CHAPTER V
MANNINGTON, like most old-fashioned English towns, is built in a wood-sheltered hollow, and screened from the inclemencies of northern and easterly winds by the big chalk towns of Wiltshire. Before the days of railways and the decentralisation of local centres that followed, it had been a county town of some importance, but situated as it was only on a branch line of the Great Western, the mercantile and manufacturing life, never very vigorous, was sucked out of it into Swindon, and for the last fifty years or more it had been a place of singular sedateness and most leisurely life. In olden times the “county” and local gentry used to foregather there in considerable numbers for Christmas festivities, such as county and hunt balls, and the town is full of charming old red-brick residences, now for the most part let to wealthy and retired tradesfolk, or less wealthy but equally retired colonels and captains of the services, who, surrounded by their wives and families, live a very quiet and pleasant existence, warding off the gout which port and advancing years threaten them with by golf or gentle horse exercise on the downs. To the south and west the country is flat and open, the line of downs holding the town itself as if the base of the fingers of some huge grass-clad hand, while across the palm of it below, following, so to speak, the “line of heart,” the Kennet makes a loitering half-circle before wandering on again through its low-lying water-meadows, starred with red ragged-robin and the burnished gold of the marsh marigolds, to join the Thames at Reading. But though the vigour and stress of competitive manufacturing, as has been said, had left it, it still grew slowly, not in the way of small houses inhabited by the lower trading class, but of villas for those who had finished their trading, and it was now nearly joined by means of such an artery of gentility with the little village of St. Olaf’s, some miles distant from the streets of Mannington itself, of which Canon Alington was so assiduous a vicar. The church, gray, Norman, and of wonderful quiet dignity, stood with the vicarage and its acre or two of garden on the furthest edge of the village itself, and from there the Swindon road, which had curved downwards from the hills behind Mannington to collect the traffic of the town, began to climb the downs again, shaking off the houses from its margin, and, after passing a couple more larger residences, screened behind trees of fine growth from the dust and passage of carts, started on its lonely journey to the next village.
It was in the last of these, standing on a plateau, just above the water-meadows of the Kennet, that Mrs. Allbutt had just settled. It had been built in Jacobean times, and the trees which surrounded it, planted probably at the same date, were towers of leaf and spreading bough; but southward, toward the river, the view was open, and here lay the lawns and flower garden. The kitchen garden was at the back of the house, separated from the livelier and more ornamental part by a huge boxhedge, and beyond that again was the disused chalk quarry, now a place of grassy hollow and luxuriances of straggling bramble bushes, from which no doubt the old name of Chalkpits, so unromantically revived again by Mrs. Allbutt, was derived. Beyond again came an acre or two of beech-wood that even in this hot midsummer of the year retained something of the freshness and milky green of spring, and a wooden fence that shut off the little estate from the down and the road.
Edith’s determination to settle in the country had, though Peggy had tried to dissuade her from it, been made with perfect deliberation and foresight. She alone knew how deeply the past years had seared and burned her, and though, as she had told Peggy, she did not in the least cease to expect much pleasure from life and many agreeable days, she did not even now, though three years had passed since her torture had ended, feel up to making those incessant efforts, to racing with the rest, that were so essential a feature in the lives of those she would have lived among had she chosen to go to London. But she no longer felt those vital and exquisite anticipations of desires for happiness that are the distinguishing characteristics of youth. Youth for her in that sense, she believed, when she put into effect her determination to live quietly here, away from the boil and froth of life, to be definitely over. Nor had she even those memories and recollections of life and love which are sufficient to keep a woman alive and alert till the end of her days. She had missed that and the opportunity of those days would not come to her again.
But there were other ways apart from the love of husband and the love of children by which she could keep her soul alive, and keep also in touch with things that lived. Nature, the wonder of growing things, the miracle of running water, the flame of sunset and the white splendour of moon-rise were all things that spoke to her with that intimacy known only to the real lover of Nature. She realised how big a part in her healing had the silent, mystical touch of the great mother contributed: birds and beasts and trees and flowers had all had their hand in it, and it was they who still kept her power of living alive. It seemed to her now as she superintended and took active part in the making of the garden, which had been allowed to run riot in the unoccupied year before she had taken this house, a matchless miracle that when she dabbed seeds into the ground, a little rain that fell, a little sun that shone, a little darkness of night should cause the slender weak spikes of the plant to pierce the earth. A thrush built a nest in the box-hedge that separated the flower garden from the other, and it was with almost incredulous delight that one day in late spring, when she was down here superintending the arrangement of her furniture, she had seen in the wattled dome of the nest the unfledged birds, all gaping mouths that would make music on her lawns in another year. All this, the flaming of the Oriental poppies, the incense of the mignonette, the carpets of wild flowers, cistus and thyme and harebell on the downs above, she knew to be a voice that spoke to her. Humbly, reverently she listened to it, to its words of healing; but, oh, how much more passionately could she have loved it had it been the accompaniment, the setting of the human love which so few missed, but which in her case had been blurred and marred and could never come back again in splendour of banners!
