Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven/Chapter 5

by Blanche Edith Baughan

V

SPRING IN AUTUMN

Away and away across the tawny plain of tussock, absolutely flat, the white road runs between its two converging hedgerows, absolutely straight. To right and left the vast, sea-like level, interrupted only at wide intervals by little islets of dark, pointed trees, which hide the homesteads they surround, spreads serenely into space; behind, the empty stretch of it engulfs even the road, and rounds out upon nothing save the open, airy, and deeply coloured distance which, all the world over, proclaims the neighbourhood of that further void—the real sea. But, right ahead, monotony and naked space come all of a sudden to a full stop, and the plain and the road run together straight to glory; for there, up from the ended flat into the endless heavens, sweeps and springs, soars and stands, the long, lofty, pinnacled rampart of the Alps—snow-peaks flinging a dazzling fringe of silver along the fresh blue of the sky, bases of purple and ravines of indigo showing deeper and darker yet in the radiance of this bright spring air.

Yes, it is Spring! From the wide leagues of air and sky on every side come showering down the carols of innumerable larks—Nature’s clear cry of joy. The grassy borders of the white road are green, its gorse hedges in flower. What masses of bloom! What clusters of burning orange, purest yellow, gold of unimaginable softness! The double, dark-green walls are one long blaze; the brilliance intoxicates one’s eye; and the colour! the intensity of the colour! surely it must be as much with weight of colour as of substance that the great grape-like bunches droop. Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, who fell upon his knees before the glory of the gorse in bloom upon an English common, what would Linnaeus have done here in New Zealand, at the sight of this tenfold illumination?

For miles and miles these running lines of gold tip and trim the road with light, sweeten as with a smile the snowy grandeur of the prospect beyond, and smooth the racy air with puffs of balm, rich and dreamy. Little runnels and “races” of water, led through the plain from the mountain rivers, ripple, brightly blue, here and there across the road; their flat rims of musk and clover, flowerless as yet, are lushly green. A field of oats, running and shimmering in sheets of emerald before the sunlit breeze, laughs through the grey bars of yonder gate; from the paddocks on either side comes up the cry of lambs; and look through those trees a little off the road! Can you not catch light glimpses and twinklings, past the dark soberness of pine and macrocarpa, of a green more gay and lively, and a dapple of pink-and-white?

“It must be an orchard. There must be a homestead there?”

That there is—a homestead, and a home! For this is Sunshine, where the Rosses live—Peter Ross, and Catherine his wife. Twenty years ago, Peter, then already on the wrong side of thirty, and with indifferent health, came out from the Old Country; and, after years of toil and saving (for he never became strong, and never met with “luck”), took up this bit of tussock-land, and started to make a home. Many and many a year more, of unremitting toil and scraping and self-denial, it took to do it; but, at last, the little prudent hoard was large enough, Catherine, waiting still faithfully and hopefully while for her part she drudged along, earning a dull livelihood at Home, received at last her tardy summons in a letter that enclosed the passage-money; and the long journey, seventeen years long, did at last actually end in happiness and lovers’ meeting. The pair were wed, and settled down at Sunshine, to begin life. Peter was fifty years old, and Catherine forty-nine; yet it really was life that they began, for all that!

I dare say that the mistresses of some of the thriving homesteads which lie at no great distance from the Rosses’ place may have smiled to themselves and one another at some of the newcomer’s ways, when first they came to see her. Very likely, indeed, they smile still, and with a little superior pity, perhaps, at her infinitesimal bakings, the few pounds of butter she makes up every week, her careful selection of a basket of strawberries, or anxious packing of a box of eggs, to trade with at the store in town. And I dare say that their husbands, too, may sometimes get a little amusement out of Peter’s microscopic holding, his handful of stock, his tiny paddocks of rye and turnips, his minute methods, his humble, inconspicuous hopes. But, if all these good people do laugh, it is certain also that they respect and like, while as for pity—pity forsooth!—pity is clean out of it. Not another couple in the district is one half so happy. It is not only that, after years of separation, they can be at last together; not only that, after years of dependence on the one side, of rigid scrimping and saving on the other, they are, actually, and oh, wonder of wonders! landowners (Peter is a feudal-hearted Englishman, Catherine cannot conceive that the freehold question may have two sides); it is also the daily duties, toils, trivialities of their present life that they delight in—the daily round, the common task, that fills their every moment with interest, and awakes them fresh every morning to a whole new fortune of zest. Trifles all; but it is the pennies that make the pounds.

