The Chinese Garden by Rosemary Manning

Author:Rosemary Manning
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558614147
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2016-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis.

Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores.

VIRGIL

(Fortunate that man who knows his country gods, Pan and old Silvanus and the sister spirits of the woods.)

THE May term came, and Rachel felt the acute restlessness of the young animal in springtime. Unable in this nunnery to find any normal outlet for her emotions, she sought violent physical exercise. All over the park, trees had been felled that winter, and left lying, to be carried into the wood sheds in the early summer, sawn up and stacked for the following autumn.

‘Chief,’ said Rachel, one morning, catching Miss Faulkner as she came out of assembly, ‘Chief, I want to do some work in the park.’

Chief slipped her arm over Rachel’s shoulders and propelled her gently down the passage towards the front hall. They paused in front of a huge bowl of red tulips.

‘Wonderful,’ said Chief, appreciatively, and caressed one of the pear-shaped flowers with her smooth hands. ‘Wonderful. Now, come along, my dear Curgenven, we’ll take a walk in the park, and you can tell me what it is you want to do.’

They walked slowly across the deserted cricket pitches.

‘It’s the wood-sawing, and the collecting up of the felled trees,’ said Rachel, at last. ‘I wondered if you’d let me help the men. I like sawing.’

‘Do you? Can you use a saw? Or an axe?’

‘I’ve used one at home.’

‘Let’s walk round to the wood sheds and talk to Tarrant.’

The white house shimmered softly in the heat; the great elms, grouped at one end of the playing fields, smoked in the sun in the humid atmosphere. A little way off the deer were grazing, and Chief’s words were punctuated by their staccato coughs. A pleasant sense of well-being, bred of this flattering intimacy and the soft charm of the scene, came over Rachel, and the weight of Chief’s arm upon her own seemed an honourable burden.

Slowly they walked round, past the Big Hall, past the chapel, past the concrete on which punishment drill took place. In the wood sheds, Tarrant and another man were unloading tree trunks from the cart and stacking them. There was a sweet smell of sawdust.

‘I’ve brought you a second mate, Tarrant,’ said Chief. She got on well with the men of the estate. She had the hereditary gift of dealing with servants, of managing estates, of judging horses and trees and soil. The men touched their caps, and Tarrant looked Rachel up and down.

‘Meaning the young lady, ma’am?’ he asked in his broad Somerset voice.

‘Yes, let her come and work here. Watch her with an axe, Tarrant. If she can use it properly, she has my permission to come whenever she likes.’

‘Right, ma’am.’ Nothing surprised the Bampfield men. ‘Are you starting now, Miss Rachel?’

‘Well, I ought to be doing French, I believe,’ said Rachel guiltily.

‘Go ahead,’ said Chief, increasing the pressure of her arm a little before withdrawing it. ‘Go ahead. It’s not one of your University Entrance subjects. You can say you had my permission to miss it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.