Title:      Doomsday (1932)
Author:     Warwick Deeping
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Title:      Doomsday (1932)
Author:     Warwick Deeping





CONTENTS

PART I

Bean Flower and Hay Time

PART II

The Orchid House

PART III

Doomsday




PART I

BEAN FLOWER AND HAY TIME


I


1


Someone had asked Mary Viner as a child why she so disliked going
to school, and had received the pregnant reply:  "'Cos one does the
same thing every day"; and at the age of three-and-twenty Mary was
still resenting repetition.  Only more so, because life had become
more busily full of it, a circus of dreary tidyings and
cleanlinesses, of washings up and washings down, of moments that
smelt of yellow soap, and tea leaves and paraffin.

Moreover, it could not be helped.  And the turning of the domestic
wheel demanded the obedient hands of the dutiful daughter.  Mary's
alarum clock set the welkin ringing at half-past six.  It was
winter, January and cold.  She had cause to know how cold it could
be in that cardboard box of a bedroom with its walls of tile and
plywood sheeting.  The very clock seemed to make a bouncing sound
like a pea rattling in a box.  The room remained quite dark, and
the day's duties offered her no compensations for the loss of her
warm bed, so she lingered there, guiltily snug, the clothes pulled
up to her chin, her pretty, slim legs tucked up.

Thank heaven she had not to struggle with half a yard of black
hair.  A bobbed head had its advantages when your hands got colder
and colder.  The house was very still, but across the landing there
travelled a faint sound of harsh, asthmatic breathing.  Captain
Hesketh Viner was still asleep, but soon she would hear the little
twittering voice of her mother, like the voice of a rather futile
and busy bird.

O, this house--this "Green Shutters," where everything was heard,
from the stirring of the kitchen fire to the brisk functioning of a
toothbrush!  And her father's cough!  She flung out of bed suddenly
with a rush of fastidious despair that fought with an inarticulate
compassion.  What a life for the three of them, cooped up in this
jim-crack cottage in a little world of other jim-crack cottages!
No wonder that Carslake, solid Georgian Carslake, referred to the
Sandihurst Estate as "Cinder Town."

She lit her candle and scuffled into her clothes, intent upon
making that morning dash downstairs to light the fires in the
kitchen and living-room.  Yes, damn Colonel Sykes for exploiting
this patch of clay and sand in Sussex, and for persuading the new
poor to put up cottages and bungalows.  Cinder Town!  She slithered
down the steep and narrow stairs and into the kitchen, jarring a
slim ankle against the coal-scuttle that was standing where it
should not have stood.  And that, too, was her fault!  Resenting
this, she jabbed at the thing with her foot, and by way of retort
it tipped a rattling stream of coal upon the floor.

Putting her candle on the kitchen table, and bending down to
recover the lumps of coal, she signalized her submission to the
tyranny of trifles by a sudden rush of tears.  There was anger in
her tears, and self-pity, and the rebellion of her youth against
life's aimless and inevitable repetitions.  But how foolish!  And
like a child she brushed the blurring wetness away with her
fingers, forgetting the coal dust upon them.  She put a match to
the kitchen fire, wondering whether it was going to prove sulky,
and while it was deciding that it would burn she collected the cans
for the morning's hot water.  And how she yearned for gas!  To be
able to slip down and turn a tap, and perhaps slip back to bed
again.

The hands of the grandfather clock stood at twenty past seven when
Mary crossed the little hall between the kitchen and the living-
room.  There was that second fire to be laid and lit; the kitchen
fire she had laid the night before, and if there was one thing she
loathed it was cleaning out a grate on a cold winter morning.  A
beastly job, remaining eternally beastly!  Picking out pieces of
slag and cinder and dropping them into the housemaid's box!  She
pulled on her gloves, and kneeling, was about to start on the grate
when she heard the spring-bell attached to the front door burr
loudly.

It startled her.  No one was to be expected at this hour but that
very red-nosed boy with the milk, and he always came to the back
door.

She went to investigate, drawing back the plain black bolts and
turning the key of the cheap lock.  She opened the door and saw a
man there.  A milk-can kept him company on the doorstep.  He made
no remark.  He looked at one of her gloved and empty hands as
though he had expected to see a jug in it.

"Oh, the milk."

She stared and he seemed to stare still harder, for she had black
smudges all over her face.  And then she realized somehow that this
was Furze, of Doomsday Farm, and that he was in a hurry, and that
something must have happened to the red-nosed boy.

"I'll get a jug."

Returning, she was aware of him in the dim light as something big
and brown and silent, with a pair of very dark eyes set deeply
under the brim of his hat.  His face had ruggedness.  It was clean-
shaven, but she could see that he had not shaved this morning.  His
lips were very firm.  The breadth of the face seemed to match the
breadth of the man, the loose-limbed, easy breadth of the worker.
When he took the jug from her she noticed the fineness of his
hands, delicate even in their roughened strength.  He bent down to
fill the jug.

"What has happened to the boy?"

"Laid up."

His voice was deliberate and deep, and his eyes seemed to match his
voice.  He was looking at her again, a pretty, dark thing in an old
cherry-coloured jumper and black skirt.  Those smudges of coal dust
on her face might have amused him had he been the sort of man who
was easily amused, but his glances went deeper.  A pretty girl--and
a gentlewoman--cleaning a grate on a January morning!  Why
shouldn't she?  He handed her the jug.

"Will that do for the day?"

Her eyes were on his big brown hands.  Standing there under the
flimsy rustic porch, he seemed to fill the whole of the sky with a
significance that puzzled her.  He did not belong to Cinder Town;
he was part of that other world that had preceded and would outlast
a little collection of bungalows and rustic porches.

"I think it will do.  I expect you are busy."

"I am."

He picked up the milk-can, half lifted his hat, and with another of
those deep and curiously silent glances, he swung away down the
cinder path.  He closed the white gate behind him and turned to the
right towards the Jamieson's cottage--Oak Lodge.  Mary hated the
Jamiesons, and especially the Jamieson children.

She closed the door, carried the milk-jug into the kitchen, and
completed the resuscitation of the sitting-room fire.


2


Mary placed the can of hot water on the mat outside her people's
door.  She knocked.

"A quarter to eight."

Her father began to cough, and she could picture his poor bald,
birdlike head growing pink on its thin neck.  These spasms of
coughing seemed to shake the flimsy little house, and with it the
whole futile world of her daily endeavour.  Her mother's voice,
twittering like a robin's, caused her to pause.

"Mary, dear, your father will have his breakfast in bed."

A tray to be laid as well as a table!  Well, what of it?  If
drudgery were your lot, complete submergence did not matter.  She
carried her own can of hot water into her bedroom, and pulling up
the blind, discovered to herself in place of a dead white surface a
panel picture of surprising beauty.  It was strange and unexpected,
and it hurt her, and she wondered why it hurt.  She stood and
looked at a red winter sun and a smoking mass of blue grey clouds,
and dark hills, and woods spiring up.  She could see the great
knoll of beeches purpling the sky above "Doomsday," the mysterious
and black stateliness of the "Six Firs," and beyond them the aery
tops of a larch plantation.  It was very beautiful and sad and
strange, with colour tossed about, and that red sun edging the
clouds with gold.  It hurt her.  It made her yearn for all sorts of
unimaginable things, escape, romance, dreamy happenings, a world
other than her own.  Her sensitive youthfulness stretched out its
quivering hands to beauty, and felt the choke of it in its throat.

She looked into her mirror.

"Heavens!"

No wonder the man with the milk had stared.  She was all smudged
under the eyes with coal dust.  She saw herself as a flustered
little drab, a seven o'clock in the morning slattern too hurried to
be clean.  She went red in the face of her own reflection.  Beauty--
and that smudged skin!  A kind of rage seized her.  She splashed
the hot water into her basin, and soaped and gloved and towelled
herself before rushing downstairs with a red nose and eyes, and a
sense of being driven to do a dozen things at once.  More coal had
to be put on the fires, the frying pan greased, the kettle filled,
the cloths laid on tray and table; cups and saucers, spoons,
plates, mustard, bread, butter, marmalade to be collected.  And
while she hurried about, and was aware of the clatter of her
harried handling of all these articles, she remembered that an hour
hence she would be washing up the greater number of them and
putting them back in their places.

O,--that washing up, that eternal getting out and putting away!
Repetition, endless repetition!  The woman's part!  And she seemed
to feel in the core of her consciousness the passionate impulse to
escape from it.  Yes, from that tyranny of trifles that seemed to
her to be the whole end and tragedy of a woman's life.

She heard a door open.  Her mother was coming downstairs, that
little brown chaffinch of a mother with her "pink-pink" voice and
her little beak of a nose.

"Mary, dear."

"Yes, mother."

"Your father will have a lightly boiled egg--this morning.  And
some--toast."

"Yes,--some toast."

So there would be toast and a lightly boiled egg as well as the
bacon!  And while she bustled about, her mother sat on a stool in
front of the living-room fire, rubbing her red knuckled and thin
little hands.  Mrs. Viner was subject to chilblains.  She had a
stagnant circulation and a habit of inertia which did not fit her
birdlike appearance, and yet it was a cheerful, twittering inertia.
She perched there just like a young old bird waiting for the
breakfast worm, intent upon rubbing her cold hands, while her
daughter did all the work, and wondered why she did it.  Their
tacit acceptance of the situation was the most depressing part of
the whole business; her parents took everything for granted; they
were so patient and sweet and unseeing.  They exercised their
claims upon her with such complete confidence that sometimes she
wished that she had been born with her sister Clare's temper and
her determination to get out of the devoted niceness of it all.
While she--with that fatal softness--and a sensitive desire to
please--and an uncomfortable habit of self criticism--!

She thrust the prongs of the toasting-fork--another thing to clean
by the way--into a slice of bread, and crouched in front of the
kitchen fire.  She was a slim thing, with long legs and a willowy
neck, large dark eyes set wide apart, a wavy and poignant mouth,
and one of those noses with a delicate breadth at the nostrils
which somehow give an expression of pathos to a woman's face.  She
could flush quickly and look scared.  In repose she was inclined to
droop her shoulders and sit with her arms wrapped about her knees,
as though life was a cold and dreary business and her brown eyes
saw nothing but woe.  But, as a matter of fact, she was a strong
young wench, supple and healthy, with plenty of red blood, only
there was nothing to set it moving as a young thing's blood should
move.  Her starved, beggar-maid look was due to the fact that two
old people were contentedly sucking her vitality.

The toast grew brown and she thought of Clare; flaxen haired,
restless, mercurial Clare.  Yes, Clare had been selfishly wise.
She had insisted on self, and none too gently either.  Hence a
husband, and a house at Weyfleet in Surrey, and tennis and bridge-
parties and dances, and shoppings and matinées in town, and two
servants, and early tea brought to you in bed.  Clare appeared to
have ascended into a suburban heaven.  Her letters were full of
happenings.

The toast fell off the fork into the ash tray under the grate.

"O,--damn!" said the girl.

She recovered it, and with a sigh of momentary moral slackness she
replaced it on the fork.

"Mary,--dear."

"Yes, mother--"

"Is there any honey?  Your father--"

"There is no honey.  I'll order some.  I shall have to bike up to
Carslake presently."

At last, breakfast was served both upstairs and downstairs, though
Mary could never bring herself to look with any pleasure at Captain
Hesketh Viner in bed.  He wore a grey flannel nightshirt, and his
poor old chin would be all silver stubble.  There were times when
she felt deplorably sorry for her father, even when his coughing
kept her awake.  Her mother was very talkative at breakfast; she
rattled things and was very busy with her knife and fork.  She had
a high colour, and pretty grey crinkly hair, and brown eyes that
were much smaller than Mary's, eyes that never seemed to see
anything larger than pin-heads.

And who was that at the door this morning?  Had not she heard a
man's voice.

"Yes,--Mr. Furze with the milk."

And what had happened to the milk boy?

"Laid up."

"Influenza--I suppose," said Mrs. Charlotte, tapping away
cheerfully, "and what is Mr. Furze like?  I thought his voice
sounded almost gentlemanly."

Mary heard her father's stick rapping on the floor of the room
above.

"I expect I have forgotten something."

And she went up to see what it was.


3


Arnold Furze of "Doomsday" had paused for a moment where the
Melhurst and Rotherbridge roads join each other at an acute angle
and become the road to Carslake, for though his day's work began
before dawn and went on after dusk he was one of those men who can
spare his soul five minutes.  A hundred yards farther up the
Carslake road his farm lane emerged north of the bank where the Six
Firs grew, and on reaching the lane he left his empty milk-can by
the hedge, and climbed up beside the trunk of one of the six old
trees.  Far above his head their outjutting green tops swayed very
gently against the cold blue sky.  Rabbits had been nibbling the
short grass.

Furze stood there, seeming to look at nothing in particular, as
much a part of the country as the trees.  The rising sun lay behind
him.  It sent forth a yellow finger and laid it upon that splodge
of chequered colour, those abominable little dwellings that dotted
the Sandihurst Estate.  There were thirteen of them, strung on each
side of the cinder track that Colonel Sykes had had made between
his red and white bungalow and the road to Melhurst.  They looked
just like a collection of big red, white, yellow, green and brown
fungi, excrescences, each squatting on its quarter acre or so of
land, and surrounded by lesser excrescences that were tool-sheds,
chicken-houses, and here and there a little tin-roofed garage.
Furze knew every one of the thirteen dwellings, though he had not
walked up the cinder road more than six times in his life.  He
supplied the colony with milk and eggs and cordwood and an
occasional load of manure.  His bills went in once a month.

"What a collection," he thought.