Catherine, for example, had eaten baker’s bread and “shop butter” all her life, until she came to Sunshine: now she makes her own, and never thought she could have such an appetite for breakfast! Living in that one little room of hers, with the pot of geranium on the windowsill, how she did use to envy, though always without rancour, the “gentlefolks” their gardens! while now, she can pluck whole posies for herself, of pinks or sweet-williams, red roses or white lilies, as many as she likes; and when, at the heel of autumn, she makes up sweet dark bunches from her violet-bed each time Peter is going into town, she takes less delight in the thought of the easy shillings they are going to bring in than in the prospect of the pleasure they are going to bear forth.

And as for Peter, Peter is breeding his flock after a theory of his own, that he has never before had the opportunity to put into practice—and it is succeeding! “Ross’s brand” begins to be favourably known in the sale-yards. With his Orpingtons, too, he is experimenting, and his white Leghorns; and this year he has fifteen coops of them, all fine birds. Strawberries again—he grows three varieties of strawberries, and deeply are they loved, and jealously attended. Out of sympathy for Peter and his strawberries, Catherine has learned to detest the pilfering blackbirds—who, at Home and landless, once she loved. The other day, even, so she confessed to me in a whisper (a little bit shamefaced, like one having consciously done a rather unwomanly thing), with Peter’s pea-rifle she actually shot one! impudently feasting before her very eyes, while Peter was in town; and she keeps, too, a dreadful little Bluebeard’s Chamber of a box, full of dried blackbirds’ heads, for which she now and then proudly claims so many pence per dozen from the authorities. “And pence are pence,” says thrifty Catherine. “I made my best hat over again the other day, and fourpence was all it cost me. You might say it was trimmed by the blackbirds, now, mightn’t you?” I was reminded, a little dolefully, of the four and twenty blackbirds that went to make a pie; but Catherine pointed out that she was now, first and foremost and last, and for good and all, a practical farmer’s wife, and had no time for sentimentalising over blackbirds’ rights—and no doubt she was wise.

No doubt, either, that the hat so contrived—no matter whether its aspect be that of the latest thing in hats or not—sends a thrill of triumph and satisfaction through its wearer every time she puts it on her good sound head. After all, joy, like that Kingdom of Heaven of which undoubtedly it is a part, does lie within, and I would rather be Catherine in her humble fourpenny affair, than Miss Angelina Snooks, peacocking it in that three-guinea creation straight from Paris, which is depraving into jealous “copy-cats” half the girls of her acquaintance, and which, after all, no later than next season is bound to be out of season itself!

You would like to see Mrs. Ross? Come along, then, through this—gate, I was going to say; only, you can see for yourself it is not, properly speaking, quite a gate, as yet. Peter will make the gate, some day, when he can spare the time; and really, for the present, this pair of hurdles, placed together a little slantwise and secured by a leather strap, makes quite an efficient substitute. If Mr. Ross were in sight, I should feel it my duty to undo these straps—he is so very thorough, that, when I am with him, I always feel certain the slowest way must needs be the best; but, since he is not here, suppose we just climb over?—a much shorter process. Now we are in the paddock, between the house and the road, and have only to follow the clear little water-race which runs across it—oh, but do be careful! That is the second of these foot-high trees, look, that you have nearly stepped on; and you don’t know what you are endangering! Every one of these tiny treelings was grown from a real English acorn brought out from Home by Catherine, and this, that you are trampling on, is the Sunshine Oak Avenue!

Hark, there is old Shot barking; he is Catherine’s door bell, and will give warning of visitors on the way. And here is gentle Peggy coming up to be stroked—good old lady, then: nice old white nose!—but not the foal; the foal, see, is suspicious, and holds off. Grey old Peggy is Catherine’s pet pride. She never thought she should live actually to own a horse—let alone drive behind it down a town street, and that in her very own cart! As for the foal, I have not seen its mistress since its birth, but I have no doubt that in her eyes it has at least a dozen characteristics delightfully distinguishing it from every other foal that ever was—as indeed no doubt it has, to any properly seeing eye: like Catherine’s, quick by nature, and kept single by simplicity, and true by sympathy, and keen by love.

