The Marbeck Inn: A Novel

by Harold Brighouse

Illumination came to him, not in the crowded railway carriage, but in the trap which drove them from the station to the Inn. It came, he thought, miraculously, but perhaps the miracle was nothing more than that a man sees clearly in Westmoreland, and sees through dirt in Manchester. He worshipped Effie who was sacrificing all to him, and with abasement at the thought that he had meant, with his pitiful achievements, to surprise her.

He, shepherded to joy at the Marbeck Inn had set out to surprise Effie! That was what made it, from the first dawn of understanding, a perfect wonder-tale. He had not calculated this; it happened, like a dream, in the air, unrooted in prevision. But that was all it had, except its rapt intensity, of the quality of dream. It was dreamlike because it was more vivid than his experience of life, but it was life. Only, he had not known these things about life before. He had underestimated life.

The Inn lay in a saucer of the hills at the end of a road which led to nowhere. As a road, it finished at the Inn and went on only as a rough cart-track which dwindled and divided into two trails across the passes. The fells came down in grandeur to the Inn—it wasn’t a place from which one looked at distant hills, but one where the hills were intimately there—and half a mile away there was the Lake.

They were twelve miles from a station, at the end of the world, alone with happiness. Of course, there were other people at the Inn, but Sam and Effie were alone: they two with the heather and the bracken and the pines: they two with love.

The crowd has not discovered Marbeck. The Inn, the Church, the Vicarage, down by the Lake the Hall, a farmhouse or two along the road, and that is all. Six miles away there is a post-office.

He had followed the crowd on his rare holidays. He knew Blackpool Promenade and Morecambe and the things to do at Douglas. Here, one did not do those things. One walked and climbed and lay extended on the heather or in the perfect isolation of high bracken, and bathed in the Lake or the streams or the tarns, haphazard, naked, where one liked and when one liked; and all the time one breathed the air.

It needed no thunderous knocking on the door to get her out of bed into the Marbeck air. Sam would go for an early dip in the pool below the Inn where two streams cascaded into a swimmable basin, and when he returned she would be up or ready to get up that he might brush her hair, or not up that she might play at being peevish and be lifted out of bed by him.

And the food, the good rough plenty of the Marbeck Inn! They ate of it prodigiously and carried to the hills parcels of sandwiches and cakes and cheese, shamelessly large, which they emptied to the last crumb, and eked out in the woods with raspberries and nuts.

She took him on the Lake, with a rod borrowed from the Inn, and showed him how to fish. He relished it amazingly, catching little but the spirit of the thing, happy because of the green reflection of the woods in the water and because of her. His restlessness found pause in a boat with Effie and she noted with a keen delight that he did not envy the expert basket of the postman who cycled to Marbeck in the mornings and fished till he cycled away with the letters in the afternoon. She registered as a happy gain that he did not want to shine, or try to beat that seasoned fisher at his game. Nor did the posts distract them. They had no letters there.

They bathed continually, for it was hot, and here again he made no effort to excel, but let it be admitted that she was the better swimmer. How much the better she did not let him know. She knew that he found the water here a purer element than in the old Blackfriars Baths where he had learnt when he was at school, and she tired less rapidly than he did. But he was wondrously content to own inferiority.