IT may have been only the weakness of convalescence, of course, but I confess that I got angry the moment I set eyes upon Jasmine Cottage. I had a love for gaunt hills and wide heaths, and grey stone and big skyscapes, much as one finds in Dorset, and that fool of an agent had saddled me with a strawberry cottage with a thatched roof set in a curly Devonshire lane! The place was absolutely picturesque. And what on earth should I say when my friends turned up and found me living in a picturesque house? An artist has troubles enough without folk remarking that his home looks like a Christmas card.
As such things went it was not a bad sort of place, I suppose. There was some bright green moss on the thatch, and a water barrel so ancient that it only held water by a miracle. There were slippery stones all down the path to the gate, and leaves which dribbled on to it in a thousand gay colours at the time of my arrival. There was a jasmine arch over the door that made me blush, and the dearest of little chintz curtains fluttered from every window. I felt myself growing long hair at the sight of it.
‘You’re sure you haven’t brought me to a tea-room by mistake?’ I demanded of the driver of the dog-cart who had conveyed me from the station. ‘Jumping Jehoshaphat! I’ll have to install a machine-gun to keep trippers away in the summer.’
The man coughed modestly. ‘They artisks do like this sort o’ place around here as a rule,’ he said. ‘Mr. Siddle did mention as you was a-goin’ to paint.
‘Not as I care for old-fashioned ’ouses meself,’ he added before I could reply. ‘They be too damp for my likings. Old Biddy Crump, as reared sixteen children in the place, was fair crazed wi’ screwmatics afore she moved into her decent council ’ouse.’
‘Rheumatics?’ I yelled, flinching away from the gate. ‘You don’t say that——’
‘Good morning, sir. Mr. Maddock, sir?’
An agreeable old soul had appeared at the cottage door. She had lumpy hands and a nice check apron, and I had to admit that the house acquired dignity with her presence.
‘Don’t you go takin’ notice of Sam Small here. ‘I’ve had a fire burnin’ all week and the cottage is as dry as a biscuit.’
‘A water biscuit,’ I answered feebly as the driver lugged my things in. ‘Have you any grub ready, Mrs. Andrew?’
She had, and it was good food too—lovely clear water from the spring, home-baked bread, ham and golden-yolked eggs, stewed apples and Devonshire cream. My recent illness was almost forgotten in the pleasure of it. My irritation fell away. I found myself sitting back in a fat afternoonish mood and beginning to like the homeliness of everything about me. Birds chirruped conversationally in the eaves, the fire bickered in its grate and fell from time to time with that soft sigh which indicates sleep to the listener, the autumn wind very peacefully prowled around the garden, lifting leaves and bending branches; and soon I yielded to the influences and fell asleep for a long time.
It was dark when I awoke. The fire had gone out and I hadn’t the faintest idea where the lamp and candles were, or where the coal was kept. I stood up and caught my head a nasty crack on an oak beam. I fumbled towards the mantelpiece and barked my shins on a ridiculous brass affair by the hearth. I swore pretty heartily at that, and the thing went over with a crash that would have shocked my neighbours for miles around—if I had had any neighbours. Eventually, however, my grasp came upon a box of matches and I managed to light candles and go exploring with one of them.
There was no coal inside the cottage. I found dim, underground sort of rooms, whose floors were covered by apples and pears spread carefully out on paper; I found an undeniably damp scullery with a dreary-looking wash boiler, but I could not find coal. Thinking it might lurk in some unsuspected outhouse, I opened the front door and went into the darkness. Immediately my candle blew out. I struck a match, and that also was extinguished.
Then I fancied I heard a rustling behind me, a rustling and a very queer burrowing sound almost as though soil was being scraped.
I turned sharply.
‘Hullo!’ I said. ‘Hullo. Who’s there?’
‘It may be a friend,’ a voice answered quite clearly.
‘If you’re a friend,’ I said, ‘tell me where in thunder the coal is kept.’
To my astonishment there was no reply.
I struck a second match, but nobody could be seen in the gloom. The garden greenery seemed to press upon me rather more than I remembered from my daylight observation, but the path was empty.
Now, I am not in any way a nervous man, so I concluded that my odd visitor had stepped matily into the cottage, and I fingered my way along the outside wall until I came to the coalhouse door and there began thumping coal into a bucket which I found standing ready for the purpose. I chopped some wood, too, by my relighted candle, wondering whom good fortune had brought along to spend the evening with me.
Judge my utter bewilderment when I returned to the cottage and found it as empty as I had left it!
‘Ahoy!’ I cried, a score of times, going back into the garden, through into the scullery, even mounting the stairs; but there was no sign of human life anywhere.
I lit the fire and it went out again in the playful way cottage fires have. I rumbled round and prepared supper, still pondering upon who could have spoken to me in the dark. I was not given thoughts of ghosts or attackers of any kind, so dismissed the affair from my mind altogether and retired to bed.
The next day dawned sharp and clear and I went out to see if I could spot any footmarks. A multitude of leaves had fallen during the night obliterating every possibility in that direction, but something strange certainly had happened. An enormous new plant had appeared in front of my window! It displayed curious leaves ending in spikes very like the leaves of the holly, its roots were scattered all over the surface of my garden as though it had been hastily and insecurely thrust into the soil, and it had a gnarled stem which suggested the vine more than anything else in the world. There were no flowers or berries by which I might hope to christen the plant, so I turned somewhat naturally to wondering who the blazes could have come and dug it into my soil during the night. For there could be no doubt of the fact that the thing was not there when I had arrived the previous day. The earth all about it was tossed and tumbled, dozens of feeders were still above the surface—giving a grotesque impression that the plant was standing upright on its roots—and weeds and smaller stems were broken down for a considerable distance.
