Free Donkey Boy by Henry Williamson Page A

two years ago? And had Jenny been dead only five short months? Jenny, so beautiful and wise and calm, the one he had, from the moment he had seen her, loved with his soul, was dead; and John left with a baby son, one year and eight months younger than Phillip. She had died in childbirth during the gale that had swept all England last December, the same night that the Chain Pier at Brighton had collapsed in the storm. He had cried as he walked to the station after he had read John’s telegram.
    *
    Richard sighed and closed his eyes; then started up, as a cry came from the kitchen. At once he thought of burglars; his hair twitched coldly on his neck; he thought of his special constable’s truncheon which he kept inside his desk. He went to the door.
    It was nothing, Hetty assured him, nothing at all. “I was only startled for the moment, by the sight of a mouse.”
    “You are becoming a nervous little thing, aren’t you?”
    Richard was never irritable now that Minnie was with him. Minnie and Richard often talked and laughed together about the old days. He showed her his cases of butterflies, and she peered at them, murmuring at their beauty and precision in line. She was devoted to Richard; she was able to endure an alien living mainly through him, the only one left to her. She was almost selfless, almost entirely subordinated to his feelings. His true, or inner living, was held in affection for Minnie; and the rows of pinned and mummified insects were as real to her as to him.
    Hetty had cried out because suddenly as she was suckling the baby beside Minnie a mouse had appeared on Minnie’s lap; and before she could say anything, Minnie had sprung up and with a shake of her skirts had jerked it into the open grate. It had screamed in the flames and tried to run over the hot coals. Hetty had hidden her eyes. How could Minnie do such a thing?
    Minnie was now living for the day when she would see her Fatherland again. She thought London was the dirtiest and cruellest city in the world. The filthy streets, the untidiness, the careless ways of people, their acceptance of low standards, and above all, the look in the faces of the children seen in the streets, all blank and worried, had given her heimweh, homesickness for the clean and orderly countryside of her childhood. Truly the Englanders called their country the Motherland, for they treated it as so many treated their wives, with no mitleid, and often with unkindness. How she had suffered for her poor hochgeboren baronin, her father and brothers killed in the war, and then a cruel Englander for husband! But God in His Mercy had taken her, and surely her spirit on its way to Heaven had gone back to Lindenheim, to the beautiful schloss on the side of the hill, where she belonged.
    So Minnie departed. Richard obtained leave to see her off from Liverpool Street Station, on the train for Harwich and the Hook of Holland. The outside porter from Randiswell came up with his trolley to take her corded wooden box early one morning. When the moment came, of parting from the place that Minnie could not bear, a place neither of the town nor of the countryside, suddenly Minnie looked stricken. Fortunately at that moment Mrs. Bigge popped out of her front door, beaming with affection, and trotting up the porch, put her arms round the older German woman and hugged her.
    “Pleasant journey, dear, and don’t forget us, will you? We won’t forget you, and your beautiful yellow skirt, will we, Mrs. Maddison? Nor will dear little Phil, in a hurry, with his ‘Minnie Mummie’, bless his little heart. Well I must not keep you, I’ve left my iron on the gas-ring, so tootleoo, and give my love to Germany. I’ve never been there, but I know it is very beautiful.”
    With a wipe of an eye and wave of hand Mrs. Bigge hurried away down the front path lined with candy-tuft and London Pride growing in the rockery, with some fleshy cactus-like plants,and so into her own house again. And there her