They were of all shapes and all sizes, and they agreed in nothing
but in their flimsy newness.  Colonel Sykes' red brick and rough
cast bungalow headed the formation like a field officer mounted and
leading his company up the hill.  Oak Lodge, a mock oak and plaster
cottage in the Tudor style, contained the Jamiesons, who
manufactured jam up at Carslake.  Next to it stood "Green
Shutters," the home of the Viners, half brick and half tile and
pink as a boiled prawn.  Following south came the "Oast," a
pathetic improvisation contrived out of a circular steel shelter
with an old railway-coach attached to it, the whole painted a
bright green, and inhabited by one-eyed ex-lieutenant Harold Coode.
In his hurry to recoup himself after his speculation in land,
Colonel Sykes had sold the plots without troubling himself about
building restrictions.  Next to the "Oast" the Perrivales had built
themselves "Two Stories" in yellow brick.  "The Pill Box," a cement
block structure, looking like a white box with four red chimney
pots placed on it, belonged to Mr. John Brownlow--a retired
schoolmaster.  The Engledews lived in the "Lodge," by the Melhurst
road.  On the west side of the cinder canal the buildings were even
more amateurish and ephemeral.  Lieut. Peabody had placed two
Nissen huts side by side, painted them red, joined the fronts with
a white veranda, and christened the creation "Old Bill."  The
Vachetts--literary people and very desultory at that, inhabited a
red and white bungalow, "Riposo."  The Clutterbucks had had to be
content with a big corrugated iron hut that resembled a football
pavilion or a mission hall.  Commander Troton owned "The Bungalow,"
brown stained weather board and pink pantiles.  Lieut. Colonel
Twist had put up a chalet and called it what it was.  The Mullins'
had shown a sense of humour in calling their cement box "Pandora,"
for it was full of children and prams, and rag dolls and trouble.

Furze's very deep blue eyes seemed to question the significance of
this colony.  He considered it as a native might speculate upon
some sudden growth of alien haste, and, as he scrambled down into
the lane and picked up his milk can, his thoughts remained with
Cinder Town.  He saw in it one of those improvisations flung up by
the confused flux of the post-war period.  The new poor!  The
relics of a superfluous generation dumped down among Sussex clay.
Impoverished gentlefolk drawn together in a little world of
makeshifts, and keeping up appearances--of a sort.  Rootless
people, withering, waiting to die.  It was rather pathetic.  What
on earth did they do with themselves in those little transitory
houses on their quarter-acre plots, without a decent tree on the
estate, and the very road a squdge of clay and clinker?  Keep a few
chickens, and grow starved vegetables, and train nasturtiums up
flimsy trellises?  One or two of them had hired land and were
chicken farming.  Chicken farming!  Lieut. Peabody had planted
fruit trees on a south-west slope full in the blue eye of the
Sussex wind!  And that girl with the smudgy face, and the soft coal-
dust eyes who had taken in the milk?  Deputizing as a maid of all
work?  Well, anyway, she worked, did a woman's work, though it
might be because she could not help it.

Passing on up the farm lane between high hedges of thorn and ash
and maple, with the Ten Acre on his right, and the Ridge Field on
his left, Arnold Furze returned to a world that seemed solid and
real.  He paused--as he often did--just above the pond--to see the
greyish brick chimney stack of the farmhouse showing above and
through the bare poles of the larch plantation.  From this point
above the pond where the lane began to dip and the hedges were
lower, he could command the greater part of his farm.  Immediately
below him stretched the pond and the two old ilexes at the end of
the larch plantation, and beyond them lay the yard, and the stone
farm buildings their grey walls and rust coloured roofs patched
with yellow lichen.  Rushy Pool and Rushy Wood were hidden by the
larches and the house, but above the swelling brownness of the Sea
Field, the beeches of Beech Ho seemed to carry the sky on their
branches.  Eastwards, along the slope of the valley the greenness
of the Furze Field met the deeper green of a wood of Scotch Firs.
Southwards at the heel of the Gore, and lying in the deep trough of
the valley, the oaks of Gore Wood stood embattled at the end of the
Long Meadow.  The old cedar beyond the orchard raised three dark
plumes above the roof of the house, and further still the spruces
at the south-east corner of the Doom Paddock would flash like
spires in the sunlight.

To Furze it was very beautiful with all its changing contours, its
high woods, and the swelling steepness of its grass and arable.
Never did it look the same, but was eternally changeful above the
green deeps of its valley where the brook ran down to Rushy Pool.
Difficult--yes--but he never grudged it its difficulties; for a
beauty that is loved is born with in all its moods and mischiefs.
For five years now he had been able to call "Doomsday" his.  He had
fought it, loved it, wrestled with it, and there had been times
when it had threatened to tear the guts out of him.  But that was
life.  Better than finnicking about in an office, and putting paper
over your shirt cuffs.

He went on and down to the path above the yard.  A middle-aged man
with very blue eyes and a moustache the colour of honey was forking
manure out of the cowhouse.

"Will."

"Sssir--"

"We'll cart that wood up from the Gore.  I'll be with you in ten
minutes."

The blue-eyed labourer thrust his fork into a pile of smoking dung,
and went with long trailing steps towards the stable, turning to
glance over his shoulder at Furze who was disappearing behind the
yew hedge screening a part of the garden.  But there was no garden
there now, only coarse grass and a few old unpruned roses.  Arnold
Furze had no time for life's embroideries.



II


1


A part of Doomsday Farmhouse had been built by a Sussex ironmaster
in Elizabeth's day, and to this man of iron it owed the stone walls
of its lower story, its stone mullions, and its brick chimneys.
The second story warmed itself with lichened bricks and tiles.  The
spread of its red-brown roof with its hips and valleys had an ample
tranquillity.  The parlour, jutting out queerily towards Mrs.
Damans' sunk garden, had a roof of Horsham stone, but Mrs. Damaris
had been dead a hundred and seventy years or more, and her sunk
garden had become a sunny place where hens clucked in coops and
yellow chicks toddled about over the grass.  Many of the windows
still held their lead lights, but in the living-room and the
parlour they had been replaced by wooden casements.  As to its
setting, nothing could have been more charmingly casual and tangled
and unstudied.  On the east the branches of the old pear and apple
trees of an orchard almost brushed its walls and held blossom or
fruit at the very windows.  Behind it lay the vegetable garden
backed by the larch plantation, and full of lilacs and ancient
rambling currant and gooseberry bushes, and groves of raspberry
canes, and winter greens, and odd clumps of flowers.  The tiled
roof of the well-house was a smother of wild clematis and hop.
South lay Mrs. Damaris' little sunk garden, its stone walls all
mossy, and the four yews--left unclipped for many years--rising
like dark green obelisks.  Beyond the orchard the big cedar looked
almost blue when the fruit blossom was out.  West of it, the cow-
houses, stable, barn, granary, and waggon sheds were grouped about
the byres and rick-yard.  The sweet, homely smell of the byres
would drift in on the west wind.  Everything was old, the oak of
the fences, the posts of the waggon sheds, the big black doors of
the barn, even the byre rails and the palings of the pig-sties.
Silvered and green oak, grey stone, the mottled darkness of old
brick and tile.  The gates leading into the lane and the Doom
Paddock were new, for Arnold Furze had made and hung them on new
oak posts.  The gates he had found there had been tied up with wire
and lengths of rope, and patched with odd pieces of deal.

From the window of the parlour you looked over Mrs. Damaris' little
sunk garden and the Doom Paddock to an immense thorn hedge that hid
the Long Meadow, and the brook beyond it.  Rushy Pool glimmered
down yonder towards the rising sun.  The high ground on the other
side of the brook rose like a green, tree-covered cliff in which
were cleft blue vistas of woods and shining hills, and white clouds
low down on the horizon by the sea.  The sea was fifteen miles
away, but when Arnold Furze was hoeing turnips up in the Sea Field
he could lean upon his hoe and see the grey hills flicker between
him and the old memories of France and the war.  The birds in these
Sussex woods had heard the rumble of the guns in those days, guns
at Ypres, guns on the bloody, white-hilled, red-poppied Somme.
Furze had been with the guns, the captain of a 4.5 Howitzer
battery.  It seemed very long ago.

A year as a learner on a farm in Hampshire, and five years at
Doomsday!  Five notable, terrible and glorious years, full of sweat
and hate and love and weariness, and a back that had refused to
break, and a stomach that would digest anything.  Lonely?  O, yes,
in a way, but when a man has beasts and sheep and pigs, and two
horses, and a dog, and a cat, and a number of odd hens and ducks to
look after, his hands are full of life.  And there were the birds,
and the crops, and the trees, and the yellow gorse, and the wild
flowers, all live things.  No, a man had no time to be lonely, with
Will Blossom and Will Blossom's boy and himself to work a hundred
and twenty acres, though twenty acres of it were woodland.  And
difficult land at that.  Heavy--some of it, and steep.

Five years!

He came up the stone steps to the door, with a great red winter sun
setting behind him over the roof of the waggon shed.  His boots
were all yellow clay, and there were spots of it upon his face.  He
shaved himself twice a week.  Bobbo the sheepdog flummoxed in at
his heels, and making for the log fire on the great open hearth
under the hood of the chimney, lay down to share it with Furze's
black cat.  The floor of the living-room was of red tiles, which
made it safe for Arnold Furze to keep a wood fire burning and to
pile upon it three or four times a day billets of oak and the butts
of old posts and the roots of trees.  In the winter this fire never
went out, for in the morning two or three handfuls of kindling
thrown upon the hot heap of wood ash would break into a blaze.  He
kept his logs and billets in the living-room, a great pile of them
stacked in a corner.

Here--too--an iron kettle was usually simmering on the hook.  Tea-
making was a simple process.  The breakfast tea leaves were shaken
out of the teapot upon the fire, more tea was added from a canister
on the shelf, the kettle seized with an old leather hedging-glove,
and the teapot filled.  Milk, a loaf, butter on a white plate, and
a pot of jam waited in the cupboard beside the fireplace.

Furze had his tea by the fire.  He sat on an oak stool of his own
making, like some Sussex peasant of the iron days before man had
realized cushions and comfort.  He too was of iron, one of those
lean big tireless men with his strength burning like a steady
flame.  You saw it in his eyes; it waxed and waned; it might die
down like a flame at the end of the day, but with the dawn of the
next day it was as bright as ever.  He needed it, but he needed it
a little less than he had done, for he had his feet well set in the
soil, and could draw his breath and look about him.

Before filling his pipe he poured out a saucer of milk for Tibby
the black cat.  The dog, a devoted and lovable beast, cuddled up
beside him like a shaggy second self, his muzzle resting on Furze's
knee, while his master sat and smoked, and allowed himself one of
those short interludes that were like the five minutes' halt on a
long march.  The fire flung the shadows of him and his animals
about the bare, old room with its brown distempered walls and
beamed ceiling.  He had a way of holding the stem of his pipe in
his left fist as though he could not touch a thing without gripping
it.

The fire was good, like all primitive phenomena to a man who is
strong, and Furze's life at Doomsday was very primitive, and not
unlike a colonist's, a concentration upon the essential soil and
its products, an ignoring of individual comfort.  He had come to
Doomsday with a claw-hammer, a spanner, and a saw, his flea-bag and
camp equipment, and a hundred pounds in cash, all the capital that
was left him after the purchase of the farm.  War gratuity,
savings, the thousand pounds an aunt had left him, Doomsday,
derelict and lonely, had swallowed them all.  A Ford taxi,
chartered from Carslake station, had lurched up the lane, and
deposited Furze and all his worldly gear on the stone steps of the
old, silent house.  He had slept on his camp bed, washed in a
bucket, used a box as a table, and another box as a seat, camping
out in one room of the rambling and empty house.

From that day the struggle had begun.  And what a struggle it had
been, that of a lone, strong, devoted man who had that strange
passion for the soil, and who combined with his strength,
intelligence and a love of beauty.  There had been hardly a sound
gate on the farm; the hedges had been broken and old and straggling
into the fields like young coppices.  The Furze Hill field had been
a waste of gorse; the Wilderness a tangle of brambles, bracken,
thorns, broom, ragwort and golden rod, and it was a wilderness
still.  The coppice wood had not been cut for seven years in either
Gore or Rushy Woods; elms had been sending up suckers far out in
the Ten Acre; weeds had rioted, charlock and couch and thistles.
Dead trees had lain rotting; a beech, blown down in Beech Ho, had
never been touched.  The stable roof had leaked.  The gutters had
been plugged, so that water had dribbled down the walls.  The byre
fences had sagged this way and that; the roof of one of the
pigsties had fallen in.  Nettles had stood five feet high round the
back of the house.

What a first six months he had had of it, working and living like a
savage, but a savage with a sensitive modern soul!  An occasional
stroller along the field path that crossed Bean Acres and Maids
Croft and ran along the edge of Furze Hill to Beech Ho had seen him
as a brown figure in old army shirt and breeches, swinging axe or
mall, or lopping at an overgrown hedge, or cutting over the tangled
orchard, or ploughing with his one horse and second-hand wheel
plough.  Wandering lovers had discovered him scything or hoeing in
the dusk; only the birds had seen him in the dawn, with dew upon
his boots and a freshness in those deep-set blue eyes.  The lovers
had marvelled.  They had talked about him at Carslake in the shops
and the pubs.  "Mad Furze"--"Fool Furze"--"Mean Furze."  Mean
because he had had to set his teeth and calculate before buying
anything.  He had never missed a sale, and had brought away old
harness to be pieced and patched, old tools, a machine or two, just
as little as he could do with.  All his shopping had been done up
at Carslake on Saturday nights, and the tinned food, the jam and
the tea and the sugar, and his week's tobacco, and an occasional
piece of butcher's meat, had been carried home in an old canvas kit-
bag.  For a year all the ready money that had come to him had been
provided by the milk of two rather indifferent cows and the sale of
a couple of litters of pigs.  He had eaten the eggs laid by his
dozen hens, and helped himself to live by the few vegetables he had
had time to grow.  So grim had been the struggle that he had had to
sell some of his timber, fifty oaks in Gore Wood, and it had hurt
him.

