V
HE came back from re-tracing the slow trend which had led to the writing of the letter to find Machell staring at his open doorway from across the garden. From that distance, as he knew, the man could see nothing of what was happening inside; yet he bestirred himself sharply and moved away from the table. Len’s attitude affected him unpleasantly, just as his coming early had done; so that, when he went out at last to join him and give him his orders for the day, he had an uncomfortable feeling that this morning he was an enemy rather than a friend.
The feeling passed, however, as soon as he came into contact with him. Len was apparently his usual genial self, with nothing more sinister at the back of his mind than the preparations for peas and potatoes. The rest of the men arrived presently, and the gardens fell into their usual routine. By the time the sun had broken through, Kirkby was again beginning to wonder whether the letter and all that it stood for had been anything more than a dream.
The very weather of yesterday, that soul-troubling weather which had helped so largely towards his decision, now seemed like a dream, too. Looking at the fresh yet quiet colouring of to-day, at outlines diamond-clear and yet soft as human breath, he found it impossible to re-imagine it. But that was the worst of weather, as he knew, even although at the same time it was the wonder of it. You were happy on the good days, feeling that they would go on for ever; but, on the other hand, the bad days seemed as if they would go on for ever, too. And the bad days were very dangerous, because they were apt to make you lose heart. On the bad days, if you were not careful what you were doing, you might find yourself signing the whole of your life away....
Yesterday had been a destructive day, so bitter and killing that it seemed as if this morning everything should have been withered; but instead of being withered things were pulsing with new vigour. Even where there was no life showing above the soil, life spoke to him from below. The air, vivifying yet soft, had that baptismal touch which comes only at one time of the year. And running all through Nature was the thrill which comes out of nowhere, like the Spirit, so that the quiet land seemed to heave and thrill like sunlit waves of sea.
It came to him now that, next year, when the thrill was in the air, he would be in Canada. It would be the same thrill, he told himself hurriedly, because Nature’s magic was the same everywhere; and yet it would not be quite the same. On the soil where you had been born and bred there was always something more. Not only did you feel the thrill of the spring that was coming, but the thrill of the springs that were gone; so that, with each fresh spring on your native ground, the thrill deepened because of the past.
That thrill, at least, if he went to Canada, he would never feel again....
He had been right about Machell, he discovered later.... He discovered it after breakfast,—a breakfast which seemed to him more like a meal in a railway station than anything else. Beyond removing a few things from the mantelpiece, and routing a few other things out of a cupboard, Mattie had not actually begun her preparations for packing, but she managed to give the impression, nevertheless. The ebb and flow of her talk, rising and falling as she passed between kitchen and larder, came to him like the signals of approaching or departing trains.... Finishing his meal more hurriedly than usual, he went out to find Len again standing staring at the cottage.
This time, however, Machell made no attempt at concealment. Instead, he came forward to meet his chief awkwardly but eagerly.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” he began hastily, as if unable to contain himself any longer, “but there’s something I’d like to ask you. It’s all over the place you’re giving up your job, and I thought happen you’d put in a word for me if I was to apply for it.”
For a moment or two after he had spoken Kirkby did not know how to answer. He should have been prepared for the shock, he knew, but the fact remained that he was not prepared for it. Absurd as it seemed, it had not yet occurred to him that this sort of thing would follow naturally upon his “notice.” It would have come to him, of course, with the actual sending of the letter, but so far he had not progressed beyond the actual writing of it. His intuition had been trying to warn him, it was true, but he had not been able to grasp what it wished to tell him. But it was clear enough to him now why Len had seemed to him like a stranger who might possibly do him harm....
“What makes you think I’m meaning to give up?” he enquired at last, evading the question, and shifting his gaze from the man’s face to the greenhouse behind him.
Len wriggled uncomfortably.
“Nay, I don’t know ...” he began, looking down. “But it’s been all over the spot for a long while now. They’ve got it down at the village, too. Mrs. Kirkby’s always talked a deal about leaving, you see,” he added, rather more confidently, “and lately it’s seemed to me you were leaning that way yourself.”
“How d’you mean—‘leaning’?” Kirkby questioned him a second time, and Machell wriggled again.
“Well, sir, you haven’t been like yourself for a bit now, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Absent-minded and such-like, and not hearing when folks spoke.... And, begging your pardon again, sir,” he finished, with a nervous burst, “but you’re getting on. It’s only in reason you should be thinking of retiring before so long....”
He found himself presently on the further side of the greenhouse, without quite knowing how he had got there, or what he had said to Machell before he went. He felt pretty sure, however, that he must have promised him his support, for he could still see the smile on the man’s face, though distorted by panes of glass. But he had got away quickly because he had not felt equal to smiling at him in return. Indeed, never in his life had he come so near to experiencing the emotion of positive hate.
