The man on the other side

Ruth Courthope Seer stood on her own doorstep and was content. She looked across the garden and the four-acre field with the white may hedge boundary. It was all hers. Her eyes slowly followed the way of the sun. Another field, lush and green, sloped to a stream, where, if the agents had spoken truth, dwelt trout in dim pools beneath the willows. Field and stream, they too were hers. Good fields they were, clover thick, worthy fields for feed for those five Shorthorns, bought yesterday at Uckfield market.

The love of the land, the joy of possession, the magic of the spring, they swept through her being like great clean winds. She was over forty; she had worked hard all her life. Fate had denied her almost everything—father or mother, brother or sister, husband or children. She had never had a home of her own. And now fate had given her enough money to buy Thorpe Farm. The gift was immense, still almost unbelievable.

“You perfectly exquisite, delicious, duck of a place,” she said, and kissed her hand to it.

The house stood high, and she could see on the one hand the dust-white road winding for the whole mile to Mentmore station; on the other, green fields and good brown earth, woodland, valley, and hill, stretching to the wide spaces of the downs, beyond which lay the sea. In 1919, the year of the Great Peace, spring had come late, but in added and surpassing beauty. The great yearly miracle of creation was at its height, and behold, it was very good.

In front of her sat Sarah and Selina. The day’s work was over. They had watched seeds planted and seeds watered. They had assisted at the staking of sweet-peas and the two-hourly feeding of small chicken. Now they demanded, as their habit was, in short sharp barks of a distinctly irritating nature, that they should be taken for a walk.

Sarah and Selina were the sole extravagance of Ruth’s forty years of life. They had been unwanted in a hard world. Aberdeens were out of fashion, and their sex, like Ruth’s own in the struggle for existence, had been against them. So bare pennies which Ruth could ill afford had gone to the keep of Sarah and Selina, and in return they loved her as only a dog can love.

Sarah was a rather large lady, usually of admirable manners and behaviour. Only once had she seriously fallen from grace, and, to Ruth’s horror, had presented her with five black and white puppies of a description unknown before in heaven or earth. Moreover, she was quite absurdly pleased with herself, and Selina was, equally absurdly, quite unbearably jealous.

Selina had never been a lady, either in manners or behaviour. She was younger and smaller than Sarah, and of infinite wickedness both in design and execution.

Ruth looked at them as they sat side by side before her.

“To the stile and back,” she said, “and you may have ten minutes’ hunt in the wood.”

The pathway to the stile led through a field of buttercups, the stile into the station road. That field puzzled Ruth. It was radiantly beautiful, but it was bad farming. Also it was the only bit of bad farming on the whole place. Every other inch of ground was utilized to the best advantage, cultivated up to the hilt, well-fed, infinitely cared for.

Ruth was not curious, and had asked no questions concerning the late owner of Thorpe, nor was any one of this time left on the farm. The war had swept them away. But after two months’ possession of the place, she had begun to realize the extraordinary amount of love and care that had been bestowed on it by some one. In a subtle way the late owner had materialized for her. She had begun to wonder why he had done this or that. Once or twice she had caught herself wishing she could ask his advice over some possible improvement.

So she looked at the buttercups and wondered, and by the stile she noticed a hole in the hedge on the left-hand side, and wondered again. It was the only hole she had found in those well-kept hedges.

She sat on the stile and sniffed the spring scents luxuriously, while Sarah and Selina had their hunt. The may, and the wild geranium, and the clover. Heavens, how good it all was! The white road wandered down the hill, but no one came. She had the whole beautiful world to herself. And then a small streak came moving slowly along the centre of the road. Presently it resolved itself into a dog. Tired, sore-footed, by the way it ran, covered with dust, but running steadily. A dog with a purpose. Sarah and Selina, scenting another of their kind, emerged hot foot and giving tongue from the centre of the wood. The dog—Ruth could see now it was a Gordon Setter in haste about his business—slipped through the hole in the hedge, and went, trotting wearily but without pause, across the buttercup field towards the house. To Ruth’s amazement, Sarah and Selina made no attempt to follow. Instead they sat down side by side in front of her and proceeded to explain.

Ruth looked at the hole, wondering. “He must have belonged here once, of course,” she said, “I wonder how far he has come, the poor dear.” She hurried up the slope, and reached the house in time to hear Miss McCox’s piercing wail rend the air from the kitchen.

“And into every room has he been like greased lightning before I could hinder, and covered with dust and dirt, and me that have enough to do to keep things clean as it is, with those two dirty beasts that Mistress Seer sets such store by. But it’s encouraging such things she is, caring for the brutes that perish more than for Christian men and women with mortal souls——”

Red of face, shrewish of tongue, but most excellent as a cook, Miss McCox paused for breath.

“She do be wonderful set on animals,” said the slow Sussex voice of the cowman. He settled his folded arms on the kitchen window-sill. A chat about the new mistress of Thorpe never failed in interest. “But ’tis all right so long as we understand one another.”

