Soul Searching: Chapter 1
When the Groundskeeper retired at a respectable age, his former employer, the Allerton School, endowed him with a modest pension and the privilege to live out his days in the small cottage on the school’s premises where he had lived since he first started working for Allerton. The cottage was by no means an extravagant dwelling, but more than adequate for his needs.
There was a small stone bench by the front door, and on days when it didn’t rain the Groundskeeper would sit outside and read. More often than not he would have a bottle or two of homemade blackberry wine for company, and sometimes he would doze off. Many of the naughtier students at Allerton knew about his habits and found it amusing to sneak up on the sleeping old man and pelt him with chestnuts or pine-cones.
On such occasions the Groundskeeper, who was a large man and strong beyond his age, would jump to his feet and shake his fists and cane at the fleeing assailants. He did this just to humor the attackers and make them come back and bombard him at another time. He was secretly pleased with the attacks, since the students saved him the trouble of collecting chestnuts and pine-cones for his pet squirrel. The squirrel was perfectly capable of collecting its own food, but preferred to stay indoors reading, or debating with its friend, a cat named Tulip. For this reason the students’ attacks were welcome by all the inhabitants of the cottage.
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Sometimes the old Groundskeeper set aside some of the nicest looking pine-cones before giving the rest to the squirrel. On cold and rainy days he added legs, usually four or six, but sometimes more or fewer, to the pine-cones. He then gave the pine-cone figures a coat of varnish and painted eyes, mouths and teeth where their faces would be.
“Any moderately gifted five year old could do better than that,” Tulip taunted. “Why do you bother with such pointless nonsense?”
Besides reading, Tulip’s own hobby was to cast finely detailed tin soldiers in uniforms dating to Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1812 Russian campaign. The cat would painstakingly paint the highest ranking officers to resemble historical figures of the era, and each member of the rank and file was given individual characteristics.
“Look at this one, for example,” the cat might say. “It’s a French sapper under General Morand’s command, who has been lightly wounded in the shoulder during the Battle of Mogilev. What’s that you’re working on? Oh, a pine-cone with six legs. How utterly fascinating.”
The Groundskeeper wasn’t bothered by such comments and only smiled as he clumsily applied paint to his varnished pine-cones.
“I have a plan,” he would say. “Wait and see, wait and see.”