The Splendid Fairing

THE SPLENDID FAIRING -- 1919 -- CONTENTS SIMON A N D S A R A H . I ELIZA - 69 MAY . I77 GEORDIE-AN-JIM . I99 SIMON AND SARAH -- PERHAPS it would never have happened but for the day. A brave, buoyant day, with a racing wind, might have scattered the clinging obsession just in time. A tender, laughing day might have laid a healing finger on old sores. A clean, frosty day might have braced the naturally sane old mind. But Fate, out of all the days in the year, took upon itself to send just this. The human soul, which seems so utterly out of reach, is only shut away from every other soul. In every other respect it is like a harp hung on a tree. Even the actual day as it comes is itself a lever in many a fate. Deeds are done on certain days which on others would be mere passing impulses easily dead before the night. This blind Martinmas Day went all day long with its head among the clouds, as if it thought that never again would there be any sun. Indeed, it was out of the lack of every sort of sight that the evil grew since, otherwise- Mothers couldnt have done those things, as Geordie would have said. All day the earth retained that stillness which it keeps as a rule only for the last hour before the dawn. Everywhere in the morning there was mist-that strange, wandering, thinking mist that seems to have nothing to do with either earth or air and when the slow dark drew back there would be mist everywhere again. Between those shadowy tide-marks of the air there was a space when the white mist shredded above the trees, leaving the atmosphere with the look of a glass that has been breathed upon and never clears. The Simon Thornthwaites were going to market simply because they did not know howto stay away. They went as naturally as the sun comes out of the east, but with a good deal less of decision about the journey. They looked dull and tired, too, less indeed as if they were setting out than as if they were wearily trundling home again. Both horse and trap looked as though they might fall to pieces after an extra jolt, and the jumble of harness was mended here and there with string. There was neither butter nor fowl in the market-basket behind there was not even a limp rabbit dangling over the wheel. But all the time they were part of a chain which gave them a motive and impulse not their own, since others, more sure of their errand, were taking the same road. Sometimes a horseman on a young Shire went past with a flash of feather and a clumping of hoofs. Livelier traps spun by at a trot and gave them a hail. Behind and before them they had an occasional glimpse of the procession stretching to the town. They had climbed from the marsh, leaving it dropped like a colourless cloth beside the sea, and already they seemed to have been a long time on the road. They had not slept much, and, waking, had had the cheated feeling, common to the weary, that the foregoing day had never really ended nor the incoming morning ever quite begun. Indeed, the strange, dreamlike day had never really seemed to come awake...