“Oo—please—is this right for Naylor’s Farm?” shouted Sylvia, running a little way after her.
“First on the left; you can’t mistake it,” Nurse called, as her tiny ruby light dwindled away down the road, “then just keep straight on. Merry Christmas.”
Sylvia made her way through the gap in the hedge, and was soon slowly moving across the frozen morass of mud covered by virgin snow between the road and the farm. The lights from the latter’s windows were still hidden by the dip in the meadows, and she could distinguish nothing beyond the dim blanched wastes extending on every side, broken here and there by the elongated white hump of a hedge or a large vague object, laden with snow and looming against the sky, that was a tree, and she soon became frightened again. The stars were hidden once more behind clouds and an icy wind blew into her face; she went slowly, doggedly on with her legs aching from the effort of lifting them at every step from two feet of snow; a tiny dark figure that was the only moving object between empty fields and vast sky. Had she been in company with a friend she would have been shrieking with laughter and enjoying it all, but she was not capable of laughing at discomfort while enduring it alone.
Meanwhile, Mr. Hoadley was coming across the meadows towards her, carrying a lantern like a Shepherd or a Wise Man, and, unlike either of them, in a bad temper. As he was a good-natured man he disliked being in a bad temper, and he also felt that it was wrong to be in one on Christmas Eve, when even his wife’s sharpness had been temporarily blunted by letters from home (Mrs. Hoadley, like Dante and Mr. Waite, was an exile; in her case, from Ironborough) and when there were a duck and a goose for the Christmas dinner to-morrow, and the farmhouse was full of his old parents from Amberley Wild Brooks and
other
relatives from out Pulborough way, including two little nephews of whom he, the childless man, was fond. But drat that girl! he had wasted the whole afternoon, when there were a thousand things to be done, in meeting three trains on her behalf; and finally he had had to come down here at nine o’clock at night in the forlorn hope that she might have come out on the eight o’clock bus from Horsham to Burlham and walked from there.
The rays of the lantern beamed along the glittering surface of the snow as his massive patient figure trudged on, and each of his steps made a hollow deep enough for a rabbit to shelter in. He swung the lantern impatiently, so that its ray flickered upwards upon his frowning face, and peered ahead, searching for a human figure in the dimness.
In the meantime, Sylvia had naturally taken the lights of Pine cottage for those of the farm, and was even now (though with some misgiving as she observed the smallness of the place and the lack of outbuildings and haystacks and that sort of thing surrounding it) knocking at the front door.
WITHIN, EVERYBODY WAS
too busy to hear a knock at the front door, especially as they were not expecting one. Jean was undressing Meg and putting her into bed, while Jenny and Louise, with many whispers and grimaces, were moving their pillows and pyjamas into one bed in their room in order that Jean could sleep in the other. Alda was hastily preparing something more solid than the tea that had been awaiting herself and the children for Ronald, who had not eaten since early that morning, while giving him the latest family news.
“Is that someone at the front door?” he interrupted her,
from
beside the kitchen fire where he was warming his numbed feet.
“Oh no, darling, no one ever comes here at night. It’s only the children bumping about. Here, drink this while it’s hot.”
“Alda, I’m sure that is someone at the door,” he said again in a moment, when he had taken some soup.
“I’ll go—it must be someone from the farm with a parcel,” and she was going out of the room when he stopped her, saying:
“Better let me go; we’re living in the New Dark Ages, remember,” and he put down the basin and went down the passage, moving slowly because he was weary and stiff from travelling.
“Oo, please, is this Naylor’s Farm?” inquired a loud, fresh young voice plaintively as he switched on his torch and opened the door. He looked down (for she had retreated outside the porch and was standing below its step) into a pair of blue eyes shining beneath a mop of dyed hair, dark and damp from the recent snowfall.
“I’m afraid not. This is Pine Cottage; the farm is about three hundred yards further on,” he answered.
