Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard

by Eleanor Farjeon

Margaret looked at him thoughtfully and said, "If they have, I have not seen them here. And I think they could not have been here without my knowledge. For no one lives here but I, and I live nowhere else."

Hobb sighed and said, "I had hoped otherwise. For, dear, I cannot rest until I have helped them." Then he told her as much as he knew of his four brothers; and her face clouded as he spoke, and her eyes looked hurt and angry by turns, and her beautiful mouth turned sulky. So then Hobb put his arm round her and said, "Do not be too troubled, for I know I shall presently find the cause and cure of these boys' ills." But Margaret pushed his arm away and rose restlessly to her feet, and paced up and down, muttering, "What do I care for these boys? It is not for them I am troubled, but for myself and you."

"For us?" said Hobb. "How can trouble touch us who love each other?"

At this Margaret threw herself on the grass beside him, and laid her head against his knee, and drew his hands to her, pressing them against her eyes and lips and throat and bosom as though she would never let them go; and through her kisses she whispered passionately, "Do you love me? do you truly love me? Oh, if you love me do not go away immediately. For I have only just found you, but your brothers have had you all their lives. And presently you shall go where you please for their sakes, but now stay a little in this wood for mine. Stay a month with me, only a month! oh, my heart, is a month much to ask when you and I found each other but an hour ago? For this time of love will never come again, and whatever other times there are to follow, if you go now you will be shutting your eyes upon the lovely dawn just as the sun is rising through the colors. And when you return, you will return perhaps to love's high-noon, but you will have missed the dawn for ever." And then she lifted her prone body a little higher until it rested once more in the curve of his arm against his heart, and she lay with her white face upturned to his, and her dark soft eyes full of passion and pleading, and she put up her fingers to caress his cheek, and whispered, "Give me my little month, oh, my heart, and at the end of it I will give you your soul's desire."

And not Hobb or any man could have resisted her.

So he promised to remain with her in Open Winkins, and not to go further on his quest till the next moon. And indeed, with all time before and behind him it did not seem much to promise, nor did he think it could hurt his brothers' case. But the kernel of it was that he longed to make the promise, and could not do otherwise than make the promise, and so, in short, he made the promise.

Then Margaret led him to two small lodges on the skirts of the forest; they were made of round logs, with moss and lichen still upon them, and they were overgrown with the loveliest growths of summer—with blackberry blossoms, a wonderful ghostly white, spread over the bushes like fairies' linen out to dry, and wild roses more than were in any other lovers' forest on earth, and the maddest sweetest confusion of honeysuckle you ever saw. Within, the rooms were strewn with green rushes, and hung with green cloths on which Margaret had embroidered all the flowers and berries in their seasons, from the first small violets blue and white to the last spindle-berries with their orange hearts splitting their rosy rinds. And there was nothing else under each roof but a round beech-stump for a stool, and a coffer of carved oak with metal locks, and a low mattress stuffed with lamb's-fleece picked from the thorns, and pillows filled with thistledown; and each couch had a green covering worked with waterlily leaves and white and golden lilies. "These are the Pilleygreen Lodges," said she, "and one is mine and one is yours; and when we want cover we will find it here, but when we do not we will eat and sleep in the open."

And so the whole of that July Hobb dwelt in the Pilleygreen Lodges in Open Winkins with his love Margaret. And by the month's end they had not done their talking. For did not a young lifetime lie behind them, and did they not foresee a longer life ahead, and between lovers must not all be told and dreamed upon? and beyond these lives in time, which were theirs in any case, had not love opened to them a timeless life of which inexhaustible dreams were to be exchanged, not always by words, though indeed by their mouths, and by the speech of their hands and arms and eyes? Hobb told her all there was to tell of the Burgh and his life with his brothers, both before and after their tragedies, but he did not often speak of them for it was a tale she hated to hear, and sometimes she wept so bitterly that he had ado to comfort her, and sometimes was so angry that he could hardly conciliate her. But such was his own gentleness that her caprices could withstand it no more than the shifting clouds the sun. And Margaret told him of herself, but her tale was short and simple—that her parents had died in the forest when she was young, and that she had lived there all her life working with her needle, twice yearly taking her work to the Cathedral Town to sell; and with the proceeds buying what she needed, and other cloths and silk and gold with which to work. She opened the coffer in Hobb's lodge and showed him what she did: veils that she had embroidered with cobwebs hung with dew, so that you feared to touch them lest you should destroy the cobweb and disperse the dew; and girdles thick-set with flowers, so that you thought Spring's self on a warm day had loosed the girdle from her middle, and lost it; and gowns worked like the feathers of a bird, some like the plumage on the wood-dove's breast, and others like a jay's wing; and there was a pair of blue skippers so embroidered that they appeared and disappeared beneath a flowing skirt with reeds and sallows rising from a hem of water, you thought you had seen kingfishers; and there were tunics overlaid with dragonflies' wings and their delicate jointed bodies of green and black-and-yellow and Chalk-Hill blue; and caps all gay with autumn berries, scarlet rose-hips and wine-red haws, and the bright briony, and spindle with its twofold gayety, and one cap was all of wild clematis, with the vine of the Traveler's Joy twined round the brim and the cloud of the Old Man's Beard upon the crown. And Hobb said, "It is magic. Who taught you to do this?" And Margaret said, "Open Winkins."

Early in their talks he told her of his garden, and of the golden rose he tried to grow there, and of his failures; and Margaret knew by his voice and his eyes more than by his words that this was the wish of his heart. And she smiled and said, "Now I know with what I must redeem my promise. Yet I think I shall be jealous of your golden rose." And Hobb, lifting a wave of her glittering hair and making a rose of it between his fingers, asked, "How can you be jealous of yourself?" "Yet I think I am," said she again, "for it was something of myself you promised to give me presently, and I would rather have something of you." "They are the same thing," said Hobb, and he twisted up the great rose of her hair till it lay beside her temple under the ebony fillet. And as his hand touched the fillet he looked puzzled, and he ran his finger round its shining blackness and exclaimed, "But this too is hair!" Margaret laughed her strange laugh and said, "Yes, my own hair, you discoverer of open secrets!" And putting up her hands she unbound the fillet, and it fell, a slender coil of black amongst the golden flood of her head, like a serpent gliding down the sunglade on a river.

"Why is it like that?" said Hobb simply.