“I’m sure she could,” said Dorothy with conviction. “I have her address and I’ll write to-night and tell her all about you: that you’re a rising poet, and that your friends and relations will be so grateful if she’ll do for you what she did for Tommy.”
He had an ironic glance for her “rising.” His relations—and Aunt Emily and her brood were the nearest left to him—had never in the least taken in his standing or realized that he was, among people who knew, looked upon as completely risen. At the same time, sunken was what he felt himself; drowned deep; too deep, he sometimes thought, for recovery. His last little volume had been like a final fight for breath. He had written most of it over there, after Ronnie’s death and before his own decisive breakdown, and he knew it a result as much of his malady as of his war experience.
He wondered now, anew, whether these people had really read the poems. If they had, it only showed how impervious to reality they must remain. And there had actually been one, written after one of his leaves, called “Eating Bread-and-Butter,” that should indeed have embarrassed them, had they remembered it, inviting them to eat it with him in a trench with unburied comrades lying in No-Man’s Land before them. His head, as he thought of that,—from unburied comrades passing to unburied friends,—gave a nervous, backward jerk, for he had told himself before that he must stop thinking in certain directions; and indeed the poems had helped to exorcise the obsession at the time when they had been written.
All the same, it was very strange—such a poet at such a tea-party. He had plunged into Aunt Emily’s tea-party as he plunged nowadays into anything that presented itself as offering distraction. And now, as he said, “Well, if you’ll put it through, I’ll go, and be very grateful to you,” he felt that he was making another plunge into Mrs. Baldwin’s cottage.
II
IT was a pretty cottage he found, as, on the September evening, his station fly drew up at the wicket-gate. They had come a long way from the station, and, after leaving a small village, the winding lane, too, had seemed long. He saw, nevertheless, as he alighted, that the rustic building, old stones below and modern thatch above, could not be far from the central group of which it formed an adjunct; for it had been contrived, by devices dear to the heart of the week-ender, from two or three labourers' cottages thrown into one and covered all over with the capacious and brooding thatch. “Quaint,” Dorothy’s really inevitable word, altogether expressed it, from the box hedges that ran on either side of the flagged path, to the pale yellow hollyhocks beside the door.
A round-cheeked country girl, neatly capped and aproned, opened the door on a square, rush-matted hall; and beyond that he saw a room full of the sunset, where a table was being laid and from which Mrs. Baldwin came out to greet him.
She was not tall, and had thick, closely bound braids. He had dreaded finding himself at once dealt with as a case; but Mrs. Baldwin’s manner was not even that of one accustomed to paying guests. Her murmur of welcome, her questions about his journey, her mild directions as she led him up to his room, "Be careful at this landing, the level of the floor goes up and the beam comes down so low,"—were rather those of a shy and entirely unprofessional hostess.
He thought, as soon as he took in his room, with its voile-de-Gènes hangings and dear old furniture, that he pleased her by saying, “What a delicious room!” and even more when, on going to the wide, low, mullioned window, its panes open to the west, he added, “And what a delicious view!” There were meadows and tall hedgerow elms, and, running in a tranquil band of brightness, the stream that reflected the sky.
She did not say that she was glad he liked it, but her very gentle smile at the welcome it all made for him was part of the welcome. What she did say was, with the little air of shy preoccupation, while she wrung her finger-tips together, those of one hand in those of the other, “I think the water’s very hot. I have a rather young little maid. You’ll tell me if you want anything. Are three blankets and the down quilt enough? The nights are rather cold already.”