“The faintest smell floated about the room, and as I stood in slight bewilderment looking round I wondered what it could be; it was oddly familiar; it transported me, by one of those side-slips of the brain, away from England, and though the vision was too dim and transitory for me to crystallise it into a definite picture, I dreamed myself for a second in a narrow street between close, towering houses; yoked bullocks were there somewhere, and the clamour of a Latin city. I have gazed at a rainbow, and fancied I caught a violet ribbon between the red and the blue; gazed again, and it was gone; so with my present illusion. Then I saw that the old woman was fingering something by the fire, and in my interest I looked, and made out a row of chestnuts on the rail; one of them cracked and spat, falling on to the hearth, where she retrieved it with the tongs and set it on the rail again to roast.
“The bullock-like sons took no notice of me beyond their first dispassionate glance, but Mrs. Pennistan in her buxom, and Amos in his reticent, fashion gave me an hospitable welcome. I was strongly conscious of the taciturn sons, who, after a grudging shuffle—a concession, I suppose, to my quality as a stranger—returned to their meal in uninterested silence. I was abashed by the contempt of the young men. It was a relief to me when one of them pushed aside his bowl and rose, saying, ‘I’ll be seeing to the cattle, father.’
“Amos replied, ‘Ay, do, and see to the window in the hovel; remember it’s shaky on the hinge.’ I had a sudden sense of intimacy: a day, a week, and I too should know the shaky hinge, the abiding place of tools, the peculiarities of the piggery.
“I wandered out. A mist lay over the gentle hills, as the bloom lies on a grape; a great stillness sank over the meadows, and that mellow melancholy of the English autumn floated towards me on the wings of the evening. I felt infinitely at peace. I reflected with a deep satisfaction that no soul in London knew my address. My bank, my solicitors, would be extremely annoyed when they discovered that they had mislaid me. To me there was a certain satisfaction in that thought also.”
“On the following morning,” continued Malory, “I rose early. I went out. The freshness of this Kentish morning was a thing new to me. The ground, the air, were wet with dew; gossamer was over all the grass and hedges, shreds of gossamer linking bramble to bramble, perfect spiders’ webs of gossamer, and a veil of gossamer seemed to hang between the earth and the sun. The grass in the field was gray with wet. A darker trail across it showed me where the cattle had passed, as though some phantom sweeper had swept with a giant broom against the pile of a velvet carpet. The peculiar light of sunrise still clung about the land.”
For a moment Malory ceased speaking, and the goats, the barren mountains, the impetuous torrent, rushed again into my vision like a wrong magic-lantern slide thrown suddenly, and in error, upon the screen. Then as his voice resumed I saw once more the hedges, the clump of oaks, and the darker trail where the cattle had passed across the field.
“I was at a loss,” said Malory, “to know how to employ my morning, and regretted my stipulation that my training should not begin until the following day. I wished for a pitchfork in my hand, that I might carry the crisp bracken for bedding into the empty stalls. I heard somewhere a girl’s voice singing; the voice, I later discovered, of Nancy, upraised in a then popular song which began, ‘Oh, I do love to be beside the sea-side,’ and so often subsequently did I hear this song that it is for ever associated in my mind with Nancy. I could hear somewhere also the clank of harness, and presently one of the sons came from the stable, sitting sideways upon a great shire horse and followed by two other horses; they passed me by with the heavy, swinging gait of elephants, out into the lane where they disappeared, leaving me to my loneliness. I felt that the great fat ball of the world was rolling, rolling in the limpidity of the morning, and that I alone had given no helping push.
“I wandered, stepping gingerly upon the cobble stones, round the corner of the farm buildings, and there, in a doorway, I came unexpectedly upon a girl I had not previously seen. She stood with a wooden yoke across her shoulders, and her hands upon the two pendent buckets of milk. I felt myself—do not misunderstand me—suddenly and poignantly conscious of her sex. The blue linen dress she wore clung unashamedly to every curve of her young and boyish figure, and around the sleeves the sweat had stained the linen to a widening circle of darker blue. Swarthy as a gipsy, I saw her instinctively as a mother, with a child in her arms, and other children clinging about her skirts.”
I thought I understood Malory, a lyre whose neurotic treble alone had hitherto responded to the playing of his dilettantism, with the chords of the bass suddenly stirred and awakened.
“You have probably known in your life one or more of those impressions so powerful as to amount to emotions, an impression such as I received now, as, at a loss for words, this girl and I stood facing one another. I knew, I knew,” said Malory, looking earnestly at me as though driving his meaning by force of suggestion into my brain, “that here stood one for whom lay in wait no ordinary destiny. She might be common, she might be, probably was, rude and uncultivated, nevertheless something in her past was preparing a formidable something for her future.”