Sprigs of lad’s love lay among the clothes in the oak presses, and the children at school wore bunches of it to keep them healthy now the damp mists were about.
The woods all round the house were heavy with rich-smelling fallen leaves and decaying moss, with scarlet toadstools and enormous fungi which, when Susan kicked them, turned deep purple, the sure sign they were the deadliest of dead poisons, the food of witches.
The robin’s note had changed. He twisted the corkscrew in infinitesimal bottles and poured out the sparkling, chuckling winedrops. He became bolder, the little visitor who was always welcome, and stepped with light foot and engaging eye into the shadow of the doorway to see what there was for breakfast. No cats lived at Windystone Hall, to drink the milk and kill the chicks and scare the robins, so he had no one to fear.
Pheasant strolled proudly across the meadows, and carelessly pecked the turnips which lay in the plough fields. They knew they were safe so long as they did not go in the gardens or orchard. Twenty rabbits sat in a hollow of the field, under the crooked crab-apple tree, which leaned its branches down weighted with green crabs. Susan clapped her hands as she stood at the door, to make their white tails bob, but they, too, didn’t care.
Dan came in with a capful of mushrooms, silvery globes and buttons from the Daisy Spot. Tom climbed the filbert trees and filled the big round basket to the brim with the frilled and petticoated nuts.
Pears were ripe round the south parlour window, and their pointed leaves tried in vain to hide them.
The autumn days went slowly by, dragging the last warm apricots and crimsons from the sun. It was a time of mother-of-pearl mists, changing to soft reds and yellows as the sun gained its puny strength, and then lengthened into shadows.
The gables of Windystone were pricked out on the steep fields, like a colony of tall houses inhabited by a race of giants. Phantom black smoke rose from the shadow chimneys, and ran up the hill. The haystacks, too, spread out their gabled shadows, and pretended to be black witches’ cottages with living, breathing old women waiting for dark to ride up into the sky on the broomsticks which lay against the barns. Grotesque, dusky cows, with lanky legs sprawling up the trees and banks, cropped beside the sleek velvet-eyed creatures with their red satiny coats and white faces.
Flocks of little clouds ran over the sky, driven hither and thither by the dogs of the wind, until they too, like the shadows, went over the mysterious rim of the world.
The world’s end was very near Windystone, just up a field and a steep scramble through Druid’s Wood, with its dense trees and bracken, its crumbly, leafy soil which broke under the foot, and the horizon was reached. A stark naked, blasted tree stood with white bleached boughs on the edge against the sky, as if to proclaim the fact that there was nothing more.
When Susan was little she had thought that if ever she got up here the world would fall right away, down, down, for ever. But when she was taken to the top she found a soft green field, dropping slowly to beech wood and valleys beyond. So the edge of the world was pushed further away, but even when she was nine and very wise she would not have been surprised to find the ultimate precipice beyond one of those hills.
Mornings began with mists like pools of milk upset in the valleys, into which Susan ran helter-skelter to school. Gossamer, beaded with jewels, bound together the bracken and heather, the trees and ferns. The briars, the hedgerows, the bushes were covered with millions of tiny webs, beaded like fair necklaces with dewdrops. Her feet broke silvery meshes spread like a net over the wet grass, and she left dark footprints as if she walked in snow. Soon the first hoar frost would come, powdering the world, making the wood a vast jeweller’s shop in the morning, a haunted palace at night.
Down the lane the briar hung in circles and garlands with ruddy-veined leaves and cursed ill-luck late blackberries. Susan picked up fallen acorns and gathered bunches of nuts as she skipped through the wood, families of five and six on a stem, which she took to school.
She snatched branches of hawthorn and ate the fleshy crimson aiges as her breakfast dessert, washing them down with water from a spring which ran through the bracken.
The hawthorns and hollies were full of field-fares and redwings, clearing away the fruit like ragamuffins let loose in a greengrocer’s shop. Squirrels ran up and down the nut trees and beeches, carrying nuts to their hoards.
