To return to the cottage. I am not going to pretend that it had no drawbacks. There were painful surprises, especially in the honeymoon period of my affections. Most young couples, if they were honest, which they never are, would admit that they emerged stunned, if not partially paralysed, from the strain of the first weeks of wedded life. I was stunned, but I remembered it was the common lot and took courage. Yes, there were painful surprises. Ants marched up in their cohorts between the bricks in the pantry floor. When we enquired into this phenomenon, behold! there was no floor. For a moment I was as “dumbfounded” as the bridegroom who discovers a plait of hair on his bride’s dressing table. The bricks were laid in noble simplicity on Mother Earth, no doubt as in the huts of our forefathers, in the days when they painted themselves with wode, and skirmished with bows and arrows. I had to steel my heart against further discoveries. Rats raced in battalions in the walls at night. Plaster and enormous spiders dropped (not, of course in collusion) from the ceilings in the dark. Upper floors gave signs of collapse. Two rooms which had real floors, when thrown into one, broke our hearts by unexpectedly revealing different levels. That really was not playing fair.
Frogs, large, active, shiny Suffolk frogs had a passion for leaping in at the drawing room windows in wet weather. The frogs are my department, for the Home Ruler, who fears neither God nor man, hides her face in her hands and groans when the frogs bound in across the matting; and I, moi qui vous parle, I pursue them with the duster, which, in every well organised cottage, is in the left hand drawer of the writing table.
The great great grandchildren of the original jumpers, jump in to this day, in spite of the severity with which they and their ancestors from one generation to another have been gathered up in dusters, and cast forth straddling and gasping on to the lawn. Frogs seem as unteachable as chauffeurs!
Very early in the day we realised that in the principal bedroom a rich penetrating aroma of roast hare made its presence felt the moment the window was shut. Why this was so I do not know. The room was not over the kitchen. We have never had a hare roasted on the premises during all the years we have lived in that delectable place. We have never even partaken of jugged hare within its walls. But the fact remains: when the window is shut the hare steals back into the room. Perhaps it is a ghost!!!
I never thought of that till this moment. I feel as if I had read somewhere about a ghost which always heralds its approach by a smell of musk. And then I remember also hearing about an old woman who after her death wanted dreadfully to tell her descendants that she had hidden the lost family jewels in the chimney. But though she tried with all her might to warn them she never got any nearer to it than by appearing as a bloodhound at intervals. Everyone who saw her was terrified, and the jewels remained in the chimney.
Is it possible that I have not taken this aroma of roast hare sufficiently seriously! Perhaps it is a portent. Perhaps it is an imperfect manifestation—like the bloodhound—of someone on the other side who is trying to confide in me.
Yes, we sustained shocks not a few, but there was in store for us at any rate one beautiful surprise which made up for them all.