Living Alone — 7 - The Faery Farm

THE FAERY FARM

Sarah Brown, finding herself unfetched by the witch, went home alone as soon as the 'buses began putting out to sea after the storm.

She expected to find the witch at home, but only the Dog David and Peony were in the House of Living Alone.

David lay on Peony's bed, and Peony under it.

Sarah Brown saw them as she passed their open door.

"Ow Marmaduke!"

said Peony, "is it all over?

Are you sure?

Them 'uns is so bloody deceitful you never know but what they might go an' blow a bugle or two to mike believe they'd done, an' then drops bombs on us just as we was comin' 'appily out from under our beds."

Peony, with a touching faith in the combined protective powers of twelve inches of mattress and nine inches of dog, had been reading a little paper book called _Love in Society_ by the light of an electric torch.

"It's all truly over," said Sarah Brown, who had come home through a roar of rumour.

"They say we've brought down at least one Boche.

In fact the ferryman says his aunt telephoned that the special on her corner says a female Boche was brought down.

But that hardly sounds likely.

Hasn't the witch come home yet?"

"Lawd no," replied Peony.

"The dear ol' Soup never comes 'ome of a moonlight night.

It's my belief she goes to Maiden'ead among the Jews, to keep out of the wiy, and 'oo's to blime 'er?"

"Well, that's all right," said Sarah Brown.

"For now I shall be able to buy--without pawning anything for the moment--a little land outfit from stock.

I know she has some."

The night was by then far from young, in fact it was well into its second childhood.

But Sarah Brown and the Dog David sought and tried on land outfits for several hours.

The shop was divided into three horizontal departments.

Nearest the floor were the foodstuffs; biscuit tins buttressed the counter on every side; regiments of Grape-nuts, officered by an occasional Quaker Oat, stood in review order all round the lower shelves.

On the counter little castles of tinned fruit were built, while bins beneath it held the varied grain, cereal, and magic stock.

About on a level with one's head the hardware department began: frying-pans lolled with tin coffee-pots over racks, dust-pans divorced from their brushes were platonically attached to flat-irons or pie-dishes, Stephen's Inks were allied with penny mugs or tins of boot polish in an invasion of the middle shelves, and a wreath of sponges crowned the champion of a row of kettles in shining armour.

Against the ceiling the drapery section was found.

Overalls, ready-made breeches, babies' socks, and pink flannelette mysteries hung doubled up as if in pain over strings nailed to the rafters.

From this department Sarah Brown, balanced upon three large biscuit tins placed on the counter, chose her outfit with vanity and care.

The general effect was not good, but she did not know this, for she studied the parts separately in a six-inch mirror.

She was filled with a simple pleasure.

For she was always absurdly moved by little excitements, and by any prospect of a changed to-morrow.

She was not really used to being alive at all, and that is what made her take to magic so kindly.

"In six hours," she said, "I shall be on my way to something utterly new."

And in six hours she was on her way, whistling, across the Parish of Faery.

The Dog David ran in front of her among the daisies.

The rabbits can never be caught in this land of happy animals, but they give good sport and always play fair.

David Blessing Brown, a dog of independent yet loving habit, had spent about four-fifths of his life in the Brown family.

He was three years old, and though ineligible for military service, made a point of wearing khaki about his face, and in a symmetrical heart-shaped spot near his tail.

To Sarah Brown he was the Question and the Answer, his presence was a constant playtime for her mind; so well was he loved that he seemed to her to move in a little mist and clamour of love.

With every one else she held but lame intercourse, but her Dog David and she withheld no passing thought from each other.

They could often be heard by unmattering landladies and passers-by exchanging views in the strong Suffolk accent that was a sort of standing joke between them.

I believe that Sarah Brown had loved the Dog David so much that she had given him a soul.

Certainly other dogs did not care for him.

David said that they had found out that his second name was Blessing, and that they laughed at him for it.