Then again—and this, too, was so much more attainable in the country than in London—there was still intellectual achievement possible to her, by which she could speak intimately with others, and perhaps be a living and moving force in the world. For that, and for the long patient concentration of thought that it demanded, London seemed to her an impossible home; she was still too much in love with life not to be continually distracted by the bewildering fury of it there. The spectacle of that to her, as to Peggy, was absorbing; it was impossible to live one’s own life in town; all the hours belonged, as if in small allotments, to others, and there it was impossible to lead that detached life which to her at any rate seemed to be an essential condition of creative work. For she was no quick and nimble worker for whom the briskness of town life seems somehow congenial and natural; it was rather in solitude, in quiet, solitary evenings, in rambles alone over that open and exhilarating down that her thought matured and ripened best. It had been thus, though not here, that “Gambits” had been evolved; it would be here in this green, pleasant home of hers that she would work out and elaborate the new play which was already beginning to take form in her mind. As she had said to Hugh before on that night at Cookham, she marvelled at his not caring to set his mark on the world, to make people listen to him, for this to her was something of a passion which she could not imagine unshared by others, and the fact that she had done it, had tasted the intoxication of brilliant success, made her but more eager to drink of it again. But she had no intention of living a hermit’s existence, and, just as she wished to avoid the riot and rush of the world, so she had no idea of being a recluse. Solitary hours and many of them she wished for, but she filled up much of the day in the quiet, unexciting life of the place, for it was part of her plan to be busy, though not at the break-neck, runaway pace of Peggy. For she still had to keep her head turned in the direction of the future and averted from the past, and when she was not at work it was just in these cheerful little local employments that she could pass the time pleasantly but unemotionally. Then, too, there was the garden, which like some hungry animal swallowed at a gulp all the time she could give to it, though that time was considerable. For here the two main strands of her life as she had planned it were interwoven; Nature, grateful for and eagerly responding to her ministrations, spoke to her from the garden-beds, while some separate compartment of her brain, so it seemed, was brooding and busy, unconsciously for the most part, turning over in the cool darkness of it the scenes, the combinations, the characters of the next play. Sometimes out of that darkness would leap a sudden flash that she was wholly conscious of, and showed her how that subconscious self had been busy sorting, turning over, accepting and rejecting till a definite point, a clenched situation was struck out.
On this Saturday morning, the day following that on which Hugh had come down to St. Olaf’s, there was grim and deadly work before her, and with much misgiving and an almost fanatical honesty she had determined that she had to do it herself, since the kitchen garden was still much behindhand, and the heavy digging to be done there was a work that would employ the efforts of both her gardeners. So this morning she sallied out, with thick gloves on, and armed with a jar of brine and a small wooden peg, for even with gloves she could not bring herself to touch the slugs that she hoped and yet feared she would find on the traps she had put for them. For the evening before she had laid down at small and hospitable intervals a whole bushel of thinly-sliced potato: then came in the little wooden peg to transfer them to the jar of brine. When she looked at her nibbled seedlings she hardened her heart, but when she looked at the spread feast of sliced potato she dreaded to find the guests for whom she had spread it. Of course, she might have ordered a gardener away from the kitchen garden to do it for her, but it was only the weakness of the flesh that suggested that. She wanted to do things herself, and not be lily-handed. But she sincerely hoped there would not be many slugs.
She turned over the first piece of potato and found to her inexpressible relief that the purpose for which she had put it there was quite unfulfilled. But at the second there was a huge one, tortoise-shell coloured.
She put the brine-pot down on the garden path and, suppressing a shudder, tried to steel herself by thinking of the pansies whose faces had been eaten, of the Phlox drummondii which she had sown in such profusion, but which had never arrived at greater maturity than small spikes of leafless stem. She told herself, on the other side, that it was far better and wiser to spend the morning in work, to answer all the letters that certainly did want answering. Did she not pay two iron-nerved gardeners to do that sort of thing? At this moment she positively loathed Canon Alington, who had recommended to her this most deadly plan of entrapping slugs, simply because it was so brilliantly successful. Yet how mean and treacherous an operation! She spread the bounteous table on her garden-beds, and when her guests came, even while the flesh was yet in their mouths, their host arrived with death in the brine-pot! And all the time she knew this was false sentimentality, and not the least real even to herself. She was pumping it up in order to find some excuse for not putting that dreadful tortoise-shell slug in the brine, not because she loved or respected his life in the smallest degree or felt really any duties of a host towards him, but because the operation was so disgusting. And “Oh, this is not kindness, my poor Edith,” she said to herself; “it is sheer cowardice!”
For the moment, however, she was given a respite, for from the open French window of the drawing-room her butler appeared carrying a salver on which was a card. She tried to think to herself that it was very tiresome being interrupted in the morning, and knew that it was not. Then she took the card.