THE farmhouse kitchen probably stood where it did as
a matter of accident or haphazard choice; yet its
situation might have been planned by a master-strategist
in farmhouse architecture. Dairy and poultry-yard, and
herb garden, and all the busy places of the farm seemed
to lead by easy access into its wide flagged haven, where
there was room for everything and where muddy boots left
traces that were easily swept away. And yet, for all
that it stood so well in the centre of human bustle, its
long, latticed window, with the wide window-seat, built
into an embrasure beyond the huge fireplace, looked out
on a wild spreading view of hill and heather and wooded
combe. The window nook made almost a little room in
itself, quite the pleasantest room in the farm as far as
situation and capabilities went. Young Mrs. Ladbruk,
whose husband had just come into the farm by way of
inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner, and
her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz
curtains and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old
china. The musty farm parlour, looking out on to a prim,
cheerless garden imprisoned within high, blank walls, was
not a room that lent itself readily either to comfort or
decoration.
"When we are more settled I shall work wonders in
the way of making the kitchen habitable," said the young
woman to her occasional visitors. There was an unspoken
wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed as well
as unspoken. Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm;
jointly with her husband she might have her say, and to a
certain extent her way, in ordering its affairs. But she
was not mistress of the kitchen.
On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company
with chipped sauce-boats, pewter jugs, cheese-graters,
and paid bills, rested a worn and ragged Bible, on whose
front page was the record, in faded ink, of a baptism
dated ninety-four years ago. "Martha Crale" was the name
written on that yellow page. The yellow, wrinkled old
dame who hobbled and muttered about the kitchen, looking
like a dead autumn leaf which the winter winds still
pushed hither and thither, had once been Martha Crale;
for seventy odd years she had been Martha Mountjoy. For
longer than anyone could remember she had pattered to and
fro between oven and wash-house and dairy, and out to
chicken-run and garden, grumbling and muttering and
scolding, but working unceasingly. Emma Ladbruk, of
whose coming she took as little notice as she would of a
bee wandering in at a window on a summer's day, used at
first to watch her with a kind of frightened curiosity.
She was so old and so much a part of the place, it was
difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing. Old
Shep, the white-nozzled, stiff-limbed collie, waiting for
his time to die, seemed almost more human than the
withered, dried-up old woman. He had been a riotous,
roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was
already a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a
blind, breathing carcase, nothing more, and she still
worked with frail energy, still swept and baked and
washed, fetched and carried. If there were something in
these wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with
death, Emma used to think to herself, what generations of
ghost-dogs there must be out on those hills, that Martha
had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last goodbye
word to in that old kitchen. And what memories she must
have of human generations that had passed away in her
time. It was difficult for anyone, let alone a stranger
like Emma, to get her to talk of the days that had been;
her shrill, quavering speech was of doors that had been
left unfastened, pails that had got mislaid, calves whose
feeding-time was overdue, and the various little faults
and lapses that chequer a farmhouse routine. Now and
again, when election time came round, she would unstore
her recollections of the old names round which the fight
had waged in the days gone by. There had been a
Palmerston, that had been a name down Tiverton way;
Tiverton was not a far journey as the crow flies, but to
Martha it was almost a foreign country. Later there had
been Northcotes and Aclands, and many other newer names
that she had forgotten; the names changed, but it was
always Libruls and Toories, Yellows and Blues. And they
always quarrelled and shouted as to who was right and who
was wrong. The one they quarrelled about most was a fine
old gentleman with an angry face - she had seen his
picture on the walls. She had seen it on the floor too,
with a rotten apple squashed over it, for the farm had
changed its politics from time to time. Martha had never
been on one side or the other; none of "they" had ever
done the farm a stroke of good. Such was her sweeping
verdict, given with all a peasant's distrust of the
outside world.
When the half-frightened curiosity had somewhat
faded away, Emma Ladbruk was uncomfortably conscious of
another feeling towards the old woman. She was a quaint
old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part
and parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once
pathetic and picturesque - but she was dreadfully in the
way. Emma had come to the farm full of plans for little
reforms and improvements, in part the result of training
in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of
her own ideas and fancies. Reforms in the kitchen
region, if those deaf old ears could have been induced to
give them even a hearing, would have met with short
shrift and scornful rejection, and the kitchen region
spread over the zone of dairy and market business and
half the work of the household. Emma, with the latest
science of dead-poultry dressing at her finger-tips, sat
by, an unheeded watcher, while old Martha trussed the
chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for
nearly four-score years - all leg and no breast. And the
hundred hints anent effective cleaning and labour-
lightening and the things that make for wholesomeness
which the young woman was ready to impart or to put into
action dropped away into nothingness before that wan,
muttering, unheeding presence. Above all, the coveted
window corner, that was to be a dainty, cheerful oasis in
the gaunt old kitchen, stood now choked and lumbered with
a litter of odds and ends that Emma, for all her nominal
authority, would not have dared or cared to displace;
over them seemed to be spun the protection of something
that was like a human cobweb. Decidedly Martha was in
the way. It would have been an unworthy meanness to have
wished to see the span of that brave old life shortened
by a few paltry months, but as the days sped by Emma was
conscious that the wish was there, disowned though it
might be, lurking at the back of her mind.