At the farm the work in the plough fields was at its height. Abel, the ditcher, and Noah Smith came to help gather the potatoes and store them in trenches with a few for the house in the old cow place. Mangolds were pulled and beheaded, and piled in great mounds like the barrows of the Stone men who had lived there once. Hedges were trimmed and the cuttings fired in numerous little bonfires.
Bonfire day passed with the great roaring fire in the corner of the plough field, when potatoes were roasted under the stars and tiny Chinese crackers flew through the air.
Susan had never heard of Guy Fawkes, nor had Tom or Becky, or Joshua. It was a ‘Bun Fire’, when they ate parkin and treacle toffee, and children danced round the fire before winter swept the fields.
As it died they leapt through the low flames and each had a wish. Then they stood in the fields to watch the other fires, on the hills in the distance, before they went in to their early bed.
Nights were nearly dark when Susan came home through the wood. Shadows were about and things peeped at her. Then one night the wind bumped into her like a butting lamb ready for play. The beech trees rose and fell with dull roars, and thick grey clouds ran across the sky, with arms intertwined, closer and closer, until, like a mob of children, they raced into school beyond the outermost hill.
But the wind became stronger and bellowed like a bull, and fiercer, blacker clouds covered the sky. The trees rocked in excitement as if they knew what was coming and rejoiced in the battle. They were free, they moved, the boughs creaked and rattled their bones. Winter was coming, galloping up with the cold blasts from the North Pole, and the world shook.
Susan struggled up the hill to the orchard; the straw lying loose in the stackyard rose and danced on its ends; the loose boards over the grain pit flapped up and down like the slippers of an untidy woman. Hens were blown, crying and cackling, with feathers awry, as they fled to the hen house, and scrambled up the narrow little stairway which ran along the side of the wall.
The wind seized Susan’s skirts and blew them over her head. She was intensely vexed and embarrassed, although there was no one to see but the weathercock man, who twirled madly on top of the stable. She dragged them down with one hand while she clutched her hat with the other, and fought her way to the door, breathless against the buffeting wind.
Dan, Joshua and Becky were struggling across the grass from the big cow-house with full pails of milk which the wind splashed on their clothes. Everybody walked with head bent forward to get through the gale.
The cows were kept indoors for the winter, only the young stirks with their rough coats and the calves and sheep stayed out, and they had open shelters to which they could retreat.
The men came into the house bringing packets of cold sweet air entangled in the rough wool of their coats, the smell of cows in their hair, and the good scent of earth on their boots. Their cheeks and eyes shone, their skin was clear and rosy.
Margaret laughed as she trimmed and lighted the lamp and hung it over the table. Becky and Susan went round the house, cottering the kitchen and dairy shutters which closed on the outside, latching the great oak shutters of the parlours, hall and stone room, which were folded in the thickness of the walls.
Tom reached down the horn lantern with its pointed top like a roof and the little hole in the side where the draughts blew the flame awry, and Dan fetched the new hurricane lamp, with shiny glass and bright cage. They measured and ‘scyed’ the milk.
Dan drove down to the station with the night’s supply, and the rest sat round the table eating great puffy roast apples bathed in cream, crisp celery with deep sweet hearts, and plat
es heaped with crusty home-made bread and butter.
The wind howled round the house like a wolf, whining under the doors, screaming down the wide chimneys. The flames were driven out into the room and then roared up the chimney. Margaret brought out the new sacking and the pieces of cloth she had collected during the year, good parts of worn-out trousers, coats and skirts. She and Becky cut them into strips and started to peg the rug which was their winter work.
Joshua sat by the fire with the Farm and Stockbreeder. Tom reached down a little black lantern from a corner cupboard and polished it with a soft cloth. Then he hung it from a hook on the ceiling. The next day Susan, too, must have a light to bring her home from school.
