The Worn Doorstep — Story, Setting & Ideas

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.

But when my equipage is drawn up at the Inn door, whom do I see but my wayward friend of the meadow, harnessed to an absurd little basket-cart as diminutive as he. I am delighted to see him; is the pleasure mutual? He gives me one look out of his eyes that seems to say he will be even with me yet; Don leaps to a place of honour in the cart, and we go flying down the village street with sparks flashing from the iron-shod little hoofs. Drive? Yes, I am accustomed to driving _horses_, but not Pucks, not changelings; I never, never drove a mischievous kitten fastened to a baby carriage! And that little "trap" was a trap indeed! What breed my pony is, as mortals reckon things, I do not know; he is too big for a Shetland, too little for a horse; perhaps he is an Exmoor pony, or the product of some northern heath. We go gaily to the left, somewhat perilously near a corner at the right, and we are out racing over a long dike built across what was once a low-lying sea-meadow. Don looks up at me with vast enjoyment in his eyes, and that little quiver of the face that means a fox-terrier smile.

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.

"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.

"I'm sure, Miss, if the laundry could be put out----"

"And a charwoman for the rough scrubbing----"

"And if you wouldn't mind me knowing little about waiting at table----"

"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 archæological, 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?

This is my _apologia pro domicilio meo_, but why, after all, should I need to explain a longing for my own rooftree, my own hearth, my own pathway leading to my own front door? I must have come into the world with a belief that for every woman born was intended a little nook or corner or cranny of her own. So here is mine, a quarter of a mile from the village, not many miles from the sea, seventy odd miles from London, and how far from that heaven where you are? Can you tell me the way and the length of the road? Sometimes it seems set on the very edge of eternity, and I keep expecting to see stray cherubim, seraphim, and angels stop to ask the rest of the way.

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.

"Wy _'im_ at the 'All? Wy not me?" was the last I heard.

"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.

Last night I laid a scarf of yours, which I had been wearing, across your chair; Don sniffed at it and whimpered, then jumped up into the chair and whined piteously. No, do not be afraid! I shall not whine, even if my heart break. I shall come to you smiling, belovèd, and whatever wrinkles are on my face shall not be worn by tears. Everybody is _game_ in England now; I will be game too! There are no cowards among those who go to fight, or those who are left at home: my battlefield lies here. You need not think I am going to mourn in loneliness; I shall not let you go, though you are dead; I am going to live my life in and for you, and every least wish I ever heard you express shall be carried out. After dinner Don and I sat on the rug in front of the fire and talked about you; it is sorry comfort for both of us, but it is all we have. For him, as for me, I think, the sense of you comes more strongly in favoured nooks and corners, by the fire on the hearth, or by the living room windows in the sunshine. He knows you better than anybody else does, except me, and I sometimes feel,--at least, he remembers farther back than I can, and I am envious of him and of every one else who knew you first. He has chosen his permanent abiding-place, for he went close to the right side of the hearth, sat down, wagged his tail beseechingly, and held up one paw as he does when he is begging for things.

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.