Across the water-race where the musk is beginning to spring up, over another pair of hurdles, and here we are, in the roomy, rambling garden—isn’t it a pleasant garden? It is one of the very pleasantest I know. Here, you see, forming the boundary on one side, is the race again, tinkling and twinkling now through shoots of willow, all in their first new tender green, and some beautiful young silver-poplars. The latter make a line of pale-gold all down the race in autumn, but on this October day they are all glancing and laughing, with their blossom-like leaf-buds looking as though they were made out of silver and ivory and moonlight—all in one, and much more beautiful than any, and alive.

On the other side of the grass-track up which we are walking lies that orchard that you guessed at from the road—orderly row upon row of apple-trees: Pearmains, Nonpareils, Irish peaches, Bess Poules, Pippins, stone and orange, great Purities, and a whole host more. What charming names apple-trees have: not like those of the poor roses and sweet peas, all William This, and Mrs. That, and Adolphus Ebenezer the Other:—and what a charming sight this apple-orchard is! all a delicious froth of fresh white and pale pink, and new, shy green; and, expanding beneath it, hidden in the new-sprung grass, I know what green fans, what soon-to-be-white wide flowers! for that is Peter’s strawberry bed. And, between us and the race, look at Catherine’s broad flower-border—herb-garden, too; where the wallflowers, primroses, and polyanthus now, the stocks and lavender, tiger-lilies and Seven Sisters roses in the hot days coming, mingle kindly with grey sage and marjoram, with mint that steps down into the water, and thyme that spreads a fragrant cushion beside the path.

A little further, and here, beneath the apple-trees, are the coops of the Leghorns in sight. Cheep, cheep—only look at all the little ones! Catherine must hear the voice of Fortune calling to her quite clearly now, whenever she comes this way. All of them in coops? Ah, yes—for a certain reason which you have but to look up in order to see for yourself. How beautifully hawks do fly, don’t they? sailing round and round with scarcely a movement of those splendid wings. But for all that, Mr. Hawk, not a white Leghorn for dinner, if you please! Go and dine, if dine on tender chick you absolutely must, from some farm where the owner’s wife does not know every feathered thing by heart and with her heart.

Here we are now at the house. . . . It is the rarest thing to happen, but I am afraid Mrs. Ross really must be out, or Shot’s frenzied barking from the pines would surely bring her to the door. Just a little grey, unpainted cottage, as you see; with four rooms in it, and an attic overhead, that runs the whole length and breadth of the house. The cold South room is the dairy and apple-store; it is always fragrant with fruit, and bright with wide tin milk-pans brimmed with cream. These two front rooms that take the morning sun are the bedroom and the little sitting-room; the kitchen, at the back, gets the sunset. The attic is the choicest room of all, to my mind, with its wide views—seaward over the plain at one end, at the other out into the heart of the mountains; or, rather, that mountain-window in reality is a door—fling it open, and you stand in a

“Bright chamber level with the air,”

and level also with the velvet middle depth of a great old pine-tree, breathing spice, where the birds love to hop up and down, and the raindrops play at being diamonds.

But Catherine glories in her scrap of a sitting-room, with its motley collection of furniture, bought bit by bit at sales, transmogrified to meet the Sunshine needs, and upholstered by patient fingers into an effect somehow harmoniously old-fashioned, although the stuffs are new. And both of them are immensely proud of the whole dwelling—for did not Peter build it all himself? The kitchen dresser is a packing-case, and packing-cases in disguise make up most of the bedroom furniture; there is not a single cupboard in the house, and Peter has yet to put up the scullery and shed—but what of that? He has got as far as planning them, anyway; and the wants that are hopes only make looking forward the more pleasurable; they furnish the future. Philosophers tell us that the best way to be rich is, to have few wants; but whenever I visit the Rosses I have my doubts of this, and suspect instead that the really richest man is he who has the most schemes up his sleeve.