In the night the wind dropped and went into his den to sleep ready for another attack on the trees. But the leaves had gone, all but a few odd ones which Susan watched from day to day, waiting to see how long they could stay. The country looked naked, and bare, the trees were stripped for the fight. Only the fir trees waved their dark boughs up and down, with the regularity of a clock, sighing happily.
Margaret wrapped a scarf round Susan’s neck, and gave her a box of matches and the lantern when she sent her off to school. Susan felt proud and grown-up, elated as an explorer.
She hid the lantern under a stone by the gate at the end of the wood ready for night.
She asked the teacher to let her out at four o’clock without waiting for the pin to drop, or late prayers.
When she returned to the wood, dusk had already fallen. She opened the little door of the lantern and held it under her cape. Then she struck a match, sheltering it with her curved body, and lit the bit of candle. She quickly closed and latched the door, and the brave little light shone out, clear through the clean glass she had polished with her handkerchief, breathing and rubbing as she had seen old Joshua polish the trap lamps.
Ruby red came through the side windows, but they were so small and the candle so wee they only made a glow. Even the smell of the japanned metal was comforting, and the tiny curl of smoke warmed her fingers as it came through the top, under the handle.
The difference the light made was surprising. It might have been a holy candle and Susan a little saint walking unharmed and unafraid through the terrors of hell.
She felt valiant and brave as she walked in the dark shadows, with trees hemming her in and the candle throwing a gleam like a firefly among the branches and on the black path.
She felt invisible, like the prince in the fairy tale, wrapped in a cloak of darkness, fenced round by security, with the light dancing along ahead in slender beams of gold.
She flashed the lantern on the hideous wall, herself safely hidden behind it, and the evil eyes turned away. She held it towards the menacing oak tree, and the Things shrank back as before a magic sword.
Sometimes the wind slashed the trees so that they shrieked and rocked together with boughs interlaced, a wild mad wood, and the candle wavered and trembled ready to go out. Then she carried it under her cloak, where it was a secret joy, a little hidden fire, at which she peeped as she walked along stumbling in the darkness.
But if the wind really conquered and extinguished her lantern, she never stopped to light it again, but trudged on, battling with her head forward, pressed against the wind, defenceless, lost, ready for death at any moment, until she reached the safety of the fields beyond.
So she climbed up the hills to the light beckoning her at the top, where the farm, like Noah’s Ark, with all its animals safe inside, floated in the sea of darkness, cut off from the drowned black world outside.
10
Moonlight
The sky was like an apple tree hung with myriads of little gilt apples as Susan looked up at it from the lonely stillness of the wood-field, where the stirks stood half asleep under the hawthorn trees, knee-deep in red bracken. Her father had told her there would be a moon tonight so she would not need the lantern.
She waited, staring up to the stars, and watching a soft light steal from behind a great peaked hill like a sugar cone, across the river. She was first at the meeting-place, the moon was late.
Then he came round the corner of Stark Hill, just in time to light her through the wood, which lay like a black cave in front of her. The gate shone bright and the stone posts glimmered.
Susan walked along with her eyes on the moon’s golden face. The path was dim, but she was unafraid, for the crowding trees were asleep, the powers were harmless, and the moon, this spiritual unearthly friend, was her companion.
At school she had a reputation for bravery which she didn’t deserve. The teachers stared at her as she set off, dressed in her little grey cloak and wool mittens, on her four-mile walk in the gathering dark, which would swallow her up when the other children were all sitting round their fires at home or playing by their cottage doors. They never suspected her heavenly friend waiting up in the blue.
She stared up at the moon and his dark eyes stared back at her, as he swam along the sky by her side. One night she had turned her eyes away, the path was uneven and rough and she had stumbled against the bank and fallen into a pit of brown leaves. So she looked down on the ground. But when she turned to the moon again, he had stopped behind! Hot and alarmed she ran back, and fixing her eyes on his face, she started off again, with the moon alongside.
