Pure Juliet by Stella Gibbons Page A

mathematics and other branches of science, but the nourishing facts that feed the senses; and, above all, to make her feel the beauty of Nature, which the old world before science came used to spell with the capital letter, bestowing femininity and deity on – on an abstraction? Yes, an abstraction that took a million forms.
    Wanby was a village so pretty, so well kept, that passing motorists were apt to pause, with murmurs of admiration, looking around for somewhere providing luncheons.
    There were none. So far as the grosser appetites were concerned, Wanby was fairy gold, a hollow mockery and a Barmecide feast.
    For that same sour-reputationed nobleman, who owned the land where Hightower stood amidst its four acres, also owned Wanby, and all attempts to obtain licences for cafés or restaurants had been dismissed with urbane indifference. Nor did the occassional cottager display the consoling word Teas in the picturesque window, for in Wanby there were no cottagers. Long ago the last of them had thankfully fled to council houses and flats in Stevenham or St Alberics, for like Edith Cavell in another situation, they had felt, strongly, that views and elm trees were Not Enough.
    Their former homes were grouped about a triangular village green, shaded at its verges by sturdy elms, with a picturesque dry old well in its centre. The houses were not marred by pastel front doors; a chaste scheme of brown, black and white was strictly kept to, under the eye of the Wanby Amenities Committee; andthere was not (let the imagination ponder this, and let it sink in full horror into the soul) . . . there was not a garage in the place. When a retired company director or superannuated admiral had trouble with his car, he had to telephone to Stevenham fifteen miles away, or perhaps to St Alberics, which was five. The one Wanby public house, the Two Doves, permitted no coaches and ‘did’ nothing more solid in the way of eatables than the superior kind of biscuit containing no fat and little sugar. There were those, bicycling sullenly through Wanby on their way home from the few working farms left in the district, who bitterly referred to it as a bleeding museum ; but in ten minutes they could dismount outside the Green Man on the road to Stevenham, where the proprietors did ‘do’ lunches; ploughman’s, greasy sausages and limp chips. Coaches were permitted, and one could be companionably sick in the yard. The Green Man’s lights were visible, nay, even bursts of drunken song on Saturday evenings were audible, in autumn and winter, through leafless old thorn hedges surrounding Frank Pennecuick’s two meadows.
    Frank now led Juliet past the immaculate cottages, and down through a thick clump of elder, hazel and thorn, which in a few moments opened out onto meadows: green, empty, still, in the fading light.
    ‘My house is in the other field, through the gate.’
    When they were halfway across the meadow, she stopped, and stood as if listening.
    ‘That isn’t a robin?’ she said questioningly.
    ‘No, that’s a blackbird – better than the nightingale I always think – in spite of—’ He had been about to quote Arnold, but checked himself.
    Only six months ago, ‘Eternal passion! Eternal pain!’ had run intolerably in his heart by night and by day. The line did not do so now. So much for ‘eternal’! Really ,he thought, I am nearly thirty-two. Isn’t it time I stopped being adolescent ?
    ‘There ’e is!’
    Her exclamation cut across the silence as the blackbird, after the habit of its kind, darted out of its bower, low and away above the grass, and Juliet’s ‘h’ went with it.
    Frank gave her a smile of approval and – yes, he felt that it was – affection as they walked on.
    They went through the gate, which he carefully shut behind them, and then he turned and pointed across the second and larger meadow, with a group of fine oak trees at its far end, their sturdy branches black against the opal sky.
    ‘There –