Morrison met him at the station. She was glowing with health and good spirits and began to tease him at once about his luggage, of which she insisted on taking charge.
“It’s the loveliest little cottage!” she said; “only two rooms. . . . I hope you don’t mind walking along the road. There is another way through the fields, but I daren’t try to find it; besides, it goes through the woods, and I don’t want you to see any woods before you have been to mine. I don’t believe there’ll be room for you in the cottage. You’ll have to sit in the garden and have your meals handed out to you, among the chickens and the pigs.”
“Pigs?” said Mendel, “I want to draw pigs. Marvellous animals!”
“These are the most marvellous pigs that ever were.”
So they chattered in a growing glee as they walked along the winding road up into the hills. They were unwilling to let their deep thoughts emerge until they had been caught up in the beauty of the place, the serene lines of the comfortable folding hills, the farmsteads tucked in the hollows, the rich velvet plough-lands, the blue masses of woods, the gorse-grown common, and the single sentinels the trees, and the hedges where the birds sang and twittered, Tit-a-weet! tit-a-weet! . . . And over the hills hung the wide sky, vast and open, with great clouds that seemed to be drawn from the edge of the earth and sent floating up and up to show how limitless was the space above the earth.
For the first time Mendel had no sting of anger at the exhilaration in the English girl, no desire to pluck her out from the surroundings of the lovely English country in which it seemed to be her desire to lose herself. She was one with the rich fields and the mighty trees and the singing birds in the hedges, and when his heart sang Tit-a-weet, he knew it for a comic Cockney note. It was he who was at fault, not she, and she was the very comfort he had come to seek.
The farmer’s wife received him with a kindly pity—the poor, pale London foreigner—and told him he must have plenty of good plain country food, plenty of milk, plenty of fresh air.
“I do the cooking for Miss Clowes,” she said, “and if you’ll excuse my saying so, the young ladies take a deal of tempting.”
Mendel thought her a wonderful woman, his room a wonderful room, the cottage a wonderful cottage, and the place the finest in the world. The air was rare and buoyant and he had never felt so free and so strong. His life in London looked to him like a bubble which he could break with a touch or with a puff of his breath. But he was reluctant to break it yet, for the time had not come.
The girls showed him their work and he praised it, and began to talk of his own picture. Clowes led him on to explain what she called the modern movement, which she could not pretend to understand.