march of life--my ancestors came from this East country--grow tired and rebel in a village like this and run away to America? In some way, by memory, by prophecy, all seems mine; the worn paths; the hollowed door-stones; the ruddy faces moving up and down the walled streets, and the quiet under the grass in the churchyard. And you are everywhere, interpreting, making me understand, with that insight compounded of silent humour and silent sympathy. I am too tired to do anything to-night but have my tea and bit of toast and egg, and warm my fingers at the open fire, for the evening is chill; but to-morrow I shall go searching for our house, and I know I shall find it, for I have a curious sense that this is not only the place for my home with you, but that some far, far back sense of home broods here.

The grey war-cloud drifts closer and grows darker. Namur has fallen into German hands; there are rumours--God grant that they are not true!--that the French and the English troops are retreating. In spite of the entire confidence of the people here in their island security, there is fear in my heart for England, this England which seems so remote from cruel struggle, as if created in some moment of Nature's relenting, when she was almost ready to take back her fell purpose,--it is so full of fragrances, of soft colours of flowers, of softer green of hedgerows and meadows. There is something in you, you Englishmen of finer type, shaped by this beauty, quiet and self-contained, of hill and dale and meadow. Surely in you too I know this quietness, this coolness, the still ways of the streams.

August 26. Past the grey church, and down the hill, at the edge of the great green meadow, and a bit apart from the village, I found our house, with its wooden shutters and its white front door closed, a quaint old brick cottage, waiting for life to come to it again. It has a brick front walk, and a brick wall stands about it, save at the back, where the stream that skirts the meadow flows at the very garden edge. Can you see it, the wistaria, the woodbine, the honeysuckle over the wee porch, the climbing, drooping, straggling vines that make the whole little house look oddly like a Skye terrier? It is all unkempt; grass grows in tufts between the bricks, and weeds in the neglected grass. The chimney needs repairing; some of the little diamond panes in the latticed windows are broken, alas! I did not venture inside the wrought-iron gate, for the encompassing veneration for property rights is strong upon me; not in the British Isles shall I be caught trespassing! Can you not imagine, as I can, how a dainty order, satisfying even your fastidious taste, could grow out of its present desolation, with a little weeding here, a little trimming there, a nail, a bit of board, a few bricks,--surely we could find a few old weathered ones to match. There must be touches of the new, but careful preservation of all the old, of all the eloquent worn edges that tell of the coming and going of past life.

Something--anything--to keep away the thoughts I refuse to harbour. I can not, I can not even yet, think of the misery of this war. It beats in my ears, like great hard waves; it clangs and clamours, strikes, comes in imagined horrible shrill whistles and great explosions. There is nothing in me that understands war; new tracks will have to be beaten out in my brain before I can grasp any of it. It is a vast, unmeasured pain beyond my own pain.

I have got to have a place of my own in which to face them both, for a little while, a little while, where I may stand and think,--perhaps even pray.

No one was about, except a shaggy pony, grazing in the rich green meadow, with a rough lock of hair over his eyes. I find a little stone bridge across the stream and try to make his acquaintance. He lifts his head and looks at me through his forelock, seems to respond with cordiality to my overtures, whinnies, and even takes a step or two toward me as I draw near; then, when I can almost touch him, gives a queer little toss of his head, kicks up his heels, and dashes off to a rise of ground, where he stands with a triumphant air, his legs planted wide apart, seeming to say: "Such be forever the fate of those who try to catch and harness me!" Then he falls to grazing again, keeping one eye out to see whether I am coming near.

Presently came an old man with a rake, and I made some inquiries about the house, but the haymaker's dialect was as hard for me to understand as mine was for him. I learned only that the little 'ouse belonged to the 'All; that it had been occupied by one of the functionaries at the 'All;--it will be good for you, you Englishman, to live in a little house once inhabited by an unimportant person, good for you to forget caste and class and bend a bit, if need be, at your own front door! Like yourself, young Master went with the first adventurers to the war, the old man said, and the 'All was closed. And he added, with significant gestures with his rake, what he would do to "they Germans", if he once got hold of them. I judged, by the red satisfaction in his face, that the wooden rake in a shaking old hand constituted for him a vision of "preparedness for war."