He stared at the fire and stroked Bobbo's head.

My God--how tired he had been sometimes, ragingly tired.  He could
remember hating the place for one whole winter month with a furious
and evil hatred.  It had had its claws in his soul's belly,
twisting his guts.  Beaten--no--by God!  He had trampled on in his
muddy boots, without time to cook or wash, sleeping like a log in
the flea-bag on his camp bed.  Lonely?  Well, he supposed that he
had not had time to feel lonely.  Holidays?  Perhaps seven days off
in three years.

Half playfully Furze blew smoke at the dog--and stretched himself
on his box in front of the fire.  He had made his roots; they were
not as stout as he intended them to be, but they were there.
Twenty good shorthorns, thirty sheep, two horses--fine dapple greys--
six black pigs, fifty or so fowls, and a dozen ducks.  And manure
stacking up, and Rushy Bottom, the Long Meadow, Doom Paddock, and
the Gore growing good grass with clover in it, and his winter wheat
showing well in the Ridge Field, and a hundred-ton crop of mangels
clamped, enough for all his stock.  He had had a bumper hay crop.
He had a man and a boy now to help.  This spring he would be able
to buy a new mower, and a new horse cultivator, and in the autumn
perhaps a corn crusher, a decent tumbril.

He knocked out his pipe on the toe of his boot.

"Come on, Bobbo.  Work."

He lit a lantern, and as he went down the steps and along the path
with the shadows swinging from the light, he heard the chug-chug of
a chaff cutter.  A good sound that.  He sniffed the sweet smell of
the byres, and looked up at the stars.

A minute later he was in the big cowshed, helping Will with the
sliced roots and the hay.  The place steamed; it was full of the
sweet breath of the beasts and the sound of their breathing and
feeding.  Rows of gentle heads and liquid eyes showed in the long,
dimly lit building, and the warm, milky, bestrawed life of it sent
a whimper of pleasure and of pride through Furze's blood.  He was
fond of his beasts, and as he passed down the building, his hand
caressed the placid creatures--"Well, Mary--well, Doll--old lady."
The dog kept close to his heels, and the cows, accustomed to Bobbo
being there at feeding time, were not troubled by his nearness.

Will Blossom, with a dusting of chaff on his honey-coloured
moustache, went through the cow house, holding his lantern shoulder
high.

"That thur wood be ready loaded f'tomorrer, sir."

"Right, Will.  Good night."

"Good night, ssir."

Blossom went out with his lantern, but Arnold Furze remained for a
while in the cow house, watching the cows feeding, and feeling the
warm contentment of the big brown creatures.


2


Afterwards, having looked into the stable at the two "greys" and
locked up for the night, Furze put out the lantern and wandered up
the lane.  There were times now when he could stand and draw
breath, and let the tenseness of his self relax, and raise his head
and look about him at the waiting beauty of this world of his.  For
years the singing of birds had been no more than a little chant
going on while he laboured, heard dimly but without attention.  The
soil had held him grappled, and every sense had been absorbed into
the struggle, but now he had eyes and ears and nostrils, and a
consciousness that could pause and enjoy.  Often he would walk the
lane at night or wander about the Doom Paddock like a captain whose
ship sailed steadily under the stars.  To-night it was very still,
and yet he knew that the air was moving, for he felt it on his left
cheek, and last year's oak leaves on some saplings in the hedge
made a dry twittering.  He paused to listen to the whisper.
Presently, he went on as far as the Six Firs on the mound.  They
too seemed to send a murmur from the towering darkness, a sound as
of breathing; and climbing the mound Furze laid his head against
one of the trunks.  Yes, he could hear the faint, slumberous
breathing of the tree.

Down yonder he saw lights, little yellow points, the lights of
Cinder Town, and he stood watching them for a while as though he
were the master of a sailing ship out at sea.  These six tall trees
towering like masts seemed set so high above those puny little
residences.  He felt sorry for them.  Poor little places, no more
than bathing huts set up along the edge of the great sea of man's
effort.

Well, well, he had no quarrel with Cinder Town.  It had been of
some use to him, and had opened a little market at his very door at
a time when he had felt like murdering every butcher and corn-
factor and milkman in the neighbourhood.  Poor little places!
Feeding them upon the rich milk of his shorthorns was rather like
giving milk in a bottle to motherless lambs.

The dog had followed him and had been at his heels all the while,
but with so devoted and self-effacing a silence that he had been no
more than a shadow.  They returned together to the house where the
light of the fire wavered through the casements.  Bobbo slipped in
at his master's heels, and as Furze closed and bolted the door upon
the darkness he had a feeling that something had slipped in after
him as silent as the dog.  An emotion; a subtle and shadowy
impression, the wraith of a mood or a manner of feeling.

Hitherto the big room had satisfied his wants, for it was parlour,
bedroom, and workshop all in one; he still slept in his camp bed,
and used a dining-table that he had made out of deal boards with
four fencing posts for legs.  A second table over by the orchard
window displayed a collection of harness, leather, a pair of boots
that were waiting to be soled, a boot-last, tools, a harnessmaker's
awl and thread, odd boxes of nails and screws.  There was only one
chair in the room, an old basket thing covered with faded green
cretonne.  At his meals Furze sat on the home-made oak stool.

He hung his hat on a peg and crossed the room, slowly and
thoughtfully, and pushed the arm-chair forward with his foot.  He
sat down in it by the fire, took off his muddy boots, and reached
for the plaid slippers by the cupboard door.  His thoughtful look
deepened; he stared at the fire, but once or twice he threw a quick
and considering glance over a shoulder at his barrack of a room.
He found himself wondering what Will Blossom's wife thought of it
when she came up once a week to clean and wash and cook him a
joint.  It was like a room in a backwoodsman's hut.

Yes, he ought to be able to afford something better before long,
but not before he had bought every machine and tool that the
beloved and exacting soil demanded.  He had got along very well all
these years.  The furniture, and the pretty-pretties could wait.

Yet, a desire for something else had slipped into the room with
him, and he was aware of a vague unrest.  Almost it reminded him of
those longings during the war when a man sat in the mud under a tin
sheet, and thought of Piccadilly Circus, and the Savoy, and girls
in pretty frocks, and tables laid for dinner, and a room with a
carpet and white sheets, and a bath.  Yes, he had had to cut out
the æsthetics, but even if he were to fill the place with club-
chairs, and Turkey carpets and old oak and china--what then?

He left that question unanswered, perhaps because he was
subconsciously aware of the voice that was asking it, a voice that
he had met with deaf ears.  Why explore your own subconscious, or
drag it up to the level of the painfully conscious?  Better to turn
your back and avoid it.

Presently, after a supper of bread and cheese and ale, he lit a
pipe, and opened the door leading into Mrs. Damaris' parlour.
Empty, panelled in white, and with its old black Georgian
firegrate, it always suggested to Furze the memory of a woman.  It
had a faint perfume, a faded daintiness, something that was not
male.  Sitting in the deep window seat you looked down into Mrs.
Damaris' sunk garden, and could imagine a peacock spreading its
tail upon the stone wall.  It was in this room that Furze kept the
one extravagance that he had allowed himself, a baby-grand piano in
a rosewood case, bought at a sale in Carslake.

Leaving the door open so that the firelight played into Mrs.
Damaris' dim white parlour, he sat down on another stool of his own
making, uncovered the keyboard and played Schubert.  He played
well, with a firm touch and a richness of feeling, and in that
empty house the music sounded ghostly.


3


There was in Mary Viner a gentleness that consented, and a young
idealism that rebelled.

In the matter of the week's washing Cinder Town divided itself into
the washers and the washed.  "Simla"--as befitted the head of the
estate--sent its soiled linen to a washerwoman, and the Vachetts
and the Perrivales and the Twists conformed to this convention.  At
the other end of the scale and the colony, poor, fat, fair and
frowsy Mrs. Mullins, helped by a strong girl, decorated on each
Monday the back lawn of "Pandora" with innumerable garments,
nighties and towels and stockings and blouses and little etceteras,
and her husband's blue and white striped pyjamas bellying in the
wind.  The display annoyed Lieut.-Colonel Twist very considerably.
He was a pernickety, iron grey, yellowish man, with scornful
nostrils and pale blue eyes.  Matters between the "Chalet" and
"Pandora" were not quite neighbourly.

As for "Green Shutters," it made a virtue of necessity, and hung
its bunting above the patch of grass behind the cottage and close
to the Jamieson's fence, where it fluttered against blue March
skies, or drooped idly against the green of June.  To Mary Viner,
Monday was always a day of pain.  If to hate doing your own washing
and hanging out to dry was snobbery, then she confessed herself a
snob, though next door ex-Lieut. Harold Coode kept her in
countenance by hanging out his shirts.  True, he appeared to have
only two of them, the one with a patch, and the one that had no
patch.  They alternated on the six feet of clothes line behind the
"Oast," hanging there with a pair of grey socks and a vest, keeping
the flag flying.  That was the sort of man Coode was, eager and
bright and thin, a noble fellow, but not quite a man, and he was a
trouble to Mary.  He tended towards worship over the four-foot
fence, and she was sorry for him, an uncomfortable emotion, for
Coode, like many noble fellows, had no tact.  He appeared when he
should not have appeared.

On the other side were the Jamieson children, two tow-haired
savages with lapis lazuli eyes, and faces that looked as though
they had been dipped in their father's strawberry jam.  Irreverent
children, they poked their tow heads above the fence, and giggled
and were rude, and sometimes a clod of clay left a mark in the
middle of one of Mary's sheets or towels.

She was tired and touchy on Mondays, and apt to be quick of colour.
The whole business humiliated her.

"You little wretches."

Chortles from the dear little children.

Mary had complained to Mrs. Jamieson who sent her washing out, and
who had stared at her with her round, milkmaid's eyes.

"I'm sorry, Miss Viner.  They are such young Turks.  But it is
tempting, isn't it?"

Mary had flushed.

"O, no doubt.  But I don't see the humour."

But the culminating Jamieson joy screamed when the clothes line
broke, which it did on occasions, and the whole string of bunting
collapsed upon the grass.  The little red faces exulted.  And the
line broke upon this particular morning early in March, with a cold
and blustering wind blowing.  One of Captain Hesketh's shirts and a
couple of handkerchiefs had made direct for the cinder path and
drabbled themselves there, when she heard a voice behind her.

"You--are--busy.  Do come and look at my new car."

On the grass behind her stood pale-haired Winnifred Twist, an only
child and precious as Ming china.  She had a soft, drawling voice
and an air of very intelligent languor.  The Twists might live in
Cinder Town, but they made it obvious that they were not obliged to
live there.  Winnifred's father emphasized his potential mobility
and freedom by always talking of "Selling the damned place."

Mary, with the two ends of the broken line in her hands, and aware
of the other girl's leather coat and fur gauntlets felt a sudden
rage which she was careful to subdue.  It was human of Winnifred to
show off, but it was not kind of her to show off to Mary, with that
washing draggled on the grass and the heads of the Jamieson
children visible above the fence.

"Oh, it's come.  I heard you were having one."

"Do come and look.  She's just outside.  I have been up to Carslake
and back.  And I nearly ran into a cart.  Made the horse shy."

Mary was voiceless.

"The man with the cart cut up quite rough about it.  That Furze man
who sells us milk.  He's a bit of a boor.  I shall advise the mater
to change her milkman."

Mary, sleeves rolled above the elbows, reknotted the rope, and felt
herself being overpowered by her friend's chattering enthusiasm.
She supposed that she would have to go and see the precious child's
new toy, and put a good face upon it, and appear brightly and
nicely envious.  After all, why should she grudge Winnifred Twist a
car?  It was rather petty and beastly of her.  But always the good
things seemed to come to the wrong people.

Going out to inspect the car she found half Cinder Town gathered
about it.  Colonel Twist was there, and the Vachetts who always
looked so sorrowful, and Mr. Stephen Perrivale, and Phyllis his red-
headed daughter, and Commander Troton booming cheerfully, and the
Brownlows, and poor Coode, who fixed his one pathetic eye on Mary
and watched her as she stood between the Twist father and the Twist
daughter.  Why did not someone give Mary a car?  Why could not he
give her a car?  That sorry old bicycle of hers with the rusty
handle-bars and the rattling mudguards always made him feel a
little thick in she throat.

"What a beauty!" said Miss Viner.

She smiled.  They all smiled, save the Vachetts in whom sorrow had
turned sour.  The car smirked and glistened, and sleeked itself in
its new blue coat.  It was only a little car, but in Cinder Town a
car was a notable possession.

"New balloon tyres--I see," said Coode--and was smothered by the
Troton fog-horn.

"Very pretty, very pretty.  Call her the Blue Bird--I suppose?
Twist, you will be paying fines.  That's the penalty."

Mary was looking at the Perrivale girl whose pale face was all
screwed up under her beautiful flaming hair.  Yes, to Phyllis the
thing was unspeakable, bitter, mocking.  Poor little Phyllis, so
quick, and hot hearted, and hot headed, and generous and passionate
even in her envy.

Up the cinder road came a cart loaded with cord wood, and with a
grey horse between the shafts, and a man, whose eyes were still
angry, walking beside it.  The group had to stand to one side while
the cart went on to deliver its wood at "Simla."  Furze gave one
glance at the blue car, and spoke to nobody.  His eyes lifted as he
passed, and dwelt for a moment on the face and figure of Mary
Viner.

She had her sleeves rolled up and her hands were red.

His deep eyes seemed to go up into the wind.

"Cinderella."

He had christened her.



III


1


There were times when Mary Viner reasoned with herself, composing
little homilies that laid a gentle and restraining hand upon her
restlessness.  She confronted the age-old problem of the begetter
and the begotten, trying to feel dutiful and not succeeding, and
coming to rest upon a feeling of pity.  Yet, she knew in her marrow
and heart that age and youth should not live together, though youth
may not know what it wants and age wants so little, but that little
a tyranny of trifles.

