Read Ebook: The Worn Doorstep by Sherwood Margaret Pollock

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Ebook has 332 lines and 34354 words, and 7 pages

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.

"But perhaps you were thinking of going to the war?" I ask.

"No, Miss," said Peter, "I weren't."

He spoke so emphatically that I may have raised my eyebrows; perhaps I shook my head. I shall be afraid of borrowing unconsciously some of the pony's gestures; these strong personalities always leave their impress.

"War," said Peter firmly, "is against my principles. I am a socialist."

"It's a fine way to keep from serving King and Country, being a socialist," said Madge unkindly. Madge is evidently not progressive.

"My fellow man," said Peter, striking the gate post with a heavy fist, "is more to me than King or 'Ouse of Lords."

"Or fellow woman, either," murmured Madge, thinking that I did not hear.

From these advanced radical theories Madge and I turn back, as women will, to the old and homely needs of human life. She fingers her apron.

"Yes."

"Yes."

"With but one person in the family, that isn't very complex," I say reassuringly. Don looks reproachfully at me; was I forgetting him?

I watched Don to see how he would take them; his manner was perfection,--polite but distant, refusing any intimate advances, but refraining from growling. There was a certain approving condescension in his air, as if he thought they were quite well in their way. He never for a moment forgets that he is a gentleman's dog, and his flair for social distinctions is as fine as that of any of his fellow Oxford dons. That delicate snobbery showed to-day in his air of connoisseurship while he weighed the matter with daintily snuffing nose and then assumed an air of invitation to these two to come and keep their place.

I was delighted when they said that they would come, and we trotted merrily home to the shining companionship of the hearth fire, flickering on pewter pots and copper pans as on my landlady's red cheeks; to the comfort--ah, that I, a twentieth-century American, dare confess it--of a feather bed!

September 29. Here I live in mine own hired house, like the gentleman in the Bible,--who was it,--Paul? I hope only that he had one half the sense of entire possession that is mine. I look at Madge and Peter, busy in kitchen and garden, at Don, guarding the little iron gate, at the pony grazing beyond the stream, and I feel like a feudal lord. Especially do I feel so when we rout out the utensils in the kitchen,--knives, forks, skillets. Some of them surely antedate the feudal era; they were probably left by the cave men; their prehistoric shape, in its ancient British clumsiness, looks as if it might have archaeological, if not practical, value. I shall use them for gardening; the forks will be a great help in wrestling with mother earth.

Wrestle I do, indoors and out; I dare not be idle, and besides, I like to do these things. The Vicar's lady, passing, is shocked to see me scraping the putty off of my new-old diamond-paned windows; but somebody had to get it off; Madge couldn't, so why not I? Madge watches me working about, torn between her old attitude of maid at the Hall, with its fixed ideas as to what the gentry should do, and a something new that is slowly creeping into her mind. Throughout England, I am told, the gentry are doing things they used not to do,--for economy, for possible service to the country in its day of need. And it is slowly dawning on us all that its need is great. The Germans have been halted on the Marne, and we breathe more easily, but it is rumoured that they have brought their great siege guns up to Antwerp, and the poor Belgians are flocking over here in hordes.

Madge, as she sees me toiling over my chintz curtains, and sees the bothersome things come down to my undoing, wants to know why I wished to come, quite by myself; why I didn't take lodgings somewhere,--it would be far less trouble. She doesn't understand in the least when I tell her that I cannot endure the irrelevance of lodgings, the antimacassars, the hideous bric-a-brac, the rooms packed full of horrors, where I cannot collect my mind. A home of your own is worth while, if only to keep it bare of human clutter; bad pictures intimidate me; ugly upholstery defeats my soul. Of provincial England I could say, if it weren't profane, all thy tidies and thy ugly reps have gone over me. The publicity of hotel or boarding house I cannot endure, nor the kind of tissue-paper life that one must live there. Not among gilt cornices but beside meadows and running waters I choose my lot. Your relatives are kindness itself in inviting me to stay with them, but just now I cannot bear kindness; I want people to be as cruel as God! Was I not lonely enough, after my own family had vanished into the silence; why did you come into my life only to leave me more alone?