He floated through the boughs of the trees, thin now the leaves had gone, and made her path silver, mottled and fretted with dancing shadows. The pools in the few level places shone out and she walked round them dry-shod.
When she got to the end of the wood he stood still above the lovely valley, with the twisty river like a silver snake, writhing at the bottom, and the broad white road alongside like a second river, and the square fields with black walls, a chess-board on the slopes of the hill, and another tiny chessboard higher up, and a glittering one all soft and lost under the moon himself. Round the edge was a fringe of black wood, going up to the sky, and when she climbed up to Windystone the fringe would go right round the cup of the world.
She left him there, and walked gaily on, swinging her dinner bag, whistling merrily, in spite of her father’s adage, ‘Whistling women and crowing hens deserve to have their heads chopped off’, for she was looking for shooting stars. Every night in the winter she saw one, sometimes many, and for every star she had a wish.
Now she was clear of the wood she could see her moon shadow, running along the wall by her side.
‘A moon shadow must never be trodden upon,’ said Joshua, and she looked curiously at the frail thing which fluttered from her feet. There were so many kinds of shadows, all different in their feelings, sun and moon, solid and ghostly, lamplight and candlelight, homely and goblin.
She turned back at the top of the steep steps to rest a minute and recover her breath. She looked across the tops of the apple trees to where the moon stood waiting with soft clouds and rainbow veils across his face. He threw them off with a smiling gesture, and shone with all his might.
‘Goodnight, Moon; thank you,’ she called, and her voice floated across the trees through the silvery atoms of air and the mysterious ether to the great moon.
If she went out in the dark for a drink of water from the troughs, or stepped across to the farm buildings to watch the milking, he was outside waiting to float along with her. Sometimes she raced along the Whitewell field to the distant barn just to see him race across the world.
He looked at her through the windows when she helped to shut the shutters, and he shone through the long latticed windows in the hall, making patterns on the barometer and high-backed chairs, lighting up the delicate carving as if a silver lamp hung there.
She never looked at him when he was new through glass, for he hated mirrors and windows until he was full grown, and she always bowed to him three times, as her mother had taught her. Never did she point a finger at him, for he would resent it, and one does not lightly incur the displeasure of the powerful moon. The moon was everybody’s friend at Windystone, but no one
talked to him and told him secrets and delightful plans as Susan did.
He saved candles and so saved money. Dan blew out his lamps as he came up the hills when the moon was out. Tea parties, occasional visits to other farms, Peacock Farm with its great rooms and remains of splendour, Daisy Bank Farm with its thatched barns and irregular garden and its pond with bulrushes, Greensleeve Farm built in the ruins of a monastery: none of these could be visited except when the moon would light the drive home, and aid the candles in the trap.
But where the moon went in between the visits Susan did not know. She asked Joshua about it.
‘Tell me about the moon, Joshua,’ she said coaxingly one night, as he sat making spelds for the candles. ‘Was it just the same when you were a boy?’
‘Well, it seems to be a deal smaller now, but I don’t know. Like a man gets smaller when he’s old. I’ve heeard tell the moon was once a part of the earth, and it always sort of hankers to get back, and pulls at it.’
‘I do know this,’ said Becky, looking up from her work, ‘I do know there is a man in the moon, because I’ve seen him.’
‘So have we all,’ said Joshua, ‘and he was taken up for picking sticks on Sunday, and his dog was took with him, too.’
‘That’s true,’ said Becky, ‘but it must be lonely up there for him.’
Susan hugged herself secretly. She knew him quite well, but he wasn’t lonely now that she talked to him.
‘You must never fell trees by moonlight, or they will rot away and be no good to nobody,’ said Tom, ‘and never let the moon shine on your scythe or on a looking glass.’
‘That reminds me, Becky, go and put out that cloth. Spread it on the grass plot for the moon to bleach,’ said Margaret, who just came in. Becky went out and Susan with her to spread the stained cloth in the moonlight, where it lay all night.
The Country Child Page 9