HER SON
To H. M.
I
She awoke that morning earlier than was her wont, emerging from a delicious sleep into a waking no less pleasant. Lazily she slipped her hand under her pillows—there were a lot of pillows, all very downy, into which her head and shoulders sank as into a nest; she liked a lot of pillows; that was one of her little luxuries, and she was in the habit of saying, what was one’s own house if not a place where one’s little luxuries could be indulged?—lazily she slipped her hand under the pillows, feeling about, and having found what she wanted, pressed the spring of the repeater watch lying there tucked away. Its tiny, melodious chime came to her, muffled but distinct. Seven clear little bells; then two chimes for the half-hour; then five quick busy strokes; five-and-twenty minutes to eight. Five-and-twenty minutes still before she would be called. She lay contentedly on her back, with her arms folded beneath her head, watching the daylight increase through the short chintz curtains of her windows opposite. The chintz, a shiny one, was lined with pink; the light came through it, pink and tempered. She lay wondering whether she should get up to pull the curtains aside, but she was so comfortable, so softly warm, and in so pleasant a frame of mind, that she would not break the hour by moving. She had a little world inside her head to-day making her independent of the world outside. And besides, she knew so well what she would see, even did she make the effort and get up to pull the curtains; she would see what she had seen every day for forty years, the barn with the orange lichen on the roof, the church tower, the jumbled roofs of the village, the bare beautiful limbs of the distant Downs; she knew it all, knew it with the knowledge of love; and yet, in spite of this intimate knowledge, she was frequently heard to remark that the country had always some new surprise, some gradation of light one had never seen before, so that one was always on the look out and one’s interest kept alive from day to day. The seasons in themselves constituted a surprise to which, in her five-and-sixty years of life, she had never grown accustomed; she forgot each beauty as it became replaced by a newer beauty; in the delight of spring she forgot the etched austerity of winter, and in winter she forgot the flowers of spring, so it was always with a naïve astonishment that she recognized the arrival of a new season, and each one as it became established seemed to her the best. A discovery took some time before it settled itself into its place in the working of her mind, but, once there, it held with a gentle obstinacy, and, because there were not very many of these discoveries, none of them were very far away from the circling current of her thoughts. Nor was she eager for fresh acquaintances among her thoughts, any more than for fresh acquisitions among her friends; just as she liked faces to be familiar, so she liked ideas to be well-tested and proven before she admitted them to the privilege of her intimacy; the presence of strangers was an inconvenience; good manners forbade little jokes from which strangers were excluded, little allusive or reminiscent smiles in which they could not share. It followed, logically enough—although she enjoyed the small, carefully-chosen dinner parties she gave once a fortnight on summer evenings—that she was really happiest alone with her house and garden, because, as she said, one never knows anybody so well as one knows oneself, and even one’s most approved friends are apt to contradict or to disagree, or to advance unforeseen opinions; to disconcert, in fact, in a variety of ways impossible to the silent acquiescence of plants or furniture; and the one person whose constant companionship she would have chosen, had hitherto been absent.
She was perfectly happy now as she lay waiting for eight o’clock and the beginning of the day, agreeable anticipations floating in her mind as her eyes wandered over the comfort of her room, from the chintz curtains to the bright stoppered bottles and silver on her dressing-table, from the small bookcase full of nicely-bound books to the row of photographs on the mantelpiece. All was very still. One of the curtains bellied out a little in front of an open window. From time to time a smile hovered over her lips, and once she gave a sigh, and moved slightly in her bed, as though the very perfection of her thoughts were giving her a deliciously uneasy rapture. But she never allowed herself to indulge for long in reveries which, however pleasant they might be, led to nothing practical. She knew that she had a great deal to see to that morning; and if all were not done in an orderly way, something would be forgotten. She stretched out her hand and took from off the table by her bed a memorandum book, fitted with a pencil and bound in green leather, across which was written in gilt lettering, “While I remember it.”
With the pencil poised above the first fair page, she paused. Would it be better to execute her business in the village first, or to do what she had to do about the house? The village first, by all means; if any of the tradesmen made a mistake, there would be the more time to rectify their blunder. She began, in her mind, her journey up the village street, stopping at the stationer’s, the grocer’s, the fishmonger’s.
How difficult it was to cater for the wants of a man! So long since she had done it; she had lost the habit. What would he want? The Times. She noted “Times,” and added, after a long concentration, “The Field.” Then she remembered that he liked J pens; she herself always used Relief; how lucky that she had thought of that. There was nothing else from the stationer’s; of all the ordinary requirements, writing-paper, blotting-paper, ink, pencils, gummed labels, elastic bands, envelopes of assorted sizes, she kept in her cupboard an exhaustive store. The grocer next; and she had already, a long way back, when she first heard that Henry was coming, made a note that he liked preserved ginger. She renewed this note, neatly, under the proper heading in her list: Ginger, Brazil nuts, a small Stilton, anchovies—he would want a savoury for dinner, and he should have it—chutney. She could not think of anything else, but once she was in the shop she could look round and perhaps see something that he would like. She passed on to the fishmonger’s, and with a delighted smile wrote down, “Herring roes” and “Kippers.” How amused and pleased he would be when he realized how well she had remembered all his tastes! Not the taste he had when he was a little boy, and which she might have remembered out of sentiment; no, he should see that she had kept pace with his years, and remembered his preferences as a man up to five years ago, when she had last seen him.
She had finished now with the village, for all the more staple requirements had, of course, been ordered at the beginning of the week, and these were only the extras which she had treasured up to do herself on the last morning. There was more to be seen to at home. Flowers—no, she need not make a note of that; she would not forget to do the flowers. But there were other things which, unless noted, might slip her memory:
“Order the motor; eggs (brown) for breakfast; honey; fire in his room; put out the port; put out the cigars; early morning tea.”
At that moment she heard the church clock beginning to strike eight, and with a knock on the door her maid came in, carrying a little tray in one hand and a can of hot water in the other. There were a few letters slipped under the edge of the saucer on the tray, and Mrs. Martin read them while she drank her tea, but they were not very interesting, only the annual appeal from the local gardeners’ society—she thought it unthrifty to send that by post, when it could so easily have been left by hand—a couple of bills, a bulb catalogue from Holland (“Early every morning will be seen dozens of parties of men, women and children tramping up the mountains between France and Spain, singing the popular song of Harry Lauder, ‘We’re all going the same way, we’ve all gone down the hills.’ Now perhaps you will ask me why I tell this in a Bulb Catalogue, and here I will give you the answer: In the valleys of those beautiful Pyrenees mountains live numerous daffodils, which are the richest flowering of these garden-friends I ever meeted. Will you not try a couple of hundred from our stock? and you will be convinced to have invested fife bob on the good horse.”), and a letter from her sister in Devon which she put aside to read later on. The maid moved about the room, putting everything ready very quietly and skilfully. The curtains were drawn back now, and from her bed Mrs. Martin could see the wide autumn sky, gold-brown behind the scarlet trail of splay-leaved Virginia creeper that hung down outside the window. She was glad that it was neither raining nor windy. She would have the motor opened before it started for the station.
The day had really begun.