Once he asked his mother “What had happened?” She told him that “They were very wicked people and had gone away.”
When he was up and about again he went to the farm and looked through the gate. Within there was absolute stillness. A pig was snuffling amongst the manure.
He went out to the moor. It was a perfect afternoon, only a little breeze blowing. The pools, slightly ruffled, were like blue lace. A rabbit sitting in front of his hole did not move. He threw himself, face downwards on the ground, burying his nose in it, feeling in some strange way that Humphrey was there.
CHAPTER IX
THE PICTURE-BOOK
I
September 1 was Mary’s birthday, and it had always something of a melancholy air about it because it meant that the holidays were drawing to a close. Soon there would be the last bathe, the last picnic, the last plunge across the moor, the last waking to the sharp, poignant cry of the flying, swerving gulls.
Then in strange, sudden fashion, like the unclicking of a door that opens into another room, the summer had suddenly slipped aside, giving place to autumn; not full autumn yet, only a few leaves turning, a few fires burning in the fields, the sea only a little colder in colour, the sky at evening a chillier green; but the change was there, and with it Polchester, and close behind Polchester old Thompson stepped towards them.
Yes, Mary’s birthday marked the beginning of the end, and, in addition to that, there was the desperate, urgent question of present-giving. Mary took her present-giving (or rather present-getting) with the utmost seriousness. No one in the whole world minded quite so desperately as she what she got, who gave it her, and how it was given. Not that she was greedy; indeed, no. She was not like Helen, who guessed the price of everything that she received, and had what Uncle Samuel called “a regular shop mind.”
It was all sentiment with Mary. What she wanted was that someone (anyone) should love her and therefore give her something. She knew that Uncle Samuel did not love her, and she suffered not, therefore, the slightest unhappiness did he forget her natal day; but she would have cried for a week had Jeremy forgotten it. She did not mind did Jeremy only spend sixpence on his gift (but he was a generous boy and always spent everything that, at the moment, he had) so that she might be sure that he had taken a little trouble in the buying of it.
Jeremy knew all this well enough and, in earlier years, the question of buying had been simple, because Cow Farm was miles from anywhere, the nearest village being the fishing cove of Rafiel, and Rafiel had only one “shop general,” and the things in this shop general were all visible in the window from year’s end to year’s end. Mary, therefore, received on her birthday something with which, by sight at least, she was thoroughly familiar.