His face was seamed with the scars of their laughing.

But I know that the enmity had a more fundamental reason than that.

I know that when men speak with the tongues of angels they are shunned and hated by men, and so I think that when dogs approach humanity too nearly they are banished from the love of their own kind.

Sarah Brown was not altogether unfamiliar with the Parish of Faery, but she never failed to be surprised by the enchantment of the Enchanted Forest.

The Green Ride runs straight through it, so incredibly straight that as you walk along it the end of it is at the end of your sight, and is like a star in a green sky.

There is a dream that binds your mind as you cross the forest; it is like an imitation of eternity, so that, as you pass into the forest's shade, time passes from before you, and, as you pass out of it, you seem to have lived a thousand quiet and utterly forgotten lives.

Clocks and calendars have no meaning in the forest; the seasons and the hours haunt it at their will, and abide by no law.

Just as the sun upon a stormy day makes golden a moving and elusive acre in our human woods, so the night in the Enchanted Forest comes and goes like a ghost upon the sight of lovers of the night.

For there you may step, unastonished, from the end of a day into its beginning; there the summer and the winter may dodge each other round one tree; there you may see at one glance a spring hoar frost and an autumn trembling of airs, a wild cherry tree blossoming beside a tawny maple.

The forest is so deep and so thick that it provides its own sky, and can enjoy its own impulses, and its own quiet anarchy.

There you forget that sky of ours across whose face some tyrant drives our few docile seasons in conventional order.

I think the Dog David in his own way shared the dream that leads wayfarers through the Enchanted Forest.

When he came out with Sarah Brown under the tasselled arch of Travellers' Joy that crosses the end of the Green Ride, he was all shining and dewy with adventure, and his tail was upright, as though he were pretending that it carried a flag.

On an abrupt hill in the middle of an enormous green meadow a Castle stood, just as Richard had predicted.

It was To Let, and was not looking its best.

Some man of enterprise, taking advantage of its forlorn condition, had glued an advertisement upon its donjon keep.

You could almost have measured that advertisement in acres; it recommended a face cream, and represented a lady with a face of horrible size, whose naturally immaculate complexion was marred by the rivets and loopholes of the donjon keep itself, which protruded in rather a distressing way.

Oak trees stood round the foot of that pale hill, and the general effect was rather that of parsley round a ham.

Between two oaks Sarah Brown, following directions, found the beginning of the Daisified Path.

There were not only daisies all over the path but real violets on either side of it.

The daisies looked one in the face, but the violets did not, because they had morbidly bad manners.

Still of course manners are very small change and count for very little; the violet, being an artist, is entitled to any manners it likes, while the daisy has no temperament whatever, and no excuse for eccentricity.

Grasshoppers tatted industriously and impartially among the daisies and the violets.

Here outside the forest there was weather again, and the weather was more promising than generous.

It continued to promise all day without exactly explaining what its promise was, and without achieving any special fulfilment.

Fine silver lines of sunlight were ruled at a steep angle across a grey slate view.

At the gate of Higgins Farm, Sarah Brown was a little disconcerted to find a small dragon.

It was coiled round a tree beside the clipped box archway.

It was not a very fine specimen, being of a brownish-green colour, and having lost the tip of one wing.

Its spine was serrated, especially deeply between its shoulder blades, where it could raise a sort of crest if angered or excited.

But at present it was asleep, its saturnine and rather wistful face rested upon one scaly paw.

Sarah Brown was uncertain what to do, but the Dog David took the matter into his own paws by mistake.

He had just met one of the castle dogs, one of those tremulous-tailed creatures who spend themselves in a rather pathetic effort to sustain an imaginary reputation for humour.

David retorted to this dog's first facetious onslaught with a kindly quip, they trod on each other once or twice with extravagant gestures, and then parted hysterically, each supposing himself to be pursued by the other.

It was then that David tripped over the dragon's barbed tail.