She felt her exasperations to be atrocious, but there they were,
like muscle pain or toothache or a chafed heel--realities,
disharmonies, and though she strove for their repression she was
but weaving them into the texture of herself, threads that would
break or get ravelled when some human crisis should come upon her.
Such repressions are not good for the soul.  For her parents were
nice old people, sweetly selfish in feeling themselves unselfish.
It is probable that they thought Mary fortunate in having a home,
and in not having to cheapen herself in the world's market.  And
healthy, homely work, cooking and washing and cleaning.  Besides,
you had to live somewhere, and pensions did not carry you far at
post-war prices, and the Sandihurst Estate had gentlefolk upon it,
and you could get "bridge" most nights a week, and Colonel Sykes
and Commander Troton and the Twists were putting down a hard tennis
court.  Age forgets so easily its own youth and its youth's blind
gropings and hungers.  It sits resigned by the fireside, and yet
can be full of a senile restlessness of its own, of little
chatterings and exactions, and odd irritating tricks and
mannerisms.

O, those evenings, those long winter evenings when "Green Shutters"
seemed buried under a mountain of finality!  Nothing happened,
nothing could happen, save perhaps the occasional and tentative
intrusion of poor Coode who sat nobly on the edge of a chair, and
called Captain Hesketh "sir," and listened politely to an old
soldier's meanderings.  A nice fellow!  And his one eye was so dull
and adoring!  Those evenings, with her mother reading and stopping
her reading to chatter directly Mary opened a book!  And her father
and his acrostics!  How she loathed those acrostics and the
ingenious people who strung the jingles together.  And the poor old
man's perpetual clearing of his throat, an explosive sound rather
like a sheep's cough; and the trick her mother had of tapping with
one foot on the iron fender!  Silence, an immense, eventless
silence, and those fidgetings and rustlings and poor little
fussinesses!

There had been nights when she had put on a hat and rushed out
wildly into the darkness.

"Where are you going, Mary?"

Yes, where--and why?  They always wanted to know the reason for
everything.  As if one could give reasons, at the age of six-and-
twenty, when life felt like a dead volcano, and your heart was
ready to break for something and nothing.

"Where are you going, Mary?"

She would blurt out some excuse.  She had forgotten to shut up
their six hens, or Winnifred had a dress to show her, or the
Brownlows had asked her in.  She would rush out and walk wildly up
the wet and empty road to Carslake or down the wet and empty road
to Melhurst.  Sometimes her heart cried--"It would be better if we
were dead."

Also, on those nights she thought much upon the foresight of her
sister Clare.  She glimpsed Clare as a palely glowing and fortunate
creature away yonder within reach of that London shimmer.  Lights,
happenings!  In the damp, dark deeps of a Sussex night she would
turn her face in the direction of the distant city, yearning for it
and for all the things that to her young loneliness it seemed to
offer.  Theatres, dances, shops, a sense of appetites felt and
satisfied, trains, buses, tea-shops, the crowds, the stir, the full-
throated life of it all.  She envied Clare.  Clare had escaped, as
most women long to escape and dare not confess it.

Sometimes she would wander a little way up the "Doomsday" lane, not
because she was conscious of the man who lived there, but because
she had no business in the lane and it gave her a faint thrill of
childish adventure.  Once or twice she had scrambled up the mound
and stood among the Six Firs, looking out into the rolling
darkness, with Cinder Town pricked out in yellow points below her.
She would lean against one of the trees, and hear its sighing.  Her
heart seemed to sigh like the tree.

On other rare days she would escape for an hour or two on her old
bicycle, going out to meet life that never came, so full of her own
unsatisfied youth that she was blind to the life about her.  She
loved beauty, but in her passion to escape she passed beauty by,
youthfully hurrying, hastening somewhere and nowhere.  She seemed
to know Melhurst and Rotherbridge by heart, and all the lilies in
the moat of Cadnam Castle, and the ruins of Carslake Abbey and the
Roman walls of Hoyle.  To ride up to Carslake was no adventure, for
she did the household shopping there, buying meat and groceries,
and her father's cough mixture, and her mother's wool, and an
occasional Weldon's Journal with a brown paper pattern of a jumper
or a nightdress pinned up inside it.  True, you could buy hats at
Sturtevant's, but what hats!

It was on one of these excursions to Melhurst early in March that
her old hack of a bicycle broke its chain halfway up the long hill
that ended in the white gates of Melhurst Park.  She accepted the
rupture as fate, and went on, wheeling her machine, and into
Melhurst Park, for the public road ran through it.  The park rolled
like a great green sea, with woods of beech and fir sailing upon
it, a north wind blowing white clouds across an intense blue sky,
and dead leaves scudding like foam.  She saw the downs in the
distance.  In the valley below deer were feeding, and the cedars
and sequoias and spruces of Melhurst House looked black as thunder.

A four-mile walk!  Well, quite an event.  And she would be alone
for the best part of two hours, and there are days when loneliness
can be precious.  She walked at her leisure, and coming to a group
of old beech trees standing beside the park road, she leaned her
bicycle against one of the white posts and sat down on the high
grass verge.  The March wind had dried the grass; it was still
wintry and brown, and thousands of last year's beech leaves were
scurrying about and making little fluttering rushes hither and
thither.  The air was full of the sound of their rustlings and of
the blowing of the wind through the beech boughs.

A blue wagon drawn by two grey horses, and coming from Melhurst
way, appeared upon the road.  It topped a rise, and was lost to
view in a hollow, though Mary heard the rumble of the wheels.  A
man's figure rose into view, and then the heads of the two horses,
and both the man and the horses were familiar.  It was the
"Doomsday" wagon.

She could have walked on, but there was no conscious impulse
bidding her go or stay, and yet she had a feeling that the man on
the wagon had been watching her, and that she was sitting there
like a deer covered by a sighted gun.  The wagon rolled towards
her, and she looked straight ahead towards the downs.  It was right
upon her now, and still she had that feeling of being observed.

Furze stopped his horses.  Her quick upward glance caught him in
the act of rising from his seat on the rail.  He had a hand to his
old grey-green soft hat.

"Any trouble, Miss Viner?"

He looked at the bicycle leaning against the white post, and she
was aware of a quick flushing of her face.

"The chain is broken--"

He came down at once, deliberately seizing the opportunity with his
strong hands and yet doing it so naturally that that flush of hers
need not have happened.  He asked no permission, but picked up the
machine and lifted it on to the wagon and standing on a fore-wheel
hub, settled it on the load of cake he had picked up at Melhurst
station.  Then he stood down and looked at her.  The turned-down
brim of his hat seemed to make the deep stare of his quiet eyes
more serious.  She had a new and sudden impression of him as a man
who had some meaning for her, a man with a tanned and silent face,
and a mouth that was both hard and kind.

"Will you ride?"

She stood up.

"I was going to walk."

"Just as you please.  I can fix you up a seat."

His curiously dark blue eyes remained fixed upon her face all this
time, not boldly or gallantly, but with a deliberate and grave
interest.  She had the instant knowledge of the fact that as a
woman she pleased him.  She may have gone on to the intuitive
glimpsing of him as a man who was not easily pleased.  Her thoughts
flew back to the morning when he had brought the milk, and she had
shown him a smudged face.  Again, her colour changed quickly.

"It is very good of you."

"Not a bit."

"I think I will ride."

She had not visualized his helping her up, and she felt more lifted
than helped.  His hands were very strong, but they touched her
gently, giving her a sudden and very vivid impression of contact.
She felt it as an act of homage, and her eyes sought to veil
themselves.  She was just a little confused.

"Where shall I sit?"

"Wait a moment."

He was up in the wagon, gathering two or three empty sacks and a
horse cover.  There was a space between the stacked cake and the
front of the wagon, and he made a seat for her on the cake, folding
the sacks very deliberately and placing the cloth upon them as
though the careful doing of it mattered.

"That ought to do."

"Thank you so much."

She smiled, with something of a quick, scared self-consciousness in
her smile, and sat down.  She was aware of a pleasant perfume, the
smell of the cake.  And he, smiling down at her momentarily with a
something in his eyes that went straight down into the depths of
her, climbed over the edge and gained the road.

He was going to walk.

"O,--please," she felt like saying, and was silent, her hands
clasped in her lap.  But if he meant to walk, well--it meant--She
drew a deep breath.  For his walking was like his touching of her,
an act that was both sensitive and big and manly, not the act of a
little, vain, agile creature, and yet so natural.  She had a
glimpse of him standing there brown and still beside the blue wagon
and the grey horses, part of the landscape, and right with it.

"Thank you," she said.

So, her blue ship sailed through Melhurst Park, with the white
clouds going over, and the landscape half sunlight and half shadow,
and she sat and wondered, because he walked beside the head of the
near horse as though the wagon held nothing but its load of cake.
In a way she was glad of his silence and his back.  She could
consider him at her leisure, or as much as she could see of him,
the broad back, the tanned neck, the old felt hat with the brim
turned down, the long, striding legs, and the arms swinging easily.
His very clothes seemed to have the soft, weather-worn half tints
of the landscape.

He owned Doomsday Farm.  He was supposed to be a little unusual.
She had seen the house in the distance from the field path by Beech
Ho, and had thought it romantic, and a little mysterious, but
lonely.  Him, too, in a sense she had only seen at a distance and
almost as though he shared Doomsday's mystery and loneliness.

Half-way up the long hill out of Cherry Bottom he stopped his
horses, placed the little wooden roller under a back wheel, and let
them rest.  He pushed his hat back, looked across the hills and
smiled.  Next moment he was speaking to her, standing square to the
wagon, and looking up steadily into her face.

"Do you mind the smell of the cake?"

No, she did not mind it; she thought it rather fragrant.

"Country smells are," he said; "at least to me.  They hang about
like memories.  The meal tub and the hay loft, and the reek of a
weed fire.  All good.  You don't get out much--I suppose?"

"No, not much."

His quiet blue eyes confused her.

"Women don't.  Not with house work.  Same with me.  I'm stuck there
on the soil."

She had a feeling that he approved of woman as a domestic creature,
and his man's view of it was as of something natural and
inevitable.  Vaguely she was aware of resenting this.

"But yours is more interesting.  A man's always is."

His blue eyes seemed to receive this statement with peculiar
seriousness, and to consider it.

"Do you think so?"

"I would rather be a farm labourer than a servant."

He appeared puzzled.

"Much the same--surely, though one is out in the air more.  A man's
job is."

"But why should it be a man's job?"

"It happens so.  Always has been, hasn't it?  Except in the case of
the idle young persons who play golf and tennis all day and every
day, and they don't count."

She felt herself flushing.  It seemed to her rather ridiculous to
be sitting there in his wagon and getting into an argument with
him.  What had they to argue about?

"You think women ought to work?"

His blue eyes suggested that he had never thought of it in any
other way than that.

"Well, don't they?  Ninety-nine out of a hundred.  It's life.  Of
course, if you get the notion--"

He had silenced her, and he seemed suddenly aware of the fact, and
grew silent himself, and then he restarted his horse, and resumed
his place by the head of the horse.  They sailed slowly athwart the
landscape till they came to the place where the Melhurst and the
Rotherbridge roads joined, and here he pulled up.

She stood up, and refused his hand.

"I can manage, thank you."

But she had to leave him the handling of her bicycle.  She noticed
that he glanced at her with something between perplexity and half-
amused concern.

"Thank you so much," she said.

"Not at all.  Glad to have been of use."

He raised his old felt hat, and with a grave and smile-less nod she
turned away towards Cinder Town.


2


At eight o'clock on a moonlit March night a young woman went out
with a jug in quest of milk.  For Ransford, the Carslake doctor,
expected all day, had not arrived at "Green Shutters" till seven
o'clock, and had shown himself a little testy, as an overworked man
will.  Two old people in bed and coughing in chorus and both with
temperatures, and why hadn't Mary sent for him before?  As though
doctor's bills were to be incurred with frivolous recklessness!
Ransford had warmed his hands and ordered milk, meat essence,
junket.  He had promised to send down some medicine by a boy on a
bicycle.

Hence Mary's quest for milk, for in the larder she had found just
enough to cover a lump of sugar in the bottom of a breakfast cup.
She knew that she had only to knock at the green door of the "Oast"
in order to command immediate devotion, but she did not knock at
poor Coode's door.  She tried the Perrivales, to be met by Phyllis'
red head--and a "So sorry, but I don't think we have got a drop.
Dad had the last in his coffee."  She hesitated outside the
Brownlows, and then went on down the cinder track and out into the
road.  She would find milk at "Doomsday," and she faced the full
moon and saw it hanging like a round shield behind the trunk of one
of the Six Firs.  There was not a cloud in the sky.  She looked up
at the zenith, though the stars were dim because of the moonlight,
and the Milky Way--invisible--trailed symbolically above her head.

Where the lane began to descend she heard the dry rustling of last
year's oak leaves shivered over by a little wayward breeze; the
gleam of the pond appeared, and upon it the very black shadows of
the two ilexes.  The moonlight splintered itself upon the larches.
She went softly, to pause by the pond, persuaded to loiter there a
moment by her own self-consciousness and the night's mystery.  She
fancied that she could see a light shining beyond the trunks of the
larches, and she watched it for a moment as she went on past the
pond.  She opened the gate, hesitated and was guided by the light.
A little below her lay the farm buildings, very black, and with
their roofs glimmering a little, and as she followed the path along
the edge of the larch plantation she felt like a woman playing the
part of a timid child.  But how absurd!  To thrill a little over
the fetching of a jug of milk from a farmhouse on a moonlight night
in March!

She reached the yew hedge and was puzzled.  Where was the door?  In
the wall facing her or over there where the house sent out a dark
projection?  Straight ahead she saw a window all a-flicker with the
light of a fire, and it seemed to her that a weedy path went that
way.  She tried it, and saw the three stone steps and the leaded
hood over the door.

