To complete this discursion on cottages, some of us visited the other day a tiny house, where all the downstairs rooms, except the kitchen, had been thrown together, making a charming, long, low living-room with one great black beam across the ceiling. On the walls was a perfect cottage paper, with isolated pink rose-buds well-distanced from each other: a pink rosebud chintz and black carpet dotted with faint stiff roses, made quaint and unusual but very satisfying arrangement. The windows looked out on a pine wood across a hedge of rampant pink Dorothy Roses. Gazing out on the dim, dark green grey aisles of the fir trees one would want the gay note within; and the little Rose-strewn paper was perfection.
Yesterday the Grandfather of Loki dragged the Grandmother in her bath-chair out into the heart of the moors. It’s a sporting bath-chair this. It has been over as much rough ground as a horse artillery gun-carriage, and nothing in the matter of obstacles stops it unless it is barbed wire; it was chosen as light in make as possible, and now it has a rakish, weather-beaten appearance, like an old mountain mule.
The rare strangers we meet on our wild career regard us with varied sentiments. Some are obviously filled with compassion over the joggling the occupant of the bath-chair must be enduring. “What can that fool of a man be about to expose that wretchedly delicate woman to such suffering?” their expression says to us as they pass. Others, on the other hand, are horror-stricken at the spectacle of the wifely brutality that condemns this weakly, good-natured man to the task of lugging her about. There is a good deal of uphill work, of course, about us, and he goes a good pace. “You ought to get a donkey, Madam,” is their conclusion.
On two or three occasions good Samaritans have rushed to assist him, with glances of scathing rebuke at this new embodiment of woman’s tyranny.
But they are some of our best days, in spite of outside disapproval. And, to go back to yesterday, we started off with all the dogs in a state of “high cockalorum”—Arabella in her most obsequious mood ‹having been scolded the day before for running away›; Loki, the Chinaman, trotting on in determined and splendid isolation as usual, it being quite against Chinese etiquette to speak to any fur-brother outside the garden gates; Betty, and her father Laddie, secretly determined to go hunting, no matter what execrations should be hurled after them. Laddie comes from a neighbouring house, and insists on adopting us as his family. It is very hard to be brutal and say that we won’t be adopted when a pair of the most beautiful cairngorm eyes in all the world are looking up at us out of the dear long, wise, pathetic dog face. In fact, we are not brutal; and Laddie comes and goes as he likes. Only he is occasionally carried back to his cook ‹who, it seems, duly loves him› by Juvenal the tender-hearted.
It is very difficult to reach the moors, with this discursiveness! But, in a sunshine as blazing as that which ever fell from any Italian sky, we did get into the hollow of the heather hills, and there spend an afternoon of perfect dreaminess and pleasure.
BATH CHAIR AND HEATHER
Loki’s Grandfather took off his coat and marched up the slippery paths, the bath-chair bumping merrily after him. It is one of his male prerogatives to scorn the idea of sunstroke, and Loki’s Grandmother is filled with apprehensions half the time. But when she saw him stretched on a rug over the heather, smoking his pipe, and the four dogs cast themselves down in attitudes expressive of their different natures, the mental horizon became cloudless. The material skies—if such an adjective can be used in such connexion—the unplumbed dome of mystery above us, were by no means cloudless, and that was part of their wonderful beauty. Huge lazy white clouds, so luminous as to be dazzling, sailed over the rim of the moor and cast shadows of indescribable mauve and purple into the hollows. A day of such intense light it was that every tree in the thick of the woods flung its patch of shadow, purple-dark against the vivid green. And, oh, the colour of the Ling, mixed with Hill Heather, set with islands of Bracken—Bracken in its proper place—silver under the sun rays, against the blue! And the scent of the Heath and the Whin!
One doesn’t know if it is exactly one’s soul that the beauty touches, the appeal is so strongly to the senses. But the soul is of it; for no mere physical joy can give such a serenity, such an airiness as of wings to the spirit. Mr. A. C. Benson says, in some early book of his, that one of the great proofs to him of the existence of God is the feeling which comes at the sight of a very beautiful prospect. We want to give ourselves to it—he says—to be absorbed into it; and that is a movement of the soul, for everything earthly is possessive.