“Thank goodness for that, anyway,” she said, cheered by the pleasant educated voice and the sight of a tall masculine figure. “Sorry to have bothered you,” and she was turning away when Alda came down the passage to see who the visitor was.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, catching sight of the green jersey and Women’s Land Army flash on the coat sleeve, “Mr. Hoadley will be glad you’ve come! He thought you’d got lost; he’s been down to the station twice and we’ve just seen him go by here with a lantern; I expect he’s gone down to the road to see if you’ve come by the last bus.”
“I simply can’t go back across that field; I’ll die,” declared Sylvia flatly, and sat down upon her suitcase. “I’ll wait here until he comes back and catch him,” and she gazed expectantly from one face to the other, obviously hoping to be invited to wait inside the house.
“Won’t you—” Ronald was beginning, when a touch upon his arm from Alda silenced him.
Every human instinct of sympathy, of hospitality, of desire to feed the hungry and shelter the outcast, had been aroused in him during the past months in Germany, and every one of those natural instincts had been denied full expression. He now thought of a house only as a place into which so many
dispossessed persons
(as homeless people are now called) could be fitted with some prospect of relief, if not of actual comfort; and the sweet narrow walls of his own family life had not yet had time to rise about him once more and shut out the ever-present vision of that horde of starved, filthy, hopeless, almost nameless, fellow-creatures to whom he was father and judge.
But Alda felt the walls firmly and strongly about her, and she was certainly not going to invite another person into Pine Cottage that night, even though it was a snowy Christmas Eve.
“He should be back any minute now,” she said brightly. “I’ll leave the door open for you, shall I? I won’t ask you in; you’d probably miss him. A merry Christmas! Good night,” and she went quickly back to the kitchen, leaving Sylvia sitting upon her suitcase in the snow.
Ronald followed more slowly. He did not like to see a girl sitting on a suitcase in the snow, waiting; it was too much like what he had been seeing at every station, all through Germany, all through Belgium, all through France, during his journey of the past forty-eight hours; nevertheless, he looked tenderly at the back of Alda’s bright head as she bent over the stove, and loved her.
Meg immediately turned her flushed cheek into the pillow and went to sleep, leaving Jean with nothing to do but stand a shaded candle upon the mantelpiece, make up one of the fires which she had lit in a mood of Christmas Eve recklessness in the two bedrooms earlier that afternoon and tiptoe away into the next room, where she found Jenny and Louise bouncing up and down in a heap of bed clothes upon the floor.
“Hey, what’s going on here?” she demanded.
“We’re making the bed and all these pillows and things needed a good shaking.”
“I see. Well, now let’s put them back on the bed, shall we? and then you pop into the bathroom and wash and I’ll bring up your supper.”
The children had an indulgent liking for Jean which was unconsciously modelled upon their mother’s half-derisive, half-affectionate attitude towards her, and although they barely regarded her as having a grown-up’s authority, they consented to do as she suggested and were soon sitting side by side in the large, freshly smoothed bed, gazing at the two long black stockings hanging from the brass rail at its foot and waiting for their supper, while the firelight danced upon walls and ceiling, transforming the ugly room with cosy mystery. Both wore dressing-gowns made by Alda from an ample old white shawl printed with a Paisley pattern in red and green which she had bought for a few shillings at a junk shop in some country town. There had not been enough of it to make a full-length one for Meg but all three children considered hers the best robe of them all, for it had a hem of green velvet a foot deep (discarded evening dress, Marion, vintage 1939) and Jenny called it “absolutely princess-like.”
Jean was happy to be in this little house standing in the midst of the meadows, which, after the conventional luxury of her parents’ box-like flat in St. John’s Wood, seemed to her a romantic place. All her journey had been romantic; the snowstorm, her struggle across the frozen fields with her suitcase, and finally, her entry, through the back door (which she greatly wondered to find unlocked) into a quiet, shadowy cottage where the fire burned in the parlour like a veiled garnet and all the clocks ticked peacefully through the afternoon hush. The recent bustle of her own life suddenly seemed to her blessedly remote. She had left behind her the documents to be signed and the relations to be consulted, the furniture dealers and lawyers and
house
agents and prospective tenants, and was now at rest, surrounded by the familiar atmosphere belonging to her oldest and closest friend.