He understood now that he had never known how much he had valued his position until he was on the point of losing it. He had done well at his job, of course, arriving early, and achieving a horticultural reputation, not only in his own immediate neighbourhood, but in a wider district. Visitors to the Hall treated him with deference, and consulted him as an authority. He was invited to lecture, to judge at flower-shows, to sit on the committees of various societies. He had also written pamphlets,—one, upon an Alpine plant which nobody else in England had been able to grow, but which grew quite simply and easily for Kirkby, merely, as far as one could make out, because he wished it to do so.
Successful, however, as he had been in his own little world, he had never allowed it to upset him. He had never been over-elated about his doings, or tried to create an impression. Indeed, he had hardly ever thought about himself at all. He had taken the rewards of life, when they came, as simply as he took the fact of the pollen in the ripened flower.
But he had grown used to the situation, all the same. He had grown to expect the deference and the recognition, without knowing that he expected them. They had ended by creating a special atmosphere of his own in which he moved and breathed as naturally as in the air around him.
That atmosphere would be one of the things which he would have to leave behind him when he went to Canada. He would be nobody,—out there. People might be kind to him, of course, might even like him, but they would know nothing about him. If they thought of him at all, it would probably be only as somebody’s father, old-fashioned and rather a nuisance. They would never know that he had done anything or been anything,—out there.
He felt ashamed of himself at first for caring so much about the loss of a thing like that, but as he pondered the question further, he saw deeper. It was not just conceit and vanity that made people want recognition when they were old. What they were looking for when they asked for it was a definite confirmation of their personality,—a vital necessity, without which they were apt to wither away. They were like cut flowers, he thought, once they had lost their special identity. That was why so many lingered on in the place where they had lived and worked, feeling that they would die if they were taken away from it. Even those who had been neither pleasant nor useful in their lives received some sort of recognition in the place where they had lived. The new folks whom you met when you were old often seemed tacitly to deny that you had ever lived at all. You fought against it, at first, but you could do nothing about it. Presently, perhaps, you even came to see yourself through their eyes as a sort of ghost,—a ghost who would never have any future, and who had never had any past....
And along with your life, of course, they denied your work,—that work which was part of you and yet was so much bigger than you, and which you had fondly imagined would still live on in people’s minds, even after you, who mattered so much less than the work, were dead and crumbled away....
One of the several garden-cats appeared at that moment around a corner of the greenhouse, and twined itself lovingly about his legs. He could see another inside the greenhouse, sitting on one of the stages, and still another sunning itself happily inside one of the frames. They were an old breed now, which had been in the gardens for years—so old, indeed, that he had ceased to distinguish between the generations. For the same reason, and because of their puzzling likeness to one another, they had no individual names, but were known collectively as The Cat.
They were an ugly breed, he supposed, although he admitted it grudgingly,—brindled, with the darker spots of the brindling appearing invariably in the wrong places,—but he liked to see them about. It gave him a sense of pleasure to watch the sun bringing out on their glossy sides the tawny hues which went so well with wood and soil. He had grown so accustomed to them, indeed, that a cat of any other description about the place would have offended his artistic eye.
The Cat was another of the things which he would have to leave behind him when he went to Canada,—the things which already he was beginning to count over and to weigh before the time came to let them go. He wondered for a moment or two whether it would be possible to take one of the breed with him, but came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t do. Mattie might not like it; the people at the other end might not like it; and most certainly the cat wouldn’t like it. No, it would never do.
He pulled himself together, after a while, and went off about his business, but the beauty of the young spring day was largely spoiled for him. He even shrank from it, now, especially when it called to him, attracting his attention with scent and sigh in the fashion peculiar to the spring. Instead of soothing and heartening him, as it had always done before, it now seemed almost to attack him. He shrank from The Cat, too, especially from the sight of the sun touching it as it stalked across the gardens; and, going into his little office to examine his post which had just arrived, he shrank when he found catalogues and circulars addressed to “The Head Gardener.”
But most of all he found himself shrinking when he had to approach any of his men, fearing to find some other of them with Len’s petition ready upon his lips. As it happened, indeed, not one of them as much as hinted at his going, let alone applied for his post; but he continued to shrink from them, nevertheless. Self-conscious with his staff for almost the only time in his life, he felt that they talked about him when they saw him coming, and talked again when he went away.
He felt sure, at all events, that they knew what was happening or about to happen, together with the fact of Machell’s application. Discreet as they might choose to be on their own account, they must at least be aware of that. He wondered how long the question of his retirement had been discussed among them, and how much time they had given him. It humiliated him to think that the struggle between himself and his wife should apparently be common knowledge. Perhaps they had even betted upon the contest, he said to himself, bitterly, backing first one and then the other? Or, perhaps, he added, with a cynicism which was very foreign to him, they, too, had known that he would be defeated from the start?...