As I approached I heard voices. There were white-clad figures in the garden—the dresses looked thin and cool. I caught the sound of laughter, gentle and well-bred, and the clink of ice in glass. For one moment I stood irresolute, and then I fled. Down past the strawberries I hurried. I crouched behind the rose trellis, and made the open. I did not want to run,—I might be observed,—so I assumed an air of importance and walked as rapidly as possible over the rough ground. I climbed the stone wall; a loose stone fell and scraped my ankle. I said something and hurried on. A great elm tree shades the corner of this pasture; I sank to the ground in sheer exhaustion beneath its extended branches. Now I was safe.
I took off my coat and tried to put it between my back and the tree. What a lot of nonsense, I thought, is talked about Mother Nature. I never lay on the ground comfortably in my life; something always pricks or tickles or crawls, and it is hard. Now a low chair in a shaded garden with a cool drink in a tall glass, that might—but no, I would rather lie here until numb with stiffness than go back now.
Why people you don’t care about insist on breaking into the privacy of people they don’t care about is a mystery to me. This whole fabric of social life is a tissue of pretense, an empty trading in social coin: a dinner for a dinner, a luncheon for a luncheon, a call for a call, with a sweeping clearance-sale once a year in the form of a crowded miscellaneous affair called a tea.
Those people there in the garden. I do not know who they are, but I can guess. I am well out of it; I am sure I am not interested in the domestic details of their lives, and they are all talking at once about their servants or their children. Unpleasant as my present situation is, I am quite content to stay here until they go and life returns to the pleasant channels of normal privacy.
I tried sitting up straight; I even tried to cross my legs, tailor-fashion—this proved an anatomical impossibility. I remembered the tobacco, rose, and laid some out on a stone near at hand. As I did so I heard the swish of grass, and the family cow moved placidly into the area of shade. With delicate deliberation she lay down, and we found ourselves face to face. If she was surprised she did not betray it. She looked at me with great liquid eyes as tranquil as a forest pool. I noticed her nose. How flat and big and wet and cool it looked! I decided she was a good-looking cow. I hope she is as good as she looks, for she constitutes the entire herd.
I have a friend, a most engaging person, who combines profound knowledge of a dozen sciences with an encyclopædic erudition in regard to cows. He asked me once if she was a grade cow. I said I did not know, but she had a curious metal tag in one ear. He explained the significance of the tag, and smiled. I like his smile—he has wonderful teeth—poor fellow, he does not smoke enough to ruin them.
There being nothing else to look at, I looked at Dolly. She was chewing her cud. The slow rhythmic precision of her technique fascinated me. I particularly admired the sideways movement of the lower jaw. She stopped; a gentle genuflection of the neck was noticeable; and she resumed. I had never had such a chance to observe a cow before and I made the most of it. I felt that I was seeing for the first time the noble dignity of her head, her broad fine brow, and above all the eyes, serene and beautiful.
She was tormented by flies, but she ignored them except for a lazy swish of her tail. A distant train whistled; a car screeched on the highway; she did not move, but chewed serenely on.
I found it growing cooler; the tobacco experiment was a success. I discovered an agreeable hollow in the ground and fitted myself comfortably into it.
I recalled those far-off bitter days when I did not own a cow, when her only substitute was the rattle of bottles in an alley at some grim hour before dawn. What fiendish delight the purveyor of those bottles took in banging area gates! I have never known any early-morning milkmen intimately, but I have often wondered what their private lives might be. I suppose they enjoy the rights of citizenship—they may have homes—I wonder.