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WHITELAKE COTTAGE

When Mr. Dekker and his son set out to walk to White-lake River they decided to cross that particular region in the environs of Glastonbury to which local usage had come to restrict the romantic name of Avalon. Over the uplands known as Stonedown they directed their way straight to the hamlet of Wick. At this point Mr. Dekker began to take a little surreptitious pleasure in their excursion independent of its troublesome and complicated purpose. He always loved a long walk with Sam and there was not a field or a lane within several miles of their home where some rare plant or bird, or, as the Spring advanced, some butterfly did not arrest their attention.

“I was telling Mr. Crow,” said Sam's father, “about this hamlet. Do you know, it was the one thing I told him that really interested him. A quaint fellow this Crow seems to be.”

His last words were spoken in a raised voice for Sam had moved a little ahead of him and was standing by the side of an immense oak tree which grew at the edge of the lane. Another tree of the same species, equally enormous, grew a stone's throw further on; and these two gigantic living creatures, whose topmost branches were already thickly sprinkled with small, gamboge-yellow leaf buds, appeared to be conversing together, in that golden sun-haze, far up above the rest of the vegetable world and where none but birds could play the eavesdropper.

The sight of these two titanic trees, trees that might have witnessed at least a fifth portion of the long historic life of Glastonbury, suggested to the mind of the elder Dekker thoughts quite unconnected with either Vikings or Druids.

“We must try again here this summer for those Purple Hair-streaks, Sam, my boy.”

But the lad heard his father's words without his accustomed sympathy in entomological pursuit. His body was at that moment bowed forward towards the great corrugated trunk, his outstretched arms pressed against it, his fingers extended wide. All this he was doing in complete unawareness.

Was Sam's gesture, at this moment, destined to prove the existence of an increasing rapprochement in these latter modern days between certain abnormal human beings such as were both Sam and John, and the subhuman organisms in nature? Was it in fact a token, a hint, a prophecy or a catastrophic change imminent in human psychology itself?

Across the soul of that immemorial oak tree, as it flowed upward like an invisible mist from the great roots in the earth to those gamboge-coloured leaf buds, there had passed more wild November rains, more luminous August moons, more desperate March winds whirling and howling over Queen's Sedgemoor and Wick Hollow, than either Sam Dekker or his father had any notion of. Then why to the troubled heart of the younger man, just then, did there not come from the immense repository of this huge tree's vast planetary experience, a kind of healing virtue?

Why did Sam Dekker draw back from that oak tree uncom-forted, uncounselled, unsoothed, uninspired? Against that great rough trunk many a gipsy donkey had rubbed its grey haunches and got comfort by it, many a stray heifer had butted with her wanton horns and eased her heart, squirrels had scampered and scratched there, and hung suspended, swaying their tails and scolding, wrens had built their large, green, mossy nests there, chaffinches had scraped and pecked at the lichen for their nests, so small, so elegant, in the nearby blackthorn bushes. Past that trunk and its great twin brother further down the lane had ridden men in armour, men in Elizabethan ruffles, men with cavalier ringlets, men in eighteenth-century wigs. Many of these no doubt jumped down from their horses, drawn by an indescribable, magnetic pull, and touched that indented bark with their travel-swollen bare hands. And to many it must have brought luck of some sort, some healing wisdom, some wise decisions, some hints of how to deal with their mates, with their offspring, with the tumult of life!

But nothing of this sort came to Sam Dekker. The son was he of the man who refused to worship the sun! That great reddish orb, now sinking down towards the Bristol Channel, had its own strange superhuman consciousness. And this consciousness, roused to anger against this simple priest, had resolved with a mysterious envenoming tenacity, corrosive and deadly, to separate him from the only earthly thing he loved!

The two men walked on in silence now, Mr. Dekker instinctively understanding that his son was on tenterhooks about this encounter, and beginning himself to feel, in his own sturdy consciousness, certain premonitions of danger on the air.

They passed Wick Hollow. They passed Bushey Combe. As they went on, they were sometimes compelled to stop and stare at the hedges for it was weeks since they had been that way and they were astonished at the extraordinary beauty of the celandines this year. The ground was uneven, broken up into many little depressions and small hillocks, and whether because February had been exceptionally wet, or because the winds had been so steadily blowing from the west, not only were the petals of the celandines more glittering than usual, but their leaves were larger and glossier.