I haven't begun on the garden; in a way I haven't let myself see it, there has been so much to do in the house; but, if you will believe it, and of course you will, being an Englishman, a plum tree and a pear tree are espaliered on the sunny southern wall of the house, branching out a bit over one of the windows. There are two apple trees, a clump of holly, ferns in a corner, rosebushes, and climbing roses. I shall not know all the colours until next summer, though some of them bloom late; I have discovered white ones, and pale yellow, and one of a deep and lovely red. The garden is neglected, weedy, and grass-grown, but I find hollyhocks, foxglove, larkspur, and a forgotten violet bed. A small kitchen garden borders my lady's garden, and Peter shall till this. Don walks up and down the paths with a step so exactly fitted to your old pace in the college gardens that I feel always a little shock of surprise in not seeing you, as of old, just ahead.

Scraps of conversation drift to me from Madge and Peter when they happen to work together; upon the invincibility of the British they agree, and upon the fact that no foe will ever dare set foot upon the British isles, but in matters of social opinion they are hopelessly at variance. Madge is a conservative, standing staunchly by the Church, the 'All, the 'Ouse of Lords; Peter is an extreme radical, a "hatheist", as he solemnly informed me, eager for anything new in word or thought, and usually misappropriating both. He reads American paper-covered novels, and a touch of transatlantic slang creeps now and then into his conversation, or a queer abstract phrase from some socialist lecturer whom he doesn't understand but accepts entire. Many a bit of stubborn debate comes to me through open door or window, as Peter defends his rights as man and scoffs at the social system.

"You!" said Madge scornfully. "You couldn't even stand up on the floors, they are that shiny and polished."

With the fragrance of ripening fruit, and the warmth of the brick wall about me,--September is September everywhere,--I sit here upon my own threshold, a worn old threshold made wise by the coming and going of life through unnumbered years. There is something comforting about a place where many lives have been lived; the windows have a strange air of wisdom, as if experience itself were looking out. I am tired, physically tired, with all the work, but I am well content with it: are you? All within is nearly finished. Your books, for your mother gave me many of them, are in a set of shelves I had made by the fireplace; my own in a low case that runs all across one side of the room. The window seats have chintz cushions; two easy chairs flank the fireplace; the old walnut table with reading lamp is placed where it can command either the flame of the hearth or the sunset flame: do you like all this, I wonder? In the little dining room a stately armchair stands ready for you always, as befits the master of the house, and your place at table shall be always set, the cover laid. So begins our divine housekeeping, you on your side, I on mine--alas!--of the universe and life and time.

So I have closed my little iron gate,--Madge, Peter, Don, and I inside, and all the world shut outside. Perhaps I am moved by the instinct of the hurt animal to go away by itself and hide. It cannot be wrong--now; henceforth I must live in the past; the dropping of the latch will be the signal, and the old days will slip back one by one over the brick wall. I shall establish a blockade; haven't I a right? The pain, at times, is more than I can bear, and every face I see recalls the sight of happy people, the sight of wretched people alike. Safe, with my sorrow, inside these walls; and outside, the surge of great sorrows, anguish, perplexity.

October 8. Of course I take long walks day by day, yet nothing more intensifies my sense of loss, perhaps, because we walked so much together. The country is as green as it was that July day when we stopped and helped the haymakers in the Oxford meadows, and they jeered good-naturedly at our way of raking. I have found relief in watching the harvesting and the gathering of the fruit; looking resolutely at field and stream, centering mind and soul there, my grief softens and grows more kind. Everywhere I see the picturesque and finished charm of English life.

As I climb the hill past the church, the old, old woman who lives in the little house by the lych gate,--the churchyard gate, the gate of the dead,--and sells gingerbread, biscuit, and ginger ale, is putting out her wares. She is so old, so much a part of the other world, she lives so near the edge of this, that I half suspect her, as I catch a glimpse of the green mounds through the rusted wrought-iron bars, of ministering to those we cannot see. None but the English would think of selling gingerbread at heaven's gate! Over the soft gurgle of ale from the stone jars we exchange greetings; she is only another of your daring and delightful incongruities, seen in the gargoyles on your cathedrals, the jokes in your tragedies, and the licensed mischief of your Oxford students on Commemoration Day.

