Eastbay. The high ground rising abruptly behind the red roofs of the
little town crowds the quaint High Street against the wall which
defends it from the sea. Beyond the sea-wall there curves for miles in
a vast and regular sweep the barren beach of shingle, with the village
of Brenzett standing out darkly across the water, aspire in a clump of
trees; and still further out the perpendicular column of a lighthouse,
looking in the distance no bigger than a lead pencil, marks the
vanishing-point of the land. The country at the back of Brenzett is
low and flat, but the bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and
occasionally a big ship, windbound or through stress of weather, makes
use of the anchoring ground a mile and a half due north from you as
you stand at the back door of the "Ship Inn" in Brenzett. A
dilapidated windmill near by lifting its shattered arms from a mound
no loftier than a rubbish heap, and a Martello tower squatting at the
water's edge half amile to the south of the Coastguard cottages, are
familiar to the skippers of small craft. These are the official
seamarks for the patch of trustworthy bottom represented on the
Admiralty charts by an irregular oval of dots enclosing several
figures six, with a tiny anchor engraved among them, and the legend
"mud andshells" over all.
The brow of the upland overtops the square tower of the Colebrook
Church. The slope is green and looped by a white road. Ascending along
this road, you open a valley broad and shallow, a wide green trough of
pastures and hedges merging inland into a vista of purple tints and
flowing lines closing the view.
In this valley down to Brenzett and Colebrook and up to Darnford,
the market town fourteen miles away, lies the practice of my friend
Kennedy. He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards
hadbeen the companion of a famous traveler, in the days when there
were continents with unexplored interiors. His papers on the fauna and
flora made him known toscientific societies. And now he had come to a
country practice - from choice. The penetrating power of his mind,
actinglike a corrosive fluid, haddestroyed his ambition, I fancy. His
intelligence is of a scientific order, of aninvestigating habit, and
of that unappeasable curiosity which believes that there is a particle
of a general truth in every mystery.
< 2 >
A good many years ago now, on my return from abroad, he invited
me to stay with him. I came readily enough, and as he could not
neglect his patients to keep me company, he took me on his rounds -
thirty miles or so of an afternoon, sometimes. I waited for him on the
roads; the horse reached after the leafy twigs, and,sitting in the
dogcart, I could hear Kennedy's laugh through the half-open door left
open of some cottage. He had a big, hearty laugh that would have
fitted a man twice his size, a brisk manner, a bronzed face, and a
pair of gray, profoundly attentive eyes. He had the talent ofmaking
people talk to him freely, and an inexhaustible patience inlistening
to their tales.
One day, as we trotted out of a large village intoa shady bit of
road, I saw on our left hand a low, black cottage, with diamond panes
in the windows, a creeper on the end wall, a roof of shingle, and some
roses climbing on the rickety trellis-work of the tiny porch. Kennedy
pulled upto a walk. A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping
blanket over a line stretched between two old apple-trees. And as the
bobtailed, long-necked chestnut, trying to get his head, jerked the
left hand, covered by a thick dogskin glove, the doctorraised his
voice over the hedge: "How's your child,Amy?"
I had the time to see her dull face, red, not with a mantling
blush, but as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, and to
take in the squat figure, the scanty, dusty brown hair drawn into a
tight knot at the back of the head. She looked quite young. With a
distinct catch in her breath, her voice sounded low and timid.
"He's well, thank you."
We trotted again. "A young patient of yours," Isaid; and the
doctor, flicking the chestnut absently, muttered, "Her husband used to
be."
"She seems a dull creature," I remarked listlessly.
< 3 >
"Precisely," said Kennedy. "She is very passive. It's enough to
look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at
thoseslow, prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind -
an inertness that one would think made it everlastingly safe from
allthe surprises of imagination. And yet which of us is safe? At any
rate, such as you see her, she had enough imagination to fall in love.
She's the daughter of one Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has
sunk into a shepherd; thebeginning of his misfortunes dating from his
runaway marriage with the cook of his widowed father - a well-to-do,
apoplectic grazier, who passionatelystruck his name off his will, and
had been heard to utter threats against his life. But this old
affair,scandalous enough to serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy,
arose from the similarity of their characters. There are other
tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from
irreconcilable differencesand from that fear of the Incomprehensible
that hangs over all our heads - over all our heads..."