“Celandines were my father's favourite flower,” said Mat Dekker as they moved on again after one of these pauses. It always pleased him to think of his father when he was alone w7ith his son and to speak of him to him. It made him feel that the three of them—three generations of Dekkers—were intimately bound together, and bound together too with that fecund Somersetshire soil. His piety in this classical sense was one of the massive single-hearted motives by which he lived.

The landscape around them changed completely now, for they descended from the verdurous island of Avalon down into a confused series of cattle droves which led across the low-lyi^g water-meadows.

Few, even among the dwellers in Glastonbury, could have found their way as these two did over these fields and ditches. When they had passed the outskirts of Brindham Farm and reached the less-frequented marshes of Splott's Moor, it was even more difficult to proceed; for the cattle droves yielded place then to mere foot-tracks from weir to weir and dam to dam. Wider ditches too, interrupted their way, those great ditches of formidable water called rhynes to which Mary Crow had referred in her conversation with John; and the planks across these deep water courses were, in many places, perilously rotted by rains and floods and needed to be trodden with extreme wariness by two such heavily built men. Whitelake River itself wTas also no contemplible obstacle to surmount, for there were no bridges anywhere near; but in the end they discovered a willow branch fallen across the little stream, and managed to make use of this as a bridge. It was in the overcoming of little chance difficulties like this in exploring the country that Mat Dekker always showed at his best. On this occasion, with the sun, his heathen enemy, already so near the horizon he forgot completely the annoying nature of their excursion and began chuckling and boasting over this or that achievement of the way, as if they had been crossing the Danube instead of Whitelake River!

They were now actually upon the marshlands of Queen's Sedge-moor; and here they found themselves without the trace of even a footpath to follow, and once again the elder Dekker had an opportunity of displaying to his son his skill as a cross-country guide.

“Whitelake Cottage is on the bank of this stream, my son,” he said gravely, “and we are on the bank of this stream. All we've got to do is to follow it down.”

Sam mechanically obeyed, letting his father move in advance of him by several paces. In his son's silence the elder man had reverted to his natural custom of brooding sluggishly upon every single little natural object they encountered. Nothing was negligible to this despiser of the sun when once he was out-of-doors. There was no weed that lacked thrilling interest for him. But it was not a merely scientific interest; still less was it an aesthetic one. The master-current of the man's passionate West-country nature found in a thousand queer, little, unattractive objects, such as mouldering sticks, casual heaps of stones, discoloured funguses on tree roots, dried-up cattle-droppings, old posts with rusty nailheads, tree stumps with hollow places full of muddy rain-water, an expression of itself that wide-stretching horizons failed to afford.

By approaching their objective this particular afternoon by so rambling and indirect a road, it was a good deal after half-past four—the hour when they had been invited—that they reached Whitelake Cottage at last.

In recognition of the abnormally warm day, Nell Zoyland had arranged to give her guests their tea upon a little grassy terrace overlooking the swollen stream. Here then the father and son sat, munching such exquisite thin bread and butter as Mistress Pitches did not often cut for their delectation and trying to conceal both from each other and from their host, the growing measure of their uneasiness. For, truth to tell, the situation was drifting, moment by moment, more and more out of control. Nell Zoyland's cheeks were hot and her breath came quick. Mat Dekker had certainly never seen a girl with more beautiful, moVe alluring breasts than hers; nor had he ever seen one who dared to wear a bodice so tightly fitting, so mediaeval-looking, so unfash-ionably piquant! These beautiful breasts seemed indeed to dominate the whole occasion. Mat Dekker felt that there was something so unusual about their loveliness that they endowed their owner with a sort of privileged fatality; a fatality that might lead to halcyon happiness; or on the other hand, to tragic devastation and destruction. They seemed meant, Mat Dekker thought as his eyes wistfully followed them, for something beyond the suckling of any human infant. At this point the man's ingrained morality pulled him up short. But he could not resist the feeling that there was something in the loveliness of such breasts that carried a person far from ordinary human life, to those old wild legends of immortal creatures of mist, of dawn, of dew that have troubled good men's minds from the beginning.

“It is only children of the elements,” he said to himself, “that such breasts ought to suckle!”

It was at this point in this singular tea-party that William Zoyland began to speak his mind.

Sam Dekker soon ceased to drink any more tea or to eat any more bread and butter. He sat now with his shoulders hunched up and his chin sunk into his neck. His elbows rested heavily upon Nell's wicker-work garden table. His eyes were fixed upon the face of William Zoyland as if upon the face of a well-known animal that had suddenly begun uttering surprising sounds, sounds that belonged to an entirely different type of beast.

