The things which belong—

by Constance Holme

Yet, after all, he said to himself, straightening himself as he stood, it was his weak pen which had altered their destinies. Mattie’s handwriting, superior though it was, could not in this case have had the weight of his. The ink that was left had been more than sufficient for the few, colourless words in which, after forty years’ service, he had sent in his notice.

It had seemed so impossible a thing before it was done, and, now that it was done, it seemed so easy. Simple and easy, as death seemed, when you saw it close.... But it was wrong of him to keep on thinking of the change that was coming in terms of trouble or death. Once already that morning he had had to remind himself that what it really stood for was new life.

Yet it was only in terms of death, he said to himself obstinately, that he could think of the actual break. It seemed absurd that the snapping of a tie like that could be brought about by the mere scraping of a rusty pen. It should be accomplished, he thought, in some more dramatic way, like the call to attention of clean shot, and the lowering of something into a grave.

Forty years’ service was in that letter, but there was so much more besides. He had been bred on the estate, like his parents before him, and he had never left it. All that was in it, too. Old customs and ways of thought, closer and closer growth to human beings and to the soil,—links that had loosened and even broken, but had always welded again,—all these were there. Not in the actual wording of the letter, of course, but in its very texture; so that it seemed as if one man alone could never carry its weight of association and memory, and its long tale of the years.

And more besides.... Not only was there forty years’ service in the letter, but there was forty years’ struggle ... all that long contest between himself and his wife, which had begun in the first year of their marriage and never stopped,—never, that is, until last night with the writing of the letter, when it had stopped as a clock stops in a house where somebody dies.

Even this morning he had that same feeling as of a clock stopped somewhere in the house, followed as it always was by a silence that could be heard....

Well, it was all over,—the talks, the disputes, the discussions as to ways and means. She had always wanted to go, and he had never been able to go; first, because he hadn’t the money and, second, because he hadn’t the heart. He had grown to believe that the discussions would go on for ever, and now they were at an end. It almost seemed as if they would have nothing to talk about any more.

She had never liked the place from the very start; never settled or learned to look upon it as home. He had waited for the years to work their magic upon her, and they had never worked it. She had never settled.... Always she had gone on longing and reaching out for something that wasn’t there, something that in the very nature of things couldn’t possibly be there.

It had taken him a long time to understand, and he was not sure that he understood, even yet. All that he had definitely learned from the clash of wills was that the heart must face its own way; that one man’s meat may be another man’s poison, and that the holy, inhabited place wherein one soul can find its peace may be nothing but an airless vacuum to another.

Yet it was not, he sometimes argued with himself, as if he had taken her from such a very different existence. She was a gardener’s daughter, as he was a gardener’s son, and had been born to the same tranquil round and lovely isolation. He had thought her happy enough when he saw her at home, cheerful and busy and making her own interests; but that, as he knew now, was merely because of her youth. The soul can lay out its own pleasure-grounds when it is young. Later, when it ceases to do so, it sees the little ring-fence surrounding it only too plainly.