August 27. But can I get it? I am in a prolonged state of suspense. Nobody in the village seems to know anything, but everybody is of firm conviction that somebody higher up knows everything, and that all is well. I appealed to my landlady; she very pleasantly informed me with an air of great wisdom that it might be I could 'ave it, it might be I couldn't; nobody could say. No, she could not tell me to whom to apply, with the 'All closed, as it was, 'm, and the Squire away. Standing--there was barely standing-place--in her own over-furnished sitting room, filled to its low ceiling with bric-a-brac, whatnots with unshapely vases, tall glass cases with artificial flowers or alabaster vases under them, porcelain figures,--one a genuine purple cow,--she seemed, as many a more imposing person on this side of the water and the other seems, a victim of property.

"An' I do 'ave difficulty, Miss, in gettin' about," she said, as her apron knocked a Dresden china shepherdess and a Spanish guitar player off an over-crowded table; "but I don't quite know what to do about it."

"A broom!" I suggested.

"Broom? Oh, it's nicely swept, and everything dusted regularly once a week, 'm," she assured me. Oh, for one German bomb!

Luncheon time, and no solution of my problem; a futile visit to the postmistress, who informed me that I should have to wait until the war was over, and Master came home to the Hall. I was meditating an inquiry at the vicarage, though that involved more audacity than I can easily summon, when my landlord came riding home on a big bony steed and had a conference with his wife in the kitchen. He, it seems, is temporarily agent for the property; he has the keys to the little red house and to my future destiny. I try hard to think what will be pleasing to so huge and so important a personage, as I walk down the village street at his side, two steps to his one. An unfortunate conjecture about the retreat of the British brings forth the emphatic statement that the British never retreat. With a train of thought of which I am, at the time, unconscious, I tell him that I am an American; he listens indifferently. I tell him that my uncle is at the head of an important New York banking house; he at once becomes responsive and respectful. We go through the little iron gate and up the brick walk; out of a vast pocket he takes an old wrought-iron key and unlocks the white front door.

As we entered, I had a curious sense that you were inside; I never draw near a closed door without a feeling that it may open on your face. Instead, there was only the blankness and the empty odour of a house long closed, and yet it seemed hospitable, as if glad to have me come. I examined every inch of it, peered into each corner, and explored every nook and cranny. It is just as it should be, with low ceilings, old brown rafters, and brick fireplaces,--the one in the kitchen has a crane. The little dining room is panelled, the living room wainscoted; I like the dull old oak woodwork and the solidity of everything, which seems to belong to an elder, stable order, not to this earth-quakey world of to-day. The living room, facing the south, and thus the meadow and the brook, is sunny, but not over-light, with its window seats and casement windows, diamond-paned. The stairs are narrow and a bit cramped, but my landlord of the Inn gives me permission--ah, I forgot to say that he tells me I may have the house and grounds for fifty pounds a year; fifty pounds for all this and a running stream too!--permission to make a few changes which I hesitatingly suggested, and for which I shall pay, as the rent is low. There must be a bathroom--perhaps water can be piped from the stream; a partition is to be knocked down, and the stairs will then go up from the living room, not in the little box wherein they are at present enclosed. Where can I find an old stair rail and newel post suitable for the old house? Mine host will himself attend to the roof and the chimneys; and he says that there are some discarded diamond-paned windows lying in an outhouse at the Inn, from which glass may be taken to replace those that are broken, if any one can be found to set it properly.

He was amused that I wanted them, amused by my pleasure in the old and quaint. If he had his way, large new panes of glass should go into all windows wheresoever; he would like everything shiny and varnishy. Naturally I did not confess, when he apologized for the lack of this and that, that I was glad of the inconveniences, glad of relief from the mechanical and tinkling comforts of our modern life; he would never understand! To speak of an old-fashioned American would be to him a contradiction in terms; yet in some ways we are one of the most conservative people on earth, holding certain old ways of thought most tenaciously. It is only our muscles that are modern! I am very like a Pilgrim mother in my convictions of right and wrong.

There is some deep reason why many Americans care so profoundly for old buildings, old furnishings, old habits which we find here; they typify inner characteristics which we must not forget in a young land where changes come too swiftly. There is a steadfastness about it all; these old stone houses wear a look as if they had been built for something more immutable than human life. Never as in these recent wanderings have I had this sense of England, innermost England, of that enduring beauty of spirit best expressed in Westminster and the old Gothic churches; that England of ancient faiths and old reverences. Delicate carving and soft tinted glass bear witness to the richness of inherited spiritual life and make visible the soul of a people grown fine, old, and wise. Old shields, grey with hoary dust, still hang on the tombs of those who have fought and conquered, or have been defeated; a sense of old sacredness lingers at Oxford's heart,--and yours. There is something here which not all the sins and shortcomings and decadences of contemporary life can change; not the luxury and the selfishness of titled folk whose high glass-guarded walls shut miles of green land away from common people; not the mistakes--and they are many--of the government. Back of all this, and beyond, is a something which means keeping, as no other nation keeps, the old and sacred fire, safeguarding civilization from the over-new, the merely efficient, the unremembering.

