Chapter VII The Log Cabin
The log cabin had reached the interesting stage at which its framework was complete, and the immediate task was to nail thin bark-covered boards upon it. After that it was to be thatched. Then it was to be lined with match-boarding.
Harry had built every bit of the framework himself, with such help as Jane and Pobbles could give him in lifting and holding the timbers in place, not without some risk to limb if not to life. He had drawn out his constructional plan, from careful study of a book. Then he had had the timbers prepared at the sawmills four miles away, and he and the children had fetched them in a farm cart. It had taken them weeks to get the framework finished, but they had made a very good job of it between them. As they hurried up through the wood to the clearing upon the edge of which the cabin stood, Jane and Pobbles were full of excitement at the thought of work to come which they could really do themselves. So far, it had been helping Harry, which was pleasurable enough, but not to be compared with the pleasure that was to come.
Harry let them chatter without much response, but made the pace towards the clearing so fast that they had to run to keep up with him. He was excited too. He was doing something real, from the beginning. He had invented something and had already carried out the most difficult part of it, meeting the difficulties as they came, and surmounting them. All the rest would be easy enough until it came to the thatching. He proposed to do that himself too. Watching a thatcher at work on a barn had first put the idea of building a log cabin into his head. He thought he knew how it was done, and he could always ask the old thatcher questions; but he was not going to let him lay a finger on the roof of the cabin, nor even stand by and direct. Jane and Pobbles might do whatever lay within their power; it would have been he who had taught them and directed them in everything.
They came to the clearing—a space of bright green turf nibbled short by rabbits, surrounded mostly by oaks interspersed with glistening hollies and here and there a graceful deliciously green beech. The cabin stood back among the trees, its squared timbers showing white and new against the background of green and russet. Harry paused and put his head on one side to contemplate it, and a grin of pure pleasure lit up his face. “A very workmanlike job so far,” he said. “Come on, we’ll get the whole of the front covered in this morning.”
They worked at a rate unknown to members of Trades Unions, measuring and sawing up the boards, and nailing them fast to the posts. Harry did all the sawing, Jane and Pobbles took it in turns to nail one end of a board while he nailed the other. They quarrelled a little over this until Harry stopped them. Jane was of the opinion that Pobbles did not drive in a nail as well as she did. Pobbles was of the contrary opinion. There were only two hammers between the three of them, but Harry was to provide a third for the afternoon. They were to have a picnic tea at the cabin, after lessons, and hoped to see the walls roughly finished before dusk fell.
The brooding summer noon did not daunt these eager labourers. It was more like real work to sweat under the hot sun. Harry took off his coat at the start and turned up his shirt sleeves. Pobbles did the same in imitation of him. Jane, having nothing that she could reasonably take off, contented herself with rolling up her sleeves and warning Pobbles that he would catch cold, which gave him an opening that he was not slow to take advantage of. “Men don’t catch cold when they’re working,” he said, and took off his waistcoat. Jane had to admit inferiority, for once.
They worked till the last possible minute, and met again at the first possible minute in the afternoon. The game which they made of their work was more entrancing now than it had been in the morning. The tasks of the day were done, and the long summer evening stretched infinitely before them. Moreover, the cabin, with its front all boarded in, was now beginning to look like a cabin and not the skeleton of one; and a picnic is always a picnic to happy youth, however inadequate the viands. They were not inadequate on this occasion. All three labourers had brought baskets. A fire was to be lit and tea made—billy tea, of which Harry had learnt the recipe from a book. The meal was to be an adequate substitute for what they would have eaten indoors. Harry was to be excused dinner for it. The children had their freedom until half-past eight.
Jane had changed her clothes, and wore, instead of the cotton frock of the morning, an outgrown coat and skirt, already laid aside “to be given away.” The reason for this apparent feminine vagary became manifest when, arrived on the scene of action, she took off the coat, which was uncomfortably tight, and rolled up the sleeves of the shirt she wore beneath it. She was now at least as much like a pioneer as Pobbles.
In their imaginative adaptable brains they were pioneers in very truth. Harry was as serious about it as the children, though he was too old for any childish game of make-believe. “Now we’ll knock off for an hour,” he said, when one of the end walls had been boarded in, and the desire for bodily sustenance became urgent. “We must get the roof on before the rains begin, but we’re well ahead, and it’s better to keep at it steadily than to work ourselves out.”
He was in some imagined country of the new world, where the first duty was to provide shelter before attacking the primeval woods and bringing the soil into cultivation. The soft English glade, upon which the shadows of English oaks and beeches were beginning to lengthen under the westering sun, was transformed in his imagination to a clearing in some tropical forest, or in the backwoods of Australia or Canada. The Castle, the Vicarage, the village, were wiped out. They were very far away from all such signs of ancient civilization, very far too from all possibility of replenishing their stores, if these should be wastefully used. He asked Jane to count the eggs carefully. “If there’s one over, Tom had better have it,” he said.
