AN UMBRELLA MAN " 193 



expressions as he thought and remembered, like an 

 animal's face. Living alone and never having to fit him- 

 self into human society, he had not learnt to keep his face 

 in a vice. He was returning — if the grave was not too 

 near at the age of seventy-seven — to a primeval wildness 

 and simplicity. It was a pleasure to see him smoke — to 

 note how it eased his chest — to see him spit and be the 

 better for it. The outdoor life had brought him 

 rheumatism, but a clear brain also and a wild purity, a 

 physical cleanliness too, and it was like being with a well- 

 kept horse to stand beside him; and this his house was 

 full of the scent of the bracken growing under the oaks. 

 Earth had not been a kind but a stern mother, like some 

 brawny full-bosomed housewife with many children, 

 who spends all her long days baking and washing, and 

 making clothes, and tending the sick one, and cutting 

 bread and pouring out tea, and cuffing one and cuddling 

 another and listening to one's tale, and hushing their 

 unanimous chatter with a shout or a bang of her enormous 

 elbow on the table. The blows of such a one are shrewd, 

 but they are not as the sweetness of her nursing voice for 

 enduring in the memory of bearded men and many- 

 childed women. 



Once or twice again I met him in later summers near 

 the same place. The last time he had been in the in- 

 firmary, and was much older. His fire was under the 

 dense shelf of a spruce bough in a green deserted road 

 worn deep in the chalk, blocked at both ends, and trodden 

 by few mortal feet. Only a few yards away, under 

 another spruce, lay a most ancient sheep who had appar- 

 ently been turned into the lane to browse at peace. She 

 was lame in one leg, and often fed as she knelt. Her 

 o 