Nell, on the contrary, had the aspect of a girl desperate and reckless at the close of a day-long struggle with an equal adversary. She fixed upon her husband's leonine head, as he went on speaking, that careless, contemptuous look, which, of all looks in their harem, men dread the most.

Whitelake Cottage was like a little doll's house by the reedy banks of Whitelake River. It only possessed two rooms downstairs and two upstairs, with a little kitchen at the back, above which, under a sloping roof, which had been attached to the rest of the house at a recent date, was a low-ceilinged attic-study devoted to the use of the master. They evidently had no servants nor was* there any sign of a flowerbed, although at the edge of the grassy slope where they all now sat, several wild-flower roots, by the look of the disturbed soil and the appearance of the plants, had been lately put in.

Under that flowing torrent of deep-toned revelations, full of startling import, to which they were perforce listening, Mat Dekker was staring at last year's drooping rushes, brown and crumpled, among which several newly green shoots were sprouting up. The sun was quite below the horizon now; and in the early twilight these green reed shoots threw forth a peculiar coolness of their own, a pure, liquid coolness, after that warm day that was like a calm but tragic Finis to some magical play of a great playwright.

Mat Dekker was gathering up his forces to deal with a situation altogether new in his narrow and single experience, and the effort to cope with this was so great that its effect upon him, as Zoyland went on speaking, began to be the very last anyone would have predicted. He began to grow extremely sleepy. This tendency to grow sleepy at a crisis was indeed an old infirmity in his family. The great-grandfather of his father, James Dekker, had grown sleepy when called upon, with other well-known Somersetshire gentlemen, to rise to the support of William of Orange against the last of the Stuarts.

“It's for the wench to decide for herself,” Will Zoyland was saying, as, lying back in his wicker arm-chair with his leather-gaitered legs stretched out in front of him and one hand deep in his corduroy breeches' pocket and the other tugging at his great yellow beard, he rolled his blue eyes from Sam's bowed face to Sam's father's averted face. “I'm a philosopher, Mr. Dekker. I'm not one to let myself suffer, or the girl either, when there's no need for it. But it's too much for her to expect that I'll go on living with her and sleeping in a separate bed. In fact, I refuse to do it! I'm a philosopher, I tell ye; and as such I know that all conventional idealism is puff-ball foolishness. Any girl can love two men if she wants to, just as we can love two women. I've no doubt a man like yourself, Mr. Dekker, has frequently loved two women at the same time. It's natural to us. Nell and this silly lad here think they're in love. They've imagined till today, or at any rate Sam has imagined till today, that I was the sort of born cuckold who could be fooled till judgment Well! I'm not. D'ye hear, Sam, me boy? Fm not. I live my own life in my own way and always have. I could live here perfectly well without Nell, though she doesn't think so. She thinks I could live without sleeping with her; but she don't believe I could get my meals for myself or get on without having her to talk to. That's where women are so stupid. They think they're necessary where they're not necessary; and they don't know how necessary they are, in another direction! But I'm a philosopher, as I say, Mr. Dekker, my good Sir, and I know very well that my little Nell still loves her old Will (though she doesn't know it herself!) quite as much as she loves this sulky young gentleman here. Now what I say to her, Sir, and to you, my romantic young friend, is simply this. If Nell will stop this foolery of sleeping on the sitting-room sofa, stop, in fact, this foolery of being cross with me and cold to me, I'll be ready—d'ye hear me lad?—I'll be ready to share her with ye. So long as ye don't tumble her 'in me wone bed,' as they say round here, ye can have the lass uphill and down dale—Fm mum. I'm mute. Fm the dumb fish. In fact, to tell ye the truth, Mr. Dekker, I've got ridiculously fond of this great hulking son of yours. I respect the boy. I like talking to the boy. We've had some fine times together, haven't we, Sam? No, no. I agree with that old rogue Voltaire. Fm one who could be quite content to live £a trois,' as the rascal says. But Fm noi one who can live side by side with a girl like Nell and have her cold and cross and savage, like she's heen this last month. To Hell with her cooking! I'm as good a cook as she is; and a better, loo. Sam would like her to remain my servant and to become his light o' love. Nell wants to run oS with Sam and leave everything. Only when I lell her to stop talking about it and do it, she says Sam hasn't the guts to leave his dad. And then when I laugh at her and tell her to try him and see, she just cries and cries at the thought of how her poor old Will is to get on, all alone, without anyone to get him his meals.”