The Worn Doorstep

by Margaret Pollock Sherwood

"Yes."

"And if you wouldn't mind me knowing little about waiting at table——"

"With but one person in the family, that isn't very complex," I say reassuringly. Don looks reproachfully at me; was I forgetting him?

I watched Don to see how he would take them; his manner was perfection,—polite but distant, refusing any intimate advances, but refraining from growling. There was a certain approving condescension in his air, as if he thought they were quite well in their way. He never for a moment forgets that he is a gentleman's dog, and his flair for social distinctions is as fine as that of any of his fellow Oxford dons. That delicate snobbery showed to-day in his air of connoisseurship while he weighed the matter with daintily snuffing nose and then assumed an air of invitation to these two to come and keep their place.

I was delighted when they said that they would come, and we trotted merrily home to the shining companionship of the hearth fire, flickering on pewter pots and copper pans as on my landlady's red cheeks; to the comfort—ah, that I, a twentieth-century American, dare confess it—of a feather bed!

September 29. Here I live in mine own hired house, like the gentleman in the Bible,—who was it,—Paul? I hope only that he had one half the sense of entire possession that is mine. I look at Madge and Peter, busy in kitchen and garden, at Don, guarding the little iron gate, at the pony grazing beyond the stream, and I feel like a feudal lord. Especially do I feel so when we rout out the utensils in the kitchen,—knives, forks, skillets. Some of them surely antedate the feudal era; they were probably left by the cave men; their prehistoric shape, in its ancient British clumsiness, looks as if it might have archæological, if not practical, value. I shall use them for gardening; the forks will be a great help in wrestling with mother earth.

Wrestle I do, indoors and out; I dare not be idle, and besides, I like to do these things. The Vicar's lady, passing, is shocked to see me scraping the putty off of my new-old diamond-paned windows; but somebody had to get it off; Madge couldn't, so why not I? Madge watches me working about, torn between her old attitude of maid at the Hall, with its fixed ideas as to what the gentry should do, and a something new that is slowly creeping into her mind. Throughout England, I am told, the gentry are doing things they used not to do,—for economy, for possible service to the country in its day of need. And it is slowly dawning on us all that its need is great. The Germans have been halted on the Marne, and we breathe more easily, but it is rumoured that they have brought their great siege guns up to Antwerp, and the poor Belgians are flocking over here in hordes.

Madge, as she sees me toiling over my chintz curtains, and sees the bothersome things come down to my undoing, wants to know why I wished to come, quite by myself; why I didn't take lodgings somewhere,—it would be far less trouble. She doesn't understand in the least when I tell her that I cannot endure the irrelevance of lodgings, the antimacassars, the hideous bric-a-brac, the rooms packed full of horrors, where I cannot collect my mind. A home of your own is worth while, if only to keep it bare of human clutter; bad pictures intimidate me; ugly upholstery defeats my soul. Of provincial England I could say, if it weren't profane, all thy tidies and thy ugly reps have gone over me. The publicity of hotel or boarding house I cannot endure, nor the kind of tissue-paper life that one must live there. Not among gilt cornices but beside meadows and running waters I choose my lot. Your relatives are kindness itself in inviting me to stay with them, but just now I cannot bear kindness; I want people to be as cruel as God! Was I not lonely enough, after my own family had vanished into the silence; why did you come into my life only to leave me more alone?

This is my apologia pro domicilio meo, but why, after all, should I need to explain a longing for my own rooftree, my own hearth, my own pathway leading to my own front door? I must have come into the world with a belief that for every woman born was intended a little nook or corner or cranny of her own. So here is mine, a quarter of a mile from the village, not many miles from the sea, seventy odd miles from London, and how far from that heaven where you are? Can you tell me the way and the length of the road? Sometimes it seems set on the very edge of eternity, and I keep expecting to see stray cherubim, seraphim, and angels stop to ask the rest of the way.

I haven't begun on the garden; in a way I haven't let myself see it, there has been so much to do in the house; but, if you will believe it, and of course you will, being an Englishman, a plum tree and a pear tree are espaliered on the sunny southern wall of the house, branching out a bit over one of the windows. There are two apple trees, a clump of holly, ferns in a corner, rosebushes, and climbing roses. I shall not know all the colours until next summer, though some of them bloom late; I have discovered white ones, and pale yellow, and one of a deep and lovely red. The garden is neglected, weedy, and grass-grown, but I find hollyhocks, foxglove, larkspur, and a forgotten violet bed. A small kitchen garden borders my lady's garden, and Peter shall till this. Don walks up and down the paths with a step so exactly fitted to your old pace in the college gardens that I feel always a little shock of surprise in not seeing you, as of old, just ahead.