Ah, at last! a sparkle of something bright moving behind the westerly pines, and here comes Mrs. Ross round the corner, a little tin pail in each hand. Look at her well, for you shall see a happy woman. Not very handsome is Catherine, with her spare figure, a little stooped, her weather-beaten, life-worn face, and hair long since gone grey. Neither is she elegant, or even picturesque, with those tucked-up skirts, that must already have been old when she brought them out from Home, that tweed cap of Peter’s on her head, and those clumping, thick boys’ boots. But Catherine Ross has things to think about far more interesting than her own outward show; and the moment we really look into that pleasant face of hers, with its honest, kindly glance, and its settled look of happiness, so have we.

“I was feeding some chicken we’ve got up yonder, beyond the rye-patch,” she explains, the first greetings done. “You really must come up by and by and see ’em, for they’re real beauties, the finest, Peter thinks, he’s ever had—and you know that’s saying something!” She goes over to the water-race that here, close to the house, runs right across the path beneath a miniature bridge of planking, and drops her tins beside it; there they lie and twinkle to the sun from the fresh grass; treacle-tins I see they are, with the paper label scoured off them, and a bit of wire set in as handle—just the thing for watering the coops.

“Peter’s gone to town,” continues Peter’s wife. “We’d two dozen wethers ready, and he’ll see if he can get his price; if he can’t, of course he’ll just bring ’em back again. Isn’t it a blessing stock still keeps so high? Now, come you in, and get a cup of tea.” For to that colonial weakness, a cup of tea at all hours, I am sorry to say Mrs. Catherine took most kindly from the start.

So in we go, to the little clean, bare kitchen, with all its litter of work under way (what a difference there is between such busy, “still-alive” litter and mere left-over untidiness!) and before long are drinking hot tea, and eating puffy brown fried scones with home-made apple jelly. To these delights we may sit down, but our hostess, excusing herself on the plea that, being a farmer’s wife, she must needs be every moment busy, moves about the kitchen cup in hand, attending to twenty little odd jobs: setting milk upon the stove to warm, chopping up firm white skim-milk curd to mix in with the fowl-feed, stirring up Shot’s daily cake of oatmeal, to be fried, presently, in hot mutton-fat: tidying here, rearranging there, and talking all the time. It is always a treat to Catherine, brought up as she was in the bustle of a town, and inevitably missing it a little now and then, to see a fresh face; and her tongue runs on “as if it had just been oiled,” as she presently interrupts herself to say—and, if we are really quite sure that we won’t take any more, will we just come and see her feed the lambs? for it is high time she did.

And, accordingly, she pours some of the nicely warmed milk into a clean lime-juice bottle, fitted with an india-rubber teat; the rest, for replenishing the bottle, is put into a billy; and out we go, across the race, through the kitchen garden, with its lines of sprouting peas and cabbages, and so down to a little patch of grass, held, as it were, in an elbow of the race, and sheltered by a tall gorse-hedge. Here, in sunshine and safety, in a green pasture literally, and beside still waters, dwells Catherine’s especial flock. The dear little snow-white things! Absolutely fearless, leaping and bounding, up they rush—ears of pink velvet, faces of innocence, voices. . . . Oh dear! of the very shrillest—They know it is meal-time, bless them!

“Those two are Peace and Plenty, and this dandified chap is Algernon,” says Catherine, presenting eager Algy with the bottle, while Peace butts at her knee, and Plenty lifts a plaintive nose to the billy in my hand. “Only three this year? yes! and I’m sure I want no more, they do so take one’s time. How many times a day am I feeding them? Only five now, but that’s quite enough. Every time Peter comes in from the paddock these days, I’m in a real fever for fear he brings more ‘pets’—last year I had eleven, and that was a treat! Not but what you can’t help but get fond of the poor little lonesome dears, all the same,” she adds, with a tender little note in her voice. A pretty picture it all makes—the brilliant blue and snows beyond, the golden gorse beside, the green grass before, and in the midst this homely, elderly woman, patiently kneeling to mother her family of frisking orphans.

The lambs fed, we are taken to admire the ultra-precious chicks, the new yard or so of fencing, Shot’s fresh kennel, made out of a beer-barrel (“Don’t I wish every beer-barrel had got a dog in it!” cries Catherine, that ardent Prohibitionist), and, finally, a happy family of yellow single daffodils, laughing and nodding at the reflection of their own sunny faces in the race. “They’re very late this year, we’d moved the bulbs; but I think that only makes their coming all the pleasanter,” says Peter’s wife. She stoops, to lift up and smile down upon one of the golden heads, and the spring sunbeams lie like a blessing on her own grey one.