She was on the very point of knocking when a sound surprised her,
three deep rich chords played upon a piano.  Her hand was
restrained.  Those prelude sounds were followed by one of Chopin's
ballades, played as a strong man might be expected to play it, with
a largeness of touch and a good deal of feeling.  She was
astonished.  But why--astonishment.  A man might be a farmer and
yet love music.  Her first thought had been that Furze was the
owner of a pianola, but a moment's listening told her that the
music was made by human hands.

She stood and heard it out, the white jug held against her body and
between her two breasts.  Her knock, when it came, was rather
tentative and timid.  It was answered by the barking of a dog.
Then she heard footsteps, and the door was opened.


3


He did not recognize her at once, for she was in the shadow, and
the light from the fire was wayward.

"Yes--what is it?"

He saw the white jug held to her bosom.

"Milk?"

She spoke quickly, as though a little out of breath.

"I'm so sorry to trouble you at this hour.  My people are ill.  The
doctor ordered milk."

"Miss Viner--"

He stood back a little, and was silent for a moment, as though he
was in doubt about something, or was embarrassed by her coming, and
she noticed his hesitation.  She did not expect hesitation in him;
deliberation--perhaps.

"I'm sorry.  Nothing very serious--I hope?"

"Bronchitis."

"Both?"

"Yes."

"Rather hard luck on you.  The jug--"

She gave him the jug, wondering whether he was going to leave her
standing on the doorstep, and if so--why?  She could see Bobbo's
fluffy head pressed against one of Furze's legs; even the dog
seemed to deliberate.

"Won't you come in a moment?  By the fire--while I go to the dairy.
I'm afraid I'm rather a backwoodsman."

Now that he had asked her in she hung back.

"O, no--I mustn't bother you; I'll wait here."

"Please come in.  I won't keep you a moment."

There was that in his voice which said "You shall come in," and she
obeyed it, and to mask the surrender she spoke to the dog,
caressing the fluffy head, and drawing it against her knee.

"What a dear!  Your farm dog--?"

"Yes."

She would not show him her face, but while she bent over Bobbo she
was all eyes and ears, and trembling with a quick and darting
curiosity.  She saw him move to the right, and put his hand behind
him, and close a door that appeared to open into another room.
Now, why did he do that?  She supposed that the piano was in that
other room.

And suddenly she felt herself stiffen.  She was assailed by a
consciousness of herself as an intruder, trespassing upon something
that he wished to hide.  But what could he wish to hide?  A piano
and a room which seemed to have had no light in it?  She stiffened
more awkwardly as her thoughts extended.

"Won't you sit down?"

He had pushed the one chair forward and she seated herself as
though she were made of china, while he--with a queer look at her,
went out by another door, carrying her jug.  She heard the scraping
of a match.  And sitting very still, she turned a head on a rigid
neck, and scanned this room of his and its poverty and disorder,
its improvised tables, its pile of logs in a corner, its camp bed.
Surely, he did not live in this room?  No, that could not be.  The
work-bench with its litter of tools and leather and odd pieces of
harness convinced her that he used this room to work in.  And in
her innocence she supposed that the dog slept upon the camp bed.

She heard Furze returning, and directly he reappeared she stood up.

"Thank you so much."

She held out her hands for the jug, smiling uneasily, her eyes
downcast and hidden by their smoking lashes.  She was in a kind of
panic mood, and when she got herself to the door she realized that
he was behind her.

"Good night, Mr. Furze."

"I'm coming out," he said; "take care of the steps.  Wait while I
light a lantern."

She spilt some of the milk on the doorstep while she was quaking
there, wanting to run, but holding herself back from such
foolishness.  He was lighting his lantern bending over it as it
stood on the table.

"I'll light you down the lane."

"O, please," she said; "don't bother; there is a moon."

"I have to come out, anyway," was his reply.

He came and held the lantern shoulder high so that she could see
the steps, and when she was down them he moved quickly in front of
her to light her along the path.

"Just follow."

She followed, and when they reached the gate he held it open for
her.

"Please," she said, "I can manage now."

He closed the gate deliberately.

"Oh, I shall be up most of the night.  It so happens, if you call
it wasting my time--"

She walked on--and he was beside her.

"Up most of the night?"

"Yes--lambs."

But she was still asking herself why he had closed the door of that
other room just as though he had something or someone to hide.  And
yet--if he was to be up half the night--?  And--anyway--did it
matter?  She saw the Six Firs towering overhead, and feeling that
her silence had been rather churlish she turned her face to him as
they reached the road.

"You must not come any farther.  Good night."

"Good night.  I hope your people will soon be better.  We shall
both be looking after helpless creatures--you and I."

His voice held her there for a moment, very still, and looking up
at him.

"I think I heard you playing--"

"O, my poor old piano--yes.  Schubert.  Good for these winter
evenings.  And then I heard your knock."

She was holding the white jug to her breast, and to him her eyes
appeared dark and immense.

"You must go to your lambs, Mr. Furze.  Good night."

He stood and watched her go down the road.



IV


1


Arnold Furze struck back along the lane, and turned into the Gore
Field by the gate opposite the pond.  He had blown out his lantern,
for in truth it had not been needed after its lighting of Mary
Viner down the steps and along the path, with the moon's silver
lamp rising in the sky.  Furze loitered here, one arm along the bar
of the gate, the old thorn trees in the hedge making a shaggy
blackness, and the Gore sloping away from his feet like a mirror
that has been breathed upon.

His sheep were pastured here, for he preferred to run them on the
grass to folding them on a root crop, and at the end of the field
and under the shelter of the Gore Wood were the pens and shelters
of hurdles and faggots where the lambing ewes and their lambs were
kept snug for the first few days.  But for the moment Furze was not
thinking of his ewes.  He was thinking of Mary Viner and her big
brown eyes with their smoking lashes, and her quick changes of
colour, and her air of breathlessness.  A creature so easily scared
and silenced--so he thought.  And sensitive, and not too happy.
Yet, she puzzled him, and he, supposed that he did not know much
about women.  He had been too busy doing things.  But her moods and
their expressions seemed to blow this way and that like brown
leaves on a March day; she appeared to be moved by vague currents
that would not have been perceived by his stronger nature.  She was
yea and nay all in one breath, giving him the impression of a
palpitating, warm-blooded bird.  Her refusing to enter his house--
for instance, and then her coming in, and the queer blight that had
swept suddenly over her face after he had closed the door of Mrs.
Damans' parlour.  Certainly, he had hesitated about asking her in,
for never till that moment had he realized the almost sordid
poverty of his house.  It had come upon him in a flash when he had
seen her there with the white jug pressed to her bosom, and her
brown eyes all glimmering.  It had come as a shock.  He had put out
a hand and closed that other door because he had felt that house's
nakedness and was suddenly ashamed of it.

What had she thought of his room with its rough tables and its
litter and its deplorable old chair?  It must have seemed to her a
squalid hole.  And what if the seeming squalor of it had attached
itself to her impression of him?  He was conscious of a gust of
mortification.

She would not understand--perhaps--how he had had to labour
incessantly and furiously in the service of the soil, and that he
had had neither the time nor the patience nor the money to be
fastidious?  He had just succeeded in keeping clean.  But that
room, and Mary sitting on the edge of the chair as though she was
not sure of it, and her air of rigid decorum, and her half-
frightened eyes, and her hurry to be gone!

"Damn!" he said, and flung away from the gate and down the field.
"I can't afford sentiment--at present."

For the rest of the night, under the waning moon and the
shepherding stars, he was kept busy.  Crouching in one of the
shelters, with his lamp hung from a forked stake, he had to succour
one of the ewes.  It was life and death in the sheep pen, with the
moon paling and the stars going over, and a little whispering wind
coming with the dawn, and Furze, like the eternal shepherd, losing
life and saving it.  In the greyness of the dawn the poor ewe lay
dead, and Furze, tired and grave eyed, went up the slope of the
Gore with a new-born lamb wrapped up in his coat.

Passing through the gate he met Will Blossom coming to his day's
work, and the two men looked at the little, long-legged creature.

"I'm sorry to have lost that ewe, Will."

"They will die, sir."

The blue eyed man spoke as though dying was a natural cussedness.

"You'll give he the bottle."

Furze smiled, and stroked the lamb's head.

"Bring me up an armful of hay, Will.  The little fellow can lodge
in my room."

So Bobbo sat and watched a little bleating thing lying on a sack on
his master's bed, while Furze routed out an old hamper, and filled
it with hay, and put the orphan to bed beside the fire.  Bobbo was
a very wise dog; he knew all about sheep and their stupidities, and
the mischievous vagaries of young cattle.  The lamb was as safe
with him as it would have been with its own mother.

Furze looked from the lamb to the dog.

"Gentle, Bobbo.  We've got to be gentle, old chap, to all such
things."

The dog's amber eyes stared up at him devotedly.  The night was
over, but the day's work waited, and Furze went into the kitchen to
wash.


2


There were other ministrations at "Green Shutters" where two old
people lay propped up in bed, with all the sitting-room cushions
brought into use because the number of the Viner pillows were
limited.  They coughed separately and they coughed in chorus, poor
old Hesketh very red in the face, and Mrs. Charlotte all fluffed up
like a sick bird.  They were very much worried about each other.

"I'm afraid I shall keep you awake, dear."

"I shall do that myself, my love.  You are the one to be pitied."

"I could not sleep--anyway--Hesketh.  I should be sitting up with
you.  It must have been that wretched 'bridge' party.  The Vachetts
had terrible colds."

And Mary was cumbered with much serving.  She had a fire to light
in the old people's bedroom, and Dr. Ransford had given her
instructions to keep it up, and they were to have their medicine
during the night, and some warm milk if they fancied it.  She was
in no mood for bed or the prospect it offered her of emerging from
the warmth of it every two hours to put coals on the fire or to
pour out medicine.  An arm-chair in front of the sitting-room fire
seemed to her a more practical and comfortable proposition, for she
had a book to read, if she chose to read it.  Moreover, bed might
have proved too persuasive, and her duties have sunk submerged
beneath a healthy young woman's need of sleep.

Mary belonged to a generation that values comfort, and though she
had had no chance of experiencing the complete flavour of it, her
sensitive nostrils could quiver over the imagined perfume.  Her
parents' ideas upon comfort were utterly different from her own,
and to express her ideal of it she arranged the two arm-chairs in
front of the fire, and curling up in one of them, disposed of her
legs and feet in the other.  She had brought her pillow down from
her bedroom, and collected her novel, and two or three copies of
the weekly illustrated magazines lent her by Winnifred Twist.  A
box of chocolates would have completed the illusion.

For it was an illusion.  She had just snuggled down and opened the
Bystander when she heard the rapping of her father's stick on the
floor of the room above.  She was wanted.  She had to get out of
her two chairs and go upstairs where a night-light was burning,
throwing the shadows of two heads upon the wall.  The room had a
flat, warm, stuffy smell.

"Mary, dear, your father feels so sick."

"Get me--a basin," said her father, with the anxious and earthy
face of a man urgently in need of it.

She was just in time.  She steadied the basin for him, and when the
paroxysm was over and he crouched there panting, she supported his
poor old head against her bosom.  How deplorably thin the back of
his neck looked.  She too was feeling overwhelmed by a sense of
nausea, and the stuffy heat of the room.  But how beastly of her!
Though somehow--she could not help it.

Her mother was twittering.

"You had better empty the basin."

Of course she would have to empty the basin when her father felt
secure without it.

"Can you manage now, daddy?"

Captain Viner's head was back on the pillow.

"Yes, my dear, thank you.  But I think I will have it on a chair."

She carried the basin away, emptied it, washed it, and returning,
placed it on a chair beside the bed.  Was there anything else she
could do for them?  No, not for the moment.  They were grateful to
her, nicely appreciative.

"Sorry to give you all this trouble, child."

"O,--that's all right, daddy."

She patted his old hand with its blue veins and shiny and mottled
skin, and closed the door gently, and descended the stairs with a
dreary sense of having done her duty.  Pity?  O, yes--she felt all
three of them were to be pitied, but then--the other two had lived
their lives, and she saw no possible chance of living hers.  The
dutiful and loving daughter!  Why could not she be that, and not
the grudging, restless, squeamish creature that she was, yearning
for things to happen--so long as they happened to her?  Were there
any dutiful daughters, ministering angels who found complete and
wholehearted satisfaction in surrendering to others?  She wondered.
She could not help wondering, because her own flesh rebelled so
fiercely.  She hated poverty and housework, and coal fires, and the
smell of dishcloths, and the greasy water in which you had washed
up, and the reek of boiled cabbage, and the eternal dusting, and
the washing of soiled clothes.  Always, her sensitive gorge was
rising, and her fastidious and eager spirit shrinking from the
things she had to touch.

"What an egotist I am," she thought and pulled the two arm-chairs
apart, and sat down in one of them, shoulders rounded, her arms
wrapped round her knees.  Her little illusion of a transient
basking before the fire had gone.  She felt like a cat with a wet
fur.

Irritably she picked up one of the illustrated papers and turned
over its pages.

How tantalizing!  She found herself regarding pictures of the
fortunate world parading and playing tennis where the sun shone and
the sea was blue.  Ah, that blue sea!  She could imagine it, and
the orange trees in fruit and flower, and the mimosa and the olives
and the palms.  A world of flowers and of sunlight, and of colour,
and of spacious, golden hours.  Things must happen down there.
Sister Clare had passed a gorgeous three weeks at Monte Carlo.  She
had written letters, and sent them vivid picture-postcards in which
sea and sky were two splashes of blue.

She threw the magazine aside, and sank back into the chair.  Her
mouth looked thin, and she bit restlessly at her lower lip.  She
was Cinderella, the new Cinderella, peevish and pale, with brown
eyes that asked questions.