Ruth passed his broad back, politely blind to Miss McCox’s facial efforts to inform him of her appearance in the background.

The dog was now coming up the garden path between apple-trees still thickest with blossom. A drooping dejected dog, a dog sick at heart with disappointment, a dog who could not understand. A dusty forlorn thing wholly out of keeping with the jubilant spring world.

Ruth called to him, and he came, politely and patiently.

“Oh, my dear,” she said. “You have come to look for some one and he is not here, and I cannot help you.”

She did what she could. Fetched some water, which he drank eagerly, and food, which he would not look at. She bathed his sore feet and brushed the dust from his silky black and tan coat, until he stood revealed as a singularly beautiful dog. So beautiful that even Miss McCox expressed unwilling admiration.

Sarah and Selina behaved with the utmost decorum. This was unusual when a stranger entered their domain. Ruth wondered while she brushed. It seemed they acknowledged some greater right. Perhaps he had belonged to the man who had so loved and cared for Thorpe before she came. And he had left all—and the dog.

Presently the dog lay down in a chosen place from which he could command a view of both the front drive and the road from the station. He lay with his nose between his paws and watched.

After supper Ruth Seer went and sat with him. The stars looked down with clear bright eyes. The night wind brought the scent of a thousand flowers. An immense peace and beauty filled the heavens. Yet, as she sat, she fancied she heard again the low monotonous boom from the Channel to which people had grown so accustomed through the long war years. She knew it could not really be; it was just fancy. But suddenly her eyes were full of tears. She had lost no one out there—she had no one to lose. But she was an English woman. They were all her men. And there were so many white roads, from as many stations.

The next morning the stranger dog had vanished, after, so Miss McCox reported bitterly at 6 A. M., a night spent on the spare-room bed. It was a perfect wonder of a morning. Even on that first morning when the stars sang together it could not have been more wonderful, thought Ruth Seer, looking, as she never tired of looking, at the farm that was hers. The five Shorthorns chewed the cud in the four-acre field. The verdict of Miss McCox, the cowman and the boy, upon them was favourable. To-morrow morning Ruth would have her first lesson in milking. The Berkshire sow, bought also at Uckfield market, had produced during the night, somewhat unexpectedly, but very successfully, thirteen small black pigs, shining like satin and wholly delectable.

The only blot on the perfection of the day was the behaviour of Selina. At 11 A. M. she was detected by Miss McCox, in full pursuit of the last hatched brood of chicken. Caught, or to be fair to Selina, cornered, by the entire staff, at 11.30, she was well and handsomely whipped, and crept, an apparently chastened dog, into the shelter of the house. There, however, so soon as the clang of the big bell proclaimed the busy dinner hour, she had proceeded to the room sacred to the slumbers of Miss McCox and, undisturbed, had diligently made a hole in the pillow on which Miss McCox’s head nightly reposed, extracting therefrom the feathers of many chickens. These she spread lavishly, and without favouritism, over the surface of the entire carpet, and, well content, withdrew silently and discreetly from the precincts of Thorpe Farm.

At tea time she was still missing, and Sarah alone, stiff with conscious rectitude, sat in front of Ruth and ate a double portion of cake and bread-and-butter. Visions of rabbit holes, steel traps, of angry gamekeepers with guns, had begun to form in Ruth’s mind. Her well-earned appetite for tea vanished. Full forgiveness and an undeservedly warm welcome awaited Selina whenever she might choose to put in an appearance.

Even Miss McCox, when she cleared away the tea, withdrew the notice given in the heat of discovery, and suggested that Selina might be hunting along the stream. She had seen the strange dog down there no longer than an hour ago.

It seemed to Ruth a hopeful suggestion. Also she loved to wander by the stream. In all her dreams of a domain of her own always there had been running water. And now that too was hers. One of the slow Sussex streams moving steadily and very quietly between flowered banks, under overhanging branches. So quietly that you did not at first realize its strength. So quietly that you did not at first hear its song.

It was that strange and wonderful hour which comes before sunset after a cloudless day of May sunshine, when it is as if the world had laughed, rejoiced, and sung itself to rest in the everlasting arms. There is a sudden hush, a peace falls, a strange silence—if you listen.

Ruth ceased to worry about Selina. She drifted along the path down the stream, and love of the whole world folded her in a great content. A sense of oneness with all that moved and breathed, with the little brethren in hole and hedge, with the flowers’ lavish gift of scent and colour, with the warmth of the sun, a oneness that fused her being with theirs as into one perfect flame. Dear God, how good it all was, how wonderful! The marshy ground where the kingcups and the lady smocks were just now in all their gold and silver glory, the wild cherry, lover of water, still in this late season blossoming among its leaves, the pool where the kingfishers lived among the willows and river palms.