David squeaked, and the dragon awoke.

It uncoiled itself suddenly like a broken spring.

"Gosh," it said.

"Asleep again!

I was waiting for you, and the sun on my back always makes me sleepy.

I am the foreman.

Higgins telephoned that you were coming."

It preceded her through the little green archway that led to the farm.

The sight reminded Sarah Brown of watching from Golders Green Tube Station the train one has just missed dive into the tunnel.

She followed.

On the other side of the archway the whole view of the plain called Higgins Farm met the adventurer.

The farm-buildings were heaped graciously together on a little wave in the sea of ploughed fields.

Except for two pale ricks in their midst, they exactly matched their surroundings, they were plastered dark red, and thatched with very old green and brown thatch.

Beyond the buildings was a little wood, its interior lighted up with bluebells, and this wood merged into an orchard, where a white pony and an auburn pig strove apparently to eat the same blade of grass.

The various sections of the farm land lay mapped out in different intensities of brown, very young green, and maturer green, and each section was dotted with people.

They seemed small people even from a distance, and, as Sarah Brown advanced at the tail of the dragon, she saw that the workers were all indeed under ordinary human size.

The tallest, a man guiding a miniature plough behind a tall horse, might have reached Sarah Brown's shoulder.

None of them seemed hard at work, they stood talking in little groups.

One group as they passed it was trafficking in cigarette cards.

"I want to get my Gold Scale set of English Kings complete," a voice was saying tragically.

"Has nobody got Edward the Confessor?"

None of them took any notice of the foreman.

"I'm afraid I haven't got the gift of discipline," sighed the dragon.

"And fairies are of course abnormally undisciplined creatures.

Still, we simply can't get any one else, and Higgins will not apply for a few German prisoners.

Get on with your work, you people, do.

There, you see, they defy me to an extent.

Ever since the cowmen dipped me in the horse-pond my authority's gone--gone where the good niggers go."

I find that there are quite a lot of people who cannot say the word "gone" without adding the clause about the good niggers.

These people have vague minds, sown like an allotment with phrases in grooves.

Directly the dragon said "to an extent" without qualifying the extent, one saw why it had no gift of discipline.

"I wouldn't attempt this job," it continued, winding breathlessly along the rutty road, "only I am under a great obligation to Richard Higgins.

I am a _protidgy_ of his, you know, he rescued me from a lot of mischievous knights who were persecuting me.

One of them had tied his tin hat to my tail, I remember, and the rest were trying to stick their nasty spears between my scales.

Really, you know, it was quite dangerous.

I have known a fellow's eye put out that way.

I am not very good at fighting, though I might have tackled one at a time.

Richard Higgins rode right into the midst of them, knocking them right and left.

Gosh, he gave them a talking to, and they slank away.

He took my case up after that, made enquiries, and gave me this job.

We scrape along somehow, but I'm afraid I'm not really suited for it."

They reached a part of a field in which broad beans were enjoying an innocent childhood among white butterflies.

"If you wouldn't mind," said the dragon shyly, "I should like you to hoe between the rows of these beans.

You will find a hoe against the big stack.

This is your row, I reserved it for you."

All the other rows were occupied by fairy women with their skirts tucked up--for only your amateur land-woman wears breeches.

They all had hoes, but were not using them much.

They were singing curious old round songs like summer dreams; you could hear strange fragments of phrases passing from voice to voice.

They took no notice of Sarah Brown, and she began to work.

"Oh, my One," she said to David.

"How happy this is.

No wonder they sing.

Any one must sing working like this in great fields.

Why, I even remember that the Shropshire Lad whistled once by mistake, while ploughing, on his own admission, until a fatalistic blackbird recalled him to his usual tragic mind."

David sat uncomfortably on a broad bean, protesting against this new mania.

For a moment he had thought that she was seeking for a mouse with some patent mouse-finding implement.