Presently, she fell asleep.  She had not meant to fall asleep; it
just happened.  And she slept the rest of the night there, to be
wakened by a sound which she took to be the clamour of her alarum
clock.  In bed?  Not a bit of it.  A greyness was stealing in, and
the fire was out, and she heard the grandfather clock striking the
half hour.

She jumped up.  It was the back door bell that she had heard, and
she found the red-nosed boy there, a young Blossom, with the milk
can.

"You're late," she said crossly.

"Know I be.  Muster Furze was up all night lambin'."

"What's that got to do with it?" she asked.

The boy stared at this ignorant and unreasonable creature.

"'E were late with the milkin', o' course."

She felt snubbed.  So--he--had been up all night.  And she wondered
whether he felt as cross as she did.


3


A little flickering yellowness in the tree tops, and the daffodils
blown flat in Furze's orchard, such seemed the beginnings of the
spring that year.  Skipping lambs and bleating ewes, and the sallow
blossom flashing a pale gold and the celandines out in the moist
places.  A night's gale had stripped tiles off the roof, and
unroofed two of the lambing pens.  On the soil it is the expected
that happens, and a man of the soil must expect trouble.

But, looked at largely, life was very good, even when you had the
stress of the year before you, and the weeds were ready to grow.
Soon, the wryneck would be calling, and the cuckoo ringing the
valley with its double note.  Moreover, Arnold had bought a carpet,
two basket chairs, a sofa, a small painted wood table, a fender,
and a length of cretonne to be cobbled into curtains before the
fire at night, with the lamb, the cat and the dog making a queer
group upon the two sacks that served as a hearth rug.  Furze's lips
were very compressed over the making of those curtains, and he was
inclined to breathe heavily.  Bobbo would sit on his stumpy tail
and watch.

"What the devil's this?"

His barley sugar eyes had observed many phenomena, but this stuff
spread over Furze's knees--what was it?

"Camouflage, old dog," said his master.

There were times when he talked aloud to Bobbo, finding him a
sympathetic animal, and not like Tibby the cat who was the blackest
of egoists.

"Ever missed an opportunity, old chap?  Let an obvious rabbit get
away--when it ought to have had no chance with you?"

Bobbo had.  He blinked his eyes at the lamb who was becoming a bit
of a nuisance, and altogether too sure of himself, trotting and
butting about the place as though the earth belonged to him.  Bobbo
was a disciplinarian so far as sheep were concerned; it was time
the lamb went to school; he was getting through his period of long-
legged and silly charm, and would soon be a stupid beast.  Bobbo
had no opinion of the brain of a sheep.

Furze poked away carefully with his needle.  The carpet was down in
Mrs. Damaris' parlour, and the furniture arranged, and on the white
walls he had tacked up three or four coloured pictures collected
from some old magazines.  Obviously, furnishing was some business,
and he had tried the chairs, the sofa and the table in every sort
of position, with the table somewhere in the centre of each scheme,
and then had given it up, and left them all backed against the
walls.

"A woman would do it in two minutes," he supposed.

Stitching steadily, he reflected as he often reflected on that lost
opportunity.  Why had he not gone to ask after the health of
Captain and Mrs. Viner?  How simple life might be, and how
difficult one's silly moods and sensitiveness made it!  He had let
three days pass before he had taken young Blossom's place with the
milk-can, and had had the door opened to him by a very unromantic
wench from Carslake.  Her manners had been as slatternly as her
appearance.

"Miss Viner not well?"

"She's abed."

"Serious?"

"Not as I knows of.  Do I pay yer now, or do you send us a bill?"

"I send in a bill.  Will you give my compliments to Miss Viner, and
say that I am sorry?"

The girl had gasped in his face, clutched the milk jug and closed
the door upon him and his compliments.  Compliments indeed!  It
might be a democratic age, but did the man who delivered the milk
send up his condolences to a lady?

Furze stitched away at his curtains.  A south-west wind was
breathing about the house, and upon one window there was the patter
of the rain, and upon the other the tapping of an apple bough in
the orchard.  He had left that bough uncut, like the brushing of
its fingers against the lattice, for when a man lives alone sounds
have a friendly significance.  Warm rain and a southwest wind,
lushing up the young grass in his meadows, and breathing gently
upon the pear and the plum blossom!  The sound of the wind in the
chimney seemed to make a stirring in the heart of the old house,
and he sat and listened as though those empty upper rooms were
coming to life and filling with a presence.  He could imagine feet
going softly to and fro, a creaking of the old boards, hands busy
with white linen.  Yes, a woman's presence, breathing within the
house as the south-west wind breathed outside it.

He put his woman's work aside, rose, and stood up with a
questioning and inward stare, moved by some impulse that seemed to
have come to him out of the wind.  Whence--whither?  Was man but a
creature of the soil, and of the sky?  Did all his yearnings and
strivings grow out of the earth, and put out their inevitable
leaves for the wind to play with?  And leaves died.  The trees cast
them off, and the wind played with them.

He became aware of Bobbo sitting up and solemnly watching his face.

"Moods, old chap, moods."

But he took a candlestick from the shelf, and lit the candle with a
brand from the fire, and opened the door of Mrs. Damaris' parlour.
His head drooped a little.  He had kept a dimly apprehended ideal
shut up with his music in that little room, a room in which the
perfume and the memory of some woman seemed to linger with a
delicate, soft sadness.  It was a woman's room, the one feminine
room in that great empty old house.  It needed a woman.  Yes, good
God, how it needed one!  That furniture!  Quite hopeless!  Why on
earth had he bought it?  Because of a silly, shy male pride, and
after a moment of mortification?

"That's not my job," he thought; "it should be hers."

He closed the door deliberately and firmly, but his hand remained
on the handle.  He had gone down into sudden deep thought, and the
candle, tilted askew, dripped grease upon the floor.  He did not
notice it.  "Hers."  And who was she?  Was she the woman?  Were
hers the hands that were to complete the rough-hewn product of his
labour, to give the soft and delicate touches to the home, to bring
a sense of tenderness and beauty into it?  Flowers, and soft
fabrics, and pretty human things, human because of their
association, and the soft breathing of her about the house, and the
spell of her presence?

Something very deep stirred in him.  Five years of loneliness, and
all that he had lacked!  He began to yearn for it now with a
fierceness that was part of his man's nature.  He was not a man to
love easily or soon.  Oak, deep rich soil, tough fibre, a devotion
that could be tragic.  He stirred like a man in his sleep, and all
the while the dog watched him.  He became aware of the guttering
candle and the grease on the floor.

"Dear heart,--it is time.  The spring is here."

He smiled.  His deep blue eyes had light in them.  He went and
opened the door leading to the old staircase, and climbing it,
passed slowly from room to room.  He stood in the centre of each of
them, looking gravely and intently round.  Yes--this should be the
woman's room, the one looking south over the roof of Mrs. Damaris'
parlour and her garden.  He must do something with that garden.

He came down again to the fire, to find the dog standing absolutely
still beside his chair, waiting and watching for him.

"Dreams, old chap."

The dog's cool nose nudged his hand.

Dreams?  But why should it be a dream?



V


1


Colonel Sykes had finished his tea, and was standing at the window
of the "Simla" dining-room, lighting a cigarette, and looking
uncommonly complacent over it.  He was tallish and slim, with a
birdlike head and a high colour and very English blue eyes.  He
wore an eyeglass.  His hair, growing thin, was of a dubious and
yellowish brown, and most carefully spread like thin butter on a
brown loaf.  He looked youngish for eight and fifty, because of his
slimness and his colour, but when that colour was examined more
closely it lost much of its youthfulness, being a stippling of
minute and twisted blood vessels.  His appearance must have caused
Colonel Sykes to pay much attention to detail.  He shaved twice a
day, so that he should never be caught with an incipient crop of
grey stubble upon his chin.  He was mostly seen in golfing clothes,
grey, very baggy as to the knickers, with a blue and yellow "pull-
over" under the coat, the stockings a soft fawn.  He was alert,
loquacious, and emphatic, and at emphatic moments he would drop his
eye-glass out of his eye.  His friendly loquacity was such that at
times he would talk to his own reflection in a mirror.

Colonel Sykes was a bachelor.  Behind him his cook-housekeeper was
clearing away the tea things from the oak table.  An immensely tall
woman, and incredibly ugly, with a broad flat colourless face, a
black moustache, and grey hairs on her chin, she had been with
Colonel Sykes for seven years.  Her name was Death, Mrs. Jane
Death.  "Cheerful name" as the colonel put it--"and safe."  Having
lived the life, he appreciated safety.  No chance of any romantic
foibles being attached to Jane Death.  "Might as well consider a
little riskiness with Cleopatra's needle."

Colonel Sykes completed the lighting of his cigarette and threw the
match into a brass ash-tray on his writing table.  The woman was
still clearing the table, and he glanced a little testily over his
left shoulder.  What a time she was about it!

The door closed upon the straight immensity of this black figure
and china jiggering on a metal tea-tray.  The colonel faced about
and dropped his eye-glass.  The thought had been recurring of late
that Mrs. Death was becoming a little too authoritative.  "Knows
too much about me, damn it!"  Which she did.  Also, there was
another reason for Toby Sykes' reaction against the funereal
finality of the woman's name.  Death?  Not a bit of it.  He was
feeling young, sentimentally and benignly young, a well-tailored
Orpheus capable of leading life back out of the shades, a bachelor
Orpheus whose young old fingers were fidgeting to twang the strings
of a romantic and domestic lyre!  The inspiration piqued his mature
youthfulness.

Over the mantelpiece hung a mirror of the Regency period, and
Colonel Sykes wandered firewards to look at himself in the mirror,
carefully and with a certain complacent primness.  He passed a hand
over the back of his head, and gathering his eye-glass, adjusted it
into his left eye.

"Capital, capital!  Splendid, splendid!"

Notable words during the war, for the junior members of his mess
had caught their colonel on one occasion in this very same pose,
and addressing his own reflection.  Irreverently they had
christened him the "Parrot."  Those words served him in every sort
of crisis, or when he was feeling young, or had accepted a cigar,
or wished to be sporting at golf, or to praise some noble
sentiment.

"Splendid!  Capital!"

He returned to the window, and from it he could look down the
cinder Via Sacra he had created, and command the various
homesteads, and by shifting his position a little he was able to
obtain a view of a portion of the Viners' back garden.  The
Jamiesons had planted a golden privet hedge against a portion of
the boundary fence and over the top of this hedge Colonel Sykes
beheld a deck chair and a young woman sitting in it.  It was an
April day and warm, but the young woman was all wrapped up, April
herself convalescing after March.

The Colonel's eyes grew sentimental.

"Poor child--poor little Mary."

Twenty-six was she!  And he felt less than forty, and was quite
sure that he could pass for forty-five.  Splendid, splendid!
Capital, capital!  A pretty, affectionate, dark-eyed creature was
Mary Viner, a young woman who stayed at home and did her job, God
bless her, without much jam on her bread.  The poor old Viners were
very dull people, anecdotal sit-by-the-fire folk, and the woman
Death would have made a much more suitable nurse for them than a
pretty girl who ought to have been eating chocolates out of a box.

Colonel Sykes stroked his chin and considered the girl in the deck
chair.  Poor little Mary!  Life was rather hard for her, nothing
but the filling of hot water bottles for a couple of amiable old
bores; and there she was sunning herself after a nasty bout of
'flu.  She needed a month at the seaside or in Switzerland, away
from Harold Coode's patched shirt and his devotion, and the voices
and the strawberry jam faces of the Jamieson children.  Blatant
people those Jamiesons.  Sorry he had sold the land to them.  And
Coode was the sort of fellow who took off his hat when he met a
funeral.  Quite right--of course--and proper, but Coode would do it
with too much nobility, or as though it was the one and only
funeral he had ever met.

Colonel Sykes collected copies of Punch, and the Graphic, and the
Bystander.  Not that he needed an excuse to wander into the "Green
Shutters" garden, and stand with an air of tender distinction
beside Mary's chair.  How was she to-day?  Better?  Capital,
capital; splendid--splendid!  For he was beginning to feel himself
a veritable Lochinvar destined to snatch her up and carry her off
to a world of sentimental happening.  He was sure that she would
make a sweet wife.  He would buy a new car, teach her to play golf,
and rid himself of the Death woman.

Pausing with his bundle of magazines he looked with sentimental
blue eyes in the direction of the gentle lady.  Someone was coming
up the cinder road, a man in a grey green suit, and wearing new
brown boots that glistened.  That fellow Furze--"Captain Furze!"
To Colonel Sykes there was no incongruity in the reverting of a
temporary captain to the status of a milkman, but when he saw Furze
stop at the "Green Shutters" gate he felt challenged.  What did the
chap want there?  Had he called for his money?  The Viners were
never anything but hard up.  And the fellow could not be allowed to
dun the household when Mary was lying there convalescing.

Obviously--no!  Colonel Toby had begun to think of her as his Mary.
He settled his eye-glass, tucked the magazines under one arm, and
went out for kindly intervention should intervention be necessary.
He rather hoped that it would.

Reaching the "Green Shutters" gate he saw no one on the doorstep.
Had the fellow pushed his way in?  Colonel Sykes deliberated, and
then cut neatly round the house to the patch of grass at the back
of it, to find Furze standing beside Mary Viner's chair.  H'm,
damned cheek!  Surely--?

He was very much the great gentleman.  He arrived convincingly on
the other side of Mary's chair, eye-glass glimmering, magazines at
the present, his heels together.

"Well, how are we to-day?  Better?  Capital, capital!  Brought you
a few things to look at."

Very properly, when he had paid his homage to the lady, he attended
to the man.

"Afternoon, Furze."

Furze smiled and nodded.

"Good afternoon, sir."

The next few moments were a little awkward, for Furze remained on
the other side of the chair with an air of having as much right to
be there as had Colonel Sykes, yes--and more right.  He was twenty-
five years younger; he had come in the spring of the year to this
April woman; he made the Colonel look like a withered old
chanticleer.  Moreover, he had ease, and the repose of a strong
thing rooted on that grass patch, a little shy and reserved, but
capable of smiling.

