Ringstones lies in the very heart of the moors, in a valley whose stream is fed by the spongy bogs of all the surrounding hills. The nearest other houses are at Blagill, a little hamlet three or four miles away across the moor.
I had sent a telegram to Ringstones to say that I should arrive at Staineshead at four−twenty and take the next bus. I had some time to wait and it's quite a long way from Staineshead to Blagill by the road, so it was well on into the evening when I got down at the sharp corner of the road which the bus conductor assured me was Blagill. The few low houses lie up a glen away from the road and you do not immediately see them as you alight I walked, following the conductor's waved direction, a short way up the stony lane towards the hamlet, gazing round me with delight and a feeling of exhilaration at the high hills, so clean and fresh−looking, so free in the broad extent of their stone−walled pastures and the unfenced wastes of heather and bracken into which, near the skyline, those pastures merged.
The first thing I saw in Blagill was a pony and trap hitched to a stone gate−post. By the pony's head stood a short, dark, sulky and foreign−looking man. He touched his cap, said “Ringstones?” in a questioning way and, at my reply, took my suitcase and helped me into the trap without another word. Nor did he speak all the way to the Hall. For the first part of the journey he strode along leading the pony, for the rough lane led very steeply uphill. I had never ridden in a trap before, and the lane was so steep and the pony plunged so suddenly and fiercely at the rises, tilting the trap at such a sharp angle, that I clutched the sides, afraid that I should be thrown out of the thing, and I would have jumped out if I hadn't been more afraid of looking silly.
After as near as I can judge a mile of this plunging progress we twisted suddenly between two high banks tufted with heather and here, pulling the pony momentarily to a stop, the dark man sprang very lightly into the trap and sat on the seat beside me, while the pony went away over the more level track at a trot. From this point nearly all the way to Ringstones we followed a road, or track, which, though rough enough and frequently dipping down to fords through little streams, kept, on the whole, to one level of moor. We seemed to branch off from the original track and then to branch again, and in the end so twisted and turned about round dark tarns and pallid grey−green mosses and between miniature cliffs of peat whiskered with heather roots that I lost all sense of direction. The long blue lines of hills that bounded the view were so featureless that I could pick up nothing on the skyline by which to obtain any idea of the course we were taking.
Only one thing, or group of things, I noticed in all this tract of moor that I thought I might stand a reasonable chance of recognising again: that was a number of big stones, all embroidered with grey and golden lichens, that reared up out of the heather away on our left front and which, as we passed within a few hundred yards of them, seemed to be situated on a wide, low, flat mound tolerably free of heather and rising a few feet above the shaggy surrounding waste.
Shortly after passing these things our track went downhill and, after running between banks for some little distance, turned sharply along the lip of a deep valley. Then I saw below me the tops of trees and a silver glint of water in a little level space of parkland which made an astonishing contrast with the tangled steeps of bracken and heather and the bare grey crags that ringed it almost completely round. In this little park, half concealed by some very high and branching trees, stood a long, low steep−roofed stone house of which I caught a glimpse from the brow of the hill but which was lost to sight among the trees before we had got far down the steep road to the park.
I did not know that it was possible to find a house so isolated and set in such unspoiled natural scenery in these days in this country. I suppose I have grown up in days and in places where angular plantations of pylons and skeins of wires strung across the sky and shiny bands of tarmac road curving over every hill are accepted as inevitable. The country round Towerton is reckoned some of the loveliest in England and yet there you are hardly ever in a spot where you can't see either an electric−power cable standard or a main road. It had occurred to me as we were crossing the moor above Blagill that all the way I was seeing nothing that a Roman centurion leading a patrol beyond the Wall would not have seen; here at the door of the Hall I thought there was nothing I could see that would not have met the eye of a straggler from Prince Charlie's army.
Mrs. Sarkissian, as I guessed her to be, met me at the door and exchanged a few words in a foreign language that I did not recognise with the man who had brought me in the trap. Her English when she spoke to me was good, and it was ordinary English, not the well−nigh incomprehensible dialect of the Staineshead people. In fact, if it had any local tinge at all, I should say it had a trace of Cockney in it.
She took me first to my room. I feel that “room” is the wrong word. It was a chamber, lacking nothing that should characterise a seventeenth century bedchamber and containing nothing, except my things, to remind me of the twentieth century. What first took my eye that evening was the huge four−poster bed such as I had seen only in pictures before, and next, the deeply−recessed mullioned window with its wide view over the park— a splendid picture of summer green and gold backed by rich browns and purples. A lattice of the window stood open, and into the bedroom came the murmuring and chuckling of ceaselessly hurrying water mingled with a whispering of leaves. As I stood there, with one knee on the broad windowseat, gazing out, there came to me such a sweet, strong freshness of evening air that I felt I could draw in a breath as deep as to my toes and still not satisfy my thirst for it.
I felt a pang of envy—of retrospective envy, as it were— for the lucky children who were spending their summer holidays there. If only I could have had a holiday in such a place when I was fifteen! Looking down at that inviting turf below and listening to that chuckling stream I felt I was going to make up for lost time.
The family's tea, Mrs. Sarkissian said, was over, but thee was something for me in her room. There, by the abrupt turns of little passages and a steep stair between walls panelled with dark oak, she led me. The “something” was a substantial tea—a boiled egg, scones, tarts, bread and jam, cake, and more butter than I've seen in one dish in my life before. It was spread on a clean scrubbed table in a wide and comfortable room with a window that looked out on to a tidy stone−flagged yard. A large smoky−blue cat was dozing on the print cushion of a wicker chair and raised a sleepy head to inspect me as I sat down. A canary hopped up and down in a cage hanging in the big window.
(3)
The climax of my pleasure that evening and the final assurance that my job was going to be a holiday came when I met the children.
While finishing my tea, and after that settling the various little pieces of domestic business to do with my ration book, my washing, shopping and so forth, I had learned from Mrs. Sarkissian that Dr Ravelin was back at Ringstones but that he would not be free until dinner. I wanted before then to have got over what I looked upon as something like the moment of receiving the question paper in an examination. The first moment, I felt, would tell me whether I could do it or not; whether my job at Ringstones was going to be a delight or a misery.