Nearing home, Tibby vouchsafed his first independent observation.
“The hired man’s quit!”
“Has he?”
“Yep. Quit this morning.”
It had begun to snow. They turned and made their way back to the house. The information she had received did not cause Jill any great apprehension. It was hardly likely that her new duties would include the stoking of the furnace. That and cooking appeared to be the only acts about the house which were outside her present sphere of usefulness.
“He killed a rat once in the wood-shed with an axe,” said Tibby chattily. “Yessir! Chopped it right in half, and it bled!”
“Look at the pretty snow falling on the trees,” said Jill faintly.
At breakfast next morning, Mrs Mariner having sneezed, made a suggestion.
“Tibby, darling, wouldn’t it be nice if you and cousin Jill played a game of pretending you were pioneers in the Far West?”
“What’s a pioneer?” enquired Tibby, pausing in the middle of an act of violence on a plate of oatmeal.
“The pioneers were the early settlers in this country, dear. You have read about them in your history book. They endured a great many hardships, for life was very rough for them, with no railroads or anything. I think it would be a nice game to play this morning.”
Tibby looked at Jill. There was doubt in his eye. Jill returned his gaze sympathetically. One thought was in both their minds.
“There is a string to this!” said Tibby’s eye.
“Exactly what I think!” said Jill’s.
Mrs Mariner sneezed again.
“You would have lots of fun,” she said.
“What’ud we do?” asked Tibby cautiously. He had been this way before. Only last Summer, on his mother’s suggestion that he should pretend he was a ship-wrecked sailor on a desert island, he had perspired through a whole afternoon cutting the grass in front of the house to make a ship-wrecked sailor’s simple bed.
“I know,” said Jill. “We’ll pretend we’re pioneers stormbound in their log cabin in the woods, and the wolves are howling outside, and they daren’t go out, so they make a lovely big fire and sit in front of it and read.”
“And eat candy,” suggested Tibby, warming to the idea.
“And eat candy,” agreed Jill.
Mrs Mariner frowned.
“I was going to suggest,” she said frostily, “that you shovelled the snow away from the front steps!”
“Splendid!” said Jill. “Oh, but I forgot. I want to go to the village first.”
“There will be plenty of time to do it when you get back.”
“All right. I’ll do it when I get back.”
It was a quarter of an hour’s walk to the village. Jill stopped at the post-office.
“Could you tell me,” she asked, “when the next train is to New York?”
“There’s one at ten-ten,” said the woman, behind the window. “You’ll have to hurry.”
“I’ll hurry!” said Jill.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1.
Doctors, laying down the law in their usual confident way, tell us that the vitality of the human body is at its lowest at two o’clock in the morning: and that it is then, as a consequence, that the mind is least able to contemplate the present with equanimity, the future with fortitude, and the past without regret. Every thinking man, however, knows that this is not so. The true zero hour, desolate, gloom-ridden, and specter-haunted, occurs immediately before dinner while we are waiting for that cocktail. It is then that, stripped for a brief moment of our armor of complacency and self-esteem, we see ourselves as we are,—frightful chumps in a world where nothing goes right; a gray world in which, hoping to click, we merely get the raspberry; where, animated by the best intentions, we nevertheless succeed in perpetrating the scaliest bloomers and landing our loved ones neck-deep in the gumbo.
So reflected Freddie Rooke, that priceless old bean, sitting disconsolately in an arm-chair at the Drones Club about two weeks after Jill’s departure from England, waiting for his friend Algy Martyn to trickle in and give him dinner.
Surveying Freddie, as he droops on his spine in the yielding leather, one is conscious of one’s limitations as a writer. Gloom like his calls for the pen of a master. Zola could have tackled it nicely. Gorky might have made a stab at it. Dostoievsky would have handled it with relish. But for oneself the thing is too vast. One cannot wangle it. It intimidates. It would have been bad enough in any case, for Algy Martyn was late as usual and it always gave Freddie the pip to have to wait for dinner: but what made it worse was the fact that the Drones was not one of Freddie’s clubs and so, until the blighter Algy arrived, it was impossible for him to get his cocktail. There he sat, surrounded by happy, laughing young men, each grasping a glass of the good old mixture-as-before, absolutely unable to connect. Some of them, casual acquaintances, had nodded to him, waved, and gone on lowering the juice,—a spectacle which made Freddie feel much as the wounded soldier would have felt if Sir Philip Sidney, instead of offering him the cup of water, had placed it to his own lips and drained it with a careless “Cheerio!” No wonder Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka-bottle empty.