Malory smiled.
“Don’t I? Well, perhaps I don’t. I should have to give up my sense of wonderment, for they have none. They may be poems, but they are not poets. The people among whom I lived were true yeomen; they and their forefathers had held the house and tilled the land for two hundred and fifty years or more, since the Puritan founder of their race had received the grant from, so tradition said, the hands of Cromwell in person. Since the days of that grim Ironside, one son at least in the family had been named Oliver.
“The house was partly built of lath and plaster and partly of that gray stone called Kentish rag, which must have been, I used to reflect with satisfaction, hewn out of the very land on which the house was set. I remember how the thought pleased me, that no exotic importation had gone to the making of that English, English whole. No brilliant colour in that dun monochrome, save one, of which I will tell you presently. Have patience, for the leisure of those days comes stealing once more over me, when haste was a stranger, and men took upon them the unhurrying calm of their beasts.
“After the fashion of such homes, the house stood back from a narrow lane; a low stone wall formed a kind of forecourt, which was filled with flowers, and a flagged path bordered with lavender lay stretched from the little swing-gate to the door. The steps were rounded with the constant passing of many feet. The eaves were wide, and in them the martins nested year after year; the steep tiled roofs, red-brown with age, and gold-spattered with stonecrops, rose sharply up to the chimney-stacks. You have seen it all a hundred times. Do you know how such houses crouch down into their hollows? So near, so near to the warm earth. Earth! there’s nothing like it; lying on it, being close to it, smelling it, and smelling all the country smells as well, not honeysuckle and roses, but the clean, acrid smell of animals, horses, dogs, and cattle, and the smell of ripe fruit, and of cut hay.
“And there’s something of the Noah’s Ark about a farm; there’s Mr. Noah, Mrs. Noah, and Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and the animals, because there’s nothing in the world more like the familiar wooden figures of our childhood than the domestic animals. If you had never seen a cow before, gaunt and unwieldy, what a preposterous beast you would think it. Also a sheep—the living sheep is, if anything, even more like the woolly toy than the woolly toy is like the living sheep. And they all fit in so neatly, so warmly, just like the Noah’s Ark. However, I won’t labour the point....
“This house of which I am telling you was nearer to the earth than most; it had, in fact, subsided right down into it, sinking from north to south with the settling of the clay, and the resultant appearance of established comfort was greater than I can describe to you. The irregularity of the building was the more apparent by reason of the oak beams, which should have been horizontal, but which actually sloped at a considerable angle. I found, after I had lived there no more than a couple of days, that one adopted this architectural irregularity into one’s scheme of life; the furniture was propped up by blocks of wood on the south side, and I learnt not to drop round objects on to my floor, knowing that if I did so they would roll speedily out of reach. For the same reason, all the children of the house, in this generation as no doubt in many generations past, had made their first uncertain steps out in the garden before they climbed the hill or toppled down the incline of their mother’s room.
“I paused, on the evening of my arrival, before my future home. I said to myself, here I shall live for one, two, three, possibly four, years; how familiar will be that unfamiliar gate; I arrive with curiosity, I shall leave, I hope, with regret. And I foresaw myself leaving, and my eyes travelling yearningly over the house and the little garden, which in a moment the bend of the lane would hide from me for ever. I say for ever, for I would not court the disillusion of returning to a once happy home. Then, as my eyes began to sting with the prophetic sorrow of departure, I remembered that my one, two, three, or possibly four, years were before and not behind me; so, amused at my own sensibility, I pushed open the swing-gate and went in.
“The house door opened to my knock. I stood on the threshold—I stand there now in spirit. Have you experienced the thrill of excitement which overcomes one when one stands on the threshold of new friendship, new intimacy? such a thrill as overcame me now as I stood, literally and figuratively, in the doorway of the Pennistans’ home. I scanned the faces which were raised towards me, faces which were to me then as masks, or as books written in a language I could not read, but which would speedily become open and speaking; no longer the disguise, but the revelation of the human passion which lay behind. The facts of life at Pennistans’ I could foresee, but not the life of the spirit, the mazy windings of mutual relation, the circumstance of individual being. These people were anonymous to me in their spirits as in their names.
“You might fare far before you came upon a better-favoured family. I was in the low, red-tiled kitchen; they were seated at their supper round a central table, the father, the mother, three sons, and the daughter Nancy. Amos Pennistan had the bearing, the gravity, and the beard of an apostle; I never saw a nobler looking man; he had his coat off, and his scarlet braces marked his shirt like a slash of blood. His sons, as they raised their heads to me from their bread and porridge, cast their eyes over my city-bred frame, much as calves in a field raise their heads to stare at the passer-by over the hedge, and I felt myself in the presence of young, indifferent animals.
“An old, old woman was sitting over the fire. No mention of her had been made in our correspondence, nor did I then know who she was. Yet had it not been for her, and for the strange flame she had introduced into this English home, the story I am endeavouring to tell you might never have sprung up out of the grayness of commonplace.