In Pursuit of Spring

by Edward Thomas

“I will not tell you her age, but I want to give you something of Martha’s history, though it is now too late for the development of that instinct for treating her deferentially.

“The family has been in the parish since the beginning of the parish register, in 1597. I should say that 597 would be much nearer the date when they settled in that clearing among the oaks. Fifteen centuries is not much to a temperament like theirs, perhaps. But they will hardly see another fifteen: they have not adapted themselves. Martha and her sister Mary were old Norgett’s only children. I don’t think you ever saw Mary. You would have treated her deferentially. As bright and sweet as a chaffinch was Mary. She had small, warm brown eyes that seemed to be dissolving in a glow of amused pleasure at everything. Everybody and everything as a rule conspired to preserve the glow; but now and then—cruelly and very easily—drawing tears from them because then they were softer than ever, and one could not help smiling as one wiped the tears away, as if she had only cried for craft and prettiness. That was when she was seven or eight. For a year or so she was always either laughing or crying. Visitors used to take delight in converting one into the other. They treated her like a bird. She had very thick and long, fine and dark brown hair—such beautiful and lustrous hair! I remember treating it as if it were alive, apart from her life, as if it were a wild creature living on her shoulders.

“She was considered rather a stupid child. Some people seem to regard animals as rather stupid human beings never blessed with spectacles and baldness—it was they who called her stupid. She never said anything wise. Usually she laughed when she spoke, and you could hardly make out the words: to try to read a meaning of an accustomed sort into her speech was little better than making a translation from a brook’s song or a bird’s song; for in her case also it really meant translating from an unknown tongue. Everybody gave her presents. She had as many dolls as the cat had kittens. She was fond of people, but she seemed fonder of these, and, seeing her, I used to smile and think of the words: ‘Ye shall serve gods the work of men’s hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, not eat, nor smell.’

“There were a hundred differences between her and Martha. Martha had but one doll. It was an old stiff wooden doll, cut by the keeper for his first-born, and never clothed. Martha kept it in the wood-lodge, and would not have it in the house, but went to look at it just once at morning and once at night, and never missed doing so. She did not play with Mary’s, though as maid-of-all-work, bustling about seriously and untidily, often breaking and upsetting things, she treated them with immense reverence, putting them safely away in a sitting posture when their mistress was tired of them and left them on chairs, in the hearth, or on the table—anywhere. Nobody supposed that Martha cared anything for her solitary wooden idol, and if you inquired after it she only looked awkwardly into your face with those pale eyes and said nothing, or perhaps asked you if you would like to see Mary’s newest one. She was always busy, they could not keep her from work; she was strong, and never ailed or complained. If a baby was brought to the house, to see Mary’s delicate ways with it was worth a journey; surrounding it with dolls, and giving herself up to it and taking good care of it, while Martha slipped away and was not to be seen. Mary was tenderest hearted, and could never pass carelessly by anything like a calf’s head thrust out of a hole in a dark shed into the sun. As for Martha she was too busy, though of course she would run to the town, if need were, to fetch a vet.

“Mary was not nearly so strong, but she continued to grow in grace and charm. At seventeen I think she was the loveliest human being of her sex that I ever saw. I say of her sex, because she was so absolutely and purely a woman that she seemed a species apart, even to me a mystery; every position of her, every attitude, action, everything she did and did not do, proclaimed her a woman newly created out of the elements which but yesterday made her a child, an animal or bird in human form. Many would have liked to marry her. Her round soft chin, her rather long, and not too thin, smiling mouth, her living hair, her wild eyes, won her lovers wherever she was seen. And yet I had a feeling that she would not marry.... However, I came back from Italy one year to find her married to a young farmer near Alton.

“Martha had already been with us for some years. When Mary began to have babies Martha was over at the farm as often as possible. Mary grew paler and thinner, but not less beautiful, and hardly less gay and childlike. She did as she pleased—always perfectly dressed, while others, and, above all, Martha, busied themselves in a hundred ways for her and her baby. Now that she was obviously delicate as well as beautiful, her hair looked more than ever like a wild life of some kind affectionately attached to her. Martha worked harder for her, if that were possible, than for us. I have heard her panting away as she swept the stairs and sometimes sighing, too, but never stopping for that luxury, and her sister would call out and laughingly chide her for it, to which she replied with another laugh, not ceasing to pant or to sweep. Mary was adored by her husband.

“Few men, I should say, took notice of Martha. She was very abrupt with them, and had nothing to say if they spoke out of a wish to be agreeable. Now and then she reported some advance—a soldier, for example, offered to carry her parcels home for her at night; but as soon as they turned from the high road into our dark lane she found an excuse, swept up all the parcels into her arms and was off without a word. Another time she allowed herself to be taken home on several evenings by a young man whose real sweetheart was away for a time: he had told her the fact, and politely asked if she would like him to take her home in the interval. What Martha wanted was a baby. She was the laughing-stock of the kitchen for confessing it. She did not mind: she stitched away at baby’s underclothing which all went for her sister’s infants, but was meant for her own. She once bought a cradle at an auction sale—do you feel deferential now? Yet one man she put off by telling him she already had a lover.

“Did you ever hear of her one dream? She came in and told us in great excitement that she had had a dream. She said, ‘It was as plain as plain, and all the family were eating boiled potatoes with their fingers except me. Law, mum, that ever I should have dreamed such a thing.’... She blushed that the family should have been put to shame in a dream of hers.

“At last we heard that she had a lover. Her fellow servants accused her of doing the courting, and he was younger than she. She was not impatient, even now. When she heard that we were to move in a year’s time, she made up her mind that she must go to the new house and see what it was like living there. ‘He’s not so bad,’ she said quietly. ‘Father and mother think the world of him. It’s not love. Oh, no! I’m too old for that, and I won’t have any nonsense. But he says he’ll marry me. We shall love after that, maybe; but if not, there’ll be the children. We shall have a nice little home. Charley has bought a mirror, and he is saving up for a ring with a real stone in it.’ And so she went on soberly, yet perhaps madly.