Tom was Pobbles, so called only on such occasions as this. Jane understood perfectly. She was the woman of the party, and it lay with her to adjust and husband the stores, also to support the head of it in his designs. On such terms she was willing to shoulder her burden of womanhood, and rather regretted having approximated her attire to that of the men. “You’d better put your jacket on now you’ve left off working,” said Harry, throwing a glance not altogether of approval at her shirt, which she wore open at the neck, as he and the virile Tom wore theirs. She obeyed meekly, and went into the cabin to put on her tie as well, also the hat which she had discarded. “We ought to nail up a bit of looking-glass inside,” she said, as she came out, and before she joined in picking up sticks for the fire she went into the wood where some late hyacinths were still to be found, and fastened a bunch of them on her breast.
Thus far they might make believe, acting as if they were a backwoods party, but not bringing the pretence to the point of utterance. They both laughed at Pobbles when he said: “We’d better stick together when we’re picking up sticks, or one of us may get scalped in the wood,” and Jane said: “We’re helping Harry; he’s not playing a silly game with us.” Pobbles thought it would have been more amusing if they had boldly played the game which seemed to be in their thoughts no less than in his, but accepted the correction, and half understood it. Harry, who was so wonderful at making things, would belittle himself by playing children’s games about them.
But there was no diminution in his dignity when he showed that his mind was full of the reality of what they were playing at. They sat on the chips and sawdust outside the cabin, when they had devoured everything in their baskets, and talked. Harry leant against the new built wall of the cabin with his legs stretched out in front of him, his dog at his feet, and Pobbles leant against the wall beside him, in as near an imitation of his attitude as he could contrive without making himself too uncomfortable. Jane reclined gracefully on her elbow, and occasionally pulled her too-short skirt over her knees. The shadows of the trees had perceptibly lengthened. There were two hours of daylight yet, but the heat had declined, and the evening freshness was mingled with the evening peace. The cuckoo was calling, now here now there, and its grey form could be seen sometimes flitting from tree to tree across the glade. The rabbits were out at the far end of it, and the wood pigeons were swinging home to the high woods behind them. But of human occupation, besides their own, the world seemed empty. They were secure in their retreat.
“It must be a grand thing, you know,” Harry said, “to find a new place in the world which you can make what you like of. Supposing this were really right away from everywhere, in a new country, we should begin just like this, with a cabin a bit bigger but much the same in plan. Then we should make our garden round about it. After that we should prepare our fields. We should cut down trees, for more building when we wanted it, and for logs for burning in the winter. We should have our animals; we should have everything that we wanted round us, and what we hadn’t got we should have to do without until we could go and bring it from the nearest town, which might be hundreds of miles away. There’d be a tremendous lot to do every day, but you’d like doing it, and you’d see the whole thing grow and grow till you had a splendid place which you had made out of nothing, and hundreds of people working on it.”
“Shall you do that, when you’re quite grown up, Harry?” asked Pobbles. “I think I shall. I know a good deal about it already, and I can easily learn some more.”
Jane forbore to rebuke his assumption of knowledge, having one to make on her own account. “I used to think I should hate having to sew and learn to cook,” she said. “But I shouldn’t mind it if I was living in a log cabin. I can cook some things already. I suppose it would be more fun to be a man, but a woman would have to ride and all that, if she lived in a new country; and she could ride astride.”
“It’s only when things begin to get a little settled that women go at all,” said Harry, dashing these dreams. “The real pioneers go alone, and carry everything they want with them on horseback. It must be glorious to ride for day after day in a country where no white man has ever been before, and at last to come to some lovely place where he can make a settlement.”
“There’s no reason why a woman shouldn’t do that too,” said Jane. “She could go alone herself, if the man didn’t want her. She could dress like a man.”
Pobbles exploded with mirth, at some cryptic joke of his own. “A pretty fool she’d look if the Redskins caught her!” he said.
“Shut up,” said Jane sharply, relinquishing her dreams of a woman’s empire, “or I’ll punch your head.”
“Shut up both of you,” said Harry, “and don’t spoil things by quarrelling. You’d never do for that sort of life if you couldn’t spend five minutes without flying at one another. You’d have to spend weeks and months together without seeing another living soul.”
“But you’d be there,” said Pobbles. “You’d keep her in order.”
“Shall you ever do it, Harry, do you think?” asked Jane. “I should like to come too, if you do. I could wait behind till you’d found the right place, and then Tom and I could come on together.”