My new abode is lowly and cozy, with a fine simplicity in the antique furniture, carved chest, and plain chairs. The fundamental things are here; you should see the walnut table in the living room, with its deep glow of red-brown colour. There must be some new things, of course, fresh chintzes, linen, kitchen utensils, but for the most part only oil and turpentine and a pair of good red sturdy English arms are needed to remove a certain dinginess.

So I've a home of my own, though earth crashes and kingdoms fall and a comet strikes against us and puts us out. For a little I have a fortified spot wherein to defy the worst that time can do. I am a householder, on my own plot of ground, crossing and re-crossing my own threshold; and the big wrought-iron key is in my hand. There are ashes still upon the hearth,--from whose fire? New flame shall go up from the old grey ashes,--the central spark of home shall be rekindled here; and that is the whole story of human life.

How fortunate, and how unusual, in so small a house, that the hall leads all the way through from green to green! We shall get all the breezes that blow, for the house faces the west, as all houses should face; and always and forever we shall hear the stream. There's a step there at the back, down to the garden walk, that you must remember, you who are so absent-minded.

--I keep forgetting that you are dead.

September 6. I have been away for a week, a week in which I have not dared leave one moment unoccupied. To keep my sanity, I must be busy all the time; life cannot be cut short in this way. When great forces have begun to stir within you, like the gathering of all waters far and near, you cannot safely stop them all at once; I must have, in the weeks to come, some outlet for this surging energy.

London is quiet, and awful with the self-control of great tension. The war-terror mounts, though few speak of it; the Germans have crossed the Marne; the French government has moved to Bordeaux, and all the world seems tottering. Back in my charmed village, I wait and listen. They would not take me at the front; did you know that, the day after you left, I made an attempt to follow? No training, and physically unfit, was the verdict. I thought that I could perhaps prove to you in act that of which I could not convince you by argument in our dispute the day we walked to Godstow,--that women have the kind of courage possessed by men.

I live at the Inn during these days while my house is being put in order. A glazier has been found who can re-set the old diamond panes; carpenter and plumber are hard at work. The hideous wall-papers in the chambers have been scraped off; they were so ugly that they actually hurt. You always told me, you remember, that I minded too much the things that make for ugliness, that my eye was too sensitive to evil-coloured and unshapely things, and that I must live more in the world of thought. The contrast between these, in their wicked purples and magentas, and the wonderful cottage itself with its dim beauty of old brick and dusky panelling, makes one wonder at the potential depravity of the heart of modern man or woman! There's a shop in London,--I was going to take you there,--where they have reproductions of quaint old papers, the kind made a hundred years ago, with little landscapes, and sheep and shepherds, and odd flower designs. I chose three of these, and they are going on at this minute; I must go to see that they piece the two bits of the shepherdess together neatly and do not leave her head and her beribboned hat dangling several inches above her embroidered bodice. It is a relief to escape from the purple cow and the hundred and one china abominations in this sitting room.

My landlady, fingering her black alpaca dress apron, assures me as I go, that the best of news, 'm, has come from the front; that the Germans are in full retreat, and the French and the British are nearing Berlin! If only this insular confidence that for Britons there is no defeat be not too rudely broken!

Don went with me; I went to Oxford to get him during my week away. I am so glad, so very glad that you let me have him when you went to war. He potters along behind me or runs ahead, with all his questing little fox-terrier soul in his eyes, sure, like myself, that around some corner, or on some blessed rise of ground, we shall meet you. At each fresh disappointment he turns to me with that look of perfect trust in his eyes that I, some day when it seems fit, will give you back to him. Within five minutes, at his first visit to the little red house, he had sniffed every corner, and he dropped with a deep sigh of content on the warm brick walk, knowing the place for his own.