He had even tried to help her, and turned over a clod with a critical paw, but one sniff had showed him the empty futility of the thing.

Sarah Brown hoed rather happily for a couple of hours, and then she began to count the beans still waiting trustfully in the queue, waiting to be attended to and freed from their embarrassments.

There were ninety-six, she decided, standing up ostensibly to greet an aeroplane.

She became very glad of the occasional aeroplanes that crossed above her field, and gave her an excuse for standing with a straight back to watch them.

Aeroplanes, crossing singly or in wild-bird formations, are so common in the sky of Faery that every one in those parts, while turning his own eyes inevitably upwards, secretly thinks his neighbour lamentably rustic and unsophisticated for looking at them.

Every aeroplane that crosses Faery feels, I suppose, the reflected magic from the land below, for there is never one with the barest minute to spare that does not pause and try to be clever over Higgins Farm.

You may see one industriously climbing the clouds over the Enchanted Forest, evidently trying hard to be intent on its destination.

You may see it falter, struggling with its sense of duty, and then break weakly into a mild figure eight.

The ragged rooks of Faery at once hurry into the air to show their laborious imitator how this should be done.

The spirit of frivolous competition enters into the aeroplane, its duty is flung to the winds.

It flaunts itself up and down once or twice, as if to say: "Now look, everybody, I'm going to be clever."

Then it goes mad.

It leaps upon imaginary Boches, it stands upon its head and falls downward until the very butterflies begin to take cover, it stands upon its tail and falls upward, it writes messages in a flowing hand across the sky and returns to cross the t's. It circles impertinently round your head, fixing its bold tricolour eye upon you until you begin to think there must be something wrong with your appearance.

It bounds upon a field of onions and rebounds in the same breath from the topmost cloud of heaven.

The rooks return disconsolately to their nests.

Then you may see the erring machine suddenly remember itself, and check itself in the act of some new paroxysm.

It remembers the European War that gave it birth; it thinks of its mates scanning the sky for its coming; its frivolity ebbs suddenly.

The eastern sky becomes once more its highway instead of its trapeze.

It collects its wits, emits a few contrite bubbles of smoke, and leaps beyond sight.

Whenever this happened, the female fairies behaved in a very plebeian and forward manner, waving their hoes at each machine, encouraging it by brazen gestures to further extravagances, and striving to reach its hearing with loud shrill cries.

There was very little difference between these fairies and other lady war-workers.

In fact they were only distinguishable by their stature and by the empty and innocent expression of their faces.

Also perhaps by their tuneful singing, and by a habit of breaking out suddenly into country dances between the bean-rows.

Sarah Brown, who worked a great deal more industriously than any one else in sight, soon overtook them, and while conscious of that touch of interested scorn always felt by the One towards the Herd, found relief in watching their vagaries, and presently in speaking to them.

For she needed relief, poor Sarah Brown, her disabilities were catching her up; a hoarse contralto cough was reminding her of many doctors' warnings against manual work.

She could feel, so to speak, the distant approaching tramp of that pain in her side under whose threat she had lived all her life.

But there were seventy-five beans yet.

The note of her hoe, a high note not quite true pitched, clamoured monotonously upon her brain.

Three blisters and a half were persecuting her hands.

"Let them blist," she said defiantly.

"This row of beans was given me to hoe, and Death itself shall not take it from me."

She could almost imagine she saw Death, waiting for her tactfully beyond the last bean.

She had no sense of proportion.

She was so very weary of having her life interrupted by her weakness that anything that she had begun to do always seemed to her worth finishing, even under torture.

To finish every task, in spite of all hindrance, was her only ambition, but it was almost always frustrated.

Seventy more beans.

"Three score and ten," thought Sarah Brown.

"What's that?

Only a lifetime."

She bent to her work.

A great clump of buttercups bestrode her bean row, and as after a struggle she dragged its protesting roots from the earth, something fell from it.

"Oh, a nest," she gasped.