“Perhaps I shall some day,” said Harry, for whom time and youth seemed to stretch ahead illimitably. “But not until after I’ve been in the army for some years. And I couldn’t be away long from Royd. I might just go pioneering, and leave somebody else to work up the place I’ve found.”
“Oh, you could leave Jane and me,” said Pobbles. “And you could come there and see us sometimes. You would find we had worked it up better each time you came.”
“I shouldn’t care about it unless Harry was there all the time,” said Jane. “Besides, I am going into the army too. I read about a girl in Russia who fought all through the wars, and nobody found her out. I shall be in Harry’s regiment, but he won’t tell anybody. You can too, Pobbles, when you’re old enough.”
Harry looked at her, and laughed with great enjoyment. He had just seen the woman coming out in her, and been mildly entertained by it through his seriousness. Now she was a sexless child again. “You’re one in a thousand, Jane,” he said. “Of course you shall join my regiment, and Pobbles too. We’ll have some jolly times, and when it comes to fighting we three will stick together.”
Jane did not mind being laughed at by Harry, and was pleased at the prospect held out to her. She took off her jacket, when they set to work again at the cabin, and threw away the bluebells, wondering why she had picked them.
Dusk was falling as Harry made his way up through the wood and across the park homewards. The air was very still, and the sweet scents of the earth, dissolved in dew, rose like incense. Usually his impressionable untroubled mind would have leapt to the message of his senses, and he would have exulted in the beauty that lay all around him, sublimated by the spell of oncoming night. But as his feet brushed the moisture from the grass, and stirred the cool scents to greet his nostrils, he looked down and not up as his way was. A vague discontent was upon his spirit, which was not quite unhappiness though near akin to it.
The vision of a free life in a free untouched land had come to him. For the first time in his happy boyhood he felt himself bound by his lot. The great world, with its endless varieties of adventure and invitation to be doing and living, lay beyond his horizons and he had never crossed them.
Melancholy touched him so seldom that it was a discomfort to be resisted. He wondered what made him sad at the thought of being tied to Royd, which had hitherto been a paradise of enjoyment to him. He stood still as he came out from among the trees and looked across the park to the dark mass of the Castle, in which lights were glimmering here and there, making it more romantic and beautiful even than when seen in the day-time. And as he looked, the momentary sadness fell from him, and he smiled with pleasure at the scene so familiar yet always showing itself in some new emanation of beauty. He was coming to the age at which he could no longer be satisfied with it as holding everything in life. The shadow of unrest had just fallen upon him, but it would not be yet that he would walk in it.
As he neared the Castle a white figure, dimly seen in the dusk, detached itself from the gloom that lay about the massive walls and came towards him along the trodden path by which he was hastening. He recognized it as that of his mother, who not infrequently came out to meet him like this when he had begged off dinner and came back after it. It usually gave him pleasure to find her waiting for him in this way. There was not, perhaps, very much in common between them, but he knew how much he was to her, and his chivalry went out towards her, in love and a sense of protection.
To-night he was conscious of the least little sense of discomfort in meeting her. His time was so fully taken up, with his work indoors and his innumerable pursuits out of doors, that neither his mother nor his grandmother saw very much of him except at meal-times, and less than ever in the summer-time. It was part of the wisdom of Lady Brent that he was left as free as he was. But he was sensitive to the atmosphere around him, and of late when the inmates of the Castle had been together it had been uncomfortable. Wilbraham, while they had done their work together, had been much as usual, but at table he had been morose and snappy. The two women had obviously put constraint upon themselves to be easy and natural before him, but the coldness and irritation between them had peeped through. There had been nothing to cause him to reflect upon something wrong, and the cause of it; he had been full of his own devices and forgotten all about the discomfort at home the moment he was away from it. But the discomfort was there. Perhaps it had had to do with the vague discontent that had just come upon him and passed away. But the sight of his mother coming to meet him brought it back ever so little. Whatever his dreams for the future, whether at home or abroad, the whims and vagaries of his elders if indulged in must shut them off. Going away from Royd meant going away from them; Royd itself must lose some of its glamour if life there was to be troubled by their jars.
But he remembered now, as he called to his mother and hurried his steps to meet her, that the cloud had seemed to have lifted itself somewhat at luncheon that day. Wilbraham, at any rate, had recovered his equanimity entirely, and had been good-humoured and talkative; and Lady Brent had been suave, when for some days she had seemed covered with prickles. Only his mother had been subdued, with traces of past tears about her eyes.