The cloistered Oxford gardens, with their incredibly smooth grass, were unchanged, but the immemorial quiet is broken. Your Oxford is a new Oxford, awake, struggling, suffering, nursing the wounded, while the noblest of her sons follow you to the war. Thinking of all these things as I walk, I decide not to go to the house, after all; there is a sound of hammering and an air of disquiet. I cross the little stone bridge and follow the stream; this, like the pony, is a new neighbour with which I must become acquainted, and it proves more friendly than that other. There is a touch of September gold everywhere, of autumn perfectness in things, that belies wrong anywhere upon the earth. And all the old days float down the stream; something, the way of the water with the grasses, the ripple of the water, brings back May, and my first English spring, and you.

Do you remember that my very first glimpse of you was at the Union? You were debating, very convincingly, on the subject of disarmament, and proved the possibility, the practicability, of peace among nations. I was idly interested in you; Gladys had whispered that you were one of her friends. That night,--but never again,--you were just one of a type to me, with the fine, lean, English look of race, the fine self-control of every nerve and emotion and muscle. I noticed that you were already beginning to have a touch of the scholar stoop, and that you were a shade, just a shade, too slender. It was quite a surprise, and something of a blow to me, to find you English men not, on the whole, so stalwart as the men in America. All our lives we have read of the hale and hearty John Bull, yet our first glimpse of you makes us think that John Bull and Uncle Sam will have to change places in the caricatures if this transformation keeps on.

The vastness of my loss I can not even grasp; my world is swept away from under my feet, and I am alone, with nothing to stand on, nothing to reach in space. Dying myself could hardly mean such utter letting go; I am aware only of a great blankness. I have not even tried to measure my disaster, to understand. I shall have all the rest of my life to learn to understand; I come of a long-lived race.

That which comes more often than my sense of loss is the sense of my part in letting you go, making you go! You remember that August afternoon when we drifted down the river, for you even forgot to row; the trailing willow branches ruffled our hair and gently took off my hat. It was a lazy, sunshiny, misty afternoon, such a happy afternoon, except for the war-cloud beyond the peace and the exquisite grey and green calm of Oxford. You were wondering, idly enough, about war; how was it to be justified? What right had England, with her love of peaceful enlightenment, to take this swift plunge into the awful horror? And you went, my Lord Hamlet, with that deepening look which showed a soul drawn far within, into a long philosophic discussion as to whether war is ever justifiable; no one could adjust philosophic niceties of thought better than you. Could a man of ethical conviction, without outrage to his better self, go into that barbaric hell? All the time that your intellect was balancing, weighing, and deciding "no!" old impulses were stirring, old heroic fingers were tugging from their graves, old simple-minded forebears were alive and awake, impelling you.

The green, lovely banks grew dim; the shadows lengthened across the rippling water, and sunset flushed the western sky beyond the overhanging branches, while you fought it out. When you turned and asked me squarely, what could I say? It had seemed so piteously, cruelly simple to me from the first, so simple and so great! Of course, I come of the practical American race. Back of me lie generations of ancestors who have had to act and act quickly without exhausting the ultimate possibilities of thought on any subject. I do not mean that they have done unjustifiable things, but that they have had to take life at the quick. When the Indian brandished his tomahawk inside the door at the baby in the cradle, some one had to shoot and shoot instantly, without stopping to ask any authority whether shooting was wrong. That actually happened in my family; it was a little great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of mine. Her Pilgrim father was quite right. Even if his mind told him that it was wrong, which I judge was not the case, there was something in him deeper down and farther back than mere intellect; he did the right thing and did it instinctively, Lord Hamlet. Of course, in reality, his intellectual problem had been settled when he loaded his gun.

All life is transition, and always has been. As I understand it, with one's ancestor one has to load one's gun with one hand, while reaching forward with the other to one's descendant for the pipe of peace. One has to keep collected, centered, ready to do one's utmost in any need; the luxury of the last shade of reasoning is denied us as yet: our task is not to fail at the crisis.

What could I say, when you asked me, except the cruelly hard thing which I did say? Back of me, as back of you, lie the same fighting, plucky ancestors. The same heroic impulses that stirred their dust stir mine, and yours,--alas that it has but feminine dust to stir in me! To me, as to you, there is but one answer in the world to a question like that. There had never been any real doubt in my mind as to what you would do; I think that there had never been any real doubt in your own mind. In the great moments, life seems neither right nor wrong, but something greater; it seems inevitable.

Poor Belgium and the baby in the cradle come back to my mind together, the highly "efficient" tomahawk replaced by the highly "efficient" siege guns. But even apart from the high justice of this issue, England was in trouble, England was fighting. What was there for you to do but help? I said only the one word "go," and even now I can recall the stillness and the wash of the ripples against our boat and through the grasses. The silence of perfect beauty rested on sky and tree and water, and the river no longer seemed a little inland stream flowing softly through grassy meadows with retarding locks, but a flowing passageway to some great sea.

