Doomsday. Warwick Deeping

in bloom, and those emerald larches, and Rushy Pool with a few kingcups still left, and his meadows, and his sleek violet-eyed cattle. Surely she would love it all as he did, and feel the beauty and the goodness and the cleanness of this English land. Devoutly dreaming, he believed that she would.

      "Mary Viner, Mary Viner."

      The thrush who perched on the old cedar sang her name. He saw the face in the milk, her lips in the budding apple blossom, her eyes in the brown water.

      But chiefly now he loved to loiter in Mrs. Damaris' garden under the window of the white parlour, for it was here that his man's thoughts took shape. He would stand with his back against the stone wall, and watch the light die out of the sky, and the stars prick the increasing blackness. Here was grass for her feet, and flowers for her hands. Next spring it should be a mass of hyacinths and tulips. Music in colour—a Schubert's song.

      Then, perhaps, he would go in and feel a little chilled by the empty and barren house. No fit place for her yet, but if her heart was as his he felt that he could pull the welkin down to hang it on the walls for her. Hangings of blue and of gold.

      Meanwhile he would light the lamp, and sit down at the rough table with the account book and a pencil and some odd pieces of paper, and make calculations and scribble little sums. His figures were like himself, large and simple and steadfast. He would run his hand over his wavy brown head. Supposing he did without the corn-crusher and the new wagon and harness in the autumn? The reaper he must have. The farm was showing a profit; he had money at the bank; he felt sure that his strong hands could drag more money ont of the soil. Yes, supposing he furnished a bedroom, the parlour, the sitting-room and the kitchen, not flimsily, no, but with gear fit for her? By God—of course it could be done. The soil had been swallowing everything; it was fat and lusty; let the house have its turn.

      Arnold was a man of method—even as a lover, and part of his success as a farmer was due to his methodical intelligence. He kept accurate accounts, a diary, and a day book in which he entered up the work for the week in front of him, and the keeping of these books was an act of heroism, as any man who has to strive with the soil will tell you. To feel dog-tired and sleepy, and yet to make yourself sit down and scribble! That is where will-force comes in, and Furze had been taught that half the farming of England is laborious and haphazard, without that last flip of intelligence which knows where the muck goes, or how the money comes, and has it down on paper.

      He did his scribbling last thing at night, after half an hour at his piano, sitting in socks, breeches and shirt, his feet tucked back under his chair, both arms spread on the table. He hated this scribbling but he made himself do it, and many had been the times when he had blessed himself for doing it. It was a check on himself, and a check on Will Blossom, for however good a man's body is—his brain may be a sheep's, and such was Will's.

      But now Furze would pause and dream a little. He might win a partner. And perhaps she would sit at a table and write for him while he dictated the day's doings. A wife was interested—surely?

      "You are tired, Arnold. Sit and smoke and talk, and I'll write."

      Yes, he would love her for that, and perhaps she would love doing it.

      The routine of his life began to be altered in a dozen significant ways. His camp-bed had ascended into one of the bedrooms; the kitchen became a kitchen, and the living-room something of what it should be. Logs ceased to be piled in a corner; the work-bench was transferred to an out-house. The home-made table had its legs planed and stained, and its top covered with a blue and white cloth. Sarah Blossom gave the house two days a week instead of one, and she—being a woman—had eyes in her head and a tongue.

      "Muster Furze be sweet on someone."

      Yes, because a man does not become suddenly fussy about his house, and rise to table cloths and electroplated spoons and forks without an adequate reason. And that garden, and those flowers! Mrs. Blossom was a little, thin, rat-trap of a woman with a bluish tip to her long nose, and straight, mouse-coloured hair dragged back very tight off her forehead. She was a careful woman, close, with shiny and clutching red hands. Furze had always noticed her hands. He disliked the idea of them touching his food.

      Mrs. Blossom talked. In such little, mean lives as hers talking becomes a vice, a vocal drunkenness or incontinence. She got her excitement out of talking. Yes, Furze was wearing two shirts a week instead of one; changed his working shirt after milking-time. And three soft collars a week instead of one and a half. And he had a new pair of brown shoes, and he shaved himself every day. And he had planed those table legs and stained them! Hee, hee, hee!

      Mrs. Blossom had an irreverent mind. Those table legs seemed to her a great jest. She would go off into thin laugher that was rather like a sheep's bleating, and press her red hands to her breastless bosom, and screw her head on one side.

      "Don't know who 'tis—but there's a gel—somewhere."

      She was always cross-questioning Will.

      "Ain't you seen a gel—any time?"

      Will hadn't. Domestic life had tended to make him more and more like a blue-eyed bull, surly and sluggish, and breaking out occasionally into exasperated bellowings. He was a good fellow, but in the bull-ring of marriage his wife's tongue maddened him.

      "Guess it be one of the gels at Cinder Town."

      She was so eager to get her nasty little blue-tipped nose into the mystery of Arnold Furze's transfiguration that she would go wandering down the lane of an evening, ostensibly to gather rabbit food. The Blossom cottage stood on the road to Rotherbridge. When met and spoken to butter would not melt in her mouth, but remained there to turn rancid.

      "Evening, Mrs. Blossom."

      "Good evening to you, sir."

      She had caught him in the lane, wearing a clean collar, and with something bulging in his pocket, and going towards the main road. She had an apron full of green herbage. She idled after him far enough to see that he went down to the Sandihurst Estate. There were happenings in the air. Will had had orders to have the blue wagon and the greys ready early to-morrow morning. There was to be a sale at Melhurst. Mrs. Blossom had seen the auctioneer's placard posted on the back of Mr. Burnham's cow-shed.

      2

      Mary Viner was mowing the lawn. She herself called it a grass plot, but to her mother and her father it was the lawn, twenty feet square between the road and the fence and the house. An ash path divided it on Harold Coode's side from the herbaceous border; towards the Jamiesons it was flanked by a privet hedge that did not exclude the red and intrusive faces of the Jamieson children. The lawn held a circular bed in its centre where Captain Viner tried to grow violas, and the slugs saw to it that his success was relative.

      The Viner mowing-machine was like most things in Cinder Town, a make-shift, cheaply American, and second hand at that. It gnawed the grass instead of cutting it. It had clenched its teeth upon many rusty nails and small stones, and its soul had grown churlish and embittered. It clanked and rattled and squeaked.

      Mary went to and fro with the cross-piece of the handle pressing close to her young bosom. She remained strictly attentive to the business in hand, for poor Coode was hovering like a celestial scout-master eager for a day's good deed. She knew that if she relented ever so little he would come and hang devotedly over the fence. "I say—do you think—you—ought—to do that? After 'flu? Why not let me do it for you?" Also, she had seen Colonel Toby strolling in his garden, smoking a cigar, and that little circle of crystal had flashed frequently in her direction. "Fine young woman. Cutting grass! No false pride. Capital, capital!"

      Furze came to the gate a moment after the knives of the machine had jammed, and she was trying to extract a rusty wire-nail from the mower's teeth. Hot, flushed, and a little peeved, she looked up and saw him. He was half inside the gate.

      "Trouble?"

      His glance had a deep and lingering steadfastness. It disturbed and fluttered her, so that her colour came more quickly. Her brown eyes were elusive. Yes, she was in trouble. This