Mrs. Andrew’s astonishment, when she duly appeared to begin upon my housework, completely outdid mine. She declared that she ‘didn’t know’, that she was ‘blowed’, and finding these remarks manifestly too weak for the occasion, she wound up with the statement that she ‘never did’—which I could well believe. We walked round and round the plant together, we discussed its leaves and its roots and its shape, we examined every tiny possibility of its arrival, but in the end we had to confess profound bewilderment. Mrs. Andrew mentioned the growth to a knowing market-gardener when she returned to the village, and in the afternoon I was treated to a visit from him. He arrived with many apologies, much cap-lifting and bobbing and bowing, and the moment I took him through to see the strange plant he blew enormously and said he was ‘danged’. No: he’d never seen a thing like that afore, brasted if he had. It dudn’t look like a English plant at all, he added, and then profusely wiped a brow that had grown moist with his walking, and said he ‘dudn’t mind’, to my offer of liquid refreshment.
The remark about installing a machine-gun to keep folk away looked like becoming true as the days went by. The vicar called, breathless and eager, the following afternoon, said ‘By Jove!’ and ‘Dear me!’ and all the things usually associated with vicars, and finally promised to write to a botanical friend of his about the plant. And the very same day the local doctor stopped his car in my lane, popped his head over the hedge, asked in a breezy way if he might look at the famous mystery plant, and then seemed to think very little of it, having seen dozens of similar growths on his various holidays in Spain.
The interruptions were maddening, of course. I had come to Devon in order to find quiet and a chance to paint, and here I was discussing an idiotic plant with one imbecile after another. No one attempted to explain the sudden manner of its arrival, and I did not mention to any of them the voice I thought I had heard in the darkness.
Further troubles assailed me as winter came. The cottage began to show its true nature in an alarming way. Damp oozed from it everywhere, from ceilings, from floorboards, all over walls, even from the main chimney. Great patches of wet gleamed in every corner, the oak beams sweated, and little pools of moisture collected overnight in the hearth. Mrs. Andrew blamed me for not having more and merrier fires, and at last took refuge in the plea that all houses turn damp in November.
This certainly was true of Jasmine Cottage. The tea changed into a sodden mass in its packet, the matches refused to strike, it was death to sit down upon any cushion that had not been carefully aired before the fire. I cursed the place. I swore and banged things about. And the callers still trotted up to see the unknown plant. They came and they came and they came—like bees to a hive. The vicar’s botanical friend came and spent hours mooning about my garden, departing at last with a vigorous shake of his head and a fishy shake of my hand, adding nothing at all to the previous guesses. A funny sort of expert came from London, a Professor Gibbs, with a care-worn face and a frock coat of questionable age, and thin bony wrists which stuck out inches beyond their cuffs. Some bright young undergraduates descended upon me from Cambridge during the Christmas vacation, and asked endless questions, and laughed, and ragged each other, and made some atrocious drawings. And they all looked for refreshment from me, refreshment I was too cowardly to refuse. I tell you, I was pretty sick of it all, and when spring approached and the botanical callers buzzed around ever more thickly with the prospect of the thing’s blessed spring reactions, my desperation reached fever point.
One day, whilst I was drawing that accursed fire into life with an old newspaper, my eye chanced to catch the advertisement of a man who was anxious to sell a motor cycle. ‘No reasonable offer refused’, he said, and it struck me that here was a stunning means of evading my callers and also a gift of extra time to put into my pictures once I had found my open-air subject. To cut a long story short, despite the age of the advertisement I found the machine still unsold and bought it—knowing no more of its workings than a child would know. I studied the instruction book minutely, of course, and held any amount of inquiries into the various controls of the mechanism, but somehow I could not bring my courage to the point of pressing my foot upon that starter and going flying off through the air at the mercy of a mass of kicking metal. I had to do it, I knew, and on a Saturday just after lunch I did it.
How I got into the saddle I never remember. There was a terrific roar, and immediately I was rushing along at a pace which threatened to kill all the live-stock in the district. Miss Wood’s hens cluttered away into the hedge with maidenly shrieks. An old spaniel, fond of dozing in the middle of my lane, arose with undignified haste. Bit by bit I began to gather my scattered wits and succeeded in slowing down to meet the bridge at the bottom.
I met it all right, did a wild swerve to avoid a girl carrying a milk can and then went chugging triumphantly up the farther hill. The air whistled past my ears and I laughed aloud with the delight of breasting the smooth Devonshire lanes at forty miles an hour.
Suddenly the engine started misfiring for some unknown reason, and after spluttering along for half a mile or so it conked out altogether. Now, as I have said, I am a perfect novice with anything mechanical and was quite unable to trace the cause of the trouble, so I decided that as I was about twenty miles away from my cottage I would spend the night at the nearest inn. There at least, I promised myself, I should be dry and could enjoy warmth and light and company—unbotanical company. A walk of another mile brought me with my disabled machine to a jolly little place called the Three Pigeons, whose landlord stood at the door and hummed. A bread-cart was drawn up on the cobbles, and the sight and smell of all those new-baked loaves filled me with happy anticipations.
‘Have you a bed, and grub, and a mechanic to look at this wild beast?’ I called across. ‘I got stuck, down the road.’
‘A bed—yes, sir,’ the landlord answered promptly. ‘Food—ready in half an hour. As for the bike, I think George Brooks’ll be able to do all you need, sir.’
It was a delightful village in which to spend a night, not too dull and yet not picturesque. There was a church of most impre. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