They were full too of homely toil; such queer things we had to do in getting you ready, dear. Of course you were not a trained soldier; how to become a trained soldier in a week of short days is a harder problem than many a one in philosophy. When you decided that you would be a despatch bearer and join the motorcycle brigade, because thus you could go to the front sooner, I am proud that I did not say one word of protest, though I knew that it was the most dangerous task of all. Being a despatch bearer seemed a fitting service for an intellectual leader.

How we laughed as you practised riding! Lord Hamlet on a motorcycle, with no time for thought, no time for scruple! How we searched out rough bits of road and watched you try to cross a newly-mown meadow, where late poppies, I remember, were blossoming in the stubble. Once you struck a stone and fell, and your mother amazed you by crying out. I laughed and horrified her; but I kissed its handles before you went. The motorcycle had been to me the most hateful of modern inventions, inexcusable, unmentionable. And here it became a symbol of dauntless courage and highest service; beyond the bravery necessary for a charge in battle is the bravery needed here; this evil, roaring, puffing thing might turn into the chariot that would carry you over the borders of the sun.

That one brief hour that we found to steal away to Bagley wood lingers yet. The anemones were gone, but all about was the soft midsummer murmur, and the ripe fulness of August life. What practical things we talked about! I think that we sent you out fitted up as well as any German soldier of them all. Who, in the Kaiser's army, had a more complete or smaller sewing kit? Who had thread wound off on very diminutive bits of cardboard to save the space that spools would take,--white linen and black linen and khaki coloured, all very strong? What Teuton could challenge you on the score of buttons? It was good, it was very good, in your mother to let me help.

You thought I never wavered; when you were doubting, I was sure; when you were sure,--you never knew that I wrote you a note that last night and took back my decision, saying that thinkers had their own separate task, and that you should stay. I burned it.... I would not have you back, dear, if it meant giving up that inmost you I knew in those glorified few days. You have fulfilled yourself.

September 15. Who is going to keep house for me--that is the problem? Somebody there must be to cook and clean and polish; a staff composed of one British female is what I need, for I can do many, very many things myself.

Mine host and my landlady took counsel; I let them do a great deal of thinking for me, for their minds are rusty from disuse; you can actually hear a kind of creaking when they try to make them go. They finally decided that I was to drive in a pony cart to a village off to eastward, to consult Madge and Peter Snell, man and wife, both from a different part of the country, lately employed at the Hall as under-cook and gardener, now out of work because the Hall is closed. I readily agreed; yes, I was used to driving, and the directions--first turn at the left, then a bit of road and a turn at the right, 'm, and then a long stretch across a dike to a stone bridge and a stream and a village spire--seemed clear enough.

About half-way across we come to a gate; there is nothing to do but for me to get out to open it, and this I do. Swift as a flash, my Puck whirls about and goes dashing for home; holding tightly to the reins, I run also, laughing as I have not laughed for days. Don, with his paws on the edge of the cart, barks furiously. Pulling and dragging with all my might, at length I stop the pony. The little wretch looks at me almost respectfully as I turn him about, and he trots meekly back; he was only trying me out, to see of what stuff I was made. He stood as firmly as the Tower of London as I shut the gate and climbed into the cart. Then came the stream and the stone bridge and the village spire; and a row of small garden plots with yellow, late summer things blossoming in them, and Madge and Peter standing by a garden gate.

I knew at first glance that they must both come; now that I think of it, I have quite a garden, though it will seem little to one who has worked at the 'All; there are always heavy things to be done about the kitchen, and Peter knows more than he will admit about the drudgery necessary to sustain human life. Peter, it seems, has been a soldier, has served in the South African war, and is a time-expired man who has beaten his sword into a ploughshare,--or is it a pruning hook? But none of his accomplishments is my real reason; the half-belligerent affection on the face of husband and wife shows me that they should not be separated.

Madge, the look of anxiety already lifting from her smooth and comely face,--one sees that look here in many of the unemployed,--looks questioningly at Peter when I extend my invitation. I assure him that I need a man to look after the garden and the pony; at this Puck pricks up his ears and gives me a half glance. Yes, I have decided to have him, if I may, for my very own. There is a remote something in Peter's gait and bearing that suggests the soldier, but it is the soldier whose long leisure re-acts against the discipline.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet