Title: Collected Short Stories
Author: D. H. Lawrence
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
Title: Collected Short Stories
Author: D. H. Lawrence
CONTENTS
A MODERN LOVER (1933)
HER TURN (1913)
LOVE AMONG THE HAYSTACKS (1930)
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER (1929)
NEW EVE AND OLD ADAM (1934)
RAWDON'S ROOF (1928)
STRIKE-PAY (1913)
THE BLUE MOCCASINS (1928)
THE MORTAL COIL (1917)
THE OLD ADAM (1934)
THE OVERTONE (1933)
THE PRINCESS (1925)
THE WITCH A LA MODE (1934)
THINGS (1928)
A MODERN LOVER
I
The road was heavy with mud. It was labour to move along it. The
old, wide way, forsaken and grown over with grass, used not to be
so bad. The farm traffic from Coney Grey must have cut it up. The
young man crossed carefully again to the strip of grass on the
other side.
It was a dreary, out-of-doors track, saved only by low fragments of
fence and occasional bushes from the desolation of the large spaces
of arable and of grassland on either side, where only the unopposed
wind and the great clouds mattered, where even the little grasses
bent to one another indifferent of any traveller. The abandoned
road used to seem clean and firm. Cyril Mersham stopped to look
round and to bring back old winters to the scene, over the ribbed
red land and the purple wood. The surface of the field seemed
suddenly to lift and break. Something had startled the peewits,
and the fallow flickered over with pink gleams of birds white-
breasting the sunset. Then the plovers turned, and were gone in
the dusk behind.
Darkness was issuing out of the earth, and clinging to the trunks
of the elms which rose like weird statues, lessening down the
wayside. Mersham laboured forwards, the earth sucking and smacking
at his feet. In front the Coney Grey farm was piled in shadow on
the road. He came near to it, and saw the turnips heaped in a
fabulous heap up the side of the barn, a buttress that rose almost
to the eaves, and stretched out towards the cart-ruts in the road.
Also, the pale breasts of the turnips got the sunset, and they were
innumerable orange glimmers piled in the dusk. The two labourers
who were pulping at the foot of the mound stood shadow-like to
watch as he passed, breathing the sharp scent of turnips.
It was all very wonderful and glamorous here, in the old places
that had seemed so ordinary. Three-quarters of the scarlet sun was
settling among the branches of the elm in front, right ahead where
he would come soon. But when he arrived at the brow where the hill
swooped downwards, where the broad road ended suddenly, the sun had
vanished from the space before him, and the evening star was white
where the night urged up against the retreating, rose-coloured
billow of day. Mersham passed through the stile and sat upon the
remnant of the thorn tree on the brink of the valley. All the wide
space before him was full of a mist of rose, nearly to his feet.
The large ponds were hidden, the farms, the fields, the far-off
coal-mine, under the rosy outpouring of twilight. Between him and
the spaces of Leicestershire and the hills of Derbyshire, between
him and all the South Country which he had fled, was the splendid
rose-red strand of sunset, and the white star keeping guard.
Here, on the lee-shore of day, was the only purple showing of the
woods and the great hedge below him; and the roof of the farm below
him, with a film of smoke rising up. Unreal, like a dream which
wastes a sleep with unrest, was the South and its hurrying to and
fro. Here, on the farther shore of the sunset, with the flushed
tide at his feet, and the large star flashing with strange
laughter, did he himself naked walk with lifted arms into the quiet
flood of life.
What was it he wanted, sought in the slowly-lapsing tide of days?
Two years he had been in the large city in the south. There always
his soul had moved among the faces that swayed on the thousand
currents in that node of tides, hovering and wheeling and flying
low over the faces of the multitude like a sea-gull over the
waters, stopping now and again, and taking a fragment of life--a
look, a contour, a movement--to feed upon. Of many people, his
friends, he had asked that they would kindle again the smouldering
embers of their experience; he had blown the low fires gently with
his breath, and had leaned his face towards their glow, and had
breathed in the words that rose like fumes from the revived embers,
till he was sick with the strong drug of sufferings and ecstasies
and sensations, and the dreams that ensued. But most folk had
choked out the fires of their fiercer experience with rubble of
sentimentality and stupid fear, and rarely could he feel the hot
destruction of Life fighting out its way.
Surely, surely somebody could give him enough of the philtre of
life to stop the craving which tortured him hither and thither,
enough to satisfy for a while, to intoxicate him till he could
laugh the crystalline laughter of the star, and bathe in the
retreating flood of twilight like a naked boy in the surf, clasping
the waves and beating them and answering their wild clawings with
laughter sometimes, and sometimes gasps of pain.
He rose and stretched himself. The mist was lying in the valley
like a flock of folded sheep; Orion had strode into the sky, and
the Twins were playing towards the West. He shivered, stumbled
down the path, and crossed the orchard, passing among the dark
trees as if among people he knew.
II
He came into the yard. It was exceedingly, painfully muddy. He
felt a disgust of his own feet, which were cold, and numbed, and
heavy.
The window of the house was uncurtained, and shone like a yellow
moon, with only a large leaf or two of ivy, and a cord of
honeysuckle hanging across it. There seemed a throng of figures
moving about the fire. Another light gleamed mysteriously among
the out-buildings. He heard a voice in the cow-shed, and the
impatient movement of a cow, and the rhythm of milk in the bucket.
He hesitated in the darkness of the porch; then he entered without
knocking. A girl was opposite him, coming out of the dairy doorway
with a loaf of bread. She started, and they stood a moment looking
at each other across the room. They advanced to each other; he
took her hand, plunged overhead, as it were, for a moment in her
great brown eyes. Then he let her go, and looked aside, saying
some words of greeting. He had not kissed her; he realised that
when he heard her voice:
"When did you come?"
She was bent over the table, cutting bread-and-butter. What was it
in her bowed, submissive pose, in the dark, small head with its
black hair twining and hiding her face, that made him wince and
shrink and close over his soul that had been open like a foolhardy
flower to the night? Perhaps it was her very submission, which
trammelled him, throwing the responsibility of her wholly on him,
making him shrink from the burden of her.
Her brothers were home from the pit. They were two well-built lads
of twenty and twenty-one. The coal-dust over their faces was like
a mask, making them inscrutable, hiding any glow of greeting,
making them strangers. He could only see their eyes wake with a
sudden smile, which sank almost immediately, and they turned aside.
The mother was kneeling at a big brown stew-jar in front of the
open oven. She did not rise, but gave him her hand, saying:
"Cyril! How are you?" Her large dark eyes wavered and left him.
She continued with the spoon in the jar.
His disappointment rose as water suddenly heaves up the side of a
ship. A sense of dreariness revived, a feeling, too, of the cold
wet mud that he had struggled through.
These were the people who, a few months before, would look up in
one fine broad glow of welcome whenever he entered the door, even
if he came daily. Three years before, their lives would draw
together into one flame, and whole evenings long would flare with
magnificent mirth, and with play. They had known each other's
lightest and deepest feelings. Now, when he came back to them
after a long absence, they withdrew, turned aside. He sat down on
the sofa under the window, deeply chagrined. His heart closed
tight like a fir-cone, which had been open and full of naked seeds
when he came to them.
They asked him questions of the South. They were starved for news,
they said, in that God-forsaken hole.
"It is such a treat to hear a bit of news from outside," said the
mother.
News! He smiled, and talked, plucking for them the leaves from off
his tree: leaves of easy speech. He smiled, rather bitterly, as he
slowly reeled off his news, almost mechanically. Yet he knew--and
that was the irony of it--that they did not want his "records";
they wanted the timorous buds of his hopes, and the unknown fruits
of his experience, full of the taste of tears and what sunshine of
gladness had gone to their ripening. But they asked for his
"news", and, because of some subtle perversity, he gave them what
they begged, not what they wanted, not what he desired most
sincerely to give them.
Gradually he exhausted his store of talk, that he had thought was
limitless. Muriel moved about all the time, laying the table and
listening, only looking now and again across the barren garden of
his talk into his windows. But he hardened his heart and turned
his head from her. The boys had stripped to their waists, and had
knelt on the hearth-rug and washed themselves in a large tin bowl,
the mother sponging and drying their backs. Now they stood wiping
themselves, the firelight bright and rosy on their fine torsos,
their heavy arms swelling and sinking with life. They seemed to
cherish the firelight on their bodies. Benjamin, the younger,
leaned his breast to the warmth, and threw back his head, showing
his teeth in a voluptuous little smile. Mersham watched them, as
he had watched the peewits and the sunset.
Then they sat down to their dinners, and the room was dim with the
steam of food. Presently the father and the eldest brother were in
from the cow-sheds, and all assembled at table. The conversation
went haltingly; a little badinage on Mersham's part, a few
questions on politics from the father. Then there grew an acute,
fine feeling of discord. Mersham, particularly sensitive, reacted.
He became extremely attentive to the others at table, and to his
own manner of eating. He used English that was exquisitely
accurate, pronounced with the Southern accent, very different from
the heavily-sounded speech of the home folk. His nicety contrasted
the more with their rough, country habit. They became shy and
awkward, fumbling for something to say. The boys ate their dinners
hastily, shovelling up the mass as a man shovels gravel. The
eldest son clambered roughly with a great hand at the plate of
bread-and-butter. Mersham tried to shut his eyes. He kept up all
the time a brilliant tea-talk that they failed to appreciate in
that atmosphere. It was evident to him; without forming the idea,
he felt how irrevocably he was removing them from him, though he
had loved them. The irony of the situation appealed to him, and
added brightness and subtlety to his wit. Muriel, who had studied
him so thoroughly, confusedly understood. She hung her head over
her plate, and ate little. Now and again she would look up at him,
toying all the time with her knife--though it was a family for ugly
hands--and would address him some barren question. He always
answered the question, but he invariably disregarded her look of
earnestness, lapped in his unbreakable armour of light irony. He
acknowledged, however, her power in the flicker of irritation that
accompanied his reply. She quickly hid her face again.
They did not linger at tea, as in the old days. The men rose, with
an "Ah well!" and went about their farm-work. One of the lads lay
sprawling for sleep on the sofa; the other lighted a cigarette and
sat with his arms on his knees, blinking into the fire. Neither of
them ever wore a coat in the house, and their shirt-sleeves and
their thick bare necks irritated the stranger still further by
accentuating his strangeness. The men came tramping in and out to
the boiler. The kitchen was full of bustle, of the carrying of
steaming water, and of draughts. It seemed like a place out of
doors. Mersham shrank up in his corner, and pretended to read the
Daily News. He was ignored, like an owl sitting in the stalls of
cattle.
"Go in the parlour, Cyril. Why don't you? It's comfortable
there."
Muriel turned to him with this reproach, this remonstrance, almost
chiding him. She was keenly aware of his discomfort, and of his
painful discord with his surroundings. He rose without a word and
obeyed her.
III
The parlour was a long, low room with red colourings. A bunch of
mistletoe hung from the beam, and thickly-berried holly was over
the pictures--over the little gilt-blazed water-colours that he
hated so much because he had done them in his 'teens, and nothing
is so hateful as the self one has left. He dropped in the
tapestried chair called the Countess, and thought of the changes
which this room had seen in him. There, by that hearth, they had
threshed the harvest of their youth's experience, gradually burning
the chaff of sentimentality and false romance that covered the real
grain of life. How infinitely far away, now, seemed Jane Eyre and
George Eliot. These had marked the beginning. He smiled as he
traced the graph onwards, plotting the points with Carlyle and
Ruskin, Schopenhauer and Darwin and Huxley, Omar Khayyam, the
Russians, Ibsen and Balzac; then Guy de Maupassant and Madame
Bovary. They had parted in the midst of Madame Bovary. Since then
had come only Nietzsche and William James. They had not done so
badly, he thought, during those years which now he was apt to
despise a little, because of their dreadful strenuousness, and
because of their later deadly, unrelieved seriousness. He wanted
her to come in and talk about the old times. He crossed to the
other side of the fire and lay in the big horse-hair chair, which
pricked the back of his head. He looked about, and stuffed behind
him the limp green cushions that were always sweating down.
It was a week after Christmas. He guessed they had kept up the
holly and mistletoe for him. The two photographs of himself still
occupied the post of honour on the mantelpiece; but between them
was a stranger. He wondered who the fellow could be; good-looking
he seemed to be; but a bit of a clown beside the radiant, subtle
photos of himself. He smiled broadly at his own arrogance. Then
he remembered that Muriel and her people were leaving the farm come
Lady-day. Immediately, in valediction, he began to call up the old
days, when they had romped and played so boisterously, dances, and
wild charades, and all mad games. He was just telling himself that
those were the days, the days of unconscious, ecstatic fun, and he
was smiling at himself over his information, when she entered.
She came in, hesitating. Seeing him sprawling in his old
abandonment, she closed the door softly. For a moment or two she
sat, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, sucking her
little finger, and withdrawing it from her lips with a little pop,
looking all the while in the fire. She was waiting for him,
knowing all the time he would not begin. She was trying to feel
him, as it were. She wanted to assure herself of him after so many
months. She dared not look at him directly. Like all brooding,
constitutionally earnest souls, she gave herself away unwisely, and
was defenceless when she found herself pushed back, rejected so
often with contempt.
"Why didn't you tell me you were coming?" she asked at last.
"I wanted to have exactly one of the old tea-times, and evenings."
"Ay!" she answered with hopeless bitterness. She was a dreadful
pessimist. People had handled her so brutally, and had cheaply
thrown away her most sacred intimacies.
He laughed, and looked at her kindly.
"Ah, well, if I'd thought about it I should have known this was
what to expect. It's my own fault."
"Nay," she answered, still bitterly; "it's not your fault. It's
ours. You bring us to a certain point, and when you go away, we
lose it all again, and receive you like creatures who have never
known you."
"Never mind," he said easily. "If it is so, it is! How are you?"
She turned and looked full at him. She was very handsome; heavily
moulded, coloured richly. He looked back smiling into her big,
brown, serious eyes.
"Oh, I'm very well," she answered, with puzzled irony. "How are
you?"
"Me? You tell me. What do you think of me?"
"What do I think?" She laughed a little nervous laugh and shook
her head. "I don't know. Why--you look well--and very much of a
gentleman."
"Ah--and you are sorry?"
"No--No, I am not! No! Only you're different, you see."
"Ah, the pity! I shall never be as nice as I was at twenty-one,
shall I?" He glanced at his photo on the mantelpiece, and smiled,
gently chaffing her.
"Well--you're different--it isn't that you're not so nice, but
different. I always think you're like that, really."
She too glanced at the photo, which had been called the portrait of
an intellectual prig, but which was really that of a sensitive,
alert, exquisite boy. The subject of the portrait lay smiling at
her. Then it turned voluptuously, like a cat spread out in the
chair.
"And this is the last of it all--!"
She looked up at him, startled and pitiful.
"Of this phase, I mean," he continued, indicating with his eyes the
room, the surroundings. "Of Crossleigh Bank, I mean, and this part
of our lives."
"Ay!" she said, bowing her head, and putting into the exclamation
all her depth of sadness and regret. He laughed.
"Aren't you glad?" he asked.
She looked up, startled, a little shocked.
"Good-bye's a fine word," he explained. "It means you're going to
have a change, and a change is what you, of all people, want."
Her expression altered as she listened.
"It's true," she said. "I do."
"So you ought to say to yourself, 'What a treat! I'm going to say
good-bye directly to the most painful phase of my life.' You make
up your mind it shall be the most painful, by refusing to be hurt
so much in the future. There you are! 'Men at most times are
masters of their fates,' etcetera."
She pondered his method of reasoning, and turned to him with a
little laughter that was full of pleading and yearning.
"Well," he said, lying, amiably smiling, "isn't that so?--and
aren't you glad?"
"Yes!" she nodded. "I am--very glad."
He twinkled playfully at her, and asked, in a soft voice:
"Then what do you want?"
"Yes," she replied, a little breathlessly. "What do I?" She
looked at him with a rash challenge that pricked him.
"Nay," he said, evading her, "do you even ask me that?"
She veiled her eyes, and said, meekly in excuse:
"It's a long time since I asked you anything, isn't it?"
"Ay! I never thought of it. Whom have you asked in the interim?"
"Whom have I asked?"--she arched her brows and laughed a
monosyllable of scorn.
"No one, of course!" he said, smiling. "The world asks questions
of you, you ask questions of me, and I go to some oracle in the
dark, don't I?"
She laughed with him.
"No!" he said, suddenly serious. "Supposing you must answer me a
big question--something I can never find out by myself?"
He lay out indolently in the chair and began smiling again. She
turned to look with intensity at him, her hair's fine foliage all
loose round her face, her dark eyes haunted with doubt, her finger
at her lips. A slight perplexity flickered over his eyes.
"At any rate," he said, "you have something to give me."
She continued to look at him with dark, absorbing eyes. He probed
her with his regard. Then he seemed to withdraw, and his pupils
dilated with thought.
"You see," he said, "life's no good but to live--and you can't live
your life by yourself. You must have a flint and a steel, both, to
make the spark fly. Supposing you be my flint, my white flint, to
spurt out red fire for me?"
"But how do you mean?" she asked breathlessly.
"You see," he continued, thinking aloud as usual: "thought--that's
not life. It's like washing and combing and carding and weaving
the fleece that the year of life has produced. Now I think--we've
carded and woven to the end of our bundle--nearly. We've got to
begin again--you and me--living together, see? Not speculating and
poetising together--see?"
She did not cease to gaze absorbedly at him.
"Yes?" she whispered, urging him on.
"You see--I'll come back to you--to you--" He waited for her.
"But," she said huskily, "I don't understand."
He looked at her with aggressive frankness, putting aside all her
confusions.
"Fibber!" he said gently.
"But--" she turned in her chair from him--"but not clearly."
He frowned slightly:
"Nay, you should be able by now to use the algebra of speech. Must
I count up on your fingers for you what I mean, unit by unit, in
bald arithmetic?"
"No--no!" she cried, justifying herself; "but how can I understand--
the change in you? You used to say--you couldn't.--Quite
opposite."
He lifted his head as if taking in her meaning.
"Ah, yes, I have changed. I forget. I suppose I must have changed
in myself. I'm older--I'm twenty-six. I used to shrink from the
thought of having to kiss you, didn't I?" He smiled very brightly,
and added, in a soft voice: "Well--I don't, now."
She flushed darkly and hid her face from him.
"Not," he continued, with slow, brutal candour--"not that I know
any more than I did then--what love is--as you know it--but--I
think you're beautiful--and we know each other so well--as we know
nobody else, don't we? And so we . . ."
His voice died away, and they sat in a tense silence, listening to
the noise outside, for the dog was barking loudly. They heard a
voice speaking and quieting him. Cyril Mersham listened. He heard
the clatter of the barn door latch, and a slurring ring of a
bicycle-bell brushing the wall.
"Who is it?" he asked, unsuspecting.
She looked at him, and confessed with her eyes, guiltily,
beseeching. He understood immediately.
"Good Lord!--Him?" He looked at the photo on the mantelpiece. She
nodded with her usual despair, her finger between her lips again.
Mersham took some moments to adjust himself to the new situation.
"Well!--so HE'S in my place! Why didn't you tell me?"
"How could I?--he's not. Besides--you never would have a place."
She hid her face.
"No," he drawled, thinking deeply. "I wouldn't. It's my fault
altogether." Then he smiled, and said whimsically: "But I thought
you kept an old pair of my gloves in the chair beside you."
"So I did, so I did!" she justified herself again with extreme
bitterness, "till you asked me for them. You told me to--to take
another man--and I did as you told me--as usual."
"Did I tell you?--did I tell you? I suppose I must. I suppose I
am a fool. And do you like him?"
She laughed aloud, with scorn and bitterness.
"He's very good--and he's very fond of me."
"Naturally!" said Mersham, smiling and becoming ironical. "And how
firmly is he fixed?"
IV
She was mortified, and would not answer him. The question for him
now was how much did this intruder count. He looked, and saw she
wore no ring--but perhaps she had taken it off for his coming. He
began diligently to calculate what attitude he might take. He had
looked for many women to wake his love, but he had been always
disappointed. So he had kept himself virtuous, and waited. Now
he would wait no longer. No woman and he could ever understand
each other so well as he and Muriel whom he had fiercely educated
into womanhood along with his own struggling towards a manhood
of independent outlook. They had breathed the same air of
thought, they had been beaten with the same storms of doubt and
disillusionment, they had expanded together in days of pure poetry.
They had grown so; spiritually, or rather psychically, as he
preferred to say, they were married; and now he found himself
thinking of the way she moved about the house.
The outer door had opened and a man had entered the kitchen,
greeting the family cordially, and without any formality. He had
the throaty, penetrating voice of a tenor singer, and it came
distinctly over the vibrating rumble of the men's talking. He
spoke good, easy English. The boys asked him about the "iron-men"
and the electric haulage, and he answered them with rough
technicalities, so Mersham concluded he was a working electrician
in the mine. They continued to talk casually for some time, though
there was a false note of secondary interest in it all. Then
Benjamin came forward and broke the check, saying, with a dash of
braggart taunting:
"Muriel's in th' parlour, Tom, if you want her."
"Oh, is she? I saw a light in; I thought she might be." He
affected indifference, as if he were kept thus at every visit.
Then he added, with a touch of impatience, and of the proprietor's
interest: "What is she doing?"
"She's talking. Cyril Mersham's come from London."
"What!--is HE here?"
Mersham sat listening, smiling. Muriel saw his eyelids lift. She
had run up her flag of challenge taut, but continually she
slackened towards him with tenderness. Now her flag flew out
bravely. She rose, and went to the door.
"Hello!" she said, greeting the stranger with a little song of
welcome in one word, such as girls use when they become aware of
the presence of their sweetheart.
"You've got a visitor, I hear," he answered.
"Yes. Come along, come in!"
She spoke softly, with much gentle caressing.
He was a handsome man, well set-up, rather shorter than Mersham.
The latter rose indolently, and held out his hand, smiling
curiously into the beautiful, generous blue eyes of the other.
"Cyril--Mr. Vickers."
Tom Vickers crushed Mersham's hand, and answered his steady,
smiling regard with a warm expansion of feeling, then bent his
head, slightly confused.
"Sit here, will you?" said Mersham, languidly indicating the
armchair.
"No, no, thanks, I won't. I shall do here, thanks." Tom Vickers
took a chair and placed it in front of the fire. He was confusedly
charmed with Mersham's natural frankness and courtesy.
"If I'm not intruding," he added, as he sat down.
"No, of course not!" said Muriel, in her wonderfully soft, fond
tones--the indulgent tone of a woman who will sacrifice anything to
love.
"Couldn't!" added Mersham lazily. "We're always a public meeting,
Muriel and I. Aren't we, Miel? We're discussing affinities, that
ancient topic. You'll do for an audience. We agree so beastly
well, we two. We always did. It's her fault. Does she treat you
so badly?"
The other was rather bewildered. Out of it all he dimly gathered
that he was suggested as the present lover of Muriel, while Mersham
referred to himself as the one discarded. So he smiled, reassured.
"How--badly?" he asked.
"Agreeing with you on every point?"
"No, I can't say she does that," said Vickers, smiling, and looking
with little warm glances at her.
"Why, we never disagree, you know!" she remonstrated, in the same
deep indulgent tone.
"I see," Mersham said languidly, and yet keeping his wits keenly to
the point. "YOU agree with everything SHE says. Lord, how
interesting!"
Muriel arched her eyelids with a fine flare of intelligence across
at him, and laughed.
"Something like that," answered the other man, also indulgently, as
became a healthy male towards one who lay limply in a chair and
said clever nothings in a lazy drawl. Mersham noted the fine
limbs, the solid, large thighs, and the thick wrists. He was
classifying his rival among the men of handsome, healthy animalism,
and good intelligence, who are children in simplicity, who can add
two and two, but never xy and yx. His contours, his movements, his
repose were, strictly, lovable. "But," said Mersham to himself,
"if I were blind, or sorrowful, or very tired, I should not want
him. He is one of the men, as George Moore says, whom his wife
would hate after a few years for the very way he walked across the
floor. I can imagine him with a family of children, a fine father.
But unless he had a domestic wife--"
Muriel had begun to make talk to him.
"Did you cycle?" she asked, in that irritating private tone so
common to lovers, a tone that makes a third person an impertinence.
"Yes--I was rather late," he replied, in the same caressing manner.
The sense did not matter, the caress was everything.
"Didn't you find it very muddy?"
"Well, I did--but not any worse than yesterday."
Mersham sprawled his length in the chair, his eyelids almost shut,
his fine white hands hanging over the arms of the chair like dead-
white stoats from a bough. He was wondering how long Muriel would
endure to indulge her sweetheart thus. Soon she began to talk
second-hand to Mersham. They were speaking of Tom's landlady.
"You don't care for her, do you?" she asked, laughing
insinuatingly, since the shadow of his dislike for other women
heightened the radiance of his affection for her.
"Well, I can't say that I love her."
"How is it you always fall out with your landladies after six
months? You must be a wretch to live with."
"Nay, I don't know that I am. But they're all alike; they're jam
and cakes at first, but after a bit they're dry bread."
He spoke with solemnity, as if he uttered a universal truth.
Mersham's eyelids flickered now and again. Muriel turned to him:
"Mr. Vickers doesn't like lodgings," she said.
Mersham understood that Vickers therefore wanted to marry her; he
also understood that as the pretendant tired of his landladies, so
his wife and he would probably weary one another. He looked this
intelligence at Muriel, and drawled:
"Doesn't he? Lodgings are ideal. A good lodger can always boss
the show, and have his own way. It's the time of his life."
"I don't think!" laughed Vickers.
"It's true," drawled Mersham torpidly, giving his words the effect
of droll irony. "You're evidently not a good lodger. You only
need to sympathise with a landlady--against her husband generally--
and she'll move heaven and earth for you."
"Ah!" laughed Muriel, glancing at Mersham. "Tom doesn't believe in
sympathising with women--especially married women."
"I don't!" said Tom emphatically, "--it's dangerous."
"You leave it to the husband," said Mersham.
"I do that! I don't want 'em coming to me with their troubles. I
should never know the end."
"Wise of you. Poor woman! So you'll broach your barrel of
sympathy for your wife, eh, and for nobody else?"
"That's it. Isn't that right?"
"Oh, quite. Your wife will be a privileged person. Sort of
homebrewed beer to drink ad infinitum? Quite all right, that!"
"There's nothing better," said Tom, laughing.
"Except a change," said Mersham. "Now, I'm like a cup of tea to a
woman."
Muriel laughed aloud at this preposterous cynicism, and knitted her
brows to bid him cease playing ball with bombs.
"A fresh cup each time. Women never weary of tea. Muriel, I can
see you having a rich time. Sort of long after-supper drowse with
a good husband."
"Very delightful!" said Muriel sarcastically.
"If she's got a good husband, what more can she want?" asked Tom,
keeping the tone of banter, but really serious and somewhat
resentful.
"A lodger--to make things interesting."
"Why," said Muriel, intervening, "do women like you so?"
Mersham looked up at her, quietly, smiling into her eyes. She was
really perplexed. She wanted to know what he put in the pan to
make the balance go down so heavily on his side. He had, as usual,
to answer her seriously and truthfully, so he said: "Because I can
make them believe that black is green or purple--which it is, in
reality." Then, smiling broadly as she wakened again with
admiration for him, he added: "But you're trying to make me
conceited, Miel--to stain my virgin modesty."
Muriel glanced up at him with softness and understanding, and
laughed low. Tom gave a guffaw at the notion of Mersham's virgin
modesty. Muriel's brow wrinkled with irritation, and she turned
from her sweetheart to look in the fire.
V
Mersham, all unconsciously, had now developed the situation to the
climax he desired. He was sure that Vickers would not count
seriously in Muriel's movement towards himself. So he turned away,
uninterested.
The talk drifted for some time, after which he suddenly bethought
himself:
"I say, Mr. Vickers, will you sing for us? You do sing, don't
you?"
"Well--nothing to speak of," replied the other modestly, wondering
at Mersham's sudden change of interest. He looked at Muriel.
"Very well," she answered him, indulging him now like a child.
"But--" she turned to Mersham--"but do you, really?"
"Yes, of course. Play some of the old songs. Do you play any
better?"
She began "Honour and Arms".
"No, not that!" cried Mersham. "Something quiet--'Sois triste et
sois belle'." He smiled gently at her, suggestively. "Try 'Du
bist wie eine Blume' or 'Pur dicesti'."
Vickers sang well, though without much imagination. But the songs
they sang were the old songs that Mersham had taught Muriel years
before, and she played with one of his memories in her heart. At
the end of the first song, she turned and found him looking at her,
and they met again in the poetry of the past.
"Daffodils," he said softly, his eyes full of memories.
She dilated, quivered with emotion, in response. They had sat on
the rim of the hill, where the wild daffodils stood up to the sky,
and there he had taught her, singing line by line: "Du bist wie
eine Blume." He had no voice, but a very accurate ear.
The evening wore on to ten o'clock. The lads came through the room
on their way to bed. The house was asleep save the father, who sat
alone in the kitchen, reading The Octopus. They went in to supper.
Mersham had roused himself and was talking well. Muriel stimulated
him, always, and turned him to talk of art and philosophy--abstract
things that she loved, of which only he had ever spoken to her, of
which only he could speak, she believed, with such beauty. He used
quaint turns of speech, contradicted himself waywardly, then said
something sad and whimsical, all in a wistful, irresponsible manner
so that even the men leaned indulgent and deferential to him.
"Life," he said, and he was always urging this on Muriel in one
form or another, "life is beautiful, so long as it is consuming
you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is
glorious. It is best to roar away, like a fire with a great
draught, white-hot to the last bit. It's when you burn a slow fire
and save fuel that life's not worth having."
"You believe in a short life and a merry," said the father.
"Needn't be either short or merry. Grief is part of the fire of
life--and suffering--they're the root of the flame of joy, as they
say. No! With life, we're like the man who was so anxious to
provide for his old age that he died at thirty from inanition."
"That's what we're not likely to do," laughed Tom.
"Oh, I don't know. You live most intensely in human contact--and
that's what we shrink from, poor timid creatures, from giving our
souls to somebody to touch; for they, bungling fools, will
generally paw it with dirty hands."
Muriel looked at him with dark eyes of grateful understanding. She
herself had been much pawed, brutally, by her brothers. But, then,
she had been foolish in offering herself.
"And," concluded Mersham, "you are washed with the whitest fire of
life--when you take a woman you love--and understand."
Perhaps Mersham did not know what he was doing. Yet his whole talk
lifted Muriel as in a net, like a sea-maiden out of the waters, and
placed her in his arms, to breathe his thin, rare atmosphere. She
looked at him, and was certain of his pure earnestness, and
believed implicitly he could not do wrong.
Vickers believed otherwise. He would have expressed his opinion,
whatever it might be, in an: "Oh, ay, he's got plenty to say, and
he'll keep on saying it--but, hang it all . . .!"
For Vickers was an old-fashioned, inarticulate lover; such as has
been found the brief joy and the unending disappointment of a
woman's life. At last he found he must go, as Mersham would not
precede him. Muriel did not kiss him good-bye, nor did she offer
to go out with him to his bicycle. He was angry at this, but more
angry with the girl than with the man. He felt that she was
fooling about, "showing off" before the stranger. Mersham was a
stranger to him, and so, in his idea, to Muriel. Both young men
went out of the house together, and down the rough brick track to
the barn. Mersham made whimsical little jokes: "I wish my feet
weren't so fastidious. They dither when they go in a soft spot
like a girl who's touched a toad. Hark at that poor old wretch--
she sounds as if she'd got whooping-cough."
"A cow is not coughing when she makes that row," said Vickers.
"Pretending, is she?--to get some Owbridge's? Don't blame her. I
guess she's got chilblains, at any rate. Do cows have chilblains,
poor devils?"
Vickers laughed and felt he must take this man into his protection.
"Mind," he said, as they entered the barn, which was very dark.
"Mind your forehead against this beam." He put one hand on the
beam, and stretched out the other to feel for Mersham. "Thanks,"
said the latter gratefully. He knew the position of the beam to an
inch, however dark the barn, but he allowed Vickers to guide him
past it. He rather enjoyed being taken into Tom's protection.
Vickers carefully struck a match, bowing over the ruddy core of
light and illuminating himself like some beautiful lantern in the
midst of the high darkness of the barn. For some moments he bent
over his bicycle-lamp, trimming and adjusting the wick, and his
face, gathering all the light on its ruddy beauty, seemed luminous
and wonderful. Mersham could see the down on his cheeks above the
razor-line, and the full lips in shadow beneath the moustache, and
the brush of the eyebrows between the light.
"After all," said Mersham, "he's very beautiful; she's a fool to
give him up."
Tom shut the lamp with a snap, and carefully crushed the match
under his foot. Then he took the pump from the bicycle, and
crouched on his heels in the dimness, inflating the tyre. The
swift, unerring, untiring stroke of the pump, the light balance and
the fine elastic adjustment of the man's body to his movements
pleased Mersham.
"She could have," he was saying to himself, "some glorious hours
with this man--yet she'd rather have me, because I can make her sad
and set her wondering."
But to the man he was saying:
"You know, love isn't the twin-soul business. With you, for
instance, women are like apples on a tree. You can have one that
you can reach. Those that look best are overhead, but it's no good
bothering with them. So you stretch up, perhaps you pull down a
bough and just get your fingers round a good one. Then it swings
back and you feel wild and you say your heart's broken. But there
are plenty of apples as good for you no higher than your chest."
Vickers smiled, and thought there was something in it--generally;
but for himself, it was nothing.
They went out of the barn to the yard gate. He watched the young
man swing over his saddle and vanish, calling "Good-night."
"Sic transit," he murmured--meaning Tom Vickers, and beautiful
lustihood that is unconscious like a blossom.
Mersham went slowly in the house. Muriel was clearing away the
supper things, and laying the table again for the men's breakfasts.
But she was waiting for him as clearly as if she had stood watching
in the doorway. She looked up at him, and instinctively he lifted
his face towards her as if to kiss her. They smiled, and she went
on with her work.
The father rose, stretching his burly form, and yawning. Mersham
put on his overcoat.
"You will come a little way with me?" he said. She answered him
with her eyes. The father stood, large and silent, on the hearth-
rug. His sleepy, mazed disapproval had no more effect than a
little breeze which might blow against them. She smiled brightly
at her lover, like a child, as she pinned on her hat.
It was very dark outside in the starlight. He groaned heavily, and
swore with extravagance as he went ankle-deep in mud.
"See, you should follow me. Come here," she commanded, delighted
to have him in charge.
"Give me your hand," he said, and they went hand-in-hand over the
rough places. The fields were open, and the night went up to the
magnificent stars. The wood was very dark, and wet; they leaned
forward and stepped stealthily, and gripped each other's hands fast
with a delightful sense of adventure. When they stood and looked
up a moment, they did not know how the stars were scattered among
the tree-tops till he found the three jewels of Orion right in
front.
There was a strangeness everywhere, as if all things had ventured
out alive to play in the night, as they do in fairy-tales; the
trees, the many stars, the dark spaces, and the mysterious waters
below uniting in some magnificent game.
They emerged from the wood on to the bare hillside. She came down
from the wood-fence into his arms, and he kissed her, and they
laughed low together. Then they went on across the wild meadows
where there was no path.
"Why don't you like him?" he asked playfully.
"Need you ask?" she said simply.
"Yes. Because he's heaps nicer than I am."
She laughed a full laugh of amusement.
"He is! Look! He's like summer, brown and full of warmth. Think
how splendid and fierce he'd be--"
"Why do you talk about him?" she said.
"Because I want you to know what you're losing--and you won't till
you see him in my terms. He is very desirable--I should choose him
in preference to me--for myself."
"Should you?" she laughed. "But," she added with soft certainty,
"you don't understand."
"No--I don't. I suppose it's love; your sort, which is beyond me.
I shall never be blindly in love, shall I?"
"I begin to think you never will," she answered, not very sadly.
"You won't be blindly anything."
"The voice of love!" he laughed; and then: "No, if you pull your
flowers to pieces, and find how they pollinate, and where are the
ovaries, you don't go in blind ecstasies over to them. But they
mean more to you; they are intimate, like friends of your heart,
not like wonderful, dazing fairies."
"Ay!" she assented, musing over it with the gladness of
understanding him. "And then?"
Softly, almost without words, she urged him to the point.
"Well," he said, "you think I'm a wonderful, magical person, don't
you?--and I'm not--I'm not as good, in the long run, as your Tom,
who thinks you are a wonderful, magical person."
She laughed and clung to him as they walked. He continued, very
carefully and gently: "Now, I don't imagine for a moment that you
are princessy or angelic or wonderful. You often make me
thundering mad because you're an ass . . ."
She laughed low with shame and humiliation.
"Nevertheless--I come from the south to you--because--well, with
you I can be just as I feel, conceited or idiotic, without being
afraid to be myself . . ." He broke off suddenly. "I don't think
I've tried to make myself out to you--any bigger or better than I
am?" he asked her wistfully.
"No," she answered, in beautiful, deep assurance. "No! That's
where it is. You have always been so honest. You are more honest
than anybody ever--" She did not finish, being deeply moved. He
was silent for some time, then he continued, as if he must see the
question to the end with her:
"But, you know--I do like you not to wear corsets. I like to see
you move inside your dress."
She laughed, half shame, half pleasure.
"I wondered if you'd notice," she said.
"I did--directly." There was a space of silence, after which he
resumed: "You see--we would marry tomorrow--but I can't keep
myself. I am in debt--"
She came close to him, and took his arm.
"--And what's the good of letting the years go, and the beauty of
one's youth--?"
"No," she admitted, very slowly and softly, shaking her head.
"So--well!--you understand, don't you? And if you're willing--
you'll come to me, won't you?--just naturally, as you used to come
and go to church with me?--and it won't be--it won't be me coaxing
you--reluctant? Will it?"
They had halted in front of a stile which they would have to climb.
She turned to him in silence, and put up her face to him. He took
her in his arms, and kissed her, and felt the night mist with which
his moustache was drenched, and he bent his head and rubbed his
face on her shoulder, and then pressed his lips on her neck. For a
while they stood in silence, clasped together. Then he heard her
voice, muffled in his shoulder, saying:
"But--but, you know--it's much harder for the woman--it means
something so different for a woman."
"One can be wise," he answered, slowly and gently. "One need not
blunder into calamities."
She was silent for a time. Then she spoke again.
"Yes, but--if it should be--you see--I couldn't bear it."
He let her go, and they drew apart, and the embrace no longer
choked them from speaking. He recognised the woman defensive,
playing the coward against her own inclinations, and even against
her knowledge.
"If--if!" he exclaimed sharply, so that she shrank with a little
fear. "There need be no ifs--need there?"
"I don't know," she replied, reproachfully, very quietly.
"If I say so--" he said, angry with her mistrust. Then he climbed
the stile, and she followed.
"But you DO know," he exclaimed. "I have given you books--"
"Yes, but--"
"But what?" He was getting really angry.
"It's so different for a woman--you don't know."
He did not answer this. They stumbled together over the mole-
hills, under the oak trees.
"And look--how we should have to be--creeping together in the
dark--"
This stung him; at once, it was as if the glamour went out of life.
It was as if she had tipped over the fine vessel that held the wine
of his desire, and had emptied him of all his vitality. He had
played a difficult, deeply-moving part all night, and now the
lights suddenly switched out, and there was left only weariness.
He was silent, tired, very tired, bodily and spiritually. They
walked across the wide, dark meadow with sunken heads. Suddenly
she caught his arm.
"Don't be cold with me!" she cried.
He bent and kissed in acknowledgment the lips she offered him for
love.
"No," he said drearily; "no, it is not coldness--only--I have lost
hold--for to-night." He spoke with difficulty. It was hard to
find a word to say. They stood together, apart, under the old
thorn tree for some minutes, neither speaking. Then he climbed the
fence, and stood on the highway above the meadow.
At parting also he had not kissed her. He stood a moment and
looked at her. The water in a little brook under the hedge was
running, chuckling with extraordinary loudness: away on Nethermere
they heard the sad, haunting cry of the wild-fowl from the North.
The stars still twinkled intensely. He was too spent to think of
anything to say; she was too overcome with grief and fear and a
little resentment. He looked down at the pale blotch of her face
upturned from the low meadow beyond the fence. The thorn boughs
tangled above her, drooping behind her like the roof of a hut.
Beyond was the great width of the darkness. He felt unable to
gather his energy to say anything vital.
"Good-bye," he said. "I'm going back--on Saturday. But--you'll
write to me. Good-bye."
He turned to go. He saw her white uplifted face vanish, and her
dark form bend under the boughs of the tree, and go out into the
great darkness. She did not say good-bye.
HER TURN
She was his second wife, and so there was between them that truce
which is never held between a man and his first woman.
He was one for the women, and as such, an exception among the
colliers. In spite of their prudery, the neighbour women liked
him; he was big, naïve, and very courteous with them; he was so,
even to his second wife.
Being a large man of considerable strength and perfect health, he
earned good money in the pit. His natural courtesy saved him from
enemies, while his fresh interest in life made his presence always
agreeable. So he went his own way, had always plenty of friends,
always a good job down pit.
He gave his wife thirty-five shillings a week. He had two grown-up
sons at home, and they paid twelve shillings each. There was only
one child by the second marriage, so Radford considered his wife
did well.
Eighteen months ago, Bryan and Wentworth's men were out on strike
for eleven weeks. During that time, Mrs. Radford could neither
cajole nor entreat nor nag the ten shillings strike-pay from her
husband. So that when the second strike came on, she was prepared
for action.
Radford was going, quite inconspicuously, to the publican's wife at
the "Golden Horn". She is a large, easy-going lady of forty, and
her husband is sixty-three, moreover crippled with rheumatism. She
sits in the little bar-parlour of the wayside public-house,
knitting for dear life, and sipping a very moderate glass of
Scotch. When a decent man arrives at the three-foot width of bar,
she rises, serves him, surveys him over, and, if she likes his
looks, says:
"Won't you step inside, sir?"
If he steps inside, he will find not more than one or two men
present. The room is warm, quite small. The landlady knits. She
gives a few polite words to the stranger, then resumes her
conversation with the man who interests her most. She is straight,
highly-coloured, with indifferent brown eyes.
"What was that you asked me, Mr. Radford?"
"What is the difference between a donkey's tail and a rainbow?"
asked Radford, who had a consuming passion for conundrums.
"All the difference in the world," replied the landlady.
"Yes, but what special difference?"
"I s'll have to give it up again. You'll think me a donkey's head,
I'm afraid."
"Not likely. But just you consider now, wheer . . ."
The conundrum was still under weigh, when a girl entered. She was
swarthy, a fine animal. After she had gone out:
"Do you know who that is?" asked the landlady.
"I can't say as I do," replied Radford.
"She's Frederick Pinnock's daughter, from Stony Ford. She's
courting our Willy."
"And a fine lass, too."
"Yes, fine enough, as far as that goes. What sort of a wife'll she
make him, think you?"
"You just let me consider a bit," said the man. He took out a
pocket-book and a pencil. The landlady continued to talk to the
other guests.
Radford was a big fellow, black-haired, with a brown moustache, and
darkish blue eyes. His voice, naturally deep, was pitched in his
throat, and had a peculiar, tenor quality, rather husky, and
disturbing. He modulated it a good deal as he spoke, as men do who
talk much with women. Always, there was a certain indolence in his
carriage.
"Our mester's lazy," his wife said. "There's many a bit of a jab
wants doin', but get him to do it if you can."
But she knew he was merely indifferent to the little jobs, and not
lazy.
He sat writing for about ten minutes, at the end of which time, he
read:
"I see a fine girl full of life.
I see her just ready for wedlock,
But there's jealousy between her eyebrows
And jealousy on her mouth.
I see trouble ahead.
Willy is delicate.
She would do him no good.
She would never see when he wasn't well,
She would only see what she wanted--"
So, in phrases, he got down his thoughts. He had to fumble for
expression, and therefore anything serious he wanted to say he
wrote in "poetry", as he called it.
Presently, the landlady rose, saying:
"Well, I s'll have to be looking after our mester. I s'll be in
again before we close."
Radford sat quite comfortably on. In a while, he too bade the
company good-night.
When he got home, at a quarter-past eleven, his sons were in bed,
and his wife sat awaiting him. She was a woman of medium height,
fat and sleek, a dumpling. Her black hair was parted smooth, her
narrow-opened eyes were sly and satirical, she had a peculiar twang
in her rather sleering voice.
"Our missis is a puss-puss," he said easily, of her. Her
extraordinarily smooth, sleek face was remarkable. She was very
healthy.
He never came in drunk. Having taken off his coat and his cap, he
sat down to supper in his shirt-sleeves. Do as he might, she was
fascinated by him. He had a strong neck, with the crisp hair
growing low. Let her be angry as she would yet she had a passion
for that neck of his, particularly when she saw the great vein rib
under the skin.
"I think, missis," he said, "I'd rather ha'e a smite o' cheese than
this meat."
"Well, can't you get it yourself?"
"Yi, surely I can," he said, and went out to the pantry.
"I think, if yer comin' in at this time of night, you can wait on
yourself," she justified herself.
She moved uneasily in her chair. There were several jam-tarts
alongside the cheese on the dish he brought.
"Yi, Missis, them tan-tafflins'll go down very nicely," he said.
"Oh, will they! Then you'd better help to pay for them," she said,
amiably, but determined.
"Now what art after?"
"What am I after? Why, can't you think?" she said sarcastically.
"I'm not for thinkin', missis."
"No, I know you're not. But wheer's my money? You've been paid
the Union to-day. Wheer do I come in?"
"Tha's got money, an' tha mun use it."
"Thank yer. An' 'aven't you none, as well?"
"I hadna, not till we was paid, not a ha'p'ny."
"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself to say so."
"'Appen so."
"We'll go shares wi' th' Union money," she said. "That's nothing
but what's right."
"We shonna. Tha's got plenty o' money as tha can use."
"Oh, all right," she said. "I will do."
She went to bed. It made her feel sharp that she could not get at
him.
The next day, she was just as usual. But at eleven o'clock she
took her purse and went up town. Trade was very slack. Men stood
about in gangs, men were playing marbles everywhere in the streets.
It was a sunny morning. Mrs. Radford went into the furnisher-and-
upholsterer's shop.
"There's a few things," she said to Mr. Allcock, "as I'm wantin'
for the house, and I might as well get them now, while the men's at
home, and can shift me the furniture."
She put her fat purse on to the counter with a click. The man
should know she was not wanting "strap". She bought linoleum for
the kitchen, a new wringer, a breakfast-service, a spring mattress,
and various other things, keeping a mere thirty shillings, which
she tied in a corner of her handkerchief. In her purse was some
loose silver.
Her husband was gardening in a desultory fashion when she got back
home. The daffodils were out. The colts in the field at the end
of the garden were tossing their velvety brown necks.
"Sithee here, missis," called Radford, from the shed which stood
halfway down the path. Two doves in a cage were cooing.
"What have you got?" asked the woman, as she approached. He held
out to her in his big, earthy hand a tortoise. The reptile was
very, very slowly issuing its head again to the warmth.
"He's wakkened up betimes," said Radford.
"He's like th' men, wakened up for a holiday," said the wife.
Radford scratched the little beast's scaly head.
"We pleased to see him out," he said.
They had just finished dinner, when a man knocked at the door.
"From Allcock's!" he said.
The plump woman took up the clothes-basket containing the crockery
she had bought.
"Whativer hast got theer?" asked her husband.
"We've been wantin' some breakfast-cups for ages, so I went up town
an' got 'em this mornin'," she replied.
He watched her taking out the crockery.
"Hm!" he said. "Tha's been on th' spend, seemly."
Again there was a thud at the door. The man had put down a roll of
linoleum. Mr. Radford went to look at it.
"They come rolling in!" he exclaimed.
"Who's grumbled more than you about the raggy oilcloth of this
kitchen?" said the insidious, cat-like voice of the wife.
"It's all right, it's all right," said Radford.
The carter came up the entry with another roll, which he deposited
with a grunt at the door.
"An' how much do you reckon this lot is?" he asked.
"Oh, they're all paid for, don't worry," replied the wife.
"Shall yer gi'e me a hand, mester?" asked the carter.
Radford followed him down the entry, in his easy, slouching way.
His wife went after. His waistcoat was hanging loose over his
shirt. She watched his easy movement of well-being as she followed
him, and she laughed to herself.
The carter took hold of one end of the wire mattress, dragged it
forth.
"Well, this is a corker!" said Radford, as he received the burden.
"Now the mangle!" said the carter.
"What dost reckon tha's been up to, missis?" asked the husband.
"I said to myself last wash-day, if I had to turn that mangle
again, tha'd ha'e ter wash the clothes thyself."
Radford followed the carter down the entry again. In the street,
women were standing watching, and dozens of men were lounging round
the cart. One officiously helped with the wringer.
"Gi'e him thrippence," said Mrs. Radford.
"Gi'e him thysen," replied her husband.
"I've no change under half a crown."
Radford tipped the carter, and returned indoors. He surveyed the
array of crockery, linoleum, mattress, mangle, and other goods
crowding the house and the yard.
"Well, this is a winder!" he repeated.
"We stood in need of 'em enough," she replied.
"I hope tha's got plenty more from wheer they came from," he
replied dangerously.
"That's just what I haven't." She opened her purse. "Two half-
crowns, that's every copper I've got i' th' world."
He stood very still as he looked.
"It's right," she said.
There was a certain smug sense of satisfaction about her. A wave
of anger came over him, blinding him. But he waited and waited.
Suddenly his arm leapt up, the fist clenched, and his eyes blazed
at her. She shrank away, pale and frightened. But he dropped his
fist to his side, turned, and went out, muttering. He went down to
the shed that stood in the middle of the garden. There he picked
up the tortoise, and stood with bent head, rubbing its horny head.
She stood hesitating, watching him. Her heart was heavy, and yet
there was a curious, cat-like look of satisfaction round her eyes.
Then she went indoors and gazed at her new cups, admiringly.
The next week he handed her his half-sovereign without a word.
"You'll want some for yourself," she said, and she gave him a
shilling. He accepted it.
LOVE AMONG THE HAYSTACKS
I
The two large fields lay on a hillside facing south. Being newly
cleared of hay, they were golden green, and they shone almost
blindingly in the sunlight. Across the hill, half-way up, ran a
high hedge, that flung its black shadow finely across the molten
glow of the sward. The stack was being built just above the hedge.
It was of great size, massive, but so silvery and delicately bright
in tone that it seemed not to have weight. It rose dishevelled and
radiant among the steady, golden-green glare of the field. A
little farther back was another, finished stack.
The empty wagon was just passing through the gap in the hedge.
From the far-off corner of the bottom field, where the sward was
still striped grey with winrows, the loaded wagon launched forward,
to climb the hill to the stack. The white dots of the hay-makers
showed distinctly among the hay.
The two brothers were having a moment's rest, waiting for the load
to come up. They stood wiping their brows with their arms, sighing
from the heat and the labour of placing the last load. The stack
they rode was high, lifting them up above the hedge-tops, and very
broad, a great slightly-hollowed vessel into which the sunlight
poured, in which the hot, sweet scent of hay was suffocating.
Small and inefficacious the brothers looked, half-submerged in the
loose, great trough, lifted high up as if on an altar reared to the
sun.
Maurice, the younger brother, was a handsome young fellow of twenty-
one, careless and debonair, and full of vigour. His grey eyes, as
he taunted his brother, were bright and baffled with a strong
emotion. His swarthy face had the same peculiar smile, expectant
and glad and nervous, of a young man roused for the first time in
passion.
"Tha sees," he said, as he leaned on the pommel of his fork, "tha
thowt as tha'd done me one, didna ter?" He smiled as he spoke,
then fell again into his pleasant torment of musing.
"I thought nowt--tha knows so much," retorted Geoffrey, with the
touch of a sneer. His brother had the better of him. Geoffrey was
a very heavy, hulking fellow, a year older than Maurice. His blue
eyes were unsteady, they glanced away quickly; his mouth was
morbidly sensitive. One felt him wince away, through the whole of
his great body. His inflamed self-consciousness was a disease in
him.
"Ah but though, I know tha did," mocked Maurice. "Tha went
slinkin' off"--Geoffrey winced convulsively--"thinking as that wor
the last night as any of us'ud ha'e ter stop here, an' so tha'd
leave me to sleep out, though it wor thy turn--"
He smiled to himself, thinking of the result of Geoffrey's ruse.
"I didna go slinkin' off neither," retorted Geoffrey, in his heavy,
clumsy manner, wincing at the phrase. "Didna my feyther send me to
fetch some coal--"
"Oh yes, oh yes--we know all about it. But tha sees what tha
missed, my lad."
Maurice, chuckling, threw himself on his back in the bed of hay.
There was absolutely nothing in his world, then, except the shallow
ramparts of the stack, and the blazing sky. He clenched his fists
tight, threw his arms across his face, and braced his muscles
again. He was evidently very much moved, so acutely that it was
hardly pleasant, though he still smiled. Geoffrey, standing behind
him, could just see his red mouth, with the young moustache like
black fur, curling back and showing the teeth in a smile. The
elder brother leaned his chin on the pommel of his fork, looking
out across the country.
Far away was the faint blue heap of Nottingham. Between, the
country lay under a haze of heat, with here and there a flag of
colliery smoke waving. But near at hand, at the foot of the hill,
across the deep-hedged high road, was only the silence of the old
church and the castle farm, among their trees. The large view only
made Geoffrey more sick. He looked away, to the wagons crossing
the field below him, the empty cart like a big insect moving down
hill, the load coming up, rocking like a ship, the brown head of
the horse ducking, the brown knees lifted and planted strenuously.
Geoffrey wished it would be quick.
"Tha didna think--"
Geoffrey started, coiled within himself, and looked down at the
handsome lips moving in speech below the brown arms of his brother.
"Tha didna think 'er'd be thur wi' me--or tha wouldna ha' left me
to it," Maurice said, ending with a little laugh of excited memory.
Geoffrey flushed with hate, and had an impulse to set his foot on
that moving, taunting mouth, which was there below him. There was
silence for a time, then, in a peculiar tone of delight, Maurice's
voice came again, spelling out the words, as it were:
"Ich bin klein, mein Herz ist rein,
Ist niemand d'rin als Christ allein."
Maurice chuckled, then, convulsed at a twinge of recollection, keen
as pain, he twisted over, pressed himself into the hay.
"Can thee say thy prayers in German?" came his muffled voice.
"I non want," growled Geoffrey.
Maurice chuckled. His face was quite hidden, and in the dark he
was going over again his last night's experiences.
"What about kissing 'er under th' ear, Sonny," he said, in a
curious, uneasy tone. He writhed, still startled and inflamed by
his first contact with love.
Geoffrey's heart swelled within him, and things went dark. He
could not see the landscape.
"An' there's just a nice two-handful of her bosom," came the low,
provocative tones of Maurice, who seemed to be talking to himself.
The two brothers were both fiercely shy of women, and until this
hay harvest, the whole feminine sex had been represented by their
mother and in presence of any other women they were dumb louts.
Moreover, brought up by a proud mother, a stranger in the country,
they held the common girls as beneath them, because beneath their
mother, who spoke pure English, and was very quiet. Loud-mouthed
and broad-tongued the common girls were. So these two young men
had grown up virgin but tormented.
Now again Maurice had the start of Geoffrey, and the elder brother
was deeply mortified. There was a danger of his sinking into a
morbid state, from sheer lack of living, lack of interest. The
foreign governess at the Vicarage, whose garden lay beside the top
field, had talked to the lads through the hedge, and had fascinated
them. There was a great elder bush, with its broad creamy flowers
crumbling on to the garden path, and into the field. Geoffrey
never smelled elder-flower without starting and wincing, thinking
of the strange foreign voice that had so startled him as he mowed
out with the scythe in the hedge bottom. A baby had run through
the gap, and the Fräulein, calling in German, had come brushing
down the flowers in pursuit. She had started so on seeing a man
standing there in the shade, that for a moment she could not move:
and then she had blundered into the rake which was lying by his
side. Geoffrey, forgetting she was a woman when he saw her pitch
forward, had picked her up carefully, asking: "Have you hurt you?"
Then she had broken into a laugh, and answered in German, showing
him her arms, and knitting her brows. She was nettled rather
badly.
"You want a dock leaf," he said. She frowned in a puzzled fashion.
"A dock leaf?" she repeated. He had rubbed her arms with the green
leaf.
And now, she had taken to Maurice. She had seemed to prefer
himself at first. Now she had sat with Maurice in the moonlight,
and had let him kiss her. Geoffrey sullenly suffered, making no
fight.
Unconsciously, he was looking at the Vicarage garden. There she
was, in a golden-brown dress. He took off his hat, and held up his
right hand in greeting to her. She, a small, golden figure, waved
her hand negligently from among the potato rows. He remained,
arrested, in the same posture, his hat in his left hand, his right
arm upraised, thinking. He could tell by the negligence of her
greeting that she was waiting for Maurice. What did she think of
himself? Why wouldn't she have him?
Hearing the voice of the wagoner leading the load, Maurice rose.
Geoffrey still stood in the same way, but his face was sullen, and
his upraised hand was slack with brooding. Maurice faced up-hill.
His eyes lit up and he laughed. Geoffrey dropped his own arm,
watching.
"Lad!" chuckled Maurice. "I non knowed 'er wor there." He waved
his hand clumsily. In these matters Geoffrey did better. The
elder brother watched the girl. She ran to the end of the path,
behind the bushes, so that she was screened from the house. Then
she waved her handkerchief wildly. Maurice did not notice the
manoeuvre. There was the cry of a child. The girl's figure
vanished, reappeared holding up a white childish bundle, and came
down the path. There she put down her charge, sped up-hill to a
great ash-tree, climbed quickly to a large horizontal bar that
formed the fence there, and, standing poised, blew kisses with both
her hands, in a foreign fashion that excited the brothers. Maurice
laughed aloud, as he waved his red handkerchief.
"Well, what's the danger?" shouted a mocking voice from below.
Maurice collapsed, blushing furiously.
"Nowt!" he called.
There was a hearty laugh from below.
The load rode up, sheered with a hiss against the stack, then sank
back again upon the scotches. The brothers ploughed across the
mass of hay, taking the forks. Presently a big, burly man, red and
glistening, climbed to the top of the load. Then he turned round,
scrutinized the hillside from under his shaggy brows. He caught
sight of the girl under the ash-tree.
"Oh, that's who it is," he laughed. "I thought it was some such
bird, but I couldn't see her."
The father laughed in a hearty, chaffing way, then began to teem
the load. Geoffrey, on the stack above, received his great
forkfuls, and swung them over to Maurice, who took them, placed
them, building the stack. In the intense sunlight, the three
worked in silence, knit together in a brief passion of work. The
father stirred slowly for a moment, getting the hay from under his
feet. Geoffrey waited, the blue tines of his fork glittering in
expectation: the mass rose, his fork swung beneath it, there was a
light clash of blades, then the hay was swept on to the stack,
caught by Maurice, who placed it judiciously. One after another,
the shoulders of the three men bowed and braced themselves. All
wore light blue, bleached shirts, that stuck close to their backs.
The father moved mechanically, his thick, rounded shoulders bending
and lifting dully: he worked monotonously. Geoffrey flung away his
strength. His massive shoulders swept and flung the hay
extravagantly.
"Dost want to knock me ower?" asked Maurice angrily. He had to
brace himself against the impact. The three men worked intensely,
as if some will urged them. Maurice was light and swift at the
work, but he had to use his judgement. Also, when he had to place
the hay along the far ends, he had some distance to carry it. So
he was too slow for Geoffrey. Ordinarily, the elder would have
placed the hay as far as possible where his brother wanted it.
Now, however, he pitched his forkfuls into the middle of the stack.
Maurice strode swiftly and handsomely across the bed, but the work
was too much for him. The other two men, clenched in their receive
and deliver, kept up a high pitch of labour. Geoffrey still flung
the hay at random. Maurice was perspiring heavily with heat and
exertion, and was getting worried. Now and again, Geoffrey wiped
his arm across his brow, mechanically, like an animal. Then he
glanced with satisfaction at Maurice's moiled condition, and caught
the next forkful.
"Wheer dost think thou'rt hollin' it, fool!" panted Maurice, as his
brother flung a forkful out of reach.
"Wheer I've a mind," answered Geoffrey.
Maurice toiled on, now very angry. He felt the sweat trickling
down his body: drops fell into his long black lashes, blinding him,
so that he had to stop and angrily dash his eyes clear. The veins
stood out in his swarthy neck. He felt he would burst, or drop, if
the work did not soon slacken off. He heard his father's fork
dully scrape the cart bottom.
"There, the last," the father panted. Geoffrey tossed the last
light lot at random, took off his hat, and, steaming in the
sunshine as he wiped himself, stood complacently watching Maurice
struggle with clearing the bed.
"Don't you think you've got your bottom corner a bit far out?" came
the father's voice from below. "You'd better be drawing in now,
hadn't you?"
"I thought you said next load," Maurice called, sulkily.
"Aye! All right. But isn't this bottom corner--?"
Maurice, impatient, took no notice.
Geoffrey strode over the stack, and stuck his fork in the offending
corner. "What--here?" he bawled in his great voice.
"Aye--isn't it a bit loose?" came the irritating voice.
Geoffrey pushed his fork in the jutting corner, and, leaning his
weight on the handle, shoved. He thought it shook. He thrust
again with all his power. The mass swayed.
"What art up to, tha fool!" cried Maurice, in a high voice.
"Mind who tha'rt callin' a fool," said Geoffrey, and he prepared to
push again. Maurice sprang across, and elbowed his brother aside.
On the yielding, swaying bed of hay, Geoffrey lost his foothold,
and fell grovelling. Maurice tried the corner.
"It's solid enough," he shouted angrily.
"Aye--all right," came the conciliatory voice of the father; "you
do get a bit of rest now there's such a long way to cart it," he
added reflectively.
Geoffrey had got to his feet.
"Tha'll mind who tha'rt nudging, I can tell thee," he threatened
heavily; adding, as Maurice continued to work, "an' tha non ca's
him a fool again, dost hear?"
"Not till next time," sneered Maurice.
As he worked silently round the stack, he neared where his brother
stood like a sullen statue, leaning on his fork-handle, looking out
over the countryside. Maurice's heart quickened in its beat. He
worked forward, until a point of his fork caught in the leather of
Geoffrey's boot, and the metal rang sharply.
"Are ter going ta shift thysen?" asked Maurice threateningly.
There was no reply from the great block. Maurice lifted his upper
lip like a dog. Then he put out his elbow, and tried to push his
brother into the stack, clear of his way.
"Who are ter shovin'?" came the deep, dangerous voice.
"Thaïgh," replied Maurice, with a sneer, and straightway the two
brothers set themselves against each other, like opposing bulls,
Maurice trying his hardest to shift Geoffrey from his footing,
Geoffrey leaning all his weight in resistance. Maurice, insecure
in his footing, staggered a little, and Geoffrey's weight followed
him. He went slithering over the edge of the stack.
Geoffrey turned white to the lips, and remained standing,
listening. He heard the fall. Then a flush of darkness came over
him, and he remained standing only because he was planted. He had
not strength to move. He could hear no sound from below, was only
faintly aware of a sharp shriek from a long way off. He listened
again. Then he filled with sudden panic.
"Feyther!" he roared, in his tremendous voice: "Feyther!
Feyther!"
The valley re-echoed with the sound. Small cattle on the hill-side
looked up. Men's figures came running from the bottom field, and
much nearer a woman's figure was racing across the upper field.
Geoffrey waited in terrible suspense.
"Ah-h!" he heard the strange, wild voice of the girl cry out. "Ah-
h!"--and then some foreign wailing speech. Then: "Ah-h! Are you
dea-ed!"
He stood sullenly erect on the stack, not daring to go down,
longing to hide in the hay, but too sullen to stoop out of sight.
He heard his eldest brother come up, panting:
"Whatever's amiss!" and then the labourer, and then his father.
"Whatever have you been doing?" he heard his father ask, while yet
he had not come round the corner of the stack. And then, in a low,
bitter tone:
"Eh, he's done for! I'd no business to ha' put it all on that
stack."
There was a moment or two of silence, then the voice of Henry, the
eldest brother, said crisply:
"He's not dead--he's coming round."
Geoffrey heard, but was not glad. He had as lief Maurice were
dead. At least that would be final: better than meeting his
brother's charges, and of seeing his mother pass to the sick-room.
If Maurice was killed, he himself would not explain, no, not a
word, and they could hang him if they liked. If Maurice were only
hurt, then everybody would know, and Geoffrey could never lift his
face again. What added torture, to pass along, everybody knowing.
He wanted something that he could stand back to, something
definite, if it were only the knowledge that he had killed his
brother. He MUST have something firm to back up to, or he would go
mad. He was so lonely, he who above all needed the support of
sympathy.
"No, he's commin' to; I tell you he is," said the labourer.
"He's not dea-ed, he's not dea-ed," came the passionate, strange
sing-song of the foreign girl. "He's not dead--no-o."
"He wants some brandy--look at the colour of his lips," said the
crisp, cold voice of Henry. "Can you fetch some?"
"Wha-at? Fetch?" Fräulein did not understand.
"Brandy," said Henry, very distinct.
"Brrandy!" she re-echoed.
"You go, Bill," groaned the father.
"Aye, I'll go," replied Bill, and he ran across the field.
Maurice was not dead, nor going to die. This Geoffrey now
realized. He was glad after all that the extreme penalty was
revoked. But he hated to think of himself going on. He would
always shrink now. He had hoped and hoped for the time when he
would be careless, bold as Maurice, when he would not wince and
shrink. Now he would always be the same, coiling up in himself
like a tortoise with no shell.
"Ah-h! He's getting better!" came the wild voice of the Fräulein,
and she began to cry, a strange sound, that startled the men, made
the animal bristle within them. Geoffrey shuddered as he heard,
between her sobbing, the impatient moaning of his brother as the
breath came back.
The labourer returned at a run, followed by the Vicar. After the
brandy, Maurice made more moaning, hiccuping noise. Geoffrey
listened in torture. He heard the Vicar asking for explanations.
All the united, anxious voices replied in brief phrases.
"It was that other," cried the Fräulein. "He knocked him over--
Ha!"
She was shrill and vindictive.
"I don't think so," said the father to the Vicar, in a quite
audible but private tone, speaking as if the Fräulein did not
understand his English.
The Vicar addressed his children's governess in bad German. She
replied in a torrent which he would not confess was too much for
him. Maurice was making little moaning, sighing noises.
"Where's your pain, boy, eh?" the father asked, pathetically.
"Leave him alone a bit," came the cool voice of Henry. "He's
winded, if no more."
"You'd better see that no bones are broken," said the anxious
Vicar.
"It wor a blessing as he should a dropped on that heap of hay just
there," said the labourer. "If he'd happened to ha' catched
hisself on this nog o' wood 'e wouldna ha' stood much chance."
Geoffrey wondered when he would have courage to venture down. He
had wild notions of pitching himself head foremost from the stack:
if he could only extinguish himself, he would be safe. Quite
frantically, he longed not to be. The idea of going through life
thus coiled up within himself in morbid self-consciousness, always
lonely, surly, and a misery, was enough to make him cry out. What
would they all think when they knew he had knocked Maurice off that
high stack?
They were talking to Maurice down below. The lad had recovered in
great measure, and was able to answer faintly.
"Whatever was you doin'?" the father asked gently. "Was you
playing about with our Geoffrey?--Aye, and where is he?"
Geoffrey's heart stood still.
"I dunno," said Henry, in a curious, ironic tone.
"Go an' have a look," pleaded the father, infinitely relieved over
one son, anxious now concerning the other. Geoffrey could not bear
that his eldest brother should climb up and question him in his
high-pitched drawl of curiosity. The culprit doggedly set his feet
on the ladder. His nailed boots slipped a rung.
"Mind yourself," shouted the overwrought father.
Geoffrey stood like a criminal at the foot of the ladder, glancing
furtively at the group. Maurice was lying, pale and slightly
convulsed, upon a heap of hay. The Fräulein was kneeling beside
his head. The Vicar had the lad's shirt full open down the breast,
and was feeling for broken ribs. The father kneeled on the other
side, the labourer and Henry stood aside.
"I can't find anything broken," said the Vicar, and he sounded
slightly disappointed.
"There's nowt broken to find," murmured Maurice, smiling.
The father started. "Eh?" he said. "Eh?" and he bent over the
invalid.
"I say it's not hurt me," repeated Maurice.
"What were you doing?" asked the cold, ironic voice of Henry.
Geoffrey turned his head away: he had not yet raised his face.
"Nowt as I know on," he muttered in a surly tone.
"Why!" cried Fräulein in a reproachful tone. "I see him--knock him
over!" She made a fierce gesture with her elbow. Henry curled his
long moustache sardonically.
"Nay lass, niver," smiled the wan Maurice. "He was fur enough away
from me when I slipped."
"Oh, ah!" cried the Fräulein, not understanding.
"Yi," smiled Maurice indulgently.
"I think you're mistaken," said the father, rather pathetically,
smiling at the girl as if she were "wanting".
"Oh no," she cried. "I SEE him."
"Nay, lass," smiled Maurice quietly.
She was a Pole, named Paula Jablonowsky: young, only twenty years
old, swift and light as a wild cat, with a strange, wild-cat way of
grinning. Her hair was blonde and full of life, all crisped into
many tendrils with vitality, shaking round her face. Her fine blue
eyes were peculiarly lidded, and she seemed to look piercingly,
then languorously, like a wild cat. She had somewhat Slavonic
cheekbones, and was very much freckled. It was evident that the
Vicar, a pale, rather cold man, hated her.
Maurice lay pale and smiling in her lap, whilst she cleaved to him
like a mate. One felt instinctively that they were mated. She was
ready at any minute to fight with ferocity in his defence, now he
was hurt. Her looks at Geoffrey were full of fierceness. She
bowed over Maurice and caressed him with her foreign-sounding
English.
"You say what you lai-ike," she laughed, giving him lordship over
her.
"Hadn't you better be going and looking what has become of
Margery?" asked the Vicar in tones of reprimand.
"She is with her mother--I heared her. I will go in a whai-ile,"
smiled the girl, coolly.
"Do you feel as if you could stand?" asked the father, still
anxiously.
"Aye, in a bit," smiled Maurice.
"You want to get up?" caressed the girl, bowing over him, till her
face was not far from his.
"I'm in no hurry," he replied, smiling brilliantly.
This accident had given him quite a strange new ease, an authority.
He felt extraordinarily glad. New power had come to him all at
once.
"You in no hurry," she repeated, gathering his meaning. She smiled
tenderly: she was in his service.
"She leaves us in another month--Mrs Inwood could stand no more of
her," apologized the Vicar quietly to the father.
"Why, is she--?"
"Like a wild thing--disobedient, and insolent."
"Ha!"
The father sounded abstract.
"No more foreign governesses for me."
Maurice stirred, and looked up at the girl.
"You stand up?" she asked brightly. "You well?"
He laughed again, showing his teeth winsomely. She lifted his
head, sprung to her feet, her hands still holding his head, then
she took him under the armpits and had him on his feet before
anyone could help. He was much taller than she. He grasped her
strong shoulders heavily, leaned against her, and, feeling her
round, firm breast doubled up against his side, he smiled, catching
his breath.
"You see I'm all right," he gasped. "I was only winded."
"You all raïght?" she cried, in great glee.
"Yes, I am."
He walked a few steps after a moment.
"There's nowt ails me, Father," he laughed.
"Quite well, you?" she cried in a pleading tone. He laughed
outright, looked down at her, touching her cheek with his fingers.
"That's it--if tha likes."
"If I lai-ike!" she repeated, radiant.
"She's going at the end of three weeks," said the Vicar consolingly
to the farmer.
II
While they were talking, they heard the far-off hooting of a pit.
"There goes th' loose a'," said Henry, coldly. "We're NOT going to
get that corner up to-day."
The father looked round anxiously.
"Now, Maurice, are you sure you're all right?" he asked.
"Yes, I'm all right. Haven't I told you?"
"Then you sit down there, and in a bit you can be getting dinner
out. Henry, you go on the stack. Wheer's Jim? Oh, he's minding
the hosses. Bill, and you, Geoffrey, you can pick while Jim
loads."
Maurice sat down under the wych elm to recover. The Fräulein had
fled back. He made up his mind to ask her to marry him. He had
got fifty pounds of his own, and his mother would help him. For a
long time he sat musing, thinking what he would do. Then, from the
float he fetched a big basket covered with a cloth, and spread the
dinner. There was an immense rabbit pie, a dish of cold potatoes,
much bread, a great piece of cheese, and a solid rice pudding.
These two fields were four miles from the home farm. But they had
been in the hands of the Wookeys for several generations, therefore
the father kept them on, and everyone looked forward to the hay
harvest at Greasley: it was a kind of picnic. They brought dinner
and tea in the milk-float, which the father drove over in the
morning. The lads and the labourers cycled. Off and on, the
harvest lasted a fortnight. As the high road from Alfreton to
Nottingham ran at the foot of the fields, someone usually slept in
the hay under the shed to guard the tools. The sons took it in
turns. They did not care for it much, and were for that reason
anxious to finish the harvest on this day. But work went slack and
disjointed after Maurice's accident.
When the load was teemed, they gathered round the white cloth,
which was spread under a tree between the hedge and the stack, and,
sitting on the ground, ate their meal. Mrs Wookey sent always a
clean cloth, and knives and forks and plates for everybody. Mr
Wookey was always rather proud of this spread: everything was so
proper.
"There now," he said, sitting down jovially. "Doesn't this look
nice now--eh?"
They all sat round the white spread, in the shadow of the tree and
the stack, and looked out up the fields as they ate. From their
shady coolness, the gold sward seemed liquid, molten with heat.
The horse with the empty wagon wandered a few yards, then stood
feeding. Everything was still as a trance. Now and again, the
horse between the shafts of the load that stood propped beside the
stack, jingled his loose bit as he ate. The men ate and drank in
silence, the father reading the newspaper, Maurice leaning back on
a saddle, Henry reading the Nation, the others eating busily.
Presently "Helloa! 'Er's 'ere again!" exclaimed Bill. All looked
up. Paula was coming across the field carrying a plate.
"She's bringing something to tempt your appetite, Maurice," said
the eldest brother ironically. Maurice was midway through a large
wedge of rabbit pie, and some cold potatoes.
"Aye, bless me if she's not," laughed the father. "Put that away,
Maurice, it's a shame to disappoint her."
Maurice looked round very shamefaced, not knowing what to do with
his plate.
"Give it over here," said Bill. "I'll polish him off."
"Bringing something for the invalid?" laughed the father to the
Fräulein. "He's looking up nicely."
"I bring him some chicken, him!" She nodded her head at Maurice
childishly. He flushed and smiled.
"Tha doesna mean ter bust 'im," said Bill.
Everybody laughed aloud. The girl did not understand, so she
laughed also. Maurice ate his portion very sheepishly.
The father pitied his son's shyness.
"Come here and sit by me," he said. "Eh, Fräulein! Is that what
they call you?"
"I sit by you, Father," she said innocently.
Henry threw his head back and laughed long and noiselessly.
She settled near to the big, handsome man.
"My name," she said, "is Paula Jablonowsky."
"Is what?" said the father, and the other men went into roars of
laughter.
"Tell me again," said the father. "Your name--?"
"Paula."
"Paula? Oh--well, it's a rum sort of name, eh? His name--" he
nodded at his son.
"Maurice--I know." She pronounced it sweetly, then laughed into
the father's eyes. Maurice blushed to the roots of his hair.
They questioned her concerning her history, and made out that she
came from Hanover, that her father was a shop-keeper, and that she
had run away from home because she did not like her father. She
had gone to Paris.
"Oh," said the father, now dubious. "And what did you do there?"
"In school--in a young ladies' school."
"Did you like it?"
"Oh no--no laïfe--no life!"
"What?"
"When we go out--two and two--all together--no more. Ah, no life,
no life."
"Well, that's a winder!" exclaimed the father. "No life in Paris!
And have you found much life in England?"
"No--ah no. I don't like it." She made a grimace at the Vicarage.
"How long have you been in England?"
"Chreestmas--so."
"And what will you do?"
"I will go to London, or to Paris. Ah, Paris!--Or get married!"
She laughed into the father's eyes.
The father laughed heartily.
"Get married, eh? And who to?"
"I don't know. I am going away."
"The country's too quiet for you?" asked the father.
"Too quiet--hm!" she nodded in assent.
"You wouldn't care for making butter and cheese?"
"Making butter--hm!" She turned to him with a glad, bright
gesture. "I like it."
"Oh," laughed the father. "You would, would you?"
She nodded vehemently, with glowing eyes.
"She'd like anything in the shape of a change," said Henry
judicially.
"I think she would," agreed the father. It did not occur to them
that she fully understood what they said. She looked at them
closely, then thought with bowed head.
"Hullo!" exclaimed Henry, the alert. A tramp was slouching towards
them through the gap. He was a very seedy, slinking fellow, with a
tang of horsey braggadocio about him. Small, thin, and ferrety,
with a week's red beard bristling on his pointed chin, he came
slouching forward.
"Have yer got a bit of a job goin'?" he asked.
"A bit of a job," repeated the father. "Why, can't you see as
we've a'most done?"
"Aye--but I noticed you was a hand short, an' I thowt as 'appen
you'd gie me half a day."
"What, are YOU any good in a hay close?" asked Henry, with a sneer.
The man stood slouching against the haystack. All the others were
seated on the floor. He had an advantage.
"I could work aside any on yer," he bragged.
"Tha looks it," laughed Bill.
"And what's your regular trade?" asked the father.
"I'm a jockey by rights. But I did a bit o' dirty work for a boss
o' mine, an' I was landed. "_E_ got the benefit, _I_ got kicked
out. "_E_ axed me--an' then 'e looked as if 'e'd never seed me."
"Did he, though!" exclaimed the father sympathetically.
"'E did that!" asserted the man.
"But we've got nothing for you," said Henry coldly.
"What does the boss say?" asked the man, impudent.
"No, we've no work you can do," said the father. "You can have a
bit o' something to eat, if you like."
"I should be glad of it," said the man.
He was given the chunk of rabbit pie that remained. This he ate
greedily. There was something debased, parasitic, about him, which
disgusted Henry. The others regarded him as a curiosity.
"That was nice and tasty," said the tramp, with gusto.
"Do you want a piece of bread 'n' cheese?" asked the father.
"It'll help to fill up," was the reply.
The man ate this more slowly. The company was embarrassed by his
presence, and could not talk. All the men lit their pipes, the
meal over.
"So you dunna want any help?" said the tramp at last.
"No--we can manage what bit there is to do."
"You don't happen to have a fill of bacca to spare, do you?"
The father gave him a good pinch.
"You're all right here," he said, looking round. They resented
this familiarity. However, he filled his clay pipe and smoked with
the rest.
As they were sitting silent, another figure came through the gap in
the hedge, and noiselessly approached. It was a woman. She was
rather small and finely made. Her face was small, very ruddy, and
comely, save for the look of bitterness and aloofness that it wore.
Her hair was drawn tightly back under a sailor hat. She gave an
impression of cleanness, of precision and directness.
"Have you got some work?" she asked of her man. She ignored the
rest. He tucked his tail between his legs.
"No, they haven't got no work for me. They've just gave me a draw
of bacca."
He was a mean crawl of a man.
"An' am I goin' to wait for you out there on the lane all day?"
"You needn't if you don't like. You could go on."
"Well, are you coming?" she asked contemptuously. He rose to his
feet in a rickety fashion.
"You needn't be in such a mighty hurry," he said. "If you'd wait a
bit you might get summat."
She glanced for the first time over the men. She was quite young,
and would have been pretty, were she not so hard and callous-
looking.
"Have you had your dinner?" asked the father.
She looked at him with a kind of anger, and turned away. Her face
was so childish in its contours, contrasting strangely with her
expression.
"Are you coming?" she said to the man.
"He's had his tuck-in. Have a bit, if you want it," coaxed the
father.
"What have you had?" she flashed to the man.
"He's had all what was left o' th' rabbit pie," said Geoffrey, in
an indignant, mocking tone, "and a great hunk o' bread an' cheese."
"Well, it was gave me," said the man.
The young woman looked at Geoffrey, and he at her. There was a
sort of kinship between them. Both were at odds with the world.
Geoffrey smiled satirically. She was too grave, too deeply
incensed even to smile.
"There's a cake here, though--you can have a bit o' that," said
Maurice blithely.
She eyed him with scorn.
Again she looked at Geoffrey. He seemed to understand her. She
turned, and in silence departed. The man remained obstinately
sucking at his pipe. Everybody looked at him with hostility.
"We'll be getting to work," said Henry, rising, pulling off his
coat. Paula got to her feet. She was a little bit confused by the
presence of the tramp.
"I go," she said, smiling brilliantly. Maurice rose and followed
her sheepishly.
"A good grind, eh?" said the tramp, nodding after the Fräulein.
The men only half-understood him, but they hated him.
"Hadn't you better be getting off?" said Henry.
The man rose obediently. He was all slouching, parasitic
insolence. Geoffrey loathed him, longed to exterminate him. He
was exactly the worst foe of the hyper-sensitive: insolence without
sensibility, preying on sensibility.
"Aren't you goin' to give me summat for her? It's nowt she's had
all day, to my knowin'. She'll 'appen eat it if I take it 'er--
though she gets more than I've any knowledge of"--this with a lewd
wink of jealous spite. "And then tries to keep a tight hand on
me," he sneered, taking the bread and cheese, and stuffing it in
his pocket.
III
Geoffrey worked sullenly all the afternoon, and Maurice did the
horse-raking. It was exceedingly hot. So the day wore on, the
atmosphere thickened, and the sunlight grew blurred. Geoffrey was
picking with Bill--helping to load the wagons from the winrows. He
was sulky, though extraordinarily relieved: Maurice would not tell.
Since the quarrel neither brother had spoken to the other. But
their silence was entirely amicable, almost affectionate. They had
both been deeply moved, so much so that their ordinary intercourse
was interrupted: but underneath, each felt a strong regard for the
other. Maurice was peculiarly happy, his feeling of affection
swimming over everything. But Geoffrey was still sullenly hostile
to the most part of the world. He felt isolated. The free and
easy intercommunication between the other workers left him
distinctly alone. And he was a man who could not bear to stand
alone, he was too much afraid of the vast confusion of life
surrounding him, in which he was helpless. Geoffrey mistrusted
himself with everybody.
The work went on slowly. It was unbearably hot, and everyone was
disheartened.
"We s'll have getting-on-for another day of it," said the father at
tea-time, as they sat under the tree.
"Quite a day," said Henry.
"Somebody'll have to stop, then," said Geoffrey. "It 'ud better be
me."
"Nay, lad, I'll stop," said Maurice, and he hid his head in
confusion.
"Stop again to-night!" exclaimed the father. "I'd rather you went
home."
"Nay, I'm stoppin'," protested Maurice.
"He wants to do his courting," Henry enlightened them.
The father thought seriously about it.
"I don't know . . ." he mused, rather perturbed.
But Maurice stayed. Towards eight o'clock, after sundown, the men
mounted their bicycles, the father put the horse in the float, and
all departed. Maurice stood in the gap of the hedge and watched
them go, the cart rolling and swinging downhill, over the grass
stubble, the cyclists dipping swiftly like shadows in front. All
passed through the gate, there was a quick clatter of hoofs on the
roadway under the lime trees, and they were gone. The young man
was very much excited, almost afraid, at finding himself alone.
Darkness was rising from the valley. Already, up the steep hill
the cart-lamps crept indecisively, and the cottage windows were
lit. Everything looked strange to Maurice, as if he had not seen
it before. Down the hedge a large lime-tree teemed with scent that
seemed almost like a voice speaking. It startled him. He caught a
breath of the over-sweet fragrance, then stood still, listening
expectantly.
Up hill, a horse whinneyed. It was the young mare. The heavy
horses went thundering across to the far hedge.
Maurice wondered what to do. He wandered round the deserted stacks
restlessly. Heat came in wafts, in thick strands. The evening was
a long time cooling. He thought he would go and wash himself.
There was a trough of pure water in the hedge bottom. It was
filled by a tiny spring that filtered over the brim of the trough
down the lush hedge bottom of the lower field. All round the
trough, in the upper field, the land was marshy, and there the
meadow-sweet stood like clots of mist, very sickly-smelling in the
twilight. The night did not darken, for the moon was in the sky,
so that as the tawny colour drew off the heavens they remained
pallid with a dimmed moon. The purple bell-flowers in the hedge
went black, the ragged robin turned its pink to a faded white, the
meadow-sweet gathered light as if it were phosphorescent, and it
made the air ache with scent.
Maurice kneeled on the slab of stone bathing his hands and arms,
then his face. The water was deliriously cool. He had still an
hour before Paula would come: she was not due till nine. So he
decided to take his bath at night instead of waiting till morning.
Was he not sticky, and was not Paula coming to talk to him? He was
delighted the thought had occurred to him. As he soused his head
in the trough, he wondered what the little creatures that lived in
the velvety silt at the bottom would think of the taste of soap.
Laughing to himself, he squeezed his cloth into the water. He
washed himself from head to foot, standing in the fresh, forsaken
corner of the field, where no one could see him by daylight, so
that now, in the veiled grey tinge of moonlight, he was no more
noticeable than the crowded flowers. The night had on a new look:
he never remembered to have seen the lustrous grey sheen of it
before, nor to have noticed how vital the lights looked, like live
folk inhabiting the silvery spaces. And the tall trees, wrapped
obscurely in their mantles, would not have surprised him had they
begun to move in converse. As he dried himself, he discovered
little wanderings in the air, felt on his sides soft touches and
caresses that were peculiarly delicious: sometimes they startled
him, and he laughed as if he were not alone. The flowers, the
meadow-sweet particularly, haunted him. He reached to put his hand
over their fleeciness. They touched his thighs. Laughing, he
gathered them and dusted himself all over with their cream dust and
fragrance. For a moment he hesitated in wonder at himself: but the
subtle glow in the hoary and black night reassured him. Things
never had looked so personal and full of beauty, he had never known
the wonder in himself before.
At nine o'clock he was waiting under the elder-bush, in a state of
high trepidation, but feeling that he was worthy, having a sense of
his own wonder. She was late. At a quarter-past nine she came,
flitting swiftly, in her own eager way.
"No, she would NOT go to sleep," said Paula, with a world of wrath
in her tone. He laughed bashfully. They wandered out into the
dim, hillside field.
"I have sat--in that bedroom--for an hour, for hours," she cried
indignantly. She took a deep breath: "Ah, breathe!" she smiled.
She was very intense, and full of energy.
"I want"--she was clumsy with the language--"I want--I should
laike--to run--there!" She pointed across the field.
"Let's run, then," he said, curiously.
"Yes!"
And in an instant she was gone. He raced after her. For all he
was so young and limber, he had difficulty in catching her. At
first he could scarcely see her, though he could hear the rustle of
her dress. She sped with astonishing fleetness. He overtook her,
caught her by the arm, and they stood panting, facing one another
with laughter.
"I could win," she asserted blithely.
"Tha couldna," he replied, with a peculiar, excited laugh. They
walked on, rather breathless. In front of them suddenly appeared
the dark shapes of the three feeding horses.
"We ride a horse?" she said.
"What, bareback?" he asked.
"You say?" She did not understand.
"With no saddle?"
"No saddle--yes--no saddle."
"Coop, lass!" he said to the mare, and in a minute he had her by
the forelock, and was leading her down to the stacks, where he put
a halter on her. She was a big, strong mare. Maurice seated the
Fräulein, clambered himself in front of the girl, using the wheel
of the wagon as a mount, and together they trotted uphill, she
holding lightly round his waist. From the crest of the hill they
looked round.
The sky was darkening with an awning of cloud. On the left the
hill rose black and wooded, made cosy by a few lights from cottages
along the highway. The hill spread to the right, and tufts of
trees shut round. But in front was a great vista of night, a
sprinkle of cottage candles, a twinkling cluster of lights, like an
elfish fair in full swing, at the colliery, an encampment of light
at a village, a red flare on the sky far off, above an iron-
foundry, and in the farthest distance the dim breathing of town
lights. As they watched the night stretch far out, her arms
tightened round his waist, and he pressed his elbows to his side,
pressing her arms closer still. The horse moved restlessly. They
clung to each other.
"Tha doesna want to go right away?" he asked the girl behind him.
"I stay with you," she answered softly, and he felt her crouching
close against him. He laughed curiously. He was afraid to kiss
her, though he was urged to do so. They remained still, on the
restless horse, watching the small lights lead deep into the night,
an infinite distance.
"I don't want to go," he said, in a tone half pleading.
She did not answer. The horse stirred restlessly.
"Let him run," cried Paula, "fast!"
She broke the spell, startled him into a little fury. He kicked
the mare, hit her, and away she plunged downhill. The girl clung
tightly to the young man. They were riding bareback down a rough,
steep hill. Maurice clung hard with hands and knees. Paula held
him fast round the waist, leaning her head on his shoulders, and
thrilling with excitement.
"We shall be off, we shall be off," he cried, laughing with
excitement; but she only crouched behind and pressed tight to him.
The mare tore across the field. Maurice expected every moment to
be flung on to the grass. He gripped with all the strength of his
knees. Paula tucked herself behind him, and often wrenched him
almost from his hold. Man and girl were taut with effort.
At last the mare came to a standstill, blowing. Paula slid off,
and in an instant Maurice was beside her. They were both highly
excited. Before he knew what he was doing, he had her in his arms,
fast, and was kissing her, and laughing. They did not move for
some time. Then, in silence, they walked towards the stacks.
It had grown quite dark, the night was thick with cloud. He walked
with his arm round Paula's waist, she with her arm round him. They
were near the stacks when Maurice felt a spot of rain.
"It's going to rain," he said.
"Rain!" she echoed, as if it were trivial.
"I s'll have to put the stack-cloth on," he said gravely. She did
not understand.
When they got to the stacks, he went round to the shed, to return
staggering in the darkness under the burden of the immense and
heavy cloth. It had not been used once during the hay harvest.
"What are you going to do?" asked Paula, coming close to him in the
darkness.
"Cover the top of the stack with it," he replied. "Put it over the
stack, to keep the rain out."
"Ah!" she cried, "up there!" He dropped his burden. "Yes," he
answered.
Fumblingly he reared the long ladder up the side of the stack. He
could not see the top.
"I hope it's solid," he said, softly.
A few smart drops of rain sounded drumming on the cloth. They
seemed like another presence. It was very dark indeed between the
great buildings of hay. She looked up the black wall, and shrank
to him.
"You carry it up there?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered.
"I help you?" she said.
And she did. They opened the cloth. He clambered first up the
steep ladder, bearing the upper part, she followed closely,
carrying her full share. They mounted the shaky ladder in silence,
stealthily.
IV
As they climbed the stacks a light stopped at the gate on the high
road. It was Geoffrey, come to help his brother with the cloth.
Afraid of his own intrusion, he wheeled his bicycle silently
towards the shed. This was a corrugated iron erection, on the
opposite side of the hedge from the stacks. Geoffrey let his light
go in front of him, but there was no sign from the lovers. He
thought he saw a shadow slinking away. The light of the bicycle
lamp sheered yellowly across the dark, catching a glint of
raindrops, a mist of darkness, shadow of leaves and strokes of long
grass. Geoffrey entered the shed--no one was there. He walked
slowly and doggedly round to the stacks. He had passed the wagon,
when he heard something sheering down upon him. Starting back
under the wall of hay, he saw the long ladder slither across the
side of the stack, and fall with a bruising ring.
"What wor that?" he heard Maurice, aloft, ask cautiously.
"Something fall," came the curious, almost pleased voice of the
Fräulein.
"It wor niver th' ladder," said Maurice. He peered over the side
of the stack. He lay down, looking.
"It is an' a'!" he exclaimed. "We knocked it down with the cloth,
dragging it over."
"We fast up here?" she exclaimed with a thrill.
"We are that--without I shout and make 'em hear at the Vicarage."
"Oh no," she said quickly.
"I don't want to," he replied, with a short laugh. There came a
swift clatter of raindrops on the cloth. Geoffrey crouched under
the wall of the other stack.
"Mind where you tread--here, let me straighten this end," said
Maurice, with a peculiar intimate tone--a command and an embrace.
"We s'll have to sit under it. At any rate, we shan't get wet."
"Not get wet!" echoed the girl, pleased, but agitated.
Geoffrey heard the slide and rustle of the cloth over the top of
the stack, heard Maurice telling her to "Mind!"
"Mind!" she repeated. "Mind! you say 'Mind!'"
"Well, what if I do?" he laughed. "I don't want you to fall over
th' side, do I?" His tone was masterful, but he was not quite sure
of himself.
There was silence a moment or two.
"Maurice!" she said, plaintively.
"I'm here," he answered, tenderly, his voice shaky with excitement
that was near to distress. "There, I've done. Now should we--
we'll sit under this corner."
"Maurice!" she was rather pitiful.
"What? You'll be all right," he remonstrated, tenderly indignant.
"I be all raïght," she repeated, "I be all raïght, Maurice?"
"Tha knows tha will--I canna ca' thee Powla. Should I ca' thee
Minnie?"
It was the name of a dead sister.
"Minnie?" she exclaimed in surprise.
"Aye, should I?"
She answered in full-throated German. He laughed shakily.
"Come on--come on under. But do yer wish you was safe in th'
Vicarage? Should I shout for somebody?" he asked.
"I don't wish, no!" She was vehement.
"Art sure?" he insisted, almost indignantly.
"Sure--I quite sure." She laughed.
Geoffrey turned away at the last words. Then the rain beat
heavily. The lonely brother slouched miserably to the hut, where
the rain played a mad tattoo. He felt very miserable, and jealous
of Maurice.
His bicycle lamp, downcast, shone a yellow light on the stark floor
of the shed or hut with one wall open. It lit up the trodden
earth, the shafts of tools lying piled under the beam, beside the
dreary grey metal of the building. He took off the lamp, shone it
round the hut. There were piles of harness, tools, a big sugar
box, a deep bed of hay--then the beams across the corrugated iron,
all very dreary and stark. He shone the lamp into the night:
nothing but the furtive glitter of raindrops through the mist of
darkness, and black shapes hovering round.
Geoffrey blew out the light and flung himself on to the hay. He
would put the ladder up for them in a while, when they would be
wanting it. Meanwhile he sat and gloated over Maurice's felicity.
He was imaginative, and now he had something concrete to work upon.
Nothing in the whole of life stirred him so profoundly, and so
utterly, as the thought of this woman. For Paula was strange,
foreign, different from the ordinary girls: the rousing, feminine
quality seemed in her concentrated, brighter, more fascinating than
in anyone he had known, so that he felt most like a moth near a
candle. He would have loved her wildly--but Maurice had got her.