Colonel Toby did not feel like smiling.  He dropped his eye-glass,
picked up one of the magazines, and discovering a particular
picture, displayed it before Mary's eyes.

"See that.  Sir Carnaby Jackson.  Knew him in India.  Used to play
polo together."

"How interesting."

She looked at the photo of Sir Carnaby, and Colonel Sykes looked
at her.  What was the matter?  Frightened?  Yes, she looked
frightened, distressed.  Surely, that fellow had not come to
present a bill for milk and eggs?  He glanced under his yellow-grey
eyebrows at Furze who was staring intently and with a puzzled
gentleness at Mary's feet.  Tucked up in the rug they had fidgeted
themselves free, and one shoe was half off.  The colonel was
shocked.  He saw Furze bend down as if he was doing the most
natural thing in the world, he slipped the shoe back on to Mary
Viner's foot, and readjusted the rug.

"Damn the fellow!" thought Colonel Sykes.

He replaced his eye-glass, and discovered blushes, a glowing
quivering face, and eyes that were veiled.  No wonder!  Infernal
cheek of the chap!  He felt excessively hot and annoyed.  Capital,
capital, splendid, splendid!  No, not exactly.  And Furze had his
hands in his pockets, and was looking down at the rug-covered feet,
and was smiling as in a dream.

Colonel Sykes cleared his throat.  Something needed saying--and the
remark that arrived had to be directed to old Hesketh who appeared
with a trowel and a trug basket containing--well--of all things--
the scrapings of the chicken house.

"Ha--Viner, active again--I see."

Captain Hesketh was one of God's most simple creatures.

"A little something for my sweet peas, Sykes."

"Capital--capital!"

But the surprise was yet to come.  The big fellow appeared to wake
out of his dream.  He was smiling at old Hesketh and taking the
trug from him, and though they had only approached each other over
milk bills, they went off together like a couple of dogs who
understood each other from the first mingling of their doggy sense
of smell.  Furze was saying something to the old man.  They walked
on past the six blackcurrant bushes and the two scraggy pyramid
apple trees to where old Hesketh cherished his sweet peas.

Colonel Sykes' eye-glass fell out of his eye, and he bent devotedly
and just a little deprecatingly over the April woman.

"My dear little lady--I do hope--ahem--that that fellow has not
been--"

She went the colour of June.

"I don't quite understand."

Her brown eyes were all blurred.  Colonel Sykes smoothed the air
with a suave hand.

"You really must excuse me, little lady.  I am concerned.  The
fellow has been worrying you--"

She was almost voiceless.

"Worrying?"

"Yes, with some wretched milk bill--or other."

Her face seemed to sink into an extraordinary and blank silence.
She was groping for something--her handkerchief.  She found it and
pressed it over her mouth.


2


Colonel Sykes never discovered the truth of the matter, for when
his April Lady had smothered what he took to be a spasm of
coughing, she erected a barrier between herself and that too
intimate and sentimental eye-glass.  She spread one of the papers
he had brought her, and made desultory remarks upon the
illustrations, while he had to stand at the back of her chair in
order to see what she was talking about.

"Ha," he said to himself, "sensitive--proud, of course.  Does not
wish to talk about it.  Such sweet, silent pride is adorable."

When all the pictures had been looked at twice Punch was put away,
and then the brown eyes of Mary Viner rediscovered her lover.
Colonel Toby's eye-glass glimmered towards the same quarter, the
strip of ground beyond the currant bushes and the apple trees.
Dash it, if the fellow had not got his coat off, and possessed
himself of a spade, and was hard at it opening a trench for the
planting of Captain Viner's sweet peas.  And there was old Hesketh
with his trugful--of--ahem--tipping it into the bottom of the
trench that Furze was digging!

"Capital, capital!  So--Mr. Furze comes in and does odd jobs for
you?"

She did not appear to catch the remark.

"A useful fellow.  Might employ him myself--now and again.  By the
way--what does he charge by the hour?"

Her brown eyes remained utterly innocent.

"I don't know.  Why not ask him?"

He had had his "devoir" given him by his dear lady, and since his
sense of direction was limited and his only movements were one of
advance or retreat, he marched across to where Furze was digging
and old Hesketh was scattering the colour that was to be.  Mary
could do nothing else but watch.  She saw Arnold Furze pause in his
digging, and stand with his two hands on his spade.  Colonel Sykes
was speaking, and Furze was looking into the colonel's face.  The
man with the spade had dignity, and realizing his dignity she was
both afraid and glad.

Colonel Sykes returned to her.  He did not see the faces of the two
Jamieson children projecting above the fence, each with a penny
screwed into an eye, but Mary saw them, and all her sympathy was
with the colonel.  The Jamieson children always produced in her an
angry and self-conscious seriousness.  She lost her sense of humour--
and she had not too much of it--when those two strawberry-jam
faces appeared above the fence.  Little beasts!  Her elderly
Orpheus discovered her a readier listener to his sentimental music.

"The man's too busy.  I asked him.  Wonder if I put my foot in it,
Mary?"

She dared to remind him that Furze was a farmer, and that when a
man had a hundred and twenty acres and cattle to look after--
Besides, in spite of a surface smile, she had her grievance against
the great man.  She could not decide how much or how little guile
lay behind that eye-glass.  Having lived with her father's
simplicity for twenty years and marvelled at it, she was on the
watch for a like simplicity in other old soldiers.  For to her
Colonel Sykes was old, though he did not appear to know it.

Very properly he asked after her mother, while she tried not to see
those detestable children, each with one blue eye and one copper
one.  They were beginning to giggle.

"Mother is rather weak--still."

Colonel Sykes had "Capital, capital"--on the tip of his tongue but
managed to withdraw the words before they had escaped.

"She must be careful.  These spring days--treacherous--you know.
Sure--now--that you don't feel chilly, dear lady?"

She assured him that she felt quite warm, and was suddenly and
horribly afraid that he was about to do something foolish.  She
felt it in the air, a quivering of his sandy eyelashes over eyes
that were suffused and tender.  O, bother the men; he was going to
be as troublesome as poor Coode!  And then the Jamieson children
extracted her from this delicate situation.

Giggles, and the sound of a mouth making a smacking sound on the
back of a fat red hand!  Colonel Sykes, looking round sharply, saw
the two faces and the pennies.  He glared.  The two heads
disappeared, and there were sounds of joy behind the fence.

He lingered a moment, very stiff and proper, keeping that brave
circle of crystal glued into his red face.

"Damn those infernal children!  That's what comes of selling land
to such people."

Mary lay relaxed, eyes half closed, watching Furze and her father.


3


Under her rug lay a bunch of primroses.  He had brought them
wrapped up and hidden in a clean handkerchief.  "We have lots of
these.  I thought you might like a few."  He had stood holding them
with an air of grave shyness until she had put out a hand and taken
them, and thanked him, not looking at his face but at the flowers.
She had heard his voice going on.  "They came out of Gore Wood.
Masses of them there since I had some oaks felled and the underwood
cut over.  Same with other flowers.  Bluebells later, like a bit of
blue sky fallen down on the ground.  And then--foxgloves.  I hope
you are better?"

A bunch of primroses, that was Colonel Sykes' imaginary bill,
concealed from the conquering eye-glass, lying snugly somewhere
near her bosom.  She lay and watched the two over yonder, the
strong man with the spade, and poor old Hesketh with his egg-shaped
head looking too heavy for his thin neck, and his long legs
flopping about as though neither quite knew what the other was
doing.  She heard Furze speaking to her father, and his voice had a
gentleness.

She felt warmed, and yet curiously alert and afraid.  He disturbed
her.  He appeared to her as deliberate as the seasons, a vernal
equinox of a man, part of the inevitable purpose of the soil.  And
he was no fool.  Cinder Town was full of fools, nice and otherwise,
and there were times when she grasped the implication of their
foolish ineffectualness.  That was why Cinder Town was.  His
chousing of Colonel Toby had impressed her.  So wisely done, and
yet so naturally!  To go off with her father and get a spade and to
start digging!  She had known at once that his spade would outlast
and out-talk Colonel Sykes' tongue.  Doomsday!  No, assuredly he
was not to be hustled out of his opportunity, having made it and
seized it, or--perhaps planted it.

She knew that presently he would come back to her and stand beside
her chair.  She was both afraid and excited.  His eyes looked at
you as though you were a piece of land that he wanted and meant to
have, not arrogantly, but with profound conviction.  She neither
accepted her liking of him nor repelled it.  He was just there, to
be looked at and wondered about, something new and strange, an open
doorway in her dull life.

The work was over.  He had put on his coat.  He came towards her
with her father, still carrying the spade.  He stood beside her
with a kind of glowing silence, looking at her figure, for an
impulse that was feminine had made her slip the rug back so that
the bunch of primroses showed.  She did not mean all that he
thought she meant.

"I am so glad you are better."

He glanced at old Hesketh.

"It was good of you, sir, to let me--Yes, I must be getting back
now.  Work is never done on a farm."

He raised his hat, and the glow of him seemed to envelop her.

"You have saved my back," said her father.  "Mary, Mr. Furze ought
to have had tea with us."

She found her voice.

"Oh--another day--perhaps."



IV


1


For Arnold Furze, life, that spring, renewed all its strangeness
and its mystery.  It began with the singing of birds in the
greyness of the dawn, a chant such as it seemed to him he had never
heard before, the whole earth waking suddenly into exultation.
Pipings in the orchard and in the hedgerows.  But there were other
volumes of song, a massed chorus that came from Gore Wood, and
another and fainter thrilling that trembled across the meadows from
Rushy.  A blackbird in the "Doomsday" orchard led off the chant
each morning, and a thrush ended it, piping "Awake--awake" to the
blossom that slumbered.  Furze never drew a curtain, for daylight
found him stirring, and in the long light evenings he was about
till dusk sent him to bed.  The rising sun looked in at the orchard
window, and lit up the rosy lips of the apple blossom, and turned
the young green of the pear leaves to gold.  Masses of white cloud
floated brilliantly above the dim blue woods.  And on rainy
mornings even the rain sang a song to him.  Murmuring upon the
great, spreading roof of the cow-house, it joined its soft moist
music to the purr of the milk into the milking pail.

About half-past five was his usual hour for rising, but this spring
he rose at five, adding those extra minutes to the day's labour of
mystery.  Those still and secret hours of the dawn, with the yellow
sunlight stealing through, and dew everywhere, and the stillness
and the solitude, how he loved them.  Each dawn came with a sense
of adventure.  He would put a match to some kindling and hang the
kettle over it, and go out and up the lane as far as Six Firs,
Bobbo at his heels--and as grey as the dew-covered grass.  He would
climb the mound, and stand for a moment looking towards the little
red and white and green and brown houses.  Cinderella Town!  They
were asleep down there.  They had nothing to get them out of bed,
no clamorous crops, and no cows with swelling udders, and all the
essential urgency of the soil.  But she--she would be up earlier
than most of them, mysteriously busy about mysteriously simple
things, lighting fires and sweeping rooms.  The distant
contemplation of her labours fascinated him, for they were coming
to have a personal meaning for him, a glamour, a tenderness.  The
man in him reached out to the imagined woman in her.  He saw her at
"Doomsday," moving about the house, more happily busy perhaps than
she could be down yonder.

Wandering back with his face to the dawn he would see his old house
as a symbol, raising its chimneys above the young green of the
larches.  The flames of the wood fire would be licking the black
kettle.  That early cup of tea and slice of bread and butter had
the flavour of a sacrament.  Then followed his half-hour of
service.  Chicken coops had been banished from Mrs. Damaris'
garden; he had scythed the grass, and collected some flagstones and
made a path, and now he was at work digging a border under the grey
wall and two beds--one on either side of the path.  He had begged,
bought, or scrounged plants, sweet-williams, Canterbury bells,
white pinks, snapdragons.  He was sowing annuals, larkspur,
correopsis, candytuft, marigold, flax, Virginia stock, mignonette,
nasturtiums.  My Lady's garden should be dressed and perfumed after
all these years.  Flowers for Cinderella.

For she had taken his primroses.

His large simplicity moved to the new measure.  Never had he felt
so strong or so tireless, and yet he seemed to have more time to
think and to feel.  The days had lost all sense of effort.  Driving
the milk cans to Melhurst station, or harrowing his wheat, or
rolling the meadows, or milking, or hoeing his bean field, he felt
life moving easily, like a young man well mounted setting out upon
an adventure.  His love for the old place increased.  He would
wander out in the dusk, with the birds singing their vespers, and
the woods growing a greyish blue, and a faint mist spreading over
the Long Meadow.  Perhaps he would wander in among the oaks of Gore
Wood, where the young oak foliage was the colour of gold above the
pale faces of the last primroses.  Wild hyacinths were beginning to
make a blueness there.

Why should he not ask her to come and see them?

Yes, he wanted her to see it all, to be able to spread it before
her in its beauty as he saw it, the fading gorse and the yellow
broom of the Wilderness, and the young bracken like shepherds'
crooks, and the golden spikes of the beeches bursting with an
incredible greenness, and his orchard in bloom, and those emerald
larches, and Rushy Pool with a few kingcups still left, and his
meadows, and his sleek violet-eyed cattle.  Surely she would love
it all as he did, and feel the beauty and the goodness and the
cleanness of this English land.  Devoutly dreaming, he believed
that she would.

"Mary Viner, Mary Viner."

The thrush who perched on the old cedar sang her name.  He saw the
face in the milk, her lips in the budding apple blossom, her eyes
in the brown water.

But chiefly now he loved to loiter in Mrs. Damaris' garden under
the window of the white parlour, for it was here that his man's
thoughts took shape.  He would stand with his back against the
stone wall, and watch the light die out of the sky, and the stars
prick the increasing blackness.  Here was grass for her feet, and
flowers for her hands.  Next spring it should be a mass of
hyacinths and tulips.  Music in colour--a Schubert's song.

