All the same here he was, walking his motor cycle up the field road
leading to Great End Farm, and looking eagerly about him. A lonely
position, but beautiful! On the woods behind the house he turned a
professional eye. Fine timber! The man who was to succeed him at Ralstone
would no doubt have the cutting of it. The farm quadrangle, with its
sixteenth century barn, out of which the corn seemed to be actually
bursting from various open doors and windows, appeared to him through
that glamour which, for the intelligent American, belongs to everything
that medieval and Elizabethan England has bequeathed to the England of
the present. He will back himself, he thinks, to plan and build a modern
town better than the Britisher--in any case quicker. But the mosses and
tiles of an old Brookshire barn beat him.
Ellesborough paused at the gate to watch two land lassies carrying
pails of milk across the yard towards a prolongation of the farm-house,
which he supposed was the dairy. Just beyond the farm-yard, two great
wheat-stacks were visible; while in the hayfields running up to the
woods, large hay-stacks, already nearly thatched, showed dimly in the
evening light. And all this was run by women, worked by Women! Well,
American women, so he heard from home, were doing the same in the fields
and farms of the States. It was all part, he supposed, of a world
movement, by which, no less than by the war itself, these great years
would be for ever remembered.
The farm-house itself, however, seemed to him from the outside a poor,
flimsy thing, unworthy of the old farm buildings. He could see that the
walls of it were only a brick thick, and in spite of the pretty curtains,
he was struck by the odd feature of the two large windows exactly
opposite each other, so that a spectator on either side of the house
might look right through it.
"Seems like being in the street. However, if there's nobody to look at
you, I suppose it don't matter."
Then he laughed, for just as he led his motor cycle into the yard, and
passed the sitting-room window, he was struck by the appearance of two
large sheep, who seemed to be actually in the sitting-room, at its
farther end. They were standing, he presently perceived, upon the steep
down beyond the house, on the slope of which the farm was built; which on
the southern side of the farm quadrangle came right up to the house wall.
At the same moment he saw a woman inside get up and shoo them from the
open window, so that they ran away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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