Doomsday. Warwick Deeping

stairs with a dreary sense of having done her duty. Pity? O, yes—she felt all three of them were to be pitied, but then—the other two had lived their lives, and she saw no possible chance of living hers. The dutiful and loving daughter! Why could not she be that, and not the grudging, restless, squeamish creature that she was, yearning for things to happen—so long as they happened to her? Were there any dutiful daughters, ministering angels who found complete and wholehearted satisfaction in surrendering to others? She wondered. She could not help wondering, because her own flesh rebelled so fiercely. She hated poverty and housework, and coal fires, and the smell of dishcloths, and the greasy water in which you had washed up, and the reek of boiled cabbage, and the eternal dusting, and the washing of soiled clothes. Always, her sensitive gorge was rising, and her fastidious and eager spirit shrinking from the things she had to touch.

      "What an egotist I am," she thought and pulled the two arm-chairs apart, and sat down in one of them, shoulders rounded, her arms wrapped round her knees. Her little illusion of a transient basking before the fire had gone. She felt like a cat with a wet fur.

      Irritably she picked up one of the illustrated papers and turned over its pages.

      How tantalizing! She found herself regarding pictures of the fortunate world parading and playing tennis where the sun shone and the sea was blue. Ah, that blue sea! She could imagine it, and the orange trees in fruit and flower, and the mimosa and the olives and the palms. A world of flowers and of sunlight, and of colour, and of spacious, golden hours. Things must happen down there. Sister Clare had passed a gorgeous three weeks at Monte Carlo. She had written letters, and sent them vivid picture-postcards in which sea and sky were two splashes of blue.

      She threw the magazine aside, and sank back into the chair. Her mouth looked thin, and she bit restlessly at her lower lip. She was Cinderella, the new Cinderella, peevish and pale, with brown eyes that asked questions.

      Presently, she fell asleep. She had not meant to fall asleep; it just happened. And she slept the rest of the night there, to be wakened by a sound which she took to be the clamour of her alarum clock. In bed? Not a bit of it. A greyness was stealing in, and the fire was out, and she heard the grandfather clock striking the half hour.

      She jumped up. It was the back door bell that she had heard, and she found the red-nosed boy there, a young Blossom, with the milk can.

      "You're late," she said crossly.

      "Know I be. Muster Furze was up all night lambin'."

      "What's that got to do with it?" she asked.

      The boy stared at this ignorant and unreasonable creature.

      "'E were late with the milkin', o' course."

      She felt snubbed. So—he—had been up all night. And she wondered whether he felt as cross as she did.

      3

      A little flickering yellowness in the tree tops, and the daffodils blown flat in Furze's orchard, such seemed the beginnings of the spring that year. Skipping lambs and bleating ewes, and the sallow blossom flashing a pale gold and the celandines out in the moist places. A night's gale had stripped tiles off the roof, and unroofed two of the lambing pens. On the soil it is the expected that happens, and a man of the soil must expect trouble.

      But, looked at largely, life was very good, even when you had the stress of the year before you, and the weeds were ready to grow. Soon, the wryneck would be calling, and the cuckoo ringing the valley with its double note. Moreover, Arnold had bought a carpet, two basket chairs, a sofa, a small painted wood table, a fender, and a length of cretonne to be cobbled into curtains before the fire at night, with the lamb, the cat and the dog making a queer group upon the two sacks that served as a hearth rug. Furze's lips were very compressed over the making of those curtains, and he was inclined to breathe heavily. Bobbo would sit on his stumpy tail and watch.

      "What the devil's this?"

      His barley sugar eyes had observed many phenomena, but this stuff spread over Furze's knees—what was it?

      "Camouflage, old dog," said his master.

      There were times when he talked aloud to Bobbo, finding him a sympathetic animal, and not like Tibby the cat who was the blackest of egoists.

      "Ever missed an opportunity, old chap? Let an obvious rabbit get away—when it ought to have had no chance with you?"

      Bobbo had. He blinked his eyes at the lamb who was becoming a bit of a nuisance, and altogether too sure of himself, trotting and butting about the place as though the earth belonged to him. Bobbo was a disciplinarian so far as sheep were concerned; it was time the lamb went to school; he was getting through his period of long-legged and silly charm, and would soon be a stupid beast. Bobbo had no opinion of the brain of a sheep.

      Furze poked away carefully with his needle. The carpet was down in Mrs. Damaris' parlour, and the furniture arranged, and on the white walls he had tacked up three or four coloured pictures collected from some old magazines. Obviously, furnishing was some business, and he had tried the chairs, the sofa and the table in every sort of position, with the table somewhere in the centre of each scheme, and then had given it up, and left them all backed against the walls.

      "A woman would do it in two minutes," he supposed.

      Stitching steadily, he reflected as he often reflected on that lost opportunity. Why had he not gone to ask after the health of Captain and Mrs. Viner? How simple life might be, and how difficult one's silly moods and sensitiveness made it! He had let three days pass before he had taken young Blossom's place with the milk-can, and had had the door opened to him by a very unromantic wench from Carslake. Her manners had been as slatternly as her appearance.

      "Miss Viner not well?"

      "She's abed."

      "Serious?"

      "Not as I knows of. Do I pay yer now, or do you send us a bill?"

      "I send in a bill. Will you give my compliments to Miss Viner, and say that I am sorry?"

      The girl had gasped in his face, clutched the milk jug and closed the door upon him and his compliments. Compliments indeed! It might be a democratic age, but did the man who delivered the milk send up his condolences to a lady?

      Furze stitched away at his curtains. A south-west wind was breathing about the house, and upon one window there was the patter of the rain, and upon the other the tapping of an apple bough in the orchard. He had left that bough uncut, like the brushing of its fingers against the lattice, for when a man lives alone sounds have a friendly significance. Warm rain and a southwest wind, lushing up the young grass in his meadows, and breathing gently upon the pear and the plum blossom! The sound of the wind in the chimney seemed to make a stirring in the heart of the old house, and he sat and listened as though those empty upper rooms were coming to life and filling with a presence. He could imagine feet going softly to and fro, a creaking of the old boards, hands busy with white linen. Yes, a woman's presence, breathing within the house as the south-west wind breathed outside it.

      He put his woman's work aside, rose, and stood up with a questioning and inward stare, moved by some impulse that seemed to have come to him out of the wind. Whence—whither? Was man but a creature of the soil, and of the sky? Did all his yearnings and strivings grow out of the earth, and put out their inevitable leaves for the wind to play with? And leaves died. The trees cast them off, and the wind played with them.

      He became aware of Bobbo sitting up and solemnly watching his face.

      "Moods, old chap, moods."

      But he took a candlestick from the shelf, and lit the candle with a brand from the fire, and opened the door of Mrs. Damaris' parlour. His head drooped a little. He had kept a dimly apprehended ideal shut up with his music in that little room, a room in which the perfume and the memory of some woman seemed to linger with a delicate, soft sadness. It was a woman's room, the one feminine room in that great empty old house. It needed a woman. Yes, good God, how it needed one! That furniture! Quite hopeless! Why on earth had he bought