第31章 A Thaw That Lied

The twentieth of April came up white and bright and wrong, and by one o'clock the whole of the Hollowell was running. It came off the south in the morning with a warmth in it that had no business being in the mountains in April, and the south wall of the kitchen had a stripe of wet on it a foot wide by two o'clock, and there was a sound coming off the roof like a held breath letting go all at once, and by three o'clock the lane was a stream and by four o'clock there were eleven people in the common room with their coats on and their cases packed at their feet. "There it is," said Amberley, at the window. "That's the south. It's come in from the sea and it's two degrees in Selborne and it has been raining on the pass since two o'clock, and if it keeps up there'll be water in the beck by midnight." * * * "Well, the rule's off," said Bel Starveling. "No," said Pippa. "It's the twentieth of April. It's the thaw. That's the whole meaning of the word, my aunt has been saying it since January—" "The rule is about the ground," said Pippa. "And the ground has not been the same ground it was in December, and I have not walked it since the sixth of April, and neither has anybody else in this house, and it is the twentieth of April and it is the best day we have had since the first of December." * * * Kerrith put down the book she had not been reading. "Say that again." "The rule says no guest may leave before the ground is soft enough to take a cart." Pippa stood in the middle of the common room. "It is the twentieth of April and there is a green stripe at the bottom of the pass at eleven o'clock this morning and it was hard as a table at seven this evening. And in three days it will be soft enough to take a cart, and on the day it is, everybody in this house walks out of the gate at the same time, and I will walk out last and I will stand in that gate and count, and that is what I have been waiting four months to do." "And if it doesn't come?" "Then we all stay," said Pippa. "All of us. And I'll put it in the book in my own hand as the first entry that was ever written by somebody who was wrong and did not pretend to be right afterwards." * * * They stayed. And Bel Starveling, who had packed her case at two o'clock and had it by the door until five, took it back up to her room and unpacked it and came down and sat on the settle and did not say a word for two hours, and then went up and did her hair and came down and asked Tibb what was for supper. "I said I'd not have a wedding," she said, to nobody, "and I've had nine weeks of other people's, and I'm going to have one." * * * At about eleven o'clock at night the wind came round to the north-west and it came hard. It came hard enough to take two hundredweight of slates off the top of the byre and it came hard enough that Sella woke up at one and came and knocked on the keeper's door in her stockings and said, "Miss Danby, it's snowing." "I know, my love. Put the kettle on." She put the kettle on. The wind was driving the snow straight at the south wall and it was going past it in sheets and every part of the roof that had been running was running with grit, and by two in the morning it was two feet on the ground and still coming. At four in the morning Pippa walked out to the yard in the dark and the whole of the world was white and the lane was gone and the coach was not going to come down that pass for four days. "Mind your left," somebody said behind her, and Nancarrow came out of the dark at the yard gate with a lamp and a rope. "What are you doing up?" "I'm a shepherd," said Nancarrow. "That's a man up at four in the morning, same as anybody." * * * Tibb and the two Bredon cousins and Gammon and Wrenfield and four of Nancarrow's men did eleven hundred ewes down off the high pasture in a blizzard with an open top of wall and forty store lambs already in the fold. It took until Thursday. Nobody slept more than two hours at a stretch and Pippa found herself sitting on the bottom step at about two o'clock on Wednesday morning with a cup of broth she had made for somebody else and finding that she could not remember the last time she had eaten. And on Thursday afternoon Wrenfield came in with his barrow and put the barrow down in the middle of the long room and said, "It's gone back to nine inches on the pass and it will not clear before Sunday." * * * Bel Starveling was the one who said it, and she said it to the whole room standing up in the middle of the long room at four o'clock in the afternoon, with her hair done and her best dress on, and every single person in that room knew which day it was. "I put the cake out on Monday," she said. "There's a cake in the kitchen with a hundred and twenty candles' worth of icing on it and there's a wedding in a mountain inn at half past two this afternoon because nobody in this house is allowed to leave until the ground takes a cart, and I would like it minuted that I asked for the rule to be lifted in the common room at one o'clock this afternoon and was outvoted nine to one." "You were outvoted ten to one," said Pelyn. "What was the eleventh?" "Mr Sablewood's trunk, by post," said Pelyn, and there were eleven people in the room and every one of them laughed until they had to hold the table. * * * Tibb cooked for thirty and they ate it in two sittings, and the cake was cut at half past two by a woman of ninety-one who insisted on doing it herself and did it badly and unevenly and made eleven pieces and one of them was enormous, and the man whose plate it was ate it and said nothing at all about it, and afterward gave the baker a paper of flour and a seal that he has used every year since. * * * Pippa went up at half past ten and wrote the day's entry, which was the shortest of the winter, and then read it over, and then went to the window. The ground on the top had gone white again and the posts were in it up to their middles and the snow was standing in a low blue ridge along the wall side, in one place, and only one, about eleven paces of it. She did not go up. She stood at the window and looked at it for a while, and then she said out loud, to a girl of eleven who was standing in the doorway with a cup in her hand and had come up without knocking, which she had started doing in April and which Pippa had permitted, "It's all right, my love. That's the ground settling. It does that." "Is it settling or is it the other thing?" "It's the ground settling," said Pippa. "It's been doing that since the first of December and I've watched it a hundred and nineteen nights and I know the difference and so do you, and you're going to go to bed and count forty-four stairs in the morning and tell me if it's forty-five." ---