The Men Who Wrought

by Ridgwell Cullum

In twenty minutes the cab had threaded its way on to the Oxford Road, and, regardless of all speed limit, raced on towards the famous Chiltern Hills.

Already the early autumn leaves were beginning to fall under the freshening breeze. The hedges were beginning to lose their trim appearance, and the dust-laden leaves on the midsummer growths wore a mildewed aspect that somehow matched the lank, weedy grass of the road banks. The roads were dry, and the fields looked dry. There was a weary look about the countryside as though Nature had completed her summer's work, and was eagerly looking forward to her winter rest.

A solitary horsewoman was leisurely riding down one of the tarred roads approaching Wednesford. Her horse was steaming, and her obvious intent was to cool him down before reaching her destination. Presently she turned off upon a narrow country lane, whose surface was no advertisement for the zeal of the local urban council. It was rough, and deep in dust, with overgrown hedges crowding in upon its narrow limits in a manner which forced her to keep an accurate middle course.

But Princess Vita was not only cooling down her horse after a joyous gallop upon an adjacent gorse-laden common. She was thinking deeply, dreaming as only a woman of romantic ideals can dream. Nor were her thoughts with the rural picture through which she was now moving, and which her ardent heart loved. She was gazing back over past moments so recently spent in the heart of the great capital. Just now her whole mind was filled with thoughts of the man. And so she had no room for any other consideration.

For the moment the affairs which had brought this man and herself together were powerless to disturb her dreaming. The sweet, fragrant air of the autumn countryside was filling her lungs, a sense of well-being pervaded her body in the exercise in which she delighted, and so the youthful heart of her had turned aside from the cares which lurked in the background, and sought only the image of the man who was already beginning to occupy so great a part of her life.

The Princess Vita was a well-known figure in the neighborhood. She was known as Madame Vladimir, who occupied Redwithy Farm, standing in a sleepy hollow nearly two miles outside Wednesford. She had occupied the farmhouse for several years, and gossip, supported by the reports of the local police during the late war, declared that she was a refugee from Russian Poland, and consequently one of our Allies, and so those who lived sufficiently near by had set themselves to be kind to her, and, incidentally, to satisfy as much of their curiosity as possible.

But the Princess was not easily available to the curious. She was gentle, she was sufficiently ordinary in her methods of life to please the most exacting of her country neighbors. Furthermore, while professing some Polish religion which the country folk had no understanding of, in the absence of a church of her own she had readily adopted the Church of England. This was enormously in her favor, and she quickly became an admittedly proper person.

But even the most well-meaning never succeeded in penetrating beneath the surface of acquaintanceship. She was credited with being extremely well off. Redwithy Farm was a miniature, restored Elizabethan mansion of rare antiquity, set in the heart of a parkland of over eighty acres. During the war she had only kept English servants, some seven or eight, but from the moment peace had been declared these had been replaced one by one with foreigners, retainers from her own home in Poland. No one seriously questioned the change. One and all admitted that the conditions of Poland after the war made it a charity on the part of Madame Vladimir to rescue these poor people from such a condition of devastation and afford them the blessings and peace of the English countryside.

So, through her own consummate tact, Vita was enabled to live more or less unquestioned in her English home. And such peace was justly her due, for her objects were simple and honest for the country of her adoption. She was preparing, as many another foreigner had done before her, a refuge in the hospitable heart of Britain for that father for whom she foresaw the growing threat of danger.

Half-way down the winding, narrow lane she turned out through an opening which had once been a five-barred gate. She crossed a field and passed into another, and then another. Then, making her way through a small iron gateway, she entered the twenty-acre patch of larch and birch woods which stood on a hill on her own land dominating the farm.