"Look, I have hoed up a nest."

"Good gracious," exclaimed a fairy.

"Look what she's done.

It's Clement's nest, poor chap, he only married in February.

Say, girls, here's Clement's semi-detached gone up."

Cries of consternation were heard from every bean-row.

Clement's nest was really almost more than semi-detached.

It had been but lightly wedged between two buttercup stalks.

The two eggs in it were at once unseated, and one was broken.

Sarah Brown was deeply distressed.

"What a blind fool I am," she said, trying helplessly to replace the nest.

"Won't Clement ever come back?"

"Mrs. Clement won't," said the nearest fairy.

"She is almost hysterical about the sanctity of the home, and all that.

She'll probably get a divorce now."

"Oh, poor Clement, poor Clement," said Sarah Brown.

"Will he be terribly cut up?"

"There he is," replied the fairy, pointing upward.

"He's watching you.

That's Clement's voice you hear."

"Clement's voice," exclaimed Sarah Brown.

"Singing like that?

Why, he sounds perfectly happy."

"Perfectly happy," mocked the fairy.

"His family only sings like that when it's upset.

Perfectly happy indeed!

Can't you understand tragedy when you hear it?"

Sarah Brown with despairing care tucked the nest up under a bean, and replaced the unbroken egg.

"Do you mean to tell me, then," she said, after a busy painful pause, "that Shelley probably misunderstood that lark he wrote a poem about?

He called it a blithe spirit, you know, because it sang.

Do you suppose it wasn't one?"

"Certainly not," said the fairy.

"I don't know the actual facts of the case, but without a doubt your friend Shelley was standing on the unfortunate bird's nest all the time he was writing his poem."

Sarah Brown, with a deep sigh, began hoeing again.

Fifty beans yet.

She had altogether ceased to find pleasure in the day.

Pain is an extinguisher that can put out the sun.

She had ceased to find pleasure in the singing of the birds, the voice of the pigeon sounded to her no more than an unbeautiful falsetto growl.

She was irritated by the fact that the cuckoo had only one song to sing.

She tried not to hoe in time to that song, but the monotony of it possessed her.

Her row of beans stretched in front of her right across the world; every time she looked along it the end seemed farther away.

Every time she raised her hoe the sword of pain slipped under her guard.

The Dog David, impatient of her unnatural taste in occupations, had forsaken her.

She could trace his course by a moving ripple across the potato patch, just as a shark's movement seams the sea.

Forty beans.

Time wears a strangely different guise out of doors.

Under the sun time stands almost still.

Only when every minute is a physical effort do you discover that there really are sixty minutes in an hour, and that one hour is very little nearer to the evening than another.

People who work indoors under the government of clocks never meet time face to face.

Their quick seconds are dismissed by the clicking of typewriters, and when their typewriters fall silent, their day is over.

We of Out of Doors have a daily eternity to contend with during which only our hands are busy; our minds may grow old and young again between sunrise and sunset; the future may be remade in an hour, hope killed and reborn before a blackbird's song is over.

We know the length of days.

And after many slow months of stress we come back again, old and bewildered with much silence and much wondering, to our friends in offices, and find them unchanged, floating innocently on the surface of time.

Sarah Brown dropped her hoe and fell upon her knees.

"I can't hoe any more," she said.

"There are twenty-five more beans, but I can't hoe them."

"Why should you?"

asked the nearest fairy indifferently.

"The foreman never notices if we shirk.

We always do."

"I said I would hoe this row," said Sarah Brown.

"But I am accursed.

It is a good thing at least to know one's limitations."

Even in affliction she was prosy.

"I would advise you to go and have your dinner," another fairy said.

"Only that I ate your sandwiches as I passed just now.

But I left a little lemonade in your bottle.

Go under the trees and drink it."

"I can't move," said Sarah Brown.

"Sit there then," said the fairies, and passed on, tickling but not uprooting the weeds in their rows.