The practical necessities of life take me, perforce, beyond my own domain. I have made the acquaintance of butcher and baker; that of the candlestick maker is still to come. The passing faces of people in the village street, even of farmers stopping at the Inn, I begin to recognize; the latter look little more concerned about the present crisis than do their stout nags. Life goes quietly on here, as it has always done, I fancy; steps are scrubbed, and brasses of knocker and door latch are polished until you can see your face there. Is this encompassing calm mere apathy, or is it conscious strength? In his little shop the sleepy chemist wakens unwillingly to deal out his wares; the sleepy service goes on as of old in the little church. It is grey with dust; perhaps the caretaker does not think it worth while to dust in war-time, yet I doubt whether he knows there is war. In the bakeshop window day by day are displayed the great clumsy loaves of bread with the foolish little loaf tucked on at one side. Why? There's neither rhyme nor reason nor symmetry in it; the force of custom may be wise and may be merely stupid. Here one gets constantly an impression of the overwhelming power of old habit and has a feeling that unless these people are shocked out of some of their ancient ways, disaster will follow. As I collect my wares, I fall to wondering whether either this nation, which worships its past, or we, who worship our future, is wholly right.

My mood softens as I stroll toward home; the glow of the blacksmith's forge fascinates me; there at least is tremendous strength, which is also skill, welding in this most ancient art, blow upon blow, old-fashioned horseshoes, which I am told are the best. Past quaint old doorways my path leads; the sight of these, and of fine old-fashioned faces behind the windowpanes, revives my normal mood of affection. What other people would, in reverence to wishes of those long dead, give out the dole of widows' bread at Westminster, the daily dole at Winchester, or administer the Leicester charity at Warwick in the spirit in which it was meant? What other people would be honest enough to do it? There is a basic honesty here which recalls the old tale of Lincoln and the money he saved for many years, in order to give back the identical coins with which he had been entrusted.

As I enter my own domain, I observe once more that my gate does not latch properly; all this time, when I have found it left open, I have reproached Peter.

"Peter, you did not shut the gate."

"No, Miss," rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand.

"You must be more careful."

"Yes, Miss."

This has happened several times; today I found that no power could make it really latch, and I confided the fact to Peter.

"Yes, Miss, I knew it all along, Miss."

"But why--" there I stopped; I should rather never know why than to try to penetrate the wooden impenetrability of mind of the British serving-man. There are no "whys" in their vocabularies, no "whys" in their minds, only "thus and so." Things are as they are; it has always been so; theirs to stand under the atlas weight of caste and class, prejudice and custom, not theirs to reason why, when they are blamed by their masters for things not their fault; theirs to go on digging, very respectfully digging.

"Peter, will you get some one to fix it, please?"

"Fix it, Miss?" He does not understand Americanese unless he chooses.

"Put it in order." I am quite red and haughty now, and as dignified as Queen Alexandra.

"I'll try, Miss. I expect that was broken a long time ago." Peter half salutes and goes on spading the earth for next year's flowers.

"Peter," I say severely, "the most lamentable thing about you English is that you are always 'expecting' things that have already happened. It's both grammatically and politically wrong to expect things in the past." He has not the slightest idea of my meaning, but of course he assents.

"You were a soldier once, weren't you?"

"Yes, Miss. It's a nasty business."

"Slavery," I venture, "would be worse."

"I can't say, really," answers Peter.

"Sometimes I wonder that you do not volunteer for this war, Peter," I suggest.

Stolid Peter goes on digging.

"There h'isn't any war, Miss!"

"But Peter, what do you mean?"

A fine look of cunning incredulity over-spreads Peter's broad face, as he stops and wipes his forehead, for this October day is warm.

"No, Miss; it is just a scare got up by the 'Ouse of Lords to frighting the common people."

"What for?" I ask stupidly.

"To take their minds off the 'Ouse of Lords; we had threatened their power, 'm, and they wish to keep their seats. It is what you call a roose."

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