His thoughts beat the same course, round and round. What was it
like when you kissed her, when she held you tight round the waist,
how did she feel towards Maurice, did she love to touch him, was he
fine and attractive to her; what did she think of himself--she
merely disregarded him, as she would disregard a horse in a field;
why should she do so, why couldn't he make her regard himself,
instead of Maurice: he would never command a woman's regard like
that, he always gave in to her too soon; if only some woman would
come and take him for what he was worth, though he was such a
stumbler and showed to such disadvantage, ah, what a grand thing it
would be; how he would kiss her. Then round he went again in the
same course, brooding almost like a madman. Meanwhile the rain
drummed deep on the shed, then grew lighter and softer. There came
the drip, drip of the drops falling outside.
Geoffrey's heart leaped up his chest, and he clenched himself, as a
black shape crept round the post of the shed and, bowing, entered
silently. The young man's heart beat so heavily in plunges, he
could not get his breath to speak. It was shock, rather than fear.
The form felt towards him. He sprang up, gripped it with his great
hands, panting "Now, then!"
There was no resistance, only a little whimper of despair.
"Let me go," said a woman's voice.
"What are you after?" he asked, in deep, gruff tones.
"I thought 'e was 'ere," she wept despairingly, with little,
stubborn sobs.
"An' you've found what you didn't expect, have you?"
At the sound of his bullying she tried to get away from him.
"Let me go," she said.
"Who did you expect to find here?" he asked, but more his natural
self.
"I expected my husband--him as you saw at dinner. Let me go."
"Why, is it you?" exclaimed Geoffrey. "Has he left you?"
"Let me go," said the woman sullenly, trying to draw away. He
realized that her sleeve was very wet, her arm slender under his
grasp. Suddenly he grew ashamed of himself: he had no doubt hurt
her, gripping her so hard. He relaxed, but did not let her go.
"An' are you searching round after that snipe as was here at
dinner?" he asked. She did not answer.
"Where did he leave you?"
"I left him--here. I've seen nothing of him since."
"I s'd think it's good riddance," he said. She did not answer. He
gave a short laugh, saying:
"I should ha' thought you wouldn't ha' wanted to clap eyes on him
again."
"He's my husband--an' he's not goin' to run off if I can stop him."
Geoffrey was silent, not knowing what to say.
"Have you got a jacket on?" he asked at last.
"What do you think? You've got hold of it."
"You're wet through, aren't you?"
"I shouldn't be dry, comin' through that teemin' rain. But 'e's
not here, so I'll go."
"I mean," he said humbly, "are you wet through?"
She did not answer. He felt her shiver.
"Are you cold?" he asked, in surprise and concern.
She did not answer. He did not know what to say.
"Stop a minute," he said, and he fumbled in his pocket for his
matches. He struck a light, holding it in the hollow of his large,
hard palm. He was a big man, and he looked anxious. Shedding the
light on her, he saw she was rather pale, and very weary looking.
Her old sailor hat was sodden and drooping with rain. She wore a
fawn-coloured jacket of smooth cloth. This jacket was black-wet
where the rain had beaten, her skirt hung sodden, and dripped on to
her boots. The match went out.
"Why, you're wet through!" he said.
She did not answer.
"Shall you stop in here while it gives over?" he asked. She did
not answer.
"'Cause if you will, you'd better take your things off, an' have
th' rug. There's a horse-rug in the box."
He waited, but she would not answer. So he lit his bicycle lamp,
and rummaged in the box, pulling out a large brown blanket, striped
with scarlet and yellow. She stood stock still. He shone the
light on her. She was very pale, and trembling fitfully.
"Are you that cold?" he asked in concern. "Take your jacket off,
and your hat, and put this right over you."
Mechanically, she undid the enormous fawn-coloured buttons, and
unpinned her hat. With her black hair drawn back from her low,
honest brow, she looked little more than a girl, like a girl driven
hard with womanhood by stress of life. She was small, and natty,
with neat little features. But she shivered convulsively.
"Is something a-matter with you?" he asked.
"I've walked to Bulwell and back," she quivered, "looking for him--
an' I've not touched a thing since this morning." She did not
weep--she was too dreary-hardened to cry. He looked at her in
dismay, his mouth half open: "Gormin", as Maurice would have said.
"'Aven't you had nothing to eat?" he said.
Then he turned aside to the box. There, the bread remaining was
kept, and the great piece of cheese, and such things as sugar and
salt, with all table utensils: there was some butter.
She sat down drearily on the bed of hay. He cut her a piece of
bread and butter, and a piece of cheese. This she took, but ate
listlessly.
"I want a drink," she said.
"We 'aven't got no beer," he answered. "My father doesn't have
it."
"I want water," she said.
He took a can and plunged through the wet darkness, under the great
black hedge, down to the trough. As he came back he saw her in the
half-lit little cave sitting bunched together. The soaked grass
wet his feet--he thought of her. When he gave her a cup of water,
her hand touched his and he felt her fingers hot and glossy. She
trembled so she spilled the water.
"Do you feel badly?" he asked.
"I can't keep myself still--but it's only with being tired and
having nothing to eat."
He scratched his head contemplatively, waited while she ate her
piece of bread and butter. Then he offered her another piece.
"I don't want it just now," she said.
"You'll have to eat summat," he said.
"I couldn't eat any more just now."
He put the piece down undecidedly on the box. Then there was
another long pause. He stood up with bent head. The bicycle, like
a restful animal, glittered behind him, turning towards the wall.
The woman sat hunched on the hay, shivering.
"Can't you get warm?" he asked.
"I shall by an' by--don't you bother. I'm taking your seat--are
you stopping here all night?"
"Yes."
"I'll be goin' in a bit," she said.
"Nay, I non want you to go. I'm thinkin' how you could get warm."
"Don't you bother about me," she remonstrated, almost irritably.
"I just want to see as the stacks is all right. You take your
shoes an' stockin's an' all your wet things off: you can easy wrap
yourself all over in that rug, there's not so much of you."
"It's raining--I s'll be all right--I s'll be going in a minute."
"I've got to see as the stacks is safe. Take your wet things off."
"Are you coming back?" she asked.
"I mightn't, not till morning."
"Well, I s'll be gone in ten minutes, then. I've no rights to be
here, an' I s'll not let anybody be turned out for me."
"You won't be turning me out."
"Whether or no, I shan't stop."
"Well, shall you if I come back?" he asked. She did not answer.
He went. In a few moments, she blew the light out. The rain was
falling steadily, and the night was a black gulf. All was
intensely still. Geoffrey listened everywhere: no sound save the
rain. He stood between the stacks, but only heard the trickle of
water, and the light swish of rain. Everything was lost in
blackness. He imagined death was like that, many things dissolved
in silence and darkness, blotted out, but existing. In the dense
blackness he felt himself almost extinguished. He was afraid he
might not find things the same. Almost frantically, he stumbled,
feeling his way, till his hand touched the wet metal. He had been
looking for a gleam of light.
"Did you blow the lamp out?" he asked, fearful lest the silence
should answer him.
"Yes," she answered humbly. He was glad to hear her voice.
Groping into the pitch-dark shed, he knocked against the box, part
of whose cover served as table. There was a clatter and a fall.
"That's the lamp, an' the knife, an' the cup," he said. He struck
a match.
"Th' cup's not broke." He put it into the box.
"But th' oil's spilled out o' th' lamp. It always was a rotten old
thing." He hastily blew out his match, which was burning his
fingers. Then he struck another light.
"You don't want a lamp, you know you don't, and I s'll be going
directly, so you come an' lie down an' get your night's rest. I'm
not taking any of your place."
He looked at her by the light of another match. She was a queer
little bundle, all brown, with gaudy border folding in and out, and
her little face peering at him. As the match went out she saw him
beginning to smile.
"I can sit right at this end," she said. "You lie down."
He came and sat on the hay, at some distance from her. After a
spell of silence:
"Is he really your husband?" he asked.
"He is!" she answered grimly.
"Hm!" Then there was silence again.
After a while: "Are you warm now?"
"Why do you bother yourself?"
"I don't bother myself--do you follow him because you like him?"
He put it very timidly. He wanted to know.
"I don't--I wish he was dead," this with bitter contempt. Then
doggedly; "But he's my husband."
He gave a short laugh.
"By Gad!" he said.
Again, after a while: "Have you been married long?"
"Four years."
"Four years--why, how old are you?"
"Twenty-three."
"Are you turned twenty-three?"
"Last May."
"Then you're four month older than me." He mused over it. They
were only two voices in the pitch-black night. It was eerie
silence again.
"And do you just tramp about?" he asked.
"He reckons he's looking for a job. But he doesn't like work in
any shape or form. He was a stableman when I married him, at
Greenhalgh's, the horse-dealers, at Chesterfield, where I was
housemaid. He left that job when the baby was only two month, and
I've been badgered about from pillar to post ever sin'. They say a
rolling stone gathers no moss . . ."
"An' where's the baby?"
"It died when it was ten month old."
Now the silence was clinched between them. It was quite a long
time before Geoffrey ventured to say sympathetically: "You haven't
much to look forward to."
"I've wished many a score time when I've started shiverin' an'
shakin' at nights, as I was taken bad for death. But we're not
that handy at dying."
He was silent. "But what ever shall you do?" he faltered.
"I s'll find him, if I drop by th' road."
"Why?" he asked, wondering, looking her way, though he saw nothing
but solid darkness.
"Because I shall. He's not going to have it all his own road."
"But why don't you leave him?"
"Because he's NOT GOIN' TO HAVE IT ALL HIS OWN ROAD."
She sounded very determined, even vindictive. He sat in wonder,
feeling uneasy, and vaguely miserable on her behalf. She sat
extraordinarily still. She seemed like a voice only, a presence.
"Are you warm now?" he asked, half afraid.
"A bit warmer--but my feet!" She sounded pitiful.
"Let me warm them with my hands," he asked her. "I'm hot enough."
"No, thank you," she said, coldly.
Then, in the darkness, she felt she had wounded him. He was
writhing under her rebuff, for his offer had been pure kindness.
"They're 'appen dirty," she said, half mocking.
"Well--mine is--an' I have a bath a'most every day," he answered.
"I don't know when they'll get warm," she moaned to herself.
"Well, then, put them in my hands."
She heard him faintly rattling the match-box, and then a
phosphorescent glare began to fume in his direction. Presently he
was holding two smoking, blue-green blotches of light towards her
feet. She was afraid. But her feet ached so, and the impulse
drove her on, so she placed her soles lightly on the two blotches
of smoke. His large hands clasped over her instep, warm and hard.
"They're like ice!" he said, in deep concern.
He warmed her feet as best he could, putting them close against
him. Now and again convulsive tremors ran over her. She felt his
warm breath on the balls of her toes, that were bunched up in his
hands. Leaning forward, she touched his hair delicately with her
fingers. He thrilled. She fell to gently stroking his hair, with
timid, pleading finger-tips.
"Do they feel any better?" he asked, in a low voice, suddenly
lifting his face to her. This sent her hand sliding softly over
his face, and her finger-tips caught on his mouth. She drew
quickly away. He put his hand out to find hers, in his other palm
holding both her feet. His wandering hand met her face. He
touched it curiously. It was wet. He put his big fingers
cautiously on her eyes, into two little pools of tears.
"What's a matter?" he asked, in a low, choked voice.
She leaned down to him, and gripped him tightly round the neck,
pressing him to her bosom in a little frenzy of pain. Her bitter
disillusionment with life, her unalleviated shame and degradation
during the last four years, had driven her into loneliness, and
hardened her till a large part of her nature was caked and sterile.
Now she softened again, and her spring might be beautiful. She had
been in a fair way to make an ugly old woman.
She clasped the head of Geoffrey to her breast, which heaved and
fell, and heaved again. He was bewildered, full of wonder. He
allowed the woman to do as she would with him. Her tears fell on
his hair, as she wept noiselessly; and he breathed deep as she did.
At last she let go her clasp. He put his arms round her.
"Come and let me warm you," he said, folding her up on his knee,
and lapping her with his heavy arms against himself. She was small
and câline. He held her very warm and close. Presently she stole
her arms round him.
"You ARE big," she whispered.
He gripped her hard, started, put his mouth down wanderingly,
seeking her out. His lips met her temple. She slowly,
deliberately turned her mouth to his, and with opened lips, met him
in a kiss, his first love kiss.
V
It was breaking cold dawn when Geoffrey woke. The woman was still
sleeping in his arms. Her face in sleep moved all his tenderness:
the tight shutting of her mouth, as if in resolution to bear what
was very hard to bear, contrasted so pitifully with the small mould
of her features. Geoffrey pressed her to his bosom: having her, he
felt he could bruise the lips of the scornful, and pass on erect,
unabateable. With her to complete him, to form the core of him, he
was firm and whole. Needing her so much, he loved her fervently.
Meanwhile the dawn came like death, one of those slow, livid
mornings that seem to come in a cold sweat. Slowly, and painfully,
the air began to whiten. Geoffrey saw it was not raining. As he
was watching the ghastly transformation outside, he felt aware of
something. He glanced down: she was open-eyed, watching him; she
had golden-brown, calm eyes, that immediately smiled into his. He
also smiled, bowed softly down and kissed her. They did not speak
for some time. Then:
"What's thy name?" he asked curiously.
"Lydia," she said.
"Lydia!" he repeated, wonderingly. He felt rather shy.
"Mine's Geoffrey Wookey," he said.
She merely smiled at him.
They were silent for a considerable time. By morning light, things
look small. The huge trees of the evening were dwindling to hoary,
small, uncertain things, trespassing in the sick pallor of the
atmosphere.
There was a dense mist, so that the light could scarcely breathe.
Everything seemed to quiver with cold and sickliness.
"Have you often slept out?" he asked her.
"Not so very," she answered.
"You won't go after HIM?" he asked.
"I s'll have to," she replied, but she nestled in to Geoffrey. He
felt a sudden panic.
"You musn't," he exclaimed, and she saw he was afraid for himself.
She let it be, was silent.
"We couldn't get married?" he asked, thoughtfully.
"No."
He brooded deeply over this. At le