The Worn Doorstep

by Margaret Pollock Sherwood

My new abode is lowly and cozy, with a fine simplicity in the antique furniture, carved chest, and plain chairs. The fundamental things are here; you should see the walnut table in the living room, with its deep glow of red-brown colour. There must be some new things, of course, fresh chintzes, linen, kitchen utensils, but for the most part only oil and turpentine and a pair of good red sturdy English arms are needed to remove a certain dinginess.

So I've a home of my own, though earth crashes and kingdoms fall and a comet strikes against us and puts us out. For a little I have a fortified spot wherein to defy the worst that time can do. I am a householder, on my own plot of ground, crossing and re-crossing my own threshold; and the big wrought-iron key is in my hand. There are ashes still upon the hearth,—from whose fire? New flame shall go up from the old grey ashes,—the central spark of home shall be rekindled here; and that is the whole story of human life.

How fortunate, and how unusual, in so small a house, that the hall leads all the way through from green to green! We shall get all the breezes that blow, for the house faces the west, as all houses should face; and always and forever we shall hear the stream. There's a step there at the back, down to the garden walk, that you must remember, you who are so absent-minded.

—I keep forgetting that you are dead.

September 6. I have been away for a week, a week in which I have not dared leave one moment unoccupied. To keep my sanity, I must be busy all the time; life cannot be cut short in this way. When great forces have begun to stir within you, like the gathering of all waters far and near, you cannot safely stop them all at once; I must have, in the weeks to come, some outlet for this surging energy.

London is quiet, and awful with the self-control of great tension. The war-terror mounts, though few speak of it; the Germans have crossed the Marne; the French government has moved to Bordeaux, and all the world seems tottering. Back in my charmed village, I wait and listen. They would not take me at the front; did you know that, the day after you left, I made an attempt to follow? No training, and physically unfit, was the verdict. I thought that I could perhaps prove to you in act that of which I could not convince you by argument in our dispute the day we walked to Godstow,—that women have the kind of courage possessed by men.

I live at the Inn during these days while my house is being put in order. A glazier has been found who can re-set the old diamond panes; carpenter and plumber are hard at work. The hideous wall-papers in the chambers have been scraped off; they were so ugly that they actually hurt. You always told me, you remember, that I minded too much the things that make for ugliness, that my eye was too sensitive to evil-coloured and unshapely things, and that I must live more in the world of thought. The contrast between these, in their wicked purples and magentas, and the wonderful cottage itself with its dim beauty of old brick and dusky panelling, makes one wonder at the potential depravity of the heart of modern man or woman! There's a shop in London,—I was going to take you there,—where they have reproductions of quaint old papers, the kind made a hundred years ago, with little landscapes, and sheep and shepherds, and odd flower designs. I chose three of these, and they are going on at this minute; I must go to see that they piece the two bits of the shepherdess together neatly and do not leave her head and her beribboned hat dangling several inches above her embroidered bodice. It is a relief to escape from the purple cow and the hundred and one china abominations in this sitting room.

My landlady, fingering her black alpaca dress apron, assures me as I go, that the best of news, 'm, has come from the front; that the Germans are in full retreat, and the French and the British are nearing Berlin! If only this insular confidence that for Britons there is no defeat be not too rudely broken!

Don went with me; I went to Oxford to get him during my week away. I am so glad, so very glad that you let me have him when you went to war. He potters along behind me or runs ahead, with all his questing little fox-terrier soul in his eyes, sure, like myself, that around some corner, or on some blessed rise of ground, we shall meet you. At each fresh disappointment he turns to me with that look of perfect trust in his eyes that I, some day when it seems fit, will give you back to him. Within five minutes, at his first visit to the little red house, he had sniffed every corner, and he dropped with a deep sigh of content on the warm brick walk, knowing the place for his own.

The cloistered Oxford gardens, with their incredibly smooth grass, were unchanged, but the immemorial quiet is broken. Your Oxford is a new Oxford, awake, struggling, suffering, nursing the wounded, while the noblest of her sons follow you to the war. Thinking of all these things as I walk, I decide not to go to the house, after all; there is a sound of hammering and an air of disquiet. I cross the little stone bridge and follow the stream; this, like the pony, is a new neighbour with which I must become acquainted, and it proves more friendly than that other. There is a touch of September gold everywhere, of autumn perfectness in things, that belies wrong anywhere upon the earth. And all the old days float down the stream; something, the way of the water with the grasses, the ripple of the water, brings back May, and my first English spring, and you.