“But aren’t you lonely, Mrs. Ross, here all day by yourself?”

“Oh, no, never!” she responds, with ever so bright a look. “I’m far too busy ever to be lonely. And then, there’s the lammies, and the chicken, let alone Shot and Peggy, you know, for company; and Peter’s mostly in to his meals, and always done by dusk. But I know what you mean, too. We don’t have so very many neighbours, and we always live retired—once a fortnight, coming out of church, is mostly my only chance to see folks. Sue Simpson, now, at Home—or Martha Pope . . . no, I don’t know a single one of my old friends, perhaps, as could have stood it; but I’m perfectly happy! Maybe I mightn’t have been, that’s true, had I come here quite a young person; but, you know, I’d seen a deal of life already, considering my station. And then, we always read in the evenings, Peter and I, and discuss things. Having the Bible taught in school is what we’re at just now—I can’t seem to make up my mind about it . . . And I always did use to say too, when I was Home, and looking out of window upon nothing but chimneys, as I did hope, before my time come to die, I’d have got me to some place where I could have enough sky for once——

“Happy?” she suddenly burst out. “Why! this is the very best time of all my life! It’s as if I’d only just got to things, and there’s so much to do! Ain’t God good? for He gives me the work to do, and He gives me the strength to do it with. Happy? Why, sometimes I feel that happy I can scarce contain myself, and am forced to go and give the chicks an extra bit, or take poor Peggy a carrot, so as to do a little something for somebody, and get a mite of it worked off!”

And I warrant that Peter, too, is happy! that, as he footed it leisurely this morning, behind the little flock of his own rearing, in the spring sunshine and along the sweet-smelling road, he whistled like his enemy the blackbird as he went—or else was silent only with a happier silence, a glad uplifting of the heart. For with him, as with Catherine, a deep, unspoken piety lies quick at all the roots of life. It is not only literally and in the body that this plain, unpretentious couple have their home among serene pastures, under wide skies, near to everlasting hills, and in full sight of Glory. Nay, and that inner, spiritual scene and prospect they were able still to share in soul when physically they were held apart by half the width of the world. Perhaps that is why, during all those long and barren years of waiting, they were able to preserve their freshness and fecundity of heart, to keep their lives still capable of this eventual blossoming.

It is a pity that they have no children, though, nobody to work for, and hand this cherished place to, when they die? A better land system, now, would earlier have rewarded Peter’s labours, and done its best to secure to the country descendants of so worthy a stock. Well, that is as it may be. I believe, too, that there is a little nephew of Peter’s, an orphan, still at home in England, whom Catherine has set her heart on bringing out as soon as it can be afforded. But I should like to see you suggest either to Catherine or Peter that they are not still quite young people themselves, with years and years of vigorous toil before them. Heaven grant they have!

But what is Shot barking about now?—so gleefully, too, and with such a welcoming tail. Is it your master, old fellow? Why, indeed, it actually is—here comes Peter, walking up the grass-track: a long, cadaverous, but wiry-looking man, with serious, deep-set eyes. Back already—and alone? the wethers sold, and so early? What, and at top-price, too? Well done, Mr. Ross! Brains are better than muscle, after all, even when it comes to farming. Long-headed experience is not altogether out of it in the race with dash and go.

But come, now, we really must be off, despite the kind and pressing invitation to “stay dinner.” Well, at least they will walk down the orchard with us, then, and see us on to the road (H’m! the hurdles will get untied this time!); and on the way Peter has his two new beehives to show us, white with clean paint, under the apple-green. This is a fresh venture—good rains to the clover-crop! And Catherine—well, there now! she knew there was something else. Why, she has clean forgotten to show us her new hope in carnations, out back there by the race—deep crimson and flesh-coloured, and such good, firm flowers to travel into town, come summer, with the butter and the eggs. Well, we must be sure to see them next time. Good-bye, then, good-bye! As we step out again upon the road, and look back for a last glimpse, there goes the pair of them arm-in-arm up the Oak Avenue, and deep in the discussion of what new enterprise? Good luck to it, whatever it is! Good luck to the little oaks! and God-speed to all the rest of this brave adventure!

October! . . . It was autumn in England. In New Zealand, it is spring !