He reproached himself that he had not taken much notice of these signs of disturbance in her. He had been too busy with his schemes for the afternoon, about which he had talked freely, as he was encouraged to talk about everything that interested him. He had felt instinctively that any sort of chatter from him would be welcomed. But he had escaped as soon as possible after luncheon and forgotten all about the tension until now.
“Well, little mother!” he said as he came up to her. “Ought you to be out at this time of night without a wrap or anything?”
He had a clear, rather high-pitched voice that was music in her ears. She loved him anew for the kindness in it, and for the question which showed that he was careful of her. He put his arm round her shoulder and kissed her, and his hand went down to her waist and remained there as she turned to walk with him. All this thrilled her with pleasure, and her voice shook a little as she answered him, though she tried to keep it level.
“Oh, I’m all right, dear,” she said. “It’s very warm. Shall we go into the garden for a little? It’s lovely there now.”
“Yes; let’s,” he said at once, though he had intended to go in and forage for food, for he was hungry again.
They went into the garden through a tall iron gate in the wall, and walked up and down the long bowling green, which was hidden from the house by a high yew hedge. A fountain plashed in a pool at the far end of it; there were no flowers to be seen just here, but the air was full of their scent. The light had not yet faded out of the sky, but stars were beginning to twinkle in it. The grass was close cut, but wet with dew. He bent down to see whether she was fitly shod, and found she had put on goloshes. She laughed at him. “Nobody can see them,” she said, “but you like taking care of your old mother, don’t you, darling?”
“You’re not old,” said Harry; “and of course you must be taken care of. Isn’t it lovely out here? I don’t think there can be any place so lovely as Royd in the whole world, though I haven’t seen much of the world, so far.”
“I think it’s lovely too,” she said. “But I shouldn’t want to stay here always if you weren’t here. You’ve never wanted to go away, have you, Harry?”
He laughed at his remembrances. “Just for a little this afternoon, I thought I should like to go somewhere else,” he said. “The children and I have been building our log cabin, and I rather wished it was a real one, quite away from everything, in some far-off country. But I suppose I shouldn’t like to be away from Royd for very long.”
“It won’t be very long before you do go away now,” she said. “Oh, I do hope it won’t change you, Harry dear. It’s so different, out in the world. Sometimes I long for it, but I believe this is best, after all. If you told me I could go to-morrow I don’t think I would now. I wouldn’t go as long as you were here, and I knew you were happy being here.”
“I haven’t looked forward very much to going to Sandhurst,” he said, thoughtfully. “I shan’t be nearly so free there as I am here, and I’m not sure I shall get on very well with the others. I’ve never had much to do with other people of my own age.”
“No, you’re different,” she said. “But you’re much nicer. I don’t think you’d have been so nice if you had been brought up like other boys; or so happy, either. But you’ll have to be careful when you go away. There are lots of temptations which other boys of your age know about, and you don’t.”
He turned a smiling face on her. “Then hadn’t you better tell me about them?” he said. “Do you mean drinking and gambling? I was reading a book the other day about all that. It didn’t seem to me much of a temptation. I suppose I shall have as much money as I want without gambling for it, shan’t I? And why should I want to drink if I’m not thirsty?”
She had not paid much attention to this. She was wondering whether she dared talk to him of the life, as it appeared to her, from which he had been kept secluded. It had been tacitly accepted, all through his boyhood, that no mystery was to be made of it, and any questions he might ask should be answered, but that his being kept at Royd was to be taken as a natural thing. After her late revolt she had swung round to a complete acceptance of the understanding by which those who were responsible for Harry should share in the seclusion which had been laid down as the best thing for him during his boyhood. Only so could it be accepted without question by him. Lady Brent had triumphed, and had shown, this evening, that she bore no malice on account of what had lately happened. Mrs. Brent was at peace with her, and once more a loyal supporter of her views. But there was a little jealousy and a little egotism left. She was Harry’s mother. If any enlightenment was to be brought to him as to what lay before him, surely she might be considered the right person to give it! It was only because she knew that Lady Brent would not think so that she hesitated.
“Oh, drinking and gambling,” she said, catching him up. “No, I don’t think those would be temptations to you, brought up as you have been, though one never knows, with young men. It’s women I should be afraid of. They’ll try to get hold of you. You see you’ll be a great catch, Harry. And of course you’re very handsome. You’ll have to be careful about designing women.”
No, decidedly, Lady Brent would not have approved of this kind of warning.
It seemed to be distasteful to Harry too. “All right, mother, I’ll take care,” he said, shortly.
“It would never do for you to marry beneath you,” she went on, rather surprisingly, and would have gone on to amplify her statement, but that Harry suddenly cut her short.
“I’m most frightfully hungry, mother,” he said. “Let’s go in and see if we can get hold of anything. Then I think it will be about time for me to go to bed.”