Fairies are never ill.

They have immortal bodies, but no souls.

If they see you in pain, they simply think you are flaunting your superiority and your immortal soul in their faces.

The dragon undulated up the field.

"Very nicely hoed," he said, looking vaguely at Sarah Brown's row.

"Much better than the other rows.

Having your dinner?

Quite right too."

He never noticed the twenty-five unhoed beans.

Sarah Brown sat on the edge of a shore of green shadow, and a sea of sun speckled with buttercups was before her.

David Blessing came and leaned against her.

His first intentions were good, he kissed her hurriedly on the chin, but after that he kissed the sandwich bag.

Sarah Brown wondered whether she could cut her throat with a hoe.

"Suicide while of sound mind," she said.

"The said mind being entirely sick of its unsound body."

If she sat absolutely still and upright the pain was bearable.

But even to think of movement brought tears of pain to her eyes.

She detached her mind from her predicament, and sank into a warm tropical sea of thought.

She was no real thinker, but she thought much about thinking, and was passionately interested in watching her own mind at work.

Thought was like sleep to her, she sank deeply into it without reaching anything profound, nothing resulted but useless dreams, and a certain comforting and defiant intimacy with herself.

She thought of Richard, and wished that she could have hoed a blessing into every bean of his that she had hoed.

She noted half-consciously and without surprise that the thought of him was beautiful to her.

She could not conjure up his face before her mind, because she always forgot realities, and only remembered dreams.

She could not imagine the sound of his voice, she could not recall anything that he had said.

Yet she felt again the magic feeling of meeting him, and dreamt of all the things that might have happened, and that might yet happen, yet never would happen, between him and her.

All the best things that she remembered had only happened in her dreams, her imagination no sooner sipped the first sip of an experience than it conjured up for her great absurd satisfying draughts of nectar, for which the waking Sarah Brown might thirst in vain.

But there was no waking Sarah Brown.

Her life was only a sleep-walking; only very rarely did she awake for a moment and feel ashamed to see how alert was the world about her.

So she thought of Richard, not of Richard's Richard, but of some pale private Richard of her own.

The approach of Richard upon a white horse for some time seemed only an extension of her dream.

It was only when she realised that he was riding up her bean-row, and partially undoing the work of her hoe, that she awoke suddenly with a start, and caught and tore her breath upon a pin of pain.

It seemed that the afternoon had now long possessed the fields, it had wakened into a live and electric blue the Enchanted Forest which she had last noticed shimmering in its noon green.

All the workers at the approach of Richard were working busily, bent ostentatiously in the form of hairpins up and down their rows.

The dragon was rippling anxiously along at the heels of the white horse; a helpless hoping for the best expressed itself in every spike along his spine.

"I don't really know why she's idling like that," Sarah Brown heard him say in his breathy pathetic voice.

"I left her hard at work.

They're all the same when my back's turned.

A fellow needs to have eyes at the tip of his tail."

"Are you suffering from that Leverhulme six-hour-working-day sort of feeling?"

asked Richard politely of Sarah Brown, in the manner of an advertisement of a cure for indigestion, as he approached.

"I think it's just splendid how receptive and progressive working people are in these days."

"I was meditating suicide," replied Sarah Brown candidly, if faintly.

"I am a stricken and useless parasite on the face of your fine earth.

But my hoe is too blunt."

"I have a pocket-knife with three blades I could lend you," said Richard, slapping himself enquiringly over several pockets.

"Or would you rather try a natty little spell I thought of this morning while I was shaving.

I think any one stricken might find it rather useful."

"Ah, give it to me.

Give it to me," said Sarah Brown.

The pain was like a wave breaking upon her, carrying her away from her safe shore of shadow, to be lost in seething and suffocating seas without rest.

Her eyes felt dried up with fever, and whenever she shut them, the darkness was filled with a jumble of nauseating squares in blue upon a mustard-coloured background.