“Jean!” Alda’s voice came subduedly up the stairs. “Supper.”
She had suspended branches of holly and yew with scarlet threads from the picture rail in the parlour, and these conspired with firelight and white tablecloth to fill the room with the mysterious innocent happiness of Christmas. Jean began to smile as she came down the dark narrow staircase into the light, and the other two, chagrined though they were at the spoiling of their family Christmas, smiled with her.
The remainder of the evening passed pleasantly, as Meg did not awaken, and sleep must do her good, and half-way through supper Jean remembered that she had a bottle of gin in her suitcase, intended as a Christmas present for her hosts. (The late Mr. Hardcastle had known a number of wealthy, slightly mysterious men with hard faces who frequently sent him a bottle of this and a case of that, or gave him a tip in season about the other, and it was one of them, wishing to show respect to the dead, who had presented Jean with the gin.)
Sipping and gossip ended the day. At midnight she crept shivering into bed, having bestowed some sweets and Black Market oranges in the two sad, flat stockings hanging on the bed-rail; and in the shy and sceptical prayer which she murmured before she fell asleep, she asked a blessing upon her friend and her friend’s husband and children.
When Sylvia had been sitting upon the suitcase for some ten minutes she saw a light coming towards her over the fields which seemed to her to be bobbing up and down in an irritable manner. However, she was now so hungry, cold and tired that she had ceased to be afraid of facing an angry farmer, and she therefore went down to meet the lantern, calling cheerfully:
“Is that Mr. Hoadley? It’s me—Sylvia Scorby. I say, I’m
ever
so sorry I couldn’t get here before. I missed two trains from London on account of them being so crowded.”
Mr. Hoadley was very surprised to see her, and also slightly annoyed, for he had by this time given up all hope of her and was returning to the farm resigned and ready to make the most of what was left of the evening’s pleasantness. He also disliked having to jump abruptly from one state of mind into another, but he did notice with satisfaction that she seemed—from what he could make out in the dimness—to be a tall strong girl, and the cheerfulness of her voice was disarming.
“You’ve certainly given me an afternoon of it,” he answered gruffly, but putting out his hand for her to shake. “I’d given you up for to-night. How did you find your way here? (This way—it isn’t far, and we’ve kept some supper for you.)”
This was good news for Sylvia, who enjoyed eating better than anything in the world except shrieking with her friends and going to the pictures, and soon she was giving Mr. Hoadley a lively account of her adventures on the journey—and she included Emilio’s attempt to kiss her.
He let her talk away without making any comment, but the incident confirmed his personal belief that Emilio was the worse character of the two Italians, and it also gave him a favourable sidelight upon Sylvia herself. If she had displayed virtuous indignation even he, charitable and good-natured as he was, would have suspected its genuineness, for he was no fool and he took human nature for granted; but her robust mingling of impatience with laughter as she related Emilio’s discomfiture convinced him that if there were to be any trouble “in that way” later on, it would be started, not by this girl, but by the Italians.
Nevertheless—missing trains, picking up Italians in that Linga-Longa place, dodging kisses at nine o’clock at night on lonely roads—no, it was not what you might call a good beginning; she must be a scatter-brained creature, and, glancing at
her
as they went up the path leading to the door and light from the windows fell upon her eyes and hair, Mr. Hoadley wished that the Board had sent him someone with glasses and a wig.
The next moment Sylvia stood in the kitchen of the farmhouse, a long, low chamber running the whole length of the front of the building, with windows whose broad sills supported ancient shutters freshly painted grey, and a floor of narrow pale red bricks scooped into hollows by the tread of feet throughout two hundred and fifty years. The walls were washed in rose colour and divided at irregular intervals by wide oak beams richly blackened by smoke from countless household fires, and the ceiling was similarly adorned.