She felt the meanness of the wish come over her with
a qualm of self-reproach one day when she came into the
kitchen and found an unaccustomed state of things in that
usually busy quarter. Old Martha was not working. A
basket of corn was on the floor by her side, and out in
the yard the poultry were beginning to clamour a protest
of overdue feeding-time. But Martha sat huddled in a
shrunken bunch on the window seat, looking out with her
dim old eyes as though she saw something stranger than
the autumn landscape.
"Is anything the matter, Martha?" asked the young
woman.
"'Tis death, 'tis death a-coming," answered the
quavering voice; "I knew 'twere coming. I knew it.
'Tweren't for nothing that old Shep's been howling all
morning. An' last night I heard the screech-owl give the
death-cry, and there were something white as run across
the yard yesterday; 'tweren't a cat nor a stoat, 'twere
something. The fowls knew 'twere something; they all
drew off to one side. Ay, there's been warnings. I knew
it were a-coming."
The young woman's eyes clouded with pity. The old
thing sitting there so white and shrunken had once been a
merry, noisy child, playing about in lanes and hay-lofts
and farmhouse garrets; that had been eighty odd years
ago, and now she was just a frail old body cowering under
the approaching chill of the death that was coming at
last to take her. It was not probable that much could be
done for her, but Emma hastened away to get assistance
and counsel. Her husband, she knew, was down at a tree-
felling some little distance off, but she might find some
other intelligent soul who knew the old woman better than
she did. The farm, she soon found out, had that faculty
common to farmyards of swallowing up and losing its human
population. The poultry followed her in interested
fashion, and swine grunted interrogations at her from
behind the bars of their styes, but barnyard and
rickyard, orchard and stables and dairy, gave no reward
to her search. Then, as she retraced her steps towards
the kitchen, she came suddenly on her cousin, young Mr.
Jim, as every one called him, who divided his time
between amateur horse-dealing, rabbit-shooting, and
flirting with the farm maids.
"I'm afraid old Martha is dying," said Emma. Jim
was not the sort of person to whom one had to break news
gently.
"Nonsense," he said; "Martha means to live to a
hundred. She told me so, and she'll do it."
"She may be actually dying at this moment, or it may
just be the beginning of the break-up," persisted Emma,
with a feeling of contempt for the slowness and dulness
of the young man.
A grin spread over his good-natured features.
"It don't look like it," he said, nodding towards
the yard. Emma turned to catch the meaning of his
remark. Old Martha stood in the middle of a mob of
poultry scattering handfuls of grain around her. The
turkey-cock, with the bronzed sheen of his feathers and
the purple-red of his wattles, the gamecock, with the
glowing metallic lustre of his Eastern plumage, the hens,
with their ochres and buffs and umbers and their scarlet
combs, and the drakes, with their bottle-green heads,
made a medley of rich colour, in the centre of which the
old woman looked like a withered stalk standing amid a
riotous growth of gaily-hued flowers. But she threw the
grain deftly amid the wilderness of beaks, and her
quavering voice carried as far as the two people who were
watching her. She was still harping on the theme of
death coming to the farm.
"I knew 'twere a-coming. There's been signs an'
warnings."
"Who's dead, then, old Mother?" called out the young
man.
"'Tis young Mister Ladbruk," she shrilled back;
"they've just a-carried his body in. Run out of the way
of a tree that was coming down an' ran hisself on to an
iron post. Dead when they picked un up. Aye, I knew
'twere coming."
And she turned to fling a handful of barley at a
belated group of guinea-fowl that came racing toward her.
* * * *
The farm was a family property, and passed to the
rabbit-shooting cousin as the next-of-kin. Emma Ladbruk
drifted out of its history as a bee that had wandered in
at an open window might flit its way out again. On a
cold grey morning she stood waiting, with her boxes
already stowed in the farm cart, till the last of the
market produce should be ready, for the train she was to
catch was of less importance than the chickens and butter
and eggs that were to be offered for sale. From where
she stood she could see an angle of the long latticed
window that was to have been cosy with curtains and gay
with bowls of flowers. Into her mind came the thought
that for months, perhaps for years, long after she had
been utterly forgotten, a white, unheeding face would be
seen peering out through those latticed panes, and a weak
muttering voice would be heard quavering up and down
those flagged passages. She made her way to a narrow
barred casement that opened into the farm larder. Old
Martha was standing at a table trussing a pair of
chickens for the market stall as she had trussed them for nearly fourscore years.
-THE END-
The Cobweb, a short story by Saki [H H Munro]
from the collection of 'Beasts and Super-Beasts'
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