John Powys - Ducdame

The third day of June was Mrs. Ashover’s birthday; and now, as Pandie went in and out of the two little rooms she was attending to, rooms kept scrupulously clean in a sort of contented emptiness, as if waiting to be turned into a day nursery and night nursery when the autumn came, it occurred to her mind that it was time to remove the old lady’s breakfast things and receive her orders for the day.

Through the open windows and the open doors of that panelled landing the warm sunshine was pouring into the old house bringing with it the pleasant sound of the mowing machine and the sweet smell of cut grass.

Pandie hummed to herself as she went up the short flight of polished steps that led into the “new wing,” as it was called, at the end of which, looking out upon the orchard and upon the yellow gorse and green bracken of Battlefield, was her own bedroom and that of her friend Martha.

Taking off her rough apron and tidying herself before the glass, preparatory to ascending to the third floor which was almost entirely taken up by Mrs. Ashover’s long, low-ceilinged boudoir, the red-haired servant changed her humming into the erratic strain of an ancient Somersetshire song, such as in all probability had never been heard before in that Frome-side manor.

She moved to her open window, as she sang, tying up the strings of a spotlessly clean apron and rolling down her sleeves. Leaning out of the window she soon met the gaze of two elderly men resting at that moment in leisurely contentment from the not very arduous task of mowing the grass paths of the kitchen garden. It was the privilege of Mr. Twiney to steer the lawnmower, while Mr. Pod, acting the part of a human horse, marched in front, pulling the machine along by the aid of two slender cords.

Mr. Pod was now with the utmost deliberation emptying the box of the lawnmower into a wheelbarrow, which was already half full of velvet-soft dark-green grass.

Mr. Twiney was lighting his pipe. Hie two old cronies standing there in the early summer sunshine between the rows of immature green peas and immature sweet peas, between a border of yellow pansies and a hedge of pink and white peonies, gave an added sweetness to that ribald Sedgemoor song, as the hard-worked damsel trilled the lines like a great red-poll’d bird.

Both of the elderly men were arrested by her voice; but Mr. Pod only gave her a cursory glance and turned to his wheelbarrow. Mr. Twiney, however, jerked his thumb in the direction of his companion, as much as to say, “Don’t ’ee mind his being there, me pretty maid; I be a-listening to ’ee!” and then made a deliberately gallant gesture, beckoning the wench to come down and speak to him.

Pandie did not hesitate. With one glance at the looking glass on the chest of drawers she ran down the stairs, slipped through the scullery unnoticed by Martha, and emerged from the back door.

Mr. Twiney, moving leisurely toward her in his shirt sleeves, had the air of one whose professional duty required him at that juncture to survey with care certain gooseberry bushes and certain rhubarb stalks and to pick off the blighted leaves of particular standard roses whose buds were still green.

Arriving at length, after many pauses, at a point opposite to the kitchen door he proceeded to greet the red-haired maiden with a gesture of dignified surprise; and, like a man interrupted in the preoccupation of a lifetime, began to unbend the austerity of his visage into a grave but indulgent urbanity.

“A fine morning, Pandie, me girl!” he exclaimed. “’Tis good growing weather for both beasties and roots. Them peas be wonderful well come on, and I’ve never seed they onions so high. ’Tis the same with me old mare down in village. She do put her old head out of winder and hollers to everythink what traipses along. ’Tis real summer be come this season, same as it used to be when us were childer. Old Pod he be got his bit of mead, down by river, most ready for cutting; only it be so full of them sour weeds that ’twon’t make good hay. Now there’s me own little patch up by churchyard, maidie! Pod had dunged his mead with nothink but cow-dung, while all them dead folk, right down from King Charley’s time, do make hay for I and me old mare!”

Pandie nodded her head sympathetically.

“You was always a lucky man, Mr. Twiney,” she remarked. “Though they do say that grass what’s nourished by corpses makes milk bad for butter. But maybe horses be different; though me old father used to say that horses be more human than we be. They be sensitive beasts, I reckon. But maybe your horse takes kind of natural to churchyard grass, Mr. Twiney?”

“Maybe she do. Maybe she don’t,” replied the gardener. “There be more sextons in my family, come to think of it, than there be in Pod’s; though he did cut me out with the parson that is. Not that I grudge it to the poor man. If it weren’t for what he gets for thik little job ’twould be workhouse for ’ee; and all the village do know it.”

The two interlocutors stared gravely at each other, while over them both floated, on waves of aromatic sunshine, the scent of currant bushes and gooseberry bushes, the scent of heavy peony blooms, of the sun-warmed leaves of budding briar-roses and of the barrowful of cut grass.

Pandie pondered in her heart for some piece of news that would enhance her value in the eyes of her friend. She recalled the occasion when by a heaven-sent piece of luck Lady Anil had been so nervous and “beyond herself” that she had confided in the servant that this was the beginning of her fifth month of pregnancy.

How dearly would she have loved to reveal this fact to Mr. Twiney!

Still more powerfully was she tempted to speak of a matter that she and Martha Vabbin had been discussing for the last three months: the extraordinary change that had taken place in Lady Ann’s own habits and ways; her long preoccupied silences under the linden, when she neither sewed nor read; her long hours of heavy thought at her own window, her long lonely walks with the dog.

But the most agitating urge of all, an urge that only the strongest inbred loyalty could have resisted, was the desire to make a confidant of Mr. Twiney concerning the two separate bedrooms and concerning certain inexplicable scenes that had taken place between the Squire and his new lady, scenes of which she had not even dared to speak to Mrs. Vabbin herself!

Suddenly the right inspiration came to her.

“’Tis Missus’s birthday to-day — the old Missus’s, I mean. And she’ve a-got in her head to do what she’ve a-always done on her birthdays; and that’s to picnic out in Antiger High Mead. I’m a-going up now to her room to take her orders for what Martha have to pack in hampers; and pretty soon they’ll be sending for thee own self about driving of them out there.”

Pandie’s face got as red as her hair as she made this announcement. She looked at the gardener with austere gravity, as much as to say: “You see before you the possessor and revealer of all hidden things.”

But Mr. Twiney’s composure was unshaken. “I’ve a-known all that these last two days, maidie,” he replied, “and I’ve got somethink to tell ’ee what’ll make ’ee stare like an owl to hear of! I heard tell of it from our policeman when he was last round here. It seems that that old bitch-wife Betsy Cooper, what folks call a gippoo though she be no more a gippoo than I be, have moved her cart up from Bishop’s Forley to thik crossroad where Gorm Lane do meet Antiger Lane. ’Tis where the old bitch can snare all the rabbits she’ve a mind to and where there be a fresh-water spring. The place have naught to do with our Squire. All that belongs to he over thik way is that Antiger High Mead where I be to drive the Missus.”