Doomsday. Warwick Deeping

to the wagon and standing on a fore-wheel hub, settled it on the load of cake he had picked up at Melhurst station. Then he stood down and looked at her. The turned-down brim of his hat seemed to make the deep stare of his quiet eyes more serious. She had a new and sudden impression of him as a man who had some meaning for her, a man with a tanned and silent face, and a mouth that was both hard and kind.

      "Will you ride?"

      She stood up.

      "I was going to walk."

      "Just as you please. I can fix you up a seat."

      His curiously dark blue eyes remained fixed upon her face all this time, not boldly or gallantly, but with a deliberate and grave interest. She had the instant knowledge of the fact that as a woman she pleased him. She may have gone on to the intuitive glimpsing of him as a man who was not easily pleased. Her thoughts flew back to the morning when he had brought the milk, and she had shown him a smudged face. Again, her colour changed quickly.

      "It is very good of you."

      "Not a bit."

      "I think I will ride."

      She had not visualized his helping her up, and she felt more lifted than helped. His hands were very strong, but they touched her gently, giving her a sudden and very vivid impression of contact. She felt it as an act of homage, and her eyes sought to veil themselves. She was just a little confused.

      "Where shall I sit?"

      "Wait a moment."

      He was up in the wagon, gathering two or three empty sacks and a horse cover. There was a space between the stacked cake and the front of the wagon, and he made a seat for her on the cake, folding the sacks very deliberately and placing the cloth upon them as though the careful doing of it mattered.

      "That ought to do."

      "Thank you so much."

      She smiled, with something of a quick, scared self-consciousness in her smile, and sat down. She was aware of a pleasant perfume, the smell of the cake. And he, smiling down at her momentarily with a something in his eyes that went straight down into the depths of her, climbed over the edge and gained the road.

      He was going to walk.

      "O,—please," she felt like saying, and was silent, her hands clasped in her lap. But if he meant to walk, well—it meant—She drew a deep breath. For his walking was like his touching of her, an act that was both sensitive and big and manly, not the act of a little, vain, agile creature, and yet so natural. She had a glimpse of him standing there brown and still beside the blue wagon and the grey horses, part of the landscape, and right with it.

      "Thank you," she said.

      So, her blue ship sailed through Melhurst Park, with the white clouds going over, and the landscape half sunlight and half shadow, and she sat and wondered, because he walked beside the head of the near horse as though the wagon held nothing but its load of cake. In a way she was glad of his silence and his back. She could consider him at her leisure, or as much as she could see of him, the broad back, the tanned neck, the old felt hat with the brim turned down, the long, striding legs, and the arms swinging easily. His very clothes seemed to have the soft, weather-worn half tints of the landscape.

      He owned Doomsday Farm. He was supposed to be a little unusual. She had seen the house in the distance from the field path by Beech Ho, and had thought it romantic, and a little mysterious, but lonely. Him, too, in a sense she had only seen at a distance and almost as though he shared Doomsday's mystery and loneliness.

      Half-way up the long hill out of Cherry Bottom he stopped his horses, placed the little wooden roller under a back wheel, and let them rest. He pushed his hat back, looked across the hills and smiled. Next moment he was speaking to her, standing square to the wagon, and looking up steadily into her face.

      "Do you mind the smell of the cake?"

      No, she did not mind it; she thought it rather fragrant.

      "Country smells are," he said; "at least to me. They hang about like memories. The meal tub and the hay loft, and the reek of a weed fire. All good. You don't get out much—I suppose?"

      "No, not much."

      His quiet blue eyes confused her.

      "Women don't. Not with house work. Same with me. I'm stuck there on the soil."

      She had a feeling that he approved of woman as a domestic creature, and his man's view of it was as of something natural and inevitable. Vaguely she was aware of resenting this.

      "But yours is more interesting. A man's always is."

      His blue eyes seemed to receive this statement with peculiar seriousness, and to consider it.

      "Do you think so?"

      "I would rather be a farm labourer than a servant."

      He appeared puzzled.

      "Much the same—surely, though one is out in the air more. A man's job is."

      "But why should it be a man's job?"

      "It happens so. Always has been, hasn't it? Except in the case of the idle young persons who play golf and tennis all day and every day, and they don't count."

      She felt herself flushing. It seemed to her rather ridiculous to be sitting there in his wagon and getting into an argument with him. What had they to argue about?

      "You think women ought to work?"

      His blue eyes suggested that he had never thought of it in any other way than that.

      "Well, don't they? Ninety-nine out of a hundred. It's life. Of course, if you get the notion—"

      He had silenced her, and he seemed suddenly aware of the fact, and grew silent himself, and then he restarted his horse, and resumed his place by the head of the horse. They sailed slowly athwart the landscape till they came to the place where the Melhurst and the Rotherbridge roads joined, and here he pulled up.

      She stood up, and refused his hand.

      "I can manage, thank you."

      But she had to leave him the handling of her bicycle. She noticed that he glanced at her with something between perplexity and half-amused concern.

      "Thank you so much," she said.

      "Not at all. Glad to have been of use."

      He raised his old felt hat, and with a grave and smile-less nod she turned away towards Cinder Town.

      2

      At eight o'clock on a moonlit March night a young woman went out with a jug in quest of milk. For Ransford, the Carslake doctor, expected all day, had not arrived at "Green Shutters" till seven o'clock, and had shown himself a little testy, as an overworked man will. Two old people in bed and coughing in chorus and both with temperatures, and why hadn't Mary sent for him before? As though doctor's bills were to be incurred with frivolous recklessness! Ransford had warmed his hands and ordered milk, meat essence, junket. He had promised to send down some medicine by a boy on a bicycle.

      Hence Mary's quest for milk, for in the larder she had found just enough to cover a lump of sugar in the bottom of a breakfast cup. She knew that she had only to knock at the green door of the "Oast" in order to command immediate devotion, but she did not knock at poor Coode's door. She tried the Perrivales, to be met by Phyllis' red head—and a "So sorry, but I don't think we have got a drop. Dad had the last in his coffee." She hesitated outside the Brownlows, and then went on down the cinder track and out into the road. She would find milk at "Doomsday," and she faced the full moon and saw it hanging like a round shield behind the trunk of one of the Six Firs. There was not a cloud in the sky. She looked up at the zenith, though the stars were dim because of the moonlight, and the Milky Way—invisible—trailed symbolically above her head.

      Where the lane began to descend she heard the dry rustling of