The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; andthe rim of the sun,
all red in a speckless sky, touched familiarly the smooth top of a
ploughed rise near the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch
the distant horizon of thesea. The uniform brownness of the harrowed
field glowed with a rosy tinge, as though the powdered clods had
sweated out in minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted ploughmen.
From the edge of a copse a wagon with two horses was rolling gently
along the ridge. Raised above our heads upon the sky-line, it loomed
up against the red sun, triumphantly big, enormous, like a chariot of
giants drawn by two slow-stepping steeds of legendary proportions. And
the clumsy figure of the man plodding at the head of the leading horse
projected itself on the background of the Infinite with a heroic
uncouthness. The end of his carter's whip quivered high up in the
blue. Kennedy discoursed.
"She's the eldest of a large family. At the age offifteen they
put her out to service at the New Barns Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith,
the tenant's wife, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs.
Smith, a genteel person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black
dress every afternoon. I don't know what induced me to notice her at
all. There are faces that call your attention by a curious want of
definiteness in their whole aspect, as, walking in a mist, you peer
attentively at a vague shape which, afterall, may be nothing more
curious or strange than a signpost. The only peculiarity I perceived
in her was a slight hesitation in her utterance, a sort of preliminary
stammer which passes away with the first word. When sharply spoken to,
she was apt to lose her head at once; but her heart was of the
kindest. She had never been heard to express a dislike for a single
human being, and she was tender to every living creature. She was
devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries;
and as to Mrs. Smith's gray parrot, its peculiarities exercised upon
her a positive fascination. Nevertheless,when that outlandish bird,
attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in human accents, she ran out
into the yard stopping her ears, and did not prevent the crime. For
Mrs. Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity; on the other
hand, her want of charm, in view of Smith's well-known frivolousness,
was a great recommendation. Her short-sighted eyes would swim with
pity fora poor mouse in a trap, and she had been seen once by some
boys on her knees in the wet grass helping a toad in difficulties. If
it's true, as some German fellow has said, that without phosphorus
there is no thought, it is still more true that there is no kindness
of heart without a certain amountof imagination. She had some. She had
even morethan is necessary to understand suffering andto be moved by
pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room for
doubt in the matter; for you need imagination to form a notion of
beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar
shape.
< 4 >
"How this aptitude came to her, what it did feed upon, is an
inscrutable mystery. She was born in the village, and had never been
further away from it thanColebrook or perhaps Darnford. She lived for
four years with the Smiths. New Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile
away from the road,and she was content to look day after day at the
same fields, hollows, rises; at the trees and the hedgerows; at the
faces of the four men about the farm, always the same - day after day,
month after month, year after year. She never showed a desire for
conversation, and, as it seemed to me, she did not know how to smile.
Sometimes of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put on her best dress,
a pair of stout boots, a large gray hat trimmed with a black feather
(I've seen her in that finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol,
climb over two stiles, tramp over three fields and along two hundred
yards of road - never further. There stood Foster's cottage. She would
help her mother to give their tea to the younger children, wash up the
crockery, kiss the little ones, and go back to the farm. That was all.
All the rest, all the change, all the relaxation. She never seemed to
wish for anything more. And then she fell in love. She fell in love
silently, obstinately -perhaps helplessly. It came slowly, but when it
came it worked like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients
understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse - a possession!
Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face, by a
presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form
under a joyous sky -and to be awakened at last from that mysterious
forgetfulness of self, fromthat enchantment, from that transport, by a
fear resembling the unaccountable terror of abrute..."
With the sun hanging low on its western limit, the expanse of the
grass-lands framed in the counter-scarps of the rising ground took on
a gorgeous and somber aspect. A sense of penetrating sadness, like
that inspired by a grave strain of music, disengaged itself from the
silence of the fields. The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling,
with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of an over-burdened earth
hadweighted their feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their
glances.
--
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And Allah Knows the Best!
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