The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons Read Free Book Online

the wind, sighing steadily, and she could hear the pines at the back of the house sighing too; their sound was like the sea’s sound, the sea fifteen miles away across the black, turfy downs . Suddenly, something made her glance down at her feet, and there, neatly arranged upon the doorstep, was a pile of books.
    “Oh, how kind!” Alda exclaimed, and stooped to examine them, not realising that the unknown might have put them there as a lure to engross her while creeping up to bash her on the head.
    She had just read the title of the first one, In Touch with the Transcendent , and had time to experience dismay, before a gust of rain blew in over herself and the books and she shut the door.
    Back in the parlour she put them on the table and finished her inspection. The titles were:
    With Rod and Gun in Jugoslavia; Foch, Man of Orléans; In Touch with the Transcendent; Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant; To Haiti in a Ketch .
    In Touch with the Transcendent , a volume of vaguely religious essays, was the most worn of the five, and was clearly a favourite with its owner, but Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant also bore traces of frequent use. It was not easy to conjure up a personality who should delight in both works, and when Alda went up to bed an hour later she had got no further than the conviction that he was good-natured, eccentric, and a man.

4
     
    AT BREAKFAST THE next morning Jenny and Louise instantly assumed that the unknown was a spy, and worked out an elaborate plan by which he could be identified and trapped, while Meg methodically worked her way through a large bowl of cereal and milk, glancing continually from one animated face to another.
    The subject kept them absorbed until breakfast was over and before them—long, rainy and dull—stretched the day. The irregular nature of their lives during the war had never permitted Jenny and Louise to acquire the sense of order and routine which is alleged to play such an important and valuable part in a child’s upbringing, and Alda herself was no routine-lover; the impromptu picnic, the unheralded treat, were what she enjoyed, and her housekeeping was slapdash and cheerful. She was well fitted to bring up children (who do not miss routine and order if they have security and love) and her daughters, with imaginations kept in play by the many home-diversions provided by an ingenious mother, were happy children.
    They each had a paint-box; there was the hoard of old Best-way and Weldon ’ s Fashion Books that travelled round with the family for colouring and cutting out; there was Louise’s box of dolls’ clothes and the unfailing interest to be obtained from swapping them with those in Jenny’s box; there were books (two of Louise’s favourites were Bessie in the Mountains , a pious mid-nineteenth-century American story, and By Order of Queen Maud , a Late Victorian tale in which the highly exhibitionist heroine ended up as a cripple for life, just to learn her); and finally, all three owned raincoats and sound rubber boots . This meant that they were made free of the pleasures of an English winter; if all else failed to amuse, they could go for a walk.
    Alda knew that bread, vegetables and groceries would be brought to her door, and she reckoned that it would not be necessary to shop in the village more than twice a week. There was, therefore, no sound excuse, after she and Jenny had whisked through the washing-up and sketchily made the beds, for going out.
    But the fire burned cheerfully in the kitchen and three heads were bent placidly (even Meg, who was too young for painting, was temporarily entertained in watching) over the painting books. Alda went across to the window and looked out; green, wet, fresh and empty the fields stretched away to the brown woods. She felt the raindrops on her face and the suck of wet mud at her boots and the cold crystal scatter of water over her hand as she pulled at a late blackberry; she could taste its soft rotten sweetness on her