Then, perhaps, he would go in and feel a little chilled by the
empty and barren house.  No fit place for her yet, but if her heart
was as his he felt that he could pull the welkin down to hang it on
the walls for her.  Hangings of blue and of gold.

Meanwhile he would light the lamp, and sit down at the rough table
with the account book and a pencil and some odd pieces of paper,
and make calculations and scribble little sums.  His figures were
like himself, large and simple and steadfast.  He would run his
hand over his wavy brown head.  Supposing he did without the corn-
crusher and the new wagon and harness in the autumn?  The reaper he
must have.  The farm was showing a profit; he had money at the
bank; he felt sure that his strong hands could drag more money ont
of the soil.  Yes, supposing he furnished a bedroom, the parlour,
the sitting-room and the kitchen, not flimsily, no, but with gear
fit for her?  By God--of course it could be done.  The soil had
been swallowing everything; it was fat and lusty; let the house
have its turn.

Arnold was a man of method--even as a lover, and part of his
success as a farmer was due to his methodical intelligence.  He
kept accurate accounts, a diary, and a day book in which he entered
up the work for the week in front of him, and the keeping of these
books was an act of heroism, as any man who has to strive with the
soil will tell you.  To feel dog-tired and sleepy, and yet to make
yourself sit down and scribble!  That is where will-force comes in,
and Furze had been taught that half the farming of England is
laborious and haphazard, without that last flip of intelligence
which knows where the muck goes, or how the money comes, and has it
down on paper.

He did his scribbling last thing at night, after half an hour at
his piano, sitting in socks, breeches and shirt, his feet tucked
back under his chair, both arms spread on the table.  He hated this
scribbling but he made himself do it, and many had been the times
when he had blessed himself for doing it.  It was a check on
himself, and a check on Will Blossom, for however good a man's body
is--his brain may be a sheep's, and such was Will's.

But now Furze would pause and dream a little.  He might win a
partner.  And perhaps she would sit at a table and write for him
while he dictated the day's doings.  A wife was interested--surely?

"You are tired, Arnold.  Sit and smoke and talk, and I'll write."

Yes, he would love her for that, and perhaps she would love doing
it.

The routine of his life began to be altered in a dozen significant
ways.  His camp-bed had ascended into one of the bedrooms; the
kitchen became a kitchen, and the living-room something of what it
should be.  Logs ceased to be piled in a corner; the work-bench was
transferred to an out-house.  The home-made table had its legs
planed and stained, and its top covered with a blue and white
cloth.  Sarah Blossom gave the house two days a week instead of
one, and she--being a woman--had eyes in her head and a tongue.

"Muster Furze be sweet on someone."

Yes, because a man does not become suddenly fussy about his house,
and rise to table cloths and electroplated spoons and forks without
an adequate reason.  And that garden, and those flowers!  Mrs.
Blossom was a little, thin, rat-trap of a woman with a bluish tip
to her long nose, and straight, mouse-coloured hair dragged back
very tight off her forehead.  She was a careful woman, close, with
shiny and clutching red hands.  Furze had always noticed her hands.
He disliked the idea of them touching his food.

Mrs. Blossom talked.  In such little, mean lives as hers talking
becomes a vice, a vocal drunkenness or incontinence.  She got her
excitement out of talking.  Yes, Furze was wearing two shirts a
week instead of one; changed his working shirt after milking-time.
And three soft collars a week instead of one and a half.  And he
had a new pair of brown shoes, and he shaved himself every day.
And he had planed those table legs and stained them!  Hee, hee,
hee!

Mrs. Blossom had an irreverent mind.  Those table legs seemed to
her a great jest.  She would go off into thin laugher that was
rather like a sheep's bleating, and press her red hands to her
breastless bosom, and screw her head on one side.

"Don't know who 'tis--but there's a gel--somewhere."

She was always cross-questioning Will.

"Ain't you seen a gel--any time?"

Will hadn't.  Domestic life had tended to make him more and more
like a blue-eyed bull, surly and sluggish, and breaking out
occasionally into exasperated bellowings.  He was a good fellow,
but in the bull-ring of marriage his wife's tongue maddened him.

"Guess it be one of the gels at Cinder Town."

She was so eager to get her nasty little blue-tipped nose into the
mystery of Arnold Furze's transfiguration that she would go
wandering down the lane of an evening, ostensibly to gather rabbit
food.  The Blossom cottage stood on the road to Rotherbridge.  When
met and spoken to butter would not melt in her mouth, but remained
there to turn rancid.

"Evening, Mrs. Blossom."

"Good evening to you, sir."

She had caught him in the lane, wearing a clean collar, and with
something bulging in his pocket, and going towards the main road.
She had an apron full of green herbage.  She idled after him far
enough to see that he went down to the Sandihurst Estate.  There
were happenings in the air.  Will had had orders to have the blue
wagon and the greys ready early to-morrow morning.  There was to be
a sale at Melhurst.  Mrs. Blossom had seen the auctioneer's placard
posted on the back of Mr. Burnham's cow-shed.


2


Mary Viner was mowing the lawn.  She herself called it a grass
plot, but to her mother and her father it was the lawn, twenty feet
square between the road and the fence and the house.  An ash path
divided it on Harold Coode's side from the herbaceous border;
towards the Jamiesons it was flanked by a privet hedge that did not
exclude the red and intrusive faces of the Jamieson children.  The
lawn held a circular bed in its centre where Captain Viner tried to
grow violas, and the slugs saw to it that his success was relative.

The Viner mowing-machine was like most things in Cinder Town, a
make-shift, cheaply American, and second hand at that.  It gnawed
the grass instead of cutting it.  It had clenched its teeth upon
many rusty nails and small stones, and its soul had grown churlish
and embittered.  It clanked and rattled and squeaked.

Mary went to and fro with the cross-piece of the handle pressing
close to her young bosom.  She remained strictly attentive to the
business in hand, for poor Coode was hovering like a celestial
scout-master eager for a day's good deed.  She knew that if she
relented ever so little he would come and hang devotedly over the
fence.  "I say--do you think--you--ought--to do that?  After 'flu?
Why not let me do it for you?"  Also, she had seen Colonel Toby
strolling in his garden, smoking a cigar, and that little circle of
crystal had flashed frequently in her direction.  "Fine young
woman.  Cutting grass!  No false pride.  Capital, capital!"

Furze came to the gate a moment after the knives of the machine had
jammed, and she was trying to extract a rusty wire-nail from the
mower's teeth.  Hot, flushed, and a little peeved, she looked up
and saw him.  He was half inside the gate.

"Trouble?"

His glance had a deep and lingering steadfastness.  It disturbed
and fluttered her, so that her colour came more quickly.  Her brown
eyes were elusive.  Yes, she was in trouble.  This beastly old
machine--!

He smiled and bent over the mower.

"Builders scatter their nails--like the bread in the Bible.  On
grass--though."

His strong brown fingers freed the blades.  He tossed the bent nail
into the flower bed, and without a "Shall I?" or an "If you
please," began to finish the job for her.  And she stood and
watched him, feeling vividly conscious of him and of herself, and
of all the windows and the gardens, and of poor Coode melting away
nobly, and of Colonel Sykes' eye-glass fixed upon them like the eye-
piece of a telescope.

"It wants sharpening," he said suddenly.

She agreed that most probably it did.

"And oiling."

"Does it?"

"Afraid so."

"I use the oiler belonging to my bicycle, and I've lost it."

"Bad luck for the machine!"

He paused, smiling, and she had an impression of white teeth and
very deep blue eyes in a very brown face.

"I use a scythe."

"Isn't that--rather difficult?"

"Not when you have the hang of it and know how to have the blade.
Makes a nicer noise, too.  Purrs."

A few stridings to and fro and the mowing was finished.  He picked
up the machine.  "Where do you keep it?"

"Oh,--in the tool-shed."

She led the way to the tool-shed, a brown box no bigger than a
small chicken-house.  It also contained her bicycle, and a barrow
with a wobbly wheel, and a few odd tools.  She felt apologetic
about the tool-shed, as she felt apologetic about nearly everything
connected with her existence in Cinder Town.  How trivial it all
seemed, and she resented its triviality, for she conceived herself
cheapened by it.

"I hope you are better?"

He had put the mower away and had shut the door, and she was
wondering whether she should ask him into the house.  She was
ashamed of the house.  Also there was the question of supper, and
even the sunset and the soft green splendour of this spring evening
were effaced by her vision of a small leg of mutton carved to the
bone and a few cold potatoes waiting in the larder.  Her father was
one of those dear and hopeless souls who can never learn to
understand a woman's sensitiveness, her hatred of being caught with
no cake for tea.  "Mary,--Mr. Furze will stay to supper."  And how
could she produce that scraggy end of mutton?  Supper--too!  Real
people dined.

She said that she was quite well now.

"And your mother?"

"O,--much better, thank you."

He was taking something out of the side pocket of his coat, six
brown eggs in a paper bag.  He handed them to her.

"Thought your mother might like these."

The nay of her mood gave place to the yea.  She was touched.  Six
brown eggs in a paper bag!  She had to ask him into the house after
that, and to show the eggs to Mrs. Viner who was a child in these
matters.  "See what Mr. Furze has brought you."  Old Hesketh, who
was a sahib, however simple he might be, tried to make Furze take
his arm-chair.  "Sit down, my dear fellow"; but Furze would not
hear of it.  He sat on a hard chair in front of the fire, between
the two old people, with Mary on a footstool and quite close to
him, so close that his dream seemed to be coming down to earth.

They talked, or rather Hesketh and his guest talked, while Mrs.
Charlotte knitted and threw at Furze quick bird-like glances.  She
was considering the man who brought them flowers and eggs, and who
wanted to marry her daughter.  A farmer, but a farmer who could
claim to have that notable word "gentleman" added to him.  Yes, Mr.
Arnold Furze--gentleman farmer.  Mrs. Viner asked of fate to be
allowed her gentleman.  Captain Furze was not "service," of course,
not a pukka captain, but in these topsy-turvy days did it matter?
The little old lady's bright-eyed, bird-like mind reflected a more
clearly cut image of life than did her daughter's, for she had
lived her life, and Mary had not.  Even a twittering old lady must
be allowed her philosophy, and a wise, thrush-like glance at the
responsible man.  To Mrs. Viner it was most important that a
husband should be kind; strong, too, and capable of using a
protective shoulder; also just a little exacting at times.  So she
knitted and watched and listened, her head on one side like an
attentive bird's.  She did not want to lose Mary, but if Mary had
to be lost, well--"Doomsday" was very near; moreover, Mrs.
Charlotte liked Arnold Furze.  He was kind; he could sit still and
talk quietly and naturally to two old people; she watched his eyes
when he looked at her daughter.  Yes,--that was the way a man
should look at a woman, with human wonder at so human and wonderful
a thing.

Like most women--an innocent snob--she could be impressed by
frankness--and by the easy carriage of the man who possesses what
has been called inward dignity.  Furze talked a little about the
farm and his work.  He was so unashamed of it that Mrs. Viner felt
that there was nothing to be ashamed of.  He could laugh--too--at
some of his struggles and his make-shifts.  Not one of your fussy,
irritable little men, who must walk on his toes and crow.

"You ought to see the bluebells in Gore Wood."

His eyes seemed to catch the firelight as he spoke of the wild
flowers and looked down at Mary.

"You too, sir, if you are fond of flowers."

Cinderella, one hand along the cheek turned to the fire, seemed to
muse.

"I should love to."

"Any time you like.  Go where you please, you know.  The Wilderness
too is a picture, all yellow broom and young bracken.  It lies
above Rushy Pool and Wood."

He was silent for half a minute after offering her free trespass
upon his farm, and then suddenly he rose, bent to Mrs. Charlotte,
and laid a big and restraining hand on old Hesketh's shoulder.
"Please don't get up, sir."  Captain Viner produced the inevitable
invitation to supper, and there was a moment of feminine suspense
quickly relieved by Furze's refusal.

Mary went with him to the door, and since the dusk had fallen and
she was grateful to him for going, she went a little farther.  He
paused at the gate and held it open as though he hoped that she
would go with him as far as the main road.  He looked at the sky,
and at a moon coming up over Beech Ho.

"You know that when I say a thing I mean it, Mary."

It was the first time that he had called her Mary, and he uttered
the name as though it was both beautiful and sacred.

"I believe you do.  You mean--about the farm?"

"Yes, go when you please, and take what you please.  Fruit--flowers--
anything."

He moved out into the road, and she felt herself drawn out into the
dusk.  The spell of his tenderness was upon her, the gentle lure of
his strength.  And there may have been some curiosity behind her
vague emotion, and a little thrill of conscious power.

He was silent for a moment.  Her drifting out with him into the
dusk was so blessed a happening.

"I'm going to Melhurst to-morrow.  There is a big sale on there.  I
am taking the wagon."

"That sounds as though you were going to spend a great deal of
money."

"Just as little as I can for as much as I can get."

"Animals?"

She fancied that he laughed slightly and soundlessly, if laughter
can be soundless.

"No--furniture and things."

"O,--furniture."

Very significant--that, and she knew it.  The nay in her felt that
it was time to turn back.

"You love old things."

"Old things for an old house.  I shall be away most of the day.
Wish me luck, will you?"

"Of course," she said, pausing by the Engledews' gate, and looking
at the moon; "I wish you all sorts of bargains."

They parted there--she going back to that dull little house, and he
to the great spaces of his fields and woodlands.  He felt that he
could throw his hat as high as the tops of the Six Firs, but she
had been caught by a sudden panic of seriousness.  She was looking
beyond him, and through the quivering air of her emotion at the
ultimate choice and its finalities.

Doomsday!  A farm!



VII